The Rebirth of Pancake Mouse: Year Two of Cold Approach

Coming into September, I announced my excitement at the approach of “YND Season”, the time when weather peaks, colleges come back into session, and the streets are filled with young girls looking to experience New York. To prepare, I got an incredibly detailed and helpful coaching session with Shadow, and then, with the exception of a few streaks of progress in mid-September, I fell flat on my face. In October, I barely went out, recording less than 20 approaches, and dropped most contact with my wings and with the community.

What happened?

The full story is complicated and more private than I feel comfortable publishing (even anonymously) on this public blog, but in short, I had compounding physical and mental health breakdowns.

Seven months of promoting 5-6 nights a week, then waking up to push myself to the limits during daygame finally caught up to me. I caught a cold, which morphed into a sinus infection, which morphed into acute bronchitis. The entire time, I felt pressured to keep promoting, so I barely slept. These stressors pushed me into a episode of mild psychosis which lasted nearly the entire month of October.

Though I’ve now beat back my physical ailments and returned to baseline mood, something interesting happened while I was coming down: for the last week, my mind entered a completely calm state where all worries, anxiety, and negative thoughts disappeared, and I was able to live completely in the moment. This was instructive for how many secret negative mindsets and thoughts I had developed during my time in New York City. For the first time, I was able to walk the streets without thinking about promoting approaches, daygame approaches, rating girls, blackpill thoughts, or anything else related to Game. It removed all the anxiety and pressure I had unknowingly been putting on myself with regards to Game. I realized for the first time that I was in too deep.

I started reviewing the copious notes I took while in this new mental state, I started to see patterns: what if I could harness this mindset to ensure even greater success and less stress for my second year of dedication to cold approach (November 2022-November 2023)?

This is what I’ve come up with:

Focus on myself instead of on community/truthseeking

I’ve been too involved with the community, be it blogging, answering forum or Facebook group posts, engaging on twitter, “calling people out”, seeking to “dispel community myths”. I realized that a lot of what I was doing was a performative exercise for the purpose of making some great change in the community or in Game, or being some sort of icon or Messiah.

I will no longer do this at the expense of my own game. Instead, my focus will shift solely to myself and my own deficiencies in game. The only thing I’m going to do is constantly look over my list of sticking points and put myself into situations where I can improve them by recording interactions and dates and getting feedback from wings.

What does this mean?

• I will no longer engage on twitter. I have already blocked twitter.com on my phone and I’ve blocked the feed on desktop. I will still tweet field reports. I may still tweet random thoughts, but only when they absolutely have to be said.
• I probably won’t write a lot of the article ideas I had in the hopper, like “The Death of Daygame”, “Archetypes”, “Exponential Results”, at least not until I’ve mastered Game. I know a lot of people are looking forward to these, but I just can’t expend mental energy on this at my own expense.
• No more “gamifying of game”. I will no longer update my spreadsheet. No more tracking lays, rating of girls, date costs, superlatives. No more tracking daygame approaches and stats. No more treating Game like a bucket list where I check items off. In general, I will move away from quantifying anything.
• The only service I will continue to provide is moderating the Game New York Telegram group because I’m the right person for the job and I still do think the community needs me there.

Eliminating anxiety due to false urgency

I was stressing myself out every day like time was running out to get better at Game. I would curse myself if I wasn’t out the door by 3 or 4 PM – “I’m gonna miss the sets!”. Everything I was doing that wasn’t cold approach, I would feel guilty that I was “wasting the year of cold approach”. I realize this was in part because I had put this impossible pressure on myself to become advanced in one year. Obviously this is impossible.

I was pushing myself to perform, and that was causing anxiety that I was too busy to even realize was occurring.

New mentality: I will do my best to carve the time out to cold approach, but I will NEVER again judge myself for finding a balance and prioritizing needed rest. I will NEVER again curse myself for “missing good days” or “missing the sets”. I understand that those girls will always be there, whether I’m approaching or not. I will have DRIVE, but not urgency. I will not let my age be a factor in creating urgency around learning this. I am prepared to do this until 40 if I have to.

