SOLVED with Mark Manson - 5 Ugly Truths That Make Life Beautiful

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

So many people seem to be obsessed with feeling good all the time. They’re always looking for “hacks” to an easier, happier life. But what if the easy way actually makes it harder to have a life full of meaning and purpose? Today, Drew and I take on the ugly truths that give life its beauty. Some of these might be a little hard to stomach at first. But if you see them through, you might be surprised at what’s on the other side. 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. Dot-app. Drew, I'm feeling very French this morning.

Why is that? Very, uh, very tutlement. Okay. Very, uh, mercy bucou. Suflet, wah-wa, we, wee. Well, it's just, I feel like French people, they have this saying, or they say beauty is pain. Mm-hmm. That if you want to talk about what makes life beautiful, then there's a certain degree of discomfort that's required in observing that beauty. I actually have this argument with my wife oftentimes about music. I will play an absolutely gorgeous song that's in a minor key, and she'll complain that it's sad. And I'm like, it's not sad.

It's beautiful. It's fucking beautiful. It's the melancholy. It's the Instagram meme of don't be sad at half. Wait. Don't be sad. Wait, how does it go? Don't be sad.

be happy it happened. Oh, I remember. It's the Instagram meme. Don't be sad. It's gone. Be happy. It happened. That's what today's episode is about.

It's about French people and Instagram memes. No, it's actually, we're going to talk about how ugly and painful truths are actually what makes life feel rich and beautiful. And I should probably stop. So why don't you kick us off? Let's get off of that. train real quick, yeah. Bro.

Do you even podcast? Like, bro. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Well, the first one, if you want a life of meaning, at some point you have to choose a life of suffering. Why? Says who? I think you've said this before, actually.

Fuck. Oh, God damn it. All right. I guess I'm stuck here. All right. No, I mean, this is one of the big points that I made in subtle art. They're not giving a fuck. And I think it resonates today because I think so much of our culture is optimized for pleasure and kind of superficial, meaningless pleasure, empty calorie pleasure.

And the truth is, is that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. I have a section in the book that I talk about how people mistake highs for happiness. Highs come from very temporary short-term, meaningless, pleasant experiences, whereas generally lifelong happiness emerges out of a consistent commitment or sacrifice or willing to suffer for some greater cause or purpose. So it's this counterintuitive ability to step into challenges and discomfort. It sucks in the short term, but it ultimately, it's the Instagram meme, Drew.

It's, don't be sad it happened. Be happy. Wait, no, don't be sad, it hurt. Be happy that it happened. Right. Yes. No, but there's a difference here between chosen suffering and suffering you didn't choose. Right.

Too, right? So I think a lot of people, you know, life is suffering or choose your suffering or whatever. Chosen suffering is really what imbues our lives with a lot more meaning than just say, random suffering or trauma that we. that we face, right? Which I think there's, so there's two things here. One is kind of legitimate victimization situations where, where you are, pain is thrust upon you completely outside of your control, you know, so some terrible tragedy happens

or you get a cancer diagnosis or something. But I would argue that most of this actually comes down to how we define choice for ourselves. And I think what often happens is that we choose one side of an experience while either denying or remaining oblivious to the other side. I saw there's this hilarious thing that went viral a couple days ago. Right now, as we're recording this, there are a bunch of student protests on campuses, students protesting the Israel War in Gaza.

Regardless of what you feel about the situation, there were a group of students at Columbia who were occupying the quad, occupying the administrator building for days and days and days on end. And then they were demanding that the school give them food, and they were complaining that they were hungry. And the reporter was like, well, wait, I thought you wanted to be revolutionaries. Now you're asking them to feed you.

Like to me, that's a perfect example of they chose something without realizing they chose it. It's like, okay, if you're going to choose to protest by occupying a building potentially illegally and being aware of those consequences and being willing to be arrested and being willing to be criticized and ridiculed for your beliefs, part of that is that your lunch doesn't get catered. Part of that is that, like, you need to figure out how to go get food and water. You have agreed for sure, right? That was part of your choice, whether you realized it or not. Maybe you didn't think about it ahead of time, and that's its own problem. But, you know, don't pretend like you didn't choose this. Like, this is part of what you chose.

