The Reality Method 2.0

Why Pickup is Such a Big Deal

I hear guys trying to down-play pickup and seduction all the time. A lot of “naturals” (myself included) sometimes get into these attitudes where they just say,

Get over it. Girls and guys hook up all the time. It’s totally natural; in fact nothing could be easier or more natural. Why are you guys spending all this effort trying to learn how to do it better? Why try so hard? You’re just making it worse on yourselves, becoming more and more ‘try-hard”, literally. If you just laid back and were cool and vibed like us you would do a million times better, and you’d be happier, too.

Every time I hear this, though — and especially when I myself am saying it — I have to remind myself that this statement can only exist in a specific context, and that context is an environment of plenty.

When you’re getting laid regularly, and getting consistent attraction and regular social recognition from the men and women around you, your brain chemistry changes and you just naturally feel more comfortable with yourself and the world. You’re satisfied, and therefore able to make statements like “It’s all in our head” and “It’s not hard.”

Guys in a scarcity context, however — guys who haven’t had sex in six months or a year and don’t get regular social recognition, and don’t notice or aren’t getting sexual validation from women when they go out — those guys have a lot harder time swallowing those pollyannaish platitudes.

The “it’s so easy” mindset has a lot to offer guys, and there’s a lot of truth to it, so I’m glad it exists. At the same time, it’s silly to act like pickup isn’t difficult for a lot of guys (the majority, in fact), or to act like people who acknowledge their limitations with women and deliberately work to overcome them are going about things the wrong way.

The Emotional Payload
I think the main reason that guys get so worked up over pickup is that it can be a highly emotionally-charged experience, in both a positive and a negative sense.

You hear about guys being “on top of the world” after a really good night. Other guys leave their houses with the intention to do pickup, and then never actually walk into a club because they’re so fearful. They go home without talking to a single person and get all despondent because they feel they’ll never make any progress.

What these wild extremes of pickup and seduction are reflecting are our most deeply-held beliefs about the world, the future, and our place in it.

If you have beliefs about yourself that are in line with wanting to project yourself into the future (via sexual reproduction), then your other beliefs will probably be somewhat in line with going out to do pickup.

If, on the other hand, you are so frightened or anxious about the future that you don’t believe the future will be a place worth living in, your other beliefs will probably discourage you from doing pickup.

This is what a lot of people in the community refer to as “internals”. “Work on your internal state and everything will fall into place.” What is meant by that statement is, of course, that if you work on your beliefs — and by “work on” I mean analyze them, become aware of them, examine where they are adaptive or maladaptive, and then work to change them — then your results in the external world will follow. The results will follow as a direct function of your actions no longer being so at odds with your beliefs.

I’m mixing advice and discussion here, but the bottom line is, pickup is an emotionally charged experience, and it is so charged because it cuts so deeply to the core of our belief systems.

This makes sense if you think about how many guys go out to see a bootcamp or a master pick up artist demonstrate his skill and say their “belief systems were shattered”. They’re talking about the violent upending of all the mental structures they have grown over the years to protect their ego and attitude towards reality.

This upending process doesn’t have to be so violent as it is typically described in a bootcamp, but it does need to happen if your belief system is not currently in a place that supports the practice of actively reaching out to connect with women.

People’s attitude towards pickup reveals a lot about their internal and most deeply-held beliefs. I once had a student who, after some initial exposure to the idea of approaching women, said, “Why would I need this information? There’s so much porn on the internet.”

I later learned that this same guy, who did manage to hook up with a girl in the same class, did not perform very well. He was a guy who needed this information pretty badly, but his belief system (the same system that prized porn so highly) didn’t admit his own weaknesses. Unfortunately, too, because his belief system wasn’t making the women in his life very happy.

That’s just one example; there are many, many more. Maybe society’s prevailing (though changing) attitude of pickup as something shameful and slightly sinister tells us something important about society’s core values.