Keeping things easy and mostly automatic going into the new year.
Made with Midjourney
I love investing. I love saving. I love seeing my money grow over time without having to do anything other than sit and wait. I think it was Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett who said, “Compound interest is the eight wonder of the world.” He was quite right.
2024 delivered some fantastic gains across the board for virtually all assets — gold, Bitcoin, and US stocks, of course. Like many others, I’ve seen my networth grow substantially. At this rate, I’ll be semi-retired far earlier than I expected. All good.
While I love investing and watching markets, I hate all the hand-wringing and consternation that often goes along with it. It’s great to make money, but not if you’re going to obsess about it and be checking stock tickers and the Bitcoin price every five seconds. What kind of a life is that?
It stressed me out all year. As I get older, I’ve learned that nothing beats having peace of mind.
I’ve been burned in the past on bad investments that I put way too much time and thought into, while ironically doing quite well in ones I didn’t think much about because they were diversified and “boring.”
My ETFs and index funds? All in the green. But often I do poorly in individual stocks or options investing. I did do great with the Reddit IPO in 2024, nearly 5x-ing my small pre-public investment. Looking back, I wish I had put way more in than I did. But hindsight is 20/20 and all.
To help keep things simple and easy, I’ve decided on a very straightforward strategy. Basically, any money I use for investing after taxes, expenses, and my retirement account contributions will be apportioned like this:
60% equities — Meaning SPY and QQQ, the only two holdings currently in my main non-retirement brokerage account.
20% Bitcoin — This is in addition to my 2025 DCA experiment, which I outlined here. Bitcoin is volatile as hell, obviously, but I’m in it for the long haul. I’ve been in crypto since 2020, so I’m a weathered vet at the ups and downs.
10% precious metals (mainly gold)— I only buy bullion in one ounce increments to save on over spot mark-up, and I prefer the .9999 purity of the incomparable British Britannias. Such a lovely coin, and actually the cheapest way to buy gold over the American Eagles, Buffalos, Canadian Maple Leafs, or almost anything other than packaged gold bars. I also like to buy the silver Britannias every year, too.
10% cash savings — This is money I’ll be saving for pretty much anything. It could be for investing into any of the above categories, toward vacations, collectibles, something risky like options, or whatever. This is savings that sits on top of my emergency fund. Obviously, if I had to dip into my emergency savings for something I’d have to replinish that first before anything else.
What’s missing? Real estate. I don’t own a house or any property, and don’t have any plans to just yet. Housing is not really practical or even worthwhile where I live because of the harsh winters and the constant maintenance problems. So, I continue to rent, which I think is a better value overall for now. In the future, I’d like to own my own home. So when that happens my investment strategy would have to be adjusted accordingly.
Also missing, a side business. Medium provided a nice little side income for 2024, but not enough to make a big difference. I’m looking to get into YouTube in the new year, but that may take awhile to become monetized. I have considered buying businesses and such. It would have to be the right deal and the right situation. I’m not going to plunk down money into something just because it’s trendy or seems like a “sure thing.” There is no such thing as a sure thing in business.
Really, at the end of the day, I’m a writer. A “content creator,” to use that hated phrase that’s in vogue. I think I’d rather just focus on that gift. I’m only happy when I’m writing and creating something to entertain or inform people. I’ll look for ways to expand, improve, and monetize my writing skills.
Hopefully, this new investing strategy will help alleviate my mind. Looking back, I’ve spent way too much time thinking and worrying about money, while neglecting other areas of my life. Money is great and all, but it cannot give you a fulfilled life, necessarily. I love being in the game, don’t get me wrong. The process of making money is fun and fulfilling. But after awhile, it just becomes video game points.
Cradle-robbing, wrinkly, and penniless sad sacs are giga-generating single moms and fatherless kids in SEA. That is some bullshit right there.
For a guy who sings about not getting any satisfaction, Rolling Stones frontman, the legendary (and knighted) Mick Jagger actually has eight kids. His latest, named Deveraux Octavian Basil Jagger, arrived back in 2016 when the singer was freaking 73 years old. At the time his partner, American ballerina Melanie Hamrick, was 29 years old.
To that I say, good for you, buddy. With the population plummeting across most of the world, we need stone cold Sperminator’s like the old Mickster firing on all cylinders, so to speak. Afterall, the guy’s got to be a billionaire at this point. He’s been a rock and roll legend for over five decades. If he croaks tomorrow, he’ll be leaving an enormous estate to his wife and children. I bet each of his kids already has a $50M+ trust fund in their name ready to go for fast cars, vintage clothing, and high-quality blow, or whatever it is trust fund babies get up to these days.
While a massive pile of cash can never replace your one and only father, it certainly goes very far in securing you a comfortable existence, and allows you to appreciate the legacy of your sire.
But is this good idea for every old guy out there with a solid sperm count?
Having children in your 70s as a man, while biologically possible, is fraught with various risks and downsides. Chiefly that you likely won’t be around to see your kids grow up, or won’t be in any kind of shape to do so anyway. It’s hard to play catch with a 12-year-old when you’re in a nursing home hooked up to an IV.
But hey, love is love, and if you’re a guy like Jagger with “wealth and taste” and still able to get that sweet, sweet honey, I say go for it.
However, pulling a Mick Jagger is not something that can work or should work for most men. Which brings me to my point of outrage in this article.
What the fuck is up with broke and old ass loser geriatrics knocking up young hotties in South East Asia, and then leaving behind penniless single moms and fatherless children after they croak?
There’s an old guy I follow on YouTube who lives in the Philippines. He chronicles his experiences there, interviews other expats, and shares pearls of widom about love, life, money, and getting older. He’s married to a beautiful Filipina in her 20s. Just this year his wife gave birth to a son.
But just recently, this guy died unexpectedly from a stroke and heart attack at the tender age of 69.
I won’t name or link to the channel out of respect for the friends and family of the guy. He had an interesting life story. He moved to the Philippines about five years ago out of desperation, unemployed, broke, with only social security, needing to live in a place with a very low cost of living. But most importantly wanting to restart his life somewhere after years of health and employment problems in the States. He’d been divorced for some time, and had grown children. After settling in, he started his YouTube channel, which eventually blew up and has nearly 100,000 followers now.
Now, I liked this guy, don’t get me wrong. He was a model expat in some ways. Productive, enterprising, intelligent, and contributing back to his adoptive country. However, his wife and a friend posted a video where they announced his passing, and then proceeded to ask for donations to a PayPal link for help during this tough time. This guy was not totally broke. He was living off SS and YouTube revenue. But now with him gone his wife is a single mom and will likely have to move back in with her parents. She has no financial support. They intend to probably keep his channel going, but YouTube channels die quick deaths if you don’t post regularly, and even “successful” channels don’t all make a lot of money. This poor woman is only in her late 20s. She still has a long life ahead of her. Worst of all, this infant child will now grow up without ever knowing his father.
I’m sorry, but that is some bullshit. I don’t have a problem with age gaps in relationships. Even wide ones like this guy and his wife had. I don’t even care so much if these old farts are knocking these young women up. However, if you’re going to do that, you’d better have plenty of resources to leave behind if/when you die, so that, you know, you don’t leave your wife and offspring in dire fucking straits.
Obviously this old guy was going to die way before his young wife. It’s great that he met someone and fell in love and had a kid. But you have to take into account the problems you’re creating when you leave your family nothing. The Philippines, and South East Asia in general, is filled with impoverished single moms who got either got ditched by expats, or the expat up and died. Many old men go over there and find relationships with younger women. That’s all fine. But let’s not pretend that these women are not naive about the risks. Many of them just want to have a White baby with a foreigner. They don’t care or are not aware of how screwed they can get.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy old guys are able to make a go of the expat life over there. I’m happy these old guys are able to restart their lives. But let’s not pretend the West is “sending its best” over there. Most of these guys are broke losers who wouldn’t get a glance from women their own age back home. Most of these guys are barely getting by on pensions or SS. Many of the Filipinas over there don’t realize that, of course. They just see a Western guy and think that’s their ticket to security. Or they see a White guy and want their shot at a mixed-race baby with White genes. I’ve visited the Philippines before myself. Fuck how these YouTubers glamorize that tropical country, people are desperate as hell over there.
