I received the following article request in response to my article The Dangers of Chads Living the Stacy Lifestyle:
I was wondering if you can write an article request on resilience as it relates to your article The Dangers of Chads Living the Stacy Lifestyle. It appears that men nowadays lack the resilience than previous generations
before. You noted,“There is also the issue that guys who are blessed with good genetics, but who do not have money, sometimes lack “GRIT” because life, during their formative years, was too easy for them.”
“…the sons of well-off but not rich families to not develop any real ambition in life.”
Now, are there certain life experience or life adversities that men should and/or need to experience to become resilient and perhaps this shapes them and makes them more
masculine and well-rounded, and can too much life adversities hinder one life achievements?
I think there are few ways parents can damage their children more than by removing all hardship from their life. This leads to raising children who are extreme people pleasers who cannot deal well with setbacks, and the first time they face any adversity at all, they may not be able to handle it. It is easy sketch how this works in well-off families: the children get sent to good schools, get private tutoring, then they enter a respectable university, followed by embarking on a traditional career path by joining BigCorp or becoming a lawyer or doctor.
I was fortunate enough to experience the discrepancy between a regular university and a highly selective one. At elite schools, your professors and the administration really coddle you. Sure, you are expected to work hard, or hard enough, but the safety nets in place are quite ridiculous. One of the biggest surprises was when I attended my first class, as one of perhaps 20 students. The professor had a printout on his desk with the pictures and names of all students, and he went out of his way to memorize our names. It was the only class he taught this term, so this was surely not much of a challenge. This was just the beginning, though. You had great leeway in picking topics for your essays, and if you accidentally missed a deadline, they granted you an extension. I once forgot about an upcoming deadline, perhaps because I was partying too hard, and the professor approached me directly after he heard me talk to a class mate about it. Without me having to ask, I was offered a one-week extension as the university wanted to avoid putting too much pressure on students. I did not need it because there was enough time, but this is really not how the real world works.
In contrast, if you attend a large state university, you may be one of about two hundred students. If you don’t show up for class, nobody will care or even notice. If you forget to hand in your assignments on time, they flunk you without giving it a second thought, and the tutorial sessions may be poorly run. To survive, you more often than not need to sit down with your books, and figure things out by yourself. The result is that it is not uncommon that 50% of the people in your class drop out or pick an easier subject after just one semester. In contrast, at selective universities, you need to get in, but once you are in, you almost feel as if you are in some kind of academic theme park.
A lot of people seem to be completely unable to learn anything themselves. In my field, in my day job, there is a cottage industry of conferences and training providers, all just because apparently the average engineer cannot just pick up a book or a language reference and read the fucking thing. You can pick up a programming language really quickly with the available documentation and a compiler, yet Joe Average needs his employer to spend $2,000 to sit in a seminar where some schmuck goes through a bunch of examples. It is a total travesty.
The other aspect that really messes up children is easy access to money. I get that their parents just want to ensure that Little Timmy has a good time in school and can wear the right clothes to fit in, but this sets a disastrous baseline. Many women, in fact, need years to grasp that money is not some kind of limitless resource. You can go into any mall and see young women spend hundred of dollars on clothes they may hardly ever wear. I met women who had clothes at home they had never worn, except to try them on to see if they fit. Then, the sweater they really had to have gets put into their wardrobe until they throw it out.
In the past, it was not uncommon that your parents made you get a summer job in high school, just so that you get a sense of what it means to work and earn some money. I have the impression that this is getting less and less common nowadays. In particular in well-off families, parents go out of their way to buy whatever their children want. Rarely will they get told that if they want something, they should go earn the money for it. Having to carefully watch your budget is a very valuable exercise. I think every guy should have to do this at least once in their life, and for at least one year. Even if you end up in a comfortable position afterwards, you probably will not be inclined to blow $200 on some bullshit.
Perhaps the fastest way to grow resilience is if you completely leave your comfort zone. I left home in my early 20s and basically started over from zero in a big city, and I lived in two other countries for extended periods of time. Meanwhile, there are people who live in the same city as their parents and whose mother still does the laundry for them. Climbing a hill, figuratively speaking, is an excellent exercise. What would you do if you had to go abroad for an indefinite amount of time? If you have never done it, the mere thought may send shivers down your spine. However, once you have been through this, you realize that you can make friends somewhere else, too, or that all the belongings you thought you needed to have are perhaps not much more than a distraction.
There are also other, safer, ways to build resilience, albeit I am not sure how well you can transform the lessons learned this way to your life. The reason is that I am not sure about cause and effect. A simple example is picking up a sport, or lifting weights. Is this just a way for you to pass some of your time or do you really push yourself to your limit? Did you ever get so exhausted after a workout that you were at risk of fainting? Did you ever do a deadlift that was so challenging that you could not walk for a while afterwards? Over-exercising is surely not healthy in the long run, but I consider it valuable to at least try to explore where your limits are. However, if you have lived life on easy street all your life, you probably do not even consider this. Probably attending spinning class and following the lead of your instructor is good enough for such people.
I also like to bang my head against the wall when I play video games. Modern triple-A games with their insipid gameplay that consists of pressing A for Awesome do nothing for me. However, I have a very small selection of games I frequently return to, and in some I have become quite competent, after hundreds of hours of practice. This sounds like a lot but it averages out to half an hour every couple of days over many years, and in my view this is preferable to going through dozens of modern games that basically play themselves. Oftentimes, hearing that a particular game is “difficult” is enough for me to check it out. Again, just like with sports, I think that you already have to be a glutton for punishment to play such games. I find it implausible that well-adjusted Timmy who has absolutely no idea what hardship of whatever way is hears about games like 1001 Spikes, Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy, Dodonpachi, Tetris The Grand Master, SpaceChem, Super Ghouls and Ghosts, The Witness, or Sekiro, and is eager to play them. Timmy just does not like getting slapped in the face over and over. Also, the streamers of the games I am thinking of do not seem to be the most well-adjusted guys around. If they were, they would play Fortnite or Apex Legends.
There are also downsides to building resilience. One is that you may seek out challenges just for the sake of it. This can mean joining a company that has a reputation for being “toxic”, but not because they employ a lot of white men. I think it is more important to be able to make it through tough times when needed than it is to seek out difficult situations at all costs, and only for the sake of it, in particular if there are no clear benefits attached to it. I struggle a bit with this myself, in fact. For instance, I have worked for companies that are known for their shitty work culture, but I thought that the experience I gained there would be worth it. On the one hand, it was, but on the other, I really did not enjoy my time very much. At one place, when I resigned, I wondered why people put up with such crap, and in this context I learned that none of the three people who had this particular job before me lasted for more than eight months. I managed to stick around for about twice that time. Bizarrely enough, I don’t have a lot of memories of this time. I recall that it was a lot of work, a lot of office politics, and that my manager was quite intolerable, but it was just a blur in the end. I have more memories of some internships.
Another issue is that, depending on how you built your mental resilience, you may enjoy a lot less psychological comfort than others, but likely you will not need it anyway. For instance, I have moved a lot in my life, and if I told you how many registered addresses I have had in my adulthood, you likely would not believe it. In one year, I lived in four different apartments and three different cities in two countries, for instance. This is more than a lot of people experience in their entire life. As a consequence of this lifestyle, I do not have a lot of strong connections wherever I live, but on the other hand, I have some friendships who have lasted for decades. Also, just because you live in the same place for decades does not mean that you make lots of contacts. This is particularly true for large cities.
Lastly, too much adversity can obviously mess you up. Some people resort to drugs or alcohol to dull themselves, and this is the beginning of a vicious cycle. You probably want to be single and unattached when you go out in the world to get punched in the face. You probably should aim to be in pretty good health. The worst outcome would be to seek out adversity in order to build character, only to fail over and over. I have met a few people like that too. There are a lot of people who move to their country’s capitol to have fun and reinvent themselves, and plenty of them fail completely. I met people in London and Berlin who were completely out of their comfort zone, but not in a good way. They could not handle life in a big city at all. Some crash and burn, and move back to their little hometown within months as they find it too difficult to take care of everything at once. Life surely is a lot easier if your mother still does your laundry and you can visit each Sunday for a nice, filling meal, and if life never throws a curveball at you, you will be fine.
>Over-exercising is surely not healthy in the long run, but I consider it valuable to at least try to explore where your limits are.too much adversity can obviously mess you up.<
"Don't bite off more than you can chew" as they say! I talked about how I've currently decided to tackle the issue of my weight (which is going rather wonderfully!) before getting involved with the workforce and as I'm inching closer to the end of this journey,I still firmly hold that I've made an excellent choice in doing so.
Yes,there are still guys who lose weight while juggling a 9-5 stressful job and even kids. I've had folks tell me this,but I say to them…why on earth would I want to make this journey harder on myself than it has to be? The truth is,making the process and the environment to support it as convenient as you can is one of the most important but unfortunately also underestimated/under-spoken factor of succeeding in this endeavor.
Yeah,maybe 1 in 10,000 people can succeed even with their environment completely stacked against them,but even if you possess that level of willpower,why on earth do you want to make it harder on yourself to fix a lifelong issue? makes no sense to me.
This doesn't mean I don't plan to ever make a living on my own. I obviously do. just that there are stages to address certain things. "1 major goal" at a time as the cliche saying goes.
