• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

LIFE UNCIVILIZED

Dating And Life Advice For Men

  • ARTICLES
    • BEST ARTICLES
    • ALL ARTICLES
  • COMPLETE DATING COURSE
  • COACHING
  • E-BOOKS
  • ABOUT
    • CONTACT

Archives for June 2018

What Makes A Man Chronically Unattractive?

by Visko Matich · Jun 28, 2018

what makes a man unattractive

IT DOESN’T MATTER if you’retall, good looking and successful. You can still be chronically unattractive to the opposite sex.

The reason for this doesn’t lie in anything that’s missing from your life. You don’t need more money, better looks, or more status. In fact, the reason has nothing to do with what makes someone conventionally attractive at all.

The reason lies in simple choices that you’re making every single day.

WHAT ATTRACTIVENESS IS NOT

There’s this show in the UK called Love Island. It’s unbridled reality TV trash, but like anyone born after 1990, I watch it without a hint of irony.

The premise of the show this:

A bunch of hot single people living in one villa. They either couple up and make it work, or they get voted off. The final couple wins £50,000.

Simple, right?

As you can imagine, this makes the singles couple up pretty fast. And naturally, the more time they spend time together, the more they develop feelings for one another. And because the producers of the show are crafty (and require drama) they frequently put obstacles in the way of each developing relationship. Which, in turn, strengthens or breaks the bond between the respective couples.

With me so far?

Good.

Because it’s within this show, that despite being good looking, tall, educated, successful, and surrounded by single women, one man just can’t catch a break.

He’s called, or at least, I will call him, Dr. Alex. And no matter what he does, no girl seems to be interested in him.

Doesn’t seem so bad?

It’s a strange situation. Everyone in the villa loves him, and the public has been extremely fond of him ever since he first appeared. He’s polite, even-tempered, he helps people out, and, if Twitter and the Media are to be believed, he’d make a great boyfriend.

Yet despite this, no girl on the show is interested him. He’s always a friend. Nothing more. Even when it seems like he might have something… Nope, straight back to where he started.

Why? If he’s so great, why can’t he keep a girl’s interest?

The answer lies in how being unattractive works.

HOW BEING UNATTRACTIVE WORKS

Watching the show, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by this guy’s unfortunate story.

We’re so often told that attractiveness is a set of traits (usually height, looks, and success), yet here was a guy who ticked all of the boxes but was still wiping out relentlessly. As far as conventional wisdom was concerned, it didn’t make any sense.

Girl’s should have been finding him attractive. But for some reason, they weren’t.

Well, there’s a simple reason for that.

When it comes to attraction, conventional wisdom is full of shit.

No matter how attractive you may inherently be, being unattractive is always just a few bad decisions away. Decisions about how you act, how you think, and most of all, how you see.

And far from just applying to Doctors on reality TV shows, these are decisions that apply to all of us.

REPRESSING YOURSELF IS UNATTRACTIVE

A key hallmark of someone who is unattractive is repression. There is a divide between what they truly want, and what they actually do. When it comes to Dr. Alex from Love Island, this is his most obvious flaw. He’s constantly repressing what he actually wants and feels until its too late.

And if we’re honest, this is something we’re all guilty of.

In our lives, repression usually manifests itself in three ways:

You repress your sexuality

When you want to talk to a girl. You don’t do it. When you want to kiss a girl, you don’t do it. When you want to do anything even vaguely connected to your sexuality, you don’t do it.

It frightens you. It feels wrong. So you don’t do it.

The result of this is that people stop feeling anything for you sexually because sexuality thrives on mutual reciprocity and expression of desire.

You repress your spontaneity

Because there is such a clear divide between what is, essentially, your consciousness (a.k.a you), and your actions, your habitual repression leaves you with an inability to be spontaneous.

You’re constantly filtering through your emotions and thoughts deciding what is and is not appropriate, instead of running with what you feel and what is true for you.

The result of this is that you aren’t fun, and you are rarely ever funny. You’re simply nice, or pleasant – because everything you do is artificially appropriate.

You repress your opinion

When you have something you truly want to say or something you truly feel, you don’t express it. You either couch it in softer phrases, drain all the genuine feeling from it, or you don’t say it all. The reason for this is that you don’t accept that it’s normal to voice your opinions and feelings and that you do not need permission to do so.

