Don’t be too eager to get a corporate job and wear a suit [Career][lifestyle]

In an earlier post I wrote, “Don’t End the Week With Nothing,” and a user named USMVP00 wrote:

Any chance of there being a TRP Finance sub? I’m trying to learn as much as possible before I get to College and have to pick a major

At the time I said:

Career advice doesn’t necessarily have to be “Red Pill” per se. The big thing in today’s world is about YOU. No one else will look after you but you. We’ve had decades of time in which implicit promises between companies and employees have been voided. Whether that is good or bad, it means that you always have to look out for yourself and realize that no one else will.

That doesn’t mean you should be an asshole or screw people over, but it does mean that intangible like good will are shit and it does mean that you need to work proactively to advance your career.

Finally, career and money aren’t everything. If you’re young take cool fun jobs as bartenders or lifeguards or shit like that. I have done a lot wrong in my life but going from swim team -> life guard was like a free spot at the free pussy buffet. Don’t be too eager to put on slacks and a shirt and go to an office every day. You have the rest of your life for that, if it’s your path. Do some crazy shit. Work on a cruise ship. Bartender. Tour guide.

That got me thinking about career and life path. I’ve been working in offices for a long time now but before I did that I started out being a lifeguard in high school and college and those were awesome gigs at the time. Every summer and sometimes during the school year I’d get paid to sit in a position of authority and check out / chat up girls (when I wasn’t on the guard chair obviously). The atmosphere at most pools, especially outdoor pools, is great, and lots of girls want to crush on the lifeguard. At the time I had very basic guy game that was still better than like 90% of guys that age so it worked. “Hey, how’s it going?” and “Hey, how’s your summer?” were good. I was scared of hot girls but I was also horny enough to very slowly escalate them into sex in a way that seems pussy now but then seemed titanic.

I’ve got above-average work ethic and above-average workout ethics. In high school I swam, but I was never the fastest or best swimmer, just like I’m not the tallest or best-looking guy. In high school and college I also had almost no money so I had to work. For much of that time I had no car or a shit car but you know what? It didn’t matter much. It would’ve been nice to have a sweet ride but that was not an option, not until much later. Cars are super expensive and many people working low-level jobs end up working to pay for their car instead of working to pay for their lives. My clothes were cheap shit and didn’t fit me well. Didn’t matter.

Being a lifeguard at the right place and the right time helped put me in the right place to meet lots of girls I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Having little money and lots of access to girls is better from a getting laid perspective than the inverse. Being a swimmer helped me in college because I swam on the club team and hung out with lots of other swimmers, including lots of cute girls.

During the school year my college game was basically hosting parties at the swim house every week or two and inviting any cute girls I could meet to the parties. When we weren’t having parties my game was, “We’re having a few beers at the swim house tonight, you should come by at 8.” Seriously that was pretty much it, beyond chitchat about classes, majors, and random gossip.

This strategy won’t work for everyone. The basic idea is adaptable to a wide range of interests. I know lots of guys who worked as bartenders when they could’ve been (unpaid) interns or doing other jobs that didn’t bring them into contact w/ hot girls. Smart guys choose their jobs not only for income but also for freedom and other kinds of fringe benefits. Working in restaurants seems like a mixed bag (it can leave you really tired and drained), but I know guys who’d flirt with their customers, leave a phone # on a copy of receipt, and scoop up a couple new girls a month just by showing up and doing a little low-level escalation.

I know guys I went to college with who were way too eager to get in a suit and meet some girl (who they’d get bored with in a couple years anyway) and move to the suburbs so they could drive 45 minutes – 1 hour to work each way. Bad move. A lot of those guys have crises of various kinds imposed by their unthinking acceptance of whatever they think the “right” or “prestigious” path is. Being a lifeguard can be perceived as less prestigious than a lot of internships or low-level, office-based jobs. Who gives a shit? If you want to get laid more it’s great.

Let me step aside to look at that kind of life as some women will see it. Some women try to convince themselves they “love” a guy who happens to have a good job or lots of money, because they think they should be in love with him. Also a bad move that often ends poorly. Women are susceptible to many variants of the crises men face. A woman who marries young, moves out to the suburbs, has a kid or two with a boring guy working a boring job and who gets fat driving back and forth is plenty likely to GTFO of that situation sooner or later. You would too if you were her.

