Here’s the thing with obedience-centered parenting: it totally kneecaps your ability to be an adult. Totally. Adulthood requires a willingness to act upon and change states of affairs that the logic of obedience is totally opposed to
@sola_chad "If anyone ever asks you 'what would Jesus do?', remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities."
there's no nootropic or supplement in the world that can give you the drive you get from having people you love depending on you
take on more than you can handle, you'll figure it out. you always do when there's no other way.
just doing it for yourself is not enough. you'll get comfortable. you need external pressure. boats to burn.
cross the rubicon and never look back
Shyness lives at the identity level. At some point you decided you were the kind of person who is not safe to be fully seen, and every shy moment since has been you obeying that decision.
Most people think shyness is about other people. It is not. It is about the relationship you have with yourself when other people are watching. You are not afraid of strangers, you are afraid of being witnessed inside an identity you do not fully believe in. The discomfort you feel in a room is the gap between who you are pretending to be and who you secretly think you are, and that gap gets exposed the moment eyes land on you.
This is why advice like "just be confident" does nothing. You cannot perform confidence on top of an identity that does not include it. Your voice shrinks, your shoulders round, your eyes find the floor, because your body is loyal to the picture underneath, and the picture says you should not take up space.
Shyness is almost always a protection strategy from childhood. Being seen got punished at some point. You were laughed at, criticized, or raised by someone whose attention felt unsafe, and you learned that staying small was how you survived. It is an outdated survival response that nobody updated.
For most people pushing yourself into situation after situation only works on the surface. The identity underneath stays the same, and the moment your effort drops, it pulls you back to where you started. Actual change happens when you shift who you believe you are in private, since that is the version of you that shows up in public.
The shift happens when you stop trying to overcome shyness and start questioning the identity that produces it. You sit with the actual belief, that you are too much or not enough or fundamentally not built for this, and you ask where it came from. Most of the time it was installed by someone whose opinion you would not trust today, and your entire shyness is built on a foundation laid by a person who no longer has any authority in your life.
Then you build a new identity through vivid daily imagination, rehearsing the version of you that has nothing to hide, until it becomes more familiar than the old one. The behavior follows on its own.
The version of you that emerges on the other side of this is not someone new. It is who you would have been all along if you had not been busy managing how you came across.
@Landeur This is from today. As a counterpoint, a jeet served me in McDonald's today and refused to give me a plastic straw. Overall it's still great though, can't complain.
You will never outperform your self-image, this is one of the most important things ever said about human behavior and almost nobody understands what it really means, your self-image is the picture you carry inside your head of who you are, what you're capable of, what you deserve, and what's possible for you, and your entire life is just your nervous system executing the orders of that picture, you don't behave according to what you want, you don't behave according to what you say, you don't behave according to your goals, you behave according to who you secretly believe you are, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always the exact gap between your real self-image and the one you keep trying to talk yourself into.
The plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz figured this out in the 1950s when he noticed that some patients, even after he fixed their face perfectly, still walked out of his office feeling ugly, and others with minor cosmetic changes walked out feeling brand new, the surgery didn't matter, what mattered was whether the internal picture had changed, and he wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics in 1960 that became the foundation of basically every self-development book that came after it, his point was simple, the brain operates like a guided missile that locks onto whatever self-image you've installed, and it will steer you, sabotage you, and bring you home to that image no matter how hard your conscious mind fights, you can win the lottery and end up broke again in two years if your self-image is "poor person," you can lose 50 pounds and gain it back if your self-image is "fat person," you can land your dream job and quietly destroy it if your self-image is "not good enough," because the brain experiences any mismatch between reality and self-image as a problem to be corrected, and it always corrects toward the image.
This is why goal-setting, willpower, motivation, and discipline almost always fail in the long run, they're all happening at the level of behavior while the self-image underneath stays exactly the same, you can't out-discipline a self-image, you can't motivate yourself past it for more than a few weeks before it pulls you back, the only real way to change your life is to change the picture first, and the picture changes through repeated vivid imagination, especially in the relaxed state right before sleep and right after waking, when the critical part of your mind goes quiet and the subconscious actually listens, you spend ten or fifteen minutes a day living inside the version of you you want to become, with full sensory detail, with the feeling of it already being true, you do that consistently for a few months and the internal picture genuinely shifts, and once the picture shifts the behavior follows by itself, no daily battle required, because now your subconscious is steering you toward a different home.
Men have absolutely no idea what the majority of good women find attractive. The world is not a fucking MMO, you cannot min/max. Height? Income? Women are fucking psychic bro, they don't care about the color of your tailfeathers.
