#961 - Mark Manson - 19 Raw Lessons To Not Mess Up Your Life

Summary

Podcast Summary: Modern Wisdom #961 - Mark Manson - 19 Raw Lessons To Not Mess Up Your Life

Release Date: June 30, 2025

In this engaging episode of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson sits down with renowned author Mark Manson to delve deep into practical life lessons aimed at helping listeners navigate the complexities of modern existence. Their conversation spans a broad spectrum of topics, including personal relationships, therapy culture, productivity, authenticity, and societal trends such as performative victimhood. Below is a detailed summary capturing the essence of their discussion, enriched with notable quotes and timestamps for reference.

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1. Dealing with Difficult People and Therapy Culture

Mark Manson opens the dialogue by addressing a prevalent issue: the frustration people face with "dicks" in their lives and the overreliance on therapy to manage these relationships.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • Identifying and Removing Toxic Individuals: Manson emphasizes the simplicity of distancing oneself from problematic people instead of attempting to change them.
  • Therapy vs. Practical Solutions: He critiques the culture of pathologizing everyday struggles, suggesting that many issues stem from simply tolerating fewer difficult individuals rather than deep-seated psychological problems.

• Notable Quote:

  "[00:35] Chris Williamson: People would need less therapy if they tolerated fewer assholes."
  "[00:40] Mark Manson: It's just such a losing battle... maybe just don't call them back. Is it that hard?"

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2. Scarcity Mindset and Courage in Relationships

The conversation transitions to the psychological barriers that prevent individuals from maintaining healthy relationships.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • Scarcity Mindset in Relationships: Manson explains how the fear of losing a significant relationship can lead to dependence and lack of self-worth.
  • Courage to Speak Up: He advocates for the bravery required to set boundaries and prioritize one's own needs over others' demands.

• Notable Quote:

  "[03:35] Mark Manson: One is the scarcity mindset around relationships... When somebody exits your life, generally somebody new will show up."

  "[04:38] Mark Manson: Relationships fundamentally function with a healthy relationship with yourself first."

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3. Authenticity and Self-Conflict

Mark and Chris explore the importance of being authentic and the internal conflicts that arise from trying to balance multiple personal desires.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • Being Comfortable with Imperfection: They discuss how embracing one's flaws leads to genuine connections and trust.
  • Second-Order Emotions: Manson introduces the concept of feeling emotions about emotions, which can lead to an endless loop of self-criticism and doubt.

• Notable Quote:

  "[14:04] Mark Manson: It’s the old 'put on your oxygen mask first' philosophy for relationships."

  "[95:14] Mark Manson: It's layers of an onion, like you never stop finding novel ways to trick yourself and bullshit yourself."

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4. Productivity and Emotional Alignment

The duo critiques the modern obsession with productivity, arguing that emotional alignment is a more effective driver of true efficiency and fulfillment.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • Emotion as a Productivity System: Manson asserts that passion and emotional investment are crucial for sustained productivity, contrasting this with the often disembodied advice prevalent in hustle culture.
  • Trade-Offs in Pursuing Goals: They emphasize the necessity of acknowledging and accepting the sacrifices that come with achieving significant personal and professional goals.

• Notable Quote:

  "[75:10] Mark Manson: There is a lot of cheesy, clichéd advice around passion, like 'if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life,' which is bullshit."

  "[76:35] Chris Williamson: Alex Hormozy talks about choosing what you're going to suck at because opportunity cost demands trade-offs."

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5. Performative Victimhood and Societal Trust Issues

A significant portion of the discussion addresses the rise of performative victimhood and its impact on societal trust and personal relationships.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • Virtue of Victimhood: Manson critiques how victimhood has been weaponized for social and political gain, leading to a culture where almost every demographic feels persecuted.
  • Trust in the Modern World: They explore how excessive online interactions and social media exposure have eroded genuine trust, making meaningful face-to-face connections more challenging.

• Notable Quote:

  "[120:50] Mark Manson: I think empathy has been weaponized both politically and socially. People carry around a badge of honor by claiming they've been mistreated."

  "[121:05] Mark Manson: I've been doing this a long time. I call them meta emotions. Feeling bad about feeling bad or feeling bad about feeling good."

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6. Trust, Authenticity, and Social Interactions

Wrapping up the conversation, Mark and Chris emphasize the foundational role of trust and authenticity in building meaningful relationships and fostering personal well-being.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • In-Person Interactions: Manson shares personal anecdotes illustrating how face-to-face interactions foster empathy and genuine trust, contrasting them with the superficiality of digital communications.
  • Authenticity Over Perfection: They argue that being real and embracing one's imperfections are far more valuable and trustworthy than maintaining a facade of perfection.

• Notable Quote:

  "[117:56] Mark Manson: It's intimacy with someone when you can just trust that they're not going to bullshit you or try to be something they're not."

  "[119:39] Mark Manson: It's all related to trusting people. Just err on the side of trust. Sure, you're gonna get hurt sometimes, but the alternative is worse."

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Concluding Insights

Throughout the episode, Mark Manson provides a candid and often blunt perspective on self-improvement and personal growth. Key takeaways include:

• Simplify Relationships: Focus on removing toxic individuals rather than overcomplicating relationship dynamics with therapy.
• Embrace Scarcity and Courage: Recognize scarcity mindsets in relationships and cultivate the courage to prioritize personal well-being.
• Authenticity is Key: Strive to be authentic and comfortable with imperfections to build genuine trust and connections.
• Redefine Productivity: Align emotional passion with productivity goals, acknowledging the necessary trade-offs.
• Avoid Performative Victimhood: Challenge the societal trend of endorsing victimhood as a virtue and strive for genuine trust in interpersonal relationships.

Mark Manson's insights encourage listeners to confront their fears, let go of unrealistic expectations, and embrace a more authentic and fulfilling approach to life.

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Additional Resources:

• Mark Manson's Work:

  • Website: markmanson.net
  • Books: "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck", "Everything Is Fcked"
  • Podcast: Mark Manson Podcast

• Chris Williamson's Resources:

  • Website: chriswillx.com/books
  • Podcast: Modern Wisdom

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This episode offers a treasure trove of practical advice and thought-provoking discussions for anyone seeking to improve their life by understanding the complexities of human behavior and relationships. Mark Manson's no-nonsense approach provides valuable lessons that empower listeners to make informed and authentic choices.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

What are you laughing at, Mark?

[Mark Manson]

Your business idea, it was just incredible.

[Chris Williamson]

Thank you.

[Mark Manson]

I'm still thinking about it.

[Chris Williamson]

It's, I'm unable to speak about my million billion dollar idea.

[Mark Manson]

Yes. Is that because you don't want anybody to steal it or because you would never be allowed to speak again?

[Chris Williamson]

It's a combination of both.

[Mark Manson]

But look, the world will wait.

[Chris Williamson]

The world is going to have to wait. But when it happens, it's going to know about it. And Andrew Heumann is as well.

[Mark Manson]

Yes, for sure.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, controversial opinion.

[Mark Manson]

Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

People would need less therapy if they tolerated fewer assholes.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I think what, so I hear, I hear problems from a lot of people. I get a lot of emails and I have for a long, for almost 20 years now. And it's amazing to me how often people will email me or message me about some issue that's going on in their life. And really it just comes down to, like, somebody in your life is a dick. And yet instead of just being like, you know what? I'm not going to hang out with a dick anymore. I'm going to try to change their dickishness. I'm going to try to manipulate it or control it or convince them or have them see the light and understand their own dickitude. And it's, it's just like such a losing battle. And of course they always, you know, the, the, the email that comes in is like eight pages long and it has a full biography of every, every party involved. And I'm just like, well, what? Maybe just like, don't call them back. Like, is it that hard? So I, I, I just, and, and, and when you, when this doesn't even get into the therapy culture thing, you know, like, especially when you get on Instagram and you start seeing all these posts about, you know, like, you know, if they don't, if they don't appreciate you at your worst, then deserve you at your best. You know, it's like, life's hard. People don't get along. Like, some people are disagreeable and some people are going through shit and they'll say mean things to you. And like, at a certain point you just, there's a skill set of deciding what is acceptable and what's not acceptable in your life. And you can either develop that skillset or you can just continue to be subjected to the whims and the asshole niche of the people around you.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you think are the contributing skills of that skill set?

[Mark Manson]

So I think, I think one reason people get stuck in this is like, one is Just the scarcity mindset around relationships. Right. So you often hear scarcity mindset around like business and money and all this stuff and all that stuff is true. But like, a lot of people have a scarcity mindset around relationships. They think like, oh, if I stop hanging out with half my friends, then I'm just never going to have friends again. Where it's like, no, there's an abundance of people in the world. And the way life works is that when somebody exits your life, generally somebody new will show up and do time to kind of fill that role. So I think that's one, I think two is just the courage to speak up or the courage to stand up for yourself. A lot of people don't feel, I don't know what the word is, that they have permission to express what they feel or express that they feel that they've been disrespected. And I also think that a lot of people develop some sort of like codependent emotional attachment to people around them. Right. Their self esteem is lodged in the minds and mentalities of others.

[Chris Williamson]

And so if you're not okay, I'm not okay.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. And so the idea of like excising you from my life is literally like psychological suicide. Exactly. So it's just not even an option that occurs to them. So yeah, it's like it's such a simple thing, yet so many people struggle so deeply with it. Which, I mean, I sometimes joke with my team that like, my whole job is just telling people obvious things in a way that like, doesn't feel so difficult because like, most life problems are actually extremely simple and basic. You know, it's like, how do you break up with somebody? It's like, well, you just say like, I don't want to be with you anymore. But like, that is so emotionally hard and painful. And you know, most, most of these life issues that I deal with or that, that I write about, it's just, it's extremely simple. Actions that are laden with so much emotional attachments and neuroticism around it, it.

[Chris Williamson]

Clouds your ability to see just how simple the problem is. I think with the breaking up with someone thing, how many times in history, what percentage of breakups have used the sentence, I just don't want to be with you anymore? That sounds so fucking unsophisticated. Yeah, it sounds so shallow. It sounds flippant. Uh, it's blase, it's, it's not very empathetic. Um, if you are, if you've got even a fucking hint of scarcity, Mindset or uncertainty about your future and you say to somebody, I just don't want to be with you anymore. There's this fear of karmic retribution. Yeah. Oh, the universe is going to come and get me. I didn't have. It wasn't because the. I worked until my health fucking fell apart. And then, and then mum, I needed to help my mother with her. You know, you need this cosmic weight of justification as opposed to your offering of love is simply just not what I want.

[Mark Manson]

Well, the irony here too is that generally people who are in bad relationships or like unhealthy relationships, one of the reasons they're unhealthy is that there's a running scorecard that's going on. So there's this like running tally in each person's head of like, well, I did this thing for you and I did this other thing for you, and you never did this thing for me. And when I was here, like, you weren't you, you weren't there to support me. And there's just a scoreboard that's always being calculated. And what those people don't realize is that it's the scoreboard itself that is the problem. It's not that one person is winning or losing. And so I think when it comes time to somebody wants to break up or wants to end a friendship or stop speaking to a family member or whatever, they're thinking of it in terms of the scoreboard. They're like, well, I just need to show this person that my score, like I'm winning the scoreboard right now.

[Chris Williamson]

And if they justified in my departure.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. So if they understand that, then they'll understand why I'm like, not going to be their friend anymore. And it's like, well, no, dude, like the scoreboard's actually the problem in the first. Like the fact that you feel a need to keep score in the first place means it's a shitty friendship.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I, I am also concerned about the therapy, language culture, the self pathologization on Instagram, that somebody wasn't mean to you, they were narcissistic, that this wasn't a bad experience, it's caused you trauma, that you're not sad, you've got depression. And in other ways you think, well, fuck me, it wasn't that long ago that men, and maybe women too, were just totally in fucking denial of any mental health issues. So it seems like we're incapable of sitting in some nice gray area of good balance in the middle that we can just go from, no, no, everything's fine, you know, work until I get PTSD or even the most sort of micro displeasure is a huge supernova event. Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

I actually. I forget where I read it, but I read it was actually in a research paper where a psychologist at the APA was talking about how he believed that simultaneously people were both underdiagnosed and over diagnosed. And the way he explained it is he was like, there's a population of, say, people with depression and anxiety. And within that population of people with depression, anxiety, not enough of them are being diagnosed. Like, the majority of them are not diagnosed. But then if you look at the circle of people who are being diagnosed.

