It was hard to actually define Dread. It was a vague term that men seemed to grasp, but no one ever defined it. It can be a branch swing from one woman to a better one, but with an olive branch in the event she invested. It can be the injection of anxiety in a relationship in order to create more sexual desire. The best and my favorite definition is:
Dread is the opposite of being taken for granted.
You are frustrated in your marriage because you feel you are being taken for granted. Being taken for granted is not pleasant. In any other endeavor, when you've felt taken for granted you just leave. Your boss takes advantage of you? You quit. You’re dating a girl and she takes advantage of you? You kick her to the curb. Everyone at some point has had a girlfriend, friend, or employer who seemed to be investing a lot less into their association with you than you were in them. Eventually, you'd get pissed off, and you'd leave.
There is very little need for Dread in a relationship when you can end it with little consequence. You decide:
"I'm not getting what I'm putting into this, so I'm going to stop doing it."
It's that simple. The mere fact that you have this option early in a relationship usually inspires enough Dread for it to function. People won't treat you shitty because they know you have the option to stop dealing with shitty people e.g. Women act as shitty as you let them.
So if kicking her to the curb is the natural response why is there so much focus in here on Dread, luxury branding, codependency and the other mental models? Because men don’t actually want to leave their women. Leaving means divorcing, and divorce imposes a lot of external costs that men don’t want to pay.
Sure, financially debilitating divorce settlements and parental alienation can be largely avoided with a good lawyer and preparation but divorce still sucks. Men don't want to get divorced. Men want things to be better. I won’t argue whether the financial and custodial tolls on fathers and husbands are exaggerate or understated. It’s enough to assume those costs do exist and that they are significant and painful to pay.
While it’s an option to ditch this relationship and start a new one, it’s not the first choice. This is the difficulty that men experience when first learning and applying Dread. They think of it like a covert contract: if they do more things and become more attractive their wife will love them back and they will have a problem free life. Fellow author who goes by the pen name Whinemoreplease put it best:
"For most of you guys, you've already decided that you're going to stick around through whatever bullshit she throws at you. pretty much dread is your only option, you know, unless you want to be hard core red and have divorce on the table at all times."
It’s like working in an old timey company town. You have a job there and it sucks. The paycheck sucks, the hours suck, your boss was an asshole. You want to quit but you can't. There is no one else to work for and even if there was the company town could just blacklist you.
The price of respect seems to be quitting and being broke. That's going to make any man feel stuck. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. No wonder it's easy to harbor resentment for women. It's easy to resent everything when you feel you're in a lose-lose situation. It doesn’t help that there’s a marketing apparatus out there that’s feeding into this quiet desperation. Sad and angry men are emotional, and emotional men spend money, they spend watch time and they over engage with baited content.
So what can you do? Go to your boss and say, "if you don't give me a raise, I'll get a job elsewhere?" He knows that's a bluff. Do they get to take you for granted forever, since they know they're the only employer that can offer you a job? The answer is "no." You can and should use Dread. I'll explain how any why it works.
There’s 4 main concepts in luxury branding that apply to Dread:
The Socratic method
Loss aversion
Operant conditioning
The scarcity effect
The Socratic method
The Socratic method is, simply put, a way of framing your questions in such a way as to inspire critical thinking. When you read in volume 1 that truth wasn’t as important as utility, this is what I meant. Another Author in this space, pen named Jacktenofhearts had a wonderful example:
If you tell someone
"your wife's an emasculating bitch for calling you out in public," you will get some sort of defensive response. Their mind shuts down and will irrationally reject any further evidence. But if you say,
"hey, when your wife called you out in public, it looked like you didn't enjoy it that much" he will probably respond,
"No, I didn't. She does that shit all the time."
"I see. Why do you think it bothers you so much?" And they may respond:
"I don't know, it just does. I guess it just makes me feel she's an emasculating bitch."
