Bardamu’s Bookbag: Freedom Twenty-Five: The 21st Century Man’s Guide to Life

Once more into the literary breach, my friends. Check out my other book reviews here. If you’ve written a book and think it’s good enough for my bookbag, email me here. I can’t guarantee a positive review, but I CAN guarantee that at least one person will laugh their ass off at my treatment of your book (and no, it probably won’t be you).

Once again, to keep this post from getting too long, I’m sticking to just one book – a damn good one. Check in every week for new reviews.

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Freedom Twenty-Five: The 21st Century Man’s Guide to Life by Frost

It was a chilly January day when I logged in to my vanity Facebook account and found this waiting for me in my private messages:

Hey Ferd,

Long-time listener, first time caller. I’ve been a fan of In Mala Fide for a while now, but your post on Roosh Syndrome in particular nailed my life to a T.

I’m writing to ask you to have a look at my blog. Here’s a summary from the intro page:

“This blog’s mission will be to narrate and inspire my rise from what I am – a content and conventionally successful young guy, one year into his tenure at a prestigious, but soul-destroying desk job – into what I want to be: An Artist. A Man. A genuinely happy and fulfilled person, whose life is spent creating and experiencing the sublime.”

http://freedomtwentyfive.wordpress.com/freedom-101-new-to-the-blog-start-here/

I haven’t written about politics yet, but I am a close follower of you, (obviously) Steve Sailer, Mencius, Roissy, Mangan, OneSTDV, Derbyshire, etc.

I’d like to jump into the alt-right blogosphere in the near future, so I’m putting together a few sample posts and sending them around to gauge reactions.

I would really appreciate if you would consider recommending a specific post to your readers. It’s titled “How radical politics can save your life” and I’d be happy to email you a draft if you can send me your address.

Cheers,

[CENSORED]

(I also guest-posted as “Zdeno” at 2Blowhards a while ago)

Another kid brownnosing me for a favor. It’s one of the side effects of fame. Two plus years of venting my rage and frustration on this website and giving all my fellow bloggers virtual reach-arounds in the form of weekly linkage posts means I get a lot of up-and-comers asking me to promote their work. Every week, my inbox fills up with bloggers new and old asking me to plug one of their posts or take a look at their sites. It’s like picking up women. When you’re a nervous chump starting out, you have to approach the girls yourself; after you’ve gotten your share of notches and straightened your life out, they start coming to you. I’m practically the Andy Warhol of the alt-right/manosphere, giving everyone who passes through my doors their fifteen minutes of fame.

This was the response I sent:

Hey [CENSORED],

Sorry for the delay, been busy. I did add your blog to my roll, though. My advice – forget about reactions and just publish the post. If I like it, I’ll link to it. Blogging isn’t about achieving perfection on the first draft – it’s about working out your flaws through repetitious practice and feedback. Putting the post up publicly and allowing lots of people to read and comment on it will do you far more good than mailing it around privately.

Ferdinand

Shortly thereafter, Frost took Freedom Twenty-Five live, and the rest is history.

One year later, this Bardamu Superstar has accomplished everything that he set out to do. He’s quit his job, he’s moved to Thailand, and now he’s written a book on how you too can liberate yourself from the sexless, carb-loaded capitalist rat race – Freedom Twenty-Five: The 21st Century Man’s Guide to Life. And it’s required reading for everyone in the manosphere.

Full disclaimer: I had a small role in proofreading the draft for Freedom Twenty-Five, enough so that Frost gave me a shout-out in his Acknowledgments. I must admit, it’s a little weird seeing yourself credited in a printed book under a pseudonym, but there are stranger things in this world. But just because I helped edit the book doesn’t mean I’m gonna go easy on it.

First off, if you’re expecting Freedom to be a fully-detailed tome in the style of The 4-Hour Workweek, you’re going to be disappointed. Frost’s book could have easily have been titled “The Red Pill Reader,” because that’s what it is – a brief introduction to paleo dieting, gold investing and other strange stops along the road less traveled. To compensate for Freedom’s brevity (152 pages), Frost has both priced it cheaply ($15.99 for paperback, $9.99 for Kindle) and assembled an Online Companion to supplement the main text.

