Something is better than nothing! Here’s about half of the drafts I’ve yet to finish where I’ve managed to write something about each one. Where I’m not writing about my personal experience, I write to fill gaps, writing what I wish was already there for me to read. I recommend this heuristic!
Here’s What You’re Up Against. A laundry list of all the biological, social and other forces I can think of which collectively cause Game to be so uniquely difficult, especially for the highly demanding of rigor; which mean large amounts of knowledge are non-transferrable; and which can block beginners and skeptics as they run up again and again against different theories and schools of thought. It is an “epistemically challenging” sphere of life, and all we can hope is to do our best regardless.
The Great Scrupulosity Honeypot. There is a twisted logic behind the forces that tortured my shy young nerd self and many others. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature, designed to filter out the poor males who are way too altruistic (or memetically open) to be dependable mates. How unjust. Coincidentally, shortly after I realised this, I saw some validation published around the same time (e.g. search “gaslighting PR campaign” here and an Aella tweet on “don’t you dare approach me!!”)
How a Meta Shit Test Feels from the Inside. On the same theme, thanks to redpilldad’s posts like Real Talk vs Power Talk and Psy-ops, I finally came to understand the meaning of my misspent youth reading feminist blogs and worrying about all the ways I could cause harm without realising. I glimpsed the cold, cruel beauty of the Platonic Form of the society-level Meta Shit Test and formed an analogy: there’s a cool club, with a sign that simply reads: “YOU AREN’T ALLOWED IN.” The bouncer will affirm it, everyone you ask will affirm it, and no matter how hard you push they all seem to genuinely believe it. Yet you are constantly seeing people saunter in without resistance. The trick is to ignore everything that everyone is sincerely telling you (!), including the sign, and walk in anyway. I’m not sure there’s any other area of life in which this madness is the correct strategy, which contributes to the difficulty.
The Value Theory of Creepiness. The theory that a low-value male can perform even “safe” actions and still come off as creepy, while a high-value male can “get away” with actions that the opposing bluepill “Action” theory prohibits as inherently creepy (because they’re imagining a low-value male doing it). It’s a nice case where redpill and bluepill models make different predictions in a particularly clear way. A woman’s genuine disgust feelings towards an otherwise perfectly decent moral man has a twisted evolutionary logic that checks out, and this just makes me feel so sorry for everyone involved. The transhumanist revolution can’t come soon enough.
Intra-Sexual Competition: Cope, Sabotage, Accept? Identifying a common theme in the following: madonna/whore defence mechanism, post-wall age gaps seethe, douchebag hate, and denigration of male mating strategy. (Spoiler: “Accept” is the only healthy policy.)
[FR] Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory. How my best date yet somehow went south, the bullets I dodged before and after, and the sheer frustration of it all. Summarised here.
[LR] Brushing Up on a Little Russian. Beginner’s victory lap for the best sex of my life so far. Summarised here.
Acausal Threesomes and Other State Hacks. I wouldn’t be a true rationalist if I hadn’t figured out a way to shoehorn acausal thinking into my Game. In my case, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a threesome in the rest of my life … so I might as well act as if it already happened, right? Other hacks to bring me good state include: face reality like the Terminator / an AI; they can’t feel hurt by making cringe mistakes so neither should you (it still negatively reinforces their behaviour, but they don’t avoid the risk out of an icky feeling.)
The Normie Anti-Sex Field: A Case Study. While planning my Euro trip I made the mistake of clicking on this video. It provides a great example of Negative Affect as the author … boos and hisses at tourists chasing pussy. That’s it. It’s impossible to argue with because it actually avoids making any argument at all and refuses to even nail down what it thinks is wrong. This reveals it as a propaganda piece emanating a confusing type of sex-negativity I call the “normie anti-sex field” and serves as good practice for exposing its incoherence. (All this sneering, suggesting, insinuating … come out and state your thesis, coward! Is your problem with male tourists succeeding in laying the women? Is it that they’re trying but failing? It it that they’re pursuing that “sleazy” goal at all? That they’re doing it while too ugly/old/fat/cringe/low-value? Is it that it’s not fair that people who look like that might be getting a chance at pussy? Pretty sure it’s some mix of these last two.)