For the younger guys reading this, don’t be too eager to start working in a lab or corporation. I know because I see and work with young guys making that mistake right in front of me. You have your entire life for that, later on. Eventually you will likely need a real job or consulting gig or similar. There are not very many 50-year-old bartenders or lifeguards. When you’re in high school and college, think about the jobs that will help you build social skills and that will get you interacting with lots of hot girls. The corporate world has some hot women in it but sleeping with them is usually not a good idea and competition for them is fierce. Why it’s not smart to sex up women you work with has been widely covered here, and if you haven’t read about why and can’t figure it out on your own, I don’t know what to tell you. Learn how to learn, I guess.

Your career and your lifestyle are linked. You can’t think about one without thinking about the other. If one is unbalanced it will be very hard to balance it with the other.

Eventually you will probably need a conventional job, job skills, and career or skill path. The number of guys who really go their own way career-wise is small. The guys (and girls) who jump for conventional career stuff too eagerly often come to regret it later, just like the hard-core party animals who get laid all the time but wreck their teens and 20s with partying often come to regret not building real skills and careers. It’s possible to party too hard and it’s possible to not party enough. It’s possible to study too hard and it’s possible to not study enough.

If she is a women’s rights activist, sexual assault educator, or similar, RUN

If she is a women’s rights activist, sexual assault educator, or similar, RUN. Fast. Should be obvious, right? Phil Greenspun posts a sad tale of a guy who fails to follow this simple advice, “The sexual assault seminar may not be the best place to meet a sex partner.” The longer story is here and it is sick:

The facts are largely undisputed: Two college students on summer break – he’s a sophomore; she, a freshman – make a date. It’s Memorial Day weekend, 2014, and their intentions are explicit. They meet and have sex – consensual, enthusiastic – when a passerby interrupts them.

A few hours later, still together, the male student attempts to resume the sexual encounter. He reaches under her shirt to touch her breast. He stops immediately when she asks him to. They agree about these facts.

Yet this “one-time, non-consensual touching,” as university documents summarize it, is the crux of a startling Michigan State University sexual misconduct case. It has generated a thick stack of legal documents, months of MSU administrator time, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills since the female student, known here as Melanie, formally complained on Sept. 25, 2015 – almost 16 months after the incident.

Even if you can have sex with women like that it’s best to avoid the ones who are obsessed with policing sex. They want someone to make an example of and they want to be the victim because victims have status in that world.

If a woman is involved with hard core women’s rights orgs, sexual assault orgs, or tells you she’s been raped, RUN.

That last one can be tricky because if she tells you she’s been raped and you have sex anyway, you run the risk of being labeled the next rapist. But if you soft next her you will be insensitive. That happened to me once when I was about to have sex with a normal-seeming woman who stopped me as we were heading in that direction to tell me she’d been raped. To her credit she did not want to share graphic details with me, but I steered us away from sex and ended the date.

I softly but firmly ended things with her and of course she knew why, even though I told her that I liked her but not in that way, etc. Realistically, if she was actually raped she needs someone else to help her w/ psychological trauma, and if she wasn’t but thinks she was I want to be 100 miles away from her lest I be next. Either way a week later she wanted to tell me about how hurt she was by me, etc., and I was polite but firm and distant. I don’t need to cater to extra problems in my life.

There are an infinite number of women out there, and you do not and should not need the crazy or crazily political ones. If they are attending or running “sexual assault seminars,” find a woman who isn’t. You could be next.

Most women want to find hot cool masculine guys for sex & dating and don’t buy into this every-woman-is-a-victim crap. You do not need to deal with the small, noisy minority (of less attractive women, too) who don’t. It is of course possible to avoid such women and still fall victim to false rape charges, but there is no reason to increase your target area needlessly by finding activists who have been primed to attack you. Most women want hard dick from a hot guy who is clean and who is good at going down on them. The activists are a minority but they are a dangerous minority. There are too many cool normal chicks to bother with crazy activists who can go straightup Gone Girl and mess up your life.

