Active Dread: Bad. Passive Dread: Good.

"Something's died in me," she goes. "It took a long time for it to do it, but it's dead. You've killed something, just like you'd took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now."

I just described how luxury brand marketing can be difficult because it cannot be an overt message. Overt messaging and scarcity are contradictory, and Dread is difficult for the same reasons. Going back to the infomercials, did the whole $49.99 FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY PLUS A FREE MUSTACHE GROOMING KIT! really inspire you to go and buy that product? Did that message about a "limited time only" really generate any anxiety about you potentially losing out on this opportunity? No.

So -- Dread is difficult because it pretty much has to be 100% covert.

Furthermore, when people are aware of this kind of marketing -- it's not just that it's ineffective to them. They react very negatively. Think about the last time you purchased a car. Did you enjoy the experience? No, you didn't. It probably was a huge pain in the ass. Why? Because at some point, you'll be negotiating with the sales guy, and he'll say, "Hmm, I don't know if I can make that happen. I'll have to talk to my manager. In fact, he may be upset I'm even offering the deal I'm giving you. But I'll see what I can do. Just wait here."

And he leaves, and you're sitting there for 20 minutes, just stewing there because you know this is bullshit and they're just trying to make you freak out about losing out on this supposedly great deal that you stop trying to negotiate anything more. Then he comes back and says, "Yeah, sorry, I can't make that happen. In fact my manager is pissed I'm even giving you this price. He had a wholesaler coming in willing to buy it tomorrow at $500 more. I convinced him that if I could sell it to you today, though, we'd give it to you for that price."

Are you thinking, "wow, this is such a rare deal?" Are you thinking, "oh no, I better just sign the purchase contract right now, I'm so close to buying this car and I'll lose it if I don't buy it today!"

No. You just think the car salesman is a fucking asshole.

There's a reason why we hate "telemarketers" but love Apple commercials. Humans love "marketing." They hate "sales." It can literally be used as an insult: I hate her husband, he's such a fucking salesman about everything.

You're probably tempted to call those car salesman techniques "mind games" or "emotional manipulation." This is what the SJW idiots call us, but when we use Dread this overtly, they are not wrong. I mean, they are wrong in the sense that terms like "emotional manipulation" imply that it's immoral. Personally, I am the furthest thing from a moral absolutist, which means I don't think "mind games" are inherently immoral. But they are really not much more than mind games, just like the whole "intentionally turn your cell phone off and leave the house" is a mind game. I'm not going to label them otherwise.

So I call this kind of shit "Active Dread." If you try and have sex with your wife and she shoots you down and you immediately leave the room, you are basically just being the douchey car salesman. Your wife will immediately launch into a tirade about how "you only care about sex" and how "you've been acting like a fucking asshole lately." Don't get me wrong: this can work. You can use this type of Active Dread and motivate your wife to have sex with you. Just like that car salesman did use those bullshit tactics to convince you to buy pay $325/month at a 2.9% APR over 60 months for a Ford Focus.

I don't really recommend this kind of marketing though. I much prefer luxury brand marketing. I want my wife to think of me as Apple, Audi, Grey Goose. I don't really care to be thought of us a fucking car salesman.

"I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone"

So to restate this plainly: I think Passive Dread is superior to Active Dread. Active Dread can work. But it's essentially just way more annoying and way less effective, in my opinion.

Let's return to that example I used in my first post: working for a company that was literally the only employer in the area. If you walk into your boss's office and say, "give me a raise or I'm going to get another job," he will tell you to go fuck yourself. One, because he thinks you're trying to manipulate him and he'll reject you out of spite. And two, because he knows it's a bullshit threat since there are no other jobs, anywhere.

But say you started dressing better, wearing the kind of clothes you would for a job interview. You get a new haircut. You take your breaks in the middle of the day and always get in your car as if you're driving off somewhere and coming back. Your boss will notice these things. He will wonder what's causing this behavior. The company did not change its dress code. You don't have a public-facing job that requires a well-groomed appearance. Nobody else leaves the company campus when they take their break but you.

Eventually, his mind will float around to this question: Why is he acting this way? Is he interviewing for other jobs? He will try and convince himself that's impossible. We are the only employer. Right? Did some other company move into the area? Are they offering employees here new and better jobs? Should we start giving raises and promotions? These thoughts will cause anxiety.

So your boss gives you a raise. You still dress well, but maybe you stop leaving the office campus every day. Your boss is more comfortable since it's unlikely you're leaving for job interviews. He has less anxiety. He begins to think that giving raises means not having to be anxious about employees being unhappy and leaving. He concludes should give out more raises.

Hopefully the analogy to your marriage is pretty clear. For many marriages, increasing your SMV is pretty much all you need to do to generate that sweet, sweet, Passive Dread. In other words: once you start looking and acting like a luxury brand, this alone will project scarcity. Scarcity leads to anxiety about loss aversion. Anxiety about loss aversion leads to behavior to remove said anxiety. Removing anxiety feels good, and will encourage more of said behavior. Once you improve your life from a Ford Focus into an Audi A6, your wife will wonder if she's taking that Audi A6 for granted after all.

