*you’re

Get this… Many good friends!

I kind of do this. I high rig for concerts in the summer, then fuck off the rest of the year.

Hot take: tons of office jobs are super reasonable. Small to mid sized companies that don’t do anything particularly exciting, where you can find a position where you play an important role in the company but someone else can take on the work you normally do when needed, or the work you do only needs to be done at certain times of the year. You can talk directly to the owner, or managers have leeway to handle employees schedules without a ton of oversight.

Talk to whoever you need to. Explain how time off is more important to you than pay, and how the company will still do well when you take extended time off. It goes 1 of 3 ways. They agree immediately - win. They want proof that your idea will work - so prove it will work, then win. Or they outright refuse or fire you, in which case you find somewhere else to work and try again until you win.

Probably pushing 2 months. I was thru hiking the Appalachian Trail and was in full on dirty hippie mode.

Top tier whataboutism.

Anyway, my point is that any time someone says “I know exactly what I’m doing. Follow me in my massive restructuring of society!” The results typically land somewhere between a massive waste of money for unappealing infrastructure, to everyone dies in war and starvation. The particular political bent doesn’t matter. Restructuring a society is like cutting all the leaves off a tree so you can put them where you think they should go.

*Losing

Succeed at capitalism? That’s a fool’s errand

I did it. Lots of people I know did it. The main trick is cutting toxic people out of your life, moving to a better place, and making new friends who are also dedicated to succeeding.

Was with you until that last bit. I’m not opposed to democratic reforms or testing socialist ideas piecemeal. But massive restructurings of society towards utopia have… a history…

[Hint: lots of people die]

You are making an excellent point right up until your last paragraph. What 15 year old boy wants to be Mr Fucking Rogers? Sure, maybe they want to be him in like 40 years (but only the version of him who was secretly a marine sniper covered in tattoos everywhere his sweaters hid). What does a 15 year old boy who is vulnerable to the manosphere want? He wants to get paid and get laid.

Trying to shove a 15 year old’s raging hormones and desire for rebellion and independence into a Mr Rogers box will only lead to… more rebellion. Give the kids role models who are good people, who also succeed at things they care about.

I mean, I think the problem you are talking about is actually a solution. You ditched a bunch of people who were your “friends”, but who didn’t actually care about you. Good! That’s what you should do! Building a good social circle isn’t about being friends with literally everyone, and it isn’t about staying friends with people who don’t value you - it is about finding the people who value you for who you are, and who actually give a shit about you.

Your abusive upbringing, your experience having bad friends - I don’t wanna say that shit doesn’t suck. But my advice here is to look for the lesson that you can learn. I’m not religious, and “everything happens for a reason” doesn’t resonate for me - but I do believe that in every painful human experience, there is an opportunity for growth and learning if you look for it. So with your shitty friends, you learned something about how you don’t like to be treated. You learned about some personal standards you will hold future friends to. Same with every other time you got taken advantage of - you learned what shitty people do, how they manipulate you, what warning signs to look out for. Every time you have a shit experience, you learn more and more about how to identify the assholes so you can filter them out of your life quickly and efficiently.

The fact that you are comfortable doing things solo is great. Being able to feel good and get shit done on your own is a foundation of living well. But at the same time, I wouldn’t use it as an excuse to retreat from social life. However far you can go solo, whatever you can accomplish, however good you can feel, I guarantee that you’ll be able to go farther and get there faster, with less effort, with friends - good friends.

I am trying to rebuild my life, and part of it has to involve (early on… as early as possible actually) to get a girlfriend.

This is an awesome goal, and I 100% support you. However, I recommend you reframe this to “I want to rebuild my life, and part of it is becoming the type of man who is confident in his ability to get a girlfriend.” Because when your goal is just “get a girlfriend”, you can end up with someone who isn’t a good match for you just because that was your goal. And if you don’t feel confident that you can get another girlfriend, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking “well, she’s good enough, it’s not like I could do any better” or “I don’t like it when she does that, but I better not say anything or she’ll leave.”

