Answers

I was idling at work, consumed by the questions that have been circling around in my head: ‘Why don’t I see hotter girls?’ ‘Am I ever going to fall in love again?’ ‘What am I doing wrong, why am I not getting what I want?’ ‘Should I go out more?’ ‘What else do I need to learn’ etc. when I stumbled upon an article of Entropy. This led me to another article, called A long list of ways the seduction community can make you weird. I have to say, I find it both hilarious and confronting. I’ve recognised myself in it, also some things that I figured out myself (yeah!), and things that are typical to friends of mine.

Favourite quotes:

- Lots of sexually inexperienced guys get into the community to hopefully one day become players. This is the pot of gold. If they’re anything like how I was, they imagine it to be a lifestyle almost like a real life porn movie – lots of random, disconnected sex with various hot chicks. Guys will tell themselves this is what they want, and it sounds good when you put it like that. They think they’re never going to want to settle down and instead remain eternally and happily single, or juggle several girlfriends at once.

More importantly, they think that if they can just become players then their lives will be perfect and all their problems will disappear. Players are gods among men, right? How can they have troubles? How can anything be going wrong if you’re scoring with lots of chicks? Or they think that while they may be losers and failures in other aspects of their lives, if they could get that confidence boost of knowing they can sleep with lots of girls, then that won’t matter.

So anyways, they start doing a little better with women and they come to realize that sex isn’t that big a deal. They have a few one nights stands and find them fun, but strangely unsatisfying after a while. They come to see constantly going out to bars trying to get laid as a pain in the ass. They realize that they’d rather be in a fun, fulfilling relationship with one cool girl than get laid once a month by picking up some random drunk girl they may not even be that into. They stop seeing what the fuss with having a ‘high score’ for its own sake is all about. It could happen to you, or maybe not…

- Having a false feeling of superiority just for knowing about the Community is a poor source of self-esteem. You can come across as extremely deluded to normal people because as much as the Community sees itself as an elite secret society, it’s honestly mostly made up of below-average guys trying to catch up to the rest of the world in some very basic areas. For every one true player in the Community, there are hundreds of awkward guys trying to reach milestones that most people experienced as teenagers.

- It’s kind of strange to always be talking about hooking up with women all of the sudden. It can just be poor people skills to constantly talk about the same thing or keep turning the conversation towards the topic when it isn’t appropriate. Also, I don’t think it’s good if you’re trying to derive self-esteem from other people seeing you as an expert on gaming girls. That’s I why did this sometimes. I wanted people to go, “Wow Chris! You’re so cool for knowing this stuff!!!”

- Being in the Community can warp the way you see other males. Instead of them just being another person or a friend to hang out with, you can start to categorizing them according to a different set of priorities:

* Clueless mainstream AFCs who you look down on and derive self-esteem from for being better than.
* Mainstream guys who are alright with women. Competition. Someone to practice AMOGing concepts on.
* Non-Community guys who are naturally good with women (i.e., Naturals). These are living gods whose tricks you must learn for yourself. They are objects to learn from.
* Community guys who are good with women, or at least better than you (i.e., Pick Up Artists/PUAs). Also people to idolize, but more importantly, to extract value from for your own gain.
* Community guys at your level. Wingmen. Guys who can go out with so you’re not at the bar alone. People to learn from. More than we’d like to admit, a way to grease the wheels of your own development. A means to an end.
* Friends. People to go out with so you can practice your game once you arrive at the destination. People to give you ’social proof’. People to meet girls through. People to learn social skills from. Another means to an end.

- Before they get into the Community, the typical guy has beliefs about women such as:

* Women are special, beautiful creatures.
* Women need to be saved and protected.
* Women need to be loved and nurtured.
* You need to make women feel special.
* Women need to be wined and dined and romanced.
* Women want nice guys.
* Women don’t like sex.

A little too naive and romantic in other words. Then they get into the Community and before long they’ve been exposed to ideas like:

* Women are flaky and unreliable.
* Women are emotional and illogical.
* Women only live in the emotion of the moment, do what feels good at the time, and justify their actions to themselves after the fact.
* Women are manipulative and use guys for free drinks and dinners.
* Women are fickle and have short attention spans.
* Women are self-centered and self-interested.
* Women primarily go to clubs for attention and validation from men.
* Women constantly test men, try to devalue them, and try to make them jump through hoops.
* Women try to make men suck up to them and put them on a pedestal.
* Women think their pussies are made of gold and sell them to the highest bidder.
* Women don’t know what they really want.
* Women are confused and hypocritical. They’ll profess to dislike whorish behavior then blow a guy in a bathroom that night.
* Women are programmed to want to get knocked up by an Alpha Male then ensnare an unwitting Beta Male into raising the child for her.
* Women will cheat on their partners coldly and unemotionally.
* Women are slaves to how their friends and society sees them. They want to sleep around, but have to be discrete about it.
* Society’s expectations have given women all kinds of weird hang ups up about sex and hooking up. Their minds are full of strange rationalizations and justifications.
* Women aren’t happy for long in a relationship and you have to constantly keep them on their toes and off-balance to stay with them.
* Women are powerless to resist the right type of guy. Even if they’re married, they’ll get sucked along.
* Women are easily manipulated by simple magic tricks and talk of new agey topics.

