The childish and immature discourse problem

Are you engaging in boy psychology, or man psychology?

There is a tweet thread from Alexander of Datepsych saying, "The 'women initiate most divorces' discourse has a sort of childlike quality to it, like 'my dad administers most punishments.'"

Alexander @datepsych

The "women initiate most divorces" discourse has a sort of childlike quality to it, like "my dad administers most punishments." Ask yourself how you contributed to the divorce and why you were broken up with. 🧵

I laughed when I read it, because for the couple years I've been more keyed into the way so many of the guys in red pill / manosphere / pickup seem and probably are immature.[1] There's also usually a loser air to them, sometimes fainter and sometimes like fish forgotten on the countertop, but always present, even when the guys are right about some things, and some very important things.[2]

The childlike immaturity might be most prominent on Reddit... some Red Pill moderator "banned" me a few months ago for some post he didn't like, and, when I saw that, I just thought... "You sound like a dumb teenager." And Reddit Red Pill barely generates any traffic any more! Hasn't for years. Most of that "no traffic" effect is the quarantine, but the moderator behavior contributes. The guys who do it all seem to be dickheads (this is not shocking but is consistent with Datepsych's theories).

I've sought to target Red Quest at guys who are adults or who want to be adults. Adults who f**k, who f**k a lot, who want to learn how to f**k a lot, who understand women, who want to learn to understand women, who can achieve the kinds of sex and relationship lives they desire, who can get what they want... but adults.

And a lot of the guys in or adjacent to this world still act like children or teens.

Many of us have moments of immaturity, crisis, acting out, behaving like we shouldn't, etc. But we also usually have the ability to recognize when we're wrong, and the relationship repair skills to attempt to make things better when we're wrong or have behaved badly. If you think you've never behaved badly, you probably have trouble with friends and relationships and work. So it's not like anyone is perfect. But adults notice immaturity (part of the job of an adult is taking care of children), and the immature often don't.

I like this Datepsych guy so far cause he doesn't have that stink of loser and/or immaturity that's way too common.

In the posts and tweets I've read, though, the Datepsych guy doesn't emphasize something important... what's possible for a guy at the top.[3] What a guy who really learns the game can do. I'd write that here but I've already put it in the free book. Find it there. It's tautological to say that the averages are about the average. Red Quest is mostly about the elite, and it's about teaching guys how not to be average.

To his credit, Datepsych also has a thread on divorce and says that many contentious divorces involve Cluster B personality disorders. If you end up with a psycho chick, your life may resemble the hell that makes good stories. (If a chick ends up with a lunatic guy, the same can happen). Many individual stories are not relevant, however, to normal people in normal relationships.

While we're talking about immaturity and childishness, a word about forum guys: Internet forums disproportionately attract guys who don't do anything... they instead hang out in forums all day. Many of the guys you're taking advice from on forums don't know anything (this has been a universal problem since the invention of Internet forums, but I see way too many credulous guys accepting the advice and, worse, the temperament of Internet forum guys). Many forum guys have limited connection with and to the real world. If they seem unhappy, bilious, foolish, etc., and seem to have had very negative real-world experiences and very negative real-world lives, that may say more about them than it does about the real world, or normal people, etc.

Take all those realities about forum guys, and now apply them to forum moderators. How many of life's real winners spend large amounts of time in Internet forums? How many of life's real winners spend time moderating said forums?

Why moderate someone else's forum? Why not set up your own? If you have too weak a grasp of human psychology and motivation to answer the questions I've been asking, game is not your most pressing concern and you're going to have a real hard time doing well with women. In modern parlance, you're ngmi.

Less is more regarding Internet forums… a little Internet forum goes a long way. You may have noticed the ridiculous and absurdly negative temperament in Internet forums. Is that the temperament you want to marinate in? Here are a few of the headlines on Reddit Red Pill when I was writing this,

* "Existential emptiness afters years of red pill awareness and personal bitter experience."

* "Great example of a real-time feminist takeover of a male-based hobby forum. Home automation sub gets language police. The men bend over and ask for more."

* "Brown Beta Males."

* "Feels like I'm drowning."

These are the guys you're taking advice from. The seduction sub-reddit is okay but entirely newbie questions... if you are a newbie, maybe it will have some utility for you, but the minute you are not a newbie, GTFO.

Guys who are smart and have their lives together look at the collective tenor of the conversations happening, and those smart guys leave. Though there are some true things being said and some non-obvious things being said, losers naturally repel winners and the dumb naturally repel the smart. You don't have to engage with people online. Richard Hanania has a great essay on "Why the Media is Honest and Good, How to critique the press without devolving into nihilism." Please go read it and apply it to everything you've read by guys talking about men's stuff online. Hanania has something almost everyone talking about men's issues online lacks: perspective, and the ability to weigh the relative importance of things. He is genuinely contrary on many topics, but he also changes his views based on new information... something I try to do as well. Arguably this essay, the one you're reading, is a change in my views. This one describes another change in my views.

