Manosphere Maladjustment Of The Week – Having Feelings For A Girl Is “Weird”

“I’m sad because I am maladjusted”

Honestly, I see so much social maladjustment in this part of the internet (usually from adolescents trying waaay to hard to be “alpha” or “dark triad” or some other such nonsense), but at least once or twice I see a peach on the blog of one of the more renowned bloggers.

Let’s set one thing straight before I continue – I’m not writing this to imply “I’m better than anyone else”, or any other such sentiment that threatens the fragile egos around here. Nor am I doing it to criticise anyone, or launch a personal attack in any way – lord knows I’ve said and thought some daft things over the years. And even if I’ve taken someone’s remark out of context, it’s not important, since it’s merely serving as a catalyst for a post. I’m writing in the hope that some people might read it, and realise they were perhaps heading slightly down the wrong course with how they were approaching this pickup and self improvement lark. As I know only too well, going off the wrong way, with a head full of nonsense, can literally add years on to how long it’s going to take you to get to where you want to be.

So without further ado (having got the legal disclaimer out of the way, and naming no names) apparently it is now “weird when you develop feelings for girls”. Yes, that’s right, that biological urge that has been programmed into us by millions of years of evolution, to ensure our offspring has the best chance of survival, and that we fulfil our ultimate natural goal of reproduction – that is now to be considered “weird”.

Oneitis is a terrible affliction. It ultimately is our subconscious signalling to us that we don’t think we are worthy of the girl we are pursuing. Her perceived value is greater than our own, and so we pedestalise her, altering our behaviour, supplicating, and eventually driving her away. Consequently, budding PUAs attempt to ruthlessly quash such feelings, fearing that it makes them weak. In doing so, they shut off a large portion of what it is to be human, and prevent themselves from ever really connecting at anything above a superficial level with the girls they shag.

But what is the point of all this self improvement, if at the end of the journey you can’t look forward to the chance of a meaningful relationship (you know, one with emotions and everything) with a girl who you know is true top quality in every regard?

I am single, I am happy, and I am happy to continue being single until such time as I meet a girl who makes me reconsider – and I’d still be happy even if that never happened. My life is good – but I’m not so conceited as to think it couldn’t be better shared with someone else, who complements me in every way. And if or when I do, I need to make sure I’ve got my shit together. That I am a sufficiently confident, masculine individual, with enough going on in his life other than pickup, that I can retain my sense of self, and not pedestalise and supplicate even when I have strong feelings for someone.

It’s easy to be aloof when you don’t care about something. Maintaining state and frame when you care – now that’s a real challenge. One that I hope I experience often – since if I don’t, then it means I haven’t met any girl I actually give a shit about, which is ultimately a shame.

So no, I do not think it is “weird” when you develop feelings for a girl. It is completely normal, and part of being human. The other alternative is to be a soulless, unfeeling robot, and then wonder why you suffer player burnout down the line. The problem comes when these feelings overwhelm you, and you lose your sense of self. Despite being unpleasant in the short term, it can serve as a flag that you are not as far along in your journey as you thought you were, and so in that sense can be beneficial.

Stop trying to gain confidence solely through picking up women, redefine what matters to you, adopt an abundance mentality to life, and watch as your confidence and ability with women skyrockets quite independent of how many notches you’ve currently got under your belt. Women should be the side dish to life, not the main course. There’s no better immunisation for oneitis in my book.

Sleep And Mood – Another Update

Because what good girl doesn’t sleep in full makeup?

Following on from my previous posts in this series:

• Sleep And Mood
• Sleep And Mood – An Update

I thought I’d share my recent thoughts on the issue.