And I think we all do that a certain amount in our lives, right? Like, we tend to choose the benefits of something, and we pretend. like we didn't choose the costs. And then when the costs show up, we get really upset and blame somebody else. Right. Yeah. I think to just watching you over the years, too, I think one thing you've chosen in your life is the ability to be disliked or I guess just that you've accepted to a degree that a lot of people don't. I've had a lot of practice. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotten a lot of practice. How does that like, how much of that was a conscious choice or how much but it was just like, this happens and this is part of the game.

First of all, let me back up even a little bit further. This is kind of the higher version of this question just removing myself from it is, you know, I often get approached by people who want to write a book or start a podcast or build an audience online. And one of the most common questions I get from those people is like, what do I do with criticism? What do I do with hate comments? How do I do this and not get blasted by trolls and haters? and my answer is always like, you don't. That's just part of it.

That's part of what you're signing up for. And generally, like, the size of your audience is going to be proportional to the bullshit negativity and hate that you get. And it's just part of the deal. Some people are not naturally disposed to handle that well. Like, I've known a number of peers in this space and other authors who just, they really struggle with criticism and hate,

and the bullshit that happens on social media. And then some people seem pretty disposed, predisposed to just handle it well. I think I'm predisposed to handle it well, whether that's kind of just my natural personality or, you know, I grew up in an environment that I felt like a fish out of water since I was a young child. Yeah. You know, so it's like I was never the cool kid in school. I was bullied. I was called a nerd, a dork, a loser, you know, all those things. So I think I just grew up with the thicker skin and was like,

this is just kind of natural, you know, for me. So to me, that wasn't a super hard choice, but it's also easy for me to recognize. Well, yeah, dude, if you want millions of people to see your shit, some of them are going to hate it. And you're going to hear from those people. And that's just the price of injury, essentially. Yeah, I think it was it Dan Kennedy who said,

if you haven't pissed off someone by lunch, you're probably not doing anything interesting or something like that. Yeah, you said, Yeah, if you haven't, if you haven't pissed somebody off by lunch, you're probably not making much money. Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Which I feel like is truer than ever today.

Yeah. Truer than ever. I don't know. What is a pain that you have chosen that you think most people have not chosen? I think, I don't know. My whole life is pain, Mars. My whole life is just pain. That's actually not true.

Wow. I thought I was being French today. I do think I have. from a young age, I always kind of have thought differently. I feel like I've thought differently than a lot of people around me. Part of that's just where I grew up and everything like that. I don't know if I have chosen like huge pains or anything like that, but I've always been kind of proud of like just being different,

being like a little bit different or being speaking out when it's really not popular. I found myself in those situations several times. I remember, you know, I grew up in small town, Nebraska. and it was a great time and place to grow up there actually when I grew up. But I remember in high school, we had a debate, a quote unquote debate, and it was about the death penalty. And I was the only one who was anti-death penalty in the whole class. And I remember doing that.

And I was like, oh, it's okay to do that. I remember doing that. And like, all of my friends are over there, like, yelling at me and everything like that. And I took it. And I'm like, yeah. And that's a small example. But I've done that throughout my. life where it's like, okay, when it's something that I feel is right and standing up for it,

I'll suffer that. I think that's an important thing to realize about yourself. And it's also, I don't know if I always relished it, but I definitely relish it now. Like there's kind of a, as you pointed out, like a pride of, you know what, no one's saying this, I'm going to be the one that says it. Yeah. Like that's, and I'll take you do that for sure. I'll take the heat.

Yeah. And I get kind of like a sick, masochistic pleasure out of doing that. before we move on, I do want to return to this idea of definition of choice because I think the magic of this concept is that if you want to be philosophical, you start to realize that you can expand the definition of choice to encompass almost anything, right? So a few minutes ago, I used the example of like a tragedy, you know, you get in a car accident or you get a cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, you could look at that and say, this is so unfair, it's random. why did this happen? I would never choose this, etc. On the other hand, you can expand your

definition of choice to a point where everything starts to feel like a choice in your life that you had some hand in. So, you know, let's say you get in a car accident. Well, obviously, you didn't choose to be in the car accident, but you chose to drive. And statistically, a certain percentage, you know, everybody ends up in a car accident at some point, a certain percentage of people end up in serious car accidents at some point. And a certain percentage of people end up in serious car accidents at some point. And so if you were living in a busy city and choosing the drive and choosing to be engaged on the road at busy and dangerous times, like that in effect is a choice to a certain extent. And that may sound really obnoxious, like just, you know, splitting hairs. But I do

think there's value in that because it forces you to recognize the tradeoffs that you made. Right. So there's huge benefits of living in a big city and driving off. And as you're enjoying those benefits year after year after year, you're not really thinking about the cost. And then when the cost comes, you want to pretend like you never made the choice. Like that cost was thrust upon you completely outside of your control. And in a sense, it wasn't. Like you chose to be there. You chose to be in the car.

