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.
Years ago, this was a taboo subject for me. If someone asked me, “What are you?” (which, by the way, is not really the most tactful way to ask someone about their ethnicity) I would freeze up. I’d get angry, but try not to show it. Sometimes I’d just ignore the question altogether as if it were clearly only asked by mistake, or uttered due to a Tourette tic, and therefore to be ignored so as not to embarass the asker. It would take me hours to calm down.
Nowadays, I don’t really care as much. I’ll usually answer with some generic version of, “I’m a lot of things.” If I’m feeling spicy, I’ll say something like, “What, are you a census taker?” It’s more a source of humor for me now. I can laugh at it. I don’t turn into some schizoid weirdo anymore when the subject of my race comes up. I can examine it detached, clinically, and somewhat neutrally. But it’s not exactly a subject I care to get into. I truly do wish we lived in a race blind world where it was no big deal. But people are curious. And like it or not, race is a fascinating and often contentious subject.
I should probably clarify what I mean when I say, “I hate being biracial.” That’s a pretty extreme statement. I don’t hate myself, to be clear. I hate my racial mixedness and my skin tone that implies it in the same way a 5’2″ guy might hate the fact that he’s short. Or a balding guy hates that he’s losing his hair. Or the way someone might hate that they struggle with their weight. I don’t view race as some “extra” thing about one’s identity. It’s just another physical attribute of one’s body. I hate that it’s a “conversation piece.” Something that it feels I have to justify or explain. It’s like missing an eye — you’ll invariably get that question of how you lost it. I also hate the size of my nose and my acne-prone skin too, for that matter. So, it’s purely in that vein.
I’m not saying being racially mixed is inherently a negative. Some people I’m sure love it or take “pride” in it. Me, not so much. It’s always felt like I was wearing clothes that don’t fit.
I tend to surprise people when I bluntly state how I don’t like being mixed. “What, OMG, but what about Tiger Woods or (fill in the blank racially mixed celebrity)?” Yeah, what about him? His race is Wealthy Celebrity Athlete, not whatever mix he is.
“Oh, but you have the best of both worlds. Whites tan at salons all the time so they can look like you.” If it’s so great, then everyone would be in an interracial relationship so they could have mixed kids. Except the vast majority aren’t because they don’t want that, because most people want their kids to look like them.
“But you look like the future.” What future? When? In two hundred years? Why should I give a fuck what people hypothetically may look like in two centuries?
“But Jesus was biracial” (yes, someone said that). What? No he wasn’t. He wasn’t even really human (assuming he existed). You see any ordinary people turn water into wine or rise from the dead? I didn’t think so.
::sigh::
Race carries with it more social baggage than most other physical characteristics. People tend to assume all kinds of different things about your race. One’s race can often result in far different life experiences and perspectives. I don’t subscribe to many of the left wing concepts about DEI, unconcious racial bias, and a lot of other race-themed stuff. It all seems to be targeted unfairly in one direction — at Whites. A lot of it is nonsense. And also because honestly, I just don’t care. So-called “bias” is often rooted in simple pattern recognition. If a woman by herself sees me walking down the street at night, she’s more apt to feel afraid of me than another woman. Well, duh. That’s because men commit like 99% of all assaults, and mostly they assault women. By the same token, if you had to guess who the majority of shooting victims in major cities are, and you thought Black youths, you’d be correct. Stats are not a form of “bias.” Self-preservation based on pattern recognition is not bias. But I get where the leftoids are coming from in some ways. Some genuine racism exists. Okay, got it.
I’m also not as extreme as, say, Jesse Lee Peterson, who refuses to acknowledge that racism even exists. But I also get where he’s coming from there, too. Racism is very overrated these days as a social ill. Most times if someone doesn’t like you, it has nothing to do with your race. They just don’t like you individually. Too many people are too quick to assume it’s all about race and racism. It really isn’t. I also don’t care for the right wing platitude, “There’s only one race — the human race.” Really, you sure about that? Because I’ve never seen a right winger (or anyone, for that matter) just blindly choose where to buy a house. Usually “the type of neighborhood” (i.e. how many Blacks/Browns live there) factors a great deal into where one intends to live, especially if they’re White.
Basically, I’m 64% European. Mainly a mix of Italian, Irish, English, Portugese, and other things. While also being about 25% Indigenous American due to my Mexican/Hispanic background. The small remainder is a mix of West Asian (4.9%) and Sub-Saharan African (2.7%). The precise genetic mixing is not that important. What’s important is that I’m dark and different looking enough to not just be “plain boring” White. Most people don’t really know what the hell I am just from looking, though many will guess Hispanic, as that part of me dominates my physical features.
For the fortunate, their race or ethnicity is not a contentious issue. For some it’s a total non-factor. For me, even the fact that I was racially mixed at all was a source of debate. Well, denial, really. My mother (White, mainly Italian and almost entirely European) always insisted that I too, was White, because “Hispanics are considered Caucasian.” That’s debatable in some ways depending on how closely related one is to the Spanish versus the native tribes the Spaniards and other Western nations colonized way back when. But few people will just lump Mexicans in with White unless they look totally White. Certainly not dark. I did not have “dark” skin, I had “Mediterranean olive skin,” according to my mom. Given that I am 64% European, I can see her point. But I think a lot of my mother’s beliefs were wishful projections on her part. She split from my father when I was barely an infant, and then the two fought a nasty two-year custody battle over me. My father is where I get my darker pigmentation, as he’s largely Mexican. My mother did not wish to have a Mexican-looking kid. She wanted a kid who looked more like her. So, therefore, I was “White,” darker complexion be damned.
It’s a tough thing for one’s mere conception to become the source of great conflict and drama between parents. When you add in the culture and racial clash, it can become pretty severe. Then when you also add in the fact that one parent denies that you’re even racially mixed to begin with, it can create a rather toxic identity-shattering brew. Making matters worse, I did not have the opportunity to know my biological father growing up. I never had any connection to my Mexican/Hispanic heritage. I did not get to know my many half-siblings on my father’s side. That whole part of my background was handwaved away and treated as though irrelevant. My mother later married a White guy whom I never cared for, and then had three more children. I was the lone mixed bastard offspring.
As a kid I adapted fine to the family dynamic. What other choice did I have? It was only as I got older that I realized what a shit deal it all was for me, and resented being the different one. I wasn’t even allowed to refer to my step-dad as “step-dad.” He was my “father,” which became a source of contention and conflict. My mother’s separation of me from my real father was never really explained and never justified. Making things worse, my mother became an extreme fundamentalist Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition. This was at the height of the “Moral Majority” and End Times stuff in the ’80s and ’90s. My mother viewed her past with my father as her old, “sinful” life. Now she was “saved.” This is not uncommon. Many women go out into the world, get pregnant by some dude they end up hating, then do the about face into the piety and religion thing. It’s practically a trope, which I call “whiplash conversion.”
This whiplash conversion trope is something White women excel at particularly. Get knocked up by a Brown/Black guy they were just “experimenting” with, then go running into the arms of a safe White guy provider and turn Christian and go to church three times a week. It’s become such a common thing that it’s mercilessly mocked on the racist side of X and other social media. It’s called “paying the toll,” “coal burning” or “mudsharking.” There are tons of memes about it which I won’t share here, but they’re easy enough to find. Having been the product of such experimentation and suffered as a result, I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel visceral anger when seeing such cataclysmic breakups happen to other children, especially boys. It’s not pleasant to know that most of society views you as the butt of a joke, even though they’d never admit it outloud. Sure, you can say it’s “only social media.” But social media reflects a lot of actual social thought.
For me, race mixing, and its consequence of racially mixed offspring, will always carry a negative taint, even though I myself am biracial. It will always be something that bears high risk. Like carrying nitroglycerine across a cobblestone road. It will always be something that represents pain and loss for me, due to the fallout between my parents and how it affected me. Divorce and parental strife is bad for children of all races, but for the biracial there is the added risk of losing touch with half their heritage, and potentially feeling lost and bearing an identity crisis later in life. Many biracial people report having conflicted identity issues no matter what.
Many biracial people would choose one side over the other if they could, and feel it isn’t themselves but society that chooses what they are. It’s that lack of having a choice about who you are that bothers me especially. I also have no choice but to perpetuate race mixing if I were to have kids. No matter what race my wife would be, my children will be mixed because of me. Do I risk potentially burdening them with the same issues I had?
Even in an ideal family situation, there’s a tendency to prefer association with those who look like you. Like tends to attract like. This is why Whites tend to buy homes in White neighborhoods. It’s why race tends to marry within race, even in supposedly multicultural America. Something like 80% of White women marry White guys. Black women and Asian women tend to be most open to marrying outside color lines. With Hispanic women, it’s more split. But then many Hispanics do pass for White or have some overlap (like myself).
Being biracial puts you at a statistical disadvantage when it comes to finding a partner, because you have to find one who is comfortable with both your backgrounds — something I’ve found is not often the case. You could, of course, try to find another biracial person. But we are actually few and far between, and depending on shade, we tend to go for our “dominant” side. Then there is the aspect of disappointing both sides. As I wrote about in the above-linked article, I’ve been told I’m “too White” by Hispanic women and not White at all by White women, or not White enough. Something I’ll always find sadly amusing.
You also have to watch out that you’re not just a “flavor of the month,” or that someone is only interested in you just because of your skin tone. Many years ago, a White lady at work tried to set me up with her only daughter because her daughter was “into Hispanic guys.” I politely told her no thanks. I have no idea what it means to be “Hispanic.” It’s just genetic happenstance to me. I’m just a man. I’d rather someone like me for me. This was a tough thing to do, because her daughter seemed nice and I did find her attractive, and I got along well with her mother. I sometimes think back to that encounter and think that had she approached me from a better angle, how it could have gone another way. But I didn’t have any idea what sort of expectations a girl who’s “into Hispanic guys” had, and it honestly made me uncomfortable. I get that race is a factor in attraction, but it’s usually not something that’s a first priority unless you’re fetishizing it. Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.
Being mixed is like living in a racial no-man’s land. Given the fact that virtually every social environment I grew up in was nearly 100% White, it’d have been far easier for myself to have just been White rather than only culturally White. Being Not Actually White but having to be surrounded by Actual Whites makes one feel like a fraud, as I suppose it would be for a “daywalker” of any other race. Half-Black, Half-Asian, whatever. I never really felt comfortable or fit in, even with my own half-siblings. It’s not exactly psychologically healthy to always feel alien, especially when living in your own house. Moving around as much as I did didn’t help things, either. And I moved a lot. You tend to feel more alone and isolated. It was increasingly harder to even relate to my own mother. I look very little like her, and in fact, look the most like my father out of all his kids. Had I grown up and lived in a largely Hispanic area, I would probably have felt the same alienness about my Whiteness.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Perhaps my experiences are what led to my self-reliant and highly individualist nature as an adult. Besides, virtually all kids have trouble fitting in in their own way. I knew a White girl in fifth grade who one day decided to stab herself in the side with a pencil because she didn’t like being in class. I remember the side of her t-shirt soaked with blood as she got up to go to the nurse. I wonder what kind of inner turmoil she must have been going through. For all my inner angst at the time, I mean, hey, I never stabbed myself or did any self-harm. It could have been worse, you know?
These days, mixedracedness and diversity are broadly celebrated. At least it would appear that way in the media. There is less cream cheese on TV and in movies in favor of caramel and chocolate. Racially ambiguous stars like The Rock and Vin Diesel are popular. Hell, we had a biracial president in Barack Obama. Doesn’t all of that mean we’re progressing? Surely we are on the cusp of a racially blind utopia. Daywalkers like myself should be rejoicing as we enter this new age. Except I think we’re more divided now than ever. I think a lot of diversity is forced, contrived for image, and not exactly genuine. Like I said before, people freely associate. We don’t exist in some hypothetical national narrative perpetuated by the media. We exist at the local level. In our own lives. Not in an NFL commercial. Racial and ethnic tensions still exist. But whether you’re one race or another, at least you know what team you’re playing on. When you’re mixed, you have no idea, and neither does anyone else.
My perspective has grown and matured over the years. In the end, you get handed the genetic cards you’re dealt, and you’ve got to play them however you can. Both my parents are short, and yet somehow I wound up six feet tall. Something like only 15% of men are six feet or higher. That’s a plus. Most of my family lived long healthy lives, even into their 90s. I’ve been healthy my whole life, knock on wood. I admit that a lot of my thinking about being biracial is colored negatively because of how my parent’s relationship fell apart. Had things gone better there I probably would feel rosier about it. But the chips fell as they did.