If you are a guy in a modern university and you are ever accused, you need to get a lawyer ASAP before you do anything else. Things you say to university administrators may be held against you. They are not here for you, they are here to protect the university first and foremost.

Almost every woman who claims to have been assaulted or harassed is, in the real world, at least partially implicated in the event. You as a guy don’t want to go there.

“Why don’t you post more field reports?”

To be honest, my game is not that strong and I don’t do a whole lot of cold street opens (I do some but not enough to be good). Those two are related: to get good game you have to practice it like any other skill. There are also two blogs, Good Looking Loser and Krauser, that I link to and that say pretty much everything I could say about game and much, much more. They also say it better. I don’t like to repeat other people’s work and I have a thing about efficiency, so if you want to learn more about game nuts and bolts, those two blogs and Neil Strauss’s original book The Game are all strong resources.

My game is basic and in cold approach terms mostly boring and situational. I deliver well and am good at sexualizing early. I like polarity and will filter women who don’t like sex pretty quickly. I also take rejection well and move on swiftly. Most of my game post-approach involves telling stories or sketching a scenario then asking the girl what she’d do or what she thinks of the people involved. It’s not that advanced and I do all right with it, although I’ve probably missed out a lot of “maybes.” Compared to most guys, though, I think I’ve also turned a lot of “maybes” into “yes” or into a “hard no.” A firm and final “no” can be useful.

Online dating used judiciously is also okay for me. I have a simple rule: I only use any given system for at most three weeks at a time. Most systems now show new users the best matches and degrade rapidly in quality. It’s best to activate one, use it for one to three weeks, and then delete your account for at least one or two months. I’ve done online dating on and off for a long time, and that world is constantly evolving so this advice may not be any good by the time you read it.

It’s rarer for me to find women under age 26 or 27 through online dating today, but women ages 30 – 40 are on there…. online dating has a mixed reputation and depends on strong fundamentals (see next paragraph) and strong photography. Photography really matters for online dating and I’ve looked through online dating profiles with women, and so many guys on them have total shit for pics.

Guys with good fundamentals (looks, style, body, lifting) eventually learn that game often becomes less about what you say and more about how you say it, who you are, and whether the girl is available. My most common type of interaction is getting absolutely zero traction or having a short conversation and collecting a number, only to have the girl not reply or flake after a short back and forth.

I can also leverage a lot around my job and social status or situation, so a lot of higher-quality women come indirectly from there. But those field reports will likely be boring. I’m also pretty deep into the sex positive, consensual non-monogamy, and sex party scene, which is its own form of game and one I rarely see discussed. Conventional game applies to group sex, but that world has its own logic and rules that aren’t totally amenable to field reports.

A lot of men don’t have the interest or skills to swim in this world, but I do and find its rewards rich. To me it’s a kind of next-level game that is more pleasurable and easier than cold approach. More women than you think are interested in this world, although not all women are and your success in doing this will be location dependent. There is also a stronger online component for this world than there is for conventional sex and dating.

Once you have solid fundamentals, a lot of the game is rolling the dice.

Escorts can improve the rest of your game

Many challenged the idea that escorts, hired effectively, can improve your interactions with other women:

The occasional escort improves my game because it shows me what women will do and because it means I have zero scarcity whatsoever. If I want sex I pay for it and have it within 24 hours. Women can tell when a man is getting sex and when he isn’t. Hiring escorts can, odd as this may appear, improve your game, if they are hired correctly.

Women can sense a desperate guy and a guy who other women won’t sleep with. I don’t know how and I don’t understand the precise mechanism, but they can. They can also sense confidence, and learning to be confident and to project a sexually successful image is vital. Paying for it, done correctly, can aid that.

The more you use a skill or interact in certain ways with certain expectations, the more you improve that skill or reinforce that interaction. The more you interact with women and expect sex to be the conclusion of those interactions, the better off you are (provided that you can gracefully accept rejection).

Paying for it is obviously different than getting it through unpaid, normal channels. But if you’re a normal person you’re still talking to someone before, during, and after. You’re still paying attention to what someone likes instead. Building those experiences is almost always good. Always be trying to learn and always be learning. While hiring an escort is about pleasure, it should also be about learning, like everything you do.

