@realcaseyrollins It's tough. All most people want is for people in power to fuck off. It's a pretty easy request, but it seems there's very few who can figure it out.
(By the way, check narwhal -- I responded to a bunch of your posts after I fixed federation I think permanently)
(By the way, check narwhal -- I responded to a bunch of your posts after I fixed federation I think permanently)
@NorseRealist @rasterman What they can't prove false despite trying their very hardest, at least.
@NorseRealist @rasterman The reason is that for all the talk of "trust the science" people aren't doing motherfucking science.
They're saying what they want to be true, not what they know to be true.
They're saying what they want to be true, not what they know to be true.
@Jackuu @InceptionState @zerohedge I completely agree, which is why I'm fundamentally against the idea.
I've got an essay on here specifically about the environmental industrial complex that specifically exists not to help the environment but to package up the idea of environmentalism and take resources from things that might actually help.
I've got an essay on here specifically about the environmental industrial complex that specifically exists not to help the environment but to package up the idea of environmentalism and take resources from things that might actually help.
@guttersessions Vaccines aren't miracle drugs. They have a chance of preventing the illness, and they have a chance of reducing the symptoms, but guess what? They might not. All it's doing is training your immune system, so it's up to your body to actually do the work. It's like giving your immune system brass knuckles -- Well, if you give brass knuckles to some 98 pound wimp who has never thrown a punch before, he'll be better off against another 98 pound wimp and he might even be able to handle a 120 pound wimp, but he won't be able to go up against Ewan McGregor.
That's where the cult of the vaccine is so ridiculous -- Of course there are risks we can't foresee to taking vaccines that came into existence largely by cutting regulatory hurdles that include long-term efficacy and safety testing. Even if they're effective long-term (and it takes 9 months to make a baby and it takes long term to test long term effectiveness so we can't know yet) we know from the data provided by the manufacturers themselves that they aren't 100% effective at preventing COVID and they aren't 100% effective at preventing serious cases.
The world isn't black and white, it's made of shades of grey and the sooner these idiots realize that the sooner they'll stop looking stupid.
That's where the cult of the vaccine is so ridiculous -- Of course there are risks we can't foresee to taking vaccines that came into existence largely by cutting regulatory hurdles that include long-term efficacy and safety testing. Even if they're effective long-term (and it takes 9 months to make a baby and it takes long term to test long term effectiveness so we can't know yet) we know from the data provided by the manufacturers themselves that they aren't 100% effective at preventing COVID and they aren't 100% effective at preventing serious cases.
The world isn't black and white, it's made of shades of grey and the sooner these idiots realize that the sooner they'll stop looking stupid.
@erinotoole
>Only Canada’s Conservatives will ensure our country recovers and prospers coming out of the pandemic.
Fake news.
>Only Canada’s Conservatives will ensure our country recovers and prospers coming out of the pandemic.
Fake news.
@InceptionState @zerohedge I'm generally against carbon taxes because I don't think it's ethical to increase heating and transportation costs in a way that will disproportionately affect the poor.
That being said, if it's a necessary evil, then I'd support a tariff on countries based on noncompliance from the norms of first world nations so that we're competing on a level playing field.
China is just one example, but not the only one. Candy companies claim in court that they cannot possibly make chocolate without slave labor -- Well if that's the case then maybe we need to stick a 120000% tariff on the chocolate from countries that tacitly allow slavery? Competitive advantage is one thing, but where western companies rely on competitive advantage that comes from something that shocks the conscience to the point that it's been outlawed for hundreds of years, but potential first world growers are competing with literal slavery.
That being said, if it's a necessary evil, then I'd support a tariff on countries based on noncompliance from the norms of first world nations so that we're competing on a level playing field.
China is just one example, but not the only one. Candy companies claim in court that they cannot possibly make chocolate without slave labor -- Well if that's the case then maybe we need to stick a 120000% tariff on the chocolate from countries that tacitly allow slavery? Competitive advantage is one thing, but where western companies rely on competitive advantage that comes from something that shocks the conscience to the point that it's been outlawed for hundreds of years, but potential first world growers are competing with literal slavery.
@zerohedge
>25 big cities account for more than half of the climate-warming gases. 23 of them are in China - Reuters
>Time to boycott all Chinese products
>https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/handful-cities-driving-urban-greenhouse-gas-emissions-study-2021-07-12/
To defend China minimally, this was caused by westerners being NIMBYists. They pushed industry out of european and american countries so we could feel great about how we're not polluting, but then we buy the stuff made in China made in the polluting factories anyway.
>25 big cities account for more than half of the climate-warming gases. 23 of them are in China - Reuters
>Time to boycott all Chinese products
>https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/handful-cities-driving-urban-greenhouse-gas-emissions-study-2021-07-12/
To defend China minimally, this was caused by westerners being NIMBYists. They pushed industry out of european and american countries so we could feel great about how we're not polluting, but then we buy the stuff made in China made in the polluting factories anyway.
@zerohedge
>Stagflation Shockwave: China Surprises With Unexpectedly Strong Inflation As GDP Shrinks https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stagflation-shockwave-china-surprises-unexpectedly-strong-inflation-gdp-shrinks
TRANSITORY STAGFLATION
>Stagflation Shockwave: China Surprises With Unexpectedly Strong Inflation As GDP Shrinks https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stagflation-shockwave-china-surprises-unexpectedly-strong-inflation-gdp-shrinks
TRANSITORY STAGFLATION
@moth_ball @waltercool "Respect other cultures!" "CHANGE YOUR CULTURE WE DO NOT RESPECT IT"
@MrMaxPowers247 when I got my second shot, the guy at the drugstore asked me why I was getting this vaccination and not the other vaccination for the flu, I said to him "they don't shut down the universe when someone catches the flu"
>Internet was down this morning.
>TFW the main websites I visit are all ok because they're hosted locally
>TFW the main websites I visit are all ok because they're hosted locally
This is a message to the upcoming generation
The basic drive for all life can be summed up as "survival and replication". It is a little bit axiomatic because only life that strives to survive and reproduce exists over the long term.
Reading about geology and paleontology is very interesting because on those timelines you begin to realize just how small you are, and how much little things add up over a very long time. My favorite example is the oxygen catastrophe. Life overwhelmingly relied on metabolizing carbon dioxide to exist, and once most of the carbon dioxide had been metabolized, major oxygen sinks started to be used up. For example, the Earth was made of iron and all of that iron had to rust before oxygen could accumulate in the air. Fitting, that an event called the oxygen catastrophe and the single greatest extinction event in the history of the planet also stained the Earth red. The ones that survived were the ones that were able to survive. There was some microbial life that was either tolerant to oxygen or was actively utilizing it at that time, and those forms of life thrived whereas forms of life that found oxygen poisonous disappeared. The same thing happened a lot of times. I think five or six or seven times the dominant forms of life on the planet died out because the fundamental rules of the game changed. Some really amazing things happened over millions of years. Anytime that you see soapstone, that's made up of millions of years of little microbes and other life compacting together and all the stuff that doesn't rot stayed behind and turned into this form of rock that never existed on the planet before. All the carbonates didn't just come out of nothing, they came from life combining carbon together to form a hard shell, and that happening probably trillions of times and all of those forms of life dying and all of the their carbonate shells packing together to become this type of rock. You can read about the forests that covered the planet at one point, and there was absolutely nothing that could attack the wood and so these massive forests just grew and grew and grew. The trees would die, and over millions and millions and millions of years all of this life that couldn't really go anywhere just compacted together and became what today is coal. Later on in history, fungi would evolve the ability to eat wood and suddenly wood could rot, and so that little moment in time called the carboniferous period is the source of most of the planet's coal. And all the while, species come to exist out of other species and live or die and only the species that survive and produce offspring get to move on.
We like to pretend that the human race is different, that because we can think and our conscious we are somehow above those animal impulses. That's false. In a lot of ways you don't realize, the human race is entirely defined by our biology. Many of your deepest rooted fears and ambitions are written into your blood, in a library that was passed down by millions of generations of successful creatures going all the way back to the single celled organisms that first crawled out of the primordial ooze. Many of these things absolutely keep you alive. When you're hungry, if you didn't get hungry and you didn't eat you would die. You don't need to be taught that you need to eat. When you're thirsty, you need to drink and if you don't drink you'll die. You don't need to be taught that you need to drink. In fact, besides these very base impulses there are much higher level impulses that are also pushed by our biology. There are a lot of things related to mating that you've never been taught, you just know. If you're a man, no one needs to tell you that you're attracted to a pretty girl. On the other hand, no one needs to tell you that you're nervous when you're about to talk to a girl that you like either. Some of our urges are almost transcendental in the sense of they have existed so much longer than humanity, so much longer than ground dwelling life in fact you could consider them to be universal. That last one though, that's almost uniquely human. Having fears about certain social situations makes absolutely no sense in a setting before social animals. Some of those rules may have been written by our prehominid ancestors, as well as hominids coming all the way up to homo sapiens. The thing to realize and remember is that most of those rules were not written during an age where billions of human beings existed. For most of the existence of hominids and prehomonid life, your entire society and everyone in it would be made up of maybe 50 people. That might be all the people that you ever met in the history of your life. Maybe once in awhile you might come up against another society and maybe there would be conflict at that time, but overwhelmingly you'd be talking about the sort of people that never see anyone outside of their social group.
In that 50 person society, social niceties are not just a nice idea, they are literally matters of life and death. Human beings are social animals, and if you take away a person from their society the odds are that person is going to die and they're never going to reproduce and the story of their bloodline ends. If you want to know why people feel such anxiety over social situations, that's why. It's written into our blood, the lessons from all the people who made it.
It's hard to imagine right now, but the human race has been on the brink of destruction at times. According to scientists, every human being on the planet is descended from one woman who's been named mitochondrial eve. Mitochondria are symbiotic organisms that exist within animal cells that convert sugars into more refined fuels. They are essential to most animal life because without these specialized organisms, animal cells would have to maintain a method to convert courser sugars into more refined fuels themselves, and that's rather costly compared to just having a symbiotic organism do it for us. There are a number of single-celled organisms that don't rely on mitochondria, in some cases the main cell basically just absorbed the functions of the mitochondrial cell, and in other cases they independently evolved a separate method to refine those sugars, but multicellular life almost universally has mitochondria. The first mitochondria are contained in mother, and so mitochondria is passed down from mother to child, it's matrilineal. Mitochondria has its own DNA as it is an independent organism living within ourselves, and we can sequence that DNA. As far as we can tell, there's only the one person that all of our mitochondria descend from. There was probably a Time where the human race was so close to the brink of destruction, and it was The offspring of mitochondrial eve who happened to be strong enough to survive and replicate. Just imagine, every human being alive is a descendant of this one woman. And this wasn't the first human being either, it was just one particular choke point in the history of civilization. Imagine that all the other mothers in that generation were unable to produce offspring who were capable of surviving and replicating over generations. Every single one of them, the story of their bloodline ended around there.
In such a cutthroat world with such a small number of options, it is only understandable that taking risks that could lead to the extinction of your bloodline would cause incredible anxiety. Also imagine that in the 50 person society, mating would be extremely high stakes. Of those 50 people, you can assume half of them would be women. Some of them would be too young, some of them would be too old, and so in between you would have a very small number of eligible mates, and among those very small number you would have to pick the person most likely to produce kids strong enough to survive the astronomical infant mortality rate. When you are attracted to a beautiful woman it's not because you're vain, it's because if you don't pick the healthiest woman to produce the healthiest child, then not only might your child die but so will your mate. It's a life and death game.
The fact is, we don't live in that world anymore. First of all, almost every person who's born will make it to adulthood, and frankly most people who make it to adulthood are fully capable of meeting someone and having kids. More importantly, we don't live in a 50 person society. Even the smallest town inevitably has thousands in it, and even if you live in a 50-person town you can just move. You could go through life making enemies of every single person you meet and have it not matter because you just move on to the next place where no one knows who you are. I don't recommend it, but it's an option.
For this reason, both men and women are programmed with very specific instructions passed down from our ancestors. Whatever the crackpots might try to tell you, men are attracted to a certain thing and women are attracted to a different thing, and while there are some modifiers with respect to which cultures they come from they are still fundamentally the same things. Men are looking for health, women are looking for power and abundance and stability.
One mistake that both men and women make is in trying to become more attractive, they try to become more attractive to themselves. Men will spend countless hours dieting and in the gym hoping to reach the level of peak physical form to attract women, and women will spend years of their life getting an advanced degree and buying a house. These aren't bad goals in and of themselves, but they are bad goals if what you're trying to do is attract the other sex.
I've gotten in shit for this, so let me make something perfectly clear: I recognize that other sexualities exist, but if you think that I can tell you how as a gay man to attract other gay men, or how as a lesbian woman you attract other women, you're barking up the wrong tree. If you want to go find out how to be gay, ask a gay. Not lying here, I'm going out on a stretch just guessing how women might attract a man.
One of the early seminal guides on meeting women I think applies to meeting men as well in terms of one of the core strategies that they talk about: "find, meet, attract, close".
This framework is important because it talks about steps that are required along the process. There are entirely too many people who are willfully ignorant of the basics and just assume that magical thinking will get them to where they want in life. Generally speaking that's not true. Yes, there are some people who just naturally have a knack for meeting people but even those people still have to follow a process they just happened to do a better job intuiting the process early on.
So the first thing is find. It's a general statement but I think it's a true one that most of the time men hang out with other men and women hang out with other women. That being the case, it's going to be really hard to meet somebody if all the people that you hang out with have the specific quality of not being people you're interested in romantically. Honestly, people who have friend groups that are made up of both men and women are overwhelmingly more likely to find romantic success then equal or better people who have friend groups exclusively consisting of their own sex. It simply a matter of availability, you can be the greatest guy in the world and if nobody knows that you exist then you don't. Not for the purposes that we're talking about. Going out of your comfort zone and going to the places that the sort of people that you want to meet go is a key part of meeting someone. It's a simple concept, but one that most people end up missing out on. When I was growing up, I was always a very nerdy guy. At that time, this was before the zuckerbergs of the world had changed computers into something everybody carried around in their pocket. At that time, being a computer nerd was decidedly uncool. And so the sort of people who hung around were male. The reasons for that are simple, men tend to be more willing to take risks and do things that aren't perfectly safe socially speaking, and also men tend to be more interested in things than people so in both cases computers at the time were a very male hobby. You spent an awful lot of time reading books and clicking away on a little thing that didn't have a whole lot of connections to the outside world and you didn't spend a whole lot of time socializing because you were considered kind of a social pariah for your interests. You ended up where almost everyone you hung out with was mail because they were the only other ones who were willing to take that risk until a woman showed up. Say what you will about a bunch of nerds, they were still men and that one woman realistically kind of had her pick. Being the sole woman in an all-male space meant that she was at a distinct advantage to all of the women who didn't bother coming into that space. By contrast, each individual man had basically no chance with the girl because there were dozens of you and one of her. Most small communities of nerdy people have their stories about the woman, and it doesn't really matter which particular community you're talking about because it doesn't really matter. The one woman would be put up on this giant pedestal because she was the only one and it didn't really matter her physical attributes or if she was even a halfway decent person because there was only one of her and there was a dozen of you. What are you going to do? Kick the one woman out of the club? Not bloody likely. By contrast, a lot of men who have managed to find themselves accepted in female only spaces don't tend to have a whole lot of problems meeting women cuz they already have found women. When I was young, the advice that I always ended up getting was "go outside". This is kind of shitty advice because it doesn't really say much. You can go into your backyard and you are outside, but that doesn't mean anything! Thus my specific piece of advice is not to just go outside, but to leave your home and go somewhere that the opposite sex is. It's probably going to be somewhere that makes you feel very uncomfortable because that's how this works, but unless you win the lottery you're going to have to put yourself into some uncomfortable situations for a while to get the sort of things that you want out of life.
So, you found some! What next? Just because you can see that they exist doesn't mean you've done anything special. If you show up every day to the beach and I'll go the pretty girls and don't say a word, guess what: you're a creep. The next step is to meet people. This is a social skill that can be either really easy or really difficult in it depends entirely on the sort of person you are in your life experiences. If you are like me, and an extreme introvert and you have life experiences like mine that make you quiet and shy, you also have as I mentioned earlier and extreme anxiety about speaking to the opposite sex. That makes sense, it's written into your biology. So there's a few things that you can do here, but the bottom line is at some point you have to walk up to someone and start a conversation. This is a lot easier the younger you are, and as you get older well... You know, I'm sure that there's some sort of bell curve at work here. I have this nagging suspicion that when you're very young It's relatively easy as you get into your prime years it gets a lot harder and then later on as you get older you run out of fucks to give and it becomes really easy to talk to whoever the hell you want. However, nothing worth having comes without some level of risk and some level of pain. I am not a pickup artist, I'm happily married man, and I'm also rapidly approaching middle age if I'm not already there. And that makes it pretty difficult to head out to the club and start spitting game at 20-year-old women. But forget about spitting game for a moment, that sort of high stakes pain it's for super experienced guys who are used to that sort of thing. You know a great thing to do, figure out a completely non-threatening way to approach anyone. Particularly if you are in a more social setting, you can usually just approach a mixed group crowd and start talking and you have a little bit where most people are polite enough that they'll indulge you. One thing that's really neat is you don't actually have to have anything complicated. A lot of things that I recommended by the guys who do this sort of thing for a living are acting like you're just trying to get some different responses for a question that you need answered. There are a lot of neat little hot button topics that you can start a conversation about and you're not going to offend anyone but everyone's going to have an opinion. People like to give their opinion. I should know, I'm writing an entire book of them. When you're in your sort of prime meeting people years, you kind of want to keep your eyes open because you never know when something interesting will come about. A great conversation starter would be something like "hey guys just a moment I need to ask a quick question, I'm just trying to help my friend. Has photos of his ex-girlfriend sitting under his bed. He doesn't do anything weird with him, he just keeps him his mementos of his past relationships and his girlfriend wants him to burn them or he's going to break up with him. What do you think about that? What do you think he should do?"
Full stop for a minute, we got to talk about something that is going to be very important every step of the way. In the industry they call it "calibration". Calibration is paying attention to the people that you're talking to to see how they are reacting to the thing that you're saying. A lot of the time, their body language is going to be telling you exactly where they're at. Back when I was single, I approached a group who was the only group in the bar at the time, and started talking to them and you could tell they were more than happy to have a cute guy at the table talking to them. I was anxious as hell, but paying attention and realizing that they were open to talking to me for a bit helped me out a little bit. Every step of the way there are things you can be doing to sort of calibrate and get a feel for things. At this stage, you should be able to tell right away just by looking at everyone if they seem amenable to answering your question. Just as a good person you should be constantly calibrating. If you're talking to someone and it seems like they're kind of losing interest in you, maybe it's time to move on. On the other hand, if they seem really interested in you then great keep at it. There's even little things that you can throw, little questions you can ask. You don't need to be a psychic, sometimes you can just ask "hey you guys seem cool mind if I chat with you for a bit? And if they like you they'll say yes and if they don't like you they'll say no and sometimes they don't like you but they're being polite and I'll say yes anyway but usually that's pretty obvious as long as you're paying attention which is the key thing here. Like I said though, this doesn't just end here. This is going to have to keep on going right up until.... forever actually. You know, I've been married for 10 years and I still calibrate with my wife, because that's just what you do when you're a good person. You end up getting a little bit more latitude obviously, you don't need to ask your wife of 10 years who's carrying your son whether it's okay if you talk to her if her friends would approve, but sometimes you got to just stop and go "hey do you really feel like hearing this right now?" When there just seems to be a look on her face and sometimes she'll come back and say "I got a lot on my mind right now maybe we could do this another time" or "no I'm really interested in this I'm just thinking about what you're saying". So you're going to be having to calibrate when you find women because there are definitely a lot of situations where maybe you don't want to be going and finding those women, and when you meet women there are going to be times when you can immediately tell you're not welcome and it's just time to go out "never mind I'll chat with you later", and sometimes you'll be at a point where you're trying to attract a girl and you realize there's just no chemistry and it's time to move on because you're just not getting the calibration back that you expected, sometimes you'll be right there at the finishing line and you'll just realize that somewhere along the way you messed up, and maybe it's time to go into salvage mode but maybe it's time to pull the plug. It can happen at any point. The key here is that you have to keep your eyes open you have to be paying attention because human beings are inherently social animals and they are constantly giving you cues as long as you get out of your head and start paying attention. Often, those cues are not subtle.
There's another thing I want to mention right now, because it is the number one destroyer of dreams: oneitis. This is a chronic disease, a chronic inflammation of the feeling that person you like is "the one". Symptoms of oneitis include: chasing after some guy or some chick who doesn't like you nearly as much as you like them. Constantly being there for someone right before they move on to the next boyfriend or girlfriend who isn't you. Feeling like you need to confront someone over your romantic feelings. If you feel like you need to confront someone over your romantic feelings, it's almost 100% certain they're not interested and you really need to stop wasting your time chasing after someone who doesn't actually like you. I've helped a number of men find romance. In virtually every case, they needed help mostly because instead of going out and trying to meet new women, they had the one that they had often spent years courting in a very passive way. You know, people aren't stupid, a woman knows full well that you're trying to get with her. And if you're a woman and you're giving attention to a man, he knows it. Maybe not immediately, but if you have known someone for years and it's never come up, I'm not saying that it can't happen where you proclaim your love to your friend and it just so happens that they had the same unrequited feelings as you! But the fact is it's almost never the case. Usually, you are putting a bunch of expectations on someone who really doesn't deserve the pressure of expectations they've never given you any reason to have. From virtually any ethical standpoint, it's pretty unethical because if you're doing that, you're making the amount of happiness in the world shrink significantly. You are not happy, they're not happy, it's just not good. In both cases, those guys finally managed to rip their eyes away from "the one" and they went out and met people that they actually liked and liked them back. We live in a world of 8 billion people. Half of those are women. Millions of them are women in the age range that you're looking for. If you're spending a bunch of time racing after someone who doesn't really like you, you're being an idiot. There are other fish in the sea. I'm not saying that you need to cut every single relationship the moment that things get bad, but what I am saying is chase after people who like you, chasing after someone who doesn't is a great recipe for getting used.
So let's move on to this idea of attraction. There's a sardonic joke out there: "Rule 1: Be attractive. Rule 2: don't be unattractive." It sounds pretty silly, but it's actually true. The thing is, you need to understand what is and isn't attractive. Of course, everybody easily gets The superficial stuff. Be fit. Have genetically good looks. Have genetically perfect hair. But you remember what I said at the beginning of this? That men and women both seek different things in terms of being attractive? It certainly is harder for women because many indicators of health are things you don't really have a lot of control over. And some of them are things that even if you do have control over them, they're really hard to control. They say to be skinny, but reality is losing weight is one of the hardest things on the face of the planet. People who have never had to lose weight don't understand that if they are naturally more inclined to being skinny. It's nightmarishly difficult. It doesn't happen overnight, you have to make a concerted effort to silence one of your number one essential urges, one of those voices in your head that from birth is telling you that if you don't do this thing you will die. Even if we know it's not true, it's not like turning off a light switch silencing that voice. You know what though, there are ways to make it work. You can prove that you're healthy in ways that don't have anything to do with your looks. How do you do that? One way to prove that you're healthy and spunky is through your behaviors, attitudes and mannerisms. Another way that really does help is showing you're either part of their tribe or part of a tribe they would like to join. That's pretty universal to be honest. Fat women get laid, get relationships both short term and long term, and get married every single day, and it might shock you how often the men who put a ring on that finger are thankful for the privilege. For men, being attractive is more complicated than just being healthy. A lot of men seem to think that all you need to do is be healthy and be basically unfriending and you'll be good. I've got a news flash here: most passably beautiful women get hit on from the moment that they turn about 13 until probably they turn about 50. Everyday. Usually multiple times a day. There is this legend of that beautiful woman who has never been told she's beautiful that movies just love to peddle. It's not true. It's a lie. The reason that happens in romantic comedies is that romantic comedies are designed for people who don't have love in their life. They're designed as a wish fulfilment fantasy. The idea is that you have these absolute knockout women on screen and the women who can't find a man who are watching these movies imagine themselves in that role, and that's why they do it. Because that story is relatable. Overwhelmingly, the stories aren't going to be the real kind of stories that a beautiful woman lives first of all because if you're not experiencing them first-hand they're kind of boring, and second of all because the stories would probably make you hate said beautiful women. You shouldn't, that's just their life. We all have our reality and our realities come with benefits and drawbacks. Ugly men fantasize about being popular and noticed by everyone, beautiful women fantasize about just being left alone. The way for a man to not be part of this massive boring people that are constantly hitting on her is to not try to just show that you're interested. Instead, you should be trying to show that you're interesting. Having stories about places you've gone and people you've seen and things you've done, having interesting topics to talk about, being passionate about different things. You know, even if she's not interested in whatever you're interested in, a lot of women are going to be interested in the fact that you're interested in something. It's kind of remarkable when you think about it, but it's true! That's not carte blanche to go out and inundate some woman with stories about your Warhammer 40K cosplays, but you know, the fact that you have some kind of interest is interesting. Now you might be saying, "well how am I supposed to have all these stories, I'm not interesting!" Well, the best way to seem interesting is to be interesting. That means leaving your house and going off to do cool things. When I was single, I started a list of neat things that I wanted to go out and do so that I could talk about the neat things that I'd gone out and done. Some of them were big things like going on a giant road trip or this or that, but some of them were really small things. I've never eaten sushi so I decided to go out and get some sushi. This was before sushi was everywhere, so trying to find a specific restaurant that actually had good sushi so that I could find out all about it and have a good experience was really interesting. The fact is, most people are fairly boring. Especially beautiful people. They don't need to be that interesting, because they're beautiful. Writing that sentence was funny, and not intended to sound as bitter as it does on paper. The point is though, being interesting helps. Another thing that I found out is this serves two purposes. By going out and doing things and being interesting even when there's no one else involved, you also save yourself the trouble of trying to come up with interesting things to do later on when you start getting dates.