I don’t view any one race as inherently better or worse. But there’s no denying that being in a region where one race is the super majority that you’ll likely feel isolated and alien if you look different. However, it’s not like being White means you automatically fit in with other Whites. No race or ethnicity is a monolith. Still, I’ll probably go to my grave hating being biracial. For me it brough too many complications I’d just assume not have. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing for someone else. Everyone is different in their own way.
A few weeks ago I got an email from Amazon alerting me that I’m party to a class action lawsuit against Clif Bar & Company.
You know Clif Bars, I’m sure. Those little brown rectangular granola “sustained energy” bars that cost way too much. The bougie version of those super crumbly Nature Valley bars. The bars with the wrapper that shows some guy mountain climbing that makes you think, “Oh my God, if I eat these I could be a mountain climber, too.”
Well evidently, Clif Bars has gone and done something heinous. Something awful. Something so terrible that some guy named Ralph Milan went and filed a class action lawsuit against the company.
What did Clif Bars do? Did they fiendishly put fentanyl in select bars, hoping to cull part of the active granola-eating population like some mad comic book villain? Did they replace some bars with plastic explosive set to detonate when the wrappers were opened? Did they replace the raisins with the calcified bodies of cockroaches?
What devilishly malicious scheme did Clif Bars do to warrant the ire of Ralph?
Apparently, Clif Bars did this, according to the settlement website (bold face mine):
A proposed settlement has been reached against Clif Bar & Company (“Clif Bar”) in an action alleging that Defedant violated certain laws in labeling its Clif Bars and ZBars with claims that made the products seem healthy, when Plaintiffs allege they were unhealthy due to their added sugar content. Clif Bar denies any wrongdoing of any kind and maintains that its products are not unhealthy due to added sugar content and that the statements on its Clif Bars’ and ZBars’ labeling are true and not misleading.
Holy shit, this is worse than anything I previously mentioned. Clif Bars alleged on their packaging that their products were “healthy” when in fact they were not healthy because of added sugar content.
This is like a personal 9/11. I eat Clif Bars all the time at work!
I’m a victim of Clif Bar’s vile and evil masterplan to sell overpriced and oversugared granola bars. I too was swindled, deceived, hoodwinked, made a fool, and poisoned with slightly excess sugar, all while believing I was consuming a healthy snack. It’s a travesty. A disaster. A traumatic edible experience from which I’ll likely never recover.
Much to my alarm, I still had the toxic treats in my kitchen when I received this email. Luckily, I had a biohazard suit hanging nearby (it’s a long story) and was able to discard the dangerous packaged rectangles of doom into an outdoor dumpster. I just hope the raccoons don’t find them. What if they eat them and mutate like the ninja turtles and that green ooze? I’m not Splinter. I can’t train a pack of mutant trash pandas to fight crime! I don’t know the first thing about kung-fu.
Clif Bars has already made a settlement for their atrocious misdeed. They’re paying, get this, $12,000,000. All I have to do is file a claim and I too could get a slice of that (non-sugary) pie. That’s a lot of cheddar for a lot of improperly-advertised granola.
Should I join this class action lawsuit? Should I file a claim and take the fight to Big Granola? I feel like Luke Skywalker flying down that trench and getting ready to fire a proton missile into the ventilation shaft. I feel like Neo learning to control the Matrix. Jake Sully fighting the imperialist humans in Avatar. You get the idea.
Of couse, I still have the right to sue Clif Bars myself. And now that I think about it, maybe I should. Afterall, their packaging still says their bars offer “sustained energy.” Except whenever I’ve eaten them, I’ve never had what I would call “sustained” energy. Energy, yes. But NOT sustained. More like very fleeting energy. Sounds like I have grounds for a massive lawsuit right there. Shall we say, ten million to begin, to ease my pain and suffering?
Then there’s the packaging itself. Showing some guy mountain climbing. I’ve never once felt the need or ability to go mountain climbing while eating Clif Bars. In fact, I think if I did, I’d probably fall and kill myself, despite eating a Clif Bar beforehand. So is Clif Bar & Company trying to kill me? Sounds like attempted manslaughter right there, though I’m no lawyer. That’s another easy ten mil or so.
I’m glad Amazon alerted me to Clif Bar’s pure evil, and about my chance to cash in big on this wretched and outrageous criminal enterprise.
Have you eaten Clif Bars, too? Did you survive? Are you a sad victim and entitled to compensation? I’ll see you at the Rolls-Royce dealership when the settlement check clears.
