How Richard Hanania used The Game and evolutionary biology to overcome anxiety

It’s a story consistent with things you’ve read here on Red Quest, although few people probably want to “constantly troll people, and get them to hate you with a passion.” Instead of trolling people and getting them to hate you, it might be better to try and be right, and to grow, but the most interesting parts concern Hanania’s introduction to THE GAME, which goes beyond the game…

While in college, I read The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The author was Neil Strauss, a journalist who as a New York Times columnist had achieved some level of professional success but had bad luck in his dating life. He started out by doing research on the “seduction community,” a group of men that in the early days of the internet got together to figure out how to meet and attract women

THE GAME is still the introduction many of us have to the game. Evolutionary biology underlies the game…

What does a serious society look like? What does a serious movement look like?

The Case for American Seriousness is a great work that explains what’s wrong with many currents in American society, including the abortion discourse right now. As of June 2022, abortion is the current thing, replacing Ukraine, which was the current thing a few months ago. Last year, the current thing might’ve been the Jan. 6 attempted coup event. Before that, the election. Before that, the “defund the police” and “black lives matter” protests/riots. Before that, it was “immigrants welcome here.” I don’t entirely remember what else happened, but in 2016 it was an election.

“He’s not paying enough attention to me”

I run into a chick I know peripherally, mostly through a friend: she’s a high 6, about 30, not bad but a little outside my ideal hotness window, and we talk about our mutual friend and how he’s moved, though he gave her all of his mushrooms. I ask how that’s going and she tells me she’d taken what she meant to be a microdose, but it was apparently more, and had an emotional experience last weekend. Does she want to say more about that? Not too much, but she says she cried because the guy she’s been seeing “isn’t paying enough attention to me.”

Did I smirk, laugh, or nod sagely? Not sure, can’t recall, but the narcissistic flashed me back to Attention is the only tool modern men have. Her guy sounds like he’s handling her well, making her fanny flutter, cause she’s thinking of him, and not yet bored with him.

Cause I’m a dog at heart I got her number, uselessly, but, like I say, fire & manuever, baby. Next time I run into her I’m going to ask if she’s found a man to pay her enough attention yet.

The whining disparity: Male struggle is invisible to most women

Successful men have an incentive to hide how hard getting to the top and staying there is, because women don’t like weak men who whine and complain about not getting laid… or almost anything else. Guys who have some success must present it like it’s easy and organic to women, despite the fact that almost all guys experience a lot of rejection and difficulty when it comes to dating… but this can’t be stated, because the unsuccessful men die off, figuratively, in her world and her attention. Women internalize the idea that men have it easy, because that’s what a lot of successful men are marketing… because they (we) think women demand it. When a market demands fantasy, sellers offer fantasy.

“Never settle” is an expression of narcissism

The best thing written about modern dating is by The Last Psychiatrist, and it’s so good he felt compelled to delete it, Don’t Settle For The Man You Want. It’s about narcissistic monster Lori Gottlieb, a woman who can’t see herself for who and what she is but is compelled to ladle advice out to everyone else. She thinks TV shows like Will & Grace and movies like Titanic are somehow real… “Nothing characterizes the dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world better than using throw away cinema as a template for life.” Lori can’t find a man for many reasons, one being that “She wants someone who will see her the way she wants to be seen and fulfill various other roles she has planned for him, leaving herself free to ‘grow.'” People are people, not roles, and not props in another person’s drama, however much social media tries to convince us otherwise (the best women I’ve met and dated in the last decade use social media minimally, if at all: not a coincidence). Lori is an expert in the negative, not in the positive,

A reasonable question might be, what kind of a man is this woman looking for? I defy you to answer this question. She’s two books and at least three essays into the topic, and still I have no idea. What I do know, however, is what she’s not looking for. That’s where her laser focus is pointed.

She is all “want” and no “give.” Real relationships mean give and take. Too much of either makes them impossible or dysfunctional. But, lots of people (especially women) have been trained to think like Lori: the man is an accessory to their life, not a person with whom she’ll build a new thing. Religion used to try to fight against narcissism, but it’s dead, and now it’s all about you. Advertising tells us so. And we have good psychological defense mechanisms that prevent us from realizing that we only want to take and never want to give. “Gottlieb figures that because she’s attractive and intelligent, the problem must be her standards are too high or men are threatened by her. Wrong. The problem is she is daring someone to like her.” Well that is one problem, and not the only one. But the key word “standards.” Listen to single women and you’ll hear endless talk of “standards.” Listen to married women and they’ll talk about how much they love their kids. Coincidence?

Listen to women’s dating podcasts (I don’t recommend it, but xbtusd listens to them, masochistically) and the idea of “standards” recurs over and over again. It’s right up there with “Living your truth” and letting emotions rule, and ruin, your life.

