“Creativity can release you from the limitations that the world has constructed around you; the everyday, mundane, 9-5 jail cell where everybody is waiting for the weekend to party so they can get outside of their head.”

– Robert LaSardo

Mandatory Fun

I’ll always love America. As long as you aren’t mediocre it’s a fun place. My biggest complaint about the United States has always been something that I had control over anyway. Logistics is, by far, the worst aspect of living here.

When men complain about American women or culture they are actually complaining about their surroundings. I’ve never seen anyone from Manhattan or Vegas claim that American girls are ugly and overweight. Most of that hate stems from places you shouldn’t live in anyway. All the negativity comes from guys who live in Altoona, Pennsylvania and work at H&R Block. Most of the guys who complain about American girls aren’t much better than the women they love to hate.

With that said, your environment does have influence over you. Iowa is a nice place with a lot of friendly people, but there really isn’t a whole lot to do. The state population is 3 million. The largest city is just over 200,000. From there things drop exponentially. There are entire counties containing less than 5,000 people.

When you live in a world that small you deal with a lot of limitations. Outside of college you don’t really get to be around a lot of cool or adventurous people. A guy who’s entire life revolves around knocking up his high school sweetheart and getting some lame job in his hometown isn’t going to be interested in learning about online business or copywriting.

I had to master a lot of stuff on my own because no one else was around to help. I would have killed to have a friend who wanted to make an affiliate blog or start a writing company. That kind of stuff wasn’t really available though. Most of my peers were more interested in drinking beer and playing video games.

Rather than joining them, or sitting around and complaining about how much America sucks, I decided to grind my way out. I’d work all day and come home to develop my business. At my regular job I’d skip eating lunch so that I could read books like How to Get Rich. On weekends I’d do odd jobs, respond to Craigslist writing ads, and tinker with my Fiverr account. Most of the time I didn’t even bother going out. It wasn’t worth it.

4:59 on a Friday afternoon is only the end of the work week if you’re cool with being poor. It always cracks me up when guys complain about the quality of their lives, yet spend their free time hitting up bars or amusing themselves in front of a screen. If you aren’t going to make any changes you can’t be that uncomfortable.

All the alpha male manly men who like to sit around and whine about meaningless drivel are losers. They obviously have the free time to sit on message boards and complain, meaning that they aren’t in the gym or hustling. There’s no mystery as to why their life sucks.

What to do if you’re in a bad spot

Here’s a quick little cheat sheet that I wrote up for anyone who is in a place they want to escape from.

1. Cut the entertainment.

I’ve been broke. And when I was I hustled. Working a normal job, roofing garages in the evening, and reading books at night. I didn’t have time to browse message boards, watch YouTube videos, or play games. I also managed to add extra zeros to the end of, what had been, a double-digit bank account.

2. Skip going out.

If all the girls in your area are ugly trolls who smell bad, as you’ve repeatedly mentioned in the comment section on various blogs, why are you still trying to have sex with them? As an experiment I stopped going out for a month and saved almost $500. That’s like a month’s rent in Asia.

3. Buy a book of puzzles.

Browsing the Internet is a massive time suck. There have been whole days where I got nothing done because of sites like Reddit. If you get bored and have some free time sit down and do some puzzles. I bought a ton of Search-a-Word Puzzles and work on them whenever I have nothing else to do. It’s better than mindlessly browsing your phone.

4. Find a place to move to and work towards getting there.

You won’t stay on track without a goal. Pick a place on the map that you’d like to live and then focus on getting there. Vietnam, Mexico, Las Vegas, New York City, there are a ton of cool places that are better than where you’re at.

If you aren’t happy with your situation fix it. Guys will sit around and complain all day, but very few of them will ever take any type of action. Don’t let yourself succumb to the throngs of whiners and losers. Step up and take action.

“There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.”

– James Michener

How many words do you write a day?

Every time I travel abroad I pack one huge book. In Belize I read about the history of Brazil. In Nicaragua I knocked out a whole slew of Neil Gaiman books. This time I packed Chesapeake. Knowing very little about the book, I was surprised to learn that the author, James Michener, used to sit down and spend 12 hours a day cranking out words. Assuming that he wasn’t completely incompetent at typing this means that he produced several thousand words every single day.

This fact got me thinking about my own writing habits. As a freelancer I have to constantly write. If I don’t write I starve.

Last week I wrote about 5,000 to 6,000 words a day. This week I’ve been kind of burnt out and will be doing significantly less. Maybe 3,000 on a good day. I need to recharge for a bit.

