Why is it so hard to hold on to money?

Why do so many of us, if we come into money like a big lottery win, mismanage it so badly? How many stories have you heard about the people who win huge sums of money and not only are miserable a year later but have lost nearly all of it?

First of all, you have to look at the human organism after the way it's evolved for the last million or more years into its current form. The reason we're so successful as a species is our adaptability to new environments and circumstances.

Our nervous system and emotional response to our surroudings and what's going on in our lives works extremely quickly - the reason we were able to survive when an ice age descended 100,000 years ago is the same mechanism as the reason it's so easy to get bored in today's world.

That means that when we suddenly get money, we get used to it a lot quicker than we think we will. Most of us spend all our lives dreaming of suddenly coming into wealth and being delivered from the constant grind about how we're going to pay our bills. We imagine that if/when it happens our lives will be changed forever and will turn into a constant parade of joy, a honeymoon period that never ends.

In fact, we're built to get used to it at a speed that's almost scary considering how long most of us spend wishing for it - in fact a matter of only months. After that, and just like our ancestors had done a few months into an ice age, we've reset our sense of normal and reached emotional equilibrium again like we're designed to - instead of struggling and worrying about money being our normal state, having enough money to do whatever we want is now our normal state. Problems don't go away, we now just have the problems that come with having lots of money (and they exist, in spades).

We do indeed go through a honeymoon period where we pay off our house (or buy another one), get rid of all our debts and go on an opulent holiday with all the trimmings, help our friends and family and everything else we've always dreamed of. But that feeling of joyous deliverance doesn't last any longer than it takes our nervous system to recalbirate to expect it.

In fact that's where the stories you've heard about how miserable lottery winners become comes from – after family, friends and hangers-on descend and resentment erupts over who gets money and who doesn't, many people say they were better off before having any.

The next thing is that I think the amount of time we feel like that depends on the kind of person we are. If we put particular emphasis on money in our lives it can be an even emptier achievement, the sense of joy and deliverance being even shorter.

We've spent all the time leading up to the change in circumstances believeing money itself will change our lives, but in believing that we've just bought into an outsized version of the buyer's remorse we all know to some degree, thinking buying things will make us happy.

The version of that when we get rich is only the momentary achievement of a self-imposed milestone, and we're no sooner there than we uncosnciously set our goal higher, ending up with the curious phenomenon of people with so much money they never have to work again if they don't want still feeling pressure to keep up with the Joneses and buy even more houses, an even more expensive car, a longer boat, etc.

You might have heard about one of two studies. In the first, researchers asked a sample of people how much money they'd need to be completely happy and satisfied with their lives, and the response was the same - twice as much as they currently earned. The kicker is that it didn't matter whether the respondents earned $20,000 or $20,000,000 a year, what they had was never enough.

In the other, scientists measured annual income against levels of life satisfaction and the magic tipping point was $70,000. Under that, income affected happiness in the form of stress because of financial worries, but above it, multimillionaires were no happier overall than those on $70,000 a year.

If you look at money the right way the honeymoon period can last longer, and you can even turn it into something more permanenet and meaningful over the long term. If you understand it's a means to an end and that it won't make you happy in and of itself, you're in a better position – we all learn very quickly that money can only buy so much and that very little of what it can buy will truly fulfil us.

Humans are by nature achievement machines. We evolved under the constant need to find the next meal and the next place of shelter. The modern equivalent of that is things like career advancement, winning at sport, etc. Take that away from the human animal by giving us everything we've always dreamed about and completely eliminating scarcity from life and you take away our reason to get out of bed in the morning, hobbling our most innate drives and leaving us moribund.

But if you use money as a tool to do what you should always be doing in your life - invest in relationships with people and with helping and serving your fellow man – it will remain what it should have been in all our lives (if the capitalist system was fair instead of being an all-consuming source of worry for so many people) - part of a vast toolset to live rather than a reason to live.

