How to Waste Your Life (properly)
A profound guide to existentialism, meaning, and creating the greatest comeback of your life.
Most people will die having lived a life they never truly wanted.
You have been handed a script you never asked for.
And it is a tragedy that you’ve been following it so perfectly…
Go to school.
Get good grades.
Get a better job than the jobs your parents had, so you don’t suffer like your parents did.
Get the better job... but still suffer, just differently to how your parents suffered.
Retire(?).
The education system is designed to do anything but provide you the one thing it promises.
Help you build the life you want.
I will never forget waking up the morning after my mam died. Cancer sucks, I was 12, so ten years ago now. That feeling of my soul confronting a literal fucking abyss... I drifted and suffered in the least fun way imaginable for about 4-6 years after that.
Mainly because I was totally lost. I didn’t know how to respond to that type of hurdle.
I set the grades record leaving my secondary school in 2022. The only reason I chose Multimedia, was because I was told I would “never struggle to find work with that degree.”
Little did I know, this was the easy choice I made, not the right choice.
I went through 3 years of college achieving nothing. I learned nothing. Well, not really. I got my jiu-jitsu blue belt, and I started building this newsletter one month after I got my degree... using zero of the skills I obtained during my time in college.
My audience is now more valuable to me than that degree.
But there was a missing piece that I wish I had found sooner.
Responsibility.
This newsletter is for a special type of person.
If you have been following “the right path” and still feel empty.
If you feel like you have been drifting for the longest time and don’t know why.
If you have ever wondered why doing everything right has always felt so damn wrong to you.
If you have tried time and time again to fix your whole fucking life at 3am every Sunday...
...and go back to doom-scrolling your evenings away by the end of the week.
My goal with this letter is simple.
I want to help you close the gap between the life you have right now, and the life you actually want to be living.
Specifically, I want to show you exactly what is causing you to drift. What you can do to change that forever. And give you one daily practise to help you to start bringing your ideal future into the now.
(I can’t ever seem to stick to a 2k word count. Still, you’ll enjoy this one. The more you put into thinking about this, the more you will get out of it)
Idea I - Reality is indifferent... and you just aren’t taught that
Man is condemned to be free. - Jean-Paul Sartre
I do not think you are lazy, broken, or unmotivated as fuck.
I do think there are many things you just aren’t being told in life.
That is why I am here :)
With this being one of them.
Every problem in your life stems from avoiding the truth that reality is harsh.
Reality simply is.
Reality does not care.
Physics is indifferent.
Physics is neutral.
The apple falls from the tree or it doesn’t. Your personal brand grows because your writing is valuable or it isn’t. You lift the barbell off the floor or you don’t.
The universe operates on concept called entropy.
Entropy is disorder within a system.
Chaos, decay, randomness, uncertainty.
Concepts we face (and try avoid) every day without realising it.
How so?
All things naturally decay if they are not maintained.
When you spend 5 minutes after your morning mocha or latte tidying your bedroom, it stays ordered. It’s clean. But when you neglect it, disorder increases. Clothes pile up, Dairy Milk chocolate wrappers everywhere, Penguin Classics books spread around the room with your disorganised notebooks full of profound ideas...
That is entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And it is the reason that the universe naturally tends toward disorder and uncertainty.
Human beings HATE uncertainty.
Albert Camus, who wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, said that reason and certainty is what the human heart truly desires, in a universe that offers neither.
Dead right! Because of entropy.
When the truth is too painful, the mind resorts to comfort systems.
Think about the person who follows religion without question because uncertainty is unbearable. The person who needs everyone to agree with them because disagreement feels like abandonment (from the tribe). The person who holds themselves to impossible ideals because being imperfect feels like proof they were never good enough.
The human mind, heart, soul, psyche, it has one fundamentally core desire.
To feel important.
To feel special.
To feel significant.
But reality tells us we are none of these things.
That morning I woke up and wanted to run into my Mam’s bedroom the day after she died, that was it. That was my first confrontation with this existential and truly profound idea.
An idea that causes so many people do and believe anything to avoid confronting it fully. Which is why we develop those comfort systems.
Accepting that you and me are not as special as we think, that is not nihilism.
Accepting that reality is indifferent, that’s not nihilism either.
Nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value.
In fact, if you do become nihilistic over these facts, you are missing the other side of the coin.
Insignificance is freedom, but freedom without meaning is nihilism.
