SOLVED with Mark Manson - Finding Your Life Path, Solved

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

You've been told your whole life to explore, keep your options open, try new things. And you've done exactly that. Moved cities, pivoted careers, taken every personality quiz. But here's what nobody warns you about: all that freedom might be the thing keeping you stuck. This episode digs into a depressed 19th century Danish philosopher who diagnosed our entire modern crisis 180 years before we lived it. We tell the story of Casanova, history's most famous fuckboy, who had more adventures than anyone alive and died completely alone with nothing but 2,000 pages of memories nobody believed. We break down Dan Gilbert's research on why your brain is actually better at justifying your choices than you give it credit for. We walk through Kierkegaard's three stages of commitment, from the aesthetic life of endless options to the point where commitment stops feeling like a choice at all. And we talk about the grief that nobody tells you about when you finally pick one life and let all the others go. Get your free episode guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/commitment/ CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 The Paradox of Too Many Choices 00:08:16 Kierkegaard's Crisis: The Engagement He Couldn't Keep 00:22:26 Anxiety as the Dizziness of Freedom 00:43:30 The Media Environment That Makes Commitment Impossible 01:01:00 Cultural Forces Engineering Indecision 01:11:45 The Aesthetic Life: Casanova and the Trap of Endless Novelty 01:19:24 Five Predictions Kierkegaard Got Right About Modern Life 01:37:55 Why We're Biologically Wired to Keep Our Options Open 02:18:30 The Ethical Life: Learning to Choose With Your Eyes Open 02:41:20 The Cold Pool Metaphor: Why Commitment Feels Like Liberation 02:49:28 Self-Concordance: Aligning Decisions With Who You Actually Are 03:14:01 The Grief of Cutting Off Alternative Selves 03:19:17 The Religious Stage: When Commitment Becomes Absurd 03:30:00 Finding Your Calling: It Chooses You, Not the Other Way Around 03:50:26 Going Pro Before You're a Professional 03:57:10 The Leap of Faith: What It Means to Commit Religiously Check out our sponsors OneSkin: Head to https://manson.deals/oneskin to unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. Get 15% off OneSkin with the code MARK. Notion: Learn more about how Notion can support your business at https:///manson.deals/notion Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/solvedpod or use code SOLVEDPOD at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! Shopify: The only thing standing between you and your own income is getting started. Free trial at https://manson.deals/shopify AG1: For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at https://manson.deals/ag1 BrainFM: Go to https://manson.deals/brainfm to get 30 days of unlimited access, completely free. Momentous: Head to https://manson.deals/momentous to try Momentous Signature Spec Creatine, and use code SOLVED for up to 35% off your entire first order. Purpose: Go to https://solved.deals/purpose to start getting unstuck today. Waking Up: Get started at https://manson.deals/wakingup for a 14 day trial, no risk. ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠.

You know, Drew, people listening to this, they could listen to any podcasts. There's thousands of podcasts out there. There's probably podcasts with more clever intros, better theme songs, more attractive hosts. Actually, probably not. More attractive. Probably not. Yeah. But they chose to be with us.

This is part of their life path. And they are making a commitment to this episode with us. And so I just want you to know that I take that commitment very seriously. I'm not taking that lightly. Yeah, we're putting a label on it. What are we? What are we audience? Yeah, what are we?

Is this getting serious? Are we committed to each other now? I think we are. All right. Welcome everybody back to the Solve podcast, the most thorough and comprehensive podcast in the world on the life's most important topics. Now, if you're listening to this, my guess is that you are somebody with options, maybe a lot of options. You're probably smart, you're definitely curious, you've got interest, you've got potential, and people have been telling you all of this since you were 12 years old.

And you've probably done the thing you were supposed to do with all of that potential. You explored, you tried a bunch of stuff, you moved to a new city, or two, or 14. Maybe you've pivoted jobs or even entire careers. You've definitely read all the books about finding purpose. You've taken personality quizzes and attachment-style tests. And maybe you've even paid a few people to tell you things. things about yourself that deep down you kind of already knew. Chances are you've left no stone unturned. You've explored all of your options and you've learned as much as you could about yourself along the way.

And yet, you still don't really know what the hell you're doing with your life. You're still swiping. You're still browsing. Still keeping one foot out the door of every room that you walk into just in case a better door opens up down the hall. And somewhere underneath all of that freedom and flexibility, there's this quiet, creeping suspicion that you're not actually going anywhere. This commitment-phobic problem that you're experiencing is quite real. It's everywhere. And a depressed Danish philosopher literally predicted it 180 years ago with terrifying accuracy. But more on him in a minute. A lot of people think that finding their path in life is a discovery problem. They think that if they just explore long enough, try enough things, meditate enough mornings,

that eventually their divine path will reveal itself like a magic eye poster. You just need to stare a little longer to see the dolphin and the blurry dots. But that's exactly backwards. Yourself isn't sitting there inside of you waiting to be found like some artifact buried in the backyard. Yourself is built. And the thing that builds it is your willingness to shut some of those doors. Because as we'll see, the people who never commit to anything don't preserve their options. They actually prevent themselves from becoming their true selves.

