2023: My First Year In Game

(Or: 2023: The Year I Finally Became A Man)

I started this year savouring the final remaining days with my girlfriend of the past 5 years, knowing I would soon face the most daunting challenges of my life: finishing my PhD, and … learning to date girls. I end the year immensely proud of my success with both of these. Missions accomplished! Victory!! Victory!! Victory!! The latter mission is the source of most of the contentment in my smile; it was about 1000 times scarier.

This has been the craziest, most intense, most exciting, and overall best frickin’ year of my life, and not because I passed my viva. It’s been about 10-100 times better than the next best year, 2018, when I met my recent ex after bleak years of inceldom in all but name. That was a good year, but this one has been unlike anything I have ever experienced. And it’s all thanks to this:

I trusted my ability to dive into a forbidden memeplex, soak it all up, and come out a better person. I call this memeplex RPSG.

Definition: RPSG (Redpill, Pickup, Seduction, Game). The subset of the Manosphere that excludes MRA (Men’s Rights Activism), MGTOW (male separatism), and incel/Blackpill (defeatism). I don’t hate the excluded subcultures but I don’t find them very promising to immerse myself in. (On second thoughts, add “Masculine Self-Improvement” to the definition, because that’s a lot beside dating success.)

(“Memeplex” is the best available term I’m aware of, followed by “egregore“. Many of today’s idea systems can’t be usefully described as “religions”, and the word “ideology” has negative connotations.)

If you’ve been running from something for your entire adult life, I guess that’s how you tell. This past year I did long-overdue battle with my dreaded Sex Mindfuck – this swirling cloud of confusion, contradiction, hypocrisy, gaslighting, misinformation, outright lies, and general insanity in (official/respectable/polite/educated) Anglo culture that has tormented me over the past decade. I’ve felt all the puzzle pieces finally fall into place, and I can’t wait to eventually succeed at writing my definitive take (maybe even in 2024!)

The Stats

So, I consult my spreadsheet, forgive my autism… actually, screw that, if there’s one place I can sperg out, it should be my own goddamn anonymous blog, I have nothing to apologise for.

I spent only four months of the year Actually Trying: March, May, August, October. The rest I spent on the rest of my life (family, PhD) or on background instrumental subgoals (e.g. fashion/accessory upgrades, reading theory). During those four magical months, I went on 20 first dates and 6 non-dates (fast escalations to kisses or lays).

Overall, in 2023, my first year Pursuing What I Want:

• I made out with 17 women
• …of whom 15 went to heavier petting
• …of whom 12 I pulled or they pulled me to a private place to fool around
• …of whom 7 were willing to have sex (Lay Opportunities)
• …of whom 5 I actually had sex with. (bona fide Lays)

(I care more about Lay Opportunities because they represent success at the hardest part, the outside world that isn’t part of me. The reason I didn’t complete 2 of them was, I think, just because I’m part of the porn generation and my dick decided not to turn up for work on those occasions.)

One of my persistent flaws is trying way too hard to avoid overconfidence or appearing arrogant/bragging, even to the point of being underconfident instead. I will work on this. Anyway, I’m not making any claim about these results other than I am really happy (relieved?) with what they represent, given that I was coming from a state of near-total uncertainty about my objective SMV and near-zero experience with Pursuing What I Want. These objective collisions with reality tell me: thank goodness! I at least have Entry-Level Competence, and can focus on happy things like improving my results or reducing costs instead of frantically scrabbling to get a crumb of pussy (7 Lay Opportunities in four months, that’s nearly two a month; extrapolating, if I Actually Tried for a year without improving I could rack up ~20 notches).

(Past this, I don’t know how to judge where I stand on this absurdly unfair Pareto distribution. I don’t know how much sex my peers are having beyond a vague understanding that it’s less than prior generations, or even what the appropriate reference class is. I do know that I must be in the top few percentiles for effort / caring about this, RPSG having been my top interest in life for most of the year. I believe normal guys just meet girls “naturally” through social circles or half-assedly using the apps, in between their other daily activities, and then cling onto them to escape the whole cutthroat business. Regardless, heed Lobster Daddy’s advice: compare me-today to me-yesterday rather than others-today.)

I got a taste of all four Game spheres:

• Nightgame: my least favourite, but I did try a little. One dancefloor makeout, a validation cuck, and (if you count it as nightgame) one MFM from a Lisbon sex club I found on FetLife (I still can’t believe I’m writing this. Did I dream it?)
• Social Circle: This activated in the Lisbon hostels because I don’t have a social circle back home (fixme 2024). 15 date invites, 8 date paths, 4 makeouts, 2 further escalations – but logistics precluded anything further.
• Daygame: a mere 167 cold approaches, many in the campus gym, some on various streets here and in Europe. 33 numbers (1 in 5), 16 of which responded (1 in 10), 7 first dates (1 in 24) including 2 instant dates, 1 makeout and first-date pull home, fool around but no sex.
• Triple SOD (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge): The source of all (“all” 5 of) my actual lays. Tinder Plat: 124 matches, 49 responders, 5 first dates, 2 instant lays (my/her place immediately), 2 date pulls without sex. Hinge+: 1225 opens (messages at first, later I switched to just photo/prompt likes), 37 matches (so now I know that if I need a match, I just like 33 profiles), 2 first dates, one lay opportunity. Bumble: maxxed out free daily swipes during the Four Months; 28 likes, 22 of whom I liked back, 1 first date to nowhere, 3 instant lays.

