Vlastimil Vohanka tells me he met online with Marin Zhelezov on June 13, 2026 and discussed the nature and examples of epic life. VV solicits my comments. Consume cum grano salis. I have not read Zhelezov beyond what he is quoted as saying below. Here are the elements of an epic life, as formulated by Zhelezov as reported by VV. My comments are signaled by ‘BV.’
1. Travel — must have, adventures unfold with travel.
BV: True! To the young, in particular, I say: get out there and take the risks. “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” (Henry David Thoreau) See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won’t regret your adventures. Then you can boast, “Been there, done that.” Forever after you will enjoy the having done what the old man, having had enough of this vain world, would no longer want to do.
But be careful! Especially you women who too often are trusting to the point of being pollyannish. See The Young and the Restless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan.
2. Meaningful goal, not just entertainment.
BV: Of course. No ‘killing time.’ Make good use of your incarnation, your time in the human body. Serious games for entertainment, games that require concentration and deep study to play well: chess and Go, for example.
3. A sense of leveling up, catching progressively stronger pokemon —> boss battle.
BV: The formulation here is too sloppy for it to be worth my time trying to make sense of it.
4. Flow state, act at the edge of your competence.
BV: There are two ideas here that ought to be separated. You can perform at the edge of your competence without entering the flow state, but if you enter said state it will probably be at the edge of your competence. Take it to the limit to see where your limits lie. The trick is to go to the limit without falling into the abyss.
In the late ’70s, training for a marathon, I pushed as hard as I could. One day after a training run, I urinated blood. I had taken it to the limit. A one-time event. Never pissed blood again. I had the good sense to back off. But if you don’t push hard, you won’t know where your limits lie.
During that marathon training I had gotten myself into the shape you have to be in to experience the flow state called the ‘runner’s high.’ I experienced it a few times. It is rare, like a mystical experience, but it is not a mystical experience. It is a form of ‘mundane transcendence’ in which your vehicle is no longer a Volkswagen bus but a supercharged Corvette.
As a a young man I drove many a time from Dayton, Ohio where I had a teaching job to Boston, Massachusetts where I had girlfriends, without stopping except for gas. 18-20 hours of driving. Thermos coffee and sandwiches for body fuel. The first ten hours were a warm-up. I then entered the flow state, in touch with my inner Neal Cassady, ready for some serious driving. “Put me on a highway/Show me a sign/ Take it to the limit/One more time.” (Eagles, 1975)
Some years later I traded in the VW bus for a 1988 Jeep Cherokee base model: five-speed manual tranny, 4.0 liter, six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive, off-road shocks, oversized tires, and manual air conditioning. Bought it in Ohio, but kept it in Arizona despite the fact that I live in the infernal Valle del Sol — from which I don’t escape in the summer like some snowbird wimps I could mention.
Manual air conditioning: if you want air, you use your God-given hands to roll down the windows. In this part of the country manual AC is also know to the politically incorrect as ‘Mexican air conditioning.’ “Roll down the windows, Manuel!”
One blazingly hot August I drove straight through from Bishop, California up on U.S. 395 to Chandler, Arizona, 600 miles, alone. Stopping for gas in Blythe, on the California side of the Colorado river, I noted that the afternoon temperature was 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Bouncing along Interstate-10 I saw that the only people with their windows down were me and the Mexicans.
It’s no big deal, really, driving through 115 degree heat in the middle of the day in the middle of the desert with the windows down. You take a bandanna and soak it in the ice water in your cooler and wrap it around your neck. When the dry blast of desert wind hits the wet bandanna some serious evaporation takes place, cooling your neck and with it the rest of your body. Feeling a little drowsy after four hundred miles of nonstop driving? Stoke up a cheap cigar, say that Swisher Sweet that’s been aging under the seat alongside those oily shop rags, and throw another audio tape into the deck. May I recommend Dave Brubeck? Or how about Kerouac reading to the piano accompaniment of Steve Allen? Or perhaps that latter-day beat, Tom Waits.
