Backstory:

My father was making a good amount of money when he was younger and decided to “retire” in his early 40s. No in his 60s, he finds himself in a sexless marriage, lonely with no real friends, and desperate for human attention and meaning in his otherwise meaningless life (which he gave up on in his 40s).

It’s something I came to terms with when I was younger. He was narcissistic, self-centered, self-important, emotionally needy, in constant need of attention and praise, and overall a disgusting and embarrassing man-child. Nevertheless, I was the sentimental kind, and having a relationship with my family was something that was always important to me. So despite how down it would bring me to even be around him, despite how much my wife hated it, I would always push myself, my brother, and even my wife’s side of the family to go visit him and give him attention.

My uncle was a high level executive at one of the largest American investment banks. Following a bitter divorce that destroyed his credit, he also ended up losing his job, and was left broke and begging my father for money. He also trained his daughter to beg my father for money as well.

The event:

My father had to go in for open heart surgery.

The aftermath:

Prior to his surgery, I would go visit him. The hospital was 1.5-2 hours from my house. So, it was a 3-4 hour round-trip just to spend 2-3 if company with him.

On the night before his surgery, he was a baby and super anxious, despite having over a 98% proven success rate through the conventional method, the head of the CTU being his surgeon, and being in one of the top hospitals in the United States of fucking America. So when I got there at around 9pm, he was relatively quiet. We made brief conversation until my brother got there at 11:15pm.

Literally as soon as my brother walked into the room, my father’s first words were, “At least you showed up. I’m so disappointed with both of you. All day I’m alone, and lonely, and neither one of you bothers to be here the day before my surgery. You show up at night to spend a few hours before I go to sleep just to say you showed up?”

I cut my brother off. I signal to him with my hand 🤚 so that he doesn’t speak. I take over the response for him. So I respond:

Me: “Dad, guess what, you failed all of us as a father. Yet here we are.”

Him: “Excuse me?”

Me: “You made a choice between your family and yourself, and you picked yourself. You decided, fuck my family, and you retired in your early 40s.”

Him: (sarcastic) “So, you wanted me to keep working so I can support you?”

Me: (most of this was in a foreign language, so a lot may get lost in translation) “No, I wanted a father to be the kind of man all the other fathers were for fucking nobodies who are giving interviews in the NASDAQ and starting their own real estate development companies or businesses with the money the older version of their genetics earned. It wasn’t about the fucking money. Do you have any idea what it was like to grow up with a fucking embarrassment as a father? You were a fucking embarrassment. What were your teenage kids going to tell you? That you’re a fucking embarrassment? You were. And you still are, today more than 20 years ago. More every passing year. Why? Because you gave up on life. You chose consumption over production. You chose comfort and pleasure over effort and growth. You have no idea what we went through, because you never gave a genuine fuck about anyone besides yourself. Grandpa had a construction company with over 5,000 workers. He resurrected more than half a country torn apart from WWII. That was your father. You had someone to feel proud of. What did we have? A lazy fuck who gave up on his life, on his body, on his wife, on his children, and doubled down in denial, telling everyone that he retired and was enjoying life, thinking that maybe if enough people would pretend to believe it that it would somehow make it true. So, I’m fucking sorry. I’m not going to sit here and have you call us shitty sons for coming to spend time with their disappointment of a father. You don’t get to say we’re not giving you enough. You’re not happy with how much time your kids are spending with you during the two weeks you’re in the hospital? Guess what, we weren’t happy about your lack of effort over the past 20 years. Yet here we are. Why, dad? Why do you think we’re here? Because it’s certainly not because of the money. It’s all in an irrevocable trust and we’re the beneficiaries. We could just not show up and it wouldn’t make a fucking difference. So why are we here?”

Him: (defensiveness) “I don’t care, LEAVE! I DON’T WANT YOU HERE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE!”

Me: “Fuck you. We’re here because we’re the ONLY ONES who cared enough about you to want to see you do much better than what you settled for.”

