I’m a little older than some of you (I’m 33) so I wanted to give you some thoughts from a little bit of an older guy. I usually don’t find these things useful because everybody’s life experiences are different, so let me know if this was a waste of time.

Your 20s are fucking hard One of the weird secrets of society that nobody talks about is how hard your 20s are. When I was 19 I had no fucking idea. No matter what field you go into, you are going to probably be working some entry-level job where you will have no idea what you are doing for some dickhead Baby Boomer who doesn’t understand or give a shit about your struggle. The working world is cutthroat, intense, really fucked up, and a lot more competitive than school. A lot of people coast in school just because they are smart – you can’t do that in the real world. Even worse, you will be going into the real world completely unprepared – college might prepare you a little bit for the field you go into, but it definitely will not prepare you for dealing with life (finances, your health, dealing with people in the business world, etc...). I was amazed at how much I needed to rely on my dad for even basic life advice like buying a house, getting a car loan, etc... I know this sounds super gay, but listen to older men you respect and take their advice. Use the internet to get advice from people regarding relationships, finances, and even basic shit like how to fold shirts, etc...

Compared to your 20s, college is basically summer camp with a few hours of class thrown in. All the free time you enjoy now will be gone. It will be much harder to keep in touch with friends because they will too busy dealing with their own struggles. Money? Unless you have a plan for managing it you will be amazed at how fast it disappears.

The 20s breaks a lot of people. A lot of the hot, popular, “cool” kids from your high school will become broken shells of their former self. A lot of people will become fat and age very quickly. A lot of people whose personalities are awesome when they are 21 sound like crazy idiots when they try to act that way at 30. My friend who works in a psych ward tells me that most people with psychosis first start experiencing it in their mid-20s. That makes sense to me – they are dealing with the crushing reality of the real world without the support system (school, teachers, mom) that they are used to.

I am not here to sound like a bitter old man or freak you out. I am saying this to help you prepare. Being an adult, making money, having your own place and not having homework are fucking awesome. If you start eating well, lifting, managing your time, managing your addictions, and developing the skills you need to succeed at work you can crush the competition and have an awesome time. But you can’t see self-improvement as a hobby; it’s an absolute must. If you don’t do these things you WILL be miserable when you get older. I had an awesome time in my 20s, but that was because I was very smart, I had a great dad and I started the self-improvement shit when I was young. I’m 33 and there are people my age that look great and have awesome lives and there are people my age that literally look old, tired and sad. It’s terrifying.

Work out You can ask most guys older than 30 – they will tell they wish they were more active when they were younger. You are lucky that you have the time and the energy now. Use it! When your body starts slowing down and breaking all the time you will regret wasting your prime years not working out.

Aging is not a foregone conclusion I know that it’s premature for me to say this because I have not yet reached that age where I am really “aging” but from what I see nothing changes about you when you get older unless you let it. You can choose to learn from your experiences and grow as a person or you can choose to stay the same. I know people my age that have not changed a single bit since they were 22. Hell I know 50 year olds that talk and act like they are 20 – the only thing that gives away that they are 50 is the wrinkles on their face. I also know people that gave up on life at 25 and now talk and act like an old person. The only psychological thing with aging I see is people getting stuck in their ways and not wanting to adapt to new and better ways of doing things – that’s why they come off as “old.”

Physically a lot of “aging” is just people not taking care of their bodies. Imagine if you start eating like shit at age 20. By age 22 you won’t look that bad but by age 32 you would literally have had 12 years of doing that and it will show. My dad is 65 and he tells me that physically he does not feel any different than when he was in his 30s. He eats right, works out, and lives a fun, stress-free life.

Life is short, but it’s also long I say this because you are going to regret looking back at your life and all the missed opportunities. If you’re 22 and you feel like you are too old to start something imagine how you will feel when you are 32 and you realize that if you had started at 22 you would have had 10 years to work on getting good at that thing.

There are no rules after college In high school and college, the rules are pretty simple: listen to your parents, get good grades, do good in sports, and be popular. After college, those rules go out the window. As long as you don’t get arrested or become homeless, you can do whatever the fuck you want and nobody will give a single shit. If you’re a weird goth kid who got beat up a lot in high school, you can join a goth community and never have to see a “cool kid” again. Hell, you can live in a cabin in the woods and nobody but your parents and your 3 friends will even know.

Some people take advantage of this freedom and build themselves awesome lives because they are no longer constrained by the conformity of high school and college. People like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and tons of other lower-level entrepreneurs have changed the world and society. Other people, however, can’t handle this freedom and end up living in some dark basement becoming obsessed with weird porn and videogames. I think part of the reason psychosis sets in around age 25 is because people can’t handle this freedom.

This goes for gaming too. A lot of the “rules” for getting women disappear as you get older. I know a lot of girls that were all about a certain type of guy when they were younger and are now dating or married to somebody completely different. People change and more importantly, the criteria of what they are attracted to changes differently. I know a lot of girls that chased bad boys when they were younger, got dicked over, and now go for clean-cut professionals. It’s bizarre to see.

Live life for yourself When I was young, I wanted to be cool and impress my cool friends by getting hot chicks. To me, the point of life was having a bad chick and being the life of the party. But around my mid-20s by “cool” friends started marrying boring women and having kids. That’s when I realized that spending my life impressing people was stupid. The people I was trying to impress were literally gone. They don’t care if I have a 3-some with Playboy Playmates in Vegas: they are worried about parent-teacher conferences at their kids’ school.

Like I said, there are rules in society so you should live life for yourself, not to impress anybody else. The point of life is to enjoy it, not to achieve some far-off goal that you may not even care about in 5 years. This is why guys have mid-life crises: they realize that they’ve wasted their life being miserable.

Under the same logic, don’t waste your 20s trying to make some woman happy if she doesn’t deserve it from you. I have seen a lot of guys suffer so much heartache trying to fix a woman who is damaged or just doesn’t care about them. Once a person is broken, you have to walk away. You can’t fix them and even if it did, it would be too much of a drain on your life.

If you are successful, your competition for women dwindles as you get older For a lot of reasons that I can’t go into here, women are outperforming men in our society right now. Women go to college at a much higher rate, they do better in school, and they get better jobs than men. The percentage of women going into “professional” (i.e., high paying, prestigious) jobs is much higher than men, so there are a lot of women that literally cannot find a man on their educational, intellectual and career level. This is a real problem because a successful woman literally cannot be with a loser. It’s not just a matter of women being hypergamous – a woman who is a lawyer or accountant will not have anything in common with a guy who is a construction worker that watches pro wrestling and drinks beer with his buddies. No offense to guys with blue collar jobs – but those are just 2 different types of people.

The "alpha male" at 30 is not necessarily the same guy as when you were 20. When you're young, you are probably intimidated by tall, athletic, good looking guys that get all the girls. But as you get older, those guys are not necessarily the hottest guys to girls. Older girls are interested in guys with jobs and money and intelligence. That guy that was the nerd in high school that started the tech company after he graduated - HE is now the alpha male and all the hot girls want him. And I don't mean that hot girls want him for his money or just because he is stable, they are actually attracted to him because HE is now the alpha male. They just can't get excited about the cool guy in high school who now has a shitty job and is struggling in life. It’s hard to act like a badass in front of a tech millionaire nerd when you’re working in Target. There are going to be some dumb, trashy girls in their 30s who are still going to go for the bad boy with the felony conviction, but if you’re hanging around those types of girls you’ve already failed.

Of course, it is still good to be tall, good looking, etc... But its a lot harder to be attractive as you get older because girls have a longer list of requirements guys have to meet. Women in their late 20s are a lot more intelligent and worldly, so if you're an idiot or you are not going anywhere in your life they are not going to be interested anymore.

"Leagues" mean nothing after 30. Remember when you thought a girl was "out of your league"? That doesn't exist anymore. Like I said earlier, there are no rules after college and girls have a lot longer of a list of things they need in a man, and very few men can hit everything on that list, so girls just go for the guy that has the best combination. This is also why a lot of girls bounce from guy to guy – they can find a guy who is good in one category but sucks in another category, they get bored with that, and then they move to another guy who is good in one category but sucks in another category.

Game is a double edged sword A guy with game is a ninja with amazing abilities, but those abilities are dangerous as well. I know lots of guys whose lives were changed for the better because of game. I know a really awesome guy who sucked with girls and met his wife because he read the Neil Strauss book The Game and used those techniques to approach women. I also know really awesome guys who never learned game and ended up with terrible women because they were afraid to go out and meet somebody else.

On the other hand, game can fuck you up. I know a few guys who left their families and kids because they couldn’t give up the rush of meeting new women. In many of those cases, those men loved their wives and it tore them up to leave but they were addicted. So be careful! Also, if you spend too much hanging out in seedy clubs with trashy people and dealing with shitty, drug-addicted, superficial, materialistic “party” girls, you will change for the worse and you may not be able to come back and interact with classy, respectable women again.

A lot of guys that are “gaming” in their 30s are doing it to fill some insecurity, usually from their youth This is probably going to piss some of you off, but it’s just what I see. Most of the cool, popular guys from my youth are now married with kids. They look happy in their photos but of course I can’t really tell. Most of the guys in their 30s that are partying and gaming are the dorks in high school that never got laid and are trying to make up for it now that they are adults and have money and are slightly less socially awkward.

I am not trying to shame anybody by saying this. I don’t think there is anything wrong with gaming in your 30s. In fact, it’s a necessary skill, especially if you get dumped or divorced. Also, for a lot of guys, 30s are peak attractiveness and you will be amazed at how many young hot women in their early 20s want you. That said, I’m just saying what I see.

Don’t be an asshole When you are young, you are motivated by a lot of really hot emotions that might make you do shitty things – the desire to be the “alpha”, the desire to fuck lots of girls, the desire to look cool, etc... When you get older and those emotions die down, you will look back at douchey shit you did with regret. I will be candid and say that I did some shitty things when I was younger that haunt me. When I was in college, I brought a girl home and kicked her out when we were done – she was drunk and hit a tree on the way back home and spent the night in jail. She’s fine now, but now that I’m a mature adult that tries to be a “good” person I always cringe when I think of that.

Go to my website: http://www.woujo.com