Advice From A Professional 25 Year Old

Happy birthday to me. Life is incredibly short, but also insufferably long at the same time. It sometimes feels like another 25 years seems like a long way to go. But when all is said and done, I’m proud of who I’ve become so far and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished thus far but there is still far too much to do. I have so much I want to do in my life, but I will likely never complete it all. But let’s move on. I’ve got a few nuggets of wisdom to throw at you.

My first piece of advice is usually aimed at younger people, but also at those who didn’t grow up with a smartphone in their hand or videogames as a main hobby. You have to train yourself to not be bothered by icons notifying you of new things. Whether it be a text message, a new item in a game, new challenges, emails, etc. Your phone and most of what’s on the internet will drain your time and energy without you noticing it so fast because you either want to see whatever it is that is fighting for your attention with that tempting drop of dopamine or even if you just want the annoying notification gone… just stop. Accept it, let the notification icon just sit there, because that app or game will use any excuse to show you another notification icon. I grew up playing a video game called The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. In this game, you go on an adventure with a companion fairy who will squawk at you whenever there is new information to learn, but it’s often not useful, and it’s just annoying. I had to learn quickly to ignore the flashing icon in the corner of my screen in order to enjoy the game and not stop every 15 minutes to make it go away. However, this plays into my next piece of advice.

Murder the perfectionist inside you. Keeping your home clean, doing things to the fullest extent, and making sure all your eggs are in order is great, but it also takes a lot of time and effort. They leave the last 2 percent in the milk because it takes an absurd amount of effort to get it out. The first 98% is easier and more efficient. This is easy advice for me by nature, so it might not be so easy for you. I am the kind of person whose desk or bedroom looks fairly messy, but I know where everything is and I can do things faster this way. I also learned this lesson from Zelda. In this game when you break something or kill an enemy they occasionally drop “hearts” that you can pick up to refill your health meter. But I and many other gamers find that we’d be running around picking up every heart even if we don’t need it. As you can imagine, it’s annoying and takes up more time than we realized. Now apply that to your life. Nothing needs to be perfect, and perhaps we should stop expecting perfection from others. Also, there is a sort of charm to life without perfection. It’s actually more relaxing and stress-free when every little thing is not perfect in my eyes, let go of control, and just enjoy it for what it is. This leads me ‘perfectly’ to my next point…. Sorry, that was a joke.

Gratitude. To be grateful. A straightforward and easy thing to do in theory. But in our world here in Canada and our southern neighbors in the United States, money is the primary motivator. For a company to get your money, they must work hard to tell you that you need their product or that your life should be better. It’s so deeply woven into our culture that you deserve better, therefore many people are not happy with what they have. Granted, yes, we could have more. But very few of us are really missing out on much of anything. I know lots of rich people whose favorite pass time is watching TV, something you can sustain on a $40k salary, maybe less. The old saying of money can’t buy happiness is true, especially since our biggest issue in North America is being so isolated from any sense of community and fellowship. I’ve worked hard to be more grateful for what I have in my life and I must say, you’d be surprised how rarely you need to open your wallet. Other than for food, I almost never open my wallet. Even my main hobby, gaming, I have more than enough to enjoy and lots of free games come out all the time. You won’t feel the need for expensive things, nice cars, nice clothes, and basically everything else. From what I can tell in life, as long as you have the gear to enjoy your hobby of choice, you pretty much never need much else and the small things you don’t have are cheap and don’t need to be high-end. For example, I have a fairly nice gaming PC to enjoy my favorite hobby, but I also enjoy sports and writing. Writing is literally free and a hockey stick and a soccer ball cost less than it does to fill my car with gas. Long story short it saves you money and you are happy with what you have, ultimately improving your life. Gratitude saves you from many other issues as well. You’ll stop comparing yourself to others, you’ll be simply content just living in your own space even if it’s just a one-bedroom apartment. Ultimately it sets you free and to care less about the things that simply don’t matter.

Next up is how important it is to have healthy competition in your life. Luckily for me as a gamer, I can get this from the comfort of my own home with friends and I love playing a certain competitive game where trash talk is almost as much fun as the actual game. Nothing beats playing this with friends and scratching that competitive itch. That said, it’s ideal to scratch this itch with physical sports because exercise is great too, but I’ll mention that in the next paragraph. In a nutshell, for some reason at least as a man, having something to do with friends where we compete against each other or other random people, is just so therapeutic. I’m sure there’s some science behind it, but I just know, my life never feels quite right without a healthy dose of trying to beat someone at a game while they try to beat me.