A post on Reddit took the internet by storm with a polarizing question.
Source: Reddit
Are rich boomers greedy assholes selfishly clinging to their lifelong gains, or prudent individualists responsibly preserving their wealth to endure the unknown storms of old age and life in general? Were they simply the beneficiaries of better economic times, cheaper cost of living, and a jobtopia American culture, who bootstrapped their way to financial security through their own gumption, or did they cruelly pull the ladder up behind them and say, “Suck it, kiddos!”
Are Millennials lazy, entitled brats looking for freebies from mommy and daddy instead of doing the hard work necessary to build their own lives? Or ar they the victims of “late-stage capitalism” and all its ills: high cost of living, obscenely high real estate prices, and high college tuition costs? Are Millennials truly just fucked by the economy they inherited from their boomer parents? Are they working their asses off and still getting nowhere through no fault of their own?
And what about Gen-Xers? Do they even still exist? Or did they all just become Millennials when grunge rock died?
I’ve been thinking about the screenshotted post above all week since I saw it reposted on X. I don’t generally puruse Reddit anymore, so I get most of my viral soap opera content from Musk’s Madhouse.
The post prompted a lot of feedback. Some outraged. Some insightful. Some hilarious.
I don’t think anyone is entitled to anyone else’s money. Even their parents. Even if their parents are rich and it’s clear that when they die they are going to hand down millions, or tens of millions to their kids.
Are Millennials struggling these days? Yes. Many are. Are they having fewer children because of their struggling? Yes. Would a bailout from their parents help? Yes, it would. Money in your thirties, when many are building families or buying homes would serve much better than getting a bag of cash in your late 50s or 60s, after most of life has been lived. No doubt about that. And if rich boomers want to help, then by all means.
But let’s start with why so many Millennials are struggling today. For the most part, it’s largely due to student loans and real estate prices. And tons of bad debt. I myself had almost $35,000 of debt at age 30. Most of which was student loan related, but also credit cards and auto loans. I was truly fucked up. But unfortunately, I grew up in the lower-middle class, and while some extended members of my family, and ex-family, are quite well off, there was never anybody coming to lend me a hand.
I had to take the hard route. Packing up everything I owned in Philadelphia and moving to the frigid tundra of North Dakota. There, after some struggle, including brief homelessness and being reduced to one dollar to my name, I wound up securing a nice income in the oilfield. After two years, I had paid off all my debt, and built up a nice cushion of savings to finally go back to school and finish my bachelor’s degree. After checking off that box, I returned to work, and am now on the road to financial independence. I have zero debt, side income from investments, and basically have a “CoastFIRE” level networth. That means your retirement is secure via compound growth even if you don’t put another dime in of your own.
While I still have a ways to go until I’ve got that Holy Grail “Fuck you money” that everyone wants, I don’t think I’d have ever gotten off my ass and accomplished what I had if I thought mommy and daddy were going to help me out via inheritance or bailout. In fact, I’m way better off now than my parents are in retirement. I’m the rare Millennial who beat the odds and has done far better than his parents.
I rather like that. I like knowing I made it on my own without a handout. I won’t lie. Whenever I hear of Millennials who needed their parents to give them money for a house down payment, I look down on them. I think less of them. My mom and step-dad wouldn’t even fill out the FAFSA without giving me a hard time (a long story), despite apparently having “too much income” to qualify for it anyway. I paid for college entirely on my own. Hell, I moved out when I was 16. I did the best I could, fucked up along the way, but wound up course correcting big. On. My. Fucking. Own.
That’s not to say there have not been sacrifices. Real, killer sacrifies, on my part. For one, the oilfields of North Dakota is the place love goes to die. It’s virtually impossible to meet anyone up here. I had to sacrifice my prime dating years to pay off debt and secure my own financial future. Not an easy task, and not something every man is willing to do. It was very hard to try to have long distance relationships. It was demoralizing to make brief connections via dating apps, only to see them whither and die on the vine because of the distance, or because a girl I liked met someone else closer to her. Now in my 40s, I have to accept the fact that the optimal dating window has closed for me. Even if I am financially secure, that only goes so far once you’re past 35 as a man. I won’t accept garbage situations like single moms or women with baggage issues. I’ve never been sex-driven or needy or dependent on having a woman in my life. Again, a rare thing for a man. But then I’ve always been a loner and largely self-reliant. I was MGTOW before it was cool, baby.