At that point, my brother and I just walked out. He sat there alone, after he played the role of the poor victim to his nurses. He fell asleep alone before his surgery.

The day of his surgery, I came to the hospital again just to give him some company (even though I knew the surgery went 100% fine). He was still sleeping and under anesthesia when I got there, and the nurses said he would still be under for another 4 hours. So, I left, because I had work the next day.

My uncle and his daughter showed up, however, after he woke up. He started lamenting to them, about how “my sons broke my heart so much yesterday, that the doctors had to use crazy glue to try and fix my heart.” My uncle jumped on the opportunity to feed my father’s ego and need for attention and to feel loved, “Well, forget about that. We’re here now. Let’s talk about something more positive. We’re just glad that everything went well and that you’re okay.”

But then something miraculous happened. So miraculous that it actually warranted this post on this sub. Despite enduring a childhood from a strict tradcon father, and being sent off to military boarding school, and being a narcissist his whole life, and that vicious untimely confrontation hours before his open heart surgery, and despite my uncle and his daughter working my father for years ... my father confided in my mother in private after my uncle and his daughter left: “I was very disappointed at (his brother) and (his niece). Today, that pleasant and loving conversation hurt me more than (I) and (my brother) hurt me yesterday. I could tell that all of it was fake. I didn’t want to believe it, but I also couldn’t NOT see it either. The whole time, I just noticed how fake they were. How my own brother and this little girl didn’t really care about me. All these years. And he trained his daughter. I just felt so disgusted more at myself than at them.”

He then (according to my mother) proceeded to cry, and the nurses had to come in and check up on him because this was all as soon as he woke up 6-7 hours after his surgery. He apologized to my mother for letting her down for the past 20 years. My mother showed him a picture I had texted her when I came to the hospital post-op, but he was still under anesthesia. My mother told him, “That’s the difference between your sons and your brother. Some people show you how much they love you and care about you, but they don’t give a fuck about you. And the people who actually care about you and love you, you don’t always see it.”

Then, my brother went to the hospital post-op. My father apologized to him. He apologized for letting him down all those years in every single way. Unfortunately, my brother coped with my father’s narcissism a long time ago by being emotionally numb, so, he wasn’t really too moved or touched by what my father had to say, but it was emotional nonetheless.

Then, I finally had the chance (break from work) to come to the hospital post-op again. I walked in not knowing what had transpired between my uncle, my mother and my brother yet. So, I walked in angry at my father, and ready to block his verbal punches and hit him back twice as hard as if he was out of the hospital. I didn’t give a flying fuck about the “Oh, how could you, he’s your father, just finished open heart surgery and in the hospital” bullshit excuse. If he’s healthy enough to spit verbal poison, then he’s healthy enough to take it as well.

My father welcomed me with open arms, kissing me on both cheeks and just bringing me in for a light one-armed hug (given that his sternum was non-existent and his chest muscles were destroyed post-op). He looked at me and started crying. He said, “(my name), (my uncle’s name) and (my cousin’s name) came over yesterday. And I honestly FELT that your angriest ‘fuck you’ or calling me a ‘failure’ had more love in it than their sweetest and most tender, ‘I’m so happy everything went well and that you’re okay.’”

“And I thought about everything you told me, and I thought about my father (my grandfather). And when you were talking to me, that’s the same way he would talk to me. About what a fuck up I was. About how lazy I was. It was like he was talking to me through you. But then I realized, no, the reason I feel that way is not because my father was a cold emotionless person, or because I raised two ungrateful asshole children. It’s because what everyone who actually cares about me is saying is the truth. My father was angry at me and beat me, not because he cared about having an amazing son. He didn’t need his sons to be successful so that he could feel successful. He was already successful. He wanted to see me become my best self. It pained him to watch me throw my life away. And the only way he knew how to express that was with anger, to take off his belt, and to beat me or send me off to a military boarding school. It’s not that he didn’t love me. It’s that he loved me so much that it made him so angry to see me, as a person, not as his son, not being the best that he knew I could be.”