Here's a harsh truth to start us off. There is no predetermined life path for you to find. There is only the life path that you make. And every year you spend keeping all of the doors open is a year that you hold yourself back from carving the path that you want for yourself. In this episode of Solved, we're going to talk about commitment. We're going to talk about making difficult choices and dedicating yourself to something to find out who you are.

We're going to talk about the philosopher who diagnosed our entire modern crisis of too many options and zero convictions over 180 years ago. And why nearly every single word he wrote rings even more true today than when he wrote it. We're going to talk about the three stages of commitment and what each one looks like across your career, your relationships, where you live. We'll talk about a specific type of dread that you experience when making decisions that define your life and the self-sabotaging strategies that you use to dodge it. We'll talk about why the freest and wealthiest generation in human history is also the most anxious, the most lonely, the most dissatisfied, and the least likely to have someone that they would call a close friend. We'll talk about the psychological mechanism your brain uses to make committed choices feel right, and the one condition that keeps it switched off entirely. We'll talk about how modern culture quietly engineered an entire decade of your life where commitment became optional. This and much, much more.

We're going to argue that you feel lost because modern life has handed you so many options that you've mistaken the act of searching for the act of living. We're going to walk through exactly how committing to a single life path works, what it does to your brain, what it costs, because, well, it does cost something, and why the people who figure it out are not the ones who found the perfect option. They're the ones who found something imperfect and dedicated themselves to it anyway. because once you understand that, it stops feeling like you're missing some crucial piece of self-knowledge that everyone else got handed. It stops feeling like you need another quiz

or another city or another year of figuring it out. It starts to feel like something you can actually do starting today, like right now. I'm the three-time New York Times best-selling author Mark Manson and this is Drew Bernie, my intrepid co-host, producer, lead researcher, and a man whose only commitment in life is to a Persian hairdresser in Westwood named Reza.

And this is the solve podcast, the most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode we aim to solve one serious problem in your life once and for all. Today, we are solving the problem of commitment, how to find your life path, how to choose it, and ultimately how to stay on it. So you and I, and probably everybody listening to this right now, has more wealth, more freedom, more opportunities. more options than any generation before them in their family. Yet, if you look at the data, you and I and probably everybody listening to this are more anxious, more lonely, and more dissatisfied than our grandparents or great-grandparents were. And this creates a bit of a conundrum in a paradox. And I think the best person to address this, I think the historical thinker that just nailed this issue, harder than anybody else

was Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher from the 19th century. Now, as somebody who loves philosophy, it's always interesting to go back and read old philosophers because sometimes they say things that are true and interesting, but, like, it feels less applicable today than it did back then. There are a lot of things, you know, that, like, Kant and Hume wrote and Descartes wrote that, like, I don't know, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal today

or nearly as applicable. I think Kierkegaard is the rare, philosopher that everything he wrote, I think, is more applicable and more of an issue today than at the time that he was writing. When you go back and read his work, it is almost prophetic in many ways of the world that was to come. A quick bio about Kierkegaard. So he was the youngest of seven children. He was born to a very devout and religious family. And in his childhood, five of his six siblings and his mother all passed away before he reached adulthood. And so there's right away, you're just confronted with an immense amount of guilt, trauma, pain, suffering.

And on top of that, to make matters worse, apparently his father was extremely devout, very guilt-ridden, shame-ridden, and kind of took it out on the surviving family members. So right off the back, Kierkegaard grows up with this kind of like morbid, pious upbringing where almost, almost everybody he's ever loved has ended up dead or absolutely miserable. Perfect setup for a philosopher career. But yeah, sorry, go on, go on. Yeah, I mean, not to get off on too much of it, Anja, but it is fascinating. Like, some philosophers were incredibly happy people. Like, if you read about Hume, like, he just seemed like the fucking coolest guy.

Kierkegaard is definitely one of the most miserable philosophers that I've certainly ever come across. Now, all of this tragedy and pain from his childhood is actually quite relevant because once he reached adulthood, he did propose to a woman that he was in love with, a young girl named Regine Olson. And actually, by his own account, the way he proposed is just fucking hilarious. So apparently she was singing and she was holding some sheet music in front of her. And apparently mid-song, he grabbed the sheet music, slammed the book shut and looked at her and said, what do I care for music? It's you I want. Pretty emo.

