You’re saying that if I trick my brain into thinking that the shitty activity that sucks and makes me feel terrible somehow isn’t shitty, doesn’t suck, and doesn’t make me feel terrible; I’ll somehow believe it?

Yes

Sorry, my brain doesn’t work like that.

It does work like that.

It tends to reject blatant fucking lies, especially when they come from myself.

Then tell it the truth you want to believe.

Truth is, you need to exercise to not die. You can choose to see this as a terrible burden you are forced to endure. Or you can see it as a stroke of luck, pushing you out of your comfort zone to do something that will be beneficial to your overall health, in addition to being something that will bring you joy for the rest of your life. Either way of looking at it is completely valid - it’s just your choice if you see it as a good thing or a bad thing. But if you see it as a good thing… you’ll probably be happier.

As others have said in this thread: don’t go home after work. Go somewhere else. That’s it.

If you wanna start doing a workout routine, join a gym close to your work and go straight there instead of going home. Want to learn to dance? Find something to do away from home until it is time to go to a dance class that happens every week. Have hobbies you would normally do alone at home? Start a group dedicated to doing those hobbies together in a public place, and meet there regularly.

If you feel really exhausted after your workday, almost universally you can use this technique: go to the next place you are going to be, find somewhere to sit or lay down, then set a timer for 15 minutes and just close your eyes. You can meditate if you want, but that’s not what this is about. You are literally just sitting there, doing nothing, resting your eyes. The hardest part is dealing with the fact that you feel bored and want to look at your phone - don’t. Being bored is a way to mentally recover from your stress. Looking at your phone doesn’t do this.

Then, work on building up a schedule of events in your life for your after-work time. These should be things that:

1. Are fun. They are things you actually want to do. They are goals you chose for yourself because they are personally meaningful.
2. Are social. You are spending time with other people with the same interest, who you enjoy spending time with. You can reasonably expect that they will be happy to see you, and that you will be happy to see them.
3. Are regularly scheduled. You should be showing up to the same place at the same time every day or week.

Gradually build up a schedule like this for 4-5 days out of the work week, and possibly on the weekend. Leave one afternoon per week open for life admin - laundry, cleaning, groceries, etc.

Don’t go home from work. Go to a place to do the thing from work instead.

The reason you hate it is because you expect to hate it, because you are “forced” to do it. Self-fulfilling prophesy. Sure, endorphins are good - but because you are priming yourself to hate exercise, even if you generate them your brain will avoid interpreting their existance as a “good” feeling.

It is possible to learn to love exercising. It’s easy, actually, since exercise is fundamental to human health, so the body is primed to reward you for doing it. But you will probably find it difficult, since not only do you hate exercise, but you like hating exercise. I don’t wanna psychoanalyze you too much - but based on this comment, it is pretty clear that hating exercise is something of an identity for you. I have all sorts of tips and tricks for learning to enjoy exercise (which really boil down to “make it easy, fun, and social”) - but they all fall flat if you are simply determined to hate it because that is what makes your ego feel safe.

I highly recommend working on the psychological barriers before surgery. Surgery is never risk free, has a long recovery period, and is often unnecessary. Many people with bulging discs in their spines live completely pain-free. Back pain, in general, is the focal point of a lot of research around chronic pain because it is so common, and the general consensus in the field of pain research is that most back pain is best treated via psychosomatic interventions, not via drugs or surgery.

As someone who has dealt with chronic pain quite a bit in my life, I really recommend getting a copy of the book The Way Out and using the techniques outlined in it. The book was a total game changer for me, and issues I’d been dealing with for years disappeared basically overnight. Seriously. Read the book, start practicing the techniques, and start returning to normal activity and exercise.

Relevant

I mean, you can believe that about yourself if you want. But if you’re calling me stupid, you can go fuck yourself

Most Americans support legal abortion, and there is no federal law against it. Abortion is legal in the united states in most of the places where people live. The reason we don’t have a federal enshrined right to abortion is because we have significant problems in election districting, voting systems, party legal structures, and campaign financing. Also because both parties like the issue staying in limbo as a useful political chess piece.

