LordFall

Sure yes apologies I didn't get a notification for your question on that thread. I don't think the idea is to be guarded as you enter a relationship. More about making self-development part of your identity so that you naturally self-improve. Some people tend to only use self-improvement to secure a baseline of safety and then let themselves go once they get into a relationship. I think that's why the idea of life purpose is so powerful. If you are in a lane of society that you hate then yeah it makes sense to see clocking in or working out or building a social network as a draining obligation and once you find someone that accepts you for who you are type of idea then you've arrived and there's no need to try anymore. If you genuinely fall in love with what you're doing in life I think you can keep reaching greater and greater heights. In the case of a relationship it'll either make it more fulfilling as you both embark on a shared life purpose together as a mission that underpins your marriage. Some people don't really like each other nor have common goals and just use their relationship as a childrearing arrangement. If you build your life this way and you do get into a divorce or a breakup, you'll be back on the dating market stronger than ever instead of being completely out of your depth and a shell of your former self.

@Lyubov I would be careful with throwing out the baby with the bathwater in terms of invalidating the validity of hierarchies. They serve many purposes in our society beyond soothing low self-esteem or chasing approval. Our doctors for example face a rigid hierarchy to get into college and to get into med school. Our engineers similarly need to be above the crowd in their skillset so our infrastructure is high quality. A lot of people do not enjoy striving for excellence but the ones that do generally tend to bless the rest of us with the fruits of their labor.

Yes I like smart and somewhat dominant women too. For me they also need to know when to give up control and be submissive. Then it becomes a fun dance of polarity. Some women are very uncalibrated and it turns me off pretty instantly. I like women that can banter and speak well, I'm definitely a sapiosexual.

It's an important concept to understand to better identify the type of woman you're dealing with. Some women play games because they enjoy chaos and don't know how to function in a stable environment. Some others simply have high standards and are serious in their quest to find a long term partner. If you mistake the former for the latter you'll end up with the exciting but destructive woman instead of an exciting powerful woman that's gonna be a blessing in building all that you desire in this world.

It's definitely a test, although it's probably mostly subconscious. It comes from the concepts of signalling theory in evolutionary biology where in the mating process every suitor pretends to be a highly valuable choice. There are signals that are harder to fake than others and those are called honest signals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory For human males it can come from the form of pretending to be higher status than you are or also hiding a lack of compatibility. That's why a lot of women will subconsciously say something offensive to you to test your frame and men will either be able to banter back and not be affected, get angry at her and "put her in her place type of energy" or crumble under pressure and start stuttering because they don't react well to confrontation. In all cases she has gained invaluable information in being able to see through the mask the man was putting on.

How did it go?

Because you get paid to solve problems and if someone didn't solve it already it was probably too hard, complicated or annoying to solve. Our economy is derived from agriculture for which you needed to toil for months to get to the harvest and then collect and be able to relax for a bit. It's still the same concept today where your paycheck is what you harvest from the marketplace for solving other people's problems. That’s why your best bet is to find where your natural inclinations intersect with market demand. Study business models to understand how value is packaged and delivered, then build a skillset that solves problems efficiently and at scale. When you do that, the money takes care of itself. This is why I find myself drawn to the creative and media space. It's a big industry with many problems worth solving and my form of intellect complements more artistic people well that find researching marketing and content distribution pipelines to be boring whereas I find the interconnecting ideas to be fascinating. I'm not quite financially independent yet as a result but I feel much closer with all I've learned this past 12 months.

@Joshe I don't think you understand utility of the model well. You seem to have a huge bias against it due to a fear of being labelled and perhaps your identity diminished? The whole point is not to particularly map each individual but to figure out where their centre of gravity lies. I find spiral dynamics very useful in generally assessing what a person's viewpoints and values centre around @Leo Gura Yes, I think that's where its cognitive limitations lie. By refusing to empathize with people they demonize, they fail to understand the mechanics behind those people's actions and thus fundamentally misunderstand the world. @Xonas Pitfall Well put. I think green is indeed quite empathetic but its refusal to understand the darker side of the reality keeps it quite limited in both its understanding but also impact on the world. @OmniNaut I find myself mostly centered around Stage Yellow. I've had a lot of Turquoise level awakenings but I also have a lot of unintegrated aspects from the lower states that stop my development as an individual. I'm an INTP. @Ulax I think they are a cool stage. Indeed annoying but well meaning. It's important to understand a stage's limitations to be able to integrate its strengths and overcome its limitations.

