nerdspeak

@Miguel1 I'm in Belgium

I live in a big city in northwest Europe, one of the most "green" cities in the world with several million people, multiple universities, and a decent gender ratio. That helps a lot. With dating apps, I share a lot of information about my interests and what I am looking for. I get few matches, but those I match with usually want to meet up. I am fairly selective about who I go on dates with from those matches. Like, I screen a fair amount unless their profile already signals likely compatibility. This is very different from my approach in my 20s, where I wrote one vague sentence in the profile to signal "fun" vibes and suggest dates with anyone physically attractive, pretty much right away. With IRL dating, I work with a large public institution, so I have an enormous number of colleagues in my age range. There's no strong policy against dating colleagues as long as you're not their boss, and it's so big that if it doesn't work out, we won't see each other much afterwards. Plus, I am cool with all my exes. I am not going to do things to cause drama, and even if the woman tries, I don't feed into it, so it's low-risk. I also attend conferences and other professional networking events through my job, which expose me to women with similar values and interests.

Athenian aristocrats didn’t meet their emotional or intellectual or even sexual needs through their wives. You don’t have to either. But given the expectations around monogamous relationships now, it’s really a big drag if your partner doesn’t meet these needs to a certain degree. I’m allergic to therapy-speak now but Esther Perel has written a bit about this. In my own case, I have very niche interests and spent years trying to date normies because I was optimizing only for looks and doing pickup and apps before the filters now available. It doesn’t work, and now I only date people in my professional area. This brings up some ethical issues sometimes but luckily Europe is more chill about this than North America. Funnily enough, I don’t have to trade down on looks. You’d think I might have to, but by nicheing down and being very specific, I get better “results” than from the wide-funnel approach I used in my 20s. And the relationships that come out of it are usually more durable and satisfying. When these relationships end, it’s not because someone gets drunk and cheats or because she found a hotter richer guy lol. Usually there’s a recurrent incompatibility that we discuss over months until it becomes apparent that we can’t resolve it. Usually there’s a recurrent incompatibility that we discuss over months. Cheating is often caused by not knowing how to discuss or address these issues; people try to hide the problem for too long and then act out.

Bingo. As the billboards used to say to gay teens on the NYC subway: “It gets better.”

Those of you generalizing from experience I’d also ask, how old are these girls/women? Because women in their teens and early 20s are going to be more unstable, unsure of what they want, and attracted to the next shiny thing just because of age. And lack the communication skills and life experience to negotiate. But, this is true of most men that age too.

Even if this is true, you’re describing a response to an extreme situation. If all the men a woman knows are killed or enslaved, she might be responsive to romantic advances from the new dominant power. But in Western countries nothing analogous to a tribe being catastrophically defeated in war has happened since 1945. Losing your job or getting a chronic illness is not the same as being defeated in a violent conflict. Of course, if you start becoming depressed and mistreat the woman in response to the setback, that might cause her to leave eventually.

I’m well over 30 years old, I’ve had all the women awakenings. At one point I thought more red pill like you do, but if you really pay attention the source of this thinking is male egocentric solipsism because of course at the extremes their loyalty has limits. And the male ego hates that and wants completely unconditional loyalty, and of course that’s impossible. I’ve repeatedly had to break up with girls because the relationship was hurting them, they weren’t happy and they knew it and could even articulate it, but they couldn’t let go. That’s how loyal most women are once they’re attached—they want to stay in bad situations and make themselves and you miserable.

@AION no they’re hard-wired to be loyal to their male partners to preserve group cohesion. If you want to use evolutionary psychology you should read actual evolutionary psychology, not online BS. Women (speaking generally) are almost as loyal as puppies. Of course if you abuse them or neglect them, gradually they’ll distance themselves and eventually move on. You might experience that as her not being supportive during a crisis, but looked at objectively, probably the crisis caused you to (emotionally) abuse or neglect her. Of course, there are exceptions.

@Lucasxp64 not worth it, if you make yourself into someone you’re not just to get a gf, you’ll resent the girlfriend you end up with because she’s blocking you from fulfilling your purpose. Eventually you’ll feel trapped and sabotage it. For a relationship to last, the girl needs to be aligned with who you are (your purpose) otherwise you’ll sabotage it in the end because she’s getting in your way, or become anxious and depressed because you’ll feel pressure to perform this false extrovert self to keep the relationship, while feeling anxious gnawing feeling about how you’re ignoring your real goals. That doesn’t mean don’t learn basic social skills, but abandoning an intellectual career you’re suited for to become a salesman or club promoter because you think you’ll get a hotter gf is really a bad idea. From both a pure career perspective (you won’t be good at those extrovert jobs) and from a life satisfaction perspective. I could go on and on, trust me, don’t do it.

