Sometimes I think I just hate people.

All the time I hear people say how they “used to” do fun things in college, in “the good old days” or some shit, and think about it all wistfully, and then move on with their day.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?  You don’t have to act like a different person just because you’re no longer enrolled in a university.  This is some stupid crap that society has told you, and you just go along with it.

I just don’t understand why people immediately try to turn into their parents as soon as they get a job.  What the hell! Why is it so difficult to find people who are as carefree and retarded as I am?

Just drink a cheap beer for once, you snooty bitch.  No, not a “lager” or “pillsner” or whatever girly shit you call it now.  Drink a fucking beer.  How about a Keystone Light.  Delicious.  I can drink 3 of them in the time you drink one of your women’s beers.  You say it “tastes like water”? I say we drink water on a daily basis, and if I can get alcohol in my water, all the better.  Goes down smooth. Says so right on the can, fag.  I just don’t get why people look at me strangely when I turn down a “vermont IPA” for a pabst blue ribbon.  Give me what I know – beer.

What I really think is ridiculous is that the reason people like these beers is not really for the taste, it’s just marketing.  They think they’re cooler when they can find an unheard of local beer because they can sound like people who drink wine when they talk about their beer.  “It’s an edgy lager with a lingering aftertaste” .. fuck you.  Is it a beer? Do I get drunk?  It doesn’t sound like it from that description.. I’ll pass.

After the first few sips, your mouth cant tell the goddamn difference between one beer from another anyway.  Alcohol makes your tongue go numb.  That’s why drunk people slur.  If you want that classy first beer, fine, then switch to something cheaper for the next beer.  You’ll save some money and stop kidding yourself.

The fact that you drink classy beer and I don’t doesn’t make you better than me.  It just makes you the same as everybody else.  You are competing for status in a consumer culture.  Get over yourself and find something you really enjoy, like cat-calling at strippers or flipping off a 10 year old.  Try it, you won’t believe the liberation.  Oh, sorry, that might get in the way of your next 5% raise or eventual promotion to middle manager.  My ‘B’.

I guess the trick is just to remind yourself every single day of what your goal is, and to remember that it is a worthy goal.  Also remember that even if you do fail, so long as you’ve still got your wits and your health, the worst thing you can lose is money and maybe your friends or your respect.  Whatever it is, if the goal is worthy in your own head, it’s just worth moving forward.  Make big moves and learn from your mistakes.  Don’t start something you don’t intend to finish unless you have a DAMN good reason not to finish it.

Because there will be that nagging feeling.  Something will inevitably not go exactly your way, and you’ll wake up one morning with some kind of doubt in yourself.  And we are defined by our response to that.  You can either dig your trenches deeper and commit yourself to success, or you can abandon the project for the “safety” an average life. But true glory comes from sticking it through and defeating the odds.  I beg you to make waves.

Why do so many other people just seem to follow the path forged by so many others, only taking the safest of moves?

Why don’t people want more?  Why is the vast, vast majority of the world satisfied chasing a carrot on a stick that some other guy is holding?

What the fuck?

How are people so attached to their jobs, as if their lives would be over if they didn’t have that steady paycheck?  How come those same people complain about their jobs most days, or simply walk around dreary-eyed and dull all day, every day?  How do they not go fucking nuts and chase a higher goal?

Why do people not believe me when I say I’m going to make money online and travel around the world?  Why is that literally so unbelievable to them that they just laugh, thinking what I said was a joke?

Doesn’t anybody want a book written about them?  Don’t they know nobody writes books about people like them?

In school, there are many smart people. These people learn subjects well, can work within the structure and pick up ideas quickly. They can recite countless facts, engage in debate, and prove themselves to others. You can see this pattern everywhere in real life as well – people who perform well and follow their orders, and succeed within a structure.

In order to be practical, these smart people need to remove themselves from the system. They need to see the hamster wheel they’re running in, and find a way to escape it. To design a lifestyle that leverages their intelligence so that the world is working for them. Otherwise, they are no better off than a manual laborer. They are exchanging hours of repetitive thinking time for a paycheck, just like a manual laborer exchanges hours of repetitive labor.

The practical smart people will look at the system, and rearrange it. Instead of thinking for someone else, they will begin to think for themselves. Come up with a nice idea and turn that into a reality. Create a life structure where they design a system to have others thinking and working for them. These “others” could just be a computer program running a process that generates them money all day long. Leverage.

Intelligence by itself is useless. It takes the willpower to change your surroundings and design your reality in order to make good use of it.

How are you using your intelligence? Is it working for you, or for someone else? Are you running around in a hamster’s wheel, or are you building the platform for a higher cause?

Will you have a story to tell?

