Steroids Change EVERYTHING! How Society & Relationships Mirror Your Enhancement (Should You Do AAS?)

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🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO 
Discover how changing your body visually influences social perception, self-identity, and your mental resilience. This episode delves into the unseen social shifts, gendered responses, and mental discipline required when your physical appearance evolves. It emphasizes external validation risks and the importance of detachment in maintaining inner stability.

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🧠 TIMESTAMPS 
00:00 - The body as a social object: How physical changes influence others’ reactions
02:14 - The projections onto enhanced physiques—mostly about observers, not the individual
03:37 - Cultural default: natural talent versus cyber-enhancement myths
05:02 - Gendered social responses to muscularity in men and women
06:46 - The impact on romantic and sexual dynamics
08:10 - Dealing with social comparisons and questions about drug use
09:35 - Positive social influences and the responsibility of role modeling
10:59 - Shifting perception in relationships and handling jealousy or insecurity
12:25 - The pleasure versus dependence of external validation
14:18 - The disciplined posture: detachment and internal stability
15:43 - Practical interaction strategies for social feedback
17:07 - Separating external perceptions from internal self-image
18:05 - Summary: The inner work to keep your self-view independent of social reactions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most of the conversation about steroids, it kind of treats the body as a private object, like something you change in private that mostly affects just you. So the compounds, the doses, the blood work, the mirror in your own bathroom, it's all inside the borders of just one person. That framing, I believe, is incomplete. So once the body actually changes in a way that other people can see, the body stops being purely private. It becomes a social object, is what I call it. It becomes something other people read, they interpret, they react to, they project onto, and they treat differently than they treated before. And um that change, how in in like how the world responds to you, is not a side effect of your decision to do steroids. It is part of the decision, whether you have thought about it or not, whether you signed up for it or not. So this episode is about that, not the ethics of disclosure, which we covered on episode seven, not the cultural game of the natural versus enhance, which is going to come up in episode 26. This episode is about the felt experience of what being like seen differently after your body changes actually does to you. What happens when the world starts treating you like a different person, even when you have not changed in any way that you can aim from the inside? So let me start with the central observation because everything else is gonna follow from it. When you become visibly more muscular, more powerful, more physically present, the social environment around you shifts very, very significant. It's not slightly at all. The shift is very real, it's consistent and it's largely outside of your control. So people look at you differently. The duration of the look changes. Some people stare at you longer, some people glance away faster. The kind of look you receive when you walk into a room is different from the look you received before. People treat you differently in physical space, they give you a little bit more room or a little bit less. They differ slightly when you arrive somewhere, they calibrate, they often unconsciously do so around the body that you are now inhabiting. So people make different assumptions about you before you even say a single word, just because of the body that you walked in the room with. So the assumptions are not always positive and they're also not always negative. They're just different. And they are happening before you even have a chance to be a person to them. So this shift is one of the most under-discussed parts of the entire decision of go and enhance. And I think it deserves a special episode here because the decision to enhance is also a decision to enter a different social environment. And you do not get to opt out of that part once you have opted in to the rest. So here's the strange thing about how this shifts like how this actually works. Like the projections people put onto you when your body changes are almost never about you. They're always about them, almost every single time. So some people they see a muscular body and a disciplined, you know, they they they a disciplined person, they project competence into it. They assume the person is disciplined, they assume they're hard worker, they're focused. That projection is a mirror of qualities the projector values and is striving for. Some people see the same body and they project arrogance onto it. They assume that the person is vain, self-absorbed, and shallow. That projection is a mirror of qualities the projector is anxious about in themselves. Some people see the same body and they feel admiration. Some people feel envy, some feel intimidation, some feel inspired, some feel resentful. The same body, the same person inhabiting produces wildly different responses depending on who is looking, because the body is being generated by the looker, not by the body, is about the perception. So