There’s two things I really wish I’d done much earlier in life, which I cannot catch-up with, due to the realities of aging. Also one thing I did do, which I’m happy about. So if you’re near 30, here’s three things you really should do ASAP.
1. Test Your T
As you age and your metabolism accrues errors, your hormone levels will degrade. Testosterone is the chemical of desire. As you lose it you’ll lose your motivation to do things in general, and attendant energy levels as well. Honestly, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe as we age we should set our sights lower and accept that we’ve won our biggest victories and cultivate the fruits of our prior accomplishments rather than striving for ever greater heights.
But maybe not. Maybe it’s good to stay hungry. The good news is that testosterone is super cheap to manufacture and very easy to supplement, so you can keep it at your healthy youthful levels indefinitely. The bad news is that by the time you realize you need it, you don’t know what those levels were.
Male testosterone ranges from 300 to 1,000 ng/dL (nanograms per deciliter). This is a very wide range! You probably want to aim to restore the level your healthy young body naturally produces and has adjusted to. But if you go in and test at 300 ng/dL there is no way for your doctor to know if your base level 10 years ago was 450 or 700 or 950. He’ll probably aim for a middle line, but that’s probably an under- or overshoot.
You can’t get this information from the past once it is the past. When you want it is when you can’t get it. Head this off. Go in and get your testosterone levels tested when you’re young so that when you get older you’ll know what to restore to.
Honestly you may want to do this in your late 20s. 30 is an easy-to-remember milestone though.
2. Finagle Some Finasteride
Finasteride prevents hair loss. With very few exceptions, men look better with a full head of hair. Keeping your hair is super easy, all you have to do is take Finasteride every day, which is readily available and cheap.
Unfortunately Finasteride doesn’t regrow hair (rare exceptions notwithstanding). You have to take it before you start losing your hair (or at the very first signs). The biggest difficulty with this is that no one EVER sees the top/back of their own head. Try it right now. I bet you can’t. Mirror doesn’t help, it shows you from the front. Even phone camera isn’t that useful because it’s hard to get a good angle by reaching back.
Your best option is to have a loved one you really trust enough to actually tell you when you’re starting to lose your hair, and to tell them that you want them to do that. If your partner will tell you when you have some food on your chin/teeth, they may be high-integrity enough to do this for you. Fortunately if you’re reading this you’re probably rat-adjacent so you likely have a partner that will do this for you. :) Otherwise you are basically doomed to not notice until at least a year past the time you should have started.
Again, this is a thing that you can’t get take-backs on. By the time you realize you need it, you’ve already suffered irrecoverable losses. So start early. At 30. Probably earlier tbh, many guys start losing hair before 30. But 30 is an easy-to-remember milestone.
Contrary to initial reports on finasteride, the chances of sexual dysfunction are extremely low — maybe 1%. And if you do experience them you can just stop finasteride and they go away. As a bonus, it may slightly slow down skin aging.
3. Suspend Your Spunk
If you’re like most career-minded moderns, your girlfriend/wife will start thinking about kids around 30. She’ll be ready for them around her early/mid-30s. At this point fertility is becoming hard. In America “Advanced Maternal Age” for a woman is 35 and hospitals generally treat her differently. If she’s been thinking ahead and has/had a career, she probably froze some eggs in her late 20s or early 30s. You may very well use these eggs to conceive.
This is a biologically intense process, and extremely expensive. You’re probably 2-4 years older than her, so if you haven’t planned ahead she’s using mid-30s to late-30s seed to fertilize a limited number of very expensive eggs. You’ve probably heard by now that male sperm quality also degrades with age. The sperm you make in your late 30s is worse than the sperm you made in your late 20s.
Your wife has gone through several intense medical procedures that cost her a ton of money to maximize the chance of healthy offspring. Getting your semen frozen is trivially easy and basically free in comparison. You’re paying maybe a thousand dollars the first time and $100-$200 a year to keep it in cryo storage. You should be willing to invest this minimal amount into your future children and to do your portion of the medical sexual effort.
Huge bonus - if you do this you can get a vasectomy without future regrets. This helps avoid some of the worst tail-risks of a condom failure, and opens up potential for less-protected sex with some close partners.
Honestly, younger sperm is better so you may want to do it even before 30. But 30 is an easy-to-remember milestone.
Timing
In all of these pre-30 is even better than 30. But in addition to being a milestone that’s easy to remember, pre-30 humans have more money constraints. These interventions are all pretty cheap in the grand scheme, but the practicalities of getting together a spare $1000 in your early 20s can be very daunting. By the time you’re 30 it still isn’t trivial, but at least now it’s not wrenchingly painful.
Of course the looming question over all this is “wtf are you talking about Eneasz. It’s almost 2027. Any advice that’s supposed to pay biological dividends years down the line is beyond irrelevant.”
OK. Yeah. It is weird to give this advice as if the age of classic biology wasn’t about to end, one way or another. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing either. Why write something like this when no one will care about their male pattern baldness soon either because they won't be alive to care or they won’t have to worry about it because they can choose any age and any body in any configuration?
But I dunno man. Maybe we get a pause. Maybe the Internet is harrowed. Maybe things limp along weirdly for another fifteen years and people still need to worry about their motivation levels and being attractive and having a small family to be happy with. In those timelines, I would have rather have been told these three things to do, than not.