Exercise and mental strength. Of course, I had to mention exercise, that thing on the top of our new years’ resolution lists. I’m not going to tell you that you need to be an athlete since that’s not for everyone, and you certainly don’t need to be ripped, because let’s face it that takes a good chunk of time and energy. If you have a manual labor job or a job that has you working lots of hours, you probably don’t want to spend even more time working on something, even if that something is your body. Sadly, it’s really important to be healthy. It helps your energy levels and even more important if you want to be young with any future kids of yours, being in shape is the best way to do it. But also, I think at least as a man, it’s partially my responsibility to be strong to defend my family or at least be able to help around the house with manual labor tasks. I find far too many men these days are simply too weak. I know it sounds old school, but even those of us nerds can be strong. You don’t have to be a meathead to see the value of being able to kill a violent intruder with your bare hands if needs be. (but hopefully, that situation never happens to you). Mental strength is also important, a woman needs a man who can remain calm in any situation and not lose his cool, in order to solve the problem. But it’s also important for you as a man (or if you’re a woman but I’m mainly talking to men). There are many days at work where I must show grit and just power through the day, even if it seems like the worst day of my life and I’d rather go home and cry myself to sleep. But I don’t. I choose to be strong no matter how much it breaks me. Now I’m no rock, I’ve broken down to my wife about the many pressures I’m under several times, but you’d see a dinosaur before you see me give up.

Next, live like you’re poor. In other words, live well within your means. If you make $50k a year, pretend like you only make $30k a year. This takes some pressure off you and lets you save money faster. But most important if something happens to you financially or you lose your job or are trying to get a new one, it gives you breathing room to adapt to the situation. Finally, and maybe this is just me, expensive lifestyles and expensive stuff, seem to primarily exist just to impress others. If you combine this advice with gratitude, then you’ll feel no need to even spend that money on stuff. You’ll see a nice car, or an expensive watch on some dude’s wrist and think “what a waste.” As far as I can tell, the only point in money is to buy yourself time to actually enjoy life and sustain your preferred hobbies. Friends and family are free, and most hobbies and sports are really cheap. The importance of time is also so that you can hopefully make a positive difference in our dying world, or at the very least help make one person’s world better. I’m sure I could go on and on about the advantages of this, but I’ll move on.

This might seem kind of strange, but tell people how you feel, especially the good things. These days people don’t just get genuine compliments, and if they do, the person giving the compliment often has an ulterior motive. Next time you see, basically anything worthy of a compliment on a person, do it. At the local Tim Hortons and the dude behind the counter has a wicked beard, tell him! Next time the girl at the music shop has a cool haircut, tell her! (just joking music shops all died thanks when Spotify got popular). Next time there is someone in your life you think is awesome and you admire something about them, tell them! I’m very open with my friends about just how awesome I think they are and I let them know what aspects of their character I admire because the few times that’s happened to me, it’s let me know what I’m doing right in life and that people do recognize those good things. But rarely do people get told that their quiet actions of integrity actually matter. We’re always too quick to point out the bad in others, but a strong person encourages the good and helps lift others up. Cliche I know, but ever so important.

Finally, and I’m sorry but like most of my writing video games are littered throughout. This last paragraph is about video games, but please hear me out. Gaming is a very underrated hobby. Sadly, I understand why. Big companies make mediocre games designed to be addictive and have over-the-top explosions and fast-paced action. They also contain mini gambling systems in the form of loot boxes and other mechanics designed to feed on people’s fear of missing out. However, these games are only from the biggest companies looking to squeeze as much money out of people as possible. If you look a little harder, there is still a sea of endless games that do not do this. Games that are built on passion, and want to make something that will be a wonderful addition to the life of you, your friends, and your loved ones. Bare with me, I’m making a point. If someone wants to get into gaming, you can get started with a fairly average run-of-the-mill laptop, or even get into some solid modern gaming with a simple Xbox Series S for $380 CAD, and then get Xbox Game Pass for $12 CAD a month to get access to over a hundred games. The point is, it is very cheap. It’s even cheaper if you’re okay with getting into older game consoles like the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3. Unlike many hobbies, once you own the game and hardware to play it, it is yours forever. Many hobbies require monthly or yearly memberships or it’s a physical thing you build or work on, meaning you need to get new supplies. Unless your hardware breaks, there is no need to ever open your wallet again with video games. But why get into video games? Video games have something for everyone, most importantly the ability to hang out with friends and play games online with great convenience and even allows you to make new friends. Gaming is a great way to also express yourself, compete against others, go on adventures, learn new things, and give your brain a good workout. I think one of the most important features gaming has for parents, is the ability for you to actually keep up with what your kids are doing, and what they like and be a cool parent who actually has fun with your kid in a world that’s not entirely dictated by you. Working together as a team in a video game is great bonding, and playing games with friends and family is the best way to play games. Unless you’ve already shot your relationship with your kid in the chest, I bet they’d be happy to teach you how to play.

I think I’ll end it hear folks. But while writing this I discovered 3 more good points that all deserve their own articles, so stay tuned for those. Peace out everyone, I hope this was educational for you, and please make good choices!