“Deserves” is a childish word

“Deserves” is a childish word and the people concerned with what they “deserve” are often childish, if not outright narcissistic. The topic arises cause a guy I know is with a woman whose aspiration in life is to get married, it seems. Not BE married, GET married (the difference matters). She doesn’t want kids. Weird, right? Why bother with the marriage except for social status and kids? She doesn’t want the “kids” part of marriage, the part that really matters, so it’s pure social status for her, I guess. If that weren’t enough, my buddy (we’ll call him Steve) has read and been ensorcelled by the sex club book, so he wants to try non-monogamy. Steve has good communication skills, so he’s been negotiating out what the life with him and the woman should look like, since they want different things. He’s talked to her and not come to a final conclusion, in part probably because the girl fucks really well and is hot, two things known in combination to beguile men. There are FDA warnings about such women.

They were talking and the girl said she “deserves to get married” and “deserves to be excited about getting married.” I say “said” instead of “argued” because “I deserve to get married” isn’t an argument. Adults know that people don’t get what they deserve all the time. People also often don’t get what they do deserve, to the extent any of those things are computable at all.

I’m not opposed to people “getting what they deserve…” justice and fairness are based partially on those lofty goals. But “deserve” has so many dimensions that trying to compute them, let alone talk about them, seems futile. “Deserves” may not even be a linear system, so something like linear algebra may only be useful for approximations, not the real thing. The real world has very large, maybe infinitely large, matrices that include many variables for “deserve.” Does someone who works hard and makes a lot of money but is an asshole “deserve” the money? Does someone who is a good person who gives away too much value “deserve” to get that value leeched? I don’t know, and a person could generate an infinite number of such questions, with no final answer. Life is not solvable.

Friendship and how to be real

Friend from out of town came to visit, and his visit showed me the friendship is dead. I’m mourning its death, because we were tight at one point, but time and his own personality problems have shoved us apart. He’s been depressed for years, and I’m finding myself realizing that I, or perhaps we, are trying to have the friendship of many years ago, and… it isn’t working. I’m annoyed at myself more than anything else, because I should have known this, and acknowledged it to myself, but I didn’t. I wanted him to be continuing to learn & grow, but, instead, he was busy wallowing in his own world of feelings, too inwardly directed and not sufficiently outwardly directed. I realize I’m being vague here but the specifics are too specific. I saw a tweet where a guy said, “In 2050 it will be an accepted fact that focus on psychological health (including meditation) was one of the biggest biggest disasters for the advancement of humanity ever.” That’s true of my friend, a victim of “psychological health” that is the opposite of psychological health, and a victim of his own weakness.

The visit was a waste of time… I’d thought it would be a regenerating visit in which I’d help him help himself, but he rejected the gift to instead pursue a path of folly and isolation. He thinks I don’t understand him and that I need to respect his feelings. I’m a man, though, and if “feelings” are not useful, they need to be ignored, jettisoned, and changed. Part of being a man is ignoring feelings to get things done. Losers whine about their best; men go home and f**k the prom queen. I want to f**k the prom queen (and literally have, granted we were in college at the time… another story…), not whine pointlessly about my best. He needs to read my guide, Female “friends:” the comprehensive statement, but he never will. What he thinks of as his own conviction is really cope for being inert.

A lot of guys are pussies, but that means opportunity for the few who aren’t

This post, and all others, are now on Substack. 

A depressing Reddit thread, Why are young men giving up on dating? (not going to link it), is full of guys saying they’re tired and their feelings are hurt. The highly upvoted comments indicate that a lot of guys are pussy… could be that Japanese herbivore culture has come to America. Let’s hope guys posting on Reddit aren’t representative of guys as a whole. But, if they are, their weakness shows your opportunity: if all these guys are so weak that they can’t compete at all, where does that leave you, the guy who’s decided he can and will compete? Jeff Bezos says your margin is Amazon’s opportunity. These guys’s whining, is your opportunity.

The Reddit thread is disturbing because the guys in it don’t think about history… to them, only the present exists. They have been raised by the consumer culture of TV and video games, not the producer culture of men. They are the anti-Elon Musk. Despite their whining, they do not properly realize how they are the results of thousands of generations of unbroken male success. Any guy who is alive today is alive because his father managed to get laid, as did his father before him, as did his father before him. Guys not long ago fought in Vietnam (think also of the guys on the North Vietnamese side, facing American firepower). They fought in Korea, World War II, World War I. Not long before that, most guys were agricultural peasants, barely scraping a living out of the land. They didn’t even have sunscreen. Can you believe it! What about skin cancer? Before that, they were hunter-gatherers who couldn’t even play the latest PlayStation or XBox. How did they even live? Your ancestors took spears in the chest and managed to soldier on. Seriously, read some history. Read SAPIENS. Whatever. The world is not safe. As of 26 February 2022, Ukrainian President Zelensky is refusing U.S. evacuation offers, as Ukraine resists the armies of evil despot Putin, and Zelensky is saying he needs more ammo, not a ride. Seriously, think about that, and think about the guys you hear whining on the Internet about how hard it is to ask out chicks.

