Well. It’s been several years now that I’ve been studying seduction, though I never did and never will consider myself a part of some “secret society.” I can clearly and distinctly remember the first few times I tried stuff out, the feelings of confusion, and the excitement of the first few successes. And man, have I learned a lot along the way. I have reached what is called, in the language of learning, “unconscious competence” in the field of socialization (if not seduction per se), which basically means that I’m doing things right and no longer thinking consciously about what exactly I’m doing. This, to me, is the ultimate goal. It is not getting laid constantly, it is not sleeping with the hottest women around. Given my background as friendless loser in high school, this is all I wanted, and is the reason that this will most likely be my last post for quite some time. I just wanted to be able to make friends, male and female, and seem like a person worth spending time with.
For all those new guys coming onto <a href="
">PUA Forum</a>s, and for those who have been doing this for years with what I consider to be all the wrong reasons or methodologies, I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned in the hopes that it will be useful and prevent some of you all from making the kinds of mistakes that I see so frequently in this community.
1. The gurus who travel the word doing workshops, writing new books, coming out with DVD programs, and offering in-field coaching want money, and nothing more. They are EXPERT salesmen, and use every trick in the book in order to get you to buy their products. They study seduction, the art of persuasion, for a living, and this has resulted in more than just sleeping with women—it has given them the skills to create followings, mini-cults, and most importantly, make a ton of cold hard cash. They will convince you to abandon everything you know and love in order to follow them and convince you that their way is right. As an example, when I was fairly new to this whole thing, they had me convinced that not getting laid was the cause of my misery, and they knew the way out. It’s an old, old, sales tactic, but I bought it hook, line, and sinker.
They had me convinced that I’d be the happiest dude on Earth if I had the ability to sleep with any woman I wanted and be the life of any party. They need to sell you this idea in order to get you to buy into their beliefs and programs, and this leads me to my next point:
2. Learning pick-up is not going to make you happy. I don’t mean here that it won’t add joy to your life, as well as options and social mobility. I simply mean that if you are a desperate, needy, unhappy individual, it is not going to save you from yourself. You’re unhappy because you’re choosing to be, for a litany of reasons. Pick-up is not going to be the magic bullet» you’re looking for, and it is abundantly clear that some of the best pick-up artists in the world are not only miserable human beings, but no less needy and desperate than when they started out. They’re just expressing it in new ways.
3. Do what makes you happy. If you love video games, if you love computer programming, or anything else, do not let anyone on this Earth convince you that what you’re doing makes you a loser, or an “AFC,” or anything else with a negative connotation. Let me ask you this: Who’s more of a loser, the guy doing what he’s passionate about, or the guy telling the first guy that he’s a loser because he’s not getting laid every night, as if that’s somehow the ultimate test of what makes you a man?
4. A LOT of this material will destroy you, and fuck you up in unimaginable ways if you buy into it without a critical eye. A lot of the advice that guys give, and tell other guys to do, is fucking CREEPY. It is WEIRD. Not understanding this and doing whatever a guru tells you to is going to leave you extremely lonely in the long run. You may get laid a lot, but unless you retain your sanity and humanity, you will not be able to settle into any kind of fulfilling relationship, and your void will only deepen. Read, and learn, with extreme caution.
5. A LOT of people in this community become sociopaths. They may not realize it because they’re part of “a community,” but when you start seeing all women as HBs or Targets or Obstacles or Pivots and all guys are AFCs or PUAs or AMOGS, you are DEHUMANIZING people. You are seeing them as objects, and manipulating them to get your way. Ironically, the “better” they get at pick-up, the more pathological their behavior becomes. Maybe Charles Manson was a PUA. This will also cause you to lose your old friends, who some Community guys will tell you to ditch anyway because they’re AFCs, as you’ll no longer be able to relate to them without thinking about whether they can help you get laid or not.
6. All this crap about “rAFC and RAFC and AFC and PUA and mPUA” is completely retarded. It DOES NOT MATTER. You are a human being learning a skill and growing, there is absolutely no need to categorize yourself and others this way.
7. The last thing I can think of for now is some of the justifications that go on in peoples’ heads as they learn this stuff. The whole “leave them better than you found them” idea is great—if it were remotely true. If you become a guy who hops from woman to woman, racking up as many lays as you can without any desire for anything deeper, you are going to hurt people. There is no way around it. And on that note, “if one of us has to get hurt it’s not going to be me” does not fly either.
If I can think of more stuff, which I surely will, then I will come back and add to this. If any one sentence I wrote resonates with something inside you and gets you to see more clearly, then I’m a happy man. Learn social skills. But don’t lose your humanity.