something_else

Idk, that's quite a generalisation. If you go to big melting pot cities like London you see people with pretty vast differences in earnings together. If you are an interesting person or have a lot in common it compensates a lot for differences in earnings. As an example you could see a 1M$+ earner hanging out with dudes from his marital arts gym who are making £30k a year, but they have something else in common so it works. Or even people from the same company. When I go down to London I've spent lots of time with people from my company including my boss (the CEO), and his brother who is a multimillionaire that was talking about casually losing £400k on an investment. The idea that guys earning $100k won't spend time with executives earning $1M+ is kind of an old notion. Nowadays you have much more diverse groups of people who all earn different amounts. Especially with very flatly structured companies where everyone is generally much more equal.

Have you ever worked somewhere that told you everyone there was 'one big family'? and then you tried to ask for literally the smallest, most reasonable request and being denied because it's not policy and they can't make exceptions? or being fired on a moments notice? or them making record profits and buy you all a cake to celebrate and give you 15 mins extra break one day, instead of you know, a raise that matches inflation? or have your contract redesigned to fuck you over out of even more money? Those things are not what a family would do, but massive companies who tell employees they are family will do them all the time. Places that tell you they are a big family are full of shit. You want to work for companies that acknowledge and respect the serious working arrangement you have, not bullshit and gaslight you. A large part of that comes from employers doing essentially everything they can to de-humanise workers and treat them as a resource instead of human beings. You don't need a union at a good company that respects its workers, where you can sort things out without a more formal protest. But most companies are not decent to their workers. They see them as a replaceable resource.

I was taking the piss out of @StarStruck for saying "I'm an extreme empath" earlier in the thread, wasn't talking about @zurew You'd be surprised how far a healthy dose of compassion will get you towards having healthy relationships with women. Don't believe all the red pill propaganda you read online.

So empathetic

I mean nature doesn’t provide you with 100kg weights to bench press Nor does it provide you with a community of other people who are trying to improve their fitness either, which is pretty good for motivation

Have you had particularly bad or one-sided relationships that give you this viewpoint? I have not experienced this to be true, it sounds like a POV that would be born from being mistreated in a shitty relationship, or not having the quality of relationships you want or deserve. In fact I would say I have found that men tend to be the most selfish in relationships from my experience of relationship dynamics in the like 18-25 age range. I’ll even admit I’m more selfish than the partners I’ve been with. Both sexes are capable of being very selfish. Human nature is to be selfish. To say that the love men as a whole give is selfless is wrong purely on the basis that 95% of humans are very very selfish. Men have their own set of selfish relationship goals and they’ll sacrifice only what they need to to obtain those goals, and rarely more.

The thing is, these aren't really internally driven at their core. Self expression is about expressing yourself to others. The desire to feel beautiful is about how others see you. Making yourself look good for others isn't something to be ashamed of. It's perfectly natural. You don't need to come up with reasons why you're 'doing it for you' and 'not doing it for others' Guys who are jacked will admit that easily. But women seem to be hung up on it sometimes. Possibly because of the constant objectification, I suppose. If you are constantly objectified for looks, I can see where the drive to say "I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing this for me" to others would come from. But it doesn't make it ultimately true. If you lived on a planet all by yourself, a woman would never do makeup again, and a man would not be jacked. Neither would wear stylish clothes.

Yea I've gotta admit this frustrates me as well when I hear it Yea, it makes you feel good, it makes you feel good because you know you look better to other people. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all, but for some reason there seems to be this drive to say that making yourself look good isn't about other people. If it made you feel good independent of others you'd wear fancy clothes and makeup everyday at home even when you're not leaving the house.

I think it's fine to go and talk to girls in your grocery store occasionally. I'm talking about guys who go there specifically to approach a bunch of girls in the shop instead of actually buy groceries.

If you want relationships that cannot extend past basic primal urges then by all means go and dominate 18 year old girls until they hit 20 and then dump them for the next 18 year old. Lots of guys have a phase somewhat like that. It's great fun, but it's not sustainable. If you want a conscious, developed, and happy relationship at some point in your life you might find that strategy stops working because any women with a decent amount of self-respect and maturity who you might actually still enjoy being around after 2 or 3 years is not going to go for a setup where you are bossing her around all the time like Tate, or a 1950s husband. You can have masculine/feminine polarity without anyone needing to be the boss.

Depends how you define pickup guy. If you go out to clubs and bars and meet women that way, they absolutely don't. I think that's a healthy thing for a lot of guys to do, especially if undersocialised. And most women I've met that way have been pretty receptive to advances because of the environment. Those are environments where you're literally meant to go up and talk to new people. Going out hunting for sex at 11am on a Saturday in your local grocery store though... yea you're getting sorted out by a lotta women

You just pulled those numbers out of your ass my friend Yea maybe guys can look at 80% of the women in the dating pool and say "I'd have sex with her" but that doesn't mean after the novelty of sex goes away that they'd actually be emotionally compatible and enjoy spending time together. To say that any man could spend the rest of his life happily with 80% of the women in the dating pool is really pretty absurd. Humans are so vastly diverse that such a statement is just not true.

Are you trying to speedrun divorce with this strategy? Just wait til you're in a long-term relationship with a woman you're not compatible with emotionally/spiritually and see how miserable it makes you, no matter how pretty she is. Yea, guys can detach and fuck just about any woman without needing emotional compatibility, but if you want anything remotely long-term, those are extremely important factors. For something long term, sacrificing some looks for compatibility is an obvious choice. If you can't see that, you're probably going to end up old and miserable. I think every guy should go out and fuck really hot women, it grows you as a man. But that's different from a more mature relationship. Once you actually want to start building something long term and sustainable, you need someone who is compatible.

