something_else

There are definitely exceptions to this, but I actually find that shared goals can ruin friendships for me. I don’t want to be thinking about long term future stuff all the time with friends, I want to chill, relax, live in the moment, and do fun stuff. Shared hobbies are good, but getting competitive or serious over goals surrounding them can ruin friendships, deep friendships come from spending enough time just vibing in each other’s presence for no purpose other than enjoying each other’s company There’s a concept of a doorbell friend which is somebody that you would be genuinely excited to see if they just randomly rang your doorbell without them telling you they were coming. That’s a good metric for deep friendships

From what I have heard about your pickup journey and the way you're talking here (which I relate to a lot) I think you're probably quite high on the avoidant scale. That can cause you to avoid friendships or other close/deep connections. I still struggle with this to a degree as well, though in the past year or two I've built some much deeper friendships (which I certainly hope will be lifelong) and it's one of the best things I've ever done. There is no single number, but I feel like a solid group of 3-5 close friends that you enjoy spending time with for no specific purpose other than vibes and fun is one of the best things you can have. It isn't transactional, you don't need to constantly worry about providing or exchanging value, you can just vibe. It's great for your mental health to have people who like you for you, and not what you can provide them.

"I was only joking!" excuse when called out for poor behaviour Classic

You don’t have to be attractive to get your foot in the door with women enough to show off personality and conversation skills, you just have to not be unattractive, or repulsive. Most men can achieve that with basic grooming and style unless they’re very very unlucky genetically.

Oh almighty stage Yellow overlord, please hand me down thy pearls of wisdom so that I may one day have an ego as large and bulbous as thee

Exactly

I'm sorry, but I can't help but feel intense cringe when reading this. Whenever somebody talks about 'being yellow' like this it almost certainly means they aren't, because somebody who was actually stage yellow would not phrase something like this.

@Joshe This has generally been my experience as well. I have always found that the more I tried to think about game or pickup frameworks and apply concepts from them, the worse I was actually perceived by women. I've always done better by not overthinking it, focusing on improving my social skills, making friends, going to social places with lots of girls.

Ironic

I genuinely thought this was a parody, I thought you were mocking OP until the last sentence 😂

A good fallback for starting a conversation with anybody is a Barnum statement. Statements that almost everybody feels like apply to them but still sound personalised “You look like you’re either gonna be the nicest person I’ve ever met, or like you’re going to ruin my life” It’s somewhat manipulative but as a means to an end for getting into a deep conversation it works well

I know this first hand. I was a loner most of my time between high school and my early twenties. I resorted to going out to bars and clubbing alone to build better social skills. It worked to a degree, but I don’t have a single person from that stage of my life who I still talk to, and I was still deeply insecure at the end of it. I also had baseline social skills already which is why that was even viable. Now I have a solid social circle of 4-5 great friends who I love dearly, and it has almost eliminated my social anxiety. I wish I had prioritised building that first instead of going straight to cold approach. Deep friendships are where you learn who you really are and how to express that in a way that is appealing to others.

I’m not talking about social circle game, I’m talking about making genuine connections with people and building friendships without the sole purpose of it all being to get laid. The kind of friendships where you can actually go and do social stuff together and just have a good time. That’s the path to developing basic social skills if you have none. This teaches you basic social dynamics, and most importantly it teaches you that socialising is actually fun, and not just a barrier in your way to getting laid. Cold approach can be good for developing social skills, but if you’re weird or cringy and don’t possess even basic social skills it’s just going to make it worse for you. You’re going to be continually told how weird or strange or awful you are which will totally destroy your self-image. Not to mention in a small town you will end up with a reputation.

This is not a downside! This is called growing up

No reputation is also a problem as it means no status. No status + weird gimmicky approaches will put you solidly in the loser category in the mind of most women Women don’t really want a nobody, or somebody with nothing to lose. They want a man who is somebody. You don’t need celebrity status to clear that bar, a good group of friends that you do fun social stuff with is enough. You have the wit to be entertaining and sociable, this is something that’s definitely achievable for you and it’s where you should direct your energy if you want to get laid. I guess if you’re not doing these gimmicky approaches too often you may have avoided a negative reputation for now, but certainly don’t risk tarnishing your reputation anymore. In a town of 60k people most people know each other and stories about the weird guy who pretended he was married to try and get laid is exactly the kind of story a girl shares with her friends and laughs about

Dude, in a small city like that you’ve got to approach this by building a social circle. With some of the stuff you’ve told us about here I’m willing to bet you already have a fairly negative reputation in a town that small As I’ve said, you’re spinning your wheels because you’re trying to learn to drive in a car without any tyres. Learn basic social skills and get a social circle going and you might actually get somewhere.

lmao

Thank you

Leo's comment says nothing about liking anything. He specifically says 'disliking a thing before understanding the thing is backwards', implying that you should understand something before you dislike it. There is no mention of liking at all. You literally just misunderstood what Leo was saying. Or you interpreted it that way because you wanted to see it that way which, ironically, is the exact thing about bias that is problematic.

You've got to be trolling at this point, right? 😂 The whole point is that you need to be relatively neutral and unknowing towards something before you form an opinion on it, if you want that opinion to have any chance of being accurate. You don't like it, you don't dislike it. You are neutral and open minded. Claiming you are self-aware of your own bias and that you don't let it cloud your judgment is, to be frank, laughable. People spend their entire lives aiming to reach a state like that and are still plagued with blind spots. Right now you are at the peak of a Dunning-Kreuger chart. And, again, taste/preference are entirely separate thing. Being biased against women in the way you often present it is not a 'preference' or a 'taste'.

🫪 Disliking strawberries is a personal preference. Disliking or discriminating against someone because they’re a woman is prejudice. You’re conflating completely different things by hiding them under the word “preference.”

To a degree. Yes, bias can be useful in a genuine survival situation. But if someone breaks into your room, you have direct evidence that person is dangerous. That is completely different from being generally prejudiced against men because one might hypothetically attack you. Or being generally prejudice against women because the only value you see in them is as being meat to stick your dick in. Some biases being useful does not make all biases justified. Context matters a lot. In the vast majority of cases (e.g. the bias you show on this form towards women) your survival is not threatened enough to justify acting on bias instead of truth and understanding.

Yea, that was the exact point being made. Most people are incredibly biased. That's the default. Being wise involves being acutely aware of your own biases, not denying their existence or claiming that you're above them. That is delusion. Bias is incredibly subtle and tricky. It grabs the balls of your rational mind and puts them in a vice, then forces it to produce an endless stream of very logical reasons for why your biases are the right biases.

If it were logical then people in sub-Saharan Africa would be the most regenerated and healthiest in the world. Yet instead it is one of the places most plagued by disease and health problems. I believe fasting or dry fasting could have mental benefits in the sense that it will put you in unusual or spiritually meaningful state of mind. What I don’t believe is that it will do anything remotely helpful for the body. There is no logical reason it would because water is foundational to every single regenerative process in your body. I’m sorry but you shouldn’t be taking health advice from YT grifters Also, you can’t just say “your comparison has lots of flaws” and make it true. You have to actually list them out. Water is to humans as oil is to cars.

"fertile" 😬😬😬 As the fertile Gen Z women would say, "cringe"