She didn't really say anything. She went along with it. And almost immediately he was consumed by this deep, immense sense of dread. He believed that he was too sad and melancholic. He thought he was too tormented, that he was going to make her life miserable. He felt like he was too devoted to his career and that he was never going to make time for her. He basically spent the following months just, like, flagellating himself, telling him. telling himself that he did not deserve this relationship. He didn't deserve this marriage.

Now, for those of you who have listened to some of our dating and relationships episodes, you will notice the pattern here of somebody who feels unworthy for love and affection, self-sabotaging and finding justifications to reject love and affection from his life. So, of course, he eventually tried to call it off. Now, Regine actually was in love with him, and so she tried to stop him and reassure him that she did want to be with him. She even at one point threatened to commit suicide if he left her. But that didn't slow Kierkegaard down. He broke off the engagement in 1841, returned the ring by mail, which I feel like is the 19th century equivalent of like texting somebody to break up with them.

Yeah. And then he moved to Berlin. So he like literally got out of the country to not have to deal with her anymore. Now what's interesting is that this event kind of came to define his entire psyche as. an adult, his inability to live up to the most important commitment that he wanted to make with his life. All right, but before we get back into it, a quick word from the people who keep the lights on around here. This episode is brought to you by Notion. Guys, I have a confession to make. My entire life is run in Notion. My whole business is run in Notion. My personal life is run in Notion. It's so

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That's Manson.deals slash Notion. That's Manson.com. And try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. This episode is brought to you by AG1. September is when everyone's calendar quietly turns against them. Summer's loose schedule is gone, school is back, work picks back up, and suddenly there is a lot more competing for the same 6 a.m. that you used to have have to yourself. Now, most of my routine gets renegotiated this time of year, but one part of it doesn't, and that's AG1. It's a multivitamin, pre-and probiotics, and a whole-food nutrients in one serving that supports steady energy production and gut health. It's one less thing to manage

on a morning when everything else needs managing. I've been drinking it long enough that I don't really think about why anymore. But if I'm honest, digestion feels more regular on the days that I have it, and there's a sense of relief in knowing that the nutrition side of things is already handled before my day even starts. Now, I'm not an easy sell on supplements, so it matters to me that there are four clinical trials behind this one. AG1 NextGen combined with a proper diet meets 94% of nutrient requirements, and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome.

Everything else about my schedule renegotiates itself this time of year. This is one part that doesn't have to. So for a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 NextGen or AG1 at Manson.com. slash AG1. That's Manson. Dot Deals slash AG1. Welcome back to the Solve podcast. Let's get back into it. I don't think it's a coincidence that when you look at his philosophy, so much of it centers

around commitments, the inability to make the sacrifices necessary for commitments, the inability to maintain commitments, and the importance of commitment in terms of developing a self or an identity. So both the inability to commit and the consequences of that inability to commit, and the consequences of that inability to commit and the necessity of commitment for psychological health and well-being and happiness. This is the common thread that runs through pretty much all of his work. And his core claim at the time was that one sense of self isn't found. It doesn't just happen to you. It is built through the commitments that you choose to make. Basically,

the sacrifices that you choose to take on in your life for someone. greater good or some greater pursuit, that ultimately becomes how you define yourself and how you live with yourself over the long term. Now, this was incredibly profound because this predates Freud by like 60 years. And as we'll see later too, like the modern psychological research backs it up, that he was all and all correct. Now, the reason we all struggle with these commitments, Kierkegaard argued, is that we all have a fundamental tension within ourselves, which is the tension between our potential and our necessity. Basically who we are and who we are kind of stuck being, but also what we could potentially become. This tension between the infinite and the finite,

the infinite number of things that we can imagine ourselves as becoming versus the finite amount of things that we actually are between freedom and stability. I can imagine an infinite amount of selves that I could potentially pursue and try to become. Yet, I am only one self, and I only have so much time and energy. I only have one body. I only have so many hours in the day. So I am inherently limited by how much I can pursue. Now, Kierkegaard argued that a proper, healthy self or a healthy identity is a person who is able to balance those two polarities within themselves, that they are able to see the possibilities of what they could become, but also be grounded in reality and understanding who they are and understanding that a lot of those possibilities

are not practical or reasonable. And what he pointed out is that when we get lost in one of the two polarities, that's when we start to experience existential dread. Now, this is super, super important for the listener because Kierkegaard's idea of dread or despair is not just a feeling. It's not about being sad. It's about a lack of self. It's about a lack of self-definition and identity. So his argument was that if you are too confined in the finite, right, if you are overly aware of your own limitations and you have too much structure around you and you have too many barriers preventing you from pursuing your potential, you'll feel stuck and you will forfeit your sense of self and identity, you'll outsource it to all of the barriers and stuff

around you. On the flip side, if you are stuck in the infinite, if you were stuck in the constant potential, the constant pursuit of some new novel self, then you will also experience a sense of despair because you will never know who you are. You will never have a clear self-definition. You will simply identify with whatever is the most interesting or exciting at any given moment. the idea of balance and this is what you're kind of getting at. It's actually very, very difficult. We talk about like work-life balance and then there's some like, you know, entrepreneur bros or whatever out there saying, no, you don't need that, you know, just go all in on this and whatever. Actually, it's very, very difficult to find balance. And I think this is the tension you're talking about.