I grew up without ever knowing my real father. There isn’t a day that goes by where it doesn’t hurt that I lost that opportunity. While I’ve since connected with my dad, who’s still alive and active, this expat guy’s son will never have that chance. I think it’s very foolish and irresponsible to leave your wife and kids in that situation like this expat guy did. But he’s not the only one. There’ are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of old dudes doing the same thing, and leaving these women and children behind in the same conditions, if not worse.
I’m not saying you’ve got to be a multi-millionaire if you’re a geriatric with plans for having a late family. But you’d better have enough so your wife isn’t going on the internet with a virtual change cup and asking internet strangers for alms for the poor. What the hell kind of a legacy is that to leave behind?
Bitcoin has been kind to me this year. Especially the last few months. It may not get me to early retirement this cycle, unless some of the uber moon boys are right about it hitting $250K-$400K next year. But it has made me a lot more comfortable than I was a year ago.
Like many, I first heard about Bitcoin back in 2017 during the peak of its bull run. I admit I really had no idea what it even was. I likened it to website credits or tokens you might win playing an online RPG like World of Warcraft.
I didn’t think about Bitcoin again for a few years until 2020 after the Covid crash. I bought my first in September, right when it was around $10K. I made regular buys thereafter before sinking in a sizable amount almost a year later following its initial peak in March, 2021. I saw my investment nearly double in a matter of months, before plummeting down hard the following year.
It was wrenching to watch my investment sink by almost 75%. But having watched Bitcoin rise and fall twice before in ’17 and ’21, there accompanied my dismay a slight reassurance in the fickle decentralized digital currency. I kept stacking sats, HODLed and hoped, until eventually it climbed back to even early last year. This last run-up has finally put it into the six-figure zone at $100,000. A momentous achievement.
Is Bitcoin going to climb higher and higher into next year? Or will there be another calamitous crash? Who knows. There are many positive signs lining up for the currency. The incoming Trump Administration is very crypto-friendly. Trump has expressed interest in starting a national strategic Bitcoin reserve, which may prompt other countries to do the same. Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, continues to buy Bitcoin by the billions with his stock sale scheme. Wall Street has opened up numerous ETFs for Bitcoin, which have seen billions of inflows. China has dropped its opposition to it. The digital asset has certainly gone mainstream. While it hits road blocks here and there — MicroSoft shareholders just rejected putting it on their balance sheet Saylor-style, for instance — for the most part it just keeps bouldering ahead.
Will it one day be worth $13 million a coin? Or even a million a coin? I have no idea. I don’t do predictions, projections, or prognostications. Bitcoin attracts far too many Punxsutawney Phils who see price targets in their shadows. But fundamentally, if there are more and bigger buyers over time, the asset should see a gradual rise in value. Here’s a simple thought experiment. As of now, MicroStrategy owns almost 2% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist. If the U.S. acquires 1 million Bitcoin as is intended for the proposed strategic reserve, that would mean a 5% stake. That’s 7% between just two entities. If other countries and major corporations follow suit, that will place enormous buying pressure on an asset with a fixed supply. What happens then? Number go up, of course.
I do believe in Bitcoin long-term as a tool to counter centralized banking and its widepsread currency debasement and inflation. I’m not a Bitcoin trader. I have no plans to sell my holdings, unless I’m moving the proceeds into another investment or an asset of some kind. But unlike before, when my buys were largely random or inconsistent, I want to set up a DCA system. Therein lies a problem, as many exchanges charge exorbitant fees. I’ve been with Coinbase since 2020, but their charges are excessive.
Recently, a finance Youtuber named Marko — Whiteboard Finance informed me about River in one of his videos. River is a Bitcoin-only exchange that allows you to set up recurring buys for no fee after a week.
(NOTE: I’m not affiliated with River. This is simply my own experiment. I’m not even going to provide a link to the exchange, but it is easy enough to Google. Also, do your own research on Bitcoin and crypto and whatever else you want to invest in with your own money).
Here’s my simple plan:
Starting this month and going forward next year, I’m going to DCA $20 into Bitcoin every day through the end of 2025.
Twenty bucks every day. That’s $7,300 in total over the next 365 days.
River also currently pays 3.8% in BTC on cash deposits you make on the exchange. Since I’ll be dropping a good bit of that $7,300 up front, I should also see gains from that annual rate as well.
I already made my first buy yesterday, Dec. 12th. So, one day down, 364 to go.
Hey, wait! Why not just smash buy Bitcoin with that money right now?
Well, I plan to buy chunks of Bitcoin in addition to this daily DCA over the next year and beyond. But part of why I’m setting up this experiment is to take the hand-wringing and guess work out of when to buy Bitcoin. I struggle with paralysis-by-analysis a lot when it comes to making investment decisions. Well, with most decisions in life, if I’m being honest. Mostly that comes from fear. Fear of losing money. Fear of uncertainty. But also fear of missing out (FOMO). So, this DCA strategy with River is a happy medium. It’s a sizable enough purchase over a year to make a difference. But it’s not so much where I won’t have reserve funds to make bigger purchases when I feel it’s warranted.
I’ll be providing updates over the next year, perhaps monthly, on my 2025 Bitcoin Experiment. We’ll see how it goes.
If you ask me, the entire banking industry has still not recovered its reputation from the 2008 Wall Street crash.
You know, the crash that nearly brought the global economy to its knees. The crash they made that movie about where Margot Robbie explains mortgage backed securities in a bubble bath. The crash that saw millions laid off, small businesses destroyed, while the U.S. government rushed to save precious giant institutions that were “too big to fail.”
You know, that crash.
Has the banking industry EVER had a reputation that wasn’t ranked somewhere between a sewer rat and rattlesnake? That’s hard to say.
Anyway, a few months ago I wrote an article about how my stupid bank wants to charge me $15 to use my own money. Check it out here.
Basically, my bank changed their policy starting November of this year. In order to avoid a monthly service fee of $15, you must maintain a monthly average account balance of $5,000.
Prior to this policy change, it was pretty easy to avoid a monthly fee. As little as one monthly direct deposit of $200 or more was enough to prevent a tiny haircut worth a Lincoln and a Hamilton, plus a few other flexible options.
Obviously, the Federal Reserve has lowered rates recently, thus changing the financial landscape. Banks have to adapt to interest rate fluctuations, and many do by adjusting their rates. Fair enough. Business is business.
Anyway, after I received the email about the policy change, I made sure to move $5,000 into my checking account well before the deadline. The policy took effect November 1st. I moved my money over October 3rd. Plenty of time.
All’s good, says I, initiating the transfer with a few easy clicks. I was slightly annoyed by having to keep $5,000 in my checking, especially when it offers a slightly lower rate than my premium savings account (by about a percent or so). But whatever, first world problems and such, you know?
Then a week or so ago, right as my overseas vacation was winding down, I log onto my bank. And what do I find?
They’d charged me $15 anyway.
:::sad slide whistle:::
WTF? I carefully scrolled down the entire month. Had I accidentally dipped below the $5,000 average? Nope. Not one day did my account go below the big 5–0. In fact, my account fluctuated between $5K-$8K all month due to direct deposits, transfers, and such.
Of course, I immediately messaged customer servicce about this oversight. A task made impossible the first morning I tried due to their not being any “available agents.” My bank is one of the biggest brokerages in the world. They can’t afford an army of customer service warriors? Fine, whatever.
