People who give less fucks about what others think of them. People who aren't clueless as I am. People who know how to carry themselves. People who are competent and practical at living and surviving in general, I think.
Literally everything that isn't listed in the Glover's book.
I think I could name a few. I've even started to outline a story about one of them only to realise that I've written a pointless wall of text that says very little.
Are they happy and fulfilled? I don't know. I can't crawl into their heads and find out what's going on there.
I could surely learn quite a few things from them.

Not so much a specific role model (I think people are generally too flawed to want to emulate them entirely) but I have found great reassurance reading biographies (or even just general bits about them) of people who have gone on to do great things but have endured challenge.

It's very easy to see successful people and think they were always that way. For some people they had a silver spoon and they could never fail so I avoid those.

Take for example Obama. Reading about his life, his early years, basically spending his 20s kind of lost, taking time out to travel around Asia, then getting a job at a law firm, then having to wake up every day during his first big election that he knew from week one he was going to lose.

I find that quite uplifting in the weirdest of ways.

I never had a positive role model. My father was the typical abuser, later I understood that he suffered from PTSD because his father offed himself shortly before I was born. My mother was the typical enabler/victim/battered wife. I had to learn how to behave like an human being from scratch when I managed to get away from home. This affected me deeply, I have a very good first hand experience on how to behave like an enabling victim or a total crazy asshole, but very little on how to behave like a sane human being. Almost everyone in my shithole town was a miserable failure, I tried my best to not emulate anyone. I guess that the only real lesson that I learned from my youth was to not abuse drugs or psych meds.

I concur with some of >>28784 , although I'm still a miserable failure, for now anyway. All I learnt from my parents was what not to be; antisocial, drunk and obsessed with bloody horses. Although if I ever fulfill my sidequest of marrying into money knowing how to ride will certainly give me an advantage IYKWIM. I do sometimes invoke memories of WW2, not personal ones obviously, but that's usually just when I'm walking or cycling in cold and/or wet. Also Richard Herring taught me, perhaps not to be more confident as such, but that mostly no one else cared or randomly wanted to start a fight.

Looking back to my teenlad days I should have admired my best friend more, but instead I was just faintly jealous of how easy he had it and how involved his parents were. I ignorantly overlooked how much effort he still had to put in, even after he had a breakdown at 14 or 15 and spent eight weeks living in his Nan's back living room with the lights off and the curtains drawn. Anyway, that's not the question OP asked so I'll shut it.

My role models were usually singers or actors, or movie characters. That kind of thing. I pretty much grew up without a dad, so I had to find my role models elsewhere.

I still don't have male role models in my family now that I am considerably older, and I still try to get my cues from celebrities, or indeed again fictional characters.

I kind of aspire to characters like Tommy Lee Jones in the original Men in Black movie as my role model these days. If there even is such a thing, then his role in that movie as a government secret agent was just about the epitome of middle age cool. Like I said, if there is such a thing as middle age cool. I hope there is anyway. There has to be some upside to being over 40, and you can't just ponder your impending end all day long.

>>28786

To me, the only real way to be 'cool' is to not really care what people think, and that comes naturally with age for most people. There was nothing cool about me when I was in my twenties, trying desperately to pretend to not care while really wanting everyone to notice how much I didn't care.

Now, I just don't actually care, and plenty of people describe me as 'cool' or laid back or unflappable. Multiple people at work have noted that I never ever panic, despite being in rather stressful situations, which is a stark contrast to the constant internal panic of my youth. The more you see the more you realise what really matters, I suppose.

>>28787

You really kind of sound like me. I was an anxiety ridden wreck all throughout my 20s and much of my early 30s, in that what other people thought of me was cripplingly important to me and my whole live revolved around being seen as a cool or likeable lad who wasn't making an arse of himself. Now that I'm in my 40s, so many things just do not fucking matter anymore. I can truly say that in the last couple of years, I've come out the other end from a life that quite often was emotional hell. I'm cool as a cucumber about most everyday nuisances, I don't give a flying fuck what people think of me, the only thing you mustn't do is show me a lack of respect. That still gets me, when people think they're better than me or when they think they can just talk down to me and expect me to just stand there and take it. It can still get me raging mad.

But other than that, as far as finding my inner centre and inner peace is concerned, I haven't felt this serene in decades, maybe even never before in my whole life.


The one and only Biff Tannen hit the nail on the head with his over-40 song a few years ago:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-t2PDrqPCc

I'm a role model!

>>28789

Yeah, for drinking red wine in a shed.

>>28789
Please be my new dad.

>>28790
What more do you need?