With four on the road, one in the hand, a cigar in the mouth, some boiling hot McDonald’s drive-through java in the other hand, Brubeck on the box, proudly enthroned at the helm of a solid chunk of Detroit iron, rolling down a wide-open American road, with a woman waiting at the end of the line, you’re feeling fine.
5. Winning = you must defeat someone, curing cancer is meaningful but it won’t feel epic.
BV: I agree if the one you attempt to defeat is your own lower self. But why must one defeat someone other than oneself? The above reads like a ‘manospheric’ compensatory reaction to the feminization of boys, a reaction by boys who were prevented from exercising their innate masculine aggressiveness in the schoolyard or on the playing fields.
I recall reading about the schoolyard ‘tug of war’ being replaced by a ‘tug of peace’ along with the dodge ball we played back in the day. Sickening! I of course oppose such asinine feminization. But I also oppose the mindless reaction thereto: the abuse and denigration of women.
6. Element of collecting, like Diablo 2, collecting items, making you stronger, proof of past adventures.
BV: I am a collector of trophies, ribbons, photographs, religious and secular mementos, not to mention books, books, and more books all as proof of past adventures, literary and otherwise, especially during my Wanderjarhren. I don’t understand people who get rid of their books. Many of my books are like treasured photographs. I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek. That book, like so many others with their inscribed accession date, marginalia, tell-tale bookmarks, love letters, dedications, and what-not are treasured mementos.
It is not clear to me, however, how this vast pile-up of personal antiquities makes one stronger.
7. Esoteric knowledge put in practice, secrets.
BV: I need some examples.
8. Coadventurers, RPG party, guild, sense of belonging to an exclusive identity (wizard’s guild). Builds frenship [sic]
BV: What’s the RPG party? The Reactionary Philatelic Gastroenterologists? The Royal Patrons of Goombahs? The promiscuous use of unexplained abbreviations rankles my ass. And we can’t have that.
9. Winning a battle brings a maiden as a reward.
BV: Here the toxic masculinity of these argonauts of the ‘manosphere’ again rears its ugly head. How much of this is mere reaction, reflexive as opposed to reflective, to their feminization? And as I have stated many times, masculinity as such is not toxic, any more than femininity as such. But there are forms of masculinity that are appropriately described as ‘toxic,’ meaning poisonous and destructive to their agents and even more to their victims. Anyone who can’t see that is a combination of stupid and morally obtuse.
Few are the women these days who fancy themselves ‘damsels in distress’ waiting for a heroic male in shining armor to come along and save them. Few are the ‘maidens’ these days who see themselves as rewards or trophies. They will not object to being mounted, in a context of love and commitment, but not on a wall.
10. Must have some form of risk.
BV: I agree. Life is for living. No living to the full without some risk-taking. The risks are all out there waiting to be taken, in matters of money, of love, of the spiritual quest. In the latter, the serious seeker must face the risk of demonic assault. The demons hate us and want to destroy us. There is Unseen Warfare; Lorenzo Scupoli calls it Combattimento Spirituale. So the highest warrior is the spiritual warrior. Take no risks without prior calculation: look before you leap. On the other hand, he who hesitates is lost. Balance your maxims. Better to sit or better to run? “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” (Henry David Thoreau)
Later addition, after the podcast:
11. To be epic, your goal must save (some part of) the world or transcend death in the spiritual realm.
BV: Agreed.
Mr Vallicella, if you’re interested and have the time (about 11 minutes) here’s a video relating to point #6, about why we should get rid of our stuff, or some of it at least.
https://youtu.be/Gh-rjOspK10?si=3w6qUs7wFF4vts-Y
Personally, I like all of what he says except for the bit about tattoos. His points: the real value of experiences is in our memories, not in physical objects; and that one day others will have to decide what to do with all our stuff, so we should have consideration for them and make their job easier rather than harder.
