Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that I was not killed in my early 20s.
No, I wasn’t disemboweled by a knight atop his horse at Hastings.
I wasn’t mowed down in a romantic yet hopeless defense of King and Country in the Napoleonic era.
I didn’t even get to gracelessly expire of dysentery on the Oregon Trail or get puréed by the direct impact of a shell in my foxhole at Verdun.
No, I’m still here. Unfortunately. And now I’m old.
Well, not that old. I am leaving my early 20s though, which means I’m soon entering suicide territory.
Well, I feel qualified to offer some advice to men entering the time period I’m leaving, the 18-21 age group. Which was born in.. *checks notes* 2006??? Le sigh…
So ya, I feel like this is a good time to write an article specifically for young men in my chudsphere. As in, young men that are keyed in on the JQ but they don’t know how to file their taxes. I do feel like this group of young guys skews younger, so perhaps you’ll see me as a venerable graybeard that walked the path before you. IDK.
Compartmentalize the Internet
So, I’m sure we’ve all seen the cliché advice for young people to “simply spend less time on the internet”. Most of the people that tell us that don’t understand that our generation doesn’t treat socializing the way they remember it: a bunch of teenagers skateboarding at the mall. No, when we want to “hang out” it’s increasingly on Discord, TikTok, etc. I don’t think this is a good thing, btw. I’m just saying, you aren’t going to have much success getting your friend group to become luddites because their friends are online too.
But, we all know the risks and issues that come with extensive time online. So, Watdo? My advice is to compartmentalize the internet, make it something you have to “go do” instead of something that’s always around you. My parents used to not let me and my siblings use electronics until the sun went down, meaning when we got home from school we’d have to play outside until dinner (unless it was raining). I think this is a great model tbh. Give yourself time to enjoy doing what you’re doing online. Give yourself time to scroll your apps, make shitposts, whatever. But don’t let it drain away unwitting time. Like, don’t be on iFunny at 5pm on a Friday. Don’t rush home from work or classes and plop down to play Fortnite with TikTok on your phone for the slow bits when you’re downed. Go do something else until the 2 hours before you start going to bed, then do your thing online, then put your phone in a different room while you sleep.
For example, I don’t have social media apps on my phone. Well, unless you count iFunny. So I can’t scroll while I wait in line or otherwise fast travel past non-stimmy parts of my day. But, when I’m done with my work for the day, I will occasionally (once a month or so) log into social media on my desktop. I’m at the point now where I don’t even really miss it, but hopefully you get the point.
Essential disclaimer:
Do not get sucked into endless negativity online. When I was your age (sigh..) I treated iFunny like a news outlet. As in, I hung on every post from guys like ElectionMaps and iGaza to know “what was really going on”. There’s nothing wrong with ElectionMaps, my point is that I started to have a warped perspective on reality. I felt like it was my responsibility to be keenly up-to-date on all of these issues, like the sole guardian of truth for my unenlightened family and friend circle. I was physically distressed over the extinction of white people, like it was some eminent thing within my lifetime that I had to stop. I was literally relieved to see a blonde girl walk by, that sort of thing.
It took spending less time on the internet to relax a little. I had to compartmentalize my access to iFunny and the doomer part of the internet. I also had to understand that I didn’t have control over much of what I was so upset about. Like, it’s not solely on me to have 15 white children to save our kin. I’m never going to cancel out the millions of childless white women no matter how hard I try. All you can do is have a strong network and play your role. Sure, you might be some Overman that inspires the masses to have gorrillions of kids, but I know I’m not. You can replace the birthrates issue with microplastics, politics, the food supply, immigration, anything that we fret about on iFunny. There comes a point where you’re not “learning” or helping the situation anymore, you just run yourself ragged worrying about the beeping of 250,000 bombs ticking to zero simultaneously. And the situation remains the same when you’re done.
Yes, iFunny and other dissident spaces are important because I learn things from them that I’d never know otherwise in our increasingly sanitized world. But, they have their station just like everything else in life. Check yourself to make sure your online access isn’t seeping into your happiness.
