How to Deal With Bad Times in Life (This Too Shall Pass)

I haven’t cried hard in a long time.

It is rare for something to bring me to the point of tears, and while I may shed a tear or two when I come across someone in a lot of misery, it is extremely rare for me to have a torrent of tears.

As a man, you simply do not have the luxury to not be able to manage your own emotions.

Women and children can cry at will, but a man? It is simply seen as weak, and this is why men rarely cry, or if they do, they do it in private.

A man who cries frequently in public is simply seen as pathetic.

I was in Indonesia for a few weeks for a vacation and for business (depends on who’s asking, the tax man is given a different reason from everyone else), and when I came back, I noticed that one of my websites was dead.

It was because of a technical snag and I quickly fixed it and bought it back up.

This was the site that I had set up for my friend Jon Anthony’s old blog Masculine Development.

Jon was a friend of mine who had everything going for him, at least on the surface.

He was making ~$50k a month, was good with women, had youth and freedom (he had an online business that allowed him to travel anywhere he wished… and he did), and he was also extremely healthy and fit.

I had met Jon many years ago when he purchased The Art of X from me and reached out with some questions. He was very skilled with marketing, and within a year he was pulling $10k a month from X.

Full disclosure: This is an outlier result because Jon had a lot of prior experience with writing. The median user with no prior experience who applies the guide is doing ~$3k a month after a year, and it takes 3-5 years to get to $10k a month.

Over time our friendship developed and I helped him build and market his own products. Everything was going well, and we used to speak regularly.

Then one fine day, he completely stopped responding to my messages and did not pick up any calls. I thought nothing of it, and assumed that he must be travelling somewhere with little or no reception.

Then about 2 months went by, and a mutual friend reached out to me and sent me a link to his obituary.

It turns out that he had committed suicide. Why? I don’t know. He had money, women, personality, physique… I have no idea what went wrong. I can speculate, but I do not know for sure.

I was devastated at the news, and I remember I cried for a week.

Why did he not reach out to me before? I could have helped him. I would have happily flown to him to help him, and he knew that. And yet he went ahead with his decision.

When I found out, I knew I had to act quickly if I wanted to preserve his website and his work. I had the password “in case of unforeseen events” just like this and made a copy of his website.

Unfortunately, Jon never gave me his domain password, so I had to host it on a different domain masculinedevelopmentblog.com. The original website died in a few days because the hosting was never renewed, so I managed to save the site in the nick of time.

As I write this now, in July 2026, I have hosted the website for two and a half years. It is hosted out of pocket purely to preserve Jon’s work, with respect for his wishes.

The site going down without me noticing it for a while made me realize something: everything on the internet is impermanent. Sooner or later, I too will be dead, and where will mine and Jon’s works be then?

This is why I have decided to turn all of his articles into books, segregating them into categories of various topics (they will be ready in the next 2 weeks or so).

Books of this type need a foreword, and as I was writing the foreword, and I broke down into tears.

It’s been 2.5 years, and I thought I was over it, but I suppose human loss is something we can never actually get over.

We are all mortal, and we all die, both the wretched and the blessed, the rich and the poor, the virtuous and the unvirtuous.

We are all unequal in life, but in death we are all equal. It is the great equalizer. We are all short lived.

“This Too Shall Pass”

I do not know what caused Jon to do what he did.

Drugs? Heartbreak? Some financial loss I wasn’t aware of? Depression? Who knows. At least, I don’t know.

But if I could tell him something, I’d tell him that whatever it is, it too shall pass.

Everything in life is temporary.

All good things and all bad things.

If you are going through hard times, remember that IT TOO WILL PASS. Just make sure that you do your part and KEEP GOING.

Bad times are to be expected in life, because absolutely NO ONE has only good times in their life.

The ancient Greeks believed that the gods gave men a drink before they were born.

The gods had two containers, one with wine (good things), and one with water (bad things).

There were some people who the gods gave a mix of wine and water. Such men would face both fortune and hardships.

There were some people who the gods gave only water, and such men were condemned to a life of misery and suffering. (The implied third drink of just wine and no water, is reserved only for the gods, and never offered to humans.)

The world is full of the latter, and is the reason why no one wants to take the Ovarian lottery and risk becoming a sex slave or an uneducated menial laborer working 14 hours a day making bricks by hand (yes the pictures in that article are real and taken by me).

Fortunately, all of us reading this are from the former group who got the mix of wine and water.

We have an education, enough money to be able to pay for a phone, and we have an internet connection, the greatest money making platform in the world.

You will have good times, and you will have bad times. The good times will pass, as will the bad times.

Life is a 30,000 day journey (if you’re lucky) and sooner or later you will meet your maker.

So enjoy your good days, and prepare for your bad days.

The First Law of Holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

In your bad times, the very first thing you need to do is stop making the problem worse.

This is obvious when I put it in writing, but humans have an abandon ship mindset where they tend to make problems much worse before they decide to solve them.

I noticed this when I released Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program, which has made over 13,000 sales and changed thousands of lives for the better.

There were some guys who would do the program for a few weeks, and see great results.

They would see their body fat start to melt away.

They would see new muscle grow and their friends would compliment them.

They would start waking up on time, stop wasting their energy on internet pornography, and become much more focused and disciplined individuals (I am very proud of the fact that my program helped many people quit watching pornography, smoking, and drinking for good).

But then one day they would screw up something.

Maybe they overate and had a cheat meal, or maybe they smoked a cigarette, or maybe they gave in and watched some porn, or something else.

What would proceed would be a full day of extreme bingeing on all the things they were trying to curb.

They’d eat a lot, spend the entire night watching porn, etc. and become their old selves again for a while before they got back on track with the program.

Why does this happen?

Because the human mentality is: “I’ve already failed for today. Might as well do more of what I did now, because I’m already going to have to re-do this day whether or not I do more of what I did.”

This was only solved when I released the second edition of Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program that explicitly warned people about this natural tendency.

When people KNEW that their mind would try to trick them to dig a small hole deeper and deeper, they were able to control themselves.

As a result, a small mistake remained a small mistake, and they were able to come out of the 90 day program as changed men.

You have to understand… no matter how hard of a time you’re having in your life – JUST STOP DIGGING. Do not make it worse.

If you lost a lot of money gambling, do not borrow money from a loan shark to gamble even more hoping to make it all back (you won’t).

Don’t make it worse.

Stop Regurgitating Your Emotions. Make a Plan And See it Through.

Most things in life can be progressed with two simple steps.

1. Make a plan
2. See it through

What most guys do when they have tough times is that they start to wallow in their own misery.

They keep regurgitating their emotions and keep asking “why me” or “What did I do”, which is fine at first, but you have to remember what I told you when I started this article:

As a man, you simply do not have the luxury to not be able to manage your own emotions. Women and children can cry at will. Men must do what is necessary.

Sit and plan how you can improve your situation.

Act as if the past does not exist.

It is just the backstory of a video game. The real game begins today, and you have been given your present situation, all your skills and resources and connections to play with for the rest of your life.

I promise that you can do well with your current starting point.

And that people with worse starting points than you have also done really well.

And that people with much better starting points have done very poorly.

Most problems in life call for a bit of resourcefulness and creativity.

Use your brain to make a plan.

Then take action and execute the plan.

I guarantee that you will go much further than the guys who keep complaining and crying about how hard their life is.

Because the most important thing in life is MINDSET.

Control your mindset, and do the work that is necessary, and eventually you will be past the bad times and into good times again.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.

It too shall pass.

– Harsh Strongman