The original from VV reads like the mind of a perpetual adolescent but commendations to BV for the response and extracting some nuggets from the soup of not yet matured thoughts e.g. “Curing cancer… won’t feel epic”…
Bill,
Thank you for taking the time to comment!
The Anon below smells the mind of a perpetual adolescent. Me and Marin supposedly suffer from juvenile, “manospheric” (whatever that means) pathology.
Now, as Dominique Venner wrote: “Being a dissident does not mean collecting forbidden books, dreaming up plots, or taking to the hills. It means remaining loyal to yourself against the whole herd if needs be; it means that you should NEVER outgrow your youth.” To dismiss the thirst for adventure etc. as adolescent compensation is to mistake the domesticated”conscientious rabbit” (allusion to C.S. Lewis, yes) for a mature man.
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Why one must defeat anyone other than oneself? Bc we speak about epic, not just great, life. An epic journey plausibly requires a resistant antagonist in the physical world, not just an internal dialogue with your Jungian shadows. Curing cancer in a sterile laboratory is noble, but phenomenologically, it is manual labor. The process mostly IS boring.
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Again, what do you even mean by “toxic masculinity”?
Check out Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, a classic on myths; I heard Jordan Peterson steals from him a lot. A man slays the horrors of a new realm and returns with the spoils, thus he demonstrates the competence and thumos that high-tier women are biologically wired to respect. To deny that the maiden is typically the natural validation of the quest is to deny nature itself.
I am also amazed when some people ask me why I even talk about women when my theme is epic or great life. Are they being serious? Or have they heard about the importance of evolution and mating? Have they ever come across Nietzsche in Zarathustra, Bk 1, Pt 1, “On Little Women Old and Young”?: “Two things the real man wants: danger and play. That is why he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything.”
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You dismiss the concept of leveling up and the RPG party (it’s Role-Playing Game, Bill; do you know the concept? you can always ask AI) as adolescent sloppiness. But vid games did not invent these concepts. They merely hacked an evolutionary algorithm. Young men gravitate toward video games because they are the only things that still offer a gamified progression: checkpoints, clear boss battles, and a sense of leveling up.
Btw, my facebook note from 2022 on leveling up:
On random nature of life from bacteria up to humans (random within certain constraints, that is).
Also on analogical correspondences btw micro (bacteria) and mezzo (animals and humans) cosmic orders.
Life ≈
Monitor perceived goals (energy, food, money, accomplishment, love, friends, influence, sex, power, happiness, muscles, knowledge, wisdom, goodness, status in Dunbar circle, Magic cards, etc).
Accelerate when they are closer (regardless of how much closer) — i.e. grow for a while along the given goal axis.
Slow down after that while if nothing further happens.
Then sample another goal (or subset of goals) from the set of perceived goals and move towards it.
Accelerate if closer.
Slow down if nothing happens.
Then sample again.
Repeat indefinitely.
Relevant to motivation and procrastination and productivity and concentration and restless heart and Schopenhauer on frustration and Kierkegaard and Ecclesiastes on life strategies (aesthetic, moral, religious, etc.) and Spinoza and Nietzsche on will to power.
The moves may be external or internal.
Reproductive goals are just one type among others. But the latter may be spandrels/byproducts from the former and typically correlate with the former.
When depressed, people move too little or they seldom know whereto. Maybe they compare their expectations too constantly with some past or ideal state. (compare Sehnsucht according to CSL: melancholic bittersweet longing for the transcendent, not necessarily paralyzing like depression though.)
Source: nathanieltravis.com/2022/01/17/is-human-behavior-just-elaborate-running-and-tumbling (dead link)
Excerpts:
“Just as bacteria use a scale-invariant run-and-tumble algorithm to navigate towards chemical attractants (rewards), humans use a similar scale-invariant run-and-tumble algorithm to navigate towards more general rewards. The difference is primarily in how we determine our expected rewards. While bacteria determine their expected rewards based on a passive sensing of the environment, humans determine our expected rewards based on a complex, predictive model of the world. And, of course, we have different definitions of what a reward is.”
