The 30s are a critical decade where the consequences of past choices in health, relationships, and personal growth become significantly apparent, demanding a shift towards greater responsibility, self-awareness, and intentional living.
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Gather around, 30-year-olds. Papa Mark is here to bestow wisdom. I'm 41 years old. If you're in
your 30s, watch this. Your body will no longer forgive you for the crap you got away with in
your 20s. I mean, I remember when I was in my 20s, I would go out. I would drink like six Red
Bulls a day. I would eat Reese's cups for dinner. I would drink beer with my friends until 4 in the
morning. I would sleep for 2 and 1/2 hours on the sidewalk. And then I would get up and do a full
day of work like nothing happened. Those days are behind you, my friend. It's time to wake up
to reality. It's time to take your body and your health a little bit more seriously. And it's time
to realize that the margin for error is getting slimmer and slimmer. I hate to break it to you,
but the older you get, the more the world will punish you, the more your body will punish you,
the more your own mental sanity will punish you. Marriage and children don't
fix relationship problems. They just make the same relationship problems harder to deal with.
I can't tell you how many people I've known over the years who were struggling in a relationship
and rather than break up or rather than have the difficult conversation or rather than go
through the ugly mess of a divorce, they double down. That's right. They get engaged. They have
a kid and it's not pretty. It's like watching one of your best friends drive a speeding car towards
a brick wall in slow motion. You can wave your arms, but there's nothing you can do to stop it.
One of the things that happens in your 30s is that the quality of your life will shrink and expand
in proportion to how difficult of a conversation you can have with the people in your life. See,
when you were young, the stakes were low. You were broke. You were by yourself. Nothing really
mattered. If you couldn't really address things, there wasn't much downside to it. But in your 30s,
you've built up a life for yourself. You've built up some relationships. Hopefully, you've got a
career, maybe a little bit of money in the bank. And so that inability to address an issue, that
inability to have that uncomfortable conversation, uh, it's going to cost you. Until you stop needing
everyone's approval of your choices, you're not an adult. You're a 30-year-old child. One day,
I will probably record a video about growing up and what maturity actually looks like as
a human being. But if I had to distill it into a simple phrase or sentence, I would say it's the
ability to do things that will cause you to be disliked. If you study developmental psychology,
in many ways, the defining aspect of an adolescent is somebody who bases all of their opinions and
choices on pleasing the people around them. To reach that level of adulthood, to reach
that level of self-defin, of self-nowledge and confidence, it requires you to be willing to do
things that may be upsetting to those around you. Your social circle is going to shrink. Let it.
This is one of the things that blindside a lot of people about getting older. But the older you get,
the more people have things going on, you know, the busier everyone gets. And this is actually a
good thing because the older you get, the more you have things that you actually give a [ __ ] about,
things that actually matter to you, things that are really, really important to you that you're
not willing to compromise or sacrifice or blow off, you know, to go get drunk with your friends
in the bar again. And so while it's easy to lament the days of few cares and responsibilities where
you hung out with your boys, shot the [ __ ] 24 hours straight, these days your time is scarce
and it is valuable. Therefore, you're only going to have time for a few people who probably really
matter to you. In essence, your social life becomes more about quality instead of quantity.