So let me be absolutely clear: A high SMV is absolutely critical to effective Dread. If you aren't actually a luxury product, passive Dread will not work. If you are 40 pounds overweight, if your household is plagued with financial problems beacuse you've fucked up your career, if you aren't leading your household and your family, if you spend all your free time playing videogames and jerking off to porn... then you are not a luxury product. You are just a Ford Focus. You cannot effectively use Dread to inspire your wife to drive a Ford Focus more. The best you can do is the "car salesman" routine, which has a much higher chance of backfiring and resulting in negative feelings. And by the way, you're still a goddamn Ford Focus.

Referring to /u/BluepillProfessor's 12 Levels of Dread, you absolutely must have Levels 1-3 on total lockdown. If you have any deficiencies in these areas of your life (physical, professional, social, hobbies, etc), then fix those. Improve your SMV one day at a time. Lift, lurk, read, etc.

Until then, Passive Dread isn't going to work that effectively for you. Because the only thing people hate more than the "car salesman" routine is buying a luxury product that ends up being kind of an overpriced piece of shit. You may have personally had an aversion to those brands I keep citing (Apple, Audi, Grey Goose) for this exact reason. You bought one, it kind of sucked, and you felt pretty duped by all those marketing campaigns. If not those brands, then surely other ones.

So once you're truly a high-quality luxury brand, then you can start acting like one and really generate that passive Dread that will motivate your wife to stop taking you for granted. Which leads into yet another analogy...

The Hamster Maze, Not the Hamster Wheel

“They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else--the cold, and where he'd go in it--was outside, for a while anyway.”

OK, so we've covered: Scarcity -> Loss Aversion -> Anxiety -> [Anxiety-Reducing Behavior] -> Rinse, Repeat.

You are obviously going into this with an idea of what that "Anxiety-Reducing Behavior" is, but your wife isn't. And as I've pointed out repeatedly, you can't just tell her. You can never break the covert communication here. If your wife asks if you're having an affair, or accuses of you being distant, you cannot respond in any way that indicates you're doing this at least partially (if not entirely) because you want her concluding the exact thoughts she's concluding.

You want the hamster running, and running, and running, just like the boss in my earlier example. Let her in on the Dread, and the hamster stops. Even worse, the hamster will be really pissed off that you made him run so much, and got him so tired, for "no real reason."

The hamster only gets to stop - your wife only gets to feel less anxiety - when you get the desired behavior from her.

However, when it comes to Dread, "getting the hamster going" is an incomplete analogy. We use the term "hamstering" for someone having an irrational flurry of thoughts that aren't actually leading to any sort of logical conclusion. It's just a hamster spinning in a wheel -- lots of energy expended but no actual distance traveled.

So I want to propose a new yet similar analogy: The Hamster Maze. You want to direct a hamster to reach a certain thought (e.g. "if I don't have more sex with my husband, he will leave me"). But you can't just tell the hamster to go there -- ie, when your wife is feeling anxiety over Dread, you can't just tell her what she can do to reduce that anxiety. You cannot have this conversation:

Wife: Are you having an affair?

You: "No. Why do you think that?"

Wife: "Well you've been obsessed with working out, and you changed your whole wardrobe, and you're basically never home... I'm worried, I guess."

You: "You should probably try having more sex with me. I bet that would make you feel less worried."

Would be nice if that was all it took, but that's not how it works. For Dread to be most effective, the hamster has to figure it out for himself. Dread is essentially "directed hamstering, but with an indirect method."

So in Dread, this cycle of "Anxiety -> [Anxiety-Reducing Behavior]" is really more like putting the hamster in a maze, and then setting up paths in the maze so the hamster can find your desired exit. This is why Active Dread can backfire, because hamsters don't like being in mazes. Passive Dread can have a hamster enter a maze without realizing it. This is why it is so effective and powerful.

Once you've set this up, you're very likely to get some great results. It may take awhile, but typically your wife's hamster will find the desired exit. So, she has sex with you. Then she realizes that will reduce her anxiety and make her feel good. Then anxiety sets in and the hamster finds itself in the maze again, it'll consider looking for the "have sex with husband" exit. It will likely find it even faster this time around. And so on, and so forth. Eventually the hamster doesn't even realize its in in a maze anymore, because it really isn't. Your wife legitimately likes fucking the new and improve you now. And whenever feelings of Dread do arise, the hamster has memorized the exact path it needs to take to eliminate those feelings of Dread and can navigate it immediately.

Sounds pretty goddamn ideal, right? And it is... almost. It can work this well. It can also work kind of... not so well. In the third and final part, I will mainly discuss the limitations of Dread, and how you can mitigate them.