On the contrary, I’m happier right now than I’ve been in a long time. I feel great. And any melancholy tone in my last couple posts were theoretical in nature. As far as the other criticisms, I’m not too surprised as I get similar criticisms often when I talk about LTR’s. I said it twice, but it didn’t seem to make a difference, but the last two posts were SPECIFICALLY in regards to long-term relationships, not pick up.

Yes, worrying about “meeting emotional needs” or “feeling isolated” in the context of picking up women are definitely not good things. But in the context of long-term relationships, they’re valid and important. The rules change in LTR’s. But often talking about that kind of stuff falls upon deaf ears in the community, as most guys don’t care about it and there’s a lack of decent information about it.

But I promised I’d discuss the pick up corollary of the Isolation Paradox. And here it is: the Abundance Paradox. Like the Isolation Paradox, the Abundance Paradox is simple yet has a wide range of implications. Warning: If you’re a newbie, this is going to sound completely insane and foreign to you, so you might want to just skip this article and go read my Day Game Model or something.

The Abundance Paradox is the fact that the greater you abundance mentality, and the greater your experience, the less importance and significance seducing new women holds. By its very definition, an abundance mentality implies never overvaluing any specific interaction with any woman you meet. 

It sounds obvious, but what this means is, the better you get, the less you value any specific interaction, the EASIER each interaction becomes. So, similarly to the Isolation Paradox, you end up as a man with an obscenely wide range of options, but being uninterested in pursuing many or most of them.

For instance, let’s take your average attractive bar girl: not super hot, but not ugly either. She’s kind of cool, but not amazing. Kind of smart but not brilliant. Seems all right. You pursue her a bit and realize a couple things: 1) she can be kind of a pain in the ass and is a little ADD and 2) logistics aren’t great as she’s with 3-4 friends who need to be won over.

I’m running into this situation constantly recently. And what always happens is the same. I quit caring. Whereas 3-4 years ago, I’d push and push, overcome all sorts of obstacles, ninja my way through logistics and get the lay (after five hours of work and tons of effort), nowadays, I look at her, realize I’ve banged like 50 girls as hot as her, dozens of girls cooler than her, realize I would probably never call her again and wouldn’t really enjoy my time with her, and I move on.

Literally, unless girls like this do all of the work, I don’t bother.

This is a big reason why I’ve started doing day game a lot since I’ve gotten back to the US. I just can’t be bothered with all of the nonsense that goes on at night. The fact I can invest 3-4 hours in a girl who I may not even like and might not sleep with. It seems insane to me now, whereas years ago, it was par for the course.

As a result, I get laid less than I used to. I also care FAR FAR FAR less than I used to. And honestly, I’m far happier than I used to be. It’s weird, but in this case, I believe that improvement involves a drop in results. Higher quality, lower quantity, far less time and effort. These days, I’d much rather have a great conversation with an interesting girl who I don’t go home with, than pull a girl who I have no interest in. And if reading that is fucking with you, just know that it completely fucked with me for months and still is to a small degree.

But hey, it’s what makes me happy now. I approach a maybe a dozen girls a week, line up a few dates, and then only sleep with the ones who I enjoy spending the time with. At this point, my time is way, way, way too valuable to me to spend hours and hours trying to bang a girl I don’t enjoy being around. This is obvious right? Why would you bang someone you don’t like? Like I said, when you’ve already banged like 50 girls exactly like her, why would you put in all the time and effort to do it again? It’s like sitting down to read a book you’ve already read 20 times. Why would you bother unless you have some sort of compulsion or addiction? And this doesn’t even count the headaches some girls can cause afterward, or the fact that SNL sex is usually pretty bad.

So I turn down lays now… a lot. And half the time part of me still tells myself that I’m just being lazy another part of me says it’s maturity. Either way, it’s an aspect of an abundance mentality that’s never discussed. Sure, when you have an abundance mentality, women rejecting you ceases to bother you because there are millions of women waiting for you. But you don’t realize until you have it, that YOU start rejecting women. Why? Because there are millions of women out there waiting for you.

“Isn’t part of successfully being with someone long term not about finding the perfect, flawless person, but in finding someone who’s more or less what you’re looking for, and then accepting that no one will be totally perfect, and making peace with their flaws?

That attitude is something that comes from within. If you have this sense that no one is good enough for you, then the answer isn’t in some perfect woman out there, it’s in changing your view of things.”

Yes to the first paragraph, no to the second. You’re absolutely right that there’s no “flawless” woman out there for us. The defining aspect of love is that we accept and even cherish a person’s flaws.

What I’m referring to is actually what the first commenter gets at: fulfilling emotional needs. The more developed one comes, the more sophisticated ones emotional needs are, and by definition, the rarer it is to find somebody who meets them.

To give you an example. Most newbies, and this was true for myself at one time, have a large need for validation in their relationships when they’re inexperienced. That’s why almost any semi-attractive girl who comes along and makes them feel like a king, they become attached to. But as time goes on, the more our identity accepts that we are loved by women, the less validation we look for from them — or at least, the validation changes. These days, it’s far more important that I feel understood by a woman than simply cared for by her. I feel like she needs to understand my motivations and dreams and passions and empathize with them. It’s very easy to find a woman who thinks the world of me these days. It’s very hard to find one who understands my world.

