Emerald

The issue with shame is that you can't improve yourself or fix yourself to get rid of it. The only antidote to shame is unconditional self-love and unconditional acceptance on the level of being. And that does reliably resolve the shame... even though it can be a difficult and drawn out process. So, pickup will never be a solution to shame. And any type of self-improvement will always be 100% ineffective at addressing shame. Any kind of action towards self-improvement that's taken from the attempt to relieve one's self of shame, will only exacerbate the shame issue. And the higher the standards you place upon yourself to accept yourself, the more intense your shame will become. So, there is a reliable way to resolve shame. That's to find ways to accept yourself no matter what... and to never use pick-up or any other form of self-improvement for the sake of getting away from shame... as that will only exacerbate it. Instead, try to switch to a more experiential process-based motivation for the actions you take. So, instead of thinking about pick-up or any other form of self-improvement from a desire to improve or fix yourself or become better to get validation... think about it more as things you're doing to enhance your own amusement and enjoyment of the process of life. See yourself as already valid and valuable... and make decisions from a place of self-love and a desire to give yourself the best experience possible. Take action from a place of being like a kid who doesn't want to miss out on Disney World. So, if you wanted to do pick-up, think about it from a place of already being whole, valid, and valuable as you are. And interact with women from a place of self-enjoyment because you love yourself. And don't approach pick-up from a place of "I need to change myself and fix myself because I'm not enough as I am to get female validation via sex and sexual interest. And I need female validation because attractive women are the arbiters who have the power to judge me as sufficiently or insufficiently Masculine... and therefore worthy or unworthy of being. And who I am isn't enough to be notarized as valid by these attractive women, so I need to learn all these techniques and improve myself to become enough (or pretend to be enough in the case of men who lack self-efficacy in conjunction with their shame struggles.) I rarely see guys on this forum who are interested in pick-up from a place of self-amusement, fun, and pleasure. Probably 90% of the time, it's guys who don't feel enough trying to use pick-up to improve themselves to try to make themselves enough. And even if a guy gets good at pick-up, this will never resolve that shame. He'll just transfer it onto the women that sleep with him. And he'll devalue them because "If they like me, they must not be worthy". Like Mark Twain said "I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me."

I do think it's a little bit like 'take care of the shame' and other things fall into place. And that's because shame keeps us rigid, performing, and disconnected from others and our sense of belonging in the universe. And it injects really high stakes into dating and relationships. In analogy to approaching women... having no shame issue versus having shame issues is the difference between walking on a balance beam that's a few inches off the ground compared to walking on a balance beam that's 200 feet in the air. It's the same action, but the stakes feel so much higher. And it's the sense of unworthiness and shame that makes approaching feel monumentally difficult because rejection is like lemon juice on those pre-existing shame wounds. So, I see pick-up and other ideas/narratives that surround it (even Red Pill, MGTOW, and Incel narratives) as a workaround for shame. And without shame, these workarounds wouldn't be necessary. And a lot of pick-up advice is like Dumbo's magic feather. Like Dumbo believed he could only fly with the magic feather. But then he lost his magic feather... and thought he lost the ability. But he later discovered that he could always fly and that the magic feather was just a placebo effect. Also, when you feel secure in yourself, then your natural personality shines through and playfulness becomes more effortless. There may be a few things to learn. But I think men forget that heterosexual women are biologically wired up to be attracted to them. I think a lot of men can get caught up in shame narratives that make them feel like they have to be a 6'11" Chad who's perfectly strong and Masculine all the time and has a totally different personality than their natural personality to be attractive to women. And that sense of "I'm not enough as I am" creates reclusive tendencies and all sorts of attempts to "fix" one's self. To focus on pick-up as a way to resolve shame is like focusing on the symptom instead of the roots cause. It's like having Malaria, and instead of seeking the cure to Malaria... it's like trying to find a solution only to suppress the fever while ignoring the deeper cause of the fever.