You chose to be driving every day. And statistically knowing that one day you're likely to end up in an accident. So that's a very philosophical way. You know, it may say that may sound like navel gazing, but I have personally found that very, very powerful in my life. When like very unfortunate things that have happened that seemingly were outside of my control, I just zoom out as far as I can until the definition of my choice encompasses whatever happened. And then it removes the power that it has over me.

Yeah. It's like, okay. I chose to be here. I chose to live this way. I chose this lifestyle. I chose to pursue this career to be friends with these people that has repercussions. Right. Change is often born from trauma.

Yes. I brought this up briefly when I talked to Abigail Schreer maybe a month ago. But this concept of post-traumatic growth, I feel like it's so underpublicized. Underrated, yeah. Maybe this is the drum we bang on this year, Drew, is just like, let's be. bang on the post-traumatic growth drum because... I'm in for that, yeah. Trauma is just like, it's such a fucking trendy topic these days, and everybody's talking about

their trauma and how traumatized they are. And it's like, if you actually look at the research of what happens to people post-trauma, a far greater percentage of them will look back after the fact and attribute growth to the traumatic event than people who end up suffering from PTSD. And the reason this is so important is because of the expectation. effect is that people, if you tell people that trauma is debilitating and you tell people that their trauma is going to fuck up their lives and it's going to hold them back forever, it makes it more likely that the trauma will.

And if you tell people that trauma leads to growth and that trauma can be one of the best things that happens to you and that trauma can be leveraged for all these beneficial things over the long run, it's more likely to lead to growth. You wrote an article years ago, how to grow from your pain that we talk about post-traumatic growth in as well. So if people want to check that out, I think that's a good place to start with this. It's a fascinating area of psychology, though, and like a really robust theory that they've tested in all sorts of different areas and everything like that. And again, under broadcast, I don't know why. Yeah, I don't have there. You would think the self-help industry would be all over this shit,

but it seems to be the opposite. It seems to be just telling people how traumatized they are all the time, like almost trying to convince people they have PTSD instead of PTG. Right. And in case anybody's listening to this and is like, oh, well, that's easy for you to say, you know, whatever. This line of research actually started in the 1950s with a guy named Kazimir Dobrowski who took Holocaust survivors. And he tracked them the decades after the Holocaust. And he was the first one who noticed that 10 years, 15 years, 20 years out, a majority of the Holocaust survivors said that they were a better person for surviving the Holocaust. And while they would never go back and do it again and they would never choose to have it happen, that ultimately they ended up becoming a better person for having that experience. And so he called it positive disintegration, which is not a catchy term.

But essentially it was the very early findings of post-traumatic growth. Post-dramatic growth, though, too, the whole body of research, I think does a really good job of explaining, like, there's, yes, you can, there's an opportunity for growth. within this trauma, but that doesn't mean you're not still traumatized by it. The two things can happen at the same time. Yes. Right. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. We gave the example of, in that article of Maya Angelou. Yeah. I love her story. It's, it's, I mean, she suffered a great deal of abuse as a child growing up and then she went on to become, you know, an award-winning actress, and writer wrote the first best-selling novel by a black female. I know why the Cage Bird Singh. I know, fantastic story that she has.

In an interview one time, she said, though, the writing process for her was dragging her pencil over her scars to sharpen it. I love that line. It's so good because it illustrates just how, you know, she's like, this trauma is still there. All of that's still there. And I use it in my life in a way that brings me to a different level, even though it's still there.

It's almost like trauma, I'm going to sound a little woo-woo here. Warning, fair warning. Mark's going to get a little woo-woo here. But I mean this metaphorically. But like it's almost like trauma creates these like energy centers, right? Like the almost like a power plant. Like it's just, it just radiates energy within your mind and your subconscious. And you can channel that energy in any direction you want.

Yes. You can channel it into compulsive behaviors, self-destructive behaviors. like it needs to go somewhere, right? So if you were kind of on autopilot or in a bad environment, it can very easily lead you down a destructive path because you just need to get that energy out in some shape or form. But if you manage to channel it in a positive direction like she did, it can actually propel you.

