RendHeaven

I read through the last 3 pages and it broke my heart you're going through so much. I'm sorry. There's so much more, but I cannot tell you what that is. From now on, spend some time every day advocating for yourself. Every time you have a depressive thought about your looks, balance that with a charitable thought about what makes you powerful (hint: notice you're still standing even after 27 pages of pain. You've got heart.) I want to share a performance that really brought me to tears (timestamped). It's in Japanese, but if you turn on CC subtitles then it should translate the lyrics for you. Headphones recommended. The performer, CHIKA, is singing a song called "BIJIN" (which means: beautiful woman). The core theme is about overcoming the oppressive expectations of looks. She got to this stage through believing in her voice even as the whole world was telling her that she's too ugly (Japan is a very judgemental society especially towards women) I don't want to give too much unsolicited advice, because I don't want you to feel attacked or misunderstood or belittled. I understand that even simple words of encouragement from someone else can sound like "you're not enough" And more importantly I just don't know all the details of your situation. I don't want to give blanket advice that might do more harm than good. But here's a starting point: 1) Be nicer to yourself. you are your own bully. now choose to become your own guardian angel (against your own bullying voice). If you can attack yourself, then you can also love yourself. 2) Eat. starving yourself is not worth it. Absolute weight should not actually be your prime concern. What ACTUALLY matters is looking good while feeling good. This can be done at 21+BMI as long as you have the right muscle to fat ratio. In other words, you can actually gain scale weight (and thus feed yourself precious calories and nutrients) WITHOUT looking flabby or puffy. If you have your doubts, let me know. I could rattle on and on about this but I'll stop here because I don't want to trigger any hard feelings. My only point here is that looking good is not inherently tied to being stick thin. 3) Gym. Just keep going. Don't make it a chore or obligation. Don't make a whole thing out of it. No guilt. Movement and exercise is self-love. Go because you want to show up for YOU. If you stay consistent, your future self will thank you with tears. 4) Posture. Based on your comment here: ...you almost certainly have a postural issue which is promoting sub-optimal aesthetics. This is fixable. I've done it. Let me know if you want more info. Otherwise, feel free to ignore this comment. Just trying to give you hope that you're not broken or doomed. 5) Patience. I would guess that a lot of the stress and tension and not feeling safe comes from the conflict between wanting to change and become as beautiful as possible VS the belief that it's not possible for you anymore, or the belief that beauty must come from pain and sacrifice and self-harm. This makes you yo-yo between almost giving up VS wanting to go all-in and almost killing yourself. I want to open your mind to the possibility that yes, you CAN change and be more beautiful... but no, you DON'T have to self-harm. Yes, you can have the best of both worlds. You can achieve a healthy bodyweight, with a healthy relationship to food, with a stellar body composition, with perfect posture, AND feel good AND look better than you've ever looked. If you disagree and think that this is not possible, then that is a sign of close-mindedness. You can have the best of all worlds, but only if you show up for yourself in small ways, doing healthy micro-habits across a long time horizon i.e. multiple years. This takes vision and faith and hope (+trial and error and studying). Your inner gremlin who wants to be BEAUTIFUL NOW hates to hear this and thinks "ah hell what's the point? that won't work for me. let's just give up" Don't believe that voice. We're rooting for you.

https://www.instagram.com/recoveryandiscovery/

eating disorder

Fair

tell that to kim ung yong who was solving calculus problems and writing full-fledged books at age 3 lmao. we all develop at our own pace. feeling drawn to pretty people is a paltry feat. I was shocked to learn that other people were not doing this at age 3

@Joshe Looks like you have a bone to pick with my good-faith argument from earlier. But instead of addressing it head on, you're subtly badmouthing it by addressing other people who already agree with you, and framing my stance as "they would say" while straw manning me and feeling like you've won. What you're not allowing yourself to see is that a genuine lover of beautiful women will always elect to be with a beautiful woman irrespective of "status signalling" and "ego." I, for example, will always prefer a beautiful woman, even if we were to be the last two humans on earth and I had nobody left to "show her off" to. Furthermore, I would choose a beautiful woman without hesitation even if the cultural norms happened to punish that. I remember as a three year old, I was already distinguishing pretty faces VS mediocre forgettable faces. I was already forming crushes on my nursery school teachers, classmates, and random TV show characters. Nobody taught me to hyperfixate on pretty people. It was an authentic original impulse which, for the record, actually got punished by age eight, as all the kids in my class began teasing and taunting me for clearly being interested in Olivia (always staring at her, always trying to sit next to her and strike up conversation). I learned really fast that I'm not allowed to like girls if I wanted the acceptance of my classmates. For almost the next 15 years, I tried acting like girls (and especially looks) are not a big deal and totally negligible - all the while feeling torn up inside at my own lack of integrity (classic shadow repression) It's not a matter of "higher existence." It's simply a matter of being honest about what I like. Let me put it to you simply. If you took 3 year old me, and gave me the option of madison beer VS bella ramsey, I would have picked madison beer in a millisecond flat without regards to how I'm being perceived by others. Furthermore, I would not even be thinking about what I would DO with madison beer, and I wouldn't have even know I had a penis and that she had a vagina. I would have just wanted to be closer to her. And the adult version of me is just an extension of that same seed. Speak for yourself. We clearly value aesthetics different. How convenient that someone who has different values than you is defacto pathological and trauma-bound. To be generous towards you, I completely see your point and indeed you describe the condition of many modern men. Just be careful painting with broad brushes. You risk collapsing aesthetic value into mere power dispute. You can be drawn to beauty for the social implications, or you can be drawn to beauty for its own sake. For most guys, it's likely a dual incentive. When you claim that 99.999% of men who want madison beer are ego driven, you're being willingly neglectful of the fact that she's actually just pretty as fuck and most guys are drawn to pretty women. Your tone throughout this thread borders on shaming a natural impulse. Your stance is that you literally cannot pursue a beautiful woman without somehow being broken. Maybe that's been your personal experience, but for you to make a universal claim out of that takes a whole lot of projection and moralization. @theleelajoker Not mutually exclusive It makes perfect sense. Obviously looks are subjective, but everybody has a personalized aesthetic ideal in their head which is their benchmark of "10." If you genuinely can't think of a "personalized aesthetic ideal," then just recall the most aesthetic face + body combo you've ever been attracted to, and call that your 10 for now. From there, every deviation away from that ideal knocks off points. Not in the sense that they become a lesser person, but just that you're measuring their aesthetic "distance" from your ultimate preference. This is purely aesthetic. If you don't value looks, then you will find this whole endeavor stupid and wasteful and even insulting. And you're right - you can't measure the sum total of a person's attractiveness because it IS more than looks. But if you do value aesthetics, then this will just be a simple pragmatic tool, like a ruler. The ruler never promised to weigh you in pounds. The ruler just reports one metric. From there, we can cross reference every individual's subjective scale to get an average "global scale" which will be at least somewhat representative of every individual's personal scale, because it turns out that many of our aesthetic biases overlap (like proportionality, symmetry, sexual dimorphism, general health and fertility, etc.) If we do this right, we will notice that overt qualities like race or height or hair color or body type (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph, etc) barely matter. Also absolute size of bust or hips is also irrelevant. What actually matters is their ratio against the waist. i.e. what actually matters is the relation of shapes and sizes on the face and body relative to other shapes and sizes on the same body. The overwhelming majority of us are drawn to balanced faces and bodies. Not all of us, but most of us.

ugh ok fine LEO i'll finally buy the booklist

lmaooo bro rlly thought he ascended for a min

lol

To be fair to him, he could be very handsome, or he could be willing to entertain average-looking women, or he could just be plain lucky very handsome men actually do get the luxury of eye-contact tag. likewise, if you're not particularly picky about looks, then you can find yourself playing eye-contact tag with a plain looking woman. But if you're an average-looking man, and you want to shoot your shot with a conventionally attractive woman with any degree of consistency (let's say you're at a party or a club, with no mutuals), then you cannot expect any warm signals from her, ever. It's cold approach or nothing.

This is a genuine, urgent, large-scale pattern. You guys are right to call for more basic socialization. Unfortunately, your opposition is the trillion-dollar tech industry lol. fascinating

Agreed I just really liked his framing of "natural selection" in a changing environment. 2025 VS 2015 is night and day And 2005 is unrecognizable the people who deny this are those that have a strong natural affinity with (or immunity to) the new environment

@Emerald Good timing. This is becoming a real cultural talking point

Great points by her overall. Her emphasis on nuance and synergistic webs is strong. What makes it green is her explicit downplaying of brutality. She's refusing to see the natural world as "ruthless," and views such a lens as reductionist or incomplete thus disposable. The problem with this is that it ends up being a denial of survival (thus, truth). High-level synergy and cooperation is not distinct from individual competition and dog-eat-dog dynamics. They are necessarily one and the same, for profound reasons. If she had the ability to respond to my comment here, she would likely say something like: "I'm not denying survival or brutality, I just think it doesn't tell the full story. I've found a more comprehensive lens" Yes, symbiosis will have you seriously questioning the idea that the natural world is a winner-takes-all simulation. Even as the rationalist scientist tries to collapse symbiosis into "mutual self interest," you understand that he's not seriously contending with the ramifications of systems-level harmony. You see into his blind spot. From there, you work to de-pedestalize survival and brutality as a way to push back against a stage orange/darwinian culture which refuses to acknowledge benevolent dynamics in nature. To that end, survival and brutality are but a tertiary concern. but if you actually understood nature, you could not take that position. Even with infinite benevolence, the engine of nature is inextricably dog-eat-dog. This is not a bug, but a feature - as Leo would say. The highest lens would go beyond survival, but without downplaying it. In fact, the highest lens would revere survival and notice its intelligent omnipresence. If you only cared about truth, you would quickly realize that love and survival are metaphysically identical. Downplaying or willingly overlooking survival (acting like it's not important or doesn't exist) is an affront to love. The idea that we could, or should, or always have cooperated selflessly for purely wholesome or benevolent aims is a staple fantasy of stage green. Or even sneakier - green will admit that "in the past" we come from bloodshed, but that now we are in a new era where we can wholly opt-out of such cruel dynamics. Benevolent cooperation is real, and it rests atop a foundation of blood and death and self-preservation. It was never about selflessness VS selfishness. Both are two sides of the same coin: a singular superstructure. This finally reconciles orange and green without self-contradiction.

@Schizophonia 👊chad move

What a disgustingly goated individual. It's simply unfair. Thanks for sharing

+no childhood trauma +no bipolar tendencies +has no attention seeking impulse +takes radical responsibility And of course, the punchline is that she's gonna love and fuck ME and only ME and not "celebrities, professional athletes, influencers, high-level promoters, rich trust-fund kids, famous musicians, socialites, hospitality insiders, foreign billionaires etc." because I'm just gonna be so authentic. Being myself. I'm gonna have a "special connection" to her because I put in the time to open up my heart chakra (which she will definitely notice and praise) when I meet her at the bookclub (from meetup.com), everything is going to go slow-mo as we lock eyes, and in that moment I will feel a rush of self righteous validation: "thank God I avoided shallow conceited parties"

right right and she's gonna be a genuine truthseeker AND she's gonna have model looks without trying AND she's gonna be a virgin who never talks to other guys

correct. most guys have low discernment

hmm 🤗 but what if it's hot? 😈🫠 bad move bro. the way you phrased that is insensitive and actually it's not even true. her priorities are intelligent. I think you meant to say that love goes beyond political preference, but there are ways to suggest that without indirectly calling her stupid

@aurum wrong, my 10 would never go to that party because she's a good girl (sigh)

Rejecting trophies seems to be your version of a trophy

@Joshe I was mostly teasing, no malice intended. Your original point was good. I do want to push back on this a little bit. One could just have a very simple and pure lifelong interest in beautiful women, and it's not a fair interpretation to accuse this guy of "childhood issues." For such a man, it's not about the trophies or clout or praise. It's about wanting to admire femininity and beauty up close and personally. The borderline-autistic studying and strategizing arises as a necessary stepping stone towards that aim. As a healthy guy with a healthy drive to cherish beautiful women, you are faced with gatekeeper after gatekeeper. For starters, you don't even know where to go. And even if you did, you would not be allowed in. And even if you were allowed in, you would get brutally mogged. These are not obstacles that you can merely "vibe" your way past. Which is why really ambitious pickup guys can appear like plotting schemers. They could just be overcompensating for lack of love and stuck in a neurotic seeking loop. Or, they could be a real lover of beauty and they're just laying the necessary groundwork to actualize that love.

pshh, you're being far too serious and analytical, mr. aurum joshe clearly knows his stuff so I'm just gonna follow his advice and "have fun" and "be myself" and I'm gonna get all the hottest girls and I definitely won't eat shit or run headfirst into cold hard reality

all my homies h8 R!!