100% It's really evident to me that the main problems facing men in dating have mostly to do with feelings of shame and unworthiness. And women get saddled with the projection of being arbiters of male worth and society enforces that archetypal narrative. So, it creates all these stakes and tension around dating that aren't actually there. And men end up isolating themselves because they feel unworthy. Or they end up relating to women in powerless or combative ways because they see women as holding so much power to validate or invalidate them. And pick-up often gets used as a bandaid coping strategy to either make one's self more worthy of the woman OR to make one's self appear worthy to the woman by tricking her (as the appearance of worthiness is the only thing that feels possible from that standpoint of shame). Of course, some can just learn some of the seduction techniques and be successful if they don't have self-worth issues. But that seems to be the exception and not the rule. But it seems like, 95 times out of 100, men seek to learn about pickup as a means to either try to become worthy of female validation through 'becoming more Masculine' because they can't fathom of having a woman who wants them for them... or as a means of tricking women into validating them if they can't fathom of having a woman who wants them for them to the point where the woman could only love the false mask. And pickup turns into a game of seeking external validation as a temporary salve for the underlying shame. It's that thing of trying to fix a symptom rather than addressing the real root cause. And it seems to be making men lonelier and lonelier... especially the ones who end up successfully sleeping with lots of women. That's the issue when you successfully cut off the head of the hydra without cauterizing the stump.

The "being used for money/status" is probably the closest that men can feel to the type of objectification that women are subjected to. And I'm sure that can bring up lots of negative feelings and resentments around being used. But when it's your body/identity that's being objectified, there's a more all-encompassing disempowerment and de-subjectification. And you don't have the money, status, and power to mitigate this disempowerment. But there is a lot of tension in the desire to be beautiful and be seen as powerful through the lens of beauty... and trying to avoid objectification. Like, I've been on both ends of that tension... where sometimes the desire to be beautiful and centered in my Feminine power has won out. But it attracts a lot of unwanted attention that can be quite disempowering. And there's always a lot of resistance even when I do step into that. And I remember, at age 13, when I had spent my whole childhood wanting to feel beautiful... I finally started to match the beauty standard and getting male attention. And it was immediately a really negative feeling. And I would eat a lot of food when I was a teenager. My metabolism was good at the time, so I was still just on the higher end of normal, weight-wise. But I would have had to lose about 15 lbs to fit the beauty standard... which would have been easy if I just ate normally. It's only in retrospect that I can recognize that my dietary habits back then were what they were, because I was trying to avoid all that negative attention where I get treated as an interchangeable sex doll. There was also a lot of negative attention from jealous girls in my classes. I also had a really strong judgment towards the people who I knew who were obsessed with dieting. And I think that judgment towards them was also a way to avoid being proximal to the beauty standard. I'd also dress in ways that weren't universally appealing... but that I felt beautiful in. Like I made my own goth inspired style out of stuff that I'd buy at thrift stores and do all sorts of stuff with my make-up. Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I find now that looking very ordinary helps me feel safer and hidden away. But there's still the tension of wanting to step into my full power and allowing myself to fully embody what feels like me aesthetically. And I'm in a less vulnerable state now than I was before. But there's still an aversion to beautifying myself... but a desire as well.

Yeah, it's just one of those things that the guys have shame about... and they externalize that sense of shame onto OF models (or sometimes women in general).