“You’re Always Paying For It” eval

I paid for Tinder Platinum and boosts, Hinge+, and occasional Bumble Premium days just to see who liked me (and cancelled immediately). From this, the average lay opportunity cost me £70. However, I also spent £1.5k on the Canon EOS RP recommended by KYIL; these photos were no doubt crucial to my success on the apps. If I factor that in, it’s about £300. Still, I didn’t remotely make optimal use of the stuff I paid for (most of the effort being concentrated in the Four Months) and both figures will decrease over time as I improve and do more. I’ve never paid for sex and I have no idea of the going rate for hookers in my area, but – can you even put a price on screwing girls who are actually into you?

Chodes often don’t have an understanding of the real value of money. How much are these memories worth? Would you rather have an extra ten thousand in the bank when you’re sixty or a few precious memories of girls met and adventures had?

Death By A Thousand Sluts (Part One) by John Bodi (2016), p. 81. Mileage will vary according to individual tradeoff preferences; just make sure you’re not in denial about your own and you’ll be well.

I often like to think timelessly and flit backwards and forwards. Send a message back to Clarky in January, saying: look, this is what you end up doing this year. You load the machine and press the button, and this comes out. Re-seed the RNG and you get some similar-looking list with better and worse entries.

I love the unfakeable, empirical, objective nature of it all. I prodded reality and that is what came out. I talked to lots of girls in real life and on the apps, and most of them didn’t go anywhere, but some did.

America isn’t obsessed with sex and violence; it’s obsessed with authenticity (or avoiding it). It just so happens that sex and violence are the only two things that you can’t fake, and we keep coming back to them as the definitive “measures of the man.” We can fake wealth, intellect, status, kindness, political acumen, parenting, looks — there’s no objective measure of any of these things, a man can construct any identity he wants, people might not buy it but who are they to say? But a fight isn’t a matter of opinion, it is too real.   

Same with sex. “Listen baby, I’m a great lover.” Well, we’ll know in fifteen minutes. “Am I a real man?” The response stands.

When Was The Last Time You Got Your Ass Kicked? by The Last Psychiatrist (2010). I read “America” as “Anglo culture”. I have still never been in a fight and have no idea of my capability to use violence to defend myself or others. Possible fixme 2024, although martial arts counts as cardio, which makes me fear for my gains. Must Eat More.

What Went Right?

In absolute terms, 7 lay opportunities is not a Large Sample Size. Is there any signal in the noise? Is there anything to learn? Full details in the List (to be published), but looking back, most of the opportunities seem like this: woman was horny, my photos passed her looks standards, I was available, she contacted/replied to me alongside N unknown other guys, I was responsive, I had a little Game but mainly avoided displaying anti-Game tells, good enough for her!

To what do I owe this ascent into Entry-Level Competence? Is it … heaven forbid … just “good-looking guy Game”!? I’m white, 27, 5’8, and dress well. I lifted twice a week all year, optimising for upper body strength cues, making my skinny frame noticeably more muscular. I invested in a DSLR for swipe app photos. I still don’t know where I fall on the Decile Scale, but Pancakemouse told me I “have the looks” and should find a Game mentor who knows what he’s doing.

But! Looks obsession assumes the female dating model: look good and wait for someone to pick you. Most of the reason I had such a good year is that I finally accepted, internalised and followed the 80% basics of the masculine role (which could be summarised as “agent”):

