Afford Anything - Finding Hope and Happiness in a Confusing World, with Mark Manson

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

#274: What does it take to create a sustainable sense of hope? That’s the question that I invited Mark Manson, megabestselling author of Everything is F*cked and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, to answer. Mark says that three basic factors contribute to a sense of hope: 1) autonomy, 2) purpose, and 3) community. Mark and I keep these three factors in mind as we discuss how to define success, find new challenges, and choose what’s meaningful in life. We touch on the importance of emotional regulation and avoiding crises of hope. And we talk about how they relate back to the financial independence retire early (FIRE) movement. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode274 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource in your life, like your energy, your focus, your attention, your time. And that leads to two questions. First, what matters most to you? Not what does society say should matter most? But what in your life is truly a priority?

And second, how do you align your daily decisions, as well as your weekly and monthly and overall big picture life decisions? in a way that reflects that. Answering those questions is a lifetime practice. And that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. We are typically a show that airs every Monday morning, but once a month on the first Friday of the month,

we air a first Friday bonus episode. So welcome to the September 2020, first Friday bonus episode. Now, in the month of September, I am taking a September sabbatical, which means that in the month of September, rather than putting out new material, we air some of our favorite episodes from the archives. Today, we will be airing an episode with Mark Manson. Mark Manson is the mega bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F, a massively popular book that sold millions of copies and is all about,

essentially, deciding what is important enough to give an F about versus what is not important enough and is okay to let go. He's also the author of a follow-up book called Everything is Eft, a book about hope. In our interview, which you're about to hear, we talk about what it takes to create a sustainable sense of hope, particularly in a world that is so full of despair, so full of reasons to get discouraged. We published this episode a year ago, and yet the question of how to create hope remains as pressing as ever, perhaps even more so in the context of September 2020. In this upcoming interview, Mark says that three basic factors contribute to a sense of hope,

autonomy, purpose, and community. Mark and I keep these three factors in mind as we discuss how to define success, how to find new challenges, and how to choose what's meaningful in life. We touch on the importance of emotional regulation and on avoiding crises of hope. And we talk about how all of this relates back to the financial independence retire early movement, the fire movement. So if you are somebody who has heard people talk about purpose or passion, and And your default reaction is, okay, sounds cliche, sounds corny, what the heck is that? And can someone hand it to me, please? I get it.

And this episode is for you. If you are someone who's on the fire journey and you're worried about finding purpose on the other side, this episode is for you. And if you want to learn more about transitioning from a transactional view of the world and of relationships, more towards a relationship-oriented, principle-oriented, community-oriented view, you'll enjoy this upcoming conversation. So with all of that said, this is our interview with Mark Manson. Oh, and one more thing before we begin.

In honor of the September sabbatical and in honor of kicking it off with a first Friday September sabbatical episode, we are intentionally keeping today's episode ad-free. What we ask is that you subscribe to our show notes. You can subscribe for free by signing up at afford-anything.com slash show notes, and you will get a copy of all of our show notes delivered directly to your inbox. These are synopsies of the episodes. We introduce the questions that people ask. We introduce the authors or the speakers or the researchers or professors who come on the show.

We highlight what's great about the episode. You can get all of these in our show notes, and you can get those show notes delivered directly to you for free by signing up at afford anything.com slash show notes. They're amazing. Your life will be distinctly divided into pre-show notes and post-show notes. No, I'm just kidding about that. But you will enjoy them. So please sign up for our show notes, affordanything.com slash show notes. With that said, here is Mark Manson talking about how to find hope and happiness in a conflicted and confusing world.

Hi, Mark. Hey, Paula. It's good to be here. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I would like to talk to you about how to be an adult because it's something that I think, well, I certainly haven't mastered. I don't know if many of us have. So let's chat about this because you talk about this in your latest book, which is called Everything is F***. And the book starts off with the premise that hope is the only thing. It is

anything that we imbue with meaning. It's a book against nihilism. And in order to build hope, we need three things. Can you elaborate on what those three things are? So I make the argument that we need hope to sustain ourselves psychologically. And hope, I basically just define hope as something to look forward to, something valuable in the future. If we don't feel like we have anything valuable in our future, then we lose hope and we see no point of getting out of bed in the morning. So the way we create hope in our minds is that we need to find something that we believe is important. We need to believe that we are capable of achieving that thing that is important, that we have enough control over our lives to reach that important thing

in the future. And then finally, we need to have a group of people or a community around us who share in our hopes. Because if it's just us by ourselves, then it becomes very lonely and depressing. So these three human needs kind of drive or motivate a lot, pretty much all of our actions and our desires and our lives. So a sense of control or autonomy, a belief in the importance of something and a community around it. When I hear those three things, it strikes me that you know, a big part of this audience is aiming for early retirement. And a lot of the questions around that are, what do we do when work isn't the primary focus of our day? And those three things, autonomy, importance community, sound like foundational principles for figuring out what's next.

