The pesky thing about our ego is that it deceives us. Most of the time we can’t see our own ego even though it’s transparent to even mildly-calibrated outside observers. When someone points it out we tend to bristle. This is all very normal. It happens to me despite my efforts to be mindful. Within the daygame world we call it Avoidance Weasel.

The smart move is to process the feedback from reality and then introspect. You needn’t roll over and let others walk over you but if the world keeps telling you an unwelcome message then at some point you need to bunker down and listen to it. I call it percolation. Like coffee dripping through a filter I won’t back down or accept criticism in the moment but it will register and eventually will percolate through and be absorbed.

I sincerely want to be right. That’s not the same thing as winning the argument, or holding the frame.

Ego Kryptonite

To continue the metaphor, some people’s coffee filter is impermeable. It’s plastic. It’s designed to stop that criticism filtering through. Why is that? The same reason for most weirdness: low self-esteem. Some people don’t want to face up to their deep-rooted feelings of low self-worth. So reality must be rebuffed. This is where the ego becomes very devious.

When you get into Game you develop a vocabulary to parse these ideas. Whether you’ve watched The Blueprint Decoded, Deep Inner Game or Tony Robbins they all give you heuristic devices, jargon and mindsets to achieve long-term conscious control over your mind. I call it reflexivity, the gradual expansion of the realm under your influence. You must master yourself before you master the world. So we can introspect and begin to confront our ego. Perhaps we’re a Northern working class lad who drinks to excess and finds himself in pointless Friday night punch-ups. Some introspection tells us we feel low self-esteem from growing up excluded from The Good Life down South. That’s why we talk with such bravado about football and denigrate Londoners as “soft southerners”, “spivs” and “yuppies”. It’s just externalising and projecting our own low self-esteem – sour grapes.

So then what happens? The ego retreats briefly and, like HeWhoCannotBeNamed, returns in disguised form. Now perhaps we openly talk about how London is a good place full of high achievers…… Then someone tells us we are acting overly superior, that we are now swanning around saying how we’ve “made it” and enjoy looking down on our former comrades up North as being “small-minded” and “parochial”.

All that happened is our ego switched sides.

What was originally a self-important construct to valourise the identity of being a Northerner has morphed into a self-important construct to valourise the identity of being The Lad Who Done Good. The ego still achieves its two main goals:

1. Build up grandiosity and
2. Look down on the plebs

I use this example because it’s what happened to me. It’s very common. I’d suggest there’s a circular pattern going on:

Hide low self-esteem with grandiosity armour -> Reality breaks through grandiosity armour -> Develop new grandiosity armour

At no point does the original low self-esteem get addressed. The ego has outwitted conscious attempts to control it by a man who has both the inclination and guidance to try to control it. Self deceit is a powerful adversary. A common Intermediate Player ego trap is:

Original armour: Chode believes in Disney romance, pedestalises women and disparages anyone who would try self-improvement with a “just be yourself” dismissal

Reality: Can’t get laid. It knaws away. Probably a traumatic event (being dumped) forces them to confront the problem and they learn game.

New armour: Relentless approaching, routines, the PUA wizard-hat Super Player persona.

I think we’re all aware of that one so let’s float out some others.

• A guy grows up as an unathletic meek pushover, ignored by girls and excluded from the Cool Kids parties. After experimenting with alternative subcultures he discovers the gym. He can religiously monitor his diet, enjoy a Calvinist moral rush from the pain of training, and get jacked. He feels big and important and draws lots of looks, many approving. Perhaps he jacks up further on steroids, HGH and TRT to approach hulking proportions. He’s become a little boy in a gorilla suit.
• A guy is tired of being the soft kid at school. Always watching his mouth and backing down in case he gets into a fight he can’t win. Never able to express himself. So he watches the UFC and figures MMA will solve his problems. Ten years later he’s a BJJ black belt with decent hands. He’s also neck-deep in a new cult with religious training and new community norms to follow. His identity is all about being tough, unlike those “idiot” traditional martial artists or “lazy” cubicle jockeys. Watch The Ultimate Fighter for a glimpse of these types.

