Why you should learn game anyway.

"But I don't intend to pick up women," one of my classmates tells me when we're a little way out of the exam hall and on our way to the bus stop. "I don't see the point in this 'game' thing."

I've heard this line uttered sometimes in response to exhortations to learn game, in one form or another, such as "women these days aren't worth it anyways". The point these folks are making is that while they admit the value game has in the mating arena, they argue that they don't intend to mate anyway and hence have no reason to pursue game.

On the surface, that seems fair enough. I've explained in my previous posts the dilemma moralfags like me and Free Northerner face; while Roosh says to not let chastity hold one back and that passion is a virtue so long as it's in earnest, please excuse me while I disagree with the king, especially since I've recently spat out plenty of vitriol regarding the vileness of modern romantic love.

I fully understand that the deck is stacked against men in courts all over the world. I have no illusions as to how completely screwed over Singaporean men are in marriage, the cage that most of them unwittingly walk into. I fully agree with Aurini that 99% of modern women are unfuckable, let alone undateable. I fully have no intention of getting myself entangled with any sort of woman until the Cathedral falls, which might be years if we're unfortunate. Of course, there might be the exception if I'm blown off my feet, but as things stand, no thank you.

And I still am learning, and practicing in small amounts where possible, game. And if I were a mountaintop ascetic in a hidden monastery with some psuedo-mystic name like Thousand Leaves Fall, I would still go ahead and learn game.

So, if you, an unattached young man, not going to use game to pick up women, why should you go about learning it?

Desire vs. Morality.

I've written before on how I've had the desire to lead others, yet fallen short when it comes to exericising that desire due to my pig-headed unwillingness to use coercive force to compel others to my will.

Sometimes, I get bored and read the blogs of other young manosphere denizens like me, folks in their early 20s, and when I read about some of their goals and what they're building themselves towards, such as establishing a harem, I catch myself thinking "more power to them, but I could never quite do this."

Not that I don't have the desire to - I'm sure every straight, hot-blooded male has fantasised about being waited on hand and foot by a gaggle of HB 10s.

Learning Koanic Soul, or at least, attempting to.

All right, I think you've had enough bitching from me about the shitty state the world is in; all this negativity is getting to me as well, and there's no sense endlessly wallowing in it. I'm long overdue for another self-improvement post, and what better way to do that than a spot of inner game?

You may remember that a little while ago, I joined Cappy Cap's Forced Discipline and Regimen Month, during which one of my goals was to learn something about a subject I had no knowledge of. Well, I've found something that's a) interesting, b) useful and c) falsifiable via my own testing in daily life, so why not?

What I'm referring to is Koanic Soul.

Now that I've figured out why I'm actually a lot more comfortable doing outrageously silly things with people I consider my in-group as opposed to my out-group (you'd think it'd be the other way around, since you can just dump people from the out-group), coming across Koanic Soul as a system of inner game for natural introverts does sound quite interesting. The principles which it's based on are plausible by my own evaluation, and I can go out and test it on the lab ladies (whom I will say after a number of months of being my game target dummies, have warmed up to me considerably. I suppose it is easy mode because a) they are compartively starved for male attention and b) anyone with a smidgen of game will become compartively alpha in that setting...)

But the most important thing that it appears to be selling is the path to the generation of a solid core self-identity, getting you to answer yourself as to the question of "who am I?" I will admit that is a rather big plus point in my book - I suppose a good proportion of this blog, reading back on my previous entries from the start of this year, has been an education in who I am and who I was even over this short period of time.

When I first started learning game from reading Roosh/Roissy et al, I'll admit to feeling heavily uncomfortable with pick-up per se, and gravitated towards the Ironwood/Vox Day camp of game. Pretty early on, I realised that my moral code would not live up to me closing on a girl (and fuck anyone who says it's beta), and went ahead and learned game to deprogram my brainwashing regarding sexual reality and get my masculinity up to snuff from the whiny, cowardly schlobb I used to be and still am where I haven't picked up all my pieces.

So yes, game for self-improvement as opposed to adding to my notch count, then testing the precepts on a group of captive target dummies. Which is why stuff that cultivates inner game appeals to me.