- I don’t think I’ve met a natural ladies man who cares about having tight game for its own sake. He just sees a girl he likes and says what he has to say to get her. A way to get from point A to point B. But in the Community it’s all about who’s the best PUA, who could beat who in a PUA challenge, who can achieve some arbitrary game related goal, is this camp of PUAs better than this camp, is such and such PUA as good as he says he is? On a more local level, when guys in the Community hang out together, it’s not uncommon for petty little rivalries and jealousies to develop.

- The Community can be quite the soap opera at times (most of the time). Betrayal. Friendships falling out. Accusations of theft. Guys leaving one company/message board/local group to start a rival one. Wars of propaganda. Personal attacks across blogs, podcasts, and message boards. Very juicy stuff. The point is obvious: you’re wasting your time if you get too caught up in this shit, especially at the expense of living an actual life.

- It’s a no brainer that improving yourself as a person is a good thing, for you and for the people who interact with you. Lots of Community guys are into the larger process of self-improvement and see learning how to do better with women as one component of that. But I strongly believe you can go too far with Self-Improvement. You can read a few too many self-help books and listen to a few too many motivational CDs and become sort of flakey and unbalanced. It’s like anything: go overboard with it and you get a little off. You lose the ability to just watch a dumb movie – that’s poor productivity and the time would be better spent learning how to speed read. You can’t talk about current events because the only things you’ve read in the past three months are tomes on time management.

- This ‘give up your life’ mentality can also lead guys to shun regular relationships for the cause of improving their game. In the Community there’s a general belief that if a guy gets a girlfriend, especially before becoming a card carrying PUA, that he’s quitting. He’s betrayed the scene. He’s turning his back on his mates. He can’t hack it and is dropping out of the race. If he says it’s because the girl makes him feel happy, he’s just rationalizing what a loser he is. When well known people in the Community get a girlfriend, there’s always this sense of shock and suspicion, like how could he do something so crazy? It’s okay to have a harem of fuck buddies or be in an open relationship, but just seeing one girl? That’s wussy AFC stuff. (As an aside, I find Community advice towards relationships preoccupied with power dynamics and the guy always having the upper hand).

- Besides being condescending towards regular guys just because they’re not into being a PUA, this ‘convert the friends’ attitude has some other issues:

* Okay, to be fair, sometimes it’s just about being enthusiastic or wanting to help your lonely buddies out by sharing something that’s helped you.
* But a lot of the time it’s more about you than them…
* You want to be admired for introducing them to this awesome gold mine of knowledge.
* You want the rush of getting to be their guide and mentor into this new world.
* You want some people to go out with when you try to meet girls.
* You want the ego boost of being the wise teacher who brings the clueless chumps towards the light.
* Your own progress towards PUA-dom is slow and you think that by being a teacher to your friends you’ll give yourself a kick in the ass.
* You need other people’s approval before you feel comfortable being into the Community yourself.
* If they refuse, you get to feel superior to them for being so clueless and deluded.
* You want to intentionally put their skills with women under a spotlight and make them look bad, so you can feel good about yourself, all under the pretext of wanting to help.

- Community guys are collectively obsessed with getting over their fear of women. For many guys this is their biggest problem, not a lack of knowledge about how to get a girl. For some reason many of them get it into their head that the best way to become fearless is to go out in public, act like a weirdo, and purposely expose themselves to embarrassment and negative judgments from other people. Such stunts are accompanied by talk of tearing down preprogrammed social conditioning. The idea is that if you can do something totally ridiculous and extreme, talking to girls (another supposedly societally conditioned fear) will seem easy.

Sooo… what if you’ve seen all of this and you still wonder what to do about the whole woman thing? I’m still figuring that part out – feel free to comment – so to be continued…

Verges

I feel like I’m on verges today. Not a verge, but a couple if not many. There’s things at work (I’m leaving and have my own company), there’s the end of the year and my flatmate leaving, there’s friends coming and going, some disappointment I’ve caused and experienced, and then there’s women. I lost one girl I really liked, am seeing someone I half like, am thinking that my ex is about to come back in town, and generally I feel kind of powerless and useless about this last part. Not just my ex, but the whole thing with girls. I just don’t know anymore. I know that I should define what I want, but I wanted this one girl and it didn’t happen. I know it’s about dragnet, not about one specific thing, and that it’s good feedback. I guess I’m just digesting things and wishing I didn’t have to digest but that I could be enjoying the laurels of realising my dreams. But on the other hand I feel like my exhaustion is like the exhaustion is that of the unemployed: always tired about something while they don’t really do anything.

