Sergio Cantore

Why exactly does self-love “work”? TL; DR: It works because Jesus says so, and you are a fucking liar, so good at lying that you bought in your own bullshit. You gotta get out of there. ------------------------------------------------------------------- So, I’ve been on the (in)famous Bootcamp with Thomas in Sopot and got lectured quite well on self-love and the other stuff he preaches, which by the way I’m sure he also became much better at teaching right now. After practising it for a bit and reading other people resonating with the idea and applying it, I started to wonder why exactly it works. Yeah, yeah, you love yourself because why wouldn’t you, the gravity, confidence, women love men who love themselves because they’re authentic and all the other stuff. Fine. But why? Why (and how) does this thing work exactly? And how does this reconciliate with honesty and vulnerability? First, a disclaimer. I hate woo woo shit. I’m a business student, I’m very pragmatic and I have always been proud of my rational thinking skills that brought me quite far until now. Few things give me a boner as hard as reading a powerful concept explained clearly and logically, possibly with steps that can be easily proved or observed in everyday life or with little research. By writing this post, I’m trying to organize my thoughts and give myself a boner. Hopefully it will help you too. I’ve been meditating with a zen master since I was 17, putting more or less effort into the thing through different periods. After the Sopot Summit I became keen on understanding the deeper rules of seduction and human interactions in general. I’ve been meditating hard, reading quite a lot of books on psychology, hypnosis and spirituality, and I believe I came across some interesting realizations that make me able to give you a good answer here. Of course, feel free to build on it and add your own considerations in the comments. ------------------------------------ An Italian doctor that practices ago puncture told me an Italian word pun 6 years ago. It goes like this “la mente mente perchè riflette”. It literally means “the mind lies because it reflects”. In Italian, the word mente means mind, but is also the verb for lying. An interesting coincidence that our language inherited from Latin. The same doctor, who studied in China, also told me that in Chinese they have the exact same word pun, which apparently also rhymes. The interpretation I used to give was that your mind, by (over)thinking, makes you look at things as if they were more complicated than what they really are, fucking you over when you must make a decision. I recently realized there’s a deeper way to look at it though: the mind lies because it projects (reflects) outside what it has inside. What does that mean? Well, have you ever listened to your thoughts? Have you ever noticed that they tend to come out quite spontaneously good part of the time? Sure, if you decide to control them and dedicate yourself to think about something, you can. You can tell your mind “now we solve this math exercise” or “now we fix the car” and focus your thoughts on that. But if you pay attention, you will see how you might find yourself thinking about what you could have said in a discussion with your father five years ago while washing the dishes. Or maybe end up wondering what the girl you approached two days ago is doing while you eat. I’m sure you can relate to that. And you can also relate to the fact that if in your head you’re discussing with your father, you can’t really focus on the math or fixing the car. I’m also quite sure that when you meet someone new, you tend to form and opinion about him very quickly, almost naturally, and the criteria you use in the assessment tend to be the same. In a certain way, your mind tends to “judge” people, both consciously and (mostly) unconsciously. But Sergio, you said you hate woo woo stuff, where are you going with this? Calm down Billy, we are almost there. Congratulations for reading up to here in an age where the average attention span is 3 seconds or something. Now you can finally pull your pants off, the boner is coming. The criteria for judging people tend to be the same because they are correlated with what you think of yourself. Your mind judges other people on the same basis on which you judge yourself. It projects on others your own insecurities. As most of the things we do, this happens unconsciously. You are not AWARE of this, unless you pay attention when it happens. Don’t believe me, go out and try. Observe your thoughts, see what they talk about when you are in a social environment or in any situation in which you’re confronted with something new. In my experience, I tended to judge people a lot based on their physical appearance: “oh, look at this poor motherfucker, he is so short and ugly. Hey, this guy has crooked teeth/asymmetric eyes, this one has shitty hair. Oh, this is tall and handsome, but his legs are not proportionate. This one is black, this one is yellow (to be fair, I tended to be much more explicit and racist here, but there’s no reason to write it) etc.”. Guess what, I used to be quite paranoid about my own appearance: I thought I was short, that my left eye had a lower eyelid than the right one, that my teeth were crooked, that my nose was too big, I judged the shit out of myself in front of the mirror. It was almost as if, to get relief from my own perceived defects, I had to identify defects in other people. Being smart was another thing of mine. God how fucking obsessed I was (and still am, even though much less) with being the smartest kid in class. “You got 27 on the exam Sergio, are you fucking retarded? (in Italian university grades go from 0 to 30) What the fuck is that you don’t understand of this bullshit microeconomics? It’s not even nearly as difficult as the physics you did in high school. Well, probably the professor did the exam too difficult, that’s why. The grades will be curved up for sure” “oh, this guy next to me got 25? What a fucking retard, how do people like him even end up studying here?”“What? the other guy got 30? He surely is a chode with no life who studies 24/7 and clearly is not as confident as me” or “holy fucking shit I thought he was a dumbass but now that he got 30 he is clearly a fucking genius, I owe him my greatest respect for it”. Can you spot any pattern here? Now you tell me, what kind of attitude (in terms of voice tonality, body language, eye contact…) do you think I had toward guys I perceived as more handsome than me? Now that I see that, I tended to either shut up into pretended nonexistence or overcompensated with excessive jokes and clearly out of context observations. How about people with lower GPA? I just tell you, surprise surprise, that I have been perceived as an arrogant prick in more than one occasion, even though I didn’t say anything overtly offensive, and I didn’t understand why I gave that impression. Almost every one of us does this, on different scale and different topics (maybe you judge people on the way they dress, or how they talk, or whatever) but the mechanism is always the same. Do you think this applies to interacting with girls? You can fucking bet on that. How? Well, that’s what the whole “inner game” is about. The implications are twofold (long explanation incoming, brace yourself): first, you project your own insecurities on the girls, who you expect to think the same way as you do. Guess what, she doesn’t, because she has insecurities on her own that are likely to be different than yours. The world her mind created is different than yours, but you assume it’s the same because your mind tends to not really give a shit about what others think, and believes that the way, the “filter, the “map” through which you see things (I.e. your insecurities and interpretations of reality) are the only correct ones. In theory, when you grow up from being a child, you learn that you’re not the center of the world, that also other people exist and have ideas and desires of their own. This phenomenon goes by the name of “Decentering” and was first studied by the child psychologist jean Pigeat. Go check it out. Thing is, we never really grow-up. We actually keep our own interpretation, we regard it as the right one and expect others to have the same. That’s why when we discuss with people we often can’t come to an agreement, and we think of how fucking retarded must the others be to not see our point. Turns out, we are all retarded, Billy, each of us in our own, unique, beautiful way. Second, your insecurities come across in your “vibe”. If you invite a girl out on a date and you use the perfect lines to do it, but in reality you wouldn’t go to a date with yourself in the first place (because you think you’re ugly and stupid or whatever), then guess what? She’s probably going to flake you, because your acting performance lacked congruence. That’s why Social Prime tells you to expose your insecurities by being honest: first, you’re going to be congruent with them (which is an attractive thing by itself) and second, more importantly, you expose those bullshit insecurities that seem so big in your head out there and you find out that people don’t give a shit about it and they have no place in reality. Ok but what does self-love have to do with all this? Imagine having none of those insecurities. What would your mind be bullshitting about? If you accept your appearance for what you are, would your mind still judge people based on that? Nope. It would have no reason to. If you have love inside, you project love outside, and people notice that. It comes across in your vibe that you don’t give a shit, because you don’t really judge yourself nor you judge others. Plus, It is very easy to connect with the girl in front of you (or your boss, or the client, or your mother) and appreciate her for the human she is because your mind can focus, really focus, on the interaction in the present instead of trying to validate yourself by finding defects in her. Everything is much easier from there. P.S. I understand there can be some blind spots I didn’t cover here, especially on how the mind works and stuff. I might cover it in another post later on. Hope the main concepts passed through anyway. On a sidenote, it is quite funny for me (an atheist) to recall from the Gospel “Do not judge and you will not be Judged. For in the same way you judge the others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you”. Holy shit, looks like that Jesus guy was a smartass, wasn’t he? An interesting coincidence.