I tried later that night, and was finally able to get through. I expressed the problem. After some investigating, the agent came to the conclusion that yes, I had been accidentally charged.
But why, I ask? How did that happen? Is there another policy I’m unaware of that I transgressed? Did I miss something? What can I do to help ensure I don’t get charged again?
Their response? Absolutely no explanation. It was apparently a pure phenonomen that I was charged $15 erroneously. Like the Phoenix lights. Or the Bloop. Or the “Wow!” signal.
Hmmm, perhaps magic is real afterall. Perhaps an evil troll or gremlin snuck past my bank’s digital firewall and pilfered that $15 to buy magic beans to grow a beanstalk to the giant’s castle. It sure is a mystery.
However, the agent assured me that she “shared my frustration.” Well, thanks. I’m glad we’re all in this together. Just you, me, and a giant banking institution worth hundreds of billions. Yep, we’re arm in arm here, totally.
Long story short, my bank DID refund me the money. That fifteen dollars is now safely back in my hands, where it belongs.
Fifteen bucks is not a lot of money. In fact, I made almost as much as that in interest just in my checking account for November.
But that’s not the point. The point is to watch your bank carefully and anyone who manages or holds your money.
You know, not long ago Wells Fargo (aka Shithead, Inc.) got caught making fake accounts without customer approval, resulting in it having to pay $3 billion in damages. Almost every week I’m reading about some new scandal some bank somewhere committed.
Let’s not forget about FTX and Celsius. Let’s not forget about the millions of people who saw their savings wiped out after the 1929 stock market crash. Let’s not forget about the Cyprus banking crisis in 2012. On and on.
People, you have to watch these banks and other financial institutions like a hawk. You have to be ever vigilant. You can’t just trust them to do the right thing. They don’t know what the “right thing” is. They didn’t even know that they had taken my money without proper cause.
Think about that. Imagine if I stole $15 out of your wallet, and when you went to confront me my excuse was “I didn’t know I took it.” And then when you went to the cops to report me the cops do nothing. That’s basically the arrangement we have with these enormous banks. We trust them to guard our money. But they’re really just looking out for themselves.
Be careful with your money. Watch your bank. Especially nowadays. Things may be “okay” for now economically. But that can change in a hurry. Times can become tough. And when times get tough, institutions can be become dangerous, wreckless, and even more dishonest than usual.
You pay far greater in time, money, stress, health, and inconvenience than whatever you get for “expanding your horizons.”
Made with Midjourney
Once a year or so I have this fight with the lizard part of my brain that inexplicably wants to go places for some reason.
“Dude bro, you never go anywhere.”
(My lizard brain, Dude Bro Guy, is a guy in cool shades wearing a Hawaiian shirt with his hat on backwards).
Me: Yeah, that’s because I hate spending money, hate flying, hate airports, hate staying in hotels, hate eating out at restaurants, and am annoyed by/hate most people.
“But dude bro, you gotta get out and see the world, man.”
Me: Literally everything about traveling is my definition of hell.
“The world, dude bro. The woooorld.”
This year Dude Bro Guy won out, and I visited Thailand on a tour, as well as a brief stopover in Manila, Philippines, which turned out to be a complete disaster. More on that later.
I’d been wanting to visit Asia for a long time. Well, I’d been wanting to get overseas period for the longest time, too. The last time I left America was 2001 when I went to Israel, not counting an afternoon in Tijuana, Mexico. (By the way, don’t visit Tijuana, Mexico, it’s a depressing shithole.) That was back when there were regular suicide bombings in Israel. It was also one month before 9/11. I was just coming out of the Southern Baptist Church cult which I’d grew up in, and wanted to check out all the hot spots I’d read about in the Bible. I was a real Christian groupie back then, and so seeing the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, The Wailing Wall, and all the churches and temples — well, the equivalent was like a Beatles fanatic visiting Abbey Road or Liverpool.
Fast forward 23 years and I felt way overdue for a visit to someplace not under U.S. jurisdiction. I follow a lot of expats on YouTube based out of the Philippines and Thailand, and a part of me wanted to check out Southeast Asia just to see what it was all about. My job offers a generous work schedule and time off. I secured nearly three weeks off, using almost two weeks for the trip itself.
I booked a tour through a site called, appropriately enough, Tour Radar. It’s basically a giant listing site of numerous oufits offering tours to just about any developed place in the world. Except Russia. Which sucks, because I’d really like to go there at some point.
I signed up for a nine day tour that took me through Bangkok, Chiang Mai, ending in Phuket. I saw the White Temple, the Blue Temple, the Black House, an elephant sanctuary, the Kayan people aka the Long Neck Karen Village where the women wear rings that stretch their necks, a few awesome waterfalls, and a cool place in Phuket called Lion Land where you can actually pet lions. Of course, I made sure to take some long walks through each place, giving myself a personal tour.
Photo by author.
The tour fee was just under $2,000 for just myself. I notice on Tour Radar that a lot of the trips are more expensive if you go by yourself than with a partner or as a group. So, look out for that if you decide to book on there. With the flight costs, some additional hotels, souvenirs, meals, and odds and ends, the total cost was around $5,500 for my two-week vacation. A steep price for a little horizon expanding, for sure.
Included in this mega vacation was a stop in Las Vegas for two days en route to LAX before flying over the Pacific. I visited the Philippines on my own without any tour guide, so that added onto the cost. I went on 11 flights, which let me tell you, is grueling as hell. Though I really enjoyed seeing some of the Asian airports. Especially Hong Kong’s. That airport is an immaculate cathedral. It’s quiet, clean, and little old Chinese ladies hold up signs to help guide you on your path when you get off the tram. It’s the complete opposite of virtually every American airport, which are mainly loud, dirty, filled with savage children, punks running amok, and mean-mugging TSA goons snarling at you for not moving at light speed through their little safety kingdoms. Incheon Airport in Seoul, South Korea is pretty superb, too.
So, was it all worth it?
Well, Lion Land certainly was. The big cat sanctuary offers multiple feline options for visitors. You can play with cubs, see the medium-sized lion, the big lion, or the white lion. I went with the big one because why not. I felt mild terror getting in the cage with the lion. Especially when I saw the trainers only had little wooden sticks for “security.” They only use the sticks to make snapping noises as cues for the lion to behave how they want. So if the lion were to decide he’s going feral that day, it’s not like there’s anything they can do to stop him. But the lions at Lion Land are all well fed and socialized to be as tame as any wild animal can be. I even got to feed the big lion a meat kabob. I quickly got over my fear (somewhat), even laying on the lion’s back at the trainer’s prodding. In the picture below I’m holding my hand over my heart. Yeah, that was to keep it from beating out of my chest. If you’re ever in Phuket, I do recommend checking out Lion Land.
Photo by author.
I enjoyed the rest of the sights in Bangkok and Chiang Mai. I’m not religious, so seeing the many Buddhist temples was not particularly awe-inspiring apart from the impressive feats of architecture and the artisty of the statues. Many people took pictures of themselves kneeling and praying at the Buddha statues. I’m not into prostration or overt acts of worship, so that didn’t appeal to me at all. I liked going on hikes through nature and seeing waterfalls. There are a number of elephant sanctuaries outside Chiang Mai you can visit. You can feed, walk with, and hang out with the elephants in the jungle. You can also bathe them, which I did not do. I’m not getting into water where giant animals relieve themselves. The elephants are tame, though they will accidentally nudge you out of their way if you’re not careful while walking on the path with them.
As for the rest of Thailand? Obviously, the country is famous for its party scene and red light districts. I drink very rarely, so I don’t frequent bars. I’m not into the red light scene, not the least of which is I really don’t care to catch an STD. I donate blood regularly to the Red Cross and would like to keep doing that until I’m old.