You know, it can actually motivate you and make you more effective, more productive, more energized. I remember I went to high school with a bunch of guys who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. I remember hanging out with a guy after he got back doing a couple tours in Iraq. And he was one of these guys like he was like going door to door and Mosul and Volusia like knocking on doors looking for terrorists and stuff. So it's like every door, like you just knock on the next door and it's like you could just get shot as soon as the door opens. And he came back, got an amazing job.

started a company, had this incredible, like, just basically just went from zero to 100 on the career ladder in like a year. And I remember talking to him about it. And I was like, goddamn, dude, like, you're killing it. Like, congrats. Amazing. And I remember he just looked at me and he's like, dude, after Iraq, like, everything's easy. Yeah. He's like, there's nothing hard about this. Right. I don't know. It was just one of those moments that, like, I felt like a total bitch. I was like, man, I'm like, what am I doing? No, it does put it in perspective. Back to the channeling thing, though.

It's the research, what the research finds is that it's the channeling itself. Yeah. It's not the trauma, you know, that makes you thrive or get better or whatever. It's the channel. It's how you react to it in the aftermath. And so you're right, going back to the Abigail Schreter thing, if you're telling people that this is just going to fuck you up, you're channeling that in the wrong direction. Yeah.

And it's the process after the trauma that makes a, that makes a, you know, that makes a, you're That levels us up. Yeah. That's an important point to make. This is one of my favorite quotes. This comes from David Foster Wallace. He said, evil people don't believe they are evil. They believe everyone else is evil.

Tell me about this. We've kind of touched on this a couple of times. The older I get, the less I trust people who bang on about how other people are doing horrible things and they don't even try to understand where they're coming from or don't even try to think of what would I do in that situation. It just goes back to there's like that Alexander Soljanitin quote where he says the line between good and evil runs down every human heart. Yeah. Right.

It's all within us. And I think if you convince yourself that you're not evil and everybody else is, you can convince yourself of doing a lot of evil actually in a weird way. I feel like, I mean, I wonder if there's ever been any research on this. But like, I imagine if you could measure self-righteousness in people and then measure fucked up anti-social. behavior. Those two things would probably correlate. So another great quote around this is that Mary Shelley said that every atrocity is committed in the name of the greater good. She has another quote, which is that no man commits evil because he thinks it's evil. He mistakes it for happiness. I just think that the more certain and closed off we become of what's right and wrong, what's good,

what's bad, what's going to make us happy, what's going to make us miserable. The less ambiguity we allow, the more justified we're going to feel when attacking others and treating other people unfairly. When this topic comes up, the thing it always reminds me of, there was like this period in the early 2000s. You probably remember this, where there was like over like five years, there was a series of megachurch pastors, like basically like the most homophobic evangelical church ministers and pastors, they all turned out to be like hiring male prostitutes and like doing cocaine.

with like, like, gay orgies and stuff. And it's like, these are, these are guys who are on TV every week shouting about how, like, homosexuality is an abomination, how everybody's going to go to hell, how the country is going to be ruined. And then it's, you know, it's like, turns out he was in a hotel with a hooker off Craigslist, you know, giving him a blowjob. And, you know, Carl Young had this thing about the shadow self and projection. And I think there's a tendency, that certainty that we develop.

over what's good and bad, oftentimes we develop that certainty because we need it to bury what we don't like about ourselves. Ah. Right? So it's like if there's a part of yourself that you are terrified to confront, one way you can hide it from yourself is just developing this like very strict black and white view of the world and never, ever budging from that. Does that make sense?

That it does. Yeah. And then because then when that shadow comes up, you don't know what to do with it. because you've ignored it for so long, right? And that's where just the heinous awful shit can happen. You see it in politics and everything like that, but I think you can see it in your everyday life as well. Just people, I don't know, when I'm like walking down the street

and somebody doesn't move over, I'm like, what a piece of shit. You know, and I know that's a mundane example or whatever. Drew's Shadow Self. It shows that merges. I'm just driving out here in L.A. Get out of my way. But that's what I'm talking about. Have you noticed those little things in your everyday life?

