“Wow, you sure know your Nietzsche and FBI crime statistics. Your future employers will be super impressed by your general knowledge!”

It seems that more and more young Western men are finding it difficult to find their place in the world. In the United States, men’s wages have stagnated over the last four decades, while women have been closing the gap. Perhaps not coincidentally, there has been a steady increase in both male and female involuntary celibacy (“incels)”, with a growing percentage of childless and never-married Americans. Half of Americans are either single, divorced, or never married.

The media helpfully observes that, with the economic decline of men, women are less and less able to find a man who meets their financial expectations. Simple observation would suggest that men have evolved to provide and women have evolved to care (or, as Schopenhauer and Gandhi pointed out, to spend). As a result forced economic equality between two different, to not say unequal, sexes translates into sexual and romantic misery for more and more Americans.

So much for the overall trends, but let’s not worry about them too much. The question is: How can you make the most of your personal situation and thus, improve both that situation and the society’s?

Personally, I had no understanding of the realities of professional life growing up. I hope this article can help at least a few men on their career paths.

First of all, forget the idea that your “education” is in any way supposed to prepare you for life or the workplace. Personally, I lean towards Michel Houellebecq and Ed West’s view that the schools need to be emptied and child labor reinstituted. The best thing would be to shut down most of the universities and, even, senior high schools, using the savings to provide tax cuts for companies hiring young people.

Do not think your academic (under)performance reflects anything of any relevance to the professional world. Study only as much as you like: either passionately because you find the subject to be of intrinsic value or just as much as is necessary to get any rubber-stamp diploma you might need. Either is fine.

On finding a job: get the necessary qualifications for whatever field you are looking into, be willing to move (ideally to somewhere where you have some relatives, family friend, or potential mentor, this can help enormously, both socially and professionally, or simply in terms of feeling at home), and go out and meet people. Find the people and organizations with money!

On actual professional advice, I tell everyone the same thing: read Hagakure. This book of samurai savoir-vivre has all you need. In short, never complain, criticize only to improve others or rectify a situation (never to injure), serve, and listen. Your little sacrifices and good faith will radiate to others, leading them to in turn listen to you, serve you, and promote you.

Try to join a field or company which is booming, the sooner you get in the faster you will rise. Don’t be afraid to “game” the system. It took me a long time to understand that professional success has little to do with merit or actual economic productivity. A promotion is often a question of being in the right place at the right time. In politics and bureaucracies, everyone is just waiting for their superior to die off or be taken down by a scandal.

If I were to sum up how I think a man’s career progresses, much boils down to two factors: Inspiration perspiration. By inspiration, I mean sincere and spontaneous pursuit of a goal of intrinsic worth, one which interests us as such, about which we are passionate, regardless of any immediate economic gain. By perspiration, I mean something more prosaic: reliability, serving others, hopefully having a useful skill, without any particular bells and whistles.

A “traditional” career path is realized through perspiration, game-changing is achieved through inspiration. Most people, being uninspired, will rise up either as useful practitioners or boring (“reliable”) bureaucrats. A few – a Jeff Bezos, a Julian Assange, a Donald Trump – will take the chance and change the game altogether. All really successful careers, ones that don’t immediately burn out in a glorious blaze, will in fact have episodes of exhilarating inspiration and longer periods of more humdrum perspiration.

My instinct is to tell young men to follow their inspiration as much as possible, but there is something to be said for a more straightforward career path, especially if one gets in on things early. This is ideal if you have a family tradition or a mentor in the field in question. It makes sense to study to be a doctor or an engineer if you have some spontaneous attraction to the field. You must enjoy what you do on some level.

I understand that if a young American joins the U.S. military at 16 or 21, he may retire with a pension at 36 or 41: certainly twenty years of service in the world’s most powerful fighting force (or its bureaucracy) will provide a man with character and insight into the ways of the world, and leave him the bulk of his life, if he so wishes, with the leisure to engage in patriotic politics.

I know people who managed to get their PhD immediately, secured a professorship, and produced three children before the age of 35, all the while providing copious, meticulous, and erudite written work for Western identitarian publications.

Then there is government, a career path long promoted by noted twitterati Second City Bureaucrat. In France, securing a senior post in the civil service is a preferred route, making one virtually unfireable. French civil servants are furthermore free to engage in politics and seek elected office: so long as they do nothing illegal (e.g. “hate speech”), their job will always be waiting for them at the end of their political sabbatical. Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Henry de Lesquen, and Florian Philippot all took this route, their civil service position giving them a secure base to work for the Front National or other nationalist parties, or indeed to setup an identitarian think-tank.

Similarly, the international civil servant Anne Kling works for the Council of Europe (not a body of the European Union), all the while producing important Judeo-critical and nationalist books (I have reviewed and summarized Kling’s work on Jewish lobbies in France at The Occidental Observer). Anyone who gets into the EU bureaucracy at a young age will soon be rolling in dough – paying virtually no taxes – if he is not bored to death in the meantime.

Protections for government workers vary. There was a remarkable case recently of a black Florida school principal who refused to acknowledge the holocaust. He was suspended but continued to receive a six figure salary.

If you feel some inspiration, I would generally recommend you follow that: experiment, travel, do what you think has intrinsic value. This is a very male thing. Men wish to impress, to compete, to achieve insight, to achieve genuine prowess . . . to achieve something worth showing off.

