Month: July 2019

The Daygame Gold Rush

This post isn’t about monetizing game or products or email lists and shit like that. Daygame discussion on Twitter and the Internet is a mess. Just like any gold rush, there is a lot of commotion, activity, and excitement. Is there much gold?

The reports of many men on Twitter make it seem like gold is everywhere on the street, just waiting to be picked up. So many men set out to look for gold, traveling to California or the Yukon or Papua New Guinea or wherever the latest gold rush is announced.

Fools Gold

The conception in society is that you (man or woman) should just be yourself and walk around and you will magically find gold in your daily life. You just have to believe…

There are men claiming to participate in the gold rush, claiming to have struck it rich already, who claim to find gold regularly, but really the tiny amount of gold they find is augmented by another business, where they hunt for gold in the night markets, or they match in an online gold market, or purchase it outright from gold selling services. These men are often hustling and working hard for their gold, but they are not gold miners.

There are boot camps that charge thousands of dollars to take people out looking for gold.

There are many sellers of maps to gold, who may or may not have found gold, but definitely make money selling maps to tourists and naive greenhorn miners.

There are guys selling shovels, pickaxes, gold pans, tools, lamps, tents, boots, jeans, shirts, hair pomade, diet advice, fitness advice to help in the search for gold.

There are guys who tell you how amazing it is to have found gold and what crazy things you can do once you have found it, things that other men dream about, but 99% of men will never experience. These same men truly believe in the Cities of Gold, the lost mine of El Dorado and other tales of fabulous wealth.

There are even a few women who tell you how much gold they have to offer a man, and how wonderful it is to share their gold with a man (but only a man who can find gold, much more preferably a man who has already found gold). There are many women with no gold who only want a man who can find gold and has found gold but don’t want to offer him any gold (usually because they don’t have any to offer).

There are guys who just want the validation of being perceived as lucky or clever enough to find gold.

There are guys who want the validation of being a seeker of gold, whether or not they find it.

There are guys who want recognition or a pat on the back for trying really hard to find gold and failing.

There are guys who are preaching about gold fever, and how careful one should be about pursuing gold, and the evils of what can happen to men who find it.

There are guys who obsess about how pure their gold should be, and how to identify both pure and adulterated gold.

There are guys who find fools gold (or worse: BUY it) and run around proclaiming they are rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Some will realize their error, and some will die believing they are fabulously wealthy.

Finders

There are a few instruction manuals with advanced techniques for prospecting and extracting gold, but most men can’t be bothered to read the manuals. And if they read the manuals, they then have to go out into the hills and start digging. It is intimidating because it looks like hard work. It is.

There are guys who just seem to get genuinely excited by finding gold. It’s a beautiful thing, watching a guy strike gold. Watching his hard work pay off.

Some have found gold and then waste it on drink, card games at casinos (or the modern electronic equivalent), and maybe even prostitutes.

The more prudent miners who have found gold don’t talk as much, and many have an understated style. Being flashy attracts the greenhorns and claim jumpers and that’s bad for business.

If you can identify the successful miners, you can learn a lot, as they will often share a lot of knowledge. They are hanging out mostly with other seasoned and salty miners, easily identifiable by the wear patterns on their boots and jeans, the calluses on their hands, the relaxed, patient confidence from toiling day in and day out.

Some of the old timers enjoy hazing any greenhorn miners that get too close or are riding too high on the hog. They do respect hustle and hard work when accompanied by a modest temperament and a good vibe.

So what I am doing here?

I’m building a gold mine.

I tried hunting for gold at the night markets. I tried matching for gold online. I found some gold in my social circle, but it wasn’t enough gold.

2 years ago, I bought a shovel, a pickaxe and a gold pan. I packed a rifle a bowie knife, and a handful of salt. I bought appropriate clothing. I bought and read the fucking manuals. I did a lot of prospecting, then picked a claim, built a cabin and I started digging a mine. It was hard at first. It still is.

I suffer openly from gold fever, yet my temperament remains steadfast. I dig almost every day. I found a few nuggets, and I am convinced there is more “gold in them thar hills” (as a character of Mark Twain’s once said).

Sometimes my mine collapses and I have to dig it out again – it’s rough when that happens. Sometimes I find gold when I am digging out my old mine after a collapse.

My hope is that I will find some significant amount of gold, that it will be enough, and then I will be free to go do something else. That may be naive. I may be a gold miner for the rest of my life. Perhaps my mine will produce gold well into my old age. It’s possible that I will never find gold, or won’t find enough, and will just become a crazy old man looking for the motherlode of gold on a claim that doesn’t have any.

In the meantime, I’m just in my cabin or at my mine, doing the work that needs to be done and shooting shots in the air to ward off any coyotes or claim jumpers that get close enough to fuck with my vibe.

Finally, in case you are not the brightest kerosene lamp in the mine and are thinking: WTF did I just read? Gold is an analogy for intimacy and sex. Daygame is mining. I had fun writing this.