I’d have loved to have met someone when I was younger and built a family with them. A financial bailout would have helped for sure. But what would have helped out a LOT MORE was the knowledge and training from my boomer parents about the perils and pitfalls of student loan debt, and some better financial education, overall. Both my mom and step-dad knew little about saving and investing, and so imparted no knowledge. I had to figure all that out on my own.
I think Boomers are highly overrated as “successful” or “lucky” because of the times they lived in. They had their own struggles, too. Be glad you didn’t have to worry about getting drafted into a war when you were a teenaged boy. My dad is a Vietnam vet. He joined the Army at 17 and later got sent over there in intel and recon. He was boots on the ground like the troops in Platoon. I’m very thankful I did not have go through something like that, and that all wars waged by our government since did not require a draft. I’m very appreciate and reverential of my father’s contributions. He is a war hero, and frankly, I’d be an unworthy asshole to act entitled to anything he earned from his Army pension or government pension due to his work as a probation officer for many decades. Same with my mom. She was in the Army also, and has worked as a teacher for many years, and gotten her own state pension and worked for her retirement. I love them both too much, and would much rather know they are secure in retirement than to think of them as piggy banks, to be used for my own needs. Again, maybe that makes me a rare kind.
Millennials have had opportunities that Boomers never did. The stock market has been far better, and more predictable, during our young adult lives than it ever was for Boomers. We’ve seen tech stocks like Apple 500X over the last twenty years. We’ve seen new asset classes like Bitcoin and crypto explode onto the scene. Broadband internet and smartphone apps have allowed us to navigate far more nimbly than landlines and payphones did for our parents. Real estate is way pricier in HCOL areas, sure. But the Midwest and South have offered cheap opportunities in areas that turned into boomtowns. The fracking boom saved my ass, and transformed West Texas and North Dakota into spectacular growth areas.
Even if you have rich parents, it’s never good to base your life on the idea that you’ll just get bailed out. At a certain point, you have to learn to rely on yourself. We’ve all met snobby trust fund pricks before. And we’ve all met helicopter parents who control every aspect of their adult children via money. Who the hell wants that?
Do some people have significant advantages from their parents because of money? Absolutely. But usually their success comes from their own intelligence and hard work. The money was just a tool. If I ever have kids, I’ll almost certainly leave something for them. But my real contribution will be to teach them how they can succeed on their own. Equipping them with the financial knowledge I never had. That’s a real inheritance.
It then also occurred to me how when you get down to it, most people don’t really care about material possessions and money when it comes to attraction. They care if they find you “hot.” They care if they find you physically attractive. This isn’t just men. Women do, too.
Are women at home fantasizing about Chris Hemsworth, or Danny DeVito? Are men at home thinking about Sydney Sweeney, or Rosie O’Donnell?
Of course, plenty of supermodel-quality women go for rich hippo-sized uggo dudes all the time. But we’re not talking about obvious gold diggers or pay-for-play marriage arrangements. We’re talking about your average everyday relationships. Most people want someone who looks good and turns them on.
Well, here’s the problem. It’s kind of hard to be your best sexy self when you’ve got a hundred pounds of blubber wrapped over your frame like a sports mascot outfit.
Those statistics are not just for older adults who are well past the prime dating age. They’re nearly across the board for all adults. Male and female. Even young people in the hot spot of the mating zone.
Years ago when I went back to college to finish my degree I could not believe the number of overweight women I saw on campus. I’m not talking the “freshman 15” here. I’m talking both ass cheeks hanging over the side of the classroom chair. I’m talking pear-shaped plumpernutters. There were plenty of hefty guys, too. Guys with sagging beer bellies. It should be illegal to look like that until you’re at least 45 and have a mortgage and three kids.
At my job at the time, I worked on occasion with an 18-year-old girl whose legs were thicker than my waist. She would come in to work carrying bags of McDonald’s, slurping on Starbucks milkshakes, and then actually complain to others about her weight problems. One time I asked her if she needed help with something work-related, to which she replied, unprompted about the subject, “Yeah, how about you take some of my fat?” I then suggested maybe she should make nutritious food at home instead of always ordering Mcdonald’s. To which she laughed and looked at me like I was insane. I was actually sad, aghast, and brokenhearted inside. All of 18, and she was already hopelessly lost down a dark alley of Big Macs and Big Gulps.