At no point do I suggest getting a great physique or learning to fight are a bad idea. Quite the contrary, both are noble pursuits that build value. The problem is leaving your inner game unaddressed. Your ego has just sent you on a wild goose chase and you’re still the same chode with the same low self-esteem. It’s just now you have a new hook upon which to hang your grandiosity. A new intellectual construct to blind you from your own idiocy. And everyone can still see right through you.

How to tell if you’re mired in a new ego trap rather than making real inner game progress?

• You feel the need to constantly tell everyone how good you are
• You feel the need to constantly push everyone else beneath you
• You still bristle at criticism and go off on rants
• You still need to be the centre of attention and act out when the spotlight moves onto someone else
• You are a One True Way-er in whatever beliefs are important to you
• You need to set up a caricatured straw man of The Other to then gleefully tear down to prove to yourself that you aren’t one of those idiots

I don’t exclude myself from consideration from this list. While my inner game is 100x stronger than it was I still have my share of grandiosity moments. The important thing is to recognise Ego Traps and avoid what you can. You cannot address your inner game by papering over the cracks. No matter how elaborately you construct a reality-weave, at some point reality will break through and that will hurt.

“Ego traps occur when you learn to recognize and try to combat one form of ego-driven superiority, only to have the ego reassert itself using sneaky, subtle disguised ways to take over your mind from new angles” – Ricky Raw

In the manosphere there’s alot of external referencing masquerading as internal referencing. There’s plenty of people telling you how high value they are while showing you the opposite. Ironically, they are often precisely the people calling out others for lack of transparency. Don’t fall for it. Look inwards and concentrate on getting your own house in order. You’re into Game to improve your happiness and your results, not to engage in pissing contests with self-aggrandising little boys with big mouths.

Men who have reached self-acceptance are chill, relaxed and non-reactive. They don’t need to tell you how they are better than everyone else.

Allow me to offer a guest post from fellow daygamer and wing Bodi on a topic I’ve never heard discussed in the manosphere…..

Have you ever been in a crowded bar, a social place, full of noise and crammed with men and women all there with the express purpose of meeting each other yet observed a pair of girls, perhaps sitting at a small table, intensely locked in conversation with each other in their own little bubble. Perhaps you even opened them and were told briskly “they are not there to meet men”.

No dick

Have you ever known a girl, in her late twenties and single, who starts to get more into her career. Perhaps she starts ‘working all hours’. She may get a dog and/or even move out of the city into a small town. ‘It’s the only place I can afford the mortgage!’ she’ll say. She’ll get into baking.

No dick here either

Perhaps you knew a girl who didn’t go to bars and didn’t get into her career, but she had a very close group of female friends and they did everything together, organizing character building activities each weekend and staying in close contact over social media. Most of them were single. They all went to Ascot and got tipsy on Champagne.

Or maybe you were out walking one day and noticed a girl wandering on her own through the park, dressed a little alternatively and taking endless same-ey photographs with a huge SLR camera. Maybe you even thought it was a perfect daygame set and opened her, to be shocked at how disinterested, flat and drained she seemed.

Congratulations, you have encountered a phenomena increasingly common in the feminist women’s desperate attempts to ruin their own lives: the Celibacy Club. The common Celibacy Club is where a group of women (we’ll address the Solo variant later) form an intense dynamic the essence of which is to ensure the ongoing celibacy of each member. They trade their own likelihood of success in acquiring a mate for ensuring the other member’s celibacy. On a very simple level you’ve seen this behaviour before with generic nightgame cockblocking where girls will prevent friends from getting theirs if they’ve not had their own, or will even just cockblock out of spite for the sake of it. A Celibacy Club is a level beyond this, it’s less ephemeral and the natural urge to cockblock metastatizes into an all encompassing subtle mechanism of group social control where member accepts celibacy as a fair price for ensuring their rival’s celibacy too.