On some fields, I am realising my dreams. I don’t mean to complain. But when it comes to women, I don’t know anymore. The whole dynamics of it has lost its value to me. I’d like to flirt but I don’t have the energy for it, nor do I see the point. I don’t like the feeling of loving someone and afterwards, feeling like a dumbass for having done so. Oh, and in conclusion, the whole ‘hold back and play it cool’ thing now officially goes down the drain – if you like someone, make it happen! No need to push it, but you do need to make it happen. That means not saying ‘I love you’ the first week, but taking the steps to see her and get to know her immediately so maybe at some point you know whether or not to say ‘I love you’. If not, at least you haven’t built all kinds of air castles around it.

I feel like I lost a hand somewhere, somehow, and that I didn’t stick to myself. Just don’t know where.

Significance basedness

Sorry about not writing for so long, and apologies that when I do, it’s not even original content

The main reason I haven’t been writing much is that I’m kind of sick of the whole ‘game’ thing. I really believe in improving myself and reaping the subsequent rewards from it in my daily life. But the deliberation of it gets to me. Allow me to explain. When I think back on how I was thinking when I was interacting with people in the mindset of the PUA, it feels a bit icky. Because while they’re having a great time meeting me, a lot of times I was thinking functionally (or at least partly, I’m not a machine). Now this is not all bad; having an outcome isn’t necessarily bad. And it gave me the direction I was lacking before when I was sucking with women, or didn’t know what I want and just was all over the place.

I think the main changes for me have been 1) to realise I don’t need a reason to be happy, I don’t need to achieve anything before I can be grateful to be alive – and all the implications and habits this entails; 2) that when I know what I want and get it really clear to myself what it is, exactly, I’m pretty sure of getting it; and 3) it’s not about one specific result, it’s about a general result. I see it as a drag-net: when you live a certain way with certain attitudes that are geared towards a specific goal, the results of that way of living will manifest themselves without your deliberate aim at one specific thing. As in, if your interactions with women are directed towards befriending them and seeing if they’re relationship material for you, that’s not only going to give different results from playing them for sex (which is also fine if you choose for it), but you will make girl friends, and you will find someone that is relationship material! No specific actions required, just the mindset and whatever flows from that mindset. Watch out: you may have to learn some things; about yourself, your fears and limitations, and maybe even some skills like recognising and talking about your feelings, being able to hold a conversation with strangers, etcetera. I guess the better you are at these things and the more you know yourself, the easier it becomes.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing much, because I’ve been switching between mindsets. I realised at some point that I wasn’t going to meet my next girlfriend by playing the girls that are open to casual sex; it’s another market, another way of living. So while this shift has been happening, I’ve had nothing to say really

Here’s something about valuing yourself, what I was saying in point 1) above. From Tyler Durden, still one of my favourite guys out there for his clarity and positiveness. Enjoy!

The way that you perceive the world is in part a reflection of the way that you perceive yourself.

Although everyone is different, the best guys that I’ve seen in the field usually have certain qualities.

One of the big ones that I’ve noticed is that they are happy people. Internally, they are in a position where they value
themselves enough that they are ready to offer value to others.

You guys might have seen the “Wishing you the best that you deserve” thing in Geoff’s tagline when he posts. I remember when
I first saw that last year, I thought it was retarded.

But over time I realized that it was really who he was, and that that was the energy that he wanted to put out there. It was
actually a part of his success with women, too.

I’ve watched these guys over a long period of time, and learned a lot from them. Even back when they were first starting, it was
obvious that they were going to be good because they were the types of guys who had the right energy.

Because of that, if they just learned a few tactics then they would get good almost instantly. When they open a group, the
girls can feel that energy from them immediately. They’re drawn to it.

I’ve really come to believe that when a guy has a positive outlook of himself and the world, it totally comes across to the
girls.

When a guy comes to the community feeling bad about himself and the world, no amount of tactics is going to mask it. But he’ll
want tactics, because its easier to look at it that way rather than to admit that he has to work on his thinking patterns.

When a guy does not have any value to offer himself, his knee-jerk reaction will be to find reasons to be skeptical
about others or to demean them down to his level. His sense of value is weak, and so if he were to acknowledge value in others
it would cause him to feel bad about himself.

A guy with a strong sense of value knows how hard it is to cultivate that, and will appreciate it in others. His knee-jerk
reaction will be to see the good in people.

Now some guys reading this will have the knee-jerk response, “Well I’m a critical thinker, and I don’t buy everyone’s
bullsh!t!”

I understand that, and I’m not suggesting that at all.