This is it really landed for me anyway when we're researching this episode is the actual difficulty finding that balance between the infinite and the finite, between all the possible selves and the one that you actually need to be or are becoming. It's very, very difficult to find that balance. And that's the whole episode I think is going to be about this. But for me, this really landed, this point that he tries to make. Sitting in that tension, that's going to be the most difficult part. And it's finding that balance and holding that tension. It's not just committing for commitment's sake or staying open for autonomy's sake. There's a seductiveness to each poll. Right. Right. It is seductive to just say, oh, well, there's nothing I can do. Like, it's, I,

The world sucks. I have no opportunities. People around me are mean. They don't, they don't give me a chance. There's a seductiveness to that because then you don't have to take on the responsibility of your own agency. Similarly, there's a seductiveness to having infinite possibility and always imagining new possible selves and new things that you could pursue because there's there's kind of a dopamine treadmill to that. You get to dream about all the benefits without ever actually having to make a sacrifice or make a commitment to anything. And I think this is one of the most important takeaways of Kierkegaard, and I think what made him so much more insightful than a lot of people who have spoken about these issues since is that Kierkegaard recognize that you could be busy, you could have a really full, interesting life, you could be having tons of fun, you could have tons of friends, tons of interests and hobbies, and you could be full of despair. Because all of that fun is actually a distraction from the fact that you don't know who you are. You know, Aristotle talked about the golden mean and how, you know, this is very much

Aristotle's framework. And as we've learned on the show, Aristotle's always right. Kierkegaard makes the same point, which is that this tension is never solved. It's only managed. It's essentially you just get good at finding the balance between understanding who you are and your limitations and accepting them. And then also imagining new potentials for yourself for new things for you to pursue or new options. This is actually very similar to we did a change episode a few months ago. And in that, we talked about how the self is actually, there's kind of three different parts of the self.

And there is a base layer, a personality layer that is largely unchangeable. And the best you can do with that part of yourself is simply understand it and gain awareness and accept it. Whereas there's kind of a behavioral component of yourself, which, is always changeable and always has new potential. And so the best thing you can do for that is to get really, really good at adopting behavioral change. Now, the other point of this is that when you do commit to something, that infinite potential side of yourself doesn't turn off. It's always still going in the background. You still have to feel the pull of everything that you could be, but you have to consistently choose not to pursue it. Like, that is what the commitment is.

You're saying it's not like a one-time thing. It's like a general mechanism for continually choosing that. commitments are not done once. They are done on a regular basis. And it's funny because this maps really well to a lot of marriage advice that I've heard over the years. You don't just make the commitment once and then you live happily ever after. It's like a marriage or a long-term relationship is something that you have to continually choose over. Both people have to continually choose over and over and over again. Because if you're with somebody for a long enough period of time, there's always going to be opportunities for you to grow apart, to find. other interests to distract yourself, to hook up with somebody else, to become attracted to somebody else. It is this regular discipline of like coming back in choosing the same thing repeatedly over a long period of time. Right. And that's where the balance again is found. It's not, oh, I could know, I'm going to just go explore all the other options or I'm just stuck in this, so I'm here anyway. It's that continual choosing, that continual holding of the tension. When I was going back through this, it made me think about the self-help industry,

kind of conventional woo-woo self-help. I really feel like what they're doing is they are taking people who are in despair because they feel like they have no agency and no potential and no infinite options. And they are training those people to be in despair with infinite potential and infinite options. Yeah, yeah. Again, the balance is the hard part. Right. It really is.

So you take people who have never had to make a commitment in their life because all their commitments were forced upon them. And so they're in despair. and then you just train them to never make a commitment in their life and just think about all the amazing shit that they could become while not actually ever moving towards anything or sacrificing for anything. Yeah, and that's got this where you get, oh, cut off all these people and screw them. Right. Go this way. Yeah.

It's like as soon as, you know, everything is problematic and traumatic and you just keep chasing the next high. Another of many reasons that I think Kierkegaard is the philosopher that best describes the 21st century. he was the person who originally popularized the word anxiety. His description of anxiety is really interesting because it actually has little to do with fear. He called it, quote, the dizziness of too much freedom, which is basically that when you have so many options

and there are so many potential outcomes, you actually feel uneasy by being forced to experience any single one of them. Because as soon as you experience one of them, you are shutting off the opportunity to experience all the others. It kind of creates this panicked stasis of not wanting to do anything, but also feeling bad because you have so many opportunities in front of you. You should do something, but you don't want to do something because then that shuts off all the other opportunities. And so you just you just feel stuck and worried. The metaphor he uses is like standing on the edge of a cliff, right?

And looking down and you're like, oh, my God, that's the anxiety he's talking about kind of, right? It's this vertigo you get. It's not the fall, really. It's not the space there. and it's not all inside your mind. It's kind of the interaction between the two, the dizziness of freedom, what he's talking about,

the anxiety like that. And he makes this really cool point. He's like, you know, a rock, if it's just sitting there, the rock sitting next to you doesn't have that anxiety, right? It's only that you have the freedom to move in that situation

that gives you that anxiety. So it's only being an aware being, having self-awareness and having the freedom to choose, to do something that causes that anxiety. And so he even says, says like the depth of your anxiety is actually like proportional to the depth of your potential spirituality even. The more anxious you are, the more you realize like, oh God,

there's all this possibility in front of me. Right. And the more possibility, the more anxious you become because you're, you're forced to make even harder decisions every single day. Right, right. Total reframe of the whole like how we think about anxiety, I think. And I thought that was a really cool metaphor that he uses. A metaphor that I'm going to use probably multiple times in this episode, to me, it's just the best way I can describe the experience of, emitting in the face of intense anxiety is that it's it's like jumping into a cold pool. The worst part is actually standing on the outside looking at it and thinking about it. Just fucking do it.

Like, yeah. And you're thinking about all these reasons to not do it, all these other, you're like, oh, I could go get in the hot tub. That's exactly what he's saying. Yeah. But then once you jump in, there's this initial shock and then you're like, oh my God, this is so nice. Why was I so worried about this?

And actually, I don't want to get out because it's so. nice and refreshing. Okay, that's a better metaphor than jumping off a cliff. So yeah, let's go with that one. I'll, uh, I'll send Kierkegaard in my notes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. An important point he makes, though, too, I think is that anxiety isn't fear necessarily. Like, he talked about fear. Fear, fear has an object. I'm afraid of that big scary wolf out in the woods or the dog coming to bite me, whatever. There's an object of fear where anxiety, there's possibility itself, the way he's using the word anxiety. There's no real object to it. It's just a sense that we have. And I think it's probably kind of a default. state of ours, right? Like, that is our default state. Did it become that way when we had all these

possibilities? I think it became that way when we had all these possibilities. We're going to get to that in a little bit because he actually talked about that with the fucking printing press, much less social media. And we talked about this a little bit on our anxiety episode. There's like a clear cause and effect of fear, right? It's like there's a lion over there. It's growling at me. I'm scared. Anxiety is sitting by yourself in a savannah, imagining that there might be a and at some point in the future and then feeling uncomfortable about it.

Right. There's nothing realized. Yeah. There's nothing realized. It's simply, it's fear of potential. The profound connection that Kierkegaard made was that that potential

is inherently scary. And I think the other brilliant insight he had is that that scariness is not the same thing as fear. Fear always has an explanation, whereas anxiety is often just like, I don't know, I just fucking, I'm terrified.

And I have no real. no idea why. I'm just sitting here on my phone, like, freaking out. You mentioned the pool metaphor, the cold pool metaphor. Do you have any specific examples of that? I know you do. I would say every relationship I've ever committed to, I've felt some degree of that. Like, there's just been an intense level of resistance kind of in the immediate moments prior to the commitment. I would include getting engaged with my wife in that as well. Interestingly, not the marriage itself, I think it's the engagement was kind of that big leap. This episode is going to be very near and dear to my heart because I really was this guy

who kept all of his options open and like was actually extremely good at creating optionality everywhere in his life. And I felt it backfire throughout a lot of my 20s. Like I felt the dissatisfaction. Like it was the more I traveled and the more experiences I had and the more people I dated and the more opportunities. I created for myself, the more dissatisfied I became. And I had not read Kierkegaard at that point, but I quickly started to realize that I'm like,

no, I think this is actually the problem. It is the optionality that is making me dissatisfied with everything. I need to learn how to like settle down and pick something, pick a place, pick a person, pick a career. And I would say all three of those decisions were like three of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. I'm going to, maybe I'm jumping ahead here too, but I'm going to make the prediction as well that you went kind of extreme in those areas as well. And I think you got a much clearer idea of that where somebody like me, it's been a lot more subtle of a problem, which is actually more insidious. So that's a little, I'll just, I'll leave it at that. How about? I could see that. You see what I'm saying? I could see that. I mean, my personality is just all gas, no break. So the benefit of that is that if, if I've made a bad decision, I find out sooner.