Celibacy Clubs are dysfunctional herds. Think of ‘The Claw’ in Toy Story.

A metaphor, yesterday

A bunch of tiny aliens live in one of those grabber machines. They are all identical. They are weirdly culty and wait in anticipation until The Claw drops one day and picks one of them, carrying them up and away to a better place. The lucky alien, The Chosen, will beam blissfuly as he is lifted up and say “Farewell friends, I am off to a better place” as his comrades all coo in rapture at the spiritual event.

Pre-date

This is a woman’s life: they bumble along together in little groups, like herds of zebras, waiting for the lucky day that a lion stalks alongside and pulls one of them away into his own life and reality. The problem with Celibacy Clubs is they derail this prime directive: a Celibacy Club would be the crabs-in-a-barrel phenomena whereby The Claw drops so all the other little aliens jealousy hold down anyone lucky enough to get clawed, thus preventing them being spirited away. The end result: nobody gets Clawed.

How would you recognize a Celibacy Club in action? Here are some tell-tale signs:

• Lack of dick. Lots of talk; not much dick. Most members (lol) are single and continue to be so.
• Subtle attempts to prevent each other from putting themselves in any situation where men could approach them. In a social place the intenso-bubble will form. The group will generally waste enormous amounts of time attempting to schedule activities, then all constantly reschedule and flake on each other. The end result: spending time at home with a box-set.
• High levels of social control: lots of contact through social media
• Subtle attempts to joint lower their SMV: group piggery in restaurants, excessive alcohol consumption, gradually lowering standards of dress and deportment, encouraging other members to pig out or not diet
• Group shaming of members trying to break away
• Outright cockblocking

 Let’s look at some examples of such clubs, all real examples that I have encountered:

• Amanda, age 38 and feeling it. Gradually increases her working hours to help her ignore the fact her flat is cold and empty. Meets mid 40’s agressive, loud, wealthy career saleswoman. They ‘really hit if off’ and then every other weekend is a trip away involving lots of champagne and huge dinners. The older woman ‘really supports her’ and often perks her up by telling her ‘no man is good enough for her anyway’.
• Kate, age 30 and single. Every Friday night it’s drinks after work with a couple of the girls from work. It usually begins in the office with a bottle of wine and vague jokes about ‘getting chatted up’, but ends up in the corner of a pub in an intenso-huddle over a table and more wine, with orbiting males quickly repelled by the group force-field.
• Michelle, age 25, moves to London and doesn’t know anybody. She joins a Swing dancing club ‘to socialize’ and even admits she’d like to meet men. The other girls there are very friendly and she swaps numbers, gradually getting to know them. Pretty soon they are helping each other pick appropriate fashions, travelling to dances together and forming an intenso-bubble of femininity at the crucial socialization times before and after the dance classes. She never quite meets a man. None of them do.
• Clare, 28, moves to London and doesn’t know anybody. She joins a choir and sings and plays violin. She thinks it works but doesn’t understand the implications when all her new friends are 35 year old, thick set and terribly posh home-counties girls, living off daddies money in their own little apartments in good areas of London. She starts socializing, but it’s all dinner parties and drinks in nice, quiet restaurants in the suburbs. Weekends fill with choir practice and coffees in pleasant cafes by the park. In other words: a total absence of dick.

Why are Celibacy Clubs so initially tempting? Because of two things: firstly, the immediate throat-slitting joy of enforcing celibacy on other members. Second because it facilitates avoidance, and girls love avoidance. Girls all want to feel like they have unlimited time and unlimited options. It’s hard to believe this if you sit in your flat every Friday night on your own watching ER on DVD and crying into a bottle of wine and a cheescake. Fill your life with noise and the signal gets harder to pick up, and let’s not forget what we all learned when little: the thing that makes misfortune easier to deal with is having others have to deal with it as well. Remember, men’s self-help is self-development, women’s self-help is is self-acceptance.

