SOLVED with Mark Manson - 7 Life Lessons I Wish I Knew Sooner

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

A comprehensive list of lessons you shouldn’t wait too long to learn. In this episode, I’m sharing 7 important lessons I learned far too late in life. I’m doing this so that you don’t have to live through as many clusterfucks as I did to find a bit of peace in life. Some of these lessons you may already know, some may surprise you. But they’re all guaranteed to help you live a better life. This is your one and only chance to not repeat my godawful mistakes. So get into it. 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.com. So for those of you listening who aren't aware, Drew and I are both old. We're old men. We're old people. And there are many things that we learn too late in life.

And so the goal of this episode is to share the life lessons that maybe we're a little bit too slow learning. I don't know if you want to respond. to that or not. You're old. I'm not fucking old. You're six months older than I am. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm I'm old. Drew is sprightly and young and still an innocent day in the woods. These are seven things that you shouldn't wait too long to learn because one day you'll be old too. The first one, and this was actually the biggest for me personally, people tend to respect you in the proportion that you respect yourself. I feel like a lot of young

men need to learn this the hard way because a lot of young men especially have a bit of a chip on their shoulder. They feel like they need to prove something constantly and they need to earn respect constantly. And ironically, it's that perpetual need to impress people or prove something to people that actually makes them respect you less. I look back at my teens and 20s and a lot of it was filled with, I guess you could say, overcompensation for my lack of self-respect. And it took me probably a little bit too long to realize that the way you actually earn respect from the people in your life is to simply respect yourself first. And then from that self-respect, you will do things of high integrity and great value. And that is what will eventually cause people to respect you.

I thought about this one. And I trained jihitsu for a couple of years. And there's this whole like self-defense component to it. And they teach you very early on that if you know how to defend yourself, you're much less likely to have to defend yourself. If you know how to move your body in such a way that, you know, you can take care of yourself, you end up communicating that to other people and the way you hold yourself, the way you interact with other people, you know, the way you look at people, everything like that. So it's a weird kind of paradox where the better you know how to defend yourself, the less likely you're going to have to defend yourself.

It's kind of a case where competence breeds confidence and confidence is that self-respect you're talking about. So that's one way to go about it. But you've also talked about before about the confidence conundrum where how do you be confidence about something when you're not confident about it in the first place? Like there's kind of this catch-22 there, right? But you say something along the lines of in order to be confident, you have to be comfortable being unconfident. Expend on that a little bit for me.

Most people mistake confidence for an expectation of success, whereas I argue that confidence is actually a comfort with failure. So if you look at somebody who's very confident with themselves, it's not that they expect everything to go amazingly. That's not confidence. That's just narcissism. Truly confident people are completely okay with the fact that maybe something they say will get rejected, maybe something they do won't quite work.

It's that willingness to let things go wrong and to live with the consequences that actually generates that sense of confidence in people. But you brought up a really good point, which was basically subcommunication, which I think this is a really big component of this. I don't think people realize how much of our social interactions exist on an unspoken layer of subcommunication. We've all had that experience where we've been hanging out with somebody who's like very needy and desperate and like constantly seeking our validation. You can almost just kind of smell the desperation on them.

And it's a turnoff. It just makes you feel weird. You kind of want to like push them away and tell them to relax. But the funny thing is is that it's not anything specific that they're saying. It's just subcommunicated through their body language, through their anxiety, through their willingness to agree with you on everything. And so I think the same thing happens with respect. People unconsciously look to you to know how they should feel about you. People are always unconsciously looking to see how you feel about yourself to get a baseline

judgment of how they should feel about you. If you feel really good about yourself and you're very confident in your own skin, even on a subconscious level, they will detect that and they will treat you accordingly and they will act accordingly. Whereas if you feel really shitty about yourself and you're constantly looking for something the compensate for that shittiness feeling, they will detect that unconsciously as well, and they will react accordingly. I have this theory about why we have such a visceral reaction to that. And I'm sure somebody else came up with this, but, and I'm sure I just read it

somewhere and I'm parroting it here. Own the theory, Drew. Own your theory. You're allowed to have a theory. Well, somebody will call me out for plagiarizing somebody, I'm sure. It's the internet. We all plagiarized each other. But if you have somebody who is like super needy in a social interaction or social situations of any kind, that's signaling to other people that you're going to be a resource drain on them. Right? Like these people,

they're having to compensate for something. And what you're signaling to other people is that you're going to be a resource drain on me and I just need to stay away from you. And it's such a deep evolutionary thing that, like you said, you can almost smell it on somebody. Like it's a visceral thing for them. I like that take.

And I have not heard that anywhere before. So that is officially Drew Bernie's theory of social neediness. So I think a huge mistake here that people make too is that people tend to confuse self-respect with selfishness. They think that to respect yourself, you basically have to prioritize yourself over everything and everyone at all times. And I think that's a huge mistake because selfish behavior tends to be an overcompensation. It's the people who lack self-respect or who feel really bad about themselves, who feel

like they have to take advantage or try to manipulate people into getting. what they want all the time. True self-respect is kind of existing in a state of not feeling a need to change or be different. A person who has self-respect will go into a situation and they don't need to try to take advantage of the situation because they're already satisfied with who they are. They don't need to try to convince anybody to like them because they're already satisfied with who they are. To me, self-respect is this Zen-like state of not ever needing to prove anything to anybody, including yourself. All right, what's number two, Drew? Who you blame is who you give your power to.

I think this is such an underrated point. Needs to be shattered from the rooftops a little bit more. Maybe we should buy some billboards and put this on it. You know, this is kind of a corollary to the fault responsibility fallacy that I talk about in subtle art. As I've written in many places, pretty much every form of growth or improvement in your life is going to stem from your ability to take responsibility for your current circumstances. People often retort to that with a bunch of arguments of like, well, here are. the XYZ terrible things that have happened in my life and none of them are my fault. So what do you

say to that, Mr. Smarty Pants? And my answer is always like, doesn't really matter. Like, doesn't matter if you got hit by a car. Doesn't matter if a fucking meteor fell out of the sky and destroyed your house. You're still responsible for reacting to the consequences of that. You're still responsible for deciding what that means in your life. You're still responsible for waking up the next day and deciding what you're going to do about it. And the more time you spend pointing your family, and blaming everything else in the universe for all of your issues and problems, the more you're just giving your personal power and agency away to all those things that you're pointing at.

And so if you, Mark, if you could wave a magic wand and you could get everybody in the world to start taking responsibility for one area or one thing in their life, what do you think it would be? There are emotions. When it comes to professional career-oriented stuff, especially in the Western world, I think we're pretty good. were taught at a pretty young age that if you didn't learn your math well enough, like, that's kind of your responsibility. You were in charge of figuring that out. You know, if you get fired

from a job because he showed up late, most functional people understand that that's largely their responsibility. I think the main area of life where people are absolutely terrible at taking responsibility and really, really have a hard time not blaming other people is in their emotional lives, particularly around romantic relationships or family relationships. And so I think it's When people get really upset or really sad or feel really guilty, that's when the finger pointing comes out. And it's like, well, my dad is a total piece of shit. And he was never around when I was a kid.

And that's why all my relationships failed today and blah, blah, blah, blah. And look, that can be an explanation for your problems, but it's not an excuse. There are plenty of explanations for why you feel mad or feel angry or feel upset. But those are not excuses for why you feel those things. and they are certainly not excuses for why you behave the way you did based on those emotions. I think probably the worst and most common error that people make is they feel a negative emotion very intensely and then they act in a really stupid and selfish way. And then instead of recognizing that they're responsible for that emotion and that emotion

drove them to do that stupid thing, they look at the person who triggered that emotion and they blame it on them. That's quite literally what a child does. A child throws a temper tantrum and breaks their toys and then points to their brother and says, he made me mad. If you're a parent, you know that that is not a valid excuse for what just happened. You have to teach the child that it doesn't matter what he did. You have to decide what you're going to do.

Yet so many people seem to make it into adulthood never fully comprehending that life lesson. My biggest personal story around this, which I've written about a number of times, and this poor woman is probably so sick of hearing about it, my high school girlfriend cheated on me and left and left me absolutely destroyed, completely heartbroken. And I spent a lot of years being angry at her, being angry at women in general, being angry at the fucking world for treating me unfairly.

And it took a number of years and a lot of therapy and personal growth for me to finally figure out that, okay, first of all, A, I was not boyfriend of the year. B, there were a lot of red flags in that relationship that I willfully chose to ignore for many years. C, I chose to date her in the first place. I got to take responsibility for that. I didn't raise any of the issues that came up throughout the relationship. It never occurred to me that I could be contributing to a lot of those issues. So today is a wise, mature old man that I am, unlike you, Drew, I accept that, yes, that relationship was a total cluster fuck and the thing that ultimately broke the camel's back was her cheating on me and leaving me. But that thing was a

dumpster fire for months leading up to that point. And I threw my fair share of kerosene on top of it as well. 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. Habiniero? More like Habinier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Which this brings us to number three, which is the quality of your relationships will dictate the quality of your life.

This is one of those lessons that I intellectually understood before I, I guess, experientially understood. If you do a ton of research on what drives happiness and well-being and even things like physical health and longevity, interpersonal relationships come up over and over and over again. In many ways, they are the most consistent finding in all the psychological literature of a better life means better relationships. It means a good marriage. It means a good family relationship. It means good friendships.

It means having a strong community around you that you feel like you're a part of, all the above. And I was late to this party. I think, again, maybe growing up with a bit of a dysfunctional childhood, I became very independent at a very young age. And I adopted a lot of stories and beliefs around not needing anybody being completely autonomous, being self-sufficient, not only financially, but physically, emotionally, psychologically. And I think I resisted this lesson for a long time. My commitment phobia caused me to resist it. I never wanted to stay in one place. I didn't want to stay in one relationship. I wanted to constantly be cycling through friends. And by the time I

got to my 30s, I realized how unsustainable that was, how absolutely exhausting it is to constantly feel like you have to do everything yourself. And as I have settled down a little bit and settled into a happy marriage and a more stable community and lived in the same place for more than five years, I could not have guessed how beneficial it would have been. When I look at my life today compared to, say, my life 10 years ago, it's significantly happier and significantly better. The reasons why are so fucking dumb, I'm just like, why didn't I do this 10 years ago? It's so simple.

It's just really about making the conscious effort of like, yeah, find a community, commit to it. Find a person, commit to it. Fucking settle down, build a routine. That's the 20% that drug you. 80% of it. So this one makes me feel like a bonehead. Well, you've talked a lot about quality relationships. What makes quality relationships too? And a big, big part of that, maybe the foundation of that is unconditionally. Having a relationship for the sake of having the relationship, you know, like you said, when you're younger, a lot of your relationships are very transactional.

I'll hang out with you because you make me look cool. I'll hang out with you because other people think you're cool, whatever. There's that cool in this economy. You've written about this before. As you get older, you can look back and easily see, oh, high school, it's so transactional or whatever, even at a college and stuff like that. But again, this is one of those where a lot of people don't mature out of that. And it's a fish and water, right? They just think that relationships are some sort of transaction that's going on. Could you explain your approach a little bit more to cultivating unconditional relationships? And also, why do you think it's so hard for people to kind of mature into them? Yeah, I think the transactional nature of relationships is a big explanation. I think

for me personally too, growing up around such transactional relationships, my conclusion was, well, if relationships are so transactional and transactional relationships feel shitty all the time because you're basically constantly in a power struggle with the people around you, I'd rather just be alone. Like, that's way more peaceful than dealing with transactional relationships 24-7. What I didn't realize is that you can have non-transactional relationships. You can have unconditional relationships where you simply give value to the other person without any expectation of anything in return. And that that actually generates the most emotional satisfaction and psychological health than anything else. So I guess it was the discovery of what a healthy relationship actually

looks like that finally opened me up to the possibility of like, oh, that's why every single psych study ever done shows that this matters a lot. What was that example or what was that thing in your life that made you realize, oh, I can have these very unconditional and just pure relationships. I don't know if it was any single thing. I will say, like, meeting my wife helped a lot. Meeting her helped because I had already seen what fucked up my previous relationships. And so when I met her, I was like very determined, you know, if this one fails, just don't make it be because of those reasons that the previous ones failed. This is going to sound really stupid, Drew. But I think I was first exposed to this through fucking, I'm so embarrassed.

say this. I think I think I figured this out for the first time. The seed was planted when I fucking studied sales and marketing. And I know that sounds so ad backwards. When I first started my business, I was studying a bunch of sales and marketing and I hated it because it felt so icky. It was all the shit that I tried to get away from in my personal relationships. It was like, oh, if you say this, then that will make them want to buy for that.

And I'm like, ah, it feels fucking gross. I don't want to do that. And then I remember I came across a guy named Zig Zigler, and he had a completely radically different approach, which he was like, here's what you do. You just give people tons and tons of value for free, and then they will want to give you money without you even asking. I was like, that's such a beautiful concept of just give away value and make people better, make people happy, and then just trust that it'll be.

reciprocated in some way because it is it is human nature to like want to give back to people who have given to you. I saw that work in my professional life. And I guess I spent so much of my personal life, especially my dating life, trying to figure out those transactions of like, oh, if I make this joke and if I take her on this date, then she'll think I'm cool and she'll want to date me again and then that will get me to level two and all this dumb fucking stuff like that. I think leaving the U.S. actually really helped that. Because I would say the U.S. is a very transactional culture. I think it's probably why we're so good at business, but a lot of other cultures are very non-transactional at their base. People don't inter-social

interactions with like some ulterior motive to like try to get something out of you. And so I think experiencing that and experiencing kind of the freedom of not having to always be on your guard or trying to like pull one over on somebody was very liberating. And then I noticed that when I came back to the States and I brought that with me, the quality of all my relationships improved quite drastically. I think part of it was seeing the aspect of giving value unconditionally working so well in my professional career that when I started applying it to my personal relationships, it was like, oh, this is how happy people stay married for forever. Now I get it. Yeah, I think you're on to something there, even though it came from a really weird example.

So the next one number four here, people aren't thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are. This is a classic, especially for anybody who deals with social anxiety. You know, there's something in psychology called the spotlight effect, which is we have a tendency to assume that everybody's thinking about us as much as we're thinking about ourselves, which is all the time. But the truth is, is that everybody else is too busy thinking about themselves and worrying about what other people are thinking about them to bother thinking about us. But the funny thing about the spotlight effect is that it's one of those life lessons that you can hear a million times and you can intellectually understand it. But as soon as you go to that dinner party with a bunch of strangers or walk into some networking

event or something, that anxiety still hits you and that irrational belief that everybody's watching you and everybody's like laughing at the ketchup staying on your shirt, it takes over again. And so I feel like this lesson in particular, you really need to build a stack of nobody gives a shit experiences into your life to finally understand that like nobody cares. Literally nobody fucking cares. Unless you're hurting somebody, nobody fucking cares what you're doing. You can do the dumbest shit and people will forget five seconds later. This is probably the biggest lesson that we've been discovering on the YouTube channel with me taking out a bunch of these fans and coaching them through issues. You know, because it's YouTube, we're doing some pretty absurd shit.

And it is even me who's, I've been aware of this my whole life. I've done a lot of crazy stuff in public. It blows my mind how much you can get away with and how much people don't care. Like we just shot a video. We put a guy in a chicken costume and he walked around a park asking people to go skydiving with him and nobody cared. People would kind of like, look at them and chuckle and then three seconds later they're like back in their phone like worried about whatever's on Twitter. It is remarkable how much we overestimate this. We're hardwired to live in small groups of people where it probably actually does matter what they think about us to some extent. But it doesn't that doesn't scale very well to modern society where we interact with a whole

bunch of people who have little to know bearing on our material well-being. And so you're right. You can learn your way out of that. Expose yourself. Not literally. Don't literally expose yourself, but exposed to you. That people might care about it. The thumbnail for this podcast is going to be, quote, expose yourself, Drew Bernie. We're going to put you in a trench coat. We'll Photoshop a trench coat on you.

It'll be great. There's a book about, it's like rejection therapy. It was like this guy, he went out and he was just like, his goal was to get rejected at least one day, every day for a year.

And what he found was that it's really hard to get rejected. It's seriously like people are, they go out of their way to be nice if they're going to reject you. But he just like would knock on a stranger's door and ask if he could play soccer in his backyard. And they'd be like, yeah, sure, go ahead. You know, like it was insane. People just don't give a shit.

This actually ties in really well, too, to I think kind of another bias or assumption that a lot of people have, which is most people are really nice. We're all exposed to the worst fucking people in society all the time because of news and social media. And so we vastly overestimate how shitty other people are. But it turns out, like 90% of the world are just really. really nice people who are happy to help you, like, whatever you need, they're like happy to do a favor or give you a hand. Get off social media, get out to the real world for sure. You'll learn that very quickly. Put on a chicken suit. Expose yourself. Well, okay, so what do you think is your all-time greatest, like not-giving a fuck moment about, not giving a fuck about what other

people thought? Do you have a really good example about that? There's definitely no shortage. The thing that's coming to my mind, in hindsight, maybe this was a, maybe I should have given more of a fuck. I did a speaking tour for my book that was coming out called Everything is Fucked. The problem was I was simultaneously writing two books at the same time. So I finished that book, but I was already working on Will Smith's book. So I had no time to prepare for that tour. And I didn't have a talk ready. They booked me for 19 cities, small theaters, 500 to 1,000 people each. And I had no talk. I did not know this. And I went into, so the first The first date was in New York, and I kind of went into it just understanding I'm about to walk into

a buzzsaw. Like, I'm just going to get up there and riff and hope for the best. And then my plan was, as the tour goes on, I'm going to kind of figure it out. And sure enough, I'd say by the fifth city, I'd like cobbled together a pretty good talk with a bunch of the talking points that worked. But yeah, that first night in New York was just a fucking travesty. And I remember just riffing on it. Like, it reached a point about 20 minutes in where I was like, you know what, if I'm going to bomb, like, I might as well go down in fiery glory. Like, I don't want to bomb being boring. Like, let's at least bomb in an entertaining fashion. And so I just started trying to think of like the most inappropriate things to talk about. And I remember I started talking about, because one of the themes of that book

was AI. And I started talking about sex robots and how sex robots were going to change society. And I started making the argument that sex robots are going to revolutionize sexuality because all the things that you're afraid to try with your partner or spouse, you'll totally try with a sex robot, right? And then I started listing examples. I was like, I would never let my wife lick my asshole, but sex robot. I mean, oh, God, Mark. You might as well find out, right? There was a combo, like half the audience was just dying laughing. and the other half the audience was just absolutely horrified and wondering what they had signed up to.

We went to Q&A shortly after that and things got better. But it's honestly, I look back at that tour and I'm like, okay, I fucking, I earned my stripes on that tour. I put myself through the ringer on that one. There's a fine line between not giving a fuck and not having any shame, Mark, and I don't know about that one. It is a tight rope that I walk often. At least you didn't expose yourself, I guess.

Yeah. Which this does lead into the next one. I like how we're thrilled to find segues. We're not going to force the segue here? All right. Yeah, this one does. So nothing meaningful in life is easy. Nothing easy in life is meaningful.

And my primary note here is explain why spoiled rich kids suck. What do they suck, Mark? As somebody who grew up, I guess, privileged, I was definitely your quintessential, whiny, wealthy kid who didn't want to do anything hard, didn't want to struggle, wanted to stay home in his beanbag chair. and play Nintendo until 4 in the morning and not have to do homework. I just had a really shitty attitude as a teenager. I mean, most teenagers have really shitty attitudes, but I was caught in that mindset of just avoiding discomfort as much as possible. And somewhere around 18 or 19, that flipped,

and I started actively pushing into discomfort. And it was actually the change that that had on me as a person was quite profound. Something unexpected happens when you start actively pursuing uncomfortable things, which is all those things that you pursue take on a much greater meaning and your life feels richer and fuller, which is strange because you're fucking sore and exhausted and stressed out all the time. But I think ultimately my conclusion with this is that there's some sort of mechanism in our mind that the more we sacrifice for something, the more significant it feels. And the less we sacrifice for something, the less significant it feels. And it's funny, I had a conversation just like a week ago

with a guy who's been with his partner for like 10 years and he sees no point in marriage. And I had this exact conversation. And I told him, I said, I am the most unexpected marriage champion. I didn't even think I was going to get married. And the reason is the point is the sacrifice. The limitations you put on yourself, the binding, the social binding that you put with your partner, that is what makes it feel more significant. The fact that it is harder to leave, the fact that your lives are more intertwined, the fact that it is unnecessarily less convenient to break up is what makes it more meaningful. And I was shocked at the difference that I felt pre-marriage and post-marriage, even though our day-to-day life was basically exactly the same. I'm glad you brought this up,

and you just mentioned the word convenience too. And Oliver Berkman talks about this in his book, 4,000 weeks, time management for mortals. Mark, you blurbed this book. Fantastic book. He's got this great line in there about convenience. And he says, convenience, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what's most valuable in any given context. And I think that's just a brilliant line, especially like when you apply it, how you're applying it here as well. And the first thing that came to my mind with this was dating apps. And so it's still in that whole relationship realm. They're marketed. The whole point of them is to remove friction from meeting someone, right, and essentially finding a mate at some point, right? But

you need to stop and ask yourself, is that really what you want? You want it to be? easy to meet someone. And I don't think you actually do. In fact, it should be hard to meet the right person. You should have to, like you're saying, sacrifice something. You have to put your, get out there, meet somebody face to face like we were just talking about. Put your ass on the line. There has to be some sort of barrier for each person to overcome. That's what starts a good relationship, is that there's friction and there's barriers that both people have to overcome. And so I could rant about dating apps for a very long time. So my dating book models attract women through honesty. I kind backed into this concept what you just said unintentionally because that book was written pretender

but that is explicitly in that book and this is what I discovered too you know when I traveled all over the place dating way too many girls I realized that that friction is the point the friction is what sorts the proper people for you and removes the ones who are not going to make you happy like if there's too much friction up front to actually get a relationship going that's good because you don't waste your time and energy pursuing that person. This is why ultimately rejection in dating is a good thing because it immediately sorts for the people who are good for you and the people who are bad,

and it removes the ones who are bad so that you don't invest too much time or energy in them. And to your point, Drew, as these dating apps get more efficient at matching people on very superficial qualities, things like looks and hobbies and whatever, the shit that ultimately doesn't factor in the relationship happiness very much, It's no surprise that people are more frustrated than ever with their dating lives because that initial friction is completely removed.

They're instead being sorted and arranged for superficial qualities that don't actually correlate very strongly with relational happiness. And so everybody's going on a million dates with people that they're mildly into and none of them lead anywhere. And so everybody just kind of sits around and says, what the fuck? Why can't I meet somebody? And the truth is is that you need friction. Sometimes literally, huh? Hey, don't expose yourself, buddy. Say that type of podcast.

Number six, love occurs in proportion to one's willingness to get hurt. Absolutely. And I think anybody who's been through terrible heartbreak is aware of this on some level, but the satisfaction and the intimacy of your relationships is going to come in proportion to your vulnerability within them. So the more you conceal yourself, the more you withhold your ideas and feelings from any relationship, the less satisfied you're going to be with it. The lower the ceiling of satisfaction is on that relationship. It's basically vulnerability deepens the pool. You can play in the shallow

end with people and you can still have a good time, but ultimately the deep end is where the real shit happens. I don't know. That metaphor just fucking died halfway through, but you get what I'm saying. There's probably another exposure metaphor in there too, but we'll shy away from those. You mentioned earlier an early relationship that you had, you know, your high school girlfriend and the pain that that caused to you. And I think that's a pretty common experience for a lot of people early on in life. I know I certainly had early relationships that ended in painful ways, romantic and otherwise friends and even family stuff, you know. And so especially when you experience that early in life in your formative years, teen years, especially, I think, you start to

develop this association between close relationships and pain. And that's another one of those where you can get stuck. We keep talking about maturing out of those. So, you know, how would you convince someone that it's who's been through that sort of thing, much like you have and I have, how would you convince someone that it is worth that risk, that relationships are worth that risk of pain? Well, the opportunity for pain is proportional to the opportunity for intimacy. It's the fact that there is so much intimacy that generates that much pain. The argument is simple. It's yes, if it fails, it's going to hurt and it's going to hurt in proportional to how meaningful the relationship is. But ultimately, you're going to spend more time not being hurt.

Well, okay, time out. Assuming the relationship is healthy and you're with the right people, you're going to spend way more time not being hurt than you are going to be hurt. This kind of comes back to how being alone is better than being with unhealthy people, but being with healthy people is way better than being alone. So I think a lot of people, and I, this was certainly my learning curve, grew up with a lot of unhealthy people, got hurt a lot, decided I'm going to be alone. About eight years into that, realized like, oh, you can't live your whole life this way, started discovering healthy relationships. And sure, even in a healthy relationship, you can get intensely hurt and upset. But the odds are so stacked in your favor. The amount of meaningful, wonderful, joyous time that you spend with each of those people is, is going to vastly outweigh the times that they hurt you or upset you. And I don't know. I just feel like the only relationships that I ever come out of kind of regretting that

I was in them in the first place are the unhealthy ones. Anytime I actually had a really good relationship with somebody and it just kind of fell apart or our interest diverged or we had a big falling out, I've never regretted it. I'm like, wow, I had six great years of friendship with that person. And then six months of like shitty fights and getting mad at each other. I'm like, I'll take that trade any day of the week. Do you think men are kind of worse at this than women? Totally.

I think I find that like, you know, men, you get hurt early on, go through one bad relationship and you're like, I'm done with that, right? Like, I'm just going to do my man shit over here. And I think men are terrible at this. And women are much more resilient when it comes to this sort of thing. I agree. I think there are a lot of reasons for that as well. I also think, I mean, if you look at kind of the biological differences between men and

women. One of the most interesting things to me is that young girls tend to develop verbally earlier. So they develop social relationships at an earlier age than what boys do. And as a result, girls are kind of like a year ahead on the learning curve in terms of verbal skills and social skills, pretty much all through early life. This is one of those things that doesn't get talked about a lot, especially since boys are fucking failing out of school and record numbers right now. But like, if you look at the rate of cognitive development between young boys and young girls, they're not exact parallels. Like, they happen at slightly different times and at slightly different rates. And that early social advantage, I mean, there are a lot of people that theorize that that early social advantage gives them kind of a leg up throughout the rest of life.

A big part of my early career was just that. It's just like unstupefied men. Stop being emotional morons. I will say this. I'm generally impressed with Gen Z. I know that's kind of a controversial statement. Every generation has problems that previous generations didn't have, and Gen Z has its own set of problems.

But I've actually been surprisingly impressed with the social and emotional awareness of Gen Z boys and young men. I play a lot of video games and I watch a lot of gamers. So I end up spending a lot of time an inordinate amount of time watching and I guess kind of hanging around 20-something-year-old guys. And I am consistently impressed at things that they will say or do. And I often think, man, when I was 24, I was not like that. I was not mature enough to say that thing or do that thing.

So I do think it's getting better. I just also think there's a little bit of a backlash that's emerged. Again, because a lot of people see emotional intelligence being more comfortable with vulnerability, being more comfortable expressing emotions, being more comfortable with things like being sad, feeling embarrassed. They still equate that with weakness. And that is a very alluring message for young men, especially young men who maybe been pushed into too many lockers. You know, it's like they wish they were like the big buff dude who nobody could fuck with. I get that. I sympathize with that, that desire. But just given everything we know about human psychology,

it's not a successful long-term strategy for mental health and happiness, period. Last life lesson, be slow to judge. Everyone is doing their best with what they know. I'm coming to the conclusion that this is essentially what wisdom is, is just the ability to reserve judgment and opinion on more things. The older I get, and I know we keep joking about me being old, but I do feel like I'm going to be 40 in a few months. I feel like just in the last couple years, I'm having that experience for the first time my life where I've been alive long enough to not only see myself be wrong once, but like, be consistently wrong about things over a long period of time. There's just an appreciation for that that I don't think you can have until you've lived a certain length of time to see that

happen, right? If you ask your average 25 year old, they're like, oh, yeah, I was such an idiot in high school. I was a loser. But they haven't lived long enough to see that same cycle play out like four different times. Like, I think I was clueless at 35 and I was clueless at 30 and I was clueless at 25 and I was clueless at 20 and I was clueless at 15. And those were all like slightly different versions of cluelessness. And each one was a slight upgrade on the previous one. It's happened enough now that I find myself in more and more situations throughout my life where I just kind of shrug and say, you know, I don't know. I don't know what the fuck's going on. It's fine. I don't need to have an opinion. You're absolutely right.

that I think is the wisdom that is sorely missing from just kind of like public culture today. Trying to develop some sort of compassion for people that you don't easily relate to, who even tries to do that anymore? You get in your tribal camps and everything like that. But I think that true compassion is reserving judgment for people that you don't easily relate to and saying, well, why would they think that, getting curious about things? Why would they think this way? Why would they espouse these beliefs, whatever it is?

And that is sorely, sorely missing, a form of wisdom, like you said. And it raises a question, is the world losing wisdom or is just wisdom not being telegraphed as often? There's also maybe like a little bit of a memory bias here where the things we remember about, say, our childhoods or our adolescent years. Now I'm talking about things in the world, right? Like things leaders said actions that were taken, stories that were popular. We tend to only remember the good ones or the best ones. and remember the wise ones, where it was like, we don't remember all the stupid, horrible shit that was being said and done at the time.

So I don't know. Maybe one of the biggest social issues of the day is that for whatever reason, the distribution mechanisms on the internet greatly favor a lack of wisdom. They greatly favor certitude, judgment, condemnation, moral indignation. They don't favor things like uncertainty, reserve judgment, compassion, mutual understanding, honest debate. And I think that's an issue. I think that is the biggest thing that we kind of need to figure out as a culture. I guess a good way to wrap this up is to urge everybody listening to have some compassion. And when I say have some compassion, what I really mean is leave a five-star

review for this podcast and help our message, help our bullhorn grow a little bit with the algorithms. That's how you can have some compassion for us today. And if you have a lot of compassion, A ton of compassion. What you'll do is you'll share this podcast with all of your friends and family and tell them that if they don't listen to it, they're evil fucking scum and they're the reason that the world is where it is. One of these days, we're going to figure out how to end these, Mark. You didn't like that sign off?

I thought it was a good sign off. I thought it was a good sales bitch. Fucking like and subscribe or you are evil fucking scum. Have some compassion, Mark. I have some compassion. All right. I'll work on it. I'll work on it for next step.

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