I always keep a small circle of friends when I do have them and I would rather keep it that way. I am picky about that for a reason.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with having a small circle of close friends. I’m not recommending, like, trying to get 100k followers on IG and calling them all friends or some shit. But the “when I do have them” part is concerning. If you only have 3 people you consider friends, but none of them are that close and you periodically lose them, then you have a very shaky social support system. What you should aim for is having a small circle of really close, really supportive friends who you are fairly certain will not ditch you. But no one just shows up in your life and immediately becomes a close confidant - you meet acquaintances, then those acquaintances become loose friends, then regular friends, then close friends. At each stage, most people in each level will not make it to the next level for whatever reason. Meanwhile, your small circle of close friends will often shrink for one reason or another - hopefully for good reasons, like a friend getting their dream job on the other side of the country. But that means in order to maintain your strong social support system, you need to always be feeding your friendship pipeline. If this sounds Machiavellian, I can assure you that in practice, it isn’t. It just looks like doing things like what you are already doing, like going to meetups, meeting new people, spending more time with people you like, not spending time with those you don’t, and becoming comfortable opening up emotionally to the people you like the most.

I want to convey that, no I will not be using her as an emotional dumping ground. That’s just not style. It never was.

I will say that if you have never used a girlfriend as an emotional dumpster, then you probably will soon. It’s kind of just an inevitable part of the process of becoming a more dateable man. You have a bunch of pent up shit, and then you end up finally feeling close enough to someone to open up, and then it ALL comes out. Therapy can be helpful, but isn’t really the same as dumping all your shit on someone you know. I’ll also say that if you aren’t talking to people in your life about your worst shit, you aren’t really making the progress towards emotional openness that you need to form good relationships long term. Your eventual goal should be to have a solid group of friends you can talk about your deep shit with, plus a therapist, plus a girlfriend. That’s called redundancy.

On the topic of NG/CA, I think your concerns and experiences are 100% valid. Like I said, I think it is pushed way to hard as “the way to meet girls”, when actual success rates are rock bottom. I think you are holding on to some limiting beliefs on this front, but at the same time, I don’t think they are worth addressing at the moment. You’d do much better focusing on SC and OLD. If you wanna try to pick up girls in the club - at any age - I think it is possible and I think you have a shot if you put the work in. But it’s inefficient and there are easier ways to meet girls that won’t fuck up your circadian rhythm. It sounds like you don’t wanna do that, so good! Don’t do that. Same with CA.

Also, you hit the nail on the head with how dating advice is doled out. It is at once extremely generalizable and extremely specific to the individual.

On the other hand, you say you lack a good social circle, and in my opinion, that will be a big hurdle you will have trouble avoiding. I would like to gently recommend that you consider that you might not be as introverted as you think you are, but that you feel introverted because of your social anxiety. That your social battery doesn’t run low just because that is the way you are, but because it is draining to feel anxious and to hide yourself and to feel like you will be judged and rejected in social situations. This isn’t to say that you need to spend every minute of every day out meeting with people - but you seem you almost seem committed to not being social. And the reality is… women want to date guys who have friends. They want to date guys who have a good social support system outside of them, so they don’t become the guy’s emotional dumping ground. The friends you have and your ability to make new friends has a huge impact on where you will be able to go in life, your success in your career, your ability to take care of yourself, etc. Humans are social animals, and not being social at all is going to be a big red flag to a lot of women.

I 100% support you seeing a sex therapist. Professionals exist for a reason. I wouldn’t depend on your therapist to solve all your problems - you have to be the captain of your own ship - but therapy definitely sounds like a piece of the puzzle for you.

As far as the 15 years spent on lifestyle - I think you can do it faster. What those years were spent on were overcoming social anxiety, building a community of supportive friends, establishing habits around diet and exercise, getting my career to the place where I didn’t hate my job, finding hobbies I enjoyed and getting good at them, and then also a lot of pointless floundering. I got myself from being completely isolated, hopeless, and depressed, to being hopeful and somewhat happy, with communities based around things that I found personally meaningful. Ie, I created a life that some women would find interesting and want to be part of. So when I actually buckled down and made a tinder profile, I was already pretty fit and had cool hobbies to show off and a good lifestyle to talk about.

I’ll dm you the tinder guide.

Right, but walk in customers aren’t being treated badly. They are being treated quite fairly. They walk in, place their order, and get their spot in the food preparation queue. When they walk out, they saved time relative to how quickly they would have gotten their food if they waited in the drive thru line. Like, if McD’s closed their drive thru and had everyone go inside, you would have to wait longer for your food, because you wouldn’t be able to cut in front of the tail end of the drive thru.