Manifesto for the Libertine of the 2020s. Attempt to articulate the tenets of the ideal community where I’d spend all my time. Currently: We Share Enlightenment Values; To Achieve Harmony, We Live in Reality; Preferences are not Morals; Sex is Not (necessarily) A Big Deal; Sex is a Fun and Beautiful Thing; “Adults Only” Means You Have To Act Like One; Politics is Not Sexy; We Are What We Do.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury… An attempt to silence my scrupulosity demons once and for all by refuting the bad memes I absorbed and making my best case for the ethics of my Game policies.
Game vs. Anti-Anti-Game. In Constructive Logic, not-not-P isn’t the same as P itself. How much of “Game” is just the avoidance of losing moves and unattractive reflexes? Probably the most disproportionately effective idea I absorbed early on was “simulated abundance” as a means to avoid needy/desperate behaviours that might otherwise come naturally. Such “negation of actively repulsive behaviour” is nice, easy, lower-hanging fruit, so to me it doesn’t really merit the term “Game”; it’s just bringing you up to not-actively-cockblocking-yourself well-adjusted adult status. “Game” connotes a set of skills positively built up from such a neutral starting point. It feels easy for me to ask “What would Chad text?” and do a decent job avoiding the opposite, but even basic Game like making emotion-spiking conversation, teasing, touching, stacking and storytelling are hard precisely because I don’t have them in me by default, ready to activate by mere self-control.
Unaffected Yet Tongue-Tied. As an example of easy “anti-anti-Game”, I’ve long been able to be “unaffected” by arbitrarily shitty/boundary-pushing behaviours. My problem is … I’ve no idea what to say and I find it hard to summon anger and my brain even shuts down in high-stress conflict situations. Unaffected silence is easy, but it’s only half the battle of responding appropriately to challenge. Wit does not come pre-installed!
What’s the Venn Diagram of Self-Improvement and Narcissism? Something to cross-post to the TLP subreddit through which I found RedQuest and ultimately ended up here. I wish to settle scores with a certain interpretation of the cryptic writings by The Last Psychiatrist, where it is clear to me now that my adherence to those ideas actively held me back from pursuing my current life which is empirically the best I’ve experienced. I kept dismissing all my sexual dreams and the sense I was being held back in my committed relationship, on the basis that these were silly narcissistic ego fantasies and that I should stop thinking me, me, me and instead take pride in the mundane raising of the next generation or something. “If you’re reading it, it’s for you” yeah, and now I see why – it was yet another memeplex containing a key that fit my doormat-shaped hole and got me to deny what I genuinely wanted. I greatly regret the error. It’s clear to me now that I am one of the people for whom (that interpretation of ) TLP should be reversed, and I’d like to warn anyone who might be similarly vulnerable.
The Plan. It’s not rocket science. I have needs for connection, company, affection, touch, and sex. The first two I can get from male or female friends. I can get sexual release on my own, and porn will be always be more convenient and more hedonic than real girls, but committing to this path carries risks and is not to be chosen lightly (really, only as a symbol of defeat). Touch and affection I cannot simulate from the glowing rectangle, so I’m dependent on girls for this. My baseline needs could plausibly be satisfied at the current level of effort and prevent misery. My Intrinsic Value Discovery Phase is now over. The fact I can be described as good looking, plus my successes so far, have dampened my previous sense of urgency and made me lazier. Yet, I have a superego desire to go onward and upward, to have wild experiences with hotter girls, and to live my libertine values out of the closet. I also have an ego desire to be fucking real, imperfect, unoptimised girls and thereby defy the cyberpunk dystopia edging ever closer. More practically, I want to be in as strong as possible a position if/when I decide to settle down in midlife. By that point, I want to understand women and how to be a man they want to fuck. That means I need far more experience than I would get from lazily remaining at my current level. I am lucky to still be young at 27 and arguably ahead of my peak. I have around 10 years available to me to climb the Mountain before my precious youth definitively runs out. And as the last decade has taught me, a lot can change in that time. Conclusion: I do not get to take it easy now I know I won’t be Forever Alone after my breakup. I am in this for the long haul. Even with my physical needs satisficed I will continue to climb for the sake of my future market exit and the top level of Maslow’s Pyramid. I may not have been born to do this, but I was definitely made so by key life events. They wrote this path into my destiny, and I have never felt more alive.
Scaling the Mountain 