There are numerous massage parlors all over Thailand. And I do mean numerous. They are to Thailand what Starbucks is in America. Literally on every corner. I probably went to a dozen while I was there. Cost of living is insanely cheap in Thailand, as many people know. A one hour massage costs about 300–400 Baht, or about $8-$12 USD. Here in America I pay about $80, so I made sure to take advantage. And no, in case you’re wondering, these were not “happy ending” massage parlors. Such places do exist, but they’re usually not on the main roads where most of the tourists stay.
The food is cheap, too, and pretty good for the most part. I avoided eating from any food trucks while I was there, sticking mainly to restaurants. If you’re ever in Chiang Mai, I recommend a place called the Gecko Restaurant. I had a decent salmon dinner there for about $9 that would have cost about three times that in America.
Everything on that board costs less than $7.52 USD. Photo by author.
I’m not a fan of tropical environments, and obviously Thailand is hot and humid. Temperatures ranged in the 90s for most of my trip. It only rained briefly while I was in Phuket. My hotels were mainly resorts and top notch, relatively-speaking. It’s easy and cheap to get around. There are taxis, or you can use the rideshare app Grab. Transportation had been a big concern for me that kept me from visiting previously, so I was relieved to see Thailand has its own Uber-like app. You won’t have trouble going places on your own if you want.
Also, the internet was remarkably reliable almost everywhere I went. I used the international plan with Verizon and except for when I was in the deepest parts of the jungle I had a decent connection with video, social media, and everything.
Do beware of the mosquitos, which are ferocious, and seem immune to bug spray. I practically bathed myself in it during my hikes, only to still come back covered in massive bug bites. Mosquitos in parts of Thailand can spread things like dengue fever, Zika, and other diseases. I checked with the Red Cross before I left on whether a visit to Thailand automatically rules you out from donating blood for a period. It doesn’t exactly. It depends on certain locations. There are parts of the country that are red zones. I won’t be able to donate anytime soon anyway due to my sickness, but it’s something to keep in mind if you visit.
Overall, I enjoyed Thailand. However, you do not need to pay for a tour company like I did. In fact, I really think the $2,000 I paid was a waste. You can reserve your own hotels online. At many hotels there are kiosk tables set up where you can book all kinds of activities. Then the next day a van comes to pick you up and take you and whoever else signed up wherever. Thailand is very tourist-friendly, so they make it very easy to do stuff over there.
I would also say that if you’re planning on going, probably just stick with Phuket. That island has everything the mainland has, including temples and elephants. Stay at one hotel and just take day trips to wherever. You can get from one side of the island to the other in about half an hour. There are also activity kiosks everywhere. If I ever go back to Thailand, I’ll probably just fly directly to Phuket and set my own itinerary. Flights from LAX to Phuket are sometimes decent ($800-$1000 for coach), so a vacation there is not unreasonable. Just be sure to take into account the time change. Flights out of LAX for Asia often leave late at night, which means you sometimes arrive two days later at your destination (Thailand is twelve hours ahead of the U.S.). Be prepared for some serious jet lag.
After Thailand, I decided to check out Manila, Philippines. I did this to take advantage of the cheap flights from Thailand to Manila. One way tickets go for around $200 or so. However, going to the Philippines turned out to be a mistake as I got food poisoning the very first night and was laid up sick for my entire brief stay. Don’t ever eat at a place called The Filling Station in Makati. It’s an Americana-style diner that looks like Jack Rabbit Slim’s from Pulp Fiction. I had a burger and a milkshake there that left me feeling like Mia Wallace after she snorted Vincent’s heroin thinking it was coke.
This was right before Thanksgiving, too. I was sick the Tuesday and Wesnesday. Then on Thursday I felt well enough to try eating again. I opted for KFC, as the chicken outfit is big over there in Asia. I ordered a bucket, only to find that food disgusting also. I managed half a leg before tossing the whole thing out. So I went 0 for 2 on meals that didn’t taste like shit on a stick. That was my Thanksgiving “dinner.”
As an aside, how is KFC able to stay in business? They’re seriously terrible. KFC tastes like soggy wet rags soaked in grease. KFC sucks ass in the Philippines, too. Just unbelievable that a company can put out such a shitty product and not only stay in business but thrive.
Since I watch a lot of expats talking about how great the Philippines is, I was really looking forward to checking the country out. So, I’m sorry to report that pretty much everything I saw there disgusted me. Aside from the food poisoning, there were prostitutes hanging out on the street harassing me everytime I stepped out of my hotel. I should mention, too, that sex workers in SEA can be aggressive. I went down the wrong street in Phuket one night and one grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until I pried her arms off my body. The ones in Manila are just as aggressive. They’ll follow you around asking if you want a “massage” and whatnot. It’s all a ploy to get you inside where they’ll either rob you or give you a “massage” for a price. They’re so bad that there are even signs posted on business windows warning about the “massage scam.” All the while the police stand around and do nothing. A trangender prostitute got in my face and wouldn’t leave me alone until I ran off. It’s so bizarre seeing sex work thrown at you so blatantly in the middle of a major city. It’s like something you’d see in a dystopian ’80s movie. The hotel I stayed in smelled like a gym locker crossed with a ratty bodega. The streets were crowded, polluted, and loud. Traffic was completely out of control. There were homeless everywhere. Creepy dudes kept coming up to me trying to sell Cialis and Viagara pills. Local TV sucks. The only thing I found worth watching was HBO. It was a mess. On top of it, I was sick the whole time. So, the Phillippines was a rotten time. I may give it another shot at some point, but we’ll see.
I will say this. My trip to SEA, and my first international trip in 23 years, only confirms what I knew all along — traveling is fucking overrated. You pay far greater in time, money, health, and inconvenience than whatever you get out of the experience. I’m still sick from my visit to the diner from hell. I’m not saying I’ll never visit another country again. But the optimum time to travel abroad is when you’re young and the world is still all sunshine and rainbows. Especially if you can travel in a friend group, like from college or something. The only other way to travel is if you’re super rich and can stay in all the best places and fly in a higher class. Sitting in coach on a 14-hour flight is a goddamn nightmare. Any other way and traveling is mainly just a waste of time and a big pain in the ass.
All of a week into my trip, even before I got sick, I honestly found myself just wanting to go home. I was relieved and happy to be back in the United States. After having seen SEA for myself, I don’t understand these passport bros on YouTube who are all bouncing off the walls with joy just being over there. Yes, the cost of living is cheaper. But you get what you pay for. These are developing countries with poor infrastructure. The tropical climate is oppressive. You have the rainy season. Pollution and poverty are widespread. Real poverty, by the way. Not American “poverty” where people still have four walls that are enclosed, flat screen TVs, iPhones, and access to various resources.
On my taxi ride into Bangkok, I saw shanties literally built on top of trash-strewn rivers underneath and between the highways. People live in one-room apartments that lead out into alleyways, and make a living with a food truck or by selling trinkets. I saw elderly women sleeping right out on the sidewalk. I get that passport bros and retirees are taking advantage of geographic arbitrage by living in a cheaper area. But in reality all their crowing about “living in paradise” is cope. They are mainly brokies slumming around. And it’s honestly sad to see the level of deprivation there.
Yes, the women are far more welcoming. I started a Tinder account on my way to the Philippines to experiment, and sure enough, I instantly got a lot of legit likes and messages. Had I not gotten sick I would have lined up a few dates easily. But there again, the culture over there is very different. Most of the women are only into foreign guys because they want to date a rich Westerner. Not because they are just so filled with love.
I’m glad to be back home. I’m done with traveling for now. That’s not to say Dude Bro Guy won’t convince me to venture out again. I still haven’t seen the sights in Europe. Maybe that’ll be next year.
One of my biggest pet peeves in life is misrepresentation. It pisses me off. Considering I’m on the internet 24/7 like everyone else (gotta check X, bro, or I’ll die), that of course means I’m pissed off all the time.