It's no wonder we all dream of being rich, but just like advertising and the consumerism it promotes, if we're not emotionally prepared for it, we're going to be taken in by it and left hollow and disappointed if we ever get it.

How do you steal a man?

There are a lot of examples from pop culture of some homewrecker woman 'stealing' another woman's man, and it's never sat comfortably with me.

I know it's 'just' a song or 'just' a movie, and I know no songwriter or screenwriter really thinks a man is so easily stolen like a DVD player under the arm of a crack addict as s/he runs out of a house in the dead of night.

But we're prepared to acknowledge how decades (a century in fact) of portraying gay people as the squealing, sissy comic relief in movies has been to the treatment they've received throughout most of modern history. So I think it's only fair we admit how the all-pervasive idea that a woman can 'steal' another woman's man might also be generating or adding to a dangerous culture we're already battling with.

As the last few years have proven to us, stereotypes persist and no matter how harmless the intent, they matter to the way we as a society perceive a certain gender or group.

One of the biggest parts of the cultural conversation today is around women having their own agency and power to make decisions, no different than we've always expected of men.

Why don't we take pains to afford men the same agency, and say so in our gender discourse? There's a (very valid) complaint that female characters have long gone without real depth or dimension in popular entertainment – every female character a variation of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy – and we're starting to see the end of it, or at least a lot more awareness of it in the MeToo era. Maybe we need to acknowledge the same thing for men and their power to not be 'stolen'.

Because there's another potentially damaging side to this, and it's related to the way women are punished for the same sexual behaviour men are rewarded and revered for. If a woman 'steals' some other woman's man we consider her the villain and the homewrecker rather than him for allowing himself to be so easily 'stolen'.

Is it another symptom of rape culture where we automatically consider men to be barely-autonomous fucking machines who have no control over their drives, whether it's the way we blame the other woman if he strays or the rape victim he drugs because of the length of her skirt?

Maybe instead of asking Joelene not to conspire to steal her boyfriend, Dolly Parton should have been singing to him, imploring him to remember what they have together and not to throw it all away because he can't help thinking with his dick for 10 minutes?

Authors with Longevity

What is it about some authors that have made their careers endure when it seems nowadays that you only get one shot at fame and fortune and then you're passed over for the newer, hotter name no matter how hot and bright you burnt?

Think of Ira Levin, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, PD James, Barbara Cartland and other writers who came of age or came to prominence in the postwar era. For some reason they have careers with longevity, every new book as successful as the last until they've reached near-mythic status.

The generation that influenced them in turn - Poe, Hammett, Christie, Stoker, etc – are beyond mythic, now titans in the field of published fiction.

But look at a lot of the hit authors you know from the last few years like Paula Hawkins, Ernest Cline, Liane Moriarty or Andy Weir. They get a single shot at household name recognition because of (respectively) The Girl on the Train, Ready Player One, Big Little Lies and The Martian, but is anybody who loves fiction still talking about them to the extent we do King or Cartland?

What's different today? Is it simply because there are so many more books being published and – paradoxically – a much more fractured field, making it so much harder to market oneself as a writer with any enduring appeal across a whole oeuvre (whereas writers like William Peter Blatty or Dean Koontz had the benefit of a few decades to seep into the cultural consciousness)?

Is it just because those newer names simply haven't written more than a single good book and therefore don't have long careers to sustain? Whereas Stephen King has published one beloved novel and collection after another since the mid 1970s, I wouldn't have a clue what else Andy Weir has written.

The only authors who've come close to such immortality in the 21st century have been Dan Brown, JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and to a lesser extent EL James. The reason for Brown's phenomenal success with The Da Vinci Code is still inexplicable because (like Cline's Ready Player One) he did not write a particularly good or memorable book.

The same goes even more so for James. Not only did she do nothing particularly groundbreaking with 50 Shades of Grey to warrant such fame and media legitimacy (ebooks had pioneered and established that kind of erotica years before) many can point to dozens of still-obscure books that have far better prose.

The Harry Potter series was certainly popular but – like Moriarty, Cline and the rest mentioned above – Rowling's popularity got a huge shot in the arm from the film version/s of her story.

But even that seems not to prove anything. The Twilight films had as much cultural impact as the Harry Potter franchise, but do you ever hear Stephanie Meyer's name anymore? Her and Rowling's careers have in fact been mirror images of each other – one huge series of five or six parts, then a couple of standalone novels that have made few waves in literary circles.

Maybe Rowling's just smart, keeping herself in the fray by writing the next few movies in the Potter world, rubber-stamping and/or writing the Potter stage show, etc.

But it still leaves us with a question. How do you become a name author we love and read over generations versus a one hit wonder? Was there something in the media, sociological or technological landscape in ages past which made it possible to solidify an artistic legend, but that day's over?

Why I hate Christmas

Every year my hatred of Christmas grows, and every year I articulate what I hate about it to myself a little bit better, so I thought I'd finally put it into words.

It started off years ago when I thought I still liked Christmas but couldn't quite reconcile the anxiety leading up to it with the stress and fatigue associated with it. One day I simply realised I don't like it at all, that the downsides I felt about it more than outweighed any of the upsides like the big dinner, presents or time with the people I love.

After that I suppose I looked for and latched onto external or socioeconomic reasons not to like it so as to validate my inner cynic, and my dislike of it's only grown since.

First, here's what I hate about my own experience.

My household outlays much more money than it can afford or that I want to. In the early years when we had no money it seemed to leave a smouldering crater in our already torpedoed finances that we'd spend the next six months recovering from, and what did we get out of it to be left in that state? A ton of food that certainly wasn't worth months of tenuous household income, a huge task undoing all the furniture removal and mess to fit everything and everyone in, and yet more stuff cluttering up my life.

We'd sit up all night wrapping presents nobody would care about in two weeks, we'd spend a fortune on enough food to feed three times as many people as we'd host, food and drink that's incredibly bad for us which I never wanted and which is wildly over-catered (enough soft drink to sink a ship, cake, pudding and ice cream crowding decent food out of the freezer, etc).

I'd get a handful of presents that in some other life might be cute and nice, but in this life and in the space we have to live in with all the crap already in it because of our constantly unsettled circumstances, it just ends up more stuff I have to find a corner somewhere to shove out of the way.

Presents not because the giver has had the time and energy to put thought into something that's unique to both them and me – the entire point of a gift from someone, after all (and I don't hold anyone, least of all my wife, in contempt or anger about that because she faces the same unbalanced deficit of energy, time and money every year I do), but presents to fulfil a social obligation we're brainwashed about our entire lives.

I'd move furniture all over the place to accommodate everyone (including between houses in most cases), have no time to work or relax for what feels like weeks on end, and it's all for absolutely no tangible benefit.

But it's for the kids, you might say. Fine, except the way we entertain and raise our kids today and all the material goods we surround them with is utterly obscene. My grandson has so many toys in his life he'd never get to play with them all even if he wanted to, and every time he's at my house he completely ignores his toy box and goes straight for the iPad game he's addicted to. He'd get more out of $200 credit on that game than all the crap he unwraps and leaves everywhere at Christmas.

My wife talks about when her mother was a girl in WWII-era England and how, when they got an orange in their Christmas stocking, it was like getting a Wonka golden ticket because they almost never saw one. They probably got a steel train carriage or a knitted doll too and that was it, and let me promise you they were happier with their fun than kids of today's world whom we drown in oceans of plastic crap.

But it's about the pleasure of unwrapping presents, you might counter. 19th century European royals and nobles got pleasure out of hunting animals across their African colonies too, to near-extinction.

Unfair analogy? For the privilege of all that momentary and ultimately meaningless pleasure of present-opening that gives them the kind of dopamine response retailers use to swindle us every day, we spend enough money to get entire continents out of debt. A news story this year reported that just in WA – the least populated state in the least populated continent on Earth – we were going to spend $833m... over three days.

