Jaimie Mantzel is a toymaker and inventor who got out of the rat race, sold his Vermont house, and moved his family to a secluded Island in Panama.
You may be familiar with the small but growing trend of people bugging out of America to do homesteading abroad. But Jaimie uses his ingenuity to take going off the grid to the next level.
In addition to his three boats, Jaimie has built a concrete habitation dome, a mini-bulldozer that also powers his workshop, and a fruit tree garden capable of sustaining his family.
Eccentricity aside, Jaimie is a rugged go-getter of the kind that tamed the wilderness in the first place. He’s accomplished more on a remote third world island than most people in the richest country on Earth can dream of.
Some members of younger generations have noticed Jaimie’s achievements and asked him for advice. Like all good advisors, Jaimie tells his Millennial audience members what they don’t want to hear.
Since understanding a problem is the first step to solving it, Jaimie invites his NEET viewers to ask who, if anyone, is responsible for their wretched lives.
His conclusion? Millennials were raised – more accurately, abandoned to state schools – by parents who didn’t know how to be parents.
But instead of stopping there and pinning all the blame on Baby Boomers, Jaimie points out that the Boomers didn’t know how to parent because their Greatest Generation parents never taught them.
Which makes sense when you consider that their mothers went to work when their fathers went off to war.
This cycle has now run through multiple generations. Boomers left parenting up to TV, and Millennials are leaving parenting up to tablets and phones.
As a result, young adults today have little contact with the highs and lows of the real world. Instead, their lives are defined by screens that act as windows into false realities where nothing really happens. These electronic illusions sap Millennials’ and Zoomers’ motivation by giving them dopamine hits for simulated achievement.
Jaimie’s solution?
Cut the screens cold turkey.
And not just electronic devices. To cure false reality addiction, Jaimie advises his viewers to reset their lives. That means throwing out the iPhone, laptop, tablet, game console, booze, drugs, and TV.
In fact, he suggests picking one room in the house and clearing everything out of it except for a mattress.
This done, our young NEET must commit to following one rule: Don’t do anything that makes you go backwards.
Jaimie wagers that viewers who take these drastic steps will soon get so tired of sitting alone without any stimulation, they’ll venture outside to relieve the tedium.
And that impetus to get up and go will be the first spark of their rekindling motivation.
What will Millennial NEETs find beyond their doorsteps? In time, they will have real-life experiences with real stakes. They’ll meet people, get exercise, and gain experience.
But most important of all, they’ll try new things and fail.
Because failure is a great teacher. And persistence is invincible.
Watch the whole video here.
Note that Jaimie advocates breaking the cycle of absentee parenting and home schools his kids. That alone earns him a fair hearing.
As you mull over his wisdom, know that you needn’t move to Central America to thwart the people that hate you. For now, you can stop giving them money.
If libertarians would want more out of life than pot, they would become Jamie Mantzel.
The truth hurts sometimes.
One thing that I’ve noticed as a teacher is that most people, but especially millennials and zoomers, have trouble distinguishing “this situation is unfair” from “there is something I need to do to get out of this situation.”
Take the example of a student getting sick for a week and so missing a lot of learning and needing to make things up. It is common for a student in this situation to go on at lengths about how he didn’t want to get sick and isn’t trying to game the system, but to still get insulted at the suggestion that he get tutoring from the teacher to get back on track. He’s aware that he is behind, but he rejects the tools given to him to fix the situation because he thinks that using them would imply that he intentionally put himself in the situation. This type of student really wants something impossible: he wants to get the normal experience of being in class, even though that time is gone, because nothing he did made him deserve to miss class. What I want to stress is that while some students try to game the system and get an improved grade with no understanding due to their hardship, most are not doing that. They simply are unable to accept that they must do something unusual to get back on track and so languish in a state where they get further and further behind while ranting to those who listen about how it isn’t their fault.
You get the same issue when it comes to life improvement. Yeah the millennials and zoomers have definitely been dealt a bad hand (a worse one than Gen Y and Gen X and we got stiffed in a lot of ways too.) But at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter why you have the hand you are dealt; if you don’t do anything about it you’re just going to keep those cards and remain in a bad situation.
I can corroborate. The first half of my life was an obsession over the world’s unfairness, and I rarely tried to make the best of my situations until I understood the fall of creation. After that, I realized that life was unfair for a deeper reason than bad parents and bad governments.
Part of the answer may lie in plummeting testosterone levels.
I went to visit Jaimie twice when he was in Vermont. Google maps now displays his house as a landmark which sure would have been helpful back then to find it!