The real reason the pickup and red pill movement died.

[Indian Race Troll (IRT)]

I wanted to chime in a bit on a question that is being asked lately about what happened to the big movements and voices in pickup and red pill, why it all went away. For the longest of time, dating back to freshman year of college which seems like a lifetime ago, I would read a lot of material about pickup and red pill related things. Some parts about it really hit home with me and I steadily got better.

Man was it one painful fucking journey....

This year I hit a remarkable milestone, I slept with over 100 different women in my life, but it was painful. I went from a borderline suicidal dude in a college dorm who could not fit in with the rich cool kids to a guy now who has some of those same cool kids wanting to take a piece of his success. The journey was a painful one full of rejections, accepting hard truths, doing the tough things, and being honest with myself along the way. At times I felt like giving up, you don't really know how much it hurts to be brutally rejected by a hot girl and even see others in the audience witness it. What carried me through was the realization that I have to have it, my life is not complete until I do.

Guys like me are rare, most guys who join are not about it but they stick around.

Most guys who joined movements dedicated to helping men get better at women do not have that same drive. What it ultimately turns into is them giving up on the idea of getting laid a lot but sticking around to complain about politics, gender relations, racism, and try to come off as experts. For guys like that, it is easy to sit away and criticize the men actually trying, once you get enough of those guys then the guys trying often give up due to not having a supportive atmosphere.

In other words, most of these guys were not about that life.

They thought they were but they were not.

They thought that it would be good to learn game until the rejections and long nights piled up, then they quit.

They thought they were going to live the player life until they realized the amount of investment it took, then they quit.

Except here is the catch, they never quit, they stayed. A lot of them stuck around because of the company the forum provided.

When you drill down enough, you recognize that very few men actually have what it takes to live that life or even pursue it.

What does the life come with? A lot of sacrifices.

A lot of investment for sure.

Many of these men will cop out with garbage like "don't put pussy on the pedestal bro" or "it's just pussy bro", acting holier than thou and like experts and looking down on men who make the sacrifices to be good with women. The problem is these men just want to talk about game and spit theories back and forth or rant about some social trend, very few actually want to put in the work to get laid a lot.

It requires potentially moving cities.

It requires potentially giving up a comfy lifestyle.

It requires potentially changing your thought patterns and realizing that IT job won't get you hot girls.

It requires not spending a ton of time on the internet and spending more time in the field.

The truth is feminism and society had very little to do with the movements dying, it's just that most men who were a part of it were not cut out for them.

 

[Space]

It's interesting and all but as far as I remember you and me never managed to have a fruitful exchange of ideas here so I don't even know where to start.

 

[Colt Williams]

I think that's a part of it. The "movement" had many factors. One aspect of it is that if you become a high-value enough man, in most cases you will find a woman who you want to be in a relationship with (I think that's the endgame for most men). Another aspect of it is that there were many Red Pillers (I have many particular ones in mind) who were acting from a place of emotional pain/backlash toward women. I believe in masculinity and in the power of claiming it, but I also think many Red Pillers went a bit too far in villainizing women. And for the common reader, that's fun for a while. And then hopefully you find something fulfilling (or something to distract you) and it's not.


Finally, lots of Red Pill sites got shot down b/c they couldn't monetize on Paypal, Stripe or other platforms. And even the commenting services banned them. So they kind of cut off the snakes head and these sites weren't able to sustain themselves

 

[naturalmikey]

Red pill is still very active on YouTube and has pretty much replaced the pua industry. Rsd just shut down their main website. Seems they’re completely distancing themselves from anything dating. The YouTube’s are no longer linked. I’m fairly certain there’s something serious goin on behind the scenes.

 

[DarkKnight]

I think it has to do with hope and indeed a lack of drive. A lot of people who enter the realm of pickup search for a magic bullet which can help them, but they underestimate or are not willing to make real changes to themselves. So sooner than later they are going to burn out. Also there is lots of bullshit pickup advice out there "just approach": which can traumatize timid beginners. So a lot of people get demoralized. Also lots of guys still underestimate fundamentals and just hope for some magic lines.

