The post about there not being much left for me to say, while encouraging other guys to carry on

I’ve said as much before, so maybe this one won’t stick either, but I think I’m basically done writing Red Quest. After more than five years of writing, few, if any, of my original goals for Red Quest have been accomplished: I thought, to cite one example, that writing about sex clubs and non-monogamy would make a bunch of guys try some of the strategies I suggest, then report back on what they found, but, instead, I’ve moved closer to the view that most guys interested in or peripherally orbiting this space don’t get laid at all, or minimally (a view elaborated in most guys don’t care much about getting laid, I hypothesize). Most guys feel they are doing good enough and thus don’t try to do better, or they are so mired in their existing problems that they think the path to improvement too long and arduous to start.

Anything you read about dating in the legacy media is about weirdo outliers

Normal, reasonable people don’t have the weird, bizarre sex and dating problems that legacy media outlets are continually writing about: the point comes up because of a foolish advice column from a woman to a woman, titled “Why Isn’t Anyone Sliding Into My DMs?!” I’m not going to do a link because however dumb you think the material might be from the title, it’s dumber. I used to write analyses of this class of dumb article but then I was like… “Why?” Why bother? It’s pure entertainment, with no more bearing on reality than novels about dragons and swords.

The media is almost entirely made by people who are abnormally self-aggrandizing, self-regarding, grandiose, entitled, and/or narcissistic people… and those people are trying to make money in a shrinking, shrieking, deranged industry. Almost all of the dumbest stuff comes from NYC, too, I think because of the extreme gender skew there… college-educated women far outnumber men in the NYC metro area, creating an environment in which women have to compete much harder for men than they do elsewhere. The high cost of housing, because of legal constraints imposed by the city on building more housing also means that most people feel they can’t afford to have families, so they might as well f**k around a lot instead.[1] Women get pushed towards spinsterdom, because so few guys can afford the cost of an okay family housing unit. Normal girls in normal places, like Denver or Dallas or wherever, who want boyfriends, get them, and don’t have the constant struggle some NYC chicks do.

“How did you figure all this out?” On women and dating

A guy at reddit asks that rarest of things, an interesting question, which got started from this post. The guy says, “I was the outsider for a long time (I box professionally) so I had this idea that it doesn’t matter what the average person says or think, I can do whatever I want. I was super disagreeable and would keep grudges (and of course I lost friends like that). This was my most recent realisation, after finishing my study abroad year in Madrid. Having (the right) friends give you an unwavering amount of confidence and motivation, whether it’s picking up a girl or starting a business.”

Furthermore, “the contrast thing is also very true. A lot of my friends think I get girls mostly because of boxing plus I study at a top university in the UK, but the reality is because I paint and post it on Instagram.” Yet he says grew up in poverty. He asks, though: “how did you figure all this out?” It took me a while to figure out how to answer him, because to answer it with any level of honesty demands detail. So I took a shot:

Getting hit in the face (figuratively, mostly, took boxing lessons but never fought), failing, flailing, struggling, reading Peter Thiel (one of the great geniuses of our age, even when he’s wrong), reading broadly + deeply (the people who tell you fiction is a waste of time are dumb), observing, practicing, feeling humiliated by rejection from chicks, realizing some chick is saying “ljbf” before she goes off to get railed half an hour later, trying to figure things out, reading pickup / game / red pill blogs (for too long now, though I’ve learned much from these guys, even some of the crazy ones), studying Bayesian statistics, studying statistical thinking more generally, talking to guys. Some of the “how did you figure all this out?” is just an interest in puzzles, of which human social life presents many. A lot of guys are stuck in an overly simplistic mindset, where they think “iff a, then success” when in reality “a” may be helpful, but success is rarely, if ever, monocausal. That overly simplistic mindset is evident in many comments online, many of which are so incomplete as to be effectively wrong. Many aspects of success in social life are not only not monocausal, but they’re a matter of balancing opposites: an idea many Internet users reject.