Extrapolate that out to the amount we spend around the whole world in a single year on all that garbage and it wouldn't only end poverty, it would solve every sociopolitical problem there is, advancing human society to the point we probably wouldn't reach for a century otherwise. Instead, all it does is let Disney, Hasbro and Proctor and Gamble maintain (not even increase – they structure their whole business models around expectations of that revenue) their margins and not fire hundreds of thousands of people, which they have to do to 'correct' their stock price.

And every time I look at him unwrapping some other piece of forgettable plastic he might play with twice before it eventually gets thrown out or given to an op shop in a year after its lain under a bed or outside in the weather, I can't help but wonder at what a minority he's in. He was lucky to be born in a rich Western country where we can afford all that useless shit.

Whatever he opened was probably put together by a kid just like him – maybe several of them – in some third world hellhole where they're chained to a factory lathe churning them out by the millions after already losing a couple of fingers in the machine, are paid barely enough to scrape crumbs from the ground and who wouldn't know a Christmas present if you hit them over the head with it.

But even if we didn't move forwards as a society thanks to the whole enterprise, it would be a start if we didn't move backwards. After it's all over, it takes me a fortnight to get rid of all the Christmas paper and plastic packaging by cramming it into the bins to get rid of it.

If the stuff it contained turned out to be beloved treasures in a child's life that might almost make the abominable scale of waste worth it, but the amount of material left over after all the carnage is mind boggling to behold in a single household – imagine a whole country.

We now have to take our own bags to the supermarket and we've all jumped on board the same hashtag bullshit about banning plastic straws, yet we know very well that more than half of every Christmas present we wrap is the packaging that will be thrown away. Where do we think it'll end up? Google pictures of Pisang Batu river in Jakarta.

'That's not us', you might argue, 'it's unenlightened, backwards, third-world Asians who won't stop polluting their own backyard the way they throw their trash into a river'. So just because the backyard we throw all our clamshell Nerf gun packaging (as well as our computers, phones, cars, food scraps and everything else – nearly a ton of rubbish per person per year, and that's just the average American) is in some other country where laws about polluting their waterways and poisoning their people are so lax, that makes us so much better? The fires and cyclones of global warming won't only hit the technology-strewn rubbish dumps of China and India...

If I leave water in a saucepan overnight to soak the food off the side, I take it outside the next morning and throw it on the garden rather than down the sink. It's a completely useless gesture coming from a single person in a corner of the smallest city on the most sparsely populated land mass on Earth when China, America and all the other economic powerhouses are getting worse at the way they treat the environment.

But I once heard the phrase 'be the change you want to see', and one thing I can't stand in myself is hypocrisy. Of course, tipping two measly litres of water on a plant instead of wasting it when I cram all that plastic into my bins every Christmas like everyone else makes me a complete hypocrite.

There's a socio-cultural dimension to it as well, and it can be summed up in the cheesy old phrase we always associate with the occasion - 'peace on Earth and goodwill to all men'.

At its most simplistic the notion that we'd all stop fighting and killing each other in the endless orgy of power struggle-fuelled violence we keep kidding ourselves we're better than for a single day to drink eggnog and open presents is an insult not just to the sensibility of what it means to be human but – if you want to be politically correct about it – the millions of people who've died because of it.

Dig deeper. The economic system that perpetuates and relies on Christmas being the destructive orgy of consumerism I described above is the reason for that continual power struggle. Today nation states exist to buttress ways of life, and in the West the endpoint of that is the concentration of wealth in an ever shrinking number of corporate-controlled hands. The artefacts our political and economic systems rely on – Frozen DVDs just as much as oil – come to us through a very entrenched industrial infrastructure, some of which exists in unstable parts of the world.

And as governments over the last century have proven, they'll act as outsourced police forces to maintain the supply stability of those artefacts to prop our economic systems aloft. Decades-long wars and occupations in the Middle East not to free or protect the people but assure the continued flow of oil is only the most visible example. For ones you've barely heard about search online for Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Cochabamba Water War and many other examples like them.

None of that political force or violence committed by and on behalf of financial interests is going to stop for Christmas, because it's by its virtue that Christmas take the form we know, with all the shopping centre Santas, snow spray painted in shop windows, turkey with all the trimmings, etc etc.

But I've got political again. Take me to task on spending time with your family. I won't even talk about how many people are forced to spend time with people they don't even really like and only see on Christmas because it's the done thing – a million memes and social media jokes about Christmas Day fights cover that more than adequately.

Let's suppose you're spending time with family you really love and want to be around and you only get to see them on Christmas (or some similar special occasion). You know all the studies about how we're destroying our health through constant overwork as well as I do, and it's not just distant relatives we only see on Christmas who suffer – our spouses and children are emotionally stunted and damaged because of it.

Our society (the same one that invades foreign countries to protect oil interests – at the risk of getting political again) normalises working yourself stupid until you have an ulcer or heart attack, and we're all headed for the same endpoint where we realise one day that our wife/husband/partner doesn't know us any more and that our children have been raised by Playstations and phones, faultlessly trained to understand that we don't have time for them.

If you look forward to seeing certain family (or just people you love – family takes many forms) on Christmas, you're probably not seeing them enough to begin with. Why wait until one day of the year to make the effort? As it is it's the worst day to socialise with people because you'll be so stressed and harried cooking three times as much food as they'll need on time and drowning in all the wrapping paper and plastic strewn around the perfect house you just spent three weeks decorating and that nobody even looks twice at (because all they're interested in is eating all the food you bankrupted yourself to pay for and what they'll get in their presents)?

Throw in all the conspiracy theories about how Coca Cola invented the modern visual iteration of Santa Claus and how corporations have conflated certain holidays to shove down our throats because of the money to be made (St Patricks' Day is only advertised by pubs, after all, and only confectionary companies and soft toy factories make extra money at Easter) – most of which are true – and the whole thing is an abomination.

What does it take to be a visionary?

Here's a question I can't quite figure out the answer to. Think of the people we consider visionary today. They come from technology (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg), film (James Cameron, George Lucas Steven Spielberg), science (Einstein, Edison or Dawkins) or politics, either on the official end like FDR or the action end like Martin Luther King).

And what's the one thing the people we think of as visionary and who've changed the world in some tangible way have in common?

They're all rich. Einstein as worth $12m when he died in 1955. Martin Luther King was from a wealthy family because of his influential father. You can't make any kind of splash in the technology world today without a mystique born out of billion dollar venture capital and expensive start-up funds. The smallest possible cut of some of the most successful movies would still put any film director or producer among the 1 percent.

Is that a prerequisite to being a visionary? We all have ideas, some of us huge ones, and many of them would undoubtedly change the world if they were bought to fruition. But it's a big world, and that means that on an industrial/practical level there's a high cost barrier to entry in executing world-beating ideas.

Almost everyone you care to mention who's done something that's changed the world has done so with the backing of an extensive infrastructure. Steve Jobs might have dreamed up the Mac or the iPod (he actually did neither), but without a company the size of Apple behind him to develop, manufacture and distribute it, he would have stayed a scruffy hippy with a passion for computers.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are transforming more industries than we can count and will be long remembered as visionaries, but would they be making the advances they are in AI or self-driving cars without that kind of money behind them?

There are actually two really good reasons supporting the idea that all it really takes to be a visionary is that you be loaded.

First, Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod in isolation. Nor did James Cameron paint every set or stitch every costume of Titanic or program the motion capture software of Avatar. Nobody we consider visionary can claim full ownership, command or even stewardship over the aspects of a product or change the word 'visionary' bestows upon them.

