aurum
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Posts posted by aurum
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3 hours ago, something_else said:Funny, I was just out at a bar and there was a guy who was burning through his last (apparently) £100 he had buying these two girls drinks because he reallllly wanted to get with one of them. First thing she told me when I spoke to her is that she had a BF but she was letting him follow them about all night without telling him so he'd keep buying them drinks
He must've spent nearly £50 on them total, then just left after getting nowhere. Don't be that guy
Or that girl for that matter lol
Right, so in that case our friend needs a bit of an intervention. He needs to learn how to properly attract someone without assuming he can just buy his way into their pants. So put the wallet away.
The danger then becomes when our friend actually then gets some success doing that. Then he goes “ah, so the secret is to NOT pay for girls! Therefore I will never pay for them”. And of course that is equally stupid, but also a very common conclusion you’ll see guys make. It usually happens when they’re learning how to flex their “alpha” muscle and take it too far.
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Not buying things for girls is just a good rule of thumb for guys who are newer at game. Because unfortunately a lot of guys have been conditioned into thinking they can or need to buy a girl’s affection. So telling those guys “don’t buy her a drink” is probably good advice.
But in reality, you can totally spend money on a girl and it’ll be fine. You just want to avoid this transactional expectation.
Equally dumb of a move would be to refuse to pay for something when it would make sense to do so. But because you heard from a PUA guru and have built an ideology around not buying things for girls in order to seem alpha, you’ll not do it. And it’ll come off as strange or even cheap.
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1 hour ago, Loving Radiance said:@SamC @aurum I've got the High Fidelity Earplugs by etymotic https://www.etymotic.com/passive-hearing-protection/
It's good design. I always take them with me also to ecstatic dance events, tantra retreats and the like.
I’ll check them out, thank you ?
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I never had any luck with earplugs. Couldn’t hear the conversation.
Musician earplugs are probably your best bet but I wouldn’t count on it.
The reality is that going into night clubs for a long period of time on a regular basis may damage your hearing to a degree. But you’ve got to be pretty hardcore about it. Most likely you’ll grow out of clubs before that happens.
I’d just make sure you stay away from the speakers if possible. They can be substantially louder than the rest of the club, so be conscious of where you are standing.
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13 hours ago, Knowledge Hoarder said:I don't think it's possible to get rid of that anxiety completely, but you can lower it. I've heard that herbs like ashwagandha can work like a charm, meditating can help also ofc.
Saying hi to people and being overall social is probably a good place to start, that's what I'm doing also. @aurum Thanks for the tips.
You’re welcome ?
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1 hour ago, Javfly33 said:Thanks man, but tbh, I´ve already done that "indirect approach" "get into state" technique, plenty of times I think. And yeah, it makes you feel better, but at the end I just become comfortable to it and end up not doing proper approaches.
Then my guess is you’re not hitting it hard enough.
In order for this to work, you have to be fast. You can’t do one and then wait 10 minutes. Ideally less than a minute in between these approaches.
You could easily do 10-20 of these before you do a “real” approach. So unless your numbers look like that, I’d say bump it up.
The key is you’ve got to send a signal to your subconscious that it’s safe for you to be outgoing and approach. Which means you’ve got to be continually leaning into your edge of what seems “scary” at the moment.
If an approach is too scary, you’ll lock up. If it’s not scary enough, you won’t be sending that subconscious signal that it’s safe. So feel into that edge of where it’s uncomfortable, but still do-able.
1 hour ago, Javfly33 said:I´ve gone out 3-4 times with "wings" but they are as unexperienced as me. And it was nighttime, we opened sets but I don't think its the same "real deal" as daygame. (Girls are so so so closed on nighttime in my opinion. Seems way more difficult for a beginner). And now that winter comes nightgame will be less easy to do also.
This is not a problem at all.
At this point, you don’t even want wings who are too experienced. They’ll just shove you in your head and make you more insecure. And they probably won’t to go out with you anyway.
You need guys who are also inexperienced.
