Monday, June 3, 2013

Message from a Reader: The Consistency Trap

Below is a message from a reader: Max describes how he got caught up in PUA, and how he managed to free himself from the negative influence. Please pay particular attention to what he calls the "consistency trap".


Hi there. My name’s Max, and I was into PUA for a few years. Even though I learned through experience that it was unnecessary, it was your site and PUAHate which convinced me that it was really ridiculous. Weirdly though, I found it hard to let go of it. It took me a while to figure out what the issue was. I eventually realized it was something I call the consistency trap.

Basically, you can encounter PUA because you were searching for “solutions” with girls, either because you wanted more or because you feel bad. I was in the second category: at that time, I had been heartbroken by a girl I really liked and didn’t like me back. I felt awful, and discovering the PUA thing was a revelation: if I could just master “social dynamics”, be alpha and a master PUA, I could probably fix that! And moreover, this could enable me to make sure that I would never suffer from that again.


So I did some PUA and saw results pretty fast. This led me to become pretty arrogant, but also quite lazy, which inevitably led me to drop some PUA nonsense, and then realize my results didn’t vary as long as I made a move. It was not long after that for me to find your website and PUAHate, and decide PUA was idiotic.

The thing was, I couldn’t really let go. Even though I would not do PUA, I would get stressed in social settings, and in my head, I had all these permanent fantasies about out-alphaing other dudes. I was constantly in my head. It took me a while to realize that I was stressed because there was one thing I had not rid myself of: basically, that there was a certain type of personality or behavior that was universally attractive, and that not being in this character (alpha, super social, always witty, etc) even for a second would mean permanent loss, which in my case echoed to the suffering I had felt when I got into PUA.

I call it the consistency trap because it comes from the fact that PUAs convince you that there is one way of being which you need to learn (generally a narcissistic sociopathic sex-crazed social retard), otherwise you will fail for sure, and if you don’t fail, it will be temporary because, ultimately, the foolproof way of not suffering with chicks is to become like the guru.

This fucked me up for a while: it led me to question my behaviors, thought patterns, “limiting beliefs”, view of the world, values and even reasoning abilities! I wento to hypnotherapy first to try to change myself to fit that mold because I thought that my upbringing had fucked me up since I was not up to the standard! I even blamed my parents for it. Fortunately, at some point, I figured out something was wrong and worked instead on breaking the link between the pain I had felt in the past and the PUA pseudo-logic.

That is some toxic stuff. Humans will try to avoid suffering by using anything that seems to remotely make sense if it just promises it might help. I discovered that the hard way, and I believe it is the most fucked up thing PUA teaches: that basically doing things your own way means you are doomed to fail.

Thanks a lot for the good stuff Aaron! And also AlekNovy.

Max, thank you very much for your message!

11 comments:

  1. Man do I feel lucky that my entrance to PUA wasn't some dumbed down RSD stuff.

    Reading something like this makes me really sad. PUA should not put pressure on men but instead be a tool to empower us. We should learn not to fake outcome independence to win girls but to actually be outcome independend, so that we are free to enjoy flirting again.

    Most PUAs seem to me to have it all the wrong way.

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  2. This is revealing. I always wondered what would happen if two or more budding PUAs met in a social setting. A human version of cockfighting? Would they try to "dominate the social interaction" and "AMOG" each other to death until they actually forgot to just enjoy themselves, like Max described?
    I'm constantly surprised by the fact that just a few people are able to recognize the idiocy of the "alpha" concept, or the PUA interpretation, at least. If you don't (or can't) try to look and act as close as possible as what can charitably be described as an Arnold Schwarzenegger caricature, and try to out-alpha everyone in whatever social setting you find yourself in, then you're a Beta who will be inevitably be ignored, scorned, spurned, jeered and end up masturbating to Japanese porn cartoons.

    If you suggest that women have a psyche and a life history and a personality and might even find the whole alpha thing uninteresting or even annoying, then -gasp! - you're worse than a beta: you're a male feminist, an enabler, a white knight in denial. Such women don’t exist and if they do exist they’re just faking it or they're gold diggers with an agenda or they have a traumatic past like an abusive father or a creepy uncle who molested them and unnaturally put them off "dominant men" against their best interests, or whatever rationalization they come up with.

    I don't particularly hold the female gender in high regard, don't get me wrong, but I would expect adult men in their 30s and 40s to have a slightly more sophisticated view of human relationships and the human condition in general. "The manosphere will become mainstream" my arse.