This is definitely the normie response to the actual situation. But everyone imagines someone drawing them and imagines being flattered. And they imagine the artist being hot and charming.

Someone drew me once in my life, and I still have the little index card they drew me on

Unpaid internships aren’t slavery because you can, ya’know, leave. Duh. This is a charity working to combat literal slavery. They probably have next to no budget. Lots of people want to do something meaningful with their lives - like combat literal slavery - and would be happy to do this. Same as how people volunteer to build houses and work in soup kitchens.

Carrying anything on my face is a terrifying prospect, IDK if it’s an autistic thing but I can’t do many expressions that don’t look obviously forced.

I’m confused by what you mean here - you mean your face doesn’t express emotion? Because you are afraid of expressing emotion? That will be a problem. As you already said you are working with a therapist - maybe this is something to work on specifically.

And I do live in a metro of less than 1m, but I believe my range goes up to a metro of > 1m.

If you have that number of people in your range, then it isn’t the problem in how much you are matching. It may become more of an issue when trying to actually arrange dates, though.

The clothes I have now are stylish. But I have no photos in them yet.

Yeah, no one on the apps knows how well you dress unless you have pics of it.

But more importantly, I think I’ve just realized I’m really not ready to date, no matter how strong my desire for intimacy is. I’ll be going through some medicine changes and therapy. Maybe I’ll re look at this after.

Totally valid.

It is almost certainly the shit pictures. If you are in “too good to be true” territory, you will be getting matches, but women will be asking you things like “are you real?” and “are you a model?”

As I said, grab a bro or a tripod. A friend is better - but said friend should almost certainly also be a single male friend with a strong focus on improving their dating profile. No one else will be as dedicated. Professional photogs can also be helpful, but for anything beyond “school photo” shots, you will really be racking up the bills. Shooting good photos takes a lot of time and effort, so your friend and photographer will need to show up again and again and again in order for you to build a good profile. Ime, it takes about 2-3h on average to get one photo, including finding a location, setting up equipment, figuring out a good pose, working with lighting, etc. Then you should shoot somewhere between 500 and 1000 shots - iterating, messing around with lighting and posing, etc. And then, typically, only 1 in 3-5 photos you spend the time shooting is actually good enough to include in your profile. So if you and your bro go out 5 days per week and shoot for 5 hours each day (2.5h for each of you), you should expect to generate one good photo for the apps each week.

Or you could use a tripod and remote shutter. The downside here is that you have no one to push you out the door to actually do the work, no one to give another opinion on how the shots look or what to try, you have to line up all your shots yourself and iterate time and again with delayed feedback, and there is no one around to take the edge off the fact that you are posing in front of a camera alone in public which is incredibly awkward. But the upside is that your tripod won’t complain about waking up at 4:30 am so you can shoot for 2 hours during the golden hour.

Other possibilties: you are shooting yourself in the foot with your bio; you live in a metro of less than 1mil (or SF); your misanthropy and social isolation are etched into your face and posture, and this comes through in the pics you currently have. Don’t worry, you can hide this last one with the law of large numbers in your pics. But also… it’s something to work on long term

Edit:

Re: fat loss. If you can cut down to abs and get a shirtless shot, its a bug win. But not necessary to get matches.

Re: clothes. Make sure your clothes aren’t just “nice”, but are cool or stylish, hopefully expressing something about who you are.

Eh.

1. Even dirty, slutty women don’t like constantly being give death and rape threats.
2. There are not enough slutty women to meet demand. Even if a woman is banging 3 guys per day, either her roster will fill up instantly or (if she never bangs the same guy twice) the guys she has alreadh banged will be back in the market an hour after they blow their loads.
3. Slutty women might want to fuck a lot, but they still have their preferences and will exercise them. Why fuck the overweight, balding McDonald’s worker when you can fuck a finance bro with a six pack and a razor-sharp jawline? And if you are that finance bro, why would you be on an app with so few women (as per, (2))? Most women will gravitate towards platforms where they feel safe and respected (wrt normal cultural norms regarding sex), so the hot guys will be spending their time on these platforms since they are largely ambivalent to anything except the existance of a suitably large and attractive female population.

