SOLVED with Mark Manson - 5 Life-Changing Lessons From Visiting 75 Countries

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

If you’ve ever been stuck working some BS desk job thinking there’s got to be more to life, then you were right. There’s travel. High-quality, intentional travel is one of the most transformational experiences a person can have. Without a doubt, my 10 years living abroad made me more confident, more self-assured, and ultimately more educated about the world and the people in it. It also informed a lot of the philosophy that I've written about over the past 10 years—the counterintuitive approach that so many people have come to love. This episode dives into the key takeaways I got from my years of traveling. I can’t be sure, but I think they might inspire you as much as they have me. Enjoy. Get started with BetterHelp today and receive 10% off your first month when you use my link ⁠https://betterhelp.com/idgaf 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. That is purpose. Dot app. So one of the most common questions I've gotten throughout my career, for lack of a better term, is people asking me, how the hell do you know all this stuff? I'm not a psychologist.

I don't have a PhD. Most of my personal stories involve me being drunk or doing something stupid. And one of the things that I have not talked about a whole lot publicly, but has been massively influential on me is the fact that I've spent about a quarter of my life living abroad outside of the United States. And one of the interesting things as well is that a lot of the classic tropes that people associate with world travel, you know, things like, oh, everybody's so happy and we're all one and people all want the same thing.

Like, yeah, that's kind of true. But if you actually spend a lot of time in different countries or corporations, cultures outside of your own, there's actually a lot more counterintuitive takeaways that I've found. For example, I would actually say living outside the United States for 10 years, it actually made me more conservative in my political views. It actually convinced me that money is actually more important than I used to believe. And in some ways, I feel a little bit more disconnected from the rest of the planet. So it's, in a way, I came back with completely the opposite of what most people would expect when you go live abroad. But at the same time, my time

abroad made me a lot more confident, made me more self-assured, made me more realistic about the world and the people in it. And I think it's informed a lot of the philosophy that I've written about over the past 10 years. So I'm going to take this episode and we're going to break down some of the biggest takeaways that I got from my years living abroad, some crazy personal stories and some unexpected breakthroughs that happened along the way. Cool. Let's just start this right at the top then, Mark, what's the Mark Manson kind of travel origin story? When did you leave? What was your motivation for leaving to? Where did you go? Just kind of frame it for us at the beginning here. So I read Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week in 2008, and I was working a bullshit desk job in a bank,

and I couldn't wait to get out. I had built a website. I was doing some blogging. And when I read that book, Tim talked about how he automated his online business and moved to Argentina, and learned how to tango. And I was like, fuck yeah, I'm going to do that. Except for tango, I'm just going to drink beer and party. And I quit my job in the bank, and it took about a year. But by the end of 2009, I took off for Argentina. And I was 25 years old.

I was single. I was broke, but I also didn't have any debt. So the whole goal was just like, go live in South America, live super cheap, spend all your money on beer and chasing girls. And that's essentially what I did for the first year. And Latin America became my home for about four years. I lived in a number of different places. I lived in Argentina for about a year, Colombia, about a year, Brazil for about two and a half years.

And for me, Latin America was very intoxicating because there's an emotiveness or a passion that comes with the culture that most people recognize as soon as they see it. I think for the initial year or two, I kind of convinced myself that this part of the world's got it figured out. man, like it's, this is where you got to be. This is home for me. This is going to be it forever. And I think this happens a lot when people travel to another culture that shows them a part of life or has maybe a value that they didn't grow up with, that they really love that's really powerful and impactful for them. They kind of convince themselves like, oh, these people get it.

Like, this is the country that's got it all figured out. The same way when you're young and you, you like meet your first crush and you like convince yourself that they are the perfect human that has no flaws whatsoever. I feel like a newbie traveler does the same thing with cultures. The first culture they come across that they love, they're just like, this is it, never going home. But when you spend a little bit more time in Latin America, you realize that there's a cost to the passion and the emotion, that people can be very dramatic. They can be surprisingly selfish. They can be volatile, unreliable. They show up two hours late for something that is rather important.

As I spent more time there, I realized that it's not that this country's got it all figured out. It's that all cultures have a trade-off of values. And I guess this is my first big takeaway from my time abroad, is that everything is a trade-off. Every country makes a trade-off in its systems and its laws. Every culture makes it a trade-off in terms of, like, what values are you. it prioritizes what social expectations it puts on its people. And whatever makes a place great is also likely the same thing that makes it suck.