Don’t be an Improover
This one is for me in the past. I had a real desire to be perfect, or at least max out my stats / genetic potential. The problem is, I was 18 and this is just not realistic. I was hard on myself until I learned this lesson. I think there’s an emerging, dangerous trend of people that take self-improvement to ridiculous extremes. Like, minmaxxing every minute of their day, trying to maintain 15 hobbies at once, forcing yourself to do “based activities” that you don’t even like, self-help books, “5 minute habits”, whatever. You can turn into your own version of retarded by doing this.
It’s a form of poisoning the well because self improvement is important. Just like the internet, it needs to be compartmentalized.
What worked for me was to have several important goals, and to be rather fluid with how I achieved them. For example, I got in great shape not by “waking up at 4am every day to work out for 90 minutes followed by 15 minutes of journaling”, but by saying “I need to work out 5 times in 7 days. Where does this fit into my schedule this week?”. I achieved the same result by entirely different means than the Improovers will tell you is possible. It wasn’t “undisciplined” of me to not work out at the same time every day.
I think its important to keep expectations and the total number of new habits low. As in, you can really only meaningfully impact 1-2 things at a time until they become reflexive. This is something improovers struggle with: they still think the human brain is capable of multi-tasking. It’s not. Especially for men. Instead of looking like this:
Take stock of yourself and figure out what needs to be fixed now, what can be fixed later, and what is a “nice thought”.
Don’t be hard on yourself when something doesn’t work. I remember feeling so mad because I didn’t like journaling. But all the successful guys like journaling at 5am!! I sperged, mad over not filling out the prompts in my (unironic) Daily Stoic branded diary for 3 days in a row again. I shudder to think if I would’ve been an Andrew Tate autismo in those days.
This is why I think spelling out your goals is more important than how you achieve those goals. My goal with the journal was to spend more time self-reflecting. Ok, if journaling doesn’t work and you don’t like it (and therefore won’t do it), then why not just go through your day in your mind while you shower before bed? If you don’t like that, why not set aside 15 minutes of sitting in your car after work to decompress and assess? You get the idea. Don’t hold your success up by someone else’s standards, in improvement specifically. Only you know what you need, when you need it, and how to get it. Think of it like innovating, not “giving up”. Experiment and find what works, then expand on it. Throw away what doesn’t work.
Disclaimer: it’s important to not let being flexible turn into “watering down the results”. Sometimes, you just need to force yourself to do stuff you don’t like, even if you really don’t want to. For example, not having a consistent gym time only works if you know you really are going to get up and go to the gym at 7pm. Otherwise, you’re just going to negotiate into sabotaging yourself.
Consider college and the military
These two were a much better sell like, 30 years ago. Man, doing both in the 90s was probably ebic.
I still think both are good routes for young men that don’t have a concrete plan in their lives.
The military
The military is still a low A-tier route for most young men. If you enlist, it allows you to pick your job and get free training on it. The recruitment is so bad right now that you can basically pick whatever job you want. There are many, many jobs in the military where you are nowhere near the front lines, if that’s what you’re concerned with. For example, you can get paid to go to school to learn how to be a welder, a veterinarian, or a physicist. Then you get to do this job in a typically low-stress environment for like 2-3 years. After that, you get veteran status the rest of your life.
Being in the military solves a lot of questions that young guys either don’t have the answer to or aren’t mature enough to ask. Where will I live? What will my schedule be? Who are my friends? Where am I going with my life? What’s my pay going to look like? How am I going to get health insurance? That sort of thing. The military solves all of them for you.
The reserves are another epic option. One weekend a month for a few years in exchange for a lifetime of benefits? Of friendships, skills, connections, etc?
Think about it. Let’s say you enlist when you’re 18. You do a 3 year contract, make friends, learn skills, and get insight into a unique line of work and environment. You’re “certified” in the eyes of most anyone you talk to for the rest of your life. Then you move on, at 21 years old.
Now, the common anti-military complaints I think are quite silly.
“But what about ZOG!”
