 Over my hiatus I've spent lots of time talking with the closer members of my audience about more personal topics than economics and politics and found some very worrying patterns. My audience is primarily men in their late teens or early adults and are part of the same issue affecting that broader demographic which is plaguing our societies and nobody seems to realise it and if they do they know even less what to do about it. And that is a sense of hopelessness leading to depression and even suicidal feelings. Men around my age are largely dissatisfied with life, the world and their place in it and allow this perception of their standing or lack of it to define them and determine their happiness which is disastrous thinking and just plain wrong. I believe a harsh application of truth is most effective here and if you think that you're among these people I've described then you're a big boy and should be able to handle hearing all of this. You have not been wronged, you are not entitled to happiness or a fulfilling life, you have to earn it. Many people are drawn to fringe politics out of this false belief that someone, some force is actively making your life difficult. The government, taxation, Trump, Biden, gun control, the rich, the patriarchy, the gays, the straights, men, women, someone out there is actively preventing you from being given the life you claim to deserve to be. This is a rampant and childish notion running rife through all of our culture and is simply backwards. If you want to live a good life only one person can achieve that and it is you. You do not have a right to be given a good life just for being alive. The life you're given is a lump of clay and unless you mould it to be what you want it to be it's going to remain a damp lumpy brown mess and there is nobody you can blame for this but yourself. The simple fact is that who you are, what you stand for and what you deserve starts from within yourself. Hopelessness and loathing are an internal problem and yours to fix, nobody else's. This doesn't mean you have to do it with no help if that's what you need. If it means going to therapy that is still up to you to get out of bed, pick up the phone and fix your problems. You can point out all the problems in the world and claim how depressing they are but the only judge of what you let affect your state of mind is you and if you let the outside world affect your internal self then quite honestly you are developing the habits of a weak mind. Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. If you make a habit of letting the universe at large define you and your mental state then you are letting yourself become someone who will not only always struggle to achieve happiness but quite frankly wouldn't deserve it. And habits are hard to break. The longer they go on for the more entrenched they become but overcoming obstacles is the very first step to excellence and all that follows from it. An Olympic sprinter who takes a year to shed their run time by one second has achieved less in that time than a lethargic person who takes a minute off of theirs. The greater the obstacle in front of you the more motivation you should have to overcome it. Stand at the top and look back at how far you've come. Take pride in yourself and what you alone have achieved then dust yourself off and move on to the next one. The point is that if you are unhappy and don't even take the first steps to molding yourself in mind and body to improving yourself, making yourself a better person more worthy of happiness then why should you have a right to be happy in the first place? After all one of the motos of America is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not being given it. It's not a thing that somebody else bestows on to you or can withhold from you. It is an achievement you earn through virtue and living according to your values. When it comes to this sort of thing I always invoke the philosophy of teaching someone to fish rather than giving them one and from this talk so far it should be obvious why. But if you're gripped in the throes of woefulness over injustice in the world, the way other people treat you, your insecurities and worry over what others think about you then you already know what it is that is actually making you unhappy. Even if you're too afraid to be honest with yourself and look inward because that's a much harder thing to do than look for scapegoats. But life is hard. Life is hard for everyone and hardness is the default position that you have to overcome. Your life would still be hard if the world were the way you wished it to be because it is the very nature of your existence. It's blindingly obvious why it seems the majority of socialists are absolutely crippled with mental illnesses and want to completely unravel the fabric of the entire world and make it again in their own image. It's because they are deeply unhappy, unfulfilled and weak people who don't want to fight their inner demons because it is easier to blame others for their existence. And with their sense of self-worth so utterly corrupted and misguided it is never any surprise that when they do get to manifest a society in their own image that it's nothing short of disgusting and terrible. There is so much truth in Jordan Peterson's famous saying that you should clean your room before you try and fix the world. A broken person cannot fix other people. And if you do not find happiness within your own mind, values and achievements then you are freely letting external forces break you and that is the essence of weakness. Weakness however is not a condemnation or an eternal fate. Think especially of my clay analogy. If somebody is physically weak they don't become strong by being sad about it. They go to the gym. If they ridicule people who do go to the gym in order to reject their insecurities rather than address them then they will remain weak physically and even weaker mentally. Mental strength is trained just as much as physical strength and requires you to do some heavy lifting. You need to seriously consider what your values are and more importantly why. Ask yourself if you're not living in accordance to them then the most crucial step comes in asking whether or not you have control over that. If you value freedom as I do to paramount you have to look at what aspects of freedom are within your control. I, for example, can't legally own a gun. I don't want to undergo the consequences of owning one illegally and I can't move to a place where I can. I could let the fact that I can't control this infringement on my values affect me or I can choose to accept it. It doesn't make it any less unjust and justice is one of the highest virtues a person should strive for. You should try to make this value become more controllable if you can but in terms of your happiness your inner peace you ultimately have the choice to let the external influence the internal or not and I choose to let my happiness be defined by myself by living the best way I can. If I want to live a way that I cannot throwing a tantrum won't make it any more possible. If you are a young man distraught that you can't get a girlfriend why can't you? Are you overweight, lack social skills, have idle hobbies or no friends? Well whose fault is that? It's not the fault of the girl you like. It's not the fault of society nor is it in any of their powers to change it. It is only in yours. If you cannot change these reasons of say disability either physical or mental then do your best to not let it define you. Are you a disabled person or a person that happens to be disabled? Once again the decision is yours and I need to talk more about what it actually is to look inwardly and develop mental fortitude that the journey is the real reward as the destination is essentially impossible. Unless you are perfect and are what is known as a stoic sage you will always have moments of a lapse of rationality where your emotions get the better of you and the negative forces of the outside world make it through the cracks in the walls of acceptance that you've built. But you are not perfect nor should you be. Imperfection is an aspect of human nature and simply the material universe. Accept your inherent flaws and champion your strengths even if they are few and through a daily process of training yourself to be a better person the days will fly by and you will look back on your former self and laugh at the time when you couldn't get a girlfriend because you were a hermit yet tried to blame other people as if that wasn't your problem to solve. Never compare yourself as a person to another, only the person you used to be. Seek every day to be stronger and better than the last and you won't believe how far you can go. If I've reached out and touched something within you here and you want to learn more what I've espoused is the philosophy of stoicism and I've mentioned it before although this is a very blunt force interpretation of it simply because that's what I find most effective for myself. Whether you've found the way I've said this too brutal yet with an underlying truth or you agreed entirely then you have to do some further reading because you naturally take out of it what helps you while leaving behind what doesn't. My recommendation for reading is a book called Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This was an ancient Roman Emperor and as such the book is almost 2,000 years old but its ideas will never become outdated. That is because stoicism has such a succinct, grounded and evergreen understanding of human nature that it simply can't be wrong in nearly all of its teachings. It's similar to how the Austrian School of Economics puts so much emphasis on refining assumptions through praxeology that it can make definitive claims on human nature and its results in economic activity and they always end up being right no matter how many sycophantic so-called experts construct pointless graphs to say otherwise but the results always inevitably correct themselves very quickly. Anyway, back to meditations. You need to understand that gap in time before you read it but also that it was essentially his journal that he wrote quotes in every day so it's not anything like a philosophical tome from Kant, it is literally a list of quotes not page after page stuck on the same abstract point on a theory of forms. It is simply an incredibly wise man telling you paragraph by paragraph how to live your life in order to find tranquility but also bear in mind that book one aka chapter one is literally a list of his family and friends that have been dead, buried and forgotten for millennia and thanking them for lessons and values they taught him in his life so go ahead and skip that part. If he still doesn't take your fancy there is another Roman by the name of Seneca and because stoicism has been building up a bit of a trend in recent years, if you just search for it on Amazon you can find oodles of modern books so if you prefer that just pick any of them with lots of good reviews. I would actually caution you away from reading Ryan Holiday to start with. His works are incredibly clear and great for beginners but he and other modern authors sometimes make the mistake of trying to relate stoicism to politics, something the ancients never do and nobody should ever do because it is a personal philosophy and not a political one. And as my audience is of course from politics I'd recommend going way back to not get aggravated by some claim about rolling over and taking some political institution that you believe is unjust and therefore making stoicism seem defeatist which it absolutely shouldn't be. If still stoicism doesn't quite float your boat there are other philosophies similar to this despite their disagreements due to being built on virtue, personal values, the pursuit of individual excellence and self-determination and these are from Aristotle and Ayn Rand so if you've ever considered reading them and rather that than stoicism then now is the time. I hope this serves to help the target audience I detailed at the start of this video and if that isn't you but you still found this interesting please actually leave comments telling me you'd like more of this. I'm not saying this is algorithm bait this video is a totally different topic from any I've made before so if be back on it will actually be super helpful. Thank you for watching take it easy.