I’ve created a new post category of Mindwank. This one belongs there.

Dealing with women is often a pain in the arse. As men, our hormones compel us to seek out and try to fuck hot women. We develop our brains, create wealth, build bridges, develop art. We pacify nature and then build civilisation on top of it. Women, on the other hand, mostly just stand around, occasionally moving their womb from one place to another. In the interim, they bitch and moan.

Believe it or not, this is a perfect state of affairs. Without it, we wouldn’t have civilisation. We wouldn’t have feather duvets to sleep in, hot water showers to wake us up, or rich aroma coffee to properly wake us up. We owe our entire quality of life to women being stubborn lazy bitches and men being overly addicted to the slightest whiff of pussy.

Women are the problem and men are the solution.

Or, more correctly for seduction, women set the puzzle and the rewards go to the men who figure out the puzzle. If you can figure it out then – by default – you are worthy of the rewards. And if you can’t, then your DNA is worthless to the future of humanity. In this sense it’s factually correct to say that a man can be judged by whether hot women want to fuck him. It becomes more complicated when you consider how the puzzle is solved. To get this straight you have to understand the difference between totalitarianism and freedon, between dead and living, between Call Of Duty (single player) and Metal Gear Solid Phantom Pain. Yes, I warned you this is mindwank.

Think of how a CoD campaign works. You begin with a flashy opening scene of some bad guy fucking stuff up and giving you a goal (kill bad guy). You step into the shoes of a voiced cookie-cut character and then play a game of “follow the NPC”. Your HUD comes up and you are taken through a quick tutorial of “press L to sprint”, “press X to climb” etc and then the next six hours are one long corridor with periodic duck shoots. In gaming parlance we say it’s “on rails” because the game has decided what experience you will have and micro-managed it down to a series of set piece skirmishes. It’s like watching a movie and occasionally pressing X.

It’s fun but hugely contrived and limiting. Your character can’t vault over the low walls that form the boundaries of the playable area. You have to clear the area before the NPC will kick open the door to the next skirmish – a door that your character couldn’t open despite holding an RPG and several cakes of C4.

MGS:PP is an entirely different type of modern military shooter campaign. It relies upon “emergent gameplay”. That means it sets up the rules of its world, introduces you to a set of mechanics (e.g. how to sneak, how to aim), gives some objectives and then….. just leaves you to it. Go anywhere, do anything. Some enemy bases are too tough until you’ve researched better tech but you could still try to infiltrate them. Not a wise move, but you’re allowed to try. The real beauty of MGS:PP is that is never tries to get you back on track. You can sneak in or try all guns blazing – the enemy AI reacts accordingly by its own rules. Or you can sneak, say “fuck this” and start blazing. Usually pandemonium breaks out but it all follows the rules. The game doesn’t even force you to complete the objective – you might be tasked to steal a blueprint but you can just blow up their helicopters instead. You won’t get the set mission reward but you’ll still progress something.

In this sense CoD is a totalitarian, dead game. MGS:PP is a freedom-loving alive game. Both have their place depending upon your mood. Interestingly, CoD multiplayer is closer to MGS:PP in its role as a rule-bound sandbox that doesn’t try to dictate your actions.

This same tension between totalitarianism and freedom can be seen in political ideology. A philosophy teacher once said to me, “Nick, either you want people to be controlled or you don’t. That’s all it really comes down to.” I agree. One set of ideologies are designed to lock people down and control their daily lives – such as Planned Economies of the Marxist variant, or the thought- and speech-policing of our modern day SJWs. Other ideologies set up some mechanics and rules, then let you play in the sandbox.

The jocular saying is that, in England, “everything which is not forbidden is allowed”, while, in Germany, the opposite applies, so “everything which is not allowed is forbidden”. This may be extended to France — “everything is allowed even if it is forbidden” — and Russia where “everything is forbidden, even that which is expressly allowed”. While in North Korea it is said that “everything that is not forbidden is compulsory”

It’s the first and last which represent the extreme difference between freedom (England) and totalitarianism (North Korea). At least before Labour won their first election in my country. Once you look for it you see it everywhere. For example in martial arts you have the alive ones which set rules of illegal techniques and ways to win, then let you figure out your own answers – boxing, wrestling, BJJ, judo, sambo. Then you have the dead ones which tell you exactly what moves you must do and have judges score you on how well you do it – basically figure skating not fighting.