Real writing verses pretend writing

Writing is only fun if you’re pretending to do. Sitting at the coffee shop with Microsoft Word open is fun. Posting “Working on my novel” to social media is fun. Real writing sucks. Punching out words is mundane. I already know where this post is going in my head. I have the whole thing laid out. The thought has been developed. It is dead to me. Novel when I came up with it last night. Old news when by the time I type it out.

A joke is funny the first time you say it. When you’ve rehearsed it one thousand times it becomes routine. The audience erupts with laughter because they heard it for the first time. The comedian just goes through the motions. Professional writing is the same way. Penning an article about ab exercises or smoothie makers is fun once. Doing it 20 times gets repetitive. I couldn’t sit down and spend 12 hours on a single subject like that.

How to make writing fun

Writing an article or a book can be entertaining. There are ways to make the process fun and enjoyable. Even if you get in a rut you can work your way out easily. Here are a handful of steps and tools that I have used in the past:

• Read a book and try to emulate the author’s style.

You should never rip someone else off, but picking a writing and emulating it can transform “The Top Three Coffee Makers For Under $100” into a lot of fun. I recently read Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century, it was a bit too mystic for my tastes but still pretty good, and tried to incorporate a sort of erotic energy into the descriptions of some toaster ovens I had to write about. Describing features in a way that appealed to the senses. Being vivid. It was fun to do and broke up the monotony of an otherwise boring task.

• Do some actual research.

Modern writers never research anything. The Ukraine is labeled as Russia, quotes get taken out of context, and whole tangents are made up out of thin air. The story is written and the facts are later cherry-picked to conform with it. While reading about something before writing about it might cut into your hourly rate, it pays dividends in the future. I was once hired to write a seemingly boring article about some small beach town. Rather than just re-writing the Wikipedia summary, I actually did an hour of research and found some really cool facts. A famous musician used to stay there to relax, an Olympic athlete had grown up in the area, stuff that people would actually want to read about. My “wasted hour” ended up turning into an article that the client described as being “The best work anyone ever submitted” and I got a bonus and long-term contract. Finding out actual facts might sound like a waste of time, but it can make writing more enjoyable and actually get people to become interested in the material.

• Go off on a crazy tangent.

At one point I got paid a ridiculously low sum, like $3 per 500 words, to do a huge batch of generic articles. Basically I just had to fill the page with whatever I wanted as long as it pertained to blenders. I flew through each piece in record time. I just picked a random crazy idea and found some weird way to connect it to the subject. The client didn’t really care about how I did it anyway so I was free to make up whatever. Although the job didn’t pay much, this was back when I was starting out, it was a lot of fun to do.

Writing is fun when you actually get to be creative. Sticking to a formula and cranking out the same type of work will kill your soul. I enjoy being spontaneous with my work. The second half of this post was going to be completely different, I was going to write down my thoughts from last night, but I decided to delete that and make up a few writing tips that popped into my head. I only started to think of them as my fingers were moving across the keyboard.

Sticking to a routine ruins everything. You wake up one day and realize that you’ve become Willy Loman. Last week I was kind of bummed out over the fact that this year has been a lot different from the past ones. Then I realized that this wasn’t a problem. It was a good thing. If every year felt the same I’d be doing something wrong. It would be mundane. Boring. Shaking things up might be risky, but at least it makes you feel alive.

“[Insert thing created by a huge company] is so edgy and counter-culture.”

– Statement that I hear regularly

The Jim Norton Show is not edgy

The other day someone recommended that I check out The Jim Norton Show. It’s a new series on Vice and I was told that I’d like the edgy and bold content. Last night I decided to watch the first episode. Mike Tyson and Dana White were the special guest stars. I was excited.

While the show isn’t bad, I actually laughed quite a bit, it isn’t edgy or bold. Yes, there’s some swearing and a few politically incorrect jokes about having sex but that’s about it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the program is nothing more than mainstream ideology wrapped up and marketed as a product for “manly men.” It’s on par with one of those cheesy radio programs where two guys talk about football and boobs. There’s some entertainment value, but it isn’t edgy.

The same message in a different package

Like Fight Club, Tucker Max, and George Clooney, Jim Norton is something of a manosphere favorite. The guy gets referenced in forums and comments with some frequency. People always talk about how he doesn’t conform to progressive ideas or pander to minority groups.

