Men Like Me are Coming

Denied Adventure, a Generation Waits for the Call

We live in the most dangerous of times, a vacuum for the young and vital. Dissocialized young men throughout history have become roving marauders and aimless pirates when this has happened. You may not believe me (and 50 year olds who lived a good life certainly don’t) but there is no outlet anymore. The pressure is building and building. And when that skillful master comes along, he will be born again in the explosion that abounds.

20 years ago I could have taken the sword to Mesopotamia, 40 years ago I could have been a cocaine cowboy in Miami or making it in the oil world of North Texas, 60 years ago I could have died in the jungles of Vietnam or fully rebelled from society, 80 years ago I could have parachuted into Normandy, and 100 years ago? Well I could have picked up and my feet would have surely found adventure and opportunity even if it had been hellish work.

Nothing ever happens.

Now? We stare out at the DMZ in Korea, the still ocean in Okinawa, the calm plains in Germany, and if we’re lucky we coach a future African warlord. Or we die small deaths in the spreadsheets on Wall Street, litigate decades of polypragmosyne in DC, and create endless marketing ‘products’ in LA. Where is our most thriving place? All I can think of are the ugly nerds and their startups in the Bay Area.

This world is unsustainable and will give. Vital men will seize it.

Nothing in here should be taken seriously, its just me writing about observations in Minecraft.

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We Want Something, ANYTHING

Want an uncomfortable truth? People join the military (well the infantry, the only real part of it) to kill people. Every high minded boomer who spoke of ‘honor’ and ‘defense of the nation’ is full of shit. Sure, people value those things but it avoids the core truth. Whenever I asked the warfighters under me its always some version of this. The vital youth want adventure, they want glory, they want something greater than a cubicle. Some say it explicitly, others couch it in less aggressive language. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but there is no current war or enemy to pretend we are ‘defending’ against like there was in GWOT. We all get told how terrible war is by the veterans who experienced it and we are all sure it is. What they ignore is their own younger self. The impulse cannot be killed and now we are more open about it. Simply put, the grunts of the 2020s joined to canoe chinamen.

I was told NO (emphatically) to putting My Little Dark Age over the speakers.

Don’t believe me? Read this recent Always the Horizon article on Lord Miles’ speculative invasion of a Haitian island. Long story short, tens of thousands of young men are ready to fight and die for an online celebrity who wants to conquer an island no one has ever heard of for little to no higher ideals. This article gives a good snapshot of how many men are ready for something.

The First Crusade, the Sea Peoples, the Rashidun Caliphate, the Wild West, the Anabasis, the Conquistadors, and the Normans are all examples of this same spirit. Young men want to experience adventure, they want to taste combat, and they want to be a part of something greater. Modernity tries its best to feminize us and kill this spirit but as long as man breathes his thirst for glory will never be quenched. Not all men are like this, but the most important ones are. If I have to convince you that young, vital men want glory and adventure then you are far behind the curve.

Socrates in Xenophon’s Apology: I choose death rather than [to] supplicate in servile sort for leave to live a little longer merely to gain a life impoverished in place of death

No Opportunity, No Outlet

Most of the normies and NPC’s never needed an outlet. They can till the fields and make graphs on excel. But a not insignificant subset (napkin math tells me 10-20%) of men will never be satisfied with simplicity. Alcibiades could not have been contained to casting votes in the Ecclesia.

I cannot discover the new world nor can I go on an Antarctic expedition. Its too early to be a cartographer on Mars. There’s no wild west to roam or fur trapping to be done anymore. The best you can do is maybe working on an offshore oil rig or being a ranch hand, but neither is truly dangerous in the same ways nor are they glorious. For the men of vitality, a life of arms (the oldest adventure) is really the only way.

This Harvard study from 2023 illustrates the overall decline in youth fulfillment.

In the big 2025 (as I hear the tik tok crowd say), this path is not rewarding either. Generally, you follow this path. You join and go through intense training, some (like myself in my Minecraft server) choose to go through more rigorous and difficult training. You then find yourself in the infantry going to field ops to either shoot on golf course maneuver ranges or fire blanks at each other. Your biggest concerns? Range safety, expenditure reports, and making sure your boss whose chasing 20 years looks good so he gets good reports and makes the next rank. Are you concerned with the guys under you being lethal and ready to fight in a war? Well, your bosses aren’t; and boot blouses and mustaches are more likely to get them yelled at by their bosses so that’s what you’ll focus on.