I think you're generalizing and perhaps even projecting. This depends on the teacher that people learn from and who they are as an individual before they get into it. You undermine your point and it's credibility by making shallow observations instead of going deeper to the truth of the phenomena. Learning PUA is fundamentally a skill that teaches you social self-sufficiency and thus freedom and power when it comes to your dating and social life. It's a very rare skillset in society that's not widely taught and represents the culmination of the life's work of many very smart and competent men. That some misuse it to further their trauma and treat others poorly does not invalidate the incredible nature of it.

Dogs are present and happy, doesn't mean they're spiritually advanced. Don't conflate being detached and enjoying the present moment with high development. A lot of it comes from avoidance, a lot of these dudes defend Andrew Tate, for example, because they avoid the hard truths of what he represents and just like that he's "good vibes," validates their insecurities/misdirect their grievances towards the unfair system (THeMaTrix) and drives a Bugatti. I don't know if Owen Cook specifically has spoken well about Andrew Tate but I know that Michael Sartain has. I even specifically dmed him about it and he stood up for him, I lost some respect for him that day. He's still a smart guy that taught me a lot about game so it's important for us to be able to deconstruct people to assess them accurately and not create idols out of flawed individuals. I like Owen a lot and I'm very grateful for what he's taught me but calling him more spiritually advanced than Leo is coping lol

What price?

There are unhealthy parts to it but in general it helps you become a competent communicator who can easily relate to others and builds networking skills if you lean into social circle dynamics.

Forums are great, I spent half of my life on Reddit lol. Try a stream of consciousness, that's one of the best formats I've found for introspection through LLMs. I just vent to it about thoughts or problems I have and it does quite a good job of organizing my thoughts and finding problems for issues or at least pointing out blind spots in my thinking.

@something_else Yeah I think it depends on the phase of life you're in. When I was in my teens and early 20s then shooting the shit with the boys was one of the funnest things I could do. Now I have way more fun working on stuff that has an actual outcome and the time we spend just chit chatting or having a beer to destress after the week I still appreciate but its not as meaningful to me. Some of my best memories in life involve others but in an achievement type of setting. One of my best friends helped me make my first few montages and we created my first Youtube channel together after I hit Challenger in League of Legends. We had other great times just smoking weed and fucking around but that one stands up above all others. 2nd was probably when he came across the country to live with me for a couple months and we started out first business together. I think you proved my point here, I think a lot of people go to the gym more than they hangout with their friends. Plenty of people workout 5 times a week or daily and hangout with friends once a week or only a few times a month. I meditate almost daily but I only see friends once in a while. If an activity has really high ROI you would do it daily and perhaps multiple times a day.

I don't think it's that simple. Life works with incentives, if people got a lot of benefit from socialization they would pursue it more. Especially when you look at it from a collective consciousness perspective and being already whole as a singular being then the trope that mere socializing is particularly healthy and society is losing touch with it falls apart. A lot of socializing is coping to avoid either achieving your goals or being satisfied by yourself. I'm a big fan of intentional socializing where you hangout with aligned people to collaborate or enjoy curated events but socializing just for the sake of it is massively overrated imo. AI is a big step in the right direction here too where one of the big usefulness of hanging out with people is their ability to give you feedback which LLMs can now provide in a much superior fashion if you prompt them well. It increases the quality of engagements since you can use it to vent, get feedback on your ideas or stuff that happened in your life and when you're with others be much more intentional and present in your relationships.

@Joshe We should not talk about getting pussy as a lowly activity. We are of course rescuing our beloved female companions from the drudgery of existence. Some would call this doing the lord's work

Yeah, being able to talk dirty well with women goes a long way. Part of romance is living out a fantasy, so if you can make reality sound even more exciting than it is, bonus points. Being too boring, logical, or predictable is going to turn off a lot of women. The sweet spot is being spontaneous and unpredictable in the moment, while remaining completely reliable and trustworthy behind it. That's the ultimate combo. A lot of bad boys bring the excitement, but they're unreliable, which ultimately makes them low-quality partners.

