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But it’s also true. Most people, not just girls, would not respond favourably to hearing that a dude goes out to the park specifically to target and hit on women. If a few people respond negatively that’s a them problem, if it’s the vast majority of people that’s a you problem. Yes, there are situations where it’s the right thing to stand your ground even if everybody in the world thinks you’re wrong. I don’t think this is one of those situations personally. Specifically going out to target lone women in the park to try and get laid is, IMO, not very healthy in most cases and I struggle to think of ways to defend or justify that behaviour. “It works and some women like it” is not convincing to me. In most cases you’re just being a public nuisance. This was pretty much my thought process at the time and I decided that it didn’t align with my values. I pursued travel, parties and making friends instead as a means of dating / socialising and was much happier as a result. I don’t agree with the “don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks about you” mindset, you should be aware of how your actions are perceived by others. It’s healthy in small amounts, and it serves as a check for your behaviour.

They are. Some people are just assholes, even if it’s from deep trauma it’s still them expressing exactly how they feel and not trying to put on an act or be something they are not

Could not agree more. The thought I always had during my loner pickup phase was: “Does my future girlfriend really want to date a guy who has no friends and spends his Saturday going to the park to talk to girls?” Probably not. She wants a guy with a vibrant social life who has better things to do. Pickup got me some results, but it also made me feel lonelier, more worthless and, at times, like a creep. —— My only contention is that building a social circle specifically to get laid I.e. “social circle game”, misses the point too. The real upgrade is having deep friendships, people you genuinely love spending time with, and a life you actually enjoy. That removes a huge amount of neediness because your need for connection and appreciation isn’t resting entirely on women. It’s also just very attractive. Almost every time I go out partying or clubbing with my close friends I end up hooking up with someone because our group has such great vibes and we all love each other. Overall, the two biggest things that improved my dating life were deep friendships and travel. Pickup helped with social anxiety, which was valuable, but it was not a long term solution. Very much a phase to go through and discard.

I have found that “being yourself” is exceptional advice, but it’s misunderstood and very cliche. It doesn’t mean become a socially uncalibrated weirdo. It means develop a high degree of self-awareness, learning to express your personality, and not requiring approval of that personality from others. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin. The dudes who are genuinely assholes but still get laid don’t get laid because they’re assholes. They get laid because they are being themselves confidently. If you pretend to be an asshole to get laid it doesn’t really work because it’s inauthentic and humans have a radar for inauthenticity. In the same way, a “nice guy” is unattractive because he is faking the niceness to get laid. And also because “nice” isn’t a personality trait. If you are authentically kind and have more to your personality than “he’s nice” that is also very attractive. The deeper purpose of practicing pickup is, or at least should be, to learn to express yourself, your values, your desires and your needs unashamedly and authentically. It isn’t about learning what act to put on to get laid.

I relate to this, and a lot of what you say here really. I suspect it's a component of avoidant attachment, although I don't want to be that person diagnosing someone on an internet forum. I'm mainly saying it because I relate a lot to where you are in life as well and I notice a lot of avoidant patterns in myself. I'm using the word "you" from here on as a general descriptor of "an avoidant person" because it sounds good in writing, but I'm largely describing my own experience, perhaps you'll relate. Avoidance can leave you spending a lot of time chasing experience, hookups, adventure, achievement, but never settling down. Never letting anybody get that close to you, friend or relationship. Never really letting anybody see who you really are deep down. It leaves you in this weird state where you aren't depressed, you actually feel quite good, you're at a healthy stage in life, having fun, achieving things, but you just feel like something is... missing? I think what's missing is vulnerability, stability, and a deep rooted connection with other people. The thing that scares you most. You build exceptional social skills which function as a mask, a mechanism allowing you to socialise without connecting deeply, because being your authentic self around people without this mask of exceptional social skills scares you. You've always got an escape route for every commitment planned in the back of your mind so you can return to your life of freedom at a moment's notice. Being tied down or committed to one thing for the rest of your life, be it person, career, where you live, is a terrifying concept. You look at everybody else who has settled down and think that looks like a boring life, so you run away from it. And keep running. How can they be so happy with such a boring life? Until eventually you start looking at those people and feeling like you may actually be behind them in life. To be clear, I actually think being avoidant has many benefits in younger years of life. It pushes you to put off committing to anything too early, which is a surefire way to fuck up your life. But it only works for so long. Eventually your mind starts to realise that there's only so long you can run away from any kind of commitment and responsibility.