Once you complete all this training and rote memorization of standards (and fall behind on any and all tactical skills), you are ready for your big deployment. Your boss’ boss will be too scared to say you are there to fight China or Russia so you’ll get muddled speeches about defending against ‘near peer adversaries.’ You’ll either rot in a ship or stare into the distance in Germany, Korea, Japan, or somewhere else non-kinetic. You’ll drink beers, get told not to enjoy the country you are in, and then return to fake medals and more speeches about how the ‘near peer’ threats didn’t do anything because you and your buddies slept in some barracks on foreign soil. If someone joined the military after 2010-2012ish (give or take) they’ve likely been repeating this cycle for 10-15 years with a small chance they were involved in a one off event. No wonder every commander becomes a bureaucratic slave; when violence has left everyone’s mind as a possible outcome of this profession, they all turn into senior level DMV employees.

Suicide is almost infinitely more likely to take your life in the military than combat is now. The stress, failed relationships, and instability now come with a declining sense of purpose and increasing administrative job.

So then you decide, the conventional force isn’t for me, I want action. Well, ok, you can go special forces. But guess what? Now you owe 5-10 more years as a ‘payback’ for the opportunity. And despite what TV shows make it seem like, even they do not get any action these days. The ‘coolest’ thing you will end up doing is training an African militia for a few weeks (after over a year of intense preparation) who will be incompetent and will flip sides the second you leave. If you are super lucky and stay in the community for another 10 years maybe you will do a small scale raid on an ISIS commander. Not to mention you’ve ceded a personal life as a sacrifice to be in this community and the odds say you’ll either stay single or become divorced.

So Spec Ops also doesn’t seem to be worth the hustle and look at the contractor game. Prepare to be disappointed. Every contractor is hiring one of two people, guys with combat experience or senior Tier 1 special forces (go to any of the hiring websites and this almost always a prerequisite). So either you need to have magically been born in time for Ramadi, or this becomes a career path when you are 35-40+. Even if you do have a connection or go in at an older age, you are going to be put at the bottom of the barrel most likely standing post outside some foreign corporation. Only a few guys are fending off pirates off the coast of Nigeria, and its probably the guys who already did some real fighting.

This problem has been recognized but the older generations have no concept of it. BAP’s interviews with Erik Prince and Simon Mann (Rest in Power) both elucidated this issue. He presses both of them on opportunities for young men to seek adventure and both resort to complete non-answers. The particularly weak answer from Simon Mann was to ‘network’ and be in special forces (which I think I have explained is not a real answer here). If two of the titans of PMC’s cannot even provide an answer on opportunities for people like me to seek adventure, the problem is gargantuan.

Napoleon Bonaparte: Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Awaiting Caesar, We Stand Ready

Coepernican’s article showed one core truth, Men are ready to die in battle and glory. What I am talking about is not January 6th, that was mostly the outcry of an entire people who felt they were soon to be destroyed. No, I am talking of something far greater. I talk of Sulla and Marius now, but soon we will all talk of Ceasar and Antony (idk take your pick of what billionaire is Crassus ig).

There is no wise Pericles to stop Cleon now. No statesman in this post-modern, nihilistic hellscape is worthy of respect, nay, no statesman even exists anymore (except maybe Stephen Miller or Nayib Bukele). Trump is the only authentic one worthy of respect, but he is also the only thing holding back this unstoppable tide. After him, either leftists will seize power and give us the Spanish Civil War OR Duke William the Bastard will assemble his Normans and end this long experiment. The crown is in the gutter. The men are trained and ready, they hate the ugliness of the world around them, and their lives have been deprived of meaning and even family. When Pope Urban II issues his decree, an unstoppable force will be unleashed on this dying world.

We aren’t so different from Athens after the plague. We are rudderless in a state of crisis.

When the call comes, men like me will be ready. Someone with the resources to make themself king has certainly already discovered this disconnect and market gap. They’ll wait, for now, until there’s a bit more chaos and uncertainty in the world. And then they’ll unleash a fleshed out plan for men like me and we’ll jump on it. A little bit of charisma and a lot of money will net the next Caesar a force to conquer the planet.