When you buy a table, it comes with a manual; when you buy a car, it comes with a manual; when you are born into existence, good f**king luck!
Living is hard. Life can beat you down in all its creative ways. You can go through incredible highs and incredible lows. Your parents could totally mess you up. Your body can get the African Sleeping Sickness (a nasty parasite, see House S1 E7). And yet with all its complexity and chaos and depth and bigness, no divine manual accompanies your birth and tells you what is going on and what you should be doing.
I mean people certainly try to! Your parents, your teachers, old people, the myriad of holy text, internet gurus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oY9Cq1qwrU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzzDz2Bl4ko), etc. etc.
And so, here's my course for only $799!!! Use promo code "RAIDSHADOWLEGENDS" to get 20% off today! /s
This site will be a collection of my stories, thoughts, ideas and insights. It will span all of the topics I enjoy thinking about and believe are important! I'll be writing extensively about philosophy, psychology, sociology, bit of economics, tech, stories from my life, lessons I've learnt, random TV series, bit of music, random mistakes I've made... so really anything goes. I'll try to target the content to different age grouped readers. My motivation for creating this is because I love the idea of teaching and passing on knowledge! Having really enjoyed private tutoring and teaching programming classes at uni. In many ways I'm writing this for myself. I want to include content that a past me would've been dying to read. I also want to keep a record of who I am as a person. It'll have my musings, voice, thoughts, opinions, mistakes, beliefs, knowledge all imprinted in a navigable, cool digital website. I also want my future children, or just a curious stranger, to be able to connect with this and enjoy the prose as if I am an old friend just talking about his life.
In some sense I feel conflicted about writing this, because wisdom is something you gain through living life and going through life experiences. Everyone traverses different paths in life and learn different things and have different perspectives. So reading someone else's "wisdom" is kind of cheating. The goal of this site is not to pretend I have all the answers. The best advice I can offer you is that most people's advice is full of shit and you should rarely take advice to heart. People have all sorts of motivates, biases, misunderstandings and environmental factors that cloud their judgement. At best, they are a parent giving you their best advice on careers using knowledge from 20 years ago and at worst, they are trying to get you to buy their NFT Zoo animals (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze386d3enpo).
I remember one time when I was 12, I became convinced by this random site I found that I can learn to hynotise people and get them to do my biddings. It was one of those 2000s static pages and it offered a $800 bargain to become Professor X. I begged my mom to buy the course and let me feel special and mind control people. But thankfully she said no and I slowly lost interest after the free Youtube tutorials on mind control I watched proved fruitless on my dad.
(something that kind of looks like this)
Well I'm not a complete cynic or nihilist on advice giving and knowledge transfer. After all, some people know what they are talking about and we can learn from them. The most important ability is to slowly gain an ability over time to dicern the signal from the noise. As such, the most important objective of this website is to teach you the timeless ability to think critically for yourself. Who's right? Who's wrong? Any gray areas? Does this make sense? Like all useful skills, mastery takes time, a lot of mistakes, a lot of practice and lived experiences in the real world. All I hope to do is to provide a glimpse into my mind, and act as food to thought to prompt your own life to be better. I'm about to be 24 in 3 months at the time of creating this site and if I keep this up, in many years time I will have a long record of blogs. It's very likely that in retrospect that I'll cringe at my own ideas, or writing, or both, but that'll be part of the fun of this site.
Overall this site will be deeply personal, I'll be sharing lots of embarassing stories, but also abstract brainwaves. A manual for life is in my opinion a misnomer. We are all born different, we will all die different. There is no universal manual or shortcut or hack to life. In some ways what you want is a meta-manual, something that teaches you how to figure out your own life for yourself; that's what I hope this website can be.
My hope is that you can be entertained by my stories, learn something along the way, chuckle at my fails and pick up some tricks for your own life.