Is He Really an Irredeemable Loser at 27?

"Little by little, one travels far."

The brief story you are about to read comes via X, and it seemed worth talking about because, pretty clearly, there are a lot of people today who can relate to it. They feel like they’ve gotten behind in life, they’re in a hole, and there’s no obvious way out of it. They feel bad about where they’re at, and they aren’t really sure if it gets better from here.

Read it, and you’ll see what I mean:

First of all, when someone comments on something like this, the first thing people REALLY WONDER is, “Do they REALLY GET IT or not?”

It reminds me of a time when I was desperately trying and failing to lose weight. I asked my genetically blessed trainer if he ever struggled with occasionally binging on garbage food he knew he shouldn’t eat. This guy, who looked like the “after” shot on an advertisement for testosterone, said, “Oh, absolutely. Sometimes I totally splurge on food I shouldn’t eat.” He then proceeded to tell me about the time he ate a slice of pizza, and I was like, “This guy does not get it.”

Well, before I talk about what to do if you’re having trouble treading water, I want people to know that I’ve struggled in many of the same ways this guy has.

I’ve slept in my car multiple times and once in an ELEVATOR because I couldn’t afford a hotel room. I also seriously considered sleeping in my car for a few months to save up rent money, but my parents were so horrified by the idea of their son being “homeless” that I abandoned the idea.

I’ve driven a car with brakes squealing so badly, I didn’t know how they were still working. The car would overheat when I drove too far, and I had rearview mirrors held on with duct tape. Eventually, when I did get to the point where I could trade it in, they sheepishly told me they could only give me $300 for it, and I didn’t complain because I KNEW how bad it was.

I bounced a number of checks in my early twenties, not because I was trying to be dishonest, but because I had such a small amount of money in my account and was cutting it so close that even a 2 or $3 bank fee could lead to a bounced check, which would add another fee, which could cause another bounce, etc., etc.

I still remember doing temp jobs to make ends meet, like laying sod, and I also remember having to go to job interviews in pants with holes in them that I endeavored to keep the interviewer from seeing, because I was too poor to get more pants. Similarly, I once manned the desk at GOP Headquarters in the county I lived in for free, but I had to give it up because they told me I needed to wear nicer clothes to represent the party. I totally understood where they were coming from, but I had to quit because I couldn’t afford better clothes.

I’ve had lots of roommates back in the day, sometimes had to find a way to make it a whole week on things like a bag of potatoes and dollar burritos, and had my car break down more than once without having any idea how I’d get the money to fix it.

Are there people with worse stories than that? Oh yes, by far. My own father lived through the Depression, and the way he was raised made what I just described sound like growing up at a private school in Cape Cod.

When this 27-year-old describes his life, it reminds me of being at a very similar point in my life, except for the fact that it’s not really my nature to get depressed.

I had a bachelor’s degree in psychology that only turned out to be good for getting jobs I didn’t want, like the time I worked with troubled teenagers in a group home. I owed money and worked jobs I detested, such as a Wal-Mart portrait studio manager and a Burger King assistant manager. I had roommates, very little saved up, nothing invested, a terrible credit score, shabby clothes, and Charlotte, NC, where I lived, didn’t have a great job market. Absolutely nobody would have looked at me and said, “This guy has a bright future.”

So, what changed?

In the “hero’s journey” you tend to see in movies, there’s always this one make-or-break moment, where the hero passes some test or learns some lesson, and everything changes.

The things is, that never happened to me, and it probably won’t happen to you either.

Instead, success ends up looking a little something like that 1,500-year-old quote from the Tao Te Ching:

You take a step towards where you want to go. Then you take another step and another step, even though there’s no guarantee it will get you where you want to be because you refuse to stay where you are.

There were a lot of them for me at one time or another. I worked two jobs and saved up money. I stopped borrowing money on credit cards, paid them off, cut them up, and didn’t use one for something like 10 years. I lived below my means. I moved to Alexandria, Virginia, because it had a better job market. I relentlessly read and tried to grow as a human being.

Maybe most importantly for me, given how things turned out, I wrote. I worked on a creative print zine in Charlotte called “Fubar” and wrote for other ones in town. I wrote on a gaming website about an old game called Utopia that I was extraordinarily good at. I wrote funny short stories about Diablo when it came out. I ran an online humor magazine. I wrote my own comedy bits and tried out for a local comedy sketch group. I wrote a pro-wrestling column.

Eventually, all of that turned into Right Wing News, which took me a certain way, but then really took off roughly a decade later when Facebook came along.

Of course, the point of all this is not, “copy what I did,” because there really is no avenue to success through creating a blog these days (There really wasn’t much more of one when I started either, but there was SOME OPPORTUNITY THERE, and I just made it work).

The point is to get where I wanted to go was a grind. It took going in the right direction, doing the right thing, and making sacrifices over and over again for an extraordinarily long time to get where I wanted to go.

Although I toughened up and generally enjoyed the journey, it wasn’t always easy and fun. It required making hard choices, outworking the people around me, and doing things when it would have been easier to sit at home and veg out.

To some people, this may sound discouraging. “Oh wow, he’s saying there is no one-week fix for my problems! He’s talking about real work. About foregoing the easy path for decades at a time to get where you want to go.”

Yes, but here’s the thing – what else are you doing?

Assuming you don’t die, time is going to pass anyway, so why not pass it doing things that will make your life better? Do you think thirty years from now you’re going to sit there and think, “I wish I’d spent more time watching Mr. Beast videos and playing video games than building up this nest egg that’s allowing me to retire.” No, of course, not.

One of the things about life is that no matter what you do, there’s going to be some suffering. So, why not suffer to get what you want instead of suffering the disappointment of feeling like you’re wasting your potential and failing in life?

Know the REAL REASON people never do what it takes to get ahead? It’s because we human beings are naturally hyper-focused on the short term. What’s the easiest thing I can do now? What’s the most entertaining thing I can do right now? How can I avoid discomfort right now? This is instead of, “What’s the thing I can do right now that will get me ahead of the curve in five years?”

Furthermore, think about the guy in the original example. He wants to live by himself, have a good credit score, investments, a job he wants, etc., etc., and guess what? He’s probably not going to have any of those things tomorrow or next week, and those dates are so close, they feel clear as crystal. So, when he looks at his future, it feels depressing and unchangeable even though it isn’t.

Do you know how you break out of that? You take a step TODAY. Then another step tomorrow. Then another one the next day. Then, instead of thinking, “I’m broke. What a loser I am,” you may be thinking, “Oh wow, I got a 2^nd job! This isn’t going to be easy, but I will finally be able to save some money” or “I got $200 from my aunt for my birthday and first thing, I put $100 toward paying off my debt! That was super responsible of me! I am really going to get that paid off!” Each small step you take changes you for the better. It pushes you in the right direction. As Tolkien said:

Ultimately, what I would tell the guy who made the post on X and what I would tell you is that you can do a lot more than you think, be a lot more than you are, and go a lot further than you imagine. You just have to think about it in those terms:

That 27-year-old? Like us, he has his whole life in front of him, and as long as he is determined to keep putting one foot in front of the other, he will get far further than most people. It just requires continuing to move in the right direction, getting back up when you’re knocked down, and judging what your future looks like not by where you are, but by the direction you’re moving in.

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