• I made myself available in the mating pool on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble. If I hadn’t gone through the slog of making those profiles, I would simply not exist from the perspective of that pool. (How many dates did I miss by not bothering to make profiles on the lesser platforms? No idea, but it’s probably nonzero.)
• I accepted that Chicks Are Passive and so, essentially, I have to do all the work: message, invite to date, lead, escalate. Move her along and keep prodding her out of her natural state of ambiguity to decide a Yes or a No. (How many dates did I miss by barely swiping outside of the Four Months? Who knows. How many lay opportunities? 1.75 per month?)
• I kept an eye out for social circle opportunities, especially among travellers on holiday; when it seemed appropriate (nobody close by to judge her, while in a setting with people or clear escape routes) I grew my balls and said some variation of “…I might as well say, I think you’re cute and I’d like to take you out for a drink sometime.”
• Speaking of balls, I cold approached girls I’d never met before, in the gym, on campus, in cafés, and on the streets. This didn’t get me much in the way of results (though at the beginning, before I’d taken custom photos, I got more dates through cold approach than the apps). However, it sure does feel like a future superpower and made everything else in life feel like child’s play in comparison. My Approach Anxiety isn’t gone, but the plus side is that walking away from a pleasant Yes or No still gives an ecstasy most people need drugs for. Over 90% of my interactions were pleasant and the rest were awkward at worst.
• Once made aware of anti-Game, it all seemed so obviously correct in hindsight. The above wouldn’t have worked without a deep commitment to anti-anti-Game: Outcome Independence, Simulated Abundance, being Unaffected, avoiding dry/overt/explicit/logical talk, signalling that I Desire But Don’t Need, signalling that I’m not afraid of her disagreement or disapproval, countersignalling closeness by teasing or messing with her, having fun and avoiding negativity, not blowing up her phone, etc etc… anti-anti-Game is miles easier than Game proper and it feels like knowing is the entire battle. I’m only human and I occasionally lapsed with this, but at least I knew what to aim for.

After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down… You can deal with anything.

Fight Club (1999). Replace “fighting” with “daygame”. I managed to bottle the thrill of daygame and the ecstasy of State in the song Razorback.

After my ex moved out in January, the thing that animated me to properly get going on this mission wasn’t immediate desperation for sex or to not be lonely. It was that if I woke up one day and did crave female intimacy, I didn’t know how much of a hope I had at getting it. The function of my first few months was as an “Intrinsic Value Discovery” phase, and the more I verified that my value is OK, the lazier I got in making further progress. This need for new motivation faces me in 2024.

I’m not saying I’m a Chad, but I did do a lot better than I feared. How many genuine hidden Chads are there out there, unaware of their own value because of psychological wounds? (Mentalcels, according to the Dark Wiki.) If there’s one reason for a mass recommendation to enter the Game, it’s that some small percentage will escape being a waste of their intrinsic value and start making some lucky girls scream with pleasure.

Assigning Achievement, Courage & Effort Points

You get Achievement Points for getting results even if it’s a result of luck or natural talent or learned skills making it easy. I get points here for the modest number of girls I went on dates with, kissed, fucked, etc, even if it was right place/time/knowing basics/looks/etc. I also get points here for building noticeable musculature; I hope that if I keep at it I can go from “twink” to “twunk”.

Courage Points are awarded for facing fears, no matter how unimpressive. If a guy with an irrational fear of buttons gradually conquers it through a process involving lots of scary button encounters, he deserves pride and praise even though his achievement is literally being able to be around buttons. For me, I get a shitload of points for my cold approaches on my own; for going to nightclubs and sex clubs alone; for talking to people at the clubs; for asking the girl out at the frickin’ computer-related research conference; for a couple of other things I haven’t written about yet. Doing this stuff gives a deep feeling of satisfied accomplishment that may well beat actual sexual results on some dimensions. I award myself points for embarking on this whole quest alone, knowing that the few friends and acquaintances I have and the professional context I inhabit would not act in my best interest if I shared it with them.

Effort Points are for grinding away doing work even if it didn’t deliver the desired results. I’ve been no Eddie Morra, but I have spent a commendable amount of energy and time on reading, writing, logging, building value, and most importantly doing, that my parallel-universe counterparts spent on yet more hours of YouTube, video games, porn, and other consumption. I know I could do a lot better; my diagnosis of my strengths and weaknesses here will come soon. I get few points for lifting at the gym; I actually find it really easy and fun, it’s the eating enough and sleeping enough that I find to be a chore and merit me effort points when I can manage. (Willpower points? Virtue points?) I get a ton of Effort Points for every single word I managed to write on this blog, including a ton for this long-ass post, because I find writing really difficult. (Don’t tell anyone, but I actually spent the entire first three days of 2024 writing this, taking advantage of New Year Energy. It belongs on Dec 31.)

Who are the PUA’s? Who are those “silly, creepy guys on Oxford Street”?

Plenty of the PUA’s are weird and creepy! Maybe a third. They’re fighting
the very accurate sexual market deselection they have so far encountered.
Of the rest, some are troubled and broken; some are a bit aspies; some are
reclusive and hope daygame will help them get girls without the tedious
requirement of being a social, popular guy. A lot are just normal men,
some of whom have already had considerable success with women but
who then want better options. They don’t fancy the idea of sitting waiting
for a girl to pick them. It’s easy to mock. We’re wired to mock. After all,
female empowerment is good: male sexual desire is dirty and bad. Men
wanting multiple young, hot girls: well, this is a disgraceful thing! Women
will revile you. Men will shame you. The greatest opponent to true male
empowerment is men. Ignore them. Get out there. Get on with it. Get
yourself some options.

