40 Stupid Gimmicky Self-Help Truths I Learned By 40

I was inspired to write for Medium again and what inspired this little piece was a Youtube video by Mark Manson on 40 things he wished he knew, excuse me, harsh truths, at 20 (I believe the context is he is also 40, whenever that video went up, he looks a rough 40 while I still pass for my young 20s, whatever that means). I rolled my eyes while watching his video and I had to stop it partway through to read the helpful top comment that listed his truths. His stuff is rudimentary. Where was the wisdom? Where was an original thought? He could have written the same points at 30 or 20 (and probably did).

Therefore, I have attempted to come up with 40 things that I don’t think I would have realized at 20, nor if I had realized them would it have benefited me at all, so dimwitted and stubborn was I.

The “Harsh” Truths (not actually harsh):

1. You realize you are becoming less and less sure of how life should be done. This is because it becomes increasingly difficult to see the benefit in any one way of living. Self-help is a circle of sitting on the computer and reading the scraps of what others have said works, but it may as well be gibberish. So, too, even in the churches and religion. Where are examples of saints these days? Do we then turn to influencers? How is someone who got rich off of their genetics, connections, or ability to endure shame offer replicable advice to strangers? Is any one way of living legitimate outside of a niche community or political affiliation. Do I rebuke someone or do I accept them for who they are, so long as they don’t threaten me and mine, but they can go ahead and keep wreaking havoc on their own family. Do I seek wealth, do I seek inner-peace, do I seek both at once, does it even matter what I seek and I should instead be grateful I live where putting one’s nose to the grind may be all the life you are expected to endure. I can and will go on about this point, at a later time since it deserves fleshing out into its own post or series, but I hope I have provided a gist.

2. You constantly seek inner peace. This is building a little bit off of my first point, but I shall specify this peace as seeking shelter from the world. The media frequently puts forth bad news. Influencers get annoying with their holier-than-thou attitude, their snark, their flaunting of lifestyle and so on. Leaders are shown to be all too human and then some. I have found a desire to shrink more from the internet and only use it at arms length when I need to because otherwise my inner-peace will be destroyed in the same manner if one knew exactly how one’s spouse really felt about them.

3. Other people don’t seem worth your energy, you hardly have any for yourself. You discover that you aren’t all that broken up about not having friends you see regularly. Personal time becomes a luxury of its own if you have your own family, and friends are something that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere unless it is attached to some hobby you make yourself do outside the home. Extra reserves of energy become smaller if your life is in a constant state of stress with a protection-mindset. How you see the worth in other people reflects the state of yourself. Seek again to be in a place where it seems worth knowing and interacting with others.

4. You get sick of nostalgia. I know I am. I don’t care about your favorite franchise from the 80s or 90s. We were all duped into loving those things so industries could extract resources from us. I even believe my sense of humor was molded by 90s cartoons and sitcoms. I recently read a bunch of millennials threads on a subreddit dedicated to the cohort. Half the stuff was about nostalgia to some extent as if the past was better. It was neither better nor worse for an individual, it simply was as it always is, the same goes for people now. In 30 years young people now will remember back on the days before WWIII and global economic collapse and feel nostalgic for a time when free people elected their masters instead of being forced to live in poverty in slave camps, well, the survivors will reminisce.

5. Hedonism has reached its end. I am speaking of sensual self-indulgence. I’ve felt so many ecstatic feelings over the years I can’t take much more. How many more great movies, music, books, games, porn, food, and pleasures of other kinds can I possibly need? Sitting beside me are loads of books, a huge TV, endless internet, a piano, appliances for cooking, a retro gaming system (which I didn’t even need since I can access any retro game I want through an emulator), drawing supplies, and more. Each item has been used to consume over and over rich ecstatic experiences. Is this what life is about? By 40 you get sick of it, you want to turn from hedonistic consumption to the next level: creation.

6. You should be going through a mid-life crisis. I don’t know how anyone who is now turning 40 hasn’t gone through some version of this. With the state of the world, the economy, and no doubt, I suspect, many who haven’t made it materially in the way they expected, 40 is not the beginning of life, but the half-way station where you discover you weren’t on the correct track to begin with. At 40 you’ve had enough time as an adult to realize you are responsible for a lot of where you’ve gotten. You can only blame others so much for your fortunes. No one except the very old are going to tell you you’re still a baby. Something in your life should be bothering you by now.