Incidentally, to yourself, it might seem like you’re calm and collected when you talk this way, but to everyone else you just come off as cold and robotic.

The result is that people struggle to connect with you on an emotional and sexual level. In other words, regardless of how attractive you are – you’ve now made yourself unattractive through people’s lack of excitement and comfort they feel with you.

You don’t give it to them so why would they give it to you? Sexual interest isn’t charity.

The reason you do this is that you’re avoiding being vulnerable. Expression requires vulnerability – it inherently invites rejection and the potential of you being found to be unlikeable. This is why I always say the easiest way to develop charisma is to stop trying to be likable.

A lot of people praised Dr. Alex when he finally told a girl that he liked her, but this was wrong. There was no real desire, all he had was words. He may as well have been reading from a script.

YOURNARRATIVE IS UNATTRACTIVE

Underlying repression is always a narrative that justifies it.

The narrative is usually something like this:

I deserve to be treated the way I treat others.

But in reality, this narrative is felt to be like this:

I ought to be treated the way I want to be treated.

In other words, the world is there to serve you. This is narcissism, even if externally it comes off as shyness.

Dr. Alex, like most people who seem to operate from patterns of repression, is on the outside quite nice and pleasant, but when you really look into his behavior, he’s engaging in something that’s referred to as silent agreements.

When you use silent agreements you act in a nice and pleasant way because you believe that doing so means the other person ‘ought’ to do something in return for you, even if the other person hasn’t been made aware of this. They’ve unknowingly been put into a contract that they have no idea exists.

And of course, when you act this way, and the person doesn’t do what you think they ‘ought’ to do, you blame them.

Because you ‘ought’ to be treated a certain way, it’s never your fault when you aren’t.

And how could it be? You were entitled to something, and you didn’t get it, despite doing everything that you considered was right to earn it.

Tell me if this doesn’t strike you as that?

On a conscious level, silent agreements and blame are how you operate. But on an unconscious level, you’re telling yourself a different story.

The reason you engage in silent agreements and blame is that you’ve consistently told yourself that it’s not okay to express what you want. Whether it’s bad, shameful, or not appropriate – whatever the reason is, the message is clear.

You’re not allowed to be open, transparent and honest about what you want. It’s not okay, because you’re not okay.

At least, in your own mind.

This is most obvious when you actually, for once, try to express yourself. The language of expression is, as Mikhail Bakhtin says, alien to you. It’s awkward, unnatural, and you probably try to dilute it with irony or a laugh – despite sincerely thinking and feeling what you’re trying to say.

YOURPERSPECTIVE IS UNATTRACTIVE

Underlying a narrative is always a habit of perceiving things not as they are, but how we’d like them to be.

When we feel ourselves to be a certain way, and the world to be a certain way, we begin to look for things in the world that correspond to our feelings. We do this unconsciously.

And so good are we at doing this, that the more we see things that justify our feelings, the more we unconsciously train ourselves to keep doing this.

When we, like Dr. Alex, feel that we are blameless and that we aren’t given something we deserve, we look for, and start to notice details about people that suggest they’re treating us unfairly or victimizing us.*

We look for details that support and ramify the feelings that we’re already indulging in, but in doing so, we don’t just teach ourselves to perceive things (in this instance, people) negatively, we also teach ourselves to avoid seeing things positively.

We don’t see the “selfish person’s” kindness, we don’t see the members of the opposite gender who aren’t sexist, and in the instance of Dr. Alex, we don’t see all the clear signs that we are driving people away from ourselves and that what these people are feeling is normal and understandable.

Our perspective and our narcissism slowly erode our ability to empathize with others and accurately self-reflect.

How we choose to see is one of the most important decisions we make.

BEING UNATTRACTIVENE IS AN EVERY DAY CHOICE

The most important thing about the details above is the one thread that ties them all together.

They’re all your fault.

Nobody else’s. Not the world’s. Not society’s.

Your’s.

Dr. Alex always had a choice to take responsibility for his own actions and results but instead chose to engage in blame and avoidance.

But if he simply took responsibility for that element of this life, everything would begin to fall into place, and he could capitalize on the abundant natural advantages he already has.

Each of the unattractive flaws results from a fundamental choice that’s being made. A choice that you, I and everyone else constantly makes.

What we choose to stop ourselves from doing, what we choose to listen to, and what we choose to see.

