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Book Highlights Thread
Book: Game Over: From Pick-Up Artist to Social Heartist
Author: John Cooper
This is the book that inspired me to finally disengage from PUA. I haven't fully healed or moved on from the paradigms I absorbed from PUA, but this book was a turning point.
Book: Game Over: From Pick-Up Artist to Social Heartist
Author: John Cooper
This is the book that inspired me to finally disengage from PUA. I haven't fully healed or moved on from the paradigms I absorbed from PUA, but this book was a turning point.
"Pick-up in all its forms fucks up how you see the world and how the world sees you. And there is no way it can evolve, no matter how ‘natural’ it becomes."
"I spent two months just going out and dropping all pick-up methods and all attachment to outcome. And the funny thing is, girls were coming back into my life again... I was having regular sex again and making meaningful connections."
"How did you first fall into pick-up? Was there a painful experience before it? Was it a break up, death? Perhaps a feeling of inadequacy, or isolation that was unbearable?"
"As I started observing my wounds and working with them, I realised the break up wasn’t what created the trauma, it was actually the resurfacing of an old childhood wound of not feeling worthy of love."
"That pain I associated with my ex was actually the same pain as when I was sat in my room as a toddler, hugging my teddy wondering why my parents would side with my sister in arguments."
"[PUA teaches you to] assign strategic terminology to basic aspects of human interaction."
"PUA promises ‘success’ with women. And as you can see from my story, when I got into it, I assumed that after delving into it far enough, I would eventually gather enough of an arsenal of information that the whole thing would expand and then BOOM—I would be smothered in girls."
"What pick-up has done is forced us into a one-dimensional way of viewing intimacy with women."
"[What if you could] feel connected to people without having to approach them?]
"You’re trying to become good at pick-up, but you’re actually becoming worse with women and with yourself"
"The foundation of pick-up or game is ACQUISITION—the NEED to ACQUIRE women. This is the absolute, unquestioned and accepted law of game. The whole pick-up framework is built upon this. And ‘getting laid’ is the objective, plain and simple."
"A fulfilling conversation in a bar with a girl isn’t a success in the eyes of the PUA. In fact, it’s a missed opportunity or a downright failure."
"There is nothing wrong with actively expressing your desire and rippling that out into the world, but an acquisition-based belief system instantly creates a dichotomy in us. It makes us aware of our own emptiness—in fact it makes it resonate all the stronger."
"The moment you decide ‘I need that thing’ you have made a conscious decision that you lack that thing in your life, so now you need to cover the distance quickly and try and get it."
"The more we hunt, the more we reinforce this feeling of lack, until over time it builds from a vague feeling into a strong and deeply ingrained sense of emptiness which taints everything in our lives. When we choose a path motivated by lack, we can’t think about anything else."
"That lack in you becomes part of your identity and part of your story... Eventually, you have a story that is so big and convincing, you can’t see the world any other way."
"In that decisive moment when we decide to hunt something, we stop having it... We build this painful story from a deep wound in us, and then we go hunting to alleviate that lack, to cure that pain. It’s a quick fix and the salvation promised by the hunt is an illusion."
"You see another hot girl walk past. You think about what the community would say in this moment. You know you should “cold approach.” How does this feel in your body? A vague sense of ache or pain somewhere in your chest or torso, perhaps your neck? The pain of the hunter."
"You see this beautiful woman, like noticing a beautiful flower in the ground. Surely your body should fill with appreciation and love for her. [Instead] you feel pain and fear... This is the feeling pick-up creates and builds on. This is why it’s so toxic."
"We take that story of lack—“I’m not good enough, I’m unworthy to be loved,” and this story is projected out into the world and then it is reflected back. More circumstances and events occur, reinforcing lack and unworthiness to be loved."
"Stop hunting. Start curing the pain directly within you. Heal your heart and the world changes correspondingly."
"The story of lack creates the circumstances of lack. Not the other way around."
"There are two ways to solve a problem, you can either try to find a cure or you can remove the cause."
"‘Approach anxiety’ is manufactured only by the pick-up paradigm and its acquisition frame. It cannot exist in a paradigm of unconditional giving, play and co-creation."
"Pick-up teachers just think up all these clever ways to try and give an Approach Anxiety Aspirin, and then make you do more pick-up, which creates even greater approach anxiety."
"You cannot evolve ego-driven action to arrive at egoless joy."
"When you dig deeper into pick-up you just maintain the same base-level foundations. Deeper and deeper into acquisition."
"With pick-up you are moving through life with an agenda. You are so desperate you can’t even relax and have fun anymore—your emotional well-being is now on the line."
"The reason we fall into a transactional work frame with women is because we are conditioned by society to achieve results."
"So we are always comparing and competing against others. We therefore become self-serving machines that forget about contribution and care to others."
"‘Rejection.’ This to me is the most toxic pick-up word of all. When using this word ‘rejection’ it reinforces a paradigm of win or lose on every element of the interaction."
"We shock ourselves with self-inflicted punishment in the form of adhering to the erroneous concept of ‘rejection.’ And these constant punishments have the same effect on our psyches as the electric shocks on the rats."
"We try to avoid these painful feelings—not by getting rid of the pick-up paradigm that creates them—but by going into deeper ego driven methods. We go into CONTROL mode—deeper, deeper and deeper down into the rabbit hole."
"When we’re living [in stress], the very fact that we’re releasing all these chemicals, we shift our attention on the external world and focus on objects and things and we believe that control of the outer world is more important than the sovereignty of our internal world."
