This has been invaluable to understanding the behaviors/motivations of people in my life and past. I once worked with a guy that I had considered a close friend, but he was always rather aloof--he'd hang out once in a while, and we'd always have a great time, but mostly he was singularly focused on his work and projects. Almost always to the detriment of his relationships with friends, family, and women, whom he never seemed to have a problem attracting, in spite of his outwardly cold demeanor. I have often used him as an example of what you can accomplish when you are single-minded in your goals; I remember he often lamented that he wished he did not have to take time out to eat or sleep. I never quite understood him or his drive to succeed at the cost of everything else. He's a Sigma, and it all makes sense now.
I decided to give this post 24 hours to see how the comments evolved. I thought there would be at least one comment to the effect of 'yeah, I was that guy at one time...'. None of you are/were highly successful incorrigible hounds? I'm dubious.
I think I understand Sigma more clearly. Yeesh, not any way that actual me would want to be. I suppose though if I were like this character, that alternative me probably wouldn't care that much, however.
Some women will cheat no matter how attractive her husband is. If he really is repellent she is still without excuse. She shouldn't have married him if she found him repellent.
A wife who cheats on her husband deserves death. The man she used to cheat on her husband should also die. I'm not saying that the victim - the husband - should take justice into his own hands, but the laws should be fixed.
Well of course they can't just get another hotter, younger wife because they are Deltas and not Alphas/Sigmas. Deltas simply don't have the same range of options so it makes sense that they would be guarding the woman they managed to lock down. Advising a Delta who is in danger of losing his wife to "Just do what an Alpha would do and trade up, bro!" Is quite useless advice for the Delta because A) he won't and - more importantly- B) he can't. Now that doesn't mean of course that the Delta can't benefit from trying to imitate SOME of the higher status man's behavior, such as holding his frame and feigning indifference. But it's mostly just that - imitating behavior that doesn't come naturally to him.
They don't have to trade up, but the idea of trading sideways is foreign to them. There are plenty of remarried deltas.
I understand that advising a delta to act non-delta is foolish. I'm not doing that. I'm just pointing out the chest puffing 'I'll kill him' posturing that they think is masculine and powerful is evidence of lower status thinking.
Sigmas remind me of what I first liked about The Little Mermaid when I first read it. Mermaids could not cry because they had no tears and so their sorrow was much deeper. Longing and loneliness are not always solved by company even amongst your own kind.
Self-directed certainty and purpose are very attractive. And very uncommon. Hierarchical disinterest accentuates the allure, or at worse is irrelevant to it. Corroborated by how signs of normalcy deflate the mystique.
Sigma appeal is difficult for most men to understand because the usual markers aren’t applicable. You need to be able to look beyond the ant farm to see it.
Need to watch the Gambler, that is quite believable. Wahlburg is quite literate and from a famiky with many literary figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne in it, not just actors and singers. Known professors who were chick magnets intentionally take up assistant professorships in spite of low pay to get constant rotating harems of hot young nubile students.
Despite the violation of professional ethics on top of divine law, how many of those professors got Me-Tooed?
It also plays perfectly to the sigma's general disdain for women outside of sexual utility: the woman is not likely to get emotionally attached, there's already a convenient excuse for the sigma not to pursue more himself ("You already got a man, baby, I don't want to complicate that"), and so on.
A sigma is basically an alpha but without all the messy, emotional stuff potentially being involved. As the author of the quoted piece said, sometimes women are just bored, or want revenge, or want to see what its like to be wanted purely in a sexual manner.
For cheaters, it's a match made in heaven. Or hell, more accurately.
Nah, that's a gamma move, not a sigma one. A sigma would be totally uninterested in pursuing a taken woman in a long term sense, so there's no upside to sparking a break up and a LOT of potential downsides.
A sigma would keep his mouth shut. It's a gamma that would do the political plotting in the shadows so he could get the woman for himself. An alpha would contest her openly.
