So we've talked about how sitting around bitching about the gap between your precise desires and women's behaviour won't help you any.

But what will?

We can imagine what call the "Red Pill" as any or all of the following:

  • The idea that our dialogue about the sexes and the relationship between them must, to be useful, be based on observations and what we think is true, rather than what is politic and inoffensive to say.

  • The ideas that we come up with from the resulting observations and dialogue.

  • The discussion group where we exchange these ideas.

  • The course of action suggested by those ideas we have exchanged.

The last one can be envisioned as sort of a road between the states of what we stereotypically imagine as a neckbearded, angry, fedora and trenchcoat wearing outcast, and that of the (perhaps vaguely-described) self-actualized man who is in control of his own life.

Moving from one to the other (or from some midpoint to the desirable end, since most of us didn't start out as neckbeards) requires knowing which direction to go, and fucking walking.

We've already seen how complaining is the enemy of motion. When we blame others for our problems, or when we focus on the part of our problem that is someone else's fault, we fail to focus on the part that is our fault... the part we can change.

If we do otherwise, we create the belief that we do not need to change, that we are fine as we are. This is the error of complacency. It comes from the beliefs that we are "good enough", or from the Dunning-Kruger effect making us think we are better than we are, or the belief that the problem is with others and it is they who must change to solve our problems (as if they would), or from smug self-satisfaction with the progress we have already made.

The other enemy of progress is the opposite of complacency... despair. This is the belief that we cannot change in the ways we need to. That we are genetically cursed to be fat. That we weren't born to parents with the right connections. That it's too late to go back to college. That only steroid-using "douchebros" can have muscles. In general, that there is no point in trying to get better.

To improve ourselves, we must exist in the space between complacency and despair. We must believe that we are worth investing in, and that we are strong enough to change our lives for the better. But we must also see our own weaknesses and shortcomings, and be dissatisfied with them, ashamed of them, worried about them enough to motivate a change.

Whether we want to become more attractive to women, more successful in our careers, more fit and strong, more socially apt and confident, or just learn to play the guitar, whatever, we need to balance these two forces against each other, and not give in to one or the other.

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