This is why I think my friends and I got better at this. We all knew we sucked, which took the pressure off of failure. Instead of posturing about how good we were at pickup, we created an internal culture where mistakes were legitimately encouraged. Our criteria for guys joining our inner circle was not how experienced they were but if they were doing the approaches. Learning was our top priority.
Later on you can be more picky about wings. There’s a time when that’s appropriate. But for now, as long as they approach and they’re not a psychopath, that’s good enough.
As far as your comment on night game, I wouldn’t give up on it. What night game really does is generate more extreme responses than day game. So you’ll have more girls who will blow you out hard, but you’ll also have girls who looking to party and open to moving things fast.
Your quickest results will usually come by doing night game. There’s also a lot more girls and social grace to fuck up because “partying”.
1 hour ago, Javfly33 said:So far this last couple of days I´ve worked on being on the body and less on the mind. I try to become comfortable moving my body, trying to not being "self conscious". Because today I saw walking by me a couple of times 2 girls that I liked to approach, and it came the time to obviously run a little bit to catch them up, and I couldn't because I felt "self conscious" that people would see a guy running down the street and judge me (I am working on letting go of this self-conscious thoughts and being more in the body/present). What do you think?
I would not be running up to girls. That is kind of a bad look and it’s also just unnecessary 99% of the time.
The vast majority of time, you should be approaching before it gets to that point.
However, it sounds like even if you didn’t have to run up to those girls, you still wouldn’t have done the approach. You’re still trying to go from 0 to 100 in no time. It doesn’t usually work.
If you were very experienced then maybe you could get away with that. But as a newbie that’s just shooting yourself in the foot.
Now if you had spent the last 15-30 minutes warming up like I described above, then that could have been doable.
1 hour ago, Javfly33 said:Thanks for the rest of tips I will definitely try to be more social overall, and currently Im setting up a meditation habit. I also I am beginning to be "better" at conversations by feeling the body and being in the now that way I am not lost of thoughts of "how am I looking?" "what image am I displaying?" "is he/she judging me?" etc.
That’s all good.
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1 hour ago, Molaric said:My parents say I'm on the spectrum but I don't really align with much of the symptoms. I do relate to this nervousness since I don't want to sound weird and I try to improve my nonverbal mannerisms since whenever I do speak people give me weird looks and reactions. I just try to say something, but it always feels off and alien-ish to others I notice.
Well I’m not at all an expert on autism. But what I do know is that all diagnosing is largely just labeling.
And it seems to me that if you were truly on the spectrum, you’d not be aware that you were weirding others out and that you’re acting “off”. That already requires an ability to read social cues.
Study social skills in an intellectual way if you want, it certainly can be of some value. Otherwise I’d look into relaxing your system.
I’d also dig deeper into that nervousness. What are you so nervous of? And why?
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Do you think you could be misdiagnosing the problem?
Unless you’re on the autism spectrum, most people with an average upbringing are perfectly capable of reading social cues. Your brain is literally wired to do this, the same way we could say a dog’s nose is wired to smell.
So if you can’t do what a human being is meant to do, consider that the problem isn’t that you haven’t read enough books or watched enough YT videos on socializing. Consider that the problem is that you are not intune with your own signals. Most likely because you struggle with relaxing, and therefore your nervous system is in a state of fight-or-flight, which is anti-social.
You can of course read books and study body language. Charisma on Command is a good YT channel for this. But that’s honestly not what is going to make the biggest difference for people.
The biggest difference is going to come from relaxing your nervous system and socializing a lot.
Of course now that I said this, relaxing may become the new thing that you start to stress about. Is my nervous system relaxed enough??? Am I in fight or flight??? But you gotta start somewhere.
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@Javfly33 this has been discussed many times.
You needs wings and you need to baby step your way into approaching. Maybe just start by saying “hi” to people if that’s all you can muster. Take the pressure off, don’t try to hit a home run.
When you’re not approaching, you want to stay in a relatively positive / social state. This is just who you are and what you do 24/7. When you go to the grocery store, talk to the cashier. Talk to your Uber driver. Get lunch with friends. Pregame before you go out if you’re doing night game.