Absolutely. It's funny. There's a little bit of a paradoxical thing with hope, which is kind of the main focus of the book. Let's take a lot of your listeners, for example. They have this hope of retiring earlier, becoming financially independent, gaining this freedom and control over their lives. That hope gets them up every day, motivates them, inspires them, brings them joy, brings them frustration for years and years and years. And then one day you hit that dream, you do retire early, you are financially independent. And there's kind of of this great feeling of I did it, of accomplishment. By achieving what you hope for, now you don't know what to hope for it. You kind of go back to square one. Okay, you wake up,

you're retired. Let's say you're 40 and you're retired. There's this now what. Oh, crap, I didn't think about what happened after what I hoped for. And so we have to start this process all over again of like finding some new, new vision for the future, some goal that we can work towards some group or community that can help us get there. And so it's kind of this never ending cycle in that way, if that makes sense. Absolutely. As you say in your book, the thing that will kill a dream is achieving it. Yes, absolutely. And it's funny because my first book, The Settled Art of Not Givin a F*** was hugely successful. It sold millions of copies, was number one New York Times, all this stuff. And it was very unexpected. I kind of had this idea in my head that

I was going to have this career as an author. And over the course of 10 or 20 years, I'm going to put out book after book and slowly climb my way up the ladder. And eventually, 20 years from now, I'll accumulate a lot of these goals and a lot of this success. But that book was so successful, it just knocked out all those goals in like two months. And so I actually ended up with this period of six or eight months just kind of sitting around being like, well, what the hell do I do now?

this is wait a second this goal for myself was supposed to sustain me for decades you know like it it made it about a year and uh you know now i'm sitting around playing video games all day not knowing what to do with myself so in a weird way there's something about getting what you want that is actually psychologically difficult and i think that's something that doesn't get talked about very often so i wanted to write about it how did you push through that i mean forgive me for putting it so bluntly, but when something like that happens, there is the risk that your greatest professional achievement is behind you. Absolutely. That's quite a mind-fuck. Yeah, it's terrifying. I hit that at 32, 33. And so this idea of like, all right, guess what,

you got 30 years of books in front of you, and none of them are going to do as well as that one did. You know, it's actually very demotivating. For me, ultimately, it came back to finding some new challenge in my life. In Settle Art, I talk about metrics of success. So we all have our own definition of success. For some people, it's being famous. For other people, it's having a family in a nice house and financial security. For other people, it's owning a yacht. But we all have our own little definition inside of ourselves for what we think success looks like. And when you achieve that success, something has to happen because once you arrive at your goal or what you had hoped for for so long, you don't have anything to chase after anymore. But psychologically, we need something to chase after.

As humans, like we were not happy unless we're chasing after something. And so we need to construct some new metric of success for ourselves. And that's actually very difficult because it forces you to take this thing that had defined your life. and defined yourself for so many years, and you have to throw it away. You have to decide, okay, well, my definition of success is no longer being a bestselling author, even though that drove me for 10 years of my life. I need to find some new definition because that's what's going to get me up in the morning. That's the vision of the future that's going to get me excited. It's interesting that this particular message is actually very appropriate for a lot of your

listeners because it's great to try to reach that level of financial independence where you are able to bring all that freedom into your life. But then there also needs to be a plan of, okay, what do you do with that freedom? What are your goals post-retirement or post-financial independence? What are those going to be? Because if you don't have those, then you're going to feel lost. And it's going to be very disorienting because you're going to feel lost at the very moment that you achieve everything you would always hope for. Right. How does a person begin to go through the difficult work of choosing what will give their life meaning? I think there are two kind of fundamental questions that we have to ask ourselves.

One is, what can we do that will make ourselves a better person and what can we do that we'll make the world a better place? And keep in mind, these questions are, it's kind of a privilege to be able to ask these questions. You know, if you're fighting to pay rent every month and if you're struggling to put food on the table or somebody in your family has a health catastrophe, you know, like you don't really have an option to ask these questions. You only get to ask these questions once you are in a place of stability and security. But they're very hard questions. And so even though they're privileged, they're extremely difficult to figure out because you have to start defining for yourself, like what a better world looks like, what a better version of yourself looks like. there's a long process of searching and trying things out, testing things, seeing if that works, you know, kind of dipping your foot in the water before you kind of stumble upon something that

both A, feels incredibly valuable and important to the world, and B, is something that you are good at and enjoy doing. So, yeah, I think that's the starting point. You've written about factors that can cause crises of hopes, including either overindulging your emotions or repressing your emotions. And I see that as kind of a concept that's applicable at all stages of life. Because so much of money management kind of involves emotional management. I mean, money management is emotional management. Can you talk about both of those factors, both overindulgence and repression and how we can better. develop emotional mastery that we can bring to all areas of our lives?

Sure. It's a big question, I know. It's a really big question. How do I develop emotional mastery, Mark? In 30 seconds. You brought up a really good point, which I actually make towards the end of the book, but I feel like it's a point that's not talked about enough, which is that money is really a reflection of emotion.

Like if you think about what people buy or what people spend their money on or why people save. Like it's ultimately, the motivations are emotional in nature. They're either trying to make themselves feel better or they are trying to protect themselves and prepare themselves. I think for a long, long time, most of the advice around how to kind of manage your emotions was very much in the camp of just push that shit down

and pretend it isn't there. try to exact as much control over yourself through mental effort and sheer willpower until it's not an issue anymore. We discovered a few decades ago that that's actually not very healthy. Like if you're denying a lot of your feelings and impulses and insecurities, they always have a way of coming back and biting you. And usually in a way that you didn't expect or see coming. So at the end of the day, we need to be honest that we're emotional creatures. We make our decisions emotionally. What we choose to use our money for is very emotional.

