SOLVED with Mark Manson - 6 Things to Stop Doing in 2024 to Change Your Life

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

What if the answer isn’t to do more? What if the answer is to want less? I’ve always believed that subtracting from your life can produce better results than trying to add something. Generally, quitting a bad habit, or a bad mindset, or anything distracting, will have a bigger impact on your life than learning more. This episode covers a few things I think we should stop doing to live a better life. Enjoy. Get 10% your first month of therapy at ⁠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.com. That is purpose. That is purpose.com. If somebody is emotionally unavailable to you, you should be unavailable to them. I got off Instagram four or five months ago. I didn't realize just how much I was falling victim to the whole social comparison thing. You know, it raises a really interesting question of like, where is the line between addictive and fun? Drew, what I'd like to do today is just go through a list of some of the most useful things that we have stopped doing in our lives, what motivated or inspired us to stop doing it, and how it affected everything else. All right. So the first one I had for this was stop investing in people who won't invest in you. I just feel like this is another relationship lesson that I had to learn the hard way. I think most people have to learn the hard way, which is if somebody is emotionally unavailable or unwilling to be supportive. or show up or give the time or energy or value to your life, why would you do that for them?

It's just an elaborate form of social torture for yourself. I think what happens, when I look at my own life when I did this and when I talk to other people who are doing this, I think what happens is that it's very easy to treat an emotionally unavailable person as a status game. So like, let's say you're dating somebody and they kind of blow you off a lot or they're a little bit disrespectful. I think a lot of people look at that and they're like, well, if I could just be a little bit better, I'll win them over. And they start treating it as like a

competition almost. So they start jumping through all these hoops and playing these games. And they're like, oh, well, maybe if I do this, then they'll make the time for me and they'll respect me. And of course, that doesn't change anything. And then it becomes something else. And so it kind of sucked into this status game with themselves where they start judging their own self-worth, based on this emotionally unavailable person who's probably not even thinking about them very much. It just creates this very ugly toxic cycle. And I think for some reason, it's very difficult in those situations to realize that the only

correct action is to simply disengage. Like if somebody is emotionally unavailable to you, you should be unavailable to them. Like you should leave and go find somebody else. But I think, again, to a lot of people, particularly insecure people, that feels like capitulation. that feels like giving up, that feels like admitting that they're not good enough. And I guess it took me a long time to realize that that doesn't necessarily say anything about you or your self-worth. It just means they're not the right person.

And the longer you spend chasing after them, the more you delay finding who that right person is. There's a little bit of a danger, though, too, in that because once you do figure that out and once you do disengage, that's what usually makes the other person be like, oh, right? Like when it's a toxic relationship a little bit. They didn't realize what they had until it left. Yes. Yeah. Oh, wait a second. Right. I actually really like that guy. Right. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it ties in well with people who take others for granted. I guess that could be another one on here. It's like stop taking other people for granted. Practice developing appreciation and gratitude for the people in your life and showing it consistently. It's funny because I was on both sides of this. The people in my life who really did care about me, I took them for granted for a really long time and ignored them to chase after people who were

completely emotionally unavailable and who took me for granted. And like, it's the classic story of young insecure people who don't correctly learned the emotional skills of relationships. And this is, this isn't just true in relationships. It's true in friendships. It could even be true in family relationships. I personally find no matter how many times I repeat this, especially on social media, like, it's just a billion people like it. And they're like, oh my God, this story of my life, you know. So there it is. Stop investing in people who don't invest in you. Easier said than done, but yes. Yeah, easier. I mean, all of these are easier said than done. Did you see, by the way, actually, you might have sent it to me. The EU is suing hinge for

creating an addictive app. I looked a little bit more into this. The filing claims that match, which owns all the dating apps, that it's almost like a conspiracy theory, that matches like secretly pairing you with people who are going to, who are going to excite you in the short run and dissatisfy you in the long run, so that the evil geniuses at Match can collect more of your monthly subscription revenue and you stay single forever. I just, I am absolutely blown away. As somebody who has studied relationship research for over a decade now, there are people in this field who have been studying relationships for 50 years who still don't completely understand why some people end up with other people.

You know, meanwhile, the board at match.com or whatever is like programming algorithms to secretly ruin your dating life so that they can get another $9.99 subscription fee from you while you go looking for another date. It's just, it's bonkers, man. Okay, well, here's another one we can talk about. Stop blaming everybody else for your fucking problems. If that's the case, get off the fucking app. If that's what you really think is happening.

