What I really want is to be one of those guys who says to his younger colleagues “Yeah, I’ve had lots of professional success and acclaim, but it was all so unfulfilling.” The so unfulfilling is the twist of the knife. Shows you’re so spiritual. “Not only am I better than you; I’m better than what you’re trying to be.” What could be better?
I vaguely recall that once, at Crisis magazine, John Zmirak admitted that unmarried people like he then was, struggling to obey the Church’s teachings on chastity, were getting annoyed by converts going on about all the hot, mind-blowing sex they had before finding Jesus, and how it was so unfulfilling. Who doesn’t want to be the guy who’s so unfulfilled, so jaded, with being able to get pretty girls enthusiastically into bed with him? (Actually, I’ve noticed that it’s the girls who are more likely to confess/brag about their wild pre-conversion sex lives, but of course that’s even harder on a guy trying to keep his thoughts pure.)
Nobody tells us about how unfulfilling they have found video games, masturbation, sniffing glue, or molesting goats. In fact, I suspect that the less glamorous enticements of the world are in some ways more honest. They don’t promise true happiness or peace with oneself, but they often give the low satisfactions that they do promise. How much more exquisite, though, are the pleasures of vanity! And how much harder to forsake, so that the saints taught us rather to pray for humiliations than to be thus ensnared.
Don’t get me wrong. I still want to be one of those guys.
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Throne and Altar 
From the Simpsons:
Football player: sure I used to go to wild parties and sleep with lingerie models, but Ned Flanders and his Bible study showed me I could have more.
Homer: damn professional athletes, always wanting more.
This is precisely why I was never impressed with Malcolm Muggeridge as a human being – a leering, conceited humblebragger.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/kschiffer/malcolm-muggeridge-converted-after-reading-humanae-vitae
I dont know, I think I’m autistic enough to take people at their word and believe them when they say it was unfulfilling. To me that makes it worse–to have achieved your earthly goal and still been unfulfilled makes it just an endless source of regret. maybe this is just cope though.
A classic case of your neighbor’s garden being greener than your garden, no ?
I would say it is a case of envy, envy made much bitter by the fact that the one that was catholic for his whole life try to be chaste, and it is a difficult task that he reluctantly imposed on himself.
Ultimately, we spend a lot of time desiring too much a lot of thing… and when we have them we realise that they are not enough, that they are not as satisfying than in our dream : they are unfulfilling.
I, too, wish I were more like The Angelic Doctor. 😉
All men agree that sex is unsatisfying if it doesn’t go all the way. It’s just that inexperienced men think “going all the way” means ejaculating into a warm vagina. Actually, it means fathering children and raising them to adulthood, then doting on your grandchildren.
I don’t fault men for thinking sex is everything, because if you don’t get some, you’ll certainly never experience those other pleasures.
[…] like a crusader than I want to because the times make belligerents or slaves of us all. But this is the kind of post I really like, and writing like this is where my heart is. From the […]
[…] John Zmirak admitted that unmarried people like he then was, struggling to obey the Church’s teachings on chastity, were getting annoyed by converts going on about all the hot, mind-blowing sex they had before finding Jesus, and how it was so unfulfilling. Who doesn’t want to be the guy who’s so unfulfilled, so jaded, with being able to get pretty girls enthusiastically into bed with him? ~ What Could be Better […]