Don't sell yourself short, pattern recognition and cost benefit analysis are important skills to most industries. If you refine your skillset in those areas in a commercially viable way you can start to command big money and use that however you see fit, competence is well rewarded in the market. This is how stage green builds enough impact to now be able to impact causes that are valuable to them. There are many ways to use your personality type to solve problems for people and you never know, maybe you'll find that you like business as well and want to start one. I think AI will allow way more personality types to shine in that context. I'm very excited myself for the rise of AI agents, it benefits a system minded person like me who has low trait industriousness but understands the economy enough to build leverage. AI will gift all of us cheap labor and if we learn how to use it we can use it both to our benefits and for that of others. Especially in terms of dating this unlocks all kinds new paradigms where as 15 years ago working from home was not really a thing. It will allow us to be present while raising our children and put relationships at the centre of our lives while still being very intertwined with the marketplace. @Natasha Tori Maru Didn't know you were a gamer too! I never played much WoW but competitive games hooked me in my teens and early 20s until I got more interested in pickup and entrepreneurship. You seem to have a competitive personality similar to me, I guess you now pivoted to business as well and put that character trait towards collective good! Do you still play games these days?

In that case it would be more a lack of cohesive of systems thinking as opposed to a failure of empathy. The things that you've named don't necessarily lead to negative outcomes, you'd have to be more precise in the exact cause and effect that you're pointing to. Lumping capitalism as all bad for example is a classic argument of stage green people. A lot of people on this forum have a stage green shadow, it's something I encounter a lot. It doesn't mean that I invalidate all their points and use it to refuse the feedback it offers. I simply find that pointing out that fact gives both a compliment to the user that they have an elevated level of development but also seem to fall into pitfalls that seem common for people that generally seem to operate with that set of values. I also point to ways for people to integrate new paradigms and models that I personally have found instrumental in both increasing my understanding of the world but also my effectiveness in it. This one insight on the difference between sympathy and empathy I find massive. A lot of times, if you have too much sympathy for someone you will not be able to actually understand the world from their point of view and be able to help them if you're in a coaching position, for example. Same with developing a political understanding. In that niche a lot of people seem to sympathize first when looking at an unfortunate issue instead of being able to deconstruct the problem to find actually viable solutions.

Sure, I appreciate the compliment on my project. You're a smart guy and tough to argue with lol I do think this is good discourse, if we have only pleasant chit chat at the end of the day how are we supposed to have impactful conversations that provoke real change? I do think it's important to qualify our track record and put some real weight to what we say. Dating is a bit more nuanced of a niche but if we're to have a conversation on business, career or even health and nutrition then it would become more obvious why the source of the information matters just as much as the quality of the argument. My country Canada is in a trade war against the most powerful country in the world at the moment, I assure you the Canadian administration has not given me a call to ask for my opinion on their tariff policy. They messed up though, the fools! I'm waiting for that call any day... You see my point right, that was my insight on relevance. I'm not very relevant in that conflict and that's fine. Over the next decade I will put time to work on my poltical connections and network and perhaps the next prime minister 10 years from now will genuinely give me a call to ask for my take on stuff. For now, we chat about it in the politics section but if someone that was more experienced than me in those fields said so to qualify their post it would change how I approach the conversation with them and how much I weigh their opinions vs looking at the multiple PHD award winners in the comment section of the average IG reel or reddit post for example. Questioning someone on their credibility and asking them to put context behind what they're saying is not inherently an insult nor should even be taken as a direct confrontation. I can do it in that way if the tone of conversation is already aggressive, I don't mind the heat but the intent is not to be belligerent; it's to have high quality discourse on a self-development forum. That's a fair point, I'm not running an ad here though. I'm genuinely having an honest discussion. If someone pays me for coaching then I take more time to understand their perspective before I make a protocol for them as that's the proper format for it that type of engagement. @Natasha Tori Maru You do have a point that I can be more uncouth than I should probably be and I do own that. I will just say I think if we are trying to have serious discussions instead of circle jerks then we need to be precise with what we're trying to do and be willing to open up about our issues and track record if we want accountability or even accurate discussing without the status posturing that anonymous discussions turn into. @Willy Phallicus Thanks for taking the time to understand my perspective man. I think you made some good points.

