From here on out I will be blogging at http://nicktroyer.com. Update your bookmarks, bitches.
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Race to the Bottom
I discovered “game” as a freshman in college during the fall of 2008. Up to that point in my life I had slept with exactly one girl, my high school sweetheart. I was as “blue pill” as they come.
A buddy of mine who was in the Air Force sent me a PDF of Neil Strauss’s The Game. After reading that, it felt as if my eyes had been opened. I stumbled upon Roosh’s blog shortly thereafter. Things really took off when I started reading Roissy in the spring of 2009. As hard as it was to believe, it was all true: the worse you treat them, the harder they fight for you.
I quickly learned that putting game into practice was much harder than reading about the theory. I failed to fuck a sexy Italian girl my freshman year because, despite the fact that she was into me, I got drunk at a frat party and hugged her a little too eagerly. It was as if a switch flipped in her brain. She barely talked to after that. While I was home over Christmas break, I attempted “negging” a girl about her fake Uggs, only to have her punch me.
My first taste of success in applying game principles came the following spring, when I latched onto a blonde sorority girl and went absolutely Machiavellian on her ass. Things really heated up when she caught me making out with her roommate. Ultimately, the relationship crashed and burned when she discovered I was fucking a redheaded callipygian goddess on the side. No sweat. I rambled on.
My game truly began to blossom when I started dating a model during my senior year. I became (or at least pretended to be) a full-blown sociopath. I would ignore her for days on end. I stayed out every weekend getting wasted and cheating on her at every possible opportunity, often with girls who were nowhere near as good-looking, just for the sake of cheating. The whole time, she texted me nonstop with sweet nothings, begged me to let her come over and fuck her, and routinely did errands for me. I was getting a taste of the good life.
By no means am I suggesting that I’m some apex alpha bro with a 400 lb. bench and a multimillion-dollar business empire who flies around the world on a private jet and regularly screws Victoria’s Secret models. I have a long way to go before I would call myself a master seducer. Still, game principles have become so engrained in me that they almost feel natural. The more natural it becomes, the better I seem to do with women. . . .
The problem is that I’m starting to hate love. The one who loves the least controls the direction of the relationship. It’s always a race to the bottom. You have to prove that you give less of a shit than she does, so some other alpha boogeyman doesn’t come swoop her away. “If she doesn’t text me back for three hours, I won’t text her back for four!” When she distances herself, you distance yourself further. It works, and works well—for a while. But ultimately you end up resenting the girl you just wanted to love in the first place. I’m tired of being the inveterate cad who stays drunk and fucks any and every girl I can get my hands on, just so I can keep the one I want in the first place. It’s a sick game, and I’m tired of playing.
But what other options do I have?
everything has to be perfect
I want to shut this blog down because the subdomain is “troyernick” and not “nicktroyer.” I’m pretty sure I registered the latter one about two years ago but I can’t for the life of me remember the login. Too bad, they say. Ya gotta use your backwards name instead. It’s maddening. All I want in the world is for things to be perfect, and yet the WordPress admins are forcing me to write under some bastardized blog handle.
Who am I kidding? No one reads this shit anyway.
But while we’re on the topic, the notion that everything (or even anything) has to be perfect really fucks things up. I used to date a blonde sorority girl who came from a wealthy family. Everything had to be perfect. We were supposed to make straight As in college and graduate and each get $100,000/year jobs and buy a big house in the suburbs and have a puppy who never took a shit on the carpet. Blah. Her life was (and probably still is) full of disappointments, like the time I took her to Hooters for Valentine’s Day.
I’m just as guilty as her. The mythical “perfect” is always weighing down on me; it’s always breathing down the back of my neck. I have to go to the library and get all this reading done so I can leave campus at 5 p.m. and hit the gym. If I manage, things will be perfect. Otherwise, . . .
Otherwise, what?
What will happen, Nick? Maybe you’ll have to stay an hour late! Maybe your schedule will be thrown off, and the girl with the giant ass who always uses the stair machine will be gone by the time you make it to the gym, you’ll have to eat dinner later than normal, and laundry will have to be put off until tomorrow (or next week, heh).
My hair, which I still haven’t cut, constantly gets blown around in the wind. I spend 15 minutes in the bathroom trying to get it under some form of control in order to increase the chances that the cute chick in the library will want to sleep with me. When I inevitably fail to tame my mane, I silently curse myself in the mirror. “Damn it, Nick, you hobo. You should just get a fucking haircut.”