I’m not alone. I had a pastor years ago back when I went to church regularly who would rage against scam charity drives that offer a “free product WITH a donation.” Oh God did that burn him bad. “It’s not free if you have to make a donation!” He went off more on that than he ever did the gays, backsliding, or any End Times rapture stuff.
(I went to a lot of Southern Baptist hellfire and damnation churches growing up; no, I’ll never recover my lost sanity.)
But I did happen to agree with him. About the misrepresenting charity drives. Not much of anything else.
I see it all the time in these “retire early” YouTube niches. Gurus all over the place claim to be retired, or encourage you to retire as soon as possible.
“You’re wasting you life, bro. Retire now, bro, and live with me in (fill in the blank shitty tropical developing country) right now, bro.”
And I don’t totally disagree with them. If you can feasibly and legitimately “retire” that early and everything checks out, then by all means. However, these gurus aren’t telling you the whole truth. A lot of them aren’t really retired. They’re just working online now.
NEWS FLASH: You’re not really retired if you’re still needing to make $3,000 a month from YouTube yammering about “retiring early.”
Retirement is such a misused, misrepresented word these days. It’s been bastardized. Often its spoken by cavalier glib hype masters trying to gain clicks. I just wrote an article about people shilling LEAPS to make $10,000 a month so they can “retire” early. News flash again. You’re not retired if you’re having to carefully trade the markets and you’re constantly putting your networth at stake under precarious market fluctutations. You’re a trader. You’re not kicking back on a beach relaxing. Having to watch the market everyday is frankly the opposite of relaxation for me.
People these days take these gurus to mean ACTUAL retirement, as in they don’t work at all anymore. But in actuality, retirement means something else in the online FIRE (financial independence retire early) dude bro finance space. It really means starting a business online, or starting a YouTube channel, “content creation” (hate that phrase) or doing some other ecommerce deal or whatever to make location-independent income, so that you can (hopefully permanently) leave the “9–5 grind.”
It’s not really retirement in the true sense of the word. It’s becoming an entrepreneur in the digital economy. A business owner, to make it simple. Or an investor/trader. It’s taking on a whole lot of other duties and knowledge and workload to make an income. It’s sticking your face on Tiktok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever all the time to sell either clicks or a product. But psychologically, it still kind of fools people into thinking it’s actual “retirement.”
It’s not. It’s “worktirement,” to coin an awkward term. Well, no. It’s really still just work.
Nobody really wants to “retire.” They don’t want to sit on the freeway everyday in bumper to bumper traffic just to go to an office where some MBA douche with a comb over tells them their budget report is two minutes late and how they need to be more mindful of the company timeline.
It’s really corporate wage slavery people hate and want to escape from. This is why these gurus get so popular. And more power to them, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind people encouraging other people to free themselves from jobs or careers they hate. I just wish they would be more honest about it and represent the situation of their “retirement” better. Otherwise it sells people on a false dream. Not everyone will be able to or want to just quit a job and then mug for YouTube to make a living. YouTube might take years to work out. Or it doesn’t at all. YouTube is great. But it’s not the life for everyone.
What does retirement really mean anyway? Basically, just not working. It doesn’t have to imply that you’re financially independent enough to not need an income from anywhere else. You could be dead ass broke and just sit around not working. You could be worth a billion dollars and still grind every day.
Nobody wants to otally not work period unless they are exceptionally lazy sacks of shit with zero ambition and few functioning brain cells. They just want their lives back and the freedom to do what they want.
To paraphrase my pastor from decades past: “It’s not retirement if you still have to earn a living to keep from ending up on the street!”
Recently, I had the exquisite pleasure of telling a DEI proponent how much I think their ideology is trash.
So-called diversity, equity and inclusion is all about separating people according to supposed “privileges,” often based on race, gender, and ethnicity. But also background, economics, sexuality, physically able-bodiedness, among other things. Then trying to assemble people of all these various stripes into every situation for the purposes of “inclusion.” You see this most pronounced in the casting of movies and TV shows now.
The idea is to create a human mosaic of the modern world, I guess. It’s why Doctor Who became a lesbian, and is now a gay Black guy. It’s why virtually every White lead must be paired with a token Black best friend anymore. For example, I was just watching Inside Out 2 last night (which is a good movie, check it out), and wouldn’t you know it, the 13-year-old White chick Riley just so happens to have two “diverse” best friends, one Black, and one Mexican or something (not sure). Then there was that Chris Pratt movie The Tomorrow War where Pratt somehow has two Black friends despite being a White guy living in the suburbs. That still cracks me up.
You see this sort of colorful casting and mixing most glaringly in NFL commercials, where virtually every married couple is interracial, and quite often middle-aged uncool White guys play fools getting corrected by cool and wise minorities. A trope so common it’s become, well, a trope. There’s even an X account called White Men Are Stupid In Commercials that tracks the trope.
Now, personally, I don’t watch TV much, and I rarely watch the NFL anymore. I don’t care about 99% of DEI shit when it comes to entertainment, just because I don’t watch much of what’s out here. I don’t really care that Riley has two minority friends, or that White guys are idiots in NFL commercials. I had friends of all backgrounds when I was a kid myself. I don’t care that the Little Mermaid is Black. The actress who plays Ariel is actually very nice, and I think she was unfairly targeted with a lot of racist B.S. when she took that role. I’m simply pointing out the trend and noticing the differences. And laughing about it, of course.
DEI itself all sounds very nice on the surface. That’s why it’s been successful in wedging itself into politics and the corporate world (for now). In fact, “superficiality” is really its defining characteristic as a belief system. It puts all this emphasis on generally superficial things, ignoring what makes people truly unique — their thoughts and beliefs and accomplishments. But even worse, it makes one’s physical appearance assumptive of one’s beliefs and status within the culture. Surely you recall Joe Biden’s comment to Blacks that if they didn’t vote for him, they “weren’t Black.” Because the assumption there is that if one is Black they must automatically vote Democrat, and that by voting otherwise is to commit a sin against the Black community.
How terrible that must be. To think that because of your skin tone you should be beholden to some political party. How stupid and silly. And how is that working out, by the way? Democrat-run inner cities are shitholes. It’s not to say Republicans would necessarily do better. Some places are just going to be ghettos regardless of whatever party is in charge.
As a biracial person myself, I can’t even tell you how much I’ve been condescended to and pandered to and told how freaking awesome it must be to have the “best of both worlds.” Very often by White liberals or Whites who have bought into this DEI nonsense. Or Whites who seem to think it’s their duty to make sure I know that they know they’re totally comfortable around non 100% Whites or whatever. All the while, I hate being biracial, and largely because some people can’t help but make race one’s biggest defining characteristic and want others to join in on their fucking race-fest. And for a host of other reasons I go into in the article.
I will say, though, that if there’s one benefit to being biracial, it’s that I’m able to speak frankly about race matters while being insulated (somewhat) from criticism as a full White person would be. Though that shouldn’t be the case. Everyone should be able to talk freely about race.
DEI also runs counter against competency, favoring superficiality over qualifications that actually matter. DEI only “works” in areas where people are interchangeable and where the placement of diverse individuals is being done largely as a symbolic gesture. This is why it’s so predominant in entertainment. To me, it’s a meaningless gesture and just a way for companies to pat themselves on the back and feel good about themselves. It’s not like I’m going to buy a bag of Tostitos because a biracial White/Hispanic guy who looks like me is munching on some in a commercial. I don’t like chips much anyway. In fact, I may purposely NOT buy them just out of spite because Tostitos thinks I’ll fall for that pandering shit.
Anyway, I’m not going to get too deeply down the DEI rabbit hole. There are enough commentators out there arguing against it way better than I ever could. As a thought system, it’s a piece of shit. I’ll just leave it at that.