Society thrusts that upon them because we need a figurehead, a human face to put on industrial success. Bill Gates or Peter Jackson are easier to latch onto rather than tens of thousands of software engineers who created Windows or Weta Digital or the negotiating lawyers who ushered all those companies and products to users.

The second reason, closely related to the first, is that if you put any other educated, socially aware person in the place of those we think of as visionary, they might do just as good a job at changing the world. It might be easier than it looks with all that structural backing to do the kind of R&D, product marketing or distribution to create (or just approve) something that changes the world.

Most people who've ever done a day's work already realise the way to extract the best possible performance from any kind of commercial development apparatus is to populate it with the smartest and best people you can find.

Steve Jobs didn't walk around the design teams at Apple loudly telling them to come up with a new kind of digital music player or phone (as far as we know), he just saw the potential when it bubbled up from the dank labs that can be found in any huge company. At Google it's the famous 20 percent of employees' time rule where they get to make up and work on their own projects.

Of course, any of us might fail spectacularly because we back the wrong project – Jobs did so with Lisa and NeXt, and no less than Stephen Hawking threw all his research out at one point and set about disproving it because he realised it was wrong.

We simply underestimate the extent to which the people we idolise for being so brilliant are in the right place at the right time. Nobody has superpowers and most of them are no smarter, more forward thinking or more talented than you or I.

Give any bozo on the street $150m and expect him to make a hit movie? Undoubtedly not, but those who do aren't blessed with any potential you weren't born with too.

On why the orgasm is the emblematic state of the human condition

The human being is a very unique combination of hardware and software, enmeshed to work in tandem at the minutest level (probably cellular), and I don't think anything illustrates that as perfectly as the orgasm.

To begin with, it's an unmistakably physical process. The friction of skin and muscles eventually causes the spontaneous and rhythmic contraction of muscles around and throughout the pelvis in both sexes and pumps sperm from the testicles in men.

But there's one problem concerning the physical description of orgasm that's never been explained. In talking about orgasm physiology we tend to talk about the high number of nerve endings packed into the head of the penis and the clitoris, and saying we get pleasure from sex because of the number of nerve endings is like saying you get wet while you're drowning – it doesn't even begin to cover the extra dimension of extreme physicality that's more than just heavy sensory input.

If that was the case we might feel heady sexual satisfaction or pleasure from having our lips or fingertips stroked, both areas that are as much or more sensitive than the genitals thanks to the number of nerve endings in them.

The end result of sex (assuming we're both doing it right) is the burst of explosive pleasure we feel, not just a keen sense of touch. Where does that come from?

Obviously the flood of sexual pleasure we get from lovemaking is physical as well, somehow, and it's got a lot to do with pressure on certain muscles – you didn't know what it meant when you were little, but swing hard on a swing set today and you'll feel the unmistakable pleasure of G forces pressing on something in your groin and crotch.

It's also where the software comes in. Think of the emotional response to orgasm. Release – although the word doesn't even begin to cover how powerful and cleansing it is. You can't keep worries in your mind when you orgasm.

Togetherness – the resulting hormones flood your body and brain and prompt responses from wanting to be physically close to the person you just had sex with to believing you're falling in love.

Joy – is there anything else that makes most of us (again, assuming we're doing it right) as happy as adults as sex and orgasm?

And the release, togetherness and joy are heavy and palpable, physical sensations themselves as much as emotional responses. Orgasm prompts a wave of feeling in both senses of the word that floods the physical brain and body and the sentient mind.

The physical sensation of the pleasure is so complete, so deep seated, so seemingly stitched to our body at a micro-level it has the power to overcome almost any prior mental state of being and completely overwrite or re-program it at a stroke (no pun intended), the hardware rewriting its own software and generating a completely new expression of it. It's as if Windows or OSX knows we're having trouble because we have too many documents and windows open and spontaneously reboots itself to clear the cache.

How to be a man

Love women. Some of them might hurt you, break your heart, laugh at you, even slap you.

But never stop loving them, because as a gender, they deserve it, and if some of them hurt you or are stupid, it doesn't mean they're all like it.

Women are good at being caring, nurturing, soft, gentle, loving and giving. Here's what they don't tell you growing up - so are you.

Sometimes, believe it or not, the thought of having sex will be exhausting, nauseating or completely uninteresting to you. That's okay. It doesn't mean you're any less a man.

Sometimes when you want sex you won't be able to do it. That doesn't mean you're any less a man either.

Ignore everything you read or hear about the rules and etiquette about dating. If you want to call her, call her. If she isn't interested, she either won't call you back or you'll hear it in her voice. It's her loss – move on. Your conscience will tell you where the line between pursuit and stalking is.

Don't worry about what sort of man women want and whether you fit that description. Be yourself. Plenty of women will want and love you exactly the way you are.

Does she earn more money than you? What the hell are you complaining about? Open a beer, cook more or play with the kids. Enjoy it.

Don't compare yourself to anyone. Most rich people inherited what they have or got that way through an accident of fate and are no smarter than you.

Most of the men girls fawn over in magazines are 22 and don't know the first thing about real life. Most Hollywood stars have five hours a day to spend in the gym and have all their housework and meals done for them.

You're naturally aggressive and ambitious, more so than women are, and aggression is a dirty word in modern society. Ten thousand years ago it gave you the power to fight off predators and bring down prey who were bigger, stronger, faster and had sharper teeth. It let you feed your family. It's much too late to try and get rid of it now. What matters in this world is what you do with it.

Use your aggression to go after what you want. It's the hallmark of every alpha male in the animal kingdom.

But remember that you need be the alpha male to nobody but yourself.

Never, ever, under any circumstances hit a woman. For any reason. If you know of any man who hits a woman, hit him. Hard.

At least once in your life, shed tears over a woman. It takes a lot to make us cry, and there's no better reason to do so.

Build something. It's good for the male soul.

Destroy something. It's good fun.

Teach a child to build something. It's the reason we're the dominant species on Earth.

If you want to lash out in a temper, pick your target very carefully. It might blow off steam, but something you love might be broken and our anger is always stronger than our body – you'll probably hurt yourself. Instead, have something ready to take it, like a punching bag in the garage.

Love. There's nothing else in the world worth spending your life doing. Not even your work.

Love your work. If you don't, find other work.

Never think you know everything about something. Put yourself in a learning frame of mind even if you're the expert. The second you stop learning, you stop growing and you don't learn a thing more.

If she nags, tell her. Tell her you'll listen to her and promise to do what she wants, but she's driving you crazy and making you want to do it less.

Don't promise her you'll do something just so she stops nagging. If you promise her you'll do something, do it.

Kill spiders. It's your job. If she's not scared of them and you are, let her. But you have to kill something.

You have two people in you. The capable, strong man who can handle anything and the tiny boy frightened of everything and wanting his mother. Let them live together in harmony and don't struggle against either one.

Shake hands and introduce yourself and others. Even if somebody knows who somebody else is, it breaks a barrier.

Cultivate female friendships. Your wife or girlfriend is not the only woman in the world, and the company of women is very good for a man. If she's the jealous type, reassure her. She'll just have to learn to live with it.

As much as time and money allows, go away without your significant other, and have her go away without you. We were never designed to live in each others' faces, and you can never know the joy of missing someone and being reunited if they're there the whole time.

Being completely honest 100 percent of the time is for computers. We'll never truly and completely understand each other, so don't feel guilty of keeping some things to yourself. Chances are they're not important enough to bother her with anyway.

If you don't have sex for a year, don't put the first woman you sleep with on a pedestal. You'll end up disappointed and she won't be able to deal with the pressure.

When a wild animal is dangerous and can't be reasoned with, we put it in a cage. If you can't control damaging impulses or desires, that's where you belong too. Not for your sake – for everyone else's.

Your Dad might not have hugged you a lot, spent a lot of time with you or been much of a role model, but if he spent his whole working life putting food on your table love, respect and be grateful to him for it. If he was born before 1960 he probably never understood he should have done anything more.

If you break up with a girl, you might hate her and never want to see her again, but ask yourself if you and her could have been friends in another universe. If the answer is yes, you could be friends in this one too. Consider forgetting your past grievances and giving it a try.

If you're a virgin, you might be wondering if sex is really the be all and end all it's made out to be.

It is.

If you're a virgin, you're probably looking forward to your first time. Just remember chances are it won't be the carnal frenzy you imagined. It might even be terrible. Don't worry, it's gets much better.

Despite the erotic allure of one night stands and sex with hot strangers you meet at cool nightclubs or parties, the best sex you'll ever has is with someone you've done it with before, simply because you know what each other likes.

If you don't watch TV for a long time, you realise you're not missing anything. The best shows are on DVD anyway.

Few of the people above you in your workplace or industry are there because they're smarter, richer or more cunning than you. There's no reason it can't be you.

Don't try to identify with any group's likes or tastes to fit in. it's okay to like arthouse dramas and action blockbusters, or read high literature and comic strips.

Don't be ashamed of your hobbies, just keep in mind some hobbies will make some people assume you need a girlfriend.

If you work with computers for a living, build a wall or plant a garden. If you're a farmer or brickie, learn how to build a website. Never stop expanding your horizons.

Travel. The very act of doing it opens your soul to new experiences and you'll find strangers are friendlier and the world is more accommodating. We're a nomadic species and weren't built to stay anywhere forever.

Grow a beard at least once. Only you can do it, and ten thousand years ago that's how she picked you out from a long way away.

You'll never understand why we love boobs any more than she will when she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. Nor will you care. Just go with it.

If she never orgasms during sex it's not necessarily your fault, but don't rest until you both do something about it.

People are slack at keeping in contact, it's a fact of life. If you decide not to contact someone just because they don't contact you, you'll lose all your friends. It's holding a grudge to spite yourself, and unfortunately, it's a classic female trait.

When your daughter reaches 15 it's time to stop just saying 'no' when she wants something. Get all psychological and try and talk her out of it. Highlight the potential negatives. Lie. Anything. If she really wants it she's finally smart enough to get around you.

If what she wants isn't that bad and you're just being overprotective, say yes.

Don't compare your relationship to any other you see or hear about. If one of you snores so you have to sleep apart most of the time, so what? At least the marriage will be intact.

The most common state romantic partnerships end up in is with one party holding most of the emotional and decision making power. Fight against it like you've never fought anything. Respect her and her choices, but assert your right to have your own.

Make jokes about her being your property and belonging to you. If she really loves you, she'll roll her eyes but smile and love every minute of it.

If you're ever unhappy and feel like you can't stand life anymore, remember – everything changes. Everything. It'll get better with time, even without you really trying. Talk to someone and hold on.

It's true women love a man who can cry, but pick your moment. There's a feminine and a masculine side, and you can be too much of either.

Be brave. Even if you don't feel it, do it anyway. Courage isn't in how you feel, it's in what you do (often despite how you feel). Even if people can see you're scared, they'll respect you for doing it.

If you're terrified of public speaking, remember one thing – go slow. It's when you speed up trying to get through it you stumble over your tongue and sound like an idiot. Speaking slowly gives you the time to get your words right and you'll make fewer mistakes. If you shake, hold the podium. Make eye contact from one face to another. You'll even find yourself enjoying it – promise.

Put it in softer terms for the sake of social grace if you have to, but say what you mean and think.

They don't tell you this, but just like her, you'll have days when you feel fat, ugly and pasty and just want to hide.

Relax. No matter what you feel like a man should be, you can't be in control of everything in the world around you.

You'll probably never rule the world. Just relax and get over it. You don't have to be in control of everything every minute of the day.

No woman on the face of the Earth is out of your league.