Coked up degenerates in religious psychosis get laid or have more loving relationships than you because that freak is living from his own center. You aren't. It does not matter that it is destructive or insane. It is his destruction, his own insanity. He is free and untamed, you do tricks learned from 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr, Discord, and whatever other nonsensical hive of rejects like a crippled circus elephant. Just be yourself. Just, be, yourself. In Buddhism there is a concept of the 'original face', it is who you were before you were born, before anything was imprinted on you, before you inherited all of the karma of circumstances. Most men walk around a compartmentalized mess wondering why they feel like they are going crazy, wondering why creating more masks don't seem to resolve their misery. The drug addict, the criminal, the schizo, the artist, they've at least glimpsed at their original face, even if through a cracked mirror. That 'glimpse', that's 'it'. That's swag. Women are not attracted to confidence. They are attracted to those who exist, who inhabit reality, their own reality, not just a mirage that is shambled through whilst following another person's script. The norse concept is called 'hamingja', the power that radiates from people when they are aligned with their fate, their doom, their wyrd. It was said to be impossible to fake, it was the electricity of one who had found their true wyrd and was living it unashamedly. Warriors would switch sides midbattle to follow someone with stronger hamingja, women do the same thing.
What makes Achilles attractive is that he chose his own life, his own dharma, over a long an mediocre one. This is what women are attracted to. It is not that his life was glorious and that he was great, that is merely a consequence of him following his dharma. The Greeks called this 'thumos', the part of the soul that desires recognition and autonomy. Contemporary society destroys this in men, and it is a great shame, replacing it with domesticated "good behavior".
Imagine two guys, both NEETs
"I don't work because I don't want to"
"I don't work and I hate myself for it"
The first one has 'it', the latter does not.
a man being submissive bc it turns him on = alpha
a man being submissive cus he has emotional issues and feels bad = cringe and beta
a man who is not working cus he doesnt want to work = alpha
a man who is not working and feels like a failure cus of it = beta idiot
an ugly man who doesnt give a fuck and owns it = alpha
an ugly man who cares about it and is clearly insecure = into the mines
like a man who slaves away bc he wants to get enough money to cash out = alpha
a man who slaves away bc thats just how he was raised and slaving away gives him a sense of worth = beta idiot
Men struggle with realizing that women are attracted to internal motivations not external realities
you can have 100 men and on paper they're all the same but 50 are internalized and 50 are externalized and women will overwhelmingly go for the ones who are internalized even if you made it like so the internalized men are less wealthy and less attractive. You can be the most submissive effeminate man in the world and still have big dick alpha mode energy if its because YOU want it. You can be broke, ugly, awkward, whatever, that which is authentically yours will work without effort. Sure some people wont like you, in fact many people might not, but this increases the quality, you get someone who will love you authentically, and will not grow disappointed with you. The second you're doing ANYTHING because of some external pressure, because someone told you this is what women want. You're already fucked dawg. You're gone. You're a spirit. And women can see spirits. Most men these days have "the sickness unto death", they are so fucking alienated that they have become hungry ghosts, walking dead. That's most men these days, and we all know it to be true. Women evolved for millions of years to detect genetic fitness, you think they cannot smell spiritual rot? That uncanny feeling they get around you is their soul recognizing that you don't have one.
The "nice guy" is not nice, it is a simulacrum of niceness because he believes courtesy to be currency. When the social vending machine doesn't dispense pussy for masturbation, he rages, and post about how women are evil online. An actual nice person is nice because that is who they are. Women are keen about this difference, they can tell, they've likely been dealing with creepy freaks their entire lives.
You -want- it to be about your height, your jaw, your money, your dick size because deep inside you know that those absolve you of responsibility, it lets you tell the story of "its not my fault". Oh, but it is your fault. Yet this hurts, you cannot admit that you've been spiritually neutered by society and you're walking around like an NPC following dialogue trees and working on algebraic logic. That would mean you need to actually do something hard, that means that you need to dig your soul out from the shallow grave that you shot it into. Most men are doing all of these assortment of things for reasons that are not their own, working jobs they hate for approval they do not even want, being nice to avoid conflict, lifting weights because internet man told them to, every single move calculated for external validation. You are the last man! Comfortable, safe, optimized for intra-male social approval, and completely spiritually castrated. "We have invented happiness" you say, yet women yearn for Zarathustra, for the one who creates his own world. This is why every girl has a story about falling for some insane artist or musician who lived in a van. He may have been bonkers, sure, but he was ALIVE!
Wanna know why artists musicians druggies and criminals can find love and you cannot? It is not because women are stupid or that they love suffering and danger. It is because those men, despite all of their flaws, are living from their own center, and that is the single most attractive thing to many women that a man can do. They see the -potential- in them, where those who are successful on paper yet have no -potential- lack. One would be able to survive apocalypse, the women thinks, the other would not. Those men's destructive lifestyles are authentic, your safe lifestyle is performative. Tristian and Isolde did not fall in love because Tristian was a good provider or that he was tall and handsome, though he very well may have been, they drank a love potion, but what was the potion really to us? The dissolution of social identity. They were no longer knight and queen, just raw meeting raw. That is what women want, not the social role you are playing, but what happens when all those roles dissolve. Tristian chose love and death over a safe life. That choice echoes in the blood of every woman.
A jobless philosopher who genuinely does not give a fuck about money is infinitely more attractive than an insecure beta banker who hates his life but likes his stupid BMW. The philosopher owns his reality, the banker is owned by it. Diogenes lived in a clay pot and told Alexander the Great to go fuck himself, and yet Alexander himself said "If I were not I, I would want to be Diogenes". Women understand the difference between authentic power over performed power.