Death By A Thousand Sluts (Part Two) by John Bodi (2016), p. 350. Preach. Especially the part about having to be social and popular being a tedious requirement for introverts like me. There is another way… it ain’t easy, but it is exhilarating.

J’Accuse!

In case it wasn’t clear from the quotes, I recently devoured Death By A Thousand Sluts, John Bodi’s hugely entertaining and tragicomic account of his journey through daygame (with unsuccessful diversions into nightgame/online). Bodi begins from a truly pathetic, repulsive starting point, replete with bona-fide woman-resenting woman-hating misogyny (as contrasted with “how dare u r trying to be moar attractive to wamens u misogynistic andrew tate incel”), and of course total cluenessness about the Game. I’m a sucker for underdog stories like this, where the more awful the starting point, the more satisfying it is to see them come through at the end. (KYIL-Andy’s also gets me hard. Metaphorically speaking.)

A central theme in Death By… is the “Gamma” male personality type and how Bodi learns to tame its most negative tendencies. I definitely tick some of the criteria: above average intelligence, worked in IT/technical job, nerdy hobbies, think about myself all the time, currently enamoured with an Asian… yet the stuff about smugness, bitterness, vindictiveness, delusion I can’t really relate to. I had a bit of all that when I was younger but it’s felt immature and beneath me for many years. I also seem to have lucked through life not meeting these guys, even during my two years as a programmer. The few wings I’ve had have told me I have a good vibe. The Russian girl at the conference teased me that I was “annoyingly positive all the time”. I take these as signs I’m doing it right.

What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice or that fraud is mean. It’s that, for 15,000 years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never ever worked!

Mark Baum’s speech in The Big Short (2015). If there’s one thing for which hatred, bitterness, begging etc. doesn’t work the most, it’s pussy. Sure, it’s not nice either, but even an amoral sociopath should be able to realise: it doesn’t work! For God’s sake get rid of it, or channel it into something constructive.

I began my journey here with zero hatred or bitterness towards women, just confusion and a sense that something was being kept from me. I continue to find it hilarious that my immersion in RPSG has given me greater empathy with women rather than less – in parallel with a de-pedestalisation and healthy disrespect for them at the same time. Lasch:

An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession.

The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1979), p. 195, Ch. 8 “The Flight From Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War”. (I remembered a softer “healthy disrespect” but evidently his words were “everyday contempt”…)

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to extend the sincerest “Fuck You” to the hegemonic Social Justice Feminism egregore that coalesced around Elevatorgate, Gamergate, and MeToo; the one that inflicted misery on my two favourite Scotts and many other guys who just wanted to be decent human beings. If there’s one thing that disappointed my bluepill faith in the equalist “brainfulness” of women, it was that whole sorry zeitgeist. I utterly regret the time I spent absorbing those ideas circa 2014-16, letting the Mindfuck embed its claws into my soul, and having my desire to be Good and not be Bad ruthlessly exploited. It was more than a waste of time, it was actively destructive to my mental health and ability to date girls. I must have spent about six years of my life slowly recovering from the damage and digging myself out of that pit, helped massively in late 2017 when I discovered SlateStarCodex and through my LTR with my dear ex. 2023 has been the final nail in that coffin.

I think my least favourite theme was that even making your pitch (hitting on a girl / asking her out) was necessarily evil and oppressive if she decided she didn’t like it. And of course, the punchline of this cosmic joke is that it scared off precisely the “good” guys with a conscience (or pathological scrupulosity) while the drunken frat boys and violent criminals continued not to read feminist blogs or give a shit about anything they had to say. (TODO: link relevant hoe_math clip when I find it again)

Such a response would be so antisocial and unjust that it could only possibly come from the social justice movement.

Radicalizing The Romanceless at Slate Star Codex (2014)

I often wonder if those horrors were a one-off cultural moment, never to be repeated, emerging in the era before we eventually developed cultural antibodies to the fearsome virality of the post-Twitter memetic environment. In late 2022 I watched a debate between Aella and Louise Perry, two women I can respect even while disagreeing (“I think there is a way for both of you to get what you want!!”). It gave me a sense of relief and hope that intellectual novelty was being permitted to grow through the cracks.

Regardless, it’s been fun to extend a middle finger to all that as I slowly ascend up this rotten Pareto distribution, out of what I thought was necessity for my own quality of life, but now I realise is mainly about my deep personal fulfilment in victory over a confusing world that I insist must Make Sense. I have been shocked at how my impression of women was trained on the absolute worst possible adversely-selected man-hating sample. It turns out that girls in real life are pretty pleasant and not constantly waiting to catch you out and report you to Everyday Sexism. Same for guys too, probably.

