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abundance, battle of the sexes, blue pill, break up, break ups, career path, career woman, co-parenting, commitment, dating, discontent, divorce, faith, feminism, happiness, life change, marriage, red pill, remarriage, satisfaction, unhappiness
Something I have come to realize with age is that in almost every situation, there is a downside.
There is a downside to being in a relationship, there is a downside to being alone. There is a downside to being married, there is a downside to being single. There is a downside to getting divorced, there is a downside to staying married. There is a downside of going to college, there is a downside of not going to college. There is a downside to having kids, there is a downside to not having kids. There is a downside of working, there is a downside of not working. There is a downside to being rich, there is a downside to being poor, and there is even a downside of being somewhere in the middle of rich and poor.
Darn, there’s always a downside? Well that stinks, right? Yes and no. It only stinks if you are under the illusion that there can be no downside. In our society that seems to be the expectation. Or the belief that a downside is “a sign” that it’s time to make a change, usually the opposite of whatever the situation causing the downside may be.
However, these changes are often made in reaction to the downside, without consideration to the downsides of doing something else, instead. Far too often people see change as the solution to a downside, but they do not consider nearly enough what the downside to whatever their new path may be. Once on it, the downsides become apparent and the dissatisfaction and desire to eliminate the downside sets in once again.
I call it the “if only’s.” If only I was married/single/divorced/had kids/didn’t have kids/had a degree/didn’t have a degree/worked/didn’t work/was rich and so on. If only, if only, if only…then I could be happy!
That’s where the option of acceptance and gratitude comes in, something people don’t seem to consider nearly as often as they consider radical change. Accepting that there is always going to be a downside can be actually very freeing. And it can help one make better choices, find contentment, and even be happier.
And of course sometimes the downsides of not making a change are greater than the downsides of doing different. Once all sides are considered, maybe change really is what is needed. In those cases, considering in advance the downside of all options can help make those choices easier. It’s not change that’s bad, it’s the overly idealistic idea that change will lead to a life without downsides. Well, it won’t. That doesn’t mean life can’t be better. But there will always still be downsides. Sorry.
Of course, the good news here is that also means there are likewise always upsides of every situation. And if the downside and upsides are also considered in tandem before making major changes, sometimes just considering the upsides can help one realize things are actually more good than bad. I think that in the majority of cases in life, this is true. And studies show that simply focusing on the upsides in life, rather than the downsides, leads to much greater life satisfaction no matter what the situation might be.
So when you find yourself focusing on the downside, telling yourself, “if only” things were different, then you would be happy/fulfilled/content/whole/etc. try looking at the upside as well as the possible downsides of that “if only.” Chances are good you are likely to discover all things considered, it’s not so bad after all. And if so, focusing more on the upside and less on the “if only” might be the best solution of all.
For where your focus is, there your heart will be also.
Let those who have ears hear.
Notes From a Red Pill Girl 
“The leading cause of problems is solutions”
Redpillgirlnotes,
I think the only thing that will work to stop your SAHM friend from hubby-dumping would be her to see an example of a working marriage, ie. you getting a good sweetie. It may be that she knows no one and you may be the only one counselling her to stick with him.
As for you, it would bring someone else into the house for you to consider every time a decision is made. I noticed that with my brother and sister in law when their kids were young. Even the smallest decision has to take the kids into consideration.
Business deals with making choices all the time, usually weighing the “costs” and the “benefits” (the downsides and the upsides). That’s what it means to be in business, to make these choices when routine does not prevails. And routine can not prevail all that long without being swept away by change and being made irrelevant.
The personal life is no different. If for no other reason consider that we age, our peers age, our family and friends and children age. So life is change, just like business is managing change. Business has this clever trick that they do that is to minimize the downsides and maximize the upsides (costs and revenues respectively).
Let’s take kids for example. Maximizing the upside is participating in their lives, being active members in their growth and development into adults. Minimizing the downside is demonstrating discipline to teach them how to be responsible and accountable. Letting kids misbehave is like letting a project run over budget. Being absent from a child’s life is like not making sales or not collecting revenue owed to you. There is a joy in having kids and a joy in not having kids, and the weighting factor of either will depend on the couple.