Every person alive today has incredible, unbelievable opportunities in the world, if he or she pursues them. There has never been a better time to be a player. The amount of information available about game, nutrition, lifting, and social skills has never been higher. Yet these guys throw that all away, to play more XBox, skim more Reddit. They don’t connect their behaviors with them not getting laid.

The “communication” shibboleth women talk about about in relationships

We’ve all heard women say they wish their partners, or guys in general, would be better “communicators,” but I’m suspect of this meme: pleas for better “communication” often mean “I want the other person to do what I want,” and indirect communication often means “I know the other person doesn’t want what I want, so I’m going to be deliberately ambiguous.” A very common form of this: a man and woman have been f**king for a while, a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, and the woman wants to define the relationship, while the man doesn’t. “What does he really want?” the woman asks, and asks her friends. “Why won’t he communicate with me?” He really wants to keep f**king her but also be able to try and f**k other girls, while not having to deal with building a woman’s idea of a “relationship” that means instead of studying Bitcoin sourcecode on the weekend, she wants to drag him to brunch with her inane friends, the hot ones of whom won’t have a threesome anyway. Insert your own examples here. When sex dries up, a man often becomes more interested in communicating, that is, debugging why the sex is going away. Early in the relationship, the woman is often ambiguous about her desire to have a family, because many guys want to f**k around, not take care of infants and postpartum women who’ve forgotten that the blowjob is the essential tool for relationships harmony, perhaps even more important than making dinner and not complaining. 

So a lot of “not communicating” is really “liking what’s happening now and not wanting to f**k it up by being direct, instead of ambiguous.” For long-term relationships ambiguity strategies are often worse than not. A lot of guys know that admitting to women, “I want to f**k every hot chick with big tits I see” is not an attractive thing to say, so we don’t “communicate” our innermost feelings. A lot of chicks don’t want to say, “I’m highly attracted to photogenic 6’4” guys online, just like every other woman, and I chase him like all the other women, and we’re lemmings running off a cliff together.” Part of growing up is learning when to communicate, and when not to. For women, “good communication” means “doing the thing I want to do.” Xbtusd recently suffered a peculiar setback when his primary partner and another woman he’s sleeping with went out for drinks together, got drunk, misunderstood each other, and then caused problems for him, and for each of them. Whatever happened to women as master communicators? Not in xbtusd’s case. Many bi women can’t make it happen with another woman because neither woman will “communicate” the first move. They rely on men to make that happen. Men, to no one’s surprise, set up and execute most sex clubs and sex parties, although often with a woman in the mix, ideally as a figurehead, the same way women in music are almost always singers and never play instruments. Lead singers are figures of intense attention. For men, playing music at all, in any capacity, is linked to sexual success.

Transsexualism, bodybuilding, anorexia: body dysmorphia’s many forms

Thinspo and Gender Goals: Musing on two internet subcultures is about attention and the failure to create effective identity: I read it as, when young people, specifically girls, say, “I am a man,” they really mean, “I want to look x way. And all my problems would be solved if I looked x way.” This desire will never be completed, and reaching the “goal” will never make the desirer actually feel whole, happy etc. The way the brain is malfunctioning in an anorexic state can give us some help understanding the transsexuality trend, which isn’t so different from grunge or witchcraft or other teen girl trends. What people (and especially teen girls) say is often not to be taken at face value; it’s part of some other ploy, usually related to status, insecurity, etc. Girls are more susceptible to social contagions.

With anorexia, the body dysmorphia is clear: showing how the origin of all this stuff (Tumblr) is the same, and the memes around it, the imagery, the feelings are all very similar. Somehow, we can’t see the obvious when we introduce the idea of gender, maybe because after a long period of discrimination against gays, we falsely analogize transsexuals to gays. “I hate my body, it’s the wrong one. I’ll never be happy until I can change it to be something else.” The language is so similar, the thoughts, all of it is really powerful to a small number of people. Like many things, the left might wake up 50 years from now and be like, “holy shit were we in a dream? Did we really think this shit was healthy?” No, it isn’t, and we’ll deny we ever thought it.

Transsexualism being like anorexia is interesting in part because it seems to get the essential idea that there’s no end game. Let’s say the teens who are “transsexual” achieve their body “perfection” or whatever. Then…what? What’s the point? It’s like bodybuilders (another topic discussed around here), you get the things, and then…you show it off, I guess? You search for adulation, or something else? And then, once you get that, then what? Whatever problems drive body dysmorphia are not solved by whatever body mods people think they’re feeling. With bodybuilders, some amount of lifting and being fit is good for you, but becoming obsessed and overly optimizing on “being fit” has negative repercussions. Most people want social and romantic connections: but transsexualism is unlikely to facilitate either.