Towards the end of The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill I wrote this:
The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.
One of the hardest lessons I had to learn when I unplugged (such as it was) was throwing away ‘hope’.
Not real, internal, personal hope, but rather the ‘hope’ I had been led to believe was a realizable state – if circumstances, if personalities, if fate or some other condition defined by the feminine imperative would just align in such a way that I’d been conditioned to believe it could, then that feminine defined contentment could be actualized.
I wanted very much to realize that idealized state by defining hope (or having it defined for me) in a context that was never of my own real choosing. I got just as depressed as anyone else when I unplugged. I got angry. I didn’t want to think that I’d invested so much of myself in something that was fundamentally unattainable because the my understanding of it had been incorrect, either deliberately or by my own hopeful interpretations of it.
My own ‘unplugging’ was a gradual affair and came after a lot of drawn out trauma. And yes, to realize that all of that trauma amounted to nothing after hoping and struggling to mold myself into something that I was led to believe was achievable it was even more depressing.
It wasn’t until I realized that the hope I was sold came from the same social paradigm that never held my best interests as a priority that I threw it away. That was a tough day because I realized in doing so I would have to find a new sense of hope for myself. It seemed very nihilistic at the time, and I had to really make an effort not to make that choice from a sense of self-pity.
One particularly hard revelation I had to disabuse myself of was understanding that women love differently than men. That was tough to embrace because the old hope I was struggling to realize was based on the primary tenet of blue pill thinking; the equalist notion that men and women share a mutually recognized, mutually accepted concept of love.
Once I understood this was an idealization rather than a reality, and that women can and do love men deeply, but in an entirely different feminine-specific concept of love, I discovered that I no longer ‘hoped’ for that mutuality and embraced the hope that men and women could still genuinely love each other from their own perspectives of love without a mutual consensus.
I remembered then an older man I had done some peer counseling with while in college and how this man had essentially striven his entire life to please and content his ex-wife and his now second wife of more than 30 years. From his early 20s he’d spent his personal life in a hopeful attempt at contenting, appeasing and qualifying for a mutually shared state of love he believed these women (the only 2 he’d ever had sex with) had a real capacity for.
At 73 (now) he’s spent his life invested in a hope that simply doesn’t exist – that he can be loved as a man ideally believes a woman ought to be able to love him – just as all the romantic, feminine-defined ideals of love he’d learned from a feminine-centric social order had convinced him of for so long.
This is why I say men are the True Romantics, because the overwhelming majority will devote a lifetime to the effort of actualizing a belief in a male-idealized love to find fulfillment in a woman and for that woman.
Old Hope for New Hope
I hope that doesn’t sound too fortune cookie, but it’s a prime example of redefining hope in a new red pill-aware paradigm. You can hope and thrive in a new red pill context – I know I do – but it’s much easier when you internalize red pill truths and live with them in a red pill context instead of force-fitting them into your old, feminine-defined, blue pill context. I can imagine what my marriage would look like if I hadn’t made the red pill transition and learned to use that awareness in it. There are a lot of guys paying ‘marriage coaches’ $149 an hour because they never did.
There was a comment buried in last week’s comment thread from Hobbes that was too good not to include in its entirety here:
I think I get it!
For years I have been bitter about this need to “perform” about how this shows that women do not love us as we love etc.. And just now I was reviewing my old relationships and I recalled something.
In each of my relationships, prior to meeting the women I eventually fell in love with, I was constantly working on myself, I would get in shape, hang out with friends, explore my environment and work on myself and my music etc. As soon as I would “fall in love” I would slowly drop those activities, I’d focus on being a good bf, I would focus on providing and “being what she wanted” what I thought she wanted, better said.
But here is my Eureka moment, what I recalled each time was being unhappy, what I recall each time was feeling boxed in and kind of dull.. of feeling trapped.
Is this what Rollo means when he says our response to women is a conditioning, and that the sadness we get from Red Pill truth is the result of behaving and believing something that is not really our nature, but the result of having someone else’s behaviors and beliefs installed into us?
So I think I finally understand it for myself… the talk of putting yourself first, of “performing” etc is really just a way of saying “you don’t have to do what people say you’re supposed to do in a relationship – you don’t have to drop everything for her, you don’t have to stop doing what you like and love and you don’t have to kiss her ass”
In my case I dropped everything for two reasons. One was to do what I thought I was supposed to do.. what I heard women say they wanted from a man, what my mother said a man should be etc.. and the second reason was insecurity. I wanted her to love me, I didn’t want to rock the boat, I was scared of losing her.. so eventually I did. I believed that in order for me to be worthy of her, of her love, I had to go along and give her what she said she wanted, what I was taught she wanted.
Is this what Rollo and everyone else is talking about? Because I think I finally get it. Up to now I have faked my Game, to some extent. I just knew better than to do certain things or did things I knew would make me attractive, etc. to women. But seeing this now, not only am I realizing there is nothing to be bitter about – I was always happier working on myself and my interests and actually resentful of having to stop them – but that I am actually happier doing this thing women want of us we call “performing”.
In a way, you are performing, as Rollo says, either way. If you stop and think you can rest, in many ways you are doing so because you have been conditioned to believe, as I was, that you should. That real love meant you could and should.
Anyway, maybe this is simply me and my personal experience of it, but it makes sense to me.. and I think this has revealed to me something monumental, personally. Maybe other guys have a different experience of it, but this is how I have seen it played out in my life.I feel better.
The key to living in a red pill context is to unlearn your blue pill expectations and dreams of finding contentment in them, and replace them with expectations and aspirations based on realistic understandings of red pill truths.
Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.
Killing your inner Beta is a difficult task and part of that is discarding an old, comfortable, blue pill paradigm. For many newly unplugged, red pill aware, men the temptation is to think they can use this new understanding to achieve the goal-states of their preconditioned blue pill ideals. What they don’t understand is that, not only are these blue pill goal-states flawed, but they are also based on a flawed understanding of how to attain them.
Red pill awareness demands a red pill context for fulfillment. Oracle Z wrote a fantastic article on Return of Kings this week called Why you shouldn’t seek emotional fulfillment through women. It’s well worth the read, but what Oracle Z outlines here is a fulfillment based on feminine-primary, blue pill conditions for that contentment. Even when men achieve these blue pill goal-states, the ones they’re conditioned to believe they should want for themselves, they find themselves discontent with those states and trapped by the liabilities of them.
Just as Hobbes illustrated, the periods when he was not striving to achieve or maintain those blue pill goal-states were the times he was most fulfilled with his life, talents and ambitions.
As if this weren’t enough to convince a man he needs to re-imagine himself in a red pill-primary context, when women are presented with ‘the perfect guy‘ in a blue pill context they gradually (sometimes immediately) come to despise him. As proven by their actions, even women don’t want that blue pill perfected goal-state because it stagnates the otherwise exciting, self-important men they are aroused by, and attracted to in a red pill context.
I’ve stated this in prior posts, but it bears repeating,
“Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.”
Living in a blue pill context, and hoping you can achieve fulfillment in its fundamentally flawed goal-states, conditions men to make women the focus of their lives. Throw that hope away and understand that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.