I would qualify this a bit. Harris isn’t a real scientist with a research position but I understand what you mean. There are established scientists who, at a certain point, realize they’ll get more publications per hour by persuading more junior or less socially-skilled researchers to list them as co-authors, without contributing much themselves beyond their reputation and network. However, you need institutional leverage to do that. To get that leverage, at some point they had to do actual scientific work themselves to get there. It’s almost impossible to bullshit and network your way through an R1 PhD, multiple postdocs, hiring committees, peer review, and tenure review board. Of course it helps, but you would need to also do a lot of logical abstract work. I’m not saying it hasn’t been done (pure bullshit artists getting tenure at an R1 in contemporary academy, let’s say since 1990), but you need to be an extremely skilled politician on the level of Bill Clinton to get away with it. My point is, there are a significant number of people who are capable of both being charismatic/sociable AND hardcore scientific work. Many of those people, however, later choose to specialize in being charismatic/sociable (but not at the level of Huberman—they keep it confined within academia) because it’s more efficient from perspective of H-net scores and generating a huge number of publications, or because it’s easier and more fun for them. This is as much a problem of academia’s perverse incentives (optimize for publication volume and prestige rather than originality) as the corruption of the senior scientists as individuals. Some of these more senior researchers are cool though, and by lending their names as co-authors, innovative new stuff gets published that would never be accepted by major journals if it was just a couple post-docs listed as authors.

I acknowledged he was a cliche, but chose him as an example everyone would know. That said, you can’t be a research professor at Stanford without being a scientist, although he seems to devote a lot of l energy to his influencer career now. A lot of academia is networking and the ability to influence important people at conferences. The most successful ones tend to have at least reasonable social skills.

Surprisingly a lot of scientists are pretty sociable and charismatic, and can switch between abstract thinking and vibing quite easily. Certainly not all, but 1/5 or so. Think of Huberman as a cliche example.

I’m under 5’8”, so I can’t be more than a 6 or a 7. But this just means more filtering and approaches are needed. The shut-ins you refer to need to go touch grass and do more things with their life than doom-scroll through blackpill content. And maybe lower their standards a bit. If you’re an unemployed shut-in with below-average looks, maybe you should adjust your expectations about how hot a woman you can expect to land. The fact that such a guy can’t date a hot girl is not hoeflation, it’s just common sense. I agree the economic situation for people in their late teens and early 20s is pretty difficult atm. But the problem is not “hoeflation,” that’s a silly argument. Women are economically screwed too, and you could say there’s more pressure on men to be economically successful, but that depends on the values of the people you put yourself around.

This is not really true lol. Granted I’m a bit older but sleeping with US and Belgian women is pretty easy if you’re willing to stay within your friend group or, if not, endure a lot of rejection and nonsense. Girls will still eye-fuck and orbit you and it’s just a matter of reading the signals. And there’s less inhibition about being a slut than when I was young. Even online is not that hard if you’re in a big city with a decent gender ratio. It’s not as easy as Ukraine, but I’ve found New York, France, and Belgium all pretty easy, and while I’m somewhat good-looking, I’m also short. This weird internet stuff is more a reflection of people’s anxieties and projections than anything tangibly real about social reality. But I do think many zoomer guys lack the social skills to filter for girls predisposed to like them, and many zoomer girls are super anxious and lack social skills as well, so it is a bit harder for people under 30z

@Twentyfirst You don't necessarily need to set up social gatherings or have a big social circle to be a natural. There are loner naturals with 2-3 male friends who go out not that often, max once per week, but usually just once per month (usually while a bit tipsy), and pull almost every time off a couple of warm approaches (based on eye contact or proximity, like the girl kind of lingering around), and otherwise just do online. I met a couple of people like this in NYC and i basically imitate their approach because I lack the energy to run around nightclubs. To maintain a big social circle, with lots of beta orbiters and female friends doing grunt work, you have to actually like superficial socializing and invest energy in maintaining these relationships. These guys don't really enjoy that sort of thing. They want to have intense intellectual conversations with their long-time friends and then snipe hot girls who are already a bit attracted to them. It takes some confidence; the people I met who were like this had rich parents and/or were reasonably successful and good-looking, went to fancy private schools, played sports in college, etc. Not saying you need these things to pull like this, but they had strong, entitled frames. Not all of them were good-looking, but they all dressed well, in clothes that signalled their wealthy, highly educated East Coast patrician backgrounds.

He definitely alienates a lot of women with this approach, and it's highly suboptimal. But I think he's still qualified to teach a certain kind of guy insofar as most guys just need to do high numbers of approaches and be a bit pushier, and then they'll eventually find a girl who wants to date them and then they'll leave the community. It's like with marketing and sales; focusing on becoming extremely good at sales is kind of besides the point as a business owner (as long as you are good enough to close 10-15%) before you have good lead flow. Most business owners should focus on generating as many leads as possible, not on becoming the GOAT of closing leads.