You also mentioned the BradP quote. You’re totally right and got me there. I have two responses to that, though: 1) I made that comment when I was happily in a relationship, and 2) I have no problem ever finding COOL women. I find cool women all the time. Every night. In fact, I feel like the better my game gets, the more I come to appreciate how cool each individual girl is. What I DO find more and more difficult is a woman who fulfills my emotional needs. If that’s what Brad meant, then I was unfair to criticize him. But if he really meant that he can never find a cool girl anymore, then he’s just shallow and I stand by that.

The other thing this post made me think of was that idea that for men, getting into a serious, long-term relationship is more a frame of mind than anything to do with a girl. It’s that saying, “Women are ready to settle down when they feel they’ve found the right guy. For men, the ‘right girl’ is whoever they’re with when they’re finally decide they want to settle down”

Fantastic point. This may very well be true.

“For example, if we take self-development as a measure of success, then let’s take a look at some giants of self-help; Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Steve Covey, Brian Tracey…”

One thing I’ve always found interesting is that rock stars, porn stars, movie stars, etc., ALWAYS end up married and monogamous. But at the same time, “self-development” doesn’t necessarily equate emotional fulfillment or having emotional needs met. Half those people you listed have dark streaks and strong criticisms against their character. Even Gandhi.

But whoever said I was probably being a little dramatic with my last line is right. There’s no such thing as a person who is 100% emotionally stable, 100% baggage-free, 100% non-validation-seeking, and 100% happy at all times. Therefore, there’s always somebody for everybody, no matter how developed they become. But that’s the nature of the paradox… the more developed and experienced you become, the rarer and rarer it is to get your needs met while your ability to meet other people’s sexual and emotional needs expands and expands.

Think of someone like Jay-Z or Brad Pitt. On the one hand, half the women in the country would go to bed with them and marry them at the drop of a hat. But on the other hand, Brad Pitt’s selection of suitable women is really limited to super models, movie stars and other extremely high status people. Before you argue this, ask yourself, how many women out there can really even grasp the world he lives in? Very few. Really, only other famous people, people in the stratosphere of social status can even begin to relate to him emotionally. Now, before we all cry Brad a river, that’s an extremely small selection of women… maybe 100-200 worldwide. Maybe that’s why most stars end up with other stars or living somewhat lonely lives?

As for the rest of your post… I feel like you’re making my point for me. You’re naming nothing but celebrity and public figure after celebrity and public figure to meet a certain criteria. Honestly, how many women walking around in a club in your average US city fit even one of those criteria? It’s very rare.

Look, there are women out there SOMEWHERE for me. I suppose the melancholy tone of the article was the fact that five years ago, I would have been happy to date any decent-looking girl I met who gave me the time of day. Now, I’ll spend a whole night in a venue and not meet one I’m interested in seeing regularly.

“Nevertheless, it seems to me that you’re still blind to your own obsession with physical beauty. You may have reached a level where you can date a ‘7′, and not feel that her looks matter to you in making that decision. What if the women I’ve mentioned above fulfilled all of your criteria in terms of intellectual, emotional capacity, and spiritual development? Would you date them, despite the fact that they are not even ‘7’s? Personally, I don’t know if I would, and that’s something I know I have to overcome.”

You’re right. I’ll be 100% honest. I loved my ex to death. But her looks was something I never completely got past. It wasn’t a dealbreaker, and I obviously didn’t ever raise it as an issue or bring it out. But it was like a constant itch that pestered me. I do have abnormal standards and pre-occupation with physical beauty. Part of that may come from my job. Part of it may just be the bi-product of the amount of my experiences. But as time goes on, my standards in that department only go up. And as much as it hurts to say this, one of the primary things I’m looking for in my next girlfriend is a large upgrade in that department. It’s superficial, but I take a lot of pleasure from walking around with a really hot girl. I think every guy does.

Can I get over that? Maybe… One day, I’ll have to. Will I? I imagine when once a few kids pop out and I’m married, I’ll stop caring. But it’s important to me. And another thing I’ve noticed… I’ve lost about 30 pounds in the last year (waiting for the six pack before I post about it), and since losing all of this weight… I’ve become even stricter on physical looks and feel justified for it. My thinking is, “Well, I busted my ass and ate right and lost all that weight, why can’t she?” Call it what you will, but that’s how I’ve been feeling lately.

But often people’s tastes in women immediately after a relationship tend to be a reaction to the person they just broke up with.

And one last thing, before I get way too off-topic. I’m a fan of Pavlina’s as well, although I don’t read him religiously. But who’s to say dating an uglier woman is a noble thing? Who’s to say it wasn’t a confidence issue in him? From what I hear, he got very excited upon hearing about PUA a few years back, and in my experience, most guys who get turned on by PUA are guys who have something deep down they’re looking to resolve in regards to women.

Anyway, moving on…

“I think it would help if you could narrow this down a bit. Can you give an example of an intellectual interest of yours that girls should share, but don’t? I’ve found that few girls share my intellectual interests, but I don’t disqualify them for that.”

She doesn’t have to share my intellectual interests. She just needs to keep up with me intellectually. And I mean, she doesn’t even have to be a super-genius or anything. She just has to have something going on upstairs. If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m constantly intellectualizing shit. She needs to be able to handle that and at least converse.

