The fact is that the silver bullet, the holy grail, the masterkey that unlocks all the doors in life, the true quintessential essence of 'alpha', is confidence. That's why PUA works, it emulates confident behavior.

I used to be very depressed and have very low self esteem, and I have been actively seeking methods of building it up over the course of my life. Hopefully I have learned things that can be useful to others who feel that they need to do the same.

Circumstantial confidence

This form of confidence is rooted in your possessions and achievements and comparing them to other people's possessions and achievements. You feel like a boss when you're walking around in a nice suit, or driving a nice car, or you have a nice apartment, ripped abs, or you have a hot girlfriend, you're in a cool band or whatever. These things give you validation, you feel good about yourself and that which is yours.

If you are starting from nothing, if you have zero confidence, if you are depressed, I recommend putting effort into improving your circumstances so that you can attain this kind of confidence. Solve your problems one at a time. Start lifting and the hormones released from that will lift your mood and give you the energy to make other changes, do some PUA, have new experiences and expand your comfort zone.

There are problems with this kind of confidence though.

Firstly it is situational, if you derive your confidence from something that is not relevant in a certain situation, then you may be less confident in that situation than you would otherwise be. So you're the manager of some store or whatever, in the store you are the boss, you are the alpha male... outside of the store you're just some guy, nobody gives a shit. You can be the owner of a successful business, a self-made man. You go to a nightclub and you will still feel anxious about approaching some hot girl who probably only works as a hairdresser. How does that make any sense?

Second problem is if your circumstances change for the worse, it can have a negative effect on your overall confidence. Or if you see someone who is doing better than you then you will feel inferior to them. You become needy for the validation that comes from having nice things or having that hot girl in your life, and neediness is a very unattractive and unhealthy for you. Why do you think men are 11 times more likely to commit suicide in the year following their divorce? Its because they had invested their self esteem entirely into the circumstances and the role that was their marriage, and once it disappeared they lost their self esteem along with everything else.

Third problem is that no matter how nice your stuff is, you will always want more and/or better stuff. Even if you get all the stuff you could ever want you can still be a deeply insecure, unhappy emotional wreck underneath, because all of that stuff is just a facade. You see celebrities who have everything, fame, fortune, riches... and yet they still have mental breakdowns. Why aren't these people happy when they have so much? Clearly there's more to it than that.

I think that circumstantial confidence is a good stepping stone, but it's wise to move beyond it when you're ready. Usually people can't move beyond it until it starts to fall apart, because they have no motive to change while things are going well.

Inner confidence

You came into this world as a happy little baby. You were happy and confident in learning to walk and talk no matter how many times you fucked up. Then one day you were in the playground playing with a ball and little Timmy came over, took your ball away and told you that you sucked. You were emotionally wounded, you had to compensate for this wound and so you rationalized. You looked around and thought of reasons why you deserved to be happy and confident, and the things that you saw were your possessions and achievements, thus they became the basis of your confidence as described above. This is called the ego. "I'm so much better than that asshole Timmy because I have this cool toy car, fuck Timmy and his bullshit" you said when you were 4 years old. "Ha, look at Timmy now driving a forklift while I have this sweet job with my own office and future prospects" you said at 25...

But here's the revelation that blew my mind when I had it. We as people have the inherent right to be happy and confident regardless of our circumstances, regardless of our emotional wounds. Being happy and confident is supposed to be a default state.

The ego is the scar tissue that surrounds our emotional wounds, it's something we build up over time as a way of compensating for what we perceive as imperfections that need to be hidden. If you want to be free of rationalized confidence that is vulnerable to external factors, you need to learn to accept your emotional wounds as a part of you and to realize that we are all broken in one way or another. We all have shit that we're embarrassed about or shitty things that happened to us, so does everyone else.

Acceptance of yourself and being a genuine motherfucker is the key to deep-rooted unshakable confidence. It frees you of dependence on circumstances and outcomes because you don't need validation from anything outside of yourself. You have no reason to be needy or insecure, this in turn will make you behave in a way that is far more conducive to success in many aspects of life, including business, social and romantic endeavors.

There's no instant solution to attaining this, it's something you have to work on through mental discipline and practice, but it is possible to attain. You also have to be careful not to let the ego sneak back in, "I'm so much better than Timmy, because I've achieved true inner confidence and he hasn't" - no. You need to learn to recognize the ego if it resurfaces.

Transcending the self

I will only mention that I think that there's a level beyond what I've described above that is an even deeper and more robust form of confidence, but its getting into spirituality and eastern philosophy, and that might be disappearing a bit too far down the rabbit hole. So I'll leave it there.

tl;dr: Being confident because of the stuff you have or the things you have done is okay, but it's not a good long term solution because those things can change and you will lose your confidence. You have to realize that you have the inherent right to be happy and confident and work to cultivate that instead.

Anyway, I hope that was useful to someone.