This thread is exactly as it sounds like, a place where older men can give life advice to younger men struggling in this world of ours.
When I was a younger man I wish that I had an older mentor give me life advice because often enough many young men have no guide starting out in life at all. I was unlucky as I had to struggle in this world all by myself learning everything the hard way as a single young guy. Looking back at all of that now I wouldn’t want that on anybody. So much needless suffering in this world of ours and if I can help younger men avoid many mistakes that I encountered I would like to attempt to try helping.
So if you’re interested in my parting words of wisdom pick up a chair and stay awhile here.
If not there is nothing keeping you here as I am just another blathering old idiotic fool not to be trusted and easily ignored. Either young men will find comfort and direction in what I have to say here or they won’t.
Many younger men are quick to pick up violence as a way of achieving fast enacting change in their lives. This is the greatest and gravest of mistakes or errors to be avoided completely.
Violence solves nothing, it takes one problem tranforming it into many different problems and before you know it you’re overwhelmed in more problems than you originally had before you took a course of being violent towards others.
Violence harms others and sometimes fatally so in the loss of human life in general. But the person it harms the most is yourself as it stains your mind transforming yourself into a monsterous entity. Young men must learn to tame that fire in themselves within mastership otherwise if you don’t that fire will consume you whole until you burn out completely.
It is not a measure of strength to harm others and to take away a human life, it is actually the ultimate form of weakness. True examples of strength or conviction is learning to master yourself and helping others all around you within everyday life. Helping those less fortunate than yourself is the truest measure of strength a man can find in life fulfilling our natural male roles as guardians or protectors of the societies we live in.
Violence should always be the option of final last resort for defense against the most evil or wicked of aggressors and even then only utilized in the most extreme situations of duress. Only ignorant fools are quick to utilize violence as a way of solving their problems in life or within society.
A man of wisdom will always choose peace, diplomacy, negotiation, reason, trade, patience, and logic over violence. Learn to value those things over violence and you will become a better man for doing so.
Younger men like to think of themselves as being invincible and being young it is not hard to do with all the vitriol of energy youth provides.
But as you age you’ll find how fleeting youth really is and just how impermanent this life consists of.
As a young man you feel invincible, those five men over there you can physically fight in an altercation all by yourself because that’s the false invincibility of male youth.
Let us assume you can take on those five men in an altercation by yourself, those five men can easily turn into ten multiplying. Depending on the negative consequences of your violent transgressions upsetting the laws of the state now you’re up against twenty to fifty men all by yourself, just how invincible do you truly feel afterward? Such is the perils of false male invincibility in youth. One surely is no number to be going against an army by itself.
As a young man you feel like an Apollian god and then you find out that the greatest threat to that god is time with inevitable old age. Male youth is like a fire match, so quickly lit in the flames of youth and equally blown out with age in smoke. It all quickly ends just as it all quickly started.
Enjoy the temporary gifts and pleasures of youth while you can because it doesn’t last where it is all over in a blink of an eye. This is unfortunately something a majority of younger men don’t understand or realize.
The advice that I wish I had gotten is to know thyself. Know who you are, what your personality is, how you think, what things excite you, and get you out of bed in the morning. Knowing your personality tells you your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t spend your life fighting against your nature. Do what you are good at and let others do what you aren’t. If you are neurodivergent, don’t try to be like neurotypical people. You can’t. You’ll fail. But you’ll spend a lot of time and generate a lot of misery for yourself trying. Trust me. I know. Go somewhere by yourself for an extended period and learn who you are before doing anything else.
Yes, society is set up for neurotypical people, and if you try to “fit in,” you will be miserable. Be yourself. Don’t do evil, but be yourself. I am one of those people who really should have gone to live in a cabin in the woods or on a shantyboat by myself.
I did the whole living out of a cabin in the woods bit myself for four years straight when I was younger. A lot of work especially surviving through the winter with no reliable source of electricity. Went through a Henry David Thoreau phase there for awhile.
I’ve thought about what I would do if I woke up in my bed back in 1983. I’d get a job framing houses, build a shantyboat, live in it at the jobsite, save up a couple of years and then launch it in the intercoastal waterway and travel up and down the east coast of America and the gulf coast and paint watercolors. No rent. Catch a lot of my food, live below my means, sell art and teach watercolor classes.
Seems as if I’m the young one here. I don’t know where the hell I’m going with my life; ideally theosis I suppose.
I am 18 years old, highschool dropout. I am the son of an Orthodox Christian priest. Avoiding controversy, what I’m trying to say is that I have a very good family and I am a bad son. A bad man , I’ve screwed it.
Now I’ve done drugs, porn, blasphemy, suicide attempt, the whole lot of it. If you wish to comment on my past then do so, but I mean to ask:
Is the whole hut-in-the-woods thing, the “isolated cabin” idea of use? I have thoughts that need to be put on paper and endless books to read but I also have family to repent to. I guess the futures open to me.
Suffice to say I gotta work on myself. I’m not a reflection of my father, I don’t tell him this but he’s my role model. And I’m a broke ass druggie sinner. I’m asking for help not just from the recipient of this post but everyone.
If you have these views about “yourself”, then you obviously did not come from a ‘very good family’ at all.
First bit of advice could be do believe what you have been forced to believe. There is no ‘good family’ nor ‘bad family’. Every family is different, while the ones believing that they are a ‘better family’ can sometimes be the ones doing the most wrong things.
Well, I appreciate your positive judgment of me, and I guess that what I posted really only makes sense to me. But no, you do not get it, I have legitimately done some pretty messed up stuff whether or not it’s from a Christian worldview…
Every adult is a ‘role model’ in one way or another. Children have nothing else to go off and copy other than adults and their words and behaviours, good or bad.
Name an adult who has not done some so-called “pretty messed up stuff”.
Even your “father’s” role model did some “pretty messed up stuff”. “jesus” got itself killed, ‘for christ sake’. At least you have not done something “that messed up”.
Do you know anyone who knows what purpose they serve in both this material and spiritual world?
What purpose human beings serve is to learn, and teach, but it does not necessarily have to be in that order.
The best place I found to go in ‘the future’ and in ‘the now’ is to always be honest about our Wrong doings, always be open, and always seek out how to change for the better, or ‘to improve’ as you already noted.
No one could logically expect any more from you than you learning from yours, and your ‘role model’s’, mistakes and Wrong behaviour