Anyway,getting this topic away from fitness…
I think a potential solution to the phenomenon Aaron speaks of ("Seeking unnecessary challenges that could potentially ruin you") is to aim to keep the challenges in your hobbies. In pursuits that are optional,but you don't need them to make a living.
In the future,I would ideally want to make a living on minimal hours of work per week with minimal complication. (assuming this is achievable for me) I would instead want my challenges in my Martial Arts training or any new endeavor I decide to get into.
Its true that Man craves a challenge,so you have to find a way to make that a part of your life,but in a way that cannot (or has a minimal chance thereof) devastate your life. (I say that even though hard MA training or even most physical activities have a likelihood of you eventually getting injured in the long term,but you get what I mean I'm sure. haha)
What I describe here however is but a mere theory of mine as my experience with the workplace is very little at the moment. I could be wrong,and if you guys feel it is from your experience,please let me know.
Damn it,my post really got messed up here. lol. The video I link to in my other comment here is my response to Aaron talking about how experiencing what it is like to overexercise can have very valuable lessons,even though its obviously not something you want to be doing long term.
My writing left on the first comment here is me addressing the phenomenon Aaron speaks of about how challenge seeking can lead to ruining your life.
>In the future,I would ideally want to make a living on minimal hours of work per week with minimal complication. (assuming this is achievable for me) I would instead want my challenges in my Martial Arts training or any new endeavor I decide to get into.
So you want to exclude the challenges which can actually pay off (such as career challenges), and only keep the ones which will never pay off? I view it as the worst approach possible. You are basically working for free
>Its true that Man craves a challenge,so you have to find a way to make that a part of your life,but in a way that cannot (or has a minimal chance thereof) devastate your life.
Sports can easily devastate your life, especially martial arts. The worst thing which can happen to you in the corporate world is getting fired (unless you are CEO or something, at that level you can get in jail for really big fuck ups). Sports can cause injuries at any moment. Martial arts will either give you a concussion at some point, or you will be accumulating subconcussive head injuries which still damage your brain.
Personally, I’m looking into the completely opposite direction. I recently noticed that my life is a bit too stressful, which it shouldn’t be considering I have really chill job and enough money. So I am trying to exclude all the optional challenges from my life. Competing with other for career opportunities and getting laid is enough of a challenge to keep me sharp
Hold on…this is the 2nd time an upper part of my comment got cut off!
Damn it,I wrote so much detail on it that its gonna be a pain to replicate.
I think I’ll just link the video which was the very first thing I wrote in response to quoting Aaron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC5HdRWyG9Q (you can watch just 5:00 – 7:20 if you don’t wish to watch the whole video)
The guy talks about under-recovery in that timespan I wrote. if you have never actually experienced being “under-recovered”,then chances are you’ve never actually truly pushed yourself.
What do you mean by “getting cut off”? You did not submit a comment, and I just posted a 50-paragraph comment, and deleted it, just to verify that there are no technical issues. If there is an issue with your browser, then drafting a comment in a text editor should help.
I went into a lengthy response to what you said about how overexercising (or “overtraining”,although many folks in the community can’t seem to agree on what that actually means. lol) is a valuable experience so you know WHERE your limits really are,and push yourself and get as acceptably close to it as possible.
For whatever reason,it seems as though that part of my post just got erased and it jumped straight to my “don’t bite off more than you can chew” response.
Could be a technical issue on my part. I’ll be sure to try putting my response on a word document from now on before attempting to post just in case.
Funny thing I am recovering from my first over-training episode I think ever. Even though I’ve pushed myself hard in training many times before.
Basically I got really motivated with how cool all the home-gym exercises are, and started training 2 times a day, every day. This is on top of a ton of cardio I do every day anyway. Felt amazing. No issue. Then woke up sick some days ago. Until now overtraining seemed like a myth to me that only exists on the internet lol.
To be fair, it’s not just the volume of work, its also probably that I didn’t ramp up to it. Went from not lifting since pre-corona to more volume than 99.9% lifters, no ramp-up.
>To be fair, it’s not just the volume of work, its also probably that I didn’t ramp up to it. Went from not lifting since pre-corona to more volume than 99.9% lifters, no ramp-up.training 2 times a day, every day.