[Chris Williamson]

Many of them do not have depression.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. So there's just like. There's like this Venn diagram of, like, people who are diagnosed and people who actually have the thing, and there's only a little bit of overlap going on between them. Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, dude. I. I think the courage to say to yourself, my needs or my wants are legitimate is a. Oddly a skill set. Because we would think. We're often told about how people aren't that pro social. They often put themselves ahead of others. And in some ways, in certain situations, perhaps to strangers, perhaps to people that we can't see or don't see, in certain ways, you know, we can cut in line of somebody at a traffic junction, or we can, you know, be. Get more creative with our taxes than we should do or, you know, obviously not something that I do cut that. Yeah, well, the ir. I am. I am under the scrutiny of the IRS now. But yeah, we could talk.

[Mark Manson]

I've been there. We could talk about that.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, well, okay. I need to know about this. What happened?

[Mark Manson]

Oh, I've been audited three times.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, you've been audited. So that means that some guy with a pencil and a pad of paper comes in and looks at every receipt. Every. Everything.

[Mark Manson]

Okay, so principally, yes. In practicality, no. See, when I got audited, just a little backstory of my career, I had a hit for people listening. I had a hit book. It went absolutely supernova. So my income basically 100x in two or three years, which obviously tripped some red flags at the IRS.

[Chris Williamson]

What'd they think you were doing?

[Mark Manson]

I don't know. I like. Well, and then there's all that you get in all this weird stuff about, like, you know, territories. Right. Like, so it's like royalties are taxed differently in different states.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, how many books did you sell in the United Arab Emirates? And how much was in Hawaii versus Idaho?

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. Exactly. So it's, it's like there's a lot of bullshit like that. But so when the initial audits came in, I was absolutely terrified. Right. Because it's like, this is my worst nightmare. This is going to be awful. And then after the first call with the IRS agent, I remembered something like very fortuitous, which was that government employees have no fucking clue what they're doing. And so the audit, like just for.

[Chris Williamson]

Anybody else that's still listening from the IRX or all of the people from the irs, I don't think that at all. That was the sentence that Mark said. I think that you're perfectly competent and really should apply your resources, your very well resourced resources outside of this room.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I must have just gotten the one bad one. I'm sure, I'm sure. But yeah, they didn't look at anything. And it actually hilariously, the error, the. They found an error that my old CPA made and it worked in my favor. So I actually profited from my IRS audits.

[Chris Williamson]

All three of them.

[Mark Manson]

All three of them.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Mark Manson]

I made like almost 200k from my IRS.

[Chris Williamson]

Let's fucking go. Thank you, IRS. Wow. Actually, maybe I should be audited. Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

Audit me more.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, okay. But we do things to people that we don't know. We often put ourselves ahead of them.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

However it seems like with the people who should have our best interests at heart, the people with whom we have given the most of ourselves, invested our time, our energy, it's very difficult to put ourselves first. We often subjugate our needs in place of somebody else. I'm not going to upset them because if I upset them, that something, the fucking sentence, the syntax stops there, just falls off a cliff. If I upset them, then catastrophe, disaster, something bad will occur. Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

I mean, it's a little bit paradoxical and there's a cliche, and it's a cliche for a reason, because it's true, which is it's the old put on your own oxygen mask first before you, you try to help somebody else. And I mean relationships fundamentally function that way where it's like you have to have a healthy relationship with yourself and your own self worth before you're able to really kind of contribute and give in a healthy way to anybody else. And the same is true vice versa. So like if you grow up in an environment with two parents who are emotionally dysfunctional, right. They're, they're going to be deriving their self worth and validation from you or from somebody else. And so they're not going to give you, like, the nurturing and support and everything that, you know, need to grow up and be healthy yourself and learn how to put your own mask on yourself. So it becomes kind of this, this chain reaction that goes down through generations. And, and it's weird because it's like if you're talking to somebody who's like, never had an oxygen mask on in their life, and you try to explain to them, like, what an ox, like, why they need an oxygen mask, like they don't understand what you're talking about.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you mean, look after myself?

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

What does that mean?

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, it's like you're almost like speaking a different language. But, and it, and it is paradoxical when you tell people to, like, put yourself first, because that sounds completely antithetical to, like, what a healthy, loving relationship looks like from the outside. But, like, from the outside. A healthy relationship is like two people who are voluntarily giving themselves to each other, like, consistently and perpetually. But on the inside, what a healthy relationship feels like is like, you, you are satisfied with yourself. And because you're satisfied with yourself, your cup is overflowing, and so you're happy to, like, just hand off.

[Chris Williamson]

I literally used this analogy with two girls, one Bible the other day, which was, you don't serve people from your cup. You serve them from the saucer that overflows around your cup.

[Mark Manson]

Ah, nice.

[Chris Williamson]

And it's true. I mean, look, that's not necessarily true all the time. You can have a half full cup and be like, yo, let's take it down to a quarter, Please have some. Yeah, but it's not good. Yeah, yeah, it's not a good strategy.

[Mark Manson]

No. And it's, yeah, it, it, it backfires. I mean, I'll give you a tangible example. So my wife and I, we have a friend and she's Biological clocks ticking, right? She wants to find a husband. Great woman, super smart, you know, beautiful, everything. But she really wants to find a husband. And, like, it's actually, she's starting to panic. And so what she's doing is she's like, adapting her entire life to finding a husband. Like, it's like she's gotten rid of her hobbies and now she's like, she's going to the gym all the time.

[Chris Williamson]

And she's like, just improv classes and salsa dancing.

[Mark Manson]

It's like everything is optimized to, like, find Mr. Right. And as a result, she's kind of killed her own personality. Like, she has no more interest for herself. She has no free time. For herself. She has no. She's not doing anything for herself anymore. And ironically, it's like she's meeting tons of guys and obviously it's not going anywhere. Why? Because she has no fucking personality. Her cup's not overflowing. She's trying to give everything away all the time. And you see this. I mean, it happens on both genders, but it's like a self defeating. It's just a paradoxical thing. It's like the more you cultivate yourself, the more you'll kind of become magnetic towards others.

[Chris Williamson]

I love the insight. In order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. You have to have a life in the first place.

[Chris Williamson]

Or else. It's the same reason that comedians who get successful start only talking about airports and dinners and backstage.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Because that's all you know, you don't do. Whitney Cummings told me this story. It's so fucking good. So she's in the writer's room in chief boss bitch mode maybe five years ago, ten years ago, something. And she's just, you know, million plates spinning all at once. Classic sort of, I'm gonna do it myself woman. And they're in the writers room for some sitcom thing that she's working on. And they say, it's a Saturday morning. Where is she talking about whatever this next scene is? And someone went, she's a baby shower. And Whitney was like, no one goes to a baby shower on a Saturday. Fucking stupid idea. They're like, oh, okay, well, where else is she? She's a wine tasting. She's like, no one goes to a wine tasting. They're like, no, Whitney, you don't go to wine tastings and you don't go to baby showers. That's precisely what normal people do.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And you can't see that. And I suppose it does show up in that way as well. You don't want to just be interested in the other person. You want to be interesting yourself. And most people get the balance wrong in one way or the other. They're way too self focused. They're way too other focused because it's difficult. It's difficult to have that tolerance between the two.

[Mark Manson]

I wonder if that's why celebrities date each other because, like, they have no life.

[Chris Williamson]

Or we can bond over our mutual non lives.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly, exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, next one.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I think you know these, these simple truths that because they are so simple but painful, we find ways to avoid them and deny them and pretend that they're not there. And like, if you just take the self worth piece, right, like it's hard to accept that you're just not standing up for yourself, that you don't feel like you deserve respect or trust or time or attention. That's a very painful thing to sit with. So you make up all sorts of stories and narratives and you know, it's like, oh, well, women are all like this and it's the fucking phones and well, the political thing and you know, schools these days, like it's whatever, whatever your, your like little pet thing is, you just start stacking these narratives on top of each other just to hide that simple fact that yeah, you don't feel like you deserve it. And so what I tend to find both with myself and with a lot of the people that I talk to is that especially coming from self help, which is the world that I'm, I guess technically a part of, everything's marketed as, you know, here's the secret. Oh, if you just come to the seminar, learn these three things and you're gonna like, fix all your bullshit. And I just find it's never about learning something. It's about like unlearning things. It's about, like, unwinding the bullshit you've told yourself.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a idea I spoke about with Naval, which was cultivated selfishness or like holistic self prioritization, but there's also another one of cultivated stupidity, which is many of the problems. Are you going, it's the story of the alchemist, right? You go around the houses to come back to the place that you were at the very start and to realize, huh, the issue was that I had assholes in my life and I just needed to stop talking to them. The issue was that I just didn't love my partner that much anymore and I needed to break up with them. The issue was that I wasn't that fired up at my job. And so many of these are to do with quitting, right? They're to do with letting go. Very few of them has a bit to do with change in taking on something new. Typically you're letting go of something else. I don't like the town or country that I live in, and I need to just have the bravery to make the change and go somewhere else. And you have lied to yourself and tried to justify and obfuscate as a way to escape from the difficult decision. And you've started to layer all of these different compensatory mechanisms on top and stories that you've told yourself. And now you have to dig down through them all and go, okay, was it this thing? Was it the self therapy? I must go to therapy. I must find out why I have this attachment style. And it's like, no, you just don't love your partner that much anymore. And you used to.

[Mark Manson]

And you feel guilty also, you start to see kind of these compulsive patterns show up in people because it's like so like a narrative I had for a long time, right, Was just. I lived as a nomad for about seven and a half years. And I kind of. I started to get in my head when I started living in all these different countries. I started getting in my head that there's like an optimal place to live. And the only thing that that created for me was a desire to constantly be somewhere else.

[Chris Williamson]

Dissatisfaction.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. No matter where I was, it was like, something's not optimal. I should be somewhere else. And it really started to wear on me after a certain amount of time. And really all that was underneath all of that was just simply a fear of committing to a place in a community that was there the entire time. It's just this fear of. I was in my 20s, it was time to be a grown Up. Time to be an adult. Time to set roots and pick a path in life. And looking back now, as an older man, I can understand that I didn't have the courage to do that yet. And so I created all this narrative around, well, I gotta go find the optimal place before I sit down. But to find the place, I really gotta enmesh in the culture. And so I should probably study some languages, and I should probably split my time between these three different continents, maybe a year each, and maybe pick the five best countries per continent and let me start researching all that. And it's like, there goes four years of my life. And don't get me wrong, I had a great time. I learned a ton of stuff, but a lot of it was driven by this avoidance of a very simple truth. I wasn't ready to grow up. And as long as I'm on the road and always booking a plane to somewhere else, I don't really have to grow up. The thing you said, you said something earlier. Strategic selfishness or.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cultivated selfishness.

[Mark Manson]

Cultivated selfishness. So it reminded me of this. Have you heard of this concept, strategic incompetence?

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Mark Manson]

I love this. So it's like all the married guys listening will relate to this. So I'm a terrible cook, and you.

[Chris Williamson]

Look like someone that would be a good cook.

[Mark Manson]

No, I'm awful.

[Chris Williamson]

You have the hair of a good cook.

[Mark Manson]

Oh, thank you.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Mark Manson]

Yes, Chef. I don't know what that means, but I'll take it.

[Chris Williamson]

I know. I could just see one of those white, you know, like, high neck things. Like another £50 on you. You'd be great. You're too thin now. Fat Mark Manson would have been fine. Thin Mark Manson's a fucking shit cook. I know.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, you're right. That. That ship sailed. The. Okay, so one of the reasons I am a bad cook is my wife's an amazing cook. And so if I ever start to become competent at cooking, it means that I will have to start doing some of the cooking. And so it is better for me to just continue being bad at cooking so that I don't ever have to take responsibility for that in my house. People in relationships do this all the time. Like, you. Just you. You. Your partner's good at.

[Chris Williamson]

Find the clothes incorrectly on purpose. Put a lot of creases in it.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. Especially. Especially men working around the house. We're particularly bad about it, but it's like everybody does it. People do it at work, too. It's like. It's like oh, can you go fax these 20 papers or whatever? And people are like, oh, I've never used a fax machine before. When it's like, it's easy, you could figure it out. But like, you want to be dumb because it, it, it alleviates responsibility. I love this concept because I think people do it in all sorts of different areas of their lives. Right. Like people, people can be strategically incompetent at certain things because they don't want to deal with some of these harsh truths. Like they don't want to deal with their self worth issues. So they're like, they remain dumb in their relationships. Like it actually incentivizes them to continue to like be ignorant and clueless in the people that they associate with. Right. They, I'll give you another example. Like, I, well, you referred to fat Mark. I was fat for a long time.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude, you've got to own it.

[Mark Manson]

I do.

[Chris Williamson]

You have to own it, dude.

[Mark Manson]

You want to hear the fun? You'll appreciate this. So when I went on Tim Ferriss's show, I like mentioned, I was like, oh yeah, I've been on a health journey. I used to have like a lot of health issues. And he like, of course he got into this, he's like, well, have you tried this new therapy? And he like starts explaining like all.

