SOLVED with Mark Manson - 5 Harsh Truths That Will Change Your Life

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Why is it that the most important truths in life are also the most painful to hear? In this episode, I discuss five of the most uncomfortable truths that have changed my life and will likely change yours—from human suckage to the cheeriest truth of all… death. So put your safety harness on, the ride’s about to get bumpy… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose. That is purpose.com. Why is it that the most important truths in life are also the most painful to hear? I would argue that it's because growth requires some degree of discomfort. And every big breakthrough in life demands a questioning of yourself.

So today, I want to help you with that questioning by bringing up five of the most uncomfortable truths that have changed my life and we'll hopefully change yours. So put the safety harness on because the ride's going to get a little bit bumpy. Oh, and by the way, welcome to the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast. 20 million books sold. Zero fucks given. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. I'm here with my producer and longtime research assistant Drew. He is gone through my entire archive, hundreds of articles and newsletters. He's read all my books, and he has put together five harsh truths based on my body of work that we all need to hear, but perhaps we don't really like hearing. Yes. And I love these because they're a little bit

dark. They're a little bit harsh, like you said. Wait, wait, wait, me. Let me put my eye makeup on before we start. Paint my fingernails black. Put on to me no music. Mark, if you got it, let's do that. Everybody get in the mood. That's where we're going with this. This is where we're going. So, yes, we have five harsh truths, and this first one is a real cheery one, which is humans suck, try to suck less. Isn't this a great way to start your morning, folks?

Humans are terrible. Why don't you try to be less terrible? I think this is super important because I think a lot of people have the assumption that there's kind of this perfect state of innocence that we're all born into and then terrible icky things happen to us and fuck everything up, and that growth or healing is a process of getting back to that perfect state of innocence. And if you look at the psychological research, that is just flat out not true. In fact, I would argue that probably the most significant contribution of psych research over the past 20, 30 years is discovering all the ways that we are

horribly, horribly flawed. We have all sorts of cognitive biases, perceptual bias, Our memory is completely unreliable. We often aren't even good at knowing what we're specifically looking at or talking about. A perfect example, there was a viral video number of years ago. I don't know if you remember this, Drew, but there was like a bunch of kids passing basketballs back and forth, and you were supposed to watch the kids pass the basketballs. And you watched them for like 10 or 15 seconds. And then a text comes up on the screen and it says, where was the gorilla? And it turns out, while the kids are passing basketballs back and forth, a guy in a guerrilla suit walks into the middle of the court, stands there for about three seconds, and then walks off. And the crazy thing is,

is that nobody notices the first time they watch. And the fact of the matter is that this happens in all sorts of different ways throughout our lives. Our perceptions are colored by our emotions. Our logic is deeply flawed and can be easily swayed by our interests. Our memories are completely fallible, like half the shit we think we remember, we actually just made up. The more we learn about the human mind, the more we realize that we're not optimized for truth, we're optimized for self-preservation. I think one of those biases we have, too, is to think that we're all, we're good, everybody else is evil. And the people who think that, the people who think that, no, I'm good. I don't contain any evil. Those people just, they scare the absolute shit out of me.

because you can convince yourself to do all sorts of heinous, awful shit if you think, no, I'm good, right? And it's funny because I think in the literature, this is known as the actor-observer bias, right? It's like if I run a red light, it's because I'm in a hurry and I have a really important meeting to get to. But if somebody else runs a red light, they are an evil, irresponsible asshole and they should never be able to drive again.

And we do this in all sorts of different ways. But I think you raise a good point, Drew, because I think the shift and mindset away from people are naturally pure and innocent and perfect, and then they're corrupted, you know, by society or the government or whatever, whatever boogeyman that you want to pick. I think moving away from that mindset and recognizing that, we're actually, our cognitive machinery is very flawed and everybody is constantly battling against those flaws within the world, it opens you up to a lot more compassion to realize that everybody's starting from a pretty bad spot. Everybody suffers very intensely. Everybody has had monumental challenges throughout their