Truth be told,I have considered doing this. Are you familiar with the term “Active Recovery”? Its some form of light exercise you do for the purpose of actually help your body recover faster from hard training. I have considered a twice a day session if only to get more of this kind of work in. The closest I get to this right now is either a 15 minute or 30 minute flexibility cooldown session,which I do at the end of my MA classes. (I prefer to go home immediately after lifting to eat. The Post-workout meal timing benefit for muscle growth isn’t that big of a deal,but its an extra benefit I like to get usually)
It just happened again now! Let me repost the full message:
>To be fair, it’s not just the volume of work, its also probably that I didn’t ramp up to it. Went from not lifting since pre-corona to more volume than 99.9% lifters, no ramp-up.training 2 times a day, every day.<
Truth be told,I have considered doing this. Are you familiar with the term "Active Recovery"? Its some form of light exercise you do for the purpose of actually help your body recover faster from hard training. I have considered a twice a day session if only to get more of this kind of work in. The closest I get to this right now is either a 15 minute or 30 minute flexibility cooldown session,which I do at the end of my MA classes. (I prefer to go home immediately after lifting to eat. The Post-workout meal timing benefit for muscle growth isn't that big of a deal,but its an extra benefit I like to get usually)
Oh geez,I copy-pasted directly from word and this literally happens again. I think there may be a real technical issue at hand here Aaron.
Please delete that copy message. I’ll just post the part that got cut off:
>To be fair, it’s not just the volume of work, its also probably that I didn’t ramp up to it.
Sometimes,its also just the body taking its time to adjust to the new workload.
I mentioned that the first time I tried to alternate MA training and lifting (resulting in me training everyday except Sunday),it was too much for me at first. Now I’m able to do it. albeit not always.
Which browser do you use and when did you last restart it? I was able to post a 50-paragraph long “lorem ipsum’ without any issue, so I am not sure that the issue is necessarily due to WordPress.
This sentence is in both messages. Are you sure that the text just does not scroll up and moves out of view as you are writing the comment?
The issue might be with word. It adds a bunch of characters that could be tripping some WordPress filter. It has a lot of escaping functions designed to prevent hackers from submitting code as comment.
If you can write any length comment straight on here, and it always happens with MS word, that is indeed the culprit. Tweaking the WordPress part to support pasting from MS word would just be absurdely expensive in development costs. Just don’t paste from word.
@Aaron
I’m using Google Chrome. Always been using it.
“This sentence is in both messages.”
thankfully imgur now allows posts without an account,so here’s some screenshots from how it looks like from my end:
https://imgur.com/a/ah7wqZK
So,from my end,the part where I talk about alternating MA training and lifting isn’t in the other message.
Modern games are so shit compared to the Arcade Era. Wtf happened to game design ? The japs had it down to perfection.
Other challenging games to check out on MAME if u haven’t already;
-R:Type
-Rastan Saga
-Metal Slug series (NeoGeo)
-King of Fighters series (NG also)
-Crime Fighters by Konami ***
NeoGeo was the shit. Shame it never took off.
The industry first shifted to console gaming, as it was more lucrative and, later, to “live-service gaming” on PCs, consoles, and mobile as this is where the money nowadays is. There are still games made in the arcade tradition, by very talented Japanese developers, but they normally do not have big corporate money behind them. Crimzon Clover and Rolling Gunner, which are both available on Steam, are good examples. There is also the occasional high-production-value release like the somewhat recent Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts Resurrection by Capcom, which was developed by the creator of the series. Also, there is the fighting game community, which is probably stronger than ever. After dominating the arcades in the 1990s, this genre had a slump in the early 2000s, but from the mid-2000s onwards, primarily due to improved online play, more and more people have been flocking to it. There is also a classic fighting game scene on Fightcade, which is essentially a tool that adds netplay to emulators. The most popular games have hundreds of concurrent players. There are plenty of much more recent fighting games on Steam, in contrast, that barely get any attention anymore.
The NeoGeo was a huge success and is probably the best-selling arcade system of all time. I just looked it up: SNK sold about one million base units. The home system was just a novelty. Overall, this was a hugely successful system with an absolutely incredible run, lasting over a decade.
Thanks for the reply .
I will check out those titles on steam.. there was a retro beat ‘em up “Mother Russia Bleeds” that looked kinda interesting last I checked, but ages ago..
I meant the NG home console in the comment above . I remember seeing adverts for it but very hard to get it the UK at the time .. I assumed it failed to take off or was destroyed by Nintendo or Sega sales back then?
The NeoGeo home console was prohibitively expensive. The target consumer was the Patrick Bateman class, i.e. laywers and investment bankers who did not want to use peasant consoles like the SNES or Genesis. There is even an old ad showing a guy in a expensive clothes playing it while his trophy wife complains about his recent lack of attention towards her. According to Reddit, it is super sexist and would not be approved nowadays:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fvzgcvcefu0b91.jpg
That ad is hilarious 😀 with Bateman in the background ..awesome.
She would have been worth a fap when I was 15 😛
definitely would NOT fly today .
Shame it was so pricey NG was a killer system we all wanted to get our hands on back then. Nostalgia.
thanks for posting.