this is worth sitting with because most people, when they first encounter the responses, they are prone to take these responses personally. So they feel admired and they feel proud. They feel suspected and then they feel heard. They feel intimidated against and then they feel guilty. The responses land as if they were about the person being seen, about you. They're not. They are about the person doing the seeing. And the body is just the surface of the projector found the something to project onto. So once you can see that, uh, a lot of the social experience of being enhanced becomes a lot easier to hold because you you start seeing, um, you know, in reading these responses as data about you, and you start reading them as data about the responders. The admiration is not evidence of your worth, and the suspicion is not evidence of your fraud. The intimidation is not evidence of your aggressiveness. Each one of those is the responder telling you in a code about themselves. So there's a specific cultural pattern around this. Um, and I think it shows up consistently and it deserves to be understood whenever we're thinking about these things. People tend to attribute natural physiques to hard work and discipline. They tend to attribute enhanced physiques to chemistry alone. The first attribution credits the person, the second attribution dismisses the human being. And the irony, the part that makes this pattern very weird, is that enhanced lifters very often train harder. They eat more rigorously, and they live more structurally than most natural lifters ever will. The cultural defaults to suspicion. It operates on the assumption that visible muscularity is either a natural gift or it is an artificial cheat code. And it almost never considers the third option, which is that the product of relentless structure and intelligent enhancement, both of which are real and both of which required real years of solid work. So this default is doing psychological work for the culture. And once you can see what work is doing, you stop being able to take it as a verdict on you. The default lets the watcher feel okay, right? If the muscular person is a genetic gift, the watcher cannot be expected to have one. So they are off the hook. If the muscular person is a cheat, the watcher is morally superior, so they're also off the hook. The third option that the gap is real and it was closed by some combination of things the watcher could in principle do, but did not, leaves the watcher without a comfortable place to stand. So the default rarely lands on the third option. It bounces between the first two because the few uh the first two options here are emotionally cheaper. So that whole pattern is something happening in the watcher. It is not a judgment of you. Knowing that does not stop the comments, it just stops the comments from being a thing that you internalize as information about yourself. There's also a gendered dimension here that runs underneath all of this, and I do not want to skip it. So, sip of water first. So, for men, becoming visibly muscular usually activates a certain kind of embodied respect in physical space, right? People can often defer slightly. The body reads as competence and capability and physical presence, and the cultural skip for those readings, while flawed, it mostly works in the muscular man's favor in everyday interaction. For women, the experience is very different. Becoming visibly muscular often activates the opposite response: scrutiny rather than admiration, confusion rather than respect. The cultural narrative around women's bodies and muscle, it remains stubbornly narrow. And a woman with a visibly developed physique often has to navigate constant low-grade misreading of her body of what it means and what kind of person she must be to have that type of body. So this the same physical change in a male body and a female body produces different social environments. And neither one of those environments is being managed by the person inhabiting the body. The culture is doing the reading, and the cultural reading is not symmetric. Now, this is um this is not a reason to make or or to not make any particular decision on enhancement. This is just a reality, right? The social environment you enter when your body changes is shaped by who you are before the body changed. And uh, who you are before, it includes things like sex that you do not control. The decision is the same decision either way. The social terrain you're deciding to enter is just a different terrain. Now, there's another social dynamic that catches people off guard when they go enhanced, and I want to name it because it is one of the most psychologically destabilizing parts of the whole uh enhanced experience for some people. So, comparison dynamics they amplify. People who used to feel neutral standing next to you, they start comparing themselves to you physically. And some of them start asking questions about it. Hey, what supplements do you take? What is your secret? How long have you been lifting? What program are you running? How many drugs are you taking? What are your doses? Like the questions are mostly genuine on the surface, but they sit inside a different relational dynamic than the relationship had before. You are now also, in some part in their mind, the body they weighed themselves against. If you are not disclosing the truth of your use, you have to develop a graceful response to the question because the questions