So the basic idea behind Koanic Soul is that one crafts a number of Koans, small, simple mantras that you can repeat to reinforce yourself, almost like meditation. People already oftentimes use some form of these, Koanic says, such as "this will be easy", "everything is a learning experience" and "I'm the best". The problem, he points out, is that many of these are not a) realistic, b) in line with one's genetic hardware, c) conflict with one another, or suffer from numerous other problems and as such, Koan crafting needs to be done very carefully and Koans tweaked from time to time.

Clearly, this needs a lot of self-reflection and honesty with oneself. It'll be a good exercise, if nothing else. The link I've provided up top to Koanic's blog should have his videos on a number of the basic ideas; considering some of the similarities between us, I think I should be able to use his own Koans as a template to craft my own personalised set and see where those get me.

More to come on this as events progress.

Recovering from Gamma - seeing the box for what it is.

Vox Day has picked another poor fellow to submit to his amusement imperative, John Scalzi, and has been lampooning the sop on his main blog. One side effect of this is that there's a discussion on gamma men on Alpha Game, how they behave, and in the comments, what gamma men can do to recover from this little problem they're in. The discussion has been most edifying, and I'm still waiting on Vox's reply on what he believes to be a proper route to recovery.

As I've mentioned before in my previous posts, I believe myself to be a mix of delta/gamma on the socio-sexual hierachy, perhaps 33% delta and 66% gamma. While I like to think I've improved somewhat since learning about game and its applications, I'm also inclined to keep things realistic now. No Don Juan or Casanova here.

The lab ladies.

Everyone's got to start out small - you don't run before you can walk, you don't start out ladening yourself down when you start pumping iron, and you don't do calculus before you can do simple arithmetic.

I'm not sure what the general ruling is on this matter when it comes to game, but I've decided to start out small. Like M3 says, confidence is built by a string of steadily increasing successes, and if you fail right out the box, things aren't going to be looking up even though one of the tenets of game is projecting that aura of overconfidence. I don't think I've got enough to the real stuff to fake it convincingly, if you know what I mean.

Ian Ironwood has a very lovely guide to male dominance for beginners in a couple of easy steps, which I'm currently trying to apply in my daily life. It's not easy for one to break out of one's mould, of course, especially for a self-identified delta/gamma, but nothing ever worth having should be expected to be easy to acquire.

We're all meat machines.

 
We're all meat machines.

It's a sobering, and as is usual for me, slightly depressing thought. Sort of like discovering Santa Claus isn't real, only he is, but he really lives in a third-world country to take advantage of the cheap child labour there.

In my game practice with the lab ladies (I'm sure it says something about me that I find it far easier to imagine people I'm familiar with as target dummies than near-complete strangers) I can see the marked difference from the complete invisibility I was labelled with for the first five months of my lab work compared to the last month and a half. No Don Juan here, far from it, but being warranted a second glance by a number of the lab ladies is...interesting.

I suppose it helped that we Singaporeans were recently voted as the least emotional people in the world. Go us. Of course, I don't intend to escalate any time soon, but just seeing the basic principles produce such a marked difference brings up various thoughts and emotions in me. Here's a small incident that happened a couple days ago. One of the lab ladies comes up to me and a friend while we're busy watching the readout from a piece of lab apparatus on an experiment we're doing.

Her: Hey, do you guys have a marker I could borrow for a moment?

My friend immediately starts patting down his labcoat, but turns up nothing and apologises. Now, I do have a marker in my labcoat pocket (always have one there, never know when I might need to mark a vial or two), but I don't turn, just watch her out the corner of my eye. Having determined that my friend doesn't have a marker for her appropriation, she turns her attention to me.

Her: Do you have one, [me]?

I ignore her and continue watching the instrument readout for a couple of seconds, then lazily reach into my labcoat and draw out my marker. Instead of handing it to her, though, I keep my eyes on the readout and hold out the marker to my friend with a small shrug.

Me: Give it to her, [friend].