These guys who are just ad hominem making attacks against you without listening to all your content … like in my mind, I just want to take them private and be like: dude, they’re still not going to fuck you… like no matter how many of these videos you make dude, girls are not going to want to have sex with you just because of the anti-hoe_math video bro – I promise you, it won’t work

Michael Sartain interviewing hoe_math (2023), 2:15:36 “The White Knight Cuck Enabler”

I’ll extend a lesser “Fuck You” to the influence of TLP keeping me in my suboptimal relationship. I still have a lot of respect for TLP and it’s unclear how to distribute the blame between my own identity inertia / memetic openness / lack of galaxy brain for interpreting cryptic writing, vs. TLP or the surrounding fan culture itself being wrong. Empirically, RPSG was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time, possibly the best thing that ever happened to me. Results may well vary with different guys in different circumstances.

Here’s what makes my blood boil. I should not have to secretly read anonymous blogs on the internet to learn basic realities of the heterosexual mating dance, the thing that has been going on for 300,000 fucking years and is the entire fucking reason every single one of us exists. I should not have to live a double life in order to become my best self. I resent the fact that I have to distrust anything I could find easily in the mainstream, and dive into an underground world outside the Overton window, plausibly crawling with scams and charlatans, just to ensure I have an accurate map of this absolute basic part of life. The fact that I had to be told that “chicks want you to make the first move“, at age 26, is wrong. This represents a criminal failure of my civilisation’s knowledge-disseminating institutions. They’re fucked. But that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise nowadays.

About 95% of the male population is guilty of having flawed algebra and their equation goes like this:

I’m a really nice guy = pussy

or

I have a good job = pussy

It’s a lie which used to work because there are whole sub-formulas and sets
of underlying algebraic rules which have changed. Pre feminism the formula did kind of work as this equation held true:

I’m a steady guy with a decent job = wife

Post feminism the math collapses but it’s not in the interests of society to
expose this.

Death By A Thousand Sluts (Part One) by John Bodi (2016), p. 35 “Beta Algebra”

“First time?” Throughout my short existence on this space rock I have vomited up Jehovah’s Witness-ism, New Atheism + Social Justice Feminism, Marxism, and an empirically bad interpretation of TLP. I was more than ready for this redpill, as late as it came.

(To be fair, I can be faulted along the way too, but I’ll diagnose this elsewhere. It’s still unfair that I, who’d never lived a life before, had to figure out that presitigious and fiercely-defended memeplexes are wrong and that certain heresies are correct. How was I supposed to figure that out at age 17?! And I’m clearly a gigasperg on this topic who had the motivation to spend a lot of his free time working on it. How can normal people with normal interests even stand a chance?)

And the manosphere says: “Excellent question, we’ve actually been wondering that ourselves, why don’t you come over here and sit down with us and hear some of our convincing-sounding answers, which, incidentally, will also help solve your personal problems?”

Radicalizing The Romanceless at Slate Star Codex (2014). An RPSG meme: “Game is the men’s self-development community in disguise”.

Look, talking about things using words is an extremely fundamental social technology. Our complicated modern society faces complicated modern problems, and trying to diagnose the problem / propose solutions is literally all we have besides, I don’t know, civil war. Our best bet at living in harmony is by facing reality. I will forever resent those forces determined to shut down discussions, punish people for autistic truth-seeking, and attack this most basic of humanity’s problem-solving tools, forces which somehow took over Anglo society in the last decade or longer. I’m optimistic it will fall one day, but in the meantime, I’ll keep a low profile and try to thrive in social networks of my own making (fixme 2024). To hell with public life! Everything worth experiencing happens behind closed doors among trusted friends and lovers.

Something Doesn’t Add Up

How was I so clueless about my SMV for so long? How did I suddenly benefit from RPSG immersion with seemingly no downsides? Isn’t it supposed to have some bad side-effects, especially for my “type”?

The answer is that I am, unironically, a special little snowflake. In late 2022 I felt a sense of jaded wisdom; amused mastery; “aboveness” with respect to my life’s failure modes so far. I’d been burned enough times getting redpilled about my current religion or ideology or memeplex before moving on to another. By this point I was unable not to notice the underlying pattern of dysfunction. Never again!

Confronted with RPSG, I felt I’d been thoroughly tested and asked: am I finally ready? Can I dive into yet another memeplex, but this time, knowing what I know, refuse to let it control me without my consent? Evidently, I was right to trust myself, I was ready. I think I’ve succeeded in extracting value from a place I was supposed to believe was worthless. A triumph of self-interested rationality over fear, uncertainty and doubt.

I’ll let you in on the secret. Loyalty to people, or groups of people, could perhaps be appropriate in some situations. But loyalty to ideologies / belief systems / memeplexes is bullshit – probably a misfiring of our ancestral drive for loyalty to groups of people. Why should you be loyal to a non-human cluster containing possibly-wrong ideas just for the sake of belonging? Your loyalty should be solely to winning (instrumental rationality) as achieved via truth (epistemic rationality). You should feel free to adopt or discard beliefs without worrying that you’re betraying your tribe. You must harden yourself against the disapproval of mindkilled wingcucks who can’t see any difference between believing a fact-claim and Taking a Side. At the same time, you do need to be able to pick your battles and thrive in the inconvenient real world, among this population that most definitely outnumbers you and me.