In my 42 years I’ve noticed that people, including myself, rarely if ever fail or succeed based solely on their race and ethnicity. In virtually all cases, it comes down to a merit or a meaningful characteristic of some kind that make a real difference. Some of which are earned, while others are purely happenstantial or genetic. Here are a few of them:
This has to be one of the biggest and the best privileges one can have. I often joke with friends that if reincarnation is real, I just want to come back as a hot surfer dude who lives on the beach and gets laid all the time. I don’t care how dumb I am. I don’t care if I get eaten by a shark at 25. I don’t care how superficial it may be. I just want to be a hot guy who fucks hotties in my next life. I am so done with this fucking face of mine.
Do you know how easy life is for attractive people? Do you know how much more welcoming people are to attractive people versus ugly ones? It is life on easy mode. Even more so if you’re a guy, just because few men are considered hot by women.
You could be a convicted felon and still have women head over heels for you, just because you’re hot. The guy in the mugshot above is Jeremy Meeks, whose picture went viral. Now he’s a model. If the guy had not happened to be born with perfect bone structure, he’d have been ignored and probably rotting away in a jail cell by now. Instead, he’s got a career.
This may be an extreme case, but it’s indicative of a real form of privilege and power a person can have purely accidentally and through zero effort of their own. Is it fair? No. But life isn’t fair, as we all know.
Look, all this DEI shit is just a way of talking about social status. And attractiveness is something that grants a person instant status. I’m not saying being hot is everything. If you’re really dumb but hot, your dumbness may really work against you and cost you. But let’s not pretend being good-looking is not a huge key than can open a lot of doors to a better life. My life would be very different and certainly better if I looked more like Antonio Banderas than a slightly less-pockmarked Danny Trejo.
Intelligence/IQ Privilege
At the end of the day, this form of privilege is really the only thing that matters. Hotness may get all the attention, but intelligence and IQ are monolithically way bigger and matter way more for survival and long-term success.
For sure, you can level up in life. You can apply yourself. You can earn degrees. You can learn different skills and such. But your intelligence is very often your hardware, not your software. You either have the ability to become a brain surgeon, or you don’t. Not everyone is cognitively equipped to deal with strenuous material or certain kinds of material. I don’t think I could ever become an engineer or a math expert no matter how much I tried. I have zero knack for things like construction or mechanics. I like to write, and that’s about it. I’m probably above average in that area. But I’m no Hemingway or Tarantino. In school growing up and in college, I consistently ranked in the top fifteen or ten percent of my class. But I was never a top one percenter. I was never that kid who was really smart.
There’s a certain cynical side in me that believes that humanity largely serves at the whim of a very small intellectual elite. Not the wealthy. Not the “powerful.” The intelligent, because in most cases it is IQ that put someone in that lofty position. Take Jeff Bezos, for instance. The guy completely transformed how ecommerce is done, and his company Amazon has a virtual monopoly in the U.S. Or take Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. Our lives are largely controlled by a handful of hyper-intelligent guys working in Silicon Valley. Or take J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Nolan film that came out last year about the scientist. That whole movie is about showing how we live in a world shaped by a smart guy who (with other smart guys) invented a device (the atomic bomb) that can wipe us all out in an instant.
DEI talks all day and night about “economic inequalities.” But the truth is wealth is often a symptom of intelligence. Bezos, Zuckerberg and others are not super wealthy by accident. They invented things that reshaped society. They mastered the game of capitalism. Money is just a reward system for smartness, really. We can debate all day about whether it’s fair or right that some random guy gets paid millions on Wall Street trading with a proprietary algorithm software he created, but the fact is financial firms and hedge funds are willing to pay top dollar for such people and their talents.
This is another big one, and I don’t just mean being able-bodied and so forth. Obviously not being paralyzed or being born with some incapacitating disease or disability is a big privilege to have. But good health is pretty much the best thing to have when it comes to winning the genetic lottery. High intelligence and good looks are rare. But most people are at least given a decent-enough body that if they take care of it they can be in optimum health. Having good eyes is a privilege, as many people need glasses or lose their sight as they age.
Mental health is especially valuable. I used to work with the mentally disabled, and I can tell you that NOT having a brain that sabotages you at every turn is a gigantic plus in life.
Then there are nice features to have, like height or athletic ability. I was usually on the taller side in my classes. I’m six feet now as an adult. But I was never much of an athlete. I could compete up through junior varsity soccer in high school. But there was always a huge divide between me and the bigger more athletic boys. I could just never keep up.
Youth Privilege
I have to laugh when I see these DEI activists crying on TV news shows or podcasts about inequities and inequalities and all sorts of unfair things in life, because usually they are young people in college or right out of college.
I’ll be sitting there thinking, sir or madam, do you not realize that you are in the prime of life? Do you not realize how you likely have decades before you need to worry about gray hair, back pain, heart problems, and many other age-related issues? How are you not appreciative of the fact that in fifty years you will likely still be here while many people will not be here even tomorrow? There are people in their 90s that are as you read this languishing on their death bed, with only days or hours to live. I think of my beloved grandmother’s last days with cancer. She spent almost six months in a hospital before finally passing away. I loved her deeply and wish I could have spent more time with her. Six months is a blink, really. It all went too fast, and now she’s gone.
The younger you are, the more time you likely have in life for everything. Time is itself a real privilege. We all have some it, we just don’t know how much.
Those are just a handful of big privileges that matter in life a lot more than race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other things. Yet I never hear DEI people talk about them, because they’d rather focus on superficial bullshit that frankly, doesn’t matter all that much. They’d rather throw up tokens and symbolic castings on TV shows or movies and act like all that stuff equates to “progress.” I’m a little more concerned that we live in the Nuclear Age where we can destroy ourselves at the push of a button. I’m more concerned that half of humanity wants to blow the other half up because they don’t believe in the same sky daddy. But hey, at least the Little Mermaid is Black, right? We got that going for us.
It’s not to say racism and discrimination don’t happen and impact people’s lives. But one should be cognizant of the many tools they may have in their toolbox. Sometimes some privileges can be canceled out by deficiences elsewhere. Years ago as a teen I went to church and there was a White guy there I knew who was exceptionally good-looking. He was blonde and blue-eyed. I remember him because I was honestly jeolous of the guy’s looks when I first met him. He was what DEI weirdos would accuse of having White privilege. Except he had a rare immunity disorder that caused him to be sick a lot. Like every month he would end up bed-ridden and have to stay home for days. Imagine having to live with something like that? I woudn’t trade in my uggo face for a better one if it meant I’d be stuck in my house sick as a dog all the time. It just wouldn’t be worth it.
There are some privileges that cancel out other privileges. A healthy young Black guy is in a better spot overall than a 60-year-old White guy with heart problems. One’s got fifty some years to live. The other not so much. Wouldn’t youth and health privilege cancel out the supposed White privilege in that scenario?
DEI, like many race-obsessed thought systems, is divisive, demoralizing, and counterproductive to living a good life. It also trains people to ignore the many gifts they do have and should be thankful for and try to use for their own benefit and others. I count myself there, too. I agonize far too much over being biracial. I let it affect me when it shouldn’t. I should really just get over it and realize everyone’s an individual and not a semblance of features.
How do chronically sleep-deprived workaholics function?
Oh, to be a sleeping kitten. Source: Midjourney
I’ve always been jealous of people who can operate on little to no sleep. People who live as if they have miniature nuclear power plants inside their chests. Your enterprising, multi-tasking Energizer Bunnies that just keep going and going.
Danielle Steel, the popular romance novelist, writes virtually non-stop, sleeping only for a few hours at a time. She hardly eats, too. I wrote about her insane work schedule a few years ago. The woman is a page-peddling Terminator.