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    1. I think that the "manosphere" is as childish as the PUA movement was. In fact, I view it as a counter reaction after the PUA movement imploded. They attract the same kind of men, but instead of trying to "figure out" women the PUA way, with all their formulas, they instead stuck to an overly negative opinion of "Western women". While I agree that not all women are great -- heck, are all men!? ---, it does seem that it is just the perennially rejected man voicing his opinion. Look at Roosh V, for instance: Dude travels the globe for pussy and gets laid once every three months or so...

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  3. Yep, by far the most damaging aspect of the community isn't the stuff they teach... It's that they CONDITION YOU into NOT trying OTHER solutions out.

    They literally brainwash you into (for example) viewing a social circle as "a beta thing".

    So they literally stick you into a trap. Here you are, a virgin, who's spent the past 4 years trying to crack the "cold approach skill" - whereas you, the exact same guy, if you had invested that energy into say learning to play the guitar and macking on rock chicks, you'd have had like 20 lays in those same 4 years.

    But you were brainwashed that using a guitar to get laid is "beta" and "not true confidence".

    The most damaging aspect of the community is where they brainwash you into NOT trying other methods and strategies and teaching you everything else makes you a "non-man" to be looked down upon.

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    1. Yeah, they heavily play on the need for validation and the fear of non-conformity, which is probably one of the reasons "AFCs" don't get anywhere in the first place: they just want approbation.

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  4. Also relevant is the "sunk cost fallacy" - everyone google it. It explains why people stick to and defend something that's produced no results for them and stick to it for years, when they should have moved onto a more productive strategy.

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    1. The "sunk cost fallacy" should be taught in high school since it's so relevant. Heck, you may know about it and still waste time/money on a questionable endeavor. Just to give you a recent example from my life: I was going through a list of critically acclaimed video games and bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution, spent a good ten hours on it, and the game just never clicked with me. The story didn't draw me in, the controls were a bit clunky, and some gameplay elements I considered tedious. Yet, it took me about an hour or so until I went from "I spent x hours on this game already and I'm going to finish it" to, "this is just a waste of time".

      Another great example are bad movies. Let's say you sit the cinema and the latest blockbuster turns out to be a steaming pile of shit. Do you get up and leave, or do you sit through it? I've wasted money on some pretty bad movies, and I left the cinema a few times. What's funny is that if you leave, someone else might leave as well since you demonstrate that you can just get up and walk out. Normally, though, people prefer to suffer quietly.

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    2. Exactly.

      I've often wondered why school doesn't teach skepticism, critical thinking and logical fallacies, and other such skills which are actually crucial in life.

      And then it hit me. Because you'd use those skills against the government itself. You'd start questioning the system.

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    3. David D tells you to use his programs "for an hour a day, every day for thirty days."

      How much of a fool would you feel like if you took him at his word, spent all that time, and got bupkis?

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  5. The Manosphere is a bunch of whiners who cry over fat women yet are fat themselves. Cry about feminist and the only solution they offer is traveling aborad. Anyone can be "Alpha" picking up sluts in thailand.

    Few guys in the manosphere get laid, how do I know? I've met some of these chumps. The manosphere are rejects in real life who werent cool in high school or college. They read some "Roissy" blogs and think they are "Alpha" because they know how to throw a few "negs" now. They bang 4's and 5's or 6.5's at best. Ask yourself why are they obessed about talking about fat chicks? it's a form of projection because the manosphere are fattie fuckers.

    Guys who get laid don't cry about how shitty women are, they are to busy fucking!

    Food for thought

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    1. I'll add to your last line and say guys people want to be around don't talk all day about how shitty ANYTHING is.

      Has anyone heard of the "law of attraction"? Miserable people tend to up with other miserable people.

      Traveling the globe for "poosy paradise" must be the final frontier in manosphere idiocy, where you become so negative, so repulsive that you become willing to go somewhere where you know no one, where you can't even speak the language, where you don't understand the culture (and clearly have no desire to do ANY of these things because people who do GENUINELY WANT to go abroad) and put yourself "out there" desperately looking to get laid.

      Perhaps worse than the consistency trap is the manosphere telling men "where you are now sucks, move away where it is better."

      Which therefore leads men to create this reality in their heads (for all the wrong reasons).

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