If you are searching for an -ism to belong to, STOP. Thank me later; in the long run, it’s for the best. I am currently immersed in RPSG, but I do not feel a loyalty to it. I am a tourist, not a soldier. Litany of Tarski: I desire to believe what is correct in RPSG and benefit from it. If something is incorrect in RPSG then I desire to disbelieve it. What is ethical in RPSG I’ll strive for, what is unethical I’ll avoid. Feel free to replace “RPSG” there with every other memeplex under the sun.

If you can afford to, it’s always better to reject from a position of experience than speculation. If you’re a hetero male, I think RPSG is absolutely an Ideological Turing Test worth passing. Back in November 2022, I was posessed by a phrase from Scott Alexander’s review of TLP’s book:

During a recent spat, he said something like – “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”

I can’t remember if this was part of the conversation or came up afterwards, but there sure are a lot of holes in that area of my map. (…)

This kind of hole-filled map suggests I must be missing something here, and a whole lot of people who might know suggest trying to find it in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Book Review: Sadly, Porn at Astral Codex Ten (2022), emphasis mine. Replace Lacan with RPSG and you have my Call To Adventure triggered by my breakup.

It was undeniable: my map had a hole in it. I had no idea how RPSG would describe itself, beyond some dabbling in Lollo Rosso that I’d found intriguing but not pressingly relevant to my comfortable beta life. (And the impression from hostile hit pieces, which I already had reason to distrust.) Time to fill it. What an adventure! And I did it all on my frickin’ own, because I had no alternative; my frame crumbles in the presence of skeptics (fixme 2024).

I feel like I’ve emerged, at long last, from the Valley of Bad Rationality. I wasn’t smart/mature/lucky enough to win at first, but I think I am smart enough to win eventually, in the end. If you are smart and have a conscience, then you can do the same as me. Reject mediocrity; embrace masculinity.

(If you’re somehow reading this but are allergic to seeing “masculinity” as positive, remember: it’s mostly just agency, with some decorations.)

Of course, then you’ve got to have your resource list. And – and this is the part of this post I think will be controversial (!), I think a lot of the appropriate material is concentrated in the manosphere, ie the people who do not hate your guts merely for acknowledging the existence of the issue. Yes, it is interspersed with poisonous beliefs about women being terrible, but if you have more than a quarter or so of a soul, it is pretty easy to filter those out and concentrate on the good ones. (…)

So I think the better parts of feminism and the better parts of the manosphere could unite around something like this, against the evil fringes of both movements. Not for my sake, because after many years I mysteriously and unexpectedly found a wonderful girlfriend whom I love very much. And not only for the sake of the nice guys out there. But also for the sake of women who want better alternatives to marrying someone like Henry.

Radicalizing The Romanceless at Slate Star Codex (2014). Henry was Scott’s patient who’d beaten the shit out of all five of his wives, the latest because she was angry at him for cheating with one of his exes, who he’d also beaten.

Those of us in the pro-civilization coalition do have an enemy, but it is not a woman, or women, or men, or a person, or a group of people. It’s an eldritch swirling cloud of mutually inconsistent convincing-sounding self-defending dogmas, assured of its own infallibility and using some people as its puppets, plausibly spawned from recent material, social and technological changes. It seems to be making the lives of men and women worse. Everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone thinks they’re making the world a better place; nobody commits evil in the name of Evil, and yet evil goes on existing.

Hatred is so widespread because it’s fun and comes naturally and probably helped our ancestors do their thing. However, hatred for people results in mutually-escalating conflicts, collateral damage, and sometimes atrocities. I don’t think hatred for people actually works to make the world a better place. I won’t stoop to the level of Social Justice in attacking individuals or groups. However, the Geneva conventions needn’t apply to memeplexes themselves.

Hear my battle cry: The Mindfuck must die. Death to the Mindfuck!

Awards

Most Unbelievable Moment. Jointly held by the MFM with a couple in Lisbon, and that time I was approached by a girl on the streets of Gdańsk.

Biggest “Are You Kidding Me?” Moment. Of all the bars in all the hostels in all the cities in the world, a star from some reality TV show walked into mine, capturing the attention of the girl I was smooching. Or: I was on an i-date with a cute Arab undergrad on campus, a girl walked past and they both recognised each other as former schoolmates who hadn’t seen each other in years, and now I had to somehow deal with that. Or: finally thinking I’d found a place to get a discreet drink with my date in the conference town, entering … and running right into yet another table full of attendees.

