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A while back, I published an article about “The Wall” that described a concept a lot of guys subscribe to that claims there’s an age, usually somewhere in their thirties, at which women are no longer attractive or datable. It was interesting, and there was a lot of discussion on the topic. Today I’m going to talk about how men have a wall. It’s very different from a woman’s wall in that it doesn’t make them less attractive, it just fucks up their lives. Here’s what it is and how to avoid it.
-By Caleb Jones
Play Video
A Man’s Wall
Unlike women, there is a very specific age at which men hit this wall, and again, it’s a wall that completely disrupts their lives, often for many decades. Many men don’t ever recover from it. The specific age of when men hit this wall is 35. At age 35, a man will typically wake up and decide everything he’s been doing is wrong—he’s been way out of balance over here (wherever that is), so he assumes he has to go to the opposite negative extreme and do that instead. So instead of being unhappy on one extreme end in his twenties and thirties, he’s unhappy on the other end for the rest of his thirties and forties.
This article applies specifically to you guys in your twenties and early thirties who have not yet hit this wall. Keep in mind that the age men hit their wall is an average; some hit it slightly sooner than others. Smart men, or men who plan ahead, never hit this wall and bypass it altogether.
Case In Point
Here’s one example I’ve seen many times. You’ll get a guy who comes from the pick-up artist/red pill world who spends his twenties and early thirties banging chicks all over the place; maybe a short relationship here and there, but mostly it’s about having sex with lots of girls.
Then he hits age 35 (or close to it), and he suddenly decides this is a bad thing; to him, he’s now a shallow asshole and there’s no meaning to his life.
In response to this, he’ll go to the opposite negative extreme and get monogamous—or even married. These extreme players who’ve had sex with hundreds of women (in some cases) suddenly get monogamously married (or otherwise move in with a woman under a monogamous arrangement), and do you think that works? No. Within a few years, it blows up in their faces. They cheat, they fight, they have all kinds of drama, they get divorced, and the reason it blows up in their faces is that they’ve exchanged one extreme for the opposite extreme. Keep in mind: Long-term happiness does not exist on the extreme ends of this spectrum, as I’ve explained many times in the past.
Another example is somewhat similar. You’ll have guys who go through their twenties and thirties having lots of sex with many women and then they hit age 35 (or so) and think to themselves, Oh no—I’m a bad man. I’ve been an immoral, unethical, terrible person. And now I have to go to the opposite extreme and become a far-right evangelical Christian. Or something to that effect. They take the God pill, go hardcore Christian, or become Muslims, or embrace some other kind of spirituality that sometimes doesn’t believe in sex outside of marriage at all.
Here’s yet another example, and this time it involves money. There are guys on the internet (without mentioning any names) who make a lot of money in their twenties or early thirties. And they do what young men typically do who have that kind of money—they buy Ferraris, fancy houses, and yachts, and they bang hookers and show off all their shit on social media. They blow through all this money like it’s nothing, and then they hit age 35 (or thereabouts) and decide that making, having, and spending all this money is evil. So they go to the opposite extreme and live like a monk. They move into a little apartment with no furniture and decide to teach everyone about minimalism.
In other words, this is one crazy negative extreme jumping to the opposite extreme. And this always seems to happen around age 35. Something magical happens to a man at that age that makes him snap out of it and decide everything he’d been doing up to that point was bad.
I was lucky in this respect in that I entered into the Alpha Male 2.0 world when I was 35. As many of you know, I spent my twenties and early thirties as a beta—monogamously married, had very little game, and I made a high income for someone my age, but I was still a beta male. I snapped out of that around age 33, so it happened to me, but in a positive way; I was living a negative life and moved into a very positive life by the age of 35.
As a 35-year-old man, unlike guys in their twenties when they enter the pick-up world, I knew that I going to want to have fun and have sex with a lot of women for a while. But even then, I knew enough to ask: Am I going to want that forever?
No. I knew, because I was thinking long term, that at some point, I would want to switch that and enter into something a little more stable and consistent—in my case, an OLTR marriage. A few years after that, that’s exactly what I did, all according to plan.
So you guys in your twenties and early thirties: I don’t want you to go through what a lot of other men have gone through. I don’t want you to hit that wall and wake up one day and look back on your life and believe you’ve fucked everything up, so you have to go crazy in the opposite direction. You’ll be equally unhappy, just in a different way, which is what happens when you embrace monk-like minimalist lifestyle, no-sex-based Christianity, or hardcore monogamy *(after you’ve had sex with 150 women and you’re no longer capable of it).
