something_else

I mean kind of, yea. It depends on the degree of unpredictability and the risk to reward ratio. IMO crypto blurs the line between investment and gambling. In general I'd label anything that promises the possibility of a big win in a short timespan with a high degree of uncertainty/luck as at least gambling adjacent. This is the mechanism that creates gambling addicts. Most altcoins and all memecoins are so unpredictable that they are just straight up gambling. BTC is better, but there is still an incredible amount of uncertainty. I am quite sceptical of this. As the saying goes "past performance is not indicative of future results". There have been 3 cycles of four years, but that fact alone does not mean there is going to be a fourth. 3 is not a lot of datapoints either. We are also at an incredibly uncertain point in the world with an unstable president of the US and the looming impact of AI. And there's a dynamic whereby the more people that believe the fourth cycle is going to be a money making opportunity, the less of a money making opportunity it becomes. All of these, among many other factors, compound the uncertainty. I believe in Bitcoin as a concept, but I would not personally rely on that belief as evidence that the price of Bitcoin is going to keep going up, or follow predictable patterns.

It isn’t pre/trans fallacy. I’m arguing that manosphere content is detrimental even if you’re just starting out. It isn’t a phase to go through, it’s deadweight to be dropped. Inceldom as an identity has skyrocketed in popularity because of increased social isolation and because of the manosphere. These two things form a death spiral together. The more isolated you become the more time you spend online, the more time you spend online the more likely you are to get sucked into manosphere content, the more manosphere content you watch the more you’re told that you’re not good enough and that you’re all alone as a man. Rinse and repeat. Again, this is not accidental. This is a carefully crafted marketing funnel in action. The way out is not more manosphere content, it’s to break the cycle. Drop all of that shit, make some deep friendships and build a fun social life.

I'm going to be honest, this still just sounds like gambling psychology to me. Especially this part: You never know when the cycle will be, what the highs will be or what the lows will be. None of these things are very predictable, which makes it much more akin to gambling than investing. It's very analogous to the "just one more roll" mindset that you see from a gambler. Also this confuses me: You got in very early, if you'd sold nothing that bitcoin would be worth a fortune now, right? How did you lose 90% by not selling?

You can't just redefine terms to suit your own biases. What makes you think this is the case? I'm not naturally sociable either, and pickup/redpill theory actually made my social skills worse when I was into that many years ago. The intellectualism within the manosphere kills your vibes stone dead. Do you think the majority of the guys actually getting laid left right and centre give a shit about any of this? Or the guys who are in healthy loving relationships? No, they just focus on their own lives and doing what brings them joy, which is why they give off good vibes and reap the rewards of it. Obsessing over manosphere content online is subtle admission to yourself that you are low value, and that will always leak out in your interactions. It's fundamentally built into the framework with ideas like "men have no inherent value". That shit is toxic for your mind. It's all carefully crafted by influencers in that space to make you feel insecure so that they can present themselves as the solution, for a fee you understand. It's all a grift. In recent years I've largely always framed this area of self development as building social skills, and learning to express who I am as a person confidently. Call it bluepilled, but this has worked much better for me both in terms of results and my own mental wellbeing.

I relate to this as well, I've always struggled with execution. I figure out the plan and steps to accomplish what I want, and my brain seems to decide that's "enough" and that the actual execution doesn't matter beyond that. And ADHD diagnosis and meds have helped a lot in this regard

Exactly. The core issue is you can come up with a theory for how almost any behaviour could come from evolutionary pressure, but there is rarely any way to prove that your theory is correct. This makes it more akin to storytelling than a true science. That doesn’t mean the theories are all wrong, just that it’s easy to place far too much weight on them when culture, environment and social factors can also explain behaviour. Humans love a good story though which is what makes evolutionary psychology very appealing to many.

The definition of matriarchy is "a system of society or government ruled by a woman or women." So if most of the people in the highest positions of power within society are men, then by definition we don't live in a matriarchy. I agree, but if you internalise this way of thinking it will fuck up your vibes in subtle ways you don't even realise.

That was basically my thought. The post argues for 'vibes' being king but most women would interpret any of this as bad vibes. Not to say there aren't valid points in here, there are plenty. But in the bigger picture arguments it leans heavily on a lot of sensible sounding evolutionary psychology that actually has little evidence to support it. The use of the word matriarchy is odd as well, you just have to look at who all of the richest and most powerful people in the world are to see that we don't live in a matriarchy.

Could you expand on what you mean here?

What was your reasoning for buying crypto which made you so confident it would increase in value?

I think this shadow is quite common among INTP or ADHD type personalities, or those with high openness in Big 5. I relate to it as well. This desire to be unique and special. To lead an interesting life. Eventually you just need to accept that you (probably) aren't fundamentally very special, and that's OK. Counter-intuitively, when you accept that it makes it easier to accomplish interesting things because it shifts your perspective from "I am special and unique so I deserve Thing" to "I would like Thing in my life, how do I work towards getting Thing". 'Stage Blue shadow' encapsulates this issue really well, because stage blue heavily penalises individual uniqueness while valuing work ethic, monotony, and doing what needs to be done even if it's boring to you.

Why do you think you deserve the best women?