Most Frustrating Moment. Losing the girl who approached me in Gdańsk? Sarah suddenly changing her mind and getting re-dressed? Finding out from Nina in Lisbon that she probably would’ve come along if I’d just booked a hotel room anyway? Not being able to say an in-person goodbye to Anna? Not staying in Lisbon for long enough to meet the Tinder hottie who seemed into me? They all stung, but I mostly did OK at acting Unaffected.

Scariest Moment. The moment my beginner’s luck ran out and I annoyed a girl in the gym by accidentally approaching her a second time. I still see her occasionally – sure as hell not gonna forget that face again. But I did not get zapped by an omnipresent norm-enforcement field. Punishment failed to materialise. I was never warned or banned from the gym. I continued to approach there sometimes. I’m optimistic that she soon forgot all about me. I also had a “déja vu” moment with another girl in the gym later in the year, and it went much better.

“How Far I’ve Come” Moment. One of the three girls I’d asked out during my undergrad (feeling permitted because I was holistically attracted to them) was a cute Bulgarian I’d come to know through my CS group project. I’d asked her out on FB Messenger and got politely rejected. This March, years later and at the dawn of my daygame “honeymoon phase”, I was back in the city and spotted her on the train platform. I said hi and chatted with her on the train to London; she recognised me and I trusted my calibration that she didn’t seem to be just acting polite. We sat down for coffee in King’s Cross and I said something like: hey, I know I’ve said this before, but I still find you attractive, are you single right now? She wasn’t, but she appreciated it and joked “I’m sorry if I ruined your plans for this coffee!” We chatted about dating for a bit as we finished our drinks (I even dared to talk lightly about cold approach) then hugged goodbye and that was that.

Biggest Surprise. Finding out about r/RedPillWomen from my younger sister and discovering she’d possibly been on the Dark Side longer than I have. I felt miles of distance close between us in that conversation. Very proud of her that she seems to know what she’s doing in life.

Stupidest Risk Taken. Rushing onto a late-night inter-town train in Copenhagen, without buying a ticket, all for a booty call. Of course they had guards on this train; Sod’s Law. Damn near blew the whole thing and it’s only due to luck that I got to continue to my Bumble match.

Greatest Subjective Risk Taken / Proudest Moment / Most Courageous Moment. Getting up a second time, turning round, going over to the girl at the conference and actually asking her out this time, 60 seconds after I pussied out the first time. I shudder to think of all I missed out on in the counterfactual universe. (Sure, I might have got another opportunity, but the days were few.) Or: when I finally thought we’d found a place to get a drink … entered the pub … and ran straight into a table full of conference goers, who recognised us, said hi, shattering the secrecy… we sat down with them… and 30 seconds later, I made the call, got up, and led us back out to continue our search. That took all the balls I could muster.

Most Satisfying Challenge. Anna, the Russian girl at the conference. First date, walked her home, tried to kiss her goodnight, she resisted, I rolled off. Second date, same thing, she resisted and smiled and gave in. Third date, we were making out on the beach. The fourth night, she wasn’t available and then she departed. Constant banter and teasing and exhausting fun, bringing out the best in me. I liked her. Another poly Russky living in the West… 🤔

Moment of Belonging. Wandering around the Lisbon sex club late at night, casually observing all of the sex going on around me; chatting to an American guy spectating his hot wife getting whipped… sex-positive people. My people. But they don’t wear signs announcing it. I need to sniff them out somehow. I could use kink meetup groups as a proxy but I wonder if there’s a more direct path, because you can be positive about the vanilla too.

Moment of Motivational Jealous Longing. On my second night at the Lisbon sex club, I met a pair of swapping couples around my age. All four of them were hot. They’d first met – I swear to God – through comments on Reddit. I watched them warm up before they went to the private room. I felt a stirring in my soul, a rare note of jealousy. I like that. I want that. How can I get that? Fixme 2024, RedQuest filtration model, find a girl who wants to explore.

Best Sex. Nadya the poly Russian libertine from Tinder who served me wine afterwards.

Favourite Girl. In the irony of ironies, the anticlimax to end all anticlimaxes – my favourite girl of 2023 is one I have not even had sex with and probably will never have sex with. She’s my temporary Thai girlfriend, Tasmanee, and she has led me to the surprise that my desire for PIV sex resides at the ego and superego levels, but not the id. Or near the top of Maslow’s pyramid instead of the bottom.

I did not enter such a relationship lightly, and I made absolutely sure she knew I was free to have sex with other girls, but … I feel no urgency. I can’t be bothered to swipe. She keeps my balls drained doing all the non-PIV stuff I like. Her trad sweet femininity and love of cooking and cleaning for me have redpilled me into the stratosphere: how can I ever accept less than this now I’ve tasted it!? I’ll still appreciate the sexiness of tomboys and sluts, but for longer term investment … makes me think.