Another form of childishness is simply being ineffective. Most of us are trying to avoid the sting of pain, and thus create ego defenses around our own effectiveness or, in some areas, lack thereof. Adults try to aim for what matters most and then do what matters. The specific example I'm thinking of here are the are guys who want to have endless meandering private emails or chats but who don't want to do anything bigger or more important than those. My view is: do the big thing. Go big. Bigger. Figure out what's the most important thing and go do that. The important thing is speaking to larger audiences, not, usually, to audiences of one.

There is a famous passage about Jeff Bezos’s hard-core leadership strategy,

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

7. Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

“Service interfaces” probably means “APIs.” Guys practicing and studying game should work to expose as much of their internal thinking and learning as possible via public interfaces like Substacks and other blogs, so that anyone can learn from them. That’s making their knowledge and knowledge path “externalizable.” There is something admirably harder core about speaking publicly versus privately, so that is what you should do. Obviously there are details you’ll need to omit or change, and there are virtues to private conversations and chats, but the overall goal should be towards the public.

If you’d like to see what interfacing in public looks like, read through Madd Monk’s blog, especially the comments. I often comment, as do a few others. He’s out having experiences, and he connects his experiences to things I’ve said / written. The dialogue is happening in public and other guys can learn from it. He says something, I reply. How many thousands of guys have learned something from him, because he’s willing to use externalizable service interfaces?

There's an analogy here, between 1. the ineffective private chat and direct message guys versus the public-speaking guys, and 2. the guys who get stuck in particular phases or aspects of game: they get obsessed with their opening lines to chicks, or going to the gym, or "building their underlying value," or any number of things that are not "talking to chicks, and escalating with chicks." Prefer to speak publicly and not get stuck.

How do you do that? If you want to succeed in the game, you need to talk to chicks and escalate. A guy who isn't aiming to do that, and knocking down barriers to succeeding, isn't targeting correctly and needs correction. A guy who is meandering too much in private should be trying to do more in public. The comments section is a better place to have a back and forth about ideas and actions than an email thread. Then the comments section can, along with real-world experience, become the place where the next post comes from.

Greater impact > lesser impact. Seems obvious, right? Yet many guys are not correctly or adequately assessing what is greater and what is lesser.

Think of the people who are always on top of their email, but never do anything important. Maybe they should do less email, and more learning something important, or executing something important. Elon is probably the most extreme example: when he wanted to start SpaceX and Tesla, he read every textbook he could on rockets and batteries. That's effectiveness. He probably didn't do a lot of group chats. He knew his goal and took steps to learn everything there is to know about the relevant topics, and then executed on those topics. He didn't invest countless hours in the wrong places.

Why talk to one guy when you can talk 1,000 guys? (Substack.com, medium.com... there are many easy choices.) Obviously, you'll sometimes want to talk about details that shouldn't be public, but, when you're done with that talk, omit the details that shouldn't be public, and post. Let the discussion happen in the comments. I get comments many years after I put something up.

I posited this theory to a guy, "Beowulf," and he said, "Dude, I think you just can’t really appreciate how different you are than normal dudes." And then he went psychological, to the places I wasn't smart or wise enough to go on my own... "I think the main thing guys are looking for is a sense of belonging, a sense of validation from game." And he thinks the chats deliver that, along with a sense of faux belonging, even if it's a sense of belonging to a group of fools who can't see the bigger picture.

The validation is supposed to fill some hole in their life. At some point, it's not even about the goal, it's about the camaraderie of being with other guys... many of whom fail. They are the guys who see chicks as being like a parent administering punishments and rewards. Few of us want to say, "I am failing, and I am not doing the effective thing." Guys will spend dozens or hundreds or even thousands of hours doing things that don't matter very much, instead of investing those hours in things that might matter.

One guy I know in real life looked at a game / pickup forum. His own game isn't great, but his response to the forum is that it seems "really cringey." Cringey, childish, immature, ineffective: these words have different resonances, but they are more alike than not.

Are you being effective? Why not?

[1]One problem with immaturity is that the mature recognize the immature but the immature almost never recognize themselves (if they did, they'd be mature or maturing), and often don't recognize maturity either.

[2]Often: fitness, nutrition, "go talk to girls," improve your life. Lots of guys aren't doing the basics and the manosphere guys are right about doing those basics.

[3]What you emphasize and don't is important. We see that weakness all over Twitter, too. What happens when the Twitter guys are wrong? What price do they pay? When you listen to their wrong advice, what price will you, or your family, pay?