A Loose Collection of Mistakes to Avoid

This is too big so it will be a multi parter

RZD, a good friend of mine, once said that people only learn through pain. They will only do something when it hurts too much not to. I’ve said as much myself. During a convention in Florida that shall not be named, I had another good friend and influencer, Tanner Guzy ask if it was possible for guys to unplug, or red pill, or whatever euphemism you want to use for it, without having been destroyed by a divorce or other hardship. I told him then that our brains aren’t wired to fix the suboptimal, but to scramble after a fight-or-flight level disaster.

And time has proven us both right. As an aficionado of this space, I miss the days when it was full of guys getting actively screwed over, or destroyed financially, romantically, or losing their families. Those guys had real pain, and real pain made them get shit done. I know there’s a lot of you reading this, or have read my work in the past who don’t have a serious pain. Some of you do, but most of you are in a malaise. The girls don’t fuck, the finances don’t grow, the families stagnate, but it’s all … mid.

And I’m not happy about it, but it looks like some of the only advice that would help is to suggest that they need to hit rock bottom before anything I’ve written will make any sense, or result in action on their end. But you can’t sell merch with ‘get fucked and then you can do the work.’ I took on the attitude of being paid for the information, not the results. It’s the only way you can handle seeing an unlimited supply of frustrated and sluggish men who are doing their best to avoid succeeding on their own terms, or even defining what that means.

If it sounds cynical, that’s okay. I was a sailor, a damned good one, and being cynical got me through 13 years for King and country, and it’ll get me through a career, writing about men and their grievances and solutions to them. As for you, you’re either getting value out of me aggregating all of this into more digestible and easily sourced concentration, or you’re subsidizing those who are, and that’s okay. I don’t know how I did it, but making people who won’t do anything help those who are is a real benefit that didn’t exist before.

So having said all that, I have a loose collection of thoughts that aren’t strong enough for their own piece, a compilation of things that can add value for you or entertain you while you subsidize those who are working at their thing.

This is the most egregious of problems I see from men. If you broke it down, there’s only a few different reasons men find their way to this space: either they are single and unable to get laid and increasingly frustrated from it, married and equally as celibate, raising young kids with a neurotic wife who is failing at mothering well, or being cheated on or divorced while feeling like their life and worldview is crumbling around them. The problem is, each of those scenarios are embarrassing. A seemingly personal failure that people are so ashamed of that, even when anonymous, have a hard time being honest about.

This space doesn’t have many gatekeeping mechanisms. Rule Zero (be here for sexual strategy or positive male identity,) stay on topic (see Rule Zero,) do you even lift bro(?) and check your ego at the door. It’s a collaborative effort to make, and took nearly a decade to mostly agree on them. The hardest one is shedding ego. Dr. Glover writes about toxic shame in No More Mr. Nice Guy, the agreed upon first and most important book in the cannon of work. Something every man should read and internalize that will pay dividends in every other aspect of this space. Yet it’s the one that holds most guys back.

A guy will write his field report, write down his every want and need and grievance, while burying the most important part of it somewhere in the last three paragraphs in a throwaway line. I’m not saying you need to disclose everything to anonymous people on the internet to take things seriously. I’m saying, that by writing it down, you are making a conscious choice to show what you think is important, how much you prioritize it, and how well you understand your situation. The field report, or the journaling of your grievances with a focus on taking action to remedy them, is the most objective and accurate assessment of your problems and potential that exists. By lying to yourself or creating a proxy issue to hyperfocus on, you’re telling yourself the issue.

I’ve read hundreds, literally hundreds of field reports from guys who have one problem, their wife no longer fucks them, and will write hundreds of words on joining a bowling league, taking their kids out to ice cream, “leading” the family (which really means being Mr. Mom) while throwing a drive by line of being celibate since COVID. It’s like that line from Fight Club,

>> Don’t do that disassociation crap. Your pain is right here, stop hiding from it.

The only workaround I know of is to give it a day, then read your own work as if you’re an outsider. I say this because guys are very good at spotting the proxy in other people, but horrible at spotting it in themselves. That distance from writer to reader is as close as you can get to developing it yourself. You may think that’s what everyone else reading your field report is for. But it’s not. Everyone else has their own problems. They are mining your report for their own lives, same as you are mining theirs. No one cares about you, no one is taking on your shit for free. The collaboration is a necessary evil, a way to prevent each individual from having to reinvent the wheel when he can read the blueprints from others.

Where one guy is a sex freak but horrible at settling down, another guy is the exact opposite. Each mans problem is the other mans solution, so they steal from each other.

Not much is worse than replacing the deification of one woman (or women in general) with the deification of a random internet space. The Red Pill doesn’t have a cuck chair, even if you are hell bent on sitting in one. There’s a fair amount of guys who love the attention. They write to build an audience. They wear their sexual hang-ups and toxic shame like a megaphone. They write to the audience.

Stop doing that.

You’re supposed to write for you, same as you’re supposed to lift for yourself, same as you’re trying to improve your lot, for yourself. Others will read it, women will respond to it, and your sexlife will improve from it, but you can’t pander. It doesn’t work. First, when you pander you’re overtly trying to manipulate people. People don’t like that. No one signed onto being sold a tragic sexlife, or a downtrodden father, or a divorce from a used car salesman. Same as if a woman gets the impression you’re trying to impress her, it not only ceases to impress, but actively repels her.

