Humphrey Archer15h ago

As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.

Please boost this if you think it will help

1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part

Show threadHumphrey Archer15h ago

2. Sissyphus was a stupid allegory.

Doing something useless, and especially for which you get no praise, is not as soul destroying as people would have you believe. If you like rolling a rock up a hill and having it roll back down, it's actually huge fucking fun if you just embrace the irony and the fun of rolling a rock, building up a sweat, and then letting that sucker go tumbling down.

Corollary: you don't actually need praise. Just enjoy what you do, and try to do it well

Show threadHumphrey Archer15h ago

3. Sex is far less important than the media, buddies, influencers, and society would have you believe. It's also a fucking time trap. Especially when you are young, your body and society scream at you to want to be in rut all the damn time. It's exhausting. It also steals time and energy from windsurfing, riding a motorcycle, making curry, and brewing beer - which are all more fun, cost less, and don't involve all the fuss and bother.

Make friends with more women, just bc they are interesting

Show threadHumphrey Archer15h ago

4. Most "Heroes" are just selfish and insecure arseholes. Write down 10 guys who are supposeldly big heroes, and then actually research them. Eight of them will turn out to be total shitheads - greedy, selfish, and pompous fucknuts, and also mostly sex pests

Ergo. Stop looking for heroes, and immediately be suspicious of anyone who claims to be or who other people say is a big hero. This counts for almost exactly 100% of online influencers. They are 100% flogging you scams and grifts and lying

Show threadHumphrey Archer14h ago

5. Physical strength is overrated. The dude with the six-pack, massive biceps, and thickest neck, is still a thin-skinned animal without fangs, scales, stinger, or horns, who couldn't even outrun a crocodile, let alone any of the big cats. An ape half his body mass is more than twice as strong.

Humans are half blind, half deaf, weaklings, and the weediest person wielding a stone-age spear, can put the biggest muscleman in the grave with minimal fuss.

The weakest woman can squeeze a trigger

Show threadARGVMI~1.PIF

@screwturn

Most of the human body's alleged flaws are actually misunderstood trade-offs.

* We are weak for our height, but only because we're ridiculously tall for our weight.

* Our eyes work poorly at night, but their color fidelity is top-notch. Animals trying to blend into the scenery often won't fool humans.

* We can't outrun a deer, but we can keep chasing it long after it has passed out from heat exhaustion. Our skin isn't made for stopping claws; it's made for heat efficiency.

3:33amWeb
Show threadARGVMI~1.PIF8h ago

@screwturn

I guess the moral of this story is that it's silly to lament what you don't have while forgetting what you do have.

Show threadHumphrey Archer7h ago

@argv_minus_one
This is true.

We have two physical advantages over most other animals

- heat tolerance
- ability to smell petrichor

But that's it.

We are thin skinned, musculatly weak, and slow, and fhe laughable muscle man trope is in stark contrast to how feeble we are.

Our secret sauce is complex collaboration, not physique.

Show threadARGVMI~1.PIF7h ago

@screwturn

Yeah, that too. We may have good color fidelity, but we don't have a monopoly on it. We don't even have a monopoly on high heat efficiency; most insects can keep moving longer than we can. But complex collaboration belongs to us and only a handful of other species.