We’re already familiar with Daygamer guilt: the dissonance from thinking/knowing that you ought to be out approaching right now and the reality that you’re not. Or from being out on the streets and not approaching as much as your favourite guru might encourage you to. It comes from all the material you’ve consumed which tells you that you should be out doing your “25-30 sets each week” or “ten sets in two hours” and acts as an effective stick for beginners. The best guys had this tattooed into their arms on their first day and never looked back.
But what happens when you’re not a beginner anymore and you’re just not seeing the sets you really like? Or that you’re beyond the stage where you’re approaching girls for the pleasant feeling (or obsessive drive) of gaining increasing control over something you previously had no control over? Is the guilt pushing you to do things you don’t really want to do? Or perhaps you feel bad for not doing a set, even though she’s of approachable quality, but she doesn’t give you enough perceived reward for the approach risk?
I think that once a guy becomes a solid intermediate he has to emotionally unlearn the mantras that were good for him as a beginner. He knows logically that he doesn’t need to do these things but it takes time for him to feel that his lowered approach rate is “good.” He can see that five of those “ten in two hours” were obvious No girls and that he needs to balance quality with approach signals for the remainder. It’s particularly tough to do because most advice you can find online is for beginners and so he’s found himself in a battle against the world. This might be why intermediates and advanced guys like to congregate after a hard day of not-approaching to brag about how many sets they didn’t do that day: it helps them to convince themselves that they’re non-action was the right decision.
My motivation to write this post comes from a couple of guys I’ve spoken to recently about their Daygame Guilt and my own experiences in London. I had an email exchange with an intermediate Daygamer who felt that he had reached competency with a certain level of girls and so now only saw “juicy sets” (his words) infrequently. Then I spoke with Juergen (who’s coaching review you can read here) who was feeling guilty that he wasn’t going for the maximum number of lays that he could (oftentimes sevens would offer themselves up to him and he didn’t want to have sex with them). My advice for both of them was the same: do what you want to do; you’re competent enough now to know whether you’re weaselling or not; you don’t need warm-up sets or notch fodder; the dissonance is coming from other’s expectations of your behaviour going against what you really want.
My own guilt stems from having a lot of time on my hands and wanting to feel the rush of doing many sets in a session, hence spiking my mood, but I just can’t find them, or else they don’t pass the approach signal versus hotness calculation I run in my head. I usually go for a little walk each day to see if I see any good sets but usually, at least earlier in the week, I don’t approach at all. I can only really bring myself to do a lot of approaches in a session when I’m with a wing, which is ironic because that’s exactly what beginners are like. A wing makes you feel “drunk:” you lower your inhibitions and the camaraderie pushes you into sets. The difference between a beginner and me is that I’ve developed a filter which is correct most of the time, though I can’t help but question it sometimes when I let girls go.
I think that going on more Jaunts has exacerbated the problem. Going to Eastern Europe raises the ROI you expect. It’s just easier over there, pound for pound: the SMP is in your favour (a greater supply of hot women) and the cultural masculine-feminine polarity means it’s easier to create attraction. Plus you’re instantly shinier and benefit from coming from a higher status country. Lastly, the girls are fine with a larger age gap. It means that you can get, on average, hotter girls with better personalities for the same amount of investment.
But when you get back to London, your standards have changed. To commit to an approach you are going to compare the girl’s hotness versus how much approach signal she’s sending out. Hotter girls require less signal for you to approach and vice versa. Higher standards mean that that tipping point where “don’t approach” becomes “do approach” goes up.
So what is the solution? I have to come to terms with the new normal. On most days in London I don’t approach, and that’s okay. I got 221 sets of contact details in 2022 and I genuinely think I only need to do 400 sets a year to reach the same number of contact details; I trust in my pre-approach filter and can see with my own data that it’s usually correct. I need to continue trusting it more and more.
Then I need to take into account that I did 175 sets while on Jaunts last year which leaves us with 225 sets in London. Time for some quick maths:
- Daygame for 9/12 months of the year
- 225 sets / 39 weeks = an average of 5.7 sets a week
That’s not many at all!
Not only do I need to continue leaning into my pre-approach filter, I need to continue reframing my time on the streets as burning calories/getting fresh air/exercising/exploring the local area/etc. And to remember that others have done it before: Jimmy Jambone said at some point that he just stopped approaching in London outright and guys like Krauser and Torero ended up spending more and more time in Eastern Europe until they went full nomadic and only approached there.
