As I've restarted my self improvement journey for the umpteenth time, I've found using cash is a better way to manage expenses to ensure you think about each transaction. An additional benefit of using cash is creating an opportunity to interact with women. Swiping a card is impersonal and effortless both from a financial management standpoint and human interaction standpoint. As I sat at my local Denny's today and noticed quite a few young and attractive waitresses, I pondered this simple fact. Create opportunities to engage, dont use credit cards, and don't tip on a computer screen (especially not before a service is provided). Technology has made it too easy to miss opportunities like this. Think twice about how technology is hindering your interactions with others. You might also standout by being the only person who pays cash or takes a different approach and could eventually lead to a conversation about how you are intentional with you actions which every woman will find attractive. Let me know what you do to create interactions with women and let's share ideas to be more intentional with our day to day interactions.

Most guys spend decades optimizing for the wrong fucking metric. They grind to six figures, then seven, stacking cash while their calendar fills with obligations they can't escape. Golden handcuffs. They call it success because that's what they were told to chase. But here's what nobody explains when you're climbing: once you hit around $75K-$100K (depending on your location and lifestyle), additional income stops buying freedom and starts buying complexity. More overhead. More people depending on your time. More meetings about meetings. More obligations you can't walk away from without blowing up the whole structure. I know guys pulling $300K who have less autonomy than I did at $80K. They can't take three weeks off. Can't ignore their phone for a day. Can't turn down projects they hate because their burn rate requires constant feeding. Here's the actual metric that matters: How many hours per week do you HAVE to work to cover your fixed costs? Not your income or net worth. Your required working hours. If that number is above 15-20 hours, you're not building wealth. You're building a job with better pay. And every dollar you add to your lifestyle that increases that number is making you poorer in the only currency that actually matters. Calculate it right now. Take your monthly fixed costs (mortgage/rent, utilities, insurance, minimum food, transportation). Divide by your effective hourly rate. That's your freedom number. Everything above that is optional leverage. The guys who get this right are structuring their income around assets and systems that don't scale linearly with their time. Rental properties generating mailbox money for minimal oversight. Digital products that sell while they sleep. Equity positions that pay regardless of hours logged. Service businesses where they're not the primary deliverable. Dividend portfolios covering baseline costs so they never have to be a W-2 slave again. I'm not talking about the FIRE crowd retiring to Thailand on $30K/year eating rice and beans. I'm saying build enough fuck you money that your baseline survival doesn't require trading 40+ hours every week.

As we have seen from the corporate downsizing with installation of AI or other reasons, toxic politics, insider trading, and the constant selling out of the American people and doing NOTHING about it; I estimate America has only 5 years left before the system cannot withstand the pressure of the weight its weakened itself to hold and collapses. So its best to break off and form your own communities away from big cities and defend them wil zeal or run for office, taking these position away from the traitorous scum that sold us out but this must happen quickly. These are our only options. Elsewise, this country is DOOMED and may already be. The system is too far broken to fix. What do you all think?

Reflecting over 42 years of my life, I've learned society is driving us apart because loneliness fuels emotional spending and bankrupt reward systems in our brains to spend every dime (or even go in debt) to measure up to something that is impossible and doesn't even exist (though social media makes you think it does). I've decided no social media outside of content based on forms of accountability towards self improvement, government, and life in general. No dating apps, no brain rot content, no passive forms of communication other than what's absoluitely necessary. I even practice this at work by forcing people to schedule meetings to discuss important topics rather than drop turds via Microsoft Teams or email (cowards way out) without actually having a conversation about it. As a professional turd polisher early in my life in the military, I wish I knew this important lesson but with time it became obvious. We have to hold people (and ourselves) accountable in every aspect of our lives or else we are in effect rewarding bad behavior by enabling it and that behavior will continue. This behavior will continue to take advantage of you until you have nothing left to give. You may think you're being noble and helping others, but the reality is, people are using you without rewarding you (except for true brothers who sacrifice in return for you, which is extremely rare, even in the military). If you enable this behavior, you become part of the problem. You must take risks to break this cycle in every aspect of your life. Cut people off completely if you must and if they come back and seek true forgiveness and change their ways, you can let them back into your life. Real results require real sacrifices and taking the harder path opposed to what is easy. If you're lonely, get a dog. My dog really helped me when I was struggling and before I realized I needed to take action and accountability for my problems and for enabling bad behavior. Stop chasing the lies of social media and start living on your own terms. Take joy in the simple things in life and openly reject what popular media says you should do. This is how I found my peace and how I vow to life my life.

Discuss. What do you do? how much are you making etc.