Then there’s the Donald. I can’t believe the seemingly limitless energy Trump exhibits on the campaign trail. A three-hour conversation on a big podcast like The Joe Rogan Experience would exhaust me like a vampire at sunrise. He does that, then flies to a rally in Michigan and talks for another two hours. The guy is almost 80 years old.
Arnold Schwarzeneggar once scoffed at the idea that you need eight hours of sleep. You only need six according to him, which I suppose is all you can afford when you’re trying to be a seven-time Mr. Olympia, a Hollywood star, and the governor of California.
Are these people superpowered? Do they have Viltrumite DNA? Are they descendents of a race of gods that seeded this planet millions of years ago?
Or are they just using meth and they’re all secretly cranked out of their minds?
If I don’t get quality sleep I’m as useful as a two-legged stool. My mind turns into a beehive filled with wet sand. I become a cranky asshole yearning for sweet slumber between my silky sheets. I can power through the day, sure. But it’s a miserable slog. I’d rather have a cold than be sleep-deprived.
Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s just will power. Or maybe it’s the brain’s ability to efficiently get quality sleep in a short amount of time.
Some people are able to lie down and go to sleep instantly. For me, sleep has always been a delicate balancing act. My brain is like a bratty teenaged diva. If everything doesn’t line up just perfectly you can just forget about it cooperating for a pleasant night’s sleep. Even when I do fall asleep I still wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to bed. Sleep has always come in fits and starts for me. So much so that when I actually get a good night’s rest I feel like I won the Powerball.
Perhaps it’s too much screen time. Too much red light, or blue light, or any light. Maybe I need to get to bed earlier. I’m usually in bed by 9:45 pm and up at 5:30 am. I keep my room cool. The shades mainly keep it dark, but I suppose I could use thick curtains to block out the light totally. I’ve tried sleep shades and find they just bother my eyes.
Part of the reason I gave up drinking almost 8 years ago is because alcohol wrecks my sleep.
Lately, I’ve tried using sleep aids like ZzzQuil and it’s cheaper knock-offs. They kind of work, but I find they negatively affect my mood. Plus they make getting up harder as they take an hour or so to wear off after I wake up. I have to peel myself off the mattress when I’ve got a ZzzQuil hangover.
I’ve tried melatonin, but it wreaks havoc on my bowels.
I’ve tried to back engineer what I did the day before when I miraculously have a great night’s sleep. What did I eat? What time did I go to bed? Did I exercise? Did I read longer than usual? What? What??? It never matters. There’s no pattern.
A really bad night’s sleep is a living nightmare. It sucks. But it seems I’m cursed with never knowing the code to better Zzzzs.
I wouldn’t care if Freddy Krueger haunted my dreams if it meant I could be well rested the next day. I’ll take severe lacerations across my abdomen from finger knives over feeling like an exhausted meat puppet.
Here’s a fun fact: The brain supposedly “scrubs itself” while you sleep. Cerebrospinal fluid comes shooting up your brain stem like a pressure washer and squirts in-between your wrinkly lobes. This is supposed to wash out any gunk and keep your neurons well lubricated. So, when you get shitty sleep, you’re left with a dirty, unwashed, gunky brain, and neurons that look about as organized as rush hour traffic in downtown Manhattan.
I had three crappy night’s sleeps in a row until last night. This morning I might as well have awoken with an “S” on my chest. I feel great today. But what about tomorrow? Nobody wins the lottery everyday.
Society must deal with declining birth rates, low population, and the shocking lack of baseline domesticity of our species.
Teenagers at a party in Tulsa, Oklahoma 1947. Author unknown.
I have an ex-girlfriend who was borderline incompetent at most things in life.
That’s putting it as nicely as I can.
Her apartment was always a mess. I came over one Thursday night with groceries to make dinner. Her place looked like a bomb went off. I cleaned up the kitchen, then proceeded to make our meal. The following night I came over and her place was a disaster again. I’m talking plates with crumbs left on the floor by the sofa. Food wrappers left on the carpet. I had to clean up the kitchen again before making dinner for us both.
Her car was equally a disgrace, littered with papers, CDs, food wrappers, and other things.
She was a lazy slob who put ZERO effort into the relationship. She never came up with date ideas. Expressed no interest in having kids one day. Had no career ambitions. Couldn’t cook. Couldn’t clean, except when compelled. She constantly complained about part-time jobs she had. I think she got fired from one as a restaurant hostess.
She could, however, dress well. She looked nice. Put together. The only job she ever performed well at was as a model for a painter. A job that literally only required her to sit still and look pretty for an hour. That’s it.
Oh, and she was “pansexual,” or something that meant it took her a “long time to warm up to being physical with anyone.” Long time as in months or even years.
So, a prude. I love these modern made-up words about sexuality that describe basic human behavior that’s been around for thousands of years.
Unsurprisingly, our relationship did not last. I couldn’t stand to be with someone who seemed incapable of baseline adult functioning. She was also petulant and child-like in her attitude. I once took her to a college football game and she literally sat there and stewed the whole time. This was after enthusiastically agreeing to go. We left at halftime.
Now, possibly this lady was inadvertantly trained to be useless. She was the baby in her family, and her folks had money. So, there might have been some poor upbringing in there. But her older sister and brother were competent adults with jobs and families and drive. What the hell happend to her, I used to wonder, before finally breaking things off.
It wasn’t just that she couldn’t do most adult responsibilities. It was that she almost seemed proud to be deliberately helpless. It was a badge of honor. This is not a unique thing amongst many modern women I’ve observed, especially uber feminists. Domestic duties are somehow seen as beneath many of them. As if being able to do laundry and clean the kitchen is a betrayal of some feminist code or something. Yet such duties are common household functions. I do them all the time and I don’t feel “feminized.” It was just one of my chores growing up that I still use in my everyday behavior today. Because, you know, I like things being clean and not disgusting around me.
The oppressive, patriarchal 1950s we’ve all been told was a living nightmare for women. Photo from 1959. Author unknown.
Years ago I had a very good-looking friend. I mention he was very good-looking because I’m quite sure his attractiveness was the source of all his good fortune in life. He was a POS lazy ne’er do well, otherwise, and the kind of guy I tend to have contempt for. But he was a nice guy and had an easygoing personality. He had an attractive girlfriend who did EVERYTHING for him. She cooked, cleaned the house, managed his finances — giving him an “allowance” out of his own pay after deducting for expenses —all while holding down a full-time job. She also had a bachelor’s degree. They were an odd couple. She was a driven, capable professional. He was a former pot dealer who slept on his friend’s sofa before shacking up with Wonder Woman. There could not be a bigger contrast. Yet they were together.
It wasn’t all sunshine and roses. My good-looking friend confided to me one evening that he and his girlfriend hadn’t been intimate in a long time. I was surprised, kinda. I suppose it’s hard to fuck a guy — even a hot guy — when you’re practically his mother. They’re married today, however. A development I’d cynically say was probably due more to the sunk costs fallacy than some genuine deep connection they shared. Or maybe my bum ass ex-friend actually matured and started pulling his own weight for once in life.
He was also your typical gamer dude, capable of long hours in front of the big screen zoned out doing whatever-the-fuck. What is it with dudes and gaming nowadays? I played the original NES for a few years as a kid, but that was it. If I try to play a game now I start to go quietly insane. They’re so stupid and pointless. Yet guys in the their 30s and beyond will devote hours and hours to seeing if they can find a silly fucking sword or something for their character. I know guys with huge tattoos of their favorite game characters. That’s just weird to me. So many men are stupidly infantalized, desocialized, and underperforming these days. When you throw in ubiquitious pornography, and you might as well have most men plugged into a 24/7 morphone drip. We may not live in a bombed-out hellscape, but our society feels very dystopian these days.
As nice as my friend’s girlfriend was, honestly, I’d go crazy in a similar set-up myself. I don’t need a woman to baby me or run my life. I do just fine on my own. And the no sex deal…well, that’s a deal breaker, right there. Especially if we’re living together.