Eliminating negative mindsets and distracting thoughts

• In set and during dates, I was constantly thinking about every step and trying to mitigate all circumstances. These last two weeks, I had a couple pulls where I was completely in the moment, and it felt AMAZING. When a girl didn’t pull in hte past, I would beat myself up for “wasting my time”. My new mindset will simply be “enjoy the process”. I will enjoy every date and pull as it stands and try to do my best.
  
  I recently saw a girl I already banged that didn’t want to pull after hanging out. I didn’t mind at all, I really enjoyed our time together. Why do I need to be so focused on sex? Maybe she was on her period or something else. It didn’t have anything to do with me, so why stress about it?

• No more discussion of “this is how NYC used to be,” “this neighborhood/venue used to be better,” “today’s so cuck,” “the weather sucks today,” or any complaining about other factors beyond my control. First of all, I live in the best city in the US to do cold approach. It could be the worst day ever, but I can still walk around and do approaches. That is a gift. I must accept the circumstances of our current reality and operate within them. I will no longer complain about these things, and I don’t want to hear it from wings or in any chats or forums I’m in. If I do hear complaints like this from others, I will reframe them and encourage focus on the controllables.

• No more discussion of blackpill and no more looking at people on the street and analyzing them from a blackpill perspective. Just treat them as human beings. I realized that I was looking at EVERY person and looking at their facial characteristics, looking at couples and trying to analyze why they were with each other, etc.
  
  Timothy Leary once said: “If you get the message, hang up the phone”.
  
  I have already thoroughly blackpilled myself, and after ~8 months of being in NYC I understand and agree with all the core blackpill concepts required for success in this city. Continuing to intake the fire hose of blackpill content just fills my day with negativity and overanalysis for a potential few percent of updated understanding.

• No more lusting over girls that aren’t my personality type, just because they’re hot. No more looking at white SMDs, no more looking at value club girls. Why am I looking at every girl on the street, worrying about what their archetype is, what guy they’re with – if they’re not my type, they are INVISIBLE to me. I want to go back to how it was in 2004 when people were just people on the street, and I don’t want to analyze them and think about facial characteristics, but it’s not going to be part of my day to day anymore.
  
  I’ve realized this past year that I care more about personality than about looks. I need to just filter for girls that are my type, as long as they meet my MINIMUM looks standard: sweet, nice girls with pleasant personalities, sometimes a little bit sassy. Non-white SMDs that are feminine. YNDs of all races. These are my archetypes:

• Latinas
• Fashion/alt African-Americans
• Jamaicans/Ethiopians
• Jersey/Staten Island (Italian, etc.)
• Korean FOBs
• Interesting/multidimensional girls
• Dancers/artists/actresses
• Second generation non-Russian FOBs (Albanians, etc.)
• Plastic/BBLs (but not overly fake or status-obsessed)

• I will generally avoid rating girls, discussion of ratings, or arguments about small differences in ratings. Everything has already been hashed at this point, I’m tired of it. I know what my wings standards are, and I know that anyone outside that tends to overrate. Women are human beings, and distilling them to a number dehumanizes them and robs the joy I experience from pursuing women.

Reducing promoting and possibly quitting entirely

I said I would take a second look at what promoting meant to me after a few months, but I never did that. I think, after now 7 months, it’s time.

My current feeling is that I’ve gotten mostly all that I wanted to out of promoting and I don’t see the value in sticking around for a year or two to truly reap the flywheel part of the business versus quitting now.

Right now, I’m taking a two week mental health/sleep break to see how I feel about it.

I will likely be limiting myself to weekends-only in the short-term and likely opting out entirely in the medium term. I may still reserve the right to bring girls to a club to my co-promoters in order to get in and game/enjoy.

Apart from time, I didn’t realize how much mental space promoting was taking up that was crowding out thoughts about game and life improvement. I was constantly thinking not only about which girls to approach every time I was on the street, but also about ways to get better at promoting, etc.

Also, it messes up my sleep schedule, making me tired for daygame the next day. I often took naps from 3-5 PM, which are peak daygame hours.

I will probably do another writeup in a few weeks once I make my final decision about what role promoting will play in my life.