Here’s an excerpt from the second draft of my upcoming memoir, Demolition Lovers. Progress has retarded enormously; the task of redrafting a whole chapter when I return from work just seems too daunting. I need to kick myself up the arse.
This is a concept which I think I’ll be bringing up a lot in the near future:
Really, this is a case of classical versus romantic realms of thought. Classical thought looks at the functional form of something and constructs hierarchies to describe it. For example, in Daygame, we break an approach down into open, stack, vibe, invest, and close. Romantic thought looks at the art and the “feeling” of something: assessment without breaking down into functional form. Romantic thought wouldn’t break an approach into the five stages, it would merely be “chatting up girls”.
Of course, both realms of thought believe themselves to be correct. Classical thinkers see romantic thinkers as lazy and unwilling to sully their “art” with dirty science. Romantic thinkers see classical thinkers as “square” and overcomplicating things; they’re unable to “go with the flow”. This is unfortunate because both are right and wrong at the same time. To perceive an object there must be something you like about it. You could then list those factors in an objective way, which would make sense, but it wouldn’t entirely encapsulate why you liked it. But to merely say “I like it” would be dismissing the obvious qualities of the object which you can actually measure.
I see a lot of guys in Daygame and sometimes I think to myself, you just don’t get it. Dividing up thought into these two realms has helped me to understand what it is that they just don’t get. It’s because they are romantic thinkers, whereas to be good at Daygame you have to start as a classical thinker, or at least try to be like one. Just look at the originators of the LDM, all classical thinkers. These are the people who you are learning from.
I think that the cardinal sin of the romantic thinker is to declare the classical thinker is “overthinking things”. This is what leads to the former declaring the latter a mental masturbator. In reality, there is no way to get good at pickup without analysing and introspecting. It’s vital that you dissect your experience to see what you must improve.
Here are a few other issues I see them having:
- The overconfidence in the impact of their verbal Game; they seem to think that the perfect assumption stack and tease will win the day.
- Greater intensity of the spotlight effect due to a reluctance to treat your first 200 approaches as a science experiment.
- Extreme reluctance to keep statistics and measure progress over time quantitatively.
Yours unfaithfully,
Thomas Crown
Thomas Crown PUA 