My friend's a great guy and plays along as an unwitting accomplice, eagerly handing her the marker. What I do notice, as I continue watching her out the corner of my eye, is that she's not looking at my friend as she takes the marker, but me. Up till this point my insides feel like they've been all in a tangle, especially with using my friend like this, but I wait for her to turn and start walking away when it's my turn to face her and call out in the quietest yet most commanding voice I can manage at the time (my insides were still twisted, and it being a lab doesn't do well for shouting, either.) One eyebrow slightly arched (I hope, I didn't have a mirror at the time), one arm outstretched with my index finger in the air.

Me: [her], return the marker later. Set it on my workspace if you can't find me.

She half-turns, and her face lights up completely, betraying her spinning hamster for a fraction of second or so before shutting down again and giving me a nod and scurrying away. But what I'm finding most interesting isn't her reaction, but rather, my reaction to her reaction. She had no way of knowing I was attempting to apply Game, so I can't fault her. I, however, knew the whole thing was a farce, the courtship equivalent of going down to the range and shooting a few targets as opposed to going hunting - and yet the meat machine that I was reacted anyway.

My lizard brain's pounding and drooling away, while my more conscious and rational self is feeling...well, I don't know. By the time I finish collecting all the data I need and retrieve my samples, my lizard brain's stopped howling and all I feel is this mild interest, I guess, tinged with just a hint of disgust. Sort of like a naturalist who's just discovered a particularly interesting strain of yeast, and is now faced with the task of characterising it. Yeast, by the by, generally tends to smell really bad, at least in my experience.

Oh, and my marker was already on my workbench when I got back.

Game does open you to part of the bitter truth of how people work. We all like to think we're sane, where logic and emotion come together to produce some vestige of rationality through which we can view the world. And yet there are so many undercurrents present, and it takes a huge dollop of self-awareness to even notice it, let alone actively direct it where it needs to be.

The realisation that you're a meat machine is a shock to your system. How much of you is you, and how much is just a soup of chemicals floating about in a sea of cells, making you feel and do things against your better judgement? Sure, you hear about antidepressants and SSRIs and Ritalin and all that trash, but experiencing the raw stuff for yourself and identifying it as such truly drives the point home. Staring out of the box and seeing the world sail its merry way along its path straight to oblivion, all the shit in the world makes so much sense when you stop viewing most people as beings that even attempt to be rational, and start seeing them as meat machines whirring away on automatic.

We're goddamned meat machines, and there are far too few of us who know of, let alone try to harness or rein in our natures.

You still have much to learn, grasshopper.

 So I was in the computer lab today with a friend, working on our own project reports, when one of his friends comes in and plops herself down across the desk from us, and a small conversation ensues.

There were so many painfully obvious openings for negs - my friend's remark that her dress looked like a maternity dress, her rueful admission that she'd gained a kilo or two over the last holiday month (now I'm really wondering what might have happened if I'd gone ahead with my remark about it possibly being baby weight. Even if she'd exploded at me, it'd probably have been practice for taking histrionics calmly and aloofly/amusedly. Hah!), and yet I couldn't get the words out of my mouth or replace her with a target dummy in my mind. I guess it didn't help that my friend was the one steering the conversation between the three of us, pulling us into his frame. Since I self-identify as being somewhere along the delta-gamma spectrum (using Vox's system), I guess it's not hard to out-alpha me.

I wonder if he knows about game, or if he's just a natural. I may have to find a way to discreetly ask him.

At least when my friend moved to introduce us properly, I managed to coax her into giving her name first, before I "rewarded" her with mine.

What I think I need to work on now, is confidence when talking to unfamiliar people, men and women alike. Greeting the security guards on campus, asking people the time, asking people at the gym if they're done with the equipment instead of just standing around and hoping they'll get the message. I know it sounds pathetic, but it's an improvement over merely just looking people in the eyes and I think I'm ready for that now. Just walking like I've a sword on my belt makes me feel more confident. I know I can have a loud and commanding voice when the situation calls for it - I was told so, first in basic military training and during my two-year stint in the navy - I just need to exercise it more often.

Baby steps, baby steps. Still have much to learn, much to improve on. Reading Roosh, Heartiste and Vox every day.