After the initial two-pronged ego gratification of joining a Celibacy Club membership rapidly becomes quite stifling. Despite all the intenso-bonding a girl’s hindbrain will be screaming at her that her vagina remains continually unfilled. It starts to feel wrong and the gnawing sensation of avoidance becomes harder and harder to ignore. A Celibacy Club is a prison, a prison whose walls are held up by women’s adherence to The Female Groupthink and their intrinsic fear of non-conformance.

Smiling in hell

Eventually a girl in a Celibacy Club will begin to realize she ensuring her friends celibacy is not enough, and will try to break out of the club herself. She will try to pull away and sneak off and acquire herself a man, well aware that should she be caught by the Borg-mind she is part of she will endure their wrath. At the simplest level you have the classic scenario of a girl “losing her friends in a club”. Believe me my friends, if you’re ever in a club and you run across a girl who has ‘lost her friends’, STRIKE! Beyond this you get intermediate measures such as giving up or radically changing hobbies, increasing workload or time spent with families to avoid certain hobbies or obligations and at the highest level you quite often see girls make radical life changes: like changing career, going back to University or moving city or country. It’s not easy though…and mull over this if you want a glimpse into horror: the reason girls go the toilet together in clubs is not to gossip, but so they don’t want to leave each other alone for even one single minute.

 In the next part: Solo Celibacy Clubs and why you should smash them

Imagine if those x-ray glasses advertisements in the back of 1970s Marvel comics had been real. Imagine it was possible to don a pair of glasses that let you see through all the bullshit and see the world as it really is.

For back when women still had modesty

I had zero calibration as a child until well into my adult life. I’d run around doing my own thing, imposing my reality onto the world and then show total obliviousness to the responses of others. I never learned to read the subtle cues in peoples behaviour that betray what they really think. Perhaps I was an unusually blundering idiot but I think men generally are an oblivious bunch. We live in the world of direct obvious overt communication.

Two years into the Game I still marvelled at Jambone’s ability to just know where a girl was at and whether she was up for it. To me it seemed he had a superpower but really he’d just taught himself calibration by fucking 150 girls since he started university. When you go through enough sets from beginning to end you get calibrated. When I asked him to deconstruct and list the signals he was reading he couldn’t really do it. It was too internalised.

So one thing I’m doing with my book is deconstruction. I’m breaking everything down into tiny micro steps. Ultimately Game follows a simple mini-loop:

Provoke feedback -> Use girl’s response to place her -> Make an informed next move

When you read her IOIs you are doing this. When you compliance test her you are doing this. The further you can deconstruct the steps and the more precisely you can sort the signal from the noise, the faster and more reliably you can move the girl forwards. That’s the nuts and bolts of calibration but the end goal is to internalise it and make it intuitive.

As you get calibrated you see the world differently. It permeates your world view and can’t be unseen.

You see a chode on a first date. Immediately you classify him on the socio-sexual hierarchy and you calculate relative SMVs with the girl. You know where the girl is and what she’s looking for. You can future project the next ten years of their lives with actuarial certainty. You see people on the bus and you can see their inner game issues written into their face, their posture and their clothing. You start to see men as women see them, seperating them into “gets laid” and “doesn’t get laid” buckets.

It’s weird. There’s an unbelievable amount of information transmitted if only you know what signal to detect and how to process it. The Red Pill does the same thing. You start to see what the office environment really is. You can almost see dollar signs being transferred from the middle-aged professionals across to the welfare housing a few streets across the office. You can see the cage office chodes build around themselves.

People talk about red pill bitterness, that emotional reaction to realising everyone’s lied to you every year of your life to pick your pockets and frustrate your ambitions. Perhaps we should also talk about red pill disengagement, that Cassandra Complex of seeing things as they really are but being powerless to change them. Watching the lemmings marching to the cliff and wondering why they can’t see they are marching into the abyss.

I love John Carpenter movies. Watching They Live as a teenager really got me thinking “what would it be like to have a pair of glasses like that?” Well, twenty years later after swallowing the red pull, learning game and the fundamentals of economics I get it. The world is so simple and it amazes me the elusive obvious is so well hidden from so many.