[Chris Williamson]

These like you've got electrodes trapped your head.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. He's like, if you, if you vibrate the muscle with electrodes and like, and put your foot behind your head and all this stuff. And he like goes on this whole three minutes feel and he's like, he's like, I don't know, does any of that resonate with you? And I was like, dude, I was just fat. I was just like, I was fat as fuck. I just needed to stop drinking. Yeah, yeah, yep. But to, to the health journey point, I was really unhealthy for a long time and I was really overweight and really out of shape. And it was, even when it was clear that it was a problem I kind of had, I developed like a weird sort of like pride or identity around it because it's like, you know, everybody in this space is, is all about optimization and you know, you got to like get up at 6am and like stare at the fucking sun and, and you know, do 18 sit ups and like, do whatever your like morning routine is. And I just had this pride of like, yeah, I'm not that guy.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

You know, like, I, I'm, I, I actually relish in the fact that I have no idea what your morning routine should be. And the truth is that was a strategic incompetence because I didn't want to deal with my shit. I didn't want to deal with the fact that I.

[Chris Williamson]

Very interesting.

[Mark Manson]

I ate too much and I drank too much.

[Chris Williamson]

That's cool. There was a great insight from a guy called Alexander Datesych who is ostensibly an evolutionary psychology and dating researcher, I suppose, but he has some fucking fantastic takes and he was talking about how people that are black sheeps are still sheeps. Being a black sheep is still being a sheep. It's funny how many people think they are non conformist when they are really just strict ideological adherence to a niche dogma. It's kind of like a cult member thinking they are non conformist because their cult is small. They are actually highly conformist, real NPCs if you will. They're just conforming to a fringe. So being a black sheep is still being a sheep, basically. And it's crazy how many people think I'm not one of those followers of whatever the mainstream thinks. That's for the fucking NPCs, sheeple. You go, yeah, dude, you're even worse. You're being puppeted by the inverse of what those people are doing. So similar to the.

[Mark Manson]

It's like hipsters, Correct.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Oh, I, I need to dress. I don't need to care about fashion. It's like purposefully not caring about fashion.

[Mark Manson]

Is not caring about fashion. Yes, precisely.

[Chris Williamson]

Just the reverse. You're not even doing it right. You're doing it the opposite. Another one that's similar to that is deliberate de optimization. So picking the small areas of your life in which you're going to try and optimize.

[Mark Manson]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

And letting the rest of them go. And this is sort of the curse of the perennial insecure overachiever that, well, I need to get my health perfect, but I need to have the right number of credit cards to maximize my flight points because I can get a little bit more if I, if I sign up for three amex is at once. It means that Delta gives you the thing and then. But I mean, it's going to take me five days to set everything up and then there'll be a load of forms and the forms were wrong. But you know, once I've done that. So picking, okay, what are the areas that really matter to me? I'm going to optimize in those and the rest of them just letting them fall away because the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections will totally and will take up so much fucking time that I mean, you could literally do. You could spend your entire day biohacking.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

In order to extend your life. And in the process of trying to extend your life, completely fucking waste your life.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you live an extra 50 years, but you spend 70 years optimizing spreadsheets to live those 50 years like you're actually net negative. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

You fucked it up.

[Mark Manson]

All right.

[Chris Williamson]

Confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. At a certain point, you have to consider that you're choosing to be afraid.

[Mark Manson]

This ties into the layers of stories. Right. Like, I mean, a lot. This kind of comes from. I take a lot of. A lot of my influence comes from Buddhism. And just the core precept of Buddhism, other than life is suffering is just like not knowing. Like you don't know anything and being like developing a certain level of comfort in that and being. Still being able to function despite it. And again, I think this comes back to the narrative thing. Like, our brain is a prediction machine. And as its predictions come in, forms of stories about what's going to happen, is it going to be a good thing, is it going to be a bad thing, is it going to go well? And it's going to do it whether you like, you can't stop it. That's just what the brain does. But you don't necessarily have to believe it. You can watch those stories come and go. You can train your brain to watch those stories come and go. Right. And without necessarily identifying or attaching to them. And I just think, A, most people aren't aware of that. And then B, even if they are aware of it, they like. It's easy to lose track of what stories or narratives you're buying into or the fact that you can even kind of choose to find more helpful stories to buy into if you want. So, yeah, it's just another one of those. Like, George Orwell's got this great quote of seeing what. What's in front of one's nose takes a constant effort. It's often much easier to see what's here than what's here. And I love that metaphor. Just because it's all of this stuff that I write. That's what it is. It's right here. But because it's here, I don't see it.

[Chris Williamson]

You can see it.

[Mark Manson]

I'm focusing on you. Right? And it's constant.

[Chris Williamson]

I wonder whether the. At some point you have to admit that you're choosing to be afraid I wonder whether part of that is that we're so identified with our thoughts that it's more real to us than reality. Because reality's final touch point before we actually understand it is our thoughts. Right. We filter it through our brains before we then start to tell ourselves the story of whatever that is. And then the story's molested by the filter as well. So, yeah, confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. Okay, so we have an upward aiming trajectory and a downward aiming trajectory. You could say sort of abundance, mindset, scarcity, mindset, optimists, pessimists, whatever. And if you assume that you can choose to be confident, I can choose to believe that this is going to go well. So. Okay, are you also choosing to believe that it's going to go badly in that case? Yeah, it's like a. It's, you know, the fundamental attribution error. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a confidence equivalent.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Of the fundamental attribution error. I had this really great insight. You know, anybody that's been to therapy for a while immediately starts looking at their parents and you start to think, okay, well, fucking why? Why am I like this? And this thing happened because of that, and that's because of them, and so on and so forth. Much of the time people are happy to lay their shortcomings, their avoidant attachment and their rampant over sexualization of themselves and others and their need for external validation, happy to lay all of that at the feet of their upbringing. Very rarely do they lay their strengths at the feet of their upbringing.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, it's like, but what about your confidence and your resilience and what about the fact that you're, you know, you work really well in soccer.

[Mark Manson]

That was because of me.

[Chris Williamson]

I self authored. I self authored my strengths, but my weaknesses were imposed on me.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And it's kind of an internal equivalent of that here when it's, okay, why are you choosing fear and not confident? I mean, there's many ways, right? It's not all fucking. You are insufficient and this is your problem. And blah, blah. We've got negativity, but fucking rampant negativity bias.

[Mark Manson]

But the choice is there, there's there. There's also an element of the strategic incompetence here too. Right? Like it's, it's. Let's say I choose to fear coming on this podcast, right? I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going on Modern Wisdom. He's gonna bring the big lights.

[Chris Williamson]

Don't say it like that.

[Mark Manson]

He's gonna bring the big lights this time. I'm so nervous. And, you know, like, that gets me sympathy from people. That gives me. It's a way to, like, lower expectations. Lower expectations for myself. Maybe it's a way to kind of brag to certain people. You know, maybe after I do the show, I'm like, oh, my God, I bomb. This is, like, going so horribly. And then, like, I get to go home and, like, get more sympathy and validation from people.

[Chris Williamson]

And then positive reinforcement went. Dude, it went so well. Oh, my God, you're amazing. You have such high standards for yourself. Yeah, it is. Mark, your problem. Your problem is, like, you're amazing and you don't even see it. Like, you're. You just have such high standards for yourself. This is.

[Mark Manson]

This is getting good. Yeah, now. Now we're getting.

[Chris Williamson]

I can't do it in a Latino accent, I'm afraid. Sorry.

[Mark Manson]

This is. Now we're getting to it. But, yeah, you. You know what I'm. You see what I'm saying, though? Like, it's. It's fear. Like, there's social value in fear just in that it, like, it generates attention and awareness for yourself. And. And I think some people almost get, like, sometimes I think, like. Like people who have anxiety. It's almost like a fear addiction. It's like the. This, like, compulsive validation seeking that happens through always being worried about something, and something's always going wrong. There's always a fire to put out. It's. It's a. It is a consistent way to draw attention to yourself, draw reassurance to yourself, bring validation to yourself. And so I do think it's like, people. There are very subtle incentives around people to choose the fear narrative that maybe they aren't aware of.

[Chris Williamson]

This episode is brought to you by eight Sleep. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. It's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time, Your sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring, and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. And it'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime, which is why eight Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night. And eight Sleep has absolutely perfected this. And when I'm on the road like I am right now. It feels fucking medieval to not be sleeping on a cooled mattress topper. Best of all, They've got a 30 day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights and if you don't like it they will give you your money back and they ship internationally. Right now you can get $350 off by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout that's E I G H T sleep.com modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I had a great conversation with this guy. Dr. Russell Canady's the Anxiety, MD doctor. Guy specialized in anxiety guys. He's equally bottom up as well as top down, which I really love. So he's okay. What's happening in the nervous system? Can we do some breath work? Can we get you to fucking meditate and chill out a little bit? And what's the story you're telling yourself? Do you need cbt? Do you need ACT therapy? Blah blah blah. So I wrote this little essay that I'm going to read to you about it after this week. I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and I can see two obvious roadblocks. First is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make to leave an unhappy relationship. Change for an unfilling, fulfilling career. Complete a difficult conversation and we will often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain. The second roadblock, this is the one that's related, is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. However, this imagined reality briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. Sometimes these situations overlap. A family member gets in an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and we don't know how they're feeling overnight. We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply. So if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and why you want things to be different first. But it's that humans abhor not knowing how the in future will unfold so much that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable because it collapses the set of. Huh. Well, at least I know what it. I mean, it's terrible, right? But it's not unknown, right? And that's how much we don't like things that are unknown.

[Mark Manson]

Which if you zoom out from like an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense, right? Because it's. We're not evolutionary optimized to be happy. We're evolutionary optimized to be predictive and adaptable to our environment. Right? So it's. Happiness is actually just a lever in our brain that our biology is pushing and pulling to get us to do the right things or worry about the right things. It's just our biology's not used to watching 2000 TikToks a day.

[Chris Williamson]

Eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not. Then everything will change.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I.

[Chris Williamson]

The.

[Mark Manson]

Being liked for who you're not is not being liked, right? Even if you get people to like the performance that you're putting on, you never get the. You never get the satisfaction of being liked because it's not you, it's the performance. And it actually backfires because it just reinforces that you have to perform more.

[Chris Williamson]

You're not good enough. You're not acceptable. I think this was the fundamental. There was many. But I think that this is one of the fundamental issues with the Pick a partisan movement. The way that it came about that what it taught men who were struggling with women was that, hey, you can be really effective with women. You just need to not be yourself. You just need to be.

[Mark Manson]

I said, dude, I saw this firsthand so many times. Like I saw.

[Chris Williamson]

People don't know that you wrote Models. Dude, the best. Still the best dating advice book for men. Everyone should go and get it on audible and go back in 2014. That came out 13. 13. Fuck. 12 years, dude. That's insane. That's. If you're a guy who wants to improve, I would say, mate, be the guy. Women want. Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max and Models by you. The two. They were the two fucking. The two car garage of.

[Mark Manson]

Thanks, man.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. I used to coach those guys and it was funny because it's. I saw it all the time. You know, guys, they'd learn the lines, they practice the techniques.

[Chris Williamson]

Did you see the midget fight outside?

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who lies more? Um, but it. And a lot of em, they would start getting laid and then they, they would get laid. Like you would take these kind of awkward nerds who had never had a girlfriend, never hooked up, they'd learn all these tactics and stuff. They'd start getting laid all the time and they'd actually feel worse about themselves. They'd actually get more depressed and. And it was exactly this. It's like they're not. The fact that they had to learn a performance to get a woman to like them just reinforced how unlikable they were.

[Chris Williamson]

You're not good enough. Yeah, yeah. I The. Eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not. It took me a 15 minute TEDx talk to say that. I'm not kidding. I did an entire 15 minute TEDx talk. Took fucking months. It took so long. But yeah, I had this, I had this insight doing club promo that toward the end of my twenties, I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should be successful. Similar to, not massively dissimilar arc to yourself, right? You got notoriety, you have sort of social access, women and like a little bit of money and stuff. And you're comfortable and people know who you are. And all the rest of it, it's like, fuck, like, why does none of this success really, like, feel real? And I realized that a Persona can't receive love, it can only receive praise. You know, it's. It's saying, hey, well done, Gladiator. Not well done, Russell Crowe, well done, Thor, not well done, Chris Hemsworth. There's this sense that, you know, if you're not being who you truly are, all of your successes will feel hollow because people aren't in love with you. They're just applauding the role that you play. And you're always, at best, the closest that you get is being one degree removed from your successes. And much of the time you're 4, 5, 6, 7 degrees removed from it. Because it's okay. I, Chris, must work out what him Mark wants me to say when he said, hey, what do you think about the new Avengers movie? It's A reverse engineer. What do I know about what Mark likes about the Avengers movies and the franchise? And what do I think that he's predicted? I think it's good. Yeah, it is good. Yes, it is good. I knew it was good. You know, and there's always this performance that you have on, which, again, just reinforces you cannot be you, which is.

