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@john1 I’d start building skills that will serve society. How you choose to do that is up to you. That’s one of the blessings and the curse of living in the modern world. But you want to focus on being valuable to others. If you want some examples to get started, just looking at what people pay a lot of money for and what they don’t. That should give you a clue. I wouldn’t expect too much in the beginning. Even 2 years and 7 months is ultimately too small a time horizon. Start thinking about where you could maybe be in 10, 20, or even 30 years. Follow those inklings of things that seem interesting, but also learn how to deeply commit to something when it’s time. As far as books, there’s some decent one on Leo’s booklist. MJ Demarco has written two decent ones. Also the LP course will likely help you here. Keep in mind though that there‘s a lot of gurus in the self-help world who will exploit eager young people like yourself by selling them a dream or get-rich-quick nonsense. Don’t get clowned by them.

@Johnny Galt Can we just stop collectively defining everything in military terms? I get that it’s kind of adrenalizing. Maybe it’s motivating at a place on the spiral / emotional scale. But really, past a certain point it’s just self-defeating and toxic.

@soos_mite_ah I think it’s a good list for you. I would follow it as long as it feels realistic. I think for many people though, it would be asking too much. For instance, your point about not doing psychs until you’ve had 2 years of mentality. But some of the most promising research being done right now is with PTSD and drug addiction. Telling these people to “get clean” before they try psychedelics would be missing the point. In fact, the founder of Rhythmia was one such person. Same thing about your goal of reaching Yellow. I would say the majority of people who could probably benefit the most from psychedelics are stage Orange. Psychedelics can help move them past secularism / materialism. So again, I’d stick your list if it feels right. But I wouldn’t expect it of others.

Right, so in that case our friend needs a bit of an intervention. He needs to learn how to properly attract someone without assuming he can just buy his way into their pants. So put the wallet away. The danger then becomes when our friend actually then gets some success doing that. Then he goes “ah, so the secret is to NOT pay for girls! Therefore I will never pay for them”. And of course that is equally stupid, but also a very common conclusion you’ll see guys make. It usually happens when they’re learning how to flex their “alpha” muscle and take it too far.

@StarStruck Not buying things for girls is just a good rule of thumb for guys who are newer at game. Because unfortunately a lot of guys have been conditioned into thinking they can or need to buy a girl’s affection. So telling those guys “don’t buy her a drink” is probably good advice. But in reality, you can totally spend money on a girl and it’ll be fine. You just want to avoid this transactional expectation. Equally dumb of a move would be to refuse to pay for something when it would make sense to do so. But because you heard from a PUA guru and have built an ideology around not buying things for girls in order to seem alpha, you’ll not do it. And it’ll come off as strange or even cheap.

I’ll check them out, thank you ?

@SamC I never had any luck with earplugs. Couldn’t hear the conversation. Musician earplugs are probably your best bet but I wouldn’t count on it. The reality is that going into night clubs for a long period of time on a regular basis may damage your hearing to a degree. But you’ve got to be pretty hardcore about it. Most likely you’ll grow out of clubs before that happens. I’d just make sure you stay away from the speakers if possible. They can be substantially louder than the rest of the club, so be conscious of where you are standing.

You’re welcome ?

Then my guess is you’re not hitting it hard enough. In order for this to work, you have to be fast. You can’t do one and then wait 10 minutes. Ideally less than a minute in between these approaches. You could easily do 10-20 of these before you do a “real” approach. So unless your numbers look like that, I’d say bump it up. The key is you’ve got to send a signal to your subconscious that it’s safe for you to be outgoing and approach. Which means you’ve got to be continually leaning into your edge of what seems “scary” at the moment. If an approach is too scary, you’ll lock up. If it’s not scary enough, you won’t be sending that subconscious signal that it’s safe. So feel into that edge of where it’s uncomfortable, but still do-able. This is not a problem at all. At this point, you don’t even want wings who are too experienced. They’ll just shove you in your head and make you more insecure. And they probably won’t to go out with you anyway. You need guys who are also inexperienced. This is why I think my friends and I got better at this. We all knew we sucked, which took the pressure off of failure. Instead of posturing about how good we were at pickup, we created an internal culture where mistakes were legitimately encouraged. Our criteria for guys joining our inner circle was not how experienced they were but if they were doing the approaches. Learning was our top priority. Later on you can be more picky about wings. There’s a time when that’s appropriate. But for now, as long as they approach and they’re not a psychopath, that’s good enough. As far as your comment on night game, I wouldn’t give up on it. What night game really does is generate more extreme responses than day game. So you’ll have more girls who will blow you out hard, but you’ll also have girls who looking to party and open to moving things fast. Your quickest results will usually come by doing night game. There’s also a lot more girls and social grace to fuck up because “partying”. I would not be running up to girls. That is kind of a bad look and it’s also just unnecessary 99% of the time. The vast majority of time, you should be approaching before it gets to that point. However, it sounds like even if you didn’t have to run up to those girls, you still wouldn’t have done the approach. You’re still trying to go from 0 to 100 in no time. It doesn’t usually work. If you were very experienced then maybe you could get away with that. But as a newbie that’s just shooting yourself in the foot. Now if you had spent the last 15-30 minutes warming up like I described above, then that could have been doable. That’s all good.