This weekend, by God, I’ve gotta work on my outlines and finish the paper for Corporate Law and do that assignment for that other class. And if there’s any time left over, then I should actually read my outlines. That’s what they’re for, after all.
So if I make it to the gym on time tonight and eat dinner on time and do my laundry and fuck the chick in the library and finish my outlines and the paper and the assignment, everything will finally be perfect.
Except it won’t.
Inevitably, something else will crop up–something unexpected. My cousin will want to come into town and go out for lunch or I’ll end up getting drunk or I’ll stay up too late jerking off to Jada Stevens and my whole house of cards will come crumbling down.
And even if, against all odds, everything does work out perfectly this week, there’s always next week, and the next, and the next . . .
Maybe everything doesn’t have to be perfect. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s time to quit thinking everything has to be perfect, quit bitching, and just eat your damn hot wings.
Now we’re on to something.
NoFap is Impossible
I got wasted Thursday night. One single Left Hand Milk Stout turned into two, which turned into a run to the liquor store, which turned into chugging artisan beer that’s 13.5% alcohol, which turned into a midnight run to Denny’s where I somehow managed to get my waitress’s number and have a brief text exchange before scaring her off permanently.
I woke up Friday and of course I was hungover. You know what sounds like a good idea when you’re hungover? Porn. You know what’s diminished when you’re hungover? Willpower. You see where this is going. An innocent, “I’ll just look at a couple tumblr pages of girls with big asses” suddenly turned into a marathon session of skimming through HD video after HD video. I was a rat in a cage, eagerly pressing the lever to get another shot of dopamine.
It doesn’t even matter that I didn’t actually ejaculate because the whole premise of NoFap is that the flood of dopamine from seeing 36 girls get assfucked in a period of five minutes overstimulates viewers and effectively lobotomizes them. That would explain why I can’t remember anything from ages 12 to 23.
The worst part about the whole thing is that it’s not an exact science. Supposedly, if you make it 90 whole days without PMO (porn, masturbation, and orgasm–all three together, from my understanding), you become superhuman and your pheromones smell like Armani cologne and cute girls will practically be ripping your pants off for a shot at riding your glorious cock. You gain 20 pounds of muscle without going to the gym, and your IQ skyrockets up to 165.
I don’t know. My longest streak was 42 days. When 2014 rolled around, I promised I would make it 90 days. I planned to have more than 100 days under my belt when finals arrived, and the superpowers would kick in and I’d have a photographic memory for exams. That lasted 27 days. I got an earache and decided the only thing that would alleviate the pain would be to watch Jada Stevens getting fucked. I lasted about 30 seconds. Then, regret.
See, I have this app on my phone called Your Chain!, which counts the number of consecutive days you’ve done whatever your goal is. The theory is that it gets you psychologically invested. It’s hard to “break the chain” when you know you’ll have to look at that ugly blank square in a sea of Xs. Today would be 49. Except it’s zero, because once you fuck up a streak, you might as well go all in. You can always start . . . tomorrow.
And that’s just the problem.
Advice
Whatever you do, get at least eight hours of sleep per night. Practice lucid dreaming. Wake up early, ideally before the sun. Meditate for at least 30 minutes per day. Lift weights for an hour every day. Take cold showers. Eat paleo. Avoid plastic. Take a multivitamin. And zinc. And magnesium. And Vitamin D3. Take Noopept, which will make you smarter. Take Theanine, which will make you calm and relaxed. Cook your own meals. Avoid alcohol. Never immediately text the girl back. Spend all of your free time working on your passion. Be fashionable. Read for at least an hour each day. Write for an hour each day.
Fuck, I can’t keep it all straight. And even if I could, there’s no time to do it all. Writing a gratitude journal for ten minutes a day doesn’t seem so daunting until you realize that you’ve already filled your day with 24 hours worth of ten minute increments of bullshit.
I guess what it all boils down to is the fact that I just want to love and be loved. Is that too much to ask?
The Haircut
For those of you who don’t know, I’m in law school. That means you have to look nice. You have to wear a suit and slick your hair back and be respectable. You have to carry on societally-approved conversations. “Did you catch the game last night?” I’ve never watched a televised sports event in my life, and I don’t plan to start now.