[Mark Manson]

It's also exhausting. It's. It's like such a draining mental exercise this way. I hate. I hate networking. I'm like, I'm a terrible networker. And I think part of it is I feel like I have to do that a little bit. I don't naturally. See, this is why I don't have guests on my podcast anymore, because I'm.

[Chris Williamson]

Not keeping on top of them.

[Mark Manson]

I don't really care. I'm not super curious about, oh, I wonder what that guy across the room is like. That's just not me. I'm very low key, introverted, don't need to be everybody's friend. And I still feel that sometimes in professional context where it's like, okay, I'm in a room. I'm like, this is totally one of those rooms where I should be walking around, shaking everybody's hand, introducing myself, and I'm just like. And it's exhausting. It's so fucking exhausting. So, yeah, I can't imagine living like that. It's okay when it's just this one sliver of my life that I only occupy briefly each year, but to never.

[Chris Williamson]

Switch it off when you get home.

[Mark Manson]

If you're going through your whole life that way, and especially, yeah, if you're that way with your partner, if you're that way with your friends, it's just. It seems like such a miserable way to live.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the reason for. How would you say, front loading. Being yourself in the extreme. As early in a relationship as you think that person can tolerate. That's very carefully chosen words. Look, dude, I was single last year for the first time in a long time, and certainly for the first time being this version of me. And I had a strategy of an intellectual shit test. Okay, which is kind of like, you.

[Mark Manson]

Told me your business idea. Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

I knew that you'd keep it in your mind. Everyone's gonna be like, what's this billion dollar idea? You don't get to find out. It's if you imagine negging. But instead of insulting a girl, sending them Psychology Today articles and seeing if they say something interesting in response.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And it was, look, this is something that's Interesting to me, human nature's one of the. Like, if you're going to get into a relationship with me.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm going to send you lots of articles from Substack. Okay. And I'm going to expect at some point over the next week for us to have a chat about one of the things that I've sent you that's hopefully remotely interesting to you. And if that doesn't, it's a relatively innocuous but pretty good front end filter for. Maybe I'm not going to be reading articles at the same velocity that I am now in 10 years time, but I imagine I'm still going to be intellectually curious. And this is a good rough hewn rubric and like a cute. Oh, isn't this interesting? Do you see that article about how Taylor Swift's changed? Whatever the fuck. Like, that's interesting. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to do that. And I think an older version of me or a younger version of me would have been, huh. Well, that's not, that doesn't necessarily fit what a cool guy would do. Like, are you really gonna send this article about like the mating habits of zebras and how it's different to horses and the fact that that's like really interesting because of the different environment they grew up as some bullshit? It's like, yeah, actually, that's actually a really, really good thing to do. And the story that it reinforces in yourself is I am allowed to be me. I'm allowed to be more me sometimes than I even, Especially if you can tune it up at the start and push yourself beyond your comfort zone because you go, huh, I'm future proofed for like, I wouldn't have usually done this for two years.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And you know, I've got myself to.

[Mark Manson]

It's funny, it's funny you brought up models because, like I'm remembering now, you know, one of the central points in that book, which at the time was controversial, was that as a man, you shouldn't. You're not optimizing to get laid as many times as possible. You're optimizing to be happy with women. Like, that's the whole point of this. Like whether you get laid, whether you, you, you date and sleep with one woman or a hundred. What matters is your happiness.

[Chris Williamson]

It's not like you can get to that.

[Mark Manson]

It's not the body count.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Mark Manson]

And like what you just described is, I, I'm just having flashbacks of when I was in that industry. Like I would say things like that I'm like, yeah, dude, send them zebra articles. You know, like, because then that's going to show you if she's the type of girl that you're going to enjoy being with. And, you know, guys would be like, well, good luck getting laid with zebra articles. You know? And they'd look down on it. They'd call you fucking beta and pussy.

[Chris Williamson]

Hang on. So you're, you're prepared to sacrifice something that you know that you do want for something that you think that you do want? Yeah, with someone who doesn't actually want you because you can't be you in order to get the thing that you think that you want.

[Mark Manson]

I don't, I didn't follow all that, but yeah, sure.

[Chris Williamson]

Sick.

[Mark Manson]

All right. Okay, go ahead.

[Chris Williamson]

No, you go ahead.

[Mark Manson]

No, I was going to tell a story.

[Chris Williamson]

Tell a story.

[Mark Manson]

So the night I met my wife, I met her at three in the morning in a nightclub in Brazil. And within five minutes I somehow ended up in a conversation about Russian grammar and how it was different from Romance language grammar. And she actually sat there and listened the whole time, dude. And she was like asking questions. She was like curious about it. And I remember that moment, I was like, holy shit, she's still here. And I was like, wow, we're gonna get along really well. But yeah, it's funny, it's like one of the first conversations she and I had.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of guys want to date a Brazilian. I'm not convinced that they would have zeroed in on Russian grammar and Romance language as the way into their heart. But look, I mean, you were the.

[Mark Manson]

Guy that wrote the book, so whatever works, right?

[Chris Williamson]

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[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I think fundamentally people mistake intensity of emotion for positivity of emotion. They ride the rollercoaster of a dramatic and toxic relationship, and they. The highs are so high and the lows are so low. And they just think, well, this is part of it, right? Because they're experiencing both extremes. It's by far the most emotional experience they've ever had around anything in their life. And so they assume, okay, well, this must be what it is. But it's not that. It's actually. There shouldn't be this insane oscillation between the highs and lows. Um, there, of course, are highs and lows. Every relationship, like, that's natural, but not daily. It's what you want. What you want to optimize is like, you know, the average baseline, right, that you return to. So, yeah, I just, I see that all the time. People, people, people mistake the intensity of the emotion for, or the intensity of the relationship for being a positive relationship. And I think part of this happens because, just like the way our psychology is, that the more intense the emotion, the stronger the story and narrative and meaning that we place on that experience. When, if you think about it, there are all sorts of emotionally intense experiences you can have that actually don't mean anything at all. I can jump out of a plane. That's going to be a very emotionally intense experience. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. I can date a woman who drives me absolutely fucking insane and then have the best makeup sex of my life and just like the airplane, convince myself that it means something, but it actually doesn't really mean anything. Like what? It took me way too long to figure out that what actually means something is the quality of time spent together in the dull moments. What's the delta between your baseline and your happiness? What is your level of happiness during the dull moment when nothing's happening, when you're Just sitting around eating breakfast, reading emails. Are you happy in that moment? Like, that's what you should be measuring.

[Chris Williamson]

Because that's what life's made up of.

[Mark Manson]

That's the vast majority of life.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Life is made up of breakfast at the kitchen counter. Yeah. Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

Checking emails.

[Chris Williamson]

It's interesting to think about. Okay. There's emotionally intense situations that don't mean anything. And I imagine that there's also emotionally mundane situations that mean a lot, that mean everything. Yeah. So the level of peace in your mind as your head hits the pillow at night, never gonna probably appear in a gratitude. Not even gonna appear in a gratitud gratitude journal. Because it's just such. It's so obvious again. It's there.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

It's like, I slept okay. Yeah. You know, because I. I wasn't worrying about something. It's like, huh. Well, there's a lot of people on the planet that wish that they could have that.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

There we are. So peace. Optimizing for peace, you know, not sexy. What about obsessing over someone isn't love? It's fear disguised as affection. Yeah.

[Mark Manson]

Because obsession is. Is driven by a fear of loss. You know, you're. When you're obsessing over somebody or ruminating over somebody, you're not. You're not actually loving that person. You're trying to prevent loss of that person. And those are two very different things. Love is very loving, is. It's unconditional. It's done. Like, I don't do things for my wife to, like, prevent her from leaving me. That's not the intention. You know, it's like, I don't buy her flowers because I'm like, well, I better do this, otherwise she might leave me. Like, that's. That's not love. Love is. You do something for her, expecting nothing in return, just for the simple reason that you want them to be happy. And again, I think it's another. It's another area that people, like, mistake. Because they feel such an intensity. Because they feel such an intensity of the emotion, and that emotion is directed towards a person and keeping that person as close to them as possible, they assume, well, this must be what love is. Right. Clearly I'm in love with this person. Because all day and night, all I think about is, like, how do I keep them as close to me as possible? And that's not love. That's fear.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a good insight from Visakhandvarasmi. He says. I think he calls it the divorce paradox, which is why do people who. From the Outside seemingly have a perfect relationship. Why do they end up breaking up? And it's because as a society, we haven't fully internalized the lesson that it is not the highs but the lows and how you manage them that make or break relationships. And outwardly, it's rare that you see two people arguing. They'll put the face on. They're having a good time at the wedding or at the dinner or whatever it might be. Uh, but then when they go home, they're fucking shouting and screaming and calling each other names and sleeping in separate rooms. Uh, well, you don't see that. And how well do they deal with those bad times? So it's how you deal with bad times that are a better predictor.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Than very few, I would guess. Most marriages fail because of a surplus of poor rupture and repair, as opposed to a scarcity of super intense high experiences. You're insufficiently exciting to me is maybe there, but less than. You are too low to me. You are too much of a drag.

[Mark Manson]

Absolutely. And one thing I told, I tell friends all the time, which is a really annoying thing to tell a friend, and like a new relationship. But like, whenever I talk to people who are in a new relationship and they're like, you know, honeymoon period, really falling for the person, I always tell them, I'm like, that all sounds great, but let me know when you've had your first fight. Like, you really don't know what it's made of until you've had your first real fight about something. Because all the good stuff, I don't want to say it's easy to find, but it is relatively, it's not scarce. Like, you can find somebody who you have a lot of fun with.

[Chris Williamson]

You enjoy being happy. Hey, me too.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, it's like, oh, you like the thing? I like the thing too. Let's do the thing together. Like, that's, that's not that complicated. What's complicated is when all of her childhood issues come up and get triggered because of the thing that you said. Because you've got this blind spot in your life that you haven't dealt with. And then you start really going at it and it's really the, the quality, like you said, the rupture and repair. The quality of the fighting. Like how all commute. Like, communication always breaks down to a certain extent during fights, but it's like, how deeply does it break down? Does it get nasty? Does it get personal? And then similarly, how quickly do you recover from it? And do you recover from it or do you hold it against each other? Do you start the scoreboard? It's like, okay, it's 1 0, right? If the scoreboard's there, it's over. It's just a matter of time.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't care how smart or beautiful they are, how many companies they started, or degrees they have, they're insecure, and they have no fucking clue what they're doing either. Feeling like you have no idea what you're doing is the price of entry to achieving your dream.

[Mark Manson]

I feel like this just, like, undermines your entire podcast.

[Chris Williamson]

I have never claimed to have any idea about what it is that I'm doing. My guests may have done.

[Mark Manson]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

You included.

[Mark Manson]

No, no. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's. It's a. So a good friend of mine had a really funny story around this. So a really good friend of mine back in New York, startup guy, super smart startup founder, had an exit, did really well, went to work for a vc, did really well at the vc, and then eventually got brought in by one of the 20 or 30 biggest companies in the world to advise and help, man. Like, they're doing, like, an internal incubator, and basically they wanted him to come in and kind of, like, advise their projects or whatever. So, you know, and this guy's like, 30, right? So he's, like, climbed the mountain, climbed the next mountain, and now he's, like, being brought into, like, one of the biggest companies in the world, literally household name. And he's supposed to be in charge of, like, all these, like, special projects and new innovations and stuff. And I remember he came back. I, like, had dinner with him when he got back to town. I was like, dude, how was it? He just looked at me and he's like. He's like, I just had this realization, like, it's. Fucking idiots all the way down. Like, I. I always thought one day I'm going to walk in a room, and there's. It's like, okay, these are the people that know what's going on. These are the people who, like, have the plan and have figured it out. And these are the lords of the universe. And they're, like, secretly, like, pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes, and. And the rest of us are just trying to keep up. And he, yeah, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. Like, it's. He's like, it's a disaster. It's a complete and utter disaster. And he's like, I don't know what I'm going to do, but they're paying me a Ton of money. So I always love that story and I love that phrase, it's idiots all the way down. And I include us in that. Like, I think it's. We're all just like, chipping away at our own idiocy, slowly but surely publicly.