It doesn’t really affect your day-to-day life. Let’s say you became a truck mechanic. You’re basically a regular mechanic except you wear the uniform to work and work on cool trucks instead of lifted F150s. It’s not like you have to salute the pride flag when you walk into the maintenance bay every day. And, the people you are surrounded by also picked the same job as you. So, they’re probably likeminded.
Here’s an article written by an authentic iChud Neonazi (which, I remind you, I am not) about White Nationalists and their incentive to join the military:
“But what about dying overseas for Israel!”
This was pretty hard to do even at the height of GWOT. Being a pizza delivery guy is far more dangerous than being in the military. There are a few pretty dangerous jobs, truck drivers got rekt by IEDs all the time believe it or not, but outside of them your chances of dying at work are no greater than any other job.
Sure, deployments are stupid, but having to go stand around in Germany or Kuwait for a year is not that big of a deal. It’s common to come back jacked or with a college degree because there’s nothing else going on. Also, deployments are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“But what about WW3!”
Personally, I’m not impressed by the Chinese, Russian, or anyone else’s military. I doubt this duking it out with waves of massed infantry assaults styled war is ever going to happen in our lifetimes. And if it does, hate to break it to you, but you’re going to be drafted anyway. Even if you flee to Canada.
“But what about bad leadership!”
Bad leadership exists in any large company, the military is no different. Yes there’s BS, but I always think the retards that say they got out because they had a 0300 formation are stupid. It sucks, but it’s not that hard and in the grand scheme of things, who cares. Also, if you’re that worried about it, become an officer and be the bad leadership!
“But the pay sucks!”
It depends, but yeah, it’s not very competitive for lower enlisted right now. But, its important to remember that most of your compensation doesn’t come in the form of pure cash. You’re also getting stuff like Tricare, which is debatably the best and cheapest healthcare on earth. Also, once you pick up some rank you get paid a lot more.
There’s also so many little things that stack up to make the compensation still pretty good in this day and age. Tuition assistance comes to mind, so does the VA home buying loan. I know someone that saved over $500 on his young renter fee at Enterprise because he had a USAA account. Oh yeah, and you get access to the military rate on everything. You get to go to the VIP lounges at airports, all kinds of stuff.
It's not the perfect option for everyone, but I would still recommend it to anyone who is flopping into a low tier pathway like working retail after high school. The Reserves especially, that has got to be such a fantastic deal. Bonus points if you take my advice and join the special forces or something.
College
College is kind of like the military in that it was a much better move like, 30 years ago. But, it's still gonna be the meta within your lifetime for most high paying, non trade jobs. I think college is a good deal all around for most guys.
Of course, that claim comes with its own disclaimers (xD). The sweet spot is a small to medium sized private school with a reasonable tuition rate. People love crying about tuition today. Yes, its extremely high and overvalued -ask me how I know. But, people often fail to take into account that most students receive far more tuition assistance and aid than they did 30 years ago, even adjusted for inflation.
The conclusion here is that college is only moderately more expensive for students of any sort of quality than it was for your parents. If your schooling costs 50k a year and you don’t have at least 30k in scholarships, you must be too retarded for college in the first place.
“But what about community college!!”
That’s fine, I guess. “Doing 2 years at community college and transferring after because the name on the diploma is the same” is a strategy oft repeated by people who think they’re more clever than they actually are. The problem here is that you lose on the intangible benefits of going into college with the freshman class. You lose all the connections, adventures, stories, friends, bonds, misadventures, struggles of freshman year. By the time you get there, that level of mischief is gone and everyone already has their established friend groups that they “went through it” with.
You decide what these intangibles are worth. For me, it was worth it. I went to a small private school in the mountains that is probably 2 steps below the Ivy League, and I don’t regret it. It was epic.
My only other advice here is it is better if you “know what you want to study in advance”, but this is a really hard sell for 18 year olds. That’s why they have you take “general getting smarter” courses your first two years. Another thing retards cry about.
“What does Aristotelean logic have to do with my STEM degree!!” is a specific type of whining that I hate. It pisses me off so much. Just go to trade school to be an HVAC guy if this is you. Stop trying to shit up everyone else’s LIBERAL ARTS college with this forced, insincere pragmatism. Engineers and code monkeys should be forced to read the classics.