will not stop. So you can deflect, you can generalize, you can focus on the conversation on training and discipline. You can simply smile and say a long time, right? Like silence and brevity, they work as a clean kind of boundary. None of these responses are dishonest, in my opinion. They're just not full disclosures. And uh, you know, you are entitled to keep your medical information yours, as we covered in the honesty episode. Now, if you are disclosing, the dynamic is different and often a little bit easier, but it does require you to actually have made peace with the disclosure. There's no half measure here that works. You can't go halfway. Either you live the privacy stuff fully, or you live the openness stance fully. The discomfort of social comparison is one of the things that pushes people towards the third stance, the dishonest one, where they perform naturalism. So that stance is the one that we've been warning against the whole series, and the social pressure to drift into one of those reasons. Uh it's it's uh it's it's it is one of those reasons that people do those things. Now, there's also a brighter side of the social shifts that also deserves a space here because this episode would be unbalanced without that. So sometimes the the change in how people see you brings something good. It brings admiration, it brings curiosity, it brings people to you for advice or mentorship or guidance, and those interactions can be very, very meaningful. So, some people they're inspired by your body to train harder, to eat better, to take their own physicality more seriously. And that inspiration is real. The enhanced person can become a symbolic figure, someone who represents what is possible inside dedication, even if the dedication is being measured against a slightly different scale than that one that inspired a person that they assumed was the thing that inspired them. So this brings us to uh its own responsibility, right? And episode seven covered the ethical version of it. So for this episode, the relevant version is just this. When people look up to you because of your body, you have a choice about how to inhabit that. And that choice matters. You can let it inflate you, in which case the admiration becomes fuel for ignorance. You can let it humble you, in which case it becomes a reminder to carry yourself with care. You can shrug it off, in which case it does not affect you much. You just different choices, different lives. The admiration itself is just an input. What you do with it is the actual variable. Now, romantic and sexual perception also shifts, and this catches a lot of people by surprise. Confidence reads differently on a muscular frame, presence becomes amplified. The dynamics of attraction shifts in ways that is mostly outside of one person's control. Some people there will be drawn to the enhanced body simply because, you know, physical power is for them intrinsically compelling. Some people will be repelled by it for the same exact reason. The physical input lands as appealing or unappealing depending on who is doing the receiving. And both responses are equally real, equally common, and equally not about you. So for people who have partners, this shift can produce strain that has absolutely nothing to do with the partner's actual feelings about you. The partner notices that more people are noticing you. They they sort of feel a shift in the relational equilibrium that they did not consent to at the beginning. So this can start manifesting itself as jealousy, as withdrawal, as a sudden hyper-vigilance about other people's attention. And none of those reactions are necessarily about the partner believing you would actually leave them or cheat on them. They are reactions uh to a perceived shift in the field, and the field genuinely did shift, even if your loyalty did not. So we will cover this relational dimension in more depth in a later episode. But for this episode, the relevant point is that the changed body changes the dynamics around you, including in the closest relationships and the people closest to you in ways that they will react in ways that did, you know, to the change field, regardless of how stable you actually are inside of it. Now, there is an objection to everything that I've been saying. And the objection is Nathan, this episode is making an enormous deal out of something most people just enjoy, man. The vast majority of guys who get visibly muscular, they love the social shift. They love being deferred to, they like the attention, they love the people seeing them differently. So you're framing it as a heavy psychological burden. And for most people, it's not a burden, it's the entire point, man. They want the social shifts. They got it, so they're happy. And, you know, plenty of people do enjoy the shift. Uh, pretending that nobody enjoys it would be dishonest. So for some people, the new attention is genuinely pleasurable and uh they navigate it without difficulty, and they should not have to manufacture a crisis around it just because uh, you know, a coach on YouTube is treating it as a heavy topic. But here's where the objection misses the point the pleasure of the shift is real, and it's also one of the most destabilizing things that can happen to a fragile identity precisely because it feels good. So when external validation starts arriving in a larger and more frequent dose and the person enjoys it, the enjoyment is not free. It quietly trains the self to