@MmaUnderdogz I agree, wholeheartedly. I know he wants to give a response to Sean but it’s distasteful given he’s devoted his life to covering this sport.
there’s a particular kind of 30-year-old guy who is still psychologically living in the best year of his life.
he had something happen at 24.
a startup took off. a job paid absurdly well. an investment worked. someone important noticed him. for about eleven months, the future looked completely obvious.
he was going to be somebody.
then the thing stopped working.
six years later, he’s still negotiating with the version of himself who thought he had already figured life out.
i think early success can do something genuinely cruel to a person if it arrives before they’ve learned how to be ordinary.
it teaches you to associate your identity with acceleration.
you’re the promising one.
the guy who figured it out young.
the one relatives ask about at thanksgiving because apparently something exciting is always happening with you.
until it isn't.
now you're 31, your income is inconsistent, your friends are buying houses, and you're explaining another business idea to your parents over dinner.
your dad asks whether you've considered getting a regular job.
you hear it as a request to identify the exact moment your life went wrong.
the complicated part is that you probably could get a decent job.
you have a degree. you know how to speak professionally. you have contacts. you understand enough corporate language to survive a meeting about absolutely nothing.
but somewhere along the way, a normal salary became psychologically associated with surrender.
you spent so many years imagining yourself escaping the system that participating in it now feels humiliating.
meanwhile the person who accepted a boring job at 25 has been promoted twice, developed useful relationships, saved money, and learned how to operate inside an actual organization.
you have seventeen tabs open about starting an AI company.
one of them is a youtube video called "why 2026 will create more millionaires than ever."
it's 1:38 am.
this is the part i find genuinely sad.
sometimes family money gives people just enough protection from consequences to keep an identity crisis running for years.
there's no spectacular collapse.
just a long, quiet decline in options.
the ambition stays enormous while the evidence gets smaller.
you start avoiding old friends because their perfectly normal questions require increasingly elaborate answers.
"what are you working on these days?"
god.
you used to love that question.
eventually you become more committed to preserving the possibility of an extraordinary future than doing the fairly unimpressive things that might actually produce one.
and nobody wants to talk about how addictive potential can be.
potential is wonderful because it never has to submit quarterly results.
you can be brilliant in theory for decades.
you can keep insisting that you're one connection, one opportunity, one launch away.
the really painful possibility is that your first success was real, your ambition is real, and you still have to start again at the bottom of something.
at 31.
with people younger than you.
without making a speech about how you used to be ahead.
some guys would genuinely rather spend another five years being a future millionaire than spend six months being a beginner.
and the worst part is they know exactly what they're doing.
they just can't bear to have anyone watch them start over.
@TitleFightMedia I would never understand that fight. You are the challenger! Go and try to get the belt from Izzy! How the hell are you going to ask the champ to make the fight? The challenger makes the fight
@GMZeroOG Man his job is to figure out the offense. Ofcourse it’s tough but you can’t call them out on offense when they’re picking up for you on defense.