Now let’s pull this back to women and game.

Evolution is a freedom-based system. Nature sets rules on what is forbidden (death without reproduction) and then it’s a free-for-all for who can game the reward system to consume energy and stay alive long enough to pass on the blueprints. Pre-Darwin, philosophers couldn’t get their head around it. They thought each species had a prescriptive role like a citizen in North Korea allocated to either an office or the salt mines. Consequently their philosophical systems tended to be very large rulebooks as they tried to outline what script each role followed.

There is no spoon.

Underlying freedom vs totalitarianism is a meta-level world view. Is the world a chaotic, ever-changing river or is it a fixed immutable rock? Capitalists believe the former and thus wealth is something that is created anew every day and the economy is a shifting array of preferences and alliances where you can strike it rich and then blow it all. They want to learn how to swim in the river and take advantage of changing currents. Communists believe the world is static and there’s a big pot of wealth out there in the world, that people and circumstances have no feedback loops, and once you establish a position you’ve got it forever. They want to climb up the rock and then sit on their preferred ledge forever.

As the wildly divergent fates of capitalist and communist nations shows, the communists are dead wrong. The UFC proved the dead martial arts were dead wrong. They are fighting nature every step of the way, demanding that the tide doesn’t come in. So it is with women and game.

Nature has decreed that women will be the puzzle and as men we must solve it. Nature does not hand us a script micro-managing how that must be done. The end justifies the means. If you have a system which gets you the hot pussy, then by default that’s good. It doesn’t matter how noble, clever or just your system is if women keep you locked out of pussy paradise. You failed. You’re wrong.

Throughout the ages, all kinds of strategies have worked. Be good-looking. Be rich. Be a victorious army. Be sneaky. Be a rapist. Be charming. As far as Nature is concerned, tying a woman up and raping her until pregnant solves the puzzle just as effectively as charming her knickers off and making her fall in love.

The point is not to give up game and start raping, but to accept that solving the puzzle is the priority. Losing beautifully is still losing. Winning ugly is still winning. To win you need the “freedom” meta-level world view.

Think of pick-up with a nature-based metaphor such as hunting or fishing and you’ll unlock your creativity and puzzle-solving skills.

Think of it like linear-programming and you’ll fossilize, wither and die.

It’s not easy because there’s something comforting about the linear-programming route. You can focus blindly on the process and your inputs, ignoring the shitty outputs. It feels like you have more of the game under your control than is really the case. In the real world, you’ll never control more than 20% of the process. The vast majority of factors determining if you lay a girl this week are completely outside your control.

“But Nick, Daygame Mastery is extremely micro-managed. Isn’t that a totalitarian system?” a troll cries.

Daygame Mastery is a deconstruction of my game. It says right there in the Introduction: I have written about what I do and what I think about when picking up girls. It’s my system. Other guys do daygame a different way. Mastery outlines the physics and the engineering behind what’s going on and then lays out hundreds of practical examples of how I operationalise the principles into specific actions. Your specific actions will differ, eventually.

Mastery’s examples will guide you through the Imitate and Assimilate phases, where you switch from your previous shitty system to my good system. At some point it clicks and you move into the Innovate phase where you fully grasp the emergent creative nature of solving the Woman Puzzle and figure out your way to play in the sandbox. In that sense Daygame Mastery is like those Prima strategy guides that give you the level maps, bestiaries and tables ranking the stats of all the weapons. When you’re good at the game you just refer back to it, you’re not a slave to it.

Women are a pain in the arse because they are supposed to be. They are the Dark Souls of humanity. And like the game, it often feels like they are stealing your humanity and rendering you hollow. Your job is to overcome the challenge.