We only get one life here. Looking back on it, almost everything will get blurred out. Our lives will be summed up into an obituary that, if we’re lucky, will be longer than a few sentences. What’s it going to say?

Are you proud of yourself? Have you surprised yourself by accomplishing something lately? Have you found a deep connection with a new person lately? Have you enlightened anyone?

How do you introduce yourself to other people? How do you summarize your life in that introduction, and is that occupation the most important occupation that you think a man can have at your stage in life? Otherwise, you should start thinking about why you’re wasting your time doing something that’s not ultimately important.

When you die, and you look down upon this earth as an angel, or as a ghost like patrick swayze, and you have no more effect on the world, and it’s just like watching a TV show.. what will you miss the most? What will you look down on the earth thinking, man if I could just be a living person again, I’d ____? Will you yearn to attend your 9-5 job, or your waitress job, or your college class? Will you wish for one more night watching reality TV? Will you want so badly to walk quietly in the streets with your head down and avoiding eye contact with other people?

Will you second-guess yourself? Will you push that dream off for another more “optimal” day?

Well, will you?

When a guy gets in a relationship, they become soft. They put themselves out to pasture. “Can’t party tonight man, gonna get dinner and a movie with my GF” … Their life is over. What is left for them? Get married, have kids, keep a stable job and die. Going out to bars will lose its appeal when they feel guilty for even flirting with a girl. They’ll also start feeling guilty if they don’t touch base with their girlfriend 3x a day on the phone, and if they don’t hang out with her at least X times a week. Next she’s gonna want to go on vacation together, and they’ll start going on those “couples” vacations that are booooring. I’ve seen pictures from these vacations; there are hardly ever horny sluts dancing in the background and taking body shots off each other. It’s 400 pictures of the same 2 people smiling together in the same pose with different backgrounds. Boring as hell.

When they do go out drinking with their boys, they’ll have nothing to talk to them about because their entire life revolves around their job and their girlfriend. They’re used to waking up early every day, so they’ll get tired and start falling asleep around 1am. No longer can they hold their liquor, so they get sloppy drunk and their single friends have to take care of them. Or, even worse, they have something to do the next morning so they only have “a couple drinks” and head home early. They might as well stay home. The next day, they talk about how “wild and fun” the night was just because it’s been 2 weeks since they didn’t hang out with their girlfriend, and even bingo seems like a wild night to them at this point. They have lowered their standards. They dismiss their wild college partying days as if it were some “wacky” time in their history, and since they got their degree, they should start preparing themselves for retirement and an elderly home. Traveling or moving to new locations becomes a stretch, because they might have to leave their significant other behind.

They convince themselves that their life is better now that they have a girlfriend, because their girlfriend cooks for them occasionally and they get regular sex. But at what cost? Their sex becomes monotonous, and the girlfriend often wants it to be “romantic” or “emotional” sex as opposed to the awesome sex a single person can have, which includes completely defiling a chick they just met and recreating the porno they watched that afternoon. Sure, some chicks are down for wild sex, but it’s still the same old vagina every time. There is no surprise. It becomes routine, just like brushing their teeth. They cannot hunt in the club for the wild african pussy or the great white norwegian pussy. It’s just that same dead animal they killed 6 months ago and have been pounding away at for who knows how long. Yeah, she might have a great ass… and I’m sure they’ll keep bragging about that same ass every time they hang out with their boys as if it’s just as great the 500th time they slap it, but they know deep inside that they’d rather be slapping a new ass. That’s just how it works.

Do yourself a favor. Ramp up your life with new energy and challenge. Break up with that dirty whore. She’s probably already banging some other dude anyway. Once you do, every night will be an adventure. There will be no strings attached to keep you in your job, or even in this country. You can form closer bonds with your guy friends when you double-team girls with them. Take a 3-month trip to South America. Act like a selfish prick with no repercussions the next day – you don’t have to try to impress your girlfriend’s friends and family any more. Push yourself to the limits. Get kicked out of bars. Start a fight. Listen to wilder music. Drink more. Raise the stakes. Change your identity. Flirt shamelessly with hot women. Risk everything. Be unpredictable. Be the caveman.

How do you define success?  I define it as being happy.  But the whole problem with success is that people seek it without ever thinking about what it means to be successful.  They all want to be successful, which is an end result.  Winning, or achieving that goal.  But any self-respecting self-helper will tell you that the real joy is in the path towards the goal!  Yet, people go around telling people why they want to be successful.  I do it too.  Instead, what you should want is nothing more than taking pleasure in the freedom to seek your goals.  There is nothing more that we can ask for.

