Many high school students are stumbling across the Red Pill community, and wondering: What can I do to improve my life now? The vast majority of the Red Pill advice is written by and for men in their late twenties and beyond. Smart high school students coming to this odd new corner of the internet for the first time are an under-served market.
This essay will fill the gap.
The first thing you should do, as a young man, is recognize how ridiculously lucky you are. How old are you? Seventeen? Congratulations my friend. You are a full decade younger than I am. That is a full decade of opportunities to seize, mistakes to avoid, and experiments to run. If you take advantage of it – you will be deadly by the time your balls sag as low as mine.
When I was your age, the nascent Red Pill community consisted of an motley crew of ‘spergy social misfits that was the early PUA movement, and a few stories of drunken shenanigans written by a guy named Tucker Max. But you, young Padawan, your generation and yours alone has the opportunity to embrace truth, right from the beginning. You have access to resources like Thumotic that, humility aside, will teach you everything you need to know about being a man.
Lesson one is: Read this post. Here are the five key actions I would take right now if I were in your shoes:
1) Take A Vacation From The Present
What is the Red Pill? What are its core tenets? What unifies the fields of paleolithic nutrition, strength training, picking up girls, laughing at feminists, shunning typical careers, and whatever else seems to pop up in my blogroll every morning?
The answer is: Truth. We are not the inventors of any radical new ideas. We’re simply a collection of men rediscovering Truth in a society that has turned its back on it. Our focus is often on subjects that are of particular interest to the young men doing the rediscovering – i.e. women, money, pumping iron – but the Red Pill extends into the realms of current events, political science, history, anthropology, and art, if you eventually care to follow a bit further down the rabbit hole. The Red Pill is not just about pussy. It is a comprehensive counter-cultural movement that stands in direct opposition to everything our modern society stands for.
As you would expect, no one has a monopoly on Truth. There is nothing new under the sun. This is why so many men who have “discovered” the Red Pill, later go on to learn that all these dangerous new ideas we’re playing around with would have been considered common sense to pretty much any historical figure with half a brain and a pen – Mencken, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Plato, and Jesus all would have fit in quite well as guest posters at Return Of Kings. We are not unique for having learned the truth. The 21st century western world is unique for having forgotten it.
So, my young friend, the first thing you should do is disconnect. Disconnect from TV and movies. Disconnect from your teachers and professors (though feel free to regurgitate as necessary). Disconnect from the mainline internet. Disconnect from the values and judgement of your family and friends.
In their place, immerse yourself in the ideas of better men. Read the archives of the best Red Pill blogs, and follow a select few that are ongoing. Interact with men on a similar journey towards enlightenment (r/RedPill and the Roosh V Forum are fine places for this). Above all, spend your quiet time immersed in the best that the past and present has to offer.
2) Forget Sex And Status
I offer this point with a necessary caveat: It is no more possible for a human male to forget sex and status, than it is for a drowning man to forget about air. So you will not forget about getting laid. Instead, you will read every post that Roissy and Krauser have ever written (start from post #1 and work your way to the present.). You will read the Solomon archive. You will read every post here at Thumotic and at Freedom Twenty-Five. You will buy books on seduction, books on the mechanics of game, you will study social psychology, evolutionary biology, persuasion, seduction, and while you are reading all of that – you will find the courage to approach women, introduce yourself, and make your way into sexual relationships with them.
But, throughout all of this, you will never lose sight of this core truth: Your success with women in high school is utterly inconsequential in the long term. Once you internalize this, you will start treating women as a fun little sides dish to the real meat of your life. Your focus at this time should be on your mission, which we’ll get to later in this post, and not on a pride-fueled quest for the next notch.
Quite simply, you have better things to do in your energetic and neuroplastic teenage years than chase girls who will be of a quality that renders them utterly invisible to you in a decade’s time. Time is not even the relevant constraint here. Please, go spend many, many hours of your salad years finding and fucking hot girls.
But don’t ever let those girls define you. Don’t let them be your motivation. Don’t let your success or failure with them affect your core identity. A man’s youth should be spent building skills, knowledge and an intellectual foundation. Women are a distraction and a means of letting of steam
As for social status, you currently fall somewhere along the jock-nerd continuum. Words cannot express how irrelevant your current tribal ranking will be, the instant you graduate. Feel free to experiment and broaden your social skills, whatever category you’re in, but please do your best to de-prioritize the holy grail of coolness. In a decade, half your classmates will be broke, overweight, and depressed. Ignore them, although you should be on the lookout for smart and ambitious people to connect with.
3) Acquire Skills
What are skills? Where does one go about acquiring useful skills? You are about to decide on a career path, so this question should be at the top of your list. Let’s start by ruling out the bad ideas.
Getting a business degree is a bad idea. Business is important, but it’s best learned in a practical context. Getting a soft liberal arts degree is a bad idea. You will be taught ideological left-wing cant, and you will graduate indebted and unemployable. Law school is a bad idea. Applied sciences are not the worst idea, but probably not a great one. Getting a degree in the ‘true’ liberal arts – i.e., Cal Newport’s strategy of English Lit + Math is better than any of the above, but still not ideal.
Tragically for me, this blog wasn’t around when I was seventeen and decided to do an undergraduate degree in marketing of all things, in a school I chose on the basis of its gender ratio and general reputation as a prime hunting ground for hot slutty girls. Fortunately it all worked out for me, but if I were to travel back in time and pow-wow with my teenage self, I would advise him to take one of two paths:
Path #1 is programming. The future is software and web pages. The geeks shall inherit the earth. Three resources to start with are:
Harvard EDx CS50x
r/learnprogramming
Codecademy
But this is not my area of expertise and I am as green as you. Use those links to get started, but there are better guides than I to lead you on that path. Find them.
Your second option is to find a trade. Crazy idea, isn’t it? To learn a real, tangible, useful skill, and then go practice it. The typical high school guidance counsellor would laugh in your face. And yet, the payoff is undeniable.
But if you have a good trade and you’re smart enough to leverage it, a comfortable and financially secure life is yours for the taking. And remember, learning a ‘trade’ isn’t limited to blue collar work. Medicine is a trade. Any skill you can learn and then exchange for money is a trade. Crane operator, forklift driver, dentist, massage therapist: Trades. Guy Who Knows A Lot About Sociology: Not a trade.
4) Stop Seeing Yourself As A Child
Our culture has invented a concept called adolescence. An adolescent is a physically and mentally mature person who, supposedly, is not yet ready to accept the full suite of duties and privileges that come with adulthood. ‘Adolescence’ lasts, it appears to me, from the age of 13 to about 30.
If you’re at the early end of this range, you’re probably used to thinking of yourself as an adolescent. You’re no child, of course. But you write off a variety of stupid, lazy, and irresponsible habits as inevitable follies of youth.
Well, I am officially revoking your implicit teenage right to be less than you are. Throughout history, men have divided themselves in two categories: Children and Men. Adolescence is an invention of a poisonous post-modern culture that seeks to weaken us. Glancing around at the number of ‘guys’ my own age who still play video games twenty hours a week, I’d say it’s succeeding.
Rejecting adolescence means refusing to hold yourself to a lower standard on account of your age. Alexander The Great became regent of Macedon at the age of sixteen. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire at the age of 23. Young men throughout history have done great things. They were able to do this by embracing their status as Men from an early age.
5) Read the Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide
Act now and take advantage of my generous offer. The Lifestyle Guide, which will give you all the information you need to start immediately kicking 110% more ass in life, costs all of nine bucks which is peanuts to any grown man. As a high school student though, I’m going to cut you a break.
I am offering a free copy of The Lifestyle Guide to any high school students who are reading this. All you have to do is 1) Create a Twitter account and subscribe to your ten favourite Red Pill personalities, and 2) Create a Reddit account and submit one good article or self-post to r/RedPill. Message me from your Twitter account and include a link to your Reddit profile, and I’ll send you an electronic copy of The Lifestyle Guide. Needless to say, if you are not a high school student and you try to take advantage of this generous offer, you are a sad little cunt of a man and may God have mercy on your soul.
So, high school students: These conditions will take you all of twenty minutes to fulfill, and they will nudge you in the direction of a lifelong habit of self-improvement, auto-didacticism, and intellectual rebellion against unworthy authorities. Fulfill them, and start living a life that reflects your potential.
Not a high school student? Buy The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide, and get a copy of my new novel: A Generation Of Men, by clicking that link and entering the coupon code: PG37C