My point with all this is that men and women are not optimized for one another anymore. They are not optimized for a marriage or relationships in general. We are only optimized for our own individual needs, wants, and desires. We are like Baby People crying out for our bottles. There is only one word that exists in the collective unconscious — ME. Me, me, me.
Possibly — well, quite likely — this is the result of our ultra-individualist society. We are trained from birth to go through the school system, get an education, all so we can squeeze ourselves into some corporate Borg Cube. All while being hypnotized by the glowing rectangle of the computer/phone screen. Recently, I saw a post on X about how Gen Z women rank marriage as low as seventh on their list of priorities. Career and college were likely at the top.
I’ve mentioned before how in college when asked our future plans no one, not even the women, mentioned things like having a family or kids. Frankly, the very idea seems quaint and cringe or characterized as “traps” to anyone who isn’t a bonnet-wearing Mennonite or an immigrant from a region where having 5+ kids is basically a rite of passage. That’s honestly a shame, and narrows the reproductive window of opportunity. The women in my class were not in their teens, but mainly in their mid-20s. By contrast, my mom had me when she was 24. She had four kids. My grandmother started late relatively-speaking for her era, at 28, but she had 8 herself. Out of all my direct family, half-family, and former family, no one has had more than three kids, with most having none or one. And many of the women in my family had their kids after 30, which historically is pretty old to have a kid for the first time. I have none myself.
I don’t say of any this to shame or make fun. It’s just rather sad, and maybe more indicative of a restrictive and toxic economic climate than a statement on the broader culture. Or perhaps all our comfortable modern technology has lulled everyone into a numb ennui toward family and offspring. Who wants to change diapers when you could binge watch the latest Netflix slop? Why have actual kids when you could be a dog mom or a cat dad?
As in my two examples, even when relationships do miraculously occur, they can often be fake and unfulfilling as plastic flowers.
Whatever the reason for the divide, it seems men and women need some kind of New Deal. A restart. A reacclimation to one another. We put all this time and effort into training people to become monkeys for our corporate overlords. Why not add a School of Domesticity? Or at least pivot our cultural attitudes toward viewing genuine human connection as a natural positive, and not a punch line.
You know you’re at frothy market highs when you start seeing videos about totally can’t fail easy shortcuts to early retirement by (fill in the blank with whatever financial trading scheme you want).
We saw this with crypto back in 2021. I remember arguing with a guy on X (then Twitter) who was out there telling people to retire early by staking their money on high interest earning liquidity pools. I got into another Twitter fight with some fresh MBA grad finance bro who was out there recommending random dividend shit stocks that were paying out 10%+ to his followers.
“Bro, you don’t understand. Every five grand you put in equals $500 a year for life. For life, bro!”
Mind you, I wasn’t being nasty or anything. I was simply asking what happens if stocks go down or those liquidity pools dry up? I was asking standard good faith due diligence type questions. But like the guy who pointed out that maybe the Titanic needed more life boats, I was ignored and ridiculed.
Then the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates and stocks fell into an 18 month bear market. Crypto plummeted back to Death Valley. Mysteriously, I didn’t see too many finance bros on Twitter soon after. Same with crypto bros.
But now markets are back at all time highs. The Fed just cut rates by half a point. Stocks are roaring. Bitcoin is back, baby! It’s all good. “Biggest bull market ever, yo!”
Which of course means gurus and finance experts and self-appointed wealth wizards are out there peddling their know-how for clicks.
The latest big idea I’ve seen involves buying LEAPS and then selling calls against those leaps.
What the hell am I talking about, you might be wondering? What’s a LEAP?
LEAPS
LEAPS are an option on a stock. It stands for Long-Term Anticipation Equity Securities — LEAPS. LEAPS are at least one year out from expiration, and sometimes they can go out as long as three years. An option, as you may know, is the right but not the obligation, to buy a stock within a certain time period. If I buy one option on Apple with a strike price of $200 that expires in one year, that means I have a year to exercise my right to buy 100 shares of that stock at $200. Option contracts are worth 100 shares each.
The appeal of options is they give you the ability to potentially control 100 shares without having to actually buy the 100 shares. The downside is that option contracts expire and they are more volatile than stocks.
Option contracts are also way cheaper than buying the shares. A $200 call option on Apple for December 19th 2025 as of this writing costs about $5,300 while 100 shares of Apple would cost roughly $23,000. If Apple goes up to $250 this time next year, the value of the option you hold on those shares would also go up. Let’s say our $200 option we paid $5,300 for becomes worth $7,000. That would mean you’ve made a profit of $1,700. That’s nearly a 25% return in one year. Had you bought 100 shares at $233 instead, you’d have also made $1,700, but you would have risked about $23,000 to do so. You would have also only made about a 7% return. You can see how options can give you enormous leverage on a stock.
The Strategy
However, there is a way to maximize your returns on that LEAP call. You could also sell calls against the stock. The key here is you want to sell calls that are high above the stock price (“out of the money”) and therefore unlikely to be exercised by the buyers.
And you want to sell calls with close expiration dates. Say, a week, or a month out. Right now, a November 1st, 2024 (one week from this writing) $240 call on Apple is going for about $200. Hypothetically, if you were to sell a $200 call like that every week, you could potentially make $10,400 a year. That’s with only one LEAP option that cost you a mere $5,300.
Now, imagine if you could buy 20 LEAPS. That would mean you could sell 20 calls against them, and make $208,000 a year, or over $17,000 a month. That’s a nice income stream. On top of that, you’ll also make $34,000 if Apple goes up to $250 and your LEAPS become worth $7,000 as mentioned earlier. That’s a grand total of $242,000 of profit in one year.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, that’s because it is, duh. What you see above is where the gurus all stop talking. They don’t mention the possibility that your calls might get assigned, forcing you to liquidate your LEAPS holdings.
They also don’t mention what happens if stocks slide into a bear market, which is the biggest threat. Even a strong bull market will see big dips and corrections. But what happens during a prolonged downturn, like what we saw in 2022 through late 2023? Or what happened after the Dot Com meltdown? Or after the 2008 financial crash? It took stocks years to get back to all time highs again after 2000. It took about five years for stocks to return to highs after 2008.
You can see the problem here if you have a bunch of financial assets that EXPIRE in a relatively short amount of time. Even if you have a three year LEAP option, it might take that long before stocks get back to even. Meaning you would likely lose your investment. Option values go down way harder than stocks during pullbacks.
Yes, you could buy put options to hedge your positions. But those may only limit your downside risk. You can still lose money. Lots of money.
I’m not saying this LEAPS strategy doesn’t work or can’t work. I’ve bought LEAPS myself and profited. I’ve also sold coverered calls and put options. I’m just saying that you need to get a fuller picture of what you’re getting into. You need to understand the substantial RISK you are taking on by doing this. Using a small part of your portfolio to trade might be okay depending on your networth and risk tolerance. This strategy could potentially offer some relativey steady returns if done prudently.
But is this LEAPS stategy something you could actually RETIRE on? I certainly wouldn’t bank my retirement on this. It would only “work” assuming you have significant assets to fall back on should the market crap out for 18 months. Thinking you’re going to make $10,000 or whatever a month every month no problem is foolish.
I really get tired of these so-called experts out there chasing clicks and ad revenue by misrepresenting trading strategies or whatever other financial schemes are in vogue. Actually, no. It pisses me off. Because the fact is trading is high risk and few people make regular money from it. At worst they offer half-baked schemes that only work in optimal markets. At best they’re not giving you all the facts.
Be on the lookout for these gurus and bull market snake oil salesmen. Do your own thorough research. Do not get sucked in by the hype. Do not just blindly follow some strategy because you think it’ll give you easy returns. Be careful out there.
Dean Brooks 