Chapter 1: What role does loneliness play in the rise of online communities?
But loneliness creates this powerful vacuum and the internet fills that vacuum. Online communities provide something many people are searching for through their whole life. a sense of belonging. That's why young men joining a gym or joining a religious community or joining a sports team is super, super powerful for his sense of belonging.
And even in these communities that you find online, even if the advice isn't always healthy and most of the time it's not, the feeling of being understood is so powerful that we're willing to do anything to stay inside that group, to feel like we have a sense of belonging. And that's where the other internet ecosystem and internet culture kind of enters this story. It's the manosphere.
Now, there are people inside the manosphere who are great and give great advice. But the manosphere is a loose network of online communities kind of focused on masculinity, dating, and male self-improvement. It includes obviously podcasters and YouTubers and streamers and online coaches. And many of these creators and dudes are
position themselves as mentors for young men trying to navigate modern life. Of course, they talk about important things like dating strategies and financial success and discipline and fitness and confidence. And you think, okay, on the surface, some of this advice overlaps with the research, psychology, traditional self-help,
Great, it's like work hard, develop yourself, improve yourself, build confidence, right? Become the most dangerous man you can possibly become, as Dr. Jordan Peterson says, and have it under voluntary control.
Develop your competence and your confidence and have clarity about your mission and your purpose and your vision and where you wanna be and build your body and build your mind, all of these beautiful things.
But the person who is the messenger of those ideas is extremely important. And so the manosphere is also filled with bullshit advice that is dangerous for young men.
You know, there are critics who argue that some influencers promote very extreme ideas about relationships, gender roles, and masculinity. And those ideas go viral online. Because extreme gets attention in the attention economy. This is very important to understand. I'll relate it to this. This might not be the best analogy in the world, but it is what it is.
Imagine you have a girl who posts like regular kind of bikini photos on her Instagram. Just kind of that's the extent of her sort of sex appeal on her Instagram. And then someone mentions, hey, why don't you just do that on OnlyFans? And you can make some money off of it. So she starts just posting on her OnlyFans. There's some bikini photos, same photos she posted on Instagram.
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Chapter 2: What is the manosphere and what does it focus on?
But then they want a bigger attention. They want more attention. They want more money. So they start saying more and more and more extreme things And so now they're giving absolutely atrocious advice on very extreme ideas about relationship, gender and masculinity and things of that nature so they can keep their attention and keep their audience.
And then they're selling courses and all this shit and the courses aren't actually helping anyone. They just want to keep the money and keep the men stuck actually where they are. And so it's this whole grift and actually very unethical and unmoral because they don't actually want to help young men. They just want to keep the attention and the money that they have.
And so that's why I made that analogy to OnlyFans. You can see people like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines do this. They do this online every single day. Patreon is the home of our exclusive community where we do bonus episodes, live streams, Q&As, and merch discounts, and so much more.
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