I recently likened the Player’s Journey to a tiger raised in captivity being released from his cage into the wild. When an animal is raised in a zoo a routine and structure is imposed upon it by the zookeeper which removes risk such as through regular feeding (starvation risk) and controlled lodgings (exposure and predation risk) while also severely constraining the normal development of the animal. The animal’s socialisation is retarded. The tiger doesn’t get to roam the wilds, engage with it’s fellows, absorb the sights, sounds and fauna of it’s natural habitat. It’s a house cat. It reminds me of a quote I heard on a boxing telecast twenty years ago. To paraphrase:

There’s no such thing as a good boxer I don’t know about. To get good you must fight good opposition and if you’re fighting those guys, I’ll have heard about you.

The idea that there’s a talented well-developed fighter hidden Kung-Fu Panda-like deep inside an unknown prodigy is ridiculous. It’s the very process of building a career against diverse progressively stiffer opposition that creates the fighter. Without the process, there is no fighter. The journey can’t be skipped. The zoo-bound tiger is denied that process of growth and then suddenly released into the wild without the seasoning to compete. Freedom combined with skills is liberating. Freedom without skills is terrifying.

Prisoners and long-term hospital patients can suffer from institutionalisation. Humanity’s greatest evolutionary advantage is our ability to adapt to new environments and modify our behaviours, thoughts and emotions to fit in. This becomes dysfunctional in periods of lifestyle upheaval as we clutch at lifelines of the old routine. The daily grind of an institution, be it prison, an LTR or the office, conditions us with certain expectations, partitions off other potential thoughts and behaviours and puts us into a comfortable well-worn rut. The normal pattern of modern social life functions precisely this way because modern city life is atomising. If you spend your whole live aboard the Blue Pill Express you have no control over the destination. Your life is merely passing each station in turn until the end of the line. Work, relationships, entertainment, socialising…. it’s easy to passively accept the artificially narrow bounds upon which society has mapped out your life and to surrender decision-making.

This is why I call the Player’s Journey an emotional rollercoaster – you break out of the zoo. A chode’s life is constrained by social conventions and office routine. Usually his day is planned quite literally to the minute.

• 7:00 – Alarm goes off.
• 7:10 – Put on coffee pot, eat Quakers Porridge with semi-skimmed milk
• 7:20 – Shower
• 7:35 – Open closet, pull out shirt, suit, shoes in that order. Hang them on back of door-frame.

I’ll stop there. Most people’s lives are extremely routinised. It’s efficient and psychologically comforting. There’s a spot for the long term girlfriend in that safe routine and by following social conventions we are deluding ourselves we have escaped the rigours of the sexual marketplace. Just because you ignore a risk, doesn’t mean the environment isn’t risky. Routine is a buffer.

So you step out of your gilded cage and into the wilds of Game. What happens then?

You realise your whole life is your responsibility. The zoo-keeper isn’t feeding you or temperature-controlling your cage. It’s all on you now. Sex is something you have to go out and get. The nature of the relationship is for you to determine. Pretty quickly you realise girls are only part of the picture. Everything else is yours to determine:

• your fashion
• your body
• your work path
• you friends

Your life is a project to be managed not a series of orders to follow. Your happiness is your own responsibility. It’s both liberating and a psychological burden. Like the tiger released into the wild you must catch-up and learn all those coping strategies that you should’ve learned as a cub. You can only learn by doing.

It’s the very process of following the Player’s Journey, with its myriad highs and lows, that builds character. Adversity makes the man.

You must go out and live the life. This is why you can’t hide yourself behind internet forums and manosphere chatter. You can’t just buy some cool clothes and VIP tickets. You can’t just inject TRT/HGH and call it confidence. You can’t just reality-weave yourself to strong inner-game. Unless you’ve actually gone out and done the real work the house is built on sand. Your ego will push you back into the gilded cage. Be ready for it. It’s a natural response to the extreme emotional duress that Game places you under. Common traps include:

• Lionise a long term relationship with a “quality woman” and announce your exit from the Game. Fall back into the feminine imperative’s frame and assume all the old chode-risks while telling yourself you have “won”.
• Delusional ramblings about having become alpha / self-actualised, above the mere minions around you.
• Disappear into “value-building” hobbies that require no compliance from the world but give the illusion of moving forwards.

All three of the above are both buffers to patch up a delusional reality and ease away from the psychological rigours of the Game, and also (in rare cases) potentially pleasant end-states for men who have actually arrived there at the end of the rainbow. You really have to know the man to know which it is. Usually it’s a buffer. The lady doth protest too much.

You’ll become a better man by enduring the hardships, the introspection, the identity change and forming the mindsets and habits to cope in the Wild. It’s tough. You must learn your lessons the hard way. The temptation to return to your gilded cage will be strong.