LordFall

This one should work!

@something_else I think you're being quite naive and idealistic. Spiral Dynamics operates on the principle of "transcend and include," not "transcend and bypass." You make a common mistake on this forum of trying to bypass and invalidate the value and virtue of Stage Orange. A shift in the collective zeitgeist is merely potential energy; if the frustration at the status quo is not channeled by an individual or organization with specific goals and the competency to achieve them then the status quo will remain. We saw this in real time in December 2025 with the Iranian protests that gathered millions of disenfranchized people but that ultimately were unsuccessful in doing much against the regime since there were no functional process to achieve change apart from venting protesting and "collective awareness". The Pyramid of Responsibility isn't an "Orange corporate value system," it is a system that breaks how change happens vs staying in victimhood. Level 1 is a victim mindset that's basically crying about the unfairness of the world and Level 4 and 5 is where all the people that have made massive change to mankind live. I'm evaluating it based on what actually produces positive change in the real world. Having Stage Green ideals without competence is 90% useless. 10% is useful in terms of introspecting on what the world needs but the other 90% is action taking. @Ulax Can you see the graphic? I didn't realize Imgur was blocked in so many regions, I gotta find another image uploader. The forum's limit on image size makes most uploads directly to it quite hard.

@hoodrow trillson You're arguing against a straw-man. I explicitly stated that money by itself does nothing without a baseline of game, and I called purely transactional dynamics a last resort. In your head, a man is either a broke, charismatic "bad boy" pulling effortlessly, or a rich, sterile "ATM goober" getting cheated on, that sounds more like the cope to me than anything I said. Why are you assuming those are the only two options? What happens when a guy has game, stays in shape, and has a nice place, high income, and total freedom and control over his time and logistics? Why wouldn't that help your dating life? Money doesn't replace game, it scales it and overall makes your life more fun and exciting.

Money is SO important in game. Just by itself it won't do much but putting that on top of a foundation of game increases your potential results by infinity. It's a MASSIVE cope that pick up coaches spread to not worry about money. It's almost impossible to build a high quality dating life if you don't have your personal finances in order. I had a nice place by the Lake in Toronto and I would sleep with women by asking them to come have drinks by the lake with me and then take them upstairs. It was also 10 mins walk away from clubbing district. I knew so many people that lived 1 hour away from Downtown that never got laid because they had bad logistics. Living with your parents is one of the top predictors of sexlessness for men. https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim Also being able to take girls out for dinner without worrying about covering their bills or an uber. Being able to travel if single but even with a partner is phenomenal. Being able to invest in your appearance like getting a dating photoshoot, nice barber, good clothes, cologne, etc. Being able to host and scale events. You could take 2 years off of work and only focus on your dating life if you had enough savings or if you had remote income that required not much maintenance to keep flowing. You could also very directly use money to date, plenty of 40-60 year old men date hot ass younger women by sugar dating. Some of those arrangements are purely transactional with people not really valuing each other but a lot turn into real relationships and marriage. I think it's a last resort type of move to do that but overall the idea that being in financial abundance unlocks way more beautiful and feminine women than you could get without it is quite true. When I worked at a busy restaurant in Downtown Toronto I remember some hot ass servers dating investment banking dudes that seemed quite dorky but made 150-250k at like 26 years old while the pickup guys I knew pulled chicks that were not as hot because they didn't have the same financial leverage. There are way more things I could add. Dating as a whole has always been about proving yourself as a provider before you are able to bring a woman into your life with stability. There are a lot of interesting ideas about basing your game on the lover frame but when I did it myself and see other men do it, it ends in unstable and temporary arrangement because fundamentally you are not a stable man that can provide value long term to one or many women.

Either right before or during my morning routine. It makes a big difference. Also noticed huge difference with my game if I do it on a day I've worked out. The Testosterone and other endorphins raise my frame and charisma quite significantly.

I really like this model and I think it breaks down victim mindset so well. It's taken from the corporate world but it can apply to an individual's life and society as a whole. Most Stage Green people operate in level 1 and maybe in level 2 but rarely above. If we map it to Spiral Dynamics I think you only start to touch Stage Yellow with 3 and above because you really need to do a lot of work researching the world and getting work/business experience to start to understand what a possible solution would look like. Listen man if you find people that complain a lot but don't take action towards fixing their problems and others problems valuable then I mean good for you. I think it's very surface level way to live life and at best you're pointing out problems that you wish somebody else would fix. We'd have to get more specific at to which subset of people we are talking about but my grievance are mainly with people in 3 main buckets: - People who complain about the economy and cost of living but don't research and learn new skills in terms of personal finance and business. - People who complain about the government but don't similarly don't take any action to join or create an organization that can help their community or country and never make effort to build a relationship with their elected officials. - Men and Women who complain about the state of the dating market but don't take much strategic action towards solving their problems and instead blame the other sex for their lack of success.

@something_else My main issue is people using Stage Green talking points as an ego defence to justify their own lack of efficiency. I think you've made good points around classifying those people more as Stage Blue people grasping at Stage Orange rather than actually Stage Green. I think that leads to idealism and their points although perhaps having a surface of validity are fundamentally naive, inefficient and shallow. Healthy Stage Green would look like an individual with a productive relationship to the economy that uses his extra time to help social causes. If we're looking in terms of an organization it would be one that changes its goals from being about profit motive to now being about productive betterment of mankind. Perhaps like a Soup Kitchen or an engineering firm focused on sustainable energy. I would say both the individual and organization cross into Stage Yellow when they are able to use powerful societal systems to bring massive leverage to their cause and decouple their output from mere human energy. In other words actually developing the tools to fix the problems as opposed to just identifying them and voicing them out or crying about them if you wanted to be less charitable. If we are to bring it back to Communism since we talked about it before, it would make sense to classify it as a movement with Stage Green ideals but that failed to get past Stage Blue due to its rejection of Stage Orange. It thus got nowhere close to the Stage Yellow efficiency that would've been needed to transform society to the degree that they were aiming at.