So with Latin culture, you have this passion and emotion that cuts both ways. It makes it a very fun place to be, but it also makes it a little bit unreliable and unsafe. Some cultures are very family oriented. And what I discovered after a number of years is that it's the most family-oriented cultures that generally suffer the most corruption because people who commit corruption, whether it's in the government or a business, they justify it by saying that they're helping their family. You know, yeah, I'm going to screw over some strangers, but it's going to help my kid go to college, so it's okay, it's worth it.

I notice that places that lack crime tend to have insane draconian laws. I remember I was on a train once to Singapore. I was coming from Malaysia, and we were crossing the border from Malaysia to Singapore, and the border patrol guys got on the train, and we're kind of going through and checking everybody's passports. And they handed you this card, and the card said at the bottom, drug traffickers will be punished by death. Oh, God.

And I was like, holy fuck. Not fucking around. Yeah, wow. Where am I going? Oh, my God. And, of course, you go to Singapore, and it is absolutely. Absolutely incredible. There's zero crime. You could leave a $2,000 laptop on a table and a cafe and leave for an hour and come back and it'll still be there. There's zero anxiety or preoccupation

about safety whatsoever, but it's because they'll fucking kill you for having drugs. So things cut both ways. Everything's a trade-off. And this was particularly helpful for me with my relationship with my own country, realizing that a lot of the things I don't like about the United States, it's because a tradeoff was made to achieve something that's also great about the United States. This also, it really reminds me of the conversation you had with Oliver Berkman around cultures that are present-focused versus future-focused. You use the example of Latin American cultures, Brazil in particular. They're more present-focused, very in the moment, have a lot of fun like you were just talking about.

but things tend to not get done over a long period of time because they don't really have much of a future orientation. Contrast that with like the United States where we're more future focus, but we tend to be more miserable in the moment. How do you apply that here? What's that tradeoff? Is there a balance to strike? How does that work? Do you think? Yeah, I think that's absolutely another tradeoff.

There's a great book called the I think it's called the Culture Code. I forget who it's by, but they talk about how each culture is present focused, future focused or past focus. And so I think they said that, you know, like the United States is very future focused. Everything's about the great new thing that we're going to build and the new company that we're going to come up with and all the money that we're going to make. And the side effect of being future focused is you generate a lot of anxiety because anxiety is essentially just uncertainty about the future. It's a fear that things are going to go wrong or they're not going to go as expected. If you want to see people with like the least amount of self-consciousness possible, go to a beach party in Brazil. It's just everybody's dancing, everybody's singing.

nobody is even for a second worried about what anyone else is going to think or say about them. And it's because they're so present in the moment. And as somebody who read a lot of Eastern spirituality as a teenager, I kind of glorified that. I was like, man, you just got to be present. Like that solves, that gets rid of all your anxiety. It solves all your insecurities, all your preoccupations. Well, yeah, it does. But you also need to keep a job and you need to like save for retirement.

And, you know, that bridge over there, somebody should fucking finish building it. So it's the present focus, there's a trade-off as well. I believe in that same book, they talk about how Asian cultures are very past focus. So there's this emphasis on tradition, history, lineage, and how that can be cumbersome in its own way as well. So, again, everything is a trade-off. But there's one thing that's not a trade-off. And I want to talk about happiness because I think one, one of the first one, you know, one of the One of the things that I kind of made my name on was shitting on happiness early in my career.

And that's what drew me to you. That's what drew to you. True. I know. It's absolutely magnetic. My inability to enjoy happiness whatsoever. No, but seriously, you know, I think, again, one of the classic experiences that a lot of travelers have, especially people who travel to, say, a port. country for the first time. They'll go to Africa or India or some other developing nation. And

they'll see that like, wow, these people are so poor. They have nothing. But oh my God, they're still happy. The kids are playing. The people are laughing. Everybody's getting along fine. And I think people from wealthy countries, there's a tendency that we take everything for granted. We take the fact that we have run in water, we take for granted. The fact that electricity is relatively cheap. We take for granted. The fact that I can drive down to the grocery store and I'm not going to get robbed or mugged or my car is not going to get stolen, we take for granted. And people from wealthy countries see all those things and they think, wow, you don't need all this stuff to be happy. We should just get rid of it. We shouldn't worry about it so much. And I think that's