I don’t advocate sleeping exclusively with escorts or becoming addicted to paid sex. Addiction of any kind is a weakness.

It is true that paid sex in the United States is never as quick and easy as guys would like. It takes time to build a rep, go through the vetting process, learn the ropes, learn to sense bullshit, and develop relationships with escorts and madams. There is no such thing as a free lunch, even in paid sex.

Open relationships aren’t the devil

Open relationships work for cool guys who are in control, which is a small portion of the male population. They flop for everyone else. Guys who’ve never been cool and in control HATE open relationships because they imagine themselves as the loser in the open relationship.

Superficially awakened guys who are wildly hostility to open relationships do so because they imagine themselves paying for some woman’s apartment while she does other guys, rather than the stronger one in which the guy can sleep around as much as he wants and she will also be his wingman. A long time ago I realized that I never wanted to be in a conventional relationship with a woman again and that I never wanted to live with a woman again. That was before open relationship dynamics had really taken off in the media again.

That being said I value people as ends in themselves and have been in open-style relationships. They work great for me, and, I think, for many guys, AS LONG AS:

• You don’t live with the woman or otherwise subsidize her economically (like through marriage),
• You don’t plan to have children with her, and
• You have no problem picking up and sleeping with women.

Most guys cannot achieve bullet three so open relationships are not for them. When you fulfill those requirements open relationships can be great. Marriage used to be a contract in which men agreed to make money and provide resources to a woman who bears his children and solves domestic problems. That this contract broke down by the 1960s if not earlier should be obvious.

I want sexual novelty, excitement, and fulfilling relationships. ORs can do that, and they can be less atomizing than the relentless hunt that game involves.

I also don’t know what this will mean for me as I get older. I think I’m older than most of the guys reading and writing about the game.

See also “Women want to follow your lead: a story about a woman presenting two ways.” 

Hiring an escort is like hiring any other service provider

Some guys keep pursuing women because of their egos and because of what getting women says about them; I think Krauser talks about this in one of his books. If that’s the underlying bio-psychic drive, good for you and you can stop reading right now because you won’t give a shit about what follows. For me it’s about the sex and sometimes that means paying for it is faster, better, and more pleasant than the alternatives.

I’ve heard guys claim that paid sex is bad, or the women may be physically hot but emotional shit, or that it’s more gratifying to win the lay than to pay for it. Fair statements for some guys. True of some guys and conceivably even most guys. For me it’s all about the pleasure of the sex and the woman’s hot body and the physical sensations and the incredible feel of her when I enter and when I finish. The ego or conquest part is small for me in this domain, so for me money is a reasonable shortcut to sex.

The worst paid sex can be as bad as some online guys claim it is. The girl can be not as described or fucked up on drugs or bad in bed or clearly indifferent or any number of other things. This will not surprise you, but a decent number of sex workers are messed up and broken people with messed up and broken values. “A decent number” is not “all,” however, and great sex workers can be… great.

I’m not going to write about how to hire sex workers because you can read about that from now to forever online. Instead I’m going to write about getting the most out of the experience and how to think about the experience. Despite my materialist leanings, it’s obvious that some level of connection is a key component of sex.

Escorts are actually like hiring any other service provider. The person using the service and the person selling it need to connect on some level, even if that connection is mediated by money. This is true of personal trainers, yoga instructors, nannies or babysitters, and even high school teachers or university professors. Students in school eventually realize that it’s more the teacher than the subject because great teachers strive to connect with the students in their classrooms. Bad teachers don’t.

Escorts are the same way. The very best escorts do feel a connection with their clients. Is that connection “fake?” Sometimes. But it doesn’t matter and if she can fake it convincingly, good for her. Any kind of personal service worker who is good learns how to connect with his or her clients. The best trainers I’ve worked with are good not only because they know body mechanics and when to push and when to relax, but because they can connect with their clients.

I don’t want to over-emphasize the connection. Sex is different than the squat. It does have the obvious physical component, and some women are clearly not physically or mentally made for sex work. For every one of those, though, there are also women who love sex and who orgasm easily. They can make very good escorts if they don’t see so many clients that they move into numbness. Like with any kind of sex, if you leave space and time for the woman to enjoy it and get into it, she’s more likely to have a good time and so are you.