The longer the relationship is, the more emotional processing becomes necessary when it ends. Having a strong inner state does not mean you can ignore these emotions and get on with your life, that is avoidance. A strong inner state means that you are secure enough to face and process those negative emotions instead of running away or distracting yourself. 3 months isn't a long relationship, I agree. I don't think you need to take a break or anything. Though I will say that the initial post here (and the fact you made it at all) does give the impression that you at felt at least some resentment or other negative emotions which you shared to get them off your chest. Perhaps this means you could benefit from some reflection. Maybe that's not the case, I don't know you. That's just my impression.

While I'm glad that worked out for you, what you did is pretty much just gambling

How long were you together? It can be good to take some time to just sit with the breakup instead of jumping straight back into dating as a form of distraction. It depends how long you were together and how close you were though, hence why I asked. If it was a few months then yea, jumping back in is ideal. But if you were together 1+ years, or even 6 months, you become close enough that you should take some time to process those emotions instead of distracting yourself. I suspect the point she was getting at is that it's often a good idea to just sit with your emotions, let them surface and percolate. You may think this sounds feminine and have a gut reaction that it isn't manly to do this, but the opposite is true. Distracting yourself from emotions you're scared of is a form of running away, it's not masculine.

If only the forum had a PM feature

Being bisexual doesn't mean a girl wants to share her partner. Most are still monogamous. I've participated loosely and known a fair few people who have been more deeply involved. Guys who are trying to build a harem have a very poor reputation in that space. Especially when using poly terms to legitimise their harem-building. It is quite a common trope. Power dynamics are fun in bed when everyone consents, yes. But actual relationships built upon heavy power imbalance are not ideal. You've got the logic of my argument backwards. I don't think Google is exploitative because they're worth trillions of dollars, I think they're worth trillions of dollars because they're exploitative. It is a fundamental tenant of capitalism that to make money you must exploit people. In smaller scale businesses it's pretty minimal, but for a company like Google the exploitation is far more prevalent. There are children in Africa mining the lithium that goes into every Pixel phone, and a big chunk of of their money comes from selling customer's data to the highest bidder. There are plenty more examples of exploitation, but those were the first two that came to mind. What you describe isn't a polycule though, it's a harem. "Anybody who disagrees with me is just defending their own ego" is itself a mechanism for defending your own ego. People who disagree with or criticise you aren't necessarily doing so because you hurt their egos and threatened their status. It's beneficial for you to believe that because this mechanism allows you to discount almost any criticism as ego-backlash.

It's scary, but the answer is probably nobody. Some people have lots of power and influence, yes, but the idea that there is some secret organisation controlling everything in the world is just an oddly comforting fantasy. It's much scarier to face the fact that the world is a chaotic mess and nobody is really in control of anything that is happening.

I think this is quite a heavy generalisation. "American girls" and "European girls" are incredibly broad categories with a ton of individual variation. Regardless, I'll take on your premise and disagree. European girls are pretty comparable culturally to American girls in their mindsets towards sex, if anything I'd argue they're more open. Especially in places like Germany, Netherlands, France, the Nordics and Spain. Not an exhaustive list either.

I think it's a fair comparison. It's going to be close to impossible to maintain a harem unless there's a significant power dynamic at play. How many women do you think grow up fantasising about being in a man's harem one day? Not many. It's not something a woman typically wants, it's something a woman tolerates in order to gain access to resources, or it's something she's manipulated into. Which means there is an exploitative power dynamic at play. This analogy harms your argument more than it helps it. The larger a business gets, the more unethical and exploitative it must become. There are zero businesses making hundreds of millions of dollars which don't exploit people. In the same way, the more women you bring into your harem, the more exploitation becomes necessary to maintain it. Wanting 5 wives all to yourself is equivalent in this analogy to running a multi-billion dollar company, which cannot exist without serious exploitation. The fundamental drive creating such a business is greed, ego, status and desire, and the same is true for explicitly wanting a 5-wive harem. I think a lot of the poly community would dislike how you use their language. There are terms in that community like "harem-building" and OPP (one penis policy) which are used to identify men who want to join the poly community as a means to building a harem to satisfy their ego and status.

Ehm, kind of agree. Although if you are doing a lot of work and not getting what you want out of it, it's worth being aware of what you are actually trying to achieve. I've typically taken a different approach anyway, I've never really done the hardcore pickup stuff where I'm approaching on streets, I've always viewed it as learning social skills, making friends, going to parties, clubs, bars with friends etc. More normie pickup I guess.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be annoying. There are quite a few threads from you here and I haven't actually read all of the replies to them through fully, I wasn't aware that other people had asked that already.

I didn't mean it as a judgement. More so that it sounds like you're doing well, girls are responding well to you, but it also seemed like it hadn't really gone anywhere with a girl and I was wondering why. The high standards answers that I guess. Will this be your first relationship?

I find it interesting and impressive that you’ve met so many girls recently, well done for the effort. But out of curiosity, are any of these interactions actually going anywhere? Like a phone number, date, kiss, hookup?

You end up so in tune that you know who is best suited to handling a given situation. It’s intuitive, it doesn’t always require active discussion. Think of it like sex, even dom guys typically like the girl to take control sometimes, but it’s not like there’s active discussion about it. You feel out each other’s rhythm, preferences and skills, then control naturally flows back and forth based on that.