I’m not a fan of the fake it until you me it philosophy. And I don’t believe that all attraction boils down to confidence. I see narcissism not as an attractive trait to develop, but as a weak point that leads to long term troubles.
And so I’d be the last person to pump myself up with feel good self affirmations. I’d rather go the gym, build my business, and work on confidence from the outside in. Be confident in real things, not be confident about being confident.
And so I was surprised at a big shift in attitude that I had yesterday, when I was out daygaming in Bali, handing out business cards and chatting to hot young girls.
I’ve been in Java for the last 8 months, working with great focus on my business. I haven’t been going out or meeting new girls. But I remember that the last time I was in Bali cruising for girls that I was conscious of this feeling of loneliness and hunger whenever I went out. As if there were a poverty and emptiness inside myself. This would be there even if minutes before I’d been with one of my four lovers who were with me in the city at the time.
After noticing that I blogged about it. That made a shift. Since writing it down that sense of poverty and hunger was not the default and only mode any more.
But yesterday was a whole new level of internal shift.
Lately I’ve been commenting over at Rollo’s blog. I started out very confrontational, and basically said that all married men deep down want to do what I’m doing with my life, but can’t get it together to do it.
That caused a lot of backlash. And that led me to clarify my thinking. I had to write it down.
They say that as soon as you state an opinion out loud, that you will have confirmation bias towards that opinion. It’s not enough to think it, you have to publicly take a stance.
I took a very strong public stance saying that men undervalue their own sexual value to young women. That we are actually much more sexually interesting to them than we are told, by society and especially by other older women. I said that it’s perfectly normal and natural for older guys to go after younger women, and guys who thought otherwise were brainwashed and trapped inside cages of their own making.
I went on to detail how my real life is actually lived, when told that I was deluding myself and that young girls in SEA are actually only interested in my money.
I’ve had years and decades worth of excellent reference experiences. When I’m not living with a very hot young woman that I’m in love with, I have been keeping from two to four girlfriends, for at least 12 years now. They age from 17 to 26, and might average about 22. I’ve been doted on hand and foot by many girls, even after they have met each other, and even when I only pay for dinners, and all their friends tell them that I’m too old and ugly and poor.
Even with all these great reference experiences, when I go out to chat up girls on the beach or in the mall or on the street, I FEEL like and old and ugly man. I don’t FEEL attractive and wanted. I know that a minority of girls would eventually fall for me, given a chance for me to talk away my ugly face. But I don’t get IOIs when I go out, I’m invisible, and sometimes I’ll get a scowl.
That changed yesterday. My reference experiences matched up with the opinion that I publicly argued.
I handed out cards like a boss. I approached one extremely poised and attractive student who was with her mother, baby sister, and aunt on the beach. I told her that I had to say hello because she was so beautiful. We exchanged numbers, and later that night she sent me a goodnight text. I approached many other girls, and although I was clumsy in my brief sets, I did introduce myself, and felt great while doing it. That’s kind of a big deal for me.
I did not feel lonely or hungry or wanting. I did not feel ugly and out of my league. I felt like a perfectly natural man of value that a girl could very well be interested in, making introductions. As if it were the fun and social and natural thing to do.
I also saw another gentleman my age working the beach yesterday. He’d just sit down beside a girl and chat her up. As if that kind of thing happens all the time. I also saw some local boys doing the same. Just showing up next to a crowd of girls sitting down, saying hi, and sitting down, and starting up convos.
I don’t believe in fake it until you make it. I want to be truly congruent, and not bulshitting myself. I don’t want to deny reality in order to function at my peak within it. Narcissism is a short term benefit and a long term disaster.
But this was not narcissism, and not faking anything. There were some big inner shifts, and I can pinpoint when they happened, and I know why.
It’s because I wrote down and argued my opinion. Now I have confirmation bias towards those opinions. I created my inner reality. Now my reference experiences and my inner feelings match up. I not only have several girls and lots of history with girls, but I feel abundance. I not only have reference experiences of lots of girls liking me, but I feel that random hot girls would like me too. I not only have decades of dating much younger women as reference experiences that it’s normal, but I feel that it’s perfectly normal to approach girls thirty years younger than me.
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So what makes you blog? I find journaling of any sort hard to maintain. You constantly have a lot good insights.
