Good Life Project - The Truth About Hope | Mark Manson

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Mark Manson (https://markmanson.net/) is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has reached #1 in thirteen countries, sold millions of copies. His new book, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope (https://amzn.to/2JW2MFM), has also become an instant #1 bestseller. In it, he expands his irreverent, yet compelling and deeply-thoughtful exploration to the state of society, the sometimes disastrous quirks of the human psyche, and the role of hope in the way we approach the bigger issues in life. Mark also runs one of the largest personal growth websites in the world, and his writing is often described as "self-help for people who hate self-help." In a past podcast conversation (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/mark-manson/), we explore Manson's "origin story" and love of philosophy and writing, including his choice of profanity in his writing voice (hint: it has nothing to do with linguistic laziness). Today, we dive deep into the powerful ideas and provocations in his new book about the state of the world and our role in the exploration of hope.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, so this is Mark Manson's second appearance on Good Life Project. We first shared a conversation, I guess about three years ago, shortly after his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, came out. Deeply irreverent, that book quickly became a global phenomenon. If you haven't seen it, I'm not sure where you've been living. It claimed a place and actually remains on the New York Times list. became a global phenomenon. If you haven't seen it, I'm not sure where you've been living. It claimed a place and actually remains on the New York Times list. It's been there every week since, pretty much since it came out, selling something like seven and a half million copies to date.

In that first conversation, we explored Mark's personal journey, his provocative voice and decision to swear in print, and why also it has absolutely nothing to do with intellectual laziness and a lot of the core ideas in that first book. Today, we're exploring the ideas from a brand new book from him with an equally provocative title called Everything is Fucked, a book about hope. And sure, there are a handful of F-bombs along the way in this conversation, but honestly, not really many more, if any, than in any regular episode. And the ideas that Mark offers, his reflections not only on a life of intensive study of philosophy,

social science, and politics, and his synthesis of all these different worlds is pretty stunning. He's put together what I would probably describe as a cohesive theory of what has brought us to this place in our history, why there's so much suffering in the world right now, and offers a surprising reframe on the idea of hope that serves as a potential antidote for the existential crisis that so many of us find ourselves in at this moment in time. Super excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I mean, you're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.

What's kind of fascinating to me is you're incredibly well-read. You go deep into research, into philosophy. You know, heroes like Ken Wilber and guys where it's like most people read the first eight pages of that stuff. And they're like, this is way too complicated. I'm going to put it down. And you can't get enough of it. And the new book feels in a weird way, almost like your theory of everything. It kind of ended up there. Yeah. Was that your intention though? Like initially? No, no. Starting out, no. And it just sort of happened as the book went along. You know, initially the questions were pretty, well, I say simple, but they were pointed, I guess I should say, which is essentially, if everything's so great today, why does everybody seem to be so upset all the time? And I talk about this in the first chapter.

You know, it's statistically speaking, you know, the world is materially better off than it's ever been. We're living longer. We're healthier. We're wealthier. We're more educated, on and on and on. Yet when you look at mental health statistics, there that a lot of the statistics around depression, anxiety, suicide, they are afflicting the wealthier, safer countries more than other countries. And so this just got me very curious. Like, why is this happening?

What is it about comfort and success that seems to throw us into like a crisis of meaning. You know, these questions are kind of a privilege to ask, like a, like a subsistence farmer doesn't have the privilege to ask like what his life means. But when you're chilling in a air conditioned apartment in New York and you, you can like your last six meals were ordered on your phone and you have 800 TV shows that you can watch at any minute, it becomes a very real question of like, what is the meaning of all, like, what's the point? Why am I doing this?

And so that was kind of the starting point of like, what are the factors that are affecting us in the 21st century that are kind of causing these crises of hope, as I call them? And then, man, that just launched, I don't know where I ended up. And so I want to get in a rabbit hole with you. But another one of my curiosities,

I know when you wrote the prior book, you basically wrote the entire book and then you gave it to like a couple of trusted friends. Yeah. And they had the frank talk with you. And you were like, wrote your heart out. You're like, this is my treatise. And they sat down with you and they're like, this is my treatise. And they sat down with you and they're like,

this is terrible. And you essentially rewrote the entire book. Was there a similar process or did you hit the ground running and really just dive in with like a much stronger embrace of your voice and direction with this one? I think this one was mixed. So with Subtle Art, it was like,

the whole first draft was trash. Like a few people were like, the ideas are good. This is just terrible though. So with Subtle Art, it was like the whole first draft was trash. Like people were like, the ideas are good. This is just terrible though. What's funny about this one is I got sucked into those traps or those rabbit holes where I started overwriting with only a couple specific chapters. So there's a chapter in there about Isaac Newton. And man, that one, I probably spent as much time on that chapter as the rest of the book. Like, I don't know what it was, but my brain just kept getting sucked down these tangents and rabbit holes. And, you know, the difficult thing about writing about

a lot of these deeper psychological topics is that everything's so interrelated, you know? So if you want to talk about somebody's emotions, you need to talk about their identity and their values and their beliefs. But to talk about their beliefs, you need to talk about their emotions and identity and values, you know? So it's like, you're in this, there's web that you're just pinging around endlessly. And as a writer, it's extremely difficult to like create a coherent structure for the reader to follow. And in that chapter, I just got completely lost in it and ended up basically writing an Isaac Newton fan fiction that like nobody wanted to read. And it ended up being like a 60 or 70 pages long.

And I handed it to my editor and my editor was like, either it's all got to go or like 80% of it's got to go. I was like, please let me work on it. I'll get it down. I'll get it down to 20%. It turned out all right. But man, that, that like, I, I have this weird tendency. I think it's almost like my brain, when I start writing a book, I think it's almost like my brain, when I start writing a book, I think it's almost like my brain needs to see where the limit is and the sea where the limit is. I have to go way past it in terms of like, I guess, intellectual depth or complexity. And so I write myself way past it. And then I just start chopping my way back until it becomes something coherent and readable. Yeah.

But so I know you know well enough to know that I wonder whether you've got two warring outcomes, right? So on just a personal level, you're a complete and utter maven. Like you will pick a topic, a fascination, and just you will go as deep as you can possibly go. You want to go to the point where like there's literally nothing else that you can find to go into that. Because that's what's satisfying for you on a personal level. And then as a maker, as a writer, the idea is like, okay, so I'm the weirdo that likes to go there and I'm raising my hand also because I'm also that weirdo. But I know that if I'm writing something for a popular audience, you know, like they're

not me. They kind of just want to know, like, give me the essence and why do I care? So there's this constant tension because you're like, you can have a lot of fun going down that rabbit hole for a long time. And if you could write, you know, like your three book treatise, you'd probably geek out on it, but that's, you have a different sort of like forward facing or consumer facing outcome. Yeah. Cause it's ultimately I want, I want to bring people on that journey with me. And so in a lot of senses, you know, you have to kind of translate some of these ideas down. And that's not to say that, you know, people are stupid or whatever, but it's like, you need to make them more digestible, like more easily consumed. So in many senses, like, you know, and it's funny, cause I got this criticism a lot for subtle art. It's like,

well, he's not saying anything new. And I'm like, well, yeah, no shit. Who is? I'm like, no, it's, you know, most of my job as an author is, is to just repackage things in, in ways that are more impactful for people or reach, you know, maybe people that wouldn't otherwise be reached. That said this book, I think I took a conscious risk with this book in that I took a risk that I, I feel like our culture is getting more philosophical. There have been a number of books and TV series and stuff that have come out that have done very well that are way more intellectual than I remember stuff being, say, like 10 years ago. So on this one, I kind of stuck my neck out there. I'm like, all right, I'm going to trust that, you know, the mass readership will stick with me on some of these things. Yeah. And it's definitely, it's a very different book.

It's more, I think it's more nuanced. It's more complex. It's more philosophical in a different way. And you're weaving together a lot of different theory, which is why like the relationship to like Wilbur's original theory of everything came to me. I'm like, you're pulling from so many different domains and so many different traditions to try and like figure out how does it all, how does it all come together in a way that teaches us how to in some way live and feel a little bit better. I wonder too, cause I do agree with you.

I think, I feel like we are more open for some reason to sort of like deeper dives these days. And I wonder if part of what's driving that is an elevated level of anxiety and suffering, or at least an elevated awareness of our anxiety and suffering these days. Absolutely. I also think, and I kind of made this, I think I briefly made this argument in Subtle Art. You know, I think when you have an abundance of stuff, when you have an infinite amount of information, infinite amount of content you can consume, the leading question begins to be why? Why consume this? Why watch this thing? Why listen to this person? That quickly takes you down kind of a philosophical spiral. So yeah, I think it's the more abundant life gets, the more salient these very fundamental philosophical questions become.

Yeah, and I think also the more we feel, the more tribalism enters our public consciousness, the more separate we feel from other people, the more we start to ask a lot of these questions too. Let's dive into some of the ideas because I want to deconstruct some of them. It's going to take us a little bit of time, I think, because you kind of open with this idea of the uncomfortable truth, which kind of laid out a bit, which is if everything is so good, like why do we feel the way we feel to a certain extent? And pretty soon into the conversation, you know, you talk about your exploration of Newton and emotion. It's a really interesting sort of reflection on it. And I've heard this laid out in the context of Buddhism. I've heard it laid out in the context

of Jonathan Haidt's work in positive psychology, you know, in terms of like the rider and the elephant. And you sort of described these, what you would call the capital T thinking brain and the capital F feeling brain. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about this. Sure. So there's a lot of, even going back to the Greeks, there's a lot of models of like what our consciousness is. And essentially they, it kind of boils down to there's the unconscious part of ourselves, which is primarily ruled by impulses and emotions and feelings. And then there's the conscious part of ourselves,

which is ruled by our thoughts and rationality. So I call these, just to simplify, make these things digestible, I call them the thinking brain and the feeling brain. And I talk, I kind of explain that your two brains have a relationship with each other and they're not good at talking to each other. They speak different languages.

And essentially what we experience as say like self-discipline is when our two brains are very aligned. What we experience as say procrastination or laziness or a failure to follow through on our commitments is, you know, our feeling brain's going this way and our thinking brain's going that way. So it's a lot of what we think of as growth or understanding ourselves or finding ourselves, you know, whatever kind of cliche you want to throw out there. I simply argue that it's about training your two brains to communicate better, training your thinking brain to listen to your emotions, to process them, create helpful meaning

around them. And then also training yourself, your emotional, your feeling brain to emotionally react to your thoughts. And so you kind of get this, you'll get this like nice dialogue going between the two. And when you break down that dialogue, when one brain doesn't listen to the other, that's when dysfunction starts. Yeah. But you also, and I, and I agree with this, the way that you lay it out, those two brains are modes. They're not equal in terms of strength and influence in behavior. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's where it's really starts to get screwy.

Yeah. So the analogy I use is it's like, imagine your consciousness is a car. And, you know, most of us assume that I call this the classic assumption, which is that our thinking brain is driving the car and our feeling brain is like this really loud, obnoxious kid in the passenger seat who's like screaming and pointing at stuff out the window. And, you know, and to be a good, strong, disciplined person, you have to like tell your feeling brain to shut the hell up. You know, adults are driving, you know, leave us alone. But the truth is, and you know, the psychological literature just bears this out

over and over again, that the feeling brain is driving and the feeling brain is a little bit of a maniac. He ignores signs, like road signs and, you know, drive over the median. And it's really the thinking brain is the navigator in the passenger seat. So then the thinking, the only power the thinking brain actually has is he gets to draw the maps. And so, you know, what ends up happening a lot of times is that people either try to suppress their emotions and block out their emotions and just delude themselves into believing that they're driving. You know, I think Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist has this wonderful quote where he says that he calls them system one and system two, but they're basically the same thing.

He says that essentially the thinking brain is a supporting role who has convinced themselves that they're the star of the movie. Our thinking brain thinks very highly of itself, thinks that it has way more power and control than it actually does. But really its role in our consciousness is to listen to our emotions and then draw effective maps based on those emotions. And if you don't listen to your emotions, you can't do that. Or if you delude yourself into thinking that your emotions have no power, then you can't do that either. Yeah. And it's almost like the thinking brain has to learn to speak the language of the emotional brain in order to get the emotional brain on board with what the thinking brain wants the outcome to be because based on the assumption that the you know like the feeling brain it's always going to win at the end

of the day yeah yeah so it's like how do we like have that conversation with that part of our brain you know in order to sort of like make get all parts to come on board so that we're certainly we have the uniform outcome that we want at the end of the day. Yeah. Which is, but a lot of times, I think, you know, the goal of a lot of things

is this, what you described as like, the illusion of self-control, which is often framed as we need to functionally tamp down or get rid of that emotional, the impulsive side of us. You know, like the goal of being an adult, of planning and having all this, you know,

is self-control, which is essentially, you know, like we eliminate the influence of the impulsive emotional side of ourselves rather than understanding that it actually has a fierce amount of power and like it can't, it actually can't be eliminated. You can't get rid of it. And maybe more importantly, we don't want to because it plays a really important role in making good decisions.

Yeah, absolutely. The way I talk about it, you know, kind of bringing the two brains into alignment is thinking of it in terms of like bargaining with yourself, like, you know, almost kind of bribing yourself, you know, and the, one of the examples I give is if I get up in the morning and, you know, I need to go to the gym, but I really don't want to, You know, and one of the examples I give is if I get up in the morning and, you know, I need to go to the gym, but I really don't want to, you know, I'll kind of say to myself, like, all right, the whole idea of going to the gym and doing like a full workout sounds really intimidating. And my feeling brain is like trying to find any exit it can to like, prevent me from doing that. You know, I'll sit there and be like, okay, what if we just go walk on a treadmill?

And then what you'll notice is that your body, like your emotions will change. You know, suddenly that intimidation, that stress, that like that feeling of self-loathing, like all that disappears. It's like, well, a treadmill is not so bad. I think I could do a treadmill. You know, it's like, all right.

And then, you know, you get out of bed and you put your shoes on and you go and you start walking on the treadmill and you're like, well, damn, I'm here. Might as well pick up something heavy. I'll do a pushup. Just one. Yeah. Just do one. Just do one. Hey, while you're down there. Just one crunch. Just one. So it's almost, it's almost, yeah, it's like, it's like, you know, bribing somebody. It's like bribing like a corrupt official or something.

You kind of just have to like goad the emotional side of yourself into doing some of these things. But ultimately, like that kind of, those sorts of things, they eventually lead the habits. And then they form the foundation of like what you would call your relationship with yourself. Yeah. You talk about what started out as a, what was it? 2000 page chapter on Newton and emotion. Distilled it thankfully down. But I think, you know, like, and it's interesting because you sort of like, you create these, it's like the three, three laws of emotion, three emotional laws. Yeah.

Talk a little bit about that. Sure. So, you know, I've always had this fascination with Newton. I've always wanted to write something about Newton. Because, I mean, obviously he's like one of the smartest guys ever. But on top of that, like he was, if you read about his life, like he was just an angry, miserable, like malicious person. And he also had a really screwed up childhood and upbringing. So I always thought that was so interesting that like he could be like a really cool kind of example of like, you know, how trauma messes us up and all that.

And so I started writing something around that. What I wanted to do is basically, I wanted to have a chapter that explained what the mechanics of the feeling brain is values. It's our value hierarchy. It's our, you know, perception of like what's better or worse than something else. And so as I'm writing this thing, I'm like, wow, like I start coming up with these principles of like where our values come from. So it's, you know, every action creates an equal and opposite emotional reaction. You know, so it's like anything that happens to us we will respond emotionally in proportion to i guess the intensity of that experience and i was like man that sounds like newton's law it really sounds like newton's law of motion and so i kind of started playing with it and i found a way to do you know newton's three laws of emotion but basically they're they're just

explanations of how our experiences generate our emotions, and then our emotions generate our values, and our values generate our identity. It's basically, it's like a, you know, A to B, B to C. Yeah, so experience to emotion to value to identity. Yep. Which is interesting, because in a way, it sort of says that in order to fully develop your emotions and then your values and your identity, you have to embrace a life of experiences. Absolutely. But I think so much, especially the early life in this country, is built in no small part around sheltering and protection. Absolutely. young people of that opportunity to develop an identity. Because if they haven't gone through a

lot of those, you know, pleasant experiences, a lot of those painful experiences and seen that they, those experiences don't necessarily mean the end of the world, you know, it makes them more resilient in the long run that they actually grow. I think the analogy I use is that our identity is like this ball of yarn and every string is kind of like an experience that happens and the meaning that we create from that experience. And as we accumulate more experiences, that ball just keeps rolling and rolling and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And the experiences in the middle are like, you know, the earliest ones. But it's, if your ball is really small and an experience, you know, a really difficult experience happens to you, like you're just getting it knocked around very easily. But if

you've accumulated a ton of those experiences and have all that meaning that you've built over the course of your life, anything people throw at you, like it's not going to knock you off course as easily. And so when we're, when we're sheltered, when we're protected from a lot of these early life experiences that I think well-intentioned parents see is like painful, you know, it's like, oh, I don't want Jimmy or Susie to get hurt. It's like, well, they, they need to get hurt now because it's better that they, you know, skin their knee than like they become a drug addict or whatever. Like it's, you need, you need to get those failures in early so that the child can learn and develop and become more resilient later in life. Yeah.

And better, better to do it at a time where it's sort of like, you can sort of like keep a watchful eye and the stakes are a lot lower. Oh yeah. It's like, you know, before actually somebody has the keys to the car, before you're like this and yeah, like, okay. So the smaller stumbles, because I think those lessons apply, like, and the resilience that we build,

like when we're really young continues on. And we're getting, especially like when you're younger, you're just gonna, you're gonna kind of have those anyway. I remember a couple of years ago, we're talking to an adolescent psychiatrist or psychologist who was on the show. And he used this phrase, he's like, all the research shows clear as day now is that

until you're 25 years old, you're all gas and no break. He's like, it's not about willpower. It's not about, it's literally about brain physiology. Wow. The frontal part of your brain that really helps you sort of exert some level of whatever it may be. It is not formed at a level where it's an effective break for this just mad bundle of impulse that drives you. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. One of the things that you kind of drop into from this exploration of emotion and values and identity is the role of religion, which I think is fascinating. Yeah.

You have a lot to say about religion. And you kind of lay out, you know, the superstructure for religion that I found was really fascinating. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Sure. So, I mean, first of all, it's hard to write a book about hope without writing about religion. And it was a topic I was nervous to go into, but it soon was clear that it would be inevitable. My argument is that basically, you know, we all need values. We all need to value something. That was kind of the big argument in Subtle Art.

You know, we all have to value something. Something needs to be important in our life. But to value something, to decide that something matters, something is important, something gives us hope, requires some degree of faith. Like you can't, it's the old, I think they call it Hume's guillotine in philosophy. It's like you can't derive a value, facts from values and vice versa. Like you can't, you can study as much physics as you want, but there's nothing saying that, you know, one thing is morally better than another. There's no proof for that. Ultimately, it comes down to human emotion. So we all believe in our values based on some degree of faith. And so my argument is that if you kind of let go of the traditional

definition of religion, that it's about believing in some supernatural existence. And you simply define religion in terms of what people have faith in. We're all religious. And what's interesting too, is that if you look at the societal data of like what's been going on in the last few decades, you know, a lot fewer people are going to church than they used to. And the nuns. Yeah. It's like people are way less religious in terms of just like church attendance and, you know, beliefs.

That's not nuns, like devotional nuns. That's nuns as in non-believers. Oh, okay. I was completely. Not N-U-N. The research classifies them as like the N-O-N. Yeah, yeah, yeah. N-O-N-E's, nuns.

They're non-participants in traditional religion. Yes. Yes. But what I find fascinating too is that we're starting to see a lot more kind of religious behavior around politics, around businesses, brands, corporations. Like if you look at like Apple or Nike or something like that, sports teams, celebrity culture. So I think people are still religious. It's just that they've changed their faith and changed what they worship. And so I kind of redefine religion in that term. It's not, do you believe in a God? Yes or no, it's what do you have faith in? What do you have faith is provides

the universe value and meaning. And in that sense, we all need to be religious. And what happens is as soon as you have faith in something, you have to defend that faith. And when you defend that faith, you naturally create like an us versus them dichotomy in your mind. And so it actually turns into a very depressing chapter, which is, you know, it's kind of like we're trapped, like this is part of our machinery as humans, like this need for faith in something to be meaningful and then the need to protect that sense of meaning. Yeah, I mean, it was so fascinating for me to read, because you basically deconstruct it.

Like these are the elements of the way that I'm defining a religion these days. Like there's this, there's this, there's this, there's this. As you're going through that, I spent a couple of years ago, I spent a whole bunch of time deconstructing the dynamics of nonviolent political revolution and cults and megachurches and realized it was all the same framework. It's all the same exact thing because it is fundamentally built around human need for affiliation, for belief, for belonging.

So as you're walking through the elements of religion, I'm like, yep, check, check, check, check, check. And you can map them across nearly any domain, whether it's like business, whether it's whatever it is. And I know you referenced later in the book and we both kind of geeked out on Robert Putnam's writing, Bowling Alone,

where you really look at what's happened over the last generation, really in this country, which is that we're physiologically hardwired to have to belong to something. And yet the sort of constructive, arguably constructive ways that we would belong in the past are kind of all crumbling and falling away.

So we're finding that sense of faith, belonging, religion in all these new places. Yeah. But they also, like you said, the minute you step into a culture and a value set and a belief and a symbology and a language and some form of deity and teacher and leader, there's always those who believe and they're the non-believers. And then there's almost always notably a judgment about the non-believers. And there's a better than type of thing that happens. Fascinating thing is, is it possible not to participate in that?

I don't think so. The last chapter in part one of the book is aptly called Hope is Fucked. Because it basically, you know, I make the argument that to maintain hope, to feel some sense of value and meaning in your life, you need to essentially reject something. You need to find some conflict somewhere, something worth defending. And that is ultimately leads to some sort of destructiveness. So there's that. That's option A.

Or option B is you can just decide that everything's meaningless and pointless. Take the nihilist approach. Yeah, which that's not very enticing either. So we're left in this awful, awful choice between just absolute despair and nihilism or religious war on some level. You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be like jihad or whatever, but it's, you know, faith that something matters and then a

lifetime of defending that from what you perceive as people threatening that faith. And that sucks. That really, really sucks. And so, you know, my argument or my solution kind of going into part two of the book is that, you know, if we're going to be stuck in this mental game, we need to at least, A, be aware that we're playing it, which outside of, you know, experience-based values. Some sort of principle of like ethical principle or approach to life or behaviors. And that's what, that basically leads into part two of the book. My proposal of like how we should try to be. I just happened to like, we're looking at each other like, it's kind of funny because the first part of the book is sort of like, it's called hope. Right.

And essentially it leaves you completely demoralized. There's no hope for humanity. And then the second part of the book is, you know, like this, or like the everything is fucked part. And then, oh, no, actually like, there's an interesting maybe path through here. And like, you step into that and right away, you're kind of like, like you make the point, you're like, no, actually like there's an interesting maybe path through here. And like you step into that and right away, you're kind of like, like you make the point, you're like, okay, so step one is

you kind of have to be a grownup. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's the way I define adulthood. It's based on a lot of developmental psychology, but it's also like, I'm a big Kant fanboy, like a Manuel Kant fanboy. And it's interestingly, ironically, I kind of went through my own little period of nihilism a couple years ago, and I found Kant in the middle of that. And he was

strangely the one who kind of gave me hope. But basically Kant kind of makes this argument that like, look, for anything to be of value, it needs to be valuable regardless of who's experiencing it, where it's being experienced, you know, for something to be right or wrong, it can't be contextual, contextualized. It can't be like if it's, if honesty is valuable, then it must be valuable. Whether you're honest, I'm honest, you know, the pope is honest like doesn't matter what doesn't matter what's going on and so that at least gives us like some firm ground to stand on you know as essentially my interpretation of that is that kant is saying that like for anything if we're gonna have any sort of like universal principle. It can't be based on any individual's form of faith.

And so the principle that I took from Kant that, that like, I guess gave me a lot, gave me a direction, you know, in a post hope life, as I call it. You were so about to say,

give me hope. I know, dude, I, I am catching myself so many times in interviews. I'm like, I can't say that. But you're not going there. But you know what's funny?

So it's funny because every time I do this, I say hope. It's like, oh, I hope or it gives me hope. And then I correct myself. Whatever I correct myself with sounds so much better and like more like evolved and sturdy. So I guess, so what Kant says is he says that, that essential, essentially, you know, a universalized principle can be to never treat a human merely as a means, but always as an end. So it's like in any sort of, whatever your action is, whatever your motivation is, whatever your impulse is, you never use another person as a means to achieve some other end. And then I go on to describe like, you know, how that, that explains basic

things like stealing. Like if I steal from you, I'm using you as a means to like get this other thing. If I kill you, I'm using you as a means to fulfill some other thing. It's basically, that principle is basically the anti-religion, you know, like it's, you know, your favorite sports team or turf warfare or geopolitical argument over like, you know, who owns this river, nothing should ever be put above the sanctity of protecting human consciousness. And so I found that super inspiring.

It's essentially, it's like the only thing that we can honestly say is objectively valuable is the thing that creates value itself. Consciousness. Which is consciousness. Yeah. So that's the formula of humanity. Yeah. I actually wrote this down because I was like, I just kept thinking about it. So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time, as an end, never as a means. Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, it's like, I think the argument underneath that is that we are the only beings that actually has this thing called consciousness. Maybe there's an argument there also. Sure. One of the things that really differentiates us from other things, you know, is that we do have this thing that allows us some level of being able to look down on ourselves and observe like our thoughts and exert some sort of agency over how we focus our intentions and create our reality.

Yes. fundamentally, I mean, the notion that, you know, the minute you use another person in any way, shape or form as a way to get to some other thing or person or place that you not only remove their dignity, but you essentially, you strip yourself of your own dignity, your own sense of fulfillment and satisfaction and living any semblance of a good life. And yet that is how so many people not only live, but are taught to live. The idea of networking, right? Yeah. Networking is taught as a means to an end.

Go out and go to this function. Your sole job in this function is to like meet 25 people who can get you something. Yeah. Right. Rather than what if you just showed up and like your sole goal was to meet and exalt, like in the moment of conversation around these 25 human beings.

Yeah. Or just unconditionally help people. Yeah. And just understand that, you know, it's helping people is good for both of you. And there doesn't need to be any expectation of like something in return.

Yeah. Which is a very Buddhist way of being too. Yeah. And this is what I love so much about Kant's principle is that, you know, when I really started thinking about it and diving into it, I realized that it's like, this is the basis of all the major religions too. You know, it's Christ, you know, turn the other cheek and it's Buddhist, like, you know, do no harm.

And it really is like the fundamental principle that, you know, kind of underlies every ancient understanding of morality. And yet the trappings that we then build around that. Exactly. Is where everything starts to fall apart. Yes. And it's, and the argument I make too is that it is, there's no need to hope for anything with the formula of humanity. Like it's, I don't need to, there's nothing to hope for. It's action-based, you know? So it's, all you have to do is simply

make the right decision in every moment. It's not a morality based on the future that's contingent on certain things happening today. It's always available to you. You can always treat yourself as an ends, not as a means. You can always treat another person as an ends, not as a means. There's no, you don't need the right church.

You don't need the right clothes. You don't need to like have the right book next to you. Like it's just, it's always there for you. Right. So the fundamental difference then is under your definition, a religion is about if I buy into the set of beliefs and I behave this way, it will eventually deliver me into this state. Yes. Right. Whereas you're saying, if you let go of that and you just assume that this is it.

Yeah. You know, and fundamentally you're not using this set of beliefs or set of behaviors as a means to get to this. Yes, exactly. You're just saying like, okay, so let me just be whatever this state is that I aspire to now. And as much as I can possibly embody it, it gives you the freedom to give up the hope that you'll someday get there. Yes. And just live it. Because hope is fundamentally transactional. What hope

is at the end of the day is if I do X, Y, and Z, my life will be better. If I do ABC, the world will be better. And while that provides us a lot of sense of meaning and a lot of motivation, it also leads us into destruction, the necessity for conflict. Whereas the formula of humanity is just simply, you know, there is no transaction. You just treat, you are always the end. Some other person is always the end. And there's only this moment, the decisions you're making in this moment. So it's a weird fusion of Buddhism. You know, Kant was never aware of Buddhism, but I definitely found a lot of resonance between the principles.

And yeah, it just hit me like a rock in the face when I read it. Yeah. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

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I mean, there's an interesting relationship, too, between pain, abandoning hope, and present tense satisfaction, joy. You know, I've talked about this on the show in the past. I think we've talked about it also. So I have tinnitus. So there's a sound in my head 24-7. It's been that way since 2010. In the first couple of years, I was one of the people who does not deal with it well.

My brain could not let it go and it consumed me and it took me to a really dark place. And there was a moment where I got into, I basically created my own modified mindfulness slash exposure therapy slash pranayama breathing practice, which allowed me to sort of retrain my brain to be okay. But I didn't really allow myself to go there until there's actually, it was a line from Buddhism that kind of freed me

because there's a tenant in Buddhism that translates roughly to abandoned hope. Really? Yeah. And I was always like, no, that sucks. Like that, how can that be a good thing? Yeah, yeah. And I got to a point where I was like, okay,

so I'm waking up in the morning, I'm suffering brutally. When I would even like wake up because a lot of times I wasn't sleeping and every moment of every day was hoping that the next day would be different, hoping to find a cure, hoping to find a solution. And everything I had was invested in getting to that place. And the big change for me was when I woke up in the morning and I said, okay, what if this is me for life? Right? What if i literally and and that's when that buddhist kind of like popped into my head abandoned what what if it doesn't actually mean you're screwed you know live in suffering forever but accept the fact that this is what it is like your current state is what

it is and if you if you just accept that how might you live differently? How might you process your environment and circumstances to behave differently, to be as at peace as you can be in the moment, rather than spending every moment of every waking hour hoping and praying that things will someday be different. And that started freeing up a whole bunch of my bandwidth to say, okay, what would I do differently? And that started me building practices that just said, how can I get comfortable

with my state of being, assuming it's never going to change? Yeah. How can I just be with it? And everything changed in like a really major way. Like the drilling that we're hearing in the background. Yeah, right. How can we be cool with the fact that, you know. Abandon hope that it'll stop.

You know, so it's really interesting because it ties in with this idea of pain too, which is sort of like your conversation wraps around too as well. Yeah, pain was one of the focal points of Subtle Art. And I think towards the end of this book, I took that theme and I just went way deeper into it. In Subtle Art, I said, you

know, don't avoid pain. But in this book, I went even further and I said, you know, it's not even, it's not even about just not avoiding pain. It's that your pain actually determines what, where you find value in your life, like where, where you find importance. Because essentially anything you, you get without suffering, you just take for granted and you don't perceive it as being valuable. So it's only the things that you feel as though you've struggled for that actually represent some sort of value and meaning in your life. And there's a number of psychological studies and a lot of data and stuff that, that suggests that the more comfortable people get, the safer people get, the more absence, the absent there are

threats around them, the more difficulty they have, I guess the more anxious they get, the more they seem to invent problems for themselves. And so it's, it's, it's not even just, you know, don't avoid suffering or don't avoid struggle. It's like, dive into the struggle because that's actually where the sense of the pursuit of happiness. For one, I think as a culture, we've confused happiness with pleasure and comfort. But two, it's if you're, you know, happiness is the byproduct of pursuing the right struggles, the right challenges. If you get the challenges right, if you take on the appropriate pain

that is worth something, then the value that's created from that pain will lead you to have a happy life. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I'm totally on board with you there. And also completely on board with the notion that, you know, pain is, it is, it's the investment, it's the sacrifice, it's to a certain extent, the suffering that goes along with aspiring towards almost anything or being a certain way that imbues it with value. You know, if somebody just handed you, you know, like everything you ever wanted, you're just like, boom, done. You know, for a hot minute, you'd be like, awesome. Maybe for a month or two, you know? And then after that, you'd be like, well, okay.

I don't actually feel the way I thought I would feel. There's research around this. And it's the fact that we sweat and bled and toiled to actually make it happen. But doesn't that also imply a process of work driven to a certain extent by hope? I think it depends how you frame it for yourself. You know, so I think you can take on challenges while not being motivated by hope.

You know, that you can take on, because it's, again, coming back to the formula of humanity, it's humans are messy, relationships are difficult. You know, it's humans are messy. Relationships are difficult. You know, loving somebody is often painful. It's often difficult, you know, sacrificing for somebody. And so I think that is what I would kind of classify as like a healthy pain is taking on some sort of sacrifice for the benefit of other people or the benefit of yourself. I think where we get in the trouble is when it's like, we take on some sort of sacrifice for some ideology or some, you know, invented faith-based

thing. Yeah. Which you can't get away from. You can't get away from it, but it doesn't need to, you know, I think of it, it's kind of like, it's like the drill. Like it has to happen. Like we can't control it, but we don't have to let it, we don't have to let it be the basis of our decisions and our actions. Yeah, I'll buy that. Yeah. Because I do think certain of the elements of religion, whether ideological, spiritual, consumer, whatever it is, there are certain human needs which are constructive and which are a cake, which we need satisfaction. And we have to get satisfied in some way, even if it's not from that. Yes.

That need to belong. We need it. Oh, yeah. I mean, all the research shows when we don't have it, we literally die. Yeah. And yet we can find that and also have our own principled internal set of more universal beliefs and values. You know, like we can do that. And then at the same time, like really invest ourselves in living the formula for humanity. Yeah.

And it's, you know, I would think of it, I would think of hope in a similar way as love, you know, so there are healthy forms of love and there are very unhealthy forms of love. And you can also, you know, when you're young and maybe a little bit naive, when you love somebody or you fall in love with somebody, you think that it just, things have to be that way. Like, it's like, oh, I can't help. I can't help it that I drove across three states and woke her up at three in the morning. I love her, you know, it's, but then you get older and you realize you're like, okay, just because I feel this thing, just because I perceive this thing doesn't mean it needs to be the basis of my actions. And I think hope is kind of the same thing. You know, I don't think we can escape, you know, kind of a faith-based religious type belief system, you know, and like you said, it brings, there's a lot of benefits to

it. Like it brings us a sense of community. It brings us a sense of purpose. But I also think that there just needs to be an awareness of like, like, okay, this is my brain playing a game and, you know, it feels good and it, it like, I need some degree of it to be healthy, but my, when it comes to, like, the important actions in my life, I'm going to make those decisions based on some higher principle than just, you know, whatever, wherever my hope lies. Yeah. And also it doesn't mean, I think a lot of people move into whatever their expression of religion is because they're in a moment in their lives where they really don't want to have to think anymore. Yes. And no judgment there.

Like you may be in a dark window where you just want to know what are the rules and what are the answers and what are the ways that I behave that's appropriate. And when you do that very often, part of the contract that you make when you step into that is you turn off your own internal sense of discernment. Yeah.

You know, I think the invitation is, you know, like explore this, you know, like get the beautiful part of it. And at the same time, keep your own internal discernment engine on, you know, and understand and question the values and beliefs and find that set that like works for you. I want to come full circle with you. The last chapter of your book, like totally took me off the deep end. I'm not, I'm actually not gonna,

people just need to read it. We're not even gonna talk about it. Don't spoil it. We're not gonna talk about it, but I did not see it coming at all. I was like, oh, so we're going there now. So it was fascinating, really provocative, made me think. So you guys, you can have to read it on your own.

But I do want to come full circle and come back to the same question that I always ask at the end of every conversation. Because it's, you know, you and I have talked over the years, but it's now, we're three years now since we've been in the studio together. So if I ask you the question today,

what it means to you to live a good life, what comes up? Well, it's probably, this is probably just popping in my mind because it's very salient. We just spent 30 minutes talking about it, but it, you know, it's, it's, I would say some permutation of the formula of humanity. And it's, it's really interesting because it's, I think there were a lot of unhealthy things in my own life. You know, I think some of us are better at treating other people as ends and not ourselves. And, you know, so we do unhealthy things to our, we damage ourselves, but we like are very good with others. And I think some people are the opposite. They're very good with themselves and they, they hurt others. I had a lot of unhealthy things in my relationship with myself that that discovering that kind of helped me shake out

of my life. So I'm going to say that. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've

heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people, and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk