Ask Uncle Walt - Zoomer Mailbag #1
Things you'll never hear from your crusty Gen X dad
A while back I launched a mailbag for Zoomers interested in getting practical advice from a sagacious and accomplished Millennial, and after letting the messages pile up for several weeks I am finally getting around to answering your first set of questions.
Going forward I’ll be more regular with this—the plan is to publish a mailbag every two weeks. If you have a specific question you want answered, just DM me and I’ll be sure to address it in the next post, and will obviously anonymize your personal details.
Generally speaking if you want to make more money you should start here, whereas if you want to do better with women you should start here, here, and here. Once you’ve read all of these pieces I’ll be a lot better equipped to offer you specific advice.
Now on to the questions!
My beloved friend Elliot asks…
How do you find your "type"? Is an apolitical gf a more suitable match? Is it better if she's in a different industry from you?
James asks…
Out of curiosity, you mentioned once that you honed the ability to get woman middle managers to sympathize with you and do your work for you… I'm very interested in what exactly this looks like if you're willing to share?
A very general question: when I present my view of a situation with a girl to some friends IRL, their reaction is always "You're overthinking things, cut it out." Is this true? Is it not actually productive to apply overanalytic autism to our interpersonal relations, and if not, how does one stop overthinking? I guess the more concise question is "How do we stop overthinking our relations with girls/people," with your answer possibly including "You don't, but there's a better way to overthink them"
Randy asks…
Hey, a question from a young guy about women. I consider myself fairly competent in interaction with a woman and in making her horny.
My problem is I don't have a consistent stream of new women to meet. I have almost 0 friends in my city to go out with, and doing activities (i.e. I am going to acting classes) is not really a 'consistent' stream of new women, but a one-off new set of people. And I started enjoying these acting classes, so even though I am surrounded by beautiful women, it became a sort of 'don't shit where you eat' thing. I think I would just move to a bigger city and force myself to socialize there.
Another question is: where/how do you find intelligent women? I find it extremely hard to find a woman who is also intellectually stimulating. I get horny for yoga/alternative/hippie chicks, but talking to them gets boring, fast. Your answer in the dating advice article was 'move downtown', but I wonder if you have some higher resolution tips.
Connor asks…
Hey Walt, Your substack has been particularly useful in constructing a world view that is socially salient to the times and suits my temperamental and political dispositions. I am looking for advice on ability to gain and maintain female rel's(short and long term) and male friendships more effectively.
On the big 5 personality test I am 0th percentile Agreeableness 5th Conscientiousness 75th Openness. About to graduate college, I an All-American Athlete, 6'5, Decently good looking. Caught a bad reputation in college(people think I'm a massive douche) with girls tho after a couple of bad break ups and my general struggles to "fit in" and have a good social life. Read all the redpill and other shit dating advice. Just lost with how to navigate+ grow socially
Fantastic queries all of them.
I’ll start by responding to Elliot.
How do you find your "type"?
So the normie sensibility here (at least when I grew up—you guys can tell me if it’s changed at all) is that you need to “date around” a bit and try out relationships with lots of different girls to “figure out what you really like.”
In my early twenties I found this attitude insufferably condescending, as I was always a fairly introspective and self-aware young feller, and felt perfectly in touch with my own tastes. But like in most domains, the normie heuristic is basically correct here—just for significantly more complex reasons than the normie comprehends.
See, it’s not that your understanding of your own preferences is flawed (though for guys less thoughtful than yourself this is likely true as well); it’s more that each relationship fundamentally changes you, shaping your future preferences in both a positive and negative direction. The tricky thing is that your preferences are more contextual than you might imagine—lots of traits that seem hot or endearing during certain periods of your life will on other occasions become completely repulsive.