lives. Everybody suffers from the same perceptual flaws, biases, corruptible memories that we do. And so maybe have a little bit of patience and grace with those people. Maybe when you see that guy go through the red light, don't think, wow, what a horrible asshole, how you're responsible. Maybe challenge yourself to think, hmm, maybe he has something really important going on. Maybe he's panicking right now. I think ultimately this view of human nature, it makes it easier to lead with empathy rather than judgment. When people talk about, you know, having compassion for someone else and seeing their shared humanity, a lot of times we think about, oh, we, you know, it's all the good things, all the virtues, that's your shared humanity. But also there's compassion in the shared

humanity of our flaws as well. If you see another human being fucking up, you just say, oh, look, they're just like me. Yeah. Right. In a way. Oh, yeah, I do that too. So there's that with it too. It does. It creates that shared sense of humanity. People who have done the most heinous, awful stuff, you know, you go to a maximum security prison and you hear these people's stories. I think if you sit long enough with them, you would probably find shared humanity there somewhere. Somewhere along the way they fucked up, somebody else did something awful to them.

I've actually done that. When I lived in New York, I was invited by a charity to go speak to inmates at a maximum security prison. And I went. I don't think I remember this. I don't think I talked to the team about it. I don't remember why.

Back then I was doing eight million things a day. Yeah, I went to a prison called Sing Sing, kind of slightly upstate and talked to a bunch of prisoners there and talk to a group of guys. It was really interesting, actually, because there were a lot of educational programs in that prison, basically opportunities laid out for guys to get their GEDs, get their college degrees.

And one thing that was really interesting was that the COs, the corrections officers told me that they had spent a long time trying to foster kind of a culture within the prison where guys who were choosing to go back and get degrees were, like, there was status attached to it. Oh. Like, they basically, they kind of socially engineered it so that some of, like, the biggest, badass prisoners would get nudged into these educational programs. And then once they were in it and seeing the benefits, they would kind of bring all their

homies along. And it kind of created this culture of like, oh, well, shit, like, I want to go back and give my degree too. I want to take these college courses. So there was an interesting dynamic where a lot of the world. large chunk of the prison population was desperate to get into these these courses and educational programs. And so I ended up talking to a group of guys who had gotten in, gone through it. One of the guys I talked to, he had been sentenced to life, he'd gone through, got,

finished his GED, did his entire college education, and did law school via correspondence, got a law degree. Wow. And was representing the other guys in the prison who didn't have access or money for lawyers. Yeah, mind-blowing shit. But anyway, the point of this story is I walked away from that being like, holy fuck, these are like these are real humans. These are really complicated, nuanced, flawed individuals. And I think for me, too, it hit particularly close to home because I got in trouble with the law as a teenager. You know, I got involved briefly with selling and dealing drugs. And so there was a part of me that was kind of like, fuck, like there is a alternate universe where maybe I end up in a place like this. And so it was a very powerful

experience, actually, that to like go experience that and talk to those guys and see it. Fascinating. Okay. The next one, Mark, and that's pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. This literally is pre- like precept number one of the Buddhist doctrine, which is life is suffering or life is struggle, and it's born out of our propensity to become attached to ideas, and particularly narratives and stories around who we are and what our value is. In a way, I find it very liberating, right? Because it basically says that no matter what path you take, there's struggle in front of you. So the logical conclusion is you should always take the right path. Being unhealthy is painful. Being healthy is painful.

Having no relationships is painful. Having relationships is painful. Being lazy is painful. Working really hard is painful. It's just different flavors of pain. So you might as well pick the flavors of pain that are going to help you and give you a better set of life circumstances. This is why in subtle art I talk about how like you don't eliminate problems. You simply upgrade problems into better problems, right?

Like being obese and incredibly out of shape is a problem. being in really good shape and having the work out all the time and being sore from working out and maybe having the occasional injury, that's also a problem. But it's a much better problem to have than being horribly obese and sitting on the couch all day and, you know, having chronic diseases and shit when you're 40. So it's a question of choosing the pain that you want to sustain, choosing the problems that you want to have in your life. And what's powerful about that is that once you choose the problem you want, something kind of magical happens in your head, which is you no longer perceive yourself as a victim,

you perceive yourself as like a challenger, a competitor. It's like somebody who's like facing the odds and is set to conquer them. And that's a really empowering mindset. In fact, I personally believe that that is at the bedrock of where a happy and meaningful life is built, is choosing which problems you want to have in your life. And you've talked a lot about two, and you've already touched on a little bit about kind of the evolution, our evolutionary history of this, humans are just wired to be dissatisfied, right? Like, believe it was Dofsky-esque who said, if man ever finds utopia, first thing he's going to do is complain. And that's just wired into our DNA. And it's like you said, this negativity bias. It's a survival thing.