I also think Colt has a good point, the endgame and the natural thing is to get a relationship and I think this is healthy. I myself started from a guy who just wanted a quality girlfriend (I always had interested girls and girlfriends, so not an incel situation) , to a guy who barely settles down because suddenly there are too many options. And from an evolutionary standing point: how healthy is that? Getting laid is pleasurable and all but the true reason is in order to get kids.

Also game takes a lot of time and I noticed that I started compromizing things I should not compromize. So I toned it down.

Mind you, I am still in the game and still not willing to settle down, but just my thoughts.

But I agree Oh Pry, most men are not cut out for this world. Definitely.

 

[naturalmikey]

Game is not that hard to learn as long as your high enough smv for it to work, which at least 50% of the population is because the bar is really pretty low. But a big part of the market was below average smv and they occupy blackpill now more so. Regardless, rsd was still growing. Check out YouTube stats for the instructors channels. Rsd max had really taken off in a relatively short time.

Pick up is a revolving door. Though interest has certainly waned there will always be a market for attracting women.

 

[Space]

WTF is the red pill anyway? Explain me like I just came from the Moon. Does it offer any positive values to live by? Who are its notable proponents?

 

[Cody Lyans]

WTF is the red pill anyway? Explain me like I just came from the Moon. Does it offer any positive values to live by? Who are its notable proponents?

Red pill is what you don't know you don't know. Being open to a possibility of knowledge beyond you. It is meant to be the opposite of Dunning Kruger where a lack of knowledge is perceived as a stance for being correct simply by virtue of being unaware of its own lack of knowing better.

The red pill community is different, it was about being counter culture and people could then take it to mean anything they felt was not accepted by others so turned more alternative than actually combating Dunning Kruger.

The community needs pushers and movers. Otherwise people tend to assume they know. And you get stuck back where you started.

So in part being about that life is correct but also, there is a law of diminished returns that sees people "find their niche" and stick with it. Meaning people don't agree on the IDEAL outcome.

With no singular ideal its harder to drive people and create the buzz of social proof.

Most guys don't want to get ALL the girls they just want to get some and feel better about it. Fair enough imo. But I think it is not enough to be selfish like that, you need to get good enough to hold the power to benefit women more than normal, because normality is a low bar.

Exceed expectations basically
The aim we should pursue like science is to always improve, always refine, and always reflect on how we might have it wrong. And to improve in measurable ways consistently

 

[naturalmikey]

Red pill is knowledge that women are hypergamous, cheat, are superficial, seek status... basically common sense stuff that is denied by the current feminist narrative of most women and men today.

 

[Carousel]

There is no universal definition of "red pill", rather it can be interpreted as to be informed by facts rather than bullshit on any controversial topic.

You have "red pilled" guys on PU who get laid, but are unable to handle LTRs due to "blue pill" beliefs on screening, LTR dynamics etc.
You have guys who are "red pilled" that Feminism is full of nonsense claims, yet are unable to get laid as they don't know anything about PU.
You have guys who are "red pilled" that politicians and media outlets tend to talk loads of bullshit, however they are clueless on female nature.
You have guys who know nothing about politics, but are able to get laid etc.
And I could go on.

Finally there is a large number of guys who have no competence at any topic but fervently still claim to be "red pilled". A lot of incels are like this, no job skills, no social skills, yet they strongly claim to know better than guys who have one or both of these. This is just externalization of failure.

What to draw from this?

1) There is no universal definition of "red pill".
2) You may know one topic well and be totally clueless on even closely related topics.
3) You may claim you are "red pill" when you actually are just projecting failure on society.

So try to understand the frame any "red pilled" person speaks from before taking everything they say seriously.

 

[Indian Race Troll (IRT)]

I think that's a part of it. The "movement" had many factors. One aspect of it is that if you become a high-value enough man, in most cases you will find a woman who you want to be in a relationship with (I think that's the endgame for most men). Another aspect of it is that there were many Red Pillers (I have many particular ones in mind) who were acting from a place of emotional pain/backlash toward women. I believe in masculinity and in the power of claiming it, but I also think many Red Pillers went a bit too far in villainizing women. And for the common reader, that's fun for a while. And then hopefully you find something fulfilling (or something to distract you) and it's not.


