If I wrote a post on TRP stating that you should treat women like worthless fuckmeat and have not a care in the world for how they feel, I would get some flack by a portion of the audience but, all in all, I wouldn't raise too many eyebrows.
Instead, my aim today is trigger a larger slice of the public by talking about a subject that's far more taboo than extreme sexual nihilism: emotions. Your emotions, not women's emotions. The title is deliberately provocative for the same reason.
Guys don't talk about their emotions. They barely admit them to themselves. Our culture raises us to consider them things for sissies and, later on, an impediment to rational development. Half-baked self-improvement advice says or implies that you should disregard, silence or deaden your emotion, instead becoming a being of pure reason and willpower.
I think that's a big crock of bullshit; what's more, actual advice never tells you to hate or fuck with your emotions. Stoicism, which is pretty in vogue here, certainly doesn't. But misconceptions abound, especially in the comment section but also in some threads, and it's high time we face them.
I'm going to do that Luther-style, with a series of theses:
Thesis 1: emotions have an evolutionary origin and purpose
This should be self-evident to those practiced in TRP. Such a fundamental mechanism would NOT exist without an evolutionary purpose.
Thesis 2: the purpose of your emotions is to elicit and strengthen evolutionarily-necessary responses and behaviors
Yes, your almighty rationality can (given proper education and time to think about it) tell you what to do. But cavemen had neither education nor time; their pre-human ancestors didn't have the rationality to begin with. They had to rely on their emotions and base instincts to make it in the pitiless evolutionary rat race: survive, pass on your genes, help your kids do the same.
Thesis 3: that purpose is still relevant, that function still useful in the modern world
"But" I hear some say "we no longer live as primitives; we have rationality; we can move beyond". And I say: that's true, in a specific sense. You should certainly rely on your reason, not your emotions, to set your strategies and goals, to direct your behavior. But you should not, nor can, do away with emotions. Their function still remains strong in sustaining and strengthening useful behaviors, while opposing and counteracting negative ones. I'll illustrate how in the following theses.
Thesis 4: the use of emotions
In the modern day and age, emotions still have uses:
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strengthening and stimulating useful behaviors: lust, for example, produces both useful physiological changes (such as a deepening of the voice) and psychological ones (such as a lowering of inhibitions); anger highlights injustices and prepares you for confrontation; happiness stimulates you to repeat useful behaviors
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highlighting truths you may be hiding from yourself: if you feel stressed, upset, fearful, there may be (and for most people there definitely are) truths which you're hiding from your conscious consideration or haven't uncovered yet; for example, if you systematically feel disgusted about starting your day, it's probably because you know that your daily activities aren't bringing you closer to your objectives, something you may well be hiding from yourself (and that most people do hide from themselves)
Thesis 5: the limits of rationality
Rationality is limited. Little by little, with a lot of work, it can enable you to understand everything; but, in actual practice, in many cases your rational self will be missing something, it will deceive itself about other things, it will have an ineffective mental model with which to frame others still. Bluepilled guys are not retarded: they've been given next to no effective education in sexual dynamics, have been conditioned to deceive themselves about relationships, and generally hide their own feelings of dissatisfaction from themselves.
In all these cases, a frank assessment of your emotional imprint can help uncover something going on. This isn't some freakish irrational Freudian bullshit: it's simply recognizing that our brains evolved to solve "how do we kill that gazelle easier" and "how do I fuck Ug'Lucka", not "but why do I feel sexually frustrated even if I do everything society says"
Additionally, rationality is simply piss-poor in stimulating the physiological responses that are sometimes necessary: try telling your dick to get hard because the chick has good genetics.
Thesis 6: the true teaching about emotions
Many interpret stoicism to be a philosophy for people who want to have no emotions, who learn to suppress or contain them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stoicism teaches you not to be ruled by your emotions, which means: do not take them at face value and act on their impulse. That does not mean you should ignore them; it means you should train yourself to recognize what they actually mean, and act appropriately.
Say you approach a girl. You feel afraid. Taking that at face value would mean concluding that you're afraid because the girl, or the act of walking up to her, does actual entail a frightening danger: ridiculous, right? your fear, in that case, highlights how you're not yet confident in your abilities, and also how you're still influenced by decades of social conditioning to be extremely careful around women, because anything you do could be interpreted as creepy or even criminal.
Stoicism doesn't teach you to shove your fear in a dark corner and not think about it; it teaches you to recognize it for what it is and to not be ruled by it, i.e. not to act on its impulse and flee from the interaction. It's interesting that this stoic teaching is very in line with a philosophy born thousands of miles away: the classic Buddhist meditative teaching regarding your emotions, which is to observe them as they are. Philosophies that strike a deep chord with human nature tend to converge on many of the basics.
What does this mean in actual practice? here's the practical advice:
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make it a habit to routinely take stock of your emotions, without judging or acting; this is essentially half if not more of what you end up doing with meditation
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in particular, take note of those emotions that don't logically fit with what you rationally think is your situation: are you feeling depressed despite making progress? it might be due to setting unrealistic expectations, or to having an important area of your life in which you're not progressing and about whose importance you're in denial
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in the moment, make use of those emotions that aid you in your goals: celebrate your victories joyously, fuck with passion, fight with anger; don't think that you need to deaden yourself internally, the opposite is true
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more importantly than anything else, if you come from a lifetime of treating your emotions as a nuisance or impediment: stop. They're a part of you with which Nature armed you for your use and profit. Like all natural faculties, it can be used in the wrong way, but most likely you've been afraid to use it at all, which is your bigger problem by far.
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