I used to think my younger brother was a hopeless loser.

Not anymore.

As a teenager, he skipped so much class they almost kicked him out of high school. He spent most of his time playing video games and screwing around with distortion pedals. He didn't go to college. Now he has a mundane job. He's had one girlfriend his entire life. The kicker? He's happy. I think he'll live longer than me, because he doesn't care as much.

That leads to the first lesson…

1. Stop caring so much.

My dad and I used to play good cop/bad cop with my brother. It never worked. It didn't work because we cared more about his future than he did. Turns out, we were wrong about everything.

This is the meta-lesson.

The best thing you can do to change your life isn't going to bed earlier or juicing vegetables. It's a shift in your mindset about what really matters. My brother already knew what didn't matter.

For example…

2. Stop banking on a steady career.

This is a tough thing for a professor to admit. My brother never had much respect for all the time and energy I sank into advanced degrees and playing the game of life. He never criticized me, but he did always roll his eyes when I tried to get him to do the same thing.

My dad and I both lectured my brother about going to college and getting a steady job. We thought it was the only guarantee. Instead he flipped us the bird and did his own thing.

3. Do your own thing.

My brother did everything I wouldn't have done.

He worked odd jobs to pay for guitar lessons. He invested in Bitcoin and collected Pokemon cards. He spent vast stretches of time between jobs, staying up all night learning how to code and probably watching porn. He took electrical engineering courses for fun. He drove an Uber. He worked for Wal-Mart. Now he works for an auto supplier chain.

No matter what he's doing, my brother always talks about his job like it doesn't matter that much.

He's right.

Your job actually doesn't matter that much. What you do with your time matters way more. My brother spent his time doing what he wanted, not trying to climb some corporate ladder. He doesn't have a degree, but he has skills. Now skills are in demand.

Degrees aren't.

4. Stop doing anything for love.

My brother has been unlucky in love.

He doesn't care.

He's only had one girlfriend, and it didn't go very well. She cheated on him, then left her exercise bike at his place for six months. He had to threaten to sell it before she took it back.

His last Tinder date ended in a car accident.

That's when he decided that he was happier alone, doing what he wants when he wants, and not worrying about love.

Meatloaf had it all wrong. Some people don't feel a need to land their dream guy or girl. They don't kill themselves going on hundreds of dates, just because you're supposed to.

The people we call losers only look unhappy to us, because we filter them through our own expectations. We should stop. We should live the way we want, not the way Instagram tells us.

5. Stop insisting on your own place.

Everyone wants their own house. That's how we're raised, to take on massive debt and spend our entire lives chipping away at it.

Not my brother.

My brother has been living at home his entire life. He never moved out. For a long time, I thought it made him a loser.

Then I dated an Eastern European guy for about a year. He told me something. "Where I'm from, just about everybody lives with their parents." It doesn't matter if you're a doctor or a lawyer, you pretty much live with your family until they die.

Then you take over the house and pass it down.

This seems smart to me.

6. Stop playing the happiness games.

Sociologists talk about these things called happiness scripts. They're stories our culture has come up with in order to drive the economy. The standard happiness script says we all need marriage, a mortgage, kids, and a fancy job that keeps us working 60 hours a week.

We're starting to see now. This kind of life doesn't make a lot of us happy. It simply ensures that we keep working our asses off in order to make a tiny handful of people ultra rich and cozy.

7. Live outside the bubble.

Everyone loves the phrase, "Think outside the box." That's not enough anymore. You aren't just inside a box.

You're inside a bubble, too. This bubble is drowning you with all the comforting little beliefs you grew up with about what you deserve or what you're entitled to, or what can make you happy.

You have to get out of the bubble.

8. Learn to feel like a loser.

Sometimes, living out of the bubble means rejecting the last things you thought you should, like the goals and ambitions from a world that became obsolete overnight. It's not easy.

It might make you feel like a loser.

You might get judged by people still clinging to the tattered remains of our old values and rewards systems. They don't get it yet, and they'll be quick to condemn anyone who does.

So take my brother's example. Be a loser.

You've got nothing to lose except a life you can't have anymore, and probably never wanted in the first place.

You're more like my brother than you think.

Maybe you're fresh out of the bubble. You're like Neo. You don't know how to breathe in the real world yet.

Everything you believed in was an illusion.

You thought you loved it.

But if you're like me, you never lived in the bubble completely. You probably got good at playing the game. But part of you always knew it could all crumble away. You didn't devote yourself completely to book learning and test taking. You learned practical skills.

For lots of us successful older siblings, this is going to be our saving grace. The whole time we judged the outliers as losers, we were also secretly listening to them and preparing for two possible worlds.

It's time to think different.

Everything my brother did made him look like a loser, according to our established culture. He's in his 30s and still single. He lives at home. He doesn't have a college degree. He hops from one job to the next. But now he's the one with all the advantages.

The world that judged him is now imploding. They're scared and scrambling. My brother isn't. Neither should you.

I'm not saying you should throw your life away and live just like someone's brother. But maybe you could drop your happiness script for a minute and look at your life the way he would. Think about someone you've always considered a loser. Let go of your assumptions.

You might learn something you weren't supposed to.

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