I meant that he would tell him if he cared about him.
Assuming they are close and they interact alot. Playing make pretend "all is well" around your close friend is a strange feeling. Ofc, once he shares that, the friendship ends.
Ahh, you meant if the friend's woman cheated on him with his sigma friend, the sigma would warn him that his woman was disloyal, as a favor.
Possibly. The reaction is almost always unfavorable to both cheaters, even though the sigma would be doing his buddy a solid by showing that the woman couldn't be trusted. Matters of the heart never cut clean.
But also possibly he wouldn't. Telling his buddy would just mean that he's lost a friend, over a lover he didn't particularly care about. Not a good trade. It depends on the character and principles of the sigma in question, although I would suggest that if he's willing to sleep with his good friend's woman in the first place, he wouldn't exactly be the type to treat his friends with respect by telling them about their cheating wife/girlfriend. There's very little to gain for him if the sigma blabs.
Yeah was referring to close friend, as in a brother, someone you see almost everyday. If his concern is he might loose his friend, then that's not his friend. That's some guy he's using for something, or we're dealing with a psycho.
Either way , friendship ends once you tell him. There's no maybe, it will be over. Only maybe is whether or not you'll be physically attacked. Preferable to being a two faced bitch and having to tip toe regardless of morals.
There is absolutely a maybe. My very first "girlfriend" (quotes because dating at age 14 is in no way a serious thing), way back in highschool, was seduced by one of my best friends. Yeah, I was royally pissed at him for like two weeks. Then she ended up leaving him for another guy. At the end of it, we both sort of looked at each other and were all "damn, we were at each other's throats over a flighty woman? We let a woman come between us?"
To this day, he and I are still the best of friends. Time heals all wounds. It is entirely possible that the sigma's friend comes to terms with what happened and, in the end, gets the needed perspective to see that what the sigma did was actually a good thing.
"Maybe" applies to a lot of things, and few things more frequently than human emotions and emotional responses. None but God can see the future.
The emotional isolation is absolute. Though many view the Sigma as a close friend, the total social/emotional isolation of the young Sigma doesnt allow him to have any sense of loyalty to anyone, be it male or female. Through many years and after making enemies of many high status men, he eventually learns (hopefully) that though he feels no social/emotional obligation to others, they (the others) coming from normal hierarchy expectations, will always expect the same of him and it isnt their fault. People claim to want to be a Sigma, but as with the Alpha bearing all the responsibility of the success and failure of the hierarchy, the experience of total social isolation of the Sigma is not something any person should ever desire, and isnt something one can choose by desire. It is something they are stuck with, whether they want it or not.
I know a high-IQ, very over-achieving Sigma. Somehow, any company he joins, every relationship he engages in, or any project he picks up .. there's a pattern.
1) Wild success as his intelligence, and visceral disregard for authority allows him to make strides where the meek Deltas never dared. He's very popular in the new company, gets invited to parties; women throw themselves at him.
2) He starts getting bored. He's already pissed off every Alpha / Bravo / Gamma, by shitting on them / the hierarchy, and they start making life difficult for him. He starts getting distracted by other job offers / women / projects.
3) Completely abandons his job / project / girlfriend, and moves on, like turning off a switch. No remorse, no second thought; often leaving devastating in his wake.
I was taken aback the first time I witnessed this cycle. By now, I know it's basically a yearly event.
I think the only reason we're "friends" is because he finds it entertaining to speak to someone a little smarter than the average NPC, and like the memes I share off of SG. I've certainly learned not to count on him the same way I do on my Alpha, or Delta friends.
There seems to be, for sigmas, a very thin, ill-defined line between "friends" and "people they're friend-LY with". Sigmas can play the game, so to speak, but their innate social isolation tends to make them untrusting of others, to the extent that very few people ever reach the status of "friend" and most just end up in a "ally of convenience" position - the sigma will treat them with kindness and respect... so long as they don't interfere with the sigma's goals and motivations. They don't expect loyalty, and they don't easily give it - they're self-reliant and capable solo, so giving out loyalty is potentially an unforgiveable weak spot in their armor.