I want you to be more balanced and rational, and above all, I want you to be happy. At Alpha Male 2.0, we talk a lot about long-term, consistent happiness. And if you wake up one morning and decide your life is terrible, you’re going to make decisions that will make you unhappy. I’ve seen this over and over again in the Manosphere/pick-up artist/red pill world. These examples that I talked about above aren’t isolated cases; these things happen all over the place. If I sat down and thought about it, I could probably come up with 20 names of guys who went through this when they hit 35.
Here’s how to not do that.
Step 1: Realize the way you’re currently living is not the way you’re always going to want to live.
Young guys have a real problem with this. You guys in your twenties and early thirties seem to think the way you’re living now is the way you’re going to want to live for the next seventy years. Wrong. You 26-year-old guys who say you’re literally never getting married, never moving in with a woman, never having kids, and will always be single are kidding yourselves. Statistically speaking, you’re incorrect. Come back in 25 years, and I have a feeling you may have a kid or two and/or you’ll be living with a woman (or will have at least attempted to do so and fucked it up because you never thought you would do it).
You’ve got to recognize, no matter how strongly you feel about it now, that you’re not going to live this way forever, and you have to account for that in terms of your current actions today. It can be painful to acknowledge these things, but it’s called being rational and thinking long term.
Step 2: Don’t be stupid with your money.
This is for those of you in your twenties or early thirties who have made a lot of money. When a young guy comes into a lot of money, the temptation is overwhelming to be really stupid with it. Don’t go out and buy a a fucking Lambo and don’t go to Vegas and blow $200,000 in one weekend on booze, hookers, friends, food, and drugs.
You can play a little bit; that’s fine. Take 10% or 20% of your income and have some fun with it. I don’t like spending a lot of money, but when I come into a hunk of it, I always try to take a small percentage of it and do some fun shit with it. But the vast majority of it goes into my businesses or my investments, and that’s where your money should be going—decent, boring, conservative investments that have low rates of return but are otherwise very safe.
I personally know guys who made a lot of money in their twenties and thirties and blew it all. By the time they hit 35, they were poor, and they never really recovered. So that’s another danger—you may never make it back.
Step 3: Try to think through what kind of life you’ll want when you’re 50+.
Forget about what you want right now—that’s easy. What kind of life do you think you’ll want to live when you’re 50?
Think hard: Am I really going to want to have hordes of one-night stands with chicks in Ukraine when I’m 57 years old?
If the answer is “probably not,” then what do you think you will want?
It’s hard to know exactly, but do your best to get a hold of your long-term future. I’ve done this a few times in my life; I know what I want for my life 20 years from now will not be the same as what I have now at age 48.
The reason guys hit this wall and fuck up their lives at 35 is that they’re not thinking long term. That’s the number one reason.
Just get an idea for a general path you’ll want to take long term. You’ll probably change your mind at some point along the way, and that’s fine. If you can’t determine what you might want later in life, how the hell are you going to create a path for long-term happiness? You can’t do it. You’ve got to get out of your head in terms of where you are right now.
Step 4: Always think long term.
Ask yourself this question: How will my current actions and skill sets help me in terms of what I want long term?
What patterns and habits am I developing now, and how will they help me later in life—or will they harm me later in life?
For instance: If you decide you’ll probably want to get traditionally, monogamously married somewhere down the road, but in the meantime, you want to have sex with 180 women, how well do you think you’ll do in a long-term monogamous marriage after developing a habit like that? You’re going to do terribly. I’ve seen Alpha Males 1.0 all the time who blow up in their monogamous relationships because they’ve set the precedent of having sex with lots of girls.
If I regularly spend everything I earn, especially on stupid shit, how is that going to help me or harm me long term?
You’ve got to start training your brain to think long term. I’ve talked on my podcasts about how I’m always thinking of the version of myself that will exist five years from now. I’m always remembering that guy and thinking, What am I doing now to help that guy five years from now?
The main reason I’m so happy and have such a great life at age 48 is that when I was 43, I was thinking about how I wanted to be happy when I was 48. I wasn’t thinking about me then, I was thinking about me five years from then. And if you don’t train your brain to think long term in your twenties and thirties, then boy, are you going to have problems. The more you think long term, the less likely these problems are to happen to you when you hit 35.