I don’t recommend escorts for all guys. Like so many other things, escorts work best for guys who already have strong masculine fundamentals. Escorts are still women and women respond to some guys with strong masculine fundamentals. Escorts who sense weak losers will usually respond in kind. This is tough for hobbyists who have money but lack fundamentals and find their experiences with escorts are bad. Not as bad as their experiences with normal women, but not good.

One basic rule of the game is that you cannot beat the sexual marketplace. Not consistently. You can get the rare fluke and I’ve seen guys score via flukes. Social dynamics are more like games of chance than they are like fluid dynamics or some other highly model-able field. Even paying for sex does not let you truly beat the market. Yes, you will get your dick in a live woman, but she will still respond to your weakness. Having good social skills and a good body relative to your age will set you apart when it comes to hiring sex workers. I have some game weaknesses but my gym and diet routines are strong. So are my interpersonal skills.

Probably everyone thinks their social skills are above average but even with that caveat I think mine really are and I have a good combination of sexualizing encounters and gauging where a woman is on the intellectual curve and pitching to that area. Braindead bimbos will want to talk about astrology and sex gossip because that’s where their mind is. Smarter women will want some smarter talk and somewhat higher levels of abstraction and meaning in some sex talk some of the time. I can do both and learning to pitch at the client’s level is an important skill in business and life. Fail to calibrate your pitch and you will go too high (if you can) or too low (if you get outsmarted). And I have run into a couple of hot women who are much smarter than me. It’s painful but unless you are an extraordinary expert in your field and an autodidact it will happen to you.

Some guys say that you have to have a spiritual or psychological or emotional connection with a girl to have great sex and physical chemistry to her. I think the causation is reversed: great sex and physical chemistry create and deepen the spiritual, psychological, and emotional connections. Reasonable guys can disagree about this but in my experience the physical comes first, the other stuff comes second. Have great physical moves and the head stuff follows. Have weak physical moves and the girl will be thinking about whether the hot guy at her work has a nice dick.

You may read this and wonder about why you would need some game to get the best experience with escorts. The short answer is that women still know when a guy is strong but caring and when he is weak and shriveled. If you are the former women will know it. If you are the latter they will know it too. Your being will make the connection that facilitates great sex stronger or weaker.

In some rare cases it’s also possible to evolve the escort-john experience into a FWB experience. This is rare and you shouldn’t count on it, but it isn’t impossible and if you’re the guy of guy to whom this sort of thing appeals you will only be in position to take advantage of it if you have strong frame and okay game to start with. Guys who are open to the world’s possibilities will find things that guys who are closed to the world’s possibilities do not.

Don’t hire escorts if you don’t have a lot of money relative to the average 18 – 25 year old escort. I can spend $200 – $300 periodically without sweating it. My material needs are low and always have been. That was a contentious issue in my early, brutal long term relationship: she always wanted more car, more house, more clothes, more more more, and I didn’t, and that is part of what led to us breaking up, and her then really having a lot less until she intelligently speared an older guy with a lot of money. I think I’ve written about this dynamic in other posts, and maybe someday I will write more and more explicitly about it. For now I will say that what they say is true: the experiences buy more happiness than objects.

I see many guys spending tens or hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars on their girlfriends and wives and I think, “Fool.” He could do so much more with that money. If you’re in a good job making good money, you may be misallocating resources. The occasional escort improves my game because it shows me what women will do and because it means I have zero scarcity whatsoever. If I want sex I pay for it and have it within 24 hours. Women can tell when a man is getting sex and when he isn’t. Hiring escorts can, odd as this may appear, improve your game, if they are hired correctly.

In Red Pill writing, too many guys are binary thinkers who divide the world into black and white. Most of the world is shades of gray and that includes the paid-sex world. Guys who enter that world and us it as a crutch will find that it weakens them. Guys who enter that world and use it to augment and supplement what they already have may find bliss and strength. It is neither good nor evil; it is in how you use it.

See also: “How to use Seeking Arrangements for fun and profit.” As with so many things, having strong masculine polarity is key (that doesn’t mean being bossy or a jerk or many other things people routinely misunderstand it to mean), and if you don’t have it, you likely won’t have so good a time.