The top player (seducer) is an extreme insider or an extreme outsider, but not average

The top players have a paradoxical quality: they’re often extreme insiders or extreme outsiders, rather than being average. Think about why: if you’re too insider, too consensus, you buy into “men and women are the same” and “men and women are totally and always equal” (regarding the latter, men and women have equality of opportunity, and in many ways women are favored today in business, education, and government, but equality of opportunity isn’t the same as equality of outcome). If you’re too insider, you buy too much into “the system is right,” when it frequently isn’t. You agree too much (women like it when guys break rapport intelligently). You think that “going to the best school” is smart, when what you think of as “the best school” is a marketing gimmick and will saddle you with $250,000 in student loans; something like self-teaching combined with Western Governors University is “too weird” for you, the insider, who only does what others suggest you do, and you are pathologically afraid of anything weird, anything slightly off the well-worn path in front of you. You think “the system will take care of you” when in fact the system will use you (think of all the divorced guys out there, paying alimony). You think past returns are indicative of future performance, when they may not be… property values cannot infinitely exceed GDP and wage growth, despite the fact that your fiancée wants you to buy her a house. If you’re too insider, you think chatting up strange women is “weird” and you’re afraid of rejection. You underperform in your sex life because you are too polite and scared. You think you are “polite” when you are actually scared.

If you’re too outsider, though, you have a different set of problems that will stymie you: you think the system is totally rigged and totally bullshit, so why try at all? (A good way to end up living in your parents’ basement or in a share house with four other loser guys). Rebel too hard and you won’t be able to find the better jobs, the more important skills, the most desirable mates (women do care about what you do, they care about whether you have a functional job and economic life). If you are too outsider, you won’t be able to effectively cooperate with other people, which you need to do to build larger social and company structures (in neolithic times, the best hunters work together to take down big game). If you’re too outsider, you don’t think you need friends, and you think pure cold approach is all you need, never mind its weaknesses. If you’re too outsider, you think you don’t care what anyone thinks, including potential clients, customers, or users. You don’t care about having friends, when in fact it’s almost impossible to accomplish anything substantive alone: you need friends, mentors, people to bounce ideas off of. The dirty guy living in the desert is not getting many women. The guy living a marginal existence because he can’t be bothered to work isn’t doing well with women. A lot of college is bullshit, true, but the technical degrees aren’t. And the parties, particularly the frat parties thrown by insiders, have much to recommend them.

Why are women fascinated with therapy?

Remember the Sopranos scene with Carmela’s therapist? The therapist cuts through all of Carmela’s rationalizations about staying with a monster (which are also, tweaked slightly, the viewer’s rationalizations for liking Tony). The therapist says Carmela has to leave her husband and that Carmela is enabling evil. Carmela thinks she should leave but says, “You’re going to charge the same anyway,” and he says, “I won’t accept blood money.” It’s this incredible fight for values, and Carmela can’t comprehend the therapist’s values: her whole world requires her not to comprehend him, including his statement, “many patients want to be excused for their current predicament.” 

Here’s one of my private theories about why women are fascinated with therapy: Until the post-war era, most women married who their parents told them to marry, or at least someone within their communities, and they lived in communities that effectively directed their lives and major life decisions, at least until the women themselves aged into becoming matriarchs, grandmothers, etc.[1] Camille Paglia likes to talk about how in Italian communities, young wives were bossed around by their husbands’s mothers, and the old women wielded much of the power; today, old women are ignored by anyone not in their families, and young women have all the power, until they become crones, at which point they’re discarded by anyone who’s not their husbands or families. I exaggerate, yes, but by much? Pre-war, women had relatively few choices. The “point” of life was not individual self actualization or pleasure, it was sustaining the community, having enough to eat, putting a roof over the head, raising the children. Low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and therefore (relatively) easy to accomplish. Expectations differ today.