completely the wrong lesson to take from this experience. I think the right lesson to take from this experience is, wow, happiness isn't worth very much. If you can be happy, like, drinking slum water and playing in a ditch and, like, watching your siblings get typhoid, how valuable is happiness? Is that really worth a whole lot? Like, maybe we should downgrade our estimation of happiness in the equation. Because ultimately, people who live in poverty, they suffer a great amount. And I think when you travel to these places, you don't really see that if you're just passing by or spending an afternoon with people. Like, once you actually really spend time there and get to know people, you see that they suffer very, very intensely and that the human mind

is actually incredibly resilient. And that resilience shouldn't be used as a justification to not be grateful for all the amazing things that we have. In fact, it should just be a reminder to be fucking grateful for all the things that we have and put them the good use. You know, the research of the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, one of the most mind-blowing things about some of the stuff that he worked on is that he found that there seems to be kind of a set point of happiness. And people will, regardless of what environment you put them in or what happens to them or, you know, how rich or poor or safe or insecure they are, they will tend to gravitate back towards that set point of happiness. And he even calls this the psychological immune system, that people will start diluting

themselves and warping their perceptions of the world around them to make themselves feel content with whatever they have. And I don't think that should be something that we optimize for. Like, to me, that's actually something that's probably holding us back from doing good things in the world. Like, if you're able to psychologically adjust relatively quickly to poverty, and be content. Like, that's, I don't think we should celebrate that. Definitely. You finish writing the subtle art of not giving a fuck kind of on the tail end of your long-term travel, right? You were, you were kind of wrapping it up around that time. This idea of kind of happiness being ubiquitous and, maybe not necessarily easy to achieve, but it's achievable in just about any

situation, whereas there's this missing component of human dignity. How much of that influenced the subtle art of not giving a fuck. And I think that's kind of a key theme of yours. How did that come about and how did that work into your writing and your books? So this was hugely influential on subtle art. You know, subtle art pretty much all of chapter two and I think chapter three is about how people overrate happiness. It was funny because at the time, positive psychology was the big thing back in the States. There were tons of books coming out about happiness. There was like the how of happiness and happiness hypothesis and stumbling on happiness, all these other books. And there are a million articles being written

about how to be happy. And meanwhile, I'm like in sub-Saharan Africa hanging out with people who like don't know how to read. And they're happy. I'm just like, what the fuck? This seems to me like the wrong question here. Like we should probably be thinking about, you know, some more important things. So I was in rural Tanzania, East Africa. And I was staying with this older German couple. They owned like a bed and breakfast. Really nice. And they took a day and they were like giving me kind of a tour of the region. This was near the base of Kilimanjaro. There was a town called Moshi. And the interesting thing about Tanzania is the Germans used to be there. They built a bunch of railways and stuff. Basically took all the natural resources and then left. And so there was still all

these railroads that kind of crisscrossed the country, but nobody uses them anymore. This guy took me to this old train station and it had closed down in I think the mid-90s. And the train station was just, basically kind of this like little ghost train station in the middle of nowhere. So we're like walking around looking at everything. You know, the tracks are overgrown with grass. I'm like, okay, this is pretty cool. And then the guy looks at me and he's like, you want to see something crazy? I'm like, yeah, sure. He says, look in the windows. So I walk over to the window and I peek in and everything is still there. All the desks, the papers, the pens, the chairs, the tables, pencils, everything. It's all still there, like left in the exact same spot that the Germans

left it when they left the country. And he told me, he's like, that's been sitting there like that for 20 years. And I looked at it and was like, why didn't people take it? Like, there's like a good table in there, right? Like, take that home, use that shit. And he looked at me and he said, why do they need a table? What are they going to write on? He said that the people live around that train station are, their economy is so underdeveloped that they, they see a table on a chair and they don't know why they would use it. They can't read, they can't write, they cook on the floor, why do you need a table? Why do you need a pen? So they left it there for 20 years, blew my fucking mind. So stuff like that, I've had a few stories like that over the years

that were incredibly impactful and just made me realize like it's happiness. This is a state of mind. It's a choice. It's choosing certain perceptions over others. You can be happy in any situation you want. You can be unhappy in any situation you want. Ideally, you want to choose happiness more often than unhappiness, but I don't necessarily think you should always choose happiness.