And that brings us to closing. When you talking about this sort of thing, a close is anytime that you bring things to the next level. People make the mistake of trying to set some sort of arbitrary goal that is the moment, and that's kind of the wrong way to look at things. That's not how human beings work. What you should be trying to do instead is constantly calibrating to see if you think it might be a good time to move forward and then incrementally moving forward. You move from talking to everyone except this person in their group, to talking to everyone including that person in your group, so maybe having a little bit of alone chat with that person, to slowly and making sure that she's into it moving into starting to have a bit of completely non-sexual touching like tapping their arm, anytime you calibrate and find out if it's okay. Of course you're not going to be asking every time because you're going to look like an idiot, you're going to be using your eyes and your brain. And if you push a little bit too hard and you see them sort of clench up like they're not happy with what just happened, back off a little bit. I can mean either you've completely screwed it up and she's just not into you or it can mean that she's just not ready for this yet and you need to spend a little bit more time before you move forward. Unfortunately, that sort of thing takes experience to figure out which sucks. Of course I'm speaking it from the point of view of a man, but the same thing applies to women, you're slowly making little closes and just gauging the reaction and seeing how things are going. You know, women are terrified of men. What most women don't realize is that men are also terrified of women. Nobody wants to be the first one to make a move, partly because making a move is set up in our culture to be this big thing instead of just one little step in a series of progressive movements. Therefore, if you like a guy, maybe give him a hand, especially if it seems like he likes you back. You don't need to be full on cave woman pounding over the head with a club and dragging him back to your place, but pushing a guy a bit can go a long way towards making something work. Especially today, when frankly it's terrifying being a guy. Our entire genetic makeup is sort of designed for the man to take charge in this interaction, and not to mention our culture kind of is too. That would all be fine and dandy except it's pretty high stakes now. Make the wrong move on the wrong person and your life just ended. It's tough out there. Don't make mistake thinking that I'm sitting here defending the terrible people who do terrible things. But what I am saying is those people getting their just desserts mean s that a lot of innocent people end up getting put in some bad situations that they didn't really deserve. Like it or not, this is the world we live in now. If you're sitting there alone and you don't know why and you don't know what to do about it maybe give that guy that you like a hand.
All this talk of calibration, it's super important especially for the guys. Forget about getting slapped across the face, the reality is that although we are no longer living in a 50 person society, we are living in a society where if you miscalculate and push things too far, it can mean your life. There have been many times where what a guy thought was just playing turned out to the woman to be terrifying behavior. When a woman thinks your behavior is terrifying, you messed up somewhere. If you push it too far, they can come back later and he can get canceled, or you can go to jail for something that you thought was innocent but isn't. Therefore, every single step of the way it is incredibly important to make sure that you and her are on the same page. I it wouldn't be surprised the way the world is going if eventually the same standards start to apply to women, and it's going to be a lot more of a culture for them than it was for us. It's always been kind of understood that men are bigger and stronger than women so we have a duty to make sure we're not pushing things that aren't wanted on the other side. I think it's going to soon be the standard for both sexes.
So now that I've gotten some basic advice and techniques down pat, let's talk about some stuff that hopefully might keep you safe. Just keep your eyes open, and maybe you'll be able to avoid some stuff that a lot of people have to go through. There's a lot of crazy people in the world. By the time you reach a certain age, you and probably a lot of people that you know will probably have some sort of story about someone who seemed to really nice at first, butturned out to be a psycho. There's a bunch of ways that this can manifest, and it's not their fault, but just because it isn't their fault doesn't mean it's not a problem. And watch out for the narcissist, they're the sort of people who really think the world revolves around them. They're going to like you at first if you pay attention to them, and you'll probably feel good because they give you attention because you give them attention. The problem with that is you guys aren't playing the same game. Eventually you'll realize that person's really all about just getting as much attention as possible, and often getting attention doesn't mean in positive ways. Ironically, these are the sort of people who are going to immediately jump all over me after reading this, because making a huge deal over things is kind of their thing. Pretending that they care about others is a great way to get attention. Watch out for the borderline. Borderline personality disorder is characterized by a number of different things, including chaotic personal relationships problems with impulsive decision making, and watch for this one, attendance to go in between ideation and demonization of a person. In short, one day you'll be the king, and the next you'll be the biggest monster in the world. Every step of the way it's going to seem genuine because as far as they know it is. The biggest danger with this is if you don't catch it early on, and you end up getting pulled into something way too fast, then suddenly you've made some kind of lifelong commitment, whether it's marriage, or a kid, or what have you, and then you realize they're crazy. It's no good. One of the other symptoms of this disease is a desperate and irrational fear that people are going to leave them. Unfortunately it turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, no good person is going to stand by and happily get accused of cheating again and again and again. Eventually they leave because they don't deserve this. You really have to watch out though, because when someone thinks that you're the devil, they are okay with using whatever means necessary to hurt you. Particularly after you break up with such a person, there's every reason in the world to believe that they're going to try to go after you through your family, through the police, through some whisper network, they're going to do whatever they can to hurt you because you're the devil now. Early on, it's kind of hard to recognize. If you're a legitimately good person who just happens to really like someone, and you're nothing like that, you can end up scaring off a lot of people not because you deserve to but because people like that end up making people's nightmares come true. Watch out for the "vacation in Cancun". There are people who are super fun, super full of energy, completely uninhibited, and they come into your normal life and you're just swept off your feet. It's so much fun in you kind of wish that it would never end, but it's a vacation in cancun. Cancun is a city in Mexico that a lot of college kids go to vacationing. If you are a tourist, it's a fantastic place to go for a couple weeks. The beaches are beautiful, resorts you can get free booze, there's lots of exciting things to go do and he can go to seedy bars and and all kinds of neat stuff. The problem comes if you were to decide to go live in Cancun. You see, what's the vacation is over Cancun is a shitty place to live. (No offense anyone reading this from Cancun) they're a drug cartels constantly doing crazy stuff, people are constantly getting kidnapped and ransomed, and the typical person living there is dirt poor. The reason why a bunch of middle-class Americans can go have an all expenses paid trip in Cancun is that basically nobody makes any money so the amount of money that they bring in is massive compared to what anyone actually makes. So Cancun is a great place to go visit for a while, but if you stay there you're probably going to die. Those exciting seedy bars become dens of criminal activity in the city you live in. Those tourists who were so much fun when you were one of them are suddenly just draining because you're just constantly having to deal with them and their drunken antics. The pace of a city filled with tourists all the time will just wear you out and you'll just want to take a break, and get some quiet. But you can't, cuz you live in Cancun. If you're planning on sticking around with someone, use your brain. Think about whether this person is actually someone that you can see yourself spending time with a little ways down the line once the party ends. I guarantee you that eventually you're going to want the party to end, at least for a little bit. Be aware of the person who is a victim of the entire world. You have to be very careful, because there are people who the moment that they leave the room will immediately start bad-mouthing you, and they'll do the same thing to everybody else. At first you're going to think that life has really handed this person a Raw deal, but often if you take the time and get to know that person you're going to realize more often than not that they've been handed every opportunity on a silver platter and turned it away. And the moment that you leave the room, they're going to start talking about how bad you've treated them, because you're just another person in the world. Because of the way that these people view themselves in the world, they've got absolutely no problem with using others and then acting as if they were being used the whole time.
Not everything is bad out there though, there's a lot of really good stuff in the world and being aware of the potential bad things shouldn't blind you you're the potentially good things. There are people that are kind of a diamond in the rough. People that have been overlooked, people who would be amazing if they were just given a chance. The trick is to realize that those people do exist, but if you see them right away they're probably not who you think they are. Remember earlier, when I said that there were lots of women who were routinely hit on? That's particularly true if you're just a regular old hot girl. That regular old hot girl probably isn't a diamond in the rough. Now, maybe if it looks aren't perfect? Maybe if there's something about her that's off putting at first? That's the trick. Dating is like a market whether you take that analogy to be mean spirited or not. It's like a market in economics. If you think about it, everyone is trying to find the best product at the lowest price. In terms of economics though, not every person has the same value for every product. To use a computer analogy, because that's the worst analogy I can possibly think of, some people think that a Mac is very valuable because of all the things that come with a Mac. On the other hand, you couldn't give some people a mac because they just don't want one because of all the things that come with the mac. Some people think that a PC is very valuable because of all the things that come with it being a pc. On the other hand, there's people that you couldn't give them a PC because the things about a PC make it very useless to them. In spite of the two products being exactly the same for two people they have a completely different meaning. The same goes for people. For some people, the loud gregarious outspoken person is incredibly attractive. For others, the same person is incredibly annoying. Besides that, there can also be a difference between a person's actual value and the value that they are perceived to have. When people are playing stocks, they aren't just buying and selling pieces of paper. What they're doing is trying to outsmart everybody else. They're trying to figure out which stocks are actually valuable but not being priced as valuable yet. At the same time, they're trying to figure out which stocks are actually valueless, but are priced very high. Finding those discrepancies is how a trader makes his money. To me, finding a person who is valued differently than what the market says that they should be is how you find a really good person. Generally speaking, particularly for men nobody realizes that someone's a good man until they're already spoken for permanently by a good woman. The opposite is also true though, there's a lot of times that a good woman just isn't given the respect that she deserves until it's entirely too late.