Final piece is to do the inner work. There’s endless techniques when it comes to it. See if you can become aware of why you have the anxiety. What exactly are you anxious of?
Start also building a habit of pushing your comfort zone little everyday so you have that muscle. Cold showers can help here.
If you do all of that, approaching may still sometimes be awkward, but in general it will be significantly easier.
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@Raptorsin7 In a way, highly collectivist societies have always had a influence over who people date. There’s never just been 100% freedom.
If you were in a stage Purple tribe, you’d be constrained on dating by a) who was a member of your tribe (which was already highly constrained by geography) and perhaps also b) some sort of arranged marriage, which would have been based off of the well-being of the tribe.
That’s also why sacrifice has been an important part of these cultures. You are expected to surrender to the needs of the tribe, so that we can then all live a successful life.
What you’re describing sounds like a more modern version of an arranged marriage. It’s sort of the equivalent of your father coming to you and saying “you need to marry so-and-so because then we’ll get X benefits”.
Now in our modern society, that seems crazy. We want people to get married because they fall in love organically, not out of coercion. We want personal freedom to choose. We want to feel like it was an internal decision, not one forced upon us.
And there’s good reason for that. Many arranged marriages end up not being good ones. If someone feels they were coerced into a relationship, they may not fully invest in it because they see it as an “obligation” vs something they want to do. And what if you get stuck with someone who is abusive or who you just aren’t compatible with?
My grandparents had an arranged marriage and I don’t think I ever saw much love there. It was purely a survival move.
At the same time, I doubt that societies that regularly had arranged marriages saw their situation as “dystopian”. I suspect they just saw it as a part of life, and many of them were able to find happiness regardless.
You have to remember that autonomy and freedom of choice is really an SD Orange value. Anywhere else on the spiral does not place such a high value on this. Even Red does not value “personal freedom” on the whole, as someone at Stage Red is okay being a warlord / dictator that enslaves people.
So my conclusion is that life would go on. Yes, there be a lot of problems with government trying to arrange marriages. But people would do it temporarily for the sake of survival, until we no longer felt it was at stake.
There is also a cost for freedom. How much emotional and mental energy have you spent trying to figure out your dating life? The more freedom you have, the more decisions you have to make. While I like personal freedom, too much freedom can very quickly backfire, leaving you stuck in paralysis and making your life miserable.
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I’m also a singer and I’ve thought about this a lot as well.
When I really hit into my falsetto, it actually can start to sound like a woman is singing. Whereas my chest voice obviously sounds more stereotypically masculine.
It does feel therefore like there is both a woman and a man in this body. Which would make sense spiritually.
There is also something tremendously special and the Mix voice. That place where you’re neither in deep falsetto nor deep in your chest, but blending the two. I find that is my favorite place to sing and what tends to sound best. While occasionally popping out to the extremes for effect.
Which then makes me wonder if there is a metaphor there. When we “mix” our masculine and feminine and blur the lines between them, we are unifying the energies. Which creates an amazing sound.
Speculation of course, but I think there’s something to it.
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36 minutes ago, Nos7algiK said:Naw, there is no hint though. She literally said she was mostly being friendly and not flirting at all.
Yeah dude, that’s often how girls are.
They can be extremely subtle.
The fact she reached out at all is huge. I wouldn’t expect most girls to go beyond that. Especially at this early stage.
Be careful not to just project what YOU would want a girl to do onto what is actually the best advice for Somegirl. Of course if you’re a guy that has struggled reading girl’s intentions, you would probably love it if a girl was super overtly flirty.
But that doesn’t mean it’s in her best interest.
What is in her best interests IMO is that she sees that he is reciprocating. Which so far it sounds like he is not.
Even if she hits him over the head with her intentions and he likes it, it doesn’t mean he actually likes her all that much. It just means she made it easy for him, so maybe he’ll go along with it.
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@somegirl I’m going to disagree with everyone else on this.
If dude hasn’t already gotten the hint...forget it. Maybe you were just being friendly and not flirty, but come on. Either he doesn’t get it, in which case it’s bizarre he’s dropping the ball that much. Or he’s just not that into it.