This applies to you guys over the age of 35 too, although not as much, because in my opinion, most guys post-35 usually have themselves figured out. It takes 30-35 years to figure yourself out anyway. So if you’re over the age of 35, you still need to think long term. And you younger guys think about what I’ve said here. You don’t want to go through this.
Unlike women, there is a very specific age at which men hit this wall, and again, it’s a wall that completely disrupts their lives, often for many decades. Many men don’t ever recover from it. The specific age of when men hit this wall is 35. At age 35, a man will typically wake up and decide everything he’s been doing is wrong—he’s been way out of balance over here (wherever that is), so he assumes he has to go to the opposite negative extreme and do that instead. So instead of being unhappy on one extreme end in his twenties and thirties, he’s unhappy on the other end for the rest of his thirties and forties.
This article applies specifically to you guys in your twenties and early thirties who have not yet hit this wall. Keep in mind that the age men hit their wall is an average; some hit it slightly sooner than others. Smart men, or men who plan ahead, never hit this wall and bypass it altogether.
Case In Point
Here’s one example I’ve seen many times. You’ll get a guy who comes from the pick-up artist/red pill world who spends his twenties and early thirties banging chicks all over the place; maybe a short relationship here and there, but mostly it’s about having sex with lots of girls.
Then he hits age 35 (or close to it), and he suddenly decides this is a bad thing; to him, he’s now a shallow asshole and there’s no meaning to his life.
In response to this, he’ll go to the opposite negative extreme and get monogamous—or even married. These extreme players who’ve had sex with hundreds of women (in some cases) suddenly get monogamously married (or otherwise move in with a woman under a monogamous arrangement), and do you think that works? No. Within a few years, it blows up in their faces. They cheat, they fight, they have all kinds of drama, they get divorced, and the reason it blows up in their faces is that they’ve exchanged one extreme for the opposite extreme. Keep in mind: Long-term happiness does not exist on the extreme ends of this spectrum, as I’ve explained many times in the past.
Another example is somewhat similar. You’ll have guys who go through their twenties and thirties having lots of sex with many women and then they hit age 35 (or so) and think to themselves, Oh no—I’m a bad man. I’ve been an immoral, unethical, terrible person. And now I have to go to the opposite extreme and become a far-right evangelical Christian. Or something to that effect. They take the God pill, go hardcore Christian, or become Muslims, or embrace some other kind of spirituality that sometimes doesn’t believe in sex outside of marriage at all.
Here’s yet another example, and this time it involves money. There are guys on the internet (without mentioning any names) who make a lot of money in their twenties or early thirties. And they do what young men typically do who have that kind of money—they buy Ferraris, fancy houses, and yachts, and they bang hookers and show off all their shit on social media. They blow through all this money like it’s nothing, and then they hit age 35 (or thereabouts) and decide that making, having, and spending all this money is evil. So they go to the opposite extreme and live like a monk. They move into a little apartment with no furniture and decide to teach everyone about minimalism.
In other words, this is one crazy negative extreme jumping to the opposite extreme. And this always seems to happen around age 35. Something magical happens to a man at that age that makes him snap out of it and decide everything he’d been doing up to that point was bad.
I was lucky in this respect in that I entered into the Alpha Male 2.0 world when I was 35. As many of you know, I spent my twenties and early thirties as a beta—monogamously married, had very little game, and I made a high income for someone my age, but I was still a beta male. I snapped out of that around age 33, so it happened to me, but in a positive way; I was living a negative life and moved into a very positive life by the age of 35.
As a 35-year-old man, unlike guys in their twenties when they enter the pick-up world, I knew that I going to want to have fun and have sex with a lot of women for a while. But even then, I knew enough to ask: Am I going to want that forever?
No. I knew, because I was thinking long term, that at some point, I would want to switch that and enter into something a little more stable and consistent—in my case, an OLTR marriage. A few years after that, that’s exactly what I did, all according to plan.
So you guys in your twenties and early thirties: I don’t want you to go through what a lot of other men have gone through. I don’t want you to hit that wall and wake up one day and look back on your life and believe you’ve fucked everything up, so you have to go crazy in the opposite direction. You’ll be equally unhappy, just in a different way, which is what happens when you embrace monk-like minimalist lifestyle, no-sex-based Christianity, or hardcore monogamy *(after you’ve had sex with 150 women and you’re no longer capable of it).