Like, we’re on fuckcars, so “cars bad”. And as a subscriber here, I approve that message. I’m not a huge fan of McDonalds, either. But as I see it, your complaint seems to be that McDonalds isnt serving you well because you have to wait in line, even though you can’t see the physical line in front of you. Like, yeah, there aren’t other people physically standing in front of you in line in the restaurant, but they placed their orders ahead of you, so they will probably get their orders before you. I feel like this is pretty straightforward.

I think you do kind of need to get over resistance to engaging with some PUA material. The reality is, male sexuality is demonized in mainstream society, and so any frank discussion of how to improve your dating life as a man gets pushed underground. It’s like buying drugs - there are lots of people in the drug world who are honest and reasonable, and just want to help others have a good time and make some money. But because their product is illegal, they are always going to be mixed in with seedy crooks. So try to think of “PUA” stuff as more of an ecosystem than a monolith. There are some people giving really terrible advice. Some people who have some good tips mixed in with their toxic bullshit. And a few people, often hidden, who have a lot of really good, solid advice that can help you.

Manson was a PUA. He blogged for several years about men’s dating advice, refining his ideas until he published Models. The latest edition is the most polished, and gives an excellent and fairly obvious framework for becoming a more datable person. If you read the forward to this edition, it is fairly obvious that his ideas evolved somewhat between the first edition and the second. The impression I get is that he wanted to rewrite several parts to emphasize the idea that becoming more dateable is about becoming more emotionally open and becoming a better person. But also the impression I get is that he simply removed some of his more controversial statements and coded others, because he was trying to sanitize his past for his move into mainstream writing for the upcoming publication of his next book. If you are hesitant to engage with his content because of his PUA history, I recommend reading a book called “Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser”, which was written by a female feminist, kink-friendly, rationalist-adjacent blogger. Her blog and the comments on it were also a very good read on the intersection between kink, feminism, and pickup - but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and it looks like it was taken down from the wayback machine.

Anyway - you should read Models. Manson is a smart guy, and the title is a clever joke. It is meant to draw in the typical guy who would normally take PUA advice - the kind of guy who wants to fuck models - but then the book quickly explains what the title actually means. It is about creating mental models of what it means to be an appealing and dateable man. The book is, in large part, a response to the toxic pickup culture that Manson was a part of, and his attempt to create an alternative that is less toxic.

Tinder can be frustrating because you put in all your effort up front. Being successful on Tinder is all about having good pictures, and it can be a lot of time and effort to get good pictures. Like I said, my success on Tinder was a few months of direct effort, but 15 years of indirect effort. The indirect effort was all about cultivating a good lifestyle where I was physically healthy, had overcome some of my social insecurities, and was doing cool things I actually cared about. The direct effort was getting a haircut, putting on some nicer clothes, and shooting photos where I looked like a cool, confident dude who would be a good fuck. I can send you the guide I followed. Again, the author had a history in the PUA/red pill space, but has since renounced most of that.

So, there are 4 major arenas of dating that we talk about in men’s dating advice. Daygame/cold approach, night game, online, and social circle.

In my opinion, the PUA advice emphasizes CA and NG too much, when most guys have the most success in OLD and SC. I think this is because CA and NG are harder, and so guys like to talk about how successful they are at them to prove what hot stuff they are. If you don’t have much experience, you should make things as easy as possible so you can get experience.

In OLD, you know that every girl you message or swipe on is looking to date - that’s why they are there - so you are absolved of any feeling that asking a girl out or flirting would be inappropriate. If you get a rejection - even a harsh rejection - it is usually just through text so it stings less. And if you have a good profile, it is easy to set up multiple dates each week, so you can get a ton of experience really quickly.

Social circle is where you meet girls via mutual friends or in clubs or hobbies. In social circle, you benefit a lot from already being a known entity - a girl you meet already knows other people trust you, so she is more likely to trust you, and therefore be open to your advances. Plus, you tend to be more confident around your friends, or while you are doing something you enjoy and are good at - and confidence is sexy.