The book opens with a brief introduction in which Frost explains why he’s just so damn qualified to tell you to change your entire life – he was an aimless wanderer like the rest of us:

Most importantly, I realized that I had almost completely lost the sense of purpose and drive that had once animated my life. Several half-finished novels lingered on my hard drive. A box of business cards and promo material from a failed entrepreneurial venture collected dust in my closet. Waking up in the morning and falling asleep at night became difficult. I caught myself making excuses to avoid life – friends, girls, new experiences and challenges – so I could sit at home and watch my limited hours in this world slip away.

While Frost and I come from different walks of life, his writing about the ennui and hopelessness he felt plugging away at HIS makework government job was eerily familiar. It’s been nearly a year since I walked into that hideous neo-Soviet compound for another day of mindless drudgery, and knowing that I’m not alone, that there’s another guy my age who was in the same situation, is a nice reassurance.

Freedom is organized into five chapters in the order of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – “Health,” “Wealth,” “Sex,” “Wisdom,” and “Purpose.” The first three are self-explanatory, covering the ground of diet, exercise, game, and frugality. Frost backs up his assertions with citations from expert sources from Ramit Sethi to Roissy, as well as his own methods and experiences. For example, knowing full well that one of the rationales that fatties give for being fat is that healthy eating “takes too much time,” Frost relates that going on the paleo diet means you’ll be spending LESS time eating and cooking:

I eat 1-2 meals per day, and I’m almost never hungry. The conventional wisdom states that you should eat five meals a day, which is true if you’re eating a typical American diet and need to constantly snack to maintain your blood sugar. On a high-fat Paleo diet, your body gets used to using dietary and stored fats as its primary energy source, meaning you can go long periods without feeling tired, “hangry” (hungry + angry) or like your stomach is eating itself.

I now frequently go 18 hours without a meal, and by the 17th hour, I feel a vague sense of “Oh yeah, food would be nice right now, wouldn’t it?” But I could just as easily work out, play a game of hockey, or take a nap.

As you can see, the tone of Freedom Twenty-Five is the same as the blog - like reading Tim Ferriss’ excitable, caffeine-bombed younger brother. While I was reading, I could practically feel Frost standing behind me clapping me on the shoulder, trying to gauge how impressed I was with his genius. “So Ferd, how’d you like it? Huh? HUH?” Well okay, it’s not that bad, but too often he veers into the happy-go-lucky condescension that defines modern self-improvement writing – “I’m ripped like Arnold, I’m richer than Solomon, and I’m getting laid like a bathmat and SO CAN YOU!” Maybe it’s just because I’m a cynical burnout, but I find this attitude off-putting after a while.

Still, when you’ve got the factual goods to back up your boasting, style isn’t such a huge deal. Chapter 4, on “Wisdom,” deals with actually getting off your rear-end to make something of yourself. The section on “information diets” is nothing new if you’ve read The 4-Hour Workweek, but Frost injects some manospheric wisdom by bringing up the anti-male nature of mainstream media. I also chuckled at this swipe at political junkies:

Finally, if you follow the news, not out of some sort of grade-11-civics-induced Calvinist guilt, but because you actually ENJOY it, because you feel that doing so makes you HAPPY…then you have no idea what true happiness is. Go get a girlfriend or ride a bike or something.

The final chapter, “Purpose,” is a manifesto encouraging us Millennials to rebel against the various forces weighing us down, seeking to chain us to a mindless existence of office drudgery, fast food and the mediocrity of marriage:

We are rebelling against a culture of laziness, mediocrity and spiritual poverty. We are rebelling against a world that encourages us to be passive, risk-averse and unremarkable.

The most effective way to rebel against that is to become remarkable. Become excellent. Become the best possible version of yourself you can be, and then share your story with others who want to do the same. In a culture that has purged itself of confidence, let’s create a counterculture organized along the exact opposite ideals: Pride. Courage. Self-respect. Strength.

A-fucking-men, brother.

To help you along, Frost includes a “Getting Started” section at the end of the first four chapters giving you simple, practical instructions for putting his advice into action. And of course, the book’s Online Companion, hosted at Frost’s blog, is stuffed with authoritative sources to ease your journey into the real.

My biggest criticism of Freedom is the Companion itself, or at least the way Frost handled it. The book is skimpy and short by design; rather than load it up with quotes and filler, he simply directs the reader to the Freedom Twenty-Five website if they have any burning questions that can’t be answered in the space of 150 pages. While I think Frost’s lean prose is a big plus for the book, and he’s also promised to continuously update the Companion with new info, he doesn’t go into as much detail as I would like in some sections, such as the investing portion of the “Wealth” chapter. Also a little annoying is the lack of endnotes in the book corresponding to sections in the Companion. I don’t see how it would have hurt the book to tack on the Companion as an index instead of exiling it to an online ghetto.

Another wrong note with Freedom is the forward by Roosh. He’s ordinarily a funny and frank writer, but this forward reads like a failed freshman writing workshop submission, going into very little detail about anything and doing nothing to enhance your experience of the book as a result. It’s the literary equivalent of watching two men masturbating in a hot tub – gay, unnecessary and awkward. Because this is Frost’s first book, I can grade him on a curve – not so with Roosh.

Still, the short length of Freedom Twenty-Five may end up being one of its greatest assets. I believe that too much information in these scenarios leads to paralysis; awash in pointless facts, you become unable to make a decision, too busy running the calculations in your head. Frost’s approach is to arm you with some knowledge and the means to inform yourself further, giving you just enough to get started but not so much that you get lost in mental calculus.

More importantly, Frost’s book is invaluable not just because of his practical advice but because of the attitude it presents. Notwithstanding his occasional forays into condescension, Frost reinforces an important idea that most self-improvement shysters don’t – self-improvement is a roadmap, not a guided tour. There is no 100 percent foolproof method to becoming rich, getting a six-pack or having women line up to suck your dick. You need to seek out the facts yourself, test them, find out what works for you and what doesn’t. Everyone is different enough that they’ll need to chart their own paths to prosperity.

“Living well is the best revenge” is a tired cliche, but it’s the truth. The manosphere takes heat from all corners – from feminists upset that the PC apple cart is being overturned to Christian “conservatives” eternally seeking out marks for their never-ending con game. The thin red thread connecting these disparate groups of haters is that they are all failures in their personal lives. Oh sure, some of them may be outwardly successful, healthy, wealthy or otherwise. But deep down inside, all of them feel inadequate, even if they won’t admit it. Whether it’s the barren-wombed lawyer termagent who labors eighty hours a week with nothing to look forward to but another drunken one-night stand, or the married eunuch putting himself into an early grave to provide for a wife who hates him and children who don’t respect him, mediocrities can’t stand excellence. Like crabs in a bucket, they’d rather drag down anyone who rises to the top instead of figuring out how to escape themselves.

What gives me satisfaction when these types hate on me and my comrades is not only knowing that I’m healthier, more financially secure and sexually satisfied then them, but knowing that I have one thing they don’t and never will – freedom. While I’m still working on achieving my dreams, unlike the termagent or the eunuch, I don’t have to wait until arthritis sets in to realize them. I’m not tied to my job, my house or my city. I don’t get out of bed every morning dreading the day to come. I don’t work a job I hate to pay off a stream of credit card debts. I don’t put up with disrespectful women out of some misbegotten sense of loyalty to a society that abandoned me long ago. While I’d never say I’m happy (because “happiness” is a fleeting emotion, not a state of being), I can look at myself in the mirror and claim to be fulfilled – something none of my detractors can honestly say.

Are you fulfilled, or are you going to content yourself with mediocrity? Are you going to go through life on YOUR terms or will you let the government, the church, the culture or the women dictate who you should be? If you were driven enough to find and read a blog like this or any other in the manosphere, you’re already more intelligent, driven and capable than 99% of the human herd. The tools to build a better life for yourself are at your fingertips; you just need to get off your ass and learn to use them. Freedom Twenty-Five is an excellent place to start.

Just remember that defeatism is the province of impotent and old men. A weakling cries about what was and what could be; a man molds the future with his own hands. So long as you are driven, inquisitive and always moving forward, everything will be all right.

Click here to buy Freedom Twenty-Five: The 21st Century Man’s Guide to Life for Kindle. Click here to buy the paperback edition.

NOTE: This is a review of the discontinued first edition of Freedom Twenty-Five. For my look at the enhanced second edition, click here.

Tagged as: Freedom Twenty-Five: The 21st Century Man's Guide to Life, Frost, Roosh, The Velvet Underground