There’s also the fact that I don’t really want to be in law school, which sounds whiny. Maybe it is. In any case, I decided to rebel against the system, man. I haven’t had a haircut since April 2013. I haven’t shaved in four months. If I were a real writer, or if I were a surfing instructor on some little-known island in the Pacific, my look would be cool–hip, even.
In a school full of wannabe somebodies and future soccer moms, I just look like a clown. In fact, I look a lot like a young Allen Ginsberg.
“America, when can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?”
Maybe if I were appropriately rooted in myself, or took the advice of all the Buddha quotes I see plastered all over Twitter, I could be OK with looking like Allen Ginsberg. Instead, so much of my ego and emotions are intimately linked with people’s perceptions of me. If a cute girl will give me a smile or even a second glance, the validation floods my brain with dopamine and I’ll be riding high for a week.
But it’s hard to get a second glance when you look like Allen Ginsberg. Sometimes you get smirks, but they’re just not the same.
Now, maybe you’re thinking that this is actually a benefit. No girls interested means there’s no chance I’ll cheat on my girlfriend (who isn’t really my girlfriend, but we’ll talk more about that later). Given my past history of cheating on every single girlfriend I’ve ever had, maybe this new found unattractiveness is actually a blessing in disguise.
Still, I’ve been practicing my self control. I haven’t jerked off in two weeks (and only once in the past six). Surely I can remain faithful to the girl I’m crazy about even if I do go back to looking sexy and getting regularly checked out by other women.
The obvious solution, then, is to get a haircut. Spend $20 and go back to looking like some gym rat douchebag frat boy wannabe. Then I’d get some second glances from the ladies. But there’s more to it than that. This mop of hair is the only way I know how to rebel, to express my dissatisfaction with the corporate cocksuckery and professional development circlejerk that seems so inextricably wound up with law school. That I won’t put on the suit and smile; that I’ll never comb my hair. That I’ll never lie and say I’m “intrigued by the professional responsibility issues that might arise in the context of corporate litigation.”
So I continue walking to class with five pounds of hair flapping around atop my head as greasy, dirty-blonde locks constantly fall into my eyes. Am I really “making a statement,” or am I just sabotaging myself?
The Rules
Quit looking outside yourself for the answers. Yes, I know that sounds like some cutesy little tweet a high schooler who just discovered marijuana and Buddhism would say. Seriously, though. Quit looking outside yourself for the answers.
I’ve spent my whole life thinking that everyone else, the “others” who are “out there,” somehow have the “right” answers and that I should listen to them and learn from them and do everything they suggest. No. No one really knows what’s going on. It’s fine to get counsel from wise elders, sure, but don’t take anyone’s advice as the end-all, be-all.
This mini epiphany came to me as a result of reading my Constitutional Law casebook. It finally dawned on me that the Court just makes shit up. Just like everyone else. You have to be in bed by 10:00. Why? Why not 9:59? Why not 10:01?
I’m reluctant to post this because it sounds like something a teenager who just discovered marijuana and anarchism would say. “Fuck the rules, man!” Seriously, though. Fuck the rules.
One day you’re going to be old and dying alone in a nursing home, and no one is going to pat you on the head for always being on time to class sixty years ago. No one is going to congratulate you for dutifully taking out the trash over a period of decades. There’s no trophy for making sure all of your emails are perfectly formatted.
I’m not preaching anarchy. I’m not encouraging anyone to deny God or take to the streets and destroy the opposition. I’m just saying think. Think, Nick. Think. There is no giant gold tablet in the sky that says you have to do things a certain way. Nothing says you have to go to the gym today (though you should). Nothing says you have to get a haircut so the chick with the nice ass will finally give you a second glance. Nothing says you have to go to class tomorrow. Nothing says you have to be a lawyer.
This post is for me as much as it is for anyone, but I hope somewhere out there a fifteen-year-old who just discovered marijuana and WordPress will stumble across it and question the status quo. Do you really have to do whatever it is you think other people want you to do?
Maybe it’s more important to figure out what you want to do and do that, even if “they,” all those people that are “out there,” will laugh at you and think you’re a weirdo and talk shit about you behind your back. Maybe being laughed at and thought of as a weirdo and talked shit about is noblest goal any of us can aspire to.