What I’m saying, rather, is that in the end of the day if a guy is bullshit then that is their problem, and not yours. Every
person has *something* good that you can learn from, so if you’re open to seeing it then you’ll learn at least something
from it.

So for a guy to be positive, that doesn’t mean that he worships a guy. It just means that its so obvious that he would never
worship a guy, that he doesn’t need to reinforce it to himself over and over to prevent himself from doing it.

He’s a cool guy himself, and can appreciate other people from a position of non-neediness.

Back when I was first trying to establish a sense of value for myself, I would see a celebrity and my first reaction would be
to say something like “You know, I’m not intimidated by him just because he’s in the movies. He’s still a human being!”

Notice its the *first* thing that comes out of my mouth, out of all the infinite things I could notice and comment on. Was that
*really* how I felt about the guy? And moreover, shouldn’t the fact that he’s just a human being go without saying?

Likewise, I’d be thinking about what kind of pranks I could play on him. It would never occur to me to just roll up and be cool,
and that he would want to be cool with me in return. Rather, I could get interaction with him through some means that would
shelter me from being rejected if I interacted from a position of just being myself.

Since then, I’ve worked on myself. And when I see a celeb, I might actually give props. What’s interesting though, is that
like many aspects of the game it is cyclical.

Chode: “Oh god, I worship this guy.”

Recovering Chode: “I’m not intimidated.. He’s not all that.”

Cool Guy: “Cool, this guy has done some great stuff. Props to the guy for working hard.”

Just because I give props, doesn’t imply that I’m intimidated. I’m not shreiking and asking for an autograph. I’m just
recognizing the dude is a cool guy and saying what’s on my mind.

Me giving props is a demonstration that I can see something that took hard work, and that I am secure enough with myself not to
have to be in control of the frame 100% of the time.

It so happens, that when I meet celebrities when I’m out, they sometimes invite me to come and hang with them. The reason they
do that, is because I offer value by joking around and shooting the shit. Not because I try to demean them.

If I want to come at a guy who is cool, and he’s a celeb so the situation is obvious that I want to talk to him because of
something that I know going in, then I don’t try to overcompensate by demeaning.

I just come at the guy like “What’s up bro.. Cool sh!t..” on a verbal level. On a non-verbal level, I’m just as cool. I’m laid
back, just chilling, having a good time.

Cool people pick up on this stuff. I have to trust my body language and mannerisms to do the work for me, without having to
tip the scales verbally. I’m always amazed at how well it works.

Me showing that I think he’s cool is almost like me saying that I think that of myself. It’s in the sub-communication.

It’s like a balance between demeaning and worshipping. It’s in the middle. It’s called BEING NORMAL. Being normal means giving
props if its deserved without being a fanboy. A cool guy is secure with himself to give props.

The same goes when guys interact with girls, or anyone of higher value. Many guys that I meet from the community are defensive
around girls. They’ll use cocky lines in a way where they’re sheltering their real personality. They’ll bust on girls in ways
that aren’t funny. It is very transparent.

If you can think back to any times that you did this, try next time giving a girl props on something you think is cool about
her. You won’t lose value. If you’re coming from the right place and not just seeking a reaction, then she’ll just think you’re
a cool guy who says what’s on his mind.

One thing that a friend of mine noted to me when he came into the community (at the time he making observation as a guy who was an outsider, before we brought him in from the Tony Robbins organization), was that it draws a certain type of person.

That is, “Significance based”.

Most of us are drawn to this stuff not because we woke up and decided that we want to go bang hundreds of girls. Some of us,
sure. But not most of us.

The majority of people who waded through all the manuals and guides and learned the culture of “pickup” did so because of
the drive to feel significant. By conquering their issue with girls, they thought they could feel significant.

So along those lines, here is a thought:

When significance based guys meet each other in the field, it is very common that they’ll find ways to lower each other as a
way to feel significant. They’ll be like “This guy wasn’t all that.”

I used to do this myself. I remember meeting one of my idols, and thinking he wasn’t all that and that he wasted my time.
What was interesting, was that in hindsight, it’s obvious to me now that he was a really cool guy.

He wasn’t coming there to impress me. He was coming to have a good time and offer value in that sense.

The negative energy that I was projecting was weirding him out, and making him feel uncomfortable. I chose to see in him what I
unconsciously perceived in myself. We weren’t building a vibe together that we could just throw onto the girls.

We were building a vibe where I was making him feel like he was qualifying himself, and like whatever he did was to impress me.

So the guy not going and blowing up sets was a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you feel all uncomfortable from some needy guy
draining you, its hard to turn around and create a vibe with a girl that she’ll be drawn to.

Nobody is “all that.” There are just guys who work hard to improve themselves, and they have varying levels of success.
And some of these guys, believe it or not, are doing really well. In order for a person to see it and learn from it though,
you have to be able see the good in yourself first.