And so if you have money problems or any other problems that revolves around self-discipline or self-control, that is an emotional issue. And so it should be addressed as an emotional issue. The two examples you brought up, the two varieties of kind of the overindulgence of emotion and then the repression of emotion. In my mind, these are kind of two sides of the same point. You know, people who overindulge in their emotions, they're essentially slaves to their emotions. They give up their self-control and just go with whatever feels good. This is a problem because our emotions are very impulsive. They're very present focus. They don't think about the future. If you think about somebody who goes out and buys a car on credit and doesn't have a job, that is indulging your emotions.

So that's not healthy. That creates a crisis of hope because it basically puts you in a situation where you're always having to find some new indulgence to keep yourself happy and motivated. That's not good. That's not sustainable in the long run. The other issue, which is just repress the emotion, push them down, that can work for quite a while, but ultimately it creates emotional dysfunction. Like the more out of tune you are with your emotions, the more dysfunctional you begin to react in emotional situations. So you might be fine, be fine, be fine, be fine. And then all of a sudden, some unexpected thing happens in your life. You know, you get in a car accident or economy crashes or whatever.

And because you've been pushing your emotions away for so long, when a huge surge of emotion comes, you're going to be completely unprepared to deal with it or handle it. That's when you kind of get the classic complete freak out where somebody's just like, I don't know what to do. And they like, you know, do something really, really irrational and self-destructive. So the argument I make is questions of self-discipline are an emotional question. And so it's about learning how to manage our emotions safely. And basically, the argument I make is that to make good decisions consistently, we need to find a way to make good decisions feel good. If somebody signs up for a gym and goes twice and never goes back, it's not because,

because they lack willpower. It's because they never found a way to make the gym feel good. And so there's all sorts of little techniques and tricks and games that we can kind of play with ourselves with our brain to make a lot of these things feel good. You can get a friend to go to the gym with you. You can place a bet with a family member and say like, oh, I bet I'll go to the gym 10 times this month. Suddenly, there are certain contexts you can create for yourself that make these actions feel good. Along with that, there are also contexts you can create for yourself. you just remove the decision making altogether. So, like, you can create systems where it's like 10% of your paycheck goes straight

to this account. And you don't even look at that account. Like, your decision making isn't even, you make that decision once and then it's like, it's done. It's there forever. And you don't have to consistently be making it over and over. So there's a bunch of strategies. But ultimately, it's, you know, we have to be honest with ourselves that we are emotional

creatures and that the way to get ahead is by working with our emotions rather than against them. Right. Feeling emotion drives action. You make the argument that truly our emotions are in the driver's seat and that our thoughts and reason often are used to justify our feelings rather than vice versa. Yeah, it's an upsetting part of our psychology. You know, it's interesting. In my book, I call it the classic assumption, which is basically that going back as far as the Greeks and Romans, there was always kind of this assumption that if you have these emotional outbursts or impulses or bad thoughts or whatever, it's merely a question of willpower to do the right action, to train yourself kind of as though you're like training a dog to do all the right

things despite whatever you're feeling. And interestingly, back in the 70s and 80s, like a bunch of psychological experiments showed pretty conclusively that ultimately we're not in control of ourselves. Like our thoughts are very much molded by whatever we're feeling at the moment. We're not really capable of being objective about our own lives or our own decisions or or anything like that. And I think most people have kind of experienced this. Like I travel a lot for work and it's funny because sometimes I'll travel to a city and I'll be in a really bad in mood or like maybe I had a fight with my wife or something and I'm like oh man I this city sucks I don't I don't like this place and then I go back like a year later and I'm in a

really good mood and things have been going really well and suddenly I'm like man this city's really awesome oh like the city hasn't changed it's just it's just one in one scenario I'm in a crappy mood and the other one I'm in a really good mood and so it's my thoughts and my perceptions shape themselves to match what I'm feeling and that kind of context. Right. And so we can harness this power to our advantage by knowing that our perception of whatever life we've constructed for ourselves is subjective and we can choose to enjoy it if we want to. Yeah. I think it's the awareness that we're kind of playing this game with ourselves, that these stories that we're inventing in our heads are just that, they're stories. They're not necessarily

reality. And that a lot of our beliefs and our assumptions that we develop, are irrational and self-serving. And so you can't really fight against it until you recognize that you are doing it. And so a lot of my work is very much involved in kind of showing people these little head games that we play with ourselves so that they can be more aware of them and better act against them. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size.

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Because what you write about is how children act for the things. sake of pleasure. They won't touch a hot stove because that is painful. They will eat a full carton of ice cream because that's pleasurable. And as you move through life and as you become an adult, you supplant pleasure with principles. But how do we make that transition given that even as an adult ice cream is still great? The way you do that is the principles become more pleasurable. So let me back up and explain kind of the framework. The way I write about maturity and growth and development. So when we're all kids, and anybody who has kids has observed this, that kids don't really

think ahead. Kids are impulsive. They are very self-serving. If they want the ice cream, they want it now, and they want it because it tastes good, and they don't want to negotiate or bargain or figure anything out. What happens is as they start to grow up, they start to experience failure of that, let's call it the pleasure principle. You know, it's like they want whatever they want just because it feels good.

As they start to grow up, they start to realize like, oh, wait, you know, if I just take the ice cream out of the fridge, mom gets really mad at me. I feel sick afterwards. You know, and so they start to understand that, okay, well, maybe ice cream isn't always a good thing. Maybe there are certain situations where it's a bad thing. Or maybe there are certain situations where we have to figure out whether it's a good thing or not. And so by the time they start to reach adolescence, children or people, start to understand that most things in life, there's a kind of bargain or transaction that goes on. So if I steal ice cream out of the fridge, mom will be mad at me. But if I clean my room and then ask my mom for

ice cream, she'll be very happy and she'll give it to me. So you start to learn that it's like, okay, if I do X, then that will help me get Y. And this is how our social skills develop. It's how our ability to function in the business world develops. We all kind of understand it's like, okay, you can't just take whatever you want. You have to talk to other people, understand what they want,

and then try to find, negotiate a transaction where both people get what they want. This developing this ability, you know, that's essentially what emotional development is, is learning to value the transaction or the negotiation over the pleasurable thing in and of itself.

Generally, speaking, people who grow up and are of adult age and are still act impulsively, just taking whatever they want, lying to people, not negotiating or bargaining with people, we tend to see those people as immature, and we also tend to see those people as ass-h-hast, because they're still acting like children. So this kind of transactional way of looking at the world, it can get you very far in the material world. A lot of things like saving money, getting a good job, getting a promotion, being good at sales or accounting or whatever, these are all very transactional based skills. But then you run into another problem, which is ethical issues or relationship-based issues.

There are certain contexts in the human experience that you can't really negotiate or bargain. For instance, you don't really want to be negotiating in your marriage or bargaining in your marriage. You don't want everything in your marriage to be transactional. You'll just get exhausted. And if you feel like you have to work for love every time you want to feel love, you'll start being resentful. You'll start being very frustrated. Similarly, there are certain things out in the world. They seem to have ethical repercussions beyond that simple negotiation of bargain. So let's say you're talking to a co-worker or a potential client and you decide that, well, you know, I could, just lie and now get myself a better deal. Well, then that creates problems for other people at your

office. It creates legal problems for your company. It sets a bad precedent for other people who are trying to make sales. There are all these kind of ripple effects of that simple negotiation or bargain. And so what you start to realize is that there are certain principles in life that seem to be right or true no matter what. Things like honesty, integrity, respect. charity, these things are always correct regardless of the circumstance or regardless of who is actually negotiating a bargaining. And in the context of relationships, it's trust, respect, love. These are all unconditional approaches to a relationship. And so my argument, this is a very long explanation, but my argument is that for us to go from adolescence to adulthood is to correctly recognize these

context where you can't negotiate. There's no negotiation that will ever get you where you want to be. That ultimately the only way there are some things in life that are simply good for no other reason and that they are good, that you can't negotiate them, you can't bargain them. And ultimately, you have to develop the ability to choose them, even when it goes against your desires, even when it goes against your own self-interest. That is what adulthood is. The ability to, to have an honest conversation, even though you know it's going to make people feel uncomfortable, the ability to not take the money out of the wallet sitting on the street, you know, call the person back, even though nobody would really find out. Ultimately, the way to evolve past this kind

of transactional view of the world is to start taking more pleasure from the simple principle of living out these values or what the Greeks called, or choose rather than always looking for your own self-interest. So to bring this back to the money, you know, one way to think about it is, you know, a child will just spend the money because it feels good. Saving just won't even make sense to them. An adolescent will save, maybe save up for a car, save up for a house, save up for whatever. But in the back of their head, it's still transactional.

It's still, well, you know, money is meant to get something in return. So I'm just going to try to get the best thing I can find. And I'm going to try to get as much of it as I can find. Whereas I think the adult approach to money is this idea that money is just a form of value. And you can use that money to create more value. Whether it's today or tomorrow or 10 years from now, it's not about getting stuff. It's about earning money by creating value for people and then using that money to create more value for yourself. And that process in and of itself is pleasurable.

It is satisfying. It feels good to invest your money and see it grow X percent over why number of years. It feels good to put money into an account for your kid's school or whatever. So that is adulthood, is developing that investor mindset rather than just a spender mindset. Does that make sense? That absolutely makes sense in that what I hear you say is that the adult framework for understanding money is that money is a physical manifestation of your values and to treat it accordingly. Absolutely. There's that classic book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

I think he draws that dichotomy of the poor dad mentality is like money is meant to be spent and the rich dad mentality is money is meant to create more money. You know, I think I would just take that in exchange the word money for value. You know, so an adolescent mindset is I'm going to take the value that I have and exchange it for some other value. Whereas an adult mindset is, I'm going to take the value that I have and try to multiply it, create more value for both myself and the world. Right. And to be able to do that, to be able to take pleasure in a principal-centered life is essentially the definition of adulthood. Yeah. And it requires, so one way to think about it, children, their decisions are based on finding pleasure.

The adolescent is willing to sacrifice pleasure for the sake of a good transaction, a good bargain. And then an adult is willing to sacrifice a good bargain for the sake of just the principle. So it's that the adult is willing to overlook their own pleasure and their own self-interest for the greater good and for what's going to add value to the law. world. An adolescent is just interested in its own self-interest, is always trying to find the best deal for themselves. And so it's growing through these stages. It's not only about the ability to make better decisions and to contribute more to the people around you, but it's also, research finds that people who have these more principal-based lives, they tend to be happier, the more resilient, they live longer, they're healthier. I personally think it's just they have a much stronger

progress with what actually matters in their lives. They're not caught up in the day-to-day distractions or keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. They're able to kind of see the big picture and understand what truly matters and then make their decisions based on that. Circling back to the beginning of our conversation, it sounds like a principal-centered living actually is a good framework for figuring out what's next. If a person retires early, even if they don't know specifically what they want to do next, if they at least know their principles, then that's the barometer against which all decisions are made. Absolutely. And you don't have to wait until then to start figuring this out.

There's a really cool book that just came out that talks about this called The Second Mountain by David Brooks. He says, you know, in life, there's two mountains that you try to climb. The first one is kind of the material world mountain. So earning money, getting prestige, building a career. Basically, when you get to the top of that mountain, you've achieved financial independence and stability and security. And he says that what typically happens

is people get to the top of the first mountain and they see there's a second bigger mountain behind it. And they kind of freak out. And that second mountain, he says, is that second mountain of a principle or purpose of like what was I put on this world to do? Because once you've reached that place of financial independence and security,

it's a great gift. It's not a gift because you earned it, but it's a gift in the philosophical sense of like it's an opportunity to really do something to make your mark on the world and to be able to choose what that mark is going to be. You're not beholden to a paycheck or a mortgage or whatever. You're able to sit down and decide for yourself, okay, what is the mark on this world that I want to make with my life? And it's an incredibly profound question and opportunity, but it's also It's a frightening. It's a daunting opportunity. And so we can start thinking about these questions, even when we're still climbing that first mountain, to kind of give us a head start on the second one. When you write about adolescence and you describe an approach to life that is transactional and one in which you're living out an aggregation of the desires of the people around you, as I read it, that sounded to me almost like a metaphor for a working life. But I used the term working life specifically with regard to the work that people do only if they're doing it for the purpose of earning money. Yes, absolutely.

And I think this is what is soul destroying about, you know, the nine to five. Like if you're just in a job for the paycheck, because you are not using your time on anything that feels directly important to you, you're bargaining your own time or your own life. for the desires of others. And while you can be very successful, you can make a bunch of money doing it, you can climb to the top of the career ladder. There's no sense of meaning or importance to it, like deeper meaning and importance.

I think when people dream about that early retirement or they dream about that financial independence, what they're really dreaming about is that sense of importance, is that ability to actually wake up and spend your day doing exactly, what you feel is important to do. And that's not incompatible with the work world. That's not incompatible with a nine to five job, but it is very difficult to find in a nine to five job. So it's a hard issue, and it's something that each individual person is going to struggle with

or have to figure out for themselves. And if you are due to circumstance, at least for the moment, in that position where you know you're going to be in that nine to five for maybe another 10 years, how can you develop meaning in your life given those constraints? Well, what's interesting is there's actually some research on this. And they found that people who find their jobs meaningful, it actually doesn't map out the way you would expect it. You know, like if you did a survey of people about like how meaningful they found their jobs, like you would expect like EMTs and doctors and stuff would be like at the top

and police officers and firemen and all this stuff. And at the bottom would be like secretaries and paper pushers. But what's interesting is it doesn't pan out that way at all. When they research, like what actually makes people feel that their work is meaningful, a lot of it comes down to two things. And it's surprising how simple they are. The first one is how good they are at it and how observable is how good they are. It could be somebody as simple as like a school counselor.

If they know they're really good at their job, if they like have really good, rapport and engagement with the kids, they end up having a very satisfying profession. There's a really cool book by a guy named Cal Newport called So Good They Can't Ignore You. And basically he makes the argument that he's like, you know, everybody is worried about finding a job they think is important and then they'll get good at it. And he says it actually the evidence suggests it's in the reverse is you get good at something and then it starts feeling important to you. That's the first point. The second point is perspective, and it's what you're choosing to compare yourself to. In that same book, he talks about a few examples of regular administrative people.

A lot of them have very high levels of job satisfaction. And so he went and interviewed some of them. And I think he interviewed a 60-year-old woman at a university who literally her whole job is just like answering the phone and passing papers along. he's like, well, what is it that feels so satisfying about the work you do? And she said, you know, it's, I'm basically the oil in the machine of the university. She may not be as smart as the dean or as not a professor and she's not in charge of the athletics or whatever. But if she's not there, none of those things run. And she said that she always remembers that. Like, that's what she thinks of when she thinks about going to work. And so a lot of it is just comes back to that metric of success. Like, how are you choosing to define success for yourself. Is it purely money? Because if it is, then you're going to be severely limited out of the gate. Is it prestige? Is it attention? We all have to make that decision of how we're going to see what that word means success. And the way we define it for ourselves

dictates what our relationship with our work will ultimately be. So what I'm hearing you say is that if you are currently in a job that you are just doing for the paycheck, re-frame it such that you find both meaning and mastery. Yes, because there is, ultimately, there's no job on earth. Like, every job exists for a reason, you know, and it may be very far removed from what you're doing with your day-to-day life, but somewhere down the line, somebody's benefiting from the work you do. And sometimes that benefit is very intangible or hard to pinpoint. It's like the oil and the machine of the university. You know, it's if she just thought of her job as like, well, I just send emails and answer

phones, like that's pretty soul-destroying. But when you reconceptualize the work you're doing and you think about the benefits that are reaching different people, then it starts to become more meaningful. When you try to reframe something, what do you do when thinking mind understands the value in this perspective shift? and at a cognitive level you've completely bought into it, but emotionally you just don't buy the narrative yet. How do you, do you just keep repeating it to yourself until you buy it?

I've found that usually you'll have an emotional response. Like so when you kind of reframe or rewrite that narrative that you're telling yourself, when you come upon a powerful one, you know it's powerful because there is an emotional response. you can't logically argue your emotions into feeling. You can't be like, emotions, you're wrong for being angry right now. You know, like it doesn't work that way. Your emotions are going to be what they are. And so I think it's more about you just have to keep trying on different narratives

of meaning and different stories until you find one that feels powerful. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I am the oil that runs the machine around this place. Like, man, they'd be screwed without me. And you know it's powerful because there's that kind of it lights you up when you think about it. We'll come back to this episode in just a minute. But first, one of the concepts that you talk about, towards the end of your book, you talk about hedonic adaptation. You describe how no matter what we achieve, our minds are just going to recalibrate to expect what we have, which means that then we start the journey all over again. how do we navigate decisions knowing that hedonic adaptation is our natural inclination?

This is why living based on principles is so important. Because we do have hedonic adaptation, which is basically that just to give a really simple example that I think everybody can relate to is you've got this idea. You're like, if I could just get a raise at work, I'd be so happy. And then you get a raise at work. It's like, well, if I get more vacations. days, I'd be so happy. Then you give vacation days. Well, if I could just, I could refinance my house. I'd be so happy. And then you refinite, you know, it just goes on and on and on and on. And everything that every kind of win we experience, we kind of go back to this baseline level of

mild dissatisfaction. If the thing that motivates us is some external or material marker, it's the combination of valuing external material things with the hedonic treadmill that eats us alive. It's why it's like people who, no matter how much money they make, it's never enough, they're never happy, or no matter how famous they get, they're never satisfied, or no matter how

nice their car is, it could always be nicer. And the problem is to keep leveling up materially, it requires more and more effort and work. And so the way to beat the hedonic treadmills that just stop running is just to get off it.

Because if the primary things that motivate in your life are these adult principles of things like respect and honesty and growth, you can achieve those regardless of the context. You can be broke and be honest. You can be rich and be honest. You can be sick and be honest. You can be healthy. Those things can never be taken from you. The world can never take your ability to respect or trust from you. The world can never take your ability to grow and prove yourself from you. So because of that, because those things are internal in nature, they're resilient to whatever happens in the outside world. The economy could collapse. Your country could go to war. Somebody in your family could die of cancer. And those values

will still be intact. They will still always be accessible to you, whereas a lot of the external stuff will not. So to a certain extent, at the end of the day, your principles are all you have. Yes. They're the only things that are truly yours. It's funny, actually, I was just in Australia, and I got a note from, I'll spare the long story, but it's basically a guy who's in prison. He's in prison under, like, very dubious circumstances. He's foreign national, he's accused of a crime, and there's all sorts of issues that he basically can't get a trial. So he's just stuck in this prison for years on end for something that he has no control of or he didn't do. He sent me an email, and he said that he was reading subtle art, and there's a part in a book where I talk about how, no matter what happens to you, your ability to choose how to see things is always there. And I gave some pretty extreme examples, like people who survive war, people quadriplegic, like all these crazy scenarios.

And he said, he's like, you know, I've been living in this kind of judicial nightmare, and I've been in prison, and I'm by myself 23 hours a day. And he said, I read that. It was like somebody put a window in my cell, like, you know, because he realized he's like, there's a freedom in my mind that can never be taken away from me. No matter what happens, I always have that ability to choose how I see things. For me, I think that is the primary importance of our lives is that there's that inner freedom that is always there in every moment, no matter how we feel, no matter what's happening,

boss yelling at us, whatever. It's always there. And maybe that sounds a little bit wishy-washy and philosophical, but the darkest moments of my life, that has been very true and powerful to me. Oh, that doesn't sound wishy-washy at all. I mean, I cover financial freedom, and the more you dive into that topic, the more you realize that financial freedom is only an external set of circumstances that is not nearly as important as inner freedom. Oh, absolutely. It's interesting because I started my career, I was extremely broke. and now I've sold a lot of books, so I am financially very well off in a very secure position. And it's interesting because I still worry about it. You would think that you just hit a dollar amount that you stop worrying about it.