Well I’m not at all an expert on autism. But what I do know is that all diagnosing is largely just labeling. And it seems to me that if you were truly on the spectrum, you’d not be aware that you were weirding others out and that you’re acting “off”. That already requires an ability to read social cues. Study social skills in an intellectual way if you want, it certainly can be of some value. Otherwise I’d look into relaxing your system. I’d also dig deeper into that nervousness. What are you so nervous of? And why?

@Molaric Do you think you could be misdiagnosing the problem? Unless you’re on the autism spectrum, most people with an average upbringing are perfectly capable of reading social cues. Your brain is literally wired to do this, the same way we could say a dog’s nose is wired to smell. So if you can’t do what a human being is meant to do, consider that the problem isn’t that you haven’t read enough books or watched enough YT videos on socializing. Consider that the problem is that you are not intune with your own signals. Most likely because you struggle with relaxing, and therefore your nervous system is in a state of fight-or-flight, which is anti-social. You can of course read books and study body language. Charisma on Command is a good YT channel for this. But that’s honestly not what is going to make the biggest difference for people. The biggest difference is going to come from relaxing your nervous system and socializing a lot. Of course now that I said this, relaxing may become the new thing that you start to stress about. Is my nervous system relaxed enough??? Am I in fight or flight??? But you gotta start somewhere.

@Javfly33 this has been discussed many times. You needs wings and you need to baby step your way into approaching. Maybe just start by saying “hi” to people if that’s all you can muster. Take the pressure off, don’t try to hit a home run. When you’re not approaching, you want to stay in a relatively positive / social state. This is just who you are and what you do 24/7. When you go to the grocery store, talk to the cashier. Talk to your Uber driver. Get lunch with friends. Pregame before you go out if you’re doing night game. Final piece is to do the inner work. There’s endless techniques when it comes to it. See if you can become aware of why you have the anxiety. What exactly are you anxious of? Start also building a habit of pushing your comfort zone little everyday so you have that muscle. Cold showers can help here. If you do all of that, approaching may still sometimes be awkward, but in general it will be significantly easier.

@Raptorsin7 In a way, highly collectivist societies have always had a influence over who people date. There’s never just been 100% freedom. If you were in a stage Purple tribe, you’d be constrained on dating by a) who was a member of your tribe (which was already highly constrained by geography) and perhaps also b) some sort of arranged marriage, which would have been based off of the well-being of the tribe. That’s also why sacrifice has been an important part of these cultures. You are expected to surrender to the needs of the tribe, so that we can then all live a successful life. What you’re describing sounds like a more modern version of an arranged marriage. It’s sort of the equivalent of your father coming to you and saying “you need to marry so-and-so because then we’ll get X benefits”. Now in our modern society, that seems crazy. We want people to get married because they fall in love organically, not out of coercion. We want personal freedom to choose. We want to feel like it was an internal decision, not one forced upon us. And there’s good reason for that. Many arranged marriages end up not being good ones. If someone feels they were coerced into a relationship, they may not fully invest in it because they see it as an “obligation” vs something they want to do. And what if you get stuck with someone who is abusive or who you just aren’t compatible with? My grandparents had an arranged marriage and I don’t think I ever saw much love there. It was purely a survival move. At the same time, I doubt that societies that regularly had arranged marriages saw their situation as “dystopian”. I suspect they just saw it as a part of life, and many of them were able to find happiness regardless. You have to remember that autonomy and freedom of choice is really an SD Orange value. Anywhere else on the spiral does not place such a high value on this. Even Red does not value “personal freedom” on the whole, as someone at Stage Red is okay being a warlord / dictator that enslaves people. So my conclusion is that life would go on. Yes, there be a lot of problems with government trying to arrange marriages. But people would do it temporarily for the sake of survival, until we no longer felt it was at stake. There is also a cost for freedom. How much emotional and mental energy have you spent trying to figure out your dating life? The more freedom you have, the more decisions you have to make. While I like personal freedom, too much freedom can very quickly backfire, leaving you stuck in paralysis and making your life miserable.

