Moving out on your own? It’s a different world than it used to be!
Prioritize the Acquisition of Marketable Skills instead of College!
The “old world” called this step “education.” Knowing what I know now, I would never have gone to college. How many people do you meet that are actually doing what they went to University to learn? People go to college because they are of the mistaken belief that they will acquire the skills they need to get a job and be successful in life. University guidance counselors promise students that all majors are equally valuable. The federal government guarantees that all students get money-printed loans for anything the want.
If it is your absolute, die-hard mission in life to be a dentist, doctor or lawyer, then please go to school, do the work and get your degrees. For most students, half of your student debt will be spent on required social-justice courses and the humanities. You’ll spend countless hours reading lesbian poetry when you could have been learning software engineering.
The one thing college does give students is something that many young people struggle with: discipline. In college, you have to follow a schedule and go to class at the regularly scheduled time. You are given due dates, testing dates, and are held accountable for your performance. Because 99.999% of the human race is wholly incapable of imposing any kind of self-discipline, they waste thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours for the “privilege” of being disciplined by somebody else.
I personally used the website LinkedInLearning.com (formerly Lynda.com) to teach myself software design skills. Six years later I had a six-figure career. My spoiled and lazy girlfriend at the time expressed interest in doing something similar. I kindly pointed her to the websites and resources that were available for her to instruct herself for a very low price. “The problem is I can’t make myself do it,” she said, “I just don’t have that kind of self-discipline.”
If you have the good fortune to live with your parents rent-free while you’re in your early twenties, why not leverage that time toward acquiring real-world marketable skills. For technology-oriented people, there are LinkedInLearning.com, Udemy.com, Sitepoint.com and many others. Aaron Clarey advises more blue-collar-oriented people to go to trade school, such as welding school, UTI mechanic school or perhaps electrical or plumbing school.
The “real world” (the capitalist economy) doesn’t give a damn what your social justice professor said or how many books on “white privilege” they forced you to read. Meaningless academic busywork isn’t marketable. If you’re concerned that you’ll miss out on some glorious, party-filled “college experience,” don’t be. When I first moved to Idaho, I rented a furnished studio apartment in downtown Boise while I was in escrow for my house. I’ll never forget one spring day when I was working from home and heard a bunch of yelling and screaming outside. It was the middle of the day, but Boise Idaho is a college town since Boise State is near downtown. The college students were running around, clearly intoxicated, walking from bar to bar as they were on “spring break.”
THEY deserve a BREAK?! I thought to myself.
That’s just the thing about college culture: it’s not happiness, it’s ignorance. It’s a fucking illusion. The college industry and the leftist media love to promote university life and culture. “These are the best four years of your life,” they say. Bullshit. I’m forty-one year old as I write this and I’m living my best life. College students don’t know what happiness is. They’re ignorant delayed adolescents living off borrowed cash. Anyone can take out a $100,000 loan to party and study useless garbage for four years. Does that sound like a quality plan for long-term success and happiness?
Universities actively promote socialism to college students because most students don’t know what it means to work hard or the pleasures of owning any quality property. Happiness is moving in to your first house. Happiness is driving a car that you bought yourself. Happiness is taking a date home and making out with her on your couch. They’re your things and it’s your life. If you’re not participating in capitalism, then you’re a parasite – mooching off other people who bothered to roll up their sleeves and do the work.
SO, twenty-somethings. If you don’t have to work right now, you could leverage your parent’s good graces and study your ass off. Do your research and find out what careers pay well and which lend themselves to self-instruction. Then dedicate a minimum of four hours per day, five days per week toward self-instruction. You’ll be packing your bags and moving out of your parents’ house in 24 months at the absolute most!
Career and Independence
This naturally follows your development of marketable skills. You develop marketable, career-focused skills (that are in-demand and are well paid) so that you can move out of your parent’s house, rent an apartment, and live like an adult. No, mooching off your parents while you work on a Shopify business does not count. I invented a term for people who do this, I call them “Oedipreneurs,” a portmanteau of “Oedipus” and “entrepreneur.”
There’s a horrid narcissism about Oedipreneurs. They think they’re “too smart to work for other people” and think they will be able to skip steps. They literally think that they will move out of their mommy’s basement when they suddenly become millionaires. People who have never worked for another company will always fail as entrepreneurs. Working for companies teaches you how businesses work from the inside. You learn valuable interpersonal skills and organizational skills.
The reason why I hate Oedipreneurs is the same reason why I hate left-liberals: I used to be one. I was a pre-med biology student at university. Like so many college courses, what you are studying is not an accurate reflection of the actual kind of work you’ll ultimately be doing. In this way, even for those students why study hard and take their planned career seriously, they are not given and accurate picture of what they will be doing for a living or if they will enjoy the work or outright hate it. Even though I was one of those college students who was living off of student loans, I studied hard only to discover that I would have been miserable in the medical profession, burned out and moved back in with my dad – completely clueless and directionless as to what to do next.
I was sick and tired of school and just wanted to make money so that I could live on my own. I became obsessed with books by Robert Kiyosaki, who preached the importance of business ownership and entrepreneurship. Kiyosaki is right on a conceptual level, but his advice is bad advice for young men without direction and without careers. You can’t work on a start-up business with zero capital, zero corporate experience and on your parents’ dime while they support you. There isn’t a successful entrepreneur today that will tell you “I just worked on my business while my mommy and daddy supported me until I became a billionaire and moved out.” Rather, they all worked – a lot! Many entrepreneurs worked very difficult and underpaid jobs, working their way up until they eventually decided to go into business for themselves.
In so doing, business owners have first-hand knowledge of how companies work through their own experience. Yes, there’s a time for entrepreneurship – which is as a background project when you’re already a fully functional and independent adult. Keep entrepreneurship as a steady hum in the background. Acquiring marketable skills and getting a job is the most efficient way to become independent in a short period of time.
Of course, when it comes to directionless young men and Oedipreneurs, it takes at least two to tango. The other offending party being the clueless and enabling parent(s). Earlier we discussed the deep emotional damage and withheld development that comes along with having a distant or removed father and a smothering, overwhelming mother. At the early stages of adulthood, you can see how these issues become very real-world problems. The Oedipal mother will do anything to not be alone. She’s so entrenched in her own depressive narcissism that she will sabotage the development of her own adult children in order to avoid having an “empty nest.”
The motherly caretaker instinct is only helpful so long as you are a child and incapable of fending for yourself in the world. Beyond that point, it becomes a prison sentence – preventing your further development into an independent and fully functional adult.
This problem is overwhelmingly pervasive in today’s “women are always right” society. The father is removed from any position of authority within the household (whether he is physically present or not). At best, our removed-dad can be the “buddy” of his children, but without an active position in the household, he does not have the power to instill any discipline or tough-love. Divorced parents often engage in this “who will spoil the kids more so I will be the favorite parent” contest.
We all know on an intuitive level that insulating a young adult from the harsh realities of the world is very bad for them. Today, male initiation is removed entirely from a young man’s life. Initiation is the necessary pain that instills personal autonomy and growth. Dad is removed and replaced by a feminine-primary social order, the divorce industry, and the state. The social order tells mom that she’s oh-so brave, strong, and independent for “doing it all by herself.” Thus, the enabling mother does so for the betterment of her own inflated narcissism, and not for the betterment of her adult children.
Good parents hold their adult children accountable, help their children discover what they enjoy and give them positive discipline so that their children develop the skills they need to survive as adults. Good parents know that their kids will make mistakes with money and that it is best that their kids can pay for the mistakes on their own, so they can learn from those mistakes. Good parents create deadlines and force their children to move out on their own beyond a certain age, while offering encouragement and positive guidance along the way.
Bad parents only think about themselves and how lonely they’ll be when their kids move away. They live vicariously through their children and micro-manage their children so that they don’t “make any mistakes,” further stunting their development. Bad parents indulge their kids’ entrepreneurial fantasies, Shopify projects and dreams of YouTube stardom. Bad parents never tell their kids the good news about living on their own – only the bad news, which is that it will cost money. “Why don’t you just live here and save money?” they say. “Rents are so high today, it’s a waste of money.” “You could save and invest that money instead, it’s the wise thing to do.” “You don’t want to move away from this city, it’s dangerous to live anywhere else,” they say.
To me, independent adulthood is like eyesight; you couldn’t pay me enough to get rid of it. It’s priceless. Young adults who avoid work and independence don’t know what they’re missing. They don’t know what it’s like to have fun and live life on their own terms. Because they’ve been brainwashed by their parents to “stay home and save money,” they’ve effectively sold their souls to the devil. The cost that you’re paying in the form of your own adult development doesn’t have a price.