Advice for the younger generation

[JasonBlack]

Hey kiddos (and recent adults). I was thinking today about how most of y'all have kinda just been thrown to the wolves to figure out how to navigate a broken system while getting zero guidance from people with more experience, so I thought I'd share a few useful tips. 
disclaimer: Giving advice to an entire generation requires speaking in generalizations. You will probably feel an internal sense of "but I don't struggle with that!" or "that's not me at all!", especially if you're a little more non-conformist and/or a bit unusual for your generation (adaptive). That's fine, but keep reading anyway, hopefully you'll find something useful. 

1) Never take advice from someone who isn't actually willing to listen to you. Advice given in good faith is meant to facilitate rather than dictate, and people coming at you with an attitude of "because I said so!", should be tuned out whenever possible.
2) In general, it's more important to listen and understand the reasoning behind the advice than to be obedient. Even if you do value being obedient for it's own sake (personally, I don't), you have to adequately understand what's being said in order to be obedient anyway, so either way, obedience isn't step one. 
3) Don't go to college unless and until 

• you have a plan for what you want to do
  
• your plan involves STEM or some sort of profession where you require academic credentials (ex: don't go to college to study marketing. get a sales job lol)
  
• you've worked out a basic cost/benefit analysis 
  

4) Even if you do meet all those criteria, you shouldn't feel bad if you want to take a gap year to get some experience in the real world you've been so efficiently sheltered from by the current system, perhaps getting a job and/or (if possible) spending a year at home to save up some money. 
5) Your plans can and will change, but it's still much more efficient to make them anyway. 

6) If you have the right temperament for it, there are a lot of good careers in the military, but do your own research beforehand. To put it bluntly, some military recruiters are like pedophiles without the sex, and are willing to lie to you or suggest MO's (that's your job in the military) that are against your best interests. Also, make sure you let your parents know in advance. They can help you with the process, and you'll need to make sure you can get off any meds for a certain number of months before going to basic training. 
7) If you're male, do not, under any circumstances, marry a feminist. Seriously, not even if you are liberal yourself.
8) For both genders, any potential love interest who does not respect you on some basic level should be given the cold shoulder.
9) Make sure you have in person friends you get along with. If you need/want to leave the house at 18, you will not be able to afford living alone in this economy. The sooner you begin talking to your friends about this, the better. 
10) Take a look at the people around you 
11) Related to the last point, most people today are fake as shit, and will spout nonsense to appear virtuous or appease the masses. When looking for potential role models, look at what they actuallly do, not just what they say. 
12) Lift weights. If you're male, you will feel better about yourself if you're strong and buff. It's just biology. If you're female, being toned and fit is more attractive to most men. You don't need to worry about looking "too bulky", as you probably don't have the requisite hormones to put on that much muscle. 
13) You don't need to choose between doing what you love and making a living...but the latter is more urgent. Make sure you can survive first, then you can begin working your real life goals and hobbies into your life at your own pace. 
14) If you are still in school, take any classes you can on debate, speech and business. No matter what you decide to do for a living, you will probably use all of these areas in your life in some way or another.

[pbrower2a]

Critique:  

1. It is necessary that one that offers advice accepts the uniqueness of your circumstances. Someone like LeBron James or Mike Trout could give excellent advice to someone with the raw skills to be a pro athlete. Some of it is valid for anyone (strive for excellence, prepare as completely as possible, stay away from "nose candy")...  Such is good advice for anyone who does not want to be consigned to the gigantic class of the expendable "working poor".

Before contemplating some lucrative career, remember that the current standards are extremely high. For the highly-refined level of high achievement that ensures no chance of catastrophic failure one needs about 10,000 hours of preparation, as says Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. This applies for high-level professionals (one is not a physician, attorney, or architect until one is 30), pro athletes, screen actors with genuine careers, classical or pop musicians. One consequence is that you will not have a normal life. Want a normal life? Be a truck driver or a factory worker, maybe even a domestic servant. The rap on classical musicians is that they are utterly helpless at anything outside of music, and that they are lousy lovers.

2. Everyone has an agenda. I remember my father relating that a cousin gave him an expensive watch as a gift. The fellow was an assembly-line worker at the Oldsmobile plant at Lansing. His cousin had something to say with that gift: he would do better with GM than with the company for which he was working. I can imagine how different his life would be.My father did get into low-level management where he was, but he would have been better-paid at GM. I think that he would have had a diametrically-different attitude toward labor unions, as he had the perfect skill-set for a shop steward.

3. One of the harshest realizations of life is that even with high intelligence and a sheepskin is that at age 22 (or until about 30, really), one is still raw labor -- nothing more, and nothing less.
Raw labor has never been adequately rewarded except in a frontier situation. Good reason exists for the Western as a literary and cinematic expression: the personal risks were high, and so were the potential dangers. The hardships could overpower anyone with a weakness. Plenty of industrious, well-meaning people went west and established farms, ranches, and stores. Some found opportunities closed off in Indiana that existed on the wild frontier of Kansas that after ten years of community-building became civilized communities. The problem today is that there is no analogue today to taming some wild frontier.

Know well the dark side: people who went Out West with no obvious skills, no dedication to work, great contempt for the rest of Humanity, and of course little intelligence. Billy the Kid is one of the best-known... and a stereotypical dullard who had a short career preying upon others before frontier justice set in.