My new book is a textbook. Every page offers specific actionable advice for what to say and do while interacting with a woman you’re trying to seduce. To adequately convey this advice I need to bring my poor reader up to speed on key concepts and mindsets so I’ve been writing little “box out” sections as tangents to the body of the text. During my chapter on “daygame is dirty” I go into detail about the female’s dualist sexual strategy:

• R-selection: Acquire high-quality DNA
• K-selection: Acquire long-term provision and protection.

This reminded me of the first time I ever heard PUAs reference what we now call the socio-sexual hierarchy. Tyler Durden wrote a celebrated post on the Bristol Lair called The Secret Society back when PUAs didn’t really have the vocabulary to parse the concepts but they knew they’d discovered something real. I’ve used this as a jumping off point for this particular box out. So to whet my reader’s appetites here’s an extract from Daygame Mastery……..*

This idate is looking promising

Most men are, in carnival terms, rubes. They are easy marks. They have been brought up in a deeply fem-centric world and all of its delusions. They go to work, earn money, pay taxes, buy products, watch TV and have sex with a tiny number of homely women. Dysfunctional as this sounds it’s exactly what the grand meta-narrative of the feminine imperative wants. It’s a feature not a bug. It’s no conspiracy. Most people have bought into the ideology implicitly and women can’t even articulate why they want it this way, much less design and administer such a conspiracy.

What matters is the result: Most men don’t get it.

Most men don’t realise that sex is everywhere. That innocent-looking girl in a woolly jumper sitting in Starbucks reading Proust? Last week she was picked up in Hyde Park by a player who fucked her three hours later in the disabled toilet at Charing Cross Hotel. That Iranian girl with the head scarf and wide blue eyes? Once a month her father pays for her shopping trip to Harrods and she sneaks away to spend the night with a player who picked her up outside Knightsbridge underground station.

There is a world of sex going on underneath our noses. 99% of men have never participated in it and many don’t even believe it exists. While waiting in the queue at Whole Foods they see the customer in front making small talk with the cashier as she bags his items. Oblivious, the man saw but he didn’t observe. A keener eye would recognise that “small talk” was a flirty indirect-direct ping that raised a smile, followed up by some sparkling eye contact. The player was screening the cashier, giving her a come-on to gauge her interest. Sometimes a cashier gives her number and gets fucked in a hotel room three days later. Then she goes back to work with nobody the wiser.

All women have “indiscretions”. These are her R-selected moments. It’s just that she’s not having them with the K-selected man so he doesn’t even know they happen. There are precious few R-selected men in the world so they act as aggregators. Twenty women may each have only one indiscretion but they all happen with the same man. This is why when you become an Advanced Player you stories become literally unbelievable to the average man. He’s literally never seen that world. He was never allowed into the Secret Society.

According to the UK Office Of National Statistics, 20% of all females living in the UK are aged between 15 and 30 years old. According to me, approximately 20% of them are a six or better in hotness. Depending who you believe women of that generation will have between 10 and 20 lifetime sexual partners on average. So let’s run some simple maths (it’s a crude sketch, social statisticians beware!):

• 4% of women in the UK are bangable (20% of 20%).
• Each of these women will average 1 new notch per year during their bangable window.

Let’s assume half her notches are within stable LTRs with K-selected men while the other half are R-selected “indiscretions”, thus each girl has one Player Notch every two years. This means for one player to score 20 notches per year he is aggregating 40 girl-years of indiscretions. He’s stealing the lunch money of 39 other men. Not only that but we are only looking at the top 20% of the girls. Which leads us to quite a startling conclusion about R-selected men:

The hot girl population of the UK can only support a maximum of 0.1% of men being players before female notch-counts rise exponentially.

There’s a reason the society is kept a secret.

* Smarter readers will have observed I’ve given away one of the few extracts of my book which uses ideas that are already public domain. It’s not just the society that remains a secret!