Nothing about that concept is new. Gary Vee, famously called the ‘youth pastor of capitalism’, has been shouting about this principle for years across social media. Many of the people that follow in his footsteps are saying much of the same thing. The knowledge and guru space evolves by iterating on the ideas that work and discarding the ones that don’t, much like any other profession. Austin Kleon, author of Show Your Work, wrote an entire set of books discussing the idea that nothing is original anymore. An entire published work dedicated to unoriginality. Even in its irony, it succeeded tremendously. He brought value to people’s lives by very publicly restating information that everyone already knew existed. He documented the action of documenting, and in some ironic meta-analytic way, created something entirely original.
So, what does this have to do with getting laid and being an incel? Well, for anyone that is perpetually stuck on their own, unable to find a satisfactory social life, the online guru space should be very relevant. People like me have spent a lifetime online, scrolling through fragmented information. We take what we like and leave the rest. In theory, this makes us better at whatever we’re researching. The new information we find leads to new connections and neural pathways, literally changing our neurobiology. We learn in order to solve problems, engage curiosities and reinforce beliefs. Very, very occasionally, we’ll take that knowledge and actually apply it to real life, and the outcome of those experiments will radically shift our personality and the way we look at the world. We are digital children, constantly testing and poking at things we neither understand nor fully recognize to build a model of the world that makes sense to us.
I’ve been doing this for a long time. I would like to think of myself as a digital teenager by this point. Eventually, because of that voracious appetite for understanding and an insatiable curiosity, I built myself an understanding of the world that I could rely on. I saw the world through a lens that made sense, reinforced my biases, and comforted my ego. Anyone that’s been through the Red Pill or alt-right pipelines will be very familiar with that particular journey.
For young men in the western world, the internet replaces our parents at a certain point. The lessons we were supposed to learn from our biggest role models came from bearded, tattooed men on YouTube and TikTok. Rollo Tomassi, Roosh V, Dan Bilzerian, Andrew Tate, Fresh n Fit, Coach Red Pill, Neil Strauss, RSD & Tyler Durden. Fuck, if you go back far enough, there are men dressed in high heels, fur coats, and top hats proclaiming to be able to transform boys into men. All of these guys got famous by talking to a generation of boys that didn’t feel equipped to deal with the real world. They were promised something and the universe failed to deliver. So, predictably, we went looking for answers.
“How to get girls” has over a hundred thousand google searches per month. As of writing this, when you do google that term, you get a wikiHow article, a comedy video from 2013, and a movie from 2017 that, according to IMDB, was about as shitty as the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action adaption. These are not good resources. I wouldn’t recommend that my hypothetical son scrounge around on google for this knowledge. I’d want him to be taught, preferably by someone that had already been through the struggle of going from simp to pimp, from zero to hero. Whatever mysteries women hold for a young man, wikiHow isn’t going to teach them. At the moment, Andrew Tate is.
Predictably, when second-rate blogs and family-friendly advice don’t hold water for a young fella, they turn to personalities on the internet. We consume so much knowledge from gurus and internet celebrities. And, like I started out saying, in an ironic twist of fate, these experts are nothing original. They just did the work and documented their results. It’s a twisted form of science, where public figures are the ones that tried the hardest, that read all the books and articles and watched all the tapes and hit on all the women. They did it all and then found out that the financial reward for all their hard work stood behind the elephant in the room.
Marketing.
In order to sell their secrets, the gurus all engaged in a race to the bottom. Make the courses cheaper. Sell more success. You’ll get hotter women if you buy from me. You’ll find them quicker from that guy. That guy over there says you won’t even have to find them at all, they’ll come to you. Just a little more money. Just a little more attention. Books and podcasts and tapes and courses and self-help seminars. Slowly but surely, the businesses overtook the learning, and the original goal, to help men understand women, got overturned in favor of squeezing every last dollar out of these lonely bastards as possible.
We spent as much time as possible turning art, creativity, and expression into a commoditized business and, in doing so, left a slew of unhappy young men along the way somewhere.
