Is adventure dead? That was the initial title of this post. It's a common refrain you find online. And I don’t think it is. It’s demonstrably not. I think its cope. The entire globe is filled with it. So why do people keep saying this?
On the off chance that I have any young subscribers, young men in high school or college age zoomers, than this post is primarily written for you. Its a cogent vision of being that I wish I would’ve arrived at sooner, but then again, maybe that was the whole point of the journey towards it to begin with.
This is also directed at the whiny cohort of older generations that constantly black-pill and doom and talk about adventure being dead and there being no new frontiers—as if the Marine Corps or Merchant Marines or offshore oil drilling or even Key West don’t exist.
I find this dooming and “adventure is dead” talk to be really despicable, ideologically insidious, and potential killing. And I didn’t always find it that way. In fact, I have quite often participated in that sort of discourse myself. And that is especially ironic as a country boy who joined the Air Force right out of high school, had quite a strange and exciting job while I was in, and was stationed in Las Vegas.
I literally did find adventure. I’ve also snowboarded all over the West. I’ve hunted and fished and hiked all over the place. I’ve gotten blackout in bars. And some of my adventures are tinged with a bit of youthful embarrassment. In hindsight, some were preposterously stupid or irresponsible—one of the blessings and curses of the male brain maturing at 25 and finally being able to calculate risk.
There’s not a lot about me that I would say is natural talent. I’ve never found myself to be particularly gifted athletically, at least as far as coordination goes, although I’ve always been very fit. I’m not musically talented and have a singing voice that will clear a pew, and most of my success at any given thing can probably be boiled down to a plough horse like grit, a willingness to learn, and a willingness to try. And I say all that to let you know that I’m not an outlier.
But I did live most of my early twenties with the idea of having an adventure at the very front of my brain. Of doing things for the adventure of it. Sure GI Bill was nice. A steady paycheck was nice. Everything else was nice. I’m not stupid.
But I wanted the stories and experience that come with taking paths less traveled.
This thirst for both stories and adventure is no doubt attributable to just being a man. But I would also credit a steady diet of westerns and military memoirs and Louis L’Amour books in my teenage years for helping to fertilize this wanderlust.
But suffice it to say that I should (should’ve) known better than to ever participate in this whole “adventure is dead talk.”
Modern day ennui gets to us all I guess. I understand it.
And to bring this all back around to why that talk is so harmful, it’s because it’s rooted in learned helplessness. Truly, the disease of our time. AI will only ensure that more people get filtered by it. C'est la vie.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Learned helplessness is defined as “a condition in which a person has a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression.”
So what does this have to do with adventure?
Well everything. To strike out on your own, or to have an adventure and survive, means that you must have some level of competence AND some level of confidence in your own competence.
The paradox is, you don’t typically have that competence or confidence when you first strike out. Especially when you are young. The adventure gives it to you. Life kicking you in the shins gives it to you… but the cost of entry is life kicking you in the shins.
Competence is perhaps the primary fantasy of action/adventure fiction. The adventure is the vehicle for arriving at this competence. Part of the reason a training montage trope is so integral to the action/adventure genre.
This is what people intuitively mean but don’t know how to articulate when they say, “adventure fiction is necessary for young men” or “young men need books written for them.”
“Well why?”
“Err… um… to teach them how to be good man… uh positive masculinity…”
“But what does being a good man mean?”
“You know it when you see it!”
Often they won’t even get as far as the homeric virtues, things like courage or loyalty, which would at least be an acceptable answer to the question.
Instead, they stumble past the what and the why.
But what is masculinity if not competence, both as a provider and as a defender—as the ability to solve problems and actualize goals.
It’s not chest hair or Indiana Jones fedoras or beard cream or even being kind, although magnanimity is a virtue.
Women know all of this by the way. Because competence and generosity are the primary things they find attractive when selecting a mate.
Money and “bad boys” are all just surface level markers of competence in a man, either as a provider or protector.
This is why PUAs, if they follow the game’s internal logic far enough, often end up happily married and on a farm somewhere. Picking up women is what they thought they were after, but really it was fixing their own incompetence and insecurities. Women just provided a strong enough motivation to start the adventure and the whole thing ended in self improvement. Many such cases, am I right?
