Considering Male Values in Career Paths

I get the feeling that most men are dissatisfied with their jobs because their jobs don't reflect or reward their personal values. I'm a staff accountant and I will admit that it is not a very manly job. I've only ever had 3 jobs and they were all desk jobs in some office. Phone calls, paperwork, meetings, and emails all just kind of swirl together in endless drudgery. Being an accountant is a good job and it pays my bills but I kind of hit an epiphany that something was wrong when I had a meeting with my boss and he asked me how I was doing.

I told him that I felt like sacking a village, burning it to the ground, impregnating all the women, and stealing all the treasure just like great men (Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan) had done in the past. My boss really didn't know how to respond to my statement.

Earlier that day, I had been listening to the song Alexander the Great by Iron Maiden. And it made me feel like I should shoot for higher goals in life then just getting my freedom and living in the desert. Maybe when men became free, they decided to set up campaigns to conquer lands far and wide. I could just picture Alex getting a band of men, getting super drunk, and going on rampages smashing peasant villages to the ground just for the lulz. Should I want to start my own campaign, I'd have to travel to places without government jurisdiction and those places on Earth are very rare.

It got me to thinking that masculine values aren't really considered when choosing a career path. Even though salaries are a bigger factor for consideration, picking a career that is in line with your values would lead to higher levels of job satisfaction. A man will be the happiest when he can be a man. Since these sort of values aren't taught in the public school system or passed down from most parents, I thought this post would be a short guide or spring board to matching a set of values to a career path. 

Like the snakes of MGS, there are men that have the warrior spirit and have the desire of finding glory in combat. Those men that are willing to risk life and limb would be best suited to join the military and try to achieve high ranks or become elite fighters in the SEALs. While all men may have that desire to fight, destroy, and conquer, only a select few are willing to risk life for it. These men will make the best fighters. 

If this is too risky, men can still fulfill the values of being an enforcer and protector by becoming police or SWAT. Military and police all go through weapons training and endure physical training.

For those that want to rescue lives, firefighters, paramedics, and doctors would be good options. Of these three choices, being a firefighter would be the most dangerous and probably a good choice for adrenaline hits. Every job involving a fire means that there is always a time limit especially if there are people in danger inside the building. These men have to use a variety of equipment to protect from smoke inhalation, breach doors and walls, or extract people from windows.

For men that like to build or create, I can't think of a better choice than construction work. Building houses requires pouring concrete foundations, building frames, laying bricks, putting up drywall, and a hundred other steps. On the other hand, men may enjoy destroying things and there are jobs involved in tearing buildings down via wrecking balls, bulldozers, and explosives. If building or destroying isn't appealing, maybe repairs or maintenance is a good line of work. This would include professions such as mechanics, plumbers, and technicians. 

For those that want to hunt and seek, they have to become salesmen or entrepreneurs. Essentially, they are both the same but these jobs are most directly tied to your efforts. Because of this reason, your salary is only limited to how well you can perform. These are the only options for men to earn six figure salaries with only a high school education or less. Become a sales man or entrepreneur. 

A further note to consider is that career options will be limited by the job market. It may be necessary to find a job and build up capital before finding a job that you may enjoy and reward your certain set of values. Also note that a man's values can change over a period of time. Maybe a construction worker gets sick of it after 10 years and would prefer a job handling customer service in an air conditioned office. Maybe a plumber would rather become a day trader after saving up a few hundred thousand dollars. Remember that you career path doesn't have to be fixed for your whole life. It can be changed but doing so will require some effort.

Cost of Movement

A few years ago, I really enjoyed the games Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2. Both games are turn based strategy games where you build and direct units to smash the opponents units. One integral part of the gameplay was considering the movement of your units. Different units can travel different terrain and the terrain will affect how far a unit can go. Vehicles can't cross mountains, forests cut movement in half, and tires can't travel well off road compared to treads.

I think about how this is a great reflection in real life. Just moving a thing over a distance will take time, effort, energy, and money. In a sense, it is all about money. This is why shipping is more expensive the further is has to go. Moving an object will mean it has to be loaded on a truck, ship, or plane which burns up fuel to move. And one status symbol of the rich is how easy or fast they can move around.

The more money a man has, the easier it is for him to traverse the world. Simply by walking, a man can cover more than 26 miles in a day. By traveling on foot, the limitations faced is the human body. Walking will cause fatigue over time. Muscles will ache and a man will need some shelter if traveling multiple days on foot. Of course, he could always hitchhike but that method is dependent on someone else having a vehicle.

By traveling in a car, 26 miles can be covered in 26 minutes on the freeway. Of course, a man will need to spend the money on a car and spend money on gas. The car also need maintenance over long periods of time. If a man spend 12 hours driving on the highway, he could cover more than 700 miles. Of course, cars have their limitations. They travel the best on roads but not so well on water. A car will take you wherever the roads will take you in the Americas, but it is not an option if you wanted to go to Europe.

For the average man, the only way to get to Europe would to be to take a plane. Planes can cost millions of dollars so most men will never own one. So commercial airlines will take people wherever airports are. The cost over the ocean will cost a few hundred to a thousand dollars. The cost of the plane ticket will go towards jet fuel, maintenance, overhead, and the salaries of the airline workers.

In this sense, the average American can travel around the entire Earth in a day. It isn't a really big status symbol if you can fly. The status symbol comes in if you have your own aircraft like a private jet. The limitations of airlines is that flights are set on certain schedules, airline security can be a pain, and take off takes a long time because hundreds of people have to be coordinated and serviced all at the same time. In having a private jet, a rich man can take of whenever he is ready and can travel wherever an airport will allow him. The cost of having this freedom of movement is a few million dollars.

When men become very rich, their movement options become vastly expanded. He could get a yacht and spend time hundreds of miles away from the coast of California. If he wanted to, he could buy a submarine in order to see how far he could explore under the ocean.

The furthest place men have gone was into space and on the moon. This required the money from the tax payers of the entire country of America. Doing this required a large rocket, the infrastructure to launch the rocket, and a mission control team to oversee operations. The Apollo 11 program costed $355 million in 1969. Adjusted for inflation, the cost would be roughly $2.18 billion as of 2011. There are several billionaires that could potentially go to the moon if they wished.

To go further than space, I could only think that technology would have to be developed to travel between dimensions or time. I couldn't imagine how much money that would cost.

When TV started becoming obsolete.

One thing I encourage people to do is stop paying for television service. If you have a reliable internet connection, there is a plethora of media available whenever you want in. As far as I know, the only reason to pay for television service is if you want to watch live sports however I think you can just stream that on ESPN now.

It didn't happen overnight, but television was slowly starting to become obsolete when services like Netflix and Hulu started popping up. If you are really cheap, almost any topic can be watched on youtube for free. For me, the point when television started becoming obsolete was when I first watched the Angry Video Game Nerd on Screwattack.

A few notable episodes that I can think of off the top of my head is Ninja Baseball Batman, Super Mario Bros 3, Big Rigs, and Hong Kong 97. These are all gut busting episodes and I remember being a fan of AVGN ever since 2008. AVGN was the first internet personality I ever knew about. Shortly after, I found Nostalgia Critic and then Team Four Star. Around 2010, youtube personalities were all over the place. In 2008, I was subscribing to as much content and I would get excited just to see a new video a week. Today, my inbox gets flooded with content. With all this content, it seems silly to pay for television.

Living conditions for millennials: Update from Zero Hedge

While checking the only news source I trust, I came across two articles regarding the reality that my generation faces.

The first article linked here shows how many people still live with their parents. Apparently, in the age 18 to 34 demographic, 31% of this demographic is currently living with their parents. This is a figure I want to track in the future as it might be an indication of two things. This is most likely the result of kids racking up too much student debt and not getting a good paying job that will allow the kid to live on his own. A much smaller percent of this demographic might be kids living with parents in order to save up money to buy a house or other property without having to take out a mortgage.

The second article shows how tight millennials might be pressed and how far kids need to strip away in order to live independently. There are more in California paying rent to live in shipping containers. The rent for a shipping container in San Francisco is $1000 a month. And that just sounds insane because shipping containers only cost about $2500.  One year worth of rent could buy a shipping container and some land in Texas.

I predict that in the next few decades, populations will start dispersing from heavy populated cities into more rural areas just because of the high cost of living in cities.

Kids need to play Final Fantasy

After playing several games from the Final Fantasy series, I started to wonder if games like Final Fantasy do a better job teaching critical thinking skills than public schools. To be fair, courses such as calculus, chemistry, and physics are far more rigorous than playing a video game but the bulk of classes I endured in school were liberal arts and humanities. Throughout high school and parts of college, I had several classes where you simply just memorize a set of facts and spit them back out on a multiple choice test. I usually did very well in these courses but I felt like I wasn't really learning or smart. All I was doing was memorizing facts for a test.

Of course, I did have challenging courses. There were exams that made you think about every choice to the question. For those exams, you couldn't just jump straight to the correct answer because you could have made a mistake in a series of calculations and get the answer wrong. You had to find the correct answer and figure out why every other option was incorrect. Even then, the hardest questions always had the option "none of the above" which would always leave you with a seed of doubt.

As challenging as these courses and exams were, there was something regarding the critical thinking skill that they could never do. However, games like Final Fantasy did it all the time. In games like Final Fantasy, you fight several bosses and you have several different options how to defeat these bosses. In other words, you are given a long series of tasks and you are given a toolbox filled with stuff that will help you complete those tasks but you have to figure out how to complete the tasks yourself.

For example, the standard logic of most RPGs is that you get stronger the more you fight. If you come to an enemy that is too strong, you can typically grind up levels to become stronger and destroy your enemy. However, if you find out that the boss has a weakness to ice, you can try using some ice magic on the beast to kill it faster and advance in the game. Maybe you don't have any ice magic available. If that is the case, you might be able to collect healing items from other enemies and save them for a boss fight. If this isn't an option, you might have magic that will speed up your party or slow down your enemy which will allow you to deal more damage or take less damage.

Two notable bosses from Final Fantasy 7 are Jenova Life and Carry Armor. Jenova Life will fight by only casting water attacks like Aqualung. What makes this fight so memorable is that a water ring can be found shortly before the boss fight. The water ring lets a party member absorb water attacks. If you give one of your party members a water ring, you already won the fight. Jenova can't hurt you. If that ring isn't picked up or equipped, the boss fight can actually be challenging as Aqualung does a lot of damage and hits everyone in the party. In this situation, the water ring is pretty much a free pass.

In this way, the game encourages experimentation and exploration to figure out what is the best way to manage your resources and get the most amount of plunder/money/experience out of every random battle.

The second notable boss, Carry Armor, is memorable because of how difficult this boss can be. This boss is unique in that is has two arms that can capture two of your party members and hold them hostage. If your third party member is dead and both the other members get captured, you lose and the game is over. Carry Armor is one of the few bosses that does this and this boss makes solo character runs really tough. The two arms of Carry Armor can be destroyed which will disable the boss from holding your party hostage. This boss in particular reminds you that You cannot always rely on the same strategy all the time. With this boss, it is useful to use a spell like Trine which targets all opponents and destroy the arms first.

Final Fantasy 5 and Final Fantasy Tactics are the games where strategy is experienced to the fullest. In Final Fantasy 5, almost every boss fight requires a different strategy. In Final Fantasy Tactics, each battle will have a different amount of enemies and some fights have different victory conditions. What makes these games unique is the amount of randomness and uncertainty. Often times, I've been destroyed by a boss or battle up to 20 times and I was forced to either optimize a particular strategy or create a new strategy.

In my opinion, games like this are good preparation for facing the real world. I'm not saying that getting good at Final Fantasy Tactics will turn a man into a successful day trader or beat out the stock market, but these games may encourage kids to ask the following questions.

What is my goal/objective?
What resources do I have available now?
What resources can I acquire in the future?
What are the obstacles that are in my way?
Do I have a back up plan in case things go to pot?
How long will it take me to reach my objective?
What is possible?
Can I achieve this?

When facing the real world, a man might have the goals of buying a house, starting a family, creating a business, or earning a certain amount of money. These goals may conflict with each other so he has to prioritize the goals that he deems most important.

Each goal will require a certain amount of resources, mostly money. At that point, a man needs to figure out how much resources he needs and how to achieve them. At that point, he needs to know what financial position he is in currently and figure out how he can accumulate more resources.

He will know what his current job is, how much money he spends in a month, and how long it will take to save up a certain amount of money. Now there are always unknown factors that aren't that reliable. He may find a better job that pays more money or he might get fired for a petty reason. It is always good to have a back up opportunity. If a man is a customer service representative, he could take classes to eventually become a computer net-worker. He will have to spend time and money to dedicate to these studies. Will the possible increase to earnings be worth it? If so, how long will it take to pay off?

All these kinds of questions and considerations are things I've experienced in some fashion while playing games like Final Fantasy, Sim City, or Advance Wars. It is for these reasons I think these video games teach kids better critical thinking skills than 50% of public schools.

Fake morality. The population is controlled by the media.

I've been mentioning Metal Gear too much, but lately I've been thinking about how crazy the population has been getting and how it relates to the end of Metal Gear Solid 2.

At the end of the game, you get contacted by the AI. The AI talks about how ridiculous and immoral the general population is.

Billions of dollars are spent on new methods to humanly kill humans. Rights criminals are more valued that the privacy of the victims. Money is spent on preserving endangered animals when people are starving in the streets.

The world goes crazy because a dentist kills a lion. The man is getting death threats from high level figures. A business owner is fined $130,000 because the owner would not bake a cake for a lesbian couple. A man gets fired from his job because he makes a donation to a certain politically incorrect charity. A famous golfer gets into hot water for practicing infidelity.

I'm convinced that selfish jerks to more good for the world than people who "care". In most of the instances I listed above, I'm sure most of the outrage is coming from people who think they are supposed to be outraged. Either than or the outrage is coming from people that need to launch a crusade.

The Black Brigade did a really good podcast about this craziness. It is debrief number 74.

All for the sake of achievements

While playing different video games, every so often I'll get a trophy without expecting it at all. The trophies and achievements are a great concept but I think they are done terribly. Most trophies available in a game will be obtained simply by playing the game. In Metal Gear Solid 2, I got a trophy just for stuffing a body into a locker.

Some achievements are unique. In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, there is a trophy for doing 6 consecutive cqc slams (I never got it). Unfortunately, that is the most unique achievement I've received. I think the best achievements are those that ask you to do something outside the course of normal game play. In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, I was usually horrible at the police missions so I usually waited until I got the tank or helicopter to get an easy solution. However, after several years, I kind of wondered if I could pass level 12 of the police missions without the tank or helicopter. After that, I wanted to see if I could beat the police missions at the start of a new game. It is a real challenge in the beginning because you have limited access to resources so you have to remember where all the police cars spawn and where weapon pickups and armor are.

Setting this arbitrary challenge for myself gave me a good 4 weeks of replay value while I was trying my best.

A good achievement makes me wonder if I could do it. And inspiration comes in very odd unexpected places. After watching the movie "Run Fat Boy Run" I was inspired to go do some running. The premise of the movie was a man was training to run a marathon in a vain attempt to win his former love back. A marathon is 26.22 miles. Prior to watching the movie, the longest distance I ever ran was 1 mile. I didn't expect to run a marathon, but I was kind of curious about how far I could run. So, for fun, I started making my own achievements. The furthest I actually got to run was 5 miles before I lost interest in running any further. 5 miles is a long shot away from a marathon however it is 5 times more than the furthest distance I ran before watching the movie.

A few weeks back, I heard about something called the 1000 pound club. I didn't know what it was at first so I looked it up. It is 1000 pounds between your max bench press, dead lift, and squat. Before hearing about the goal, I never really did dead lifts or squat. But now that I know that the 1000 pound club is a thing, I really want to shoot for it. I know I still haven't reached my goal of the 300 pound bench press but I'll hit it along the way to this goal.

And that is the funny thing about achievements. Some of them, you want to try just because you are curious if you can. Those are the best kind of goals. It is kind of like exploring new places.

If anyone would like to give some input, is it easier to lift more weight with the dead lift or squat compared to the bench press? I ask because I've been doing the bench press for at least 9 years and deadlifts for only about a month. Max on bench is 280 and max on deadlift is 235. I can't test my max squat because I don't have a squat rack yet. I know I have to get each excercise to 333.34 pounds to hit this achievement.