I want you to be more balanced and rational, and above all, I want you to be happy. At Alpha Male 2.0, we talk a lot about long-term, consistent happiness. And if you wake up one morning and decide your life is terrible, you’re going to make decisions that will make you unhappy. I’ve seen this over and over again in the Manosphere/pick-up artist/red pill world. These examples that I talked about above aren’t isolated cases; these things happen all over the place. If I sat down and thought about it, I could probably come up with 20 names of guys who went through this when they hit 35.
Here’s how to not do that.
Step 1: Realize the way you’re currently living is not the way you’re always going to want to live.
Young guys have a real problem with this. You guys in your twenties and early thirties seem to think the way you’re living now is the way you’re going to want to live for the next seventy years. Wrong. You 26-year-old guys who say you’re literally never getting married, never moving in with a woman, never having kids, and will always be single are kidding yourselves. Statistically speaking, you’re incorrect. Come back in 25 years, and I have a feeling you may have a kid or two and/or you’ll be living with a woman (or will have at least attempted to do so and fucked it up because you never thought you would do it).
You’ve got to recognize, no matter how strongly you feel about it now, that you’re not going to live this way forever, and you have to account for that in terms of your current actions today. It can be painful to acknowledge these things, but it’s called being rational and thinking long term.
Step 2: Don’t be stupid with your money.
This is for those of you in your twenties or early thirties who have made a lot of money. When a young guy comes into a lot of money, the temptation is overwhelming to be really stupid with it. Don’t go out and buy a a fucking Lambo and don’t go to Vegas and blow $200,000 in one weekend on booze, hookers, friends, food, and drugs.
You can play a little bit; that’s fine. Take 10% or 20% of your income and have some fun with it. I don’t like spending a lot of money, but when I come into a hunk of it, I always try to take a small percentage of it and do some fun shit with it. But the vast majority of it goes into my businesses or my investments, and that’s where your money should be going—decent, boring, conservative investments that have low rates of return but are otherwise very safe.
I personally know guys who made a lot of money in their twenties and thirties and blew it all. By the time they hit 35, they were poor, and they never really recovered. So that’s another danger—you may never make it back.
Step 3: Try to think through what kind of life you’ll want when you’re 50+.
Forget about what you want right now—that’s easy. What kind of life do you think you’ll want to live when you’re 50?
Think hard: Am I really going to want to have hordes of one-night stands with chicks in Ukraine when I’m 57 years old?
If the answer is “probably not,” then what do you think you will want?
It’s hard to know exactly, but do your best to get a hold of your long-term future. I’ve done this a few times in my life; I know what I want for my life 20 years from now will not be the same as what I have now at age 48.
The reason guys hit this wall and fuck up their lives at 35 is that they’re not thinking long term. That’s the number one reason.
Just get an idea for a general path you’ll want to take long term. You’ll probably change your mind at some point along the way, and that’s fine. If you can’t determine what you might want later in life, how the hell are you going to create a path for long-term happiness? You can’t do it. You’ve got to get out of your head in terms of where you are right now.
Step 4: Always think long term.
Ask yourself this question: How will my current actions and skill sets help me in terms of what I want long term?
What patterns and habits am I developing now, and how will they help me later in life—or will they harm me later in life?
For instance: If you decide you’ll probably want to get traditionally, monogamously married somewhere down the road, but in the meantime, you want to have sex with 180 women, how well do you think you’ll do in a long-term monogamous marriage after developing a habit like that? You’re going to do terribly. I’ve seen Alpha Males 1.0 all the time who blow up in their monogamous relationships because they’ve set the precedent of having sex with lots of girls.
If I regularly spend everything I earn, especially on stupid shit, how is that going to help me or harm me long term?
You’ve got to start training your brain to think long term. I’ve talked on my podcasts about how I’m always thinking of the version of myself that will exist five years from now. I’m always remembering that guy and thinking, What am I doing now to help that guy five years from now?
The main reason I’m so happy and have such a great life at age 48 is that when I was 43, I was thinking about how I wanted to be happy when I was 48. I wasn’t thinking about me then, I was thinking about me five years from then. And if you don’t train your brain to think long term in your twenties and thirties, then boy, are you going to have problems. The more you think long term, the less likely these problems are to happen to you when you hit 35.
This applies to you guys over the age of 35 too, although not as much, because in my opinion, most guys post-35 usually have themselves figured out. It takes 30-35 years to figure yourself out anyway. So if you’re over the age of 35, you still need to think long term. And you younger guys think about what I’ve said here. You don’t want to go through this.
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