Most relationship problems are ultimately just a lust for life problem. Gf/wife unhappy, kids distant, some disconnect with the family etc. You try to solve the discomfort through tangible achievement. Think it's because you're not making enough, providing enough, "successful" enough
You need to upsize the house, upgrade the vacations, perform more, show off more. Not realizing that this comparison based expectation you created in your mind and how it subsequently causes you to behave is exactly what's causing the problems in the first place
Meanwhile the only problem is just a severe lack of vitality. You're boring and moody and see reality as an obligation and take yourself way too seriously. You're not a beacon of energy, you don't inspire the people around you, you don't inject wonder and curiosity into their lives. There's no adventure, no spontaneity, no presence. You lost their love because you lost the love for yourself
“I would kill for you.” “I would die for you.”
Yeah, well, I would heal for you. I’d unlearn my toxic patterns, face my wounds, and become a healthier person so my love doesn’t hurt you.
Adding my 2 cents as a woman in a longterm relationship:
- Do not nag, ever.
- Always receive things graciously.
- Express gratitude for everything he does for you.
- Do not criticise or belittle him, ever. Most especially in front of other people.
- Tell him you’re proud of him, often.
- Smile at him, often.
- Don’t speak negatively about him to your girlfriends (all they hear is the bad & eventually they will tell you to leave him).
- Learn when to shut up.
- When he’s going out with his friends tell him “hope you have a great night”. Then just, simply, don’t blow up his phone. Do your own thing, have a bath, read a book, relax.
- It is not his job to make you happy it is yours, he simply adds to it.
- Don’t say “you never do x” because he will continue to never do that. You’re just affirming the negative. Instead of “you never take me on dates anymore” say “I would love to go out for dinner, just the two of us.”
- Don’t ever bring up something while you’re angry & upset. Calm down. Think it through properly. State how you feel in 1-2 sentences.
- Let him drive. Let him open the pickle jar. Let him lead the way while out in public.
You don't have ADHD, or depression, or clinical anxiety.
You just haven't spent a hour alone with yourself without a screen in years.
Quiet moments. Being sad. Stress. They are parts of life. Ignoring them, drugging over them. That'll make it worse. Stop. Look at them.
Important advice: deliberately rethink every previous concept of how things should be done.
Some thoughts, tips, and realizations:
1. Specializations are collapsing. Come to terms with and take advantage of this reality. The person who used to be an engineer is now also a data scientist, a content creator, designer, marketer, and whatever else they want to be. Deliberately expand in as many directions as you can and become great at them (scope up vs just speeding up)
2. The average person with access to tokens can now do the work of a data scientist who used to cost $500,000 a year. Seriously, this is fucking crazy. This opens up an entirely new world. Take advantage of it (also everyone else will also realize this over time).
3. 99% of what's created is now slop. Be aggressively anti-slop and you will absolutely stand out.
4. Trying is nearly free. Automating is nearly free. My mind still sometimes lives in the world from 12 months ago where an idea automatically is attached to a certain amount of time or effort. Both of these have collapsed to close to zero (or just token cost), I therefore try and experiment with *any and all* ideas with potential and have needed to retrain my brain for this constantly.
5. Tokens are a career and growth accelerant. Find ways to get cheap access to tokens, or free tokens. Extremely important, and actually an entire design space, use your imagination.
6. It's never been easier to both stand out but also fall behind. 10x, 100x "people" exist more than ever (maybe 1,000x). Outlier power users of AI, many who you see here on X. Feels like we are in a window of time, a window of opportunity while all of this is still early, to take advantage of it.
7. Local computing is (or will be) dead for 99% of work. Local was built for a world where work was bounded by the physical presence of its author, but this is no longer true. You can and should do infinite work in parallel or zero, it doesn't matter anymore. Cloud agents enable this at scale and in any computing environment, I predict cloud agent usage will 1000x over the next 12 months and optionality and accessibility will 100x. Plan for this world, take advantage of the possibilities.
8. Building on #7, you can give an agent it's own computer, and it's own identity. You can then give an agent with it's own computer it's own computer. You can give that agent with it's own computer with it's own computer, *it's* own computer. These agents are smarter than any human in history and you have access to as many as you'd like. Think about this for a moment.
After 14 years in this industry (tech) today is the most exciting time ever and nothing else feels even close.