An irony of this is that people who make unattractive choices often say “if only they saw me for who I really am.”

But the truth is, they see you exactly as you are in that moment – insecure, afraid, and narcissistic. All as a result of the poor choices that you’ve made and continue to make.

But like any choice, it exists moment to moment. And just as you’ve made one choice at this moment, so too can you make another in the next one.

This time, let it be the one that says “you’re okay.”

Because as soon as you do, you’d be right.

…..

*This applies to countless other situations, for example:

When we’ve felt, for whatever reason that our partner isn’t that great, we look for and start to notice details about them, either physically or in their behavior that makes them seem undesirable.

When we feel that women are whores or men are pigs, we look for, and start to notice details about their behavior that exemplifies their ‘innate’ immoral character, that is universal to all of them.*

**People will seek others out to share in the views. An easy example of this is someone bitching about their partner to a friend. A broader example would be people who join isolated communities on the internet that reflect their negative worldview. I.e Incels, The Red Pill, or huge chunks of Tumblr.

Photo by Pierrick VAN-TROOST on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Best Articles, Dating Advice For Men, Uncategorised Tagged With: Attraction, Attractive, Dating, Relationships

The Most Important Moments In Your Life Are Not Where You Think

by Visko Matich · Jun 24, 2018

WHAT IF the entire way we thought about life was wrong?

We often think the most important moments in life are the big events, but what if it was actually the small, boring, almost imperceptible moments that mattered the most?

Like anyone, I’ve always sought a narrative to base my sense of self around. Events like the near-death of my father, witnessing a terrible crime, and seriously endangering my life are all things I look at and think “yes, this was the turning point in my life, and after this everything was different.”

But is that actually true?

(For those of you who haven’t done my Dating Course – the answer is ‘no.’)

We like to look at events that hold meaning for us – the end of a relationship, the loss of someone we love – as events that form who we are, and likewise, we look to the future for events – achieving our dreams, finding true love – that will similarly define our lives, and in turn, make them worth living.

The idea that important events define the meaning, direction, and quality of life is central to the accepted idea of personal development. But even more than that, it’s central to the way we all habitually think about the lives of ourselves and others.

Yet to the two greatest authors that ever lived this was precisely the wrong way to look at living.

And it turns out they were right.

MOMENTS IN LIFE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

When we look at life as series of important events, we’re measuring life by very specific, limited measuring points. Life becomes about these events, and it becomes about the quality and intensity of these events.

Relationships become about passion and excitement, life goals become about success and overcoming extreme challenges, and the meaning of life becomes some kind of heroes journey. A journey which we, as the sole most important person, go on and achieve great, important things.

The problems with this are that whilst these events seem important from a desire to string together a narrative, they aren’t actually as meaningful or important as we would think.

Whether we’re looking to get better at being single, kick our anxiety’s ass, or just change our life so we’ll be a little happier – it turns out the answer isn’t where we’ve been told to look, but is just where it’s always been.

Right in front of our eyes.

But in order to explain this, I’m going to need to run a short class on classic literature. Which, I promise, isn’t nearly as boring as it sounds.

A SHORT CLASS ON CLASSIC LITERATURE THAT’S EXACTLY AS BORING AS IT SOUNDS

“Bryullóv (a painter) one day corrected a pupil’s study. The pupil, having glanced at the altered drawing, exclaimed: “Why, you only touched it a tiny bit, but it is quite another thing.” Bryullóv replied: “Art begins where the tiny bit begins.”

That saying is strikingly true not only of art but of all life. One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins – where what seem to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place – where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another – it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur.” – Tolstoy – Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves

Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky were two of the greatest authors of all time.

The former was a Count, landowner, anarchist Christian, and novelist who wrote enormous, intricate novels always attempting to prove what was true and correct about human life.

The latter was an ex-con, gambler, orthodox Christian and novelist who wrote enormous, intricate novels always attempting to prove that there was a dark shadow to human ideas and motivations.

It might seem on the surface that these two authors were remarkably different. And if you were to read them without paying close attention that might seem like the case.

But you’d be wrong.

Although seeming to be different, both writers operated from an extremely similar understanding of life; that everything hinged on infinite small moments.

This would undoubtedly be their favorite song.

Seen as a tragic novel, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is, in fact, a condemnation of romantic love, narcissism, and evil, all of which Tolstoy embodies in the main character of Anna.