So why bother trying to cultivate meaning in your life when... there might be no point at all?
Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search For Meaning (read that book please), he spent 3 years across four concentration camps during World War 2. His father starved to death in the camps. His wife died of typhus in the camps. His mother and brother were both killed inside the gas chambers. His life’s work, a hand-written manuscript, was sewn into the lining of his coat, which was confiscated the day he had arrived.
And what did he do?
He chose to cultivate meaning despite the tragedy of his situation.
He was free to do the opposite, but took the courage construct his own sense of purpose instead.
Because what else are you going to do?
You’re all in. No matter what you do. So you’d might as well pick your own poison since you have the freedom to do so, to pick a meaningful source of poision.
Lift weights or don’t lift weights. Either way, I’ll have a sore back if I reach 60.
Insignificance does not remove meaning.
Not at all.
Insignificance gives you the freedom to construct meaning yourself.
Freedom and meaning, two sides of the same coin.
Forget meaning, and watch nihilism slip in through the back door...
My point:
You need to start working with reality instead of fighting against it.
Because the minute you realise you deserve nothing, is the same minute you start owning every decision you make thereafter.
Idea II - Hierarchies are natural, inescapable, unforgiving... and climbable?
Hierarchies are not unfair in the slightest.
How would they be?
Reality does not care if they are or not.
Hierarchies are a law of nature.
Every social species has them. Chimpanzees, lobsters, humans. They predate capitalism, governments, and politics entirely.
Hierarchies are context dependent.
Put a jiu-jitsu black belt on a farm to milk cows, and they will be useless. Stick an untrained PhD student against that same black belt at a Sunday Open Mat, and they’ll get broken apart limb from limb.
The thing that determines your position in any given hierarchy is competence.
Not birthright (not anymore).
Not luck (also something very much in your own hands, too).
And yes. Hierarchies are mathematical. Anyone who thinks they are conspiratorial does not understand them.
And once you understand them, you can’t unsee them anywhere...
The Pareto principle says that 20% of inputs produce 80% of outputs, in any domain, always.
Well, that is what everybody else seems to say online. But the actual rule is more brutal than that.
In any domain, the square root of the people operating inside of it produce HALF of all the output.
Example:
If you have ten employees, three produce half the work.
If you have one hundred employees, ten produce half the work.
One thousand, it’s thirty.
Ten thousand, then it’s one hundred.
This is important to understand, and you will, right away.
The more people in a given domain, the more concentrated the output becomes at the top.
Once you see it you can’t unsee it. And you’ve always seen it.
Some cities hold the majority of a country’s population (Dublin and Cork). Some Spotify artists get all of the monthly listens. Some creators get all of the clicks and attention.
The pareto principle, like hierarchies, is a law of nature.
But that is not what most people attempt to do regarding this information...
Resentment stems from lower positions within a hierarchy blaming the existence of the whole damn hierarchy. Bitterness. Political outrage. Trying to abolish hierarchies entirely (which is not a good idea). None of this moves you up.
Everyone starts at the bottom. Especially as children.
I chose my multimedia degree because I chose the first script handed to me. It felt safe, there was little risk. And I dossed for three years and ended up nowhere on any meaningful hierarchy... other than jiu-jitsu, which I actually cared about.
And that was my fault. My responsibility. Not because of “the system” or my mam passing away.
Hierarchies do not care about your feelings any more than reality does.
But here is the beautiful thing.
Competence is trainable.
You can literally just do things.
Learn a skill. Learn to identify a problems. Build the body and mind you’ve been neglected. Start writing. Start building stuff.
Imagine if every person on this planet lifted weights for 2 hours per week, and ate well-enough 65% percent of the time. We would not be demanding more hospital beds (in my country, at least).
Individual responsibility scales outward mathematically.
I am not asking you to grind your life away. There is a huge difference between punching a brick wall with your bare hands and hitting it with a sledgehammer. Both feel productive, but only one of them really does the job.
But you do need to start taking responsibility over every outcome of your life.
I started this newsletter with nothing, also knowing nothing. I didn’t know how to write with impact. I had no audience or even a basic strategy. I was confused every time I sat down to write, and some days it still feels like that.
But I learned to write one newsletter a week, and I just kept learning, and iterating, with trial and error, from week to week.
Now you are reading this, which means I like you. I like people who like thinking about profound ideas, and who like reading long stuff instead of doomscrolling their mind to mush.