Graduate from college with only a BA degree even in a STEM field at age 22 and you will still be raw labor, and the difference between you and the dimwit (the slackers that you knew in high school who lacked the grades to get into college or the intelligence to pass technical courses at a community college) is that instead of four years' experience doing a miserable job under harsh management is a student loan that you must pay off while doing the same sort of work as the slackers that you held in contempt.

I'd encourage an apprenticeship. Maybe you will be happy as a machinist or a licensed vocational nurse. If you still cherish learning you will do it instead of getting drunk on mass-market beer at the sports bar. Know well the original purpose of the medieval university: to improve the student to be a more competent and less callow adult.

I'm 66, and when I attended a first-rate college the cost of college itself was about the same as a hobby. Now it is as expensive each year as a low-level professional salary. There's a message to be learned from that -- perhaps several.

4. Until recently, wages have been so low and the cost of living (especially apartment rent) so high that even with two jobs and a life of austere self-denial that one cannot save money for school unless for vocational training. "Saving" can be a futile effort, especially in the event of such a calamity as an unwelcome fight for which one is ill-prepared. Broken bones or teeth or wounds from a stabbing or a gunshot will devour what little one has. Everything is dicey.

5. That is the understatement of all time. One needs a dream for having any coherent hope... but any plan can be dashed. Other things, like taking care of a close relative in a degenerative situation can set those plans aside. Economic and technological change can close off some careers. About forty years ago, "word processing" was one of the best clerical careers. Microsoft has created word-processing programs that will do exactly that. That career is no more. To paraphrase a boxer, all plans are destroyed with the beating of the belly or a hard smash to the head. For good reason there are far more movies about prize-fighters than about certified public accountants.

6. It all boils down to this: armed forces are still in need of cannon fodder, even if military technology requires more technological and intellectual sophistication to use.

7. To this I say: the smart women are usually either feminists or ugly, reactionary parodies of feminists -- and the latter is worse. If you want a marital partnership with someone who can carry on a conversation, then you will end up with a feminist. I'd suggest that if one wants to enjoy some halcyon years of marital bliss with a woman not a feminist I can think of at least three ethnic groups to avoid (two are of European origin and one is east-Asian). Know well: she may morph into a feminist. In my case I well knew that any woman that I married would either be a feminist or become one.

Be prepared for that. The alternative may be to take refuge in a sports bar or to undergo a divorce. Remember well that if you are to call someone a bitch, make sure that she barks, has big teeth and claws, at least once had the tools for bearing puppies.

8. Love without respect is like a vehicle without an engine. It's at best infatuation.

9. You will need friends. You will need friends, even if they are 'only' drinking buddies who will help you get jobs when you are fired so that you can buy drinks for them. Far better are religious bodies, civic groups, and fraternal lodges. You can trust such people far more than you can trust the economic elites who see you as livestock at best and vermin at worst. Those elites are the sorts who think that their hangnail is worse than your pancreatic cancer. Those elites are mostly filthy-rich people who will never accept that you exist for any reason except to make them even filthier-rich, indulge vile fantasies that the alone can afford, or enforce their demands with cruelty and brutality. To be sure, not all rich people fit a Marxist stereotype, but there jut aren't enough of those for you to expect any good as an employee.

10. Some people are real friends, and some aren't. The most obvious rule is that real friends will not put you at legal or financial risk.

11. Yup. Most people want to appear virtuous even if they aren't. All the world's a stage... and Bill Cosby was one of them.

12. OK. Don't get overweight (it isn't sexy for either gender). Fitness is essential to the work that most young adults do, in which athleticism is paramount.

13. At this point I would argue that most people hate their jobs, and they are still broke. Remember that even if you work forty hours a week at Simon Legree Enterprises and have a one-hour commute you might have time to listen to something beautiful and noble during the commute. This said, seeking work that you like may solve most of your problems. A proletarian revolution against entities like "Simon Legree Enterprises" that overthrows and exterminates ownership and management thereof is out of the question. Such people will be delighted to make examples of rebels by killing them in particularly-savage ways.

14. Good advice. In a healthy society (and America is now sick because of its rapacious and sadistic elites that we can neither overthrow, ameliorate, or circumvent) the first objective of life is to become a better person because if enough people are humane, wise, and sophisticated, then we are better off.  


Now here's my advice:

15. Learn to appreciate great art, music, drama, and literature. Such is far richer than the evanescent "luxuries". There is hardly a more fraudulent word in the English language than luxury.

16. Do not expect perfection in others, especially in a lover. Low-maintenance is a virtue.

17. Promote community even if you are stuck in a slum or a hick town. Incremental improvements that do not require elite sponsorship can make life better.

18. DO NOT DO EVIL. We have a great surfeit of this, and damn anyone who does more of it.

19. Support small business. Liberal democracy depends upon the dispersion of wealth, as magnates of any kind invariably buy the system and put the common man in thralldom.

If you want to know what people have the sanest economic order, then look at the Old Order Amish. Their world is family farming, craftsmanship, and small business. It has no bureaucracy; corporate and government bureaucracies are playgrounds for narcissistic personalities. Maybe you would not like the limited education, the male domination, the lack of mobility, and the absence of white-collar jobs. Can't we imitate what is right about them? Or are our wealth, technology, creative talent, and social organization "pearls before swine"?    
19. Support small

[JasonBlack]

critiques are always welcome. briefly touching on your points (will probably say more when I have a bit more time)
15. hard agree
16. agree
17. from what I've seen, most Homelanders are already pretty good about this
18. same as 17
19. we have a winner