Well I can really only speak for my experience. However don't use this as an excuse to protect your ego and immediately discard whatever hard truths I'm laying here as something specific to me. In fact, I've noticed that our lives (men) are not so different and we tend face the same type of challenges in our lives. Having said this, here is my experience and my extensive introspection on why I got into pickup and why, for me, it is not the way to go.

Think about why you do pickup. Really think about it. What is so bad about being by yourself? What's the drive behind it?

First you have to realize that not having girls in your life most likely is the tip of the iceberg. It is a symptom of a greater problem. What you really lack is self-love so you need others to validate you so you feel good about yourself. Not only this is the reason you don't have girls but this is the reason that despite having friends you feel like you're not as important to them as they are to you.

Since you're a teen you’ve been eating shit all your life (socially speaking), you barely know what validation is. This made you are afraid of stepping in uncomfortable situations. This is why you didn't do any new sports when you were a teenager, why you didn't join any kind of community and group and just stayed home playing Call of Duty. This is why you rage with your parents. All this anti-social behavior leads you isolation, lack of human connection and overall social and sexual scarcity. You take on this identity of the dark but highly intelligent teen no one really understands. However you don't have the meta-cognition to realize this is just your ego protecting yourself from the harsh truth.

You get older and more self-aware. You start to admit you're miserable because you have no girls in your life. You find out about ‘game’ techniques (which are really just ways to play with other's need for validation) to create a character that will be polarizing to the few people you meet. The insecure girls start falling for it the quality ones will see right through it. Your fuckboy friends and youtube PUA's are now your gods. You start getting sporadic “results” and grow addicted to the validation the girls provide you. Eventually you realize that you’re forked between: either being the egoic player and ‘getting’ that other person, but still feeling lonely or being your vulnerable self and reliving your teenage years again.

The answer?

Well at least the path I followed was being myself. Be your true self. This implies undoing years of social conditioning, repressed emotions and limiting beliefs. It implies digging deep to understand and accept who you are. Throughout this journey you will start seeing yourself in other people too. I see myself in the loner raging guy who hates you because you commented something about sports. I see myself in the player who's feeling the validation from the girls in the club and talks down to you like you're a peasant. You will stop putting so much importance on their opinions because you realize that it has always been about them, not you. You can expand this and start realizing there was nothing wrong with you when you were a kid, you were just a target for the endless search of validation/trauma relief among your peers.

This text is as much to you as it is to myself. Being brutally honest, I'm still in the process of overcoming these issues. One thing I'll say is ever since I started to gain this insight I stopped "gaming". I realize what people meant by seeing women as objects because I was so ingrained in this way of thinking that I couldn't even see another perspective. I'm now able to establish much deeper connection with women even if that doesn't lead to sex. If this last sentence triggered some anger, some "great, another beta male giving advice" type of thinking then you're exactly who I was. For you, pickup and game is something you HAVE to do. It's compulsory because it's how you deal with your pain. Realize that your happiness is your own responsibility.

It's not that I don't want women in my life, but I'm not craving it like before. If the goal is to be happy why place external conditions on it?