7. Young people now annoy you. Not kids, but older teenagers and early 20s. The age when people start to form strong opinions no one is interested in hearing. When people think the ability to form a thought can substitute for experience. The culture of youth, as a whole, should annoy you. The frequent obsession with absolutely everything that isn’t important. The high drama and inability to be reasonable. The intensity of judgement. The full-blown hedonism. It’s all so tiresome now.

8. You see bad design everywhere. It seems no one has read or taken to heart Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. While he focused on website user experience, it seems many other things also don’t care about the user experience. From the difficult to looking around the thick pillars of my car to see if anyone is around me, to thin handles on plastic bags, to zero innovation for most appliances and everyday items, including clothes, you start to ask yourself more and more “why did they make it like this?”. As I assembled my latest piece of Ikea-influenced furniture I wondered what was so hard about using a nut and bolt for securing two pieces together instead of everything being a screw going into another screw. I am also sick to death of Allen wrenches! When did the hex key become agreed upon for all self-assembly furniture?

9. How much you do reflects your mental health. As I gaze upon my self-assembled house furniture, my walls adorned with things, my bookshelf with books I’ve read, my various projects and doings, my dirty kitchen that has seen heavy use, I realized the amount of doing one does is a reflection of the health of your mind. When I was severely depressed, not that long ago, I only did the bare minimum around the house. As my mental state improved so too did my industriousness. If you don’t think you are depressed but you still don’t do anything around the house or in your life, with hobbies, with interests, then imagine for a moment that idleness, brought upon you artificially through consumptive habits, such as scrolling social media on your favorite device, mimics severe depression. This is a topic that I will one day write upon since it deserves its own space to be fleshed out.

10. Children become more important (now that your kids should be at least elementary age, they become more and more important and less and less exhaustingly difficult to raise). By now the baby and toddler years are fading and the fun kid years are ripening. I can now take my child to a museum, or a zoo, or anything else and I enjoy the experience with them ten-fold over when they were younger. I can now have small conversations with them about stuff that matters. They are now interested, even if slightly, in what I have to say. Children truly are a delight and I wish I had more if they weren’t also the most difficult part of my life at the same time. All the same, by 40 you see yourself as highly different from those who didn’t have kids. Kids change you, those who I know who didn’t have kids are the same as they always were.

11. Well tended property gives you greater feelings of joy than science fiction CGI. I prefer to see real landscapes and nature over artificial things, namely, CGI, AI pictures, and video game graphics. I’d rather a journey through the countryside instead of messing around with Midjourney. I lamented to my wife the other day, as we were on a drive, that you see so few intentionally designed yards and fields. People don’t even know what different kinds of trees are and where they would fit best in a landscape. I blame this partly on the fact of people moving often and cities being the primary places of residence. Planting trees automatically means you expect to be in a place for a long time, maybe the rest of your life, but so many trees are cut down or destroyed because they block the sun (there’s a reason for that!) or cause allergies or spread too many saplings. I wish more young people could set down roots on a property of their own and take good care of it.

12. You don’t need a career, you need to make money. This magical phrase set me free. I started my own business and now my day job funds the potential of my business taking off and freeing me from the psychotic need for a career. I tried to go into tech, I tried learned to code but it was only ever going to work out if the industry was booming, which it is not.

13. You look forward to rereading. I recently reread The Lord of the Rings and enjoy them more than when I read them as a teenager. I felt like I was more interested in discovering what Tolkien was trying to accomplish, which was to create a fairy tale for the English. He succeeded beyond his wildest expectations and I think that’s why his book is still a best seller and widely read. Then I reread Jurassic Park and enjoyed it more but also felt more critical of Michael’s skill, since the last time I read his book was when I was in middle school. I look forward to rereading other things because once you know the plot and outcome thoroughly, the process of how the author gets there shines.

14. Dressing well becomes important again. I had my fair share of slob years, or typical American t-shirt and jeans. I find fashion to be more interesting now and look forward to finding a good shirt or pants and not whatever fits, sits.