When you write to the audience you’re subtly, or not so subtly, telling them what they want to hear. Nothing is worse for a mans improvement than to appeal to the worst parts of this space. You’ll pander, you’ll wear your problems like a badge of honor. You’ll withhold the juicy details of your lackluster sexlife as a cliffhanger in hopes of giving a distraction for others.

“Oh good. At least my sexlife isn’t as bad as THAT GUY.” Now he doesn’t do shit. You’re not doing shit. And you’ve officially crabs in a bucket, dragging each other down for a hint of dopamine's or an excuse to do nothing (because it could be worse!) And the longer you hang around these spaces, the easier you can sniff it out. You can just tell when someone is a little too on the nose with their grievances. Not every man has all the problems, all at once. Most of you are about, 80% of where you need to be. That 20% that’s missing feels like the worst problem in the world, and while guys have some overlap with each other, our miseries are unique to us. When you meet a guy who has the worst of it all, he’s either unlucky, or seeking validation. Of course we have something about that. Laws of Power, which I don’t talk about much, and rarely apply to men, fit this perfectly.

>>Law 10 of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power is “Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky.” It warns that emotional states, negativity, and self-inflicted misfortune are contagious

The moment you try to fit in with the He Man Woman Haters Club you’ve become part of the problem. A virus that wants to put every man back on the plantation, with an excuse of shared misery that loves company (thanks to Rational Male for the term)

There’s not a lot to work on. Don’t make it bigger than it needs to be

This space has a lot of material. Most of it is repetitive, most of it isn’t very useful. A small sliver is both useful, and an aggregate of the micro lessons in every mans situation. Taken as a whole, the Red Pill space is a well that runs very deep, but not very wide.

Some guys live in poverty, temporary or systemic. Once you have enough money to live independently and not have to worry about your next paycheck, it becomes a number and a question of the lifestyle you want and the tradeoffs you’re going to make for it. Making money for the sake of number going up, without any interest in the tradeoffs or opportunity costs is irrelevant. You may love crypto trading or whatever, but in order to fit in Rule Zero, you only need … enough. How much is enough is a personal choice and prone to change. And there’s only so many ways to sustainably make money, so if you are decent at it, there’s no benefit to hyper fixating on it.

Also. Having enough sex is like having enough air, you only care about it when you don’t have any. Once you sort that out, you can get into BDSM if you like. You can cheat on your wife all you want, you can enjoy prostitutes or whatever you want. Getting enough sex so that you don’t fixate on sex is as far as we go. Clear your balls to clear your head so you can focus on what matters now. Maybe you’re really good at new, interesting and enthusiastic strange. Great. Now what?

And the worst are the people who turn it into a political divinity rod for conservatism. It happened so much that I have a collection longer than my arm of guys writing about it a decade ago.

There’s a small and devoted group of guys with very slight problems (all things considered) that when they sort them out, become perpetual students. They want to see the new thing, the next thing, they treat this as a horn of plenty and want more. But there’s not anything more. It’s sexual strategy and positive identity. Most of it is about you discovering what you personally want out of life, what you won’t put up with, and navigating the gap. Once you’re there, you may feel the need to study fascism (yes, it happens) or the illuminati, or the GOD, or become a fresh 15 minute Catholic.

I’m not saying not to do these things, I’m saying they are out of scope. And the more that people try to turn this into their personal mental masturaborium, the less space there is for guys solving the real problems that brought you here. Stay on point. This isn’t a surrogate for a friend group, it’s not a self help space, and it’s certainly not a woman haters club. It’s the cast iron of male development. Make something sturdy, make it once, and never buy another one for life.

Save the personal eccentricities for another time and place.

There’s a lot of short hand terms. We need them. It’s a pain in the ass to explain what hypergamy means in a 500 word essay every time you want to talk about female nature so you just say that. You don’t want to explain that most women act on their instincts so you say AWALT. But when you’re laying out your grievances and shedding your ego, jargon gets in the way more than anything.

I mean, you think you know what you’re talking about. Anyone reading it knows what the term means, but it’s too easy to fudge the descriptions. Shit tests were notorious for this. Every guy called everything a shit test when it was really just bratty behavior from the wife. Every fight was a Main event when it was really just a wife being neurotic. The terms mean things, and while it’s easy to say ‘get the descriptions right’ it’s much easier to use your own words, describe your own things, and to avoid jargon all together. Let the guys writing essays for general consumption use the in group language. You’re not here to impress the audience, you’re here to lay out your work.

And having Said all that. When I talked about the motivated guys of the past, here’s one of my peers from 2016. A decade ago. No ego, all report. Even then, I’ve added a random field report of his to show you how easy it is to make the mistakes, even if you were motivated.

Notice how he uses his own language, but adds the Jargon. Judge for yourself if he gets it right. Notice the writing to the audience in his first post and the correction for when he’s just doing field reports. It’s one of the better examples of the best of this place, and it’s still rough.

After a few hundred of these, you understand that guys all make the same mistakes. What I love the most about this one is that Billy put together years of field reports into a single synopsis. a self awareness masterpiece. It’s only the first half here, but it helps illustrate the rest of this essay, but first.

Ghost of Odessa

Softbone