Take something like “ditziness,” or the general lack of logistical competence in a woman. At 23 I found this trait very off-putting, as I was still getting myself established and found it pretty onerous and annoying when women were “dead weight.” But then at 27 I found the same behavior quite endearing, because at that point in life I had plenty of experience / resources but no real desire to settle down, and I quite enjoyed feeling like the powerful / capable one in a relationship; having a Pet GF was kind of comfy. But now at 30 it’s come full circle and I find ditziness repulsive again, because I’m vastly more ambitious than I was at 27, and to truly scale up in life I’d need a girl who is a force multiplier instead of a drain / accessory.
My point is there’s zero guarantee that the “type” of girl you find appealing now will also be your type in ten years. So don’t get too identitarian about your current preferences, and always give yourself plenty of latitude to explore relationships with girls outside your immediate comfort zone, both temperamentally and aesthetically.
You’ll quickly notice your own tastes surprising you—I used to be quite repelled / intimidated by hipster chicks with tats and septum piercings, but these days I adore those girls and they’re easily half my dating pool.
Is an apolitical gf a more suitable match?
In my experience the most “conventionally feminine” girlies are indeed apolitical.
But if you care enough about politics to spend many hours of your life reading and poasting political shit on Substack dot com, you should really date a girl who understands and respects that passion, and ideally you’ll procure one who actively shares in it. Otherwise the situation might lead to some resentment down the line.
Generally speaking it’s really important for an eccentric / nerdy fella to date a girl who’s independently interested in the weird autistic shit he’s good at, because that means she’ll genuinely get turned on whenever he accrues status in that realm. This dynamic is what makes “holding frame” (or whatever redpillers call it these days) a natural and enjoyable experience instead of an annoying and stressful chore.
Now I could just leave the point here… but instead I’ll drop a relatively spicy take, and opine that a young right wing guy is much better served pursuing liberal girls than women on his own side of the aisle, and there are two primary reasons for this.
The first is that liberal women are much “lower maintenance” and temperamentally more feminine than conservative women on average. Liberalism is simply the default position of educated Zoomer women, so having liberal views (and also being promiscuous) usually just means a girl is obedient to the prevailing social order, which obviously suggests an agreeable and easygoing temperament. The corollary to this is that when an educated girl isn’t liberal (especially when she actively practices chastity) she tends to be quite disagreeable and obstinate by nature.
And any guy who’s dated educated young conservative women will know this tracks—a lot of these girls are a giant pain in the ass! They’ll talk about wanting a “dominant and traditional man,” but in practice all that means is they expect you to act like Batman all the time, and will get very annoyed by any display of weakness. They tend to exude a sort of neurotic and sexually frustrated Dagny Taggart energy.
This is of course great fun to play around with once you’re established in life and more experienced with women, and in the long term you’ll want precisely such a woman to raise your children and run your home. But it’s almost never a good idea to date women like this casually—particularly in your early twenties when you need some margin for error. Liberal girls are just a lot easier and way more forgiving.
The second reason to date liberal women is that it’s much easier to flirt with them, because you can pretty much always say something racist or sexist to create an opportunity for aggressive banter, which is bar none the single most effective way for a wordcel to get a girl sexually excited. It’s insanely easy to turn anger into lust, and if you’re not weaponizing this by being moderately racist on dates, then you’re practically fighting with one hand behind your back!
Is it better if she's in a different industry from you?
My response to this one is unfortunately pretty boring… I’d say that if you’re a winner it’s good for her to be in your industry, but if you’re in any way mediocre it’s quite bad.
On one hand, it’s very useful for your woman to have a frame of reference as to the effort that goes into obtaining a credential or professional distinction in your field. But it likewise creates a groace dynamic if she ever becomes more accomplished than you in a straightforward / measurable way, or if her male coworkers are doing the same thing as you but some of them are just more talented.
There’s also the practical concern that if you’re in a small industry it will be awkward to run into each other at professional conferences etc. if you ever break up… but if you spend your life stressing about dumb shit like that you’ll never get anywhere. Just do your best to avoid a situation where she gossips about you if things go awry.
That wraps up Elliot’s query, so on to my remaining answers!
But first you’ll need to bypass the ogre under my paybridge.