You had the benefit to the other side of that you are paying attention. I think a lot of people will go extreme and not pay attention. So there's that. And I've known those people. Yeah, for sure, for sure. We will probably talk about some of those people. Yeah. Whereas like I'm saying on the other side where I've been a lot more subtle about it and not as, not quite as extreme.

And it's harder to pinpoint sometimes. Yeah. I feel like the digital nomad lifestyle has gone through some interesting phases over the last 20 years, You know, back in the 2000s when I started, it was unheard of. It was like a very radical lifestyle. It was like my family thought I was crazy. My friends thought I was crazy. Like, I mean, people literally thought I was like trafficking drugs or something because

they didn't understand that you could just work from a laptop in Argentina and like make a living. I think once you got to the 2010s, it became very cool and fashionable and aspirational. And I think that really peaked during the pandemic. And I feel like there's. a bit of a backlash that it's beginning to happen. And what I have noticed is that most of the people, including myself, who live that way, we all kind of ran into all this stuff that Kierkegaard's talking about, is that it's like, it's fun for a few years. But then at a certain point, the optionality starts torturing you. And it really, like, really torturing you because it is,

you start agonizing over what are objectively very dumb decisions. And that the, the dude not deserve to be agonized over. And so a lot of us just got off, got off the roller coaster and like pick the place and settled down. And everybody I know who has done that is much happier for it. It's one of those like, I'm glad I live that way, but I'm also glad I stopped. The people I know who are still doing it, I think there's like a certain threshold that once you're past it, like, you kind of don't come back. And I think everything that we've talked about, you know, this balance between the infinite and the finite and possibility and necessity. it's a skill, like learning how to pick something and sacrifice for it and own that sacrifice,

even on the days that you wake up and you fucking hate it. You know, like there are days I wake up and my wife drives me fucking crazy, but you stick with it, like knowing how to stick with things through that. I do believe it's a skill and I think it's a soft skill. It's a very intangible kind of emotional skill. And if you have not developed that by a certain age, like you're really setting yourself up for a lot of struggle later on in life. To Kurekiragard's point, that is what a self is made out of. Like a healthy ego is a narrative

of self that stretches long into the past and the future. Like that is what keeps us happy and stable. And if you're never able to commit to anything, then you're not really going to be able to write that narrative of your past very well. And you're also not going to be able to have a clear narrative of your future. And so at a certain point, you're just adrift. and I think a lot of people today are just a drift. So this feeling of being a drift, of having too many options, this is very indicative of what Kierkegaard considered

the aesthetic stage of life. And he actually had three stages that he identified that people have to go through to find their commitments, to find their life's path. Now that first stage is the aesthetic stage. The second stage is called the ethical stage, and then the third stage is the religious stage. And we're going to construct the entire podcast,

on Kierkegaard's three stages, and we're going to go really deep on what each stage requires, how you fall into it, how you get out of it, how you transition to the next stage, so that you can end up in a place where you feel like you have some powerful, meaningful life commitments. Yeah, and let me just say the religious stage doesn't necessarily mean you have to be religious. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Kierkegaard used the word religious, not literally. It is metaphorically.

There was this guy, the Walter Kaufman in the 70s, who kind of followed up with Kierkegaard. He was like, okay, Kirka, he's got this cool framework around all of this and not making commitments and making commitments and all this. He wrote this whole book on like how we go about doing that, so like common ways we go about doing that. The one section that I found was really interesting were these 10 ways he came up with that we avoid commitments in our life. He called this tendency like decidophobia, okay?

He coined this term, it's another type of dread, or it's the same type of dread, I think, that Kierkegaard was talking about. And it's the dread that comes with making decisions that shape your own life when your eyes are wide open. So holding that tension, right? We don't like that tension, like we've already said. So he came up with these 10 ways. I don't think I'll go through all of them here, but there's a few that I've just found really interesting that I want to highlight. One of those being drifting, what do you call drifting? There's kind of two versions of this, okay? One is where you go through life, you go along with just the existing order, what society tells you, what your parents tell you, what the school tells you, go with the flow,

that's drifting. You don't have to make a decision there. You don't have to make a commitment. Somebody else has made it for you. You don't have to sit with that tension. And that's how you avoid it anyway. The other is you just reject all structure. So we've kind of already, there's people who, like we said, we already know these people who just reject everything. And they're like, no, I'm not going to live anything like this. And so, again, you don't have to make the decision. You don't have to make the commitment to anything there either. The interesting thing about that, though, and Kaufman notes this, is that that that, often turns into a hunger for commitment after, like you said, most people will see like, oh, God, this isn't working anymore. And so they'll swing really hard the other way and go for a