Impressive memory! I've tried Methylphenidate from a friend a few times in the past, and I've since been diagnosed with primarily inattentive ADHD, for which I'm prescribed Elvanse 50mg. I've been taking that daily for the last 3 months or so. I'll summarise my experience on both medications, although the methylphenidate experience is less valuable as I only ever took it as a one off. The goal with ADHD meds is to find the dosage you can take daily without experiencing any intense mental effects, positive or negative, yet still get the productivity boost of the meds. This is going to be quite long, so I'll stick a TLDR at the end as well Methylphenidate I've tried 2 kinds of Methylphenidate; extended release, and combined release. The extended release in particular gave me a taste of what it's like to be functional human being. That was my first "oh shit, maybe I have ADHD" moment. The combined was pretty great as well. But I found the short acting component of it to be very stimulating to the point where I felt more like partying than doing anything productive. Very intense euphoria. Again, because I was taking these as one offs, the euphoria is unsurprising. Many ADHD medications give you this euphoria for the first week or so, then it fades, which is good. You're aiming for a stable dose in which you don't really 'feel' the medication, you're just way more productive. Elvanse (Vyvanse in the US) This medication has been life changing for me. It's essentially extended release Adderall. It's a prodrug which doesn't convert into an active chemical until it reaches your bloodstream, at which point it slowly releases stimulants over around 12-14 hours. I take it once first thing in the morning and it lasts all day. The first week or so was a mix of euphoria and "holy shit, this is what it's like to be a functional human being who can actually get simple stuff done without a 2 hour mental battle in my mind". It's made keeping a routine much easier, keeping on top of small chores much easier, and it has made a massive difference to my performance at work. Social effects + relationships This is quite interesting. I found that if I took ADHD medication as a one off, I got a euphoria feeling that made me very sociable. Once I was taking it daily, it actually numbed my social skills for a while. I think I was previously relying on my overly active and chaotic mind to socialise, and when that's taken away I was a bit like "oh shit, my mind isn't generating words, what do I say". After around 2-3 weeks, I learned how to socialise without this chaotic mind, and now I feel like my social skills are better than ever. I feel much more present in conversations, like I'm actually listening, thinking about, and then responding coherently to the specific things somebody says. Instead of vaguely replying to them at a high level and then going off on a random tangent because I couldn't remember most of what they said. Side effects I've been pretty lucky, I haven't had many. I was very sweaty and thirsty for the first month taking elvanse, but that's gone away now. Basically the only side effect I'm left with now is that it messes with my sleep a bit more than I'd like, but it's nothing severe. I also had quite bad appetite suppression, but I've built my meals around that by having a big breakfast before taking meds, a high calorie smoothie for lunch (easier to drink a smoothie than eat a meal), and then a big dinner once the effects wear off. So a very manageable side effect. Most people I've spoken to say that eating food before taking meds (of any type) makes them work better, and reduces the side effects substantially. My friend who takes Methylphenidate experienced quite a lot of physical anxiety in his stomach, dry mouth, headaches, appetite suppression etc. the whole set of common side stimulant side effects. Then he switched to Elvanse and they all went away. It worked much better for him. Some people are the other way around though and experience more side effects on Elvanse. It seems to vary A LOT per person. TLDR For me they were genuinely life changing. They cost me a fuck ton of money, £1200 for a diagnosis, £140 per month for meds, but they work so well that I'd happily pay that till the day I die. Not everybody gets lucky with their first prescription, sometimes you'll need to try a few different kinds of medication to find the one that works best for you. Don't chance the euphoria feeling, that's a side effect, not the goal. Socially you may find it a bit weird or unsettling at first, but stick with it and you may find that they actually enhance your social skills and relationships. Let me know if you have any questions! I have a lot of friends diagnosed with ADHD taking varying kinds of medication, so I have a decent amount of insight if you need it. Hope the meds work out for you!

I am not convinced products help all that much. I think the core thing you need to learn to get good at attraction, dating, social stuff, is that practice and experience are king. Theory is good if you're a complete beginner, but ultimately what works is just a ton of experience and socialising. Build your life around being able to have a healthy active social life where you're regularly meeting new people and the rest handles itself.