I’ll note that this is essentially the dynamic at play on fetlife. We already have a real life example of how this works out, and no, it is not a utopia of abundant pussy for every horny dude, but rather the opposite - fetlife is well known for having worse outcomes for straight guys than mainstream dating platforms, because women simply don’t respond to (almost any) messages on the platform.

You could go on and have your pick of dozens of guys in an hour.

You can still do that on dating apps.

I gotta say, this does not seem like a replicable strategy.

I think “be open to meeting women where ever you go” is good advice. But I kinda doubt OP is gonna have great success meeting someone specifically by joining an IRC

@[email protected]

Awesome list. Big fan of no negativity or being demanding or needy. Also a big fan of using dgaf humor in your bio. Also a big, big fan of asking girls out quick.

A few things I disagree on:

• Motorcycles are hot. If you ride, get a cool pic of yourself riding. Like, a pic of you cornering on the track or blasting up a dirt hill (depending on bike type). But yes, don’t just take a pic of your bike like owning a bike is your whole personality.
• Imo, pics with other people in them are great. I don’t like far-away group shots, since it is hard to pick you out unless you are obnoxiously front and center. But a pic of you with one or two friends is a good pic for showing your social circle and how you look socially. After all, having friends is a green flag.
• If you are specifically seeking casual sex or non-monogamy, having other women in your profile can also be a good thing. Sure, a woman seeking a monogamous relationship may be turned off - but on the other hand, having female friends is a green flag for not being a creep. And if a girl wants to fuck, she wants to fuck a guy who fucks, since he’s more likely to fuck her good.

But I feel like the big thing I disagree with in your comment is the thing that I find I disagree with in most men’s dating advice I find in left-leaning spaces. It’s all “don’t”, “don’t”, “don’t”, and “no”, “no”, “no”. And all of the things you are warning against are good warnings - but the overall impression is one of disempowerment - here is a bunch of things not to do. Okay, well what should you do? And the answer (as you noted) is to get good pictures.

And I feel like the real thing I want to add to your conment is emphasis.

GET GOOD PICTURES.

Pics are 97% of how you succeed on dating apps. Bio is 3%. Your bio, at best, is probably neutral (though as you noted, it is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot). Picspicspicspicspics!!!

In order to get good pics, first of all, be good looking. You don’t have to be a Calvin Klein model, but be the best looking version of you that you can be. Hit the gym, eat vegetables, get enough sleep, get a good haircut, buy some stylish clothes, take care of your skin, and express who you are and who you want to become in the way you present yourself.

At this point in my rant, I feel like I need to take a moment to address the “just be yourself” crowd, who may come in and say that changing the way you dress or your diet in order to attract women is somehow fake or inauthentic. And my response is that “being yourself” is shit advice if you currently aren’t getting any matches. Don’t be yourself - become the person you want to become. Because the person you want to become is not only literally what you want, but they are also almost certainly a dashing fucking bastard. And beyond that - “be yourself?” Okay, fine, I will be myself - and myself wants to match with some hotties! Why is that an illegitimate desire? Why is everything else “who I really am”, while my desire for emotional and physical companionship is somehow inauthentic? Seriously, this attitude is just thinly veiled sexual puritanism. Fuck that nonsense!

Another side note: yes, you should lose weight and hit the gym or something. Around this time, someone claiming to be female will typically chime in with some comment about how “guys with big muscles are gross” - which is just such an obvious attempt at gaslighting. Like, go ask Arnold if he ever had any trouble with the ladies. Yes, some women dislike big muscles. Yes, if you keep getting huge (like, taking steroids huge), then you will eventually hit a point where fewer women like you than when you were smaller. Yes, long before you get to that point, you will find diminishing returns to hitting the gym more versus working on literally any other aspect of your life. And yes, women have diverse preferences on body type - some like bodybuilders, some like swimmers, some like ultrarunners, and some like big burly guys with potbellies. But it is a very rare woman who looks at an overweight, pear-shaped gamer body and says “ugh, hawt”. If you exercise regularly and eat vegetables at nearly every meal already, then good job, we are all very proud of you. But if you don’t, you need to get started on that shit yesterday. Humans are animals, and animals want to mate with other animals that are physically healthy, so be healthy

/rant

Anyway, go spend 2 months buying clothes and getting a haircut and improving your sleep hygiene and starting a (reasonable and sustainable) diet and exercise routine. Then go out and start getting some pictures.

