Last week I introduced a new concept in what most men can expect at some point in their lives. This is the idea of being Zeroed Out – basically men having most of a lifetime of status, financial equity, reputation, professional & educational growth, emotional investment and other metrics of men’s life equity being erased. I wanted to detail this a bit more here now as I think much of this concept gets easily misconstrued for men.
I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.
You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.
As I mentioned last week, it’s really easy to think of this as male victimhood or that a guy is complaining about his lot in life. Empathy, especially amongst men, has always been in short supply. I’ve learned the hard way never to bring up how sick I am, how bad my job is or how little sleep I got the night before in the company of 3 or more men – because I guarantee you that one has cancer, the other works in raw sewage and the last one’s an incurable insomniac. As men, our masculinity has classically been about how well we accept and adapt to adversity, so like I said, just mentioning a guy would be Zeroed Out at some stage in his life sounds like I’m saying “menz gots it so tough”. We’re supposed to take it on the chin and come back for more.
Guys will even get competitive with each other about how hard they’ve had it and how well they adapted to a bad situation. Others just don’t want to hear about another guy’s misfortunes, and others still will just say that men are living their lives wrong if a he bases his sense of self on the opinions of others – and women in particular.
The first two are simple to address. Men are in a general state of competition with each other even if this is only ever recognized as something going on in the social background. It doesn’t necessarily have to be vicious competition; even friendly rivalries are still rivalries.
It stands to reason that men will certainly be sympathetic with one another depending on circumstance, but that competitive nature is still something winners and losers instinctually understand. Out-group men will understand this state much more distinctly than in-group men (kin affiliation is an evolved survival adaptation), but even within that in-group there will still exist male dominance hierarchies. How those hierarchies are established is contextual to societal and environmental influences, but that they exist at all is often something our feminine-primary social order would like men to sweep under the carpet for themselves.
Qualifying Value
Competition is one thing, however, the idea that a man might base his life’s expectations, and his metric of success or failure, on external qualifiers is something I’d like to explore here. Social influences, family influences and men’s (often conditioned) subconscious understanding of how he can best effect intimacy and reproduction with women according to what he perceives are their expectations of him is a point of contention. If men feel Zeroed Out at various points in life, is that ‘zeroing’ just the effect of a man having built his personal integrity and equity on a foundation of Blue Pill sand?
MGTOWs are invited to correct me here, but as I understand it, this is a primary tenet of men going their own way – a rejection of women’s qualifying men’s personal worth based on their Hypergamous standards. I get that, but I would argue that there’s more to a man’s sense of self-worth than any qualifier womankind might place on him.
It’s no secret that Red Pill aware men need to understand the Game that they’re a part of and should indeed reestimate their personal worth based on this cutting away of oneself from their prior Blue Pill deceptions. This is why I believe every man who unplugs himself from his old ideals is, by order of degree, going his own way, but where he decides to go with it and how he decides to create value in himself according his new understanding is what’s at issue. Even in creating and building a new sense of self-worth there is still the potential of men becoming subject to losing that value irrespective of how he believes it should be measured.
I can imagine that whether or not a divorced man is ‘woke’ and living by his own terms, losing custody of and influence in the lives of his children can be something of a zeroing out for him. There are aspects of what we hold as our own personal worth that can be zeroed out no matter by what metric we think we should be evaluating it by. As I’ve always said, a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it, but regardless, we still have intrinsic value that can be erased and it doesn’t alter the fact that women, family, career peers, etc. will be affected by it.
That said, it’s just an easy cop out to just say “Well, what you thought should be valued by others really isn’t, and because you thought it was, when you lose it you lose everything.”
III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority
Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.
This is the third commandment from Roissy’s 16 Commandments of Poon. It has relevance here because it’s illustrative of how a majority of men think about prioritizing what metric to build their personal equity on. As Red Pill aware men it’s too easy to get upset at plugged in men who are blind to some of the simplest Red Pill principles. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most men are still Blue Pill and will fight you just for suggesting they might be wrong about the reality they find themselves in. They need that comfort even if they fail to see it will potentially be their undoing.
More importantly, we need to remember that the suicide rates I quoted in last week’s essay are based on men who built their own personal value on what their Blue Pill conditioning embedded into their psyches for a lifetime. That’s what we’re up against, and until more men come to unplugging this sad fact will continue. This is the gravity we’re faced with as Red Pill aware men trying to help other guys unplug. It’s not just about how a guy can get himself laid better; it might be about saving his life.
As I was saying in the last post, my brother in-law killed himself because he was convinced for a lifetime that by sacrificing every ambition and ‘doing the right thing’ he would be appreciated for it all. The Blue Pill quite literally killed him. He was convinced that he couldn’t live without his ONEitis of whom he’d made the “center of his existence”. Remove that center and he ceased to exist. Tragically though, his was only one story that mirrored countless more men’s. We live in a very dangerous age for men. The Blue Pill is even more of a liability today than it was in times past, because we live in an era that encourages men going all-in in their life’s investment in that conditioning.
Seeing that men build their sense of self-worth on this false ideology is obvious. And yes, we should make ourselves our own Mental Point of Origin, but more important is realizing that our lives depend on Killing the Beta and discarding the idealistic hope that our personal equity ought to be measured by a Blue Pill metric. One reason I take umbrage with Purple Pill hack ‘life coaches’ is because this is the dangerous value system they can never let go of and encourage other men to readopt.
Men will find themselves Zeroed Out at various stages of their lives, but if those guys are still mired in a belief set that the Blue Pill has convinced him is the only legitimate way of valuing himself he’s positioned to become another suicide statistic. And the real tragedy is that its this false evaluation that will lead most men to it – all the while he hears ‘atta boys’ and positivity thinking mantras from others who really don’t know what else to say.