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…

Two points on loneliness, family, and evolutionary biology

I have often banged on about evolutionary biology, it being the theoretical and intellectual core underlying game, as guys have evolved to like young hot chicks and chicks have evolved to like guys with skills, knowledge, resources, height, and status. But we are also an evolutionary puzzle,

Humans are almost unique in having menopause; most animals keep reproducing until they die in late middle-age. Why does evolution want humans to stick around without reproducing?

Because old people have already learned the local culture and can teach it to others. Henrich asks us to throw out any personal experience we have of elders; we live in a rapidly-changing world where an old person is probably “behind the times”. But for most of history, change happened glacially slowly, and old people would have spent their entire lives accumulating relevant knowledge. Imagine a Silicon Valley programmer stumped by a particularly tough bug in his code calling up his grandfather, who has seventy years’ experience in the relevant programming language.

On average, it seems like the people I know who have kids are more satisfied and content. Often they are not happier, if you think of happiness as a giddy joy, but they seem to have more purpose, and purpose can satisfy us.

What we find most satisfying when we’re younger, like status among our peers and f**king younger-hotter-tighter, we might find less satisfying when we’re older. Those thoughts are underlying Kids, the player, and the Red Pill: Comprehensive statement. We focus on the game because, although it may be sad, it’s also true that we need game and to understand women in order to form satisfying relationships, particularly in an age of legal theft via marriage and paternity fraud. It’s necessary both to guard your interests and for most guys to have a family. Many guys don’t do either one effectively. Your stage of life is relevant and I see too few guys discussing stage-of-life points, so I want to change that here.

The other point,

Postwar baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were Generation Zero for the Second Demographic Transition in the United States. Now shuffling their way into their sixties and seventies, older boomers give a glimpse of the long-term downside of the post-SDT culture. If we had to pick just one word to describe it, “lonely” would do. In widely quoted research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ashton M. Verdery and Rachel Margolis uncovered a recent surge in the number of “kinless” older adults. Lower fertility translates into fewer siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, whether for hospital visits or emergency contacts.

That article is amazing and please read all of it. I will emphasize that living without kids for your entire life is probably contrary to our psychology and leads many people to bad second halves of their lives. It must be especially hard for guys who fail to be players and learn about chicks in the first half of their lives, then spend the second halves of their lives with no or estranged families. Suicide rates for middle-aged and older guys have been going up for a long time and I bet that’s part of the reason. Younger guys can learn game and get laid (the way is hard but it can be done), while older guys without families don’t have that source of meaning.

I’m still anti-marriage (it’s a bad contract) but I also see the sadness in many of the older people around me, and I see a lot of younger people (mostly chicks but some guys too) who seem to be heading towards that path. Game is important because it can reduce loneliness in some ways. It can also be supremely lonely in other ways, I want to add, as game and Red Pill in general can estrange you from a lot of society when you begin to learn how the real world works. Aging is more painful for women and low-status guys than for top guys, as top guys can keep nailing younger-hotter-tighter for a pretty long time. Not forever and that is where the family aspect becomes more important.

If you are a 31-one-year-old guy do not despair and think you are over the hill. You’re not and still need to learn game and do all the Red Pill things.

Many people seem to spend their lives trying to keep their options open. But let’s say you keep your options open into the indefinite future, as you age out of your fertility window and into the injuries and sicknesses and infirmity of time: so what? What are you keeping your options open, to do? 

“The female price of male pleasure” is missing one important thing: men and women are biologically different.

“The female price of male pleasure” is missing one important thing: men and women are biologically different. For decades we’ve been hearing blank slate ideology from feminists. But men and women aren’t blank slates. We have similar, but distinct in notable ways, built-in preferences. This is basically obvious to anyone who has ever dated, but for some reason it’s been missing in feminist discourse for like 50 years.

That men and women have distinct preferences is obvious to anyone who has dated or anyone who has read evolutionary biology. Every guy who learns game unlearns blank-slate ideology and instead has to learn what women actually want. Most women do not want precisely what men want in the way that men want it.

At the same time, most women haven’t learned what actual men are like. In my opinion it’s insane that women get blackout drunk and go home with strangers and near-strangers, yet many do and the larger culture seems unwilling to tell them that no, this is not a good idea.

And then women are SHOCKED that men don’t want the same things they do. Kind of like how men are SHOCKED that women don’t behave or think like women in most visual porn (which is male fantasy).

How about we start by acknowledging the difference average preferences between men and women in terms of how, where, when, and why sex happens happens?

Get rid of the blank slate and we’ll all be better able to know each other. Stick to it, and we’re going to keep getting these missed signals and crappy hookups and drunkenness.

(The author does mention and talk about biology, which is a good start, but refuses to link it to psychology. And the failures of the medical profession to treat endometriosis and similar ailments seriously are also real. She is confused about “beauty standards,” though. Those exist because women are in competition with one another for the highest-status men. If men thought they could win sex competitions by wearing high heels and makeup, every straight guy would be at the makeup counter tomorrow. I’d be first in line.)

Guys are frustrated by sex advice like “Just be yourself” and “Be a gentleman” (AKA be asexual, then watch the girl go off with some caveman).  Women are frustrated when they realize guys are hornier and more feral than they often appear on the surface.

I think both men and women are paying the price for ignorance and failing to emphasize the desires, on average, of the opposite sex.

No one, or almost no one, is looking at the “Five whys” failure analysis of the Aziz Ansari situation. We can’t import the methods good software teams use to understand modes of failure. Evolutionary biology helps us understand those modes better, on a sexual level. Women are encouraged to act like naive waifs, like “Grace,” instead of being taught about agency and male desire. Men are taught to be overly timid and then they’re surprised when the least-timid among them are the most sexually successful.

What a mess. What’s it going to take to get a little honesty injected into this conversation?