A business that focuses mostly on the downsides will not stay in business very long. Upsides take a lot of work to find and nurture. It is the same with life.
@ fuzzie, while I would love to exemplify the model marriage to not only my friend but the world, and most especially my husband and children, I currently lack a key player in that Illiad: namely a groom! And not just any groom… But one who gets me and I him, at least well enough that we can flip heads or tales over petty squabbles, agree to work through the important ones, and skew the thing to better over worse as much as is within our direct control. Hopefully I will be so lucky. My situation is complex between my having children, a business, another business, and general life as an adult complexity. If it is so, I will be a happy and lucky girl! But why not be the one to beat the odds? Someone has to. And reality is 80% either aren’t trying or don’t see it’s a choice! Hopefully my time in the manosphere and studying the red pill increases that further!
Indeed eccentric, realizing there are risks and rewards in all situations allows one to best understand the big picture as well as the individual one. What’s that saying, if nobody totally gets what they want but everyone e isn’t unhappy either comes to mind. Sometimes one is up, sometimes down, but so it is for everyone else. Work the margins, there’s often overlooked opportunity or innovative answers there. And when all else fails, get up and show up. Consistency has much better returns than timing the market perfect
Redpillirlnotes,
This is tough to do when people are two thousand miles away frome each other. It’s hard to get together for a cup of coffee.
By the way, Molly is rooting for you.
@ fuzzie, every journey begins with a single step. Or not. But one will also never know the cost or gain of any path but the one taken. The days pass by regardless…
And I believe in Molly! 🙂 I will be ok regardless, my life is good as is! The upsides outweigh the downsides! Something to be said for embracing the moment and declaring it as it should and is meant to be, either! Better than living in the future or past, both not the current reality.
And for those wondering what the heck fuzzie and I are talking about, it’s a conversation that spanned two blogs and now three. Just ignore us… Lol
And back on topic, according to the lamatations I hear in the story behind the story when reading roosh or heartiste, even being the man swimming in options, drinking from the firehouse, perhaps their lives now boxed in by com modifying that, has its downside. Nothing is all gravy…
Redpillgirlnotes,
I’m tired and need some sleep.
About Heartiste, I find him hard to read because is so given overr to cynicism.
About Roosh, he’s secnd genration Persian and, there are rumors that Persian women are hard on their men. At a guess, I’d bet that something happened in high school, or before, that scarred him for life.
There was a gal that I fell hard for on OkCupid. While it never got to meet in person, we did talk a lot. Her son, in third grade, was sweet on a girl that told him a big story about another kid. He beats him up only to find out it was all a big lie. Now, he can’t trust.
If you want to know, I was head over heels and all ready to go. What held me back was that she went incommunicado on weekends. Snowballed from there.
There are two classes of “downside”, in business, finance, even extreme sports.
There’s the form of downside that presents discomfort. One can take a probabilistic approach to evaluating these: one can say, “on average I’ll be okay.” This is normally how a bond is valued, how a business deal is calculated, how a mountaineer chooses his equipment for maximal utility.
Then there’s the form of downside that is, in fact, obliteration. This is what happens when a loan collapses — and it’s big enough to sink your bank. Or a new product commitment renders the company bankrupt if the product can’t be finished. Or a mountaineer decides to push for the summit in a storm despite not roping up.
So we need to decide which class of ‘downside’ we are evaluating. As I often note, if flying through a thunderstorm is “usually okay — 9 times out of ten I will fly out the other side — the pilot thinking that way is already dead. He’s not uncomfortable or inconvenienced. Eventually he will fly into a cloud and that cloud will spit out his plane — in the form of broken rubble.
That is true, bv. Downsides can vary in magnitude for sure. Avoiding the biggies when possible (like not hiring a CFO with a gambling addiction) is wise. And life sometimes delivers downsides of this mammoth scale all on its own: cancer, war, natural disaster.
I have done well in the later part of my life by understanding the down side of things and taking action a to minimize the possible fallout.
I always figured roosh’s issue is being roosh. A dweeby non White trying to swing for White women well above him in the smp. Then hating Whites etc because he doesn’t measure up. One more piece of diversity that should be somewhere else but as betas do blaming the world vs fixing himself.
