Aaron Clarey Quotes

“How dare you try to charge people for something you know nothing about?”

“I cannot rejoice enough in your suffering because of your stupidity and cowardice.”

“The seven billion people on this planet don't give a f*ck what you want.

They want you to program code for cool video games, they want you hot young girls to do p*rn, and they want you guys to go build engineering and other stuff to make their lives easier.

And they want food... and they want it fast.”

“Because of the Darwinistic programming you have, many men will approach life from the angle of attaining financial security first, and then relaxing and enjoying life.

You will get everything in order, get your degree, get your career, pay off your debts, pay off your house, and then, once financially stable, finally permit yourself to enjoy life.

There is just one minor problem with that approach: Life doesn’t work that way.”

“How much money or other people’s time do you need? Do you want to slave away for all 79 years of your life expectancy? Work up millions of dollars worth in time and then die, never getting to spend it or enjoy it?

Or do you want to have a little fun in life? Go travelling, eating good food, driving fast cars, and imbibing in quality booze?

Life is not about slaving away and working all the time. It is about enjoying life and living it. But you cannot just have fun all the time, just as you cannot work all the time. There has to be a balance.

This is what economists call the 'leisure labor trade off'. Every hour you work is one less hour you can spend on leisure or enjoying yourself. And every hour you spend on leisure is one less hour you can spend on labor.

There is no right or wrong balance as it is up to the individual tastes and desires of each person, but if there is an observation I have had in my two decades of economic experience it’s that humans tend to overvalue labor and undervalue leisure.”

“In short, if you can realize that it is humans that are the most important thing in life and not material items, you will spend (at least) 60% less money on said material items, meaning you need to work 60% less in life.”

“It is a common mistake to assume that middle aged man driving that $70,000 luxury car living in that $3 million McMansion is 'rich'.

The truth is most people who drive $70,000 luxury cars and live in $3 million McMansions are poor. Yes, they own a $70,000 car and a $3 million house, but they have a $70,000 car loan and a $3.5 million mortgage.

In other words, they owe more than they own resulting in a negative 'net worth' of $ 500,000.”

“The larger point is that as society and the economy go through this shift there will not only be less economic opportunity to fulfill your role as 'father, protector, provider, and bread winner', there will be less appreciation for such roles.

Therefore, to make sure you have purpose and agency in life, you need to find hobbies and interests that are not dependent on economic circumstances and cannot be supplanted by government intervention.”

“The tell tale sign of a worthless degree is when the only or primary application of the study is to merely re-teach the same stuff to new and future students.”

“You can expect to pay roughly a 40% tax over the course of your life. 40% of your working life will be spent working up the money to pay taxes!

Normally you would expect that 40% to go to government programs that benefit you (defense, roads, police, etc.), however, in reality 70% of that money goes to other people (in the form of welfare, food stamps, WIC, health care, etc.).

Mathematically translated this means out of a 50 year career, 14 of those years are literally you being a slave to other people.”

“Men would flood the market with attention, effort, time and energy trying to find girls. Just think of all the time you would go to parties, clubs, online dating profiles, etc. etc, just to get a number back when you were 23. Men would make themselves available as much as they possibly could.

But then the bubble bursts. Men no longer go out 'clubbing'. They don't log into their Match.com account as much. And they could go to that desperate singles event, but the game is on.

And soon the supply of attention that was previously flooding the market and driving the SMV of women up, plummets, driving down the 'units of attention' per woman.”

“Criticize her as you may, Oprah is a genius because she realized people would rather feel good than actually achieve good in their lives.

And thus, she went out and told millions of women for over 20 years what they wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear.”

“In the long run smarter people more quickly assess reality, bending it to their will, capitalizing on it, improving and advancing their lives.”

“Thankfully the future is practically guaranteed to be an Idiocracy.”

“The HR ditz also introduces a new aspect of careers and the employment world. One that is the bane of existence for abnormally intelligent people.”

“There is no solution because there is no problem.”