commitment rather than just drifting along. Another one he points out is marriage. Now, there's a caveat here. He calls this kind of like the big one or the primary one that people will get into a marriage just to like not feel alone anymore or to just resolve that area of their life. I know a lot of people like this. I've had several friends who've gotten divorced and they're like, I got married because I thought that was the thing you just do, right? And they're like, I just wanted that part of my life taken care of. Obviously, that's a bad reason to get married. Kaufman isn't saying everyone does that. He's saying there's actually, you know, marriage can be a very life enlarging thing for you too, as long as you do it with your eyes wide open, right? As long as you

know why you're getting into it. The other one I wanted to point out too, he says the way we avoid really hard decisions, religion. Okay. I'm not going to shit on religion here because there's a caveat out to this one as well. But he says that religion, it really reduces decisions you have to make by just supplying all the rules for you, right? Here's the book. Here's the commandments. Here's the 10 things you can and can't eat or whatever it is. The problem he has with it is that most believers have never really questioned it to begin with, right? They were just born into a system and they just accepted that. He was totally a fan of like if you're in a religion because you've chosen it and you've doubted things, you've went through all the stages of the, like,

really exploring it and identifying with it eventually and accepting that and holding that tension. Like this could be complete bullshit. I don't know, but I'm going to choose to believe it anyway. Again, he's not shitting on marriage or religion or anything like that. His main point throughout this whole thing was you're making these decisions with your eyes wide open and holding that tension. One of mine is like, I'll stack the deck. Like I'll come into something and be like, well, I'm going to get into a relationship that I'm not super invested in anyway. you know, just because it'll end and it's fine and I'll all be okay with it. That's not really a

decision at the end. That's not a commitment at the end of the day, right? Like that's one I use anyway sometimes or, you know, it used to be that way with jobs with me too. It's like, ah, this is fine job. I'll take it for now. It doesn't matter if I lose it or not. It's hard because I think not every decision deserves like a full, roaded commitment. That's a good point. And I think if we approached every decision as a a full-throarly commitment, we would exhaust ourselves and we would actually drive ourselves a little bit crazy. These are like heuristics, right? Of like, you're outsourcing a certain percentage of decisions with kind of the understanding of like, okay, maybe it's not going to be perfect,

but I'm not going to have time to think about all this stuff or deal with all this stuff. So it seems to work for other people. I might as well do it too. I do think some of that is inevitable. I think ultimately, and we'll get to this later on, ultimately, like, we all need at least a handful of things in our lives that we do feel fully committed to with our eyes open, as Kaufman would put it, as though we have opted into it. I do think it's that perception of agency and choice that matters so much. We all have commitments that we don't really feel like we chose, and so we don't identify with them that much. but when you do feel like you chose a commitment, then it becomes part of who you are. You develop a pride, a sense of self around it,

and then it really starts to matter, and it adds a lot of meaning. There's one point two that that Kauffman makes in this book. Sometimes it doesn't always look like the cytophobia either, right? You can take the marriages, you're getting married because you love this person, and that's what it looks. Okay. One decision in my life that I made, though,

I don't think I've ever told you about this. I was actually accepted into an occupational therapy program. Really? So this was my whole, I don't even know where to start, honestly. But I took a- Buckle up everybody. No, no, no. So I took a-

Drew's life story. Here we go. If ever won't be that bad, no. I took a fifth year in college. I had a super senior year. That's what we called it back then. Ostensibly because there was one class I needed to take and it wasn't offered until the next semester.

So I was like, oh, just take the whole year. And like, yeah, but, and I loved college, too. So I was just doing that. But I went through that. And then I still didn't know what I wanted to do at the end of that. that five years of education and exploring. So I was like, oh, I had a friend whose dad was an occupational therapist and I really liked him and he let me shadow him and stuff like that. So I got accepted to this occupational therapy program was fully planning on going. And then the lab that I was

working in as an undergrad, they offered me a full-time position. But it was only a one-year contract because they only had funding for one year. And I was like, oh, great, I can do that instead. And it's only a year. And then I can go decide again. So I kept putting it off like that. It seemed rational and reasonable at the time from the outside that it was a fine decision. But honestly, what I would, it was just a psychophobia is what it was. You know, so it doesn't always have to look like, like, like, oh, I'm just avoiding this decision. In that case, it really didn't look like I was, I had all these reasons for it. It's like, oh, no, I actually, I want to go into this field instead. And there's this position that opened up and how lucky am I. And I've been working with these people and I

know them and I know it's, you know, stable and all of this. So I feel like the cytophobia is kind of like a more practical way of describing what Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith, living in bad faith. So in Sart's framework, you know, we are all making choices in every moment of, every day of what we pay attention to, what we pursue, what we care about. And that responsibility that comes with all those choices is incredibly burdensome because it's like, who knows if you're choosing the right thing. And it basically implies that every problem in your life is your responsibility. So people find ways to avoid that and Sart called it living in bad faith, but it basically was like outsourcing your responsibility to other people or other things. And I feel like Kaufman's Decidophobia framework is kind of like a bullet list of all those ways that we tend to do that. We look for situations like that of like kicking the can down the road or just following along what our friends are doing.