DG/CA and NG have their place, imo. First, they are good if you just want to make a hobby of chasing girls. If you just find you really enjoy walking up to strangers and introducing yourself, then go ahead and do it. Also, if you really want to date/have sex with the hottest, coolest women, then you will need to do pursue these avenues. First of all, because these women already have tons of suitors online and very booked out social lives, so if you don’t introduce yourself when you randomly see them you will never get the chance otherwise. And second, because walking up to a stranger and straight up asking if they are interested in you takes some balls, ie, confidence. And, again, confidence is attractive. Getting good at these avenues can also be good because then you are open to opportunities which arise even if you don’t specifically spend time pursuing them. For example, if you are spending time in a nightclub or a coffee shop just as part of your day to day life, and then you see a cute girl you are interested in, having DG/NG skills lets you confidently make a move on her rather than nervously glancing at her until you or she leaves and you think of what could have been. But finally, really the most important reason for most guys to do CA/NG is simply to overcome social anxiety and gain confidence - but this is for guys who are somewhat experienced already, who want to take their dating to the next level.

In general, I would recommend not talking about your dating life at work, at least until you are more experienced. It can be dangerous for your employment status, as you already know. Keep your conversations about dating to close friends who you can trust.

if you are in person, you get service first. You took the time to enter the restaurant and can see the service being performed - so you should get priority.

Again, fast food restaurants are the physical manifestation of platonic capitalist greed. Please explain your theory on how this change would improve profitability, and why such a change would be worth the risk it imposses when the existing system has been working for decades.

That’s because there are 3 or 4 cars in the line between the order kiosk and the window who have already ordered before you walked in the door. When you walk in, you jump the line of cars before the order kiosk. But there aren’t separate queues for counter and drive thru in the kitchen. They just see a list of orders in the order in which they were received, and process orders more or less FIFO.

If there are cars behind the order kiosk, you are almost certainly getting your order faster than if you had joined at the end of the line.

I can almost guarantee that they make orders in the order they are received, more or less. So door dash gets their orders first, because they ordered online before they showed up. Then the drive thru orders get made before yours because there are 4 cars in line between the order kiosk and the window - they already ordered, and are waiting for their order to be filled before you walked in the door. For some reason, there is always someone in the drive thru line who is ordering for their whole office or a Mormon family or something.

The drive thru has 2 bottlenecks. Ordering and payment/delivery. Thus, the drive thru will have a much more consistent pace - there is always someone waiting to order, and always someone waiting to have their food handed to them. Since this is the case, there is always someone assigned specifically to this task, sitting in the drive thru window with a mic on. The cash registers, on the other hand, are far more efficient. Ordering and payment happen in the same step, and food is delivered simply by putting it on the counter. Multiple registers mean multiple orders can be taken at once. This means the line inside can be cleared quickly, which means it is less consistent, which means the staff often forgets to check it - especially since staff taking orders will quickly reallocate to making orders once the line is cleared. Add to this, taking orders inside is when a staff member must interact face-to-face with a customer - well known as the least enticing part of any customer service job. So it is easy for a staff member to see customers at the till and procrastinate on taking their orders, since there is more enjoyable work to be done.

There isn’t some kind of conspiracy to make walk-in customers’ experience as bad as possible. Fast food restaurants are evil capitalist money making machines, and their incentive is to make you as happy as possible per net dollar earned. If you really want to get your order fast, just order online before you show up. Then walk in the door and grab your order off the counter like a door dasher. If you insist on getting your order from the counter, realize that you are still getting your order faster than you would in the drive thru - you are just suffering from the illusion that they are prioritizing the drive thru since you aren’t counting the cars in line that ordered before you.

Otherwise I agree with you except I don’t get to even talk to a human, I am directed to a kiosk.

Honestly I’m a big fan of this. If I’m eating at a fast food restaurant, I’m having a bad day. And if you are working at a fast food restaurant, I feel odds are that you are having a bad day, too. Why should we inflict our bad days on each other?

And they flash a tip option. A tip for what?

I’m confused as to why people are consistently so upset by this. What happens is obvious. A restaurant buys some POS software to plug into their checkout system. Since the software is used in many different restaurants with many different needs, it has an option for tipping. The person installing the software sees the option and says “hey, if someone wants to give us more money, why not give them the option?”, checks a box on a config screen they will never open again, and then goes to lunch. Just select “No Tip” and move on with your life.

I commonly see these drive thru lines and walk inside. No line.

This would be a believable theory if I didn’t see huge lines of cars outside fast food restaurants every day before and after COVID.