@ Ton, As for Roosh’s particular problem, I am not sure, but I do agree that understanding the risks and downsides of a situation and taking action to minimize those risks is good life strategy!
Roosh is a good poster child for not working hard enough and well enough with his downsides. Take for example the “balding ginger” Owen Cook from Real Social Dynamics (RSD) (sometimes operating under the avatar name “Tyler Durden” from Fight Club). Owen realized he did not have classic good looks, height, or really much in the way genetics going for him in Game, other than intelligence. So he learned Game well enough to game Mystery into mentoring him in the early part of Owen’s career. His business RSD went financially underwater for awhile so Owen and his crew had to work the business’s way out of debt by just gaming harder. But when you listen to Owen’s free tour videos, you can hear how he take pride in minimizing his disadvantages and turning them into advantages, and eventually bailing out his business financially.
I follow his example by taking on the avatar name of Eccentric. High intelligence, overbearing motherly discipline, and exposure to beta social conditioning put me at a strong disadvantage with women. But with intelligence comes curiosity, and gentlemanly/chivalrous behavior need not be tossed aside, just transmuted to become a useful, sigma tool. Eccentric was not a nickname I was cursed with by others, it is one I chose and embraced. Operating as a sigma with lone wolf practices definitely has its upsides.
Indeed Eccentric, flipping one’s disadvantages into an advantage is a good game ninja move, for sure.
I knew a guy, years ago, who I worked with in the middle of the dot com mega boom. He was the head of the IT department at the start up Internet biz where we worked, South of Market, San Fran, 1997ish. Travis. Now I was married at the time, so I never considered Travis “in that way” and he knew I wasn’t looking, so we could truly be just friends. Knowing the IT guys is btw, strategy #1 in any company, and they are usually fun. Anyway he had the two best looking single women in the office, both early 20s to his early 30s, just clawing over him. He was nothing to look at, not a good dresser, not a cool car, not tall, not noticeable in any attraction way except he was very very smart, both with the financial market, social smarts, and computer smarts. Plus he had that air of someone you just knew you could easily read about in the paper one day for getting out of that big electronic theft “whatever” charge and moving to Fiji. He’d openly brag how much he had to pay off his first wife, who he cheated on, as a pick up line! Anytime I hear a guy say game only works for naturals or some such, I think of him. Travis was living proof that ANY man can work game to his advantage, in his own unique flavor or style.
Actually, I am surprised Travis doesn’t rule the world by now! Lol. Maybe he didn’t get off for the “whatever” charge and is sitting in time out!
This reminds me how there seems to be a slow trend of cultural evolution away from pre-selecting for jocks and towards nerds. Probably sometime after the introduction of the World Wide Web (1995/1995), earning potential hit the tipping point away from blue collar to white collar mastery. Around the age of 35 I definitely noticed a status flip without having to do anything to my inner game due to this shift.
That’s not to say that man doing manual things, manly things, is not without its SMP value (and corresponding r-selection; lover). It’s more to do with k-selection; (beta) provider where it matters. My strategy was to align with the “maker movement”, which combines the best of manual and intellectual labor.
Doh! This is what I get when I change my avatar settings. {sigh}
.There Is Always A Downside
Tradeoffs these are called.
Of these many modern people apparently unaware of they are.
This reminds me how there seems to be a slow trend of cultural evolution away from pre-selecting for jocks and towards nerds.
This I have seen not.
Where happens this does?
Welcome Yoda! Good to see you here 🙂
@ eccentric, the new avatar is a good look too! Very classy.
Travis was indeed a nerd in one sense, but also just one step short (as far as I knew!) of a criminal mind on the other, so I am not sure he was a nerd in the true sense. Others on his team truly were the typical “nerd” and they did not get the action Travis did, even those better looking, etc. Travis was like a law of physics exception, or something. Scrappy. Maybe that was it? Overly confident? Or rather, not aware of or afraid of his “limits?” These two girls were way, way, way out of his league (one blonde, another brunette) yet they were fighting over him. I am not sure I totally get it myself, the dynamic. It was San Fran, 1997, dot com, new economy, nothing much made sense really! But it was something to be a part of all that just the same…someday I can tell my kids about the days when the Internet was brand new! We walked to work uphill, in the snow, both ways, we were tethered to land lines, and dial up….oh the horror of it all! Lol.
