Why am I so angry?
Write it down.
I’m strip mining what’s left in the old Red Pill of < 2018. Something stood out to me. A Billy, very reflective guy, realizing he doesn’t know why he’s angry, but knows he’s in the anger phase. The guy loses his composure in a therapist’s office over a mild joke about tracking his sex frequency. He storms out, sits in his car, hyperventilates. His wife comes to get him. He spends the next in a funk and doesn’t know wh.
So he writes a field report on it. It’s a perfect OODA loop. Past tense. Reflective on actions. Distance from his emotions and objective. He has put in real work. He knows the concepts. He can articulate the problem. And he still ended up in that parking lot.
I know guys like the idea of finding a help manual, running through the steps, then coming out the other side a perfect man. This space has never been that, nor could it be that in a perfect world. Guys who have been here for years and have gotten their shit together, better than in their wildest dreams, still have these moments. Covert contracts they didn’t know they had, anger they didn’t know they harbored.
All you can do is get better at recognizing these moments and correcting them. I wrote about it in Frame… You’re working against your DNA: it’s impossible to stop deifying women, in the same way it’s impossible to stop craving sugar. You can get better at making better choices and accepting your human failings, that’s all.
Billy. Why am I angry?'
Note: I’ve had to heavily edit this field report. Billy was wild and all over the place. It was full of jargon and acronyms and basically unintelligible to anyone other than Rollo or myself. I’ve kept it consistent and lay-comprehensible.
I almost screamed in a therapist’s office last week. Over a joke. A mild, throwaway joke about me tracking how often my wife and I have sex. I stormed out, sat in the car, and hyperventilated. My wife had to come get me.
I’ve been sitting with that moment ever since, trying to understand it. Not excuse it. Understand it.
The depression that followed was worse than the outburst. I couldn’t work. I could barely get to the gym. I didn’t want to touch her, didn’t want to initiate, didn’t even want to want sex. Underneath all of it was a low, constant hum of anger that I apparently carry around every single day without fully knowing it. That’s what scared me most. Not the meltdown. The fact that it was sitting inside me, fully loaded, waiting.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know the pattern. I improve, I lift, I get my head straight. Things get better for a while. Then something small happens and I’m right back at the beginning. Bitter, resentful, convinced nothing will ever change.
Third time through this cycle now.
I kept telling myself the problem was not getting enough sex. But that’s not really true, is it. We went from almost nothing to four or five times a month. By any objective measure, things are better. And yet here I am, hyperventilating in a parking lot.
The sex was never the problem. The problem is that I made it the measuring stick. Every time she said yes, I was winning. Every time she said no, I was failing. I handed her the scorecard and then got furious at the score.
There’s always going to be a mismatch. One person always wants it more. That’s just reality. If “she wants me” is how I measure my own worth, I’m guaranteed to feel like shit on a regular basis. Structurally. Mathematically. Guaranteed.
And still I kept optimizing. Lift more. Be funnier. Be more distant. Be more present. I read something once about how a woman rushing to the bathroom after sex means she’s not really into you. Now I feel a flash of insecurity every time my wife gets up to pee. My wife, who I know gets UTIs. The goalpost just keeps moving.
I can see how insane that is. I can write it out and see it clearly. And I still feel it.
The thing I’m most ashamed of isn’t the anger. It’s how long I’ve been fooling myself.
Every time I resolved to let go of the outcome, I was letting go of the outcome in order to get the outcome. I wasn’t actually changing anything. Just adding another layer of strategy on top of the same desperate need to be wanted.
You can’t think your way out of needing approval by deciding not to need approval. That’s like sitting down to meditate and repeating “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.”
What I actually need to reckon with is simpler and harder than any of this.
I’m miserable. Not occasionally frustrated. Genuinely, consistently miserable, in a life that has a lot of good things in it. That’s the real problem. Not the sex frequency, not her, not the therapy session. It’s me. The way I’ve built my entire sense of whether I’m okay around whether someone else wants me.
I don’t know how to fix that yet. But writing it down honestly feels like the right place to start.
What’s next?
A quick pause. Praxeology Volume 4 has an audiobook going through approvals. It should hopefully be ready by the time you read this. The field reports from top tier men who fell on hard times, a great supplement to the series, Frame, Dread, and field reports
Thanks. we are back
Anger
Resident expert, Bogey, had a great comment:
I look back on the days when my wife literally would berate me for buying the wrong type of bread. That would have been a three day all out frontal assault. Though today I spank her for suggesting I “may have made possibly a mistake”. I struggle with the how to turn it into something someone can use. You have a gift.
Was spanking a thing for us in the last 17 years? No. Our sex life was far from that. We didn’t have a deadbedroom but nothing spectacular either. The Sex God Method opened up a whole new frontier. While, lol, some is quite scary. She trusts me to guide us into it. I can tell a guy to cave man her. I can tell a guy to just accept a blow job. However, how can I make him obey on the internet? Yeah, a bj halftime is normal here. A bj and a beer when coming home from a trip is the default. When do we yet make a message that says “HEY FUCK ASS. OWN YOUR LIFE” and do those things you want.
Then however, paradoxically we suggest to not give interest to your wife or ideas. Yet, you know what?, some of choose poorly and we have to decide if we can live with that. Your wife will do a,b,c but not x.y.z and you probably cant fault a guy for that. Yet you see all the guys here turning theirs wives into buttsluts with spreadsheets, coconut oil, and tracking her cycle.
What is genuine?
And it hits the point. We wax nostalgic because at the time it meant something personal to us. At the time this was an existential crisis for Billy. In a year or two it will be almost funny to read, and cringe to think about. But that’s how it works. That’s also why every woman who finds this place loves to be a prick about it. Guys who suffer tend to create their own suffering. Their women are bit parts in the stage play. When they suck, their women suck. when they stop sucking, their women largely stop sucking.
I want to leave some space here, because sometimes wives are truly duds, but any guy in the pit of misery will admit, they can’t tell the difference between a dud wife and a reflection of a dud husband. So we write things down, process things, act on things, and eventually get out of that pit and into the happy, fuck filled hill for men. It’s only then will we see if we have a unicorn, or a nagging goat.
If we could do all the work in our heads, we would have done it already. Instead, we have …
an ugly space full of angry people that does amazing work. The Red Pill would never exist. Self Help would be a bankrupt industry. Women would be well fucked and happy to avoid politics while baking bread, barefoot. But we don’t life in that world, we live in this one. Monkey brains, caveman bodies, information aged world, and so we write things down to change who we are.
Writing Changes Thinking
Most men believe in mindset. It’s a marketing term that means “Don’t do anything, but consume my product and you will be better.” It’s been a grift since the early 1900’s.