What’s more unique about me though — and this isn’t true about all guys — is that I link intelligence with sexual attraction. This especially has become true the more time has gone on. Stupid girls sexually turn me off. Intelligent girls sexually turn me on. Just how I’m wired. *shrug*

At the end of the day (and this is directed at both Lou and Eros), all other things equal, every guy will happily trade up in the looks department. It’s more of a question of how much trouble are you willing to go through to find quality women who are also extremely beautiful, and/or what other qualities are you willing to sacrifice?

Like I said earlier, as I get older, the more I value things such as intelligence, personality, energy, humor, etc. and the less I value looks (despite my standards going up). And I imagine one day it’ll become a non-issue. But as for now… I’m entering my prime as a male. I’d like to try and find the best of all worlds if possible.

And finally…

“A guy I very much respect once said, the goal of pu/self development should be that you are able to give yourself everything you need and all you need your partner for is sex, because it’s more fun with two people involved.”

In theory, yes, we would all like to be emotionally self-sufficient. But in practice, I think this is a very anti-social and terrible way to look at things. Sex is actually pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I’d rather have a woman I’m madly in love and be crippled (hello Sean Stephenson) than have all the sex I want and never feel anything with the women I fuck.

I randomly stumbled across this video at an interesting point. There were a confluence of changes in my life going on at once, and for whatever reason, this video seemed to express them perfectly for me. A lot of these realizations are of the “no shit” variety — yet they’re obvious realizations that we for some reason either ignore or have forgotten. I’ll make comments on lines from the video that really stood out for me and gave me lightbulb moments.

“Stop doing shit you hate.”

Here’s an epiphany: probably half of the guys I work with hate bars and nightclubs. They may realize it. They may not realize (often they don’t). And they go anyway because they read eBooks talking about going to nightclubs, so they figure that they have to go too. It’s so plainly obvious that these guys are never going to get a high level of success until either 1) they learn to enjoy bars and clubs or 2) they STOP FUCKING GOING.

I’ve talked to a couple guys who seem to be in denial about this. I talk to some guys who are just clueless to what they want and what kind of woman they’re looking for. I’ve been saying this for 2+ years now, but the first question EVERY guy needs to be asking themselves when they get into this stuff is, “what do I want out of pick up, and what would I enjoy most?” This is not taken into consideration nearly enough.

I include myself in this as well. I had a stark realization recently: that clubs are pretty lame. OK, well I always knew clubs were lame. But I still loved pulling girls from them. But these days, these mindless drunk pulls don’t excite me as they used to. What excites me more now is an interesting girl (still hot) who I can connect with about something. Nightclubs are terrible for this. Also… going to nightclubs alone fucking blows. It’s boring. It’s stressful. And even if you get laid, it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the effort half the time. I don’t enjoy these places unless I’m with friends.

“Listening is good, caring is better. You need to care. You need to give a crap about everything. And it starts with yourself.”

I look at all of the men around the community and I see guys out for themselves. More lays. More dates. More girls. More girlfriends. It’s all about, racking up the numbers. And guys don’t actually stop and care about the women they’re talking to.

Look, the one thing that took my game from decent to ridiculously consistent was the day I decided to start giving a shit about all the people I met. Everybody has something interesting about them and it’s your job to find it. This is why women tell me that I understand them better than any guy they’ve met, when I’ve only known them for three hours. This is why women I’ve known for two hours and slept with me tell me that I’m a “treasure for every woman.”

If you’re constantly in the mode of “me, me, me,” then you’re going to get women who are in the same mode. If you actually give a crap, not only are you going to meet amazing people, but you’re going to have 10 times as much fun, get far more consistent results, and your lays are going to be immeasurably more enjoyable experiences — not just jerking off with some girl’s vagina.

But as I said in one of my Immutable Laws of Pick up: this starts with yourself. You can only care about her life as much as you care about yours. So take control and start making changes for yourself. Work for that raise you’ve been dreaming about. Join that gym and actually go. Move into that new apartment you’ve been thinking about. Fix your relationship with your parents. Call friends you haven’t talked to in ages. DO SOMETHING.

“If you love smurfs, smurf it up! Do what you love to do and people will come.”

I spoke earlier about the underestimation of lifestyle and the effect it plays. Unfortunately, I’ve been a poor example of this. In fact, being a PUA coach is possibly the worst lifestyle choice you can make to attract women (ironically). I’ll save the reasons why for another time. But there’s one guy in the Boston area, a friend of mine, who has been killing it for a few years now. I’ll let him explain in his own words.

You game best when you feel good.  So find places, activities and people that make you feel alive.

In the year after reading “The Game” I spent at lot of time going out with guys to random clubs in Providence and working on cold approaches.  While this was a good exercise for breaking out of my comfort zone and stretching myself to the limits of the art of cold conversation, I would rarely get dates.  I would look ahead to Thursday nights with dread when I knew I would have to go into clubs with loud music and make several cold approaches.

After about 9 months and little to show for it, I gave up random club game and took up dancing.  After another 3 months of lessons, I was good enough to hold my own.  But the main difference wasn’t the dancing, even though I discovered I loved it.  It was the fact that I felt good about myself, and I let this attitude infect the people around me.  And the heavens opened up and women dropped from the sky.

Most importantly, surround yourself with people who lift you up and make you feel good about being who you are.