[Intermediate to advanced game] Valentine’s Day is coming up. That can be a comfort test.

I obviously wrote this one before Valentine’s Day, but the basic idea applies to many other circumstances. Small comfort-building activities are important. Most guys overdo the comfort for so long that when they eventually learn to lean heavier on aloof game they totally forget about comfort.

Everyone reading this should be familiar with shit tests and if you are not then quit this post and read the sidebar. For 90% of guys, shit tests are the sticking point they face. For guys who’ve overcome most shit tests, however, comfort tests can be the bigger problem, especially for medium-term FWBs. A while ago I saw a post titled, “Be careful of being too Alpha, Comfort Tests are far more lethal than Shit-Tests,” and it reminded me of the issue.

Valentine’s day can be a comfort test, but it’s one that’s easy to fail by either doing too much or too little. Gifts are an element of retention. When you start banging girls you don’t have to worry too much about keeping them around, but the vast majority of women consciously or subconsciously want to “advance” their relationship with a good guy. Most women also bond with guys who are fucking them and giving them orgasms. This is doubly true if you’re going bare.

Like I said, it’s easy to fuck up through doing too much (if you are a novice at fucking hot women or more than one woman at a time, quit reading and get more experience). When I was way younger I had the bad habit of thinking that grand romantic gestures and gifts would endear me to women, because that’s what I saw in movies and read in novels. But when I tried grand romantic gestures in real life they totally flopped. As a younger guy I had no idea why. Now I do. Women love romantic gestures but only from a guy they consider to be higher status than they are.

So if you have a woman you’ve been fucking somewhat regularly, consider getting her a small present for Valentine’s Day. You should only give gifts to women you’ve been sleeping with semi-regularly. I’d say at least three times or for longer than a week, but there is no hard and fast rule. Whatever you do, DO NOT GIVES GIFTS TO WOMEN YOU HAVE NOT FUCKED. You will lower your own value in doing so and will decrease the likelihood you will ever fuck her.

The gift shouldn’t be expensive. A stuffed animal or bar of chocolate or inexpensive necklace will do. If she thinks she’s earned the gift, she will value it more than she will a $10,000 engagement ring or an expensive, fancy, uncomfortable dinner with a guy trying to buy her love and her pussy. The best gift I ever got a girl was for a girl who loved pickles and so I got her some for her birthday.

If you deliver a little bit of comfort you will set yourself off from most player assholes. The key phrase is “a little bit.” One of the commenters to that post said,

Shit Test – Too little masculine polarity.

Comfort Test – Too much masculine polarity.

Well-stated. I have been both and while you should err towards too much masculine polarity, you can overdo it. I have, and I made women pointlessly suffer by being too aloof.

For most guys this post is not going to be helpful because you will not yet be at the stage where comfort rather than shit is your biggest sticking point. But if you are like me, you might get over your initial challenges and then decide that you’re too badass to deal with her feelings or to deign to remember birthdays or holidays.

This will both make her feel bad (as well as used) and reduce your performance. A couple dollars, a box, and an air of mystery will go a long way. A little comfort also goes a long way and you should be 80 – 90% aloof, mysterious asshole, but that tenderness will up your game. There is a good book called Mate: Become the Man Women Want that uses the term “Tender Defender” for what women want and like. They want a guy who isn’t a pussy but who isn’t mean to them. When I was younger I went through phases where I was like, “I’m so fucking hard, I’m the boss, I don’t do fucking Valentine’s day,” dumb shit like that. That was a slightly better stance than giving girls I hadn’t fucked flowers in public, but it wasn’t ideal either.

This Valentine’s Day I don’t have anyone I’m seeing who’d be appropriate for this, and lately I’ve gotten kinda tired of women, maybe because I’m getting older. I wish I’d better known how to handle momentous days when I was younger, especially for FWBs-type situations where I want to keep the woman around but I don’t want a conventional “relationship.”

Don’t waste much time on video games

This one is controversial but the topic is so important I can’t ignore it. You’ll quickly understand its relationship to “Most guys are pussies. Be different” or “Today’s men are not nearly as strong as their dads were, researchers say.” The original title was even, “A lot of guys are losers and it’s easy to be better than many (and maybe most) of them.”

