General Rules of Thumb:

There is a long list of rules that aren’t necessarily consequential enough to get their own chapter, but they need to be mentioned nonetheless. In this book we talk about taxes, dating, finding the right apartment, ect., but there are small mistakes that you might make without a little guidance from a professional fuck up. That’s what we’re going to address in this chapter, the general rules of thumb. The things that won’t make you a millionaire, or necessarily get you laid, but will bring you closer to being an actual, functioning adult human.

Don’t Ask A Girl For Her Snapchat:

If you’re over the age of twenty-one years old and you ask a girl for her Snapchat instead of her phone number, you don’t deserve skin. Communicating on Snapchat should be left for college undergrad kids messaging their booty call to come over at 1:30 AM so they don’t have to deal with the embarrassment tomorrow, people trying to buy substances, and those who currently reside in Indonesia. Nobody actually interested in a girl would ever pursue them on an app that pushes stories titled how me and my girlfriend make it work, the story of our 600 pounds LGBTQ relationship and How I eat without a tongue. It’s an app for children that was sick in middle school, where you would brag to your friends which girl on the soccer team sent you the grainiest iPhone 5 picture possible, kind of wearing a bra. 

Limit the Daily Substance Intake Beyond Nicotine:

If you’re old enough to have more than one thing on your LinkedIn profile, there’s no reason to be doing any substance apart from nicotine on a daily basis. I’m not a judgmental guy, I’ve had my fair share of issues. As you’ve read already, I have friends that are sober, but if you’re doing anything besides nicotine and caffeine every day of your life, you’re going to run into some problems. An edible or one bowl to fall asleep? Fine. But getting stupid high every single day? That’s the behavior of guys who spend their time and energy participating in cutthroat debates on r/JoeRogan while sitting in a kiddie-pool filled with their own cum….. and it’s a really expensive habit. High three or four times a week? Sure, in your mid-twenties, with only a few responsibilities, not that bad. Let’s just be reasonable. 

Gossipping:

If you ever feel bad about yourself, that you’re a failure of a human being or that you think there’s a chance you might perish in a grave next to no one, please, for the love of God, go to r/NYCinfluencersnark on Reddit. It is a subreddit in which women, mostly in their early twenties, judge the actions of teens with big following under a microscope. Feeling like you want to give up on romantic relationships or that you’re going nowhere in life is one thing, but I cannot imagine something more pathetic than participating in a community where you debate whether or not a seventeen year old meant something fatphobic by lipsynching to a certain sound on Tik Tok. If only Jeffrey Epstein and his constituents were attracted to people who ACT like their in middle school, because there’s a lot of grown adults on the internet who love nothing more than spewing hatred on a keyboard that should be on an island so far away from me that I’m unaware of their existence- kind of like all of us with iPhones chose to forget the existence of the slaves in the Congo who made them while posting activism stuff on social media whenever it’s trendy to not be racist. You’re going to try and cancel someone for a celebrity agreeing with something you don’t like, but you haven’t been outside in days and you watch Hulu’s original content. You were canceled at birth. As soon as they cut the umbilical cord on you, the nurses told each other that while sanitizing their hands. What are you, the fucking Stasi? Shut the fuck up!

I know celebrities are retarded, I’ve met many in real life. Maybe not all of them, but at least eight out of ten are brainless, silicone-filled, materialistic, demons from hell whose lips look like balloon animals. They are, for the most part, not real people. But, to spend your one precious life obsessing over them for good or bad? That stuff needs to stay in your teen years. For better or worse, studying a celebrity's life like an anthropologist whose sole focus is on one subgroup is a telltale sign of a person who is not at all well-adjusted. 

Beer at Weddings:

I’ve been to a few weddings after turning the legal age to drink, and I’ve stood by my Dad’s advice of sticking to light beer until everyone is a mess and nothing matters anymore. You don’t ever want to be the drunkest person at a wedding, you want to get loose enough to the point where you’ll disregard the fact that anybody else who isn’t white will be joking about your dance moves the next day. It takes a grown man a ton of Bud Lights to get embarrassingly sloppy, and while you’ll probably get there by the end of the night anyway, you won’t be the first one to reach that milestone, and at a wedding, that’s what really matters. I’d recommend this practice to ladies and drinking White Claws or low ABV wine like Pinot Grigio. 

Expect Stupid People To Get Far:

The kid who peed in every corner of your college campus? He will work as a retirement strategist for BlackRock. The girl who once argued that trans canine rights are a prevalent issue the mainstream media doesn’t touch on? She will work as a higher up in audible.com’s misinformation department. That powerful family’s crackhead son? He will be on the board of an energy company in Ukraine. The dumbest people you know will end up making a lot of money, with a lot of influence. For fuck’s sake, guys, look at the clown posy we have in Washington DC. We, the people have, in the past few years, elected a pathological lying Brazilian drag queen and a preformative bartender who sells a $58 sweatshirt that says drink water and don’t be racist. I built a Tik Tok account to over 100,000 followers. That’s three SEC schools worth of people, and I’m a guy who thought that black people were breastfed chocolate milk until I was ten. 

Making Mom Proud:

You simply cannot succeed in the heterosexual dating world with elbows on the table, an apartment that resembles O-Block, or talking about yourself without asking a girl questions about her life and interests. Nothing you do as a single guy in your twenties has to be perfect, but you just can’t be a slob. Dishes should be done every day except when you’re battling a guerilla-warfare-style hangover. Beds should be made every day unless you’re sick and laying in one. Bed sheets should be washed at least once every six weeks or when they are too covered in (most definitely yours and not hers) cum. Let’s make sure that our counters are wiped down, we are vacuuming and mopping before a girl comes over, and that we own a few books and candles to hide the fact that we are primates pretending that we understand and uphold Western values and expectations. 

Mixing in a Salad:

Food deserts absolutely exist, they just exist in rural Southeast or in long forgotten towns in the Southwest, not in Northern cities where fat people like to pretend they live. People are free to think or eat whatever they want to, but I recommend trying to eat something green everyday. 

Bring a Gift:

As opposed to college, food becomes a big part of social gatherings in your twenties. As a guy in college, you’re either eating really gross slop and putting on weight like you’re preparing for a movie role, you have your parents credit card to buy groceries with, you manage your money well, or you have an eating disorder you are afraid to acknowledge because it’s not on purpose and you’re just fucking broke. In college, I paid my own fraternity dues, and considering I went to school down South, this ate up almost all of the money I made over the Summers. Rather than getting a job at school, I had decided to put all my effort and energy into my website, which was the genesis of my career as a writer, and then a guy involved in venture capital. I was so broke my Freshman year of college that when my friend’s parents would come into town and take me out to dinner, I would actually consume mashed potatoes like they were slop in my trough. Gulag prisoners ate more than I did that year. 

This brings us to today. Once you can kind of afford life, there are expectations for giving your host something. The gift should be completely determined by the environment, but it should be a gift nonetheless. Your friend who is a single guy invites you and others over to watch a game and caters a little food by way of Doordash? Leave him the beers you don’t drink and a Venmo that covers your tab. Your girlfriend’s friend is hosting a little Friendsgiving party? How about a half-decent bottle of red wine? A $26 bottle of Decoy Pinot Noir, maybe paired with a little cheese. A bottle of my favorite Oregon Pinot Noir, Erath, could also suffice, and it’s definitely not going to break the bank. Friends hosting a little we just moved in rooftop and burgers event? How about some High Noons for their fridge? Bringing a little charcuterie board for a double date in your friend’s apartment, getting up early and buying the bagels when staying over at your friend’s parents’ beach house for the weekend, or even giving the pregame host the first bump of cocaine before SantaCon all go a long way. It’s one thing to not reciprocate if an older, more well-established person in your life invites you over for a long weekend or takes you out to dinner, but for people your age on a level playing field, you always have to find a way to present them with a nice gesture of gratitude.

Accept Your Age:

Growing up, like the rest of you, all I ever wanted was to be cool. I got the Jordans in middle-school, I drank and listened to Alex Bamford Soundcloud mixes in high school, I did drugs in college, and I always yearned for attention from pretty girls and people who could get me to the top. As an adolescent, I always hated that I lived in a rural area and I didn’t really have a downtown center to walk to where I could get a slice of pizza and try to finger a girl. Now? None of this is true. Mid-way through my college tenure, I stopped listening to all new music, and I’ve never gone back. I don’t know what’s going on with celebrity drama, I haven’t watched a regular season NBA game in years, and my most commonly used social media platform is now Reddit, whose users I used to make fun of recurrently. Every year, my consumption of pop-culture declines to the point where I probably don’t even know who most famous people are unless they play football, know how to throw a 95 mile an hour sinker, write books, or make me laugh. After living in a few shoeboxes, I could even see myself wanting to raise my kids with some acreage. 

I know this may scare or shock some of you, but I’ve also never been happier. I have not completely become my Dad yet, I’ve just accepted my fate of getting older. I’ll always check out the new restaurant in town everyone is talking about, I’ll watch the new show on HBO, and if there’s an interview that’s breaking the internet, I’ll check it out. But the new twitch streamer trending on TikTok or Larsa Pippen’s new husband, that’s no longer for me. Reflecting on my younger years, I always thought that the most admirable people older than me were the most honest, guys and girls who admitted that their youth was fraying away and weren’t afraid to make a joke at their own expense. For the younger kids who are carefully creating music mixes and dubbing them with no viral songs, I hope I can extend the same courtesy. Much like an MLB pitcher whose velocity tails off with age, I’ve transformed my game around the player I am today, not the one I used to be five years ago. I’ll still drink 60 light beers on a crazy long weekend, risk pulling a muscle playing pickup basketball, eat too much Taco Bell, and play video games until my eyes bleed, but I’ve relinquished some of my youth, and I really don’t mind that. 

Know That You Don’t Have To Live In A Social Bubble: 

Until you have a child, you really have no obligation to any social bubble. If you don’t like your so called friends, you can leave.

Setting Goals: 

Life in your twenties can be repetitive. Wake up, shower, breakfast, work, eat, Zyn, work, gym, eat, Zyn, relax. Doing that in front of a computer all day isn’t coal mining, but it certainly isn’t as exciting as galavanting around Europe. Aside from spontaneity, setting goals is another remarkable way to make the days more meaningful. Former athletes especially struggle to find new life meaning in their twenties, but running a half marathon, painting a picture, reading a book, saving up to travel, and learning a new skill like fishing or coding are all productive ways people get the most out of their short lives without sinking into the depths of depression or detachment. Humans can do unbelievable things when we put our minds to them, and while getting started on something completely new is never easy, there’s no better pride than eventually feeling comfortable in the uncomfortable.

Know That the Most Narcissistic Person You Know iIs Being Validated by Their Therapist:

Close your eyes, and picture the worst person you know. Think about your experiences with them, think about all of the egregious ways they’ve fucked people over, and think about how easy it was for them not to care at all. Now, I want you to picture a brunette white woman with glasses sitting across from them, and telling them that their behavior is okay. I’m happy that more and more people are using therapy, but therapy only works if your therapist isn’t an idiot. I once knew a priest who would drive drunk everywhere, all the time. Cops would pull this guy over, get up to his window, and say I’m so sorry, Father, and he would say, now be good my son. You think I would recommend finding solace in confessing your sins to that guy? No, just like I wouldn’t recommend getting all of your life advice from a person who's telling people you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to support them right now. You should never trust a priest with a salt life sticker on the back of their car, or a therapist with a wild, moon child in their Instagram bio. Find value in yourself, it’s there. 

Know That Your Parents Were Right About A Lot Of Things:

Swimming in the shallow end is great because it’s easy to judge your parents for their mistakes when you're far away from encountering any of the struggles they faced in your childhood, but once you enter the deep end, things look a little different. You may not have appreciated how much sacrifice went into getting you that Wii in 2008 back in the day, but you certainly will now.