Men are 3.85 times more likely to commit suicide than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). If this rate continues to skyrocket, what would the future look like with less men in the world?
Let’s state the obvious: with fewer men, there would be fewer fathers to care for their children, fewer husbands to support their wives, and fewer men to fill crucial leadership positions.
Life as a man is hard and scary, but I’m not implying it’s more challenging than a woman’s life. As a man, it’s expected for you to meet the demands of our everyday evolving society and be strong and courageous when fear is eating you from the inside out. To make life a bit easier for men, I’ve compiled ten pieces of life advice every young man should hear as soon as possible.
The earlier a young man hears this advice, the more wise they are in navigating through the treachery of life. Here are ten life-changing advice for young men:
1. Your time is more valuable than you think
When you’re young and filled with energy and vibrance, it feels like time moves slower, giving you the illusion that there is endless time for fun. As teenagers, we should have fun. However, that doesn’t mean we should adopt the mindset of pursuing everything that gives us pleasure.
Time is your most valuable asset, which you can either waste or use to your advantage. Instead of investing it into parties, alcohol, and social media, which only serve as short-term gratification, what if you invested that into learning, fitness, and self-growth? Doing so will set you up for success and make life easier later on.
2. Women aren’t the only thing that matters in this world
Our teenage years are the time of self-exploration, where we start discovering our identity and seeking romantic partnerships. As a young man who’s never fallen in love, it’s easy to fall into the temptation of believing that the girl you see in class or at the coffee shop is the one and only.
If you’ve fallen into this mindset, I urge you to let go immediately. The higher you put her on a pedestal, the more you prioritize her over your health, well-being, and success. If we haven’t built ourselves into somebody worthy of love, we shouldn’t be chasing after romantic partnerships. Otherwise, the relationship would be low quality and a waste of time.
3. Your appearance matters
Jonathan Freeman, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science observed, “People form personality impressions from others’ facial appearance within only a few hundred milliseconds.”
As humans, we all have a natural tendency to judge others; it’s rooted in our DNA. Therefore, whenever we walk into a room, people judge us based on looks and demeanor within milliseconds. Stopping others from judging us is out of our control, but how they form their perception of us, whether positive or negative, is in our control.
Our appearance plays a crucial role in our first impression when meeting people for the first time. How we smell, how clean our clothes are, and our grooming habits can be the difference between people taking us seriously and unseriously.
4. Your friends will make or break you
“You are who you hang around” is an advice we hear often, but it’s still something we overlook. Ending relationships is hard, but staying in toxic relationships that undervalue your self-worth is even more challenging.
As you grow up and change, so do the people around you. The group of friends that you’ve known since the beginning can turn against you within the blink of an eye. They may even begin pursuing a lifestyle that doesn’t appeal to you. The more you hang around these people, the more of bad of an influence they become on you, further stunting your growth.
For ways to identity a fake friend, read here.
5. You have a purpose and you shouldn’t waste it
Everyone has a purpose—sometimes, it may take months, years, and even decades to truly hone in and discover it. Still, our purpose is the driving force that keeps us going and the reason for getting out of bed every morning. We might haven’t discovered it yet, but that isn’t an excuse to continue living every day in stagnation.
If we’re living purposeless day by day, we’d simply be wasting our potential. Fulfilling your purpose doesn’t mean accumulating mass amounts of wealth, cars, and houses; it means understanding why you’re here and paving your path to fulfilling it. You all have a flame burning inside your heart, waiting for you to add fuel to the flame.
6. Emotional control is a superpower that you must tame
Corey Whelan from Healthline.com wrote, “Impulsive behaviors can significantly damage personal and professional relationships. Emotional self-regulation lets you pause before you do or say something harmful that may stop you from achieving short or long-term goals.”
Everyone, regardless of the gender, gets emotional. Anger, jealousy, and sadness are inevitable emotions of life. Although we can’t permanently prevent them from sparking up, we can learn to manage and keep them under control.
As men, we can’t afford to let our emotions take over. If we do, it’ll cause us to act in regrettable ways that hurt ourselves and those around us. Zooming out, the increase in mass shootings, violence, and sexual harassment committed by men is due to poor emotional control. It doesn’t mean we should suppress our feelings but rather observe our emotions from afar and find healthy ways to release them.
7. Growth lies outside of your comfort zone
The discomfort zone, where we engage in freighting activities to spark growth in specific areas, is scary and nasty, but so is the comfort zone. By continuing to live inside our comfort zone, we live without ever experiencing growth and never becoming the person our future selves would be proud of.
To experience growth and improvement, we must be willing to step outside our comfort zone and face discomfort face-to-face. That discomfort you experience is only temporary, and the more you face it, the greater the exponential growth you’ll experience. If you want a six-pack, you won’t get it by laying on the couch all day and watching TV. You have to do the uncomfortable of working out and eating healthy consistently.
8. Your habits define your character and future
Here’s some advice for young men I wish I had known earlier: based on what you decide to do today, you can either make everything easier or difficult for you in the future.
We live in a pleasure-seeking society in which pleasure surrounds us everywhere (drinking, smoking, gambling, partying, etc.). The benefit of engaging in these activities is that they provide an instant rush of pleasure, but this costs us valuable amounts of time, energy, and focus. Instead, we can invest that time, energy, and focus into areas that generate a higher net benefit and less regret in the future—fitness, learning, and studying.
9. You can’t always rely on your parents
The comfort, love, and support our parents provide is like the sun; it’s necessary for fostering our growth, but too much exposure can be detrimental. Part of adulthood and maturity is becoming independent and taking responsibility. If we’re always clinging to our parents for stability, we’ll never learn to care for ourselves and stand independently. Like learning how to ride a bike, those training wheels will eventually have to come off.