Can you imagine Twitter if, like, people found utopia? Can you imagine what the tweets would be like? They'd be like, this is bullshit. I was promised 70 virgins. There's only 60 here. What was it? Louis C.K., everything's awesome. Nobody's happy. It's part of our nature.

That is not going away. So like you're saying, you may as well choose that pain. You may as well choose whatever discomfort rather than just let it happen to you. I think there's a really important distinction here as well between pain and suffering. Again, the Buddha has a really great allegory about this. He said that whenever you suffer, it's like getting struck by two arrows. The first arrow is the actual thing that hurts. The second arrow is the meaning that we create around the first arrow.

Our skin gets pierced by an arrow and we start saying, well, why did I deserve to get hit? Why am I the one that's hurt? Why didn't he get struck by an arrow? He's an asshole. I'm a good person. Why? Why does this always happen to me? Why, why, why?

And then it's those narratives that we create around the pain that linger for years, right? It's like if you physically get cut, that's going to heal in a few days or a week or two. But the narratives you create around that cut, they can stay with you for your entire life. And so the first part is the pain, and pain always goes away. It's always temporary. But the suffering, depending on how much we buy into the narratives around our pain, we can continue to suffer for decades. Right, and there's really, I think there's three ways I see it anyway about approaching this.

Since pain is inevitable, like you said, it's going to happen no matter what you do. When the pain does arise, you can avoid it. Society, I think, is becoming a little bit more amenable to that as well. But there's also, you can indulge it as well and basically feel sorry for yourself. It's the victim Olympics, right? It's like, my misfortune is worse than your misfortune, so give me the gold medal. But then what you're saying here is you actively turn towards it and you actively choose it. Yeah.

And that's where growth happens. Yeah, I think you raise a really interesting point about modern society. There's this sense that back in the good old days, quote unquote, you just had to grit your teeth and bear it. You had to fucking suffer through it and learn the hard way that the misfortunes in your life don't necessarily say anything about your value as a person. And 21st century society complicates that skill in two different ways. One is just the ease of comforts, the amount of luxury and comfort that we have. It's so easy to turn away, distract ourselves, tune out, load up TikTok, start scrolling. And then the second way is that there has emerged this subculture online that celebrates victimhood, that applauds people for, oh, you're so vulnerable.

Thank you for sharing. It kind of gets off on the moral outrage that comes with a very public form of victimhood. And I sympathize with why people do that. And I'm sure there's a certain amount of that that is healthy. But I think when you generate a culture around it, it becomes very, very unhealthy. And I guess to put it another way, if there's a person who has experienced a lot of pain and trauma in their lives, I do think there's a lot of psychological power in them stepping up and publicly stating what they've experienced and how they've suffered from it. I think there's a lot of personal empowerment involved in that, and I think it's good to support that and encourage that. But there's a blurry line that happens somewhere where if you get enough

people and enough encouragement and enough support, you start socially validating and handing out status to people based on victimhood. And you get kind of this victimhood Olympics effect. And that's unhealthy. And I think that's actually counterproductive because it starts to encourage people to find, to invent suffering where there wasn't any before, right? It's like, it starts encouraging people to sit down and think, well, well, what were all the horrible things that happened in my childhood? And how can I, and how can I talk about that to people? And it creates an incentive for people to create the suffering-based narratives, to create the second arrow when it had been dislodged long ago in the

first place. So as they say, may you live in interesting times, which we certainly do. By the way, last thing, last thought on this one. So this idea of the two arrows. The first arrow is like the actual pain. The second arrow is the narrative and the meaning around the pain. As children, we create a lot of those narratives and meaning and they stick with us throughout our lives. And if we have shitty narratives, they hold us back. Dad wasn't around. Maybe mom was an alcoholic. We spun up a bunch of narratives as a kid to cope with that reality. But now we're in our 30s, we're married, we're having our own kids, and we're just a complete fuck up in our intimate relationships. And the thing that's holding us back now are those same narratives that saved us as children. I think project of therapy

in many cases is, first of all, discovering those narratives that we've held on to for far too long. And then secondly, learning to unravel or rewrite them in a more healthy manner. So go to therapy. kids. Especially if mommy was an alcoholic. Well, you do. This leads us right into the next one then, actually. Everything you believe will one day fail you. This is how you grow.

I love this because this is one of those things that it's so obvious. Like if you're doing science, right, it's just obvious and accepted that you're probably starting out at a place of ignorance or being wrong about something. Yet when it comes to like all these other areas, of our life, we don't take that same attitude. If my next door neighbor does something that annoys me and I think he's an asshole, like I never stop and think, well, you know, I'm probably wrong about that. What is a testable hypothesis that I can, you know, repeat a few times and collect data on, like, we never do that. We're like, I know that guy is an asshole. And it's this,

like, certitude that we hold on to that I think, again, these narratives, that causes us to suffer so much. And I think it's such an obvious and practical reality that it is impossible to grow without being wrong about something. I think, if I can pull out my soapbox for a second, I think this is something that the self-help industry as a whole does not advertise enough. That, you know, they say, hey, pay all this money. Come to my weekend seminar. You're going to be a completely new person. What they don't tell you is, oh, by the way, to be a completely new person, you have to recognize all of the ways that you're wrong. and all the dumb things that you've been doing,

and oh, you probably need to grieve an old identity or two because it's not a fun process. The reality of taking a belief or an assumption that you've probably held on to for years, maybe decades, and then recognizing that you were fucking wrong about that, and that you base so much of your life on that incorrectly. Like, that is not a fun process, but it has to happen. It's very, very, very difficult to actually stop

yourself in those moments and be like, wait a second, maybe my neighbor's not an asshole. Maybe I'm being really judgmental. Maybe I'm having a bad day. Maybe I didn't sleep enough last night. Developing those mental habits is a really difficult process. So we have all these narratives and these stories we tell ourselves. And you talk a lot about this in a lot of different areas, the stories we tell ourselves. And I kind of came up with, I'm super proud that I came up with kind of what's a good story and what's a bad story, right? I'm super proud of this. I'm super Wait, wait, wait. Let me, let me get my golf clap out. I'm waiting for it. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready to go. You better to do this one up. This one, no, I'm proud of it because I think it's just something you would come up with, honestly. So I probably just stole it from you somewhere and I'm like subconsciously just plagiarizing you. Hey, I pay you to plagiarize me. That's right. You pay me to plagiarize you and say nice things about you. Yes, exactly. But there's there's bad stories and there's good stories, right? And yeah. I see like a bad story is something that it protects you, but it fails you in the long term.

And so let me give you an example. So let's say you think that you're whatever it is, not attractive enough, not smart enough, just not good enough in general, right? In the short term, that's a protective thing. You probably grew up in a family that criticized you a lot or something like that. And so the smart thing to do in that situation is to withdraw. So you tell yourself I'm not smart enough, not good enough, not whatever. You stay face in your social circle.

You don't have to put yourself out there and fail and suffer that embarrassment. It's protective. However, in the long run, let's say 5, 10, 20 years down the road, you haven't tried at this point to do anything. Now you're dealing with deep regret in your life. And so that story that you told yourself, while protective in the short term, has just failed you so catastrophically in the long term. On the other hand, there's good stories we can tell ourselves. and while they still will fail you at some point, because they all do, they actually bring you to a better set of problems or a better set of stories later on. Just a quick example, like from my own life, when I was young, I told myself I was smart, I was always looking for the external validation of that.

A lot of that was because I didn't, you know, I grew up in a family that didn't have a lot of money. And I was like, this is one way for me to get out of this is through education and being smart. So I told myself I was smart. And that opened up a lot of opportunities for me. It eventually failed me, though, kind of when I, I think when I got to grad school, actually. And it was because I got there. Everybody around me was smart. Almost all of them were smarter than me, actually.

