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Comment by jeb | Hacker News Reader

I've found out one thing that will no doubt annoy a lot of people - if you are unhappy and depressed, because you don't have many challenges in life, or you are underchallenged or something (in school, work, etc), then try the game as a new fun activity. It will cure your depression, because it's so fundamentally animal, and it has the biggest pay off of any sport you could try.

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Not so sure I agree there. I'm no PUA, but when you are coldly manipulating the situation, I find that completely lacking in challenge. Like, once you understand some of the rules and know what to say and do, it's just too easy, and all you're doing is going through the motions.

It's absolutely challenging. It takes a lot of training, willpower, dedication and willingness to fail to be successful at this.

On a side note, your last sentence has an amusingly ambiguous parse:

"(It takes a lot of training, willpower, dedication and willingness) to (fail to be successful) at this."

He said, talking about all of life. >_>

And if you like that, I would suggest that learning an intricate technique to regularly murder bums and get away with it is another great method to improve self-confidence for the depressed young man.

Oh please, I'm no fan of PUA techniques, but comparing that to murdering bums? Get real.

More often than not, the picker and the pickee are equally aware of what's happening. It's an elaborate mating dance more than anything else - one that happens to end up in the sack. What, did you think women preen themselves for a night on the town out of some virginal and innocent hope for True Love(tm)? Men and women in clubs/bars are there for similar reasons.

Personally, that's not what I'm looking for, but I constantly wonder what of the PUA community I can pilfer for my own ends - certainly, their methods for generating initial interest should be of interest to anyone, even people like me who are looking for relationships more than sex.

I didn't seriously compare manipulating people to murdering bums, the post had an air of facetiousness to it.

But the analogy is valid. The end goal is to satiate animal drives by using people. One may be more extreme, but that is simply to demonstrate the poor logic that justifying this pattern of behavior encompasses..

Personally, murder is not what I'm looking for, but I constantly wonder what the of the bumkill community I can pilfer for my own ends - certainly their methods for generating intense blood lust should be of interest to anyone, even people like me who are looking to kill bears more than men.

Your analogy is not valid. You're ignoring reality, and the posts above which explain it. You are imagining that the women hooking up with these men are so naive/gullible/stupid that they went home with a guy they just met in a bar, expecting a deep long-term emotional relationship.

The truth is, women are a lot smarter than you seem to believe. They know what the men are up to, and they are willing participants. They are not being used. Your analogy would only hold if the bums were intentionally looking to find someone to murder them.

equally aware? Isn't a PUA's game kind of over if she realizes where he's getting his plays?

In the book he says that at some point he started telling women openly up front about the game and him being the pick-up artist etc., just to see what happens, and it didn't have much effect on the outcome.

A woman on a webforum I used to frequent actually mentioned this--before she knew about PUA's, she would actually reliably recognize them in bars, and figure they were easy lays so she would target them.

It doesn't matter, she knows what you want right from the start.

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