Infatuation is not love. If you want a long term relationship or a life partner or parent for your children, learn the difference. If within a short period of time you think you've met your perfect mate, SLOW down until you can see them as a real person complete with imperfections, and only then decide how much space they should occupy in your life. If everyone you know doesn't think they are a good match, they might be right and you might be blinkered. Do your due diligence - especially before you create any children who have to deal with your fallout.
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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The same boring-ass advice you’ve been hearing and reading since forever is right.
Save for a “rainy day.” Get a new job with better pay and benefits? Save a bunch of that money. Don’t go buying toys. You don’t know if your car’s going to quit, get in a wreck, need a home repair, or hurt yourself and need days off to recover. You also don’t know if your job will go TU for whatever reason leaving you scrambling to find a new job. Save up, then buy a toy after you’ve got a cushion.
Take care of yourself. It’s a royal pain in the ass and is orders of magnitude harder to undo damage you’ve done to yourself as you get older - if it’s even possible. Alcohol abuse, overweight, etc. will shorten your life and hold you back. IDK what is going on with these guys that are 40 and complain about aches and pains. I’m way past 40 and have none of those problems, but I’m also not overweight and do my best to visit the gym regularly.
Use a condom. STIs and unwanted pregnancies. The first you can hopefully fix with meds. If you can’t, like AIDS, you’ll have to tell every potential partner forever, and you’ll lose a bunch if them that won’t want to risk it. The second is a lifetime that will forever attach you to the kid and the mom (or the dad), like it or not, and complicate your life inescapably if a marriage isn’t viable or lasting.
Don’t get complacent. If you’re not where you want to be and you have the desire and opportunity to move up, do it. Every year you spend earning less that what you can is hundreds of thousands of dollars missed out on in interest, wages, and retirement savings at the end of your career. Potentially millions.
IDK what the future holds for the markets and if they’ll still be a viable method of retirement investment, but for now it seems to be. The best advice I ever got is invest in index funds, use dollar cost averaging, and do not fuck with your money. The first is self explanatory. Index funds are self-cleaning (poor performers are removed and better performers added), so you don’t have to deal with managing it. Second, keep adding money, regularly, even when the market is down. When it’s down, the stocks are “on sale”. Buy more. However, you cannot time the market, so don’t try to wait for lows to buy in. Third, don’t fuck with your money. Don’t take it out when it’s going down, don’t try to time a rally, and most of all, don’t pay any manager to do this stuff for you because you’ll end up paying capital gains and transaction fees wiping out a chunk of your gains. Once your money is in, don’t fuck with it, especially when the market is down. You’ll pay taxes on losses and fees on the changes. Shooting yourself in the foot. Stay away from individual stocks like Tesla or Apple.
If you are very lucky you will see many people you love very much, die. If you're not lucky, you will die first. It will usually be a surprise. Tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Say "I love you" often, express your gratitude often, be in the moment often, with anyone you care about, and with yourself.
Amen. Your answer is one of the few that is actually brutal advice that everyone should be given.
Something I've wanted to know, but have been too afraid to ask older friends, is does it get easier? Especially as the number of people dying keeps increasing and happening more and more frequently.
Im 50 and no it does not. Losing my mom’s 68 year old BFF in December hurt just as much as my grandmother dying 37 years ago.
To add: knowing in advance that a death is imminent vs a sudden death is not easier. If you can, add people to your life. Loneliness makes loss even worse.
I think that depends on the death. My other grandmother who died a decade or so had significant dementia and hadn't recognized me in two years despite weekly visits. By the time she died I had already mourned her loss.
You are not a good person by default. Being a good person requires work, and that work starts by understanding who you are today and ends when you die.
You are shaped in a million ways by your parents, teachers, friends, bosses, media, algorithms, influencers, etc. It is not the mark of a good person to be passively shaped by their environment into a functioning member of society.
A good person considers how they've been shaped and actively works to change themselves to align with their personal values. Hell, examining the hodgepodge of conflicting values that society has pushed onto them is one of the biggest parts.
It is humbling, tedious, frustrating work, and many people go their whole lives without doing it. But it's worth it for the peace that comes in being proud of the person that you've made yourself into.
TL;DR: go to therapy
And your definition of a good person is what matters as “good” is relative.
Promises and contracts can't be trusted. Language makes a wall of interpretation between every person that can be used to claim the original premise of the agreement was misunderstood.
It's ok to be wrong about things. Whether it's a relationship, a job, an opinion, whatever. Take ownership of those mistakes and fix whatever it was. You're not a failure because a relationship doesn't work out or that you had the wrong answer at work or a discussion or anything.
I'll go even further - you should welcome being wrong about things.
We are all making shit up as we go, and that means that you WILL make mistakes. Seeing those mistakes as opportunities to learn and make yourself better will turn you into a better person than someone who resists admitting their mistakes.
It also was one of the things that most helped my confidence.
I see confidence as the absence of fear of messing up.
You can gain confidence by practicing until you're are good enough to not make mistakes... or you can just accept that you're not a perfect person, that you'll make mistakes, and try your best anyway.
If something seems wrong for more than 24 hours, get to a doctor, urgent care, or ER.
Thanksgiving, 2018. I was 49 years old. A good time was had by all. Met the girl who would become my daughter-in-law.
3 days later I developed really bad heartburn. Yes, I did have that extra plate of sweet potatoes. "Take some pepto, you'll be fine."
Monday - heartburn all day. "Eh, it's the holidays, you're already working from home, don't be a wuss."
Tuesday - "Man, I wish I could have got to sleep last night, oh well, work isn't going to do itself."
Wednesday - Massive nausea and vomiting. "OK, now I'm taking a day off."
Thursday - Heartburn moved into my upper arms. "That's a thing??!?!?" Center of my chest feels like there's a chunk of granite, pulling down on all my innards.
Advice nurse: "Yeah, go to the ER, get checked out. Don't drive yourself."
ER: "Blood test confirms the heart attack, come with us."
Thursday: Cardiac ward.
Friday: Cardiac ward doctor: "That heavy feeling is your heart, every time it beats, it's only pumping out 30% of what it's supposed to. That's the line between 'walking around, talking to people', and 'no longer walking around, talking to people.' You have to have open heart surgery."
Saturday-Sunday: Cardiac ward.
Monday: Open heart surgery, ICU.
Tuesday: ICU "OK, let's get you up and walking around!" Really? Are you sure? "Yup! Come with us! Let's see you walk!"
Wed-Thur: Cardiac ward.
Fri: Back home on a 6 week recovery clock.
The vagus nerve is a bitch, it gives very confused messages.
Wow glad you are better!
Been a tough couple of years... congestive heart failure, 2nd heart attack, now my doc is making noises about potential cancer. 🤷♂️
More tests that had been scheduled for September have been moved up to the 25th.
How you see yourself is far more important than how other people see you.
How you see yourself is a little bit more important than how you actually are.
A little bit of self-delusion goes a long way.
The trick is to do it and know you are doing it, and yet hold the line.
You have to be true to yourself, even when that truth is that you are lying to yourself.
Can you explain this a bit?
Why not just work to change the things you don't like, and accept that you won't do it perfectly?
Consider how narcissists are far more likely to end up as high paid lawyers, surgeons, and CEOs.
It's not that they are fundamentally better at their job, it's that their mentality makes them believe they are suited for the position, and that self belief accelerates their attainment of these positions.
Non-narcissists can tap into that power by willfully lying to themselves.
This has been the domain of self-help gurus for as long as there have been self-help gurus.
That being said, the trick is to know you're lying to yourself and believe the lie anyway, and most people fail on one side or the other of that.
But if you can believe it, like telling yourself that you are worthy of a promotion, even though Johnson two cubicles down has far more paper diplomas or degrees or something than you do, then you'll act as if you honestly do deserve it over Johnson, and so, therefore, there's a chance that that will actually influence the outcome of a better job. whether you get the promotion or not.
It's not a guaranteed thing to work, but the thing is, is that narcissists don't have an off switch. They don't pick and choose when to be narcissistic. They are always narcissistic.
Which means that they roll the dice by believing that they are worth a particular thing far more often than a person who attempts to earn the position by raw talent and skill.
When I was young, I had a friend who believed that if you had infinite self-confidence and continuously approached women with the desire to get them to go out on a date with you, that no matter what, you would always succeed.
You might get turned down 999 times, but one in a thousand pretty much no matter how bad you look, or whatever else is wrong with you, you will succeed.