And so that identity was now on shaky grounds. And then, you know, I look around and I'm like, wait a second. I'm just doing this to reinforce that identity of being like a smart guy, right? I'm not actually doing this because, you know, I don't, I'm not going to grad school and going to get into research and all this kind of stuff because that's what I really want to do. It's just to kind of reinforce that identity. And so that failed me. That story failed me at that point. And luckily, Mark Manson came along and, well, I don't know if it was lucky or not.

Maybe you ruined my life. I have no idea. Hey, we don't know what's lucky yet. The story's not over. We don't. We can't run the counterfactual either. We don't actually know. We'll never know.

You know what's funny, though? I guess I never realized this. But you and I have like very similar stories in that regard. For me, it played out with music. All right. Okay. I mean, I do love music, but looking back, you know, I grew up middle of the country, very religious environment.

I was not a religious guy. It was very nerdy. Didn't play football. And music was kind of the thing that saved me. It's like, well, if I had a guitar in my hands, people were nice to me and they wanted to hang out with me. So music very much became my identity. And it was my saving grace in a lot of social situations.

And so I started to believe that it's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. And it's funny, like, that I feel like a lot of young. people have that same experience that you had in grad school that I had in music school where you suddenly you're you go from being a big fish in a little pond to a small fish in a big pond and especially at that age your ego just gets fucking steamrolled by it like you basically I went from being the best and most talented musician at a pretty small high school to literally just one of 30 dudes with a guitar and a ponytail.

in my freshman class. It was really rough. It took about a year for the story to unravel enough for me to actually have the thought of like maybe I don't want to be a musician. And when I finally did allow myself to have that thought, it felt very catastrophic. It felt like a death almost, like a breakup.

I was just going to say, yeah, it is. It's ego death in a way, yeah. For sure. And especially at that age where it's like you and I were both young enough that we had only had one identity up to that point. Like from age 12 to 20, I was the music guy. And this is who I was going to be for the rest of my life.

And then suddenly you stop and think, well, maybe I'm not the music guy. And then the next thought is, well, then who the fuck am I? And that is, it's a very, very scary question. But I guess the kind of the profound moment for me and I imagine you would have similar experience as well. It's like when I finally cut the chord and left music school, it was like a thousand pounds came off my shoulders. And it felt so liberating. Golf clap.

We did it. We stuck the landing. Oh, let's keep moving then. Yeah. Since we're doing so awesome here. While we're patting ourselves on the back, let's, I'm sure we'll find some way to fuck this up. Yeah, well, here's a good chance for you. You don't deserve happiness.

You don't deserve anything. These get cheerier and cheerier. I am available for children's parties, folks. Okay, so this one sounds much worse. This is one of those situations when I say, you don't deserve happiness. It sounds like I'm saying you deserve unhappiness. You deserve to suffer and die. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying this whole idea of deserving, I think, creates more problems for ourselves than it solves. I do believe there's a very fundamental psychological mechanism going on in our brain all the time, which looks at how good we feel. And if we feel good, we start spinning up narratives to justify feeling good. Like, ah, I'm such a good person. I'm such a nice guy. Everybody should like me. That's why I feel good. And then if we feel bad, we also spin up all these narratives to justify why we deserve feeling bad. Oh, I'm a idiot. Nobody's going to like me. Shucks. First of all, those narratives and justifications 90% of the time are wrong or deeply flawed. What happens when we spin up a narrative to justify something in our lives,

we become very married to it. We start defending it. We act like it's plot of land and if people attack it, we have to pull out our sword and defend its honor. And that's stupid because it's just a fucking narrative. It's like it's just a thing you made up to justify why you felt good last week. And so if somebody comes and starts peeing on your lawn, Like, whatever, dude, just let them pee on your lawn.

I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here, but stay with me. The point is, you know, if we accept the previous points, which is we don't really know what's going on most of the time, mostly the narratives that we invent for ourselves generate more suffering, and so we should try not to be attached to them. And instinctually, we always like to think, he did a bad thing, he deserves bad things, or She did a good thing. She deserves good things. But we don't always know what's actually good or bad. It really gets to the idea that you talk a lot about. You talked about it in the subtle art and lots of other places. But the idea of entitlement as well, right? When you can be entitled, I'm awesome. And so therefore, I deserve everything or I deserve special treatment. I'm awful.