Yours unfaithfully
Thomas Crown
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Thomas Crown PUA 
I have a slightly different take on this and would be curious to hear your opinion on it. I live in Canada where the level of hotness is significantly lower during the cold months. Filtering too strictly is a luxury I cannot afford, especially in winter. There simply isn’t enough quality volume. What I do instead is I take a recreational fishing approach where I give myself permission to release the fish (i.e. not follow up with a date) if I don’t like the catch.
So I do as you do where I go for a walk at least 2 days a week. Except if there isn’t anything hot, I still open at least one set per session. If am not into her, I simply won’t follow up. This scenario is not ideal as you need genuine attraction to run a good set. But I find it’s still a better alternative than risking falling off the treadmill altogether. I’ve had weeks where I only opened 2-3 sets but I never go a full week without opening a set.
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It depends on if you need sets to keep your skillset topped up, but given how long you’ve been doing this I wouldn’t expect so. Sure, when spring comes around, you’ll be slightly rustier, but was it worth doing the sets you didn’t really want to do? And how quickly will that rust go away anyway whether you did the intermediary sets or not?
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I am the busy flagrantly remorseless one 😔
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Very insightful post, like it a lot.
My journey was perhaps a bit atypical. When I was a beginner/low intermediate I was actually pretty good at filtering and targeting girls I matched well with, thus my conversion rates were not bad.
Then at some point along the way I kind of bought into the concept that not approaching every single girl that was physically attractive was “AA” and “weaseling” and ended up increaseing volume quite a bit, but having on average lower quality interactions which in turn squandered my vibe during many sessions.
In addition to that I started mentally beating myself up for not doing almost all viable sets. If I saw a 3-set with a stationary audience of 15 people I’d blame myself for chickening out (again detrimental to vibe). But is that chickening out or reading the room?
There’s the obvious caveat that you need to be on your toes and learn how to distinguish genuine weaseling from actually making an informed estimate to conclude that the ROI for opening a certain set being below your honest threshold.
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Once you’re intermediate reading the room (being aware of your surroundings, present, mindful, etc) is a priority 👍🏻
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Very good post.
Its difficult to handle the dissonance. Between the “what you are expected to do” and “what I want to do”. That is something what i will drill into my head in the next weeks. Sometimes wandering around for an hour, or more, no set at all. The problem I feel is actually not the weaseling fact. I am well known for “J-Style”, or going hardcore, and some slight psychopathic patterns, means I dont care what other people think about me, or “its the weather”, “oh, I am tired”, “oh, she has a husband”, “oh, to many people can see me”.
–> I dont care much about it.
The reason is easy: I never want to be there again, where I have been. The pain of being in some engagement you dont want to be in, and not going for what you really want (finest meat), is much higher then any weasel in my head.
The biggest problem is spending hours in street, setting up dates, cancelling up to 60% of the dates afterwards, because some inner beast says: No, you should not date her, you should not fuck her. Finally not being able to “present” any result. That dissonance is very, very, very painful.
Finally, for me its not the weasel (I dont give a shit), its the “not being able to present results”. Mostly not being able to present results to myself.
Thats something, what is well written here in this article.
Thanks Tom
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Such an important article. Really. And this is probably the most insightful sentence that will stick with me:
“(…) the dissonance is coming from other’s expectations of your behaviour going against what you really want.”
Thank you, Thomas.
However, I want to touch briefly upon this quote:
“Or perhaps you feel bad for not doing a set, even though she’s of approachable quality, but she doesn’t give you enough perceived reward for the approach risk?”
This is just an observation, but don’t you all feel that the longer your daygame experience is and the more success you have, the worse perceived reward becomes? For me, if I take a look back at all the girls I’ve been with in bed or just on a date during last years, I come to grim realisation that maybe 10% of them were really valuable people (interesting personality, good conversation, kind heart, above average sex).
The remaining 90% were girls that I wanted to fuck or date just to boost my own ego. But once I’ve reached a certain level of accomplishment with women and partially moved away from this pathological need to notch, I noticed that most girls are boring, unambitious, empty and too high maintenance.
In other words, three years ago I was looking at a girl thinking to myself “She’s cute. I’d bang her. Let’s approach”. Now I’m looking at the same girl and my thoughts are “Based on my experience, there’s 90% chance that she will bore me out of my mind before I fuck her on the second date. Fuck, but I feel I should approach anyway…”.
Any of that sounds familiar to some of you? It’s so frustrating to, over the years, become the best version of yourself by exercising, reading, working on your mental health, being socially aware, making good money etc. only to end up realizing that most of the girls can just offer you a pretty face to cum on for that.
Let me end up with a quote from one of Woody Allen’s movies, that pretty much sums my comment up:
“I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people with whom you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.”
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Great comment and I agree. When the notch count hyena fades away you approach less. Using this post’s terminology the “tipping point” would be higher up the scale
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