Women are not attracted to what you have, they're attracted to why you have it. They can smell the difference between:
money earned from passion vs money earned from fear
muscles built from joy vs muscles built from insecurity
kindness from love vs kindness from manipulation
intelligence deployed freely vs intelligence performed for approval
Every woman has PhD in reading the gap between who you are and who you are pretending to be. The only person you are fooling is yourself. This is evolutionary, for millions of years picking the wrong mate meant death, not only for her, but her offspring as well. Women have been equipped with exquisite detection for the difference between real strength and performed strength, real resources and borrowed ones, real protection and fake bravado. Their ancestors who could not tell the difference aren't anyone's ancestors because they never reproduced. The ones left are survivors who can smell authenticity like sharks smell blood.
"She's trying to change me" No you fucking moron, she sees your potential and she loves you. When you're just hunting, women love your chaos. When they love you, they want you alive and healthy, you've already passed the mate fitness ritual, you're in, for now. Men who cannot handle this are simply telling on themselves, they only process relationships as zero sum power struggles because they've never experienced real love and care. Read the fucking Iliad. When Achilles loses Patroclus he crashes the fuck out. Sobbing screaming refusing to eat. The greatest warrior who ever lived we are told this. Yet this reveals something inherently true, real strength includes the capacity for authentic and radical vulnerability. You can only be wrecked by loss if you were grounded in the first place. Modern men are so defended against pain that they've become defended against love.
Women want to know you could be a thing. Could. Not that you are one, not even that you are trying to be one. Just that the potential exists, latent, in your being. That if the world needed it, if -she- needed it, you could rise. Why do women still love Genghis Khan 800 years later? Read his biography. Orphaned, enslaved, betrayed, left for dead. He had every right to be the world's ultimate doomer, your life is not even a fraction as terrible as his was. He said fuck karma and rewrote history. He did not start trying to conquer the world though, his conquest began with his conquest of surviving on his own terms, his conquest was merely what happens when someone with infinite will meets infinite opposition. Women smell that potential in you, and its absence.
You must have what in Buddhism is called the 'beginner's mind', a mind with no preconceptions. Every women is unconsciously asking "If civilization collapsed could this man create his own place or would he just die?" This hypothetical reveals who is running on their own power versus those who have simply plugged themselves into the social matrix. It is not possible to fake potential, you cannot perform it. It either exists because you've maintained your inner light, or it doesn't because you try so hard to be what others want you to be.
Stop asking "what do women want". Ask yourself, "what do I want". And I mean really, really want. Not what you think you should want, not what you are programmed to want, not what would impress your parents, strangers on the internet, or your friends. What do YOU want? Most of you have truly no fucking clue. You're attracted to women who look like instragram or tiktok girls because that is what you are supposed to want, you're pursuing careers that make you want to kill yourself because that is just how life is. You are performing a veneer of confidence because that is how people online said it works. Sartre called this nonsense "bad faith" pretending that you have no choice either which way to avoid the even more terrifying responsibility of freedom. Every "I have to" or "I must" is a lie you tell to yourself. You could choose to be homeless tomorrow, pursue your passion, but you do not, our of fear, which is fine, but stop pretending like it is not a choice, it is a choice, one that you are actively making every single day. Women sense bad faith like animals may sense earthquakes, both relate to fundamental structural instability.
Be real or die. Not real like "bro I'm just being honest" when you're being a dick. Real like aligned, grounded, centered, integrated. Real like your outside matches your inside and your actions reveals your desires. In the past they used to say that when a man's wordhoard was misaligned from his deedhoard that they would lose their wyrd, and with that, their luck. Most men's words and deeds are completely disconnected to the point where the majority of men may have a stronger case of DID than most people online saying they have it. You say you want adventure but choose security, you say you value freedom but build cages to live in. This disconnect is what makes you invisible to others, you're not whole and thus cannot be seen. Your careful externally maintained sanity is likely the most insane thing about you.
Let me be clear, we've been talking about 'what women want' but this is not about women, this is about being a fucking human being, about being alive. This is about YOU. The women part is just what naturally happens when you decide to stop being a ghost and step into being a human.
Just do more.
You will adapt. Your body will adapt. Your mind will adapt.
You can just simply do more and figure it out along the way. Most things in life simply bend to the virtue of volume. Everything is learnable, you are adaptable and the universe is endlessly malleable.
@skala_vit Kohn leží na smrtelné posteli. Oči má slepé, tak se z posledních sil ptá:
„Sáro, ženo, jsi tu?“
„Jsem tu“ vzlyká Sára.
„Izáku, synu, jsi tady?“
„Jsem, tatínku.“
„A ty, dcero Ráchel, jsi tu také?“
„Ano, tati.“
Kohn se prudce nadzvedne: „Oy vey! A kdo je teda dole v krámě?!“
good job on following all the prescribed rules and playing fair in life. really commendable. you're older now, rarely said or pursued what you wanted, and have always watched other people courageously go for what they want but at least you never stepped on anyones toes
well done