“If you’re pumping out good shit, [women] will follow. But if you for a second, for half a second, don’t believe in what you’re doing… you need to get out now.”

Look, you can either fake it, not genuinely care, and not actually put yourself out there — you know, use other people’s stories, lines, mislead her about who you are and what you want — or you can do what you love, meet women in the places you love doing the things you love, and not have to hide anything for an instant.

I honestly think that half the reason these guys look to use the silly crap they read online all the time with women is because deep down, they genuinely HATE what they’re doing and where they are, and as a result, they don’t give a shit about the girl they’re talking to. Open yourself up, don’t be afraid to care. And if you care and don’t like a place or a girl, then walk away. This should be fucking OBVIOUS. But for some reason we’re hung up on a “lay every girl you see,” mentality. This is fucking nuts. I don’t LIKE half of the girls I see and talk to. Why would I want to try and fuck all of them?

“The only way to succeed is to be completely transparent, everything is exposed.”

Again, this comes along with my Immutable Law of Connection: you can only share what you know about yourself. And you should be willing to share EVERYTHING. The best guy I’ve ever been out with in field (super natural, non-community), once told me: “You should comfortable sharing anything about yourself to anyone, at any time, in any situation.” That piece of advice is one of the most valuable I’ve gotten in the five years I’ve been doing this.

“Everybody has time; stop watching fucking ‘Lost,’ — if you want this, if you want bling bling, if you want [lays], if you want the life: WORK. That’s how you get it. Nothing else to say.”

If you don’t see how it applies immediately, watch again with the following in mind: Money = Lays; Business = Lifestyle; Work = Sarging.

Although the advice is fairly generic, I believe it’s important. It’s one of those “this is water” things where it’s constantly under our nose (be passionate about what you do; have patience to reach your goals) that we often forget it.

It’s inspired some thoughts from me, as it particularly relates to some life changes I’ve been making and also a student I’ve been working with. I’ll be back in a day or two with a full post full of my ideas. But in the meantime, check it out and leave any comments if it inspires something in you.

First off, to clarify, I don’t mean luck IN SET, what I mean by luck is all of the external factors that influence chasing tail… all external factors are out of your control and are therefore random and considered “luck.” Go out and venues are dead? That’s out of your control and luck. Open a girl and her friend just puked and passed out? Luck. Opened another girl and she’s insanely horny and loves guys who look just like you? Luck.

I am arguing that the vast majority of factors in pick up are external, therefore the vast majority of picking up girls is luck. Again, your actual “game,” no matter how good or bad, probably only influences 20% of your chances with women… It’s not much, but it adds up VERY FAST over the long-term (20 lays a year versus 2, for example).

Game will always give you the best chance to capitalize on the situations presented to you… but short of throwing yourself into as many situations as possible, you have no control over which situations you’re given. And the majority of situations are not going to be stacked in your favor. In fact, the vast majority of situations, you’re going to have little to no chance… That’s what I mean when I say luck.

Even if a guy stands in a bar all night and waits for a girl who’s horny to approach him… he’s still surrendering the majority of control over his outcomes to luck. He’s basically hoping for a drunk, horny girl to show up. Most nights, she won’t. But every now and then, she will. And even if he escalates perfectly and fucks her in the bathroom, he’s only controlled a tiny minority of his outcome.

I have a question: can you set yourself up for luck? Like, screen like crazy for girls that are really horny and receptive to escalation (if you’re going for SNL, bathroom, whatever)?

Absolutely. It’s called pre-selection, and we all do it to varying degrees. We all tend to avoid sets that we think would yield a poor result — tons of guys, seated sets, large groups, etc. — and focus on sets that we think we have a higher probability with. Again, this varies from guy to guy, and you could argue it’s even a skill unto itself. These days, I can scan a venue and find women who look like they’d be very receptive, both to me and in general.

This is how you hear some of these stories like, “two nights in a row, it was one and done. I opened one girl and took her home.” This DOES happen. I’ve done it. But you walk into a large venue, find the easiest looking girl and approach her. Or sometimes, guys will hang out for a few hours waiting for an “opportunity” to pop up. Nothing wrong with this, I do this quite a bit when I’m with friends now… But it’s definitely pre-selection, and you’re leaving a lot of pussy on the table by only approaching the low-hanging-fruit.

I have a small question, do you drink when you go out to on the ‘field’?

Yes, no, and yes. I get asked this constantly. The answer is yes, I do drink. Although I rarely get hammered, or even that drunk when chasing girls. When I first started, I had to get very, very drunk to work up the nerve to approach. After some time, I decided to stop on the booze for a while. In some ways, it made me better, but I decided that I enjoyed myself more with a couple drinks. So I’m back to drinking again, but not as hard or as often. I often won’t drink while coaching though. And some nights I’ll go crazy with some friends. My Achilles’ Heel is if a girl starts buying me shots… then it’s all over. In more ways than one…

Should you drink? My answer is always, it’s up to you. But if you feel you HAVE TO drink when you go out, then you need to learn to go out sober. Once you can go out sober, then make the decision. Gaming sober is pretty different and has its advantages, so I think every guy should try it.

If you have health concerns, like you’re an athlete or something, and you can’t afford to drink every night (those calories add up REAL fast), then no, don’t drink when you go out. Maybe save it for the weekends or something and just do shots of Vodka or something if you really want to.