@marclou@stemonteduro@AlexHormozi thoughts on skills beign overrated compared to agency?
To me its just meta skills - agency coming before skills, as skills have to be acquired to then be useful
one of the best reframes I've ever heard in my life came from @BowTiedBroke on dating:
"you don't get it out of your system.. you get it IN your system"
fucked me up ngl
all my life i grew up thinking you had to make life and business two separate things and everyone around me was in line to go to work and then come home from work 5 days a week for 40 years but now i realize how everything is made up and you can do whatever you want, if you want
being married is funny because you'll be chilling, having a bowl of cereal, and your wife will say
i hate these bowls, don't you?
and you'll shrug becuase you don't care and she'll say
i do, they've bothered me for a while now. we need new bowls.
and you'll shrug again because you have honestly, not once, ever considered the bowls at all
then a few days later there will be all new bowls in the kitchen.
and you'll be eating the same cereal in a different bowl, chilling, and she'll say
i love these new bowls
and you'll shrug again because you still don't care but she's happier and the cereal is still good and you didn't do anything at all
One of the greatest viruses of the modern man is looking at Instagram Stories. You will melt your brain looking at a barrage of outcomes—like vacations, parties, cars—with no visibility of the process that got them there.
Life out of college is fucking weird. Not sure who you are or what you’re doing or what the point of it all is. Porous to the world youre ready to take in the idea of any identity that presents itself to you.
For 2 years of my life I owned like 30 articles of clothing total. Minimalism. For a time it gave me the identity I was craving. A group. YouTube videos to watch, a mindset to cling onto, a little juice that made Dante unique in the world. It was fun.
I sold so much shit, got rid of most of my clothes, wore the same thing every day. It was fun it was cool I felt light and agile and interesting.
It was a fun experience. Decluttering all my shit. Nice to know how little I actually needed. Nice to be able to pack my whole wardrobe in one duffel and everything I owned into my car. Beyond the physical world, minimalism really helped me declutter non-physical aspects of life. Stagnant relationships, dead hobbies, fake career. Peace!
On the flip side, It was also wildly unsustainable. I like clothes. I like fashion. The hobby of saving money in it of itself didnt work for me. Not being allowed to buy things, made me want to spend money more. It made me want things more. It was an identity that didnt really suit me in its entirety. I got stressed and anxious and just felt off. Flew too close to the sun!
As many minimalist do, I think I landed somewhere closer to essentialism.
Minimalism taught me a lot. I still live light compared to the average Joe. Own less. Dont really need as much stuff as I thought I did. I do like clothes though. It also showed me that when I have a goal thats true to who I am, my desire to spend money completely goes out the window. I only try to fill the void with dumb shit I dont need when I dont have a goal worth pursuing. And lastly, it taught what happens when you open your palms up to an identity that isnt true to who you are. You feel misaligned and your soul hurts and you feel like a caged animal.
I liked my minimalism phase. Parts of that version of me still remain, and I think trying new personalities out is cool, so you can learn what you like, what you dont like, which pieces you want to add to your personal rubber band ball. Just remember to be honest with yourself about what it is you actually want out of life.
When I was young, women were a source of inspiration for us. We started bands, worked out and tried dress cool, and worked 70 hours a week to have money to take them on cool dates.
When they broke our hearts, we made films; wrote songs; became comedians.
Women in 2026 are mentally ill shrubbery: I barely notice it the first time, and don’t care if I ever see it again.
There is no light or magic in their eyes. Their voices are nails on a chalkboard. Their bodies are neglected playgrounds with busted creaky springs.
They’re never looking at you. They now only look at themselves. They’ve become sad, lifeless husks of human beings; obsessed with shiny things and that next incremental fraction of attention.
This is why art sucks and homosexuality is on the rise.
Our muses saw themselves and became stone.
Women are not wired to see you working from home. You could be nuts deep in a 184-page excel doc with billions on the line but in her head, you might as well be playing World of Warcraft with your college buddies. GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. Even if you just go to Starbucks or take calls from your car parked at the QuikTrip, in her mind you’re shirtless in the woods covered in coconut oil bowhunting Buffalo for dinner.
“That’s not true!!!”
Ok man, it’s your life
A lot of women love this fantasy but few were taught to be this woman and fewer still wanted to figure it out on their own.