There’s two things I really wish I’d done much earlier in life, which I cannot catch-up with, due to the realities of aging. Also one thing I did do, which I’m happy about. So if you’re near 30, here’s three things you really should do ASAP.
1. Test Your T
As you age and your metabolism accrues errors, your hormone levels will degrade. Testosterone is the chemical of desire. As you lose it you’ll lose your motivation to do things in general, and attendant energy levels as well. Honestly, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe as we age we should set our sights lower and accept that we’ve won our biggest victories and cultivate the fruits of our prior accomplishments rather than striving for ever greater heights.
But maybe not. Maybe it’s good to stay hungry. The good news is that testosterone is super cheap to manufacture and very easy to supplement, so you can keep it at your healthy youthful levels indefinitely. The bad news is that by the time you realize you need it, you don’t know what those levels were.
Male testosterone ranges from 300 to 1,000 ng/dL (nanograms per deciliter). This is a very wide range! You probably want to aim to restore the level your healthy young body naturally produces and has adjusted to. But if you go in and test at 300 ng/dL there is no way for your doctor to know if your base level 10 years ago was 450 or 700 or 950. He’ll probably aim for a middle line, but that’s probably an under- or overshoot.
You can’t get this information from the past once it is the past. When you want it is when you can’t get it. Head this off. Go in and get your testosterone levels tested when you’re young so that when you get older you’ll know what to restore to.
Honestly you may want to do this in your late 20s. 30 is an easy-to-remember milestone though.
2. Finagle Some Finasteride
Finasteride prevents hair loss. With very few exceptions, men look better with a full head of hair. Keeping your hair is super easy, all you have to do is take Finasteride every day, which is readily available and cheap.
Unfortunately Finasteride doesn’t regrow hair (rare exceptions notwithstanding). You have to take it before you start losing your hair (or at the very first signs). The biggest difficulty with this is that no one EVER sees the top/back of their own head. Try it right now. I bet you can’t. Mirror doesn’t help, it shows you from the front. Even phone camera isn’t that useful because it’s hard to get a good angle by reaching back.
Your best option is to have a loved one you really trust enough to actually tell you when you’re starting to lose your hair, and to tell them that you want them to do that. If your partner will tell you when you have some food on your chin/teeth, they may be high-integrity enough to do this for you. Fortunately if you’re reading this you’re probably rat-adjacent so you likely have a partner that will do this for you. :) Otherwise you are basically doomed to not notice until at least a year past the time you should have started.
Again, this is a thing that you can’t get take-backs on. By the time you realize you need it, you’ve already suffered irrecoverable losses. So start early. At 30. Probably earlier tbh, many guys start losing hair before 30. But 30 is an easy-to-remember milestone.
Contrary to initial reports on finasteride, the chances of sexual dysfunction are extremely low — maybe 1%. And if you do experience them you can just stop finasteride and they go away. As a bonus, it may slightly slow down skin aging.
3. Suspend Your Spunk
If you’re like most career-minded moderns, your girlfriend/wife will start thinking about kids around 30. She’ll be ready for them around her early/mid-30s. At this point fertility is becoming hard. In America “Advanced Maternal Age” for a woman is 35 and hospitals generally treat her differently. If she’s been thinking ahead and has/had a career, she probably froze some eggs in her late 20s or early 30s. You may very well use these eggs to conceive.
This is a biologically intense process, and extremely expensive. You’re probably 2-4 years older than her, so if you haven’t planned ahead she’s using mid-30s to late-30s seed to fertilize a limited number of very expensive eggs. You’ve probably heard by now that male sperm quality also degrades with age. The sperm you make in your late 30s is worse than the sperm you made in your late 20s.
Your wife has gone through several intense medical procedures that cost her a ton of money to maximize the chance of healthy offspring. Getting your semen frozen is trivially easy and basically free in comparison. You’re paying maybe a thousand dollars the first time and $100-$200 a year to keep it in cryo storage. You should be willing to invest this minimal amount into your future children and to do your portion of the medical sexual effort.
Huge bonus - if you do this you can get a vasectomy without future regrets. This helps avoid some of the worst tail-risks of a condom failure, and opens up potential for less-protected sex with some close partners.
Honestly, younger sperm is better so you may want to do it even before 30. But 30 is an easy-to-remember milestone.
Timing
In all of these pre-30 is even better than 30. But in addition to being a milestone that’s easy to remember, pre-30 humans have more money constraints. These interventions are all pretty cheap in the grand scheme, but the practicalities of getting together a spare $1000 in your early 20s can be very daunting. By the time you’re 30 it still isn’t trivial, but at least now it’s not wrenchingly painful.
Of course the looming question over all this is “wtf are you talking about Eneasz. It’s almost 2027. Any advice that’s supposed to pay biological dividends years down the line is beyond irrelevant.”
OK. Yeah. It is weird to give this advice as if the age of classic biology wasn’t about to end, one way or another. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing either. Why write something like this when no one will care about their male pattern baldness soon either because they won't be alive to care or they won’t have to worry about it because they can choose any age and any body in any configuration?
But I dunno man. Maybe we get a pause. Maybe the Internet is harrowed. Maybe things limp along weirdly for another fifteen years and people still need to worry about their motivation levels and being attractive and having a small family to be happy with. In those timelines, I would have rather have been told these three things to do, than not.