Deconstructing pick up: Women want good looking men with wealth and status.

[AtmanIsBrahman]

I think most of you guys hugely underestimate the role of looks. 

Here’s an excerpt from a looksmax.org post (full post here: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-even-looksmax-guests-and-new-users-please-read.18461/)

Pretend you’re a girl (if you aren’t).

1. This guy approaches you and says “Hey, you put that cute outfit on for me tonight?”

Spoiler

Now how did that make you FEEL? Probably laugh at his cockiness and reject his pathetic ass right away.

“Hey, you put on that cute outfit for me tonight?”

Spoiler

Now how did that make you FEEL? A little different hm?

Edited 3 hours ago by AtmanIsBrahman

[LordFall]

1 hour ago, AION said:

Provider game will only work if the girl is poor with no prospect for a good job and you have to be ok-ish looking. 

In SD orange society and up you need inner game. If you do then your lack of money and looks doesn’t matter.

Obviously signaling wealth or your body or anything material can come across as self qualifying and that is repulsive. 

Money and looks game (provider game) will work in less developed countries or with girls with a lower social status. 

So attraction is almost all inner game. And it is momentary. For example I’m tall-ish and I do get some attention in nightclubs but when I open my mouth and I start saying stupid stuff(fawning, insecure things, self qualifying stuff), it is over because I will feel the sexual tension disappearing.  So being good looking, tall and having money, only gets you initial attention. The moment you open your mouth and say stupid stuff like in this thread it is over. So big part of it is personality. 

Depends how you define inner game. Most men with money have at least decent inner game, they are competent at their job/business and are just not in their comfort zone cold approaching women in a nightclub or in the street. The average man in western countries is too broke to date comfortably and financial issues are one of the top causes of divorce. 

Having a dating life is ludicrously expensive in a major western city, you can perhaps do the broke guy with the broke girl frame and sure that works with some women but definitely not all. Especially not if you like particularly attractive and in demand women.

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I had that and it got me no girls.

You can't get girls if you don't learn to socialize. Pickup is just the skill of socializing.

Many guys get rich only to realize they still can't get girls because they sacrificed social skills for success.

Girls don't sleep with the rich guy, they sleep with the fun social guy.

Good looks are great, but if you don't have them you still need a way of getting girls.

If you mean really rich you're forgetting about sugar dating. I knew a guy that did it and he took multiple bootcamps from RSD and he said these guys were coping in their belief that money doesn't really matter with women and the relationships he got from sugaring where sometimes better than the ones he got from cold approach.

He said women he got through sugaring actually put effort in the relationship, their appearance and sex whereas regular women kind of took him for granted. He said people expect those women to be materialistic gold diggers but he said a lot of them just had financially insecure childhoods and were responsible and pleasant women to be around, used the sugaring money to pay bills not to spend on clothes or dumb stuff.

I haven't tried it myself but it does make sense, PUAs cope hardcore. Having a successful career let alone being rich and being able to spend $3-8k/month on sugar babies frontloads a bunch of positive male characteristics into it. I still think there is something cool about pickup and knowing that skillset but most of the pickup guys I know(I've met at least 200) never even got to sleeping with really hot women, let alone date them, let alone have a stable long term pleasant relationship with them. 

8 hours ago, Schizophonia said:

The more I try to understand women, the closer I get to an aneurysm; it's simply easier to abandon the realm of understanding and just move forward by following one's desires.

It's quite easy. Demonstrate higher value and women will like you. There are lot of ways to do so, both socially and overall with your life. Which is why my strategy revolves a lot around social media and social circle game. To build a social circle with hot women over time you need to provide value in one way or another and social media allows you to display that to women all over your country and the world and widen your net. 

[Schizophonia]

31 minutes ago, LordFall said:

 

It's quite easy. Demonstrate higher value and women will like you. There are lot of ways to do so, both socially and overall with your life. Which is why my strategy revolves a lot around social media and social circle game. To build a social circle with hot women over time you need to provide value in one way or another and social media allows you to display that to women all over your country and the world and widen your net. 

 

I mean I'm tired of being paranoid about being needy or whatever; it's too complicated It's worse than living under Stalin.

I'll try to be authentic no matter what problems it might cause, because you can't really love something you got by cheating anyway.