Why do you think outer game should be learned first? Do you think that a solid inner reframe can naturally allow things like body language and interaction skills to enhance?

Only if the guy already has those body language and interaction skills. Some do, many don’t. Let’s take an example of a student: he’s a smart, confident and successful business man who can be very dominant and commanding in proper business situations. Then yes, it’s about fixing his inner game around women. It’s just a matter of transferring his confident behavior from his professional contexts to his social contexts.

But if you have a student who has spent most of his life behind a computer, has had few to no friends, has always been shy and awkward — in every situation his entire life — getting him to “open up” and “express himself” is just going to make him continue to express his awkwardness. He never learned good body language habits or social skills initially, so there’s nothing TO open up to. RSD always talks about how game is just learning to be “unstifled.” Well, what if you don’t even have enough to be stifle with?

Outer game needs to be taught first because it gives you reference experiences in the context of women in which to develop the important inner game qualities. Again, a guy who runs around yelling, “MY GAME IS A 10!” between 15 blow outs isn’t reframing anything. He’s deluding himself and avoiding dealing with some very fundamental outer game issues. First, he needs to develop the basic outer game skills — get women to talk to him, get a few phone numbers, make a few friends — before he even has a chance to worry about things like confidence, state, etc.

The other reason outer game should always be taught first is that it’s so easy to fix. Inner game issues take months if not years to overcome, and wax and wane from day to day. Outer game stuff can be fixed immediately and results can be improved immediately. And honestly, NOBODY has perfect outer game, so there are always new things to be focusing on.

It just comes back to that every guy has a unique situation. These days, probably 1/2 of the guys who come into the community already naturally have most of their outer game stuff handled. That’s why you see such an inner game focus in general these days… that’s the way the market’s shifted and most of the new coaches these days only had to fix their inner game, so they assume that’s all anybody has to fix.

Things in life are almost never as clear cut as “All you need is X.” Pick up is no different.

How much of success is inner game and how much is outer game? A lot of people say all you need is inner game, which makes sense to me. What else do you say to a guy whose whole reality is “I’m bad with women?”

That he’s probably right and needs to fix some basic things about himself. Anyone who knows me knows that the whole “inner game only” trend drives me absolutely nutty because I think it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. A guy with bad outer game and great inner game will never get laid. A guy with great outer game and bad inner game will get laid all the time — he’ll just lay low quality girls and not be able to keep them around or be happy.

No matter how awesome the shit going on inside your head is, it’s just that: going on inside your head. All a woman ever experiences is your outer game.

If you want to change a guy’s reality that is “I’m bad with women,” then you change it by giving him good outer game first. Fixing your inner game is a luxury of those who already have outer game. I’ve never understood why having this reality is such a bad thing if the guy never gets girls. If you never get girls, then it’s true and you should face it. The problem begins when you meet a guy with 200+ lays who says the same thing: “I’m bad with women.” To have a newbie virgin deny this reality is just shooting himself in the foot. It reminds me of the RSD monkeys I’ve coached who walk around clubs shouting out, “MY GAME IS A 10!” in between getting blown out 11 times in a row… They’re not doing themselves any favors… just deluding themselves from the painful reality: they have a lot of work to do.

Also, second question: how much is just dumb luck? Every guy I talk to with a high lay count has a couple stories that are just lucky.

Or quite a lot of stories… the more experience I get, the more I realize how much is out of our control (And hers too sometimes) and is just dumb luck. I can usually judge a guy’s experience-level these days based on how aware he is of how much luck is involved. It’s always the guys who tell me with a straight face that they’re practicing cold approach threesomes, or that they’re currently working on their bathroom lay technique that I immediately assume have no idea what they’re doing but think they do because they have like 20 lays or something. There’s no technique… you just find a really fucking horny girl (the luck), escalate fast (the skill) and then drag her to the bathroom. She either goes with you or doesn’t… no technique involved.

For instance, when I first came into the community, I was sold on the idea (marketing) that we could control 90-100% of our fate with a certain girl. When I got out into field, I soon realized that was probably much more like 50%. After I banged a few dozen girls and had some ultra-wacky and crazy experiences under my belt, I realized it was a minority, probably 30%.

These days, I honestly think, even when you include all the inner game stuff, the social circle stuff, the lifestyle stuff, on top of all of the mechanics and techniques… we’re talking 20% control of our own fate with any particular girl — and that’s probably still a HUGELY generous estimate — come to South America some time and see how much control you have over the interactions…

Fact remains, the absolute best thing you can do to get laid or get girls, is to just go out and meet as many women in as many situations as possible. Everything you learn, study, practice, think about, etc. is completely supplementary. Give me an average guy will all the pick up theory and skills who goes out twice a week, and give me an average guy who is clueless and goes out five times a week, and the guy who goes out five times will (usually) have better results in the long-run… There are just far, far, far too many intangible and extraneous forces that you can’t learn about until you’ve been forced to face them. I think really the difference between a guy who’s amazing with women and a guy who isn’t is a 90% fail rate versus a 99% fail rate. It doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of 100 sets a month, it adds up very fast.

It’s only when you’re going out all the time that that 20% advantage theory gives you adds up over time. If you’re not putting yourself out there consistently, then there’s nothing anybody can do for you.