I’m not sure what these guys have been watching because the show I saw was co-hosted by a transsexual porn star. You can’t get more progressive and mainstream than that. It’s a Gawker wet dream brought to life.

The Way of Men is edgy and masculine. A show where Mike Tyson jokes about wanting to bang the transgendered co-host is not. It was The View with more f-bombs. Everyone had to play it safe.

Two types of men

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from reading, and writing, male oriented blogs its that there are two types of men in this world. Ones that grew up around masculine influences, and ones who’s entire idea of manhood came from a television. The guys who idolize Tucker Max, or call Fight Club underground are the dudes who never spent a lot of time around actual men. My dad used to own a construction company when I was a kid. During the summer I’d help out by sweeping floors or doing little tasks at job sites. The average conversation that went on there was infinity edgier than anything I heard Jim Norton say. The stories that got swapped on lunch breaks were a hundred times better than anything that Tucker Max fabricated. Swearing and being politically incorrect are natural male traits. No one ran to HR because someone said something homophobic. And if they did they would have been mocked even more.

Men who never got to be around these types of environments had to grow up in a more constricting world. If you said something someone didn’t like you’d be lectured by authorities. Speaking your mind or letting out steam was forbidden. These guys always end up receiving a culture shock when they stumble upon “men being men,” or their own interpretation of it. A joke that makes fun of something “off-limits” gets them to believe that they have found some kind of counter-culture prophet.

Final thoughts

Comedians aren’t immune to criticism. They can get blacklisted from their industry just like anyone else. Jonah Hill, a man who made his millions off crude humor, had to apologize for calling someone names recently. Tucker Max had to apologize for all of his actions so that he could try to sell a $9.99 eBook on male health. Guys who are in the public eye have limits on how edgy they can be. Media bad guys are the same ideology, just in a different shade. Back when Neil Strauss was cool, he was a womanizer who also supported feminism. Henry Rollins was a tough guy with a generic liberal message. You’re getting the same thing as everyone else. It just looks a little different. The Jim Norton show isn’t bad, in fact there are some decent jokes, but it isn’t eye-opening and there is no secret truth being spilled out onto its set.

“If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Seduced by the unknown

Summer is winding down. At this time last year I was working in the back of a clothing store, boxing up khakis to ship off to middle-aged men across the country. It sucked. The air conditioning was inadequate when compared to the size of the building, and the temperature indoors was basically the same as it was outside. During the late July heat wave that meant I was sweating in hundred degree weather.

During this time I didn’t have a lot of secondary sources of income. I had a little Fiverr gig where I did random jobs for people. It was unfocused and made me something like $36 for the entire month. Still, it was better than nothing.

I wasn’t going back to school that fall either. It was something that really worried me. I didn’t tell anyone because I was embarrassed. The only people I knew who had never completed college had either gotten pregnant or were too stupid and lazy to go to class. They had all ended up working lame jobs and dooming themselves to a life of mediocrity. It was pretty scary.

When your 20 it’s hard to imagine the future. Six months might as well be 1,000 years. You don’t really have a frame of reference. High speed Internet and microwaves have conditioned you for instantaneous gratification. Being told to wait on something sounds like stupid advice.

Fall came. I was still struggling with my goals. I felt depressed and alienated. While everyone else was talking about a teaching assistant who accidentally emailed her nudes to the whole class, and a girl who became a minor celebrity for getting drunk, I was putting pants in boxes and sending out emails every night. The only excitement that happened at my workplace consisted of an old lady getting heat stroke and a man having to go to the hospital due to health complications involving his weight. That was my life.

It took until September before I actually started to make any real money online. At the time I made a review writing service and it ended up earning me a couple hundred dollars a week. Not much, but better than anything else I had going for me. My first “big” purchase with my earnings was a road trip to Madison where I went to see Kid Cudi perform. On my drive down I realized that things might actually work out. There was a chance that I’d make it after all.

Looking back all of my struggles, triumphs, and worries seem quaint. However, all of my memories have a hint of sadness to them. I chose to take a different path in life and became different from a lot of other people. While it is easy to sit down and ramble about how “average people are losers,” most folks are pretty decent. Sitting and watching television might not be my thing, but it isn’t like Joe Average is throwing puppies into a bonfire or poisoning baby birds.

It feels like I left for some distant world and came back completely alien and unrecognizable. A lot of things have changed for me to the point where I probably won’t even be able to recognize myself. Last year it took me almost a whole summer to save up $2,000. This year I’ve spent that in a month. Last year I stayed at my parents house in Iowa. This year I have an apartment next to the ocean. Last year I had about as many skills as a dead dog. This year I helped someone start a side business and they are using the revenue towards buying an Audi.

