My Story
I'm 24 now, which means I am one of the first people in human history to grow up in the digital age. We as young people have been the guinea pigs in an experiment that we never got the choice to opt in to, and unfortunately, the experiment is failing. We are seeing less happiness, fulfillment, relationships, and hope for the future than any group of people that have ever lived, and it isn't our fault. What that doesn't mean however, is that it isn't our problem.
I know first hand, the same way that I'm sure you reading this know, that there is no way out if things go the way they are. The average person is on track to stay in this hole their whole lives, and the future looks bleak, the trend is going in the wrong direction and unless something big happens, we are headed for a slow life of consumption and inaction that will take us to a death full of regret.
I lived the life I am describing. I fell into all the traps of addiction, gambling, video games, and a depression that led me to a brush with death at an age that no young person deserves. I grew up glued to my phone, gaming until 3am, watching stuff that made me feel worse about myself and doing it again the next night. After my Masters in engineering I sent about 350 job applications from my bed, 8 hours of screen time a day, vaping constantly. I had the degree, I had the gym routine, I could hold a conversation, but I felt absolutely nothing.
The reason I'm doing this is to help young people, particularly boys and men, to understand how to avoid going down that road, and how to get off of it, and I feel I am directly in a position to do so having lived the experience myself.
Since that time in my life, I have developed a passion and deep understanding of evolutionary psychology, ancient wisdom, philosophy, and neuroscience, enough to realise that we all understand essentially nothing about anything. I've learned from people much older than myself and tried to translate that aging knowledge into the relatable and digestible format that young people can understand. I want to bridge the gap between all the information that worked up until less than 100 years ago, and repackage it alongside cutting edge science and emotional understanding for a generation that has grown up in a world that would be unrecognisable to our ancestors, grandparents, even older siblings.
We are moving so fast now that there is less and less of a connection between generations, where even I at 24 am losing touch with 18 year olds, and someone in their 30s just doesn't really get the youth's culture anymore. We as a society are crying out for an older brother or young uncle archetype, and I want to fill that void.
It took me a long time to get where I am now. I started in lockdown, when I went so far into myself that I believe I found the bottom, and it was that long period of introspection that led me to accepting the weak, angry, embarrassed parts of myself that my brain was trying to hide from me. It was then that I started reading Jung, the Greek epics and philosophers, going from gym bro science to the Huberman level, optimising my life as far as I could with supplements, routines, diet. Its on that journey that I made the connection between self-improvement and self-acceptance. How do you decide you want to improve your life while simultaneously accepting yourself to the point that you don't feel that you need to. Thats the question I spent several years answering, and its the tension between those two ideas that a lot of people struggle with. How do we know what to do next, what should we be aiming at, and how do we get there?
Since I started working on this, I've built a 2.5 year relationship, got into the ring for Muay Thai 3 times, built the physique that younger me never thought was possible, a Masters degree in Engineering and got a job outearning everyone I know. But the catch is that the way I got those things was by relinquishing them as goals. I say all the time that those things are external manifestations of solving an internal problem, and that internal problem is what I help people with.
I help people understand how to forgive themselves for their natural reactions to a world we aren't built for, how to respond to the negative voice in your head and free yourself from the grip it has on you. I teach the concrete steps you can use to manage our new environment, how to realise that no amount of discipline, motivation, or self-control will ever stop you from being weak, stupid, and lazy, and how to set your life up so those natural traits don't lead you down the traps of addiction.
680 videos, 1.9 million views, and the DMs I get every day from people going through exactly what I went through are the reason I keep going. I'm right at the very start of all this. The podcast is new, the community is new, the coaching is new. But the ideas aren't new at all and I'm not pulling the ladder up behind me.