I've been compiling a list of insights I've had around “neediness” and relationships. In particular, I feel that neediness has become a bit of a bad word on this forum, so I wanted to shake things up a bit. Some of my influences in writing this were Dr. Marshall Rosenberg (Non-Violent Communication), Teal Swan and Charles Eisenstein. You may wish to check out their work if you resonate with what I've written here. Would love to hear what you think! **Note** I will be using the word “need” is a colloquial way that is synonymous with the word “want”. **Note 2** This advice should be read with extra discernment by those with anxious attachment style or enmeshment trauma. It's also not for people in abusive or codependent relationships. If you're in these situations, please honor your needs and consider leaving. I am mostly concerned here with helping move people from independence to interdependence. 1. Non-Neediness vs non-neediness We can think of capital Non-Neediness in a Absolute spiritual sense. God is without self and form, yet simultaneously is all things. It is without lack, including even the ability to lack. Therefore we could say God needs nothing. It is Complete. From this perspective, all needs are in fact imaginary, as life itself is a thought in the Mind of God. You as this ego are a thought. We can think of lower case “non-neediness” as more of a relative non-neediness. If I just ate a huge meal, I don't need food at that moment. If I just slept 8 hours, I don't need to sleep more. Needs in this category are generally finite and satiable. They are the needs we are mostly concerned with. We can tap into the Absolute perspective of Non-Neediness, which grounds us. It's sort of a “checks and balance” to living as this finite form. But as a finite entity, perfect non-neediness is impossible to achieve. Even if we are only imagining our neediness. Which brings me maybe the single most important point in all of this... 2. All human relationships are based on meeting needs Asking people to be totally non-needy in relationships is asking people for the impossible. We cannot not have needs in relationships. In fact, if there are no needs being met, then there is no relationship at all. Needs create relationships. If I truly need nothing from you, and you need nothing from me, there is no reason for us to have a relationship. *note* don't confuse this with a “harsh pragmatism” that sees the world purely from a utilitarian perspective. Your needs actually go far beyond this. Contribution is a need. Love is a need. 3. You cannot meet all your needs on your own This may be the most controversial piece of this post. We are often taught in spiritual circles to love ourselves, be sovereign, be whole and complete, and to not be attached to anything. Peace comes from within. But these truisms can easily get misconstrued. Not only is it impossible for you to meet all your basic survival needs on your own (food, shelter, clothing, etc), I am going to go one step further. You cannot meet all your emotional needs on your own. People who love themselves and who feel whole and complete do not just sit in a room loving themselves. It's because they love themselves that they seek out and meet their needs. Which often involves others. Self-love includes having others meet your needs, not excludes it. **Note** yes, at the highest levels of nonduality where the distinction of “self/other” collapses, this line gets blurry and nonsensical. But it is still practical to make this distinction for our purposes here. 4. You can either meet your needs consciously or unconsciously There are two choices regarding your needs: a) Meet your needs consciously and deliberately or b) unconsciously manipulate your way to meeting your needs. There simply is no option to be non-needy. Often when people talk about being non-needy, they are only doing so as a strategy to meet their needs. They've learned that when they act not-needy, they (sometimes) get their needs met. When we meet our needs consciously, we can often build synergistic and win/win scenarios with others. We actually become psychologically healthier and can avoid many of the toxic elements of neediness. When we manipulate and go unconscious, it often falls into lose/lose scenarios. Our neediness becomes more toxic and damaging to others. 5. Clarity of needs is key What do we really need? Much of the toxicity of “neediness” comes not from having needs themselves, but on poorly answering this question. We mistake what we really need all the time. We may think we need a mansion, the latest gadget, or another partner. The potential list of what we could think we need is endless. And due to a lot of trauma and social programming, this list is often thoroughly misguided. If we due not distinguish what our true needs are vs what we have been unconsciously programmed with, that is a recipe for disaster both individually and collectively. What I've found is that most of my real needs are incredibly basic. They tend not to be flashy. Simple things will do just fine. So while it is possible that this clarity will reduce the number of needs you have or tone them down, that is NOT the goal. We are not seeking to get rid of needs. We are seeking clarity, and to let the needs fall where they may. If a surrendering is needed, it will then take place naturally once proper clarity is found. 6. Commitment requires neediness To commit to a relationship with someone is inherently needy. When we are non-committal and prioritize optionality, it allows us to keep things non-needy. No one is investing too much. We can always change our minds. But when we commit to someone, we are investing. It is no longer non-needy. And yet, the strongest and most fulfilling relationships are based in equally strong commitment. Commitment in a relationship allows for repair when inevitably the relationship struggles. 7. People want to be needed This one also goes a bit against the grain. We are told to be non-needy because no one wants to feel pressured. Better to play it cool. And certainly there is some truth there. Coercion or making demands is usually socially unpopular. But in our attempts to play it cool or maybe be seen as “alpha”, we often overlook an obvious point. People want to be needed. To be needed means you are valuable or desirable. It makes people feel like they are bringing something to the table, even if it's just being themselves. 8. Needing people is where you will find your greatest joy There is a real payoff from isolation that must be acknowledged. That payoff is that you will stay safe. Alone, there is no conflict. No differing agendas or opinions. No one who can let you down or hurt you. No one who can break your heart. No one who can judge you. You can more easily feel into who you truly are, away previous cultural programming. And in this, there is a certain safety. It's important to not demand the part of ourselves that desires this safety to give that up. If that is you, stay safe as long as you need. But eventually some of us will inevitably ask ourselves, is safety our highest priority? Could we maybe redefine safety not as avoiding conflict, but as including it? Could we be safe while still in the jungle that is relationships? Because that is where the most fun is. The complimenting and collaboration of unique forms IS part of the point of being alive and in this world based in duality. But this requires that we NEED each other. And all the vulnerability that goes along with that. 9. Our social problems come from a lack of meeting needs Why climate change? Why homelessness? Why racism? Why pandemics? These are, of course, extremely complex problems. A full discussion of this is beyond this post. But I will offer one lens here to view these problems, which is a lack of us truly meeting our own needs as well as others. When these shadow needs run unconsciously, it can create havoc socially. It is true that win/win scenarios can be good for those involved but bad for the collective. For example, a corrupt government official and a CEO who work out a deal that is good for both of them, but bad for the country. However, even in a case like this, the problem is that not ENOUGH needs are being taken into account. They are not accounting for the needs of the whole country, just for a small percentage of people. 10. Telling the truth and honest dialogue requires addressing needs If you do not feel that a person you are talking with is taking into account your needs, you will not listen to them. And that goes equally for the person talking to you. But when everyone's needs are known and on the table, and people feel these needs are being taken into account, it's amazing the dialogue that can open up. We sometimes like to hit people over the heads with the “hard truth” of our opinions. This often never goes far in convincing people, and then we blame them for being closed minded. But often in these scenarios, there are no needs being taken into account by either party. We have to understand that giving harsh feedback is earned through trust and relationship. And this can only occur if needs are being addressed. 11. Intimacy requires neediness If I don't know what you need, then I don't understand you. And if I don't understand you, we don't have intimacy. So we must know what this person you are in a relationship needs. This causes the person to feel seen, understood, and builds trust. And while intimacy is certainly more complicated that someone knowing your needs, it is nonetheless a necessary prerequisite.

Yeah dude, that’s often how girls are. They can be extremely subtle. The fact she reached out at all is huge. I wouldn’t expect most girls to go beyond that. Especially at this early stage. Be careful not to just project what YOU would want a girl to do onto what is actually the best advice for Somegirl. Of course if you’re a guy that has struggled reading girl’s intentions, you would probably love it if a girl was super overtly flirty. But that doesn’t mean it’s in her best interest. What is in her best interests IMO is that she sees that he is reciprocating. Which so far it sounds like he is not. Even if she hits him over the head with her intentions and he likes it, it doesn’t mean he actually likes her all that much. It just means she made it easy for him, so maybe he’ll go along with it.

@somegirl I’m going to disagree with everyone else on this. If dude hasn’t already gotten the hint...forget it. Maybe you were just being friendly and not flirty, but come on. Either he doesn’t get it, in which case it’s bizarre he’s dropping the ball that much. Or he’s just not that into it. I’d pull back a bit and see if he comes forward.

@Space I’m with Leo on this. You gotta get your money right at least enough so you can afford to live in the city. It doesn’t have to be forever, even just a year could be enough if you went hard. House share is fine. Ideally do it with other guys who are also learning game. Temporary solution might be taking the train but that doesn’t seem long term sustainable to me. Might be enough to hold you over until you rent a new place. If you have no particular love for London than maybe consider moving to another city as well.