Here’s the thing. Obesity and overweightedness is a (literally) big deal. It affects your health in every negative way. It gives you early diabetes, heart problems, cardiovascular problems, breathing issues, cancer, and wreaks havoc on your joints. Not to mention the most obvious one — it makes you look far less attractive.
Obesity also saps your libido and can harm your reproductive abilities, too.
No wonder the population is declining rapidly. No wonder young people aren’t banging each other anymore. No wonder dating apps are dead. Have you been on any dating app recently? Let’s be honest. How many people did you see on there who WEREN’T fat? Not that many, right? I’m not trying to be funny. It’s legit part of the reason I deleted my accounts a long time ago. It was Cellulite City on there. Gross, no thanks. I don’t need to spend $35 a month just to be flooded with the roundular daughters of the Michelin Man. I’ll wait for my Uma Thurman sexbot instead.
Everyone wants to blame feminism, the Red Pill, toxic masculinity, the disappearance of third places, the hectic modern lifestyle, the economy, the reduction of religion, eroding traditions, and many other reasons for the death of dating and mating. But I think it’s much simpler. People have turned into disgusting fatasses.
Look, I’ll be the first to admit I’m no Brad Pitt. I’m more a darker-complexioned Justin Long. I do make the effort to stay in shape, though. I do what I can with what I got. Being hot is not everything in a relationship. But letting yourself become a blimp will not help.
It’s hard to get out there and clap cheeks when you can barely squeeze your cheeks out the front door, you know?
I’m actually disappointed in myself. I used to really be into stuff like this when I was younger. You slap the words “obscene graphic violence” on a flick and I was there like a six-year-old kid jumping into a dark van with “FREE CANDY” written on the side.
I remember watching Peter Jackson’s ridiculously gory Dead Alive years ago and laughing my ass off. I used to watch Hellraiser on repeat. When I was a little kid I begged my mom to rent a scary movie one night. She picked Jagged Edge, which bored me. I used to run to the horror section of the video store so I could scope out any carnage shown on the backs of the video covers. The Nightmare on Elm Street series always had some gems.
Lately, I’ve been hearing about the Terrifier films. A series I know nothing about other than it involves some kind of creepy blood-covered clown named Art the Clown. I kept hearing about how people were throwing up and passing out at premiers. The other day I passed a Hot Topic in a mall and I saw Art the Clownt-shirts. Now, as much as one can glean cultural impact from a store that serves the junior goth demographic, it’s clear this Art guy has some cachet with the youngins. I’ve got to keep up with the times, thought I. I’ve got to investigate this scary new phenomenon. I know all about Pennywise the Clown. But Pennywise is yesterday’s news, and I can’t fall behind on my killer clown mythology.
To my (at the time) delight, I saw that Terrifier 2 was offered on Amazon Prime. Oh, nice, here’s my chance to check this newfangled thing out. I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes to gauge concensus, and to my surprise I saw it not only had a fresh rating, it was actually in the 80s.
What??? A critically praised ultra gory film? Now I definitely have to see this.
I clicked on the tab. Within minutes I was greeted with a silhouette of Art the Clown walking down an alley. Okay, that’s creepy but not too bad. Then it cut immediately to a medical office, and a one-eyed Art is stalking some doctor in an office who’s been stabbed in the stomach. The doctor tries to make a phone call, only for Art to come along and start beating him to death with a hammer. Then Art rips out the doctor’s eyeball and inserts it into his own eye socket to replace his missing eye.
And that was it. I was done. I clicked away, and actually turned to The Silence of the Lambs as a form of therapy. Yes, the flick about the cross-dressing murdering sadist and psychopathic cannibal was “easy watching” compared to the bloody eyeball-snatching clown.
Who the hell watches this ultra violent gory shit? Friday the 13th, Nightmare, and the Halloween series, all of which I grew up on, are tame and nothing anymore. Terrifier is like cinematic equivalent of a heroin junkie injecting the syringe in their last good vein trying to chase that dragon high of scares.
Man, there is some imagery I just don’t care or need to put into my brain anymore. Now there’s a third Terrifier coming out this weekend. Yeah, no thanks. Fuck off, Art the Clown.
Dean Brooks 