Everyone is here to improve their lives and to support each other. The problem lies in being out of touch with reality.
The PickUp 101 crew has never really liked jargon and we try not to use it because it is SO out of touch with reality.
But, listening to guys use jargon is so ridiculous to me. Going out becomes sarging, guys become PUAs, and hot chicks become HB7.565 – as if the 1 to 10 wasn’t enough, we even have decimals.
This and all the other ridiculous words pull guys away from being socially intuitive. No one outside of the community talks in this manner and words do change how you think. When you are not on the same page as society, your social intuition isn’t as precise.
Being socially intuitive is picking up on the meanings of interactions as the rest of society would see it as well.
Social intuition is not a community skill – it is a HUMAN skill. You can develop this without ever finding the community.
So, when I see that a guy lacks serious social skills and starts talking in ways that pull him away from developing those skills, its makes me cringe. Is the community really helping this guy? I know logically the answer will probably be yes, but you don’t feel that when you watch him.
I’m all about taking baby steps, but sometimes you need to sack up. When you want to do an Ironman and you are making excuses about how you’d “feel” more “comfortable” walking the first mile of the running section – it makes me want to scream “get your ass moving” like my football and wrestling coaches yelled at me.
I want to help guys out, but when you’ve been coddled too much, taking initiative seems so difficult. I feel bad for those people who don’t have the experience of being pushed to their limits because they will never know what they’re actually capable of – which is always a lot more than you’ll ever know.
I see all guys having potential to have a love life way beyond what they’d ever imagine possible, but when they don’t put the effort in – they have no one to blame but themselves. Guys need to stop feeling sorry for themselves, suck it up, and put the time in.
I know guys are trying and I don’t want to discourage that. But to me the efforts feel like a fat kid who wants to lose weight telling me he only ate 4 twinkies instead of his usual 7. Yup, its definitely a baby step in the right direction.
I know asking for a woman’s opinion in front of one of your friends can feel like the most socially difficult situation in the history of your life (relative to limited social experience), but come on!!! We’re trying to finish a god damned Ironman and still have to Bike and Swim!
Joe
Great point about separating yourself from society, Joe.
It’s a question every guy who starts to learn more about pickup, flirting, dating, seduction, whatever, needs to ask himself.
Do you want to be part of the society that you’ve felt a little left out of, and contribute to it in positive ways so you can lead a better life? Or do you want to try to be above that society, so you can get from it what you need without contributing any more than is absolutely necessary to meet your goals?
Using jargon allows you to keep yourself mentally and spiritually separate from the people you talk to. They aren’t girls, they are targets. It’s not a connection, it’s a phase. And worst of all, it’s not sex, it’s an f-close.
I know we all come into this a little too invested in the emotions. We may want beautiful girls a little too bad (and to see what I mean, watch the movie of the same name, Beautiful Girls). But removing the emotions from it and reducing it to logical bits is not the answer. Pickup is an emotional and social thing. The only way to really learn how it works is to let yourself feel, and understand, the emotions, and the social aspects.
Other people are not simply stand-ins for game theory. They all have stories, vulnerabilities, cool bits and annoying traits, just like us. So instead of hiding away from them behind a psuedo-intellectual wall of jargon, invite them in. Tell the cute girl that you love to spend your time watching people and couples and learning all about flirting, and relationships. Then make her your accomplice in people-watching and observe the people around you. Figure out who’s a couple. Who’s bored. Who’s breaking up. Whatever. Just practice it, and realize how EVERYONE is thinking the same things as you all the time when they are out being social:
“How can I get that cutie to pay attention to me? How can I get them to like me?”
You think you’re not alone because you found the community. And that’s great. But what you may not realize is that the community is actually just a subset of the entire world, and they ALL have the same thoughts, desires, and questions as you. So relate to them.
Jargon is the encapslation of complex ideas. It would be impossible to teach complex ideas with out it. Either you create jargon to express core concets or you overload existing words to capture the meaning you want to express. All social groups do this. It strengths group unity and helps to propagate group ideals and concepts.
They are extreamly useful in frame control, this of course assumes you agree with the frame it sets. Replacing it with another word which is a closer match to your prefered frame is not actually escaping the evil influence of Jargon, you have simply add an additional meme to the mix that hopful presents reality in a frame you find more agreeable.
Just because Jargon are both natrual and useful, does not mean that they do not come at some cost outside the frame control they create. Exclusive use of specialized slang erodes individuals’ ablitity to express concepts without them. Given that this is natrually an area of interest to girls and were the individual has developed a great deal of expertise it is robbing them of the ability to demenstrate value.