I was fucking this too-young-for-a-relationship girl who’s recently out of college, and she told me a little about her college experience and the guys she’d seen. You’ve probably seen the “college experience” in movies and TV, but for most people, and especially guys, college is not like that. Most of the guys at her school were not the masterful party guys of legend. In her rendition most are losers, and she described fucking a guy who would apparently rather play video games than fuck her. She eventually broke up with him because she got irritated by the way he’d spend all night playing video games with guys, rather than actually fucking her. He didn’t get another girlfriend after her.

It appears that a reasonably large number of guys would rather play video games than have sex. If you look at most guys, and I mean literally look at them, this may not be that big a surprise. The average American guy is 5′ 8″ and weighs 195 pounds. He’s a video-game-playing lardass.

There are a large number of frustrated, attractive women who correctly complain that there aren’t “good” guys available. I used to think those women were full of shit… now I’m not so sure. I’ve heard too many stories like this girl’s to think that they’re all delusional or princesses. I hear too many stories about fatass guys and video games and a total lack of ambition to think all of the complaints are exaggerated. I’m also not that great a guy (I think) yet I seem to have few problems getting with women, including ones who should be too young and hot to be interested in me. A lot of them say the same basic thing: I’m not a giant pussy like other guys, I’m not a fatass, I have a career, and they can “just tell” I like sex and am good at it.

If you’re a guy and you want to be a man, the road is sometimes hard but always worth it. It’s especially worth it because most guys seem to abrogate being a man in favor of video games or other fundamentally masturbatory pursuits. Listening to this very pretty girl talk about guys who preferred video games to fucking her seemed crazy to me. Yet it’s apparently common. You can probably do better than those guys if you try. There are reasons why guys who apply themselves often find great success fast. Not all do. Some guys are profoundly fucked up and it will take them a long time to restructure themselves. But many aren’t. They just need a kick in the ass.

Now, you can argue that this girl was trying to boost my ego by talking shit about her exes. Maybe she was. But if so, she wasted her time cause I don’t give a fuck. Her story jives with the data on men. Men are now unemployed at greater rates than women. Men on average do worse in school. The video game obsessives are almost all men. It’s not hard to be better than those guys. If you lift, practice reasonable social skills, don’t eat sugar, and pay attention to how you dress, you’re doing to do better than at least a substantial percentage of guys and maybe most guys. Mastering the basics is easy. Most guys don’t. In any field always start with the basics.

Like I said, a lot of horny and unsatisfied girls are out there. As you master the game you will discover more and more who they are and why they’re justifiably unsatisfied.

To be sure it is possible to play some video games and be all right with women and the rest of your life. But I get the impression that a lot of guys are playing video games like it’s their job. That’s a mistake. Skills and habits compound over time. But no one cares about your video game feats. Use video games to waste time and during your dead time if you want, but be very careful that they don’t consume your real life and real being. You only live once.

Overall, videogames, like smartphones and sometimes the Internet more generally, impede your ability to do Deep Work and for that reason they should be avoided.

“Don’t End the Week With Nothing” [Career]

“Don’t End the Week With Nothing” is some of the best career advice anywhere. It is too long to excerpt effectively and you should read the whole thing. Nonetheless,

One of the reasons developers have embraced OSS so much is because it gives you portable capital between companies: if your work is sitting on Github, even if you leave one job, you can take it with you to your next job. Previously this happened pretty widely but generally under the table. (Is there any programmer who does not have a snippets folder or their own private library for scratching that one particular itch?) One of the great wrinkles that OSS throws into this is that OSS is public by default, and that’s game changing.

Why? Because when your work is in public, you can show it to people. That’s often the best way to demonstrate that you’re capable of doing work like it.

Telling people you can do great work is easy: any idiot can do it, and many idiots do. Having people tell people you do great work is an improvement. It suffers because measuring individual productivity on a team effort is famously difficult, and people often have no particular reason to trust the representations of the people doing the endorsements. . . .

Work you can show off, though, is prima facie evidence of your skills. After your portfolio includes it, your ability to sell your skills gets markedly better. Given that most people’s net worth is almost 100% invested in their personal capital (i.e. if you’re a young engineer the net present value of all future salary absolutely swamps everything in your bank account), this is a fairly radical improvement in your present situation for not a very radical change in how you go about things.

