You will find plenty of different explanations for the stages of MGTOW, so this break-down is from what I went through, and maybe you will be able to relate to some of these stages.

It all begins with a catalyst, something that gets you to start questioning your surroundings and your reality. This can be a bad relationship, the inability to attract or retain women, observations of the suffering of other men, or just the gynocentric nature of our societies. Whatever your catalyst was, it lead you to asking questions and doing your own research and then stumbling upon answers.

This leads to the next stage, the Overdose stage. Here you overdose on red pills, you bombard yourself with the amount of knowledge that has been gathered in our community. It takes over your life, all you can think about is your next fix, your next breath of fresh air from the gynocentric blind spot that everyone else seems to have.

Eventually you may burn out and seek to reintegrate with society as it was before your catalyst. You’ll enter the Denial stage, and the length of this may vary, but I hope that it’s short. You’ll try to close yourself off to the harsher truths because you aren’t ready to reshape yourself, your previous state of mind won’t allow for those hard pills to be swallowed. Every where you turn, you’ll see the reality that you’re trying to run from, and you’ll never be able to escape from it because you’ve entered the next stage:

Awareness. A permanent insight that will remain with you no matter what happens or where your path takes you, this awareness will guide you through the remaining stages. It will allow you to decode the matrix and see, truly, for the first time and begin to formulate answers from an honest place, free from gynocentric taint.

The Rage phase is a direct consequence of this awareness. This great power to see was not meant for you to have, you were meant to be a slave to your desires and the sense of duty that was imposed upon you by others. Because of your newfound power, you see every bias, every double standard, every form of weakness, corruption, and ignorance and you become angry at your inability to change it. It consumes your very essence, and it is uncontrollable and directed at everything.

It takes a great amount of willpower to begin coming out of that phase, and the first attempts will lead into the next stage of Bargaining. Attempts to compromise, to try your best to navigate around problems with your ever present awareness, will leave you frustrated and exhausted. You will continue to beat your head against that wall until finally, you reach the stage of Confirmation.

Something will happen, much like your Catalyst, that will cement the teachings of MGTOW forever. When you see it firsthand in a scenario where you have an active part in the outcome and your eternal awareness influences your decisions and the reactions you get, MGTOW will be confirmed for you.

This confirmation leads to the Depression stage, a very real and dangerous stage to be in. MGTOW is the great destroyer of the ideas and dreams tied to the plantation, and only once you go beyond the fires of truth and observations will you be able to rebuild something new. Once those dreams from the old world have been shattered completely after your confirmation, you will be aimless and adrift. You were never encouraged to cultivate your individuality or chase personal happiness because it didn’t serve your old masters. Learning to walk again, to make strides towards your own path, is a painful exercise, one that brings memories of what you’re walking away from with every step, but eventually when you walk far enough, you’ll get to the next stage of Acceptance.

When you get to that place, you’ll understand that you’re better off with the knowledge and awareness, and that the pain of growth is nothing compared to the pain waiting for the men still on the plantation. You’ll begin to see the patterns that go beyond MGTOW, the patterns of male and female nature throughout all of history and how they have always been like this. You may have been able to have a wife and raise a family in a different time period, but you would still be subjected to female nature and your freedom would suffer because of it.

This acceptance paves the way for Zen. When you’ve truly found your path, and you’ll know what it is when you find it, a permanent wave of satisfaction will follow you, an aura of serenity. I try my best to avoid describing my path in too much detail or what a path that leads to Zen might look like because the whole point is to find your own path. There are steps you can take and stages you will go through to get to it, but there is no one universal path. All the different paths may offer universal benefits, but they all fit differently into our lives.

Wherever you may be on your MGTOW journey, know that there is always more personal growth to be made and that the journey never really ends. You may have enough knowledge to leave the community and forge your own path, but it will always remain with you and help you in times of need when no one else is there to help you. Your path may allow for friends and distractions, but to get where you truly need to go, only you can take yourself there. Keep walking, stay MGTOW.