Picture this in your head.

You’re working a 9-5 in a cubicle Monday through Friday.

You have a few friends who you hang out with on weekends, but you don’t feel particularly close to any of them. So they’re more like acquaintances.

You feel lost…

Down on yourself…

Putting major projects on hold because you feel like you should handle your mental health and physical health too before anything else since everything is out of order…

If this is you.

It would be extremely wise to focus only on the lifting and physical health part and ignore everyone else’s advice of going to therapy.

Modern therapy is not conducive to men who actually want to reach beyond a life of mediocre wage slavery.

I noticed that over the past 3 years, there’s been a remarkable shift in acceptance for going to therapy for men.

I hear some close friends tell me all the time things like, “There’s nothing more manly than going to therapy.”

So you end up going to a few therapy sessions, because that’s what “normal” people do nowadays, right?

And what do you end up learning?

You end up learning how to write down 10 things you’re grateful for every day.

If you have trouble with dating, the therapist will recommend some vague advice like this:

“First... Before the girlfriend, before therapy... You are going to have to be willing to change. This means being okay with digging up, talking about, and examining your wounds in your past. The times when you where hurt, the things you never healed from, the issues you never moved on from.”

And that’s why going to therapy is a horrible idea if you’re a regular dude working a 9-5 for a corporation who has trouble with dating.

Modern Therapy is basically centered around teaching you how to COPE with your problems instead of actually giving you tools to get what you want and clearing out mental obstacles, which is what it should be like.

Why Gratitude is for Mediocre People

I’m going to say something that very much goes against the grain of any mainstream concepts on how to succeed.

Gratitude doesn’t work if you want to achieve any kind of big success in life or if you utterly despise your position and have no respect from anyone around you.

Gratitude only works if you want to settle down with a 6/10, work a normal 9-5 job, and have a family.

It’s too late to revise the title of the post but Gratitude is NOT for losers, gratitude is for average people.

I will outline a period of time where I tried using gratitude to get what I want, and a period of time where I was very much the opposite emotionally (extremely ungrateful, angry with the world, willing to do anything to succeed).

The first was age 23-25.

I was an extremely late bloomer who was still a virgin at age 25.

I remember going to a therapist at age 23 and trying to work through my problems. The advice focused on writing down 3 things I’m grateful for every day in a “gratitude journal”, which I followed exactly.

It also involved being mindful of my emotions and meditating every day to cultivate a more “Stoic” outlook on life.

And you know what happened from Age 23-25?

Absolutely nothing.

No opportunities were seized. No women were bedded. It was very much a case of sit there with a smile on my face and try to pretend like everything is peachy and everything will work out eventually if I just show enough gratitude for my current situation in life and think about how much worse it would be if I was born in a 3rd world country like Sudan.

It wasn’t all negative, there were quite a few positives. I never had as good of a relationship with my grandparents and friends as I did during this time. I would remember everyone’s birthdays. I would sit down and watch stupid WWE with my grandparents because they liked that shit. Everyone around me loved me and said I was a light in their life.

But still no girlfriend, still no money.

So at age 25, I finally snapped out of it and went on a psychopathic mission of losing my virginity no matter what the cost.

I expected it to take a couple weeks at most, since I already read everything about pickup and cold approach on the internet.

It ended up taking 6 months of going out every day to the train station at day and the club at night, making well over 500 approaches total in order to finally lose my virginity.

10 dates with only 1 second date and no sex

Finally got lucky at the club and got a same day lay with a girl on the dance floor to lose my virginity.

Was I in a “grateful” state of mind at the time?

Fuck no.

Very much the opposite. I was extremely Ungrateful for what I had in life.

I was vicious, angry, and hellbent on getting what I want. Every rejection didn’t even phase me. Every time I lost a friend or my poor grandma asked me where I was, I didn’t give a fuck and kept going for what I wanted.

Looking back, those were some wild days. I was cold approaching without putting in any effort into appearance, going out dressed liked an Asian nerd with glasses and somehow expecting it to work out since I didn’t know any better due to Asperger’s.

But I reached my goal anyways, despite lacking any kind of looks or skill simply through having the tenacity and grit to keep going.

The things that kept me going on this brutal journey instead of quitting was not Gratitude, it was darker forces lurking beneath the surface. Forces like narcissism (feeling like I deserve it because I’m smarter than everyone else), psychopathy (feeling like it’s ok to hit on girls at work or in my friend group because nothing else matters other than getting laid), and of course, good ole fashioned Autism (meticulously tracking every girl approached on a spreadsheet haha)

In life, there are two things that people tend to vastly underestimate.

One is the amount of raw energy you need to break through to the very top. People start businesses these days and expect everything to be easy. (it never is, it’s always a brutal and miserable climb to the top when it comes to business)

The second thing that people underestimate is the amount of energy it takes to actually pull yourself out of the muck of being a loser. Typically, if you’re a loser, you have poor social skills or inherent emotional balance, so everything that comes naturally to others will be a huge challenge for you.

You cannot think like a “normal” guy and try to be grateful and go to therapy to solve your problems. A lot of the work will be ugly brute force grinding, bashing your head against an obstacle over and over again until it finally breaks.

Believe me, I’ve gone down the “Positive Thinking” rabbit hole.

And I would wholeheartedly be preaching about it if it worked for me.

It didn’t.

If you want massive success in life, or if you want to finally stop being a loser at the bottom of the barrel, Positivity and Gratitude are traps that you absolutely need to avoid at any cost.

They are both EXTREMELY seductive because they offer a quick fix.

Simply try to “feel grateful” and have a smile on my face and reality will magically “Manifest” outcomes that I want?

Sweet.

But it’s a scam.

Because life doesn’t work that way.

Life responds to effort, not thoughts.

If I could go back in time to my younger self and give one piece of advice, this would be it:

Life responds to Effort, not Thoughts.

Every single period of sustained high performance is inherently miserable for a man.

You will deal with days where you don’t feel like putting in the work.

Even if you love the activity, working on it every day for months on end will cause you to hate it eventually. That’s just human nature.

As a man, if you are feeling depressed on a daily basis, that’s not a sign that you need to go to therapy to feel better about yourself.

That should be the internal wake up call for you to get your act together and start getting the things you actually want in life.

If you have nothing, if you’re a nobody who can’t get girls, and if you dislike your current position in life, you VASTLY underestimate the level of effort that is actually needed to rise up.

Based on my own experience, if you’re a loser, it’s not just 1-2 quick fixes and boom you suddenly have a career you can be proud of, you suddenly date the girls you want.

It’s a vicious and brutal climb where you will have to utilize darker aspects of your personality in order to succeed.

Carl Jung absolutely had it correct when he said that “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

Any journey worth undertaking as a man will force you to confront your shadow. You will not be able to succeed just having a smile on your face and pretending like everything will be okay.

Not All Therapy is Useless

I also want to point out that not saying all therapy is useless. There is nuance to this.

If you have legit psychological trauma stemming from abuse or actual disorders like schizophrenia, you should absolutely go to therapy as that will be the highest Return on Investment for your time.

I’m only pointing out that if you’re an average dude working a 9-5 and struggling to get girls, you SHOULD feel depressed. Something is broken if you are able to walk around with a smile on your face and pretend like everything is okay.

Depression should be the kick in the ass you need to actually fix your problems.

Therapy should be the knife you use to cut out tumors and weakness from your mind, not a way to COPE with your shitty life.