There are a lot of people out there who will try to sell you a different way to meet people, and some of those are really good. You have to be aware of something though: at the end of the day, you're going to run out of material eventually and you will have to live with being you. There was one guy who warned about this, calling them social robots: they could walk into the scene and recite hundreds of hours of canned routines from the best coaches, and it worked for them for the purposes of getting one night with somebody, but after that, they don't have anything else. All they are is this one thing. It sounds really good, for your life to be just going off and doing this, but it's not. Reality isn't that kind. I've known a lot of very successful men on the dating front, and the problem is that it's very exciting in the moment but you're not actually building anything if you're not building real lasting relationships. Eventually, you're not going to be 25 anymore you'll be 30 or 40 or God forbid 50. Do you want to be somebody who has nothing other than a bunch of notches on his belt, with nothing else to show for your life by the time you turn 50? Even if you're really good at it, what will you have to show for it? A decade away from retirement, and all you'll have to show for it is another 20 something hanging off of your arm. A few decades from death,
So, this is one of my longer essays, because there's an awful lot to go over. So let's take a look at what we've talked about. We talked about the concept of find, meet, attract, and close. We've talked extensively about calibration. We've talked about a few different things to keep an eye out for because they could end up dangerous and we've also talked about some opportunities where you might just find somebody nobody realizes is amazing.
The basic drive for all life can be summed up as "survival and replication". It is a little bit axiomatic because only life that strives to survive and reproduce exists over the long term.
Reading about geology and paleontology is very interesting because on those timelines you begin to realize just how small you are, and how much little things add up over a very long time. My favorite example is the oxygen catastrophe. Life overwhelmingly relied on metabolizing carbon dioxide to exist, and once most of the carbon dioxide had been metabolized, major oxygen sinks started to be used up. For example, the Earth was made of iron and all of that iron had to rust before oxygen could accumulate in the air. Fitting, that an event called the oxygen catastrophe and the single greatest extinction event in the history of the planet also stained the Earth red. The ones that survived were the ones that were able to survive. There was some microbial life that was either tolerant to oxygen or was actively utilizing it at that time, and those forms of life thrived whereas forms of life that found oxygen poisonous disappeared. The same thing happened a lot of times. I think five or six or seven times the dominant forms of life on the planet died out because the fundamental rules of the game changed. Some really amazing things happened over millions of years. Anytime that you see soapstone, that's made up of millions of years of little microbes and other life compacting together and all the stuff that doesn't rot stayed behind and turned into this form of rock that never existed on the planet before. All the carbonates didn't just come out of nothing, they came from life combining carbon together to form a hard shell, and that happening probably trillions of times and all of those forms of life dying and all of the their carbonate shells packing together to become this type of rock. You can read about the forests that covered the planet at one point, and there was absolutely nothing that could attack the wood and so these massive forests just grew and grew and grew. The trees would die, and over millions and millions and millions of years all of this life that couldn't really go anywhere just compacted together and became what today is coal. Later on in history, fungi would evolve the ability to eat wood and suddenly wood could rot, and so that little moment in time called the carboniferous period is the source of most of the planet's coal. And all the while, species come to exist out of other species and live or die and only the species that survive and produce offspring get to move on.
We like to pretend that the human race is different, that because we can think and our conscious we are somehow above those animal impulses. That's false. In a lot of ways you don't realize, the human race is entirely defined by our biology. Many of your deepest rooted fears and ambitions are written into your blood, in a library that was passed down by millions of generations of successful creatures going all the way back to the single celled organisms that first crawled out of the primordial ooze. Many of these things absolutely keep you alive. When you're hungry, if you didn't get hungry and you didn't eat you would die. You don't need to be taught that you need to eat. When you're thirsty, you need to drink and if you don't drink you'll die. You don't need to be taught that you need to drink. In fact, besides these very base impulses there are much higher level impulses that are also pushed by our biology. There are a lot of things related to mating that you've never been taught, you just know. If you're a man, no one needs to tell you that you're attracted to a pretty girl. On the other hand, no one needs to tell you that you're nervous when you're about to talk to a girl that you like either. Some of our urges are almost transcendental in the sense of they have existed so much longer than humanity, so much longer than ground dwelling life in fact you could consider them to be universal. That last one though, that's almost uniquely human. Having fears about certain social situations makes absolutely no sense in a setting before social animals. Some of those rules may have been written by our prehominid ancestors, as well as hominids coming all the way up to homo sapiens. The thing to realize and remember is that most of those rules were not written during an age where billions of human beings existed. For most of the existence of hominids and prehomonid life, your entire society and everyone in it would be made up of maybe 50 people. That might be all the people that you ever met in the history of your life. Maybe once in awhile you might come up against another society and maybe there would be conflict at that time, but overwhelmingly you'd be talking about the sort of people that never see anyone outside of their social group.
In that 50 person society, social niceties are not just a nice idea, they are literally matters of life and death. Human beings are social animals, and if you take away a person from their society the odds are that person is going to die and they're never going to reproduce and the story of their bloodline ends. If you want to know why people feel such anxiety over social situations, that's why. It's written into our blood, the lessons from all the people who made it.
It's hard to imagine right now, but the human race has been on the brink of destruction at times. According to scientists, every human being on the planet is descended from one woman who's been named mitochondrial eve. Mitochondria are symbiotic organisms that exist within animal cells that convert sugars into more refined fuels. They are essential to most animal life because without these specialized organisms, animal cells would have to maintain a method to convert courser sugars into more refined fuels themselves, and that's rather costly compared to just having a symbiotic organism do it for us. There are a number of single-celled organisms that don't rely on mitochondria, in some cases the main cell basically just absorbed the functions of the mitochondrial cell, and in other cases they independently evolved a separate method to refine those sugars, but multicellular life almost universally has mitochondria. The first mitochondria are contained in mother, and so mitochondria is passed down from mother to child, it's matrilineal. Mitochondria has its own DNA as it is an independent organism living within ourselves, and we can sequence that DNA. As far as we can tell, there's only the one person that all of our mitochondria descend from. There was probably a Time where the human race was so close to the brink of destruction, and it was The offspring of mitochondrial eve who happened to be strong enough to survive and replicate. Just imagine, every human being alive is a descendant of this one woman. And this wasn't the first human being either, it was just one particular choke point in the history of civilization. Imagine that all the other mothers in that generation were unable to produce offspring who were capable of surviving and replicating over generations. Every single one of them, the story of their bloodline ended around there.
In such a cutthroat world with such a small number of options, it is only understandable that taking risks that could lead to the extinction of your bloodline would cause incredible anxiety. Also imagine that in the 50 person society, mating would be extremely high stakes. Of those 50 people, you can assume half of them would be women. Some of them would be too young, some of them would be too old, and so in between you would have a very small number of eligible mates, and among those very small number you would have to pick the person most likely to produce kids strong enough to survive the astronomical infant mortality rate. When you are attracted to a beautiful woman it's not because you're vain, it's because if you don't pick the healthiest woman to produce the healthiest child, then not only might your child die but so will your mate. It's a life and death game.
The fact is, we don't live in that world anymore. First of all, almost every person who's born will make it to adulthood, and frankly most people who make it to adulthood are fully capable of meeting someone and having kids. More importantly, we don't live in a 50 person society. Even the smallest town inevitably has thousands in it, and even if you live in a 50-person town you can just move. You could go through life making enemies of every single person you meet and have it not matter because you just move on to the next place where no one knows who you are. I don't recommend it, but it's an option.
For this reason, both men and women are programmed with very specific instructions passed down from our ancestors. Whatever the crackpots might try to tell you, men are attracted to a certain thing and women are attracted to a different thing, and while there are some modifiers with respect to which cultures they come from they are still fundamentally the same things. Men are looking for health, women are looking for power and abundance and stability.
One mistake that both men and women make is in trying to become more attractive, they try to become more attractive to themselves. Men will spend countless hours dieting and in the gym hoping to reach the level of peak physical form to attract women, and women will spend years of their life getting an advanced degree and buying a house. These aren't bad goals in and of themselves, but they are bad goals if what you're trying to do is attract the other sex.
I've gotten in shit for this, so let me make something perfectly clear: I recognize that other sexualities exist, but if you think that I can tell you how as a gay man to attract other gay men, or how as a lesbian woman you attract other women, you're barking up the wrong tree. If you want to go find out how to be gay, ask a gay. Not lying here, I'm going out on a stretch just guessing how women might attract a man.
