Advice For Young Men

Take it or leave it

Over the past three decades I’ve accomplished quite a few impressive things—and committed more than my fair share of impressively retarded blunders.

Below I’ll offer you lads some hoary unc takes on how to do more of the former and less of the latter, as well as more generally lead a prosperous and fulfilling life.

---

• Don’t introspect too much — It’s fine when you’re literally an adolescent and thus actively figuring yourself out, but past the age of 22 I‘d say sitting around with your thoughts is almost always a terrible idea for men, who are assessed in terms of their verbs and not their adjectives; a man’s self-concept is not coherent unless very palpably reflected in what he materially brings into the world. Thus if you’re going to ruminate on your experiences at least turn them into art, and try to make sure it’s something at least one other person finds interesting.

• Don’t plan too much — Outside the main contours of your life e.g. career changes and major relationship decisions like proposing or having kids planning is almost always a fake and gay excuse to put off the actual shit that needs to be done while feeling like you’re achieving something. Meanwhile getting attached to a rigid itinerary (e.g. with your finances or a fitness regimen) can easily drain you of motivation when you inevitably fuck up. Better to focus your energies on simply doing the thing consistently enough to habituate yourself than to dedicate any brainpower to optimization, the marginal return of which is comparatively trivial.

• Momentum is everything — Your overall mindset needs to be calibrated towards keeping up forward momentum while avoiding stagnation and depressive mires—the specific direction doesn’t really matter all that much in your youth. You have plenty of time to change course and recalibrate if needed; what matters now is seasoning yourself as a man socially, professionally, sexually, intellectually, and so on. Thing is there will inevitably be eras of your life where shit will get boring in your job, your relationship, your fitness goals etc. and you just need to plod along and coast for a bit without losing rhythm; whenever this happens it’s essential to find some new and exciting hobby or some other such extracurricular to animate you and provide a consistent source of novelty so you’re not tempted to secure it by constantly rotating jobs / girlfriends (this was probably the biggest mistake of my late twenties looking back).

• Learn to metabolize failure — The biggest challenge any young man in the 21st century faces is a cultural ecology that makes failure a lot more psychologically onerous than in past eras. Zoomers are more atomized than any cohort in history, are competing in global and algorithmically mediated status hierarchies, and are constantly told by peers that all forms of status arbitrage, local dominance, and partial / provisional success are “cope,” all the while being tempted nonstop by ubiquitous and easily accessible dopamine traps. This makes just showing up and risking failure vastly more difficult on a SUBJECTIVE level—which in turn has made conditions a lot easier OBJECTIVELY provided you have enough executive functioning and gumption to soldier through the cumfugue, because you’re often competing in virgin territory. But doing that requires making a willful distinction between Bad Copes that only serve to depress one’s agency and Good Copes that enable one to keep up momentum through setbacks and periods of adversity so as to maximize his surface area for serendipity. This is probably the single hardest item of everything on this list—and likely also the most important.

• Don’t optimize for salary in your first few jobs — Instead optimize for access to high-quality mentoring as well as opportunities to cultivate niche but in-demand skills you can’t easily lie about on a resume or learn the night before via some Indian YouTube tutorial + also aren’t likely to get outmoded by AI anytime soon. It doesn’t especially matter if you make $90k instead of $105k at 23 if that opens the door to making $400k instead of $200k at 30.

• Flirt with your female coworkers without ever asking them out — You ofc can ask them out once you leave, but until then it’s a lot more useful to operationalize sexual tension for professional ends. If you stay within the confines of plausible deniability most womyn let you get away with almost anything, so take advantage of that fact and flirt up a storm with e.g. older women and fat / nonwhite girls especially and you’ll start to notice them taking your side in office politics and a lot of times even doing your work for you.

• Date lots of different types of women — If you’re sexually active through most of your twenties the sort of chicks you like will change. Part of that will just entail finding girls erotically viable across a wider range of ages, and another part will involve your definition of a Slut changing in accordance with your own partner count, but you will likewise observe that certain female ethnicities, subcultures, and neurotypes find you yourself more attractive than others, and so develop a peculiar taste for those women just on account of generally being able to land a higher SMV gal of that group compared to chickies as a whole (note this is how Uncle Walt got into Jewesses, for instance). This will all happen ambiently and without you realizing it most of the time just over the course of normal dating—which means, again, in order to increase your surface area for serendipity it helps to keep an open mind and see what archetypes are drawn to you, because I can promise you lads that your tastes are a lot more plastic than you probably think.

• Cultivate an intergenerational friend group — It’s insanely valuable to be frens both with old dudes who have been through lots of different situations and young guys who can help you keep your priors fresh. If you’re only hanging out with fellers your own age you’ll become remarkably non-sentient very very fast.

• Once you have some cash live downtown at some point — It’s about six trillion times harder to score halfway-decent puss living out in the burbs. You want to be in walking distance of booze and more importantly a Plausible Deniability Garage so babygirl doesn’t have to feel like a whooah when she comes to get blown out.

• Don’t buy land until you have a woman you want to impregnate — As a young man housing should be seen as a lifestyle good more than an investment vehicle, as it’s nothing short of essential that you stay mobile enough to take advantage of whatever opportunities may surface outside your immediate vicinity. Women under 25 or so don’t really care if you rent or buy anyway, whereas if you’re going for older broads you can just liemaxx to babygirl about owning and then buy somewhere slightly bigger once you’re ready to put a ring on it.

• Don’t buy expensive or heavy furniture until you’re somewhat settled — It costs lots of money to move and the beans you pay to do it will usually break or scratch something. Get shit that’s minimalist and tasteful and most bihs won’t judge you for it too bad so long as you have a bed frame and shit on your walls, which will put you above like 80% of straight guys under 27. That said definitely have your mom / a gay bro / a chick ur fuckin help you pick out the decor because if you attempt to do it urself it will probably look retarded.

• Use a burner app for girls you fuck casually — Also don’t use facebook/linkedin pics in your dating profiles and give them your middle name or something until you know you want her to be a steady FWB or girlfriend because you don’t want to risk a psycho shredding u on the gossip apps, which most Zoomettes are on.

• Develop good sleep habits — Might seem a little jejune but the ability to stay up all night and function normally the next day kind of just disappears randomly in your late twenties without you necessarily realizing it, and you should definitely get your arms around that shit in advance.

• Do a light steroid cycle — With proper PCT the long-term health risks are fairly trivial, whereas the likely benefits to your appearance, energy level, sex drive, and most importantly confidence are all enormous.

• Remember you aren’t immortal — Aging pretty clearly doesn’t matter anywhere near as much for men, but that also assumes you’re constantly increasing in status or financial position, and whether a 35yo dude for instance reads as young or old is in practice very provisional. It’s not especially difficult to date younger women if you have status or money, but without those things even decent-looking women your own age won’t be especially fond of you, which means that if you aren’t married early it’s crucial to get that shit on an upward slope ASAP instead of complacently taking solace in coarse-grain manosphere bromides.

Anyway, this is just my opinion.