@Natasha Tori Maru glad you enjoy his writing as well! There aren't many authors that produce similar work to his; truly fascinating books. I assume that's the part that subconsciously scares a lot of people. I've also seen a lot of feedback saying they dislike his historical anecdotes and the reader would've enjoyed a more to the point type of narrative. Which seems a bit silly to me since both there are a lot of books that do have this dry and straight to the point writing style and the historical context tie in is what I find to be one of the most valuable aspect of his work. Yeah I would agree for 48 Laws of Power and Laws of Human Nature. Haven't read 33 Strategies but I've read the 50th Law, his book co-written with 50 cent, I thought that one was similarly quite good. What didn't you enjoy about Mastery? I thought it was quite profound and I enjoy some stuff he wrote about like going back to your childhood genuine interests for clues for your life purpose. It definitely lacked the practicality of some more direct books like Alex Hormozi's books on business for example but I think his aim was to be esoteric and not a how to guide.

Of course. You also don't have to be a master programmer to use AI effectively for a few processes inside of your business. AI is also good at allowing for more remote work due to being able to dictate to your phone and have something like Claude work behind the scenes while you're on a hike for example. It's like asking if business is possible without the internet; yes there are plenty of shops that don't have social media or any web presence today. It limits their scaling potential but they can make a living just fine.

Yeah I think it's phenomenal, I'm about halfway through it so far. It's much more brutal than 48 Laws of Power into dissecting the ego. Whereas 48 Laws of Power is more about figuring out how the outside world works, this one is more about how the mind works and plays tricks on you and how character traits like narcissism and anxiety form and how attitude has made and broken famous people in history. I'm gonna finish it over the next month and then more than likely to pickup a copy of The Law of the Sublime.

Seems like he went through his own Eckhart Tolle like experience being stuck in his backyard for 7 years after having a stroke and ended up seeing life in a new light and writing this book. Looks like a banger, I'm excited to read it. By listening him to talk about it, the main idea seems to be about enjoyment of the present moment and being able to enjoy the sublime simplicity of life. He breaks it down into 12 areas that he feels represent most the concept. He's probably my favorite author of all time so I'm very excited to see how he mixes his usual practicality and historical prose with a more spiritual topic. Interesting to see him go from more achievement-based topics to a more esoteric inquiry with the one before that being a Marcus Aurelius type book on his 366 Meditations and before that reflecting on human nature and now the sublime nature of existence itself.

What about the right-wing appeals to to you?

Scandinavia is actually a great example here, but it proves my point. In fact, you could argue the Nordic model is operating at a Stage Yellow level because it doesn't reject Orange at all and fully integrates it in its many efficient systems. Instead of treating Stage Orange market dynamics as a "necessary evil" to be moralized against or constrained, which is how First-Tier Green operates, they take a Second-Tier Yellow approach and intentionally harness market mechanics as the foundational energy engine that makes a complex high-stage social safety net possible. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway rank among the most free-market, pro-business, and high-innovation economies in the world. They don't bypass Orange productivity or bash enterprise; they built massive, efficient market engines specifically so they can actually afford a Green social safety net. Synthesizing Orange economic reality with Green human values into a functional machine is literally systemic thinking. My critique wasn't about productive citizens in social democracies who contribute to a high-output society. I'm talking about the super common trend of people using Green anti-system talking points as an ego defense and often using "the system is evil" as a cope to avoid doing the hard work of building a useful skillset, discipline, and leverage in their own lives. I don't think the average left leaning westerner is firmly Stage Green with a well integrated Stage Green. I think they are exactly the Blue/Orange/Green hybrid monstrosity that you call a stereotype. Meaning being mostly talk and virtue signalling and not very effective people.

It shouldn't be about worshipping with money but being a very effective human being that offers a lot of value to his or her society and thus gets paid very well and gets to build the lifestyle they choose on their terms. 90% of people never get there and end up living life in economic scarcity.

I find that 80% of people with a Stage Green mindset I see online or encounter don't see to have Stage Orange properly integrated at all. Do you really know a lot of activist minded people that have a solid grasp of business and the economy and have plans that make sense to further the cause they champion? Most people I see that point out social problems and seem really passionate about them, once I start to ask questions about how do we solve this go silent or say stuff that makes 0 sense. @Ulax Straight up. It's realistically more like 95% than 80% that seem to have not much inkling of Stage Orange or Stage Yellow in their perspective. Of course it depends which subset of Stage Green people you interact with. If you go to an ecoengineering convention then I would assume that the attendees would be much more solutions oriented than the average activist. Stage Green people almost always throw the baby away with the bathwater in terms of their Stage Orange perspective and start to view everything as oppression and fall straight into the victim mindset trap. They rarely are able to band together and do anything productive and at best will go to a protest(but not one that they organized themselves.) You could also view it as people coming from Stage Blue and wanting to build an identity outside of the mainstream and once they get to Stage Orange and they look at the mountain of productivity required to actually become an independent being in modern society, they bypass it and adopt Stage Green talking points and start blaming billionaires for their problems. It's hard to say but either way it leads to the same result of people complaining a lot about the injustices of the world without doing much to build a skillset that would give them the leverage over the marketplace necessary to impact their own life and society as a whole. I find that it helps me tremendously in understanding where the people I'm talking to are coming from and seeing what type of advice might actually help their perspective. Otherwise I run into the problem of offering some piece of advice that seems very reasonable to me and the objections that I got made no sense until I filtered them through spiral dynamics then it started to make so much sense and I've been able to understand the mental blocks of the individuals I'm dealing with.