I’d pull back a bit and see if he comes forward.
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I’m with Leo on this. You gotta get your money right at least enough so you can afford to live in the city. It doesn’t have to be forever, even just a year could be enough if you went hard.
House share is fine. Ideally do it with other guys who are also learning game.
Temporary solution might be taking the train but that doesn’t seem long term sustainable to me. Might be enough to hold you over until you rent a new place.
If you have no particular love for London than maybe consider moving to another city as well.
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11 hours ago, SamC said:Yeah that's a much better question. The thing is that I thought It would be so casual becuase it was in a club that you could just go for it. I always hear my friends say, who I made out with her, and her and my neighbors fucking dog
you get the point. I basically thought it wasn't that big of a deal and wasn't on the look out for those clear yes kiss me cues, which is stupied becuase it's painfully obvious that you should. I need to learn the social context better + learn to look out for the cues.
Yeah it’s very nuanced. You can get away with all sorts of crazy behavior in a night club. So pua teachers want to teach you that and show you that you’re not limited. And that you can bend social norms in your favor.
At the same time, there’s always still social cues and calibration that is going on.
So it’s not so much that you abandon all social rules in a night club. It’s more like you enter a new reality with much different rules.
Anyway, there’s no YT video or anything like that I’d recommend. You know what it looks like when a girl is interested. You have a functioning brain that has evolved over thousands of years to read social cues. It’s very, very good at this. You just have to listen to your own cues.
And if you really feel like you don’t know, maybe just google “pua IOIs (indicators of interest)”. But any list you will find online will be very limited and not robust enough for the complexity and nuance of real life socializing.
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We’ve definitely swung as a society in the direction of “cheap, easy” over “beautiful and sustainable”. So I suspect a correction is coming.
The problem is, even if people want to create something “beautiful and sustainable”, they often are economically incentivized to do the exact opposite.
So what I think needs to happen is that economics needs to be realigned with beauty. We want our economics incentivizing beauty, not the other way around.
And there may be some hard limits to that realignment. But we haven’t hit them yet. We’ve collectively barely even tried.
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3 hours ago, SamC said:Here I quickly fucked up big time though. I tried to escalate by kissing her way to early. We only talked and bounced around for like 15 min without prioir physical escalation. Rockie mistake I know. Super fucking stupied I know, but suffering is the best teacher I guess. It's really embarrassing to share this honestly... I was super naive and foolish, enough tension hadn't been built up. I feel like the biggest idiot alive.
“Too early” can be very subjective.
It’s not like there’s a rule that you can only kiss a girl after X amount of time. Especially at a nightclub.
More than likely what happened was your timing was just off. You probably went for it out of nowhere and came off as uncalibrated to the situation.
These mistakes are how you learn. Nothing has gone wrong, this is the process.
3 hours ago, SamC said:Here is what I don't understand though. The guys I went out with said to wait til like 1 am to approach. In the beginning I didn't know that, so I didn't do that. Here comes the question. Are they correct? Should you do it in the beginning or later? Why? In the beginning it was atleast for me wayyyyy easier to approach and make the girls invested and then the more crowded it got, the harder and non reactive the girls became.
1am??
That makes no sense.
So if you get there at 12am, you’re just going to sit there in the corner by yourself, not talking to anyone for a whole hour? Meanwhile, you’re getting more and more in your head every minute that goes by. And then some magic flip is going to switch at 1am and you’ll be super social? Nah.
Talk about awkward.
Unless you’re already with a group of friends and having fun, you need to be talking to people as much as possible. Pickup at a night club is like swimming. If you stop being social (swimming), you drown and die.
3 hours ago, SamC said:Second question. What the fuck should you talk about when you approach them in the club? Like, A, you can barely hear them and B they just bounce around and get distracted so easily. What should you say to grasp their attention. Fuck man Game is haaard.
You talk bullshit.
Substance matters basically zero. It just has to be fun.
