Quit Fucking Around.

Your life's not working out? The "rules" you thought you had to follow aren't panning out? The world is constantly falling apart, you're constantly helpless in the face of all these new problems, everyone's an asshole who doesn't understand you?

Then it's time to admit to yourself that your personal philosophy isn't working out. Whatever you believe about yourself and the world is DOGSHIT and needs urgent fixing.

Here's five basic ideas to get you started:

1️⃣ Your body, and where it physically exists in the universe, are your only true major limiting factors in life. Learn how to care for your body, and try not to kill it for as long as possible.

2️⃣ Staying alive is the only thing that actually matters. Every day you don't die is another day you lived. Count your days above ground, and NOTHING ELSE. Not even your blessings, because even those can be taken away unexpectedly.

3️⃣ The only thing that makes life worth living is other people. Learn how to be someone other people want to be around, and put yourself around other people as often as you can, no matter how hard it gets (it will get easier). Learn how to pick and re-pick the 3-5 people you spend most of your time with.

4️⃣ Every idea other people have about how the world works is wrong, since every other person is equally as limited as you are, doing the best that can with limited information. If their advice runs contrary to your lived reality, find more applicable advice, or do what they do: Learn more about the world for yourself.

5️⃣ The highest goal any human being can aspire to, alive or dead, is self-actualization. Every hero you think you have is just another incomplete person that worked their ass off to self-actualize at least once. The goal of self-actualization is unique to every human being alive, including you. Over 10,000 years of lived experience and recorded philosophy on this topic can be rounded down to: Focus on the things within your control, and never stop learning how to do more of the things that make you happy.

That's it.

Fuck all the 10-step programs and self-help books and gurus and meditation retreats and Top 10 Tips and Wikihow articles and the thing your buddy Dave told you from an article he half-remembers from a few years ago.

Fuck the influencers, amateur life coaches, parents, uncles and teachers that give you their version of how to get through the world, and then took zero responsibility when their advice didn't pan out. You're the only one heading to your grave.

Fight for every day of your life like your life depends on, it, BECAUSE IT DOES.

"But..."

Here's some things real people have done so that you don't have to feel like you're the first person doing them:

🚀 Built and sold a company for more money than most people will see in their lives and then stashed it, quit the game, now travels and plays music and writes and meets new people.

🚀 Spent their entire lives doing interesting side projects, begging and borrowing and scraping by only to die penniless, changed the world anyway.

🚀 Decided they disagreed with the core concept of mortality and devoted their entire existence to being a lab experiment for longevity.

🚀 Survived a near-death experience and decided to live a more authentic life, which increasingly involved doing and saying things that pissed people off. Did it anyway.

🚀 Shut down a successful IT supply business to restore classic cars, doing 1-2 a year and being immensely happy despite most of his former friends writing him off, not giving a fuck because he made so many new, better ones in the process.

🚀 Made a guitar by hand one day, posted the video online, got some interest, and now spends their time making custom guitars for clients all around the world, abandoning their miserable white collar career completely.

🚀 Spent 3+ decades living in the wrong body and tried everything else until finally transitioning and actualizing into the body that aligned to their identity, making them happier than they'd ever been before.

🚀 Divorced spouses of many years (with kids!) to pursue new relationships, passions and sexual orientations, leaving utter devastation in their wake and being happy anyway.

"Okay, but..."

Here's a few material facts for you to consider - things that are objectively true, no matter what your beliefs about them are:

✅ We live in bodies that were optimized for a lifestyle that no longer exists.

✅ We live in a universe that was here before us and will be here long after we're gone.

✅ Nobody will ever fully understand who or what you are, no matter how much you explain yourself.

✅ There is no unfalsifiable evidence of a god, or any external force that can make choices for you.

✅ No matter how strong, all emotions are temporary electrochemical reactions, even the incredible ones.

✅ There are trees, lobsters, sharks, sea sponges and tortoises that will outlive you. They don't know your name.

✅ The world is full of things you're not responsible for, no matter how much someone will try convincing you otherwise.

Sound bleak? Well, that's because it is. If your life was going great you wouldn't be reading this right now, and if you admit to yourself that your life is going poorly, it's probably because you picked up a bunch of expectations about yourself and the world at some point, are constantly being disappointed by not living up to them.

Nobody ever told you to your face that you're just a cosmologically worthless biological accident. Seems like that's my job today.

So does this all mean that you're just doomed to live a shitty life no matter what?

Fuck 👏 No 👏

Life is what you make it. You've probably heard some version of that before and dismissed it as bullshit, and I don't blame you - most of the people repeating that meme wouldn't be able to explain to you exactly how the fuck you're actually supposed to DO the "making" bit.

It's actually really simple, a 3-step process that you can start practicing right now:

1️⃣ Make a choice to do something new, ideally scary.

2️⃣ Do everything in your power to accomplish that thing, and

️3️⃣ Write down what works and what doesn't.

That's the entire roadmap. The base loop of human existence. It took millions of years of evolution to produce a species that realized that in order to survive, you actually have to get out of your cave, go do a lot of difficult and dangerous stuff, and then learn better ways of doing it so you can remind yourself and others.

But that's not the world you're living in right now, with stimulus checks and Netflix and fast internet and DoorDash and jobs that barely require you to flip open a laptop or sit behind a counter ringing up groceries.

Frankly, you're a waste of potential and it's embarassing.

The only thing that separates you from the "achievers" and "doers" and "makers" and the people you either hate, or wish to be more like (sometimes both), is that those people figured out that life is unmitigated bullshit and the only way forward is to just go in a direction - ANY DIRECTION - and keep doing things until forced to stop.

And that's the "real secret" to all this: There is no "perfect opportunity". There is no single choice that, if you make it correctly, you get to live happily ever after. No falling asleep after eating a poisoned apple and waking up to the love of your life. Real life is a series of choices (hundreds of them! every day!) and if you're pathetic at the skill of "make choice and execute" you're going to be pathetic at life, no matter what you try, or what opportunities come your way.

Eyes down!

Are you as good-looking, lucky, talented, rich or powerful as some of the people out there? No, and you never will be. Every moment you stress about not living up to that, you're burning precious brain cycles that could be used to improve the life you're actually living (yours).

Will you EVER be happy with how you look, feel proud about your capabilities, earn so much money that you stop caring about it, be the popular person in your friend group, and have the occasional realization that your life is way better now than it ever has been before?

Only if you choose to.

The world is full of people who've made it their various life missions to "inform" and "entertain" and "inspire" and they're filling your feed with their life's work (and getting well-rewarded for it too, probably!).

Meanwhile, you're beating yourself up: being constantly distracted by things that aren't right in front of you, rationalizing away your failures using your circumstances, blaming "the system" or "this economy" or your parents or school or town or whatever other go-to rationalization you've cultivated to help make sense of the fact that you're getting "fucked over every single day" (your words, not mine).

Has it occurred to you that the people who have their shit together, don't spend any time on that at all?

Well hopefully now it has, and you've realized that the problem is actually you.

Quit fucking around.