Since one goal can be just as good as another in fulfilling our quest for happiness, why do we always talk so bad about video gamers?  I don’t think we should.  If they’re happily pursuing a goal, whatever that might be in the game they’re playing, then that’s fantastic.  They’re happy, and that’s all anyone can ever hope to achieve.  People say things like, “you’re not improving yourself” or “you’re lazy” etc… but constantly improving yourself is not necessarily the same as being happy, and laziness is just a B.S. concept invented by people who try to convince you to get a job and do lots of other stupid things.

Now if people are bored and playing video games for lack of better things to do, then that’s nothing good at all.  But if they’re really passionate about World of Warcraft or some other stupid game, there’s no need to constantly tell them to go outside into the “real world” or whatever.   They’ve already found happiness.  Your goals don’t have to be their goals.

No, you’re not being productive (i.e. producing things) by playing games or drinking or doing anything else pointless, but if that makes you happy then you are achieving a higher score in the game of life than most people who work 80 hour weeks and pile up money, or the people who are in the best of shape constantly working out but never satisfied, while looking down upon others with scorn.  If you define success as being happy, then you can literally do anything with your life.  You might not be successful in the common interpretation, monetarily, but that only matters to people who keep an outer scorecard.  People who judge themselves by what they perceive others to be judging them as.

If donating to charity really gets your rocks off, then go for it!  Likewise with playing video games or doing massive, head-swirling amounts of narcotics.  Let your inner emotions be the ultimate judge of your character.

It starts with legislation.  There are laws enacted to stop you from doing just about anything fun.  You can’t even ride in a car without your seatbelt any more.  Everything is morally wrong for some reason or another.  “Politically correct” has reached a point of disgustingly squeeky cleanliness.  Everybody takes themselves too damn seriously.  The vaguest insult would send your average american into a tailspin.  Many parents are so scared of their children being abducted that they hardly let them leave their sight.  People take medications for the vaguest of ailments, and new ones are invented every day.  If you’re unhappy, there must be something clinically wrong with you.

This is also reflected in business today.  The government no longer lets large companies fail!  It used to be that only treasury bills were government-backed, but today the entire stock market is.  Companies try to smooth their earnings each quarter to place them within a tightly defined range, and any deviation from that path is unfavorable.  More and more derivatives are created every day, in an attempt to insure every company in america against default.  Obviously this is impossible and doesn’t work during times of extreme stress, as we’ve recently seen.  Nevertheless, all of corporate america is trying to appear perfect, to pad their operations with nice fluffy pillows.  Everyday people do the same.  Nobody will admit that there are problems, until it blows up in everyone’s face.  If everybody just keeps buying, prices will rise and we can continue to live in denial of underlying reality.

America is coming closer than ever to achieving its goal of every citizen believing that we live in a disney movie.  Problems?  Well, maybe you have problems… not I.

The awful thing about all this, and I’m echoing Palahniuk here, is that without real lows we can’t achieve real highs.  Our emotions are being padded in both directions to keep us in line and generally calm and orderly.  X-rated content is filtered from television and the radio, and every few monts a disc jockey is kicked off the air for a joke somebody didn’t like.  Dirty bums in every US city are overlooked as if they don’t exist or swept away into shelters where they won’t bother us hardworking, taxpaying citizens.

People working in corporate America are encouraged to leave their personalities at the door while they spend the majority of their week chipping away at excel spreadsheets until the time comes when they can be completely replaced by computers.  Until then, they’d better pretend to be one.  They’d also better carry their blackberry around 24/7 so they can respond to emails at night and on weekends.  Every day they hear that they’re “just lucky to have a job during times like these” … meanwhile piss-broke people in Guatemala are some of the happiest people in the world, with an (embarrassingly?) low GDP per capita of just $4,155.  Seems like they’re the really lucky ones.

People in this country are scared of their own shadows, scared that they’re living a lie.  Their egos are their best friends.  Sheep who spend all their energy trying to conquer their neighbors, while paying lip service to charity and spirituality.  Phonies, as Salinger would put it.

If you ask most people what the purpose of life is, most would probably answer “happiness” or something along those lines.  If you went on to ask them what makes them happiest, most people know factually and will tell you that things like family, friends, exercise, gratitude, etc. makes them happy.  But what do people spend the vast majority of their time doing?  Watching fucking TV, when they’re not at work trying to suck up to their boss.  Escaping reality.  I hate TV.

The bottom line is this:  People don’t chase happiness, they run from fear.  Constantly sleepy, they gravitate towards their beds, their padding.  Most people never take proactive steps, because they’re afraid to be different, to be ridiculed.  They do what they’re told, and copy what they see around them.  They hold their beers the same way, they buy their cufflinks at the same stores, and in unison, they scoff at people who are different.