As always, field is king.

Believe it or not, PUA game isn’t universal. It’s based heavily on the English speaking world: US, UK and Australia. It was invented by this part of the world, based on the women in this part of the world… and unfortunately, straying too far out of it leaves you screwed pretty quickly. But this is good, it’s always good to be exposed to as many pick up situations and cultures as possible… the idea is that it will make you as good as possible overall.

Argentinian women are a full step up from those in the US in terms of looks. They tend to be very skinny and often have much bigger tits than would seem normal for women that thin. Height can be an issue, as can the faces… but all in all, the average Argentinian girl is a full point higher than the average American in my opinion.

This is probably all the motivation you need to become interested in going and partying there. But throw on top the fact that cost of living is maybe 1/3 of what it is back home, and the fact that the nightlife regularly goes until 5-6AM every night, and you have a recipe for pick up heaven, right? Especially if you know Spanish… right?

Eh… it’s a bit more complicated. I’ll be honest to a fault here: Buenos Aires kicked my ass. For the amount of time, effort and energy I put into picking up girls down here, my results probably would have been triple in the States. That’s not an exaggeration: 22-23 nights in the last month, all of which lasted 6-8 hours.

Unfortunately, from a pick up perspective, BA is not all that it’s cracked up to be… in fact, it’s actually deceiving in that it’s not even that great. First of all, the clubs, while going off almost every night of the week, suffer from a lack of quantity. Either they’re stuffed with tourists, or they’re empty, or their ratios are awful (3-to-1 and even 4-to-1 were not uncommon). At first, we thought we just didn’t know the right places… but it didn’t get that much better when we DID get to the right places.

The other problem is that Argentinian culture is notoriously stand-offish and reserved. Every foreigner I talked to from Brazilians to Colombians to Mexicans to Germans complained about this. Argentina is also much more of a social circle culture. This actually explains the horrible ratios at the clubs. Girls only go with a group of friends. The only people who DON’T go with groups of friends are other guys looking to pick up girls. Which reminds me, the guys here are insanely aggressive. It’s not uncommon to literally wait in a queue for a girl to finish blowing 2-3 other guys out before you go and take your turn at her.

The way to go is day game, the casual bars, and social events like tango classes and house parties. Work your way into a social circle, and then hit the club with them. That’s really the only consistent way my friends and I were successful. Even splurging for tables yielded nothing but girls hunting for cocaine.

It sucks that it took me over an entire month to figure this out. Looking back, I was trying to shove my classic American-style PUA game into a completely foreign culture and set of standards. I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and as a result, I just beat my head against the wall incessantly. It’s no surprise that out of the few girls I DID succeed on picking up, all were Brazilian, British or American. Only one was Argentinian.

If you get out of Buenos Aires, the people (read: girls) become much, much friendlier… I only went to Mendoza. The quality was a step down, the quantity and ratios were just as bad, but I don’t remember getting blown out there once. Once you get out of the mega-cities, people become enamored with your foreign status, whereas in the mega-city they think you’re just another gringo schmuck there for cheap drugs and hookers.

Everything I’ve read and heard points me to Cordoba. Better quality, quantity and nicer people. I can’t say for sure. But next time I’m in South America, I’ll be sure to hit it.

The other factor of this experience is the massive amount of rejection I’ve had to live through again. I have to say, having a girlfriend for two years was nice and cozy. And even beyond that, picking up in the US, I rarely ever have to experience more than 2-3 blow outs in a single night. And it’s REALLY rare to suffer more than 10 in any given week without getting laid at some point.

Argentina was brutal in this regard… Mainly because of the language barrier, partly because of the cultural differences, partly because of the god-awful ratios everywhere, but it was blow out city… for me and every guy I winged with over the months. As I wrote last week, it has been dearly humbling, and has actually made me take a long hard look at myself in terms of dealing with rejection.

Even when I was a newbie, I never got rejected a whole lot. But getting blown out 8-10 times in a in a row is fucking rough. Now do it every night for 3-4 nights, and it’s easy to get pretty upset. And although I’ve seen students go through it for years, I never truly appreciated how rough it actually is. It’s making me think that maybe I’m not nearly as good at dealing with rejection as I thought. And for how bummed out/frustrated I became, it made me examine my motives and my needs a little bit more closely. Why am I STILL taking this shit personally? I know it’s a crap-shoot over and over and a complete joke in that the girl is literally judging me within seconds based on some shitty Spanish I blurt out… but it still fucking sucks. I have no idea why.

All in all though, what I’m hoping (and thinking) the outcome is going to be, is that I’m going to go back to the US and shit’s going to be easy… like stupid easy. Like, “I can do this shit blindfolded” easy. Vamos a ver…

1. First, and most obvious point of the speech was described expertly by a commenter — that we’re a slave to our thoughts and our own perspective. Day in and day out, whether conscious or not, we choose what to focus on and what to think about. Most of us do this unconsciously and as a result, we live in on an auto-pilot of selfishness and negativity. Wallace points out that by simply being mindful enough to a) become aware of our present reality, b) admit that we know little or nothing at any given time about said reality, and c) choose to assume the best and choose positive, unobtrusive thoughts, is the key to surviving a rather dull, banal and repetitive existence which — let’s admit — we all end up living.