Every mental model in both volumes of Praxeology is about the Socratic method. Nothing in here is meant to be taken as literal, except for the parts that are. How are you supposed to know the difference? Well, that’s what you’re supposed to figure out. Every mental model in here is meant to start a process, not end it. Every model comes with a question. Where does this fit in my life? Does this help me get what I want?
The Scarcity Effect
For luxury brands especially, which you want to present as being scarce. Not everyone drives an Audi, not everyone has the iPhone, not everyone at the bar is drinking that Grey Goose. A car is a car and a phone is a phone and ethanol is just … ethanol. It’s not about inputs, processing and labor, but it’s the idea and what it says about you.
Despite being scarce, you also need to be accessible. You need to make the customer feel they could be one of the lucky ones that will be in possession of your product. Either directly in a trials or rebate or indirectly like Apple's frequent upgrade cycle to make you feel like you're losing out if you don't own the latest.
Loss Aversion
Losing money feels a hell of a lot worse than winning money. Really, what it means is that we hate losing the things we have more than we like getting the things that we don’t have.
My wife and I have 3 Italian greyhounds. They require dental work every couple of years. Our ex-veterinarian (in a moment you’ll see why) would put them under anaesthetic and then call us when they finished X-Rays. They would purposefully call her and not me, saying they found some random thing on the X-ray and they require immediate diagnosis and expensive procedures to know that it wouldn’t kill them. My wife called me in a panic. They had us by the balls. The worry of losing our dog was about to talk her into ten thousand dollars worth of loss aversion.
She handed it off to me and found out the concern was over a potential disease that could affect them in a decade. They were 7, the breed only has a lifespan of 15 years max. But losing a dog feels a hell of a lot worse than buying a dog.
Operant Conditioning
Generating a desired behavior through a system of rewards and punishments. This gets the most hate, but it’s how people work. We have a dopamine system specifically for this purpose. The reason guys go to the gym is because our hormones reward us for lifting weights. Women get a giant hormone reward for having anxiety and then releasing it with comfort. The reason sexual desire comes at the tail end of anxiety is because it’s literally a reward to find comfort.
For a luxury good it’s about rewarding the customer for making the right choice. Everyone knows that story of Steve Jobs and the new iPad. His engineers sent him a prototype and he found it was too big. The engineers assured him there was no way to make it smaller and he throws it into the fish tank beside them.
“You see those air bubbles? That means there’s space inside the thing, fix it!”
He knew that if the customer didn’t have a smooth, slick experience, down to the smallest detail, they wouldn’t feel as good about buying, and it wouldn’t reward their desired behavior. It’s also the reason why the packaging for the phone was almost a ritual. Expensive packaging that felt solid and even the cardboard felt like luxury. It seems so simple but in this book are many examples of men refusing to reward good behavior, and insisting that they reward bad behavior.
The combination and scarcity and loss aversion don’t feel good. The idea of not being wealthy enough to afford the Audi, cool enough to drink that Grey Goose, or not waiting in a lineup to have the new iPhone. These thoughts cause anxiety. Waiting in line, getting on the Audi wait list, they all stave off the anxiety. When you walk out of the store with that iPhone, you may think you're feeling happy, but you're actually feeling relieved. The operant conditioning becomes clear: buy shit, remove anxiety.
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An effective marketing campaign has to do all of this covertly. Infomercials, calls to action and email marketing are stupid and unconvincing. Why? Because Billy Mays yelling some variant of
“Buy this right now” seems needy and desperate. There’s no urgency, and it’s trying to appeal to your frontal lobe and it’s logic as opposed to your limbic brain and your emotions. Did you think that product was awesome? Did you buy that shit? And even if you did, did you really think you were buying something that you’d pay 10x what it’s worth? 100x what it’s worth?
Probably not.
Marketing campaigns for luxury goods don't have a call to action. They use the Socratic Method.
“Hey, this guy looks slick! He’s having a good time and he has an iPhone, drives an Audi, and is drinking Grey Goose in front of beautiful women. Some of this stuff may let you have a good time too. Especially since those other people over there look pretty depressed and bored.”
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"A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore." —Raymond Carver
