The follow article was sponsored by The Pragmatist’s Guide To Life.
Whenever you allow yourself to feel or be objected to an emotional state that does not bring you closer to your goals, you have failed yourself.
I recently wrote a book, The Pragmatist’s Guide To Life, that shows the reader, without pushing any specific conclusion, how to develop his own answers to the four fundamental questions every human with a shred of intellectual integrity must answer in order to reach his full potential:
- What do I believe has value in life?
- How will I maximize those things?
- Who do I want to be?
- How do I want other to see me?
In answering the question, “Who do I want to be?”, one of the most important factors you must determine is how your ideal self reacts to various environmental stimuli. When do you allow yourself to become angry, sad, or happy? Ideally, your emotions should spur advancement toward your objectives, though for most modern humans, emotions present some of the most powerful, insidious throttles hindering the achievement of their objectives.
It is natural to want to pretend you don’t have control over an emotional reaction to an unexpected stimuli. If you allow yourself to believe this lie, you don’t have to improve. This lie permits you to be content with what you have allowed yourself to become. But if you live this lie, you are no better than a Healthy At Every Size (HAES) activist claiming that losing weight is impossible, “so why try?”
The three emotional states you feel
Emotional states (when I use this word I really am talking about Qualia, any feeling) can be broadly categorized into three categories:
- Low Level Qualia
- High level Qualia
- Overlay States (we will talk about these later)
Low level qualia are states like physical pain, hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, or the drive towards an addiction. While there are no doubt hippies out there who pretend they don’t feel things like hunger, the reality is these states are always felt (barring some sort of serious disability, sickness, or condition that blocks these natural impulses). Our option is either to learn to endure them with dignity or succumb to them and take the action toward which they are designed to push us (taking your hand off a red hot iron, for instance).
High level qualia are states like jealousy, happiness, anger, and pride. These are mental states only experienced by social animals and exist to assist you in succeeding within the social world in which our ancestors evolved. You have complete control over whether or not you feel these states.
The part of your brain that determines whether or not you are to feel a high level qualia state is not able to directly read your environmental stimuli. If someone tells you; “You are pathetic,” the part of your brain that determines how you react emotionally can not understand the acoustic vibrations associated with that phrase, nor does it even understand the English phrase “you are pathetic.” What it can understand is the story you tell yourself about that phrase.
Essentially, the part of your brain that determines your emotional reaction to a stimulus doesn’t speak the same programming language as most of your brain. Before you react emotionally to something, your brain first has to translate the experience into a story. Next, your brain checks that story against your internal identity (a model you maintain internally about the type of person you think you are) and an emotion is generated if your brain believes your internal identity should feel that emotion in response to that story.
To expand on the above example:
- You experience someone saying: “You are pathetic.”
- You tell yourself a story in which this person is shaming you in front of your friends.
- You see yourself as the kind of person who becomes angry when shamed in front of your friends.
- You output state = anger.
This chain can be altered at a number of points. You could alter the story you tell yourself about the stimuli you are experiencing. In this example, instead of weaving a narrative about this person shaming you in front of your friends, you can tell yourself a story about how they are desperately attempting to look tough by tossing around insults. This would change your emotional output. In short, you can alter your emotional reactions by altering the way you contextualize situations.
Changing how you see yourself
Alternatively, you could change the type of person you see yourself to be. If your internal model of yourself is someone who reacts to being shamed in front of their friends with sadness or by being unphased, your brain will output a state of sadness or nothing respectively in response to that particular narrative instead of a state of anger. The book goes into how to do this in detail and there is not enough room here to cover it, but the general principle is simple: changing the way you see yourself can significantly change your reactions.
Obviously, you could also just modulate this chain reaction by avoiding the experience altogether.
All that said, our experiences are modulated by an additional, significant filter: the overlay state. An overlay state would be something like “being in the zone”, being in a manic mood, feeling irritable, etc. When you brain outputs state = sad, it is really outputting set sad state to X, where X represents the amount of sadness. The amount of sadness you actually experience however is modulated by your overlaystate.
A lower output of sadness is needed for someone in a “bummed out” overlay state to experience the emotion of sadness. For example, a woman in an extreme overaly state brought on through taking certain hormones may experience sadness at even an extremely low level of X and begin uncontrollably sobbing over something that would ordinarily be a triviality to her.
Some of your overlay state is set at birth and doesn’t modulate that much. This is where the concept of a “happiness set-point” comes from. This is the theory (supported by some studies) that an individual always eventually returns to a certain level of happiness, whether they win the lottery or develop a series illness.