If RPSG hadn’t made me suspicious of marriage, and I didn’t know deep down that I must continue climbing the Mountain, I’d be sorely tempted to marry this girl. I know that’s what she wishes for, even though I’ve told her I’m not marrying anytime soon. I’ll be genuinely sad to say goodbye to her as she moves back home in late January; out of all the girls I dated this year, she was the only one to whom I dared to say: “I love you”. I was the first guy to ever kiss her (she was 25!!) and unleash the (loud!) animal hidden beneath her K-selected surface; that’s really special! However, all good things must come to an end, and I only let myself into this as a holiday from all the hard work to let me focus on the rest of my life for a bit.

She wants me to visit her in Thailand later in the year. It sounds nice, and could be useful… I’ll think about it. I just hope she’s capable of moving on. She studies law and even though broken English, as adorable as it is, can make someone sound unintelligent, I can tell from our conversations that she’s not actually stupid or misunderstanding my intentions, so I think she’ll be OK.

Recommendations

If I had to recommend one book from this year, it’d be Bodi’s Death By A Thousand Sluts. It has some combination of practical and entertainment value, but I’m not recommending it as “most useful” or “most anything” – it’s just my favourite, even if that just boils down to recency bias. (Technically, it’s two books – read Part One if you want pathos and despair with glimmers of hope, or Part Two if you want the victory arc for the whole underdog story.)

If I had to recommend one video I watched this year, it’d be Krauser’s “Player’s Journey” talk. The whole 80 minutes is inspiring. But I’ll never be able to forget the hilarious segment near the end, starting 53:53, where he recounts how, at the height of his experience and ability to read women, he would immediately lose interest and stop mid-sentence as soon as his spidey-sense detected that his date wasn’t going to put out that night. One of probably many absurdities waiting at the peak of the Mountain. Luckily, he went on to verify that he wasn’t too far gone, and could still enjoy the company of girls other than as sex objects, as his life goals began to change.

More practically, I’ll also recommend the rising star known as hoe_math who’s just fantastic.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to whoever linked RedQuest in the TLP subreddit. Thank you to RedQuest for writing such an intriguing and me-compatible gateway to the RPSG sphere. Thanks to RedPillDad for lots of wisdom I found helpful early on. Thank you to NightRoller for writing your blog and being candid about your awkward/embarrassing early experiences – something about that emboldened me to start this blog. Same to Pancakemouse for the helpful ideas in your blog. Thanks to both of you for your engagement in comments, both the practical ones and the words of encouragement. Same to the occasional one-off commenters I’ve had. Thanks to KYIL’s September for your comments and for setting up the Logic-cels group chat. Thanks to my occasional wings or guys I’ve had conversations with from the Game Global groups.

A huge thank you to KYIL Andy and the community he founded. If I’d read orthodox daygame theory first, my first cold approach could have been delayed by many months. Instead, his articles on cold approach got me to make my debut shortly after reading them. Perfection is the enemy of the good.

Finally, I thank my ex for releasing me to pursue the destiny I was in denial about. In hindsight, I should have been the one to end the relationship some time earlier. But I was confused and conflicted and too much of a pussy to do it, so the task fell to her to give us what she wanted and I needed but didn’t want. I regret the error, and I don’t think I’ll make that mistake again. I hope she hasn’t discovered this blog right now, but perhaps one day in the far future, if you’re reading: I hope you’ve been living your best life too, dragă.

Epilogue

On this day, ten years ago, I went to my first New Year’s house party. I took a girl’s hands and danced, with a girl, for the first time… but nothing further. It was a step up from hugs, which still melted me into a puddle. Tonight, I sleep in the arms of a beautiful and loving girl, who I chose from a position of strength, because I like her that much. I found her on my life-affirming quest of the past year, which I will return to when she’s gone.

The future is bright! My mindset is in absolutely the right place; my outlook couldn’t be more positive. I have a strong understanding of my deepest personal weaknesses that I can target next. My biggest vices are laziness and distraction. My theory knowledge is increasingly exhaustive (in case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy it in its own right). I know I need a ton more experience to get to where I’d like to be (they say you need 1000 daygame sets to internalise the basics).

Bring it on in 2024! Onward and upward!

This is your life: good to the last drop. Doesn’t get any better than this. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

“This Is Your Life” – Fight Club (1999).

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Postscript

Perhaps something else doesn’t add up: how does a guy who writes like … (gestures at everything above) … stand a chance at dating girls? Very simple: I write this blog the way I most enjoy, and I don’t talk to girls the same way I write the blog.

Compartmentalise Your Inner Sperg doesn’t have the same ring to it as Kill Your Inner Loser, but you should absolutely do both.

(Please don’t kill your inner sperg. If there’s one thing Anglo society needs, it’s more detached autism and less outraged normie passion fucking everything up. A return to Masculine Discussion Norms, if you like.)

I prefer to think of it as the late pre-truth era.

Scott Alexander (2020) on the “post-truth” era.