Don't take the living as your heroes

You know, this whole thing makes me think about why in Islam we have a sort of practice or a saying that you shouldn't admire anyone or consider anyone to be a role model for you if they're alive because you don't know what their end is gonna be like. You know them at a certain point in their life, and it may be successful. They may be virtuous. They may be admirable today, but you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. You don't know what secrets may be revealed about them tomorrow, and you don't know what their end is going to be.

So if you're going to admire someone, it should be someone who's already passed and has shown that they lived a successful life until the end. Last year or six months ago or three months ago or three weeks ago, there were people who were admiring Andrew Tate because, oh, he's very rich and he's made a success for himself and he's very popular and we like the things that he says. And today, he's sitting in a Romanian prison charged with some very serious crimes, which he has incriminated himself over on social media time and time again. And it also makes me think of another thing. I don't know why anyone is seeking relationship advice or advice on how to be a man from someone in their twenties or thirties.

You just got started in the world. You don't know anything about being a man. You don't know anything about relationships or how to have a successful relationship. You haven't even lived long enough to have had one. You should be talking to people in their eighties.

Someone who it's unlikely that they're going to completely turn around, and take a bad direction in their life in the last ten, twenty years of their life. Someone who's lived eighty something years in a successful manner and had a successful relationship for most of their life. That's who you should be getting advice from, not these kids who don't really know anything yet, whose success could very well be fleeting. So just be careful about who you take as your hero, and it's much better for you to look back at the Salaf, to look back at your predecessors, to look back at people who have proven to have led successful lives and met good, successful, honorable, and virtuous ends.