That's what I don't have a lot of sympathy for people at all. It's like, oh, you've, you're so addictive and you've made me, you know, ruined my sex life. Like, fuck, come on. You know, it raises a really interesting question of like, where is the line between addictive and fun? I was thinking about this. Like, I play a lot of video games, as you know. and some of them are extremely addictive. And some of those addictive games, I like the addictiveness of it.

Like, I liked that I couldn't put down Eldon Ring for three weeks straight. Like, I loved every second of that. But then there are other games where I don't like the addictiveness of it. I feel like it's like cheap or using my brain in some, like, unsettling or unfulfilling way. And I don't know where that line is. I find it funny with the dating app thing, where it's, Dating should be fun. You should be kind of hooked on it

because it is exciting to meet new people. It's exciting to meet attractive people and get to know them and wonder if something's going to happen. I definitely had a little bit of an addictive relationship with my dating life before apps. It was just instead of apps, I just went to bars all the time

and talked to every hot girl I could find. And sometimes I wonder if it's not that there are algorithms where there were not algorithms in the past. It's that the digital world makes algorithms more apparent. So the previous algorithms for dating was bars, networking events, meeting friends of friends, being set up on blind dates. Those were the old algorithms. And those were also addictive. You were also hooked on that. You were also calling up everybody

being like, do you have any single friends? I'd love to go on a date this weekend. It's just that algorithm got condensed, formalized, and then distributed in this piece of software. that it's a lot easier to conceive of the algorithm when it's in that context. And it's just as addictive, maybe even more addictive. But I don't know, it's like as soon as that context changes, people get really upset about it. Like they blame the company. People like Facebook, right, people were obsessed with their friend groups and what everybody was thinking about them for all of human history.

All Facebook did was formalize it in a piece of code, distribute it, and monetize it. And, you know, now they're the most evil fucks in the world. So I don't know. I don't fully understand how these lines get drawn and why people get upset about the things they get upset about. But I don't know. So would you say that they are reflecting back on us and we don't like what we see? Yes. That's always been my argument with social media.

Now, I do think that social media for people under a certain age is probably bad. I think that's pretty much indisputable at this point. It's like cigarettes, yeah. Totally. Or even drinking. You know, it's like kids' brains are developing, so you don't want to, like, introduce anything into the body that's going to fuck that development. You know, a huge part of brain development when you're a teenager or an adolescent revolves around your social relationships. Like, that's the time in your life that you start figuring out your identity, who you are, developing your self-worth, developing your first friendships.

Everybody knows. Teenagers are obsessed with their social relationships, and it's because that's where their brain is in their phase of development. So if you introduce a piece of software that just, like, puts that on. on steroids, it's like actually putting a teenager on steroids. Like, it completely fucks with their biological development. But like, if you're 40 and you're just bored at work and you just kind of refresh Twitter compulsively, I don't know that that's like an evil empire trying to like leverage your attention, you know, to like oppress you or whatever. I don't know. I think every generation gets really scared and upset at the new technologies, particularly

to new forms of media. And I just don't think this is any different. You know, When we were kids, everybody thought TV was going to ruin kids' brains. Yeah, my mom called it the idiot box. Totally. And I remember growing up, like, I had friends who their parents put them on a strict, like, you know, one hour a day, TV curfew. And they could only watch on Saturdays or they could only watch after they did their homework. The exact same shit a lot of parents do with social media. So it's one of those, like, the more things change, the more things stay the same type things.

Oh, okay, I got one for you. I've stopped comparing myself to other people. and instead compare myself to my previous selves. I think that's been a big one for me lately anyway. Interesting. What inspired that? I got off Instagram four or five months ago, and I didn't realize just how much I was actually falling victim

to the whole social comparison thing until I was a couple of months out. For the first four to six weeks, I was like, this whole get off social media thing, it wasn't really landing for me. And then about six to eight weeks in, I really started to be like, oh, yeah, I don't have that constant gnawing, inadequate feeling anymore that I generally had with if I spent, you know, an hour on scrolling through

Instagram and seeing what all these people from all over the world we're doing. I heard of this concept. I think the author Liz Gilbert talked about it where she said that every past self is an individual and every future self is an individual. So like sometimes when she like wants to get herself to do something that she doesn't want to do, she thinks about future Liz. And she's like, future Liz is going to be so grateful if I do this for her. If I load the dishwasher future Liz tomorrow, it's going to be so grateful that

I loaded the dishwasher. And then, you know, when she wakes up the next morning and all the dishes are clean, she's like, oh, thanks, past Liz. It's interesting that, like, seeing yourself as this not the same individual moving through time, but an infinite number of individuals sliced through time, this comparison piece of, like, not comparing yourself for self-esteem against other people or peers, but comparing yourself against, you know, last month's drew or last year's drew or 10-year-ago, drew, it could probably be a much healthier foundation.

Maybe unless you start thinking like, man, 25-year-old Drew, what a fucking loser. God, that guy, just a total piece of shit. I was super cool back then. You kidding me? 20-5 Drew was like, was the peeked through. You know, you've talked a lot about how you like to track things and, you know, you like numbers and data. But I think really what's underneath of that is you like the self-improvement and comparing it makes you focus on your past selves a little bit more at least.

You know, I joke about, you know, a 25-year-old Drew being a loser, but like I actually like that feeling of looking at myself five or ten years ago and like cringing a little bit. Yes. There's something healthy to that. If you're 40, you should look at your 30-year-old self and be like, oh, my God, what was I thinking? You know, because that's a signifier that you've grown and changed and developed.

The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tigwan, you deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more.

SUV, German engineered for all. Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas, and our potential were never meant to be boxed in. Nothing can contain us. With the support of export development Canada's market insights and financial solutions, you can turn obstacles into opportunities, discover new markets, and keep our nation front and center on the global stage.

The world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca to learn more. This is a tricky one because I think one message that gets broadcast maybe a little bit much is that comparison is bad. First of all, I think social comparison is just, it's an innate part of our psychology. We're humans. We evolved in tribes. We're always going to care about social comparison. There's probably like a healthy way to compare yourself to others and there's a toxic way. Like if you think about somebody who inspires you or a role model, that's a form of

comparison. You know, if there's like somebody in your life that you're like, man, that dude has got to figure it out. Like, I wish I was more like him. That's a form of comparison. But that's a form of comparison that is pulling you forward rather than keeping you back. And I think the trap that a lot of people fall into is they compare themselves in ways that holds them back. They compare themselves to unrealistic images of other people. They compare themselves to assumptions that they have about other people that maybe aren't necessarily true. Or they simply, like, the narrative around the comparison is like, that person's cooler in me, therefore I'm, my life has no value or I'm, I'm a loser or whatever.

It's like, well, no, that person can be cool and you can be cool at the same time. Like, those two things aren't mutually exclusive. So, yeah, it's actually a very nuanced thing that I think just you get this blanket advice that gets thrown around. Like, don't compare yourself to others. Well, it's, you kind of have to,

and it's kind of complicated. Yeah, you can't know who you are except for in relation to other people. That's how we figure out who we are to a large extent. And a lot of that is through social comparison. you can also compare yourself to other people and figure out what you like and the community you might fit into too, right? I think social media is actually very good at that part too,

like where you can find people who are like-minded and have common interest. Social media is very, very good at that. Taking to its extreme, it kind of just sorts us into our tribal camps, though. So you have to watch out for that. Social media is very, very bad at that. And so I think for me when I got off of social media, that was one realization I had that, hey, it's really good for like community building and everything like that in a way, but it's also very bad at celebrating those differences we have. We're either, we either feel inadequate because of the differences we see on social media or we feel indignant that those differences even exist in the world. Yeah. How dare they. Yeah. How dare they have different opinions than me. Exactly. Yeah.

I don't think this started with social media. I just think this is just a facet of the internet or mass media in general. I think like digital life is bad at ambiguity, whereas real life is really, is good at ambiguity. Like when I think back to like social groups that I was a part of regularly, like high school or people I worked with, people you see on a daily basis. Like you might go in on Monday and you're like, man, Janet is such a badass. I feel like so incompetent next to her. She totally knows what she's doing. I have no idea what I'm doing. I wish I was more like Janet. Then you go in on Tuesday and Janet like completely fuck something up and you're like, oh, okay, yeah, she is human. It's actually more complicated than that. And then you

going on on Wednesday and she like asks you for help on something and then you go on on Thursday and she's a badass again. So it's like real life is really good at showing the ambiguity and the volatility of human nature. We don't always have good days. We have very complicated lives. It's not always our best self showing up. Whereas on Instagram, it is everybody's best self showing up all the time, all day, every day, 24-7. It invites comparison to a caricature. It doesn't invite comparison to like an actual real human being who's like suffering and dealing with struggles or the ambiguity behind those struggles of like whether they're actually good struggles or not. I think what also gets lost too is that a lot of the people we admire most were actually very hated at some point.

The classic heroes and idols that people hold up and revere, there's often some point in history where they were completely laughed at or derided as crazy or assholes or selfish or what have you. it's very easy to like lose side of that and just think of the highlight reel and think that your life should be a highlight reel and that's just unrealistic. Stop expecting other people to change. Focus on changing yourself instead. It probably won't surprise people that a person who has built an entire career out of inciting people to change struggles with expecting people to change. that yes um and let me say this i obviously it's not just me i hear from readers all the time that struggle with this as well i think i think where we struggle with this the most is with

close friends and family particularly family members or romantic partners basically a person that you love so much and you see the potential and you're like man if they just did this and this like holy shit they would unlock so much potential and the intention is very very good loving and noble, but what it took me a long time to learn is that even if you can kind of manipulate or coax somebody in the changing for you, the fact that they're doing it for you undermines the value of that change. So like let's say you convince, I don't know, somebody to stop using drugs. But you do it through all sorts of threats and emotional blackmail and intense peer pressure.

Well, now they're not quitting for themselves. They're quitting to prevent pain coming from you. You've replaced one problem with another problem, which is now there's this resentment and manipulation going on within the relationship and maybe a little bit of a codependent dynamic that's emerged because of it. And that's assuming it actually works. 99% of the time it doesn't even fucking work. People just get pissed off that you're trying to control them and change them.

it took me probably too long to learn is that in most cases, not all cases, but most cases, it's actually more effective to simply try to meet people where they're at. And if they are open or interested in potentially changing and that they are open the feedback and they're open to your input, offer that input, maybe give them a nice little nudge in the right direction. But it should be gentle and you should be walking beside them and not. dragging them by their feet kicking and screaming. Somebody emailed in and they said, yeah, my mom always told me you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him love you, which I just, I remember that.

I thought that was a great line. You also had Lori Gottlieb on recently, and she made the point that, you know, one of the reasons it's hard to change other people is other people don't like being told what to do, but it's also really hard to change ourselves. So how are we expecting to change other people around us? I personally think, and this was definitely true of myself, when I was younger, I think a lot of times our intense motivation to change people around us is born out of avoiding some sort of change that we need to be making in ourselves. So it's like, I don't want to admit that I've got some sort of emotional problem going on. So you know what would make it better is if everybody around me changed to accommodate me

and realized how insufferable and unbearable they're being and how much they're harming me and how difficult this is for me, the world doesn't work that way. And it's, again, even if you do kind of guilt them into changing for a little while, you're actually just introducing more poison into the relationship. And it's not going to be effective in the long run. So that's been something that it's been very, I have had to learn the hard way. And I think a lot of people have to learn the hard way. And it's actually been interesting, I think in this scenario, so to kind of bring it back to the job, right?

Like when I started blogging in 2008 and people, basically when people started asking me for advice in 2008, I think I had a very naive view of this. I really did believe that like if somebody email me and was like, hey, I went on this date with this girl and she really liked me, but now she's not responding to my text. What do I do? How do I get her back? I think I was naive and arrogant enough to think that I knew the answer to get her back. And it's funny because the longer I've been in this business, the fewer reader questions I'm. answer simply because I recognize that either A, I have no idea. These problems are so individual and so contextual and so much is based on personal histories and values and beliefs and culture

that like I'm probably not going to give a super effective answer. But also B, it's like even if I could tell you like go do this, this and this, that might not actually end up being valuable. I do think in a lot of cases, there's an importance of simply experiencing it for yourself and learning the lesson yourself, not being reliant on some authority figure or some voice you respect to tell you what to do. This is kind of an irony with the whole self-help industry that I've found is that generally you have people who have never learned to take responsibility for themselves, spending tons of money to go to seminars, to have somebody essentially tell them that their problem

is they've never taken responsibility for themselves, thus taking responsibility for them for their change and just completely subverting the whole point of the exercise. And it's kind of like, I don't know, it's a little bit of a dangerous thing to play with. You have to be like really, really careful when giving advice and you have to be careful when steering or directing people in one way or another. Maybe it's a little libertarian of me, but you have to find a reason than not let people learn the lesson themselves rather than the other way around. to change someone is just kind of set the example. And if they take the bait, they take the bait, right? Then if they come to you and they're motivated to change, then that's much easier to be like,

okay, this is what I do. Try it. Absolutely. It's much more effective to be a counter argument than make a counter argument because people can rationalize and deflect and ignore counter arguments. But when you embody a counter argument, when you like your existence contradicts what they believe to be true about the world, it's really hard to ignore that. They can't just explain that away. Like, then they kind of have to engage with it. You know, Emerson has this great quote. He says, like, I can't hear what you're saying because your actions are speaking so loudly.

Yeah, words don't mean shit. Yeah, you can argue till you're blue in the face. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. Like, how are you going to embody the change in a way that is just undeniable? Which is why when I was a teenager, I thought it was such bullshit when you'd hear adults say, do as I say, not as I do. And I'm like, fuck you. You're the one supposed to be set in the example.

here. Did you ever actually hear an adult say that? Yes, I did. I heard several, several times, won't name names, but I've heard that before, do as I say, not as I do. And I was always like, what the fuck are you talking about? That is such bullshit. I was indignant about that for sure. That's some old school Nebraska child rearing there. I tell you what. Oh, we'll get into that later too. Oh, yeah. We'll have a. parent corner, it sounds like. So what's the most important thing you've stopped doing in your life? Stop burying your emotions and practice healthy vulnerability instead.

I've never had a problem with that. Shut up. Absolutely perfect. Flawless in every way. There are so many different ways that you can bury your emotions. I've tried them all. Let me give us the top three. Got the T-shirt.

I don't know. about the top three. My favorite, though, as I got older, I got really good about talking about and intellectualizing anything around anything to do with emotions. And that is a very, very effective form of avoidance that I've had to deal with. And I think it's pretty common, especially among people like us who get into this whole self-improvement thing and we nerd out about it. It can be a very insidious form of avoidance when it comes to your emotional life. The work I've done with you, too, it's easy for me to do that. It's like, oh, okay, we're going to make some piece of content on attachment or something like that, right? Like, your emotional attachment to other people. And it's

very easy to intellectualize that and kind of bury your emotions when it comes to that. There was a period of my life, and it really wasn't that long ago, probably, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, where I was like having a lot of difficulties remembering that period of my life. Like, it had to do a lot with like a difficult relationship that I was in, a lot of it was due to me, I came to realize. And I was like, I just don't, I don't remember this very well. I remember, I know on some level I knew what happened. I can, I knew something happened and it kind of knew the general timeline, but I'm like, I just don't remember it very well. It's so foggy to me. And so I kept rehashing that and kind of going back over that. And as I was doing that,

some of those same emotions started to bubble up, right? And my initial reaction is to just like shove that shit down, right? Like just fucking. Just fucking push that shit down and not, not address it. Instead, what I did was, you know, kind of took some of your advice and I leaned into it instead. And it's like, oh, no, I do remember that. The reason I can't access it is because I'm not letting those emotions kind of like just be. What it was is I was really trying to avoid taking responsibility for that particular relationship in that part of my life.

And it was really unsettling for me to have to come to terms with, hey, I was being an asshole. I handled this very poorly and I didn't want to face that. That's like an old school Freud thing that I think he was right about, which is our memory removes things that are extremely unpleasant or the things that we don't want to think about. I have absolutely struggled with this. I think a huge piece of unlocking those ignored or neglected emotions is developing the courage to be honest with yourself about why you're upset about something. Like what you just said about recognizing there's a little bit of a gap in your memory around a certain area of your life or a period of your life, I used to really avoid thinking about that. Like I used to explain it a way of like, oh, well, we've all got gaps in our memories. Or like, you know, memory's unreliable.

What I've learned now is that if you find a gap like that, that means that there's probably something important there that you need to start digging for. And so I think a lot of it is just understanding kind of the signals that your own brain gives you, your own methods of, escape and suppression and how to counteract them. Emotions are tricky because they can both be suppressed in an unhealthy manner and they can be overindulged in an unhealthy manner as well. And I think you often see people go from one extreme to the other. So they go from completely ignoring their emotional life and pretending it's not even there. And then when something finally kind of cracks them open and all the emotions come flooding out and they see the profundity of like recognizing their emotional life and being in touch with their emotions, they almost become obsessed with them.

It's like everything is about emotion. Everything is all that matters is how you feel at any given moment. And if you're mad, then everything, the whole world needs to stop and honor that you're mad. And if you're sad or scared, the whole world needs to stop and honor that you're sad and scared. It's like, well, you know, I don't know if the world really gives a shit, but I'm glad you recognize you're sad or scared. Like, that's, that's important. And you should feel that and you should honor it yourself, but then also recognize that life goes on. You know, life is complicated and everybody's got their own thing going on. So this is definitely a balance question more than anything, in my opinion. Yeah. And I mean, the whole thing around vulnerability, though, too, and you mentioned

this, I think it was with Lori Gottlieb as well, that real vulnerability isn't like, like you were just talking about, like the whole world needs to recognize my anger or my sadness or whatever it is and be okay with it. No, real vulnerability is I'm going to express myself with the expressed knowledge that people might not like me, that I might be rejected. That's a tough one. That's a healthy vulnerability, but it's a very, very difficult thing to do for a lot of people, especially when they've not been vulnerable before. It's been interesting and disappointing to see how vulnerability has gotten completely, like, ruined by the internet. It's like, there's no term, there's no term good enough that the internet can't find a way to ruin it.

As you know, vulnerability is a huge cornerstone of models, my first book, which came out around the same time Brené Brown's work came out. And Bray Brown's work describes it in the same way, is that the point of vulnerability is not to elicit sympathy. Sometimes it elicit sympathy, but that's not the point. The point is vulnerability is simply exposing yourself. It's an honest portrayal of who you are, how you think, how you think, how you're. you feel. And what makes it vulnerable is the acknowledgement and understanding that that might be rejected, that people might not like who you are or what you reveal. And that's okay. It's still worth revealing and sharing who you are despite the fact that it might be rejected. And it's actually

that despite the fact that gives it power. What makes two people feel close to one another is when they share things that can elicit rejection from the other. That risk, that emotional risk taking, happens between two people that makes the relationship feel meaningful and valuable to them. When you are quote unquote vulnerable, well, let's call it TikTok vulnerable. When you're TikTok vulnerable, you're sharing things merely to get attention, clout, and sympathy. TikTok vulnerable is actually the opposite of vulnerability because you're only sharing things to elicit a certain response in people. You are sharing things as a means to avoid rejection and as a means to hide who you really are

rather than share who you really are. It looks the same on the surface. You know, a TikTok vulnerable thing might be like, hey, I struggle a lot with self-doubt and depression and it's weighed really hard on me the last year. Real vulnerability will sound exactly the same. It'll be the exact same words. What changes is the intention behind it.

The TikTok vulnerable will share that fact about themselves with the intention of eliciting sympathy in getting a certain type of attention from people, approval from people. Whereas actual vulnerability is just sharing it because it's a significant fact and they just want people to know. Whether it's rejected or not

has nothing to do with why they shared it. There's a freedom that you find in all of that. And it's like when you're being really vulnerable or you're being really honest, you are not having to keep up the appearance of being something you're not. not. And there's a huge freedom through that. Whereas if you're sharing something on TikTok and it's to get other people to send you likes and whatever, there's no freedom in that. You're chained to

whatever everybody else thinks or to some version of yourself that you're not even sure if that's a real authentic part of you. Honesty, vulnerability and freedom are all inextricably linked. The less honest you are, the less free you will feel because you were constantly having to censor yourself or change your views or behaviors to accommodate others, the less vulnerable you are, the less you're able to authentically share yourself. So, yeah, I mean, they're all very, very fundamentally linked. And again, in the episode with Lori a few weeks ago,

we talked about this almost paradox of the rise in mental health awareness and vocabulary and the discussion around these concepts, whereas the mental health diagnosis, like the mental health crisis, is not abated at all. In fact, it's only accelerated. And Lori pointed out that the problem is no longer that there's no conversation around mental health. She said it's just bad conversation around mental health. And I think this is a perfect example of that. So many of these terms like vulnerability, trauma, even just various emotions, anxiety, their definitions have been misconstrued. They've gotten sucked into these status games on social media. And the definitions have gotten warped into something

that is actually in a very Orwellian way, like the exact opposite of what it actually is, right? Like the way vulnerability is expressed these days is actually the opposite of vulnerability. The way trauma is described oftentimes on social media is actually the opposite of trauma. It's just kind of this weird backwards world. I don't know what the fuck's going on anymore, Drew. I'm an old man. I don't either, Mark. I was hoping you would tell me.

Let's help us. Send help everybody. We're awash in the ambiguities of the 21st century. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Well, this one I've brought up before and in previous episodes, stop sacrificing sleep

for productivity or fun. One of the more interesting findings I've seen in the sleep research is that people who are sleep deprived, at first they recognize like the cognitive deficits, the physical deficits, they recognize that right away. But after a week or two, if you keep sleep depriving them, they come back and they say, oh, I've adjusted to this and I'm performing just as well as I was before you sleep deprive me. When objectively, that is just not true. You keep giving these cognitive and physical tests and they do worse and worse.

But they think that they're fine and that they've adjusted. And it's fascinating to me because it's like people think that they're, I don't know, above biology or something. So on a very general level, I agree with you. think when you and I were younger for going sleep, either to party your ass off or work your ass off, it was kind of a badge of honor. You know, I remember when I was in college, people used to like brag about all-nighters and how many days they went without sleeping or how many nights in a row they only slept like three or four hours. I do think that's a destructive status

symbol. Like it's, that shouldn't be celebrated necessarily. But at the same time, man, I had a lot of fun, staying up all night. And I have also had extremely productive periods where I stayed up all night. So for me, this is, I have a mixed feeling about this. I think the difference with me is that I've always slept very, very easily. And I've never had trouble falling to sleep. I've never had trouble staying to sleep. I could sleep anywhere, anytime. It doesn't matter. It's just how I'm wired. And so I think for me, it's probably easier to be flexible around this, whereas I think for you, somebody who struggled with sleep your whole life or someone like my wife who has struggled with sleep her whole life. Like what I noticed with her is that there's very little margin for error.

There are things that I can get away with that she can't, right? Like I can stay up and play video games till midnight and I will still sleep like a baby as soon as my head hits the pillow. Her, like she's, if all the screens aren't off by 9 p.m., she's completely hosed. So I actually think in a lot of ways this is similar to how people are with like alcohol and drugs. There's some people who can go out, have a bunch of drinks, maybe do some drugs, and be good for like a year and like not have any temptation or desire to do anything at all. Whereas there are other people who, if they even take like a sip of alcohol, they just spiral out of control and like the next month is demolished because they just go on this bender. And I think the same might be true

with the sleep thing. I think a lot of this comes down to being aware of your own biology and and how flexible you are around it. You know, it's one of those things. When you say it, I like nod in my head. I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's responsible. That's good advice, true. But then when I think back to my own life, like, some of the most fun nights of my life,

like, would I trade those back for a good night's sleep? No, I definitely wouldn't. Or like some of the most productive sprints that I took in my career, like I probably wouldn't trade those back either. What I would do is I'd be way more selective about it. Like, not just, stay up night after night after night because that was like the cool thing to do and not work super late night after night after night just because, you know, whatever you're hustling, you're grinding.

I think it's picking and choosing your spots and then being very strategic and smart about it. All right. Next one, since we're on the topic of health and being selective about destroying your body, I put stop drinking at least for a few months. I don't want to like hammer the audience too hard with the alcohol thing. I think everybody has kind of sensed how big of a deal it's been in my life. I did a video last year. I think I'm probably going to do another video this year as kind of like a two-year follow-up.

The experience has evolved and changed as time has gone on. And it's not necessarily that anything from that video last year is not true. It's just shit got way deeper than I expected. Yeah. The repercussions and ripple effects. of quitting alcohol has been much deeper than I expected. But yeah, the stop drinking thing, I would apply this to just any drug whatsoever, even the so-called healthy drugs.

I didn't realize it when I stopped drinking, but I had not been 100% sober for an extended period of time, probably since I was like 13 or 14. Wow, really? Like if you remove all substances. Like the last time I was completely sober for multiple. months, I was probably 14 years old. Holy shit.

Yeah. I had the same reaction. That's, I had the exact same reaction. Absolutely mind-blowing. So to be fully sober as an adult for the first time in my life for an extended period of time, it has been very eye-opening. I just think it's one of those things everybody should at least try. First of all, if it's hard, then that's a red flag.

As someone who used to drink a lot and do a lot of drugs when I was younger, I know what everybody's, everybody says the same thing to themselves. Like, oh, I could quit this anytime. It's fine. This is just, it's a thing I do for fun. It's like a weekend thing, whatever. I don't think people realize how much they bullshit themselves and rationalize behaviors. If it's hard to stop, then that's, that tells you something. That tells you that maybe it's a little bit more serious than you thought it was.

But even if it's not hard to stop, if it's relatively easy to stop, you'll have a lot of interesting observations in your life, particularly around the things that you enjoy doing and don't enjoy doing and around the people you enjoy hanging out with and the people you don't enjoy hanging out with. It will help your health immensely. Your sleep will improve dramatically. You'll have better workouts in the gym. You'll lose weight without trying. There's just all sorts of knock on effects that I think get undersold. When people used to suggest to me like stop drinking for a month, it was always for a very superficial reason. It was just like, you're trying to lose weight. You should stop drinking for a month. Or you've been partying kind of hard. Maybe you should stop drinking for a month. never really got deeper than that. So this is a deeper suggestion of stop drinking for a month, particularly if you're like me and you drank regularly for a long time. You might not know yourself as well as you think you do, just a suggestion. You know, definitely. I was one of those where it was easy for me to quit. I just stopped. It was just one day. I was like, this has become too big of a part of my life. I'm just going to stop. It was not hard for me at all. It was funny because my friends would be like, are you okay with me drinking around you? And I'm like,

I'm fine. Chris Williamson has this thing where he says that alcohol is the only substance that people think something is wrong if you don't take it. I had to get a little bit of distance from it to realize, like you said, the person I was when I was drunk was not a good person. I think I had trouble accepting that because I enjoy being drunk a lot. Like, I get very happy. I have tons of fun.

If I'm being honest, obviously my behavior was terrible. If I was to like make a list of all the worst decisions I've made in my life, probably eight out of the top ten, I was drunk. Things that I thought were funny or amusing were terrible. I definitely underestimated the mental and emotional destructiveness side of it. Like I always knew it was physically unhealthy. But like I think I underestimated the mental and emotional toll. It was taking on both me and my relationships. And it's funny like this gets into a weird, a weird thing I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is, you know, when we were growing up, self-destructiveness was.

cool for a long time for like multiple generations from like the 1960s I'd say up until maybe like 10 years ago self-destructiveness was was cool it's like what got you status it's when I was in university the guy who was the drunkest and starting the most fights and doing the dumbest shit got the most attention and he was like the most fun guy at the party and it was like doing a bunch of drugs and doing a bunch of crazy shit, it won you cool points among your peers. And from what I can tell, that was true with Gen X before my generation. And I think Gen Z is the first generation I've seen that that's not the case. And it's not just Gen Z. I think it's just a multi-generational awakening that's happening over the last five or 10 years of like people being like, wait a second,

that's not cool. There's like actually nothing cool about that. Why would you intentionally harm yourself and negligently put at risk other people around you as well? Like, that makes absolutely no sense. So I've been, I've been, like, profoundly fascinated by this trend. And if you go back far enough, if you go back to like the 30s, 40s, 50s, self-destructiveness was not cool at all then either. So, like, we have this weird 50-year window where sex drugs and rock and roll in the 70s and 80s and then. alternative rock in the 90s and the party lifestyle in the 2000s. Where self-destructiveness was cool. It was a status symbol. It was something that people aspire to. It's something that you

got you attention and even reverence from people around you. And it's just such a strange thing. And I don't really know if I have a conclusion or a point, but it's just something I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially as a sober person. I'm not only asking my past self, you know, why did past Mark do that? I'm also asking, why was this a thing? why was this so celebrated? It's confusing. No, definitely. I think you and I too were kind of on the older side of the millennials. And so we did see a lot of that from the Gen Xers, I think, around us, you know, the grunt rock scene and all that. It's funny. So Kurt Cobain's birthday was a few days ago. And I saw a couple of social media posts about him. I was the biggest Nirvana

fan when I was a teenager. And it's funny going back and reading about him as an adult. He sounds like the most insufferable, just unbearably unhealthy person. And I mean, musically, it was brilliant, just an incredible, I still love Nirvana, I still love the music. But it's so interesting looking at it with the perspective I have today. And not just him, but like all of those bands back then. Like it just profoundly unhealthy on mentally unhealthy, emotionally unhealthy, actively destroying themselves. And then being celebrated for it. And on top of of that, you know, they're all like 20 years old and had no life experience. So it's not hard to see why so much of that ended tragically, but then even the tragic ending, like, was kind of

celebrated and held up. I don't know. I feel like one day I'm going to go off to a desert island or something. I'm going to write like an anthropological study of rock music in the 80s and 90s and like how it makes absolutely no sense outside of like some weird form of cult-like religion that we all got sucked up into through MTV or something. I'd read that book. I'd read that book, yeah. Oh, God. It was an interesting time to grow up as a kid

because it was like this in-between phase where we were, we were exposed to a lot of that. And then our generation was like, no, you guys are going to be the good kids, right? And we didn't quite know what to do with that. The 90s is the perfect example that quote that I love, and it's in subtle art and I repeat it all the time. But it's like, if a person does not have a serious,

serious problem in their life. Their mind will quickly set about inventing one for themselves. The 90s is a perfect example of that. The Cold War was over. Absolutely. Economies are absolutely booming. Technology is changing the world. Just an insane amount of optimism. And nobody had anything real to worry about. And so you get all these kind of like fake made up controversies and self-destructiveness, especially growing up in Texas and Nebraska. It was just this revolt against the suburbs. The revolt against the American dream, you know, the white picket fence and the two and a half kids and a dog for no other reason and there was like nothing else to be upset about. Yeah. That's enough of that. We've, we've talked for long enough. Let's let these people go. Everybody listening, be sure to like

and subscribe, but also just follow the show. Like it helps us out, helps us get good guests, you know, helps Drew and I feel good about ourselves because we definitely need help feeling good about ourselves. Just extreme, two extremely insecure middle-aged men here coming together on a Tuesday morning talking about our emotions. Are we middle-aged now? Oh, man. Until next time, everybody.