I think Gödel's incompleteness theorem is useful here. This was Gödel's path to his theorem. He essentially took the statement "this statement cannot be proven" and showed that: if the statement is true, then there must exist logical statements which cannot be proven (logic is incomplete) if the statement is false, then it means the statement can be proven but that would logic has just proved a false theorem (logic is inconsistent) The way he did this is really cool, basically getting maths/logic to eat its own tail by creating an encoding system, representing a formula in that system that when decoded says "The formula with code number X has no proof.". But then if you decode what X is, it is the encoding of the exact same formula.

I've tested as lots of different types over the years, INTP, ENTP, ISTP, INFP, INFJ. I think INTP is probably the most accurate. Cognitive function wise, Ne, Ti, Se, Ni, are the ones I feel strongest in. Si, Te were the ones I struggled with the most until I got medicated for ADHD. Now I don't find them nearly as challenging, although I still wouldn't call them strengths. I somewhat dislike that cognitive functions and the MBTI types are treated as a linked system. They seem like two totally disconnected systems to me. I think MBTI has value as a simple 4 dimension test of I vs E, S vs N, T vs F, J vs P, comparable to The Big 5, but I don't really see how you can deduce anything accurate about someone's cognitive function preferences from those dimensions. Vice versa, someone could have Ni, Si, Ti, Fi as their strongest functions and that just doesn't map to an MBTI type cleanly at all. I think these are best thought of as two different systems.

That's fair, I did concede that point earlier in the thread. I got carried away arguing against it because some of the dudes here were talking about shit tests like they were this specific distinct phenomenon that you must learn about and that if you don't you'll always fail. Personally I have never really given this concept much thought at all and I've done just fine. Generally my policy has been: playful teasing / banter > tease / banter back, soft insult > laugh and ignore, hard insult > laugh and walk away, rejection > wish them a good night and walk away. To me this came very naturally without any kind of concept like "shit test" because... this is just how you talk to people. And I was not naturally sociable. I had extremely poor social skills until my early twenties. Even when I was "doing pickup" regularly I rarely consumed any theory because I just found it extremely cringy and it made me feel like I was learning tricks to get laid. It just made me feel like a loser. I always had this thought "does a girl want a pickup artist, or a well rounded, social guy?" and the answer is quite clearly the latter. If you tell a girl you practice pickup she'll dry up like the Sahara desert 9 times out of 10. I always framed it as learning to overcome social anxiety, build a social circle, learning to connect, learning to flirt etc. in ways that worked naturally for me. I think that getting lost in pickup theory is... not a good thing. Pickup theory is like the stabilisers on your bike, good for learning the basics, but beyond a certain point I think it hinders you more than it helps. It can warp your ability to socialise naturally because you're constantly analysing the interaction and trying to fit it into some concept or script, instead of just being present with the person. Even if the script becomes automatic and sub-conscious, you're still limited by it.

I think this is a good explanation. I'm still not sure it convinces me that the concept of a 'shit test' is a useful one though. Most of the time the expression of this is just playful banter, or observing people's behaviour for status cues. If someone tries to playfully tease or banter with you and you collapse and get defensive then yea, that loses you a lot of respect and makes you look pretty unattractive. And I agree we're constantly searching for status cues in others, if you give off low status cues then you won't be respected as much. But I don't think that a shit test is a useful term for either of these. They're both just normal human behaviour that you kind of intuitively get a feel for if you talk to lots of people. A shit test implies some active nefarious testing, and I don't think that happens all that often. And like I said earlier, I don't really want to deal with a girl who's actively testing me anyway. I'd rather go chat to the majority of girls who don't do that.

I mean, aside from the sweet home Alabama here, what you’re describing is just polyamory. It’s not a new concept

Yea, I can’t find my eye bleach after reading this

Wtf?

I agree. I think it has some narrow scope of value for people who have really underdeveloped social skills and need a step-by-step instruction booklet on how to flirt or banter. Beyond that it seems really bizarre and unhelpful to me. Again, I also come from a country where giving people shit is how you make friends most of the time, so maybe that contributes to my opinion on this being a dumb concept.