Lie To Me
Why it's so hard to unplug, before (and after) the Red Pill
A few days ago, the world had its first AI-related death. A 14-year-old teenage boy set up a chatbot on a website to get away from the real world, developed a strong emotional attachment to it, and then offed himself to be with “her”.
There’s plenty of stuff in this story that I could talk about, but:
a) Societal ills are society’s problems, not mine. I can’t fix them.
b) If I’m going to waste my time ranting about things like fatherlessness and grifting parents, I want to get paid for it.
c) I’m more interested in solutions you and I can implement by ourselves, in ourselves, for ourselves.
That’s why this article will talk about self-deception – why people keep lying to themselves, and what you can do about it in your life. That was the part in the story that stood out to me the most. The boy, Sewell, was well aware of the fact that he was talking to an AI. After all, Daenerys Targaryen is from a world where magic and dragons are real and computers aren’t.
He just didn’t care.
Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back.
(And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)
But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.
Some of their chats got romantic or sexual. But other times, Dany just acted like a friend — a judgment-free sounding board he could count on to listen supportively and give good advice, who rarely broke character and always texted back.
AI chatbots like that are intentionally designed to never break character. These AI chat companies are in the business of selling experiences, and reality checks in the middle of the immersive experience they’re selling are bad for business. If SydneySweeneyBot keeps telling you every 5 minutes, “I am a robot, bleep, bloop!”, you’ll probably leave a bad review and move on to a company that offers smoother, less annoying interactions. There is no incentive for them to solve the problem. To keep you as a loyal subscriber, they have to keep you hooked.
As I pointed out in my last article, businesses will enable your bad habits and behavior as long as you keep paying them. And they all understand two things very well:
People want to be lied to. And they don’t want to wake up from the lie.
As I said in my last post, humans are far more irrational than they think. We want to believe that whenever we come across a new notion, we mull it over, evaluate if it’s true or false (either by reflecting on past experiences or testing it out in the real world), and then make a decision – because that’s what a rational person would do.
Not really.
When we can’t immediately tell if something is true or not, we take it at face-value. Only if we have the time and the inclination later on do we properly vet that assumption. We aren’t just gullible – we want to stay that way. And this has to do with something you’ve probably heard Rian Stone bring up a number of times.
Humans aren’t built for truth. They’re built for utility.
Way back when we had no language we could use to think about abstract things, all our perceptions were based on real-world experiences. We made an assumption that was in our interests and rolled with it; if we were wrong, we would suffer the consequences for it soon enough. That’s how we honed our instincts and learned not to doubt them. We learned that not all pretty-looking berries are edible. We learned to perk up our ears and be alert whenever we heard an unexpected rustling of grass near us, because there could very well be a predator there. Even in the modern age, if we doubt the paternity of our children, we have a 30% chance of being right. These instincts and beliefs were shaped by relentless experimentation.
We were risk-takers by default, and our experiences over time taught us when to be risk-averse.
We don’t have that now. As language and technology evolved, we learned to reason and predict what could happen, eliminating the risk that reality-testing used to carry. The problem with that is, being able to use logic doesn’t make you smarter. Logic is a nothing more than a tool. No matter how rational you are, if your first principles – the ideas you are using as the basis for your reasoning – come from hypotheticals and hearsay instead of your own extensive real-world experiences, you are guaranteed to end up with garbage.
But reality-testing takes effort and thoughts don’t, so humans, being humans, choose the path of least effort. And now it’s gotten to the point that whenever guys hear something that they believe could keep them safe from harm, they don’t just cling to it – they try to find all the arguments they can to back it up (this is called motivated reasoning).
Men are now risk-averse by default, only taking risks when they feel it is safe to. And it does more harm than good. The longer they cherish an untested belief, the more ingrained it becomes, and the harder it is to get rid of.
When the godly young man hears the tradcon influencer tell him to get married and have kids to Save The West, he takes it at face-value.
When the scientific young man sees a peer-reviewed study saying the ideal time to wait before getting a girl’s number is 14 days, he takes it at face-value.
When the good husband hears from his girlboss wife that it’s a confidence booster for her to always shave down there the day before she flies off to attend a 3-week trade conference, he takes it at face-value.
When the newest red-blooded male in the manosphere hears from a masculinity guru that he’ll never bang 9s and 10s without getting a Bugatti first, and he can buy one real soon if he just joins the War Room of Masculine Brotherhood, he takes it at face-value.
Because why would all these people lie?
It gets worse when he notices multiple “glitches in the Matrix”, so to speak – other things that are off about the person’s behavior – and instead of growing skeptical, he clings onto his idea of that person, because he’s ego-invested in them and scared of his world falling apart.
He starts lying to himself because he prefers the illusion.
