I feel like digging this post out of the graveyard, because I am now in total agreement with what Senor Fingers is saying. This conclusion wasn't easy for me to arrive at as I basically had to let a part of my ego die-- the part that took pride in being superior to other men because of my knowledge about women and social interaction.
Over the past 3 weeks or so, I have been reading Pook's blog and he has been awakening me to some fundamental life questions.
Everyone is trying to get you to be a certain way. From all sides, people and forces are tugging at you to be more like how they want you to be. Marketers brand 'cool' onto anything that's profitable and 'nerdy' onto anything that isn't. We don't even question this. As a society, we don't even stop to question HOW staying in and reading came to be seen as nerdy whereas going to a trendy club to buy drinks came to be cool. It's just assumed that it's how it's always been. To actually stop and zoom out and realize that major conceptions you hold may have been formed by other people for their own benefit is truly breathtaking.
Whenever I initially argued the opposing viewpoint in this thread, I valued women above all. It was hard for me to see. After so many years of rotely repeating "I am the prize" and being taught the pickup dogma that supplication is what AFC's do, I could never fathom myself being of the same psychology of the very men I raged against.
But, like the AFC, women were the center of my reality.
I frequented sites like these to learn the latest greatest "frame-control techniques", how to be seen as having "higher value", what cologne women responded to the most. The common denominator was that I wanted women to think highly of me, because I wanted sex from them. Sound familiar?
Tell me, gentlemen, who is more pathetic? The man who spends a week's paycheque on a woman's expensive dinner? Or the man who spends a week sitting at his house in front of a computer, memorizing stories that intrigue women that he, personally, doesn't find the least bit interesting or amusing?
When I argued with Senor Fingers in this thread, I was trapped in the mindset of, "What will get me the most women?". This was the golden cow to me and if something didn't have the possibility of getting me women, I discarded it. What I didn't see at the time and what many of my PUA friends don't see now is that there is more to life than women.
What is more important? Living your life for YOURSELF and being WHO YOU ARE? Or living your life to get women and denying who you are if that's what it comes to?
Living life for yourself IS attractive, but guys get the wrong idea if they start trying to live life for themselves BECAUSE it is attractive to women. Do you see the contradiction here? Living your life for yourself is the ENDS, not the means. It IS the gratification. When women are attracted to that, it is a side bonus.
These things were hard for me to come to terms with. It was gradual and it took me nights of contemplation.
Could it have been that there was a REASON that I felt like sh!t when I practiced "PUA game" and that my feeling of phoniness was legitimate? I wasn't just creating "limiting beliefs" for myself? My gut instincts were trying to help me?
When my mom told me years ago to "just be myself," it clearly didn't work. "Who I was" was a little boy afraid of his masculinity, afraid of his sexuality, ashamed of having never been intimate with a girl.
That was who I was on that moment, but that wasn't who I was at a core level. After I found sosuave and began peeling off layers of social conditioning and falsehoods, I began to rediscover who I really was. When I covered up my sexuality and wrote girls poetry, I was not being who I was. I was being who I thought they wanted me to be, just like when I was "PUA gaming" them I was being who I thought they wanted me to be. When I first found the other big seduction website, my gut instinct was that it was ADVANCED SUPPLICATION. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the complexity and depth of what I saw, so I delved further. What I noticed over time was that my brainiac game conditioned me to be hyperanalytical and critical of everything. Over time, my game slowly devolved. Through this DJ board, I learned to value myself, and girls started rolling in one by one. In the midst of my very first relationship, I found the PUA board, and my relationship slowly fell apart and girls eluded my grasp, even though I was putting myself in their presence night after night. The reason for this is that slowly, and without my full knowing, girls became the center of my reality again.
All the work I'd done at the DJ board got scrapped in favor of what I believed to be more effective, advanced technology.
Now, don't read me wrong. I am NOT condemning the PUA board or blaming them for my de-evolution. I take full responsibility for allowing my passions and true self to fall by the wayside while I tried to become the paragon of PUA dogma. In fact, some of the biggest PUAs over there warn their followers to "Let the Venusian Arts enrich your life, not define it." I learned lots helpful concepts over there. But letting the pickup arts define your life is very seductive, and I was taken in by it.
Of course, the problem with this is that YOU cease to be the prize. Women become the prize again, and no matter how much you tell yourself that YOU are the prize, your mind doesn't believe you. If YOU were the prize, wouldn't you be working on ways to develop YOURSELF instead of on attaining a woman?
The techniques are great if you have strong positive beliefs about yourself, you're happy with or without a woman, and you're so overflowing with good things that you can't help but SHARE with the people you interact with. Then, you have the power to allow these techs to showcase who you are, even though by that time, you don't even need half of them because you're automatically behaving in an attractive way. But, IMO, the techs/tactics are very detrimental if you have strong negative beliefs about yourself, you're unhappy if women don't validate you, and you're so bereft of positive energy that you can't help but TAKE from the people you interact with. Then, all that's left is to HIDE BEHIND the techniques and let them REPLACE who you are since you don't value yourself. In this state of mind, going out and trying to "technique" girls into giving you sex propels you into a downward spiral of weirdness and negativity. Don't believe me? Look around the PUA boards. Some of them have been in the game for YEARS and hop from seminar to seminar, never getting laid and never achieving any fulfillment. And these guys are the RULE, not the exception.
So take everything you hear with a grain of salt, apply your common sense, ask yourself if you care more about getting laid than you do about the rest of your life.
Also, can I plug Pook's blog? It's
http://www.dapook.blogspot.com/
But I'm sure many of you know that already.
Cheers,
Duke