However, to at least some extent, overlay states are malleable—mostly through lifestyle changes oriented around health. Most what we can do to alter overlay states, such as exercising, eating healthy, doing productive work, and socializing, is not pleasant in the moment. Nevertheless, a few moments of unpleasantness will make positive emotional states much easier to achieve.
I therefore encourage you to take careful stock of your emotional reactions and ask whether they are working in your favor. If not, you can begin to shape them by:
- Changing your experiences
- Altering the narratives you tell yourself about your experiences
- Altering your internal self model
- Changing your lifestyle to create a more favorable overlay state
These are the simplest ways to modulate your emotional state.
The Pragmatist Guide To Life delves into this topic in quite a bit more detail. I will have the price set to less than a dollar for the next couple of days for ROK readers should you find this compelling and want to explore the concept in greater depth.
All money earned from the book goes to The Pragmatist Foundation a non-profit foundation dedicated to forcing people to take responsibility over who they have allowed themselves to become. Click here to learn more about the book.
The incentive to gain emotional control is to understand how much there is to be gained by mastering it. Conversations should be like chess matches; don’t argue, don’t explain and NEVER get angry. If you start getting excited, in most cases people will pay less attention to what you’re saying and begin focusing on your loss of control. Be cool.
“don’t argue, don’t explain and NEVER get angry.”
Golden Words !
Captain Morningwood — A good way of putting it. When I began to deal with customers in Los Angeles, I was dealing with a lot of childish and neurotic people. No offense to the normal ones in L.A but this city seems to breed anxious and neurotic people. What I noticed on my first day on the job is that the stronger my internal state is (less disruptive and requiring energy-intensive management), the more effectively I can influence the internal states of others. I hated dealing with customers that were 20 or 30 years older than me that acted like children, but this was an excellent skill to pick up.
Article has some valid points. I’ve learned the hard way, that losing control of your emotions, and locking horns with the likes of half-wits, modern feminists and women, trailer trash, the garden variety morally bankrupt, the ghetto crowd, and the unhinged, only backfires on you. Johnny law, the corporate world, academia, the entertainment industry, the media, and government loves these folks. The above mentioned are kept employed in their made for work, social welfare funded, phoney baloney parasitic jobs capitulating to these dregs of humanity. The evil working class white male will get the short end of the stick, nine times out of ten.
ANTONIO
DANA My Welfare Fraud Story
Dana was an ex-crack whore and onetime Vegas stripper whose sugar Daddy was a Swiss inventor who’d built a nice condo for her to rent out. He did not leave her millions, but it should have been enough.
Dana however, relapsed. I rented a unit from her and myself and the other tenants bolted when she started dealing crack again. Despite owning the building she was receiving welfare.
Within a week or so of her relapse Hood Rats were filing up to make purchases and on one occasion I saw a crack whore giving a 70 year old man a blowjob on the stairwell to buy crack from Dana.
Of course Dana needed security and had made a deal with a Detroit biker gang chapter (The few white in Detroit that blacks fear).
After I personally moved out, I owed her $600 for rent. Within 12 hours of leaving everything I owed was stolen, even my passport. Crackheads had combed all of her units.
Then some irate junkie reported her to welfare for fraud. Who knows what that was about but vendetta-snitches in Detroit are common.
Street word through a fellow former tenant came back to me that Dana thought I did it. I don’t know why she fixated on me.
The tenant said the bikers were pissed. Partly because they were mixed up in her crack dealing operation and partly because she HAD at one time, dated a few of them.
I rented a motel in the suburbs far away from her. Had she come over to my family’s address (Which she knew as a landlady) I would have been cut off. I had fears of bikers revving engines outside my brother’s classroom.
Thankfully, though, she was a bit player in whatever operations the bikers were conducting. They did not care that much if they lost her and she had just been another blowjob Betty in the clubhouse who hired them on the side as enforcers.
But for about a month, I laid low. All because the woman had gotten into crack and I had vacated premises without paying $600.
In that instance, I talked to a buddy who was a cop. “Don’t pay her anything,” he told me. “Its CCE at this point.”
This cop, a fellow Polish-American like her, explained that SOME of the black police in Detroit were afraid of the biker gang she dealt for and were slow to get a search warrant though everyone for a block knew she was running a crack house.
As it happened, I blew Detroit for AZ.
Dana was busted after that. Twice in fact. She ended up doing a full 30.