[Chris Williamson]

But I do think that there's a fair trade to be made, and certainly one that I've made even more perhaps than you. As somebody who's actually written legitimate books, you can trade expertise for relatability. And I think if you say, hey, I don't know what's going on, and in my not knowing of what's going on, you can feel better. In your not knowing of what's going on. You know, that is probably one of the most common threads across nine hundred and fucking fifty episodes or whatever we've done at this show, which is. I'm unsure about this thing, but I'm gonna try and find out from someone who might know a tiny little bit more than me, and we're gonna work it out together. Of. Hmm. Six months later, I finally arrive at a realization that something approximating, like, accuracy. Huh. Well, that's cool. Well, we'll hold onto that one thing and we'll get another one. And get another one. George Mack, one of my favorite friends and favorite writers. He's got this essay, adults don't exist. Steve Jobs delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer to try a carrot juice diet and acupuncture. Mozart overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt, and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money. Friedrich Nietzsche lost his virginity in a brothel and caught syphilis. He only saw his work sell 300 copies in his lifetime. Martin Luther King had extramarital affairs with over 40 different women, including spending his last night alive with two women and physically attacking another. Isaac Newton spent 30 years of his life writing 1 million words on the pseudoscience of alchemy, hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it. Don't put any adult on a pedestal, Kill your gurus. Or a more useful belief. The adults aren't going to save you. They don't even exist.

[Mark Manson]

I love that. That's awesome.

[Chris Williamson]

He realized when his friends that he went to university with who were the most degen. Larry couldn't hold. They couldn't get up on time. They weren't handing their assignments in. Went to go and be teachers. Holy fuck. That means. Oh, that means that my teachers were that idiot from. Oh, okay. Like, the adults literally do not exist.

[Mark Manson]

It's idiots all the way down it. I do want to hit on this, though. So one of the things that has been like concerning me lately, so I agree with you, by the way. I think one of the things that is good about what you do, what I do with the kind of like all the alternative media or whatever you want to call it, is that there is a little bit more of an openness of uncertainty.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't have it all figured out.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, lack of expertise, whatever, yet the end result seems to be producing a public of greater uninformed certainty. Right. So we've gone from a media and information environment that was very much built on certainty and expertise and credentials and authority and all that shit, and now we've gone to a much more decentralized information ecosystem and media system where people are very open about like, well, I don't have all the answers, but let's try to figure this out. And yet the public just seems more certain about dumb shit than ever.

[Chris Williamson]

That's interesting. There's a great idea called knowingness. Lots of the issues of the modern world are laid at the feet of misinformation. And the claim is basically this person believes the wrong things because they've consumed the wrong stuff, and if only we could get them to consume the right stuff, we could update their beliefs. You go, how? Well, I mean, that's gonna be pretty fair assessment if that's the problem. But if the problem is knowingness, knowingness being lack of curiosity around what is true in place of a dogmatic belief about what you already know. So it's believing that you know the answer to the question before the question's already been asked that is a prophylactic against any new information, regardless of whether it's miss or dis or mal or correct or whatever. Right. And the challenge that you have is to try and get or the, I guess the reason or the way that you know that this is true is precisely what you're pointing at, which is everybody act as if the facts have already been settled, while no one can agree on what the facts are. Like we say, people say, well, we know how much humans are contributing to climate change. We know this for a fact on both sides.

[Mark Manson]

Sure.

[Chris Williamson]

While both sides don't agree with each other. And it's the same as kind of a religion question, which is every religion acts as if theirs is correct whilst not agreeing with all of the others. Well, this can't all be correct. Like none of these. Everybody can't be right here. At best, one of you can be Right. And the same thing goes with the sort of knowingness question.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, Yeah, I guess it's. And it's. The more. The greater diversity of information that people are exposed to, the more contradictions arise. And the more the contradictions arise, the more people just kind of default to their. Whatever feels right.

[Chris Williamson]

So, yeah. Confident. Yeah. Uninformed certainty, it's certainly part of it, but I also see the black sheep equivalent of that, which is sort of like nihilistic despondency. Like, well, you know, we can't trust anything anymore.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Who even knows what facts are? And that you can't trust the news and you can't trust. You can't even trust your neighbor next door and what they're saying. And I wonder whether that is. There's maybe a bunch of different reactions to an overwhelm of information. Yeah. One of them being you kind of intellectually reverse engineer the biases. You wanted to be true all along. Yeah. But on another side, you just throw your hands up and say, I don't even. Like, I can't even trust anything anymore. I don't know.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, there's definitely an asymmetry around trust. Warren Buffett's got that great quote where he says it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. And I think the same is true with trust. It's like an institution can spend decades building up a certain amount of reliability and then just ruin it in a single day. And I think the more we're exposed to everything, the more we're exposed to, like, the flaws and everything.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Mark Manson]

Right?

[Chris Williamson]

It's very difficult to be comfortable in your own skin. No one believes that they're. Very few people believe that they're perfect. So given that you probably are imperfect and know it, but are comfortable with it, you think, aha, this person's relatable and reliable.

[Mark Manson]

Right. It's another paradoxical kind of relationship dynamic in that we actually admire people who are comfortable with their own flaws. Like, we don't, like, think about the. If you think about a person who's, like, just trying to cover for their own flaws and act like they're not there or pretend like it's not their fault, generally, like, we don't like those people. Those people are very annoying. And if you think about the people you do find very endearing, it's the people who are quirky, weird, you know, kind of off sometimes.

[Chris Williamson]

Why do you think that is?

[Mark Manson]

But they own it. I actually think it comes back to the trust thing. I think it's like, if I see somebody who's a little bit weird but, like, owns it, and it's like, yeah, I just got this. I'm just kind of an oddball. Like, I feel that I can trust them, that they're not going to bullshit me or try to be something they're not. Whereas somebody who's just trying to look perfect all the time, you actually don't trust. It's like a yes man, right? Like, you know, it's the irony of a yes man is that somebody who always agrees with you on everything is like, the last person you can actually go to for advice.

[Chris Williamson]

If I can't Trust you? No, I can't trust you.

[Mark Manson]

Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I do think the flaw, like the confidence that comes with one's own flaws and imperfections, it ultimately does boil down to a trusting, which is ultimately why authenticity is sexy, is because you feel like you can trust the person.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. I mean, there's an idea again from George, he's so fucking good. He just did this high agency essay. Everyone should go and see highagency.com his essay is available on that. It's fucking sick. But this one, non fungible tokens NFTs there was a big boom, whatever, 2021, when everyone had Covid money and didn't know what to do with it. He's got this idea of non fungible people and that's basically the same as what you're talking about here. He uses his mom as an example and his mum hates fighting, like can't bear physical altercations. And apparently she was on the phone with Georgie's Brother, I think 20 or something. He's some young guy and the. She's driving in the car on her own and she sees two young boys fighting by the side of the road. So she stops the car in the middle of the street and gets out and sort of fucking Arthur Shelby's them or Tommy Shelby's them. And she's like, no fucking fighting. No fucking fighting. Like she's got these two apart, but the son is still on the phone like, mom, Mom. What? And she's like, it's two people fighting. I must get out and I must stop it. It's like middle of the street, got out, like two people she doesn't know, like totally didn't need to get. Could have got punched, could have like anything. Gets back in the car, tells the son. And George made this point that at her funeral, nobody's going to talk about how she was always on time or, you know, the quality of the pasta al dente that she cooked or whatever. But she was the sort of woman that stopped a car in the middle of the street to stop people from fighting. And it's just a beautiful. That's a non fungible person.

[Mark Manson]

It's interesting to think about, like what are the stories that are. It's interesting to think what are the stories that are going to be told at your funeral? Because, yeah, it's never. I mean, obviously there are stories of like you being very charitable or loving or whatever, but like people always find quirky shit like that. Like they find the NFT version of.

[Chris Williamson]

Whoever you were in what areas were you non fungible.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. Where were you in oddball? What's the inside joke that everybody at the funeral service is gonna laugh and understand?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, dude, you remember when he. Oh, he did that to you too? Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Didn't we love him? Like, he was so great. If you aren't naturally tired at night and excited in the morning, then you probably haven't found something meaningful to work on. You are not stressed from doing too much. You are stressed from doing too little of what you care about.

[Mark Manson]

So this is a drum that I bang on endlessly to the productivity crowd, and I feel like it just gets ignored. But I think emotion is the most important productivity system there's a lot of. And I think the reason it gets discounted is because there is a lot of cheesy, cliched advice around. Like, oh, if you do you love, you never work a day of your life. You know, like bullshit like that. It's. Passion is practical. Like, when you deeply care about something you're doing, you're going to work on it longer, you're going to think harder about the problems, you're going to take feedback better, you're going to be more resilient, you're going to be willing to stay up at night, get up early on a Saturday or whatever. Like emotion is. It is actually the highest leverage system within yourself towards whatever your productivity goals are. And I just feel like so much productivity advice is disembodied. It's like, you know, the hustle culture bullshit of just like, ignore how you feel, just grind, grind, grind. And yeah, it's like, oh, you know, stop being a bitch. Like, you know, sleep when you're dead, date when you're dead. Like, whatever, go make a billion dollars. It's. What is it for? Like, if it's not for something, like, if you're not doing all this work for some greater cause, then. Then what the. What the fuck are you doing? Like, you might as well just hang out at the beach and play video games. Like, because. Because, why not? You know, like, there's a certain. There's a nihilism in the productivity space right now that, like, it really bothers me.

[Chris Williamson]

And.

[Mark Manson]

It. Because, A, I don't think it's healthy, but B, I also think it's like just bad advice. Like, the best advice is find something you really fucking love and care about and give yourself to it. Bukowski's got this great line, he says, find what you love and let it kill you. And I just. There's like, so Much beauty in that. Because when you find a craft or a trade or, or a skill that like you deeply, deeply care about or a mission that you deeply, deeply care about, you are willing, you become willing to trade yourself for that mission. And, and you are lit. Like when you trade your time, you are literally trading your life for something. So what are you going to trade it for? And what is the point of trade, of making that trade? Get $1 billion, you know, get, get 100 million followers like Whoopi, what these fucking do. Like what does that mean? You know. So I continue to bang that drum hopelessly. Hopelessly, yes. But I don't, I don't get it. I don't get invited to the, to, you know, the same, the biohacking conferences that my contemporaries do.

[Chris Williamson]

So Joe Hudson's got this wonderful line. He says enjoyment is efficiency.

[Mark Manson]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

That he looks at. However much enjoyment I get out of doing a thing is just a direct correlate with how efficient I was at doing it. That the more that I enjoy something, the more efficient I'm going to be.

[Mark Manson]

Dude, people. And it's double sided as well. Right. Like the better you get at something, the more you fall in love with it and the more you love something, the more patience you're going to have to get good at it. And so it's just like to me it's like the most obvious entry point. But I think a lot of people develop kind of like fucked up relationships with productivity and work. And I say this as like a bonafide workaholic.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I was going to say, you know, you have found something that you love and you have done it so much that it almost killed your passion, or at least acutely killed your passion. You wrote three books in three years.

[Mark Manson]

Three books in a movie in four years.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yep. And then needed to kind of just play PlayStation for basically a full year after that to recover.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. But it's interesting because in hindsight I think the reason that happened is I actually lost sight of what, what I was doing and why I was doing it. Right. So early in my career was blogging, doing the creator thing in the early 2000 and tens. Fucking loved it. Book blows up. All these opportunities show up, big book deals, movie deal, world tour, all this shit. Start saying yes to everything because it's like, well, when's this going to come around again? And basically gave three to four years of my life to a bunch of stuff that was really wasn't. It wasn't optimizing for what I cared about. It wasn't optimizing for the mission that had driven me throughout most of my career. It was optimized for.

[Chris Williamson]

Fuck.

[Mark Manson]

That's a lot of zeros on that contract. Like I should probably say yes. I should probably say yes to that. You know, and don't get me wrong, like it's. I think it's okay to do that in bits and spurts, but it's not long term sustainable. And I think a lot of people develop and it took me a number of years to kind of get back to what I love and appreciate about my work and like getting that mission focus again. But I do think people often use productivity as like they develop a toxic relationship with productivity. It becomes a, a way to outsource their self worth and avoid dealing with a lot of these like simple truths that they don't want to admit about themselves. And it's. And you can definitely get. We live in a culture that will gladly encourage that.

[Chris Williamson]

Correct? Yeah. I mean, I've always thought about Billy McFarlane, the guy that started Fyre Festival. Yeah, it's the fucking prototypical example of this. I always thought about if Billy McFarland had managed to string together a semi coherent festival, he would have been hailed as the Steve Jobs of marketing. Nothing could have changed, or nothing would have needed to have changed in his motivation for doing it, his shameless requirement for self promotion, the deception that he was going through with his investors, the fact that he didn't know that he was the adult that didn't exist, but saying that he did, all the way down. The only issue that people had was that the rug got pulled out from underneath his obfuscation and his lies and his incompetence. But if he'd even just about managed to creep like a. Okay, festival out. People are so seduced by success, the modern world prays at the altar of success so much that they would have happily forgiven or overlooked the things they did. We all know this. There's so many people that hold on to popularity not because people think that they're good or authentic or sort of genuinely being truthful, but because they're a rocket ship that's going up into the right. And that sense of, huh, I don't think that that's where your productivity pioneer should be at. I don't think that that's necessarily the person that you should be following.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's funny too, because I see so much of this stuff and so much productivity advice. It's funny to me. So much productivity advice is actually catered to people who are using their productivity as a way to escape their problems. Right? It's all about morning protocols and when to set your alarm and hey, do this thing in the first five minutes or whatever. And I don't know, I look at that, I'm like, okay, first of all, I'm up by six without an alarm and I can't fucking wait to get to my computer. I don't have a routine. I'm already awake. I'm awake because I'm excited. As soon as my eyes open up, I'm starting to think about what I'm gonna do that day. And I'm so excited that I just get out of bed and I'm in front of my computer within three minutes. And why would I use a protocol? Why would I need habit tracker or like, you know, all this stuff, like, if the emotions are aligned, like everything takes care of itself. Whereas if the emotions aren't aligned, then you have to spend all this extra energy. It's like the performative thing, right? With people in relationships, it's like if the emotions aren't aligned, then you're like basically self flagellating to get yourself to perform all these actions that are ultimately performative. It's like, okay, I put in 12 hours today. I got these six things done. I hit these KPIs this month. You know, my new nighttime routine demands I do these six things. And it's like, you know, there's a certain healthy rhythm that like naturally emerges as with most things when, you know, the systems are aligned.

[Chris Williamson]

That was an interesting transition that I had, you know. When did we have dinner? It was about a year ago when we did that dinner. No, it must have been a little over a year ago, I think.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, it was a little. It was like a year and a couple months.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. Um. And that was me as in the trenches as I've ever been.

[Mark Manson]

You were going hard, correct?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. And since then have learned to back off a little bit. But in that as you, as you take your foot off the gas or as you speed up, you sort of notice changes in life. And you could make an analogy to sort of acceleration or deceleration in things. You know, your net worth staying the same. It's kind of. It's nothing but it going up. It's like, ah, there's a change and going down. Fuck. You'll notice that too.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

One of the things that I noticed as I sort of purposefully tried to de. Decelerate and de lever some of the things that I was doing from Then until now, which I've done real, real successfully, was I had to face an awful lot more of the things that my obsession with productivity and being busy were hiding in the fog. So, you know, my busyness was certainly a hedge against uncertainty and fear and a lack of importance and meaning and this desperate requirement for validation and a lack of self esteem. It's like, how can I not be important? Look at how many calls I've got today. Like the world, the world need me. Look at how busy my calendar is. Yeah, like my calendar is so fucking busy. There's no way that I'm a worthless piece of shit. It's impossible. It's simply impossible. So, yeah, sure, there may be some echoes of existential loneliness in the, in the background, but sorry, bro, I can't hear you. I'm blasting sleep token at 150 decibels. Like, that was a busy calendar, was a hedge against existential loneliness for me. And it's a really good way to just continue to not. To not see the lies that you're telling yourself, to not have to face the fears, the senses of insufficiency, the scarcity, mindsets, all of that stuff. It's like, I'm so busy, bro, that I don't have time for that.

[Mark Manson]

Totally.

[Chris Williamson]

And if you go, okay, I see that that's a pattern that almost everybody does. And I'm going to. I now have the opportunity maybe to choose to take my foot off the gas. You sort of feel that slowing as you kick forward and you go, okay, where do I take my self worth from now? Because I used to take it from there. And now I have to realize maybe me believing that my importance, my self importance was bolstered by my level of busyness was a lie. And that's a like, that's a fucking real battle.

[Mark Manson]

It's a real battle to go through. Yeah, for sure. And again, admitted workaholic here, this is something I struggle with too. The other thing I noticed, and I don't know, I'd be curious if this rings true for you. I've not been brought up to date on your dating life, but I see in friends that they're perpetually single or they want to settle down, but then they complain that they can't find the right person. And I'm like, well, dude, you're on the road like six months a year. When was the last time you saw the same person twice? And I think in some cases that busyness, again, it kind of comes back to that strategic incompetence. It's like, oh, well, I can't figure out my dating life because I'm too busy.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a get out of jail free card. Right? You've always got one foot out of the door. So if this thing doesn't work. Well, it's not that much of a comment on my sense of self worth because I wasn't that committed anymore anyway. Like, yeah, yeah. It's not because I'm hopelessly bad at making somebody feel comfortable around me and scared of letting somebody see me. It's because I'm on the road six months at the end.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that. I think I've done that not in my intimate relationships, but I've done that in like, with like social and family relationships. Right. It's like, uh, yeah, sorry I can't come home. I'm like touring Australia, you know, I'll see you next year.

[Chris Williamson]

We missed each other by like 3 days twice in Australia. Yeah, motherfuckers.

[Mark Manson]

I know.

[Chris Williamson]

We need to organize it better. That would have been cool. I think you did. I think you actually did the same.

[Mark Manson]

We did the same cities, yes, but just in different orders. And I think a lot of people just like. Cause there were. Pick one, pick both. Well, I ran into a lot of people who were like at your show like the night before. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, dude, what? Imagine that for a weekend. A fucking Manson Williamson back to back spit roasted by us.

[Mark Manson]

We're just going to go there.

[Chris Williamson]

Two podcast bros, one fucking venue.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

The happiest people are not the ones with the most options, but the ones who stop questioning their choices.

[Mark Manson]

This comes back to your point about uncertainty, right? And this is, I think where is at the foundation of the paradox of choice is. The paradox of choice is on the surface, you have more optionality, you have more things to choose from, you have more paths that you could go down. But that optionality itself generates more uncertainty because whichever path you pick, there's proportionally more uncertainty about whether that was the right path or not, whether you made the right choice or not, whether you could have made a better choice or not. And so I think at a certain point, if you really just boil it down to it, happiness comes down to being satisfied with what you've chosen, not trying to optimize anymore.

[Chris Williamson]

That's kind of like a whatever it's called, golden handcuffs or a velvet prison, where if the thing that you claim that you want to have happen in life happens, I get better options, I achieve success, people respect me, people Want me, People need me. Things are available to me. Okay? If that happens, if that happens, you are going to need to become increasingly good at saying no to an increasingly attractive number of an increasing quality of things that you could do with your life. And you're going to have to become better at being able to be happy with the choice that you have made. Alex Hormozy talks about the woman in the red dress from the Matrix. And he says, remember that scene? Neil's walking down the street and Morpheus turns to me and he says, neil, were you looking at me or were you looking at the woman in a red dress? Look again. And it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his face. And his analogy is. Yeah, but now imagine that it was three years later and it's 1000 hypothetical 1000s, not one hypothetical 10.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And you need to. I mean, what's your thing of. I shamelessly fucking nomenclatured it. I called it identity dysmorphia. Identity lags reality by one to two years. Yeah. Is one of yours. So if you've got this identity, which everybody does, right, you just, you. You see in the mirror the person that you used to see, the world sees some other version of you, and it takes a little bit of time for that version to catch up. So you are lagging behind the options. Your ability to discern options is lagging behind the options that the world is going to give you. And your ability to say no is fucking two, three years old. You're all of this stuff. And yeah, the 1000 hypothetical 1000s in red dresses. And you need to go, I would have begged to have had the opportunity to have maybe said yes to this. And now I need to be pretty comfortable with saying no.

[Mark Manson]

I. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Crisis of success.

[Mark Manson]

That totally tracks. And I'm trying to remember, Nassim Taleb had a quote around this that was something like, true wealth is measured by the money you turn down. Which I just.

[Chris Williamson]

Morgan Housel says, wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, it's funny because I feel like good decision making at any point in life is primarily learned by making bad decisions. So whatever level you get to, there's a new set of bad decisions that you have to make to realize not to make them to get to the next level. And so, again, it's just one of these tricks that your brain plays on you of, like, oh, well, you know, if you make it, then you don't have to deal with this bullshit anymore. And so it's going to be easier. And it's like, well, no, no, no. There's a new level of bullshit that you've never been exposed to that is actually 10 times.

[Chris Williamson]

It's problems all the way up.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. It's problems all the way up and it's idio all the way down.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I think about that.

[Mark Manson]

That'd be a good book title.

[Chris Williamson]

Problems all the way up and Idiots all the way down.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. Or maybe not.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. So you come up maybe two or three times in my live show, and one of the. One of the bits is it's idiots all the way up. So it's funny that you said it's all the way down. Yeah. The ability to sort of become increasingly discerning. And Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sat there earlier on, you know, the guy that created Shrek and Aladdin and Lion King, he did Pretty Woman. This guy's a monster. Like 800 movies, 80 animated things. And I asked him about, you are someone who, if you have one skill set, you're tasteful, like, you have good taste. The ability to discern between something that is good and something that is not good.

[Mark Manson]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

Tastes very difficult to define. But that's the closest definition I can think of. He couldn't define, like, where does good taste come from? What is it?

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't fucking know. And when it comes to choices, so much of the time we try and again, that uncertainty, we abhor it so much that we would rather imagine a fantasy catastrophe than deal with something that's uncertain. The reason that you have your, you know, spreadsheet of 15 countries ranked first by continent, then by temperature, then by air quality, then by women, hotness, you're.

[Mark Manson]

Hitting very close to home right now.

[Chris Williamson]

Starting to shake with mid-20s anxiety.

[Mark Manson]

Oh, God.

[Chris Williamson]

The reason that you have that is to try and be. To provide some sort of control, some source of control. You go, fuck. Like, I just. I'm so uncertain about my choices that if only I had more information, when really what it comes down to is just vibes. And, you know, I think we've both zeroed in on the show, your show and mine, respectively, that it actually is increasingly about vibes. It's like, okay, what's the vibe that I'm bringing here? What's the sort of energy that I really want to put across in this thing? And sure, there'll be maybe some information, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not. But largely what people are going to take away is like, okay, so what was the vibe like? And being a vibe Architect is an underrated, which is basically, you know, somebody that's discerning in taste, sort of a vibe.

[Mark Manson]

Architect. You should add that to your LinkedIn.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, no, it's totally true, though. It's. I had another thing that I wrote that went viral. It said that I'm going to probably fuck it up, but it was commitment is the. Or, no, love is the result. Yeah, love is the result of commitment, not the cause. Right. Like, you commit to something, then you start loving it, not the other way around. Right. And it's similar to, like, action and motivation. Like, you don't. You take. Taking action is what generates motivation, not motivation doesn't generate action. And similarly, committing to something is what makes you fall in love with it. Not falling in love with you don't. Wait.

[Chris Williamson]

Allows you to.

[Mark Manson]

You don't go find the perfect country and fall in love with it and then be like, oh, I guess this is where I'm gonna live. It's like, no, you pick a fucking place to live, and then as you live there, you start to fall in love with it.

[Chris Williamson]

That's just.

[Mark Manson]

That's how life works.

[Chris Williamson]

The more you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I think. Talking about the discernment, I think it's. It's really. It's hard to develop the skill of knowing when you're bullshitting yourself.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, it's.

[Mark Manson]

It's. Again, there's like layers to it, right? Like, it's. As soon as you figure out your mind's first level of tricks that it plays, there's like a whole nother level.

[Chris Williamson]

That, yeah, you beat it at white belt, but then it's like, fuck, it graduated. God, now it knows leg locks and kung fu.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly. It's just. It's just layers of an onion, man. Like, it's just. It never. You never stop finding novel ways to kind of trick yourself and bullshit yourself. And you can drive yourself crazy, you know, with the doubt and the questioning, which, again, I think is a lot of the value that I took in Buddhism is that I think it's like kind of a mentally and emotionally healthy way to doubt yourself.

[Chris Williamson]

You don't know, and you're never going to know, and that's okay.

[Mark Manson]

And it's okay. And why don't you sit on the mat and stare at a wall until you feel okay about it? And because otherwise, if you're kind of trying to go through life and asking, you're like constantly questioning everything all the time. Like you're going to work yourself up into this neurotic ball of anxiety and stress. So it's almost like mental hygiene to set aside an area of your life, whether it's journaling or therapy or meditation or whatever, and give yourself that space to just unwrap the layers of the onion. Okay, well, why do I think that's true? What if that wasn't true? What if I'm like lying to myself right now? What would that mean? What would that say about my life? And kind of go the next layer down and the next layer down and then when you're done, put all the layers back and go about your life. Try to human as best you can.

[Chris Williamson]

You said about being in self conflict and it makes me think about this sort of, especially for the sort of people that read your stuff, listen to my stuff. They are the prototypical avatar for a person who will be in conflict with themselves. They're introspective, they want to improve. They have high standards for a variety of things, many of which are in opposition with each other. You know, they want to be empathetic, but they want to be honest. They want to tell people the truth, but they want to care about them. They want to be supportive as a friend, but they need independence as an individual, blah, blah, blah. And I thought about as you were talking there, you have self conflict, but you have conflict with your self conflict. Like fuck, why am I always in conflict with myself? Why does that keep on happening? And I think in some ways this sort of non attachment, you don't have it figured out and that's okay, and you'll be okay. And this is the way it's going to be in perpetuity until you die. Go. Okay, so maybe the self conflict's going to be there because many of the things that we want are in tension with each other. And because of opportunity cost, you don't get to do two things right. You want to support the mom and pop business that you are with from the very beginning, but you want to move to a new country. You're going to feel guilty if you leave the mom and pop business, but you're going to feel fucking regret if you don't go to the new country. Pick your fucking direction, western man. And the same thing goes for your self conflict. You think like I have these things, I'm going to be intentioned with myself. But if I'm in tension with the fact that I'm intentional, that is I have control over that second one at least. So you could call it Second order emotions. You know, someone gets frustrated and then they become agitated at their frustration, and then they become resentful at their agitation about their frustration. It is fucking infinite regress of emotions about emotions. And you go, yeah, I mean, the first one makes sense. That happens.

[Mark Manson]

First one happens. You can't control it.

[Chris Williamson]

But the story that you've told yourself about this.

[Mark Manson]

I wrote a, I wrote a piece years ago, I don't even remember the title, so I can't even plug it, but I talked about this. I called them, I've been doing this a long time. I call them meta emotions. Right. It's like feeling bad about feeling bad or feeling bad about feeling good, which happens a lot to people. And essentially my argument is just like, try not to have meta emotion. The emotions are always okay and the meta emotions are kind of always not okay. Feeling good about feeling good, that turns into pride. Feeling bad about feeling good, that turns into guilt. Like feeling bad about feeling bad, that turns into self loathing. Like it just don't judge the emotion, just feel the thing. It's okay, it's gonna be. Whatever it is, it's gonna be okay.

[Chris Williamson]

That's sick.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I like that a lot. Trust people. Most of them are good. And while you might get hurt occasionally, the alternative of distrusting everyone is far worse.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, man. I. This ties into a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about. I, I look around and I think a lot of the, the struggles of people today, it is around just trusting people, being comfortable. I just, I think our views of the medium person in the world have gotten so skewed by being online too much, by being on social media too much, by being overexposed to news media too much. I just think if you actually get out in the world and talk to people face to face, even people you disagree with, even people who you think are the bad ones or whatever, nine times out of 10, they're good people and you can pretty quickly find common ground and get along really well. And you know, I used to be, I used to be an esports gamer when I was a teenager.

[Chris Williamson]

I can imagine that.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. And unlike Elon, I actually was calling him out, I got really pissed because he said that he was. He competed in one of the first Quake tournaments. And like, I actually went back to my old clan buddies and. And like, we looked it up and yeah, he wasn't in it.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh.

[Mark Manson]

Anyway, my. My personal grievances aside, so there used to be a thing that happened back when I was like, I used to compete in these esports tournaments. And of course being a bunch of like 16 year old nerds, we'd like sit and just talk shit to each other all the time online. Like we'd play the game, practice against each other and everybody just like talk mad shit to each other. And of course it would devolve into like, oh, when I see you at the tournament, I'm going to beat the fuck out of you. When I see you at the tournament, I'm going to bring my boys, we're going to beat the shit out of you, you better be ready. All this stuff. And so every single tournament we went to, there was all this drama about like, oh man, it's going to go down here. Chris and Mark are going to fight, it's going to be sick. And then of course what happens? Everybody shows up, everybody meets each other, everybody realizes that we're all fat, nerdy, lonely dudes who spend way too much time on their computers. And of course we all go to McDonald's and be friends. And that happened over and over and over and over again. And so I feel like I learned at a very young age that there's just some sort of, there's some sort of like intangible softening that comes when you're face to face with people, that you're in the same room with them. The micro expressions, the body language, the tonality, like there's a, there's a certain amount of empathy and compassion that spontaneously emerges in the physical space that doesn't happen in the digital space. And I, I just feel as the world becomes more and more chronically online, I just, I, I feel like so many of our issues like really just boil down to that. I'm friends with one of the preeminent happiness researchers out here. Her name's Sonia Lubomirsky and her lab just did a great woman, super smart, and her lab just did a new study. It still hasn't been published yet, it's in pre publishing. But it was interesting. They looked at classic case social media and happiness, smartphones, social media and happiness and how they correlate, whatever. And interestingly, like a lot of research around social media and happiness, when you look at adults, it doesn't have that much of an effect. The smartphones had a negative correlation with happiness. But what was interesting is that, and the way they measured it, basically the way she summarized it was like the smartphones causing greater unhappiness was not because of the smartphone, it was because of what the smartphone was replacing, which was this just sitting in A room together, talking and actually empathizing, actually being okay. I don't agree with that, but you're a good guy. So, you know, let's have another beer. You know, like it's, it's that sort of casualness to everything that somehow gets distorted or lost. So I don't remember like what you said that got me on this thread.

[Chris Williamson]

You were talking about Quake.

[Mark Manson]

I don't know.

[Chris Williamson]

The more that you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does. Maybe it was that, oh, trust people. Oh yeah, yeah, trust people, trust them.

[Mark Manson]

Again, trusting people. So I think a lot of trust, it seems to spontaneously emerge from the in personness. Right. And so again, to the point about the asymmetry of trust, how damaging that is both for our institutions, our society, but also our personal relationships. Like if you can't trust somebody, you can't really have intimacy with them. I think it, I just think it's all related and so that that post is just like a shout into the void of like, please, people, like just trust each other. Just err on the side of trust. Sure, you're gonna get hurt sometimes, but the alternative is worse.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, there's a lovely insight from Naval Karma doesn't need spirits to deliver justice. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. And that's kind of the same thing with trust, that. Look, dude, if someone is that much of an asshole, they're probably going to get found out sooner or later because there's only so many times that you can roll the dice and that thing happen and you not get found out for it if it's bad or you not get found out for if it's good. So you didn't accumulate the negative reputation and you didn't accumulate the positive reputation for so long. And maybe some people can dance through the minefield of life and be an asshole to everyone that they meet and arrive at their deathbed and no one really realize. But that's like some 7,000 IQ samurai bullshit to be able to make that work. And I just don't think, I don't think that most people are going to do that. So yeah, I think, and as well, there is certainly a trend in the modern world of I don't need anybody. I've been hurt before, and that hurt was because of my trust. Therefore, the issue wasn't the person that I placed my trust in, but the act of trust itself. I think that's an equation that gets. That happens quite a Bit run.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. And that's completely self defeating, right? It's like I got hurt because I didn't get the intimacy or love that I crave. So I'm just gonna stop pursuing intimacy and love. Like that makes no sense. And I don't know how or why that's become particularly fashionable. I just. It strikes me as incredibly self defeating.

[Chris Williamson]

In the game of life, he who has the smallest ego usually wins. Why?

[Mark Manson]

Well, it depends how you define wins, but I think in terms of just well being. I mean you kind of just alluded to it yourself. You know, you can have that super samurai manipulative who's cheating everybody and stealing and lying everybody all the time, but like that's. They're probably miserable. They're probably incredibly dark, lonely, miserable people. And I just think all of this stuff that we're talking about, whether it's the authenticity or finding a way for your cup to overflow and finding a mission in your productivity, all of this stuff, it demands a certain humbling of yourself. And I think in a way too, it's just like choosing fear is a form of ego.

[Chris Williamson]

How do you define ego?

[Mark Manson]

That's a good question. In this context I would say it is an over importance of self, like an aggrandized sense of self. I do think having some ego or healthy egos is natural and important, but I just think it's all this stuff that we're talking about, this low level delusions and misconceptions and distrust of people and choosing fear over confidence. All of it kind of boils back to feeding this aggrandized sense of self of like, I deserve so much, I'm so special, I want all these things in the world and I'm going to be so upset if I don't get them. And all of that really just boils down to a misrepresentation of your own importance, I guess.

[Chris Williamson]

What's a better perspective?

[Mark Manson]

I think a better perspective is his understanding that everything comes with a trade off, that life is, is messy and painful, loss is inevitable. But that doesn't mean that the thing you lost wasn't worth it. And that anything you pursue or desire, like you can't just pursue or desire the positive side of it, you also have to pursue and desire the negative side of it. Like you have to. If there's some goal in your life or some dream you have, you can't just dream about the benefits of that dream. You're also signing up for the costs of that dream, you're signing up for the struggles the failures, the setbacks, the embarrassments. And the mind is just very bad at doing that. It's bad at holding two sides of a trade off at the same time. We tend to see when we create these narratives about the future or about what we want or what we don't want, we tend to only see what's bad about it or only see what's good about it. We don't see the full trade off. We don't see like, oh, if I start a new company, I'm going to have to give up some of my social life and some of my time at home and so I need to be ready for that. It's like, no, we just think that, oh that stupid fucking company, it like messed up my life and you know, what a mistake, I shouldn't have done that or my co founder is an asshole or like whatever. Right. It's like it's their fault, it's blame everybody else. So I think it's viewing optionality in terms of, of the costs, of the emotional costs.

[Chris Williamson]

Have you read much Oliver Berkman?

[Mark Manson]

I love Oliver stuff.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Fucking king dude. His newsletter, the Imperfectionist is. It's the same as that Tim Urban thing. New posts every. Sometimes it's like on no fucking discernible cadence. Oliver Berkman's newsletter is like the three body problem of publishing. You know, it's like when the fuck is it coming? I don't think you know, and neither can, no one can predict. But he has this idea from 4000 weeks which is choose what you're going to suck at.

[Mark Manson]

Yep.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, choose in advance the thing that you're going to suck at. Because opportunity cost demands trade offs. There are no solutions, only trade offs. So I want to find a partner. Okay, you're probably going to have to sacrifice some time in the gym. You're not going to be, you're going to be going out on dates, are you going to events? Maybe some late nights, maybe some early mornings, maybe some coffee breaks and stuff like that. Probably not going to maximize your finances. Maybe you're going to have to pay for ubers and dinners trips and stuff like that. Okay. I, I really want to make as much money as possible. It's like, okay, your social life's probably going to suck. Yeah. For a bit. And you maybe not going to get to hang with your friends so much. Okay. So I think by in advance of that, especially for the perennial type A fucking optimizer people, which me you have to say this is a price. I'm willing to pay in order to achieve this other thing that I want. And it's not forever. And that's a what? I don't know whether it's like personal growth, hyperbolic discounting or something, but our ability to understand that the decisions that we're making right now are just for right now, you know, not just for this second. You know, if you're going to commit to a habit, make it a couple of months, but. Okay, I'm gonna get in shape. All right, well, that's gonna take between three and three months and 12 months, something like that for most people. Okay, why get in shape? What am I, what's the price I'm gonna have to pay? What am I gonna suck at during that time? Oh, you know, I'm probably gonna have to spend more money on going to the gym and buying better food and probably not gonna have much of a social life because I'm gonna need to really lock in on diet and I'm gonna have to like be socially awkward dinners the few that I do get to attend. And I'm gonna have to say, oh, sorry, like I'm just having a steak this evening or whatever. It might be okay by doing that. When the price comes of the suck, it doesn't feel like this comment on your self worth as a person that's being ripped away from you. Oh my God, how can I? I'm not going to be able to deal with the thing that's happening. It's like, no, no, no. Okay, this is an indication that things are going well, actually. Okay, this is something that you priced in and this is a cost that you're prepared to go through in order to be able to achieve it. But yeah, for a very, very long time, I would take my eye off the ball of a thing to focus on another thing. And the second that this thing started to slip, I'd be like, okay, can I get back onto that? It's like one of those cats chasing a laser around, you know what I mean? It's like, up, up, up, up, up.