Do you get traffic to you blog via links with your username. Or do you link to them in your comments?
This is a low traffic blog and I make no attempts to market it. I’m in a few manosphere feeds, and that brings in most of the traffic.
Some writers feel compelled to write. I’ve known such personalities to occasionally declare that they are retiring from writing. When I hear that I call bullshit, because I can tell by their writing that writing is a compulsion for them also. I’ve been correct so far.
Writing is integral to my very being. It is how I think. As I’m walking around in the day, things that I see and do are held within the lens a discussion and potential blog post.
Without writing my thoughts would never get organized. Writing and clear thinking to me are inseparable. Can’t have one without the other.
And this is the key to why I write: clear thinking in and of itself is enjoyable to me. I get pleasure from organizing thoughts, and having creative insights. And that can’t be done in isolation; a guy needs dialogue to do that.
If I have a lot of insights, it’s because having insights is pleasurable to me. I do that as a habit because that’s what feeds my brain pleasure.
A lot of people simply are not built that way. They find thinking taxing, or boring, or I don’t know what. It’s not a source of pleasure. And when they do think, being logical and consistent is not a priority to them. Thinking for them might be more useful to rhetorically win an argument, even if it means resorting to slanderous lies, rather than being used to creatively puzzle together as much truth and knowledge as possible, for it’s own sake.
This difference in attitude to thinking has at times been a source of social isolation. I’d be all into talking about philosophy and the meanings of life, and I couldn’t find anyone else who gave a shit.
I believe that my mental process itself is built to require me to write. It’s not something I put any effort into wanting to do. I’d never consider not doing it.
“A lot of people simply are not built that way. They find thinking taxing, or boring, or I don’t know what. It’s not a source of pleasure. And when they do think, being logical and consistent is not a priority to them. Thinking for them might be more useful to rhetorically win an argument, even if it means resorting to slanderous lies, rather than being used to creatively puzzle together as much truth and knowledge as possible, for it’s own sake.”
This, right fucking here. Truth * 100. It disgusts me how accurate this is. 99.9% of the population seems to be allergic to thinking. I don’t get it. I truly don’t get it. Me, I can’t turn it off. I am thinking ALL the time. I try, but I can’t. This is actually a problem when falling asleep because it keeps me awake or my thinking is fragmented and it actually bothers me while I’m bobbing up and down between wakefulness and alpha waves.
No one cares about the truth. They just want to be right. God forbid I should should stand my ground on something. I’m being “argumentative” or I think of myself so smart. No, I just want to arrive at the truth. I’ve constantly got my phone out to verify disagreements. Not because I want to say “told you so” but because if I believe I know something and someone else says something different, one of us is wrong. If I’m wrong, I want to know what the truth is so that I don’t continue to hold false beliefs. Why is this so hard to understand? I used to assume that others would be equally as interested in hearing what the truth was, regardless of who was inaccurate. Not so. I find that most people are perfectly happy to go around continuing to be morons. After three or four or five exchanges on the disagreement in question, I’m being “argumentative” – like they weren’t doing the exact same thing for the exact same length of time? And when I take my phone out to check, I’m an arrogant asshole. Why aren’t they just as curious? I don’t know but it disgusts me.
I am reminded of a particular disagreement with a friend of mine. Not sure how we got onto the topic but it was freezers.
Me: blah blah blah, the correct temp for a freezer is -18 C.
Him: I read it was -4 C.
Me: No, it’s -18. It could be -20, but I’m pretty sure it was -18.
Him: Pretty sure it’s -4 C
Me: Well, it’s possible my memory is playing tricks on me but I was having issues with my fridge last year and was doing research on it. It’s -18.
Him: Well, I just know I read it’s -4.
Me: Well, I’m pretty sure whoever you got that from was wrong. I remember clearly -18. That’s how this all lead to me buying a new fridge to replace the broken one.
Him: (with a look of disdain) Well since you looked it up I’ll have to give you this one — but I read that it’s -4
Me: You don’t have to give me anything. It’s fairly fresh in my memory because it was a major event in my life that happened in the past year. Look it up if you think I’m wrong
Him: I really don’t care about it enough to look it up
No, you don’t care because it’s so unimportant but you certainly care enough to fucking argue with me like a dick for 10 minutes!
