My son (18) is finishing his A levels this year and is going to university next year. He is incredibly angry and bitter at his life and I’d like some advice on what to say to him. He is going to do a physics degree and always found academics quite easy and was always described as very intelligent or sometimes a “genius”.
He has very mild autism and was often teased when he was younger he was called things like “spastic” and “retarded” and was told he has an “extra chromosome” although it is important to note he is not intellectually disabled in any meaningful way and no one would genuinely believe he was when speaking to him.
He is bitter he never had a high school girlfriend although I know he has “pulled girls” in house parties and more recently nightclubs. He has become incredibly bitter, and he has started looking at things online that are not good for him. People like Andrew tate ad other alpha male influencers. He started telling me about things like the “blackpill and redpill” which are dating ideologies he found online. They basically say the conventional dating advice of just be kind and the right girl will come are wrong and the only way to attract women is by working extremely hard at it and constantly obsessing over self-improvement. He seems to believe he was dealt a bad hand in life and has become obsessed with self-improvement in order to be able to “pull women” and becoming one of the top 1% of men. He looks up to and admires people such as Andrew Tate and aspires to become like them. He seems to believe he is currently treated like a “sub human” and has become obsessed with self-improvement and something called “looksmaxing” to an unhealthy degree. Very often on the weekend he goes to nightclubs where his sole objective is to find a girl to take home with him so he believes can finally ascend out of subhuman status although I don’t believe he has managed this yet.
He is so obsessed with this he has spent over £50 of my money paying people online to rate his face out of 10. They sent him a long technical document filled with ratios and measurements of his face which resembles something I would read in my career as an engineer. They also gave him a final rating of a 4.5 out of 10 or slightly below average. One of them told him “Your face is common but you will be seen as slightly below average or plain looking”. Another told him you are a 4/10 but you have potential to looksmax to a 6 and the primary advice was to keep going to the gym to slim down to 12% bodyfat and get a 6 pack. Another thing he did online is he went onto a livestream of one of these alpha males influencers and asked for looksmaxing advice and asked him to rate him out of 10. This influencer online insulted him and told him he looked like he had been through a midlife crisis and that he had man boobs and a gut. However he then rated him a 6/10 and said his face looked good and there was nothing wrong with it. This seemed to please him greatly as it seemed to give him hope that he has the genetic potential to “save himself” and manage to ascend to the top 1% of men. When my son told the influencer but a 6 out of 10 is average the influencer told my son women don’t want average they only want the best men. I think this is a harmful message as it further cemented his belief how he is is not good enough and made worse his constant need to self improve.
He seems to believe that average men in western society he is treated extremely poorly and he told him girls see him like he would see “dog shit on the street”. He also believes that the top 1% of men have a quality of life 100x better and he has made it his life goal to reach the top 1% of attractiveness.
He has often tried to change his personality to attract women. His voice is quite flat and monotone and I have noticed a conscious effort to change this around women where he would try to vary the pitch of his voice. He was also told he was socially akward and compared to “AI” or “Chat GTP” in another instance of people taking the piss out of him. This seems to really upset him and I can see how much effort he puts in trying to “fix his personality” to be more attractive to women.
I would really appreciate some advice on what to say to him so that his mental health can improve when he starts university next year and how he can learn to accept himself how he is instead of constantly seeing himself as defective and trying to fix himself into what he sees as the ideal in order to attract women.