Finally, lots of Red Pill sites got shot down b/c they couldn't monetize on Paypal, Stripe or other platforms. And even the commenting services banned them. So they kind of cut off the snakes head and these sites weren't able to sustain themselves

So a true player that wanted to fuck tons of women was that unheard of and still is huh.

 

[Space]

Red pill is what you don't know you don't know. Being open to a possibility of knowledge beyond you. It is meant to be the opposite of Dunning Kruger where a lack of knowledge is perceived as a stance for being correct simply by virtue of being unaware of its own lack of knowing better.

Thanks for the explanation of the red pill in the sense of The Matrix movie. Yeah, it's the perfect description in the sense of the movie. I should have been more clear that what's not clear to me is what the heck the red pill is in the community sense. After all your explanations. Other than if it's something I could totally skip in my life as irrelevant, then we can just move on.

Here's how I see it. Seduction is experimenting, it's an art. So I'm always a little skeptical when @Chase links to his dozens of studies. Even though many reviewers say they are top notch studies, much better than the studies others link. But it's still social science and it's far from being such an exact science like math. Maybe Chase has an inherent confirmation bias selecting his studies like with other things, I don't know. It's quite a common thing in the social sciences even with the researcher having the best intentions. If a guy has experimented with something new in the field on the other hand and it worked for him it's all good. Even if there was no previous study backing it up. Denton (girls Chase writer) argues there is still so much uncharted territory with seduction to be discovered and the new guy who are on the top if it are getting better year after year. Hence we have the Tactics & Techniques forum. I bet these guys aren't on the top of the latest academic research.

On the other hand it seems to me the red pill is more like a strictly theoretical field, an academic discipline. But if you guys can't think of notable academics of books defining the field I can probably just skip the whole thing and move on with my life and concentrate on more important issues. The Dunning Kruger in action?

 

[Cody Lyans]

Thanks for the explanation of the red pill in the sense of The Matrix movie. Yeah, it's the perfect description in the sense of the movie. I should have been more clear that what's not clear to me is what the heck the red pill is in the community sense. After all your explanations. Other than if it's something I could totally skip in my life as irrelevant, then we can just move on.

Here's how I see it. Seduction is experimenting, it's an art. So I'm always a little skeptical when @Chase links to his dozens of studies. Even though many reviewers say they are top notch studies, much better than the studies others link. But it's still social science and it's far from being such an exact science like math. Maybe Chase has an inherent confirmation bias selecting his studies like with other things, I don't know. It's quite a common thing in the social sciences even with the researcher having the best intentions. If a guy has experimented with something new in the field on the other hand and it worked for him it's all good. Even if there was no previous study backing it up. Denton (girls Chase writer) argues there is still so much uncharted territory with seduction to be discovered and the new guy who are on the top if it are getting better year after year. Hence we have the Tactics & Techniques forum. I bet these guys aren't on the top of the latest academic research.

On the other hand it seems to me the red pill is more like a strictly theoretical field, an academic discipline. But if you guys can't think of notable academics of books defining the field I can probably just skip the whole thing and move on with my life and concentrate on more important issues. The Dunning Kruger in action?

The red pill community in real life was more an alternative community so I would not worry about studying it.
There are however probably good information on it in literature and classical philosophy and art. You gotta have a good eye to find it tho. I am sure someone else can recommend
Right now my brain is not functioning
But to me darwins evolution was a huge red pill book. How he wrote it was constantly referencing poetry culture etc in order that the world might see something it didn't want to and had never knew to ask about before.
Also platos alagory of the cave.