Women are attracted to driven and successful men, no doubt. Women who snag that “dream man” often then spend the rest of their lives destroying that man for the very characteristics necessary for that success.
Nagging, whining, bitching and most common “you don’t pay enough attention to me” (i.e. mental load), “you don’t do enough for me”. Derailing a driven man with a mission to what? Do the dishes? Hold your purse while you shop?
I find men have a natural weakness to this as well. They have a truly wonderful quality where they actually really, really want a happy wife.
The hard work and determination that often affords HER a luxury lifestyle is not met with gratitude and care but rather resentment and disdain.
Instead of being his helper, she revels in destroying the man she claims to love slowly over decades. I’ve seen so many men driven into early retirement simply because they couldn’t work their highly successful job AND full time manage their wife’s emotions.
I am disgusted by this woman.
She does not ask “How may I lighten his burden for our success? How may I encourage and build him up?”
She asks “What can he do for my momentary happiness and why isn’t he?”
@jackfriks ive had to deal with this at over 70k MRR (USD) and what i did was exactly this:
1. business funds deposit into Wise (USD)
2. Send to IBKR (investment platform)
3. use Norberts Gambit to get the currency as close to real conversion as possible
4. transfer the new CAD into your cad business account/personal account/whatever you wanna do with it
One issue im still coming across is the credit card situation and how to pay that off, but eventually we have to succumb to our amazingly demonetized currency
On radically different incomes life in America can be surprisingly similar.
Imagine three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One is a public-school teacher in Tampa earning $50,000 a year. Another is a lawyer in Atlanta earning $200,000. The third is a venture-capital partner in Chicago earning $1 million.
On paper, they inhabit three different Americas. One earns twenty times more than another. One is 25th percentile im wealth the other 84th the last one top 1%. They describe inequality in the USA.
Now look at their sons.
All three wake up with electricity, running water, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning. They eat plenty of food, ride in safe modern cars, wear sneakers, watch YouTube, play the same video games, use similar phones and tablets and have access to vaccines, antibiotics, dentists and modern medicine.
One goes to public school, another to private school, the third perhaps to an elite private school. One flies economy once a year, another travels frequently, the third may occasionally fly private. Their houses, neighborhoods and vacations are different.
But their actual daily lives are far less different than their mothers’ incomes suggest.
The socialist argument has always been about equality of outcomes.
Well, look around. In much of ordinary material life, capitalism has already produced something remarkably close to it.
The millionaire’s refrigerator does not keep milk twenty times fresher. Her son’s iPhone does not make YouTube twenty times more entertaining. He cannot eat twenty breakfasts, sleep twenty hours at once or enjoy a video game twenty times more because his mother earns twenty times as much.
For several hours every day, these three boys may be doing almost exactly the same thing.
This would have been unimaginable two centuries ago. The child of a rich family and the child of a laborer often lived in genuinely different physical worlds. One had plentiful food, warmth, books, servants, doctors and transportation. The other might lack adequate calories or clean water.
Industrial capitalism destroyed much of that inequality by doing something socialism never managed very well: making formerly scarce things cheap enough for almost everyone.
Cars, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning, computers and smartphones began as luxuries and became mass-market goods. The entrepreneur became rich precisely by making what the rich had available to everybody else.
And that may explain one of the great ironies of the new American enthusiasm for socialism. Capitalism’s victories are now so complete that nobody notices them.
Clean water is not considered wealth. Neither is electricity. Nor refrigeration. Nor an air-conditioned bedroom, instant global communication, unlimited music, thousands of films or a computer in your pocket more powerful than anything that existed when many of today’s billionaires were children.
Those things have become invisible because almost everyone has them.
What remains visible are the inequalities capitalism has not eliminated: the mansion, the private school, the beachfront house, the prestigious university, the best neighborhood.
But if the political demand is that ordinary people should be able to enjoy many of the same basic experiences as the rich, something extraordinary has already happened.
Put these families on a chart and the inequality looks enormous.
Put their ten-year-old boys on three sofas at eight o’clock at night, eating pizza in sweatpants and staring at nearly identical screens, and the difference becomes surprisingly hard to see.
Equality of income? Obviously not.
Equality of many of the outcomes that actually fill a human day?
Far more than we admit.