“True leadership, true and genuine leading requires intelligence, an independent mind, the ability to delay gratification, the ability to think long term, and above all else a spine.”

“We can only be as great as the rest of society allows us to be.”

“When you consider the mental pain and suffering you’ll endure as a smart person in today’s corporate America, not to mention how it is nearly impossible to achieve anything near your potential when working for someone else, entrepreneurship (whether you want to become one or not) is pretty much the only choice.”

“You can never solve the problem that doesn’t exist. You can only treat it.”

“Your entire employment environment is driven by everybody’s insistence you place feelings and emotions over reality and truth.”

“Counterintuitive as it may sound, you stand a much higher chance at becoming rich pursuing minimalism as opposed to slaving away for an employer. The reason is two-fold.

First, it’s nearly impossible to become rich working for somebody else. Understand while you can be promoted and make more money, the nature of your employer is to maximize profits for the owner, not you. This puts your self-interests in direct opposition to that of the owner.

Not that this is evil or bad on anyone’s part, it just is how it is.  So there will always be that force keeping your salary as low as possible. And given the all the unemployed people more than happy to take your job, your employer can deliver that threat.”

“Dire as the situation may be, there is some hope. Genuine hope, not the hope that is found in presidential speeches and pablum. Hope that is practical, real, and will yield results. However, this hope comes from the only place real hope can come from – within – which means we have to focus on ourselves and what is within our control to realize this hope and capitalize on it.

This isn’t to say that the world will turn out all roses and dachshunds, nor is it going to be the 'faux depressing type of hope' akin to when your mother would say: “Well at least you aren’t a cancerous, Ebola-infected, starving, blind quadriplegic, leper living in war-torn Ethiopia with lice!”

But at minimum this book will show you there is a future, you can live a happy life, the left will get their comeuppance, and no matter how bad it gets, there is always a way to enjoy the decline.”

“Ever since 1997 I have never had a job that required me to actually show up and physically be there. Oh sure, the boss required I show up, suffer a commute and spend thousands of dollars every year on gas and parking, but there was no real reason for me to be there. It could all be done over the internet from a home office.

The internet is a game changer in that it has made location irrelevant. It has obsoleted the corporate office and cubicle. It has rendered the billions of square footage in downtown skyscrapers obsolete. It has made commuting unnecessary.

It is only because of a bunch of close-minded, short-sighted, aging gray-hairs that people are forced to work at an office. But just because the gray hairs like doing things 'the old fashioned way', doesn’t mean you have to suffer a similar such fate.”

“The error you will make (especially men) is blaming yourself for failing to realize your dreams, when in reality it was outside of your control. It was doomed from the beginning. You do yourself no service misplacing the blame on yourself.”

“Why did you get laid off? The reality is because a bunch of inept bankers, criminal real estate developers, amoral mortgage brokers and corrupt politicians created the world’s largest housing bubble.

But ironically, the average man during the Great Recession probably took this personally, illogically blaming his sole self for the entire financial crisis of 2009. 

Worse still, men across America felt an incredible amount of guilt and shame for not being able to provide for their families. And worse than that, how many men committed suicide because of a recession that was not caused by them?

All of this can be avoided in mastering the skill of recognizing what you do and do not control.”

“Alas, the only reason you have planes, trains, and automobiles, the only reason an economy exists, the only reason anything outside the sky exists, is because men built it. And men built it in exchange for sex.”

“Free time. It's the paint that excellent men use to create their mural of life.”

“In full intellectual honesty and disclosure I do not believe in the social sciences or sociological studies. I think the fields are completely bunk and bogus, and are more of a welfare jobs program for unemployable hacks who have political agendas rather than any serious study into society with the goal of helping – let alone resolving – the sociological problems that plague it.

If there was any veracity in the social sciences, we would have solved poverty, crime, divorce, racial/sexual gaps, unemployment, etc., long ago, and the fact these scourges continue to exist – and are in most cases, worsening – is proof enough these 'fields' are of no value, perhaps even damaging to society.”

“Men have sex drives (estimated to be) 9 times that of women, while women... do not.”