Summary: The Red Pill involves accepting that the world of sex and relationships doesn’t work the way we’d always thought. Essentially, this involves giving up on a dream or fantasy we used to have about how our lives would go. The loss of how we wanted our lives to turn out is a real and significant loss. We go through the stages of grief over that loss the same way we would if we lost a loved one. That includes anger. That includes depression. But the final step of grieving is acceptance and moving on. Learning how to find fulfilment in the real world now that we understand it better.


When something tragic happens to a human, he or she experiences a period of grief. During that grieving process, the person feels a wide range of emotions, beginning with the initial shock of the experience and ending with acceptance and moving on with their lives. It turns out that grief isn’t limited to actual tragedy, like the death of a loved one or having your limbs blown off in a war zone. People feel grief for all kinds of things.

Some mothers go a little batty when they’re 40, have three boy children, and realize they’ll never have a little girl. Some husbands and fathers go a little crazy when they hit middle-age and realize that all of the dreams they had when they’re younger will never happen, and they’re going to work until the day they die, taking breaks to enjoy watching their wife and kids prosper in a suburbia where they never imagined themselves. Some girlfriends go a little crazy when they’re 34 and thought they’d be married at 25, and today, the only guy from Tinder who’s stuck around to date her seriously has been a 42-year-old divorced, fat single dad and if she marries him, she’ll never experience being a first wife and having a first kid with someone.

When we have an idea for how we expect our life to go, even an idea we don’t necessarily think about and acknowledge very strongly, and it’s just how we always sort of unconsciously imagined things would be, and then that idea doesn’t work out, we feel a sense of loss. Even though nobody died and we didn’t lose a limb, we still feel grief. We go through the exact same grieving process we would experience if a loved one had died, but instead of grieving a human we’ll never see again, we grieve for the dream or fantasy we used to hold on to that we will never experience.

A long time ago, or a short time for some of us, we thought that if we were kind and respectful to women, studied hard in school, got a good job, made enough money to provide for a wife and kids, and started trying to date, women would like us because we were kind and respectful and were able to build a future with them. We though that around age 25-27, we’d find a woman maybe a few years younger who would love us for who we are and appreciate how good we were to her. We would date for a year or two, get married, start a family, have a home filled with love, happiness, sex, and respect, and live happily ever after with our loving wife and our growing children.

Even if we didn’t sit around fixating on our imagined future and acknowledging it as our dream, it was an idea we had about how our lives were supposed to go. And it’s such a normal-sounding idea that we never realized how much of a dream and a fantasy that idyllic life really is. We weren’t dreaming of being an astronaut or cowboy or president. We were just dreaming about getting a college degree, a good job, a wife, house, and kids, and living a normal life. We didn’t realize that the normal life was a fantasy.

Then, in our 20s, no matter how nice we are or what job we work, women find us boring. Even the ones we thought were good, decent girls constantly pass us over to have casual sex with fun guys who aren’t nearly as nice, respectful, or able to build a future with them. Time passes and we’re in our late 20s or early 30s and still not married. When we finally do get married, much later in life to a woman who’s a few years older and a few years sluttier than we pictured in our minds, and have a couple of kids, we’re happy for a little bit and think that our life is back on track. Then things get a little weird. It’s not the happy home filled with love, sex, and respect we thought we’d have. It’s a life of constantly fighting with our wives over nothing and sleeping on the couch, then learning she’s been cheating on us for the last year while we worked to support her and the kids, and getting divorced, seeing our children 1.5 times a week, and barely being able to afford living in a tiny apartment on the bad side of town after paying our wives off.

Maybe we don’t all follow exactly that path, for sure, but the principle is the same: We thought our lives were supposed to go a certain way, and we learn that this perfectly reasonable way we expected our lives to go is just a dream. A fantasy. And we realize that our life is not going to go that way. And even though nobody died or lost a limb, we feel a sense of loss over that dream, and we grieve for it.

Truly “taking The Red Pill” is accepting this loss, and eventually moving on from it. Recognizing reality as real, fantasy as fantasy, and learning to function within reality by setting expectations that match the real world. Only by living in reality and meeting or exceeding our goals there can we reach actual happiness. Focusing on dreams is just a path toward disappointment.