Learned helplessness decapitates all of this potential by keeping you from going on the adventure or trying new things or even trying to do anything at all. Low confidence creates a failure feedback loop that eventually ends in a failure to try. Learned helplessness is the siren song of the incel, the doomer, the black-piller.
Attempt > Failure > low confidence > no new attempts > depression, anxiety, stuck in a rut = learned helplessness
or
Attempt > Success > higher confidence > new attempts > more success = competence
If one stacks enough failures, they run the risk of destroying their own confidence and getting stuck in stasis. Stasis kills you. It keeps you doing the same old same old. It makes you depressed and anxious and neurotic.
Fear is the mind killer.
Stack successes, even just small ones, and it builds your confidence and makes forward action feel good. Testosterone helps modulate this by the way, which is why T levels will surge when playing competitive sports or starting a fight club.
The higher confidence also gives you a higher probability of succeeding because you actually believe in your ability to succeed. Faith being the powerful thing that it is.
The real trick to all of this, like just about anything in life, is both in the knowing and the doing.
You can’t avoid failure, only get used to the idea of it as part of the process. The knowing allows you to rationally override the low confidence brought on by failures and make new attempts even though it feels awful. This is what people are getting at when they say, “fake it until you make it.”
And if you want to be smart about it, you’ll back off trying the thing that keeps making you fail and lower the bar a bit.
That doesn’t mean you give up on the big goal forever, but that you start breaking it down into more achievable parts. This enables you to start stacking successes and build your confidence and continue to build your competence until you are ready to take another swipe at the big goal.
It makes the psychological toll of failure more tolerable because you at least have some successes to show for it. And because you are failing more, you build up a failure callous that makes you able to stomach more of it. Go far enough and failure won’t even touch your confidence, because you will have internalized that it’s part of the process.
Imagine yourself as a platoon leader, but the private you are responsible for is YOU.
It’s your job to give him missions he can complete. It’s your job to monitor his morale and try to keep it high. It’s your job to make sure he has the tools and skills he needs. It's your job to build his confidence and make him a killing machine.
A shitty platoon leader sends his guys on suicide missions. A shitty platoon leader motivates through fear and abuse and shame and guilt.
And in a Vietnam, that guy would get fragged!
A lot of people are working for some of the most abusive and tyrannical platoon leaders imaginable—themselves.
Take this abuse far enough and the private gives up. You give up. You say things like “adventure is dead.”
I like to ragebait my wife… who is a planner like most women are… by telling her that “plans are for the unprepared.”
Of course, she’s right—weekend plans and vacations can typically use more forethought than I like to give them.
But my slogan is still sound. You must be confident in your abilities to adapt.
Plans suck. You often don’t know what the fuck you need until you get where you're going. As Brady taught me on the pod last week solvitur ambulando or “it is solved by walking.” This doesn’t mean go for a literal walk to do more overthinking like a lot of dopes seem to think.
No, it means that you solve the path by walking it. You can’t overthink your way over obstacles. You have to climb them. You figure it out by doing it. The way becomes clear once you are there.
Action trumps thinking, hence retardmaxxing.
But if you are trapped in this cycle of learned helplessness you can’t take the forward action necessary to improve your odds of success.
Special Forces aren’t special because they are extremely fit, or excellent marksman, or even especially large dudes. They are special because they are excellent problem solvers. Of course those other things matter too, but only as tools that help them solve problems more quickly and more decisively than anyone else on the battlefield.
And that is the heart of competence. Its skills and ability to solve any type of problem that comes your way. And you can only attain those by putting yourself in a position to have previously solved them or problems adjacent.
The SAS motto is “Who dares wins.”
And that is this whole essay in three words. Talk about articulate. They get it. When in doubt, dare!
Failure, as we’ve seen, comes with a high amount of psychological risk. So managing your failures needs to be high on your list of priorities. BUT, if in doubt, move forward, take action, and have faith. Failure isn’t the enemy. The faster you fail, the faster you can succeed.
This is all ironically what Jordan Peterson was getting at with “clean your room,” but he likes to talk in riddles instead of plain language. Cleaning your room is the smallest win you can stack. The goal is to keep stacking larger and larger wins.
And this is why doomscrolling and the constant glut of black pills online are so harmful. This learned helplessness is baked in. You can now skip step one and two of the failure arc (the attempt and failure) and cruise right on over to low confidence and stasis and depression and excuses.
These learned helplessness traps are all over the place and they get tossed to you all day long. It might be an offhand comment, someone saying adventure is dead, headlines, X threads, Substackistani whiners, general demoralization.
Running for local government won’t solve anything, Anon.
If you don’t reject even the most benign instances of this way of thinking you run the risk of internalizing it, even subconsciously, and you slowly lose the ability to move forward with max confidence and high aggression. The things most likely to allow you to succeed.
So of course adventure isn’t dead. It is literally scattered across the entire globe. But it’s a trite thing that people say which allows them to stay on the couch.
I recently finished reading The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina as part of my research for my upcoming novel Once Upon A Time in Argentina. And one of the things that really struck me, was how crazy and criminal the oceans still are. They are a true frontier in the sense that International Waters are essentially lawless.
You have slaves on fishing boats. You have poaching. You even have eco-terrorists harassing said fisherman. You have piracy and counter-piracy. Floating arms depots for mercenaries.
When people say adventure is dead, that is all cope.
It’s why the “I don’t want to die for Israel” crowd is coping too. But I get it. I understand this is an ironic time to publish this.
But most young men don’t join the military because they want to die for anything, even your freedoms. It’s for adventure and the promise of personal competence. And so if you want to join the military, do it, but do it for yourself!
There is a reason the recruitment statements are things like “Be all that you can be” or “Army of ONE” or even “Army strong.”
The Marines have had “First to fight” or “We don’t promise you a rose garden” or “The Few, The Proud, The Marines” and now, “Battles won.”
The promise of competence is baked into every single one!
But the military isn’t the only place where adventure and competence live. Its all over the place.
When I was vacationing in Key West, me and my bros chartered a boat to go lobstering. The dude on it was super cool and his job was super cool. He got paid to fish, to guide, to be on the water all day and be in the bars all night.
He said he moved there to fish from who knows where. He was a young guy that just picked up and went. He got a job with another fisherman and saved up enough money to buy his own boat. Then he started chartering. Dude was living his dream. It’s hardly an impossible dream. It just required him to dare.
You can just do things.
An engineering degree and a job at SpaceX is an adventure.
Joining the merchant marines or signing up to be a miner in Australia is an adventure. It’s one you can do today.
Hard and exciting jobs are just lying around waiting to be done.
Shit, even if you aren’t militaristic. There are a thousand peace orgs, some shadier than others, that will ship you off to somewhere godforsaken.
The reason I hate this whole “adventure is dead” refrain is because it’s demonstrably false. And its whole existence is as a means of cope.
Adventures are often miserable. They are hard and challenging and heart wrecking. They can destroy your body. They put you close to death.
That’s why it’s an adventure.
It’s easier to just doom scroll and decry the lack of it, to bury oneself in turn of the century adventure fiction as a means of wish fulfillment and coping. And don’t get me wrong. I like my historical adventures. I write them! But they should never become cope. And sometimes I feel like that’s how they are getting used.
“Ah, if only I was born 100 years earlier.”
Really? Losers outnumbered the adventurous back then too.
This is the magic of Taylor Sheridan’s shows and movies. Whether that be Yellowstone, or Landman, or Sicario, or Lioness, or Tulsa King.
He is a master at finding the adventurous in the modern. Most of it involves crime, and all of it is farfetched. But he finds the plausible opportunities for adventure and drama and competence in the modern day, whether its a washed up mob boss in Oklahoma, a landman in Texas, or a mega-ranch in Yellowstone.
I have no doubt he could do a hell of a take on the international fishing industry.
The dude has made oil drilling in Texas seem glamorous and dangerous and adventurous. That’s writing! Whatever you want to say about it. And those types of stories are everywhere if you look for them.
So as the SAS would say—Who Dares Wins! So dare. Dare to do anything, anon. Retardmaxx and full send. Live life and log off. Pick up a hobby. Fifty of them and get gud. Get gud at things in the real world. Get competent at boxing, or jiu jitsu, or working on cars. Get a motorcycle and take a cross country trip solo. Join the Merchant Marines. Join the real Marines. But don’t walk around with a playstation controller in one hand and a phone in the other and say “adventure is dead.”