Returned to Austin on Christmas day.
Moving out
I went back to my town with the intent of moving out within a week but I psyched myself out by having some defined outcome. So I spent a week doing absolutely nothing.
Then I realized I was starting to feel like I could sleep all day and work on my computer and do nothing else forever if I wanted to, which is what I did for much of 2021 up until around this summer. It was this feeling of "comfort", and that's when I realized optimizing comfort rather than chasing adversity results in dissatisfaction and regret. You can only grow when you seek discomfort.
Realizing I didn't want to be stuck in my town forever, I got to work on getting rid of my stuff. Rather than giving myself a timeboxed goal and psyching myself out again, I focused on what process will eventually get me to the inevitable outcome that will get my stuff out of the house. I just took it a day at a time, getting rid of the easiest possible thing I could get rid of right in that moment. Turns out it only took me 4 days to get rid of everything.
Every time I was selling, donating, or disposing of a batch of items I felt less and less suffocated. I think I had so much trouble doing this over the past few months because I was so outcome-oriented with having my stuff out by a certain time, rather than just focusing on the process itself and letting the completion time happen when it happens.
Anyway, I don't have to go back to my town anymore. Everything I own (except my bed in Austin) fits in my car, and I still have plenty of things I am going to get rid of here in Austin that I couldn't in my old town. I actually felt a sense of discomfort a few hours before I was going to drive back to Austin. Like I don't have a "home base" anymore, I'm officially a nomad. But it was a good feeling because I realized I don't need comfort in my life.
Nightgame
So I had a period where I was really not doing much nightgame at all. I felt that despite getting over my core anxiety, I genuinely didn't enjoy going out at night. I think the biggest thing that pissed me off about going out at night was talking to a seemingly receptive girl, only to get immediately cockblocked by the friends. Also, nightgame seems to expose my social unawareness more than day. And I didn't like having to have long random conversations with girls.
However, I realized my night macro volume is only around lifetime 200 approaches, vs daygame is around 800. And things like being cockblocked by friends is just mileage, *even* if the girl is receptive. I guess I hadn't truly internalized it for nightgame as much as daygame. I think I'll remember to cross-pollinate concepts I'm learning from daygame into nightgame more often to keep myself in check.
Anyway I went out for 2 night sessions with
@lacroix and Troy. Low volume on both nights, I approached only 5 girls on each night and got 1 number on each day.
First girl I got a number from I shouldn't have gotten the number. She was really receptive to me initially but I got psyched out when she said "well it was nice meeting you!" after maybe 5 minutes so I just exchanged with her. I texted the next day what she did last night and said that I went home to drink wine with my friends. She responded to that with "it was so fun!" but then ghosted when I invited her out for drinks.
Second number I got was after she said she was going to another place. I told her I'll go with y'all but she said that it was a "girls' night out". So I just grabbed the number haha.
Daygame
I did start going for instadates again before I left Austin, but my own limiting beliefs about instadates and logistics were really highlighted to me when I saw a guy in the daygame chat living in SF have some instadate+pull+smashes from driving girls from the mall to his place 5 minutes away. So there's no reason why I couldn't do it too. Now I'm regretting even more that I deliberately didn't ask for instadates in the first half of November.
Spammed all the contacts I have saved in my phone with "merry christmas! (tree emoji)". I did this over Thanksgiving too. I have 46 contacts right now, and 5 responded. Out of those 5 who responded, 3 of them subsequently ghosted when I asked e.g. what they did over christmas, if they're in Austin, what they're up to this week. The other 2 deferred (out of town). So basically all of my leads are dead now lol.
Sunday 11/26:
~20 approaches, 0 ID, 3 numbers over 2-3 hours
First sesh in 2 weeks.
Shopping street had mostly just families and cute girls with their boyfriends. I think I only approached 2 or 3 solo girls. Actually I now dislike when there are no solo girls because I can't instadate them and I can only just go for the number. Or maybe that's a limiting belief. I haven't even genuinely tried it.
Regarding non-approach AA, I did actually skip out on the first duo I wanted to approach. 30 seconds later I'm like wtf I need to approach them, but they already vanished. I was so pissed about blowing my approach window that my confidence basically shot back up to where it was before I left Austin in an instant. So I am feeling that confidence reversal from non-approach is much slower now at around 800 or so lifetime approaches.
Compare this to my previous 2-week hiatuses at ~100:
viewtopic.php?p=21304#p21304 and at ~400:
viewtopic.php?p=23546#p23546. At lifetime ~100 approaches + 2 week hiatus, it took me one day of non-approach and a day of mousy approaches to get back up to my baseline. At ~400, it took me a day of being "nervous" and missing out on half of the girls I wanted to talk to to get back up. Now at ~800 it literally took me missing one approach to get back up. So I can confirm that raw approach volume builds confidence rather than outcomes.
OLD
I actually do OLD here and there but I rarely log about it. From my limited exposure to it over the past month or so, OLD seems to be good for forcing me to improve my texting. Unlike approach where I can get volume, I don't get a lot of likes on Tinder so I can't get away with firehose spamming a template to every girl. I probably get 0-5 likes every time I boost and random likes at other times. I've been having more deregulated and unstructured text conversations similar to an approach with girls on Tinder, with some help from
@Rags2Bitches. This seems to get girls to respond more often I've noticed.
I'm logging about this now because I matched with a girl yesterday and we had been talking for a couple hours on Tinder. I went for the number but she said she'd rather do snap. I decided to play along and add her on snapchat, and now we've been messaging on snapchat for a few hours today. My mindset here has been treating texting this girl as part of a date, rather than just jumping to invite her out.
Now I'm thinking of figuring out how I can experiment with this non-soup style from cold approach leads. Like transferring some of what I'd initially talk about on a date over text, and see if my contact->date conversions increase. It's similar to how I stopped having hyper short 20-30 second approaches and switched to 2-3 minute conversations and it improved my approach->date conversions. But I'm still extra soupy over text so it might make sense to experiment with being more organic and less soupy with numbers from cold approach, given that I've gotten ghosted less often on OLD being organic.