Frat Boy Mentality as a Tool for Success

Blistering heat and zero rainfall have reminded everyone how vile an enemy climate change is to today’s summer. Yet, I raise to you a new, maybe even more vile challenger: LinkedIn. Filled to the brim with excited graduates announcing their first-class degrees and eager interns expressing their immense gratitude for an upcoming opportunity, the site is a parade of prideful productivity. As a tumbleweed crossed my profile, I felt I had no option but to acquire my residence card to Loserville. Choptown, if you will. 

Just as I was boarding the bus, sighing with my one-way ticket in hand, I realised there has to be another way. I refused to have my attitude dictated by some imminent Deloitte employee. After some careful consideration, I realised that indeed, I could learn from the smug man on my page. This guy smiled like the world was owed to him. If he could have such a mentality, why couldn’t I? Thus, I began to carve out a new philosophy for myself: to adopt the frat boy mindset as a means of building myself back up. 

I began by thinking long and hard about what this term even meant to me. My knowledge of American frat boys was developed entirely through my consumption of media, and this put me at a distinct disadvantage. However, the longer I speculated, it dawned on me that they shared many similarities with lots of other privileged men I had met, namely a couple of rugby boys. A love of the linen shirt? Of course. Having odd nicknames for their friends? Naturally. “Something something my dad?” Wait, now we’re cooking with gas. In its essence, the frat boy mentality arises from the comfort of privilege. If a job can be acquired through a connection and rent can be paid by someone else, then you are not bogged down by everyday burdens that other people face. From this socio-economic standing, an outlook emerges, one that invites self-confidence. I have seen firsthand how this mentality was developed in entirely bland individuals, and I made the decision that it was my turn. 

Borrowing this mindset helped me understand the genuine value of ‘fake it till you make it’. At first, I started imitating them purely out of jest and mockery. “Dude, let me call my dad real quick, he’ll sort it out, he knows someone, I swear”, I would utter when faced with a minor issue. “Bro, who actually cares?” I scoffed when something annoyed me. 

Over time, I felt the weight of unnecessary grievances slide off of me. If you venture onto some aesthetic sides of the internet, they will try to convince you of the power of manifestation. These phrases of “I don’t chase, I attract” and “What’s meant for me will find me” never resonated with me. Their encouragement to acknowledge the things you deserve, usually delivered by some pilates princess in athletic gear, always felt disingenuous to me. Yet, the vape-puffing brothers genuinely believe in themselves at all times. Once you adopt the frat-boy mentality, you begin to accept that you do deserve whatever you want and the paths to getting it are not always as daunting as they seem.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not encouraging you to adopt this mentality in full. Never go full frat-boy. You don’t need to start calling people ‘whales’ if they reject you, or violently haze people and have the police called on you, or any of the other dehumanising things that frat boys have been known to do. Maybe Descartes put it in a more tactful way than I when he said “I think, therefore I am”, but the ultimate message is the same. This odd game of pretend pulled me out of a slump that I truly felt consumed by. Now, I hand this weapon of destruction against self-doubt over to you. Will you wield it bravely or cower in fear at its awesome power?

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia