Skin Much Improved and the Truth About Age and Life

1:37 AM (of Thursday, May 8th, 2025)

Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025.

This photo is one handpicked out of many to showcase my skin's appearance, and I think it's a decent looking photo. Honestly I don't even know if it's a good photo or not, I think it is, but women may disagree. It's still really hard for me to tell if a photo of a man is good looking or not from a woman's perspective, because I think a lot of men may look good, but women will rate them poorly.

I think the most important step to skincare is weightcare. You can have the best skin care, but if you have a high body fat percent, for men that's higher than 12%, for women this doesn't matter much, then you are not showing anywhere close to your potential. In my case, I am around 15-16% body fat right now, so I am still nowhere near my potential, but when I lie down on a bed and take a selfie, I think it at least looks decent. I also have selfies in front of a mirror, and they look fine too, but the one in bed just looks a lot better.

So that's why I am fasting again, in order to lose weight. Right now I am around 2 hours into my fast, starting at 11:59 PM of Wednesday, May 7th, and I aim to last for around 100 hours of fasting. I've been restarting on and off for the past week. I tried starting on May 1st but failed, and kept restarting and failing every day for the entire past week. This time I'm serious. I'm aiming to last until around May 12th or so. If I started back on May 1st, I would be done by now, so I really just want this to be over and done with already.

The Internet and electricity have been having problems all week as well. Today, I woke up without any Internet for several hours. Yesterday, I woke up without any electricity for several hours, and then in the evening at around 6-8 PM yesterday, the electricity went out yet again for the entire night until 3 AM this morning (Wednesday, May 7th), I was awake the whole night to experience the electricity coming back on.

During the times of no electricity and no Internet, I took that time to self-reflect and do activities that didn't involve any social media. I cleaned up, I cleaned the bathroom, and I listened to self-discipline audio programs. There were many insights that I learned from having all this time away from quick entertainment.

One of those insights is that there really is no reason to procrastinate. We eventually have to do whatever activity we are procrastinating on. Delaying working on the activity is just harming yourself down the line. It's still going to be hard for me to not procrastinate on things, but at least I realize this now. I wouldn't have learned this lesson if my Internet and electricity were fully functional the whole time.

Another insight is that there is literally a time limit for everything. I am in my 30s now, and it would be much harder for me to change careers at this point than if I were in my late teens or early 20s. People always tell us that there's always this time to change careers, but this is not the case at all, and it's unfortunate for someone to reach their 30s without knowing what they want to do in life.

I'm currently 31, and it's not that old, but it sort of is in the tech world. Employers want young people, in their mid 20s mainly, that's arguably when our minds have the best blend of agility and experience, we can still learn and pick up things quite easily while at the same time already knowing a lot. Just like physical health, our mental health and intellect declines with age, this is a truth most people don't realize because it's not as obvious and there are less tests for this, but it's true.

An obvious area to look at for creativity and intellect is music. Most musicians are continually improving in their craft from their teens to mid 20s, in terms of the music they create, and then their creativity and musical ability decline after their mid 20s. Many musicians still continue making music over 30 but most of the time their songs aren't as good, they no longer produce any hits. Of course there are exceptions to this, and a big name will carry someone too in terms of musical sales, but in general this is true.

It's the same for tech as well. It's true a lot of the tech innovations are done by people in their 20s and early 30s, people don't even realize this. A lot of the major software, programming languages, architecture, were created by people in their 20s and early 30s. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds when he was 22, Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg when he was 20, Microsoft by Bill Gates when he was 20, Apple by Steve Jobs when he was 21, the first Apple computers hand-designed by Steve Woziak when he was 25. Unix was created by Dennis Ritchie at 30 and Ken Thompson at 26, and C was created by Dennis Ritchie at 31. RuneScape was created by two brothers, 19 and 21 years old. What the fuck.

Of course there are exceptions to this, Python was created by Guido Van Rossum when he was 35, Java by James Gosling when he was 40, but these are exceptions. It's fucking wild isn't it?

It's not as true with writing though, it seems. Frankenstein was started by Mary Shelley when she was 18 and published when she was 20. JK Rowling was 30 years old when she started Harry Potter, and 32 when she published it. JRR Tolkien was 38 when he started The Hobbit, and 45 when it was published. He was much older for his other Lord of the Rings books. Leo Tolstoy started War and Peace when he was 35, and published when he was 41. Malcolm Gladwell was 45 when he published Outliers.

For manga, this holds true. Akira Toriyama was 29 when he wrote Dragon Ball. Masashi Kishimoto was 24 when he wrote Naruto. Eiichiro Oda was 22 when he started One Piece. Tite Kubo was 24 when he started Bleach. I'm sure nearly all of the random manga and anime around today are all written by people in their 20s. I wrote some fictional work in my 20s as well.

Thomas Edison was 32 when he created the light bulb, he has had hundreds of inventions prior, Henry Ford was 32 when he invented the Quadricycle, the Wright Brothers were 36 and 32 when they invented heavier-than-air human flight (there was flight with balloons prior, those are called lighter-than-air), and so on.

For sports, this is the most obvious. Nearly all the records in the sports have been set by and broken by people in their late teens or early 20s, it's pretty much like this across the board. People are at the prime of their health at 18. In the medical and longevity world, all physical and health metrics are on average the best at 18, and then it's a decline from there. People in their early 20s are able to beat them at sports mainly due to having more experience, but in terms of physical ability, the 18 year olds are likely superior.

So, talent really shows at a younger age. If you're basically over 30, and you still haven't had any outstanding achievements or creations in your life, it will likely never happen. This is just the truth.

So I actually made this site. I made this site a bit over 5 years ago when I was 26. I have made tens of apps, games, websites up to that point as well, having created my first website when I was 9 years old, having published some apps to all the app stores Apple, Google, Microsoft when I was 19 years old. I haven't done much since then, if I am being completely honest. I have traveled a lot, have been in relationships, met lots of new friends, created a new company, had lots of adventures and gained thousands of followers on social media, but in terms of apps and websites made since then, basically none. I have made some music though, when I was around 27-29, but I hired people to make those songs for me. I have made some new songs at 31, but I used AI to make those songs for me.

This is actually a huge wake-up call because this is not something I realized at all. People really peak in their teens and 20s. Yeah sure, people have jobs and start families in their mid 20s and 30s, they live stable lives and then they work that career for their entire lives. But I'm talking about creativity, talent, intellect, health, fitness, physical appearance, etc, and in general, people peak in their teens and 20s in these areas. It's not even funny.

When people debut and become stars in their teens or 20s, whether as an actor or musician or tech inventor or sports superstar or whatever, it's not a coincidence, it's not a surprise. These are world talents given the right training and opportunity, reaching the world stage because they are at the primes of their lives.

I made some "smart" decisions such as becoming vegan when I was 19, and starting my first tech company when I was 19, Megawatt Apps, LLC. I made a bunch of apps at 19, and I made a bunch of websites prior to that in my teens from 13 to 18. It wasn't a coincidence that I learned how to solve all Rubik's cubes from 3x3x3 to 5x5x5 when I was 14, or that I aced all my math courses. It wasn't a coincidence that I was successful at 18-20, having websites that had a million visitors per month. It wasn't a coincidence that at 13, I figured it all out myself and made some videos that reached hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, back in 2006, back when YouTube first launched and literally no one knew how to make or edit videos. I even made my own scripting language at around 22 that would automate my previous job. This was me in my prime ages, making good decisions, making smart choices, at my most creative and most intellectual years.

Wow. I'm kind of trembling. In general, as a population, we really decline after 30, not just in appearance and in physical health, which are very obvious to observe and measure, but in every area. I think this is really the case, history just proves it. The genius musicians, genius tech inventors, genius writers, etc. pretty much all lived to being over 30, some are still in their careers in their 70s, yet they have never surpassed their previous selves.

Of course arguably for example, if they created a work that would persist, then their creations would only bloom in later years, such as Naruto, One Piece, Dragon Ball, etc, or any music that only continues being listened to, or any company such as Steve Jobs making Apple the number one company in the world when he was in his 50s, or Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook only improving as he got older as well, but the point is that they started this in their 20s and they showed tremendous promise in their 20s.

If someone is not showing promise in their teens or 20s, or not showing any path that they want to follow in their teens or 20s, or they are still undecided in their career by the time they reach their 30s, then it's really hard to make up for this.

So it wasn't a shock that when I was in college, I had a friend that was making their own board game with their own rules and creativity. At the time, I didn't tell him, but as a teenager myself at the time, I was thinking to myself, this guy is kind of crazy, does he think his board game will become a hit or something? And that's not the point. It's that he was creative at all that matters, and at 18/19, he should be that creative. It's normal.

He's at the prime of his intellect and creativity. I also had a friend that was doing insane physics research, like PHD level kind of work, he was getting cited and published or something, I don't even remember, and I thought at the time that he was doing too much. He's doing just the right amount. 18/19 we are at the primes of our health, intellect, creativity, more of this should be encouraged.

We do learn more and achieve more with experience, this is true. A lot of us just aren't put into the right circumstances to do well in life when we're younger. For me, all of my creativity was just a personal interest in these things. No one else I knew was into computers as much as me. My parents did not encourage this behavior from me either, it was all personal interest and growth. Most people find interest in at least one thing.

I grew up not believing in any talent. I read books such as Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Bounce by Matthew Syed, both of these books were extremely anti-talent, they were more about tabula rasa or the blank slate, and they shaped my thinking. Growing up and experiencing more of the world, I realize that talent and genetics can play a large role as well.

So, not that I've experienced much benefit from it, but I've downloaded and used a few different IQ testing apps, and they would often rank me at having an IQ of 130-140+, it's pretty common and easy for me to score in that range, enough that I think it's easy for everyone. I also score in the 99th percentile of any brain training apps I use. I actually have the delusional belief that most people have an IQ of 130+, probably because a good amount of people I interact with have that, since vegans/vegetarians on average have an IQ of 111, higher than the highest population average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews at 107. Wahl is actually an Ashkenazi Jew, and she told me she was tested by a psychologist and her IQ was 135+, my ex-gf had an IQ of 128, since we played some brain training games that had IQ testing in them together, both of them are vegans too.

But yeah, it always shocks me that the population average of the countries with the highest IQs which are China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, etc. their IQ is only around 105 on average. That's just so low to me. I've seen people on the Internet brag about having 115 IQ or something, and I was like, that's not that great.

Having a high IQ doesn't necessarily mean that my grades are good or that I would do well in school. My grades are not good right now. I procrastinate and work on my homework last minute. I currently have a 2.98 GPA or something in college, and this one class I am taking, which was supposed to be an easy elective, I will probably get like a C or something, hopefully, if it even gets that high. I am 31 and just taking an online university to get my bachelor's, right now I just have an associate's.

Anyway, there's still so much of my life I have to work on and improve. It is actually a really good idea for me to completely stop all anime, manga, and video games altogether. They really don't bring much or any benefit to my life. I haven't played any games since last year, since December 31st, 2024. But I have read manga and watched anime as recently as today. I use it an excuse for "relaxation time" and in our society, this is widely accepted. I think, just like the advice of "no rush in deciding what you want to do in life" given to teens, it's also bad advice to have "relaxation time", maybe. Did the great minds I just described above have any relaxation time? For them to have excelled by the time they got to their 20s, I think they had very little downtime.

Society is still so wrong in so many areas today, just because it's widely accepted by people, such as mindless entertainment, or killing and eating animals, doesn't mean these are good nor justified things. 70% of the population is overweight and obese after all, most of the population doesn't even have $500 for an emergency, the average IQ is only around 100, and so on. Average isn't great at all.

Just because something is classified as good advice by most people, doesn't mean it's good at all. It requires critical thinking to think about it rationally. The advice might not even apply to every field. The reason why I watch anime and read manga, is because when I would talk with them, co-workers would talk about shows they watch, video games they play, sports teams they track, and other downtime activities during our random chats. We also talk about how it's so normal to come home from work and do some downtime activity such as this. So I just ingrained it in me, that I should be doing nothing too when I come back home. I think this advice could be wrong, I haven't tried the opposite yet, no entertainment at all, to really critically come up with a judgment, but I think it makes sense.

My biggest fear of having no downtime, is not burnout, but the pain, difficulty, and boredom of having no entertainment. Manga, anime, video games, these activities are so entertaining, and they feel so pleasurable. Work and study feels so boring and unpleasurable. The thing is though, for nearly all of human history, we haven't had the kind of entertainment like we do now, and these forms of entertainment are definitely more harmful than beneficial. So even though I think it is painful to avoid all forms of entertainment, I think it's beneficial too.

Fasting is also painful. The reason why I have given up so many times the past week is because it's painful. It's painful physically and mentally, but so is working and studying. But these are the kinds of pains we have to face to improve. I think that's another revelation. There is really no improvement without at least some suffering.

Anyway, that was my day today.