It's easier to amplify one's qualities than to diminish one's flaws; if what i say makes sense. 

Edited 3 hours ago by Schizophonia

[AION]

@LordFall I have friends who are competent at their work and double income. Yet they can’t get a girl because they lack inner game. While I have other friends who are broke but do have inner game but they get girls left and right. Being good at a job and getting a girl are two different skill sets.  It is not only skill set. I think a lot of these incel guys have personality. Money and looks don’t give you personality. 

[ladelle]

As a woman I love a man’s overall energy, for example I like the guy who died yesterday from a helicopter accident, Oliver Tree, he was not what you would call a good looking man but I like his vibe. I don’t know why but I feel like there is something so sweet about him.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7BuOmWMZZu/?igsh=MXg3MWJ3MmFhNnJxeA==  

[Valach]

1 hour ago, LordFall said:

Depends how you define inner game. Most men with money have at least decent inner game, they are competent at their job/business and are just not in their comfort zone cold approaching women in a nightclub or in the street. The average man in western countries is too broke to date comfortably and financial issues are one of the top causes of divorce. 

Having a dating life is ludicrously expensive in a major western city, you can perhaps do the broke guy with the broke girl frame and sure that works with some women but definitely not all. Especially not if you like particularly attractive and in demand women.

Depends how you define "having money". But as a software engineer with a lots of colleagues who have a lot of money (it is easily one of the most lucrative jobs in my country), so many of them do not have any innergame despite being financially succesfull. 

Edited 2 hours ago by Valach

[LordFall]

1 hour ago, AION said:

@LordFall I have friends who are competent at their work and double income. Yet they can’t get a girl because they lack inner game. While I have other friends who are broke but do have inner game but they get girls left and right. Being good at a job and getting a girl are two different skill sets.  It is not only skill set. I think a lot of these incel guys have personality. Money and looks don’t give you personality. 

 

1 hour ago, Valach said:

Depends how you define "having money". But as a software engineer with a lots of colleagues who have a lot of money (it is easily one of the most lucrative jobs in my country), so many of them do not have any innergame despite being financially succesfull. 

Are we talking about inner game or social skills? These discussions often conflate both. Are these software engineers and guys with high incomes regularly going out and good at expressing themselves? If so I doubt they'd have a hard time getting laid.

Inner game to me is your self-confidence and belief in your ability to solve problems and handle pressure. Usually those high income guys solve a lot of their issues in one bootcamp because they have already good inner game they just lack the social skills portion of it. 

Also being able to put your ego to the side is probably a relevant part of inner game here. A lot of high income guys have mastered their career and don't like the idea of starting from scratch at social skills and fumbling for a few days/weeks to get the hang of it. I guess that's inner game or just not taking yourself too seriously. 

I would define having money in this context as being able to afford to live on your own and having some disposable income to date and also save/invest towards your future. So that depends where you're from, in Canada that's like a 80-120$k CAD income. You could also manage to do that remotely and have a more flexible lifestyle which would improve your dating potential big time. I know a lot of guys that are basically incels in the west that would crush it as passport bros. 

Edited 1 hour ago by LordFall

[Valach]

26 minutes ago, LordFall said:

 

Are we talking about inner game or social skills? These discussions often conflate both. Are these software engineers and guys with high incomes regularly going out and good at expressing themselves? If so I doubt they'd have a hard time getting laid.

Inner game to me is your self-confidence and belief in your ability to solve problems and handle pressure. Usually those high income guys solve a lot of their issues in one bootcamp because they have already good inner game they just lack the social skills portion of it. 

Also being able to put your ego to the side is probably a relevant part of inner game here. A lot of high income guys have mastered their career and don't like the idea of starting from scratch at social skills and fumbling for a few days/weeks to get the hang of it. I guess that's inner game or just not taking yourself too seriously. 

I would define having money in this context as being able to afford to live on your own and having some disposable income to date and also save/invest towards your future. So that depends where you're from, in Canada that's like a 80-120$k CAD income. You could also manage to do that remotely and have a more flexible lifestyle which would improve your dating potential big time. I know a lot of guys that are basically incels in the west that would crush it as passport bros. 

I am talking both, they lack both usually. Social skills and inner game are very closely related in my experience - actually I would even dare to say that social skills are a manifestation of high self esteem or inner game. I have never met a person with high self esteem who had really poor social skills.

Edited 1 hour ago by Valach

[LordFall]

Hard to say, it's hard to deconstruct self-esteem. I don't know if I agree with the blanket statements that most high earning highly technical dudes have low self-esteem but it could be right. If you didn't get socialized well you will probably not be able to express freely and charismatically in social situations by default. I don't think that summarizes self-esteem though. From the book 6 pillars of self-esteem it broadly characterizes it as thinking you're worthy of a good life and feeling confident about being able to handle life's basic challenges.

You could be high earning and not feel confident around women which would be a part of that 2nd definition but once again that's solved pretty easily with some exposure therapy from cold approach and if your career is going well you'll probably have a high baseline of confidence overall. 

[AION]

Inner game and social skills are related very much since you are only expressing what you are in the inside.

[Majed]

@Leo Gura

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I had that and it got me no girls.

You can't get girls if you don't learn to socialize. Pickup is just the skill of socializing.

Many guys get rich only to realize they still can't get girls because they sacrificed social skills for success.

Girls don't sleep with the rich guy, they sleep with the fun social guy.

Good looks are great, but if you don't have them you still need a way of getting girls.

Dude, you live in the us. The standards of living in the us are like some of the highest in the world. Imagining telling a guy somewhere in Ethiopia, or in the Congo he needs to be fun and social and he'll get laid, it's like you don't understand just how down bad the situation is Ethiopia and the Congo. Hell in my country in Lebanon if i work at McDonald i'll get paid like 400 dollars a month, for a full time job. If i had to spend 100 dollars partying once or twice a week, that's all my salary gone, and we haven't talked about getting food, shelter... Naturally in such a situation to get laid you need to focus on financial success first, then once you have the money, the time and energy, you can focus on improving social skills and picking up girls. 

In my situation it's even worse because i could've gotten a degree in a profitable field, and leave the country, which is the strategy most guys my age are doing, not just guys, even girls quite frankly. However still i am 22 years old and i didn't finish high school, because i was battling severe ocd and bipolar type 1. To this day after around 2 years and a half, of starting medications and therapy, i'm still recovering and struggling to develop the necessary discipline to finish high school and enter university. I might fail this year, and have to go again through it to finish high school. 

My strategy is to get a degree in a profitable field to quit the country, then i could focus on social skills and pick up. Hell i would've spent my 20s not getting laid, but building the foundation for my life and handling my mental health. 

Edited 17 minutes ago by Majed

[Valach]

11 minutes ago, LordFall said:

Hard to say, it's hard to deconstruct self-esteem. I don't know if I agree with the blanket statements that most high earning highly technical dudes have low self-esteem but it could be right. If you didn't get socialized well you will probably not be able to express freely and charismatically in social situations by default. I don't think that summarizes self-esteem though. From the book 6 pillars of self-esteem it broadly characterizes it as thinking you're worthy of a good life and feeling confident about being able to handle life's basic challenges.

You could be high earning and not feel confident around women which would be a part of that 2nd definition but once again that's solved pretty easily with some exposure therapy from cold approach and if your career is going well you'll probably have a high baseline of confidence overall. 

I would say that low self esteem coming from less than ideal childhood made you to move away from people and thus gravitate towards technical fields. It's a defence mechanism.

[Cireeric]

On 14.6.2026 at 11:50 PM, Majed said:

Let's be real, why go through the hell of approaching thousands of women, when most guys strategies to find partners is to take care of their finances, careers and looks, and they successfully end up finding partners. You got to drop the pick up brain washing and paradigm, and think more like a normie. To get girls, you must be fit and financially successful. No girl wants a fat guy that lives in his parents basement. Like seriously once you're in shape and successful, girls will come to you naturally. So yeah the lesson here is to think more like a normie and not forget the basics. 

Thats exactly the view that Owen Cook is deconstructing in many of his videos. If you dont get good with girls you dont get good with girls. If youre fit and financially successful you can still be socially-weird, stifled, kinda autistic etc... and then the guy comes along who is just more funny, charming, playful etc and she is way more attracted to him.