This is a response to another post entitled False Escalation Failure. The post describes an increasingly common scenario in which, as a result of social pressure and his own conscious acknowledgement of his desire to get laid, a man attempts to escalate with a woman, despite the fact that she's not actually arousing enough and his attraction to her is not genuine. As a result, the woman senses his lack of enthusiasm and rejects his advances. This is something that I've contemplated for a while, and could never put my finger on. A lot of people piped up attributing the OP's post to sour grapes: a post-hoc rationalization as an ego defense mechanism because the guy tried to get laid and failed. However I don't think it's that simple.

I've come to the conclusion that this paradigm is a symptom of a much larger problem in our society: False Stimuli.

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Facebook. Instagram. Dating apps. Pop culture. Porn. The internet in general. In much the same way that these things create unlimited feedback loops of attention, validation, and abundance of male options for women, for men they create the illusion of unlimited female options from which to select.

Historically, a man's natural environment is one in which he was out working or hunting for long hours at a time. When he finally came home, he would be chock full of testosterone and maybe hadn't seen a woman in a couple of days. Suddenly, strawberry blonde, homely-but-cute Cindy Lou didn't look so bad. And if that didn't work out, there was always Helga to fall back on.

But today things are way different. Wake up in the morning, check your Instagram. Boom. A dozen hard HB10s spreading their butt cheeks and smirking at you. Turn on the morning news, and you've got neo-Con platinum blonde ice queen Megyn Kelly, smirking at you in much the same way through your TV screen. Leave the office at lunch, and there's a billboard featuring Gisele Bundchen, with those thousand-mile legs and Aryan Nation wet-dream features, smirking down at you from on high. Get home, turn on Monday night football, and who's there smirking back at you but perennial sports-thot Erin Andrews, telling you dozens of things you're not listening to about the New England whatevers and someone kneeling during some sort of nationalistic poetry ritual. And at the end of the day, just before bed, you dial up Pornhub, and there she is: the girl you've always wanted, slippery wet and ready to go. It's a really easy trap to fall into: no effort, risk, or initiative required.

The problem is that none of them are actually smirking at you. None of them even know that you exist. The enormous unspoken flaw in our society's ointment is that we are surrounded by facsimiles of options. Hundreds of targeted, microscopic dog-and-pony shows per day, put on for you and millions of other men just like you, intended to trick your brain into believing that wherever you are is the place to be. And you can forget about Cindy Lou. The two of you are on paths that don't even intersect anymore. She's busy reading through hundreds, if not thousands of DMs and right-swipes from guys ranging from Average Melvin to Abercrombie Model. The ones she's interested in won't give her what she wants, and the ones who will, she isn't interested in. None of that matters to her, though. All that matters is that the attention makes her feel special.

Meanwhile, the constant inundation with high-def replicas of HB9's and 10's all around you creates the illusion that the grass is greener on the other side, so much so that on a limbic level, it actually affects the quality of women you're physically aroused by. You know that you want sex and companionship on a conscious level, but because you're constantly surrounded by images of Victoria's Secret angels and gym-sculpted Instagram sluts, suddenly you're sitting at a bar with your latest Tinder date while your hind-brain is screaming at you "if I'm surrounded all day by beautiful women, WHY THE FUCK AM I SITTING HERE TRYING TO IMPRESS A SOFT 7?!" Spend enough time looking through the front window of a high-end steakhouse, and eventually you'll never crave a burger from Wendy's again.

These False Stimuli are cancer. They are poisonous to the mind. They are expertly designed, honed down to a razor's edge to be maximally effective in garnering the highest possible amount of your most valuable resource: Your Time. And the tragic byproduct of these efforts to hi-jack your time and attention is that they decimate your ability to experience satisfaction. Focus on them enough, and no matter who you are or what you've achieved in life, they will always leave you peering through a crack in the fence at color-enhanced, saturated, photo-shopped hyper-green grass that you will never, ever have the opportunity to walk on. Identify them in your own life, root them out, and throw them in the fucking garbage where they belong.

"Comparison is the thief of all joy"

-Theodore Roosevelt