And that's a good thing. Don't be too nostalgic. Your definition of success is going to evolve and
change. you should also let it. The fact of the matter is we don't really know what we want most
of the time. See, we set all these goals, we have all these dreams, and then once we start working
towards them, we have this very uncomfortable realization of like this isn't totally what I
expected it to be. The experience of having this thing is not what it I thought it was going to be
when I fantasized about it. For me, this was most apparent when I went to music school. I dreamed of
being a musician, of performing all the time, of going on tours and rocking out on stage and having
a bunch of girls scream and lift their shirts and show me their titties. And really, what a
being a musician is is sitting alone in a practice room to zero [ __ ] applause. As you can guess,
I dropped out of music school. Which brings me to my next point. I hate to break it to you, but
you're going to have to decide which one of your dreams you're going to let die. I think everybody
reaches a point in their life where they realize that something they dreamed about when they were
young is simply not possible or reasonable. Now, I realize all the motivational posters and all
the like really popular Instagram accounts will tell you to never give up on your dreams, but
for the rest of us who live here in reality, we realize that life is really hard and accomplishing
anything is really [ __ ] hard. And at a certain point, an old dream becomes more of a prison than
it is a liberation. And whenever you reach that point, whenever you feel imprisoned by that dream,
it's time to let it go. Now, if I could leave you with one point or metaphor from this whole video,
it would be this. Life operates kind of like an investment portfolio. Your neglects will
compound the same way as your efforts do. If you put in a lot of effort when you're in your 20s,
you will see the compounding results of that in your 30s. But the things that you ignore,
that you don't deal with, the difficult questions that you don't ask, those will also compound well
into your 30s. And by the way, speaking of investment portfolios, like if you aren't
saving for retirement yet, now might be a good time to start. You can outsource tasks. You can
outsource [ __ ] household chores. You cannot outsource responsibility. Put that on a [ __ ]
poster. Put my name on it. Sell it for $100. Yes, my friends. That's why they pay me the big bucks.
What are you What's happening here? But seriously, you cannot outsource responsibility. Ultimately,
everything that happens in your life is only lived by you. It's not what happens to you, it's what
you do with what happens. Now, coming back to the compound interest of your failures and neglects,
you have to be really careful because if you repeat the same excuses long enough,
they will begin to calcify into your identity. See, it's one thing to be young and irresponsible
and just avoid all the unpleasant [ __ ] and make excuses for it. You know what? I don't have
time or that's lame man or that guy's an [ __ ] But if you keep repeating those excuses, if you
don't hold yourself accountable for those excuses over enough time, those excuses will become who
you are in your 30s. They will come to define the way you see the world, the way you interact with
the world. And that's a very [ __ ] dangerous thing. There's a certain amount of inertia to
your beliefs about yourself, your beliefs about the world, your perspectives about everything.
The longer they last, the more weight they carry and the harder they become to move down the road.
It's really your 30s that you start to notice the effects of the decisions everybody has made. When
you're young, everybody's young. Everybody has an insane metabolism. Everybody bounces back
from everything. The most expensive thing in your 30s is not money. It's time. See, once you get
to this age, you start appreciating how precious every hour of every day is. how every minute needs
to be invested in something something valuable or meaningful. That I I don't mean like [ __ ]
becoming an obsessive productivity workaholic mental masturbator. I mean actually paying
attention to what is adding value to your life and then being ruthless about editing out everything
that doesn't. And see, here's the thing. People who don't figure this out, these are the ones who
end up burnt out. These are the ones who end up with a midlife crisis. Burnout, it doesn't come
from working too much. It comes from working too much on the wrong things. It comes from spending
your time in a way that feels meaningless, that feels vapid, that feels like it's not really
contributing to anything, that's not compounding to that momentum of your life, that trajectory of
your life that you were hopefully building. Your 30s is also the first time in your life that I
think you have to realize that there is no someday or oh yeah, that will take care of itself. See,
when you're young, you have the luxury of knowing your entire life is in front of you.
By the time you've reached your 30s, you've realized that nothing's free and nothing just
happens on its own. Everything takes some degree of commitment. It takes some degree of effort,
takes some degree of time. I had a number of bad habits in my 20s that I just kind of figured like,
yeah, one day I'll stop that. But then I got into my 30s, in my mid-30s, my late 30s, and I'm still
going out and drinking on a Wednesday night. I'm massively overweight and underslept and stressed
out of my mind. I've still got things in my personal relationships that I'm not dealing with
that I'm trying to avoid. I mean, hell, I'm almost 42 and I still bite my nails. That's something
that I thought I'd stop doing when I was like 18. The fact of the matter is is like everything
takes effort. Everything requires some degree of focus and commitment. The more you put it off,
the harder it's going to become. The more inertia it will accumulate and the more effort it will
take to undo. If you haven't gotten your health habits in order, this is the time to do it. The
data on people with bad health habits after 40 is so much worse than people in their 30s.
Like again, you've gotten away up to this point, but it's about to get so much worse. So, eat a
[ __ ] vegetable, wear sunscreen, stop drinking on Tuesday nights, stop dating [ __ ] boys.