“Interestingly, even bacteria have different personalities. And even genetically identical bacteria have different personalities. Specifically, some bacteria tumble much more often than others (and some run much longer on average than others). This is due to the fact that although tumbling frequency always returns to its steady state, different bacteria have different steady state values (Spudich & Koshland, 1976). This can be seen as analogous to introversion vs extraversion in humans, which is driven by none other than dopamine (our equivalent to the tumbling frequency protein in bacteria) (DeYoung, 2013).”
I think this is on to something.
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Next, collecting items is not hoarding antiquities to show off. It is acquisition of physical proofs of past trials, whether it is a hunter wearing a beast’s tooth or a zoologist like Desmond Morris traveling the world to catalog human gestures. It is the evidence of the journey.
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In his habilitation treatise _Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis_, von Hildebrand outlines seven meanings of personal depth. The third kind, “running deep” (the extent to which one is affected or unnerved by the object), might not be cultivated in a sanitized, surveilled, controlled, and risk-free environment (in Bronze Age Mindset, BAP calls it “owned space”; it’s a superb aphoristic book, acc. to some, the best restatement of Nietzsche’s spirit for our times; you’d hate it of course) of work-life balance.
The sort of life so common in our modern late “capitalism” is absence of this depth. The suggested alternative is to escape this. What is pathological for the herd might be exactly what saves the few % of men (and few women, maybe).
Your advice to “balance your maxims” is robust and wise and safe for the general population. But exceptional advice might not be safe.
More here, https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/deviant-wisdom
‘Curing cancer in a sterile laboratory is noble, but phenomenologically, it is manual labor. The process mostly IS boring.’ Have you done this yourself ? You may be surprised to find that the pursuit may be ‘epic’ to someone who indeed understands the intricacies of science and has the patience to observe and synthesise, the process is slow yes but that comes with its own allure – if you cannot conceive this other reality , it underscores my earlier point. Anyway, youth and the good things that come with that are very different to the connotations of perpetual adolescence that I have in mind. From my experience it is a fruitless task to explain this.
I’ve done relevantly similar things; also some people I know. Staring at pipettes, waiting for centrifuges, repeating the same protocols under fluorescent light. Yes, there are some moments of intellectual joy; still not epic in the technical sense discussed in the podcast, please do try to entertain what is being said. E.g., _epic_ may imply _great_, but not vice versa.
You are committing a classic error of confusing the production of an epic thing with the phenomenological experience of an epic life. As said in the podcast with Marin, Kant produced one of the most revolutionary philosophical frameworks, yet he lived a non-epic life, never leaving his provincial town and walking the exact same street (maybe on autopilot) every single afternoon; or something like that.
If you find a quiet eternity of patience under a sterile hood to be the summit of your aspirations, I won’t burst your bubble. From my experience, it is a fruitless task to explain myself about these matters. But one more try: the cat vid embedded in https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/lessboring-04-marin-zhelezov-part
Btw, a related discussion with Bill, in the comments.
https://maverickphilosopher.blog/index.php/2026/05/14/seven-ways-of-life
Highly recommended 2pt interview.
“Some truths, many truths, in fact, are crass and can only be shared among men, and because they are crass truths, they must be shared crassly. C. S. Lewis wrote “to be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown-up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.” What you call juvenile I call primal. These are things that speak to men in their hearts, which are maybe too painful to just say them gravely and self-importantly.”
https://im1776.com/2021/06/08/dialogue-dc-miller-vs-zero-hp-lovecraft/
On taking risks, I’ve always liked the old saying:
“Ships are safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”
Glad to see you back in the saddle, Malcolm. I tried to leave a comment at your place. But my recent comments have been deemed “Not Acceptable!” No idea why. WordPress is weird-ass software. I was much more comfortable on the late TypePad.
But I have an insatiable itch to blog . . . So I need some platform or other.
Hi Bill,
Thanks — I have no idea why your comments are rejected. I don’t see them in any of the filters, and others are able to comment successfully. Please don’t stop trying!