I've observed that abundance isn't always the blessing people expect, but is perhaps sometimes the one they need. Let's be clear up-front:

  • Abundance Mentality is when you live your life in a way as if you have abundance, whether you do or not.

  • Actual Abundance is the fact behind the mentality. You either have it or you don't.

Let's briefly look at 3 mistakes people make when improperly balancing these two in their lives.

Over-Confidence

Some people have an abundance mentality without actual abundance. This can be good and bad. On the "good" side, I like the "fake it 'til you make it" concept. This works marvelously ... as long as you actually make it and you're not just faking it all your life, which just cripples your frame. A guy who acts as if he already has the thing he wants will find it much easier to attain it "again" - especially when it comes to sexual dynamics.

On the "bad" side, I'm reminded of the saying: "Before you attempt to beat the odds, be sure you could survive the odds beating you." Some men play the abundance mentality or other confidence-techniques in ways they're not ready for, and when it doesn't work, they find themselves turning to the black pill, thinking the "abundance mentality" concept failed them in one set of circumstances, so it must be a failure in all, so they just give up and assume looks are all that matter.

Broken Confidence

The consequence of failed over-confidence reminds me of circus elephants. Did you know an elephant in the circus (before PITA put the kibosh on all that) could be tied to a 3ft stake in the ground and it will not escape? It could easily rip it out. In fact, if you take a wild elephant and tie it to that same 3ft stake, it'll rip it right out. Why doesn't the circus elephant? Because when it was a baby, it was tied to that same stake. It tugged and pulled and stretched at its rope with no luck. Eventually it just gave up. When it grew and developed the strength and ability to rip the stake out, it wouldn't - because its confidence was broken.

That same danger exists with sexual dynamics both inside the home and out. I remember in my own past being denied sex and thinking under similar situations even years and years later, "She said no in these circumstances last time, so she'll say no again," so I didn't even bother trying. This self-defeatist attitude wasn't helping me ... or her. Or anyone. It just made the world a sucky place to live in. Even shortly after I had just-cause for initiation-confidence and could have had an actual abundance of sex, I didn't believe it was real, so my lack of abundance mentality put the kibosh on my sexuality as hard as PITA did to the circus elephants. Goodbye, poor circus elephants. We miss you.

"Just a little bit more."

All of that leads us to the very real situation of a person with actual abundance, but no abundance mentality. Shockingly, one would think the former would produce the latter, but it often doesn't. I remember reading a quote about John D. Rockefeller, who at one point had 1% of the entire US economy as his net wealth. Insane. A reporter asked him, "How much money is enough?" His answer: "Just a little bit more."

Now, I fully expect Rockefeller had an abundance mentality to go with his unquenchable thirst. But many guys will actually let their quest for abundance control them to a point where they are never satisfied and it creates a scarcity mentality, despite being in the SMP equivalent range of a Rockefeller. I've met guys like this. Sometimes ONEitis is the culprit - because they can have any girl they want, except that one who he met before he became "all that."


Abundance and Hypergamy

Women have actual abundance. For the most part any girl who's a 4 or higher could probably walk into a bar and announce, "Who wants to have sex with me?" and someone in the bar would be willing to take her up on that offer (barring circumstances that might get in his way). Girls on dating websites have a plethora of male attention - even the ugly ones. On social media, guys will rush to a woman's defense or disproportionately respond to women's posts over men's. I don't need to prove this point, right? We have all seen it.

But let me tell you - 99% of those women, when they were barely pubescent, still got flutters in their stomach at the first guy or two who showed any actual interest in them. Why? Because they hadn't been emotionally inoculated yet.

That same young girl, no doubt, maintained a steady stream of attention from men for years. It may not have always been the attention she wanted, but it was attention nonetheless. This is where hypergamy is born. The constant stream of attention makes the drug ineffective, hence inoculation. Pharmacists are noticing this with the z-pak with with bacterial infections. The z-pak has become so over-used that many strains of bacteria have become immune to it, so they have to create stronger antibiotics. When a woman has been inoculated to low-brow attention from men, she needs a stronger, more powerful hit. That means a higher value man. Instead of getting flutters when the 5 gives her attention, she then needs the 6 ... then the 7, and so on. Non-hypergamous men are willing to give them that attention because "the chance of sex is still the chance of sex." Does he intend to marry her? Probably not. She won't get the commitment she seeks. but the sexual attention she craves is coming - and from higher than her market value would account for.