But that's another conversation. The point is that we should be focusing on more important things than just feeling good. I had that thought in the back of my mind, especially I started traveling just a few years after you did and kind of came across the same thing. And the thought occurred to me and has been in the back of my mind ever since. It was like, is happiness even the point? That is a loop in my head that comes up every now and then. And I joked about it that, you know, you were the happiness grumpy guy, right? And I was attracted to that. But seriously, I was like, oh, wait, no, he's probably on to something here. And it's not that happiness isn't important. It's just that it

doesn't, like you just said, it doesn't always have to be the main thing. Yeah. There's something very, I think, self-indulgent and self-defeating about obsessing over one's happiness. I think if you look at human history and if you look at generally healthy people with good lives, they regularly sacrifice some of their own happiness for some greater cause or purpose. And I don't think that's a coincidence. Oh, for sure. Yeah. How much of this, Mark, when you were traveling, How much were you traveling alone versus with other people? I would say probably 50-50. Some friends would come out with me for brief periods.

Obviously, you meet people on the road sometimes and you travel a little bit with them. I would say the first three years I did most of it myself, solo. And I have to say that solo travel may be one of the most powerful personal development tools that I've ever come across in my life. The effect that it had on my confidence, self-esteem, just ability to rely on yourself. I think it's so underrated and so impactful. I think there's a little bit of like an altitude training effect

that kind of happens. One of my worst travel experiences that I ever had, I was in rural India. So in India, you can actually go find the tree that the Buddha sat under, supposedly. It's a place called Bodhaya. There's a little river.

It's a town of maybe a thousand people. It's out the middle of nowhere. And then there's this big temple and a bunch of monks hang out there and sit under the same tree that the Buddhist supposedly sat under. So anyway, I flew out there, and I'm out in the middle of nowhere, and there's all sorts of, like, tourist scams and charlatans

and people trying to sell you things. I got really, really bad food poisoning. And it was maybe the worst place to possibly get terribly sick because there's absolutely no infrastructure. There's not really any clean water anywhere. It's a tiny town, so everything closes at night. And then all the locals that I tried to talk to to go to a doctor, they didn't take me to a doctor, they just took me to their friend down the street and then

tried to charge me a bunch of rupees. And so I'm like vomiting everywhere. I'm a mess. So I go back to my little bungalow that I'm staying in. And as I'm laying there in the middle of the night, I'm like having cold sweats, just like everything hurts, vomiting, diarrhea, the whole works. And then in the middle of the night, the whole room became infested with some sort of a bug. I still don't know what it is, but it was like these giant mosquito things, or maybe a thousand of them, like crawled in through the crack and a ceiling and start buzzing around the room. I'm sitting there. I'm like, head is throbbing. I'm horribly dehydrated. I have no access to clean water. The bathroom's a mess. One of the most difficult and painful nights of

my life somehow survived through it, crawled my way to a market the next day, bought a bunch of bottle of water, found a little bit of medicine, nursed myself. back to health over the course of three days. When you go through that and you go home, like having an awkward conversation with your parents is not a big deal anymore. It's not something you worry about. You know, like feeling a little hungover after New Year's and not feeling like going to brunch with your friend doesn't really stop you after that. It's not a big deal. So that's an extreme example, but I would just say that the general experience of like being in a completely strange environment, regularly embarrassing yourself socially, like trying to

speak to people who don't speak your language or trying to speak a language that people don't understand you and screwing it up over and over again. You know, any sorts of like insecurities around like what people think about you or making a fool of yourself or embarrassing yourself, like all that shit goes out the window pretty quickly. So I just found that every time I came back to the States during this period, it felt like coming down from training at 12,000 feet and then like running a mile at sea level. It was everything felt easy. Yeah, for sure. I think there's also just a larger point to about travel and the lessons you learn from it. A lot of times we have these motivations and grand expectations of travel and that they're going to change us. We're

going to find ourselves, whatever it is. And usually what you end up doing is facing a lot of the issues that you already have. Right. It is a uncomfortable, but very useful thing about travel and that you remove all of the other variables from your life. So if your life's not particularly going the way, that you hoped it would, you pack up and take off to Bali for a month or something, and you're still miserable, well, guess what? The only thing that Bali and your house have in common is you. So obviously there's some shit that you need to start dealing with. Travel can be an effective way of doing that. It allows you to see what remains constant when you leave an environment and what changes. You know, there's another thing about

solo travel as well and why it's so effective. And this is going to be a little bit of a weird analogy, and it's also going to tie into the sponsor of this video, but hear me out, because I think this is important. I think solo travel is very therapeutic in an interesting way, because I think a big role of therapy or like why therapy works is because you need to get yourself into an environment where you remove other variables from your life. You remove a lot of the social pressures, social expectations, various obligations that you feel around your community, and get into a isolated space where there's nothing pulling on you and you have to have that isolated space to actually understand what you care about and what you value and essentially like what is actually true

about yourself and your life and I have found that when traveling on my own is a very effective way to do that because when you're off in the middle of Spain by yourself nobody cares what you say or do and so you have to really evaluate what you actually want to say or do and I think in the context of therapy, it's getting into a safe, closed, confidential environment that you are able to communicate with an intelligent person who's listening to you, what you actually think and feel about yourself, and they will actually listen and respond accordingly. Which brings me to the sponsor, which is BetterHelp. BetterHelp is a remote therapy platform, which coincidentally, you could use BetterHelp while you travel by yourself. I never thought about that before, but you can. Better

help is awesome because you can communicate with your therapist however you prefer you can text them you can do phone calls with them you could do zoom chats with them you can do it from anywhere in the world it's super convenient can switch therapists if you decide you hate your first one but yeah it's just really affordable and convenient so check out the link below uh in the description it's 10% off the first month and i mean big ups on therapy everybody should do it just like everybody should travel Okay, so that experience you had in India then, was that a common experience where people were kind of always giving you the run around? Did you experience that a lot? 75 countries, that's a lot of opportunities for people to screw you over.

Was that common in your experience? No, no, no, no. I mean, some places you get it more than others. Some places, unfortunately, are a little bit known for it. I mean, every place has its problems, right? So it's whether it's safety, people ripping you off, things being price gouged, you know. Like every place is going to have its problems. But generally speaking, like 99% of the people you meet around the world are really good people.

And actually, this is a big takeaway. I think it's if you haven't been exposed to the wider world, it's easy to be very pessimistic and assume the worst about people. But when you actually get out there and experience people in all these different places, you realize that most people are really good. I think this is particularly important if you have particularly strong, political views about certain countries or certain regions of the world. Because when you actually go there and hang out with the people, you realize that everybody there is kind of cool. And the system

or the government that is being obnoxious or murderous and your government doesn't like them or your political party doesn't like them, but the other political party does like, you know, like none of that shit matters. If you actually go there and hang out with the people, you realize that they're incredibly hospitable. You know, I saw a study a few years ago. It was, you know, it was, was, they were actually studying, I think, internet communities. And what they found was that it only takes like three to five percent of people in any given community to be assholes to essentially ruin that entire community. So you can have 100 people on an internet forum and 97 of them are nice. They get along. They're respectful to each other. But if you just have three people who

try to stir up shit, then it's going to spoil the entire forum for everybody. And I think This is particularly profound because negative behavior has an asymmetric effect on social interactions and social experiences. It also has an asymmetric effect on groups or people's perception of other people. So when I saw this study, for me, it was really, really important because I think it explained a lot of the incongruence that I experienced in a lot of the countries that I visited. I personally believe that most cultures and societies develop systems to try to manage those three percent of assholes as best as possible.

Some countries just lock them all up. Some countries develop really strict social norms. Some countries develop legal systems and strong government bureaucracies. I think religions were the ancient way of dealing with the 3% of assholes who were infecting society. So when you go to each country or each place, every place has its own systems, both political, legal, and cultural to try to enforce or manage the 3% of the antagonistic people in that society. So unfortunately, some systems do a better job than others of managing that 3%. In some places, the 3% managed to take control of the entire system. So you can go somewhere like Venezuela where the entire system is completely corrupt and is screwing over 90% of the population, but 90% of the population can still be absolutely lovely people. So you just quickly learn that there's a really distinct separation between,

the systems and the people. The same way, I am not always thrilled with the U.S. government and what the U.S. government does, but I'm still proud to be an American. Most Russians are not always thrilled with what the Russian government or what Putin does, but they can still be proud to be Russian. Like there's nuance to it. The human mind wants to equate the two things with each other. They want to equate the system with the people or the individuals in the society,

and it just doesn't work that way. And so it's important to try to keep this in mind, especially in situations that are really politically contentious or upsetting. It's so easy to just look at the system and then blame all the people for it without realizing that in many ways the system might be ineffectively working for the people that are part of it. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it does. What kind of systems do you think are best for controlling those, the three to five percent

of the assholes? Is it like a self-correcting system that's maybe built in? Or is there some other mechanism? You see strong institutions maybe? Or what do you think it is? Well, I'm going to be biased when I answer this, obviously, because I'm an American. I'll caveat everything I'm about to say by noting that they're not necessarily the best. I think of them as the least worst.

