If You Are Over 50, What Do You Wish You Knew When You Were 35?

I did a forum search but didn't quite find a topic specifically devoted to this.

Gents age 50 and over, what do you wish you knew when you were 35? What do you wish you could tell yourself when you were 35?

I was hoping to get some senior RVF cats to chime in with their advice to the mid 30s guys, especially to those who are considering getting a quality woman, having kids with her and raising families. I think a lot of guys would love to hear some wisdom on this.

Fire away.

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I really wish I had started working on my self discipline at a much younger age. I think back on all the countless hours that I frittered away without really enjoying myself. They could have been put to much better use, including working on long-term plans. It's funny how plans do eventually come together when a disciplined man puts his mind to accomplishing things. I think a lot of men just throw themselves into the river of life and let the current take them wherever it may instead of swimming towards goals.

At 35 I was still relatively immature, and while I did have some vague ideas about where I wanted to end up, I really didn't do much to make it happen, I was always distracted by the irrelevant minutae of every day life. In fairness to myself I was married with children at the time, so naturally those immediate concerns took precedence over my long term future, but looking back, I did squander a lot of time that could have been put to better use. I was married very early and had two children in my early 20's.

Now I'm just over 50, my kids are adults and I have expatriated to Panama where I own an apartment building and am about to start my own organic farm. I threw myself into these projects with very little knowledge about money, investments, and how finance works, so my life transition was far more difficult and costly than it had to be. I also know very little about farming (although I had always wanted to move to central America and start farming). I feel like I have a ton of catching up to do simply because I lacked the discipline earlier in life to clearly identify goals, set about researching how to make them happen, and just grinding out the work in an intelligent matter.

I guess it all boils down to "don't waste your time on unimportant things", identify concrete goals and do the work to make it happen.

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At 35,my life was already on the course that would take me to where I sit now, typing away on this laptop. I did a lot of things over the past 23 years that I could've done better, but, in all honesty, I don't think I would have done a thing different. I would have done them BETTER if I had the gift of prophecy. I should have worked harder on my fat ass, I know that. However, many of the things I do to make money, such as Internet novel writing, wasn't an option back in those days.The Internet was still new and wild.
I'm of the belief that everything I've ever done took me to this point, so why be concerned?

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To be honest with you not much. At 35 I had my own business doing something that I enjoyed doing and I still do that. I was in shape then and I'm still in shape now. Life was great then and is still great now. Of course if I had a time machine I'd go back and buy up all of the generic domain names so I could sell them today.

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Trust your intuition.

That will cover everything.

One of the things we learn on this forum is to wake up to how we have been conditioned, as men in society, as sons in our families, as members of churches, as consumers bathed in advertising since and early age, and especially today, as operant conditioned adjuncts to our electronic devices.

We can even be conditioned internally, with our own plans and desires, that have been derived from the dark wave of external pressure.

I didn't even start listening to my own intuition, really, until I was in my thirties, and if you had asked me in my twenties, I would have dismissed the concept as fairy dust, and told you I was a thinker, not a feeler.

Without intuition, this is what life is like: You cannot escape programming, and your own internal landscape will be an amalgam of things that have been imposed on you from the without. Even when you think you are venturing out into the world under your own steam, you will be acting out some program that was presented to you whole cloth from an external source.

You will think you are rebelling against you family, and end up in a relationship with some girl who is just like mom. You may change the external aspects of things you don't like, for example refusing to choose a career like dear old unhappy dad's, only to end up just like him because the subconscious dynamics will turn out to be no different because even though you are a programmer instead of a dry waller, you still have internalized all of the unspoken assumptions and practices that you never consciously learned, but only absorbed in a million ways by being in proximity to people who thought and acted in a certain way.

So what happens?

You consciously prepare a life for yourself, you make plans, chart it out, and get on with it, and somehow, incrementally, you end up chained to a course of action that your soul is screaming against. Only you don't realize it, because you don't know you have a soul, and here I am using the word soul as short hand for the authentic inner self, so there is no need to attach a religious/metaphysical meaning to it.