Climbing hierarchies is fucking hard, but so is doing nothing and blaming anyone and anything else for your current position.
I wish I knew when I was younger. Because I could have let my mam’s passing absolutely floor me, and I wanted it to.
But then I learned about what I’m writing to you right now, and there’s definitely so much meaning to be found in taking responsibility.
Which leads me to say.
I think meaning and happiness is found in progressing toward things, not so much in actually achieving them.
So.
What else are you going to do?
Let me show you why now is the absolute best time to start developing competence.
Idea III - The information age is the opportunity age
You need to be delusionally optimistic about your potential.
There has never been a better time to rise up a hierarchy of your choice.
To become truly competent at anything you want.
Before AI, information was the first bottleneck, with common folk like you or I being limited to the books we could find and afford.
Before social media and the internet, you were isolated to your immediate network. Family, friends, and acquaintances in the physical (not digital) world.
But things have changed.
Information was always the bottleneck to competence, since information informs action.
AI collapsed this bottleneck entirely.
Think back to the Pareto principle, and you will see the concentrated output still being at the top... but now the tools have been democratised.
Everyone has access to them now.
AI can meet you exactly where you are with your learning.
With social media, you can attract attention to your work. And I don’t mean what’s called shallow work that encourages people to consume their minds into a state of depression.
Work that is heavy. Work that is dense. Work that helps, not hurts. Work that encourages people to create. And by create, I don’t just mean create a body of work. I still do. But what I really mean is to create the life you want.
Creation is action, which means creation is behaviour change.
You now have the ability to learn anything, and reach millions of people from inside your bedroom.
You have all the access and tools you could ask for.
But what most people do with this fact... is the issue, here.
Most people use the greatest tools ever built to consume things that hurt them.
Doomscrolling content. The mortifying TikTok dances. Fast content that distracts.
Not the slow content that makes you stop and reconsider everything you once believed to be true. Content that wants to grab your attention for attention’s sake, and not to exchange profound value for that attention to get you on track for creating the life you want.
I was the exact same until pretty recently. I went through I-don’t-know how many years of education, and had nothing to show for it, other than a page (degree) that said I was competent.
This newsletter is my proof of argument for this section. Sorry. There is no way of saying this without sounding arrogant. But this is something I have built. And have seen hundreds of people also build, and profit from in more ways than just making money.
I mean living a life they have built for themselves.
To do this, you have to learn these 3 skills while you still can:
Learning how to learn - every skill you acquire makes the next one easier to acquire, and your rate of growth accelerates the longer you do this.
Learning how to write - writing is formalised thinking, made visible, and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of every decision, relationship, and opportunity in your life.
Learning how to build - building is how you convert learning into leverage (like with digital assets), and leverage is what turns individual effort into something that compounds. Build it once, and the value can be extracted from it by anyone, anywhere, forever.
These 3 skills compound across every hierarchy because they make every other skill easier to acquire, distribute, and build on. Like with what you are reading now. One piece of writing can reach thousands of people if created and packaged correctly.
The opportunity you have now to build the life you want, whatever that may look like, is limitless. Absolute pure potential. But you have to pick your poison, because you’re still all in no matter what.
So do you take the responsibility needed to organise your life into one that you actually want to live?
If you have gotten this far, congrats. Most people would have gone back to doomscrolling after the first section out of fear of thinking all this through.
The only variable left to help finish this puzzle, is this.
Responsibility.
Idea IV - Writing is how you take responsibility and build a life around it
The quality of your thinking determines every outcome in your life.
Writing is formalised thinking.
Every action you decide to take, that is a choice. To do nothing, or to take responsibility. Both of those paths are downstream of your thinking. Because two people could see learning, writing, and building, as the solution to living a meaningful life. But one could do nothing in response to that, and the other, access a life with unlimited opportunity across any hierarchy.
Those are two very different outcomes and futures becoming made in the present based on the same problem.
You need to write more. I mean it.
Writing forces a certain level of clarity that thinking on its own just... doesn’t.
Especially if you write by hand. Which is something I have always neglected and somewhat looked down upon. I’ve always typed. I’ve always loved typing. I can think faster, because I can type faster, too. I can write my newsletters faster yeah you get the point.
And that is the one thing I have always missed.
Thinking slow.