Have a mentor
This one is really important. If you don’t have a father figure, find one. It could be a priest, a coach, a supervisor at work, idk. I’m really just hoping its your father.
Either way, you need someone that can coach you through life’s woes. Even better if they’re in (or have been in) the same field as you so they can help you along the career track that they just went on.
It’s really important to have a masculine, mentor figure that you can bounce ideas off of, vent, problem solve with, etc. Now, if this isn’t your actual father I probably wouldn’t be asking for dating advice. But, an old guy that’s been in your industry for 30 years is such a big passive boost to everything you do at work or in research. You need a couple OG old-timers in your corner, an authentic “been there, done that” you can piggyback off of.
Seek out weird people
“Weird” is a strong word here that can mean “authentic”. At this age everyone, including you, is a bit insincere as they experiment and discover who they will be in this world.
The 18-21 age group has some of the most inauthentic, ruthlessly fake people I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Like, their entire personality is clearly a show for others. They’ve found some cliché nook to cram into and they’re going to ride it until its welded on their soul or they’ve found a new personality to download. Looking back, this was a mix of pathetic and creepy to witness, especially because I know that I wasn’t immune to this. I went through phases where I “practiced” being a silent loner and the life of the party. Everyone else is doing it too. To an extent, its normal. Just know that the people you meet at age 18 might not be the same people at age 23, even if they have the same names.
Weird people seem to be the exception here. I find that weird people are typically quite authentic and seem to know who they’re going to be (weird) for a long time. These weird people tend to make very good, very loyal friends because they typically want very little out of a cutthroat social environment.
One of my best friends in college was a Mormon who loved tinkering with Linux. Is this the guy I want running wingman at a party? No. But, he is one of the most loyal people I’ve ever met that actually picked me up in the rain at 3am over an hour away from my dorm without the slightest complaint. He listened to me, very sincerely, when my college relationship crumbled into dust. Probably for like, 8 hours over the course of a few weeks. He really empathized with me, visibly upset as I choked back tears talking about this girl. Looking back, that’s kind of vindicating.
Another weird guy I knew is a pilot that loves trains, fishing, and Catholicism. So, probably a little autistic. One time, I was playing video games with him on Discord when we both heard a large crash- the sound of my house being broken into (turns out a cat just knocked a bunch of plates off the counter and slammed into some chairs as it fled). I told him I’d be right back. Without even flinching, this guy came creeping up my driveway not even 15 minutes later with a shotgun across his lap and the headlights off. He got out of his car and told me he had 911 pulled up on his phone, but if he heard trouble he was “going in” no questions asked. He was unironically about to put his life on the line sweeping someone else’s house because he knew I was in there and needed help. He told me after he took country roads in his Exterra so he could hit 120mph to get to my house in only 15 minutes. How many friends do you have that would do the same? I bet the percentage of people that are this level of authentic skews much higher in the weird population.
So, you shouldn’t be hanging out with “funko pop” weird guys. Try “good hearted but mildly autistic and a little strange” guys. I’m envisioning the “boys raised by the grandparents” demographic:
When you find the right ones, they’re true gems and typically very good guys to know.
Especially if you’re flopping within your caste in social environments, some of the best people I’ve ever met are off the beaten path. They’re not going to advertise themselves at parties. Do a little digging and see what hidden gems you can uncover.
Allow yourself to fail
This is similar to Improovers but not the same. When I was 18, I was so hard on myself. Any time I wasn’t naturally the best, or even good at something, it’s because I was destined for being a garbage genetics disappointing sperg. I was never happy with myself.
If I got a 99 on something, I tore myself up for being too stupid to miss a small mistake that would’ve given me a 100. If I PR’d in an exercise, the weight was never heavy enough. No matter how well I did with a girl, I was always in my head telling myself I was a spergoid barely concealing my poor qualities. You get the idea.
