I got shaken down by police recently. Let me tell the story and draw the inner game / daygame lesson from it.

Those euro jaunters among us are well aware that as you go further East you tend to find hotter and more feminine girls. This initially appears to be pussy paradise but spend enough time in these countries and enough time chasing the girls and you realise there are powerful forces that undermine your faith and bring the Pussy Paradise fantasy back to the real world, frustrations and all. One such problem is the extreme K-selection of the Former Soviet Union. It’s very easy to get interest and attention from the hot girls but most of them switch off when they realise you’re only offering casual sex. The best-looking and best-groomed girls are often lifestyle whores, treating their beauty as a full-time job and expecting a salary paid by the sugar daddy in return. It’s not 100% this way and you can occasionally unearth a genuine hottie who is up for free casual sex, but it’s nowhere near as common as you’d think after the end of your first three-day number farm when you appear to be sitting on a goldmine of hot leads.

Another problem is bureaucracy. The FSU is teeming with it. I recently came a cropper of the apartment registration system. It goes like this: For a UK passport holder to get a visa to Russia or Belarus you must get a letter of invitation (which costs a fee paid to a specialist agency) and also have valid travel insurance. After a few days in the country you must register your address with the police (and pay another fee). This is especially a ball ache if you use Airbnb because many hosts will not do the registration for you.

Fortunately, Russian police are not so strict. I registered at one place, allowed the registration to lapse over a week, then re-registered at a hotel on my last night. There were no problems at immigration’s exit control on my way out. I recently found out the Belarussian police are different.

I go to register and they tell my landlady they only accept travel insurance documents in Russian (unlike the embassy which is fine with English). This is a new rule and they find a rulebook in the bottom of a filing cabinet to prove it. So I must buy duplicate insurance from a small office in the next street. I get it for seven days and register thus. Days five, six and seven are public holidays. On day eight the police telephone my landlady saying we are both to be fined for the expiring registration and she knocks me out of bed so we can rush to the police station to see what’s up.

I buy new insurance for the remainder of my stay and pay another registration fee. That should be the end of it but the cops are determined to shake me down. The say I owe a 230 rouble penalty (about £115) and my landlady owes double that. A supervisor comes out and gives her a stern telling off while his two subordinates look a bit guilty at being involved in such a blatant shakedown.

Naturally I argue the toss, via Google Translate. The embassy accepted UK insurance and nowhere on the government websites in English does it say Russian documents needed. I show them the website that says after registration lapses I have five more business days to reregister. I also explain it was not possible to reregister before today because the police station was closed for holidays.

“Doesn’t matter. You should have stayed in a hotel on final day to reset registration clock” they say, in Russian.

At that point I’m happy to face them down and just be deported but the landlady is panicking about getting in bad with cops and whatever fate may befall her apartment business. I back down, because I’m not a bad sort really [1] I pay the penalty and chalk it to the game.

I’m sure you all have your violins out playing a symphony of sympathy for me. So, why is it relevant to daygame?

It’s because I was barely suppressing a furious rage at being shaken down for what was, ultimately, an inconsequential fee. I was typing into Google Translate “this is a robbery, they are acting in bad faith, finding a pretext for a shakedown” and my landlady wisely refused to show that to the cop sitting across the desk. I didn’t lose my head, but it was close. Why?

Anonymous Conservative has the answer with his rich explanation of the amygdala. This part of the brain is at the centre of everything when it comes to state control – which is the cornerstone of Game. The amygdala is the threat detection centre and it lights up (in the modern vernacular, is “triggered”) when it perceives threat. Wolves have a highly trained (and literally larger, when measured in autopsy) amygdala that is highly effective at perceiving long term threats and will thus trigger the wolf to proactively seek out and destroy the threat before it grows more dangerous. Rabbits have an atrophied and undeveloped amygdala that is oblivious to threats until they are right in front of the rabbit’s nose. They seek also to remove the threat but usually at the last moment and by running away from it.

This is why in the migrant crisis wolves want to sink the boats and rabbits hold up Refugees Welcome signs. The wolves can very easily see the looming threat of importing third world savages into Europe and want to nip it in the bud at the minimum loss of life. Rabbits are blind to it, completely conflict averse, and just figure it’s better to prostrate themselves at the feet of the savages and hope they are killed last.

Daygame will provide you with both wolf and rabbit stimuli, and the balance depends how you do the daygame. Grinding it out on the streets, hanging out bantering with high value players, and actively honing a skill set are all K-stimuli, meaning challenging behaviours that introduce you to adversity and thus develop your amygdala. Every time you mumble “first one is the worst one” before diving into your first set of the day, you might as well be saying to yourself “adversity incoming, time to train the amygdala with some pain”.

Unfortunately, rootlessly travelling around foreign countries, living off passive income, breaking friendships when they become inconvenient, and having an abundance of casual sex are all r-stimuli, meaning they are the removal of adversity and lead to amygdala deterioration. For salient examples, look at sportsmen who go off the rails when they reach the big time (e.g. James Toney, Adriano etc). Adversity strengthens them on the way up and then comfort weakens them once at the top.

Anonymous Conservative has a whole typology of ways the amygdala can be triggered and thus overheat and take control away from our rational brains (like me in the police station). The most powerful is what he calls Violation Of Expectation. It’s the equivalent of having the rug pulled from under you, and the subject of the famous book Who Moved My Cheese? It’s pretty simple:

1. You overcome adversity and achieve abundance.
2. The abundance becomes comfortable and your new normal.
3. You amygdala switches off as there is no threat to face.
4. An event suddenly rips away the comfort and confronts you with adversity.
5. Your amygdala lights up very strongly and very quickly, accompanied by disorientation because the adversity was unexpected.
6. You’re triggered. Trigglypuffing ensues. [2]

I dare say that stage 6 is very unpleasant and can seem important all out of proportion, such as wanting to dig my heels in and get deported rather than pay a trivial fine. It is such situations that inspire sage quotes about wise men keeping their heads while everyone around is losing theirs.

So what’s the inner game takeway?

Don’t try to remove adversity from your life, no matter how tempting. And when comfort is suddenly ripped away from you, recognise the cause (and repeat to yourself “this is just a Violation of Expectation scenario”) and that your emotional reaction is likely way out of proportion to the size of the problem. [3]

You’ll probably also notice that the coolest men in the world are unruffled. Trainee players are always advised to be more chill and less reactive. This is because reactive behaviour is a sign of an atrophied amygdala and poor threat detection, and thus poor reproductive fitness [4]

[1] Despite Bodi’s two-volume attempt to convince you otherwise.
[2] AnonCon has convincingly argued this is the crux of the North Korean crisis and the increasingly insane behaviour of Kim Il Piggy.
[3] TL:DR is “don’t be a bitch”

[4] But isn’t it also interesting that it’s a sign of rabbitry,  and thus a sign to rabbit girls that you may be suited to them. Perhaps this is why grotty sluts actually like drama and seek it out – they are seeking out men with defective amygdalae because it’s a proxy sign of the rabbit breeding strategy.

If you are disappointed that this post explored some new ideas that are relevant to daygame rather than rehashing tired  bullshit in a bullet point list, you probably won’t like my books.