How Not To Waste Your Life And Die A Loser

Understand this, if you are lazy and fearful then your life will never transcend that of the ordinary man.

Perhaps you are OK with that. Perhaps an ordinary, mediocre life is all that you want. If so then that’s absolutely fine. But my message is not for you. Because I am unable to countenance such an outcome for myself. All of my strivings, both in game and career, are about escaping the ordinary, the mediocre and the dull at any cost. And that ambition forms the basis of all of my content.

I don’t believe that anyone aspires to an uninteresting life. As children we are all explorers, adventurers. The human spirit is strong. It craves novelty. But that is slowly dissipated by the narcosis that the trappings of modern life provides.

Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, TMZ, The Daily Mail, Hollywood movies, advertising. All of these things in tandem have created the mindless, artificial universe in which we now live.

Western consumerist society may be aspirational, but it makes us aspire to the wrong things. We want to buy cars, clothes and jewellery to impress other people.

This is bullshit. We should be building things and having experiences to impress ourselves.

This is hardly new news. Most people, even the most diligent cubicle worker bees, would probably agree when pressed that a few possessions are not sufficient recompense for a life spent in corporate drudgery.

This idea has been common currency for years, and certainly since Fight Club came out in 1999.
And yet so few people, even those who acknowledge it, actually do anything to change the course of their lives. The majority still get corporate jobs, still over-leverage themselves with credit (including mortgages), still get married young and still live predictable lives.

Why is this so? Laziness and fear.

Part of laziness is lack of imagination. Most people—despite the plethora of information that is now available to every one of us free through the internet—seem unable to dream up an alternative path for themselves. And even if they can, going it alone or doing anything outside of the norm requires work—hard work.

Most people do not want to spend Saturday morning writing blogs posts or shooting videos or sending out emails to their subscriber base. They would rather sit on the sofa and watch the football or catch up on that week’s reality TV.

And then there is fear. There’s a girl I used to work with. She was 24 at the time, she’s now 30. Six years ago, she told me she wanted to quit and travel around Australia and New Zealand. Today she’s still in London getting drunk on her pay check, doing cocaine and chasing unsuitable men.

She is an intelligent, capable woman. She could be doing a lot more with her life but she is locked into the metropolitan grind by her fear. The alcohol and drugs—meant to shroud her disappointment in herself—merely exacerbates it.

The good news is that you are the master of your own destiny, whether you believe it now or not. Fear is an emotion that can be controlled. Laziness is the result of bad habits that can be changed.

Think about how you would feel if you got to the end of your life without achieving any of your dreams. Then think about how much it would sting when you reflected that this had occurred because you’d never even tried.

Don’t be lazy. Don’t be afraid. If you are lazy you will hate yourself for it when you no longer have the energy to be active. And the fear that you feel now in making changes to your life will be nothing compared with the fear you will feel when you realise that time is running out.