You see this often with male fans of female content creators. Hundreds of thousands of men are engaged in parasocial relationships with these women (i.e. they have a strong one-sided emotional attachment to women who barely know they exist) on YouTube, Twitch, OnlyFans or whatever. Guys send their favorite streamer $70,000 in cash each, just to be a blip in her mind for a few seconds. She, for her part, gladly accepts the money only to hand it over to her boyfriend/husband/handler after the stream. Each of those guys believes he has a special personal connection with her despite knowing deep down that she probably isn’t single. She may be the only woman in their lives who isn’t related to them but regularly greets them with a smile and asks how they’re doing. On the other hand, the streamer is always incentivized to keep portraying herself as single and hide all details about her dating life, because she has seen her fellow content creators lose subscribers rapidly once it somehow gets leaked that they are taken.
Taking the Red Pill doesn’t make you immune to self-deception. I could write an entire piece on all the ways guys who are new to this space delude themselves, but I want to stick to the theme. Many guys who have already taken the Red Pill will feel zeroed out once something they strongly believed in is refuted and it shatters their sense of self. They’ll often create a new lie based on their failure and start living that. When a guy who has consistently been romantically and sexually successful dates a woman who puts him through the wringer, and he realizes that the warning signs he usually notices were all there but he didn’t see them, it destroys what he used to see himself as. He starts to disregard all his past successes with women, focusing on that one failure (this is called confirmation bias). Instead of the reasonable approach – get back into dating with your eyes and ears open – he swears off dating entirely, either believing he has more fundamental work to do, or wanting to avoid a repeat of what he went through (again, motivated reasoning). He goes Monk Mode when he doesn’t need to.
It’s like learning to unplug all over again.
It’s sad to see, because lying to yourself is significantly worse than others lying to you. Others will always try to manipulate you, even in innocent ways, to get you to do what they want. Even toddlers cry and throw tantrums to get you to buy their favorite toy, because every time they did that in the past, you caved. Some adults will manipulate you in malicious ways – lying, cheating, crying, gaslighting, stonewalling, self-abuse – you name it, they’ll do it. But when the one person who is supposed to be on your side throughout all your troubles – YOU – starts to sabotage your progress, that’s the hardest hole to get out of. The sooner you stop sabotaging yourself, the sooner you’ll find a way out.
So I want to leave you guys with something actionable: the OODA loop.
Those of you who’ve been in the military probably already know what an OODA loop is. It stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act and is a tool for rapid decision-making in many different fields. The only problem I’ve seen with this is that people usually give a hamfisted explanation of what Orient really means here. Let’s be honest: orient yourself towards a decision is some Jordan Peterson mumbo-jumbo. It tells me nothing actionable. What Orient means is to analyze your observations in context, using all the knowledge from your past experiences and any new data you’ve gathered. If it helps, you can call it the DADA loop: Detect-Analyze-Decide-Act.
Whatever you call it, the steps are the same:
[If observing and analyzing your self-deceptive behavior is intensely traumatic for you, skip all of this and commit to working with a therapist. I cannot fill that role.]
Make observations. In the context of this article, this is where you recognize when and how you engage in self-deception. This is where you have to put your ego aside and be honest with yourself; no one else can do your self-reflection for you. Pay attention when you start using shoddy justifications and ignore or cherrypick facts to preserve a narrative. Pay attention to when you feel defensive, guilty or avoidant when you’re confronted with the truth. If this is not your first time running through the loop, notice what has changed because of your actions from the last loop. Make notes in a dedicated document or journal if that helps.
Analyze what you’ve observed. Examine what’s causing you to lie to yourself. There may be some self-deceptive tactics you use deliberately for your own goals (e.g. fake it till you make it). Ask yourself if they’re getting you closer to your goals or further away from them. For the other self-deceptive behaviors, drill down to their root cause. They’re often driven by some kind of fear – fear of discomfort, judgment, failure, loss or even success. If you constantly tell yourself you don’t have time to be dating, there’s a good chance that’s not a genuine limitation. Identify the fear (or other emotion) and judge from a neutral perspective how valid it is. You can write the causes down in a document or journal if you want; if you relapse into those behaviors in the future, it will not only be a quick reminder of why you’re doing it, but possibly also a starting-off point for further analysis.
Decide what to do. This is where you formulate a strategy to stop lying to yourself. If the self-deceptive tactics you deliberately use aren’t helping you with your goals, it’s best to get rid of them right away, or at least tone them down significantly. Dealing with the other ones will be more difficult, which is why you need a plan to get rid of the root causes and confront the uncomfortable truths. Start by setting small goals and work your way up. Think about what you can do in the moment when you notice yourself engaging in those behaviors. If you’re lying to yourself on multiple fronts, consider dealing with 1-2 of them at a time. Think about ways you can keep yourself accountable. Tracking your progress in the document or journal you might be using is one option. You can also ask a trusted friend of yours to keep you on the straight and narrow.
Take action. This is the single most important step. None of the work you did in the preceding steps will mean anything unless you put your strategies into action. Often you’ll notice that you forgot to take something into account when you did your analysis or planning, or your plan isn’t as effective as you thought. That’s normal. Make notes on that for your next OODA loop. You’re allowed to run as many OODA loops as you need to, as long as you’re making consistent progress. Write down what was successful in each loop, and what failures or shortcomings you noticed. Reward yourself appropriately for hitting your goals.