Yes, you will almost certainly have to go out with the explicit intention of getting pictures for dating apps. Most attractive women have been practicing looking good in photos since they were 11. They’ve been practicing how to put on makeup so it hides their flaws in shots. They’ve been figuring out how to angle their heads and adjust their jaws to hide their double chin. They’ve been working on getting the framing just right so you can see enough cleavage to be enticing, but not so much that it’s slutty. Every time they go out to a bar, or on a hike, or to a party, or to a pottery class, they ask their friend to get a photo of themselves looking cute, doing the thing. Meanwhile, as a guy, you have not been doing that, so your best photo is a slightly blurry shot of you in a bar where your smile didn’t look awkward for the first time in your life. Why do so many guys have fish pics on dating apps? My theory is that it is because these are the only pictures they have of themselves. So don’t be a fish pic guy! Grab a bro (or a tripod) and go out and shoot some photos of yourself. Ideally, use a good dslr camera so you can control the f-stop and get a good bokeh - but high-end smartphone cameras and post-hoc photo editing can get mostly the same effect these days.

Your goals with these photos is:

1. Look good. Literally, if you do nothing but get a bunch of shots of you doing fuck all in different poses, locations, and outfits while looking handsome, you will be head and shoulders above most guys. Body language, facial expression, lighting, and composition all matter. Make your photos look good!! (Important side note - make sure you have at least one clear photo of your face, and one clear photo of your body).
2. Be interesting. The school photo style shot can be “good enough”, but it is ultimately boring and looks fake. The easiest way to make a photo interesting is to be doing something where it looks like a candid shot. This could be as simple as just walking down the street or drinking a cup of coffee. But your pictures are more interesting if you are doing something that is (get this!) interesting! So shots of you doing cool shit are what we want - pics of you doing a sport or hobby, pics of you doing a cool job, pics of you holding a cute dog, pics of you travelling to a cool place.
3. Tell a story. Since bio does basically fuckall, we want to tell the story of who you are through your photos. What makes you awesome? What will dating you look like? What are your attractive features? Get some shots of yourself looking focused and serious, and some shots where you look fun and playful. Show off your normal, chill side, your exuberant side, your sexy side, your stoic side. Use your photos to paint a picture of who you are, what you want, and what you can bring to the table.

Once you have done all that, if you still aren’t getting matches, or aren’t satisfied with the quantity or quality of the matches you’re getting, there are a few things to do.

1. Remember: location, location, location. The smaller the population around you, the faster your well of potential matches runs dry. If you live in a smaller town or city, there comes a point where you are better off just leaving the house and meeting girls the old fashioned way. If you are really serious - move.
2. Iterate. Improve fitness and style, and then take even more pics, replacing one pic at a time in your profile with a more attractive one.
3. Iterate more. Improve your lifestyle. Try new hobbies. Expand your horizons. Then get pics of you doing these new, even cooler things.
4. Make yourself real. The problem is that catfishing is a problem on dating apps, so many women are nervous to match with a guy who looks like he might be faking it - and with your awesome profile, you might look “too good to be true”. So build up your IG by posting regularly, and link your IG to your profile. Then a girl who is interested in you can see that you are actually a cool guy who does cool things regularly and has a thriving social life with lots of friends in his pics and liking his posts. This is pretty easy if you just do one cool thing per month and then post some pics from that thing. After a year, you’ll have a sufficiently full IG to link to the apps, and it’ll only get better from there.

Of course, at this point it is easier to actually be a cool guy who does cool things with friends all the time, at which point the women have won - they have successfully seduced you into having a life worth living instead of being a neckbeard who never leaves the house. Damn feminazis, ruining our awesome male lives /s

Also, the market is a bit saturated with MAGA bros. Certainly there are women looking for them, but the gender ratio has a skew

That’s how Hinge works also. The reason Grindr works is that men are more likely to be down to fuck in the Wendy’s bathroom with a stranger.

What if you have a fuck van and a fuck shed?

…asking for a friend