Your soul/intuition is fighting against the circumstances of your life, and yet you have no concept of even having a gut instinct at all, so all you have is a vague sense that something isn't right, and you have no idea what to do about it.

You soldier on until it gets to be too much, because what you have been doing is suppressing the deeper part of yourself, and then you have some sort of inappropriate outburst that blows things up in what can be termed, diplomatically, a less than optimal way. You blow up a job, a relationship, standing in a community, because you didn't ever have access to your own inner compass.

I didn't actively start cultivating my intuition until I was in my late twenties, and I cannot honestly say that I ever have any regrets about following it, though there are a couple of caveats about this course of action. On the flip-side, there are many many times when I suppressed that inner voice, and some of the deepest regrets I do have come from failing to listen.

It is not an easy course to chart, if it is new to you, and it will take practice and time to separate out your intuition from your programming, your own prejudices, and even your own whims. Lots of false starts and blind alleys down this way. Eventually though, even if you are like me, someone charting new territory, you will eventually learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, and learn to hone in, reliably on genuine intuition.

Intuition is like a woman, and it does not arrive, despite what the New Age gurus will tell you, in time or on demand, and many will be the time that you are listening fiercely to a voice that never comes, and you will be on your own, figuring it out as you go. It will, hoe-ever, heh, pop when you least expect it, to deliver you from some serious bad decisions right in the nick of time.

One example I can give you comes from when I was raising my step kids, and my programming was, they aren't my kids, so I will always defer to their mom, because "a mother always knows," as the programming went, at that time, in my mind. I actively suppressed my own instincts as a father because I didn't want to be overbearing or authoritarian. This was, by the way, years ago, back when Red Pill thinking was unknown, and men weren't really getting online and comparing experiences, so most guys were on their own figuring things out, lonely solitary figures, not really knowing how to push back against monolithic Blue Pill programming.

My only regrets came from the times I didn't listen to my intuitions as a father, which were many, and I cannot say that there was ever a time when I followed what I instinctively knew, and found it was a bad move.

The trick is, that the mind has to follow the intuition, and not the other way around.

Sometimes, you get an intuition, and you act on it instantly, and it is the right move. Much better though, for the most part, to actually hear the intuition at all, which is what takes practice, and then to put your mind to work figuring out the best way to implement what your gut is telling you, instead of taking the bad deal for as long as you can, and then having a dramatic beta outburst of anger, and blowing things up dramatically.

I now believe that all of the things that we learn online, and teach each other, already exist inside each mans soul, that we are naturally Red Pilled in the most life and culture affirming sense of that term, it is just that we have been trained not to listen to the inner voice that can reliably guide us if we let it.

I can even look back on my own life and see moments from relative youth and even childhood where my intuition was screaming at me through thoughts, impulses, even actual dreams, and sometimes I had the guts to follow it, and sometimes I didn't. I can't see any times when following my gut was a bad move. The catch is, it takes guts to follow your gut, and it may up end everything. It may not too, it may make things easier, though there is no guarantee of that.

Now, about those caveats.

Your intuition is like an inner spark of the divine, and whether or not you call it God guiding you, or you call it your subconscious mind figuring things out on a deep level is immaterial, the fact is that it works reliably once you can sort out genuine intuition from proclivities and whims, and very often the hallmark of a genuine intuition is that it goes against what your mind is telling you, and it goes against your native preferences and desires.

And that is a big caveat.

Your intuition will not necessarily lead you to an easier time of it. It isn't a simple concept like, I was going to work one day, and my intuition told me not to, and I didn't and I was lucky because a disgruntled guy with a gun showed up that day and I was lucky I listened. It can work on that level, and protect your ass from bad people and bad relationships, and bad situations, no doubt.

The problem is that your intuition can lead you into situations that drop you right in the middle of firestorms you never would have sought out otherwise too. It will not promise you better superficial outcomes, not at all.

The only thing that can be said reliably about intuition is that it will teach you what life is all about.

It will give your life meaning and direction, even if you don't reap the lessons until years later.

There is no simple syllogism or thread of logic that can justify following your intuition, so I won't even try to put one forward.

All I can say is that no matter the pain or trials of my life, whenever I look back at any time in my life, all of my regrets came from times when I didn't follow my intuition, and no regrets came from the times that I did.

This path clearly isn't for everyone, and many of the rewards are entirely internal.

I have many people in my life who think I am merely crazy, lazy, or bad, and have been sustained, at times, only by my own trust in some obscure inner prompting, and all I can say is that no matter how it appeared on the surface, it has been worth it to me.

But then again, you asked what I would have said to *my* younger self, and this is it, trust your intuition more than you do now, hop on the intuition train as fully as you can and as soon as you can, because the internal rewards will be worthy it.

That's what I would have told my younger self. Whether or not this advice is any good for any one else's current young self is anyone's guess.

You'll just have to trust your own intuition on that one, or your own rational mind, whatever the case may be.

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Debeguiled, I had no clue you were over 50!

You have your finger right on the pulse of things.

Respect for staying so grounded at your age. Lots of older dudes I run into are so out of the loop.

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Over 50 here.

Here are some things I know now that I didn't know 15 years ago. Not all of them are actionable but they illustrate how I see things differently now.

1. Things can get worse, both at an individual level and a societal level. I used to think that things just somehow organically improve on their own, a kind of natural law. Unfortunately this kind of thinking leads to complacency.

2. My patience is lower now -- and that's logical at my age. No, I don't need to see that French art film. I've seen enough to know that I don't like them. A young person should try almost anything, but as you get on in age, you have more experience and less time left, so it's logical to close yourself off to more and more things.

3. Hobbies are bullshit. I used to spend a lot of energy on them, including some very inward-focused ones. Now, I try to direct most of my free time into things that have a potential, concrete payoff (including fitness).

4. Fifteen years ago, I assumed that most people were rational and more or less like me, differing only in superficial ways. Now I think the opposite. That is useful knowledge to have when interacting with them.

5. This forum has had something to do with how I came to believe my final point here: Conspiracy theories, while often wrong about the specifics, often get the big picture right. There are, in fact, massive, destructive forces in society at work to promote certain interests over others. This was very apparent to me in Hillary's campaign.

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I was already on my way to being red-pilled by the time I was 30.
9/11 probably was a factor in speeding that up, as it led to question a lot of assumptions on how the world works.

One thing I can't repeat enough is to get rid of toxic people around you, whether they're friends or family.

Another thought: They say mastery takes 10,000 hours of what you do. Assuming you've been working a steady trade since your early 20's, you are approaching mastery by your late 20's.
This is a crucial time to expel any toxic people near to you.
I got out of a relationship with a neurotic nut case, moved out of a house with another neurotic shut-in owner, and quit a job at a dysfunctional workplace.
This all had to happen before getting a killer long-sought-for job with yearly raises and paid vacations (plus an Employee of the Month bonus within the first six months).
Plus, it greatly adjusted my mindset and gave me a healthier, less destructive perspective on things.



Word.

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(06-03-2017 12:49 PM)Fortis Wrote:  Debeguiled, I had no clue you were over 50!

You have your finger right on the pulse of things.

Respect for staying so grounded at your age. Lots of older dudes I run into are so out of the loop.

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By 35 I had fucked it up by marrying a bitch and wasting 20 years in a job I hated to pay for it all.

Things have dramatically gotten better since she divorced me and I started living more for me.

So my advice:

1) If you are not happy doing what you are doing, change it today. Don't wait for someone or something else to change it for you. change takes courage, but is essential for your long term happiness.
2) if you are not getting laid, change lover. don't live in a dead bedroom. life is too short not to be banging like a bunny rabbit
3) Work for yourself - it takes balls, hard work and skill. quit your job and try and make it on your own. You can never be free and happy without being your own boss and benefitting 100% from your own hard work.
4) Fuck what other people think about you, what you should do and how you live. Do the fuck what you want to do, you don't need permission.
5) Travel and experience something different at least once a year

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