True friends are a weakness to sigmas, not an asset. Everyone has an angle. They're just waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time. It sounds incredibly lonely. If they weren't so confident and self-assured, they'd be paranoid, anxious wrecks. Sigma is NOT an appealing status to hold for the vast majority of humanity, despite all the people seemingly yearning for it, and all of the seeming "perks" it brings.
Thanks for this insight - friends are a weakness because as a almost totally self-reliant and capable person, friends (mostly) represent obligations that will inevitably have to be fulfilled sometime in the future. Because while you can help THEM a lot in many ways, they can't do the same for you.
If a Sigma isn't already good at some project/task already - he can develop the skills necessary with a bit of effort. Most friends tend to be good at one or two very specific skills not dozens of them. IMO Vox is a pretty good example of how that all works.
For a Sigma, I think friends are a bug not a feature.
Acquaintance is sufficient on its own. I have many acquaintances, but I can count my friends on one hand.
You don't really need to differ between friendly acquaintance, business associate, client, drinking buddy, whatever - they all just sort of mean "guy who's cool to chat with but I'm not showing up at his door at 2 AM asking him to grab a tarp and a shovel because I got a problem that needs buried". That's what friends are for, not acquaintances.
That's not a further refinement, because pro- or anti-social are simply one possible reflection of the patterns. A Sigma can be pro-social. An Alpha can be anti-social.
Antisocial: 1) Shunning the society of others; not sociable. 2) Hostile to or disruptive of the established social order; marked by or engaging in behavior that violates accepted mores. 3) Antagonistic toward or disrespectful of others; rude.
Alphas act anti-socially when they sleep with a Delta's wife.
A Gamma can wreck /weaken a hierarchy by scheming and plotting - all within the accepted mores of society. In fact, Gammas are often very social! (sexual, not social rejects)
You're getting into ascribing morality with those labels.
Getting caught or not, both are pursuing individual priority at the cost of others. Being better at doing bad things is not good.
Also explains some of the Gamma delusion that they are Sigmas. That's what they would do in their imagination; but they lack ability to translate desire into deed.
Looks like this post really triggered some Gamma text walls lol
This has been invaluable to understanding the behaviors/motivations of people in my life and past. I once worked with a guy that I had considered a close friend, but he was always rather aloof--he'd hang out once in a while, and we'd always have a great time, but mostly he was singularly focused on his work and projects. Almost always to the detriment of his relationships with friends, family, and women, whom he never seemed to have a problem attracting, in spite of his outwardly cold demeanor. I have often used him as an example of what you can accomplish when you are single-minded in your goals; I remember he often lamented that he wished he did not have to take time out to eat or sleep. I never quite understood him or his drive to succeed at the cost of everything else. He's a Sigma, and it all makes sense now.
I decided to give this post 24 hours to see how the comments evolved. I thought there would be at least one comment to the effect of 'yeah, I was that guy at one time...'. None of you are/were highly successful incorrigible hounds? I'm dubious.
There was a bit of hostility to that sort of hound right off. Some women like to have a side piece or two too.
… so I have heard …
Sigma Grindset 372
-Have a loose 15 minutes
-Shag that dude's wife over a piece of furniture
-Unzip the minimum necessary
-Do not elaborate
I think I understand Sigma more clearly. Yeesh, not any way that actual me would want to be. I suppose though if I were like this character, that alternative me probably wouldn't care that much, however.
We got to witness the delta response to infidelity in the comments: threatening murder against the other man.
Of course no repercussions for m'lady mentioned. And they can't even imagine the option if simply getting another wife.
Adultery shoud carry prison time at a minimum.
"murder"
Jury of peers is gonna go with Not Guilty.
Adulterers should be stoned.
A jury of peers will probably have an adulterer in it.
Is an adulterer going to make the jury return a Guilty verdict?
And none about how a husband is so repellent that the wife looks for love from a player.
A man outplays him in sports or business. Murder him! It's the only solution. Play better? No, just kill the competition.
Looks for >love<? From a guy who you call a player? lol
Sport or business = marriage/ relationship? What a bot think.
Competition of fvcking other woman? What is wrong with guys these times..
Some women will cheat no matter how attractive her husband is. If he really is repellent she is still without excuse. She shouldn't have married him if she found him repellent.
A wife who cheats on her husband deserves death. The man she used to cheat on her husband should also die. I'm not saying that the victim - the husband - should take justice into his own hands, but the laws should be fixed.
Well of course they can't just get another hotter, younger wife because they are Deltas and not Alphas/Sigmas. Deltas simply don't have the same range of options so it makes sense that they would be guarding the woman they managed to lock down. Advising a Delta who is in danger of losing his wife to "Just do what an Alpha would do and trade up, bro!" Is quite useless advice for the Delta because A) he won't and - more importantly- B) he can't. Now that doesn't mean of course that the Delta can't benefit from trying to imitate SOME of the higher status man's behavior, such as holding his frame and feigning indifference. But it's mostly just that - imitating behavior that doesn't come naturally to him.
They don't have to trade up, but the idea of trading sideways is foreign to them. There are plenty of remarried deltas.
I understand that advising a delta to act non-delta is foolish. I'm not doing that. I'm just pointing out the chest puffing 'I'll kill him' posturing that they think is masculine and powerful is evidence of lower status thinking.
So guarding and being teritorial for woman you love is delta/beta/not alpfa? Did alpha can't someone that way?
Well that is certainly true. I'm sorry I misunderstood your previous comment.
That guy can read a room.
Sigmas remind me of what I first liked about The Little Mermaid when I first read it. Mermaids could not cry because they had no tears and so their sorrow was much deeper. Longing and loneliness are not always solved by company even amongst your own kind.
Self-directed certainty and purpose are very attractive. And very uncommon. Hierarchical disinterest accentuates the allure, or at worse is irrelevant to it. Corroborated by how signs of normalcy deflate the mystique.
Sigma appeal is difficult for most men to understand because the usual markers aren’t applicable. You need to be able to look beyond the ant farm to see it.
Its hard to believe this guy was Japanese and not kokojin. That's such a kokojin move.
Regarding the SSH in entertainment in general, it's obvious when the actor is miscast for a role when his real SSH rank conflicts with that role.
Examples: Chris Hemsworth and Colin Farrell as expert computer hackers in Blackhat and The Recruit, respectively.
Did these guys teach themselves coding between cheerleader bang sessions?
Another example. Mark Walhberg in The Gambler. He plays a literature professor.
I'm sure his library card gets a lot of use.
These actors are great when they play roles that match their naturally perceived SSH rank.
Need to watch the Gambler, that is quite believable. Wahlburg is quite literate and from a famiky with many literary figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne in it, not just actors and singers. Known professors who were chick magnets intentionally take up assistant professorships in spite of low pay to get constant rotating harems of hot young nubile students.
Despite the violation of professional ethics on top of divine law, how many of those professors got Me-Tooed?
Will check out the film for sure.
It was said before that it's the gammas that tend to pursue taken women.
That should be the case only in the romantic sense.
For taken women, Sigmas seem to be ideal for secret flings.
If you're the fun guy, but can't do the boring stuff reliably, why not let a husband do the boring stuff?
It also plays perfectly to the sigma's general disdain for women outside of sexual utility: the woman is not likely to get emotionally attached, there's already a convenient excuse for the sigma not to pursue more himself ("You already got a man, baby, I don't want to complicate that"), and so on.
A sigma is basically an alpha but without all the messy, emotional stuff potentially being involved. As the author of the quoted piece said, sometimes women are just bored, or want revenge, or want to see what its like to be wanted purely in a sexual manner.