Sometimes a man becomes obsessed with a skill or a topic, and will pursue that till the end of his days, avoiding familial and social ties as so many hindrances to his calling. Has anyone tried to quantify volcel (voluntarily celibate) achievement? It seems to me many of history’s great scientific and philosophical achievers chose (?) to remain single: Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tesla come to mind . . . From an evolutionary point, the childless genius can seem an aberration, although perhaps the loss of their genius genetics is compensated by their other contributions to the race.

More typical is for a meathead or nerd to succeed in a great project, secure money and prestige, and thus attract a female. In olden times, this was typically by a male risking his life in conquest, thus acquiring land and wealth (a typical Greek, Viking, or knightly pursuit). Today, the equivalent might be to found a successful tech company in a cutting-edge field. You’ll notice many of the successful tech entrepreneurs dropped out of college to dedicate themselves to their businesses. Always, it is a band of a brothers who undertakes such endeavors – welded together by honor, loyalty and mutual trust, driven by the same competitiveness and love of excellence.

If you do something inspired and excellent, eventually someone will recognize this and wish to support you. Of course, this could well be after your death. And you might not be so much an misunderstood genius as a weirdo.

Anyway, minimize your costs, experiment, make connections, don’t be afraid to make mistakes . . . but also be aware that your path might lead you, practically speaking, to a dead end. Be smart, see how your inspiration might click with some mainstream institution’s needs or, even, buzzwords.

A worthwhile technique: get a Western income in a country with Second/Third World cost of living. This is apparently quite viable for coders and language teachers. (I know one fellow who makes a good living in China teaching English online.)

We are all tempted to value inspiration and deprecate boring perspiration. But in fact, assuming you do not remain a lone artist, any inspired project will, with scale, degenerate into boring bureaucracy. It is striking that – in virtually every field – the more successful one is and rises in an organization, the more the work becomes office-based and unreal. This is so whether you are working in government, politics, a large corporation, the military, or an NGO. Meetings, PowerPoint, and paperpushing seem to make up the bulk of this professional activity.

This is particularly jarring insofar as this work, which is often fake or redundant, can be very well paid. People doing “real work” may have the satisfaction of knowing that their activities actually have an impact, but their pay is often miserably low: I speak of cleaners, fast food workers, Uber drivers and deliverers (a heroic profession), language teachers (if these are not in the public sector, with its artificially inflated wages), etc. I observe this unfairness in my city every day.

The educational system, government bureaucracies, corporate oligopolies, NGOs: everything is a vast conspiracy to secure and maintain the decently-paid and not-too-onerous office jobs . . . for ourselves and our posterity. Note that “ourselves” refers to office workers as a class, not the nation as a whole and certainly not to industrial workers, whose jobs must be shipped overseas.

And the thing is, these bureaucracies apparently produce results too. Take Western Europe, all these enormous governmental and corporate bureaucracies are quite successful on their own terms: money appears (legitimately or not) in hundreds of millions of people’s bank accounts every month and this money can be redeemed for desired (and often useful) goods and services from Carrefour, IKEA, EasyJet, or whatever. I do not discount this tremendous accomplishment.

And we also see the problems when there is a lack of bureaucratic rigor, when an artist is in charge. When you don’t have the boring committees regularly meeting to talk and discuss the same issues over and over again, somehow you greatly lose in reliability and consistency. This is quite evident in Trump Administration, where the reality-TV-star-in-chief is very good at running The Donald Trump Show and playing the (moronically short-sighted) media and Democrats like a fiddle. But Trump is not particularly good at enforcing any consistent and vigorous foreign and domestic policies (besides, it seems, massive support for Israel, where lobby groups and the corrupt foreign policy establishment are keeping things steady).

The value and risks of inspiration as against perspiration are also evident in the careers of men as different as Adolf Hitler and Charles de Gaulle, which I will cover in future articles.

To put things briefly: inspiration without perspiration (or reliability) will lead only to erratic and unsteady action; perspiration without inspiration (or sincerity) means being some insipid bureaucrat on autopilot.

Even those who patiently rise through the ranks of the mainstream may have their day however. Viktor Orbán was a mainstream conservative politician financed by George Soros, Vladimir Putin was a bureaucratic spook serving Russia’s most-drunk president as the country was plundered. Both, however, upon rising to the top, were able to “turn” against their makers: Orbán in making Hungary the only country with a government openly speaking of European identity and standing up for indigenous Europeans’ biological future, Putin in restoring Russia’s power and independence.

Today, more and more Western men are brutally psychologically bifurcated. On the one hand, a whole generation of men is being raised with access to heretical information, something which Boomer men were deprived of. On the other, the public sphere is more policed and hysterically egalitarian than ever. This means there will be a considerable body of “crypto” men in the system, but unable to voice or act upon their views without being professionally destroyed à la James Watson or James Damore. Some men will, if their circumstances permit, speak and act freely. Others can work faithfully, perhaps raising families, rising up in the system. Some of these loyal servants may even hope that should the right historical circumstances arise, they, like Orbán and Putin, will have the privilege of leading the renewal and restoration of their fatherland.

What do you think? What career advice would you give to young Western men?