In the below video, Penn of Penn & Teller talks about his time on Celebrity Apprentice and how willpower is a muscle that weakens with continual use. When people are in front of cameras, they initially exercise high willpower to manage self image, but after a while this muscle is exhausted and they become completely undisciplined.
Interestingly, Penn’s response to this exhaustion is to become quiet and non-confrontational. From this we see that he’s an introvert, which is common for intelligent big-eye melons.
(Penn’s eyes appear small now that he is old and fat, but were large when he was young and skinny. I measure eye size corner to corner.)
This willpower exhaustion phenomenon described by Kahneman is extremely relevant to introverts attempting PUA. The typical PUA strategy is a huge and exhausting self-monitoring performance for introverts. Because the judging superego of introverts is so strong, this is like working in front of TV cameras. It can take many hours of this to seduce a girl, during which time willpower runs out and the introvert reverts to his quiet default state.
There are ways around this, as the success of RSD proves, but the fact remains that this willpower exhaustion is a major problem for introvert would-be PUA’s. This is why they feel that pickup is “exhausting”. It literally is.
Koanic Soul is designed to avoid this exhaustion by eliminating the exercise of willpower in the first place. There is no big goal of pickup. There is no big “summoning of courage and focus” for the performance. There is no performance, period. There is no difference in internal activity between hitting on a girl and working on a computer. In both cases, the only focus is maintaining the meditative state. The only goal is to generate congruent spontaneous output from the subconscious.
Instead of attempting to kick-start one’s behavior and energy in social situations, one simply expresses subtle non-verbal body language dominance, thereby grabbing attention and building tension. That supplies the energy to kick the subconscious motor into generating some sort of social response, or it doesn’t, which results in increasing tension, which causes the other person to react, which is funny. It’s a no-lose situation.
There’s much more to say about this, but I’d simply be duplicating what’s already on the “How to do Koanic Soul” link at the top of the page.