3 hours ago, SamC said:It's a huge difference to go out with wings. They tried to nudge me in the right direction. It was really good. I fucking hate clubs though!? it's loud, you can't hear shit and you hear weird random sounds all the time. It's really fun to meet a lot of girls though. It makes me motivated. In the beginning especially, I felt like a king. Like they got invested very easily. I honestly think that I benefit more in an environment where I can communicate more freely and where there is less stuff going on. Don't move to fast is the lesson for today.
I strongly dislike clubs as well, but you can still have a fun time if you choose to make it fun. And since they are the ideal environment in many ways for learning, you kind of just have to do it.
I would say your biggest lesson is not to not move as fast. It’s to learn how to read when it’s appropriate to kiss or not. That could be 30 seconds in, or it could be 30 minutes or 30 hours or never.
What are the green lights that let you know a girl is open for a kiss? That’s a better question.
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5 hours ago, Lyubov said:Hey @aurum can you give me your thoughts on my situation?
So to preface I've talked to my girlfriend on this topic of neediness and she says I am not "needy" (in the negative sense) at all. She says she loves my energy and how I'm caring yet uncontrolling. I'm quite strong but also soft and vulnerable when necessary and when the moment calls for it.
Basically I've fallen in love with a woman that is on a different life path than me. I would say this is our biggest barrier: she is potentially going to relocate to a different country for a job and in general she wants to move to a different country in the future but I'm not 100% sure I want to do that. We have been together for several months now and it's hard knowing this and how potentially the relationship will end because of this. It isn't 100% certain she will relocate for this job but it's possible. She has entertained the idea of staying with me here and moving in together (her words) instead but we haven't really talked in depth about long term future plans.
I've remained brave despite of this. I'm trying to balance devotion and faith (which gets a bad wrap today unfortunately when it has a very important role in a healthy relationship) with also being practical. She is heavily devoted to me and has more hope for us than I do actually. I'm just wondering your thoughts on such a situation. It's painful to think about but I knew this from the beginning. I was just going with the flow and being present and we fell super hard for each other. I have no regrets about it though and wouldn't trade it for anything. I've learned a ton about myself, grown a ton, have made unforgettable memories with her and helped her a lot as well. I suppose I just hope things work out for us the long term. I've even been willing to rethink other stuff I never thought I would before like starting a family, if we were to stay together a year or so and still be in a healthy and functional relationship where I felt like this next step would be healthy for us both.
If she is really deadset on this job and moving than it honestly just sounds like a compatibility issue.
You’re both clear with what you want, both with yourselves and each other. But in this case that just doesn’t seem to be lining up.
In my experience, it’s common that there’s sort of “that one fight” that keeps coming up in a relationship. And it sounds like this is yours.
Some couples make it through that fight, some don’t. In my past relationships “that one fight” broke us up every time. But if you make it through I imagine you guys will be stronger for it. It will really cement the bond.
If you have other couple friends, I would maybe talk to them about it. Find people who have worked it out in similar situations and see how they did it.
Wish you guys the best.
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14 hours ago, Shin said:Thanks Aurum <3
You’re welcome!
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12 hours ago, rush said:@aurum How would you reconcile the information in that book with more general advice such as follow your calling, etc ? It seems like he is not in favour of people doing what they find interesting in life, but more just grinding through any Job/Role until they become passionate about it. I'm sure there are many people that regardless of how well skilled they become in a certain field, they would still have their eye on something more suited to their natural personality and interests ?
Well first off, I don’t think Cal is pushing people to just grind through a job / career they hate. The whole point of the book is based on the question of “how can I get the most satisfaction out of my career? How can I find truly fulfilling work”?
He just takes a bit of a different approach.
I reconcile the differences by realizing that his perspective is partial. I do think there are things I tend to be more naturally passionate about and intuitively guided towards. But I also recognize that you need skills. You want to be very, very good at what you do. And what I put into my career tends to be what I get out.
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It's a good book with a lot of valid points. General synopsis is no one is going to pay you just because you are passionate about something. You have to actually have skills that people consider valuable. And often the more we commit to something, the more passionate we become about it. So instead of getting stuck in this never-ending search for what you're passionate about, commit to a craft and as you invest you'll come to love it.
