Women Do Not Need Lunatic Overconfidence

Sun Feb 15 2026

Bad folk wisdom about confidence is all over our culture. The conventional wisdom for how men can meet women is by appearing confident. I think this is terrible advice. Your average dude, not long on introspection, probably thinks that this means feeling some sort of active sense of being a winner with a swollen chest. They inevitably perform masculinity in a way that isn’t so much bad because of the masculinity but bad because of the performance, because it’s not natural and relaxed. It’s not uncommon to observe guys pulling the fake-confidence routine with women at a bar and it’s a sad scene, folks. I think the best thing for appearing attractive (in almost any context, not just trying to pick up women) is not to appear confident as such but to appear at ease, unbothered, to give off an essential vibe that the interaction you’re having right now isn’t a huge deal to you and that you have similar interactions often. So if you’re a dude hitting on a woman at the bar, you want to project not “I have great value and you should want to associate yourself with me” but rather “I’ve done this before and it’s not a big deal, so if you go for it great but if you don’t that’s cool too.” Not presence of positive self-worth, but absence of self-consciousness about worth.