For cheaters, it's a match made in heaven. Or hell, more accurately.
If those are real close friends , he'd probably tell them after the fact so that they break up/divorce.
Nah, that's a gamma move, not a sigma one. A sigma would be totally uninterested in pursuing a taken woman in a long term sense, so there's no upside to sparking a break up and a LOT of potential downsides.
A sigma would keep his mouth shut. It's a gamma that would do the political plotting in the shadows so he could get the woman for himself. An alpha would contest her openly.
I meant that he would tell him if he cared about him.
Assuming they are close and they interact alot. Playing make pretend "all is well" around your close friend is a strange feeling. Ofc, once he shares that, the friendship ends.
Ahh, you meant if the friend's woman cheated on him with his sigma friend, the sigma would warn him that his woman was disloyal, as a favor.
Possibly. The reaction is almost always unfavorable to both cheaters, even though the sigma would be doing his buddy a solid by showing that the woman couldn't be trusted. Matters of the heart never cut clean.
But also possibly he wouldn't. Telling his buddy would just mean that he's lost a friend, over a lover he didn't particularly care about. Not a good trade. It depends on the character and principles of the sigma in question, although I would suggest that if he's willing to sleep with his good friend's woman in the first place, he wouldn't exactly be the type to treat his friends with respect by telling them about their cheating wife/girlfriend. There's very little to gain for him if the sigma blabs.
Yeah was referring to close friend, as in a brother, someone you see almost everyday. If his concern is he might loose his friend, then that's not his friend. That's some guy he's using for something, or we're dealing with a psycho.
Either way , friendship ends once you tell him. There's no maybe, it will be over. Only maybe is whether or not you'll be physically attacked. Preferable to being a two faced bitch and having to tip toe regardless of morals.
There is absolutely a maybe. My very first "girlfriend" (quotes because dating at age 14 is in no way a serious thing), way back in highschool, was seduced by one of my best friends. Yeah, I was royally pissed at him for like two weeks. Then she ended up leaving him for another guy. At the end of it, we both sort of looked at each other and were all "damn, we were at each other's throats over a flighty woman? We let a woman come between us?"
To this day, he and I are still the best of friends. Time heals all wounds. It is entirely possible that the sigma's friend comes to terms with what happened and, in the end, gets the needed perspective to see that what the sigma did was actually a good thing.
"Maybe" applies to a lot of things, and few things more frequently than human emotions and emotional responses. None but God can see the future.
"Bros before hoes" is a saying for a reason.
That does mean he shouldn't sleep with her in the first place, but sometimes she's a ho.
The lack of loyalty and guilt sticks out.
The emotional isolation is absolute. Though many view the Sigma as a close friend, the total social/emotional isolation of the young Sigma doesnt allow him to have any sense of loyalty to anyone, be it male or female. Through many years and after making enemies of many high status men, he eventually learns (hopefully) that though he feels no social/emotional obligation to others, they (the others) coming from normal hierarchy expectations, will always expect the same of him and it isnt their fault. People claim to want to be a Sigma, but as with the Alpha bearing all the responsibility of the success and failure of the hierarchy, the experience of total social isolation of the Sigma is not something any person should ever desire, and isnt something one can choose by desire. It is something they are stuck with, whether they want it or not.
Yup.
I know a high-IQ, very over-achieving Sigma. Somehow, any company he joins, every relationship he engages in, or any project he picks up .. there's a pattern.
1) Wild success as his intelligence, and visceral disregard for authority allows him to make strides where the meek Deltas never dared. He's very popular in the new company, gets invited to parties; women throw themselves at him.
2) He starts getting bored. He's already pissed off every Alpha / Bravo / Gamma, by shitting on them / the hierarchy, and they start making life difficult for him. He starts getting distracted by other job offers / women / projects.