Travis also had incredible, what do they call it, unofficial power? And access to all of the CEO and such’s emails about nights out with strippers and coke and catching the clap from a “lap dance” (yuck!) Yeah, that CEO was nuts. Oh the blackmail stuff he had on folks who were misbehavin’ — egads!
@ Yoda; some examples in the literature:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-modern-kids-dont-understand-about-being-nerd/
“A while back, we pointed out how terms like “geek” and “nerd” had become meaningless, since everything that used to be a geek hobby is now everyone’s hobby. We went from a time when only greasy-haired dorks knew how to work a computer to an era when every backward-cap-wearing jock has a smartphone in his pocket.”
“Now, it’s just really hard to ridicule someone for their hobbies when you know that 80 million people own a copy of Wii Sports.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14868-nerds-rejoice-braininess-boosts-likelihood-of-sex.html#.VYOZE_lViko
“As for picking a bed-mate, the men’s actual smartness proved a reliable indicator of their appeal for both brief hook-ups and serious relationships – which came as something of a surprise. Other studies have suggested that, for women anticipating short-term relationships, a man’s braininess isn’t foremost in their minds.”
http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/02/defining-modern-masculinity/
“O’Reilly may get ratings with his over-the-top antics, but when it comes to real power, the world was quietly taken over by those supposed “beta males”; Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs wield power and influence that O’Reilly can only dream of.”
[I once had a girl drive me home from a seminar just because she thought my “birth control glasses” were sexy. I see the same style of glasses on women’s faces these days.]
> @ eccentric, the new avatar is a good look too! Very classy.
Awe, thanks!
I’ve been blowing months of opportunity for not taking that shot sooner. Around 2008 I started working as a suit seller for three years. Apart from replacing my suit wardrobe, I also learned on the job how to coordinate clothing and how to mark a suit up for tailoring. After losing about 20 pounds in the last few months, I’m now back to the size when that suit was first fitted. Using pro deals and discounts, that outfit was put together for under $500, including the shoes worth about $370 at full retail. The downside of that job is it paid poorly, but the upside is it set me up for dressing for success.
I set the shot up for some subliminal messaging, which is proving to work well on the dating sites. The pocket square, tie, and shoe laces are red (for obvious symbolic reasons). That shoe brand is tradcon; traditional conservative, but more expensive and classier than Johnston & Murphy. Tradcon style suggests beta provider, but the red color flips the script to alpha lover. It’s a little subtle for most guys who haven’t worked in the industry, but the ladies pick up on this.
On the day of that shot the outfit went to work escorting my date to the symphony. 😀
I have never much read Irish do to the bitter beta vibe and at one he called american chicks racist because they wouldn’t fuck him. Which seems to be his go to for when he doesn’t do well in an area, though in a more.subtle manner then .oat diversity
@ ton I by no means think Roosh is a model, I read his stuff in a cautionary way, to help me avoid all that nonsense.
@ eccentric very snappy. I don’t doubt it does get you quite a response on dating sites. It’s rare to see a man in a jacket these days, much less a suit. Peacocking works! Be different!
Roosh what ethnicity he is?
Nerd types more Likly to have jobs they are.
Ex jocks the same they can not say.
The biggest difference this might be.
I believe he is Persian, or Lebanese, or something along those lines, Yoda.
If chicks are selecting nerds over jocks, why are the nerds bitching?
Fact is, women working outside the home as removed the need for beta bucks ie nerds freeing women up to chase tingles. Now when the time for a lane change comes….
Happy Father’s Day Ton!
> If chicks are selecting nerds over jocks, why are the nerds bitching?
That more nerds are upgrading from gamma/omega males to functioning betas is a mixed blessing. Not enough are studying Game well enough to alpha themselves up and replace the declining alpha lover jocks. It’s no fun having access to more bucks options when she’s losing tingles options.
Some women may see the post-Fight Club era as a coming Dark Ages of choice in lovers.