“Rule of Thumb:
When you find yourself carelessly engaging in envy of people who seem to be ‘living the life’ : short term pleasures, utter disregard for their health, brains, or future prospects, ground yourself by reminding yourself of this
“See you when I’m forty years old”
Then get back to work. And work harder.
Inoculate yourself against the midlife crisis by not buying into the bullshit.
People seem to associate getting older with degeneration: the whole premise behind YOLO is that the best years of your life are slipping by, that if you somehow forego the fleeting but intense pleasures of hedonism, that you’d be ‘missing out’, forever.
Bullshit.
The best is yet to be. I expect to be healthier, stronger, smarter, more well read, more emotionally centered, more spiritually enriched, wittier, faster, and HAPPIER as I grow older. This can be achieved, I am convinced, by a sustainable and scientific lifestyle.
Read. Meditate. Pray. Cultivate deep and enduring friendships. Develop a creative skill. Learn how to make money sustainably. Develop a deep relationship with your body and its health and workings.
Take the glamour and mystique out of bullshit by seeing them with clear and unflinching eyes.
A club is a room with lights and loud music that will wreck your ears when you’re older. Get a hearing test. Your hearing is probably fucked.
Have you been to a club in the early hours of the morning, with the strobe lights off, and the cleaners clearing the vomit and broken glass off the floors?
What it is: An empty room with the smell of stale sweat and vomit and pungent alcohol.
The young people who pay to enter clubs, who open bottles that cost hundreds of dollars, are merely turkeys sold on an illusion.
They’re ‘marks’ or “Johns” (a term prostitutes use for customers). The only people profiting are those in the club establishment, and they hold you in contempt. They KNOW you’re not the ballers you are pretending to be. You are MARKS, pure and simple. The ‘clubbing experience’ is an illusion sold to you to GET your money. And it’s either not YOUR money, but your parents, or if it’s your OWN, it’s money that you spend a disproportionate amount of time to earn, only to spend it on an illusion.
Take the glamour and mystique from EVERYTHING. Learn the skill of unflinching realism.
See it for what it really is. A pretty girl spends an hour putting on make up, and much more time throughout the day thinking about her appearances. The guy who spends his parents’ money on drugs and alcohol treats his parents like shit, and wakes up with a hangover every day.
Always, always remind yourself that there is something beneath every false appearance. And all appearances are false.
You could have spent it on something else, something more worthwhile. Learnt a new skill. Mastered a field of knowledge.
Instead, all you get is alcohol- soaked brain cells, a damaged liver, and a warning story for your kids instead of an inspiring one.
Congratulations. Carry on.
For the rest of you –
Keep working. The best is yet to be.
Also, I’ll see you when I’m forty years old.”
Straw man. Does Xavier really think every clubber is like that? What a smug self righteous attitude he has! Xavier is the enlightened one telling us stupid clubbers we will all die faster than him. Because every clubber has no friendships, no spirituality, no creativity, oh, and are also money spending wastrels. I wonder which group of people Grumpy Uncle Xavier is actually criticising? Perhaps he just needs a good dance? This whole essay seems like an exercise in moral superiority disguised under the instructiveness of a Cracked or Reddit-style article. *Puke*
Obviously Xavier is talking about people who go to clubs/assume the hedonistic lifestyle in excess. He’s not making an absolute statement. I thought that was pretty clear. You’re the one coming here reducing his argument and assuming the worst of what he is saying, and, distastefully, assuming the worst of a person whom you do not even know.