Some of you will remember me from my cold approach journals, my gym posts, or as the first guy here to document my Bitcoin and crypto journey, and I took a few members along with me. For the last few years I’ve been mostly quiet, only popping into Health & Fitness and Wealth now and then. I want to explain why. It isn’t a complaint. I think it might be useful to some of you.
This place changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. The advice, the hard truths, the guys who took the time to help, and of course the mysterious Pook: it all helped me grow up. I owe the community for that. I've even had the pleasure of meeting some people IRL in Toronto and NYC. We got one dude who did 100+ cold approaches and documented it all. He's married with a kid too and I chat with him from time to time.
Most importantly, it helped me heal. I found this place during a time when I was dealing with PTSD and facing jail time, and my friends had walked away because I was too negative to be around. This community helped me get back on my feet. Through failed bootcamp after failed bootcamp, I slowly learned to hold eye contact, then start conversations with strangers, then date again. Eventually I got married and had a child.
But at some point I noticed something, especially in Mature Men and Don Juan. The same threads kept showing up. Same problems, same patterns, sometimes the same guys, years apart. A new girl, a new crisis, the same loop. And I realized that for some people the forum had stopped being a tool and turned into a drug. Reading about the problem felt like working on the problem, but nothing was actually changing.
I’ve been there too. You can learn every concept on this site and still be the same man you were five years ago. Knowing isn’t the same as doing.
The other thing that wore me out was the arguing. Long back-and-forths where nobody changes their mind and everybody leaves drained. I get it, debate feels productive. But every hour spent proving a point online is an hour you didn’t spend at the gym, building your income, or living your life. Winning an argument here doesn’t change anything out there.
The golden cage and the sovereignty split
Here’s what I think is coming, and why I’m writing this. Over the next handful of years, I believe we’re going to see drastic change, and AI will be at the center of it.
As AI gets more powerful, it’s going to be built into everything: jobs, money, government, the apps we use every day. A lot of that will look like progress. Things get cheaper, easier and safer, and the safety net gets bigger. But there’s a cost. The more of your life that runs through systems you don’t control, the less of it is actually yours. That’s what I call the golden cage. It’s comfortable, it’s safe, and you don’t own any of it.
At the same time, most of the work people do today, executing tasks and following instructions, is going to be done better by machines. Competing with AI at that is like stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson. The people who stay valuable will be the ones who can create something new: their own ideas, their own products, their own way of doing things. The problem is that school, jobs and media have spent our whole lives training that out of us.
That’s the split. One group drifts into the cage because it’s easier. The other group stays strong on purpose, emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually, and builds something of their own while the window is still open. I think that window is about five to ten years.
I believe SS has already prepared a lot of us for this in parts of our lives. It taught us to face rejection, to stop chasing approval, and to take responsibility for where we are. But this shift won’t stay in one area. It’s going to hit everything at once: work, money, health, relationships. The strength you built here has to spread to all of them.
That’s what I’ve spent the last few years working on. The biggest lesson I took from this forum is that movement for the sake of movement is a trap. Busy feels like progress, the same way reading about your problem feels like fixing it. So I’ve been building tools that help people figure out what they actually want, break it into real steps, and use AI to do the heavy lifting, with the person in charge and the machine doing the work. AI working for your vision, not replacing you. I’m testing it on my own life and projects first.
Sovereignty, to me, means this: nobody else is running your life. Not a woman, not a boss, not an algorithm, not even a forum. You take what’s useful and you go build.
So if you’ve been stuck in the same loop for a while, here’s my honest advice:
I’m not leaving. I still check in and I still respect a lot of the guys here. I just found that growth for me meant moving on from the problems I used to post about. I hope more of you get to that point too, because that’s what this place was always supposed to do for us.
This place changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. The advice, the hard truths, the guys who took the time to help, and of course the mysterious Pook: it all helped me grow up. I owe the community for that. I've even had the pleasure of meeting some people IRL in Toronto and NYC. We got one dude who did 100+ cold approaches and documented it all. He's married with a kid too and I chat with him from time to time.
Most importantly, it helped me heal. I found this place during a time when I was dealing with PTSD and facing jail time, and my friends had walked away because I was too negative to be around. This community helped me get back on my feet. Through failed bootcamp after failed bootcamp, I slowly learned to hold eye contact, then start conversations with strangers, then date again. Eventually I got married and had a child.
But at some point I noticed something, especially in Mature Men and Don Juan. The same threads kept showing up. Same problems, same patterns, sometimes the same guys, years apart. A new girl, a new crisis, the same loop. And I realized that for some people the forum had stopped being a tool and turned into a drug. Reading about the problem felt like working on the problem, but nothing was actually changing.
I’ve been there too. You can learn every concept on this site and still be the same man you were five years ago. Knowing isn’t the same as doing.
The other thing that wore me out was the arguing. Long back-and-forths where nobody changes their mind and everybody leaves drained. I get it, debate feels productive. But every hour spent proving a point online is an hour you didn’t spend at the gym, building your income, or living your life. Winning an argument here doesn’t change anything out there.
The golden cage and the sovereignty split
Here’s what I think is coming, and why I’m writing this. Over the next handful of years, I believe we’re going to see drastic change, and AI will be at the center of it.
As AI gets more powerful, it’s going to be built into everything: jobs, money, government, the apps we use every day. A lot of that will look like progress. Things get cheaper, easier and safer, and the safety net gets bigger. But there’s a cost. The more of your life that runs through systems you don’t control, the less of it is actually yours. That’s what I call the golden cage. It’s comfortable, it’s safe, and you don’t own any of it.
At the same time, most of the work people do today, executing tasks and following instructions, is going to be done better by machines. Competing with AI at that is like stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson. The people who stay valuable will be the ones who can create something new: their own ideas, their own products, their own way of doing things. The problem is that school, jobs and media have spent our whole lives training that out of us.
That’s the split. One group drifts into the cage because it’s easier. The other group stays strong on purpose, emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually, and builds something of their own while the window is still open. I think that window is about five to ten years.
I believe SS has already prepared a lot of us for this in parts of our lives. It taught us to face rejection, to stop chasing approval, and to take responsibility for where we are. But this shift won’t stay in one area. It’s going to hit everything at once: work, money, health, relationships. The strength you built here has to spread to all of them.
That’s what I’ve spent the last few years working on. The biggest lesson I took from this forum is that movement for the sake of movement is a trap. Busy feels like progress, the same way reading about your problem feels like fixing it. So I’ve been building tools that help people figure out what they actually want, break it into real steps, and use AI to do the heavy lifting, with the person in charge and the machine doing the work. AI working for your vision, not replacing you. I’m testing it on my own life and projects first.
Sovereignty, to me, means this: nobody else is running your life. Not a woman, not a boss, not an algorithm, not even a forum. You take what’s useful and you go build.
So if you’ve been stuck in the same loop for a while, here’s my honest advice:
- Take the lesson and leave the thread. If you’ve posted the same type of problem three times, the answer isn’t another post. It’s action.
- Put your energy where it compounds. Train. Earn. Learn a skill. Those pay you back every single day.
- Make AI work for you, not instead of you. Let it handle the execution. You bring the vision. That’s the part nobody can replace.
- Stop debating and start testing. Try the thing for 90 days and report back with results, not theories.
- Use the forum like a gym. You go in, you work, you leave stronger. You don’t move in.
I’m not leaving. I still check in and I still respect a lot of the guys here. I just found that growth for me meant moving on from the problems I used to post about. I hope more of you get to that point too, because that’s what this place was always supposed to do for us.