One of the early seminal guides on meeting women I think applies to meeting men as well in terms of one of the core strategies that they talk about: "find, meet, attract, close".
This framework is important because it talks about steps that are required along the process. There are entirely too many people who are willfully ignorant of the basics and just assume that magical thinking will get them to where they want in life. Generally speaking that's not true. Yes, there are some people who just naturally have a knack for meeting people but even those people still have to follow a process they just happened to do a better job intuiting the process early on.
So the first thing is find. It's a general statement but I think it's a true one that most of the time men hang out with other men and women hang out with other women. That being the case, it's going to be really hard to meet somebody if all the people that you hang out with have the specific quality of not being people you're interested in romantically. Honestly, people who have friend groups that are made up of both men and women are overwhelmingly more likely to find romantic success then equal or better people who have friend groups exclusively consisting of their own sex. It simply a matter of availability, you can be the greatest guy in the world and if nobody knows that you exist then you don't. Not for the purposes that we're talking about. Going out of your comfort zone and going to the places that the sort of people that you want to meet go is a key part of meeting someone. It's a simple concept, but one that most people end up missing out on. When I was growing up, I was always a very nerdy guy. At that time, this was before the zuckerbergs of the world had changed computers into something everybody carried around in their pocket. At that time, being a computer nerd was decidedly uncool. And so the sort of people who hung around were male. The reasons for that are simple, men tend to be more willing to take risks and do things that aren't perfectly safe socially speaking, and also men tend to be more interested in things than people so in both cases computers at the time were a very male hobby. You spent an awful lot of time reading books and clicking away on a little thing that didn't have a whole lot of connections to the outside world and you didn't spend a whole lot of time socializing because you were considered kind of a social pariah for your interests. You ended up where almost everyone you hung out with was mail because they were the only other ones who were willing to take that risk until a woman showed up. Say what you will about a bunch of nerds, they were still men and that one woman realistically kind of had her pick. Being the sole woman in an all-male space meant that she was at a distinct advantage to all of the women who didn't bother coming into that space. By contrast, each individual man had basically no chance with the girl because there were dozens of you and one of her. Most small communities of nerdy people have their stories about the woman, and it doesn't really matter which particular community you're talking about because it doesn't really matter. The one woman would be put up on this giant pedestal because she was the only one and it didn't really matter her physical attributes or if she was even a halfway decent person because there was only one of her and there was a dozen of you. What are you going to do? Kick the one woman out of the club? Not bloody likely. By contrast, a lot of men who have managed to find themselves accepted in female only spaces don't tend to have a whole lot of problems meeting women cuz they already have found women. When I was young, the advice that I always ended up getting was "go outside". This is kind of shitty advice because it doesn't really say much. You can go into your backyard and you are outside, but that doesn't mean anything! Thus my specific piece of advice is not to just go outside, but to leave your home and go somewhere that the opposite sex is. It's probably going to be somewhere that makes you feel very uncomfortable because that's how this works, but unless you win the lottery you're going to have to put yourself into some uncomfortable situations for a while to get the sort of things that you want out of life.
So, you found some! What next? Just because you can see that they exist doesn't mean you've done anything special. If you show up every day to the beach and I'll go the pretty girls and don't say a word, guess what: you're a creep. The next step is to meet people. This is a social skill that can be either really easy or really difficult in it depends entirely on the sort of person you are in your life experiences. If you are like me, and an extreme introvert and you have life experiences like mine that make you quiet and shy, you also have as I mentioned earlier and extreme anxiety about speaking to the opposite sex. That makes sense, it's written into your biology. So there's a few things that you can do here, but the bottom line is at some point you have to walk up to someone and start a conversation. This is a lot easier the younger you are, and as you get older well... You know, I'm sure that there's some sort of bell curve at work here. I have this nagging suspicion that when you're very young It's relatively easy as you get into your prime years it gets a lot harder and then later on as you get older you run out of fucks to give and it becomes really easy to talk to whoever the hell you want. However, nothing worth having comes without some level of risk and some level of pain. I am not a pickup artist, I'm happily married man, and I'm also rapidly approaching middle age if I'm not already there. And that makes it pretty difficult to head out to the club and start spitting game at 20-year-old women. But forget about spitting game for a moment, that sort of high stakes pain it's for super experienced guys who are used to that sort of thing. You know a great thing to do, figure out a completely non-threatening way to approach anyone. Particularly if you are in a more social setting, you can usually just approach a mixed group crowd and start talking and you have a little bit where most people are polite enough that they'll indulge you. One thing that's really neat is you don't actually have to have anything complicated. A lot of things that I recommended by the guys who do this sort of thing for a living are acting like you're just trying to get some different responses for a question that you need answered. There are a lot of neat little hot button topics that you can start a conversation about and you're not going to offend anyone but everyone's going to have an opinion. People like to give their opinion. I should know, I'm writing an entire book of them. When you're in your sort of prime meeting people years, you kind of want to keep your eyes open because you never know when something interesting will come about. A great conversation starter would be something like "hey guys just a moment I need to ask a quick question, I'm just trying to help my friend. Has photos of his ex-girlfriend sitting under his bed. He doesn't do anything weird with him, he just keeps him his mementos of his past relationships and his girlfriend wants him to burn them or he's going to break up with him. What do you think about that? What do you think he should do?"
Full stop for a minute, we got to talk about something that is going to be very important every step of the way. In the industry they call it "calibration". Calibration is paying attention to the people that you're talking to to see how they are reacting to the thing that you're saying. A lot of the time, their body language is going to be telling you exactly where they're at. Back when I was single, I approached a group who was the only group in the bar at the time, and started talking to them and you could tell they were more than happy to have a cute guy at the table talking to them. I was anxious as hell, but paying attention and realizing that they were open to talking to me for a bit helped me out a little bit. Every step of the way there are things you can be doing to sort of calibrate and get a feel for things. At this stage, you should be able to tell right away just by looking at everyone if they seem amenable to answering your question. Just as a good person you should be constantly calibrating. If you're talking to someone and it seems like they're kind of losing interest in you, maybe it's time to move on. On the other hand, if they seem really interested in you then great keep at it. There's even little things that you can throw, little questions you can ask. You don't need to be a psychic, sometimes you can just ask "hey you guys seem cool mind if I chat with you for a bit? And if they like you they'll say yes and if they don't like you they'll say no and sometimes they don't like you but they're being polite and I'll say yes anyway but usually that's pretty obvious as long as you're paying attention which is the key thing here. Like I said though, this doesn't just end here. This is going to have to keep on going right up until.... forever actually. You know, I've been married for 10 years and I still calibrate with my wife, because that's just what you do when you're a good person. You end up getting a little bit more latitude obviously, you don't need to ask your wife of 10 years who's carrying your son whether it's okay if you talk to her if her friends would approve, but sometimes you got to just stop and go "hey do you really feel like hearing this right now?" When there just seems to be a look on her face and sometimes she'll come back and say "I got a lot on my mind right now maybe we could do this another time" or "no I'm really interested in this I'm just thinking about what you're saying". So you're going to be having to calibrate when you find women because there are definitely a lot of situations where maybe you don't want to be going and finding those women, and when you meet women there are going to be times when you can immediately tell you're not welcome and it's just time to go out "never mind I'll chat with you later", and sometimes you'll be at a point where you're trying to attract a girl and you realize there's just no chemistry and it's time to move on because you're just not getting the calibration back that you expected, sometimes you'll be right there at the finishing line and you'll just realize that somewhere along the way you messed up, and maybe it's time to go into salvage mode but maybe it's time to pull the plug. It can happen at any point. The key here is that you have to keep your eyes open you have to be paying attention because human beings are inherently social animals and they are constantly giving you cues as long as you get out of your head and start paying attention. Often, those cues are not subtle.
There's another thing I want to mention right now, because it is the number one destroyer of dreams: oneitis. This is a chronic disease, a chronic inflammation of the feeling that person you like is "the one". Symptoms of oneitis include: chasing after some guy or some chick who doesn't like you nearly as much as you like them. Constantly being there for someone right before they move on to the next boyfriend or girlfriend who isn't you. Feeling like you need to confront someone over your romantic feelings. If you feel like you need to confront someone over your romantic feelings, it's almost 100% certain they're not interested and you really need to stop wasting your time chasing after someone who doesn't actually like you. I've helped a number of men find romance. In virtually every case, they needed help mostly because instead of going out and trying to meet new women, they had the one that they had often spent years courting in a very passive way. You know, people aren't stupid, a woman knows full well that you're trying to get with her. And if you're a woman and you're giving attention to a man, he knows it. Maybe not immediately, but if you have known someone for years and it's never come up, I'm not saying that it can't happen where you proclaim your love to your friend and it just so happens that they had the same unrequited feelings as you! But the fact is it's almost never the case. Usually, you are putting a bunch of expectations on someone who really doesn't deserve the pressure of expectations they've never given you any reason to have. From virtually any ethical standpoint, it's pretty unethical because if you're doing that, you're making the amount of happiness in the world shrink significantly. You are not happy, they're not happy, it's just not good. In both cases, those guys finally managed to rip their eyes away from "the one" and they went out and met people that they actually liked and liked them back. We live in a world of 8 billion people. Half of those are women. Millions of them are women in the age range that you're looking for. If you're spending a bunch of time racing after someone who doesn't really like you, you're being an idiot. There are other fish in the sea. I'm not saying that you need to cut every single relationship the moment that things get bad, but what I am saying is chase after people who like you, chasing after someone who doesn't is a great recipe for getting used.
