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

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

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

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

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

@screwturn Physical strength for self-defense might be overrated, sure, but consider:

1. lifting heavy things
2. helping people with shit without getting tired
3. muscles are hot as fuck

@AVincentInSpace
None of that, although helping people is always good

With a winch, a jack, hydraulics, the weakest person easily lifts, bends, carries far more than any muscleman, and for longer. Having big muscles is not a thing a young man needs to or should regard as a step into some sort of ubermensch strata. If you desire to be all buff, by all means have at it, but what the body-maxing influencers are selling is bullcrap

Muscles are hotter in the minds of men than in the eyes of women

@screwturn let's just say it's not the eyes of women I'm interested in πŸ˜‰

i definitely don't think it necessary for a healthy life, and i certainly don't dream of becoming a member of some elite or think that working out will get me anything besides a pretty reflection and the ability to lift stuff, but it's still worth it to me

I've also heard that healthy exercise in one's youth makes moving around easier to continue to do in one's old age

@AVincentInSpace

Then more power too you