Calling light debate friction "bullying" while unraveling into "I get laid" is the clearest sign of an unstable frame. Real-world results matter, but having your single romantic case study be a zero-sum collision in your living room that burned a ten-year friendship isn't proof of abundance—it's an admission of zero social circle architecture. Maybe there’s more nuance to that story—feel free to share if there is—but since that’s the specific example you chose to highlight as proof of your results, that's what we have to evaluate. Honestly, I think that would do more harm than good. When a man lacks the operational systems to generate clean options externally, he is forced into opportunistic, high-collateral moves that destroy his own inner circle just to get laid; teaching other men to operate from that level of scarcity is destructive. Competence means building systems that create real-world leverage without cannibalizing your personal life in the process. Your story is common, a lot of men take low ROI opportunities to get laid and end up blowing up their life as a result. It's a lesson on thinking with both heads at the same time to create true harmony in your life.

What on earth is happening here? Not everything is about putting people down, can we have a baseline of analysis in our conversations without victimizing ourselves please lol Watch this video; it breaks down the documented Stage Green tendency to interpret objective systemic analysis as personal victimization. I don't think I have a victim mindset, I tend to acknowledge my shortcomings and work to fix them. I have thought about your points in our conversations and I find some of them worth thinking about but I don't find many of them to hold much credibility.

Acknowledging that private sentiment exists does not invalidate market reality; cherishing a memory or loving your family is great for inner peace, but romantic attraction operates on external value exchange. People do not date your internal contemplation, they date your competence, lifestyle, and what you tangibly bring to the table. Thanks for the vulnerability in sharing that, but interpersonal dynamics are nuanced: maybe your friend had a victim mindset, felt entitled to a woman he couldn't attract, and let his bruised ego end the friendship. Or maybe he felt you snaked him behind his back, compromised basic trust, and decided a man who moves on a girl his best friend wants isn't adding enough value or loyalty to remain in his life. Relationships are completely voluntary, meaning he didn't owe you continued friendship and you didn't owe him staying away from that girl. You made your move, incurred the trade-off of a ten-year brotherhood, and projecting that unresolved history onto an internet stranger who shares his personality type won't change the outcome. The value I brought here is the exact value I offer across all my work: cutting through comfortable intellectual theories and grounding men in the harsh, mechanical realities of human systems and sexual dynamics. I broke down how attraction actually functions in the real world, exposed the cognitive biases of the victim mindset, and held a firm boundary against low-effort posturing until you were forced to formulate structured arguments. I think intellectualism is great but it must offer results in the real world, otherwise you're wasting your time and perhaps being provably delusional. If holding a mirror up to passive-aggressive behavior, calling out bad-faith debate tactics, and refusing to validate self-soothing abstractions feels like "negative value" to you, that is simply the discomfort of having your intellectual shield dismantled. In the marketplace of ideas, real value isn't coddling someone's ego or pretending every subjective cope is equally valid; it's providing the clarity and leverage necessary to produce actual results. You characterizing me as being the antagonistic one is a bit laughable here bro.

Are you being disingenuous or this is a real argument that makes sense in your mind? Me like to take a walk down the park or enjoying spending time with family members, does not make my point weaker. It elevates it if anything, there are multiple quantifiable forms of value. How have I been fragile? I've asked you to expand on things that you enjoy and shared how I've so and hosted events and built communities around it. You answer by shutting down and starting to project in weird ways.

This is what I mean by having a fragile sense of self: when someone can't face the standards of the outside world, it inevitably results in cognitive defense mechanisms or simply mental blocks. I did not only defend my definition of value I explained to you the actual definition of the word and how it's used in the world. You can't run away from definitions bro, if you have a block towards understanding it and it seems to stem from your psyche how is that not a mental block? You're gonna say I'm insulting you again? Come on get a grip. Of course I have plenty of things in life that I don't have a quantifiable value towards. What does this have to do with a discussion on dating? It's great to live in a fairy tale world and if that has produced great results in your previous dating life then more power to you but I highly doubt it. Most people want to invest their time and life in others that give them value and is gonna enhance the quality of their life. The only other options are just dating random people that slightly peak your interest, not date at all or have a weird self-destructive streak and almost consciously look for people that are destructive to your life. Plenty of people do that, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't recommend it as a dating strategy.