• ZMA capsules – initially, I only took these on the days where I trained, the reasoning being that the deeper sleep you can achieve, the quicker your muscles will repair. Now however, I am taking these every single night – the difference between when I do and don’t is marked. On nights that I don’t take them, when I wake up in the night it can take me a while to fall back to sleep. On nights that I do take them, I still wake up sometimes, but feel “thick” with sleep, and fall back into a slumber immediately. It is the magnesium in them that has the effect on sleep – the zinc does nothing (it’s supposed to be a natural testosterone booster, the there is zero evidence for this unless you’re suffering from a deficiency)
• Clean bedding – ok, I will admit that sometimes I am guilty of letting quite a few weeks go by in between washing the sheets. It’s an incremental thing – you don’t notice them gradually becoming dirty. The difference when I do eventually get around to it however is marked – I sleep literally twice as well. I’ve started making myself wash them every single week without fail
• Falling asleep with the TV on – this one might not be for everyone, but several of my friends and I swear by it. I put an episode of some mundane nature documentary on, set the sleep timer on my TV, and put the volume to a level where I just can’t quite make out what is being said – any louder and I start listening to it. My brain tries to focus in on the words, but can’t make them out, and it completely distracts me from any thoughts going around my head. That taken in conjunction with looking at a bright screen in a pitch black room (make sure you are using the excellent f.lux to adjust the colour temperature for night time viewing) is like a sedative – I’m flat out asleep in under 5 minutes, every single time, without fail
• Respect your body clock – the hormones in our body are designed to cycle on a daily basis in conjunction with the cycles of light and dark. If I go to bed around when it gets dark, and get up when it starts to get light (I’m currently sleeping 10pm – 6am) I literally feel amazing compared to if I go to bed too late and sleep in. Even if I wake up at 5am, and I know I’ve only had 6 hours’ sleep, I will still get up rather than making myself go back to sleep for another couple of hours, since I know I will feel groggy and shitty all day if I do so

So there you have it, who’d have thought there’d be so much to discuss on the topic. I really do consider it to be the single most important factor in my life to determining my mood, my energy levels, concentration, progress at the gym – you name it, it’s all based on an excellent night’s sleep.

Apply An Abundance Mindset To Life

In the context of pursuing women, I’m sure there aren’t many of us in this part of the internet who haven’t read about the importance of having an abundance mindset. If you truly believe that you have a large number of options with women, you attach less importance to each individual interaction, not caring whether you succeed or fail, becoming more outcome independent, and in the process telegraphing all the the subcommunications of a high value individual, making yourself much more attractive. You are prepared to take more risks, since you do not fear losing what you have – you know it can be replaced. Your mood is generally better, and when you look at the world you see the opportunity to talk to and meet girls literally everywhere.

I believe it is important to extend this paradigm to all aspects of your life. I read so many blog posts by guys who are investing 95% of all their available time and effort into chasing girls, and yet bemoan their lack of money, poor social group, or unsatisfying cubicle job.

Put it this way – would you really tolerate a soul destroying job, getting berated by your boss on a daily basis, working for a pittance, if you truly believed you could walk out of there at any point and get a different job straight away? Of course you wouldn’t. You’d hand in your notice, refuse to debase yourself in that way any longer, and walk out of there, confident you could pick something up. You blindly backed yourself with women in the beginning, picking up the skills as you went along – why should this be any different?

Your friends are holding you back, they don’t like the person they think you’re becoming. You are threatening their world view, causing them to have to evaluate their own shortcomings in the harsh light of day. They want to put you back in your box. Or maybe all they want to do is go out and drink themselves stupid every weekend, using “shitfaced 3am club trawling” game as their only recourse. Why would you continue to associate with people like this, that are impeding your development? Clearly because you do not believe you are capable of walking out on to the street in any place, on any given day, and bringing cool and interesting new people into your life with the strength of your personality and social skills.

Life is about balance. 95% chasing women is not a good division of your time. What’s the use of an abundance mindset in one area, if you do not cultivate it in any others? Primarily, all we care about is getting girls when we get into this stuff, and sure, you may make good progress with girls in the short term. But you are never going to stand a chance of getting with truly top tier women – the wealthy, debutante 9.5s of this world, who are pursued themselves by extremely successful men with their shit together – if you don’t bring your whole “life game” up to scratch. And that is what you want, right? And if not, why aren’t you setting your ambitions higher?

I woke up this morning feeling slightly dissatisfied with my life, a little boxed in. As my mood began to turn lower, as it would have done in the past, the rock solid foundation of my firmly held conviction – that at any point I could fly to any country in the world, on my own, and within a day have met an entirely new group of people and have lined up as many dates as I wanted – rose up and ruthlessly quashed the nascent depressive rumination before it had a chance to form. A true abundance mindset, and unshakeable core confidence.

It is imperative that you develop an abundance mindset in every facet of your life if you really want to get ahead. Fear of loss, be it in any sphere of your life, will only hold you back.

Enjoy your weekend, do something productive!

The Foolish Man Builds His House On Sand

Your image of your self, and how you define your own self-worth, forms the cornerstone of your identity. It controls how you interact with other people, how you give yourself permission to behave, and how you feel about yourself in general. People who have low levels of self-worth tend to be unhappy, socially anxious, unconfident, and bad with women. In short, a wholly undesirable combination.

So how do you improve your own self-image and worth? Simply by becoming better at the things that matter to you.

Now, the thing I have noted about having high self-worth, is that it doesn’t matter how you got there. The effects of having it are the same – stable, confident happy moods, natural extraversion and flowing social interactions. People are drawn to you.

Much of life is out of our control, and it is important to learn and apply a measure of acceptance to such things – there’s no point fretting about things you cannot change. The choice of things that matter to us however, from which our self-worth is defined, is wholly under our own control.

As with many of us, it was my inability to get the quality of women I desired that led me to seek out this part of the internet initially. As I read and absorbed more and more game related material, how well I doing with women became the only metric which I cared about. My weekend nights out could be made or broken on the back of whether I had pulled or not, or how hot the girl was if I did, or how many there were. Every time I got with a girl who was hotter than any I had ever been with before, I was ecstatic for days. Every time I got fizzled out on after a first date, or failed to pull, I was despondent. The highest highs, and the lowest lows. I’m sure we’ve all had nights out where we’ve just been completely off, each poor interaction driving us further and further into our own heads.

Over the last few months, I’ve been feeling more happy and confident than at any other point in my life, and it occurred to me a little while back why this was – I had ceased to consider my success (or lack thereof) with women as the single most important metric that defines my sense of self-worth. Instead, I looked around me, at all the things I was doing and had already achieved and become in my relentless pursuit of self-improvement, and finally gave myself some credit.

My confidence and self-worth was now solely defined from the single measurable standard of “Am I consistently improving myself as an individual on a weekly basis?”

As soon as I made this mental shift, something interesting happened. My social skills rocketed, and I began attracting more girls of a higher calibre than ever before. The confidence I gained from my shift in perspective meant that all the things I had been chasing for years – unshakeable frame, rock solid core confidence, aloofness, natural extraversion – all suddenly came naturally to me. I no longer had to fake the qualities of a confident, successful man – I was one, and all because I had finally given myself permission to feel and behave as one.

Right here in the present, it may be hard for you to see past that one burning issue which currently matters to you more than anything else, the sole thing by which you currently judge your success as an individual – but try to take a step back, and redefine what matters to you in terms of something which is directly under your control. Don’t forget – what you deem to be important to yourself is entirely your own choice. Reality can be perceived in any way in which you wish.

As mentioned, I recommend always having an overarching life goal to be working towards, and as long as I am making noticeable progress towards this on a weekly basis, then I feel good about myself. The odd week here and there where I don’t, I actually get pretty pissed off, since I knew I could have done better as it was entirely under my control. In this way, it actually serves to motivate me more than anything else has ever done.

By basing my feelings of self-worth on a solid, directly measurable metric that is wholly within my own control, my moods are state are unshakeable. No more swings of confidence and mood, just steady confidence. Combined with acceptance of my feelings and mood (detached mindfulness) and presence, I’m essentially “on” 90% of the time, and I feel great.

You ultimately choose where to build your own mental house. Choose wisely – build it on stone, not sand.

If This Is What The Manosphere Is About, I Want No Part Of It

I debated writing this post. I see plenty of stuff written in blogs that I disagree with on a daily basis – indeed the world would be a boring place if we all agreed on everything all the time, even within the small portion of the internet we refer to as the manosphere. I usually refrain from commenting, because mainly it’s a simple difference of opinion, doesn’t really hurt anyone, and I can’t help but feel that it’s somehow bad manners to go over to someone else’s blog and start telling them how you think they’re wrong – it’s kind of like walking up to someone’s front door and taking a turd on the doormat.

I read something tonight however that I just felt I couldn’t keep silent about. This post is from last year some time, but I’ve only just noticed it due to it being linked on Twitter. Judge for yourselves – http://elementsofgame.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/a-craigslist-ad-answered/ (also http://bit.ly/YRHblh - Google’s cached version on the offchance the post is removed).

The manosphere is many things to many people. A lot of people first come here looking for tips on picking up girls, and find themselves a year later deep down a pathway of personal development and self improvement. I was firmly in this camp when I came to this part of the internet.

As time has progressed, I view things differently. To me, the manosphere I want to be associated with, and contribute to in my own small way, is about aspiring to improve yourself as an individual. Becoming a better man, earning more money, getting in shape, improving your social skills, and so on and so forth. A collection of like minded individuals inspiring one another to better themselves. And moreover, to not only increase in accomplishments, but to become a better person as you progress. To earn the respect of others, to be a role model for other men to aspire to, to live your life in a manner befitting a good man, in a way in which you can be proud to look yourself in the eye in the mirror every day, knowing that you live true to your principles.

What is should not be about, is lying, manipulating and conniving in order to obtain what you are after, no matter the cost and who you have to shit on to get it. What makes the above story even more galling is that it is perfectly possible to get all the pussy you could ever want by being a decent, principled individual, who is honest and authentic about their intentions, without resorting to cynically taking advantage of naive young girls by lying to them, systematically sexually humiliating them, and then actually going online to brag about it.

Those of us who run blogs who get even a small amount of daily views must be aware on some level that there are impressionable guys reading these sites, who through the various ills of society lack guidance in how they should be living their lives and conducting themselves as individuals. There is an opportunity to be a role model to people, to promote the living of one’s life on principled terms, whilst still being able to achieve anything you are after, be it looks, money, girls, or a combination of all three. The last thing anyone should be doing is encouraging people to behave in a manner that is directly harmful to other people simply to perpetuate personal gain.

Those two of you that commented on that post – I thought more of the first of you than to condone this sort of thing, and the second is a prime illustration of why this kind of thing is bad when read by people who apparently have impressionable young minds (judging by the word “teen” in your Twitter handle). Giving someone props for “not feeling any guilt” after behaving like that? Really? This is something you aspire to do?

It’s perfectly possible to observe and take advantage of the decline of society, by making the most of promiscuous women and living solely for yourself, without contributing to it by resorting to morally reprehensible behaviour

And in response to the tweet I’ve just seen bemoaning how “it’s sad when the manosphere only wants you to have success “their” way”: I think it’s far sadder that “your” way of having success is to lie to a naive young girl and inflict a sexual episode upon her which will probably stay with her for life purely for your own physical gratification. And then that you complain when you get called out for it.

Pretty Much All Supplements Are A Load Of Shit

Been struggling to find any motivation to blog of late, so excuse me if this post is a little terse. I’ve got about 5 blog posts half-written, but just can’t be bothered to finish them off!

In a previous post, I mentioned how important it is for anything that I choose to believe in to have been backed up by cold, hard evidence. The greater the level of near religious zealotry displayed by proponents of something, the more suspicious I become. There are few areas with such little scientific fact on display, and so much rabid conjecture bandied about than the area of supplementation.

Fortunately, the dudes over at SpotMeBro (generally good lifting blog – follow it if you’re not already) have done all the hard work for me in this area. One of the founders of the site, having already launched the excellent “supplement bible” examine.com, has taken things a step further, and come up with what he calls the Human Effect Matrix. Basically, the dude has trawled through literally 1000s of scientific papers involving the effects of a wide range of supplements, investigating the strength of the testing methodology used, how strong an effect was noted, and how statistically significant the results were.

From this data, for most supplements in their database, he has been able to produce a rating from A to D for each supposed effect (raising testosterone, increasing lean muscle mass, increased power output, etc) representing the amount of evidence backing up a particular claim, with A being definitely true, B being possible, and C & D being pretty much no correlation noted. Additionally, the direction (up or down), and the strength of each type of effect is noted from 1 to 3, along with the editor’s comment (which usually contains the important bit of analysis).

Check out this page on Fish Oils for an example.

So, having had a look over some of the information, here are some things to note:

There is not a single verified natural testosterone booster

Link

None. Zero. Nada. Zip. The only single supplement with a strongly noted effect in this regard is DHEA, and that was in menopausal women. Tribulus, maca, horny goat weed, zinc – forget it all. It’s all a load of shit.

There is no known supplement that will help you build lean mass

Link

With the possible exception of creatine, and the effect of this appears to be strongly confounded with water retention.

There is very little point in taking fish oils for any kind of weight lifting benefits

Link

Taking a single, large daily dose of Vitamin D has more proven health benefits than taking a multivitamin

Link

Creatine is the single most important supplement you should be taking

Link

The evidence for creatine increasing your power output at the gym is so strong that it is used as the baseline against which other such supplements are measured. More power equals more weight and more reps, which equals more muscle tears, which equals greater strength/size gains. There’s literally no reason for you not to be taking this supplement if you weight train and are even halfway serious about it, it’s not even expensive.

The effects only become apparent after a saturation level is reached in the body, after about a week. For the first week, take 20-25g daily, and then 2.5-5g daily from then on. No need to take before. or after the gym – it is much more slow acting than that. Just take your daily amount first thing in the morning, and get into a routine of doing so, so that you don’t forget.

No need to cycle on and off, there are no verified harmful effects of taking it long term.

So there you have it – strong factual evidence that 99% of supplements out there are doing literally nothing for you as backed up by current scientific literature.

Now I’m sure there will be plenty of people saying “But waah, supplement x definitely works for me, I have noted its effect in an incredibly subjective, and non-scientific manner. What do you mean, where’s my evidence? I know I feel stronger/hornier/whateverer than before”. It’s not possible to say with 100% certainty that there they are definitely wrong - but the weight of a hell of a lot of scientific studies, which have had their methodologies appraised, is strongly against them.

Have a good weekend all.

 

Do You Believe This Is Possible? Or That You Can Do It?

Following hot on the heels of “Put your number in my phone”

we now have “What’s your excuse not to kiss me right now?”

Whether or not you believe this is possible or not, or indeed whether you can personally do it or not, will depend on a number of factors.

• level of unplugging from the matrix – “But women don’t like men who behave like that! He’s sexually assaulting them, what a douchebag! Women want to be respected, their boundaries honoured, slowly wooed over the course of months. Women don’t like sexually forward men like that. This video is fake!”
• level of self confidence – “There’s just no way anyone can do that without getting rejected. Those are all set up. This is far too far outside what I believe to be possible.”
• intellectual honesty/willingness to face harsh truths – “There’s simply no way in the world this video is real. If that man is capable of those things, then that means technically that I could be doing that also, instead of wanking into my sleeve every night in my mother’s basement, my pale skin bathed in the pale glow of my 7 monitors, reminiscing about that one time a girl looked at me for 6 nanoseconds. If that is possible, and I desire the outcome of that man’s actions, then I must look myself in the eye in the mirror, admit that I am a total failure, and allow my ego to crumple in a heap. I am not willing or not able to do that. Mum, can you make me a sandwich?”
• reference experiences – “Whilst I believe it is possible, I have never even tried to do anything like that, and I’m absolutely certain I’d get shot down instantly if I tried it.”

I’ve got to be honest, when I first saw “Put your number in my phone”, I had a hard time believing it was real. I had no (sober) reference experiences that even came close to that myself, and I couldn’t even really picture myself doing it. However, I pride myself on always being intellectually honest with myself, and I knew it was possible, and so I was left to face up to the fact that I simply wasn’t far enough along in my development to pull something like that off yet.

Now I’ve seen “What’s your excuse not to kiss me right now?”, I didn’t even bat an eyelid. Again, I’ve got no (sober) reference experiences of doing that, although I’ve done it easily 500 times when pissed, sometimes without even saying a single word – I’ve even fucked girls within 10 minutes of meeting them whilst drunk - but I no longer think of “drunk me” and “sober me” as two different people, with two different realities of what is possible for each one. I can picture myself doing this, sober, in daylight, and firmly believe it is possible.

I’m sure that these videos took a lot of takes before they had enough successes to put together a compilation. I imagine that the dude got blown out over and over again, but the fact is, it worked enough of the time, and some of those girls are extremely hot.

A caveat? You’re not going to pull this off if you are a pale, pimply, fat, stammering dweeb. You’re going to need to have your shit together, and be very self confident to get away with something like that, but it is possible. If you’re nowhere near that level currently (and I’m not saying I’m out doing this every week – yet…), let it inspire you.