depend on validation, and the body becomes the thing producing the validation. The self becomes the thing depending on the body to keep it producing. And then when the body shifts in the off season and coming off and aging, the validation drops. And the self that learned that to and you know it needed to this, it crashes harder than it would have if it never had been uh getting the steadier supply in the first place. So the pleasure of the shift is not the problem. The dependence the pleasure trains you on is the problem. So the objection is right that most people enjoy the social shift. It is wrong that enjoying that social shift is free. There is a discipline required, even with the pleasure, which is the received response without learning to needing it. So the mature version of enjoying the attention is the version that does not also collapse when attention is not there. So that discipline is not automatic. And this is what this episode is about. So, what is the actual posture to take towards all of this? Because the whole thing happening, whether you want to or not, and you have to inhabit it somehow. So the posture that I approach with is detachment, not coldness, not indifference, a specific kind of detachment where the response they arrive, you notice them and you do not let them rent space in your sense of self. Admiration arrives and you let it pass through without inflating. Suspicion arrives and you let it pass through without contracting. Comments arrive and you let them pass through without internalizing. The responses are about the responders, and you can hear them, you can acknowledge them, but you do not let them set the temperature inside of you. So there's a practical version of this because um the abstract version is very hard to inhabit until you have noticed it in actual moments. So when a comment arrives, the practice response is short, calm, and does not engage the assumption underneath it. A friendly question gets a friendly, brief answer that does not invite more. A skeptical comment gets a neutral acknowledgement that does not justify or deny. A direct accusation gets a redirection or a closing of the topic and not a defense. You're not trying to convince anyone. You're not trying to win the exchange. You're simply the receiving um, you know, the social weather and you're letting it pass. The fewer words you spend justifying yourself, the less authority you have given the comment, and the less the comment shapes anything about you. So people who try to win every comment about their body become over time defined by the comments that they were trying to win. People who let the comments wash through, they stay defined by something else, which is the entire point. So the book this series is built on, it has a line about this that I think it it it names the discipline aspect very clearly. The self that depends on external validation is always at risk of external invalidation. The uh, you know, if in if admiration tells you who you are, then suspicion can tell you who you are as well. If you are, you know, accepting of the praise as evidence of your worth, you have already given the criticism the same authority. The only posture that holds up across the social variation is the one where the source of your sense of yourself, it is not in the room with the people responding to your body. It is somewhere else, somewhere internal, somewhere the person and the responders cannot touch. A person cannot control how others interpret their body. They can only control how they interpret themselves and how much weight they give it to the interpretation of others, right? The weight they give is the variable, the interpretation themselves are not. So let's bring this home. When your body changes visibly, the world around you starts treating you differently. The shift is real and it is consistent and it cannot be opted out by anyone whose body actually changes. The responses you receive, both positive and negative, are mostly about the people responding and not about you. The pattern of crediting naturals with discipline and dismissing the enhanced as cheaters is a cultural default, doing psychological work for the culture, not a verdict about you. The shift is also gendered, and the social terrain a man enters is not the same one a woman enters, even with the same physical change. Comparison dynamics amplify, romantic and sexual responses shift, and the closest relationships they feel new field, whether anyone names it or not. And the only stable posture across all of this is detachment from the responses, where you let them arrive, you notice them, you do not let them set the temperature inside of you. The pleasure of being admired is real, and it is also a discipline because the self that learns to need the admiration crashes when admiration is gone. The mature person who is enhanced is the one who can receive both the praise and the suspicion without either of them becoming the source of who they are. Steroids, they change how the world sees you. The work, the inner work, is to make sure the world, how the world sees you is not the same thing as how you see yourself. Those two things they have to be kept separate. Their separation is the entire defense that you have to present. Now, next episode, we're going to move out of the social and into the temporal, the long view. Why thinking in years instead of weeks changes the whole shape of your decision. And I'll see you guys on the next episode.