Therefore, I deserve special treatment. You know, there's kind of those two narratives you talk a lot about. Right. I'm glad you brought this up. Because I think what happened maybe 50, 60 years ago with the self-esteem movement was well-intentioned, but it was a little bit misplaced. Because what early researchers around self-esteem discovered is that people who are really successful contribute to society, do good things, they tend to feel really good about themselves. And then people who get in the trouble can't hold down a job, don't make any money, or alcoholics or whatever, they tend to feel really bad about themselves.

classic fucking academics, they didn't stop to think that maybe correlation is not causation. So they started going out and preaching like, well, we just need to make everybody feel better about themselves. And the truth is, is that the people who had accomplished a bunch of things probably felt better about themselves because they accomplished a bunch of things. Not the other way around. They didn't accomplish a bunch of things because they felt good about themselves. And I think what happens is if you train people or teach people to try to feel good about themselves without doing anything, you develop this sense of entitlement. You develop this sense of person who's been sitting on their couch for six days scrolling on TikTok, thinking like,

well, I deserve to be happy. So people should show up and just deliver me happiness as if it's DoorDash. And when that doesn't happen, they get really upset. I'll also give you a third narrative here, though, too, which is an interesting one, which is, man, I'm so lucky I don't deserve this. There's that deserving again. That's the imposter syndrome. Yeah, imposter syndrome type stuff. I've dealt with this. I'm sure you have too.

But what do you do? You recognize that there is a cosmic crapshoot and you just kind of won that, right? For sure. The issue around imposter syndrome, I think, is exactly the same. It's exactly the same as the person who sits on the couch and says, well, why me? Why? I don't deserve this, right? Like, you don't know what you deserve.

You don't necessarily deserve anything. What are you going to do? That's what fucking matters. And it's the same with the person with imposter syndrome. I don't deserve all this money. I don't deserve to live in this great place. You don't fucking know what you deserve. What are you going to do about it?

Ultimately, that's the question. So I recently was asked this on Twitter, and the original tweet, it was something like, terrible people never believe they're terrible. The best people never believe they're the best people. Average people never believe they're average. And the first reply was a guy saying, what do you believe you are?

And I said, I try not to think about it. I just try to think about doing good things. And I think that's all you can do. Because you can argue yourself in circles around, like, if I want to decide I'm the biggest piece of shit on the planet, I'm pretty smart. I think I could figure it out. If I wanted to convince myself, I'm like the best person on the planet. Pretty sure I could figure that out too. If I wanted to convince myself, I'm completely average and all this shit is just happening by pure luck and chance. I could probably figure that out. I think I it's more useful to just not even ask the question in the first place and just focus on what are you doing today to make the world a better place. Yeah. And I think that's been my solution to that whole imposter syndrome thing too is just to recognize it. Recognize yes. Okay, you're lucky. Fine. But now pay it forward. Maybe you don't deserve any of this, but somebody else probably doesn't deserve their suffering either. So alleviate that in whatever way you can. And that's done wonders for me. What matters is what you're going to do with it. You know that saying that it's none of your business what people think about you?

I almost think that's true with yourself. Like, it's none of my business what I think about me. Ah. Like, just fucking do good things. Stop worrying about it. Yeah. Maybe you'll take that back after this next one and our final one here. Everything you love will one day be lost.

This is what makes life meaningful. Oof. Yeah. Again, very Buddhist. Also a bit stowa. although I think it's more Buddhist. You know, Buddhism, it's all about impermanence. Everything is impermanent, and that's why you shouldn't be attached to anything.

Or, I guess, to put it, to use our terminology, that's why you shouldn't invest yourself in narratives around anything. That's why you shouldn't marry and die on a plot of land based on a narrative. Everything gets lost at some point. Everything ends, including life, including life of all your loved ones. And this is actually a very important thing to understand because it is that loss or that potential for loss that makes certain things more valuable or meaningful than others. Everybody has a finite amount of time that they're alive and they're conscious. I think it's then morally incumbent on each of us to improve the quality of that consciousness as much as we can as consistently as we can.

And the reason that's morally incumbent on us is because consciousness ends. Like, it's a life ends, and because it ends, you should make it as good as possible. If it didn't end, then who gives a shit? By the way, this is why superhero movies are bad in case you were wondering. Not a Marvel fan? This drives me crazy. Okay, yeah, they're fun, explosions, Robert Downey Jr.'s funny. But there are no consequences.