Which is important. Especially to my newsletter. I do not want to give you fast content. Shallow content. Content that does nothing to change how you feel, think, and act. Focusing on the quality of my profound ideas, my novel perspectives, and the density of each piece of writing, that is most important to me.
When you are writing, you are discovering what you actually think.
Writing is a digestive process.
Everything you consume, everything you think about. It all goes nowhere. Gets put to no use... unless you write about it.
Writing is self-education in its purest form.
You get to choose your own problems to write about... and solve them. If you replace the word “research” with “learning,” you’ve made content creation (as much as I hate that cringy term) your learning process. You are no longer a content creator. You are a creator.
That is what my newsletter is to me. If I want to learn something, I will write about it.
Writing is the last moat.
By that, I mean writing done by you.
Maybe not even typing.
Handwriting.
Definitely not information generated by AI (because AI can’t write, it only generates banal-average copies).
Most people today are outsourcing their thinking because they do not like the responsibility it entails.
Yes, thinking is hard. That is why we let Claude run as our agent buddies completing bullshit tasks and generating slop content that provides no value to anyone but your own ego, masturbating itself to productivity as its God.
Yes, thinking is hard. That is why we would rather numb our minds instead. And let social media warp our perspectives of ourselves. And what our lives should look like. Because, you know, life is lived offline.
Yes, thinking is hard. But so is let everyone else’s thinking run your life.
You cannot build a life you want if you cannot think clearly about what you want.
Writing is thinking. That is the profound idea of this section. And every piece of writing you create, be it a newsletter like this one for an audience shared publicly, or for yourself. It does not matter. That is your body of work. Nobody can take that away from you.
You can only develop a mind that finds meaning in things, by using that same mind to create meaningful things you wish existed.
That is how meaningful consumption can fuel meaningful creation.
That is how writing can become your vessel for the other remaining skills of learning to learn and build.
If you are not writing, these skills are staying inside you head.
Action plan
When I first started writing, I would think about my newsletter topics while walking around work. Thinking while walking to and from jiu-jitsu. If I had an idea while hanging out with my girlfriend at our favourite breakfast spot, or in the pub with the four lads on a Friday, I would write it down.
While at work I would write on my phone (while hiding) for 10 minutes.
Then, I got up before work, and did 30 minutes.
Then 2 hours.
Then 3 hours for a while.
I kept writing one, maybe two newsletters per week, and now I’m working closer to part-time in my job because I have built things to sell to you legends who want help with execution (I don’t like gatekeeping knowledge in the slightest).
I want to eventually do this full-time, and I am very much still learning as I go, but I wouldn’t have cultivated my audience of 32k+ subscribers, and I wouldn’t be getting 3-5 (annoying) brand sponsorship opportunities every day, and emails from people all over the globe telling me how much my writing has changed their life, if I had never started with those 10 minutes.
In terms of practical advice:
You won’t need a strategy, or an audience, or hours carved out of your schedule.
Every skill will compound if you do enough to move the needle, but done daily.
You will need a notebook, and an internet connection. A writing software helps too (I recommend Eden).
Step 1 - Write by hand for 10 minutes every morning
Write about one problem for 10 minutes straight.
It can be unorganised. It can have grammar errors. Do not edit while you are writing for those 10 minutes. And, before I forget to say. Write by hand in a notebook.
Handwriting forces slow thinking.
Yes, really.
Writing by hand activates parts of the brain that aren’t fully activated while typing.
Typing is fast and efficient, but handwriting is deliberate and more intentional. Because you can’t backspace entire paragraphs on a page.
You can get a notebook for 2 quid in a corner shop. If not, use a page. Do it first thing each morning so you actually stick to it every day. It’s only 10 minutes, so get up 10 minutes earlier. Do it before your phone ever touches your hand.
This practise will run silently in the background of your life.
It’s funny, because you will start noticing ideas forming while on walks, in the shower, at jiu-jitsu, while hanging out with friends. You can write those down too if you want. I recommend it.
Write them down in your phone, or your notebook if you can carry it with you everywhere.
The goal here is literally just to get you thinking.
And writing is thinking.
Step 2 - Pick one problem per week to research and write about
Don’t choose a topic.
Choose one problem that is currently holding you back. Stopping you from progress somewhere in your life. A problem causing you to suffer each day.
You already have the motivation to solve it. Everyone does, really. We all want to have as few unnecessary problems as we can have. That motivation is what will make this writing habit feel necessary and essential to you. It will be the vessel for that motivation.
