Essay:

https://therationalmale.com/2017/12/11/zeroed-out/

Excerpt:

Qualifying Value

Competition is one thing, however, the idea that a man might base his life’s expectations, and his metric of success or failure, on external qualifiers is something I’d like to explore here. Social influences, family influences and men’s (often conditioned) subconscious understanding of how he can best effect intimacy and reproduction with women according to what he perceives are their expectations of him is a point of contention. If men feel Zeroed Out at various points in life, is that ‘zeroing’ just the effect of a man having built his personal integrity and equity on a foundation of Blue Pill sand?

MGTOWs are invited to correct me here, but as I understand it, this is a primary tenet of men going their own way – a rejection of women’s qualifying men’s personal worth based on their Hypergamous standards. I get that, but I would argue that there’s more to a man’s sense of self-worth than any qualifier womankind might place on him.

It’s no secret that Red Pill aware men need to understand the Game that they’re a part of and should indeed reestimate their personal worth based on this cutting away of oneself from their prior Blue Pill deceptions. This is why I believe every man who unplugs himself from his old ideals is, by order of degree, going his own way, but where he decides to go with it and how he decides to create value in himself according his new understanding is what’s at issue. Even in creating and building a new sense of self-worth there is still the potential of men becoming subject to losing that value irrespective of how he believes it should be measured.

I can imagine that whether or not a divorced man is ‘woke’ and living by his own terms, losing custody of and influence in the lives of his children can be something of a zeroing out for him. There are aspects of what we hold as our own personal worth that can be zeroed out no matter by what metric we think we should be evaluating it by. As I’ve always said, a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it, but regardless, we still have intrinsic value that can be erased and it doesn’t alter the fact that women, family, career peers, etc. will be affected by it.

That said, it’s just an easy cop out to just say “Well, what you thought should be valued by others really isn’t, and because you thought it was, when you lose it you lose everything.”