Why would any rational adult assume that what “he read somewhere long ago” is more likely to be right that what someone else “researched for weeks because his fridge was broken and eventually had to buy a new one”? And more importantly, why not just look it up, find out the truth and the STFU?
Average person’s MO:
1) repeat until the other side gives up out of exhaustion – you win
2) If the other side doesn’t give up – you don’t care enough to look it up – you win (in your mind you can go on thinking the other is wrong)
3) If the other side doesn’t cave in – he’s just being an argumentative asshole
4) if the other side looks it up – he’s an arrogant know-it-all
Can’t lose.
But why is it about winning or losing? Can nobody discuss something to simply arrive at the truth to increase knowledge and satisfy curiosity anymore? WTF? Sure, it feels good to be correct but it’s not why I do it. I “argue” (actually discuss and question but to everyone else it comes across as arguing it seems), because I don’t want to keep holding wrong beliefs if they’re wrong. I want to know what is correct if it’s verifiable.
I really feel like I’m not ONLY one that feels this way out of all the people I know.
“This difference in attitude to thinking has at times been a source of social isolation. I’d be all into talking about philosophy and the meanings of life, and I couldn’t find anyone else who gave a shit.”
This too * 100. “What if…?” questions always get a response of “who cares??” or “but that would never happen so it doesn’t matter”.
Ya, I hear you. It’s enough to make a guy a misanthrope. I keep hoping and expecting for most people to not be the way they are. And sometimes they can have reasonable discussions. But then if the topic is something they are ego invested in, people stop valuing truth. Blatantly.
There are rare exceptions. Sometimes I assume someone is an exception, only to later be disappointed. I thought Rollo was a clear thinker, and recently had to come to the sad conclusion that he does not value truth. I had overestimated him, and that really sucks – it makes the world a lonelier place.
It can seem sometimes that people are working extremely hard to deliberately not hear what I say. How do I learn this language that everyone else seems to be able to use, where you just say something and others understand it? It seems that language is called “agreement”.
I don’t speak agreement.
I speak truth.
It’s lonely and annoying as fuck when you speak truth to those who speak a different language. You keep assuming you are both speaking the same language, and talk louder and louder to get your point across, but the more clearly and insistently you talk, the more they hate you, and the more you become an outsider.
It’s like I’m talking with myself. LOL. What a great way to put things.
But here’s something that occurred to me years ago. I think of myself as reasonably intelligent. More importantly, it’s not that I think I’m so smart so much as other seem to just be stupid. There are many, many, much, much smarter people out there than me. But of all the people I know, I’m the only one that consistently addresses the uncomfortable truths and tries to have consistent values and enlighten myself by revealing inconsistent thoughts/behaviors. Like you, I don’t speak agreement. I speak truth. What I realized, however, is that as smart as I think I am, maybe I’m really stupid after all. I mean, this language that you talk about, it seems that 99% of the brain dead population is able to use it effortlessly but I can’t. I don’t even know how to speak that language. When I’m tired and don’t feel like arguing or if I’m hanging out with someone that has proven to me over the years that no amount of reasoning will make a difference and that by doing so I’ll just harm the relationship rather than enhance it, I will sometimes attempt to agree and disregard, but it comes across as arrogant and dismissive. I can actually make friends quite easily. I can strike up a conversation and establish rapport a lot better than I used to. Better, even, than I “feel” that I can. But when conversation turns to things that require a bit of thought and I want to point out erroneous conclusions or flaws in logic, I can’t. I don’t know how to do it diplomatically so that both of us can feel good about it. I simply do not know how and if I do know how, I’m not able to do it effectively. I can only conclude that I’m too stupid to do it. LOL. Maybe it’s me that’s crazy after all, because it’s not likely that EVERYONE I know is fucked. But I feel so damned normal, logical and smart. (I’m now knowledge smart. I can’t remember historical facts or what have you. I’m like to think of myself as logic smart – and even then, not overly so – like I said I just feel others are stupid more than me being smart.)
