• 1 Post
  • 98 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

help-circle
  • I’ll tell you the strategy that worked for me last time (quit for ~2 years), and that I’m using this time.

    • Switch to a vape. Lung capacity increases immediately, and you get rid of the bad smell. If you haven’t vaped, give yourself some time to get used to the different habit (no cigarette packing ritual anymore etc)
    • Buy a 0 nicotine vape or two, or find a local place you can get them easily. This is your “inside” vape.
    • Buy a refillable vape and get nicotine liquid roughly equivalent to the full-nic vape you switched to from cigarettes. This is your “outside” vape.
    • Start restricting the locations you use the full-nic vape. I work from home, so I don’t vape full-nic at my desk, I walk outside to do it. You want to break the absent-minded vaping+work or vaping+tv habit.
    • Step your nicotine intake down over as long a period as you like, but don’t ever step it back up. First time I quit, I did it over about a year. That’s a little extreme. You could probably do it over a few months.
    • Once you’re on 0 nic all the time, either stay with that, or gradually wean yourself off the habit as well. This is much easier without the chemical addiction.

    Good luck.

















  • This is a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly.

    Guys find themselves desperate to get laid, and that desperation comes across in all of their interactions with women, who don’t like feeling that they’re being treated like a vending machine, which leads to the guy being rejected for reasons that he doesn’t entirely understand.

    He gets in a relationship with someone, finally, and everything is great for a while. Then he realizes that women are talking and flirting with him more than they ever have before, and isn’t sure why, but he enjoys it. He doesn’t understand that, because he is in a relationship, he has stopped being desperate and weird, and is now actually having real conversations with women about mutually interesting topics.

    Surrounded by women that are (seemingly) available, he either breaks up with his SO, asks for some sort of open arrangement, or tries to cheat. Unfortunately, for reasons that he still doesn’t understand, as soon as he’s available for sex, women start being turned off by him again (if not to quite the degree they were before) and, again, he finds it difficult to get laid.

    From here, guys often fall into some incel-style evolutionary psychology explanation for things, regularly cheat on everyone that they’re with, or gradually becomes aware of the pattern.

    If they become aware of the pattern, they can begin to manage it and reduce the desperate, salesman vibe that they give off. As they become more confident and relaxed, it becomes clear to women that they’re perfectly comfortable going home alone or just being friends, which allows them to have more meaningful relationships and, incidentally, more sex with people they like.

    Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED Talk on the origin and mating behavior of the involuntarily celibate.




  • I can’t speak to how common this is, or if overall rates have declined, but I still do it. There are a lot of people in the comments who are worried about coming off as a creep, and I’m sure a lot of guys do come off that way, but I don’t think it’s that hard to hit on someone in a non-creepy way. I asked a woman out last week like so-

    Me: “Hey, sorry if this is abrupt but would you like to have lunch or a coffee sometime?”
    Her: “Yeah! That sounds like fun”
    Me: “Cool, let me give you my number…”
    Me (after chatting a bit): “Sorry for hitting on you out of the blue.”
    Her: “It’s totally fine!”

    Things to note:

    1. I gave her my number instead of asking for hers so that she could turn me away by just not texting me.
    2. I was relaxed and willing to joke about my abrupt approach.
    3. I’m not exceedingly handsome, but not particularly ugly either.
    4. I’m ready to exit the conversation politely and humorously if she turns me down.
    5. We had talked briefly a few times prior to my approaching her.