Even if a woman manages to get a ring from the highest-value man in her social sphere, over time she will become inoculated to even his affection and begin to look elsewhere. At this point, lateral moves are a viable option, even in the absence of upward potential ... ergo "branch swinging." This is why there's a V in DEVI. As I assume /u/hornsofapathy would tell you, there's often value in integrating sexual dynamics outside the bedroom just as much as in it. One of my solutions to this problem is to constantly expand my playbook of ways to keep life/sex/"the relationship" (whatever that means) interesting rather than stale. New "tricks of the trade" create new flutters.


Abundance Fatigue

The way women become inoculated to male attention can happen to men with actual sexuality as well. The only difference is that women tend to look up (hypergamy) for a bigger dose, whereas most men I've met tend to look down. They get depressed and nihilistic. Most of these guys had made sex out to be their god, violating the third commandment of poon - "You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority." For reasons I won't go into here, I'm persuaded that at least in monogamous relationships, making sex from her your priority de facto makes her your priority, even if because of whatever "blah blah red pill blah blah" you don't get sex from her the way she thinks she wants it.

But this applies to non-monogamous relationships too. I remember a post from a TRP Endorsed Contributor who had essentially "mastered" sexual strategy and had such great abundance - both actual and in mentality - that he, theoretically, could have sex whenever he wanted. The story initially reads like a success story on how effective the red pill is ... until you get to the end and find out that actual abundance turned him nihilistic and horrified.

I'll call this "abundance fatigue." It's when a person experiences abundance to such a degree that he no longer values the thing he now has in abundance.

A bite of chocolate cake is delicious. I have no use for having 12 chocolate cakes in my kitchen. This is why restaurants will sell you a slice of pie for $9, or the whole pie for $15 (although there are other aspects of business psychology in there too).

Imagine a meteor shower hit earth raining gold from the sky all over the world. What do you think that would do to the value of gold? Is it going to go up? Stay the same? Of course not. It would plummet. Because when you have more of something than you actually need or care to have, its value diminishes.


Wisdom From Solomon

King Solomon was wise enough that even atheists will quote him. He was famous for having 700 wives and 300 concubines. Crazy. That's a new woman a day for 3-ish years (though, let's face it, it was probably multiple a day, likely even at a time). Yet he writes:

I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well - the delights of a man's heart. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me.

Then he says, fascinatingly:

In all this my wisdom stayed with me.

What cocky arrogance. I love it. Not only did he have a harem of 1000-ish women, but he was never mentally consumed by all of it. He goes on:

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure

My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve,

everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. (from Ecclesiastes 2)

Solomon spends quite some time after this on his diatribe toward the meaning of life, but I won't get into that here. The point is simple: even the wisest man in the world realized the nihilistic end of such pursuits.


This Isn't So Bad

Abundance fatigue can be depressing - to realize that everything you hoped and strived for all this time isn't all it's cracked up to be when you're swimming in it.

But that's actually okay. The reality is that abundance fatigue is usually associated with men who haven't actually "killed the blue." I remember Rollo writing in one of his posts that some men like to take blue pill notions and "sprinkle a little red on it." Some guys get REALLY good at sprinkling so much red that they look pretty doggone red. But when they end up nihilistic because mass-sex didn't fulfill them the way they'd hoped, it's clear that they were still living in their blue pill fantasy world and needed something more. I once wrote a post about Killing the Blue - and if I were to re-write it today, I'd have a lot more to add, but one that stands out in this context is the blue pill notion that "women can fulfill us" - even if "women" is an indirect way of saying "sex."

I remember in my early days of having discovered the red pill, I was sex-starved. Constant denials. Sex was once every few months, if-that. We went as long as 18 months with squat (and not the kind you do in the gym). I had in my mind, reading MMSLP for the first time, that by the time I was done, I'd be having sex multiple times a day. And yeah, we got there. Once I realized I had achieved actual abundance - that sex was available whenever I wanted ... I no longer wanted it as much as I thought. I cared more about quality than quantity. It's the same with fasting. I remember fasting for an entire week once. When it was over, I thought about all the foods I would eat. We went to a buffet. I filled my plate and sat down. A few bites in, I was done. Why? Because my actual appetite was nowhere near as big as I thought it was when I was starving. Different people will have different thresholds, but I'd wager every guy here will have a point where he realizes, "X is enough sex."

Back to Poon - "You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority."

Becoming nihilistic from life due to an over-abundance of many good things is cured simply by finding something more valuable to spend your time on than accumulating that which will ultimately disappoint.

If you bother to read the rest of the book of Ecclesiastes, by chapter 12 you'll find that Solomon figured out what he believed to be the meaning of life. You need to figure that out for yourself and then pursue it.