[Mark Manson]

Up, up, up, up, up. Yeah, I think pricing in is like a good term for it because it's, it's because ultimately it is the value of something, right? Like if you are, if you do have a goal or a pursuit or something that you want in your life, obviously you perceive there to be a certain amount of value to it. And the same way you wouldn't just look at a stock and be like, well, how much money did they make last year? Cool, let me buy it for this Amount. You need to look at both sides of the spreadsheet. You need to look at how much money they brought in and the expenses and the costs and also what are the future risks. And do the full analysis.360 but we're just really bad at that with ourselves. Like we don't think in those terms. And I think ultimately it's because generally our hopes and dreams are very emotionally driven. They're very identity driven. And that part of our brain is the more ancient mammalian part of our brain. Right. And it kind of short circuits the prefrontal cortex and like, you know, you don't really want to act like think through second and third order effects about, you know, your dream home or like that girl you're really into. And it's so. It's hard. It's like incredibly hard to do it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I wish. I don't know. It's sort of a ruthless irony that the times when you need your prefrontal cortex the most are the ones when it seems to be switched off, you know?

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, it's. I think I had another thing I, I posted a few years ago where I said it was like the, the most consequential choice you'll make in your life is, is who you choose as a partner. And, and I, I went through this whole list of things. You know, it's like there'll be your counselor, your roommate, your business partner, your financial advisor, your teacher, your lover, your travel buddy. Like whole list. And then I finished it by saying like. And yet most people put as much thought into it as like, you know, the color of their iPhone case. Like it's just some people, they're like, oh, I like this one.

[Chris Williamson]

I happened upon it.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, she's nice, she's kind of hot.

[Chris Williamson]

The more that I learned about the way that the human attachment system works. Passionate to companionate. Loved. Specifically a combination of Tai Toshiro, who's fucking unbelievable, and Arthur Brooks who's also fucking unbelievable. Those two guys together like a two car garage of really, really fucking understanding human mating for like a psychological sense, I guess, and a neurobiological sense. And so many. The way that human attraction and attachment works is it blinds you to this person's flaws. It causes you to feel unbelievably intense emotions about them whilst knowing very little about them. Real ruthless one that I learned from William Costello. When you're in passionate love, the honeymoon phase, your brain actively disengages from being able to see other available options. So it sort of brings this sort of mating blinkers on, which is why friends that are still in the honeymoon phase, but it's with somebody that's really not good for them. You say, but do you like it? You could get, like, a million other amazing women, and they're like, no, man, I'll never get anybody like her. And she's like, she sucks.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And, yes, you will. And look, your last girl was better than this girl. And how are you so functionally idiotic? I know that you're normally irrational. Oh, okay. You're kind of on drugs. Well, you mean you are on drugs. You're just on endogenous drugs.

[Mark Manson]

Exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

As opposed to exogenous ones. And yeah, I think so many people spend time with somebody where they love the smell of their hair and the shape of their nose and the way that they feel when they cuddle them at night and they fall backward into a relationship that they didn't With a person they don't actually have that much in common with.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And it is a really ruthless trick that the human attachment system plays on you to get you to bond to this person in spite of their flaws.

[Mark Manson]

Yes. And then, of course, that. That bond or that passionate love wears off after a certain amount of years.

[Chris Williamson]

You wake up being married and living in the same house with the golden retriever together.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah. Completely financially enmeshed with, like, two kids, and you're like, oh, shit, I have nothing in common with this person.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, you know, you bring your head above the water of this hormonal fugue state, and you're like, what the fuck was that fever dream just came out of?

[Mark Manson]

It's. I mean, it's another example of just, like, how evolution did not optimize for happiness or harmony. It optimized for babies making babies.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is very effective. I mean, it's. It's hilarious in some ways. But I think a good lesson there is be careful who you let yourself fall in love with. You know, you. You almost need to treat you in love as kind of like a child. It's like, if I allowed this to happen, I won't be able to use my rational brain. So while I still have a tenuous hold on my sanity, allow me to try and make judgments carefully. How long am I going to spend with this person? And I need to make decisions probably pretty quickly while I'm still, you know, in rational mode and not speed running through attachments. Because once you're in it, it's like you're lost.

[Mark Manson]

Well, and this is another argument for what you were talking about earlier of like front, load your identity as much as possible.

[Chris Williamson]

Try and do everything you can to put them off.

[Mark Manson]

Right, exactly. Like just be as much of yourself as possible. Maximize you early on because that's when you're going to find out if you hold yourself back and then you fall into this just love bucket of hormones and neurotransmitters, then you might be screwed. It's super cliche advice, but I remember at my wedding all the old people gave the exact same advice. All the old couples that have been together for 40, 50, 60 years, they all give the exact same advice, which is put the friendship first.

[Chris Williamson]

What's that mean?

[Mark Manson]

Basically they all said they're like, look, you're married now. There's going to be good years, there's going to be bad years, there's going to be romantic times, there's going to be non romantic times, there's going to be difficult points in your life, there's going to be really great points in your life. Put the friendship first because that's going to carry you through everything. Everything else is going to come and go and you'll have patience at different times, but if you're not friends, you're not gonna have the patience to wait.

[Chris Williamson]

I feel like most cultural and mental health issues these days can be summed up in just two words, performative victimhood.

[Mark Manson]

That one did not perform well as I recall.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't think people don't usually like liking a tweet that says that they're performative victims.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, a little bit called out. I'm trying to remember what inspired that.

[Chris Williamson]

But.

[Mark Manson]

I do believe that, I do believe, I mean, this comes back to the therapy culture thing of people adopt as values what they get validated for, right? Like they, they. If perceiving themselves as a victim is what brings them attention and sympathy and adoration, then it will encourage that behavior further. Like we're monkeys, you know, it's like Pavlov's belt.

[Chris Williamson]

If you reward me for something, I'm going to keep doing it.

[Mark Manson]

Right?

[Chris Williamson]

I remember when I was running nightclubs, I always used to get pissed off. There's a couple of other companies in Newcastle and the northeast of the uk. Sort of classic working class mindset, like very wily, shrewd, like not intellectually sophisticated, but relationally socially genius people. And you have one goal, busy nightclub, right? If you make your nightclub busy, you're the kings. If your nightclub is not busy, you're the fucking idiot. And I always used to get pissed off at some of the other companies that would make claims, disparaging claims. There was no such thing as slander, right? You can say that this person's night, someone got glassed and it had three people in it, and all of them had one leg, and they would, you know, they were upside down with a gluten intolerant everywhere, you know, you. Whatever. Whatever you wanted to say in order to make somebody else's event. But this was a game that we refused to play. And me and my business partner had a principle where we're like, we don't talk about other people's nights. And I always used to feel like it was unfair because we were constrained by what actually happened, but our competitors were simply constrained by what they could get away with saying and be believable. And I kind of get the sense that it's similar with this performative victimhood thing, which is if the way that you accumulate status, notoriety, recognition, validation from the world is through you doing a thing, your capacity to get the validation is constrained by a capacity to do the thing. But if it's simply through the performance of grievance, imagined or real, the sky's the fucking limit, dude. You know, like, if you're the LeBron James of pretending to be a victim, that skill set is significantly easier to acquire than being LeBron James and doing it through being in basketball. You know, the athlete who's perpetually injured, right? Or is always, you know, brief flashes of being good, but then gets the yips or I don't know what the equivalent is in America, like, gets in their own head and is unable to perform, can't perform in, like, clutch situations like that is kind of romantic in some way. Imagine what he could have been. It's like, yeah, but he fucking wasn't, dude. Like, ultimately, he wasn't. That thing even, you know, as brutal as it is, as somebody that sometimes gets injured doing lifting heavy things, like, if you are the sort of athlete who gets injured, that is also the same thing for you, too, that. Well, imagine how great he could have been. Well, yeah, but his body wasn't built to be that great, because every time that somebody hit him from the left, his knee gave out or whatever it might be. And if you have an easy route to another example of this. So this would have been me, not necessarily performative victimhood, but certainly me leaning into fear as opposed to confidence. When you play cricket, there is something called a tfc, and it's a thanks for coming. Thanks for coming means that you didn't bat and you didn't bowl. All that you did was field, because everybody fields. And it's a, like, nod to what the captain would say at the end of the game when he's Chuck Ann. He was like, thanks for coming, mate. Because you didn't contribute. And having a TFC is kind of a bit of a fucking waste of a weekend. What did you do? You couldn't have contributed that much to the game. Presumably you batted what's referred to as down the order. So you're one of the later batsmen. And if you were a bowler, you weren't needed, or the conditions weren't right for you, or the captain didn't have confidence in your ability to deliver at this stage of the game. And there was a bit of me in the back of my mind that thought, if I have the opportunity to have a tfc, at least I can't fail because I'm not faced. I would rather assure my failure privately than risk failure publicly because I'm insulated from other people having to see how I could have fallen short potentially. And that would. Depending on how confident I was. Sometimes that would be more like, I really want this. And I would lean into it. And other times it would be fear and I'd be like kind of, you know, God of scoffer. Oh, yeah, I really fell up for it this weekend. God, if you'd got me in there, you could have seen the runs that I would have got on the board. But yeah, the performative victimhood thing, I think between that, if you're not constrained by reality, you can become anything that you want to be as long as you can get away with claiming it. And also this insulation privately, I also.

[Mark Manson]

I think, think there's some. There is a cultural norm that has shifted probably since you and I were kids. And I don't totally understand why or where it shifted, but it. I think there's a certain amount of virtue has been started being ascribed to victimhood. I think if I think back to like, say, when my parents were growing up or my grandparents were growing up, it was the opposite. It was like if you felt like a victim or complained about something, it was like, ah, suck it up, you know, rub some dirt on it, you know, get over yourself, that sort of thing. And then it feels like at some point there's kind of like an overcorrection, right? Like, of course you want to acknowledge people who have had unfortunate things happen to them or maybe something's gone wrong or they've been treated unfairly or there's an injustice. But at some point along the way, victimhood in and of itself has become seen as, like, a virtuous thing. And you can. I think everybody's got their favorite pet groups that they can point to and, like, say, you know, as an. As an example. But, like, I see it all over the place. I see. It's like. I think I. I wrote in one of my books, I said, I think this is the first time in history that literally every demographic feels aggrieved and persecuted. Like, rich people feel persecuted right now. Poor people feel persecuted. White people feel persecuted. Black people feel persecuted.

[Chris Williamson]

Straight.

[Mark Manson]

Straight people feel persecuted. Gay people feel persecuted. Like, how is this fucking. Who's persecuting? Like, how is this possible?

[Chris Williamson]

It's the Spider man meme.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly. We live in a Spider man meme world right now. And I don't totally understand how it's happened. And I think, in a sense, I think empathy has been weaponized both politically but also socially. That it's. People kind of walk around with a badge of honor of, like, I've been mistreated or the group I'm a part of has been mistreated. And that makes me. That affords me all sorts of regard and respect that I didn't necessarily earn or do anything for. So, yeah, I see that as kind of the root, because we could sit here and we won't, but we could sit here and talk about political issues all day and different social and cultural norms and issues that have been changing all day. But really, at the ground level of it, I see this performative victimhood as a trend that is just, like, very fundamental, and it's across the board, across demographics, and it is, like, very worrying.

[Chris Williamson]

I wonder whether part of it is a little bit of a sense of inequality, and inequality can be due to empathy as well. If you have people who feel like they're being mistreated in one way or another, that they're. You are not recognizing the prices that I pay, whether I'm the rich person or the white person or the gay person or whatever. All three. That sense of, I want to be seen, I want my suffering to be recognized. And I feel like it's not. Starts to incentivize. And it also resonates with other people who go, huh, I don't think that my suffering has been seen or has been recognized. They're just like me. And I wonder whether it taps into this, yeah, righteous lack of recognition that many people feel like they're a part of.

[Mark Manson]

Yeah, I think there's also a lot of. I believe it's the fallacy of composition that goes on, which is like, you will see. You'll go online and you'll see, say, one terrible thing happened to one. Since we're both white guys, we'll say, terrible thing happens to one white guy. And because we're white guys, we're like, oh, my God, look at what they're doing to all the white guys. Right? And so there's like this. This, like, logical fallacy that happens, but you just get your, like, your limbic system gets hijacked by the headline and the horrible video that you see on TikTok or whatever, and you're just like, oh, my God, we're under attack.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Mark, you're awesome, dude. Thanks, dude. I think your work is phenomenal, and I shamelessly repurpose it regularly.

[Mark Manson]

I appreciate your shameless repurposing.

[Chris Williamson]

Good. I'm plagiarizing, plagiarizing you with credit all the time. You got new app, you got new stuff. Where should people go to check out.

[Mark Manson]

All the things you do? I'm on every social platform. Check out my podcast, solved. Posting on YouTube all the time. So come check it out.

[Chris Williamson]

Everyone should. And your newsletter's also sick, so people should go and check that out. Until next time, dude, I appreciate you. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books. The most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting, but there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a page. Go to chriswillx.combooks to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.combooks.