It is very important to experiment at this age. Spam new stuff. New locations, new events, new hobbies, new people, new ideas. Try everything! But, the flip side is you’re not going to like or be good at or enjoy everything you try.
This process should be treated like panning for gold. 85% of what you try is just not going to resonate. 10% is something you try again, and 5% you’re going to love. The spice of life is acquiring these 5% things. At 18, this should be your mission.
Perfect example: I thought I was gonna love fishing. Turns out, it’s not particularly exciting to me and I honestly hate managing most fishing rods. Well, I still hung out with the “fishing crowd” for a minute. I got invited to a fishing trip where I didn’t catch anything, but I did make some good friends that I still keep up with. I’m even going to one of their weddings soon.
So, yeah. Allow yourself to fail. Know when you’ve failed, know when the jig is up, but don’t be afraid to try. Not everything has to be a slam dunk, and the experience itself often makes it worth it.
Cast the widest possible net you can sustain and assemble a portfolio of things you can say you’ve tried. Approach a Stacy. Try archery. Go to a night club. Try trading options. Spend a night outside, even if you have work or class the next day. Make it 2 nights. Go try church services at every denomination you can find. Fast for 24 hours. Teach yourself to juggle, or fail trying.
Don’t be afraid to say no, or goodbye
At this age, a lot is transactional. Other people are following Layne’s advice above, and might just be stopping by for a time. My “best friends” in freshmen year vanished into the ether sophomore year. I was really bitter about this.
The people you meet at age 18, a large percentage are not going to be relevant to you in 5 years. Perhaps 2/3 will be gone in 3 years. This extends both ways btw. Sometimes, you want someone to be your friend and they don’t want to be your friend, or vice versa.
This lesson was just re-taught to me following my absolutely brutal breakup in January. My childhood friend of over 10 years, gone in one 10 minute ride to the airport. Don’t date childhood friends.
Just be aware that this is an age where relationships come and go. Possess them dispassionately, but be grateful for the ones that survive. Those become really special because there’s a “mutual choosing” after high school where you both kind of understand that there’s nothing forcing you to interact anymore. It’s also sobering but poetic in its own way to watch your friends age with you. The first time you notice one of them starting to bald is pretty frightening.
Oh yeah, don’t be afraid to say no for no’s sake. I learned this lesson when a girl I was interested in invited me to an improv comedy show. These things had the potential to be funny like, 50 years ago. Today, it’s just frantic, socially awkward band kids all “putting themselves out there” in the worst way possible. I straight up told her no. She asked why, and I said (nicely) I just didn’t want to go. No excuses, no fake commitments, no polite lie. “No”.
This is a valuable skill to have. You can’t do this whenever somebody in your life wants to do anything you don’t like, but I’ve vetoed a lot in my day. Friends wanna go watch Jewslop at the movies? “I’m good guys”. Everyone’s buying a stupid fad game (Palworld)?: “Nah, I’ll pass”.
Idk why I combined “no” and “goodbye”, this is why I don’t like not finishing articles in one sitting. I guess it kind of makes sense.
Keep commitments to a minimum
I’m getting kinda bored again. Idk why I do this to myself. Do you guys even like these giant posts or would you prefer more smaller ones
I get to the bottom of these articles and I’m about ready to log off and then I realize I’m never gonna publish it if I do…
You already know what I was gonna say here. Have a flexible schedule. Be mobile, have white space for your own sake and so you can take on new adventures as they arise.
You really don’t need to be shackled down with anything at 18. You should be able to float a little bit, within reason. Like, don’t be paying rent at 18. Pay room and board! Then there’s a small expectation for mischief and tomfoolery, and you’re surrounded by other young men with free time. When you pay rent, you have a job, and then you come back to your bug box drained and you just wanna play Warzone before bed for the 19th night in a row.
Just turned 25 myself. Great article. When you're 19 you think you'll have a chance to be a hero any day now. Life is a marathon not a sprint. Make friends, learn skills, and try to have an ok time. Being le based doesn't mean never meeting anyone or going out.
I’m 22. Should I just start picking out my casket now??? Might as well start walking with a cane….