Healthy pickup is about all of those things. Healthy pickup is mostly about teaching men how to be authentic, confident, masculine etc. in a way that is attractive to women. Fundamentally, it's about building really top-notch social skills. But pickup comes with a lot of baggage that you are correctly picking up on, and that's why it's better for guys to refer to it as something else. Pickup culture is really toxic towards women and has bad connotations. Also, guys have a tendency to use awfully crude language like value and the rating scale, but it's not like women don't do that either. It's just more subtle. Women are often brutally horrible to men who are for example socially inept and unintentionally come across as weird, creepy or otherwise unattractive. And that's a rapidly growing category of men. For that category of man, somewhat toxic pickup culture is actually an improvement over a self-pitying suicidal incel who might end up murdering a bunch of people. Generally (and I'm stealing this from, I think, Leo) you should wish for yourself to be stronger rather than for the world to be easier and more forgiving.

@Raze posted stats here Those stats are also questionable however. There are sources which contradict them to an extent, for example: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/brown-manning-relationship-status-trends-age-gender-fp-21-25.html

https://www.google.com/search?q=submissive+employee&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB977GB977&oq=submissive+employee&aqs=chrome..69i57.2241j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The word is not only sexual/kinky. It is used in other contexts to mean "ready to conform to the authority or will of others". You know this, because you use the word in a non-sexual context to mean exactly that yourself already, see below. You're just being obtuse and focusing on minutia to avoid the actual substance of the discussion.

No! No one needs to be submissive in healthy relationships, lol. You should drop this idea that one person always needs to be in charge. Relationships should be as equal as you can make them. The polarity of masculine/feminine is important, but framing it as dominant/submissive for anything other than sex is not healthy.

There's so, so much generalisation here. Just because something has been a norm for a long time doesn't mean it's healthy either. It's not even that women being submissive in a relationship is bad, it's possible for that to be healthy when it happens in stage blue cultures naturally. The problem arises when you have guys in Western green/orange cultures who want to seek out 'submissive' women who are still in that blue stage of development. It's toxic because the reason they desire that is essentially overcompensation for insecurity. You realise that submissive has non-sexual meaning, right? The definition is "ready to conform to the authority or will of others" which is exactly the relationship between a boss and employee generally. You do what they tell you.

But is that not really just what submissive means? They aren't really equal. They are paid differently specifically because there are not treated as equals. You are submissive to your boss and you're below them in the hierarchy, not equal. It works for companies because they must be cold and rational, but that's no way to run healthy personal relationships or friendships. Transfer of value is not the same as submissive vs dominant. You can both provide value to the other without someone needing to be in charge. But you also say you want a submissive girl. Is that not a desire for control and domination?

Have you ever had a great friendship where neither of you were really 'captain' and both of you treated each other as equals? They are the best friendships. Imagine you were going around only looking for submissive friends who you could dominate? That would absolutely be a red flag, and a sign of an insecurity. It's similar with relationships. You can absolutely have relationships where you both view each other as equals and no one is the captain of the entire relationship. Relationships don't really need a 'leader' beyond when you're fucking and flirting, and yea, in those circumstances, the power dynamics are fun as fuck. But they should not extend into the deeper parts of the relationship. Like, what decisions are you even planning on making for your 'submissive' girl?

Then explain to me what you mean by mildly submissive?

It is compulsive/complete, I don’t know what other words to use. You’re either equals in the relationship or you’re not. It’s one thing to play with power dynamics when you’re flirting/fucking, but if you have the desire for those dynamics to extend into day-to-day life (and important relationship decisions) there’s a good chance that’s not coming from a healthy place. Hell, that’s the dynamic that causes domestic abuse

Oh fair enough, that's my bad, I mostly focused on your direct reply to me rather than other posts you made. In terms of working through your stuff while sober instead of using something like psychedelics, yea, you could. And for some people that's probably the right choice. But I think it is somewhat arrogant to claim that psychedelics cannot create any lasting impact or help you work through stuff sustainably. Humanity has been using psychedelics to do that for 2 million years. It's not like you take some psychedelics, have an experience, then return to baseline without any lasting change in your base consciousness. They are called trips and journeys for a reason. They create lasting change in perspective just like travelling to a new country that differs vastly from your own. For example, the mushrooms that were given to dying cancer patients; whatever happened during their trips, it removed their anxiety and depression around death permanently, even after returning to baseline. And they took a tiny amount too! How is that anything other than healing? They then no longer had to work through that while sober. It's an efficient solution worth investigating and having an open mind towards at the very least. In a similar vein, if you take some MDMA or ketamine while you talk to your therapist, there are indications that creates wildly more powerful change than just talking to your therapist sober because it helps you open up so much more intensely. Of course you will need to do work while sober too, I don't think anyone denies that, but suggesting that psychedelics can in no way help anyone permanently grow or heal as a person is really just a bit arrogant.

I find you to be somewhat intellectually dishonest by ignoring the bulk of my post and focusing on the only part of it you could construct a response to. This is an argumentation strategy that immediately makes me discount anything that a person has to say because it's such a strong indicator to me that a person isn't interested in questioning the opinions they've already formed. And the response you did give here does not even address my point which you quoted, you simply reiterate your own viewpoint again; that psychedelics are bad, with no reasoning as to why. This is a further indicator to me that you have no interest in questioning your own established viewpoints. So what's the point in anyone even discussing anything with you when you already think you have all the answers? I think there are negatives and limitations to psychedelics, for sure. No sensible person disagrees with that. But to outright say they are useless, can't help anyone, and can't produce any lasting improvements, is a very, very bold claim to make, especially without any evidence or experience to back that claim up. I gave you several examples to the contrary, and you ignored them because they don't conform to your existing viewpoint.

The question I find most interesting is 'why is there something instead of nothing?'