# Life Stages

**(an excerpt from the appendix of *The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion*)**

I (Malcolm) was raised to see life as existing in explicit stages. The rule of thumb my grandfather taught me was that you should find a life partner and educate yourself as much as possible in your 20s, build your wealth in your 30s, sell or pass down all your actively managed companies in your 40s, and after the age of 50, dedicate yourself 100% to public service.

While his framework served my ancestors well, I think it can be expanded to be more useful and applicable to a broad range of wise life choices while still providing a good roadmap for descendants. As society changes, this roadmap should also adapt, and of course you may adjust this roadmap or its general premise to your own personal cultivar.

Reviewing roadmaps like these at least once every year—if not on a holiday like Future Day or New Year’s, then perhaps on a birthday—can help kids (not to mention adults) chart out new plans and recalibrate.

### Stage 1: 0-13 (Up to Adolescence):

**What This Stage is Like:** At this stage, biological instincts will lead you to respect your parents more than you probably should. You will also be able to gain happiness from play and imagination in a manner that will not be possible at older ages. For most of this period, you will be unburdened by sexual desire and benefit from an unusually clear mind that you will not be able to regain until after you find a stable (and aligned) partner as an adult.

**Your Goals:**

1. **Determine who you are vis-a-vis the world and build an identity.**
2. Incorporate your culture and its goals into that identity. For example, protection of (in order) sapience, life, and the human species is the personal responsibility of all members of House Collins. Who do you need to be to serve that role best?
3. **Learn as much as possible, with a focus on STEM skills, communication, and philosophy** (skills necessary to independently decide what is worth doing and how to do it yourself). Your brain is the core tool you will be using throughout your life—give it every advantage possible.
4. **Play—and play hard.** Play is about testing personal, interpersonal, and societal boundaries in a low-stakes environment. It teaches you when and how much to push and bestows you with personal resilience. When robbed of play, people fail to learn how to overcome their own personal boundaries and deal with others’ limitations, plus are trained to appeal to authority when encountering differences.

### Stage 2: 14-18 (Up to Legal Adulthood)

**What This Stage is Like:** At this stage of your life, you will feel an intense drive to believe that you are special and different from your ancestors. While this instinct may help you develop a more independent identity, it may also draw you into self-indulgent fantasies (e.g., “you have magical powers). You will underestimate your parents. You will also begin to feel sexual desire—but more than that, you will find yourself in a cultural context that judges status by your ability to acquire (or at least garner interest from) high-quality romantic partners.

Your brain will be uniquely sensitive to your social position. Do your best to ignore your mind’s obsessive calls to care about what your local social groups think. Almost nobody you meet at this age will matter in your adult life. Your peers today are training dummies—nothing more. Outside of family, any emotional attachments you build should be contextualized as being for training purposes and experimentation only. Make no meaningful sacrifices to impress them or endear them to you (whether that is spending money, getting tattoos, performing dangerous stunts, or trying addictive drugs). Ardently avoid any actions that will forge unbreakable bonds (like pregnancy).

Many people experience higher levels of emotional turmoil and suffering at this stage than at any other stage in their lives. Beyond the fact that hormonal shifts can make life miserable, teenagers are not legal adults, empowered to determine how they live their own lives—rather, they are forced to live with other people on their terms. People who insist that “these are the best years of your life” are either misremembering their own adolescence or experiencing failed adulthood (something proper utilization of this life stage will prevent from happening).