So let's move on to this idea of attraction. There's a sardonic joke out there: "Rule 1: Be attractive. Rule 2: don't be unattractive." It sounds pretty silly, but it's actually true. The thing is, you need to understand what is and isn't attractive. Of course, everybody easily gets The superficial stuff. Be fit. Have genetically good looks. Have genetically perfect hair. But you remember what I said at the beginning of this? That men and women both seek different things in terms of being attractive? It certainly is harder for women because many indicators of health are things you don't really have a lot of control over. And some of them are things that even if you do have control over them, they're really hard to control. They say to be skinny, but reality is losing weight is one of the hardest things on the face of the planet. People who have never had to lose weight don't understand that if they are naturally more inclined to being skinny. It's nightmarishly difficult. It doesn't happen overnight, you have to make a concerted effort to silence one of your number one essential urges, one of those voices in your head that from birth is telling you that if you don't do this thing you will die. Even if we know it's not true, it's not like turning off a light switch silencing that voice. You know what though, there are ways to make it work. You can prove that you're healthy in ways that don't have anything to do with your looks. How do you do that? One way to prove that you're healthy and spunky is through your behaviors, attitudes and mannerisms. Another way that really does help is showing you're either part of their tribe or part of a tribe they would like to join. That's pretty universal to be honest. Fat women get laid, get relationships both short term and long term, and get married every single day, and it might shock you how often the men who put a ring on that finger are thankful for the privilege. For men, being attractive is more complicated than just being healthy. A lot of men seem to think that all you need to do is be healthy and be basically unfriending and you'll be good. I've got a news flash here: most passably beautiful women get hit on from the moment that they turn about 13 until probably they turn about 50. Everyday. Usually multiple times a day. There is this legend of that beautiful woman who has never been told she's beautiful that movies just love to peddle. It's not true. It's a lie. The reason that happens in romantic comedies is that romantic comedies are designed for people who don't have love in their life. They're designed as a wish fulfilment fantasy. The idea is that you have these absolute knockout women on screen and the women who can't find a man who are watching these movies imagine themselves in that role, and that's why they do it. Because that story is relatable. Overwhelmingly, the stories aren't going to be the real kind of stories that a beautiful woman lives first of all because if you're not experiencing them first-hand they're kind of boring, and second of all because the stories would probably make you hate said beautiful women. You shouldn't, that's just their life. We all have our reality and our realities come with benefits and drawbacks. Ugly men fantasize about being popular and noticed by everyone, beautiful women fantasize about just being left alone. The way for a man to not be part of this massive boring people that are constantly hitting on her is to not try to just show that you're interested. Instead, you should be trying to show that you're interesting. Having stories about places you've gone and people you've seen and things you've done, having interesting topics to talk about, being passionate about different things. You know, even if she's not interested in whatever you're interested in, a lot of women are going to be interested in the fact that you're interested in something. It's kind of remarkable when you think about it, but it's true! That's not carte blanche to go out and inundate some woman with stories about your Warhammer 40K cosplays, but you know, the fact that you have some kind of interest is interesting. Now you might be saying, "well how am I supposed to have all these stories, I'm not interesting!" Well, the best way to seem interesting is to be interesting. That means leaving your house and going off to do cool things. When I was single, I started a list of neat things that I wanted to go out and do so that I could talk about the neat things that I'd gone out and done. Some of them were big things like going on a giant road trip or this or that, but some of them were really small things. I've never eaten sushi so I decided to go out and get some sushi. This was before sushi was everywhere, so trying to find a specific restaurant that actually had good sushi so that I could find out all about it and have a good experience was really interesting. The fact is, most people are fairly boring. Especially beautiful people. They don't need to be that interesting, because they're beautiful. Writing that sentence was funny, and not intended to sound as bitter as it does on paper. The point is though, being interesting helps. Another thing that I found out is this serves two purposes. By going out and doing things and being interesting even when there's no one else involved, you also save yourself the trouble of trying to come up with interesting things to do later on when you start getting dates.
And that brings us to closing. When you talking about this sort of thing, a close is anytime that you bring things to the next level. People make the mistake of trying to set some sort of arbitrary goal that is the moment, and that's kind of the wrong way to look at things. That's not how human beings work. What you should be trying to do instead is constantly calibrating to see if you think it might be a good time to move forward and then incrementally moving forward. You move from talking to everyone except this person in their group, to talking to everyone including that person in your group, so maybe having a little bit of alone chat with that person, to slowly and making sure that she's into it moving into starting to have a bit of completely non-sexual touching like tapping their arm, anytime you calibrate and find out if it's okay. Of course you're not going to be asking every time because you're going to look like an idiot, you're going to be using your eyes and your brain. And if you push a little bit too hard and you see them sort of clench up like they're not happy with what just happened, back off a little bit. I can mean either you've completely screwed it up and she's just not into you or it can mean that she's just not ready for this yet and you need to spend a little bit more time before you move forward. Unfortunately, that sort of thing takes experience to figure out which sucks. Of course I'm speaking it from the point of view of a man, but the same thing applies to women, you're slowly making little closes and just gauging the reaction and seeing how things are going. You know, women are terrified of men. What most women don't realize is that men are also terrified of women. Nobody wants to be the first one to make a move, partly because making a move is set up in our culture to be this big thing instead of just one little step in a series of progressive movements. Therefore, if you like a guy, maybe give him a hand, especially if it seems like he likes you back. You don't need to be full on cave woman pounding over the head with a club and dragging him back to your place, but pushing a guy a bit can go a long way towards making something work. Especially today, when frankly it's terrifying being a guy. Our entire genetic makeup is sort of designed for the man to take charge in this interaction, and not to mention our culture kind of is too. That would all be fine and dandy except it's pretty high stakes now. Make the wrong move on the wrong person and your life just ended. It's tough out there. Don't make mistake thinking that I'm sitting here defending the terrible people who do terrible things. But what I am saying is those people getting their just desserts mean s that a lot of innocent people end up getting put in some bad situations that they didn't really deserve. Like it or not, this is the world we live in now. If you're sitting there alone and you don't know why and you don't know what to do about it maybe give that guy that you like a hand.
All this talk of calibration, it's super important especially for the guys. Forget about getting slapped across the face, the reality is that although we are no longer living in a 50 person society, we are living in a society where if you miscalculate and push things too far, it can mean your life. There have been many times where what a guy thought was just playing turned out to the woman to be terrifying behavior. When a woman thinks your behavior is terrifying, you messed up somewhere. If you push it too far, they can come back later and he can get canceled, or you can go to jail for something that you thought was innocent but isn't. Therefore, every single step of the way it is incredibly important to make sure that you and her are on the same page. I it wouldn't be surprised the way the world is going if eventually the same standards start to apply to women, and it's going to be a lot more of a culture for them than it was for us. It's always been kind of understood that men are bigger and stronger than women so we have a duty to make sure we're not pushing things that aren't wanted on the other side. I think it's going to soon be the standard for both sexes.