In terms of how to research, here is what I recommend.
If you want great ideas, read old books - Read idea dense books. Likely the older ones, or the classics.
Read one Substack article per day and really think about it - If you’re not thinking deeply about one Substack article, then why bother reading 5 or 6?
Use AI - Ask it some questions, argue with it, let if surface ideas you already had but you hadn’t yet named. But limit its responses to 80 words or less. I catch myself getting lazy at times while using AI. I spent one hour thinking deeply about three 80-word AI responses the other day. This one is a gamechanger.
Write down in your notebook, from memory, without looking at the sources:
What you learned in 1-3 key points
What surprised you
What you now believe that you did not believe before
If you can get 300 words of writing like this in per day, on top of your morning writing session, that is 2100 words per week.
That’s a whole newsletter if you structure it persuasively (problem->insight->solution).
This is pretty much a self-education system that runs on your own curiosity. Every problem you solve, or at least attempt at solving, can become a fully fleshed out essay. Every essay can become a record of your thinking. Over time, that is a body of work that represents the new person you have become, because your thinking has changed.
Optional Step - Publish it once a week
Substack or X.
LinkedIn even.
Read it out in front of a camera and make a YouTube video.
Publishing your work forces you to take responsibility for it, and it forces an even deeper requirement for clarity that writing privately does not offer.
Why?
When you know someone might read it, you think harder about what you actually mean.
A lot of people don’t consider this step out of fear of judgement or ridicule. Their “friends” might laugh at them. They might be seen as wrong, but publicly.
You are not publishing for an audience. Don’t think of it like that yet, even. Think of it like yourself publishing for the future version of your self who needs to look back in 3-6 months to see the evidence that they tried.
If you can get one avid reader to devour your work across weeks and months, you can get thousands more.
Don’t deep this step. Just show off your work.
One essay can reach 10 people.
Ten essays can reach 100 plus.
Suddenly the eleventh reaches 300,000.
A small amount of your essays will gather all of the attention, views, clicks, subscribers. It’s like that for every creator, me included. Take a look and see for yourself. That’s the Pareto principle.
Step 3 - Build one thing from what you learn
A resource. A template. A guide. An essay (again). A course. A product. A Substack newsletter. A new routine. A new habit. A new hobby. A new relationship. A new philosophy. A new perspective. A new life for yourself.
Writing is thinking. Now it’s time to use that thinking to create.
For you creators out there, it’s a body of work (long and short form content) and something to sell (product/service).
If you don’t feel the need to build and audience, great!
Build the body of work regardless, and let your newfound knowledge bleed out across your entire life.
It sounds stupid. But it took me a ton of trial and error to think about creating the life I wanted.
I started lifting weights when I was 16. Then I had a think.
I felt better lifting weights for 2 hours per week (as little as that) compared to 10-20 hours of video games per week. I stopped playing video games after thinking this through. My mind just hates playing them now, because it doesn’t feel like I get any compounding benefit from them.
I started reading and listening to lectures on profound ideas when I was 18.
Just last week, I went cold turkey from my phone and completely desensitised my mind across a 4 day period. Now, I scroll for less than 30 minutes a day across all platforms. I’m sitting in silence way more than I used to. And my mind has never felt so quiet. I can write for 4-5 hours per day now. It is insane. And the quality of my reading and thinking about profound ideas has improved too. My brain feels more dense and sharp, and I can’t see myself ever going back to 24/7 sensitisation, ever again.
You have the freedom to build the life you want, but you need to take the responsibility required to create it, and the reps. Tons and tons of reps. Achieved by going out and living your life, until you discover all the things you don’t like doing, before discovering all the things you absolutely do love doing.
Learn to write. Learn to think. Learn to try new things. Learn to experiment. Learn to identify problems. Learn to take responsibility for your life and go out and live it.
I’m finishing this now. Next newsletter will be shorter. I can’t ever seem to stick to a small word count. These are like full blown products I’m writing each week, but hey. I always try to make my free stuff and best as I can within my set deadlines!
I appreciate your time and attention.
I know it’s very valuable.
You’re an absolute legend.
- Craig :)
Stuff I have built:
If you want to learn to write long-form like I do (essays, articles, newsletters) download my free writing course.
The Profound Self-Education Guide - if you want become dangerously self-educated, using self-education as a vessel for building the life and mind you were never taught to build in school.