The solutoin is not to drop the Jargon, but to take time ever so often to examine what the terms mean to you and to practice expressing them in a non community way. This will allow you to challege your current assumptions, always a good idea, and prepares you to make use of the ideas without them.
injaku
Good points, and I agree that when it comes to expressing novel and complex ideas, new terms and specific jargon help keep things clear.
What I do when I teach and learn about social skills and flirting is look for the simplest ideas and most basic, most common practices. I honestly believe there isn’t anything complex about the process of attracting and seducing a woman. It’s not an intellectual game. It is an instinctive, social game that we play not with our minds, but with our experience and senses.
And the more men try to apply logic and reason to it, the more it isolates them from the women they want to feel close to. My goal is to remove all the barriers between me and the women in my life. I refuse to use any words to describe what I do at PickUp101 that I wouldn’t be able to explain to any girl within seconds, and feel totally comfortable with it. That’s my acid test: if the words embarrass me, then they are divisive, and not useful to me.
For example: kino is fine because it describes something that had no words previously, and is easy for everyone to understand, and entirely without negative connotation.
But any terms that try to remove the human element from concepts that already exist separate me from others. I don’t think there’s anything fun or sexy about thinking of a girl as my target, or as a number on an attractiveness scale. Too many times I see guys using jargon to make it seem like they are in control of scenarios that scare the hell out of them.
Here’s the thing: guys that learn how to be good with women early in life have their own jargon, but it’s stuff that everyone already knows, and is used to separate themselves from others. Every girl knows if a guy talks about his wingman, how a girl is an 8 or a 9, or if he’s out too hook up, then that makes it easy for her to keep him safely of the category of “Sexy, fun, immature dude worth trying out for a night or two.” It’s how people identify each other.
On the other hand, guys who get great with women drop all that stuff, and become real lovers, because they see and acknowledge that they want women not for what they can take from them, but what they can share in. They are not out for conquest. They are not out to prove anything to anyone else. And they sure as hell don’t need to describe how they got a girl to notice them in terms designed to impress others.
It’s not complex because it’s not intellectual. You cannot think your way into getting a girl to love you. You have to feel it. You have to practice it. And all the thinking in the world won’t help nearly as much as one hour of smiling, listening, and holding her hand.
I believe learning something new always helps. As old saying goes “extra knowledge never hurts.” And if you are in touch with the jargon then all mystery, style and other MPUA post come very handy. It was created by them and when you read thier fr and material (you just get touch of it) and also with wings you dont want to tell female what material you are using on her like cube or any other routine or rapport building material.
If you stop using “material” and “routines” and just start relating in a fun way to the females you are engaging, then you *can* tell her all about it. Guys aren’t your wings, they’re friends you’re out having fun with who can be helpful in spreading that fun to women you’re attracted to. At this point, the foundation of “constructed game” is crumbling because it was built on a premise that these ideas were underground and thus novel and useful. Now that the cat’s out of the bag thanks to Neil’s book, not only are the techniques quickly loosing their value, the soullessness of their origins is becoming quite apparent. I for one commend Sean, Lance and the others for stepping up as proponents of “natural game”.
Jess, indirect game will not go away when certain implementations of it become mainstream. Look at the martial arts. Are those skills now worthless because they are well known? It’s not the individual technique — it’s the concepts and structure that make up the methodology. A martial artist is not rendered defenseless if an opponent learns to block a front snap kick; similarly, the venutian artist or pickup artist is not helpless when a certain routine becomes well known.
Joe’s article starts out talking about jargon but then takes a wild tangent and finishes by discussing personal iniative. I’m not sure what he’s getting at with the second half but community jargon serves several purposes:
a) Like injaku says, it helps to define concepts which preexisting words do not adequately explain. Look at the examples Joe gives: “Going out becomes sarging, guys become PUAs, and hot chicks become HB7.565 – as if the 1 to 10 wasn’t enough, we even have decimals.” “Sarging” is MUCH more descriptive than ‘going out’. Similarly, “PUAs” tell us about the background of an individual. The term distinguishes them from “guys” in a very important fashion. And surely we can all see the importance in distinguishing the difference between “HB8.5″ and “hot chick”. Look at a FR and imagine all the jargon was removed. It would take twice as many words to explan the situation and it would STILL be much more vague and unclear. To wit:
Lingo: “Opened a mixed 3set indirectly, negged the HB9 target while DHVing and after 3 IOIs, extracted target into isolation”
Non Lingo: “i approached a group of 3 women, one of whom was a very attractive girl who was popular and clearly socially savvy. I approached by acting disinterested in both body language and actions, especially in the aforementioend attractive woman i liked. I ignored her while displaying a very interesting and attractive personality to her 2 friends while simultaneously disqualifying myself to her in order to get her to start chasing me. When she did and i received 3 signals that she was interested, i asked her friends if i could talk to her privately, after which we sat down to get to know each other.
b) It creates a stronger bond among members of the group. This is partly why religions, militaries, clubs, industries, and other groups adopt specialized terminology.
c) It allows you to communicate more concisely and effectively and also prevents societal backlash when it’s overheard by others. Society still says that it’s not acceptable to study human relationships and work on self improvement in this area. That’s why the community is still mostly underground.