So now that I've gotten some basic advice and techniques down pat, let's talk about some stuff that hopefully might keep you safe. Just keep your eyes open, and maybe you'll be able to avoid some stuff that a lot of people have to go through. There's a lot of crazy people in the world. By the time you reach a certain age, you and probably a lot of people that you know will probably have some sort of story about someone who seemed to really nice at first, butturned out to be a psycho. There's a bunch of ways that this can manifest, and it's not their fault, but just because it isn't their fault doesn't mean it's not a problem. And watch out for the narcissist, they're the sort of people who really think the world revolves around them. They're going to like you at first if you pay attention to them, and you'll probably feel good because they give you attention because you give them attention. The problem with that is you guys aren't playing the same game. Eventually you'll realize that person's really all about just getting as much attention as possible, and often getting attention doesn't mean in positive ways. Ironically, these are the sort of people who are going to immediately jump all over me after reading this, because making a huge deal over things is kind of their thing. Pretending that they care about others is a great way to get attention. Watch out for the borderline. Borderline personality disorder is characterized by a number of different things, including chaotic personal relationships problems with impulsive decision making, and watch for this one, attendance to go in between ideation and demonization of a person. In short, one day you'll be the king, and the next you'll be the biggest monster in the world. Every step of the way it's going to seem genuine because as far as they know it is. The biggest danger with this is if you don't catch it early on, and you end up getting pulled into something way too fast, then suddenly you've made some kind of lifelong commitment, whether it's marriage, or a kid, or what have you, and then you realize they're crazy. It's no good. One of the other symptoms of this disease is a desperate and irrational fear that people are going to leave them. Unfortunately it turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, no good person is going to stand by and happily get accused of cheating again and again and again. Eventually they leave because they don't deserve this. You really have to watch out though, because when someone thinks that you're the devil, they are okay with using whatever means necessary to hurt you. Particularly after you break up with such a person, there's every reason in the world to believe that they're going to try to go after you through your family, through the police, through some whisper network, they're going to do whatever they can to hurt you because you're the devil now. Early on, it's kind of hard to recognize. If you're a legitimately good person who just happens to really like someone, and you're nothing like that, you can end up scaring off a lot of people not because you deserve to but because people like that end up making people's nightmares come true. Watch out for the "vacation in Cancun". There are people who are super fun, super full of energy, completely uninhibited, and they come into your normal life and you're just swept off your feet. It's so much fun in you kind of wish that it would never end, but it's a vacation in cancun. Cancun is a city in Mexico that a lot of college kids go to vacationing. If you are a tourist, it's a fantastic place to go for a couple weeks. The beaches are beautiful, resorts you can get free booze, there's lots of exciting things to go do and he can go to seedy bars and and all kinds of neat stuff. The problem comes if you were to decide to go live in Cancun. You see, what's the vacation is over Cancun is a shitty place to live. (No offense anyone reading this from Cancun) they're a drug cartels constantly doing crazy stuff, people are constantly getting kidnapped and ransomed, and the typical person living there is dirt poor. The reason why a bunch of middle-class Americans can go have an all expenses paid trip in Cancun is that basically nobody makes any money so the amount of money that they bring in is massive compared to what anyone actually makes. So Cancun is a great place to go visit for a while, but if you stay there you're probably going to die. Those exciting seedy bars become dens of criminal activity in the city you live in. Those tourists who were so much fun when you were one of them are suddenly just draining because you're just constantly having to deal with them and their drunken antics. The pace of a city filled with tourists all the time will just wear you out and you'll just want to take a break, and get some quiet. But you can't, cuz you live in Cancun. If you're planning on sticking around with someone, use your brain. Think about whether this person is actually someone that you can see yourself spending time with a little ways down the line once the party ends. I guarantee you that eventually you're going to want the party to end, at least for a little bit. Be aware of the person who is a victim of the entire world. You have to be very careful, because there are people who the moment that they leave the room will immediately start bad-mouthing you, and they'll do the same thing to everybody else. At first you're going to think that life has really handed this person a Raw deal, but often if you take the time and get to know that person you're going to realize more often than not that they've been handed every opportunity on a silver platter and turned it away. And the moment that you leave the room, they're going to start talking about how bad you've treated them, because you're just another person in the world. Because of the way that these people view themselves in the world, they've got absolutely no problem with using others and then acting as if they were being used the whole time.
Not everything is bad out there though, there's a lot of really good stuff in the world and being aware of the potential bad things shouldn't blind you you're the potentially good things. There are people that are kind of a diamond in the rough. People that have been overlooked, people who would be amazing if they were just given a chance. The trick is to realize that those people do exist, but if you see them right away they're probably not who you think they are. Remember earlier, when I said that there were lots of women who were routinely hit on? That's particularly true if you're just a regular old hot girl. That regular old hot girl probably isn't a diamond in the rough. Now, maybe if it looks aren't perfect? Maybe if there's something about her that's off putting at first? That's the trick. Dating is like a market whether you take that analogy to be mean spirited or not. It's like a market in economics. If you think about it, everyone is trying to find the best product at the lowest price. In terms of economics though, not every person has the same value for every product. To use a computer analogy, because that's the worst analogy I can possibly think of, some people think that a Mac is very valuable because of all the things that come with a Mac. On the other hand, you couldn't give some people a mac because they just don't want one because of all the things that come with the mac. Some people think that a PC is very valuable because of all the things that come with it being a pc. On the other hand, there's people that you couldn't give them a PC because the things about a PC make it very useless to them. In spite of the two products being exactly the same for two people they have a completely different meaning. The same goes for people. For some people, the loud gregarious outspoken person is incredibly attractive. For others, the same person is incredibly annoying. Besides that, there can also be a difference between a person's actual value and the value that they are perceived to have. When people are playing stocks, they aren't just buying and selling pieces of paper. What they're doing is trying to outsmart everybody else. They're trying to figure out which stocks are actually valuable but not being priced as valuable yet. At the same time, they're trying to figure out which stocks are actually valueless, but are priced very high. Finding those discrepancies is how a trader makes his money. To me, finding a person who is valued differently than what the market says that they should be is how you find a really good person. Generally speaking, particularly for men nobody realizes that someone's a good man until they're already spoken for permanently by a good woman. The opposite is also true though, there's a lot of times that a good woman just isn't given the respect that she deserves until it's entirely too late.
There are a lot of people out there who will try to sell you a different way to meet people, and some of those are really good. You have to be aware of something though: at the end of the day, you're going to run out of material eventually and you will have to live with being you. There was one guy who warned about this, calling them social robots: they could walk into the scene and recite hundreds of hours of canned routines from the best coaches, and it worked for them for the purposes of getting one night with somebody, but after that, they don't have anything else. All they are is this one thing. It sounds really good, for your life to be just going off and doing this, but it's not. Reality isn't that kind. I've known a lot of very successful men on the dating front, and the problem is that it's very exciting in the moment but you're not actually building anything if you're not building real lasting relationships. Eventually, you're not going to be 25 anymore you'll be 30 or 40 or God forbid 50. Do you want to be somebody who has nothing other than a bunch of notches on his belt, with nothing else to show for your life by the time you turn 50? Even if you're really good at it, what will you have to show for it? A decade away from retirement, and all you'll have to show for it is another 20 something hanging off of your arm. A few decades from death,
So, this is one of my longer essays, because there's an awful lot to go over. So let's take a look at what we've talked about. We talked about the concept of find, meet, attract, and close. We've talked extensively about calibration. We've talked about a few different things to keep an eye out for because they could end up dangerous and we've also talked about some opportunities where you might just find somebody nobody realizes is amazing.
@lain @augustus there's also the fact that the people who support the measures have a misinformed view of the danger of the virus.
Recall when Trump got the virus, the left was screeching "how he's gonna die! He's gonna die!" But realistically at his advanced age he was still going to survive 19 times out of 20. Lots of famous people have gotten coronavirus, but virtually nobody famous has died of it. If this was such an apocalyptic virus, wouldn't you think the rich and famous who were the vanguard of the first wave because they were the ones jet setting around the world spreading it would have been decimated?
Recall when Trump got the virus, the left was screeching "how he's gonna die! He's gonna die!" But realistically at his advanced age he was still going to survive 19 times out of 20. Lots of famous people have gotten coronavirus, but virtually nobody famous has died of it. If this was such an apocalyptic virus, wouldn't you think the rich and famous who were the vanguard of the first wave because they were the ones jet setting around the world spreading it would have been decimated?
@jeffcliff @Bangcubed @deprecated ngl, I agree. Not with the hateful rhetoric (but hey -- it's fedi, the last bastion where people can seek truth by saying what they think), but the virus keeps making its way into our countries. Instead of harming a few hundred thousand who cross the border we've locked down 40 million people for over a year.
We've known how to quarantine for 600 years, but we didn't because it's worse to inconvenience a few hundred thousand people than to take away 40 million people's fundamental human rights for what looks like will be forever.
None of these politicians will be attending any of the funerals of the people who committed suicide in excess due to the lockdowns, nor the people who OD on drugs in excess due to the lockdowns, nor the women who were killed by their SOs because they couldn't escape due to the lockdowns, they'll just build statues of themselves to celebrate their brave dictatorship.
We've known how to quarantine for 600 years, but we didn't because it's worse to inconvenience a few hundred thousand people than to take away 40 million people's fundamental human rights for what looks like will be forever.
None of these politicians will be attending any of the funerals of the people who committed suicide in excess due to the lockdowns, nor the people who OD on drugs in excess due to the lockdowns, nor the women who were killed by their SOs because they couldn't escape due to the lockdowns, they'll just build statues of themselves to celebrate their brave dictatorship.
@jeffcliff @deprecated someone pointed out something that's clearly just true: right now we have maybe 20% of the population in first world Nations unvaccinated, and probably 80% of the developing world. All the variants are coming from developing nations.
You're focusing on the wrong unvaccinated people here by focusing on a few people who want to be free to choose in the first world.
You're focusing on the wrong unvaccinated people here by focusing on a few people who want to be free to choose in the first world.