Another interesting thing that occurred to me quite a while ago is, why am I like this (and/or why is there anyone like me, if there is)? I mean, I seek logic everywhere and am always disappointed when I don’t find it. I can’t understand why someone has no interest in thinking logically. I just don’t get it and I can’t help but think they are morons for it. Obviously, they live their lives based on emotion, not logic, and that’s shameful. But guess what? My need for logic, my drive to arrive at truth, that’s an emotion! Emotions drive all of our behavior and thinking. Even the desire to be logical is emotional. So what does that make us? Is the desire to be logical and more valid than the desire to be right or the desire to avoid contradictory evidence? If so, why?
At the end of the day, we’re all emotional creatures and logic just may be an illusion.
I agree, Xsplat. Sure, confidence matters, but it’s ONE factor. Not all that matters, like Heartiste says.
If confidence is all that matters, is that just in pickup? Or in other fields as well? Imagine saying confidence is all that matters in race car driving. When someone doubts you, you say “without confidence you can’t even sit down behind the wheel.” But all the other drivers also have confidence. Confidence is just the beginning – then you need to learn how to drive.
Confidence Is All, and Fake It Till You Make It are repeated by some (CH) because that’s what readers want to hear, and you want many readers so you get many donations. Confidence worship is the Marxism of pickup. You’re great the way you are, all are equally perfect, so if you fail it’s because of external factors that you have no control over. A seductive message because it’s easy – no need for improvement.
What happens if a guy who needs to improve really believes that Confidence Is All is one of two things:
1) The guy stays behind his computer, because he’s really just drugging himself with flattery. This is the usual outcome. You see these guys stay in a forum month after month, year after year, never meeting any girl. Writing in a comment section is just a game for them, a way to be king online.
2) The guy pumps himself full of unwarranted confidence and goes out to do cold opens – and fails over and over. Because he still hasn’t changed anything. The way he talks still reveals him as a loner who can’t create a rapport. So do his looks, his clothes, and his lack of social circles.
You think women are seduced by Confidence Is All? Idiots are always full of confidence, and attractive women are approached by them all the time. Confidence is not some great new secret you’ve discovered, it exists in abundance. Hot women constantly run into this, and talk to each other about the douche who looked like a greasy monkey but thought he could impress with his bold movez. Maybe he’d been reading some blogger who wanted him to donate money.
The guy who goes out to cold-approach with nothing but confidence – no way of creating a rapport or making his approach look natural – will fail a hundred times, and will then gain a reputation in his neighborhood. It is not a good reputation, and it will stay with him forever. No woman will go out with him then because he’s known as “the creepy guy who hits on anyone”.
The deep drawback of gaining a bad reputation as the guy who hits on anything that moves is never talked about in the manosphere. The poor saps are never warned about it. Because assuming all readers will be successful sounds cooler and is a better sales pitch. And because many of the writers actually don’t do any pickup at all, so they never get to that point where a bad reputation could develop.
But hey. At least they have some friends online.
I’m glad you’re finally feeling the confidence you’ve earned.
It’s often the case that things don’t feel “real” until we stop to make the case for them. And we often don’t do that until challenged. I’m sure you’ve noticed, though, how long it has taken for you to even feel challenged enough to make the case. Normally you just dismiss people as Not Getting It, and rightly so – they don’t, and they wouldn’t respond the way they do if they did. People like Rollo can only push you so far in your personal development, as any limitations of your worldview that are beyond his sight will not be challenged until you challenge them yourself. And that requires getting to the point where you’re willing to leave those who Don’t Get It behind.
I am grateful that you make your writing public, by the way. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one to think this way, and nice to have some confirmation that it really is possible to keep sexual and romantic interest of multiple attractive young women later in life.
-J
xsplat – the dynamic you speak of:
– “It’s because I wrote down and argued my opinion. Now I have confirmation bias towards those opinions. I created my inner reality. Now my reference experiences and my inner feelings match up”
I think this psychological dynamic is actually contingent upon the underlying and deeply mysterious principle of personal agency, which I have defined as follows:
personal agency = the belief that we have the power to make meaningful non-deterministic decisions, which therefore also implies personal responsibility for said decisions.