That's where you're wrong. I'm 100% sure that men would hate being objectified en masse because you would cease to be the main character of your own sexual experience and your own story. You'd be reduced to being seen as a disposable and interchangeable dildo for women of all ages and levels of attractiveness. There's a chance that men would even hate being objectified even more than women do because men feel a more pressing need for sex and don't have all the sorting mechanisms that women do. So, you'd be feeling disempowered and objectified by more societally powerful women that are behaving vampirically towards you... and also lacking the natural aversion to sex that women have and giving in to all the sexual opportunities and feeling like you're in an addictive cycle of subjecting yourself to constant disempowerment and objectification from all sorts of women. And then society would start seeing you as a degenerate and weak loser of a man because you kept giving in to the sexual advances because "how dare you use sexuality for your own pleasure! Don't you know that your sexuality is for your future wife!". And you'd lose a bunch of opportunities because no one would take you seriously because you were a man of ill repute. And eventually, you'd have to choose between being a loser man of the streets or get married to an older woman who keeps you in a very tight lease because she must govern you because your sexuality is out of control. You'd probably start thinking of yourself that way too because you'd be having lots of sexual experiences that solidify your value as an object for women who are seen as inherently more important than you. And you'd feel competitive to other men where you want to see yourself as a better object for your older wife. You see... men like the idea of being objectified now because they get to imagine that sexual attention empowers them and adds more agency and value to them. But if men were truly sexually objectified, it would negatively impact them in every area of life and narrow their agency... including their level of sexual agency. So, sexual objectification is inherently disempowering because you just become an interchangeable chunk of flesh for ravenous dogs. Now, it may not be as physically unsafe for men as it is for women... but the physical unsafely is just a very small part of what's negative about objectification. I've never had a man commit physical violence against me. But I have experienced a lot of sexual trauma, just around being objectified and oriented to that way. It's really about being treated as mere vehicle for someone else's pleasure... and your sexuality becomes stained with that kind of disempowerment.

It's not about being bombarded with sex or sexual choices. That's the thing that men might assume it to be like. And men would like having lots of sexual choices... though would probably find it annoying that most of that attention is coming from women they're not attracted to... including much much older women. But it's more along the lines of your value and humanity being reduced to the status of object... and having a lot of people trying to use you as an object. And having people and society at large constantly projecting that onto you. This is why men can't really relate or empathize. They've been conditioned to see sexual attention as empowering and that they're the main character of that attention. But if men were actually sexually objectified en masse, it would cast you as the interchangeable side character in someone else's story where you just exist for the main character's gratification. To be oriented to constantly as a sexual object is a very disempowering and painful experience... like you're conditioned to feel like your body and your sexuality aren't your own... and that your sexuality is a source of disempowerment that has no where to exist outside of someone else's fantasies. And it takes a lot to break down that conditioning to even feel like your body is your own. When men imagine what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot, they just think about the sexual opportunities and the empowerment it would bring. But in this opposite world, if the shoe were truly on the other foot, it would be a disempowering experience because the world only sees you as the masturbatory fodder of some old woman's sexual fantasies.

There is probably that jealousy too. I honestly wish that men could experience a reality where they're constantly being sexually objectified from the age of 13 onward with all sorts of women of all ages trying to get with them every time they went into public from age 13 to early 30s. It's a really horrifying experience, tbh. And I don't think men can get a clear sense of what that's like. It's something you have to experience first-hand to empathize with, I think. It's like being a drug and a significant portion of the population are out-and-proud desperate junkies that want to use you for their next fix. So when women are upset at being objectified, it probably feels like a brag from the male perspective. It's like if a person who never knew when their next meal was going to be was jealous of someone who was constantly being tied down and force-fed a bunch of food they don't want to eat. (and food represents sexual attention in this metaphor)