ANTONIO
“Johnny Law”
When I was deep in this situation with Dana I asked a Polish-American cop (Who knew full well she was dealing and also had answered the Welfare Fraud Board) “Why is Dana Ribniki still on the streets?”
His answer was that the black cops in that district (It was mostly black by then, cheap rent) knew that Dana “worked” for this biker gang.
“Some of them (Black street patrol cops) are afraid of that biker gang”.
So there was no way to get crack-dealing Dana who also had a fair amount of money bequeathed from a Sugar Daddy off my ass. I did not snitch her out to welfare. I did not actually give a shit about her; I had merely wanted to get out of the building. Had been better-off at that time, I’d have paid her the $600 and that would have been the end of that. Plain and simple.
Control your emotions or your emotions will control you.
How many factors determine the social lives we live? Seen & unseen. “It doesnt matter what other people think about you” we’ve probably all heard moms telling their kids this as he doubts himself in front of the mirror. Im sure one could argue how its absolutely important what others think of you. If everybody truly likes you, desires your company, is attracted to you. You will feel good & have a good image of yourself via positive conditioning. Perpetuating the cycle. If however everybody hates you, hates your face, your body, your ethnicity, name, occupation etc… Most likely your life is gunna suck and negative emotions will take over in your subconscious confirming these beliefs of others & becoming your own beliefs. Essentially we manifest the image others give to us. A vicious cycle begets. You can believe inside that you look like brad pitt all you want. but if everyone else sees the elephant man, how much acceptance are you going to get?
@ Nobody
I said a similar thing regarding the Elephant Man in a comment on a previous article. I was hit whit a flame of down votes. Hopefully you will be treated more fairly. But those who doubt “game” here seem to be attacked with reckless abandon. And if that happens, I say F ’em!
Thumbs mean squat to me. Up or down. Im not after approval. If one person can expand their thinking by something read here and it makes a positive diff in this bleak landscape thats all i find important.
You keep getting those downvotes and Roosh is going to cut your pay 300%.
No more kratom. ::shakes head sadly::
To any of the guys here (and I suspect it is a very few of you) who have flame down voted me on the last couple of articles here, I only want to say F You! Keep going to bars and clubs and picking up 5s and 6s. I will use my disposable $$$ to bang hot, tight young poon until I am dead!
And, oh yeah… This:
AUTOMATIC
Trump Shot Cyrus Reality Check
The Hillbilly white trash, Guidos, blacks and Hispanics that comprised the Warriors were not headed to a bright future.
Crack cocaine would have gotten quite a few of the Warriors. Maybe 3 or 4 of them.
The youngest one Rembrandt who was only 15 or 16 was probably going to be a victim of AIDS; it was clear that he was gay.
Ajax would have come out of prison 3 or 4 years later in him mid-20’s to discover his gang was gone and old-fashioned brawls with fist and bat had given way to the drive-by shootings. He would have been the definition of nobody and probably a sex offender.
Swan and Mercy probably managed to find their way into the working class. You had the feeling that Swan was done with adolescence when he saw the prom couple and that he and Mercy were going to get jobs and that was that.
As for Cyrus’s gang, they were going to be wiped out by the anarchy of crack cocaine anyhow when Capitalism replaced the Black militant gangs of the 70’s
So there was no victory there.
AUTOMATIC
The WARRIORS did not really paint a bright picture for those young people. The Swan the white Hillbilly and the Italian nympho were probably going to be able to get into the white working class but the rest of them were fucked-AIDS, crack cocaine, welfare.
Its like BOOGIE NIGHTS. We leave Dirk at 24 years old but we know he is going to die of AIDS. As the director mentioned himself, “Dirk is probably gone by now.”
Some people are victims of the specific era that they lived in.
Dude, if you are all that, why is your first name spelled incorrectly, and you are hawking your rag on a fringe men’s self help website??? Don’t quit your day job quite yet…
1) Because Roosh recommends that we do not use the correct spelling of our name as a means to protect from automated troll bots that attack people in communities like this.
2) Because I think this community will become larger and more influential with time and it will be easier to become a thought leader in it today rather than after it is large. Your question is like asking someone why they invested in bitcoin when it wasn’t worth much.
Great read. A lot of men are out here being emotional like the single mothers who raised them.
Excellent and succinct point. You hit the nail on the head. Emotional men as the bi-products of single mommies. Single mommies are the modern black plague, and a cancer on our society.
I regulate with Kratom.
Kratom and Pink Bismuth.
+1 for pink bismuth.
That stuff is a life saver.