Like, the fucking alien invasion destroys half the planet. And then everybody, like, wakes up the next day like, oh, glad that's over and like moves on like nothing fucking happened. There need to be consequences and there needs to be possibility for death, right? This is why Infinity War was the only good Avengers movie because it actually tricked you into thinking a main character died. And because if a main character dies, suddenly there are stakes and their consequences and things matter and decisions are actually important. You're not just like waiting for the next action scene. So scarcity is the driver of all sense of value in life.

And we can hate the scarcity and fight against the scarcity, which is what we do. But the reason fighting against scarcity is meaningful is because there is scarcity. So I guess a way less philosophical and ranty way of saying this is everyone's going to die one day and many are going to die much sooner than you expect. So really cherish and appreciate the moments you have with people. It's probably cliche at this point, but the more that I think about my own death, and I've come to do that a lot more the last few years, this weird fucking thing happens, the happier I am. Yeah.

It's just, it's such a razor for your life. You just cut out the bullshit, right? What do you give a fuck about? Well, put it in terms of your death. And you're going to find that out very quickly. Right. It's like, okay, if you had a month left, would you still worry about this thing? Probably not. Not even that, Mark. I'm saying life is just so fucking short. Sure, okay, if it ended a month from now, that would really suck. If it ended tomorrow, that would suck, sure. But even if I lived to be 100, that's still too short. Yeah, it's true. It's so fucking short when you really stop and think about it and you remember your death. It's so short.

Yeah. And cliche, I know it, but it's becoming cliche. I feel like it wasn't cliche 10 years ago. But this is one of those things that I'm happy to see become cliche. Like, I'm happy to see so many people talking about it. I think it's under-discussed. It is such a useful tool for deciphering your own values and deciphering what's important. I think, and again, it's a very common experience you see a lot where people are just kind of going through life on autopilot and then suddenly somebody close to them dies.

Or maybe they have a health scare, right? like a false positive cancer screening or something. And then that's the wake up call. That's the wake up call of like, oh my God, I'm spending all my energy on all this shit that doesn't matter, spending my time with people I don't really care about. I'm working in this career that I don't enjoy. And I think the important thing is that if you turn it into a practice, the so-called momento Mori practice, you don't have to wait around for those unfortunate circumstances to happen. You can, you know, as Steve Jobs did, wake up in the mirror and ask himself, if this was my last day to live, would I be happy doing what I'm doing today? And yeah, it's just an incredibly useful practice.

It clarifies a lot of things, puts them in the perspective. And ultimately, as you said, paradoxically, I think leads to a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment in life. Apparently at this last Berkshire Hathaway meeting, 16-year-old got up and asked Buffett how to live a good life. And Buffett's answer was so simple and so wise. He said, sit down, spend an afternoon, write out your own obituary, include everything you would wish it to say, and then reverse engineer it from there. I was just like, fuck me, dude. That's fucking good.

So wise, so wise. I actually want to do that at some point. Like I kind of got on my to do list to sit down and spend like a Saturday doing that. But all right. So humans suck. Try to suck less. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Everything you believe will one day fail you. That's how you grow. You don't deserve happiness. You don't necessarily deserve anything. And everything you love will one day be lost. That is what makes it meaningful. Glad we could piss in your corn flakes, spit in your coffee this morning. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast. Welcome aboard the pain train. We will be back every week.

review, leave five stars, tell the world how much you love me because I'm getting tired of doing that. Because Drew, even though he pays me. True's back is sore. So why don't you guys chip in and leave some five-star reviews? So my insatiable narrative telling me how much I deserve happiness and success can continue on abated. But seriously, please review. It's a new podcast. We want to get out there. We want to make a good impression on the world. and everything. And what else should I promote? I feel like I should, I feel like I should promote shit. What else should I promote, Drew? The breakthrough newsletter comes out once a week on Monday. Every Monday. Every Monday we share reader breakthroughs and I answer reader questions. So check that out. I don't know. Read my shit by my books. Love your friends and family. Don't forget you're going to die.

See you next week, fuckers.