15. You discover yourself pursuing hobbies more than fantasizing about them. It’s now time to write a novel. Ulysses was written when Joyce was around 40. Now I’m that age. Why am I not writing a novel? Why am not drawing more? What’s the point of scrolling social media, I’ve seen it all and memes annoy me. By now you decide it’s okay to create things yourself and who cares if it’s good or not.

16. You realize fantasizing is self-destructive and self-sabotage. By 40, you’ve spent enough time fantasizing about success, importance, validation, hobbies, interests where you realize the fantasy itself is self-defeating. It prevents you from doing and accomplishing, it doesn’t help you at all. Dreams are fantasies that are realistically achievable. Fantasies are escape, cope, and insecurity.

17. Relationships? What are those? If my wife croaked as I type this (checks over shoulder… nope), I would have no interest in finding another spouse or girlfriend or friend. I’m over it. I’m beyond the whole romantic love-story stuff that was shoved down my throat most of my life. It isn’t happening and I’m happy to be alone, in fact I look forward to every moment of alone time I can get.

18. You’d rather watch some movie from the past you never heard of than the latest big thing. I’m much more interested in movies from the past that I never knew about than whatever is out today. I haven’t seen Oppenheimer, Napoleon, Barbie, and whatever else has come out (Dune and Dune 2 I did see because I read the whole series). I look to Tubi to help me find older stuff that came out for adults when I was still a kid. I highly recommend delving into older media.

19. You no longer want to know things, you want to understand them. I randomly became highly interested in math recently. I had a thought that all math is creative abstract thinking and I thought I finally understood its appeal. And as for physics, being able to look at something happening and then coming up with a formula that consistently proves why it’s happening, like mass = volume x density is incredible to me. Then I look up how was what mass is agreed upon. How did scientists agree upon what density is. How is it measured. How is it we can be super accurate with things we made up in our mind (numbers) and then all agree upon common definitions of them. That’s why I get annoyed at subjective philosophy and messing around with the meaning of words. It’s anti-scientific and ruins the human ability to discover more of reality.

20. The cult of celebrity disappears from your mind, you are over them all. I truly do not care and wonder why I ever did, why I ever had heroes of any kind. Even stuff like learning the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were thought up in order to sell toys, it’s like a Christian finding out a bible verse was inserted by monks hundreds of years later, or a word like presbyter was inserted, or how unicorn was a mistranslation of a translation and created whole cloth. People are people and make mistakes and at 40 I completely get this.

21. You want people to think of you, judge you, if only for any kind of feedback at all because you are now strong enough to take it and learn from it. The mark of an adult is honesty to strangers. I don’t mind if someone thinks of me and judges me, it means I have some meaning to them. Only kids and teenagers and weirdos want to be invisible. I want to be seen, heard, and get feedback. I can take it.

22. You realize you could become a criminal, so you had better be careful. I mean this in the most law-abiding way possible. What I am saying is that when you are older you no longer tolerate as well the mischief and injustice life brings and you can see yourself flying off the handle as much as a high-testosterone youngster if you are pressed too hard. There is a level of anger that comes out in adulthood that, for many, was previously well tampered down when out in public. It could be self-confidence, it could be self-dignity, but when I became a parent and got older it was like I unlocked a new level of anger.

23. You’ve been around long enough to know things often don’t work out. And you are the reason! Checkmate, stoics! You have probably tried, and failed, with many things at this point in life. Some of them were entirely your fault, some were not, and yet, we can always see how we could have put in more effort. But don’t worry, as things continue to not work out you are almost glad for some of it because you can eventually see that it was good for something to not work out. Things don’t have to work out, in fact, a long series of not-working-outs can be good for growth and wisdom, or put you on a path that you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself, and yet it is better than what you would have planned.

24. The future certainly didn’t take care of itself, now did it? Well, that’s note entirely true, the future did take care of itself, for itself. It didn’t take care of you like you wanted. You wanted the future, your future-self, to get things done so you wouldn’t have to worry, but now the time has come and present-self, all along, didn’t do half of what he was required to do as he suspected future-self would do it. While I still have no idea what my 60-year old self will see and think of me now (God willing!), I at least have learned a lot more is in my hands than I previously thought. Which is both scary and liberating.

