“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Elliot Rodger and you

I missed  out on Columbine. When it happened I was five years old. I vaguely remember adults being upset about it, but it never really affected me. I was too young.

Since then there have been a mountain of school shootings. Some dude gets mad and goes berserk. Shoots up the whole campus, kills himself, they hold a memorial. It’s like clockwork. No one bats an eye. Back to Tom for the sports recap. Here’s a commercial for soap. Two Broke Girls will be on next.

The recent Elliot Rodger shooting was a little different. It felt more personal to me. The typical shooter doesn’t do stuff I do, he doesn’t live in my world. Anime and Doritos isn’t something I can relate too. This Elliot Rodger guy, he lived in my world. A bizarre mirror of my universe, but it was was close enough to make me think.

Why game is the second creepiest thing in the world

As long time readers will probably know, I’m an advocate of men learning how actually deal with women. Not in some stupid or sleazy manner that involves wearing a fuzzy hat or pretending your name is Brock Steel and you’re a professional lion tamer, but in a way that actually makes you grow as a man. A man who knows how to deal with women isn’t going to throw his friends under the bus to try and impress the waitress at his sports bar and he isn’t going to give up on his goals because “the boss” told him he wasn’t allowed to pursue them.

While a lot of game stuff like PUA is really cheesy and there are tons of game dudes who are bitter and should be avoided at all costs, see the Return of Kings comment section for some real life examples, a lot of the actual advice is worth reading and studying. You can learn way more about physiology, science, and goal setting from a thirty minute RSD video than you could from the majority of psychologists or college professors.

You can call the video above weird or make fun of the dudes in it, but they aren’t doing anything negative. Their whole message is basically just to do your best, have fun, and grow as a man. Feminazis or slipping a girl a roofie are nowhere in the video. The overall message is positive and it’s about putting in work to reap the rewards.

Despite this, stuff like pick up or game, somebody should come up with less dorky terms for this stuff, gets treated like its pure evil. If told a room full of people that you were learning how to get better with women they’d treat you like some kind of child molester. You’d be ostracized in record time.

The mainstream narrative for men is one that lauds being passive. If you are a man you are basically expected to sit around and just hope for good things to fall into your lap. Its like predestination. If you’re fat you got bad genetics. Going to the gym is for douchebags and homosexuals, you should just sit at home. You’re bad with women, sucks to be you. Some people are just born with charisma. A nice girl will fall in your lap eventually. Buying a book about becoming a better conversationalist is for creepy perverts who are probably rapists too.

Taking any kind of action with anything automatically makes you a creepy insecure douchebag. Successful people don’t exercise, talk to women, or have their own business. They wear Khaki pants from Sears and spend their free time watching ESPN.

This argument has always made me mad. It promotes being lazy and rewards people for failure. It also cuts you off from a lot of normal and regular people. Being around old friends or relatives has some weird cloud of tension surrounding it.

After thinking over the whole Elliot Rodger incident I realized something. Going to the gym, developing self-confidence, and working towards something is in fact the second creepiest and weirdest thing that a man can do. The only thing worse is not taking any type of positive action.

Which is creepier:

• Going out with your friend to talk to girls or murdering people?
• Going to the gym or recording thousands of hours of videos where you stew in your own self-loathing.
• Going online and Googling “How to meet women” or making a graph that depicts you murdering people?

A copy of Models obviously would not have stopped Elliot Rodger, arguing that game would have saved lives is a stupid and oversimplified argument. However, it could have helped. Rodger is known to have sat around all day brooding in his own negativity and his rage was encouraged by other members of the ant-game forum that he was involved with. It would be safe to assume that his toxic environment helped, to an extent, in driving him to kill.

The classic mainstream narrative that you should be passive and wait for good things to happen is flawed and dangerous. Eventually people get tired of waiting. They grow frustrated. And without any kind of vision as to what they can do to solve their problem they lash out.