Someone who does OF is sexually objectifying themselves in exchange for money. That is part of the job description. But I have no judgments towards anyone who chooses that because financial circumstances are difficult. There will always be a demand for sex and sexual content, and it makes sense why so many people turn to it. And I certainly don't blame OF models or any other kind of sex worker for the disconnection and transactional devolution of relationships in society. That comes from other sources that are much deeper seated. But perhaps we could say that the tendency to seek out a sex worker (including OF models) could be symptomatic of a deeper feeling of loneliness and disconnection. But it would be a mistake to mischaracterize a single symptom as the root cause. That could lead to scapegoating sex workers, when those issues are not their fault. With all that said, I would imagine that most people who work in the sex industry probably have (at least) mixed feelings about the work. And the average person working in the sex industry probably feels quite negatively about it because you're getting to see a side of people where a lot of negative/predatory/objectifying tendencies arise from. Like I said, when I was in my early 20s and I was proximal to the beauty standard, I would get frequently approached, harassed, and objectified. It was like everyone and their father was always trying to extract sexual value from me... via pleasure or status. And of course, 80%+ of that attention was coming from exploitative people who just saw me as a means to their own ends. And it really jaded me during that time because I was on the receiving end of those kinds of interactions really often, as I was often in the pedestrian area near my college. And having had those experiences, I can only imagine that 10x that amount of contempt and negative feeling I felt back then would be stirred up in a person who makes money through being seen as a sex object. While they may consciously decide to do it and consciously want to do it, it doesn't mean that all of themselves is on board with being objectified that way. And part of them may feel quite resentful for being oriented to as a sexual object. So, I'm sure it could exacerbate feelings of resent and contempt towards their patrons.

I honestly think the OP and many of the guys on this thread are projecting their own (unconscious and semi-unconscious) tendencies towards sexual objectification and exploitative value extraction onto the OF models. And that's why it touches such a deeply negative chord for them that feels disturbing to them... and why their criticism towards these models seems so biting and unnecessarily personal. They just see their own objectifying tendencies mirrored back to them in their projection onto these women... with an extreme aversion to being on the chopping block of their own tendencies towards objectification and transactional value extraction. And they judge the OF models for their own disowned tendencies, whilst succumbing to a victim's mentality narrative where they see themselves as the exploited ones. Edit... Here's a song about this phenomenon...

A bit biased there, aren't you? Both are extracting value from the other without having emotions for the party they're extracting from. And at least the OF model is providing the desired outcome to the person they're extracting from... as that person has gone looking on OnlyFans and knows what they want and what they're getting exactly when they put in their card info. You just might not want to see that you're under the chopping block of your own judgment.

This seems to have touched a nerve for you that is more personalized than it is. To me, it seems pretty evident that someone who's on OnlyFans wouldn't really care too much about their audience. When you're an attractive woman who gets a lot of sexual attention from men, you experience many men trying to use you for status and pleasure. I experienced this frequently just existing when I was in my early 20s and was proximal to the beauty standard. And it did create a kind of contempt at that sort of treatment because so many people behaved vampirically towards me. And I can only imagine that someone who's a popular OnlyFans model (or sex worker in general) would probably feel very negatively towards the audience... because the audience is being objectifying, and she probably experiences objectification pretty often just being a young attractive woman. So, it's not surprising to me that OF models would feel some contempt towards her patrons as they're only valuing her as a source of sexual gratification. So, she probably feels equally okay with using the people who see her as a source of sexual gratification as purely a digit in her bank account. In my mind, that's fair enough given the transactional nature of that industry. People get back what they give out.

Yes, sorry for the late reply. It does seem like the pattern that you mentioned could be coming from that pattern of not being attuned to or paid attention to. When we have a chronically unmet need like there, there tends to be a part of ourselves that is CONSTANTLY trying to get that need met... even if we are objectively getting that need met in the present tense. And that's because we build protection strategies to keep ourselves from being fully aware of the pain/vulnerability associated with that unmet need. So, it blocks us from truly receiving that need. So, it could present itself as an insatiable need for validation and attention that can take many different forms (especially if we block off more direct forms of attention seeking or validation seeking). For example, I had a lot of judgments as a teenager towards attention seekers. But when I was 20, in my second medicine journey, it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was always seeking attention because of unmet needs for it... and feelings of insignificance and lack of importance. But I hadn't realized that I was seeking attention because I was doing so with hard work and acheivement... and qualities that people generally smile upon. But I would judge people who would act out and show emotions as weak, annoying, etc. for seeking attention. And I had a deep secret contempt for that kind of behavior. But when I realized that I was always seeking attention, I decided to be more direct with that needs and later found better ways to communicate it and to feel significant just because I exist... and not because I achieved something. So, my recommendation is to fully embrace the attention seeking part of yourself and seeking to love and understand it at the deepest level you can without any kind of judgment. Recognize the wisdom inherent in your attention seeking and what it's communicating to you about your traumas, needs, and subjective experience.

The political dynamics happening right now are rooted in very deep collective emotional and psychological dynamics. This has all grown out of collective traumas and the subsequent disconnection with the Earth, other people, and the universe at large. So, it is not a surprise that these feelings might be creeping in... as they've been rising in the collective consciousness for nearly a decade. And now it's just the dawning of this awareness for you... a little late to avert a Trump presidency though. And you're now feeling that dark heavy feeling that many of us have been feeling since 2015. But because you did not become aware of it before, it may feel new and have guilt associated with it because of the actions you took before this awareness bloomed for you. You may have thought it to be no big deal and that you wouldn't be impacted by it. Really Trump and all the people around him and the entire dynamic going on is laying bare a collective Shadow that more and more people are waking up to. And I believe that this dynamic couldn't be helped because it's just that time. It will be a bitter medicine. My recommendation is to tune very deeply into those feelings that you're feeling right now, because it is not just your feeling.

Did you ever feel like you had to stand out in some way to get your parents' approval or attention? One possible reason is that there's a part of you that's still operating off of a belief that you must differentiate yourself and "niche market" yourself to others to get them to notice. Does this resonate with you or not so much?

I hope the guardrails of our institutions hold because they are being stress-tested right now. But I see it as a nonzero chance of an authoritarian takeover from these tech billionaires... which even if it's a 1% chance, it's too much. And my most recent medicine journey makes me concerned that it will come to fruition. It was showing me the macrocosmic service that dictatorship/authoritarianism serves in the collective evolution of humanity. And I really understood it in that experience that, despite its problems, dictatorship and authoritarianism was imposing limits on people that they unconsciously desire. It's like a child that wants total freedom... but desperately needs a parent to come in and impose limits. And my experience was about choosing and desiring limitation despite a strong curiosity drive to seek unlimited knowing that has been present for me since I was a small child. I had to keep affirming over and over "I'm choosing to be limited!" to create a barrier between my finite human consciousness and the consciousness of God. It was like having to cut my consciousness away from the infinite, and it was a really painful labor-like process. So now, I'm concerned that my journey is a reflection of a collective desire (including my individual desire) for limitation... and that the call is being answered by these top-down authoritarian dynamics. And now that there are these tech people who aspire towards authoritarian power taking big steps towards that end, I can't help but wonder if my journey was showing me a premonition of what is to come and insights to help me understand and accept why dictatorship is necessary for humanity at this time. That is my fear. And I know I won't accept the limitation I asked for if it comes in that form.

What's important to understand is that coming into alignment with unconditional love means accepting, loving, and holding space for all pairs of opposites. When it comes to Truth... it includes both truth and illusion, which are the Yang and Yin of Truth. And so, if we reject illusion, it actually takes us further away from Truth because we're being dualistic and rejecting the wholeness of these two sides of the coin. And it keeps us down in the lower expressions of both poles. I find that people who polarize into truth-seeking and attempting to transcend the human smallness often just repress these parts of themselves... creating a sharp split within themselves. And their Shadow leads them into lower expressions of the illusion like hedonism, pettiness, smallness, and other negative expressions of the illusion. So, it's counter-intuitive... but if you want to come into alignment with Truth... embrace the illusion fully.