It's not bad advice overall. My biggest nitpick with his book though is that he doesn't seem to fundamentally understand why "follow your passion" is important advice. "Passion", from a spiritual perspective, is literal communication from your higher self. That feeling, that intuition, is how spirit nudges you in certain directions. And if you're not attuned to that, big problems.
Cal Newport strikes me as a guy who is highly rational / analytical. He's more or less a materialist as far as I can tell. So his perspective, while valuable, I still find limiting.
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3 hours ago, mamad said:since I see Attraction as a survival game Im afraid to lose my attraction in the long run
I would look deeper into the beliefs you have around this.
Attraction is not as simple as “who has the most money / status?”
Introspect on where that fear is actually coming from and why.
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18 hours ago, soos_mite_ah said:To a certain extent, I think this mindset has a lot of parallels with the mindset of "the one who cares the least is the one with power in a relationship." Like, power, having the upper end, or "winning" should be nonissues in healthy dynamics imo.
Yes that’s another really potentially toxic belief. It’s sort of a favorite in the redpill / pua community.
I do think there’s a place for being conscious of power dynamics in relationships. Like if I’m just investing, investing, investing and it’s not being reciprocated, then I’d want to know that.
But it very quickly can devolve into cynicism and an unhealthy competitive frame. If you’re spending the majority of your time in your relationships thinking about power dynamics, that’s a really bad sign. Because the fact you even have to think about that shows how unsafe you feel in that relationship.
17 hours ago, Gili Trawangan said:Yeah, I fall under this category myself. And it's incredibly hard to let go of as it gets entrenched and built into the ego structure. Reinforcing itself again and again as time goes on.
Really good post, OP.
Awareness is half the battle. Glad it helped!
1 hour ago, knakoo said:Great post !
Following is a insightful and fun podcast episode to explore this topic and especially the 2 points above :
Thanks for sharing ?
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2 hours ago, Lyubov said:Wow, I love it. And I actually agree with you that we can't meet all our needs on our own. I actually had this insight when I was going through some really rough times and realized talking about it helped. All those emotions were too much for one person to process on their own. I realized that there are many things I can't do on my own. The pyramids were not built by one person. That took many. I realized now that my own sort of wellbeing is very much about giving and receiving emotional support and it isn't functional to expect only myself to be able to handle it all.
Absolutely. One of the first things I tend to do when I really need emotional support is reach out to someone who I know is good for that. Feels very natural and helps a lot.
2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:Good points.
Perhaps a more precise way to frame the neediness problem is as follows:
When attracting people, your neediness level needs to be on par with theirs. If you are significantly more needy than the other person then they will not perceive you as attractive. And the higher quality a person is, the less needy they tend to be. So if you want to hook up with high quality people, make yourself less needy. But of course you will still have needs, and so will they. And that's okay because they will be roughly on par.
This doesn't just apply to girls. I also applies to friends and even professional relationships. People want to be friends with those who are strong and capable. And strong and capable people are not desperate to be given freebies.
In general I’d say that’s right.
I think we need to be cautious of that mindset though. Thinking that way feels like it can fall into the trap of forcing oneself to be less needy in order to get something. Which as I mentioned in this post should not be the goal.
But of course, if that’s where you’re at, that’s where you are at. Denial of that could also be a denial of needs.
in Psychedelics
Posted · Edited by aurum
@soos_mite_ah I think it’s a good list for you. I would follow it as long as it feels realistic.
I think for many people though, it would be asking too much.
For instance, your point about not doing psychs until you’ve had 2 years of mentality. But some of the most promising research being done right now is with PTSD and drug addiction. Telling these people to “get clean” before they try psychedelics would be missing the point. In fact, the founder of Rhythmia was one such person.
Same thing about your goal of reaching Yellow. I would say the majority of people who could probably benefit the most from psychedelics are stage Orange. Psychedelics can help move them past secularism / materialism.
So again, I’d stick your list if it feels right. But I wouldn’t expect it of others.