Yeah it’s very nuanced. You can get away with all sorts of crazy behavior in a night club. So pua teachers want to teach you that and show you that you’re not limited. And that you can bend social norms in your favor. At the same time, there’s always still social cues and calibration that is going on. So it’s not so much that you abandon all social rules in a night club. It’s more like you enter a new reality with much different rules. Anyway, there’s no YT video or anything like that I’d recommend. You know what it looks like when a girl is interested. You have a functioning brain that has evolved over thousands of years to read social cues. It’s very, very good at this. You just have to listen to your own cues. And if you really feel like you don’t know, maybe just google “pua IOIs (indicators of interest)”. But any list you will find online will be very limited and not robust enough for the complexity and nuance of real life socializing.

@PepperBlossoms We’ve definitely swung as a society in the direction of “cheap, easy” over “beautiful and sustainable”. So I suspect a correction is coming. The problem is, even if people want to create something “beautiful and sustainable”, they often are economically incentivized to do the exact opposite. So what I think needs to happen is that economics needs to be realigned with beauty. We want our economics incentivizing beauty, not the other way around. And there may be some hard limits to that realignment. But we haven’t hit them yet. We’ve collectively barely even tried.

“Too early” can be very subjective. It’s not like there’s a rule that you can only kiss a girl after X amount of time. Especially at a nightclub. More than likely what happened was your timing was just off. You probably went for it out of nowhere and came off as uncalibrated to the situation. These mistakes are how you learn. Nothing has gone wrong, this is the process. 1am?? That makes no sense. So if you get there at 12am, you’re just going to sit there in the corner by yourself, not talking to anyone for a whole hour? Meanwhile, you’re getting more and more in your head every minute that goes by. And then some magic flip is going to switch at 1am and you’ll be super social? Nah. Talk about awkward. Unless you’re already with a group of friends and having fun, you need to be talking to people as much as possible. Pickup at a night club is like swimming. If you stop being social (swimming), you drown and die. You talk bullshit. Substance matters basically zero. It just has to be fun. I strongly dislike clubs as well, but you can still have a fun time if you choose to make it fun. And since they are the ideal environment in many ways for learning, you kind of just have to do it. I would say your biggest lesson is not to not move as fast. It’s to learn how to read when it’s appropriate to kiss or not. That could be 30 seconds in, or it could be 30 minutes or 30 hours or never. What are the green lights that let you know a girl is open for a kiss? That’s a better question.

If she is really deadset on this job and moving than it honestly just sounds like a compatibility issue. You’re both clear with what you want, both with yourselves and each other. But in this case that just doesn’t seem to be lining up. In my experience, it’s common that there’s sort of “that one fight” that keeps coming up in a relationship. And it sounds like this is yours. Some couples make it through that fight, some don’t. In my past relationships “that one fight” broke us up every time. But if you make it through I imagine you guys will be stronger for it. It will really cement the bond. If you have other couple friends, I would maybe talk to them about it. Find people who have worked it out in similar situations and see how they did it. Wish you guys the best.

You’re welcome!

Well first off, I don’t think Cal is pushing people to just grind through a job / career they hate. The whole point of the book is based on the question of “how can I get the most satisfaction out of my career? How can I find truly fulfilling work”? He just takes a bit of a different approach. I reconcile the differences by realizing that his perspective is partial. I do think there are things I tend to be more naturally passionate about and intuitively guided towards. But I also recognize that you need skills. You want to be very, very good at what you do. And what I put into my career tends to be what I get out.

@rush It's a good book with a lot of valid points. General synopsis is no one is going to pay you just because you are passionate about something. You have to actually have skills that people consider valuable. And often the more we commit to something, the more passionate we become about it. So instead of getting stuck in this never-ending search for what you're passionate about, commit to a craft and as you invest you'll come to love it. It's not bad advice overall. My biggest nitpick with his book though is that he doesn't seem to fundamentally understand why "follow your passion" is important advice. "Passion", from a spiritual perspective, is literal communication from your higher self. That feeling, that intuition, is how spirit nudges you in certain directions. And if you're not attuned to that, big problems. Cal Newport strikes me as a guy who is highly rational / analytical. He's more or less a materialist as far as I can tell. So his perspective, while valuable, I still find limiting.

I would look deeper into the beliefs you have around this. Attraction is not as simple as “who has the most money / status?” Introspect on where that fear is actually coming from and why.