It is a common observation, a beginner starts with Daygame, sticks with it for a while, and then eventually gives up. The psychological strain is too big for him to handle. The whole thing is not worth the trouble and is speculative for the most part.
Or so he thinks…
Because what happened, really? The above story sounds plausible, but that is a massive misdirection. The beginner gave up on Daygame, but his life will stay static for the most part. He just traded short-term pain for long-term anxiety. The deal is against him. However, as you read the first paragraph with ease and no friction, so in the beginner’s mind, the story made sense. Let us build a model to understand what happens.
A model of the Soul
There is much interplay happening in our brains. We have our goals, but we also have the millions of excuses that come up against those goals. Hence, improvement isn’t a linear path of setting a target and advancing towards there. Instead, what happens is your brain tries to subvert you every step of the way. For a brain that is evolved for survival in the savannah, maintaining coherence and the status quo is much more important.
These are the roots of the so-called Ego-traps. Game is full of those because it deals with one of the two fundamental aspects of life. The purpose of all organisms, evolutionary speaking, is Survival and Replication. Game is the Replication aspect itself. To be able to address the issue of Ego traps, we need to first verbalise the issue. For much of the Daygame community, myself included, a mix of concepts from Jung and Freud has helped.
The Self
Call this the id, the true self, or the inner core. It is the very deepest part of your Soul. It can see the world objectively. In terms of winning and losing. In terms of advantages and disadvantages. Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Endorphin: the mechanics are neurochemical.
You might reframe your life situation all you want, but your Self knows. It knows your true part in the world, your true value, and all your self-deceptions. Essentially, this is the unconscious. We can infer its existence because even for people living under the spell of constructed realities, the following welfare aphorism tells another story:
If external narratives can fully rewrite the Self, then a man indoctrinated into a false worldview would feel fulfilled.
But he doesn’t — which means something inside him contradicts the narrative. That contradiction proves something deeper and more fundamental exists: an objective psychological core.
The Consciousness
In short, You. I mean, You with a capital Y. The entity reading and parsing this. Your inner monologue. The observable part of your brain. All the thoughts and ambitions that you can verbalise.
The advantages of Consciousness is that it can see far into the future via the interplay of df-PFC (logical) and vm-PFC (emotional) centers. This is why your consciousness is your biggest ally in your journey. It can provide long-term guardrails while the other parts of the brain will be reacting to chemicals.
However, and this is important, Consciousness can only see what the Self and the Ego allow it to see. You cannot rule your brain with Dictatorial Logic Power; you need to allow yourself to be human (for lack of a better term). Even something as simple as vision, it is actually largely regulated via the unconcious as seen in the schemantic below:
Consciousness is labelled as PFC in the front of the head
The Ego
The bridge between the Self and You. If you observe your thoughts, sometimes you will see that they have gone astray. You didn’t skip gym because it was raining, you skipped because your Self doesn’t like gym. It will whisper in your ear ambitions and the plans of the Self. Sometimes it will work for you, sometimes against you. It is the voice that tells you to stand up and fight for yourself; it is also the voice that tells you to go hide and give up.
Your Ego is usually described as your inner self-image. The beliefs you have about your own being. This is accurate enough, because remember, you cannot observe stuff your Self doesn’t allow you to.
The only realistic way to bypass your own Ego is by objective outcomes. Something impersonal, so you don’t mix the emotional mechanism of your brain. This is not perfect, because it is essentially judging by outcome, not by process, but at least it decouples a lot of inner frustration.
The interplay
Here is the psychic interplay that happens during your rebirth as a Player. You start with an Ego, that is, your inner image of yourself. That image is both affected by your Consciousness and your Self. As you put environmental pressure (infield time) on your self-image, your Ego will have to die and be reborn. It will have to reinvent itself in a new image. However, none of these steps is easy, so let us see what is going on.
Beginner stage
Every time you practice Daygame and face rejection, your Self registers this as a survival threat. It is a punch in all three relevant neurochemicals: Dopamine (expected reward), Oxytocin (belonging), and Serotonin (status). Your Self won’t just stand there and take it. It will fight back.
In practical terms, this interplay makes your Self class with your Consciousness. This is why your Ego reacts by subverting your thoughts. It gets contradictory signals. This is where all the excuses stem from, and this is where all the criticism against Game is targeted. It aims to dominate a person already facing mental strain into an external Ego rebirth (usually of the society/feminist-approved variety).
Intermidiate stage
This will be the state of things until you get results competence. Then your Self will start being on your side. This sounds good in theory, but it is exactly what causes Daygame addiction. Essentially, Daygame becomes the mechanism of all the happy feelings in your life, so you obsessively return to it. I repeat, the switch of the Self leads to addiction, not happiness.
This is where you risk forfeiting other aspects of your life to the pursuit of Game. It is a hedonistic trap with all its pitfalls. The Self can only tunnel vision to the source of happy chemicals and chase it like a drug addict chases the next shot of heroin. Let this go for long enough, and your (objective) Value will diminish back to the Beginner stage. But now you will have intermediate expectations. You built a hell and called it home.
Advanced stage
The last battle is training your Ego itself. So far, the Ego was a tool used by the Self and Consciousness. Not once was the Ego used for its true purpose: stabilizing the relationship between the two. This can only happen when your Consciousness has discovered your true individual biases, likes, and dislikes. Then, through lived experience, it has convinced the Self to cooperate with it to construct the sovereign Ego.
Only then can the Ego engage at critical moments to self-correct course. Life is not about winning everything (impulse); it is either about not living emotionally at all (cognition). It is about sovereign selective focus. Achieve this, and you can balance impulses (Self) with cognition (Consciousness), this is the true path to happiness.
Psychology in action
Therefore, the mental Game of Seduction is about training our inner mechanisms of the soul to work for us. Their behaviour is fixed conceptually, and that makes their behaviour and their impact on our thoughts predictable.
This concept is also freeing, because it lets us focus on understanding what is important for us specifically. All the guru advice works up to the intermediate stage; afterwards, it is up to us to carve our own path. No Guru can help discover the innate needs of your Self.