If you pay attention, you may notice that men who find The Red Pill tend to pass through the same stages of grief observed when someone loses a loved one. Because losing our dream for the future is every bit as real of a loss as losing a limb or a parent. Sure, maybe it’s not quite as large or tragic of a loss, but it’s a loss all the same.

First, there’s denial. You think that this Red Pill stuff is just crazy, ugly virgins on the internet who hate women, and the women they talk about are just a small segment of bad girls, but that you’re different. You’ll work hard and be a great guy and you’ll attract one of the good girls. Your girlfriend won’t cheat or drop you suddenly. Your marriage will last. But the more you read and the harder you try, the more you realize that everything you’re reading from other men describes the same experiences you’ve had. That we’ve all had.

Then, there’s the anger-phase. You hate women, society, and “beta” men who enable women and society. Maybe you even hate The Red Pill for sounding right. You start to think that women getting their just desserts and having trouble with asshole men is funny. If you’re attractive enough to have casual sex, you start treating women badly. If you’re not, you go the MGTOW/trad-con route and start pretending it’s your choice for moral or philosophical reasons or the crazy incel route and fantasizing about a male uprising and plotting to shoot people. A lot of guys spend a long time here, because anger keeps us from having to face our own demons and accept responsibility for our own failures. It’s easier to blame women, society, feminism, genetics, some kind of alt-right conspiracy theory about the Jewish Illuminati secretly controlling the universe to destroy the nuclear family, or whatever floats your boat.

Eventually, some guys hit the bargaining phase. Okay, you think to yourself. So maybe this Red Pill stuff is right, but if you do it just right and you vet your women really well and find a true “quality woman” that you can train…some ideal woman who’s 18.5 years old from a stable home with a good father and a partner count less than X who’s kind and submissive and whatever else – then, everything will work out for you. You did all the reading, you’re acting all the right Red Pill behaviors, you’re looking for all the right and wrong qualities in a woman. You can do this. If you do it all just right, you can still have that happy life with a wife and kids filled with love, sex, and respect.

Then comes depression, because that doesn’t work. Even Red Pill guys who are sexually successful go through this phase. After enough casual sex with enough women, it starts to feel empty, because even though you did everything right and it got you laid and it got you better girlfriends, you still hadn’t let go. You were still looking for a substitute for the dream you used to have. But what you found wasn’t as good as the dream. How can it be? It was reality, and you were trying to use reality to fill a dream-sized hole. And you wonder what the point of it all is. Guys who aren’t successful hit this phase sooner because they try out this Red Pill stuff hoping for an easy trick to get laid or get a girlfriend, and it turns out not to be an easy trick, so they arrive at depression, figuring there’s nothing left and they’ve tried everything now and even this last ditch crazy Red Pill stuff didn’t work for them.

Finally comes acceptance. You’ve truly let your dreams and fantasies go and have set reasonable expectations based on how things actually work. You’ve found things that bring you fulfilment without requiring women, or anyone else, to play along, but you also know how to fairly reliably get somewhere with a woman when you feel like it. The world isn’t your oyster. There are limitations on what you can do and accomplish, same as all of us, but you’re okay with that because life isn’t so bad after all.

It’s okay to feel sad. Realizing that the world of sex and relationships doesn’t work quite the way you’d always thought is something you’re naturally going to grieve over. It’s okay to feel angry, and depressed, or even both at once. Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s not okay to be an angry man or that you were stupid for ever having the dream you had. We all had that dream, and losing it made all of us angry. That’s what spawned The Red Pill. Nobody talks about this and nobody is here for men in this capacity. Part of the reason The Red Pill is here is so that you know you’re not alone. You weren’t stupid for thinking something perfectly reasonable to think, having what seemed like a perfectly normal dream, and getting angry when that didn’t work out. You were normal, and that’s fine.

But now it’s time to move on, stay focused on the end goal, and find your place in the real world. And that path is simpler than you think. Hone your body – work out, eat right, pick up some physical hobbies that interest you. Excel professionally – get educated, get a good job, make bank, save most of your money, and even invest wisely and maybe do a side hustle. Hone your mind – read, learn skills and hobbies, stay informed. (And read shit other than manosphere websites.) Our ancestors weren’t sitting around crying about women. They were playing sports, creating art, building shit, being productive, and having fun. Women happened as a by-product of a life well-lived. But fulfillment came before women came.