Summary: Automation is coming and you don't want to be a horse without his carriage. There is still time to upgrade your skills, satisfy your ego, and reach the top-percent before the bottom 99 become welfare cucks or wasted corpses.

A Machine Is Only as Good as It's Metal

168 hours in a week comes out to 8,736 hours in a year and 87,360 hours in the next 10 years of your life. Assuming you lift at least 3 times a week for an hour, 1,560 of those 87,360 hours will be spent in the gym. Really not that much in the grand scheme of things so "saving time" by not submitting yourself to iron shouldn't even be a consideration. Assuming you sleep at least 8 hours (which you should if you lift), that's another 29,200 hours down the drain. Eating shouldn't take more than an hour on a typical day, so add another 3,650 hours and we're down from 87,360 to only 52,950 hours from maintaining your physical frame alone. I'm not here to preach about why this is important--physical health is simply the baseline, and I'm here to point out that 2/5 of your time over the next 10 years is already gone.

Machines Don't Oversleep Or Crave Pizza

Machines cannot be topped in accuracy or efficiency. The only major limitation as of now is the price. Luckily for you, one or two adults were willing to invest ~$250,000 to build you into who you are today because they loved you (or something like that). Unfortunately, you came with a few defects. You're lazy, addicted to fast food, and you have a strange weakness for the vagina. You read TRP a bit and start to become aware of your compulsive candy cravings or how your voice gets soft and betafied when that cute girl asks you to explain her math homework. Maybe you even start to pity yourself, but unfortunately the machines and the owners making money off the machines really just don't care. Your weaknesses would be forgivable in a world where you are essential, but pretty soon even sandwich shops won't take you in. And if you think your office job is above the realm of automation, think again. You need to become an essential master of a craft that is safe from the realm of automation for the time being if you want to enjoy the latter part of your life.

Value that Only Humans Can Offer

This rule that one must practice a skill for 10,000 hours in order to become a master is brought up time and time again. It's important to recognize that many masters die unrecognized, and conversely some people blow up after spending a fraction of the time at a skill due to superior aesthetics or connections. If I could be a cam-girl and offer enough value to earn $100k+ by simply smiling sweetly and playing video games for desperate man-children, I would totally do it. Money is probably the most truthful metric there is. Anyone accusing a celebrity of not deserving his/her fame and money is simply jealous. What you need to understand is that attractive women cause dopamine spikes and sexual excitement by just interacting with you. Dopamine and excitement are value in and of themselves. In fact, Dr. Robert Sopalsky of Stanford concluded that it is the anticipation of pleasure/reward that releases the most dopamine, not the reward itself. What's even more interesting is that dopamine levels go through the roof when humans anticipate a reward that might not even occur. Still confused as to why Beta Billy just loves to buy his crush those chocolates on Valentine's Day?

What is an Average Man to Do?

But chances are, you aren't a hot girl or aesthetically elite man. Maybe your network sucks and you find socializing too tiring for you to make and keep friends on the long-term. This puts you at a distinct disadvantage. Right now you can offer value by doing manual labor or computations, but in 10 years that might not be true. Remember, this may be a matter of life and death. People point to Universal Basic Income as the assumed solution, but I wouldn't expect that to be established smoothly without a great deal of damage occurring beforehand. So your goal must be to propel yourself into the socially elite as quickly as possible. Ideally tonight. If not tonight, tomorrow. This is the relentless machine-like mindset that you must carry at all times.

In addition to the basic redpill advice about lifting and talking to strangers whenever possible, you need to think long and hard about your career choice. Many people won't like this, but artists are the safest from automation. Anyone who bases their career around their personality will buy enough time until interesting personalities can be simulated. Creating art and channeling your personality is the only surefire way that an aesthetically average man can create the same kinds of emotion and dopamine spikes that Chad and his cheerleaders can do naturally.

This is ironic because the thousands of young adults pursuing liberal art degrees are the crux of just about every joke made in your average Reddit thread about college. People look upon the hipsters sitting on their Macbooks in Starbucks windows with a mixture of pity and disgust. Are they really the enlightened ones?

The Process is the Prophet

Mental Masturbation is probably the most dangerous enemy facing an artist today. Just like the man fantasizing about Susie giving him a peck on the cheek instead of just goddamn lifting, the potential artist will day-dream about future television interviews and showcases of their work. There is value in taking 15 minutes of your day to listen to some hard-hitting Drake and mentally masturbate about your future success. We have an ego for a reason, and it baffles me why these new-age philosophers are so quick to suggest that we must drown it and be "happy" in our poverty. They are simply pacifying the mediocre masses. But although controlled mental masturbation is fine and even useful, the majority of your time must be spent in movement. Your fingers should be swinging the paintbrush or tapping the keyboard as much as possible. If you aren't actively creating content, you're already falling behind the millions of other people competing for your spotlight.

Maybe the Starbucks hipster is on page 367 of his novel, or maybe he's browsing Facebook. Either way, it doesn't matter to you. It is better to assume that he is a threat to your career than doubt him and be wrong.

Machines don't mentally masturbate, and they surely don't care what other machines are doing. They simply pump out the work and move on to the next job. This is how you must treat your life on a day-to-day basis. You have the distinct advantage of programming yourself and how you spend your time, but you must hold yourself accountable and execute the program. If it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at a skill, you better plan to have spent 20,000 hours by 2026.** Why 20,000 hours? Because there are too many people already planning to spend 10,000 hours. The self-help industry is rampant and blowing up like it's bloody pornography. People are getting scared, and with good reason. There are a limited number of spots at the top. TRP has 150k+ subscribers, and this is a pretty niche community. You don't have to be jaded about women in order to secure a publishing contract or land a movie gig. Hell, blue-pillers might even have an advantage with the social justice movement infiltrating mainstream media.

People always ask how to stay motivated, and the truth is that if a machine doesn't work it gets thrown out. But it's not too late to fix yourself. Even if you aren't living at home and don't have limitless time to pursue your passion, you can still rent a cheap apartment with roommates and work for minimum wage with more than enough time to pursue your craft. The ability to still work a basic job that requires little mental commitment while you get your shit together is a blessing that the next generation might not even have. There is no shame in spending 20 hours a week in a kitchen as long as you carefully plan out the other 148 hours. Open up Google Calendar right now and fill up every single hour-slot of the entire week with what you plan to do. Make it a weekly schedule that you follow religiously. It's okay to allocate time for friends, family, and fucking, but make it planned. Maybe you'll have to say "No" to your buddy spontaneously "just wanting to drive somewhere cool and smoke" at 2 AM.

Time for the calculations: if you want to spend 20,000 hours on a skill in the next ten years, that comes out to an average of 5.5 hours per day. This should be your highest priority behind physical/mental health and having a place to live. Ideally you should split this work-period up and lift or do something physical in-between. I've found that productivity tends to go down after around 4 hours of continuous work, but this might be different for everyone.

Preventing Mental Breakdown and Suicide

Perhaps the greatest advantage that machines will have over us is their inability to think, doubt, and self-sabotage. It would be depressing to wake up 10 years from now with no income earned from 20,000 hours spent on your passion. You probably won't have these dark thoughts in the process of working if you're truly doing something that you enjoy and are naturally inclined to because you'll be in a flow state. These doubts tend to come in the early morning when you're deciding whether or not it's worthwhile to even get out of bed.

The importance of a morning routine cannot be stressed enough. All you need to do is move and get yourself to the starting line. I've been unmotivated to travel to the gym, but I've never walked inside the gym then decided it wasn't worth the trip.

If you have trouble getting out of bed, the easiest fix is to set a very annoying alarm and put it far away from your bed so that you are forced to physically begin moving. It sounds stupidly obvious, and it is, but I can't tell you how many mornings my old roommate would snooze his alarm 30 to 40 times before realizing it was 4 PM and time for his junk-food binge.

Movement doesn't get rid of the negative thoughts, but it does override them. Machines move, so you move. Go take a 3-minute cold shower. You'll hear people boast about the testosterone-inducing effects; that may be true, but I've just found that it tends to wipe away the darkest of insecurities. You'll be a little bit scared every time you're about to step in, but about 30 seconds in you'll feel calm and composed. I'll take fear and calmness over lethargy any day.

Meditation is the final key to the morning routine. You can find dozens of posts about this topic on TRP. The goal is to stifle thought which perfectly coincides with your existence as a machine that does not ponder but pounces.

After meditation, I personally like to hype myself up with music as I mentioned beforehand. This is my little mental masturbation that I allow myself daily. Maybe you simply want to sit for fifteen minutes and envision your future self in 10 years. This is kind of the opposite of meditation, but the point is that these thoughts are unanimously positive. That's why I use Drake's music to induce the confident and upbeat thought patterns. Don't turn on Tai Bachman and start reminiscing about all the girls who rejected you in high school.

These are all short term fixes for preventing mental decline. All you have to do is do the physical movements and you'll reap the benefits. These rituals take maybe 45 minutes in total and aren't difficult; they're actually highly passive. One involves standing, the other involves sitting, and the last one might involve a bit of dancing or self-hype talk. Get enough sleep and these will be easy.

As for preventing lack of machine-like movement in the long-term, it really comes down to you choosing the career that makes you excited and gets you into flow-state. People will call you stupid for pursuing something risky instead of going for the safe business or programming degree. Your parents might kick you out. This isn't meant to knock STEM and business; if you find a way to be creatively expressive in those fields, go for it. Don't do it to secure a paycheck. You might make decent money, but you won't reach the socially elite unless you have insane drive for what you're doing or insane connections. So many people get swept away in the masses of other people just looking for a paycheck, let-alone the ones who are genuinely passionate and already coding the next Snapchat.

It would be more depressing to invest 20,000 hours into a career you hate and then watch it be overtaken by machines. At least the fast-food workers just got the job on a whim and didn't invest much energy into it. If you fight and fight for your passion but still end up broke and unknown, you can take solace in the fact that we're all just defective machines and none of it really mattered anyway. At least you spent a good chunk of your time doing something you enjoy. However, the chance that you genuinely put in 20,000 hours into something without acquiring at least some sort of status and above-average income is highly unlikely. If you fail that miserably, you probably picked a career that you are god-awful at. Strategize today. Pick something wisely and plan it through to the end.

What About the Sex?

There are always several posts on TRP that get contested for not focusing on the central goal of red-pill philosophy: acquiring sex. Although adopting a Machine Mode lifestyle for the next 10 years will greatly increase your chances of surviving any automation fallout that may come in the near future, the additional sexual implications should be obvious. If pornographic trends are to be taken seriously, the arrival of virtual realty porn and sex robots will be used to pacify the masses of Universal Basic Incomers who are so low-status that they can't even be orbiters for the majority of women. There will be a sub-culture of "independent men", MGTOWs (not trying to bash the present-day movement), who reject women entirely out of disgust, laziness, or hopelessness. Women won't have as much incentive to secure a BetaBux since the government will be their BetaBux, so you can be sure that they will be chasing any kind of real status that they lay their eyes on. 80/20? More like 80/1. When you're a culture icon or you help produce pornography for all the UBI's to lick-up, you can bet you'll have your selection of women. It won't just be the status but the machine-like frame that you have built up over the last 10-years of constantly waking up with no real hope but going through the motions anyway. You'll make them all cum with your silicon cock. Can you picture that?

But remember guys: only 15 minutes of mental masturbation per day.

Conclusion: *Becoming a machine in order to perfect a skill over the next 10 years is the only path to take if you want hope of sex and money after the automation arrival. *Careers involving art and personality are the safest options. *If you're at rock bottom, you can still work a shit-job and build yourself up on the side in 2016. Your children might not be so lucky.

Credits: I highly recommend reading Illimitable Man's Monk Mode article series and the book Mastery by Robert Greene.