I’m Eric
I’m Jonathan
We’ve been through what you’re going through now
As children, we’re filled with this innocent zest for life. We go after what we want without a second's thought, we don’t feel shame about our desires, and we enjoy the simplest things in life. Yet as early as the preteens, we begin to lose this in ourselves. We become disinterested, apathetic, self conscious, and unable to be satisfied with our lives.
When we turned 14, we started to lose that feeling of childhood, that feeling that we could do anything.
This feeling was replaced by a darkness we couldn’t explain. The feeling that we couldn’t achieve what we wanted, that we “weren’t good enough,” and the feeling that we were nothing special. Our excitement we had as kids was replaced by an insipidity we couldn’t explain or overcome.
We felt like we couldn’t understand
We were told that everything has different perspectives and that there’s no real truth to anything. We were told that the emotions we felt were a mystery, and that no one really understands them. We felt like life was just so complex and hard to understand that it felt impossible to really know anything.
We felt like it was silly to care
All around us was this idea that it was silly to care about your life. To get into a relationship was “needy,” to love a romantic movie or book was “gay,” to work hard at a skill was “obsessive”... We were told that caring was weird and unnatural, and that cool people don’t care.
We felt like happiness was out of our reach
When you feel like you can’t understand anything and that caring about your life is ridiculous, the resulting feeling is apathy toward everything. This is how we began to feel. Our emotional range dropped almost entirely to where we would rarely feel much of anything.
We saw this in ourselves and those around us, but felt powerless to change.
We Found Philosophy
Around the age of 14, we also found philosophy, and specifically, Objectivism. Objectivism showed us a completely new way of thinking. It gave us…
Conviction
The idea that we can know the truth of things, that we can understand ourselves and the world around us. With conviction came our desire and eagerness to understand the world and ourselves once again.
Passion
One of the most critical elements of Objectivism is that it ties valuing, the act of caring, into the nature of life itself. That having a passion in life is really what makes life worth living. We no longer felt embarrassed or ashamed for caring about the things in our lives, even if it was something people would think is weird, like opera.
Happiness
With these ideas, our emotions started to come back to life. We saw that our happiness is the goal of life and that all the things we care about in our lives is what builds that happiness.
We saw that our culture is philosophically corrupt
With Objectivism, we began to see why we and those around us were having issues with depression, anxiety, and apathy. We saw that it was how we were being taught to view ourselves and life — we saw that it was the philosophic ideas our culture promoted. Our teachers, books, movies, TV shows, celebrities, scientists, friends, family… The whole of our culture is promoting ideas and lifestyles that are driving people to despair. People struggle to function on a basic level, not because it’s the natural state of humans, but because we’ve been taught ideas that go against the very fundamentals of reality. We literally don’t know how to live on the most basic levels anymore. This is why people struggle with…
Chronic anxiety
They don’t have confidence in their ability to live.
Depression
They don’t believe their efforts make any difference in their lives.
Apathy
Ultimately, they’re left with the feeling: “what’s the point?”
We’re being broken by the culture.
Philosophy Wasn't Enough
Knowing Objectivism and having this perspective on the culture helped us tremendously. We were able to see that it wasn’t us that were broken, it was the culture and the ideas that drive it that were causing us and those around us to suffer. Even though knowing this helped a lot, it wasn’t enough. We knew what was wrong with the culture and ourselves, and we knew what we should be theoretically, but we didn’t quite know what we should do about it.
We didn't know how to change.
We Found Self-Help
We found the world of self-help and this idea of changing habits to create a different life was part of the missing puzzle piece. We dived deep into many different self-help gurus who spoke extensively about habit building. But the deeper we dove into the self-help guru's works, the more we realized that they weren’t really diverging from the cultural norms.
- They’d frame their work not as a means to build a happy life, but as a means to escape suffering.
- They’d tell us that it’s our ego, that part of us that cares, that’s the problem and we need to kill that part of us.
- They’d tell us to stop caring so much. It's the fact that we care that leads us to feel disappointed with our lives.
Not only did the self-help lack real depth, but the only depth they did have was just the same ideas we had worked so hard to escape from.
In the end, the world of Self-Help felt shallow.
It Was Up To Us
It was up to us to put the life-oriented philosophy of Objectivism and habit building practicality of Self-Help together. Once we joined these together, we created the perfect means to build a new life for ourselves, to truly live independently from the culture that drags us down. This is what started Helios. Helios is here to offer you what we spent over 17 years to discover and create: the only means to truly overcome the difficulties and the evils of our time, and the ability to forge a new, happy life for yourself.
This is What We Offer You in Our Course
Our Core Confidence for Men course is the summation of what we’ve learned. We’ve been through what you’re going through now, and we offer you the way out.
