5 Ways Young Men Can Destroy Their Lives

The first step to success is avoiding catastrophic failure

Economist Tyler Cowen says average is over. Society has been dividing into winner and losers. It’s harder and harder to thrive in the middle.

For men, it’s simultaneously the best time ever to be man, and also a time in which men are falling behind in life, and with millions of men struggling in work, in romance, and facing many serious challenges.

In this world, it’s important to make sure you end firmly on the side of success rather than failure. One way we do that is to avoid making very dumb decisions or taking huge risks that can ruin your life.

This is the principle of the “via negativa” - it’s easier to know what we shouldn’t do than what we should do. There’s certain things we just shouldn’t do if we can avoid it.

While these can affect your life at any age, there are some things that are particular risks for young men, those aged from puberty through to their early 20s. This is an era of risk taking, hard headedness, peer pressure, and a still immature brain.

Most people reading here are past that stage of life, but many of us have sons. What are the most important things for them to not do, the risks they should never take?

While terrible things can happen no matter what you do, and while even the best parents can’t prevent their children from making bad decisions, here are five things that put young men at extremely high risk of destroying their life.

#1 Dropping Out of High School

There’s a lot of debate about whether or not people should go to college. While it is certainly possible to do very well in life as a plumber, electrician or other skilled laborer, the data are overwhelming that you are likely to do much better in life with a college degree. Still, it’s not necessary to go to college, and realistically most people will not get a college degree. That’s ok.

What’s not ok is dropping out of high school. Dropping out of high school puts you into the very high risk category. On average you’ll make much less money, be more likely to be unemployed or out of the labor force entirely, and more likely to end up in prison. In fact, as many as 80% of the people in prison didn’t graduate from high school. You won’t be able to join the military, a key path for advancement for those who don’t attend college. Yes, you can get in if you earn a GED, but it’s harder than with a high school diploma.

While there are always exceptions, dropping out of high school puts young men on the path to oblivion. They need to stay in school.

#2 Serious Criminal Activity

Another way to blow up your life is serious criminal activity, particularly violent crime that lands you a felony conviction and/or prison time. Even if you don’t fall into a life a crime as a result - which you probably will, since there’s an 80%+ recidivism rate for people coming out of prison - a felony conviction will mess up your life for a very long time, such as by making it very hard to get a decent job.

#3 Impaired or Reckless Driving

Driving drunk or under the influence of drugs is about the dumbest thing you can do. Dittos for reckless driving such as drag racing, “sideshows,” and similar activities.

An accident could kill you or leave you permanently disabled. It could also kill or disable other people. If you kill somebody in a drunk driving accident, you are also likely to go prison (see item #2).

This is one where the risks are so high and the consequences are so severe that some parents have a “no questions asked” policy where they will allow their kids to call for a ride home after drinking and not punish them.

There’s no one way to parent, but there are only a limited number of things you can expect your kids to absolutely avoid. Drunk driving should definitely be on the list. Way too many teenage boys have driven drunk to make it home by curfew, etc. So it is important not to create perverse incentives for your kids to do something stupid like this.

#4 Taking Drugs

It’s amazing how many people’s lives have spiraled into ruin or death through drugs, even those from well-off backgrounds. The son of Youtube’s former CEO died from an accidental overdose earlier this year, for example.

You can die from drinking, especially if you drive afterward. But realistically, the risks of alcohol are well understood and generally manageable, even by underage drinkers.

Other drugs have much bigger consequences. Even pot today can cause psychosis, particularly in younger people. Or be contaminated with fentanyl or something else that will kill you.

But as much as I dislike pot and think people shouldn’t smoke it, unless someone becomes a serious pothead, once again the risks are probably moderate and manageable for most people.

Beyond alcohol and pot, things get ugly fast. Even prescription pain killers legitimately obtained can hook you and send you into a cycle of addiction you might not be able to escape.

This is another one where I think we have to be wise in what can be treated as absolute No’s with our ourselves and children. There’s no one right answer, but if drinking is treated as just as bad as trying LSD, we are probably failing to properly distinguish risks.

In my view, anything other than alcohol and pot has to be treated as an absolute no-go zone. And if you need to take pain killers for legitimate medical purposes, you should always enlist an outside person to monitor and get you off of them ASAP (perhaps even before your prescription runs out).

#5 Getting a Girl Pregnant

Teen pregnancy is in decline, reputedly because of the MTV show Teen Mom that showed young girls the reality of what it means to be a teenage mother.

But just as it’s not good to get pregnant as a teenage girl, it’s also a very bad idea for a teenage boy or young man to get a girl pregnant out of wedlock.

A friend of mine in high school got his girlfriend pregnant, and he dropped out. I’m not sure what exactly happened in his life after that, but he died very young and apparently had no family to erect a headstone at his grave. Our class had to take up a collection to get him one.

Another friend in high school also got his girlfriend pregnant. He was very intelligent and easily could have gone to college and had a great professional career. But after the pregnancy he didn’t do that. He did the right thing and married his girlfriend, but they got divorced and he went on to a series of other marriages. He did build a life for himself, but it was far more difficult than it would have been had he not gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant.

Out of wedlock births are associated with a whole host of personal and social ills, as I outlined in this article about Melissa Kearney’s book The Two-Parent Privilege.

11 Reasons Why Two Parents Are Better Than One

But it’s especially bad when the parents are very young.

Having kids changes your life forever. Usually, that’s a wonderful thing. And I’m sure there are great rewards even to being a single dad even at an usually young age.

But reality is if you have a kid out of wedlock at a very young age, some of those changes are going to be bad. Like a minimum of 18 years child support and judges that are primed to throw you in jail as a “deadbeat dad” even if you are too poor to afford it.

This is another area where there’s a legitimate debate about things like abstinence only education. I strongly believe and argue that men should not have sex before marriage.

But just as there is a hierarchy of sin, there’s a hierarchy of dumb. Having unprotected sex - and any man who isn’t using his own birth control is having unprotected sex - is a whole other layer of dumb on top of an already bad decision.

The Failure Sequence

These five items line up well with what sociologist Brad Wilcox calls the “success sequence.” In the success sequence, if you graduate from high school, get a job, and then wait until you are married to have kids, then you only have a 3% chance of ending up poor.

Flip the script and see the “failure sequence,” which involves dropping out of school (item #1) or having children out of wedlock (item #5). The other items on my list - criminal activity, drugs, and impaired driving - make it much less likely that you will be able to get a job and work.

The success sequence shows that the first step to success is to avoid catastrophic failure. If you manage that, you have a 97% chance of avoiding poverty.

It’s also in line with the work of Nassim Taleb, who notes that if you are taking any risk at all of going bankrupt, then the long term expected value of your investment strategy is zero, because it’s only a matter of time until you go bust.

While in life we can’t eliminate all catastrophic risk, avoiding the worst of them is step one.

What About….?

When I asked the question on X, “What are the biggest things that could totally wreck a young man's life?” I got a lot of interesting suggestions. Taking on too much debt was one of them. Watching porn was another one. Gambling was another one.

Those are all great examples of things to avoid. And they can ruin your life. But I don’t see those typically rising to the level of existential risk that say driving drunk does.

Actually, getting into debt and going bankrupt is very recoverable when you are young. Student loans, which aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy are the major risk here.

For some young men, the bigger downside is from not taking enough financial risk, such as by not being willing to start that business because of the possibility of failure. Sure, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. But it’s the sort of swing of the bat a younger man can take than an older married guy with kids can’t.

Similarly, as bad as watching online porn is, given the huge numbers of men who do it, empirically it doesn’t seem likely to permanently ruin your life very often, whatever negatives it does cause. You can stop watching it and recover, whereas the things I listed above tend to have very long term repercussions.

Still, the five things I listed are not the only things that are bad to do. I already wrote, for example, about why men should reject vice, including gambling, porn, etc.

Reject Vice

My five examples are not the only way to do yourself harm, just the most severe ways.

Be careful.