You're like, oh, I could take this as some dark fucking places if I let it happen. It's also, I think, just an argument to just kind of remain more vigilant and stand up and call out bullshit when you do see it. But also, I think, have a little bit of give people a little bit of leeway, too, when they fuck up. Yeah. I generally find that people with this sort of certainty and I would call it like an almost like an ideological or religious view of the world and of people they tend to be full of contradictions you know there's this thing called the Manosphere and it's the red pill community and it's funny because it's been around forever like it was around when I started in

men's dating advice in the late 2000s it was around it's still around a lot of the same guys are still there, still posting the same shit, which that tells you something. I always feel like you can judge the quality of a self-improvement community by how many people leave it. If nobody's leaving, then it's a fucking trap. Stay away. That is a black hole for sure. So, you know, the manosphere is definitely a trap. It's a black hole. But it's always, I've always found it amusing how these guys, you'll see these guys angrily bang on. I mean, it's just like super sexist and judgmental towards women. And they'll write these like long essays digging into evolutionary psychology and giving

you every reason why women are terrible and feminism is ruining the world. And things are so unfair for men now and how like, you know, women suck and it's, this is bullshit. And I just sit there and I'm like, okay, if women are this terrible, like, why are you literally spending every hour of your free time thinking about them and writing about them? Like, I don't know. The things that I think suck, I just kind of go do something else, you know? Like, I don't pay attention to them.

Like, I go find something more productive to do. There's, like, this weird fixation that a lot of people develop on what they deem evil. Like, there's kind of this fascination or obsession that they develop around it. And, yeah, it just feels very counterproductive, counter to everything that they purport to be saying. Well, yeah, and go back to your point, though. It's like where you, you reject what could possibly reject you. It's like a protective mechanism as well. For sure.

For sure. Yeah, that's the whole manosphere is like that, I think. For sure. So manosphere and closet of gay preachers. Thumbs down on today's episode. All right. What's the next one? The next one, death is a gift that gives life meaning.

Oh, we, we. This is so French. I love it. I love it. Where's my baguette? This is, this is very French, very sart, very, uh, camus, yeah. It is. It's quite existential.

You know, one of my favorite press or media moments, whatever was. So my books are not big in France. They did okay, but, uh, not a huge French audience. And I remember, like one of the only kind of big media opportunities I ever had in France, it was a French journalist, like one of the big newspapers there. And I get on the phone with her. And she starts asking me a couple questions, like, kind of about the book. And we get, like, maybe five minutes into the conversation.

And she's like, she's like, look, I'm really sorry. But aren't these things just kind of obvious? Yes. And I was like, you know, you would think so. And she was like, maybe it's just here in France. But I just feel like everybody knows these things. I do love the French for that, too. They're very honest.

They're very honest. I was like, yeah, I'm definitely not going to get a lot of real estate space in that newspaper. It's like American guy repeats what's obvious. Yeah. What do the French know about death, Mark? So this is my interpretation of it. This is not what the existentialist said entirely. Although I guess this is kind of an extension of it.

But like death is the only really permanent thing. Everything else of value is kind of relative or. There are tradeoffs or interchangeable in some shape or form. Death is the only finality. And so death is what generates scarcity of everything else. Ultimately, we all have a scarcity of time. We don't know how much time. But the fact that there is a scarcity of time is what makes our time valuable.

And the fact that our time is valuable forces us to make value-based decisions about everything else that we do and pursue in life. And those value-based decisions are what makes life meaningful. The fact that I choose to spend my time on a podcast instead of, I don't know, like gardening in my backyard, that feels like a meaningful choice to me. The fact that I chose to spend my life with my wife as opposed to some other woman I dated, that feels meaningful because that time is scarce. I never get it back once it's used. It's gone forever. And one day, it'll be used up.

So ultimately, death is the object that. I was going to try to do like a very poetic metaphor and I just, you know, this is why I write, Drew. I just, you know, you give me, if you give me five minutes, I'll give you a perfect metaphor. But, you know, when I just have to sit here and talk, you're going to end up with a lot of bullshit. So I think in subtle art, I say something like, death casts the shadow by which everything else is measured. Yeah, there. There you go. Mailed it.

Edit that. We're just going to make me sound poetic as shit. Death casts the shadow by which everything else is measured. And I think that is the reason why I think most people have the experience that either when somebody close to them passes away or when they have a health scare themselves or a mortality scare themselves, like a near death experience, it clarifies their values. It clarifies all those decisions that they've been making and maybe the decisions that they have. haven't been making well. So we started the show talking about the importance of choice and how often we make choices without being aware of the repercussions of those choices or the full extent of what we're choosing.

Death is the thing that makes you aware of the extent of what you're choosing. Death is what makes you aware of like, oh, I've been wasting my time with people that don't really care about me. Oh, I'm investing in a career that, yeah, it makes me a bunch of money and gets me a bunch of status and prestige, but it doesn't feel impactful and it's not making me happy. Like, death clarifies those things in a way that nothing else seems to. And I think this is why the Buddhists and the Stoics had this practice of contemplating your own death and seeing the value and importance of that just because it helps you align

your internal compass towards whatever you should be pointing at. There's also in this space, I think there's people, they make a similar point, but I I think it's a little more superficial, just like, yeah, you're going to die someday. Your time is limited. So get busy, that kind of thing, which, you know, there's value in that for sure. For sure. There's a number of different ways you can respond to this, though, too, right? You could just turn to just abject nihilism, too, right?

Yeah. Like, we're all going to die, so what's the point? Anyway, there's a whole other body of research, too, terror management theory that talks about, like, when you're aware of your death and they do all these experiments where they, you know, they call it mortality salience, where they remind people you're going to die, and then they give them all sorts of different tests. they find all sorts of interesting things and, you know, we want to leave a legacy because we're aware of our deaths and it's a way for us not to die and all that kind of stuff. But there's also, there's another side of it too where, yes, that can make you more charitable. It can make you think about your purpose more and all that. It could also make you more materialistic. It can also make you more pleasure-shaking and short-term seeking like, well, I'm going to die.

I may as well get all in really quick too. So I think that's a point that doesn't get made a lot, too. You have to really be careful with this one because I think there is a way, but like, you know, there's like a yolo, fuck it, just whatever. Heedanism all to the max. You know what this reminds me of? I don't know if this is a true story, but I remember reading it about it years ago, is that there was a guy who was suicidal. He had basically planned to end his own life. But at the last minute, he was like, well, you know what? I should go blow all my savings first.

I remember this. So he went down to Mexico and spent all of his money on cocaine and hookers and just like had this insane like two week bender. And then at the end of it, he was like, wait, I want to live. So this is awesome. Okay. Maybe I'm wrong. Okay. I don't know what conclusion we take from any of this.

But I think that's a signal to move on. So bring it back down to earth a little bit here. Are there any experiences you've had with death? that have really brought that home for you. I mean, obviously, you've talked about the one your friend Josh early on in life. That's a big impactful one. Were there any others that you can think of that brought that home for you?

I think a lot of this happened early in my life without me realizing it. Like, I had a number of family members and people in my life who died around me. I didn't realize until I was an adult, and I actually met other people who said that they had never had anybody close to him died to realize how kind of strange my. So, like, three of my four grandparents died when I was growing up. I had two classmates die. My friend Josh died. Like, all that happened before the age of 20.

And then even in my early 20s, I knew a couple other people who passed away in, like, tragic circumstances. So I think I was exposed to this more than most people growing up. And maybe without even being conscious of it, kind of took some of these lessons from that. I'm seeing this a lot now with my parents and that generation of my family, my aunts and uncles and everybody. They're all hitting that age where, sorry, mom and dad, when you listen to this, but it's true. It's like they're all hitting that age where it's like, okay, there's probably less than 10 good Christmases left. Yeah. You know, there's probably

less than a half a dozen family reunions left with these people or all these people. Like, it's, we're getting down where you can probably count the times on two hands of like how many really good years you're going to have with them before the health really kind of deteriorates and falls apart. So that's made me a lot more conscious of take the time, spin the time, you know, the little things. Maybe when my stepmom or my mom. say something that, you know, 10 years ago would like set me off. Now I'm just like, you know what,

let it go. Yeah. Yeah. And just basically be grateful and try to really take advantage of the time that I have with them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what the difference was because I feel like I was exposed to a lot of death too at a pretty young age. It seemed like I went to a lot of funerals before I was 20 as well. Yeah. Friends and family alike. It didn't really hit home for me until a few years ago when my uncle passed away, and I was actually the one who called the ambulance for him. He was fighting cancer and thought he had a couple of years left, but yeah, one day I was helping him in the yard, and we had to call the ambulance for him, and the next day he passed away. And he was my uncle. He didn't have any kids, so he was very much, he was very much an uncle

to us, you know, I'm very much a friend of ours. And, you know, I was just talking to my parents about, you know, they were talking about the village it took to raise their kids and everything. And he was part of that village for sure. And I don't know what it was about him. Maybe it was just like the right age, you know. I was in my mid-up or 30s at the time. And just, yeah, it was one of those things he had just retired too. So he had, yeah, thought he had 20 years ahead of him and he ended up only having like a year or two.

