As I sit here preparing to cook this year’s News Years dinner, I found myself contemplating the year that is soon to be behind us. It’s been a very eventful year, starting with great strife within this space, and culminating in myself almost passing during the fall. During all this, I found myself teetering for lack of a better word between the various parts of my life, and how it’s constructed. I say “constructed” because as I outlined in Gendernomics: Building Value, I believe that men build their lives, women have life build them. Man happens to life, life happens to woman.

Once you find yourself in very much a weakened state, you find yourself challenging many of your previous assumptions and coming to some new perspectives, which is what I want to talk a little bit about today.

One of the more regular questions I used to get, was “How do convert other men so that they may become Red Pill men?“, “How do I teach men what I now know to be the truth of male-female sexual dynamics?“, “How do I change myself to become more red pill?” and many variations on what is essentially the same question. “How do I integrate The Red Pill and my current life?”

A major cause of the schism earlier this year, was how to answer this question, prescriptively and concretely VS. descriptively and abstractly. I tend to prefer the latter, for the simple reason that each man has some shared variables and quite a few unique variables. However, I’ve also come to realize that the downside of the latter, is that excessive abstraction and description of abstract concepts, often renders ideas unable of application. Whereas, the downside of excessive prescription and concreteness tends to become dogmatism and control. Thus, with Gendernomics: Building Value, I attempted to bridge the two sides of the chasm through leading out principles and prescriptions from the abstractions.

This was a balancing act, as with many others we deal with from day to day, but we do not think about. We balance our personalities between our family life, our friends, our work, and our general social image, however we also have a personality that often becomes dominant when we find ourselves alone. It is this balancing act a man must find between his new-found perspectives, and those of his old life.

One of my own balancing acts that I struggle with is investment, not as in financial investment, but with time management and how personally invested I permit myself to become. As I had my reflective period post-problems, my perspective shifted a bit in that I saw that while this space has been exceedingly good to me, as of the most recent year it had morphed into something else. Rather than a mostly cooperative space founded on volunteer work by many men who offered their time, thoughts and experiences, it had become an avenue for telemarketers and evangelists. I suppose a way of putting it would be in the beginning helping yourself and helping others was the goal and any financial gains were incidental, as of last year financial gains and helping yourself became the goal and helping others was incidental.

Dealing with Balancing Acts

Many men when faced with a balancing act, will seek out prescriptions, “How do I balance work and free time”, “How do I balance my moral perspective with my desires” and people have been happy to provide prescriptions for this for thousands of years. However, no prescription is ever perfectly tailored to the individual, heck even prescription medication is largely based on aggregate numbers, and what one expects to find, which is why one can occasionally get some fairly catastrophic results when individual biochemistry deviates from the average. This is also why my reading recommendations tend to not be focused on “What to think” but “How to think“, because inevitably we all have individual needs, knowledge, patterns, preferences, circumstances, contexts and situations that we deal with on a continuous basis that all interact with each other for which no prescription can account.

It’s a variant on “Teach a man to fish“, based in the fact that most men who find this space have similar problems that often come down to many of the same variables, that can be fixed first, with little risk of a downside.

• Get in shape
• Fix your finances
• Dress better
• Sort out your grooming
• Learn some social skills

I stand by that Game in the earliest variations, meaning the written routines, the strict process (such as the London Day Game model), are training wheels for social skills, adapted to men who are stunted compared to their peers in their ability to interact with other human beings (not just women). Much of the time this is due to them having failed to balance their own comfort with the need to challenge themselves, thus they have self-isolated, or they have been ostracized for any number of reasons and thus have decided to adopt a fairly reclusive lifestyle.

The balancing act principle comes into play here, that take any of the above bullet point items and do it to excess and you actually start to become less successful. Why would I say such a thing? Because, if you become obsessed with being 8% bodyfat year around with an above average amount of muscle mass and lifting heavier loads than anyone else, then eventually you become the type of man who masturbates using equal number of strokes with the right and left hand to avoid muscle imbalances.

This is what I mean when I talk about context, goals, circumstances, and so on. The first rule is “Be attractive” the second rule is “Don’t be unattractive” however these are containers and most of the time the confusion has arisen from putting “things” in the wrong containers. For instance, some deeply devout men, would be inclined to argue that being a “Good, upstanding, Christian man who does right by God and does his duty” should be in the “Be Attractive” box, and perhaps it is in some contexts, for instance if you’re at church dealing with a single-mom who has found god, then I suppose it is. However, I can scarcely imagine an attractive woman has ever moaned the words “Oh baby, tell me more about the Corinthians“.

Conclusions

I sat down to hammer this out before I start cooking because the New Year is upon us, and many men will be working hard to make their 2020 different and better than their 2019. What they mean by different and better is up to them to define, but if they hope to make their sex life better in 2020, it’s important that they start off on the right foot, and don’t fall off the edge of a cliff. It’s very easy to get on the “Self-improvement” train and become one of the men who have read everything written on this subject, who works out, has his grooming in order, dresses well, has social skills, has money, and hasn’t been laid in 2020. All this is based on a hope that if he just becomes the most valuable man in the world, women will flock to him, push him down on a bed and mount him.

So, if I were to offer a piece of advice for when you pursue your goals in 2020: Avoid the extremes.

Get a decent haircut, but don’t become a damn stylist.

Get some decent clothes that fit and that have colors that suit you, once you can explain the difference between heliotrope and magenta, you’ve gone too far.

Get in shape, but once you start doing assisted chain-board pressed off a 73 degree incline, you’ve gone too far.

Be informed about things, not obsessed with them.

Focus on becoming a well-rounded person who knows his preferences, and has an idea of his goals and the life he eventually wants. Explore new things to find your preferences, do things that are new to you within reason and things that take you out of your comfort zone. Within reason here being “Go for a hike” not “Climb Everest“. Just do things you would not normally do, push yourself every day, and balance your obsessions, and make sure you are obsessed with things that align with your goals.

I’m reminded of my old dating motto, “I’m either getting laid, getting a good story, ideally both“.