“I was very angry at you after what you said to me. And my brain started creating reasons to hate you and justify that anger. And thank God (my uncle’s name) showed up after I woke up. Because if he hasn’t, I think I would have painted you as an asshole in my mind. We would be having a totally different conversation, or just not talking at all. But I realized that the reason I felt angry and upset was, not because I felt angry at you, but at the truth behind what you were saying. I felt angry that I didn’t believe I was capable of doing as much as you and my father “KNEW” I could easily accomplish with my eyes closed, to the point where you both felt so angry and strongly disappointed when I didn’t even make the effort. I felt angry at myself for doubting myself all those years, and angry because life didn’t have a rewind button, and I realized that I just lost those 20 years of my life. I let my father down, myself down, you guys down, and even my great, great, great grandchildren down. All I can say is, I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t fix or change anything, but at least you hopefully understand that I understand where you’re coming from now. Hopefully that counts for something.”


I’m not going to make some kind of OCD itemized list of take-away lessons from this story. Everyone’s life circumstances are different, and everyone had different lessons to take away. All RP principles are fluid, and they can be applied upwards and downwards to different things in life with various degrees of importance.

All I wanted to say is that RP is great. Like aikijujutsu evolved into jujitsu and eventually bjj and judo, PUA some would argue “devolved” (but I would maintain, “evolved”) into RP. At the core of RP is the basic PUA concept of “inner game.” At the core of “inner game” is something US Navy SEALs and executive coaches to CEOs refer to as “extreme accountability.” My father (from a military POV) and uncle (from a business POV) would preach this to me non-stop, despite both of them never really following it themselves.

My father would say, “Don’t lie. Shit floats.” My uncle would say, “Don’t fake it until you make it. Just make it.” Success is not an award, not being on the Forbes 500 list, not being the MVP, not “fucking mad bitches, yo! Word?” Success is your personal and private “reasonable commitment” to excellence.

My English professor would always say, “Honesty is who you are when you have no audience.” Your personal reasonable commitment to excellence is private. It’s not something you do for attention. It’s not something you do for women, or for other men, or for anyone else besides yourself.

It’s “reasonable,” meaning, if you can only get to 93%, that’s 100% okay. You are not a failure for not getting to 100%. But “reasonable” is not an “excuse, but a “double-edged sword.” If you can get to 93%, but choose to call it a day at 88%, then you are a failure ... even if everyone else around you is at 67%. Who you are is “independent” of anyone else around you. It’s independent of how well or poorly others perform relative to you, and it’s also independent of how well or poorly other people consider you to have performed. Again, remember, this is not an “excuse,” it’s a “double-edged sword.”

And if that’s how you show care and love for yourself, then that’s how you’re going to show it to others. Till this day, I don’t lose any sleep or feel like a bad person for breaking up with my exes and telling them:

  • I’m sorry, I’m just not attracted to you anymore
  • You just don’t turn me on
  • You dress like a mom, I’ve never seen you wear a mini skirt once or make an effort to actually look sexually attractive as a woman
  • when I met you, you were 105lbs. We haven’t even been with each other for a year, and we’re not even married, and you’re already almost 130lbs. Do the math, where do you see that going in 5 years? (Side note: 12+ years later, she’s 175lbs trying to get back down to 150lbs)

Brutal? Idk. Honest? Yes. And I only said it because I cared. Because these women were not some worthless piece of shit to me. I wanted them to leave, be angry at me or demonize me or whatever, but at least have a wake up call and improve their lives.

For anyone I didn’t give a fuck about, I would use the generic, “I’m sorry, but, I just don’t think we’re comparable for one another. I just don’t see this leading to marriage, and so, I don’t want to waste your time.” Nice? Emotionally sensitive? Yes. Honest? Fuck no. I mean, yes, in the sense that it was technically true. But it wasn’t really emotionally honest.

You can certainly apply RP principles to women, but I think RP is much broader than that. It would be nice if the focus of RP expanded away from just using RP principles for women and for more people to talk about applying RP principles to all aspects of everyday life.