"When we experience separation, we always try and force and control outcomes in our life, because we are matter trying to change matter."
"When we live by the hormones of stress we feel more like matter and less like energy and possibility."
"When we interact we should be navigated by our intuition, feeling and emotional intelligence—from our hearts. But we have been conditioned by society to 'think first before you act.'"
"The pick-up framework is the externalisation of a left-brain imbalance. [I]nstead of being navigated by our intuition and feelings, we... go into control mode to try and force a result rather than having emotional intelligence and qualities of empathy."
"An opener? For God’s sake—what is she, a can of beans? She was never closed to you in the first place! Just saying ‘opener’ means you have to open something that is closed."
"When something passes us by, we don’t lose it, because we never owned it in the first place."
"The pick-up industry wants you to see women as a survival need, because then you’re in the palm of their hands."
"Can you be happy without women? When you are on your own, do you feel empowered or is your sense of empowerment dictated by the approval you seek from women?"
"The pick-up framework is locked in the masculine Yang energy, with no feminine Yin energy."
"Practice this mantra to yourself when you see a beautiful woman: 'I don’t own this woman, I can only bring myself to her in the form of a gift.'"
"If you are feeling anxious around women, you are not playing. You are working. If you are worried how you are coming across or how your body language is appearing, you are not playing. You are working."
"Your brain and social skills are getting seriously messed up as you constantly apply dehumanising strategic thinking to your interactions with people."
"The pain of our wounded heart is what gets us into PUA. And this deep pain and resulting fear of ego death varies for each person. Some men had a relatively light trauma in their childhood. Others had horrific trauma, such as parents dying or leaving while they were very young."
"Pick-up gurus at the top of the pick-up tree are often those with the very deepest wounds."
"‘Sun Energy’ as opposed to ‘Black Hole Energy’ that constantly needs and drains energy around it. When coming from sun energy you empower yourself to the point where you feel like the sun. And when the sun emits a ray of sunshine, it does not demand anything back."
"It is not what you do on the action level that counts but what you do on the intentional level."
"The act of giving a beautiful gift to someone and not wanting anything in return is powerful beyond measure."
"Now when I go out, it’s coming from a place of creating fun with anyone in my radius (giving)."
"Language is a description of our perceptual view of the world, which we carry around with us. And our perceptual view of the world dictates how we show up and interact with it."
"The words we use are conceptual anchors. We think we are only describing the world, but we are actually creating our experience."
"When we see a woman we like, and we state the word ‘approach,’ we create all that horrible creepy adversity for ourselves. Our intention is taking."
"Part of your route to freedom is your ability to distinguish nerves (i.e. nervous excitement) with anxiety coming from an acquisition work-frame (pick-up)."
"Minds enslaved by rules are energetically frozen and they can’t flow and adapt with grace."
"Loving unconditionally means without attachments to whether that love is received, or given back. Love IS and does not need another to accept it."
"We think when we want to master something we have to do this drawn out intellectual process. We believe complexity is the way to mastery. The more we learn the better we will be. This huge arsenal, this huge artillery and then we’ll be ready. Or so we think."
"The more you define and label something... All you are doing is creating more semantic blockages inside your mind and paralysing yourself."
"Intellectual analysis creates emotional paralysis."
"Anything you do to pacify yourself, rather than take responsibility for feeling the real pain you are in at that moment, warts and all, is self-abusive and self-abandoning."
"The PUA industry is full of coaches with severe abandonment issues when they were young."
"Pick-up is a home for the abandoned children. They’re taking out all of their frustrations on the conquering of women. They never grew up... They have deep-seated abandonment issues which they’ve never confronted and they are running them like a program."
"As one goes further into pick-up, further into day game, on to more and more boot camps, videos, and theory—all of this only creates further breakdown, further traumatisation, further compartmentalising, further control-issues and reptilian action."
"Pick-up guys see women not as lovers but as strangers, as the opposition, the enemy."
"We have lost the art of aloneness."
"[Some guys] stockpile girls so if one or two lovers disappear they have back-up and so they too never have to be alone and feel that pain."
"Do you want to be a guy that’s in constant hunt mode, hunting every cute girl you see, trying desperately to stockpile girls, driven by never ending fear, or do you want to feel balanced and harmonious, even without girls?"
"As we champion the acquisition of pleasures (the perceived light) we are conversely condemning our pain (the shadow)"
"When we look to ourselves for the fulfillment of love we quite naturally attract circumstances that reflect similar states of being. In turn our relationships become more fulfilling, as they become an extension of that which is already full and whole in us."
I think PUA is more-or-less the same kind of addiction as described in this thread: https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1193670948165021697
Lots of crossover between guys who get into PUA and guys who get into nofap. It's hardly 1-for-1, but nofap is used by a lot of PUA guys as a way to build the motivation they feel they need to "take action" and "approach!" https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1323757899655442432
Speaking of PUA, literally just got hit with this Youtube ad (which is 48 minutes long -- their whole VSL):
“WARNING: The following presentation does not apply to women. And is only for men who want to make a woman obsess over them.”
“WARNING: The following presentation does not apply to women. And is only for men who want to make a woman obsess over them.”
The book the above quotes are from was written by a former PUA coach who decided to get out.
Here are my notes from a different PUA coach from a few years before I read that book. This guy is still very much involved in teaching PUA. https://twitter.com/daemonhugger/status/1324473457963229184
Here are my notes from a different PUA coach from a few years before I read that book. This guy is still very much involved in teaching PUA. https://twitter.com/daemonhugger/status/1324473457963229184