Let's just put it that way. I think ultimately some sort of free market system is undeniably necessary to let a society thrive. I think democracy is also pretty fundamental to managing the population as best as possible. I think a really strong legal system based on both enforcement and trust. And I guess those two things kind of go together. Like you can't really build trust in a legal system if there's not good enforcement and you can't really enforce very well if there's not trust. I personally think, and again, this is bias because of my cultural background.

But I think that individualistic cultural values produce better results on average than other cultural values. Again, obviously there's a trade-off, but I do think ultimately prosperity is good. Economic growth is good. Innovation is good. I think working is good and being rewarded for that work is also good. I just think these are fundamental extensions of human psychology. And the places I've been in the world that really impress me or, or I feel like have figured out something that the U.S. has not, they're generally not doing

something completely different. It's just that they have found that they have refined and optimized these principles maybe better than the U.S. has. The U.S. is kind of a clunky mess, to be honest, in terms of its systems. Like some of the systems here work really well and some of them are just a fucking dumpster fire. So there are definitely countries in the world that have taken the principles that the U.S. is based on and I think done it better than we have.

I think one thing in the U.S. is that I heard it put this way recently, we have a relatively weak society in terms of just kind of like social cohesion and all of that or a multicultural society and all that. But we have very strong institutions too. And I think that goes back to the trust thing you were talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I think our legal system is really strong.

And okay, so talk about examples of how living abroad will change your political views. man, police fucking matter. It's go spend a couple years in a country that don't have an effective police force, you will fucking notice really fast. And it's strong policing is really, really important. And I think that's, that is maybe an undersold policy in the U.S. lately. I guess this gets into the last and maybe spiciest take that I have of the time abroad. And that is that I think some cultures and systems produce better outcomes than others.

I think that's undeniable. And when I was young, I was a bleeding heart lefty. I was very like, you know, everybody's different and special and everybody's belief should be honored. And there's no right or better way. And yeah, you spend 10 years in 50 different countries and you start to notice there are better ways than others. And it's undeniable at a certain point. If you value minimizing human suffering and if you value prosperity and health and mental well-being, like some systems work better than others.

I think it's really important to not make that a taboo statement and to be able to talk about the systems in clear terms without, you know, coming across as judgmental or bigoted. To put it in another way, I think some belief systems or value systems protect the 97% from the 3% of shitheads better than others. And that's an uncomfortable conclusion to come to. You can contrast that. I think one of the reasons that's kind of become taboo in some circles at least is this idea of cultural relativism, right, where the idea is that we should, you know, honor and respect

all cultures and understand them without judgment. I'm okay with that first part all the way up to the part about without judgment. it because if it is producing these outcomes that are terrible for the vast majority of people in a society, maybe we should be a little more judgmental. I think that's a thing with our generation maybe a little bit that we're like, I don't want to judge. You know, we're very much about that. Maybe we should be a little more judgmental about some of these things. Well, and this comes back to the fragility or needing to feel good all the time.

It's like, oh, don't judge me. Well, if you have a stupid idea, yeah, I'm going to judge you. I think you can acknowledge and honor a culture's belief system without necessarily condoning it. I'll give you an example. So a good friend of mine worked in the NGO world. I'm not going to say where she worked, but it was a poor country. And she worked with an organization that built schools in the rural parts of this country. And she was very passionate about it.

She worked her ass off, one of the smartest people I've known. And she built some schools in a couple villages. And she did this for about five years. And then one day she just got. fed up, quit, and took like a cushy corporate consultancy job or something, like complete 180, like just went completely the other direction. And I remember talking to her and being kind of shocked and talking to her and asking why. And she said that she built five schools in this country. And she said that she's very proud of the schools, but none of them were really doing anything.

When I asked her why, she said that there were two reasons fundamentally. She said the first one was that during harvest season, most of the students couldn't come every day because they had to help their parents harvest the crops on the local farms. Fair enough. The second reason is she said that once the girls started hitting puberty, the teachers started dating them and getting them pregnant. And she said that her NGO intervenes maybe a dozen times to try to stop this. they talked to village elders, they talked to mayors, they talked to government officials, they talked to the girl's parents. And she said, nobody saw it as a bad thing.

Everybody was like, oh, well, he's the teacher. That's what happens. And she said she got so fed up with it that she just left. And I don't know what you do with that. And I'm not, maybe I'm not open-minded enough, but call me crazy, I don't think that's a good thing. So if you do travel far and wide enough, you know, it's easy if you're an American or European and you're sitting in some beautiful resort in Thailand or something, you know, eating pad tie and sipping fruity drinks, it's easy to be like, man, this culture is great.

But if you travel far and wide enough and get into the nitty gritty and get into the underbelly of places, you start to see things that really force you to stand on one side of the line or the other. Like, there's not really ambiguity around it, or at least there shouldn't be. And I think once you have enough of those experiences, it teaches you something about yourself. Like, again, when I was young, I was like, man, everybody's great. We should all just accept each other, listen to each other, love each other, you know, all that, the typical naive fucking 20-year-old bullshit. When you see enough of this stuff, you realize, like, oh, wait, I do have core values. I do have things that I will not negotiate. And yeah, there's not really anything you can say to

changed my mind. And so that that's ultimately where I landed. And I guess it fundamentally changed my perspective on the world and many things in it. All that said, you know, the starry-eyed young, naive hippie thing of like, you know, everybody's the same. Everybody just wants the same thing. Like, that is true. Everywhere you go, people generally care about the same things. You know, they worry about their family. They worry about money. They think about food. They tell the same jokes. They have. the same conversations. Like, it is, humans are strikingly similar most of the time, wherever they go. But Freud had this great term.

He called it the narcissism of the slight difference. And I think it's the slight differences between people and cultures where wars are fought and civilizations collide. And I think that's also just a fact of human nature. It's also something that we all have in common is that we overlook the massive amounts a commonality that we have, and we focus and fight over the slight differences, because ultimately those slight differences are the things that we won't compromise on. I do strongly believe everyone should solo travel at some point. And when you do it, try to make it extended

and try to do it in as much of a grassroots way as possible. Like save the resorts and stuff for when you're on vacation or your honeymoon or something. Like really try to ingratiate yourself into a culture and a group of people as much as possible. Do the touristy stuff, but batch it in a couple days. Like, if I go to a country, say, for 10 days, I'll try to batch all the touristy stuff in the first two or three and then have the back seven to explore, try local things, meet local people, do some interesting kind of spontaneous stuff. I think it's really important

to bake into your travel ways to interact with locals in some way, whether that's finding groups, language exchanges, activities, joining networks. Like back when I was traveling, there was a thing called couch surfing. I don't know if it's still a thing anymore. But you could basically, any major city or country in the world, you could jump on couch surfing and find a bunch of local people who are interested in meeting foreigners, try to plan ways for you to integrate a little bit and experience the culture from the inside. Always try the food.

I don't care if you're a picky eater. Try the fucking food. Because it's not just about the food. It's not just about like discovering new food. The food teaches you a lot of stuff. Like it teaches you about the geography, about the history. You also find a lot of similarities between food.

There are parts of the world where people have been fighting wars for hundreds of years and they eat the exact same food. And it's really interesting to think about why that is. And then finally, a rule I have for myself is anywhere I go, I try to read at least one book about that place, either before or while I'm there. So I recently went to Korea,

and I read a bunch about Korea while I was there. And it was super interesting. So just some ways to enrich your travel a little bit. I think that's all the takeaways I got. One I would throw in is like just fucking go for it. Just fucking go. I waited for far too long to do it and it's because I didn't have any money. And I finally just said, fuck it and went.

I think I saved up like $2,000. I spent $800 of that on a plane ticket at $1,200 and I just went to Latin America and just fucking did it. I came home with $200 to my name, but I'm still here. So, you know. A hundred percent, dude. And a lot of ways broke travel is more stimulating and fun. Got to get creative. Yeah.

Yeah. anybody under 30, if you're on the fence, just fucking go. Just do it. Find a way to do it. Don't think about it too much. Yep. It's one of the best things you'll do. That's it for this episode. Hopefully you guys got something out of it. Check out the newsletter, markmanson.net slash newsletter. It's sent it out every Monday with different life advice and tips. And Drew and I will be back next week with another episode. So stay frosty.