Imo the community is founded on the concept that relationships and human social dynamics CAN be taught because they can be scientifically broken down. It’s not some magic, mystical concept which only the gods understand. And it’s not a strictly inherent ability. “Attraction is not a choice,” as David D says. But any time you explain a pseudo-mystical concept with science, people who want to believe in the magic turn their backs and close their eyes. It happens in religion, it happens in relationships, and it happens in the unknown. People WANT to believe in the magic. They want to believe in destiny and idealism and all those things we hear in fairy tales.
So when we “dehumanize” social interactions by explaining how they work, we always face critics who say to “just be yourself” and “do what feels right.” If that worked, none of us would be here.
> “just be yourself” and “do what feels right.” If that worked, none of us would be here.
C’mon, you’re too smart to leave this open.
If just being yourself and doing what felt right DIDN’T work, none of us would be here, because people have been getting laid for thousands and thousands of years without any jargon to explain a single bit.
The terms can be useful, but the only point I’d ask you to consider is that when you use code words to describe something, you willfully separate yourself from others. You cut yourself off.
For me, this is all about getting closer to others. If your goal is something else, more power to you.
I meant none of us would be here *in the community*, but you know what i meant.
Sure, “being yourself” and “doing what feels right” works to some extent. But it doesn’t work WELL. For example, when i’m with a HB10 (or ‘hot chick’), what feels right is leaning in, telling her she’s beautiful, and asking her why she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Basically, everything i know better than to do. But damnit, it still FEELS right! It takes a lot of restraint sometimes to not act AFC (i dont know what the non community term for this is) after several decades of training in that art form.
I appreciate your distinction that it depends on what your goals are. My goals aren’t necessarily to get closer to others, so i guess the whole debate is kind of moot in this case.
>My goals aren’t necessarily to get closer to others, so i guess the whole debate is kind of moot in this case.
See, now this is where it gets interesting. I teach with the intent of helping men get the choice they want with women, and getting relationships that are fulfilling and make them happy. A big part of that is intimacy. And not the bullshit intimacy the self-help books prescribe, but the feeling that you understand and are understood by others.
Some guys just want to attract women that look good so they can feel better about themselves. Some want to seduce women so they can prove their superiority. And some are still compensating for the insecurity they felt all their lives when the pretty girls ignored them. I think of all of these as stages of growth on the way to desiring intimacy.
That’s why different concepts work well for different people. If you do want to connect with others, jargon will get in your way. If you want to control your world and remain a little above it, jargon is very useful.
And you know it doesn’t “feel right” to be overly solicitous of a girl simply because she looks pretty. It actually feels very, very nerve-wracking. And that’s why you end up saying silly and boring things that you know don’t really interest her, or convey your real personality. What feels right when communicating with others is showing your passion, your enthusiasm, your thirst for life and the joy you find in it. That’s the feeling we work at getting guys to express with everyone, pretty girls and all.
When you can let your best side show with the people that really interest you, you can have the choices you want. That’s the right feeling to pursue.
For all the silly jargon and stuff, there vare some really fundamental concepts in ‘game’ that are vry much connnected to society, and IMO improving it!
Being confident, being relaxed
Being social and fun
And accepting that the mating game is about a woman putting up some resistance and then giving in/havin it overcome (all women want it to happen this way!) and the man should learn to have fun with this process not try to circumvent it, e.g. with logic! There is nothing logcal about the mating game. (But the community does a geat job of packaging it into a pseudo-logical framewok.)
#1 reason AFC’s are bad with women? They don’t take action!
Action (practice) leads to experience which leads to confidence which leads to success, or something like that. Letting it go (control), showing yourself to others, etc. all the stuff Sean said. When you get into that frame you’ll be very sucessful with people, incl. women.
If the decimal places help guys to take action, good. But any success that results is because some, ANY action was taken, not because of the triumph of the logical (e.g. mathematical) mind. All these clever little statements (sniper neg. LOL). Heck, if a woman is into you, she’s not even hearing half of what you’re saying, she’s just feeling your vibe (what you thinking, your frame). With the right frame, you literally say anything.