This idea is by no means new. Anyone who’s practiced Zen or studied other forms of Buddhism will be very familiar with it. The concept of awareness, or presence, or “simply being” or egoless perspective comes up all the time in self help and spiritual teachings. But I’ll get to this in a minute.

2. There’s a second and deeper point that raised a lot of confusion and questions from readers, and I think this is the concept of “worship” he speaks of towards the end. The idea that as humans, we are by default programmed to worship SOMETHING — be it religion or power, vanity or morality — and that again, if we retain the awareness and presence to consciously choose what to worship, we can avoid a lot of pain and suffering.

This is kind of a deeper corollary to the first point, but I think it has much wider implications. The key phrase for me is one that is kind of glossed over with all of his talk about vanity, beauty, religion, etc.

“They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

I think this makes an easier translation to pick up and self help terms, as we talk about the idea of “value” all the time — give value, create value, demonstrate value, raise your value, etc.

But basically, what he’s saying is that a product of this “choosing what to focus on,” is also choosing what to value. It means all of our measurements for success, value and significance are chosen by us. Many people measure their value in terms of how much money they make, how attractive they are, how popular they are, how many women they sleep with, or how well they abide by some sort of morality or religion.

But again, the downfall of all of these measurements of value, is that they can suffer from the arrogance of certainty. Certainty of a reality, a lowercase-T truth. People who unconsciously value themselves on money or power, will become certain of their superiority or need to dominate; those people who worship vanity and fame will become condescending and demanding, etc.

Again, this comes back to the Buddhist concept of “not knowing” — a concept that paradoxically, in and of itself is worshiped and valued.

“Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.”

What I think Wallace is saying is that we all end up defining value and our reality for ourselves, so the most important skill we can develop is the wherewithal to always choose wisely.

3. Which brings me to why I love this speech so much. Wallace go through enormous pains to consistently remind us that he’s not proselytizing, that’s he’s not giving a moral sermon, that he’s not even telling anyone what to think, choose or do — in fact, the whole speech is about how we ALL are responsible how we think and and perceive reality. It’s OUR responsibility… he’s simply making observations about the state we all live in.

It’s philosophical observation — the original self help. Which brings me to my qualms with a lot of the modern self help genre and why I’ve always felt uneasy with it, even when I felt it was giving me decent advice.

The whole notion behind self help — that someone of some undefined authority is now going to impart superior information onto me — in and of itself implies an arrogance of certainty: here’s what to value, here’s the measurement of success, here’s what to worship. Despite all of the best intentions, I think this sabotages the whole purposes of the industry. How can you help someone to take responsibility for their own thoughts and awareness by giving them the proper thoughts and awareness?

I’m going to pick on Eckhart Tolle, not because I think he’s a bad guy, but he’s the name that gets bandied about the community more than anyone else.

The Power of Now was a decent book. I personally have a lot of history with Zen Buddhism and philosophy, so none of it was really eye-popping or anything for me. What rubbed me wrong about it was the subtle, yet implied notion that his lowercase-T truth was somehow superior than my own or anyone’s. And I don’t mean Tolle said so much or even thought that himself… I’m just saying that it’s implied. You go out and pay $19.95 for a book that’s supposed to make your life better. That, by its very definition, is a presentation of an arrogance of certainty — it gives you a new yardstick to measure value and a new concept to worship: be in the present, be in the now.

But again, there’s nothing mentioned about having the conscious awareness to CHOOSE your yardstick or what you worship. You just take it on authority, like you did everything else in your life. But here’s something to chew on: what if everyone experiences “enlightenment” differently? What if your path or my path is so estranged and distant from Tolle’s, that there’s little to no common ground.

Or even if the experience of “enlightenment” IS universal, any attempt to convey that experience inevitably gets lost in both his filter of reality and the reader’s. This has also always been my problem with many spiritual practices: spirituality and higher consciousness, by it’s very definition is something experienced. The second you convey it, you lose it. It’s like trying to give someone an orgasm by writing a book about it.

The same is true for pick up. I can write 500 pages about my experiences, my analysis and my recommendations with women, but your experiences can and probably will always be quite different than mine. And any time you take my advice and use it, there’s an implication of authority, of certain and even of arrogance… that I somehow I am more aware of a certain reality than you, my grateful reader.

In the end, we’re all operating beneath inescapable filters. What David Foster Wallace is saying is that while we all tend to believe what is coming THROUGH our filter is Truth, the filter itself is the only Truth. It’s the only certainty… that we choose how to digest reality and experience however we choose. And no matter how aligned our values, goals and dreams may be with one another, they’re always just perceptions of a greater unknowable reality — an idealized certainty in a vast infinity of “not knowing.”

This freaks some people out. But if you rest with it, what you end up with is humility and respect. The recognition that all you really know, is that you don’t really know anything… And suddenly, the crowded grocery store becomes light and dancing; the self help guru ceases to be an authority of truth and is rather yet another reference experience — another item to perceive, acknowledge and integrate if you so choose; the girl who blows you out becomes another emotional expression of human interaction, the relationship had and lost becomes another ebb and flow of life; and any reason for fear or anger subsides to a deeper comfort and joy.