You decided to entertain for due consideration a particular frame of reference wrt to the dynamics of female attraction for men (as borne by your own experience). However this frame of reference truly became a choice (meaningful and non-deterministic, and entailing responsibility), once you committed to it, via the excellent method for instilling such commitment within oneself, which is the method as you alluded to, – i.e. – by way of using the Socratic method, as on offer to some degree at Rollo’s Rational Male site. A skilled practitioner of the Socratic method will it turn make use of the empirical method, because it is best if that which one commits to, as I am so defining, is closer to truth, (much better outcomes flow to those that commit to concepts that indeed are closer to truth), and of course the empirical method is designed for that precise purpose in mind.
In any event, your insight in this post of yours, is very nuanced and I never really thought of it precisely this way myself (i.e – exactly just how mysterious, the arising of the prescription of personal agency, actually is). Your post really shines a light on just how subtle and mysterious this aspect (the “will” aspect) of this agency thing actually is.
Unfortunately, there are too many commenters over at the Rational Male who do try to use the Socratic method, but are not at all skilled wrt to the use of the empirical method, and so much of the exchange there ends up just devolving towards rhetoric by way of attempts at psychological manipulation, much of which amounts to sophistry (i.e – attempts to operant condition your ass, because the want for the perceived social power of being seen as right, is valued more than actually being closer to truth). xsplat – I noticed that was clearly part of the dynamic wrt to the exchanges you attempted to enter into with many commenters. xsplat – that is the normal course of events for Rollo’s blogspot. And I have determined for myself (over several months of commenting there), that Rollo himself sadly falls into this category, however I am still not clear on why he chooses this weakness. At any rate I have been banned there on prior occasion for no good reason, and now I have been permanently banned since several days ago, for the ludicrous charge of spamming (belies some idiocy in my view) This state of affairs wrt to the Rational Male site, is all very unfortunate, because Rollo gets a whole lot right, but then draws many inaccurate conclusions due to sometimes very sloppy (but often intricate and veiled) logical operations. This makes his discourse worse that useless (because it is misleading in a way that is not readily apparent at first without quite the time investment, and many readers will miss the logic problems in any event). And Rollo completely refuses to engage with me (he will say otherwise, but each answer he ever provided to a question of mine was just a misdirection back to the edifice of his overall narrative for which the answers to said questions cannot be found). I have come to the conclusion that, though Rollo thinks he is helping men, he actually is not, he is doing the opposite, and in fact the site is therefore pretty much the most inaccurate blogspot found in the manosphere (because if there are inaccurate conclusions drawn at other manosphere blogspots it tends to be much easier to see the inaccuracy for what it is), and as such Rollo’s particular brand of inaccuracy is toxic. An interesting and fascinating ultimate turn of events, wrt to the 9 months or so I have invested in trying to engage in exchanges over there.
One ray of hope for Rollo and his site are the very recent interesting exchanges commenter Scray has had with Rollo and others wrt to the source of the egalitarian mindset. I am heartened to see that Rollo is engaging with Scray on this front. Maybe Scray will help Rollo and the readership there finally sort some things out. Scray is a very worthy practitioner of the empirical method, and is is good to see that Rollo is engaging with him on this egalitarian issue, because that issue happens to be a very hot button for Rollo, and I think the Rollo’s overall misunderstandings have an awful lot to do with his misconceptions around this egalitarian concept.. Time will tell. Scray’s most recent exchanges over the last few days are really interesting and worth the time having a look-see.
I agree with your comment about people not taking the socratic dialogue method seriously, or simply not being capable of it, on therationalmale comments section, and I agree with the dissapointment in Rollo himself. I also agree that this is dangerous and potentially poisonous. There is much that Rollo teaches that is just right enough to be TOO believable. It’s a diorama of a world view, that is just close enough to the truth to be taken as truth. It’s also a big high contrast cartoon, and in that way more wrong than right.
However I don’t share your interest or concern with any sort of egalitarianism. No form of it. I not only don’t believe that the concept can be valid, but have no interest in it from a moral point of view. I have no guilt about that. I don’t believe that people SHOULD be treated equally, any more that I believe that people are, IN ANY WAY whatsoever, equal.
I certainly don’t treat my women as equals. I treat them as subordinates. V is the closest thing to an equal, but if she ever tried to ask me to hold her purse, she’d soon discover that I consider her my subordinate also.
I treat nearly every human I ever meet as a subordinate. That’s an inner arrogance, that I used to believe was a major psychological flaw. It caused me a lot of pain, and I felt guilty for it. Now I just admit to myself that in reality yes I’m actually better than most people. No problem, no guilt. It’s just a fact.
I’ve long wanted to literally rule the world. In my own ways I actually try to do that. Most people I interact with are my employees, or subordinate girlfriends. Even when I had male friends out here, they were younger, and in a mentorship and employee/intern position.
There are peers and betters out there. I rarely meet them. It’s fun to, and can even be a big highlight of my life. They really stand out as quite special to me. But I no longer hold any world view that discounts, on any level, differences and status hierarchy.
I no longer hold any sort of metaphysical view of people being equally deserving of respect, or of anything else. Not equal in any way, not equally deserving in any way. This causes me no cognitive dissonance.
It would have my younger self.
Of course people tend to want to feel that there are no real betters above them – “You think you’re better than me!” is a common throw down challenge for a bar fight. The lower social classes sneer at the upper, and vice versa. And there is no single metric of what is better.
There are hundreds of thousands of metrics, each valid only contextually. And all subjective. And so what? It’s an advantage to be well positioned socially, intellectually, physically, sexually, emotionally, or any scale of comparison we could come up with. I prefer to be advantaged. I WANT to be better, and have no shame if I actually in some ways AM better.
And I have no shame in being in a position of power and authority. Why should I not feel totally deserving of such authority?
Especially with the women I date. After all, I’m over twice their age. Sometimes more than three times! Damn right I should be the authority.
Some people really don’t want the burden of responsibility of being any sort of authority. That’s fine by me – I don’t really care what others do. I know about how I live my life, and I’ve taken pains to teach others how to be dominant inside their relationships. Because I know how that works, and it works for me.
Hey xsplat – thanks for the response. Interesting comments. My appreciation of the egalitarian perspective is rather nuanced and may not be what you think. I could share a whole lot on that if you wish (but perhaps you are already aware as I did comment and answered commenters questions quite extensively over at Rational Male, on this topic, over the last several months).
At any rate, if your interested, perhaps my comments at Krauser’s site within his article on Stirner, would be the briefest overview of my thoughts on the egalitarian. Here is the link:
https://krauserpua.com/2016/02/18/the-german-idealist-tradition-in-philosophy-and-daygame/
I am quite intrigued by the interplay of what perhaps could be termed Sex Magick, with humankind’s propensity for the egalitarian, given that, to me, these two propensities are so utterly foreign one-to-the-other and in contradiction, yet form the nexus of the drama we call the human condition. It seems you may have alot to say about the “Sex Magick” (as borne out by your recent comments under your “Too Much Information” post). As such I will keep reading you.
I had read that comment on Krauser’s blog when you wrote it.
You start with this premise, that we are equal in existential fundamental worth.
I don’t start with that premise, and argue that the premise is meaningless. I don’t know how to put it more clearly, and am inclined to just repeat the same thing in different ways.
There is no such “thing” as existential fundamental worth. It only exists in YOUR thoughts. There is no reality that you can point to where any such worth exists.
It’s just your personal value system. And that’s fine, and cool, and you are welcome to it.
It means nothing to me.
@ Wild Man, I’ve noticed that a large percentage of the population has an innate psychological drive and need for meaning.
People are terrified of nihilism. They think that nihilism equals certain and permanent debilitating mental depression. Or worse – they expect they would turn into sociopaths if they accept nihilism.
I have no such fear.
I’m happy. Nihilism is fine. There is no contradiction. I treat people around me well, and I’m nothing close to a sociopath.
I don’t need this existential worth that you need. I don’t need life after death. I don’t need any god. None of those things are psychologically important in order for me to feel contentedness.
This has been discussed countless times by countless people. Some percentage of us absolutely crave meaning, and invent it, at all costs. Some of us need it much less.
Truth and meaning are very often at odds. Chances are, if you have meaning in your life, either you realize that it is manufactured and you believe it in the same way that you believe in a dream, (exactly like believing in love merely because it’s fun to do and why not?), or you deny reality in favor of some “real” meaning.
Young women in Asia are typically quite happy to be going with much older guys. A 20 year or more age difference is not uncommon at all. Society is very accepting of it.