The Red Pill analogy comes from The Matrix, where Neo takes a red pill which starts his process of unplugging from the fictional simulated reality in which he and the rest of humanity are imprisoned. He subsequently wakes up in a great shock, in a world painfully alien, wherefrom he is immediately flushed away. It takes him weeks of pain to even regain the ability to stand, and is subsequently physically sick at discovering the full extent of the truth.

That's about right for how a journey from plugged-in to unplugged should feel like. If you're human at all, the destruction of your previous worldview can not but come at the cost of pain. I repeat: if you're not experiencing pain, regret, rejection at facing the new reality, it means you're not facing it. Your first reaction at discovering the red pill should be that this can't be true and that you want back into your old world.

It should be anger and disorientation, and if you're not experiencing that then I contend you haven't swallowed the red pill, you're just looking at it in the palm of your hand and fantasizing about how great it is to swallow it, rationalizing that imagining doing it is as good as good as doing it for real.

Humans are terrifically good at preserving their egos; we make up and live out elaborate fantasies just so that we do not truly have to change how we view the world and ourselves. This is a survival trait that statistically bears good fruit if you're a hunter-gatherer living the same life as generations before you had, but it's a killer flaw in an age of rapid societal transformation, where the rules your culture passed down to you don't hold true anymore.

Swallowing the red pill means going against every instinct of inertia and instinctual self-preservation. It requires taking a hammer to a few decades of upbringing, stratified experiences and internalized values and then trying to rebuild from the fragments. It is far easier to take the blue pill and chart a course through life of unhappy marriage and eternal frustration with the fair sex: just go along with the current, do as you're told, and distract yourself with porn and mindless entertainment to dull the pain.

If you think you've swallowed the red pill, and you haven't experienced furious denial, you haven't swallowed the pill.

If you think you've swallowed the red pill, and you haven't experienced outright anger and betrayal, you haven't swallowed the pill.

If you think you've swallowed the red pill, and you haven't tried to bargain to save at least some pieces of your previous worldview, you haven't swallowed the pill.

If you think you've swallowed the red pill, and you haven't felt depressed and disillusioned and like giving up on women, you haven't swallowed the pill.

If you think you're a special case that got to skip any of these stages, guess what, you haven't swallowed the pill.

Be honest with yourself. It's the hardest thing to do when your ego is involved, but precisely for that reason that's the most important time when you must try: have you gone through these stages? have you felt like swallowing the red pill was as easy as reading a few internet posts? has your life actually significantly changed in light of the red pill, as in you're banging the women you want to bang, having the social interactions you want to have, and are generally carrying yourself according to your design and not the inertia of your circumstances? if not, then you haven't swallowed the red pill, and you're wasting time LARPing about the life you could have instead of having it. Close the tab, do some pushups, figure out the next concrete step you need to take and start taking it.