And my experience is you don't, you know, because now there's an anxiety of losing it. You know, it's like, oh, well, what if the stock market crashes or what if the real estate market crashes? Or what if like, you know, there's all these things that can happen to you. And I talk about this in the new book. There's like this set level of anxiety that's just always going to exist. You know, if you don't have money, you're going to be anxious because you need to get money. And if you have money, you're going to be anxious because you don't want to lose it. So you're just going to be anxious.

Period. And so the internal work is the most important work and the one that matters. Yeah. So you might as well just develop a really good relationship with that anxiety. You might as well accept it. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mark.

Are there any kind of final points that you would want to emphasize? No, no. I mean, this has been great. You got me going deeper than I usually go. Oh, good. I'm happy to hear that. That is what I aim to do. So I'm glad.

Success. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Mark. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you? I've got a website called Mark Manson.net. Hundreds of free articles there. People want to check them out, learn more about my work. And then I got two books, subtle art and not giving enough. And everything is the book about hope. They're probably in every bookstore you could ever walk into. So check them out. I see the books everywhere. And I've spent many, many days binging on your articles on your website. I've spent a lot of time there. Thank you, Mark, for spending this time with us.

What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are five. Number one, there is a paradox related to hope. As long as we have hope, ambition, a goal, we have a reason to wake up in the morning. We have a reason to take action. But nothing kills a dream quite like achieving it. Once you've achieved what you hoped for, now you no longer know what to hope for, which means, in a sense, you're hopeless.

And that means that once you've achieved what you've hoped for, it's time to start the process all over again. Let's take a lot of your listeners, for example. They have this hope of retiring earlier, becoming financially independent, gaining this freedom and control over their lives. That hope gets them up every day, motivates them, inspires them, brings them joy, brings them frustration for years and years and years. And then one day you hit that dream, you do retire early, you are financially independent.

And there's kind of this great feeling of, I did it, of accomplishment. By achieving what you hope for, now you don't know what to hope for it. And so if your goal is to reach financial independence or retire early, that goal cannot be the end goal in and of itself. There is life after fire. and that needs to be at the forefront of your mind as you're on the journey towards it. What do you want your life to look like after you retire? And how can it look more that way now? Find that and hold that as your true north, as your reason for getting up in the morning.

Find your tribe there. Or talk to other people in the fire community. What plans do they have? Ultimately, financial independence in and of itself is not a goal. Financial independence is a tool that can allow you to do amazing things. What are those things? Identify that and your hope can be stronger. So that's key takeaway number one. And Mark's next point ties into this quite well. His next point is key takeaway number two.

Find the intersection between what will improve the world and what you're good at. How can you simultaneously best serve both the world and yourself? I think there are two kind of fundamental questions that we have to ask. ourselves. One is what can we do that will make ourselves a better person and what can we do that will make the world a better place? Give yourself permission to experiment, as Mark talks about, figuring out what a better version of yourself looks like and what a better world looks like to truly think about those questions requires a long and difficult search process. So try many things, don't give up if the first few things don't work out, one systematic way to approach

this is an idea that came from episode 206, our interview with David Epstein, in which David recommends methodically tracking all of your experiments, your life experiments in a journal, in which you write down all of your assumptions about what you think a new decision in your life might lead to, what you think the day-to-day of it might look like, what you think your emotions about it might feel like, and use those records to be able to gauge what elements of something you enjoy, what elements you don't enjoy, and how well your expectations align with reality and where those diverge. The point that David Epstein made in episode 206 is that by writing all of this down, essentially by keeping a log, you're better able to have a record of the

process which allows you to better evaluate that process. And by doing this over time, this process can improve. And so I was reminded of that during this interview with Mark Manson, when he talks about the importance of experimenting as you try to find out the answer to the question of where is the intersection of the value that I bring to the table and what the world needs. And so that is key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three. Speaking of value, money is a form of value, and you can use that money to create even more value. So the purpose of when you receive money, you're not using it to buy stuff to buy cheap plastic junk.

You're receiving it because you've created value for people, and then you're using it to create more value, both for yourself and for the rest of the world. The adult approach to money is this idea that money is just, a form of value and you can use that money to create more value. Whether it's today or tomorrow or 10 years from now, it's not about getting stuff. It's about earning money by creating value for people and then using that money to create more value for yourself. And that process in and of itself is pleasurable. It is satisfying. It feels good to invest your money and see it grow X percent over how wide number of years it feels good to put money into an account for your kid's school or or whatever so that is adulthood is developing that that investor mindset um rather than just a spender mindset

and so there's no need to feel guilty about getting paid including getting compensated well for something that you're good at if you are enhancing someone's life in a positive way why shouldn't you be compensated for that. For some of you, that's going to sound like a duh takeaway, but there is a tendency among many people to feel guilty about being compensated for our efforts. Particularly, if you look around and you see that you're making more than all of your friends are, and your friends are working hard too, but you're just making a lot more. There is a tendency to feel guilty for that among many people. But the takeaway here is that's not a productive approach. That's not a productive way to feel about it. What's far more constructive is to instead ask yourself, how can I use what I'm getting

to create amazing value for everybody else? And by the way, also, I've talked about this before, but when people talk about delayed gratification in the world of money management, remember, you're not delaying Jack. Investing your money is inherently gratifying. It is inherently gratifying to watch your balance in your portfolio grow. That is worthwhile in and of itself. So there is, I believe, no such thing is delayed gratification if you are genuinely into growing your net worth. The concept of money being an expression of value and the concept of money management being inherently gratifying. Those two concepts are both tied into our third key takeaway number four.