Believing in yourself is the same way. You might fail 999 times and then succeed the one time, but the people that don't believe in themselves above their actual abilities will never try the thing a thousand times, And so they'll never succeed, or at least won't succeed at the same rate as the person who doesn't deserve it as much as they do.
If an old person gives you advice you've heard over and over, it's often because that old person didn't listen when they were young, either, and they only learned from hard experience recently why the advice is given over and over.
If you're going to ask for advice, especially from old people who probably have learned the hard way, and then ignore the advice... why even ask?
Don't drink, don't smoke, don't use drugs, exercise, clean up your diet. Heard it all before? Of course, you have, and there's a damn good reason.
Don't get married until you've lived together for at least two years. Two years isn't arbitrary, it comes from experience.
No one cares more about you than you care about yourself.
You alone are responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. The more personal responsibility you accept, the more power you have over your life. When you blame other people, you're saying you have no control over your life--so don't be surprised when people manipulate you and take advantage of you.
Aside from the very closest of your immediate friends and family, nobody else in the world cares about your intentions or what you think or feel. Your bosses, coworkers, professors, and many of your friends and acquaintances will judge you entirely on what you do. And in many of those relationships they only care about what you do for them specifically.
Weight training and exercise. Do it now and do it for the rest of your life.
I don't mean for you to become Mr Universe or get to the point of lifting 400lbs
Do it to maintain your health, physique and general good health. Learn about taking a bit of protein supplements and build a bit of muscle. In your 20s, it's easy to build muscle and you can train and do lots without much effort. Everything gets harder the older you get.
And you don't have to go overboard on all this .... just do it for a bit of physical maintenance and building a bit of muscle.
It's far too easy these days to just sit at a computer for hours, watch TV for hours or just sit on the couch or chair with your phone scrolling for hours. You have to get exercise as it will drive your health, clean up your system and break you away from being complacent and just sitting for too long staring at digital screens.
The best time to build a good base for the rest of your life in weight training and exercise is your 20s and 30s ... if you plan on taking it up later in life, you'll be in for a sad surprise. The older you get, the harder everything becomes and the slower the results you will see.
All through my 20s, I worked in construction and building and not enough to get to the point of building any muscle. I worked a lot but I had a terrible diet. I was complacent and all through my 20s and 30s, I built some muscle but never a lot. I'm a big guy but I'm a big soft lump of soft muscle that easily strains, gets tired and doesn't have as much strength as you'd think. It wasn't a big deal in my 20s and 30s but once I hit 40, any muscle stamina and strength I had seems to have dried up. I hurt easily, I strain easily, I can't lift as much and even if I did, I usually just hurt myself. I'm just past 50 now and I started an exercise routine and since then, I've felt better and stronger but it is a struggle. I would have been in better shape if I had just maintained everything from an earlier age.
Yes!! I also recommend doing some basic joint strengthening and mobility stuff. I really like knees over toes guy and movement by David
“The most important words a man can say are, “I will do better.” These are not the most important words any man can say. I am a man, and they are what I needed to say.
The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says “journey before destination.” Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.
But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.
To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.
Excerpt From Oathbringer Brandon Sanderson
I'm reading the Way of Kings right now for the first time. It's so good, I just got to the part with
spoiler
the betrayal at the tower
and I'm so hyped to see how it ends. I am listening to the audiobook and read that first sentence and just heard Michael Kramer in my head before I recognized it was even from the series! Brandon just writes a certain way
None. There’s no reason for advice to be “brutal.” “Brutal” implies it hurts. Why would good advice hurt? Brutal advice is discouraging, pessimistic. You shouldn’t be scared or threatened into a behavior or worldview. That’s counterproductive.
Youthful optimism exists for a reason. Keep it as long as you can. Take advice that encourages and guides you to good outcomes. Take the doomsayers and “harsh reality” people with a grain of salt. Their experience doesn’t have to shape yours. You’ll have challenges and face unfairness and bigotry but there are always avenues around and through these things.
There’s no perfectly lived life. Just live. Accept some difficulties or take or take them on, pick a route. Maybe you’ll get diverted, distracted or dragged off but just keep moving. Nothing is forever.
if you assume that everything anyone ever tells you is a lie, then you'll be pleasantly surprised much more often than you are now, and blindsided/disappointed much less often
Christ, that's cynical