Tolstoy tells a story of a woman whose passionate love alienates her from a judgemental society, and whose poor choices in key moments eventually doom her to a terrible and tragic end. So masterfully does he do this that we feel great sympathy for her.

If we were to judge the novel by its big moments the novel would, in fact, be tragic. But behind these big moments, Tolstoy tells another more sinister story.

Littered throughout the novel are small, almost imperceptible insights into Anna’s thoughts, motivations, and psychology that are tucked away in dense paragraphs or various other details. Throughout we are consistently told that Anna believes herself subject to fate, that she consistently neglects the care of her children, that she is constantly looking at her own appearance, that she wants complete devotion from her lover above all, that her life is empty of anything meaningful because she fills it with trifles, that without any of this she doesn’t think life is worth living, and in fact, believes she is fated by an omen to die.

All of these tiny, tiny moments happen so frequently and so imperceptibly, that although it appears that Anna’s life changes in big moments, her life and decisions have in fact been made and lived long before, in all the moments she and we failed to notice.

In thousands of moments throughout the book Anna neglects responsibility, and indulges in narcissism more and more.*

Tolstoy makes this as hard to spot as our own behavior, drowning out these small details in enormous, dramatic moments. And this is precisely what Tolstoy is trying to tell us – that if we perceive life only in big moments, then we fail to understand what determines those big moments, and in turn life itself. We fail to spot the devil in the details.

This is something the great literary critic Gary Saul Morson calls prosaics. In essence, writing from the understanding that life is lived in the tiny details, not the big ones.

Dostoevsky does the exact same thing in almost all of his books, but especially Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

In Crime & Punishment, the main character Raskolnikov commits two horrific murders for which the reason why is never discovered. Yet throughout the novel Dostoevsky alludes to the fact that horrific evil exists within the hearts of everyone, and shows us, in small details, how Raskolnikov consistently entertains the thought of killing and consistently flees from his conscience – most tellingly through drinking alcohol, sleeping, or consciously choosing to think about something else. Whilst the character, and various other characters discuss all manner of ideologies and theories that justify or explain his action – his actual decision to kill is made in the back of his mind as he goes about his life doing everyday boring things.

Likewise in The Brother’s Karamazov, the young, idealistic Alyosha resolves his faith not in a singular moment of epiphany, but a moment that has long ago been decided, and composed of countless interconnected moments and choices he has already lived.

Dostoevsky, through these small moments, is trying to show us how right and wrong choices exist within us at all times and it is our attention (or lack of) to the many tiny moments in which they exist that guide us towards potential right or wrong outcomes.

THE EVERYDAY EXISTENCE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS

“As it is not one swallow or a fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.” — Aristotle

The point both authors are making is this:

Whether it’s good, evil, love, meaning, anxieties, fears, success, failure or the direction of our lives – all of this is decided in everyday, boring moments that we pay zero attention to.

It’s not the breakups, deaths, and parties, but instead the stuff we don’t notice ticking away in our minds as we roll around in bed, go about our day, and do our boring, everyday chores.

This is a much deeper version of Will Durant’s quote: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”*

According to Gary Saul Morson, the prosaic good and evil of our lives depend on what we pay attention to, and what we neglect to pay attention to.

For example, the character in Anna Karenina who lives the most rightly is a character called Dolly who pays attention to her life, her happiness and the needs of those around her, particularly her children. Happiness for her is in small ‘boring’ everyday moments.

In contrast, the characters in Anna Karenina who are the most evil are Anna and her brother Stiva, who continually turn their backs on ‘boring’, everyday life, shirk the responsibilities of people who need them most, and continually pursue a life which they feel it would be ‘impossible’ to live without. Happiness for them is in pleasures, trifles, excitement, and neglect.

What this means for us is that everything we want or do not want is happening not at the moment we think it occurs, but right now.

When you cheat on your partner, you don’t do this at the moment you cheat, but in the thousands of times you entertain the notion of it or neglect your attention to intimacy. You don’t cheat when you leap into bed with someone, you cheat in the small moments where you watch pornography, scroll through Instagram looking at girls, rather than pay attention to what you already have. I.e that ‘boring’, everyday partner you have next to you.