leading a principal-centered life is likely to make you happier and more resilient. Research finds that people who have these more principal-based lives, they tend to be happier, the more resilient, they live longer, they're healthier. I personally think it's just they have a much stronger grasp of what actually matters in their lives. They're not caught up in the day-to-day distractions or keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. they're able to kind of see the big picture and understand like what truly matters and then make their decisions based on that. This circles back around to the beginning of this conversation because your principles are the

barometer against which all decisions are made. And remember how at the beginning of this we talked about how financial independence in and of itself isn't a goal. It is a tool that allows you to do amazing things. So what are your principles? What are your values? what are your priorities, what are those things that you want to do that FI will enable? That question, when baked into the framework of a principle-based life, can help you answer some of these questions and keep that hope alive.

And so that is key takeaway number four. Finally, key takeaway number five, stop bargaining your time for the desires of others, because that's the thing that can be super soul-crushing about the nine to five. if you are just in a job for the paycheck. Because you are not using your time on anything that feels directly important to you, you're bargaining your own time or your own life for the desires of others. And while you can be very successful, you can make a bunch of money doing it, you can climb to the top of the career ladder. There's no sense of meaning or importance to it.

So this is really where it all comes full circle. When you find the intersection between mastery and value, you're better able to find what you want in life, what you want out of it. And you're able to make sure that this aligns with your principles and your value so that you're living in full integrity. And when I say integrity in this context, what I mean is that all of those parts are integrated. You've integrated your principles with the impact that you'd like to create, with the autonomy that you want, with the mastery that you have. all of those are working in alignment. And when all of those pieces are aligned, then you have the recipe for a good life. And so if you are going to work for a company, work for a company in which this alignment is present. And if you cannot find this in a particular company, well, this is where

financial independence can be an effective tactic in giving you the freedom to enable this type of creation. And so that is the fifth and final key takeaway from this conversation with Mark Manson. That's our show for today. This is the first Friday September sabbatical episode. That's a very special episode. It's got two things going on, September sabbatical and First Friday, all in one. So I am so happy with all of that alliteration going that Paula Pantt could interview Mark Manson on the first Friday September sabbatical. This is the most alliterative episode that we've ever had. coming up on future episodes this month, we will be airing an interview with Jill Schlesinger from CBS News. She talks about 13 really dumb things that smart people do with their money.

People who are educated, they're financially savvy, they know the basics. Heck, they know more than the basics. They're financially well prepared and well researched and well educated, and yet there are still things that they overlook. What are those things? And how can you avoid making these common mistakes. Jill Schlesinger and I discuss that in an upcoming episode that we will be re-airing this month. You'll also be hearing from Gretchen Rubin, a New York Times bestselling author who specializes in finding happiness, which admittedly is difficult to define. What are the actions that correlate with happiness?

How can we set up our lives in ways that increase our probability of feeling happy? You'll be hearing that interview later this month. You'll also be hearing from Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post about financial lessons that she learned from her grandmother. And you'll be hearing from Dr. Cal Newport about the importance of doing focused deep work. So all of that is coming up later this month on the September sabbatical. Make sure that you hit subscribe or follow in whatever app you're using to listen to this show so that you don't miss any of those enlightening, awesome interviews. And once again, please make sure that you are subscribed to our website. show notes. You can subscribe for free at afford anything.com slash show notes. That's afford

anything.com slash show notes, where you will get the highlights of each episode delivered straight to you on the days our new episodes come out. So again, afford anything.com slash show notes. We're very proud of these. We put a lot of work into them and we're excited to share these show notes with you. Thank you again so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I will catch you in the next episode. Hey, so if you listen to this episode and you find that it doesn't apply to you or you can't connect with it, be gentle with yourself. This podcast, and all self-help material that you read in a book or that you read online or that you listen to on a podcast is all part of

the self-help media. And self-help media is fundamentally, it's just media. The media, all media, including this podcast, is for entertainment and educational purposes only and should never be a substitute for seeking professional help. The content on this podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice or diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a licensed qualified health care provider with any questions or concerns that you may have regarding any medical or psychological conditions and always seek the advice of a licensed certified financial planner or tax accountant or attorney for any questions that you have about financial or life matters. I did want to say, so I'm Nepalese American and I just wanted to

thank you for in your book, The Subtle Art, for getting it right that Buddha was born in Nepal. Nobody ever gets that right, and you did. Well, I'm happy to not disappoint. I can tell you, I've read so many. books that have referred to him as an Indian prince that I've come to expect people to get it wrong. And so when you got it right in subtle art, it was like it floored me. Trust me, the Nepalese American community totally noticed that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's funny because I went to India and I went to a bunch of like the temples and shrines and places where he preached in the Bodhi tree and all this stuff. And I was like,

yeah, I want to see where the Buddha was born. And I remember I looked it up online and they're like, it's in Nepal. And I was like, well, damn it, I'm not in Nepal. I'm in the wrong country.