It's a great topic to discuss with women actually as their lives often have to be red pill since parents try to control them and society shame them. So the movement of women to vote is interesting too

 

[Chrance]

The manosphere, despite the hilarious name and many grifters, has its place in the world for shedding light on female nature and challenging the last 100 or so years of philosophical thought, namely egalitarianism, humanism and other schools that derive moral imperatives from what satisfies our nature rather than from reality itself. This is the true interpretation of the “rdpill”. You are red pilled if you are being objective (perceptions are from reality, completely independent of your own will); you are blue pilled if you are being subjective (perceptions drawn from your own will). Understanding what is an expression of your will (your perceptions, sexual desires or feelings of envy for example) and what is not is what allows us to determine if we are being red pilled or blue pilled, objective or subjective. Plato, Kant and Schopenhauer all talked about this conflict between our own perceptions and reality itself very extensively. They are a good source to fully comprehend the matter.

Many PUAs are blue pilled in that our desires are all oriented around sex, so any fact that doesn’t give us more of it becomes suspect or “beta”.

The feminist and female empowerment movements are inherently blue pilled because their frame is 100% subjective - ie what satisfies the will/nature of women most? How can women get more of what they want? The thirst is unquenchable. Any fact that doesn’t further the satisfaction of womenkind is suspect or ignored.

I miss those 2012-2016 days of the manosphere. It coincided with my time in college. I got into pickup because of rollo, Roosh and roissey. What a great time.

I think the red pill or manosphere phenomenon was bound to diminish when many people came in with the intent of changing it for monetary gain or political motives. Then after 2016 election and the aid of the red pill community in facilitating it, combined with blogs being replaced by other forms of social media, the existence of the community was gradually chipped away by shutting down key blogs, metoo fear, and big head communities (rsd and roosh) changing gears or disappearing (heartiste).

I think the difficulty of pickup, or the realization that many are not cut out for it, has more to do with the diminishing of the pickup community, not the redpilled community as a whole.

I sense at some point in the 2020s or 2030s we’ll see a rise in the community

 

[MuST0BtA1NSkR1Lla]

The real downfall of the PUA community is that it was intertwined with the 4Chan R9K community.

R9K community created Lookism.net *[Or was it PUAHate?] which then had Elliot Rodger going crazy and starting to shoot up high schools.

which then started the three or four years all the American Universities had shoot ups, and that subsided.

Then two years ago the Incel movement took over calling people FoIDS and Incels.Co was created.

the PUA movementin reference being third fiddle, manosphere being second and incel movement being first.

Now you have a younger poorer generation that hates the older generations and have a higher barrier of competition.

 

[ulrich]

I think it disappeared because it doesn't serve the newer generation.

The red pill movement was born by and for men who existed in a world with no female interaction (programmers, nerds)... ironically like the Matrix movie where it gets its name.
Those guys, 15 years ago were suffering because they didn't understand women. They felt alien and it caused distraught.
The red pill and the early PUA helped these guys understand rationally what they couldn't instinctively.

But over time, the community grew.
A lot more "normal" guys joined and pointed out that many of their holy cows needed adjustments... that some of the older techniques like negging are ineffective.

Then life changed... women started getting in many of the all-male professions like programming... there are nerd girls now... the younger guys are not so disconnected from women that they need to swallow a red pill that implies you have been lied all your life.

So the original niche is both saturated and shrinking.

And the new bigger niche is not so keen of such a conflictive message... even if liberating.

It's just natural selection.

 

[ulrich]

As a side note, I know a little about marketing and I can tell you that if you have to make your customers accept they have been stupid/wrong for a long time in order for them to buy your product... boy, you just created the hardest product to sell.

 

[ulrich]

When you drill down enough, you recognize that very few men actually have what it takes to live that life or even pursue it.

What does the life come with? A lot of sacrifices.

A lot of investment for sure.

Many of these men will cop out with garbage like "don't put pussy on the pedestal bro" or "it's just pussy bro", acting holier than thou and like experts and looking down on men who make the sacrifices to be good with women. The problem is these men just want to talk about game and spit theories back and forth or rant about some social trend, very few actually want to put in the work to get laid a lot.

I think this is something that really talks bad about the movement.

If, after 20 years, getting to the goal still require a humongous sacrifice then it means that we have not been able to make it easier, reframe it so it's more reachable or both.

It's OK if you want to have a club where hard work and sacrifice is idolized... but then don't wonder why more people don't want in.