When you’re single but experience anxiety that stops you from approaching a girl, this doesn’t happen in that moment but was in fact created thousands of times before, in tiny moments where you chose not to be socially outgoing, didn’t speak to that random cashier, avoided looking at people on the tube, and didn’t speak up in class despite having an opinion. To say nothing of those constant thoughts that said: “you can’t approach.”

When you have dreams of starting a business but all your attempts to begin end in procrastination, this doesn’t happen when you open your phone and start browsing the internet, get lost in youtube, or suddenly get sprung with the desire to do anything else but what you need to do. It happens in those little moments where, when lying around or doing something entirely different, you continually think to yourself “how hard the day is going to be” and how much “you don’t want to do it.”

When you fail to be happy, it’s because you fail to make the right decision long before you’ve actually “had to.” On the flip side, when you are happy, it’s typically because you constantly make the right decision without even noticing it.

My family often say that when my dad almost died, we all worked together “in that moment” and that ever since “we’ve had a stronger bond”.

But in reality, this is complete bullshit.

Rather than work together in one moment, we actually worked together because of the thousands of moments beforehand that we’d paid zero attention to (and often found boring). Having dinners together as a family, encouraging open communication, being upfront with confrontation. All of these everyday occurrences meant that when the big moment finally came, the decision had already been made – our tiny choices had already made the ‘stronger’ bond that would see us through.

It was the simple moments right in front of us that made us happiest all along.

This is true not just of family life but of just about anything. What is the pleasure of sex compared to true intimacy with another person? What is the excitement of a party compared to appreciating the company of a good friend? What is the pride of success compared to the simple pleasure of many days of hard work?

The most important parts of life are incidentally the ones we enjoy the most. We just constantly fail to notice that they’re right in front of our eyes.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT 101 – SWEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THE SMALL STUFF

Now, you’re probably thinking – this sounds like a lot to think about all the time.

But it’s not.

This isn’t a question of absolute control, it’s a question of attention. How much we have, and where it’s directed.

The solution to this problem is provided in another book of Tolstoy’s. The gargantuan War and Peace.*

Midway through a battle, a group of generals is discussing strategy for the coming day. The decision maker amongst them pays little attention throughout the strategizing, and then at the end recommends everyone gets a good nights rest.

It’s a fairly comical moment that’s easy to overlook, but Tolstoy is making a deliberate point. Because all life consists of infinite small moments, then war, like any activity involving humans is simply too complex for any strategy to truly apply. It is contingent at all times.*

The best solution we have is to get a good nights rest so that the next day we’re alert enough to pay attention to the small opportunities that occur and react to them advantageously.

There are five techniques we can employ in order to capitalize on these advantages in our own lives and pay attention not just to the small moments but also the thoughts we entertain.

  1. Get plenty of sleep (not enough, not some, plenty).
  2. Meditate.
  3. Think about how little you need.
  4. Think about what you already have.
  5. Pay attention to the kind of thoughts you’re thinking.

When we get some sleep we give our mind it’s alertness. When we meditate we bring our brain back to the here and now. When we think about how little we need, we bring our attention to only what we truly need, and to what we already have. Allowing ourselves to build a deeper, more fulfilling relationship with each. When we pay attention to the kind of thoughts were thinking, we bring our attention to the life is unfolding inside us in every moment.

Because that’s the art of personal development.

We usually think of personal development as the process of building the life we want, but the true art of personal development comes less from building the life we want, and more from paying acute attention to the one we have and are living right now.

Not only will this way of thinking help us get what we want. It’ll help us be happier with less, and in turn, stop chasing happiness in the first place.

 

 

* Because she is subject to fate, what responsibility can she exert on her life? Everything about life is about her and exists for her. Even the ‘omen’ she encounters, which is, in fact, an unrelated, random death.

*This is frequently misattributed to Aristotle.

*War and Peace, whilst being an incredible work of fiction, is also an enormous attack on the idea that you can apply theories that easily explain human social forces (and other disciplines). In short, when there are so many details in any one life, let alone thousands of them, how can one theory account for any of them? This idea was anticipated by Aristotle who warned about the dangers of applying the demands of euclidian geometry to disciplines with too many variables.

*Contingent, if you don’t know, means subject to chance.

 

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Decisions, Personal Development, Psychology

Copyright © 2021 · No Sidebar Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

  • TERMS AND CONDITIONS
  • PRIVACY POLICY
  • COOKIES POLICY
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • CONTACT
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.