“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

This state is what many self help gurus, New Age spiritual figures and RSD monkeys are always prattling on about — but you’ll never find it in a book, a seminar, a DVD-set or a bootcamp. No one can force you to be in this state. You’ll only find it by searching your own “skull-sized kingdom,” by constantly reminding yourself — YES YOU, THAT MEANS YOU, NOT A BOOK — constantly reminding yourself, day in, day out: “This is water… This is water…” And in my life, David Foster Wallace has been the one of the only people I’ve ever come across who can enunciate this with such painful clarity and elegance. For that, I’m grateful for him.

It’s a commencement speech given in 2005 to Kenyon College by the late author and thinker David Foster Wallace. It’s a bit long, but the 15-20 minutes required is more than worth it. Full transcript is below…

“If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna… [mumbles]

Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think”. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

From my posts in the last month a lot of guys have emailed me with the impression that I’ve been killing it here in South America. Yes, I’ve been getting laid and hooking up, but compared to the amount of time and effort and blow-outs, it’s been one long exercise in humility.

I’ve been going out 5-6 nights a week, often up to eight hours in one night. If I put in this much time and effort in the US, I’d probably have 6-8 lays this month.

For a long time, I’ve felt like I’m pretty good at dealing with rejection and blow outs. But this has really tested that, and I’ve actually found myself pretty frustrated some nights. In the US, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with more than 2-3 blow outs in a single night. Typically, I know if I go through 5-10 sets, I’m going to eventually get laid by one of them.

Not here. It’s been brutal at times. 12-15 blow outs and/or flakes in a row seems to be standard affair if you’re avoiding tourists. I think most people are tempted to jump on the “Country X is super hard to pick up a girl in,” or the “Country Y is much harder than Country Z” bandwagons. But I actually think there’s a much more universal effect going on that has little or nothing to do with specific nationalities and cultures.

The more I travel, the more I realize that cultural differences and perceptions are blown out of proportion and that these struggles everyone experiences really boil down to basic and fundamental factors.

The truth is that every country I’ve been in where they aren’t native English speakers, it mostly comes down to pre-selection. If there’s a language barrier, ANY language barrier, then you become a slave to pre-selection. And as a slave to pre-selection, the reactions to your approaches are going to be far more hot/cold than they are at home… and mostly cold.

What I mean by pre-selection is that a certain percentage of women in the country you’re visiting will be naturally interested in you and your culture, but most will be neutral. The ones who are neutral, will not have the patience to overcome the language barrier with you, whereas the ones who are interested in you will be excited to.

To use here in Argentina as an example. Being an American in a lot of these clubs, a large common perception of me tends to be: young, rich American guy on vacation… in a club… probably here for cheap drugs and/or prostitutes. Unfortunately, this is the perception of a lot of “party gringos” visiting down here. These women immediately want nothing to do with me — blow out.

Next, you have the girls who are neutral about American guys. I talk to them, and despite my Spanish being very good now, communicating well can still be a struggle and take a lot of effort, especially in a loud club. As a result, these sets either go nowhere after a while (as I’m far less witty and spontaneous in Spanish) or she simply has no patience for trying to listen to my accent over the music, so she leaves after five seconds.

Then, finally you have the pre-selected minority. The girls who love American culture (usually our music), like my “rocker” look which is practically non-existent down here, and usually have studied English in school, if not traveled abroad. These girls immediately become excited to meet me and usually (almost always) want to immediately practice their English on me.

These girls, once you find them, become very easy — again, they’re already enthralled by my culture, so as an extension of that, I have to do very little to gain attraction — but again, the hard part is finding them. In some clubs and bars, they’re practically non-existent.

So the result?  You get strings of 15, 20, even 30 sets in a row that lead absolutely nowhere, are full of awkward situations, or are demoralizing rejections.

This makes sense though. If you reverse the situation, I think I’d be the same way. For instance, if I was in a club in NYC, and I met a Japanese girl who spoke very poor English, I’d probably have little patience or interest in sticking with her for more than a couple minutes. I have little to no interest in her culture and am not willing to struggle through her bad English and put up with all of the awkward situations it will create (this is assuming she’s not smoking hot of course).

But in the same club, let’s say I met a Colombian girl. I like Latin women a lot. I speak Spanish. I’ve traveled all throughout Central and South America. Bam… she’s immediately a +1 in my book and I’m probably going to be even more interested in her than I would be in a random American girl for the night.

This is also creates the perception that the women in your home country (typically the US, Aussieland or some European country) are far easier than any other country. No, you just don’t have to deal with language barriers or cultural pre-selection. Personally, I’ve found the UK to be the easiest country for me — as I imagine most other English-speakers will find the US to be their easiest country. Why? Again, cultural pre-selection. English-speaking peoples love each other’s cultures and that just greases the wheels when it comes to meeting each other’s women.

From what I can tell in every country I visit, this pre-selection factor is 100 times more important than any perceived cultural difference. People always make a huge deal about cultural differences, but I’ve really found that once you get a girl in a one-on-one conversation, they’re all more or less similar. Sure, South American women are a little pruder, but they also don’t play head games or cockblock each other. Sure, European women (continental; Western) are generally more polite and friendlier, but they also expect a little more investment before they bang you.

But in the end, these differences are minuscule compared to the glaring fact: to do well in another country, she either needs to be very interested in your culture, or you need to speak her language fluently. Otherwise, prepare for the oncoming humbling.