3) Completely abandons his job / project / girlfriend, and moves on, like turning off a switch. No remorse, no second thought; often leaving devastating in his wake.
I was taken aback the first time I witnessed this cycle. By now, I know it's basically a yearly event.
I think the only reason we're "friends" is because he finds it entertaining to speak to someone a little smarter than the average NPC, and like the memes I share off of SG. I've certainly learned not to count on him the same way I do on my Alpha, or Delta friends.
I've noticed this in myself, though so far it's been a two year cycle. Is that not common?
There seems to be, for sigmas, a very thin, ill-defined line between "friends" and "people they're friend-LY with". Sigmas can play the game, so to speak, but their innate social isolation tends to make them untrusting of others, to the extent that very few people ever reach the status of "friend" and most just end up in a "ally of convenience" position - the sigma will treat them with kindness and respect... so long as they don't interfere with the sigma's goals and motivations. They don't expect loyalty, and they don't easily give it - they're self-reliant and capable solo, so giving out loyalty is potentially an unforgiveable weak spot in their armor.
True friends are a weakness to sigmas, not an asset. Everyone has an angle. They're just waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time. It sounds incredibly lonely. If they weren't so confident and self-assured, they'd be paranoid, anxious wrecks. Sigma is NOT an appealing status to hold for the vast majority of humanity, despite all the people seemingly yearning for it, and all of the seeming "perks" it brings.
Thanks for this insight - friends are a weakness because as a almost totally self-reliant and capable person, friends (mostly) represent obligations that will inevitably have to be fulfilled sometime in the future. Because while you can help THEM a lot in many ways, they can't do the same for you.
If a Sigma isn't already good at some project/task already - he can develop the skills necessary with a bit of effort. Most friends tend to be good at one or two very specific skills not dozens of them. IMO Vox is a pretty good example of how that all works.
For a Sigma, I think friends are a bug not a feature.
Pretty much.
I feel a short word is needed for "friendly acquaintance" and the variations.
Acquaintance is sufficient on its own. I have many acquaintances, but I can count my friends on one hand.
You don't really need to differ between friendly acquaintance, business associate, client, drinking buddy, whatever - they all just sort of mean "guy who's cool to chat with but I'm not showing up at his door at 2 AM asking him to grab a tarp and a shovel because I got a problem that needs buried". That's what friends are for, not acquaintances.
One should always plan ahead when possible for that sort of situation.
How long does it takes for him to get bored? How long does his relationships last? For how many years have you two been friends?
Those are some creepily invasive questions.
My apologies, it wasn't my intent.
No worries.
Interesting discussion. Perhaps the SSH can be further refined by categorizing archetypes according to pro- or anti-social tendencies.
Alpha, Bravo, Delta = pro-social archetypes.
Sigma, Gamma, Omega = antisocial archetypes.
I think you're missing the point.
Perhaps. Please elaborate.
That's not a further refinement, because pro- or anti-social are simply one possible reflection of the patterns. A Sigma can be pro-social. An Alpha can be anti-social.
Antisocial: 1) Shunning the society of others; not sociable. 2) Hostile to or disruptive of the established social order; marked by or engaging in behavior that violates accepted mores. 3) Antagonistic toward or disrespectful of others; rude.
Alphas act anti-socially when they sleep with a Delta's wife.
A Gamma can wreck /weaken a hierarchy by scheming and plotting - all within the accepted mores of society. In fact, Gammas are often very social! (sexual, not social rejects)
You're getting into ascribing morality with those labels.
"only the Gamma will effortlessly manage to wreak such widespread destruction in pursuit of his individual priorities."
Gamma or sigma?
The guy in the story didn't get caught because he could read women's minds. Gammas definately can't read women's minds.
Getting caught or not, both are pursuing individual priority at the cost of others. Being better at doing bad things is not good.
Also explains some of the Gamma delusion that they are Sigmas. That's what they would do in their imagination; but they lack ability to translate desire into deed.