This is why successful entrepreneurs tell you to surround yourself with other successful people, and to get a mentor.  Because without that, just wandering around learning life from the people you happen to bump into will almost certainly place you in the status quo, not in the top 1% of the nation that pays a staggering 37% of America’s taxes, because they’re so staggeringly rich.

Not to say money buys happiness, I’m using it simply as a metric of success.  If we analyzed the ratio of successful to unsuccessful people in any endeavor, including just pure pursuit of happiness, I bet we’d come up with similar statistics.  Do 1% of the nation generate 37% of the overall happiness for everyone?  I wouldn’t doubt it.

So what do you do?  Face the music.  Figure out what the hell you want to do.  Make goals for yourself.  Find others who agree with you (searching forums on the internet is very useful).  Meet these people in person.  Pursue your common dreams.  Then take a minute to be proud of yourself for chasing your dreams, and continue down that path, ad infinitum.

Most people go around wanting to have plenty of things in life, but most average people never get what they want. Many are poor, or simply wish they had plenty of things that they never actually get.

The reason is because they never decide that they want it enough to actually try and figure out a way to actively get it. They don’t think it’s realistic enough that they could have that to actually go after it. They don’t CHOOSE to get it. Instead, the only choice they’re making is to WANT it. And so they will want it forever, and never get it.

By never stopping to make that decision to try and GET something, you’re condemning yourself to a life without that thing.

So the next time you wish you were a millionaire, don’t you dare just wish it. Sit down and build a damn plan to get it.

I was quite impressed.  Those who know me well would know that I work very hard to develop a lifestyle similar to the one they lead in this movie.  I love nothing more than excessive drinking, women, debauchery, stupidity, and blissful ignorance of the outside world.  I consider myself something of a warrior, a champion of fun if you will.  Before seeing the movie, I’d obviously heard about it, and knew that it would be right up my alley.  And man, was it ever. I would go so far as to say it instantly takes a place in my top 10 favorite movies.

What do I like about it?

The spirit.  It was a celebration of zen living.  The guys were constantly being hated by everyone around them, and yet they were completely oblivious to it.  They had their life passion – partying.  And all they did was pursue that lifestyle.  Pursue adventure.  Get into trouble.  Why the hell not?

Everyone else in the movie is working so damn hard to get under their skin. And the guys in that house were not doing it to annoy the administration, or the lame frat next door.  They were doing it for themselves.  And even when their worldly possessions were taken away – their house, their frat charter, their car, their alcohol, their degrees … Everything that many people mistakenly consider to be what DEFINES them in life … they were initially shocked and worried about the future, but after a rousing speech from Belushi, they hop right back on track and rally together to create more chaos and anarchy than ever before, and their most wild stunt of all.

Some notable moments for me…

• When Otter walks into the hotel trap and gets his ass kicked, he doesn’t look a bit afraid.  He knows he’s about to get beat up, but so it goes.  He comes at them with one final smartass remark about him not bringing enough roses for all of them.  With that, he demonstrates that nothing they can do will get to his head.  Otter is my favorite character, for the record.  His mannerisms are fantastically chilled out and charming.  Great posture, excellent confidence, and a penchant for having fun.  My new role model.
• Belushi in general.  Getting food at the cafeteria, he eats like a pig and doesn’t have a care in the world.  Then he spits it all over the preppy douchebag and gets him all riled up.  Belushi is like a wild animal, without a care in the world.
• When Otter finds out his date is dead, and immediately develops a plan to get the girl who delivered the information out on a date instead.  Amazing move, shows that he is constantly making the best of every situation.  Hilarious? Yes.  But a true example of staying in the moment.  Most guys would get all thrown off and go, oh man, that sucks and head home.  Not Otter, he’s playing the game at all times.
• When the one dude’s girlfriend is trying to convince him not to go to their toga party, and he matter-of-factly tells her that he’s a member of the frat and so he has to attend the frat’s party.  He likes her, but he’s got his priorities and he doesn’t bend on that.  The man wants to mix it up and party, and if his GF wants to be with him, she’s got to accept him for who he is.  He almost loses her because of it, but that just makes her want him even more.
• The general sheer dedication to wild partying.  These guys don’t give a fuck about anyone, they throw beer bottles everywhere, they crash cars, and they generally have no respect for society’s order nor material possessions.  All they need is each other.  Nothing that is not fun even crosses their minds.  When the pledge’s car gets fucked up and he starts to cry, they all look at him like an idiot.  Cry?  No, let’s just take right action and follow the next best course.  Get rid of the car and claim it stolen.  Not so bad after all… No crying would come up with that plan, for sure.

I appreciate animal house because although it is a comedy, I gained many lessons from it, and it reaffirmed my wild lifestyle for me.