Huh? That that was a hard one for me to figure. You know, I could quit the beer,
but I couldn't quit the [ __ ] boys. It was just the story of my life. You can't life hack your
way out of shitty priorities. You can't life hack your way out of [ __ ] boys. Like, you either care
about the right things or you don't. Like, this is the whole point of the not give a [ __ ] thing.
It's not about like, oh, I'm so [ __ ] don't give a [ __ ] It's about focusing on the right things,
caring about the right things. You can watch a million YouTube videos and learn every life hack
in the book. You can macro dose your creatine and micro dose your [ __ ] ashwagandha and wake
up and stare at the sun at 5:30 in the morning. But if you're [ __ ] around with [ __ ] boys,
none of it's going to matter. If you're wasting your [ __ ] life, if you're in a job you hate,
dating a person you hate, living in a place you hate, and none of it matters. None of it none of
it matters. You're moving the chairs around on the Titanic, my friend. We are so far off
script right now. So far off script. My god. Pull yourself. If you never disappoint anyone,
you're only going to disappoint yourself. Put that on a [ __ ] poster next to what
was my other poster. I forget. Something something. It was a good one though. Yeah,
it was it was a good one. Put it on the wall of brilliant things Mark said. You know what? I don't
think the wall's big enough for all the brilliant things Mark said. This video is now going to be
read in third person. Mark says that respect is built by keeping promises, not impressing people.
Mark says that your attempts to impress people just make you less respectable. Mark does not feel
very respectable at this moment. You must think I'm stupid. Seriously though, this is important.
Respect is built through consistency. It's not built by a fancy car or a nice house or balling
out at the club. That impresses stupid, immature people. Here in reality, we look for consistency.
We look for somebody who does the things that they say they're going to do. Is there when they
say they're going to be there, is supportive when you expect them to be supportive. By the way, that
respect thing, the consistency, the impressing, that goes for yourself, too. See, a lot of people,
they think they'll respect themselves if they can impress themselves, right? That that fancy car,
the big house, whatever. It's not for the other people. It's for yourself. You need that to prove
to yourself that you're a respectable human being. Uh, guess what? That doesn't really
work either. Hate to break it to you. The same way the douchebag with the midlife crisis car doesn't
really strike shock and awe into your heart, that midlife crisis car is not really going
to strike awe into your own heart. That sounded way more sentimental than I expected. Basically,
what you see start to happen in your 30s and 40s is that the people who made bad decisions early
on and don't want to stomach the consequences of those decisions decide to cover them up with fancy
materialistic [ __ ] things that they think will impress other people and will impress themselves
and numb the aching void deep inside their heart for a little while longer. But really, if you're
chasing a lifestyle that you can't afford and you can't live up to, you're basically just paying
to look happy while still being miserable, your career will matter less than the people you share
your life with. Now, there are kind of two things that young people obsess over. Their career,
who are they going to be in this world, how are they going to make some money, and who they're
with. Don't get me wrong, the career matters. It's important. Don't do [ __ ] you hate. you know,
find something you're good at. But ultimately, you want to be surrounded by people that you care
about, that you enjoy being with. And look, if you feel like it's too late to start, it's never
too late to start. The beauty of being in your 30s is that you're old enough to know what not to do,
what not to care about, which people not to waste your time with, but you're still young enough that
you still have plenty of runway to compound all of those decisions and successes in front of you and
have a great amazing life going ahead. The last thing I I'll leave you with is is the appreciation
of time. For me, the big thing that hit me in my 30s was the realization that time never slows
down. Every year gets faster than the year before. Every year has more things that I care about than
the year before, more people I care about than the year before. And yet, the amount of available time
continues to get slimmer and slimmer and slimmer. And now, on the one hand, that's amazing because
it makes every waking hour of my life feel more meaningful and important. But on the other hand,
it increases the stakes. It narrows the margin for error. While my body may not forgive me for [ __ ]
around these days, my mind definitely won't forgive me. So, good luck to you out there.
With that said, I will definitely not waste any more of your time. But in case you want
some of your time wasted, here's a video that uh won't waste any of it.
