A pretty surefire way to know that someone is new here is if they're asking a question about whether or not they're doing one specific thing right. It doesn't really matter what it is, because the fact that it can be right or wrong is usually an indicator of an external locus of control and a lack of a personal mission.

They're looking into the future, calculating the moves to their end point, despite their interest not being the endpoint itself, but what they want to extract from it.

They want to start a business selling frozen banana's because they believe such a thing to be profitable or that it'd be a good way to launder money, rather than being interested in the concept or experience of running the stand itself.

The poster who is wet behind the ears asks "how much time, is too much time, playing video games?"

The optimist says "Nothin' wrong with a little bit of game time. Play to your heart's content."

The blowhard says "that is a waste of your time, it's trash."

The answer is individual and somewhere in between.

Most issues, will with enough introspective honesty be easy to rectify and will allow someone to deduce the way forward. As it turns out, human beings are rife with self deception.

Mark Manson addressed this meta debate in depth as a critique in his book Models, which I never really stop talking about because it so greatly understands and articulates how to solve the problem that men who lack vision to their future end up encountering when they start trying to checklist and research their way into the future without a real end goal in mind outside of "best practices." A very male problem, but one with maturity that solves itself.

The mistake that most people make when they're starting out is that they're trying to reverse engineer their way forward to an end point. Which can seem similar enough to moving authentically to the same end point (which instead we'd call self growth).

The classic example Manson gives in his book is to contrast day game culture with a more authentic approach to the same thing.

The day game PUA, taking Roosh's game plan approaches every woman who passes the minimum threshold of attractiveness and subjects her to his incongruence paying him pity unless he is so viscerally attractive their wants overlap by chance, not by skill at all. And so, the vast majority of these men report back approaching 1000 women with 990 rejections, 10 phone numbers, 5 of which are bogus, and a couple dates from women who took pity on them. Because he wants sex and believes that this will validate him, not because he wants to increase his skills of talking to women he wants to talk to.

I would argue that most, even the vast majority of men using this approach to meeting women as part of their skillset do not enjoy this. They do it as a form of compulsion or a means to an end. Many of them referring to themselves as robots.

Instead, Manson argues that men should approach women they are actually interested in, a certainly blue pill look at the world, but there is a truth nested inside of this message.

The irony is that for some men, being the pick up robot is authentic to their being. And these are the very men that end up being successful with this approach.

What they want, and how they will get it, are congruent. These are the RSD Julien's and the like of the world. Whether or not these men stage their interactions is mostly irrelevant. It's not really the point. The larger point, is that these are guys that have created a world, let's call it a "mission" for themselves where the way forward to their end point, and how they want to get there are completely congruent.

And so these two men, hopeful blue pill PUA and the professional PUA each given identical banana stands will have vastly different outcomes. Not only would we expect authenticity to drive a higher profit, but overall happiness can be derived from the process of running the stand rather than it being "a job."

Toyota has a concept called Kaizen, which is an internal manufacturing ethos to drive continuous self improvement. It is a form of the scientific method crossed with the very concepts we're talking about here.

Roughly, the process is this.

1. Plan
2. Do
3. Check
4. Act

Starting at point #1, we can expect that these two men will have similar plans having similar end goals. They will play out similar game plans approaching women, but this is where the similarities will end.

They will have vastly different outcomes and how they move forward.

Men who live authentically see each challenge as a learning experience and part of the bigger picture, they are motivated by their failures as much as their victories. This entire process is organic and logarithmic.

While the man who has reverse engineered his path to the end goal, instead can only refer to others on how they may achieve another man's goal.

That is why these questions are so telling.

If you had a mission, the answers would be obvious. The difference between one man's or another man's answer would be superfluous.

This is an absent meta discussion involving famous PUAs. What makes their lives possible or even worth living, for the time, is that it is their life. And if you read enough of these guys telling their life stories, you ultimately find out they did the whole thing for validation.

An external locus of control, authentic mission to find validation through sexual success.

Looks like it's back to plan.

So now we have a good origin story of how a man arrived into the dysfunctional relationship(s) he has in his life. Now lets rewind that relationship you had before she blew your ego and soul into a million pieces and ask your former self some questions.

What did you want in your relationship, and what did you do to make that possible?

For most men, they arrived at this relationship by accident, without a mission and maybe even gamed themselves into the chair with her. For most guys, they didn't get the girl because they had a mission and were really all that great. They were Children with Dynamite, coined by Ross Jeffries.

And the reason why, they were children with dynamite, is because they were an incongruent mess, without boundaries.

The writings here are rife with descriptions of how to manage this very dynamic of her pushing boundaries and perception within the relationship. But ultimately, the failing of most men who land here is that they lacked boundaries and willingness to enforce standards on their relationship(s) on top of the fact they had no real mission.

The origin story of these men is necessary because boundaries and expectations can only be enforced reliably by men who are operating in an authentic frame.

They demand things from their partners that inexperienced men scoff at, that they can't believe. Because the frame of these inexperienced men is desperate, the only expectations they can create and reliably enforce with the women in their lives is desperation.

And so, when she pushes, if he were to push back, she replies in a way that sub communicates you are desperate.

She laughs at him, derides him, storms out etc.

Most men identify with this perspective because their "mission" is her. Enough has been written to this end so I wont rehash it. Instead, to focus on the point being, that you can only enforce boundaries of a frame you actually own.

And so, outcome independence and an authentic mission are prerequisites to boundaries and requirements in a relationship.

And so now we've covered the origin of the incongruent man, and steps to an authentic frame to enforce expectations and boundaries in your relationship(s).

The cap stone, is that you get the relationship you deserve.

If you are an incongruent man without a mission who is not doing things women find desirable, you should expect to be treated like an incongruent man without a mission who is not doing things women find desirable. And from that, we would expect he has no boundaries and can't enforce them.

If you are a congruent man with a mission who is doing things women find desirable, you should expect to be treated like a congruent man who has a mission who is doing things women find desirable. And from that, we would expect he has boundaries and can enforce them.

Between these two men, one will have the relationship they want the other will not. But they both get the relationship they deserve.