Genetic Pre-Determinism and The Blackpill
I've been on the depths of the internet since I was a kid, like most loser kids who've spent way too much time on their computers, I started watching content on Youtube, then I started scrolling Reddit (didn't spend too much time here, even back then I always thought Reddit was a little gay), then I found out about 4chan, at about 15/16 years old.
People love to demonize 4chan as if it's some cesspool of the worst people on the planet. But really, it was simply an unfiltered messaging board; a double edged sword. Thank God I always knew to stay away from the really extremist stuff like /pol/. But what I did come across was Looksmaxxing and the Blackpill, I remember seeing that one picture of clavicular on 4chan. At the time I only thought this ideology was interesting, there is probably some truth to it, and that's that.
Fast forward to today. Looksmaxxing and the Blackpill have been blowing up on every social media platform; Tiktok, Instagram, and Twitter/X, but mainly Tiktok, with OGs like Clav blowing up. This felt like a little bit of Deja Vu: I remember being 17 during the Covid pandemic staying up till 4 am with my friends scrolling 4chan after a long day of gaming, seeing these looksmaxxing memes and laughing together. But now, years later since I was first exposed to this ideology, I've grown. I look different. I think different. So what was the conclusion the older me would come to?
Guys like Clav have grown too. He's about my age, and over time he's become sharper, more articulate, better at communicating the core ideas of the Blackpill. Beneath the satire and comedic content, he slips in undeniable truths. Because the essence of the Blackpill isn't something so shallow as "If you look good women will just throw themselves on you, you can't get a girl because you look like shit." The Blackpill is taking what happens out in the world at face value. Attractiveness matters. Everyone judges people on appearance, not just in dating, but in jobs, in school, even in daily interactions. Attractiveness matters. That's not cynicism; that's observation.
I have a close friend who live by brutal self-honesty. He looks at life like a deck of cards: never deluding himself, always playing the hand he's dealt with maximum clarity. Because of that, he performs. He succeeds. This is what the Blackpill should be: not a sentence to despair, but a framework of realism. It shouldn't depress you, it should wake you up to what needs to be done.
This ties directly into the first half of the essay's title: Genetic Pre-Determinism. People love to explain someone else's success by saying they "got lucky," to protect their own egos, but they rarely apply this same logic to failure. When someone fails they default to something like "he just didn't try hard enough." But genetics play a big part in everything, they play a much bigger role than you think.
Take this video of a short man in a bagel shop yelling at strangers about the struggles he faces. The guy in this video is a loser, this isn't to be mean, but objectively he is a loser, he is screaming at people in a bagel shop about the problems he deals with. Most people will dismiss him as crazy, or assume he's just having a bad day. But what they won't admit is how unlucky he is, because if they acknowledge, that they will have to acknowledge how lucky they are. He's short. He's unattractive. He wasn't born wealthy. Those are cards he never chose. And if you or I were born with that exact hand, odds are we'd end up like him. Not because of weakness, but because that outcome was, in many ways, predetermined.
Think back to high school. I wasn't a supermodel, but I was tall enough, decent-looking, acne-prone but nothing that crazy. I had a stable family. Now let's think about how I turned out as a probability, as a kid who was relatively tall, not ugly, good family situation at home, there was probably a 70% chance I'd turn out normal 30% chance I turn out "abnormal." Now compare that to the man in that video: short, unattractive, not rich. What do you think the chances he was going to turn out "normal" were? I bet the probability of him turning out "normal" is far lower. What people don't understand is, turning out a "loser" is the default for someone like him, unless he fights tooth and nail to claw out of that fate.
And yet, when people see him, they don't say, "he's unlucky." They insult him, laugh at him, moralize about "working harder." But they ignore the reality: many outcomes are shaped long before you make a single choice. That's what genetic pre-determinism means.
So what I want to leave you with is this: if life has already handicapped you in certain ways, you cannot afford complacency. You have to maximize everything, your looks, your health, your confidence, your skills. Because when two men walk into a job interview with identical resumes, it won't be their resumes that decide the outcome. It'll be who looks sharper, who looks better, who carries himself better.
This is the truth of the Blackpill, not despair, but brutal clarity. The world doesn't owe you fairness. The cards are dealt before you're even born. But how do you play them? That's still up to you.