This is particularly good advice because we live in a world in which your employer has zero loyalty to you and will jettison you in an instant if doing so is effective for him or it. Company loyalty is dead and has been dead for decades. Getting a job so you can “pay your dues” is a moronic notion today propagated by employers who want to exploit the worker. Paying your dues means you are lining someone else’s pocket.

Paying your dues is dumb, but if you can get a job that builds skills you should take it. Build your skills and then sell them to the highest bidder. That is how you get to the top of the financial / economic heap. There is an analogy to game here: For many guys who aren’t naturals and don’t have lots of reference experiences banging hot chicks, you build into banging hot chicks by first banging less-hot and suboptimal chicks for experience, skills, practice, ladder climbing, and branch swinging. You’re better off banging than not most of the time. If you don’t have an active harem you should be very wary of the word “standards,” just like if you don’t have a job you should be very wary wary of not getting some kind of gig somewhere doing something.

Back to work stuff though, you need to do at least two things in any modern job: Have skills and be able to demonstrate those skills. Being able to demonstrate those skills means you should not end the week with nothing. You need to be thinking about your portfolio (pretty much every job needs a portfolio now) and how that portfolio applies to your next gig.

This is a particularly timely piece because it’s the end of the year, which means it’s a good time to make a list of everything you’ve accomplished this year and why you accomplished it. You should also make a list of what you’re going to accomplish in the year to come. If you have nothing or too little on your accomplishments list you need to get off the Internet and make a real plan to do what you need to do.

What a portfolio means is going to differ based on your work. Hell even if you’re a bartender you should take pics of the best drinks you make and/or have a bunch of drinks you can make real fast. That is a kinda contrived example but you know what I mean.

You are in a world where your formal credentials, like a university degree, mean surprisingly little and lots of people have them. I have hired and fired many idiots with degrees. You need to set yourself apart and demonstrate that you have real skills. One way to do that is to make sure that what you do is visible in some way, and that you don’t have a lot of weeks where you get to Friday and you aren’t sure WTF happened that week.

“Goodwill” from your employer or clients no longer exists. When someone says they will pay you back down the road they are usually full of shit. Get it now or take your full value elsewhere.

I have other career posts I have been meaning to write, my favorite being that the only way to really get ahead in money and responsibility terms is quitting and getting a new job. Most companies will not bump you by more than 5 – 10% per year, but it is possible to jump by 50 – 100% or more by going from one company to another.

Keeping your financial footprint as small as possible is another good topic. The less you spend the less they own you (the marketing industry already owns you by the way, and if you don’t think so just look at the way people think their car expresses some deep facet of their personality and the personalities of people around them). The three biggest areas of waste are usually housing, cars, and (for younger guys) over-pricey school.

The best cost-benefit things for sleeping with women are clothes that fit, money for drinks, and a gym membership. Those things are orders of magnitude cheaper than cars or “impressive” housing, with “impressive” being defined by some marketing guy.

Embrace the awkward

In the real world, seduction and intersex relationships are often awkward. I didn’t know that when I was younger and I thought that being awkward was a sign of my own ineptness. It wasn’t and instead it was a sign of how things are for most people. Also, who cares how awkward it is if you still have sex?

Most girls actually have shit social skills and don’t know how to act around guys they like and aren’t good conversationalists. So meeting, seducing, and sleeping with them is often awkward because of both parties. Paradoxically, the more a guy embraces and rejoices and accepts the awkward, the smoother many interactions will go.

If you are a guy your job is to assume the sale and keep escalating (in a reasonable way or reasonable time) until you are fucking her or she stops you. The whole process might be awkward but when your dick is in her you don’t care, do you? Escalate until you can’t anymore. Often you will escalate your way right into sex that wouldn’t happen is you stood around waiting for the girl to indicate overt approval (which most girls will never do).

In movies and TV a lot of things are smooth and the characters have witty banter and the sex is magic and everyone comes after three pumps. That’s because Hollywood produces fantasy. In real life shit doesn’t work that way, yet we’re conditioned by watching and absorbing fantasy.