And dude, that's the other thing. Yeah. My dad had a guy who worked for him. Great, great guy. Yeah. He was great work for my dad for like 20, 30 years. great, you know, worked his ass off. And he had this dream.

He was basically saving everything for decades. Because his plan was to buy a sailboat and just sail. I forget what it was. It was like sail from like North America to the tip of South America and back or something. But like this huge kind of epic sailing trip that him and his wife had dreamed about for like 10, 20 years. And every extra dollar went to. saving for that trip, for paying for the boat and buying all the supplies and everything. And he did this for years and years and years.

Everybody at the office knew he was doing it. He retired in like two months later he got a cancer diagnosis. God. And it like that might have been another, because I think that happened when I was probably around 18 or 20. And I remember just looking at and thinking like, dude, don't. wait for stuff like that. Like don't fucking put it on the back burner and tell yourself one day. Like it's, if you want to do something epic, just fucking go do it. No, for sure. I've been thinking about that a lot recently too, just like how fortunate I was to travel when I was young and

yeah and just kind of do it and I was a broke and stupid and whatever. But yeah, no regrets about that. In some ways it's better than you're broken stupid. Oh, it's fantastic actually. Yeah. For sure. you do not actually exist, Drew. You do not exist, Drew. You are a figment of this podcast's imagination. All of the listeners right now, you are listening to a concept and a collection of stimuli known as Drew Birdie. That's right. And Mark Manson. This applies to you as well. You're not about this. No, I'm pretty sure I exist. What do you mean? We have you in quotation marks. What do you mean you in quotation marks? So this is very Buddhist, which is this idea that your conception of who you are is really just this network of beliefs and associations that you've picked up throughout your life. You know, I am a writer. My name is Mark. I am from Texas.

I am a podcaster. These are all simply associations. that I've decided are true, and I can choose to identify myself by those things or not. And in Buddhism, they encourage you to not define yourself by anything. Like, what's there? When you strip away all of these associations, you know, you have a name. One of the things that Buddhists say a lot is, or my old Zen Mashi used to say a lot, is he would say, you know, you have a name, but you are not your name.

You have anger or you have happiness, but you are. are not angry, you are not happy. You have an experience as a student, but you are not a student. So if you are not any of those things, what are you? What's left when you strip everything away? And the truth is nothing. There's nothing there. The same way you invent a concept in your head of, you know, the same way a sports team is just a made up concept of like, Somebody went to a field and painted some lines on a field and decided those 11 guys are going to stand there and those 11 guys are going to stand there. And that's this team and that's that team. It's completely made up concepts that we all get together and agree or real, quote unquote real. Your definition of yourself is the same way.

You painted lines inside your head. You told yourself to go stand in certain boxes and then you told yourself that that was real. we tend to go through our entire lives not realizing we did that. And it's important because so much of our suffering is derived from those lines and those boxes that we painted in our heads and decided to stand in without realizing like, dude, you can just step out of that box anytime you want. Like you don't have to be that. You can just decide like, okay, I guess I'm not that thing.

I'm not anything. And for me, I think this is what. most people, you know, when people are introduced to Buddhism and meditation, this tends to be kind of like the first really profound insight that they experience. And it was definitely true with me. I think it's important to kind of tie it back to, I guess, more Western-style therapy. It's useful because, you know, essentially what therapy is is taking these old narratives of what you decided you are or aren't based on prior things. experiences and helping you evaluate those and question those and decide whether they're true or not

or whether you want to keep them or not. It's essentially like helping you locate where the lines and boxes are that you drew and then helping you step out of them if you so choose. I have almost a perfect example of that, I guess, that has happened. Recently for me, you know, I've talked about this before. I have, I tend to have a pretty avoidant attachment and kind of keep people at arm's length a lot. That's a story I've told myself for a very long time. It's crazy because, you know, when I was doing research and everything like that, I studied this kind of stuff.

So I knew, you know, attachment styles and attachment science and all the research around it and everything like that. And I intellectualized it a lot. And I came to identify as I am avoiding. I am avoiding. Like you're talking, right? That's that identity. I am avoiding and I keep people at arms length and everything like that.

What I've come to find when I started questioning that, not only am I not as avoidant as I think I am, but I can just choose not to be. And like, I've gotten to the point where I was like, oh, I can catch myself and choose not to be and like lean into that instead. Yeah. And it took me far too long, far, far too long. But I've come to that point now. And it's kind of a mind fuck a little bit. And it's scary.

You know what I mean? Like letting that good, because that was such a protective thing for me, I think, for so long. Yeah. It's one of those things that when you do make that. shift, you're almost like angry at yourself because you're like, totally. Wait, this was available to me the entire fucking time and I never took it. Right. Seriously.

But you get so caught up in all these stories and explanations and theories and that, yeah, you lose sight of the fact of like, yeah, you painted a line here, you chose to stand behind it and you can just step over anything you want. I think there's so many instances of that, especially kind of in the modern world. Western therapy or the way we talk about mental health too. Like I am avoiding or I'm anxious or whatever your love language is. I need all this. And it's like, well, okay, can you step back for a second?

And how much of that are you choosing, really? There's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. Right. And it's and this comes back to kind of the trauma thing of like the danger of putting a narrative on the experience before you've like fully had the experience. Like if you tell yourself that being an avoidant is going to prevent you from having intimate relationships, then any time you're confronted with an intimate relationship, you're just like, you're probably less likely to be able to commit. Right. Whereas if you remove that narrative, then you just decide, I'm just going to experience this relationship for what it is and try not to have any judgments or preconceived notions or any narratives around it, then you're probably going to have a much higher probability of success.

And I don't know. Sometimes I just kind of had this thought on the fly. Like, I think sometimes what is useful in psychology and personal development, what is useful for description is not useful for prescription. What I mean by that is like creating these concepts and narratives can be useful to explain the people what's happening, but that explanation can unintentionally prevent them from taking the actions that will make it better. And often the explanations and narratives that help people take action and make it better are very poor at explaining what people are going through.

And those two things probably get mixed up quite a bit. No, but I think you're right. It's the language around it that you use. If you say, in my case, I am avoidant. That's different than the reason I kind of came to this realization was I started saying, I feel more comfortable when I'm the avoidant one in a relationship. Yeah. That completely changed.

my framework, just that little change right there. And it's like, oh, I'm acting in a certain way in these relationships. Yeah. Not necessarily that I am predestined to act that way. Because when you change that language, you open up the potential for, like, if you're just avoidant and that's end of story. Right. And it's like, well, there's nothing I'm ever going to do.

I'm just always going to feel like anxious and, you know, push people away from me. Whereas when you change that, that language, now it's like, well, I'm not. I'm naturally predisposed to feel one way, but I'm also capable of acting and experiencing other ways. Absolutely. And what I found was that I actually have a way higher need for connection than I thought before. Yeah. Which maybe is why you're avoiding that. I was denying that.

Yeah. No, seriously. Yeah, I think that is. I think that's what it is. I was avoidant my entire life. And I remember linguistic jujitsu I did with myself to get me to commit to my wife was basically like, I kept telling myself, you can always break up with her, but it can't be for a stupid reason.

Because every previous relationship, I had just fucking torpedoed for the dumbest reason imaginable. And I was like, if this one ends, it can't be for a dumb reason. And so there was like all these moments throughout like the first couple years of our relationship

where I'd like start getting like really anxious or like worked up about something. And I'd be like, I don't know if I can be with her anymore. And then I'm like, wait a second, that's a dumb reason. Like, just like go, go sleep on it. Try again tomorrow.

And when I, like, created a rule for myself of, like, you know, no ending relationships for dumb reasons. What do you know? I ended up happily married for 12 years. Yeah. It's those reframes like that in those situations around your identities. Just reframe them in a small way. And it can usually really eventually at least lead to a bigger, bigger shift. Yeah.

Cool. Well, I'm not feeling any less French than I was an hour ago. But who knows what we'll feel next time. I think that's it for our episode. So be sure to like and subscribe. Leave a review, leave a comment, comment on my poor, poor French abilities. But seriously, thank you for following the show.

We'll be back next week with another guest. Until next time, say goodbye, Drew. Au revoir. Oh, whoa. Whoa.