**Your Goals:**

1. **Practice romance and dating.** Utilize whatever tools you have at your disposal to learn how to secure partners—but only for practice. You are not at an age at which you are likely to find a good, lifelong partner (it is unlikely that an optimal partner for you just happens to be one of the ~500 people you have thus far met). Teach yourself to identify and control the emotions associated with dating. Learn to identify signs that someone is emotionally dangerous or otherwise unstable. You should leave this stage of your life single, but with proficiency in securing romantic partners.
2. **Set yourself up for a strong career trajectory.** It is during adolescence when society begins to sort people into those allowed to rise to the top and those who will permanently be working class. If you leave adolescence on a working-class path, it will be incredibly hard to switch, later, to an elite trajectory (and vice versa). For this reason, you will have to work harder at this stage of life than any other. Take solace in the knowledge that, so long as you put in sufficient effort at this crucial time, the rest of your life will be dramatically easier.
3. **Seek out novel information.** Leverage this time to build yourself into the most effective tool possible once you reach adulthood. This entails (among other things) sourcing information and world perspectives your parents' generation did not consider due to biases that you don’t yet hold. Genuine creativity requires an extensive and varied mental library of worldviews, concepts, and domains, which allows you to form associations others would never recognize. Now is a great time to build that library.
4. **Socialize and experiment with other cultures:** Learn to see the world from the perspective of a few other cultures by learning how to navigate them. This entails joining some youth subcultures and learning how to become “popular” within them by traversing their social hierarchies—as well as potentially learning how to work through the hierarchies of cultures outside those in which you were raised. These skills will pay dividends in adulthood, when an understanding of how to sell to and interact with people who have a different world framing plays a crucial role in your advancement.

**Recommendations and Warnings:**

1. "Ugh, did you just breathe and act like a loving, parental figure? DISGUSTING!" At this age, everything your parents do will start to offend you or feel embarrassing and you will begin to look down on your parents. While we expect you to become better than us, we doubt we are capable enough to ensure that happens by your early teens. These emotions are genetically ingrained and something for which you will need to logically correct.
2. We recommend waiting until around the age of 17 to have sex (and don't feel obligated to have sex at any age unless you really feel it's right-for women, especially, a choice to have many versus few sexual partners can impact how you experience love and pair bonding for the rest of your life; refer to The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality for more detail). Sex generally sucks until you get good at it, so don't go into your first time with high expectations and do your research.
3. If you're female, don't get pregnant. Especially if you are autistic, never allow yourself to be alone with a guy unless you actively want and expect to have sex with him.
4. If you're male, don't get someone pregnant. Avoid sex with anyone who you think is emotionally unstable enough to attempt to get pregnant without your consent.
5. Don't give out expensive gifts; it is unlikely you will meet someone at this age who warrants any serious sacrifice of personal or family resources.
6. If you must experiment with drugs, only do so with non-addictive substances and only try them (there is no reason to do a drug more than twice). Be aware that mind-altering substances will have a permanent effect on your intelligence and cognition, with some hallucinogens having the potential to forcibly twist deeply-held beliefs into a bland "oneness/connectedness" ideology.
7. Note that mind-altering substances don't hold a monopoly on addiction. Don't waste time or money collecting baubles or on Skinner box games and social apps.
8. If you are having trouble controlling your basic bodily urges (such as libido), naltrexone might help, but should only be turned to as a solution of last resort. Prepare to feel tempted to do really, really, catastrophically dumb things in an attempt to secure sexual partners at this stage of your life.
9. If you are interested in learning more about your sexuality, refer to The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality for practical information and advice.
10. (From Malcolm) If you want to explore another culture at this stage, check out The Book of the SubGenius. While technically satire, it is a functional and internally coherent culture and theology that will serve you well in your teens.

### Stage 3: 19-30 (Young Adulthood)

**What This Stage is Like:** This will be your first period of life with an "adult brain." This is not to say that your brain isn't playing tricks on you, just that most of the tricks it will play on you are the same ones you will experience throughout your life. As most geniuses produce their greatest works at this stage, don't underestimate yourself but also don't spend the whole period chasing butterflies.

**Your Goals:**

1. **Launch your career.** Work on a concrete and recognized career path while igniting your first entrepreneurial ventures on the side.
2. **Find your life partner:** You must find a spouse within this window (or someone with whom to have children if you choose another relationship structure). Refer to The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships for guidance.
3. **Start saving and investing.** You should aim to save around 35% of your income, with 40% of what you save going toward personal entrepreneurial projects and 60% being invested.
4. **Create a fertility fund.** Unless you are in a strong position to begin having kids immediately, you should save enough money to bank embryos at a later date. Keep in mind that embryo banking-at least with current technology and solutions-will require several rounds of IVF and be quite costly.
5. **Move to a major city.** If cities are still optimal places for career advancement and partner sourcing, move to a strategically favorable city. Keep in mind that, just as some cities are better than others for advancing in certain industries, some cities are better than others for securing partners as a particular gender. Your goal should be to make a favorable arbitrage play on both fronts, choosing a city in which you have an unfair advantage professionally and romantically (see The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships for more details).

**Recommendations and Warnings:**

1. Avoid the temptation of academia. While in college, this can seem like an easy and prestigious pathway, it is not—and the field may not be around forever.
2. If you want to travel, do it now. Learn how to live out of one carry-on suitcase for months on end. Be willing to do whatever you can to move your career forward-and this includes living in strange places.
3. Finding a spouse will be a full-time job during this period of your life— one you will hold in addition to your primary job. Aim to go on five dates a week for around two and a half years. If you're clever, you will develop ways to enjoy the process (e.g., by creating competitive dating circles among friends) and use it to build a strong professional network (e.g., by talking business with dates and always trying to be helpful to them, making connections and orchestrating solutions for them when opportunity strikes, regardless of their fit as a life partner).
4. If you live in a city at this life stage, remember your stay is temporary. Don't put down roots. Never "sit down." You go to a city to "run" both romantically and professionally-not to perpetually chill with the same group of friends.
5. Don't optimize your life around adolescent desires as they will grow hollow and far less satisfying, just as imagination play became less pleasurable in adolescence. While you are still likely to enjoy things you started appreciating in adolescence, such as dating, traveling, freedom, and casual sex, they will become less satisfying after you find yourself in a loving, secure relationship-and especially after you become a parent. (This advice comes with the warning that all bodies are different and some brains may not turn off these desires or go through the second shift we mention here.)

### Stage 4: 30-50 (Adulthood)

**What This Stage is Like:** This is the stage of life your brain will go through the changes associated with being a parent. This will change your cognitive processing more than you anticipate. You will begin to find it hard to experience happiness from many of the things you used to enjoy and instead your primary source of happiness will become sharing new experiences with your kids.

**Your Goals:**

1. **Bank embryos.** As soon as you have found the right person with whom to have kids (or as soon as you are ready to select genetic material for your kids-like a sperm or egg donor), spend a year banking embryos to build up a supply sufficient to have the family you desire. Embryo banking will only become more costly and less successful with each passing year.
2. **Start your family.** If you have a child every 18 months, all but your youngest child will have no memory of life without a youngest sibling, which can reduce the shock of welcoming new family members and increase closeness among siblings.
3. **(30-40) Maximize income.** As these are your highest income-producing years, you should expect to transition to a passive income within 20 years and your saving rate should reflect that.
4. **(40-50) Transition to public service:** At this stage you should be transitioning to a 100% focus on public service. This can be working for the Index, spreading our culture through media creations, government work, non-profit work, or any other job focused on spreading our culture and public benefit."
5. **Drive socialization.** After graduating from school/university, most adults stop meeting new people and ease into fairly isolated social circles. If you take the initiative to organize social gatherings, introduce people to each other, and essentially become friends' source of new friends and ideas, all sorts of interesting opportunities will arise.
6. **Leave the city.** Once your partnership and careers are secure, shift to a more rural living arrangement to give your kids a good childhood and enjoy more affordable childcare, food, and services.

**Recommendations and Warnings:**

- When considering where to live with your young family, consider what is within driving distance, as air travel becomes increasingly cumbersome once you have more than two kids.
- Don't rely overly on societies, clubs, work, or any other organizations or outside forces to be your solution to socializing; membership can be fleeting and all groups offer diminishing returns once you've met most active members.
- Become a nexus of socialization for others by hosting events. Consider renting an apartment in a nearby major city (or in several cities) once every other month or so for two nights in a row (with the kids staying home with a sitter or family). Over those two nights, host back-to-back gatherings (e.g., two dinners; one lunch) to which you invite a mix of top-tier personal contacts and high-profile strangers. So long as you put effort into sending thoughtful invites and putting together well-curated gatherings, you will be surprised by who shows up.
- Begin to aggressively position yourself for public service.
- Prepare to correct for a bias toward acquiring and improving property (as adults seem to be driven by a weird "nest and fortify" instinct during this stage) to ensure you only invest when it is logically sound to do so.

### Stage 5: 50+ (Seniority)

**What This Stage is Like:** With the caveat that we have not personally experienced this life stage, evidence at our disposal suggests that stereotypes around "tribal elders" ring true to a large extent. In terms of shifting sources of joy, people in this age range (at least from our third-party observation) appear to disproportionately enjoy mentorship, advisory roles, and cultivation of younger generations. This suggests that taking on a more active role as an investor, board member, mentor, advisor, and grandparent will provide meaningful satisfaction (not to mention value for those assisted).

**Your Goals:**

1. **Enter public service.** At this stage you should be primarily focused on public service and not active income generation.
2. **Support your children.** A major focus of your life at this point should be helping your kids with child care. Plan to locate near the largest cluster of them to help with this.
3. **Let the next generation rise.** By the age of 60, your kids should lead the family and its culture as you ease into an advisory role and resource. You are a pawn on their chessboard, not the other way around (so long as they have upheld the integrity of the family's culture).
4. **Prepare for death well before the end is imminent.** Keep in mind that end-of-life care and post-death complications can tear families apart. Rather than subject your family to that stress and put it at risk, navigating life with a partner: Systematically think through everything that can go wrong and set systems in place to ensure a smooth transition.

**Recommendations and Warnings:**

- Though "use it or lose it" applies to one's body and mind throughout life (this is a very common trend we see in peer-reviewed research on a myriad of physical and mental performance measures), the principle especially applies as age advances. If you want a sharp mind, you will need to challenge it-to the point of pushing your own boundaries and limits-constantly. If you want a healthy body, you will need to exercise, move, and push it daily. The post-1950s picture of retirement (a period during which someone just "relaxes") is a fast pass to mental and physical death.
- It is at this stage that more adults begin to become "set in their ways." Prepare to correct for this-even if correction comes at a cost. For example, psychedelics can reintroduce mental flexibility at the cost of rendering you more gullible; taking sabbaticals and moving to new locations can reintroduce flexibility, but also dampen professional momentum as you pursue roles in public service.
- Note: "Reminiscence bump" is a term used in psychology to describe a weird trend for adults (people over 40) to have more memories of things that happened in their adolescence and early childhood than later in their life (note, this may not be an age thing but rather a "lots of new experiences" thing, as you also see it in immigrants for the period after they immigrated). Some cultures may eventually find a way to leverage this to its benefit.

### Stage Transition Celebrations

Many cultures use rituals or parties to mark major milestones, such as the transition to adulthood (e.g., Quinceañeras, Bar Mitzvahs, etc.), partnered life (e.g., engagement parties, bachelor/bachelorette parties, and weddings), and coming-of-age and pair-bonding ceremonies get the most investment and air time, though a growing number of pronatalist cultures will hopefully reintroduce fanfare around parenthood.

Coming-of-age ceremonies often involve "leaving home" in some way and being given some "secret information" while performing a difficult task. While we may think of this as something relegated to tribal cultures, a pervasive modern manifestation can be found across our cultural ecosystem: College. In fact, our wider society goes so far as to treat individuals who did not undergo this ritual as if they never became "true adults."

The ritualistic role of college may explain in part why it has been so slow to die as a cultural institution even after its utility has dwindled in relation to its cost. Intentionally designed or reinforced cultivars can leverage the apparent social hunger for coming-of-age rituals to create rites of passage that outperform universities in equipping young adults to flourish and thrive (both professionally and mentally).

Partnership ceremonies-weddings, mostly—need a cultural makeover. Committing to a partnership involves reinventing one's identity, meaning these ceremonies shouldn't be about status signaling or "female partner indulgence" per se, but rather communicating to the partnership's family and wider social network: "This is what we stand for, value, and represent as a combined entity." While a one-off ceremony and afterparty (the standard Western wedding format today) can be used to communicate this in part, there may be far more meaningful ways to signal a partnership's identity and set it up for a strong start. For cultivars within the Index, this may also involve the inauguration of the partnership's House.

Though parenthood celebrations have enjoyed a recent and mostly dubious resurgence in interest via the rise of the "gender reveal party" (complete with deaths, forest fires, and millions of dollars of damage), present-day parenthood celebrations (including baby showers and christenings) don't do much to motivate parenthood, equip people to become successful parents, or provide support to fledgling families. Here is another opportunity for intentionally designed or reinforced cultivars to support high birth rates through newly coined celebrations that prepare, elevate, and support members who choose to have kids.