Some naturals are surprisingly tactical due to somewhat Machiavellian personalities. I would also say the average natural is not as effective as the best people who have deliberately learned social skills (who are usually people who were naturals or close to it, who then layered some tactics on top of it). Many naturals are too self-absorbed and entitled and it gets in their way; others are too nice and that also gets in their way. However, they can learn to overcome these faults and 5-10x their results. For example, a natural who is on the "nicer" side might have normally slept with 20 attractive women and had 2-3 hot girlfriends over a 20 year dating "career," because they're a bit too empathetic and jump into long relationships too easily. They can add these skills, become a bit more hardened and less easily pulled into premature commitment, and sleep with 100 attractive women, and maybe feel comfortable holding off on committing to gfs so quickly and maintaining FWBs for longer than they would have otherwise. Or they will tolerate less BS from their monogamous gfs and break up with them more quickly (most women are not worth dating long-term), and as a result end up with a higher lay count. (I am not saying that is everything, if you can sleep with 3-5 women before finding a good stable match, and not have FOMO, that's way more efficient and less headache than all of the BS you have to go through to sleep with 100 women.) The people who get the absolute best results tend to follow that pattern. Even someone who is less naturally talented socially than these naturals, but not an incel, who is fairly smart and leverages the knowledge based of thousands of people over ~30 years (if you mean the seduction community) or ~50-60 years (if you include assertiveness training and other forms of applied therapy developed since the sexual revolution), is going to do better than most naturals who do not capitalize on that knowledge base. Maybe they won't be as happy, as studying this stuff tends to make people neurotic, at least for a while. But they will usually be more successful (by the metrics of "pua" at least, which are lay count and quality) if they stick at it for 5-10 years. The exception would be naturals who combine their social skills (or use their social skills to accumulate) quite a lot of status. Bill Clinton would be an extreme example; I'm sure Bill Clinton has better "game" results (and probably skills) than any PUA. But such high-status people generally have a high degree of tactical intuition similar to the better people who studied PUA. Bill, in particular, is probably a full-on psychopath.

I think going all-in on spirituality for a bit could be a cool idea at 22. (1) your brain is much more plastic than it will be later so it’s easier to learn; (2) you have way fewer responsibilities and opportunity costs. Most meditation instruction in the west is a garbage money-making operation so if I could do it again, I would have gone to Thailand and temporarily ordained for a few months. All financial problems are solved while you’re a monk, that’s part of the point, so by definition you’re financially stable while ordained. But if it’s something you think you “should” do as part of orange self-development or something—serious spirituality is basically the opposite of that mindset, and so forget what I said above and focus on getting financially stable.

What most people do who try

My point is, you learn by doing, you don’t need to recite mantras or anything. Some things you might need professional help with. I had a real problem with people-pleasing that was blocking my career, because sales and negotiation is very important and you can’t be very good at that if you want your counterparty’s approval. I did a couple years of therapy for it and now everything is easier. Not that I’m amazingly successful, but I also spend lots of time doing work that’s fun that doesn’t pay nearly as well as if I focused on maxing lead gen and sales.

This happens automatically in the course of doing business. Learning sales, offer design, how to manage risk. You start to feel in control, like you can manage variance, and that creates a sense of confidence. Unless you’re seriously messed up in which case, just do therapy. This law-of-attraction stuff is basically nonsense, invented to sell seminars and recruit commission-only salespeople.

Depends what you mean by rich. To get to a couple million dollars net worth can be done by anyone of above average intelligence with 30-40 hours per week in 3-5 years. Getting that amount liquid is another matter, more like 5-10 years. To get to $10 million plus net worth takes either a long time, or a ton of work, or inordinate luck.

I’ve met a Christian I believed to be awake, and read about others. Their sort of awakening is colored by more emotive compassion due to the focus of the religion. As opposed to some advanced Theravada guys, who seem like the walking dead. Some Christians are open to psychedelics, you’d be surprised. A lot of Catholics and Eastern Orthodox do meditation-like contemplative practices. I’ve been on Theravada retreats with Jesuits and other Catholic priests in attendance (Catholics are quite ecumenical though, you wouldn’t see an Orthodox priest at such a thing). @Nemra

@Nemra I think it’s like Leo said. I will add that the visuals seem to echo your early childhood cultural and religious indoctrination in most cases. I went to Catholic kindergarten and got a lot of this imagery; my Japanese friend’s parents took him to esoteric Buddhist temples on Mount Koya in Japan. Some people claim it’s even genetic (non-practicing Jews who never went to synagogue getting lots of kabbalistic imagery) but idk about that, alternative explanations (like just knowing you are Jewish is probably enough to trigger that imagery).

I always get Catholic imagery at the beginning of my trips. Virgin Mary, stigmata, etc. My friend who is Japanese gets lots of sacred geometry. I guess the trick is not seeing it as evidence these things have any metaphysical truth.