25. The internet hasn’t helped you much in two decades. Oh, sure, I’ve learned a lot of things, but you know what else I’ve done even more? Passed time. The internet is too good at what it does, which is take up your time. Right before doing some writing for this I lost 2 hours of time watching Youtube videos and tinkering around with Mensa’s IQ course, learning that I was force-solving the problems horizontally when I needed to switch to vertical pattern recognition at some point and then switch again to horizontal plus vertical and eventually plus diagonal. I “learned” to approach problem-solving in multiple directions, or to think outside the box (there was no rule you had to solve horizontal, but the first practice question subtly created an unspoken rule) but at a dear cost of hours of my life.

26. You realize you have less and less in common with your peers, by now people could have had a drastically different life from you. I will on occasion have an opportunity to hang out with my peers. Some of them are wealthy, own multiple homes, go on vacations in exotic lands and are set for life. Some are poor and have been doing the same thing for decades. Some have lots of kids, some none. Some have had tragedy strike in their life and some are untouched. Some have health problems, some don’t. Some are even dead or dying while others are in great shape. We got used to our peers being only a little different from us, but as you age the gulf between peers widens and deepens. I may not be as successful as some of my peers, but I’ve read and thought and struggled so much I can’t relate to hardly any of them, especially those who have been doing the same job year after year.

27. You will have already cried about it by now (haven’t heard from your friends in years? Oh, sorry, over a decade? You’ve already cried about it). The crying is over, now it’s a grind to move through life. Someone didn’t hire you for a job? Too bad, do something else. Someone ghosted you? Get angry about it, whine, tear up, then move on. You don’t think anyone likes you? You don’t even like you, you can’t blame them.

28. Longtime fandom stuff no longer has much meaning for you (hey, when you’re trying to support a family and not be out on the street, who has time for Batman or Jedis?). I recently saw Dune 2. It was nice. It gave a lot of good feelings with the booming noises and special effects. Having read the Dune series, I discovered I didn’t care how closely or loosely they followed the book. I was there for spectacle, that’s all. I don’t care what they do to Star Wars now. I don’t care what happens to the Marvel universe (they could announce no more movies or shows and I would shrug my shoulders “All right, then”). I have an original poster of the second ninja turtles movie hanging on my wall. My feelings for it have diminished to almost nothing. I keep it because… why not keep it? If it has to go, it will go, but the feeling is gone. And regarding my first parenthesis, when you are living through high-inflationary times, a broken housing market, high debt and the threat of a looming economic collapse you tend to not care about fandom-related things. You hope someone comes up with something new for a change.

29. You actively seek to destroy that which you previously loved because your love for that thing wasn’t as organic as you thought (Ninja Turtles? Toys to make money. The cartoon? Made only to sell more toys. The movies? Surely they came first, right? Nope, made to sell toys.) I had mentioned in the previous point my nonchalance regarding my TMNT poster from when I was a child. Part of that nonchalance is because my interest in the turtles was a childish one, namely, they beat up bad guys using ninja skills. Heck, I even loved the word ninja itself. If they were the Teenage Mutant Karate Turtles I don’t know if I would have liked them the same. Martial arts is dominated by MMA now, but in my day it had a mystery to it, like if you learned martial arts you could suddenly beat up anyone. It was all a lie, of course. Yes, yes, you can train and beat people up, but not in an exaggerated way like in the movies. People are gassed after a single round if they aren’t training hard. Even a couple of determined bad guys can make mincemeat of you on the streets, I’ve seen hundreds of hours of riot and street fighting footage to know this. But getting back to my original point, by 40 you have reflected on the things that developed you as a kid and teenager and learn how much of that was foisted upon you. Did I want to join the Army because I had a love for my country and a desire to serve its military-political aims? Or was it because I grew up consuming loads of pro-military, pro-action, pro-fighting, pro-gun stuff and became obsessed with the fun and adventure of war and how cool I looked in camo.

