aurum

Bro, social media is not stopping women from getting horny. Attraction is way too serious and deeply rooted in survival for that to happen. If some reasonable percentage of women are not finding you attractive, you are doing something wrong. Period.

This is just completely false. I get that you're in a bad spot right now, but this ain't the answer.

There’s no easy answer for that. You have to develop wisdom and choose your pressures wisely. That’s the only real solution.

Yes that’s the crux of the issue. Ultimately, you want to ground your masculinity in something not tied to success with women at all. You should be able to be an old, decrepit monk living in the forest alone and still be 100% masculine. But that’s not the full story. You are never going to experience being a man outside of the pressures and expectations that come with that. To be a human at all is to be an amalgamation of these pressures. So give up looking for your authentic self as a human. Your authentic self is not human at all. The goal becomes not just to burn off all these expectations but to learn to relate to them more consciously, more deliberately.

Valid points. I will be taking a different approach, but yes just teaching men tricks on how to get laid is grossly insufficient if you're serious about masculine development. My project will focus on sense-making around masculinity and what it means to be a good man. Everything else is secondary.

This is good advice. Fits in well with my own experience.

I’m not suggesting it’s perfectly predictable. Obviously there is uncertainty, struggles, difficult conversations. This is not a contradiction. The only kind of love humans do is ego love. If you want non-ego love, you can’t be a human. To be a human in human relationships means ego love. Regardless of how developed you are.

Quite the assumptions.

I’d disagree. The distinction is not that clear. Even a more genuine kind of love is extremely predictable.

People are not that unique. They’re generally all looking for the same things.

I’m not just talking about addiction. I mean long-term human love as well. It’s still extremely predictable.

It really doesn't though. What makes people fall in love is extremely predictable.

Are we sure this isn't actually Russel Brand though???

Newsom seems like the most likely option, assuming we don't get some out-of-left-field contender rise up the way Mamdani did. Newsom's biggest weakness is that he's not winning over a lot of the DSA, progressive wing of the democrats. They see him as a centrist, neoliberal who is still going to ultimately cuck himself to the oligarchy. I think he also gives them the vibe of that old-school, white, toxic patriarchal masculinity. John Ossoff I know almost nothing about. So no comment there.

My gut says not the right move. I don't see her as someone who is going to really energize voters.

I get it, but faking being married is not the solution. You gotta be smarter than that.

But if you want that and to make good money, you'll probably have to spend a lot of your time abroad still working. It's not just going to be an infinite vacation where you can do whatever. You'll be in India, but just glued to your laptop.

Less you think about the opener the better, especially at night. Start talking before you know what you're going to say. The first 10 seconds is way more about vibe than content.

Sounds like his views on masculinity might be skewing his perception here.

Because they are manipulative, usually cringey and actually preventing you from learning real socialization. By relying on these tricks, you avoid the hard work. How desperate do you need to be to fake being married?

@Ziran What does your spiritual practice look like, if you have one? Do you have experience with altered states of consciousness? What wisdom do you find uniquely present in Judaism?

@manuel bon I think you need to focus more here. You've listed a ton of projects, all of which could require all your time and energy to really do well and succeed in. If you try to do them all simultaneously, you'll probably not give any of them the depth they need. You don't need to give up on everything permanently, but I would at least temporarily put some of them aside to focus. Ask yourself: which of these projects right now feels the MOST promising? What's the highest priority? They might all be interesting, but something needs to be on top.

He doesn't have to say it. It's just what happens by default when you are self-deceived that trauma is the root of all problems.

It's difficult to talk about gender dynamics in mixed-sex company in general. Everyone's biases and agenda comes out.

You should care about your trauma if you've genuinely got something from your past you can't seem to get over and it keeps impacting your present experience. Otherwise, move on. You should not make it your life mission to perpetually heal your trauma. Organizing your life around trauma-healing is itself actually dysfunctional. But this is what a lot of new age types do. Healing trauma becomes a never-ending lifestyle for them. They become self-deceived that healing trauma is the most important thing and the magic bullet to solve all problems, when it's not. To be honest, I find a lot of this behavior self-indulgent and full of faux self-importance.