You can, naturally, contrast the pre-war world with pretty much everything today: women are highly autonomous. They earn their own money and keep their own households. They have infinite freedom and choice–with it the ability to fuck up easily. A lot of people, I think, can’t handle and don’t like choice, but almost no one in the media will write an article about how choice sucks, and having less choice can be desirable to some people. So what’s the female response to total freedom? Often: anxiety, uncertainty, therapy. A lot of women get enormous social and sexual power in their teens or early 20s and wield it how one might expect someone to wield a huge amount of power with minimal guidance (that’s also the plot of every young-adult, adventure-save-the-world story).

Join the network and create the reality-based future

You should always listen to Balaji S: though he has little to directly say about the game, he has much to say about the nature of reality and much else that is game adjacent. Today, in Bitcoin, China, the “Woke” Mob, and the Future of the Internet, he speaks to the rise of networks and networked cities and states as a means of resisting the totalizing impulses of centralized, coercive states. This gets me thinking about the “woke” world that hates and feminizes men, despite despising, on a dating and mating level, the feminized men who result. If you buy into woke and being a p***y, you won’t get laid, and yet many guys seem to buy into this nonsense and indoctrination, and a larger number of women claim to want p***y guys while f**king typical hot, successful guys. What’s going on with the guys who buy the woke narrative? Could be that most guys don’t care about getting laid—or is it that getting laid in 2021 is really hard for most average guys because they don’t get it how it works and how to make it work for them, and for that reason either don’t try very hard or quit? Yours truly, however, still does try, and still feels some impulse to resist the ubiquitous media nonsense that celebrates failure and weakness instead of winning and strength. What is to be done?

Pickup is hard, and top girls don’t stay that way for long, and musings on networks

Red Pill Dad realizes that “almost everyone is doing online dating (OLD) and banging low quality chicks and then bragging about it… no one really wants to learn day game or cold approach.” [1] Well yes, and think of it this way, literally how many girls are true 7s in the entire world? The true 7s are almost always somewhere between their mid teens and mid 30s, call it 18 – 30, for legal purposes. A few 7s can persist into their early 40s, although that’s rare. A lot of girls drop from their true 7 potential into 5 or 6 territory due to poor nutrition and fitness. The number of true 8s, in the entire world, is not that high, probably a few percent of the female population, and every guy from puberty to senescence wants to bang them. They have a level of “privilege” that the male classes, who are busy working building and struggling, carrying the burden of civilization, can barely imagine, because we’re too busy toiling to try and keep a roof over the head and maybe impress the few hot chicks we’re ever exposed to (“f**king hot chicks” is a fine reason to stay in school, one not adequately emphasized).

Christianity, maybe an improvement on political religions

This post, like all future posts, is now on Substack.

I am slowly swinging around to the view that being genuinely religious is probably good for a lot of people, maybe most people… a big, big improvement over politics-as-religion. Without me personally wanting to be religious.

I’ve had religious-type ecstacy experiences in group sex scenarios… should be obvious from the stories… those scenarios are great in the moment, but from what I can tell and what I have observed, they don’t lead to real community. Your “value” is very much based on sex appeal, ability to bring in hot women, ability to be a hot woman, etc. There is a woman, Gwen Kansen, who did a twitter thread about how her group sex communities effectively eject or de-prioritize older women… her group sex communities are filled with middle-aged guys chasing chicks in their 20s, and I’ve seen this dynamic as well, the invisible older woman thing. I hope Kansen writes something longer and linkable, cause she’s emphasized something usually locked in the attic like a crazy aunt.

In Christianity, your core value is you, and being alive, and your immortal soul; you have an inviolate soul regardless of your external views and features. Of course we all know that, in the real world, that’s often not how it works… the hot Christian gal isn’t into you because of your beautiful soul in the eyes of god, your boss doesn’t hire you for that reason, etc.: there are still real value judgments involved. But there is some latent brutality in the competitive world, that the Christian world tries to de-elevate… and I’m not complaining here: I’ve done fine a lot of the time, competitively, I’m not complaining about the competition, and competition has a lot of merits. Adam Smith wrote about how the competition of capitalism encourages kindness and courtesy, because those things make good business sense. The average American or European store clerk is 100x more useful than the average Soviet government “worker.” The more advanced the market economy, the better the service, and the better the range of products. Capitalism and its competitive features are great. Christianity encourages people to have kids, to be fruitful and multiple, so it isn’t as narcissistic as secular life usually is.

Competition is good but it creates its own challenges (that is not a criticism of capitalism, it is a statement about how not all dimensions can be maximized at once), and the way competition affects and infects people who always want to do better than the guy next to them.

Red Scare podcast girls on real sex

I was listening to one of the Red Scare podcasts, I think this one, and it’s amazing how on-target so much of it is regarding how sexuality really works. One of the hosts said, “Feminism’s all about being in denial,” about your sexuality and sexuality desires… it makes me consider, how many chicks are figuring this out? Lots of them will admit as much in private but not in public, for fear of the feminist social media mob. If feminists were as drawn to the squat rack as they are to baselessly attacking others, they would have boyfriends. It’s like the old days in the Soviet Union, when everyone knew the truth privately but was afraid to admit it publicly. Modern feminism is a con… one of the hosts says, “I’ve taken the red pill on feminism a long time ago.” So Red Pill language is permeating the mainstream. One of them says, “Getting hit by your boyfriend feels good…. Well it doesn’t feel good but it makes you feel alive.” I like the distinction… is “alive” good? Sometimes. Sometimes maybe not. They get the ambivalence and ambiguity in sex and sexuality, something that’s almost entirely missing in the hysterical media world, where all women are innocent victims and all men evil predators.

In reality… there are few victims or true predators… a lot of women have decided that the inept stance that women are irrational is somehow desirable… exactly the opposite stance of the feminism in the 50s – 70s, when women wanted to be seen as being as capable as men. How many women have secret housewife fantasies they won’t express? I’ve heard those too, stated quietly.

Back to sex, one of them says, “I love getting restrained and getting the menace of violence.”… I keep saying “one of them” because it’s hard for me to figure out who is who… they both sound f**kable, could be wrong here… yet for men the lesson is, “BDSM skills matter.” That should be the new Twitter hashtag. I have another post about women’s love for BDSM that I forgot to put up… it’ll come…

Another time one says, “10 years ago I might’ve still been a yuppie.” I dunno, you kind of have to be a yuppie to afford big cities today…

I have talked about Red Scare a little bit before this, and I have been getting messages about it, and about how approving of it is somehow bad, cause it’s hosted by women, or some of the thins they say aren’t true… I disagree that some disagreement removes all value or truth… look, there are various things I disagree with them about (capitalism is awesome and the reason they have a podcast instead of being forced to toil in potato fields or factories, and also Bernie is economically illiterate and unfit to lead the country, or be more than a gadfly…), BUT: they have something interesting to say, particularly about culture, culture’s intersection with politics, sexuality, and male-female relations. It’s also important to not live your life in an echo chamber… we need to be able to disagree but be smart about it… most people can’t move on from their black/white thinking. Having something to say is compelling in an era of morons mindlessly repeating garbled angry formulas they learned fourth-hand from braindead tenured humanities professors.

If you listen to red scare, call her daddy, and joe rogan… one thing they all have in common is that they’re not having the standard media conversation.

Character, game, dating, and would YOU swap lives?

I was talking to Lee Cho daygame on Twitter about this, “One thing I’ve noticed about the game guys who write in depth… very few make me think, ‘I want to be that person.’ Many seem to have something interesting about them but very few seem top of the heap.” Most of the online game guys seem to have a bit of a screw loose, or lack common sense, or the ability to connect (for real, in a deep way) with other people… this shows, eventually, in their writing. Roosh might be the poster boy for this effect… I read him a bit years ago, probably like 2011 or 2013 or something, and found him interesting in terms of his game obsession but, even then, it was obvious that something was internally wrong with him, psychologically or spiritually, for lack of better words.

Top guys (and girls… this is really a “human” thing, not a “man” or “woman” thing) have internal congruence, and people who lack it stand out… which Roosh seemed to, even back then… his interest in f**king women seemed to come from underlying dislike and disdain for women… which many women no doubt sensed, even if they couldn’t articulate what was off about him. So the higher-value, better-put-together women probably avoided him… which reinforced some of his negative views about women… leading to a cycle. Mature adults are highly attuned to congruence and will distance themselves from people who lack congruence.

There is “good screw loose” in the sense of someone who is smart but sees the world differently, and there is “bad screw loose” in the sense of someone who is off, f**ked up, etc. The online game guys don’t seem like they have a screw loose in the crazy inventor / startup founder / rogue genius way… it’s more like a screw loose in the way of the kid no one wants to pick for their team/group… even if the online guys get really good and accomplished at game. A lot of top girls, even the ones who are open to cold approach (lots are), are going to judge a guy based on his social world and social network… if the guy doesn’t have one, or much of one, she’s going to spot that quickly. So it’s going to be hard for a lot of guys to get or retain better girls… there are limits to the front. The better girls are also going to be super curious about character, and, if they find it lacking, they are going to pull away.

In real life… the people I most like and admire, I wouldn’t want to literally take over their lives, exactly, but there’s a lot in them to emulate, not just in their field of expertise, usually. Status/coolness first, THEN evangelize for whatever the thing is. Among guys developing game skills… almost none of them I’d want to trade places with… not at even odds… the number whose overall lives I admire… is pretty small. We’ve all probably met people who are “successful” in some domain, but there is something wrong with them, and whatever is wrong keeps them from getting to where they might get otherwise.

Take… let’s use the “all women blah blah blah” guys as an example. I agree that all women have the capacity to blah blah blah (whatever the example is)… but not all will… an example story from my life… there are others. Or the ones who say all women are lazier and worse than men in a bunch of ways… well, one study claims that women in their 20s now out-earn men in their 20s… one of my own early work mentors was a woman… she was at the top of her field. On average women are worse-suited to leading and creating large organizations… but there are exceptions, and “on average” conceals a lot… in terms of dating, all women have the capacity to cheat, sure… but not all do/will. If you think so, try to get women to have a philander with you… some will, but a lot won’t. If the woman is stepping out… there’s usually also something wrong with you, with her, or with the relationship… but men don’t like to emphasize that.

Top women… don’t put up with less-than-top men… women will also show you who they are, usually pretty early, and MOST GUYS IGNORE THE SHOW. Then… they bitch when the woman acts the way she has shown him she will act… you already knew, or should have known, who she is, but you choose to ignore that (the p***y is good) and then come to the Internet to cry… or to your friends… meanwhile… are you asking yourself who you are, and what you are bringing to the relationship… no, you are not… are you asking yourself what signs you missed… probably not.

If a woman bitches about all the cads she meets, and how guys are all blah blah blah… it’s like, you have probably met thousands of men, and if they are “all like this…” what do they all have in common… you? Same thing with men. Same thing in business. Have you ever met a manager whose employees are somehow all stupid and incompetent? Or an employer who can’t ever get workers? If he says that… then the manager hasn’t learned to be a manager, he hasn’t learned to help people level up their skills, or something is wrong with him if EVERYONE is incompetent. The business is not paying enough, or something else is the matter. I have already written about the most common problem women who can’t find a man have, “Mismatched sexual market value (SMV): Diagnosis and cures.” Well, in business, if a manager or company cannot find any employees, then something is wrong with wages, work environment, location, or something else. It’s up to the manager to diagnose those problems and make changes. Markets are pretty efficient. Most often the problem is wages. People want to make more money, not less, and if the firm is not paying adequately, people will go to the firms that are.

Character judgment is hard and often separate from physical attraction… most people claim to want both in one… most often they pick one and go for that… and get results consistent with it. Extremely effective people blame themselves for successes or especially failures, even when the success or especially failure is outside of their control. The question is always, “What could I have done differently?” “What do I do differently in the future?” Kids rarely do this… to a kid, it’s always someone else’s fault… to the true adult, it’s always my fault, even if it’s someone else’s fault… the most effective people do this… if you follow Elon Musk you know that he knows just about every single part that goes in a SpaceX rocket or Tesla car… he learns relentlessly, because he knows that if the rocket explodes, no matter whose fault it is, it is his fault. Look at the Boeing managers, by contrast. In Boeing, it is always someone else’s fault. But Boeing has an unfair crony capitalist market that is heavily tied into politicians, so Boeing can’t fail, over the short term, because it’s being propped up by regulators. Unless you are a trust fund kid or something, you have to get by on your own wiles.

Character judgment is separate from technical ability… people who are wise are doing it all the time… it is what I am doing when I write, “One thing I’ve noticed about the game guys who write in depth… very few make me think, ‘I want to be that person.’ Many seem to have something interesting about them but very few seem top of the heap.” Maybe they are different in real life… reading their writing, though, problems with character, personality, and intellect seem to leak out… even among the ones with very high technical skill… Krauser is probably the most technically skilled person writing about the game… but as for his character… read his blog/memoirs closely and decide for yourself… don’t take my word… don’t take my word for anything… try it for yourself… develop your own style, sense of judgment, etc. I can help you think about how to think about things, but I can’t tell you what to think. Many people never develop these skills properly and suffer for it, including many guys who are technically good at game.

I have seen some of the RSD videos, and none or almost none of them make me think, “This guy is admirable and I’d want to hang out with him.” Some of them probably have game… almost none of them seem like guys I admire.

There are exceptions… red pill dad seems pretty well put together, although I disagree with him in places… not surprisingly, he, like most functional guys, wants to stay anonymous. In the real world, the penalty of being made known is high, while the amount of money one can earn from coaching is low, and yet most guys can’t be helped cause they’re too incompetent to be helped, or have deep problems, and “bad with chicks” is a manifestation of their underlying problems. “Bad with chicks” is, then, a symptom, not a cause.

A few guys can be helped, and they are the ones I am most speaking to. The number of psychologically okay, well-put-together adult men who don’t have a real job, is super small. There is a lot of “location-independent income” roleplay happening online. I am 100% in favor of real small businesses that can do real location-independent income… that is, however, far harder to achieve than the online hucksters would have the average guy believe, as stated. Most of the guys pitching this… have little evidence of it. I don’t think I know any adult guy in real life, who is put together effectively and doesn’t have a real job of some kind. Effective adult guys… have a job… almost all of the time.

Effective guys evaluate their effects on other people. There is a lot of “tough guy” role play online right now, among guys who think COVID precautions are stupid. Effective guys who are in touch with older parents / relatives / employers / employees… don’t wish to get those people sick, even if they don’t care too much about themselves… that is a point in How I see dating, girls, COVID-19, and the quarantines, right now.” Willful disregard of others tells us something about the guy, his mental state, and his social world. What it tells us… is not good. We know that the route through COVID and minimizing it runs through masks… yet there’s a bunch of anti-mask roleplay online (masks are a tool, not a symbol). Some guys will mistake the online game for the real world, which is sad, but maybe becoming more common, too.

If you read this whole piece… along with the original one, about internal congruence, you will see that a lot of it is about boy psychology versus man psychology… as well as, a bit less, girl psychology versus adult woman psychology. Girls are often attracted to men… and men are often attracted to younger women… but it is useful to see how and where these things intersect… and what maturity looks like. Some women reach psychological and emotional maturity very early… and if a man can’t match them, and grow with them, he is not going to last with her. People are messed up in some ways, are often attracted to and attractive to other people who are messed up. I mostly avoid the most messed-up girls (and guys)… I have f**ked girls who are somewhat messed up… probably not smart buy I have done it… but I have kept them at a distance. If the girl finds you messed up enough, and not in an attractive dark broody way, she is not going to f**k you… she is going to fade away. She doesn’t want to be in your life, like you don’t want to be in the lives of people with bad/weak character.

Read also: “The curious, cautionary fates of many of the guys who go deep into game and Internet.”