30. Complexity becomes a hated enemy. I can’t stand when something is unnecessarily complex. Like not labelling a button in Canva or explaining what an editing technique is. Or when you search for something and you cannot find it because Google is ruled by ads. No, I don’t want to create an account. No, I don’t want to use two-step verification. No, I don’t want to get a text, then an email, then have to reset my password for reasons unknown, only to do it all over again the next time I sign into the site. Technology and webpages are unnecessarily complex to me now. It’s not cool anymore, it’s a user nightmare and I say this as someone who has looked under the hood and understands technology better than the average bear.

31. Is off-grid really so bad? Asking for a friend. Sometimes I fantasize I am single and childless and living out of my car, traveling and do gig work instead of suffering to make rent.

32. Maybe cities aren’t full of culture. We have New York City and Los Angeles that rule our culture. But what sorts of things come out of them? Nothing that I care for and seemingly nothing that represents my lived experience. Other than food cooked by competent people, what do cities have to offer to anyone? A place to meet up with people? A place where gangs and criminals can grow and develop? Where the latest TikTok fad can take place? Culture is grown on the internet now and it can come from anywhere. I believe the time where cities dominate the culture is coming to an end.

33. You become more interested in why you think or react a certain way than the thing itself. Why do I find Facebook annoying? I try to do something and it fails, but then it secretly succeeded and informed me it failed when it didn’t. I find it annoying because I expect technology to operate simply and efficiently. Why? What gave me the expectation that technology should be simple? I’m reading Ulysses right now. Said to be the greatest English language novel. I can’t make sense of why that is and I don’t want to have to take a course or read six other books to find out why its so great. Does it even matter that people say it’s great? Absolutely no one I know has ever talked about it. Surely it can’t be that good if only English professors enjoy it. Should we allow professors to dictate to us what is a great novel?

34. You are tired of the vulgar AND the sophisticated. I just want it straight. Give it to me straight. I’m not interested in someone who loves the way they sound. Just be clear and explain what you mean. None of this salesy talk, none of this political talk, none of this extra-careful-try-not-to-offend-anyone talk. Just. Talk.

35. You see people more for who they are. And it’s not pretty, is it? But you care less now that so and so is a bad mother or so and so doesn’t know what they’re doing at their job and it’s effecting others. It happens, it’s all a part of the human experience and you’re over it and more willing to peer directly into someone’s eyes and guess their IQ and accept them for who they are.

36. You can finally comfort your inner-child, but it feels too little too late. Ever wanted God or some entity to know how you feel and have compassion on you? That’s your present self reflecting on younger you. Yeah, it sucked you had terrible acne, that wasn’t fair, but in 20 years you won’t ever think about it. Or, it’s been so long since it happened it might as well not have happened and no one remembers you from back then anyway.

37. Being able to take your time on something is a wonderful luxury. Not feeling hurried in any way is a pleasant thing. The art of doing nothing, as is said in Italy. If I want to take days to make a drawing or write an article (this took months because I had a lot of long breaks) over a period of time I will go ahead and do so. Enough time has passed now where I don’t worry about how long something takes. If it takes a few years for my side business to take off, so what, so be it, it’s nice I don’t need it to be a slam-dunk megahit right now.

38. Fine, I’ll do it myself starts to become a mantra. I’d love to regale you with a lot of funny anecdotes of when I have to say this, but more and more you have to everything yourself if you want it done. Not if you want it done right, but if you want it done at all.

39. Resourcefulness becomes an important life skill. You have to be able to figure it out now. Your parents are either dead or elderly and incapable, much to your surprise. As you become more resourceful you realize how scarce the skill is. Most people won’t or don’t take the time to learn something or learn from something.

40. You might not be at half-time, you could already be in the fourth quarter. It’s easy for me to assume I’ll live to at least 80, but there’s no guarantee, lots of “young” folk die in their 40s and 50s. Want to start a new career? Heh, you might be dead in 6 months, so good luck with that. Want to save for retirement? You may never make it, bud. Because of this, I have a lot less patience for people who want to waste my time. I waste my own time really damn well, I don’t need someone else helping me along. That’s why I’m actually writing now, drawing now, reading the hardest books, and attempting businesses and skill development, because time is waning and being patient and waiting for something to happen has been proven wrong by twenty adult years of nothing happening.