I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but things are a lot different from how they used to be and it can be hard to adjust sometimes. A few weeks ago I drove through my old hometown. I was shocked to see that it looked exactly the same. The only thing that was different was me.

When you grow you have to leave certain things behind. You go to the gym and you stop eating pizza. You start a business and you stop playing video games. You meet new people and make new friends, they take over your social circle. You keep moving forward and everything that can’t keep up slowly drifts into the distance.

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

– Aldous Huxley

The two dumbest reasons to travel

Before traveling I always like to read up on all the different ways that tourists and adventurers can get killed, robbed, or raped. It is a pretty fun exercise and one that will keep you vigilant for weeks on end. Will some poorly washed vegetables in your salad give you a rare bacteria that liquefies your guts? Will the taxi at the airport by operated by a vicious kidnapper? Or will your idyllic day at the beach end with some hobos stabbing you to death? Travel really does open you up to all kinds of new experiences.

Having gone on numerous adventures in the past, and having been robbed once, I’m actually not too worried. At worst I’ll probably get pick pocketed or held up for my phone. In the grand scheme of things I’m pretty safe. In fact, from all of my research, most people are fairly safe when traveling. There are some really dorky people who go abroad and everything ends up fine for them. If some 65 year-old from Kansas can travel to Rio without dying, I’m probably going to be just fine. With that said, there are two really easy ways to get into trouble while abroad. Unless you want to win a game of “Who can die the fastest” I’d suggest avoiding both of these.

Drugs

I’m always perplexed at how many people travel abroad just to buy cheap drugs. One of my friends actually went actually went to Jamaica last year just so that he could get high on their fabled ganja.* Since I’m not your dad I won’t try to give you a lecture, however its pretty stupid to visit a potentially dangerous location just so that you can get drugs for a fraction of the price that you could at home. Aside from the fact that you’ll probably end up dealing with some shady narco-terrorist faction of militants, you’ll also end up buying products that are potentially made of garbage, and you put yourself at risk of being thrown in the local slammer or executed by some local authorities. A quick Google search for “Third world jail” turns up some unpleasant results.

When I was in Belize some dudes who were staying across from me had a story about a friend who had bought cheap drugs while in Mexico. He ended up having to fork over something like $500 as a bribe afterwards when the dealer ran around the corner and told some cops who were in on the whole racket.

Flying to the middle of a war zone to buy some three dollar cocaine from an unstable militant, who probably hates Americans, is an easy way to end up dead in a ditch. Plus, there’s a place back home where the drugs flow freely and there are no repercussions for using them. Its called college.

Dangerous living

The second stupid reason to travel is a bit more vague. For lack of a better word, I’m going to call it a lust for danger. While there are a lot of dangerous yet fun things to do abroad, like climbing a volcano or swimming with sharks, these people seek out senseless thrills. The traveler with a lust for danger is the type of person who gets told “do not walk through that neighborhood at night” and then does so just to show the locals how tough he really is. People who fit this mold aren’t taking a risk to do something cool, they are just throwing themselves into danger because they can.

When I was in Nicaragua all of the roads are incredibly dangerous to cross. There are virtually no traffic laws, and trying to run across the street will get you hit by 18 buses and three horse drawn wagons. In particularity bad areas they have little walkways that are scattered about so that you don’t have to cross the street. Never the less, I heard stories about travelers who would disregard these walkways, they were pretty gross and you had to step over homeless people quite often, and would end up in the hospital after getting run over.

As much as people like to imagine terrorists and gangs as being a threat to tourists, most travelers are killed by more mundane things. According to Medical Daily, cars kill the majority of Americans who go abroad. While there are a lot of reasons for this, stupidity and disregard for basic safety are huge factors. A lot of people who travel like to pretend like they have something to prove. Unlike all those stupid pansy tourists, they aren’t scared of anything. Then they get hit by a garbage truck because they refuse to cross the street like everyone else.

Closing thoughts

If you want to do drugs or prove what a tough guy you really are, there is no reason to even leave the United States. You could play Frogger with traffic right in your own hometown. You could probably buy drugs and go to jail there too. And, if you do get hit by a car or thrown in a cell, you have the luxury of being in a first world institution where everyone speaks English and they have some basic standards for hygiene and human rights.

* According to him it was actually really lousy and not worth the trip at all.