It's not paranoia. Though I understand that it might be a more comforting notion that I'm just being paranoid. I've been correct about the rise in Fascism since 2015... and I'm correct about the situation with these tech billionaires now. Do you not know that Elon Musk and a sizable percentage of tech billionaires are trying to actively undermine democracy? My recommendation is to look into Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others in the tech space that want to upend the current social order and replace it with corporate fiefdoms. It's pretty clear that that's what they're attempting... and they've said as much. So, it's not paranoia to point out something that's (at the very least) being openly attempted by Elon Musk. I don't know if they will succeed, but my medicine journey from last March makes me think that they will. And if I didn't see a direct correlation to the current situation with Elon Musk, I wouldn't be making that connection with my medicine journey. At first, I thought it might be reflective of someone like Putin that it would be more reflective of... since the figure looked more like Putin than like Musk. 10 months ago when I had that journey, I just thought it was making a point about limitation and the general function of dictatorship in the collective... and why dictatorship happens. It was just another insight in my journey. But as more and more dictatorial dynamics are arising from tech billionaires, it makes me ponder if the medicine journey was showing me a sign of something to come in order to help me understand why these collective dynamics arise.

I'm definitely worried about it. And I've been worried about Fascism since around 2015... though I didn't think it would go exactly this way. I thought it would be more like old school Nazis... and there are elements of that. The plan from these tech billionaires is to create little corporate fiefdoms where there is an oligarch ruling as king/dictator over a patch of different territories. And it would be this Big Brother-esque kind of situation where everyone in that territory is under the control of that oligarch. The idea that they (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, etc.) hold is that democracy has failed and that corporate dictatorship is necessary. Like, if Stage Blue Fascism was Nazis... Stage Orange Fascism is this kind of hegemonic corporatist oligarchy dictatorship. And it's really clear to me the Elon is seeing the Trump presidency as a way to erode the American system enough to become the dictator. He's also trying to do it with other governments. I suspect his goal is to be dictator to all of humanity. In my most recent Ayahuasca journey, the medicine showed me this image that was a neon contour line drawing on a black background... that looked like a mixture between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin very large standing in front of a neon contour line drawing of the United States. And it was clear to me that it was depicting a dictator that had taken control of America. And it was showing me that the function of dictatorship is to impose limits on people when they don't limit themselves from a place of personal sovereignty. So, I keep going back to that image... and I suspect that it means that their plans will succeed. So, I'm concerned about it.

I'm sure that Leo definitely isn't a billionaire... but certainly a single digit millionaire. But he could have been socializing during that time, here and there... even if he wasn't putting a strong emphasis on it and was consciously thinking of himself as a loner. Just like how he was talking about enjoying living a solitary life on his blog, while also having a very large audience and engaged forum to share his experiences with... and spending a lot of time on the forum socializing. But he may not consciously value socializing. So, he may be finding rationales for why this, that, or the other social experiences don't count as socializing. Funny enough, the times where I thought of myself as a loner were actually the times when I had the most connection. I was just introverted... but also surrounded by people that I know and existing within communal systems (like school and work) where I was frequently interacting with others. So, I could afford to have the belief because my solitude was an illusion. When I was truly alone to where, if I went missing, no one would have known for weeks... that was when I stopped being able to tell myself that I'm a loner. I really felt what it was like to feel totally alone in the universe. I suspect most people who identify as loners have not experienced solitude in the extreme.

@Something Funny 100% Connection and socializing are really important for mental health. And we can't truly actualize our potential without it.

Then, why did I spend so much time in the shower when I was a teenager?

I see. These types of fears can come up in cases where we deal with negative experiences with dating... or even just in general. I just wanted to emphasize that, even if it feels true that women won't love you, that it's not true. And as a woman, I'm 100% sure that there are zero men in existence who would be romantically rejected by every woman.

The number one thing you can do is to interact with many women platonically just like you do with men. This will remove the mystique. But you may benefit from looking into integrating your own Feminine side. The more a man pushes away his Feminine side, the more he will project negative powerful images onto women as a group. And it leads to this love/hate pedestalization of women, where there is a disgust towards women but also this intense craving and feeling of women having power over you. Look into Anima possession. Here's a video about how to integrate your Feminine side...

From my perspective, this seems like an obvious statement. Of course there will be women out there who will love you. What gives you the impression that women won't love you?