It's easier than having to think about it for yourself or just getting married because that's what you're supposed to do or just, you know, believing the things that. that the church you grew up in believes it because that's just easier to do. As we'll see, we're going to get in the Kirkregards framework. The process here is first learning to open your eyes and question what you're deciding and then recognizing that you don't necessarily have to make that decision and then coming back later and making that decision with full consciousness, owning the decision, owning the sacrifices that are required of the decision, and then accepting it as kind of part of your identity or who you are. There's an amusing subgenre

of Kierkegaard that deals with the press in the media. Yeah. And I actually think it's incredibly timely for the world that we live in today, but it's also just kind of funny. Back in 1845, there was a literary reviewer who talked a little bit of shit about Kierkegaard and a local tabloid. And Kierkegaard, of course, just being a bundle of sunshine and joy, didn't take it very well. He got like very, very butt hurt about it. And so he decided to kind of like poke the bear a little bit. And he he wrote some disparaging things about the publication and the author and made fun of his his ideas and his work a little bit. And

in Kierkegaard's mind, he was stoking an intellectual feud with another intellectual and that they were going to argue ideas to ideas. What he didn't realize is that most people don't care about ideas. They just enjoy reading about somebody shitting on somebody else. And so what ended up happening is that this publication just started roasting Kierkegaard brutally over multiple months and like getting into his personal life, making fun of what he looked like, how he walked. They dug up the stories about Regine and just tortured him about how stupid he was and how he was like too afraid to marry this girl and how he's all alone. and everything, like, just absolutely roasted him to the point that people would actually stop

on the street and point at Kierkegaard and laugh at him and be like, oh, are you the guy in the magazine? Oh, my God. Ha, ha ha. So obviously, Kierkegaard didn't enjoy this very much. I don't think anybody would enjoy it, but especially a guy like him didn't really take to it. What's interesting, though, is that Kierkegaard was astoundingly brilliant. And so what this inspired in him is some of the greatest philosophy and writing about media and journalism that has ever been put to page. He basically took all of his personal grievances and turned it into philosophical works that critiqued just the whole profession of journalism, the whole apparatus of media, and what the effect of widespread media and the printing press was having on society at large.

So, Kierkegaard's argument, he made this argument, and his essay called The Present Age is he said that it created an environment where people are able to disseminate opinions without any accountability for those opinions. Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar, right? So he said basically any jackass can just go, you know, pay 10 cents, get a bunch of pamphlets printed, start putting them in on street corners, and say whatever the hell they want about anybody.

In a lot of cases, these people were publishing anonymously. There were no repercussions. there was no fact-checking. There was no, like, I think back then there were probably no libel or slander lawsuits. So it's just, like,

rampant disinformation going everywhere, all over the place, all at once. The second thing is that he noted that this media environment created this kind of nebulous sense of, quote-unquote,

the public opinion. Now, he brilliantly broke down the fact that public opinion is, like, not really a thing, right? Like, it's the public, everybody,

it's thousands, or millions of individuals who all have their own opinions and all have like very nuanced perspectives on all sorts of different issues. But when taking an aggregate, it just seems like this one massive blob of sentiment. It's like an abstraction almost. It is. Yeah. There's nothing real to it. There's 100%. Okay. Okay. And what he noted is that this kind of our inability to conceptualize public opinion or recognize that it's a bit of a mirage. It doesn't really exist. he said that journalists will leverage this to their benefit, right? So they will publish a bunch of stuff talking a bunch of shit about Drew Bernie, right?

They'll come back a month later and they'll say, well, public opinion is that Drew Bernie is like a really terrible person. Right. And so they will seed public opinion by what they publish. And then they'll come back later and say, well, this is what the public thinks. So we're just reporting on it. And this is something, I mean, you still see this today, right? And he noticed how pernicious this is and how it breeds kind of a certain amount of, distrust in others and within society. And obviously he was kind of on the butt end of the joke of that,

but it really concerned him the social direction that this would take culture and intellectual discourse. One of my favorite quotes by any philosopher ever is Kierkegaard. I love this quote so much. He said, if I had a daughter and she became a prostitute, I would spend every day of my life trying to save her, trying to correct her ways. if I had a son and he became a journalist, I would disown him on the spot and never speak to him again. Wow. Okay. Yeah. That gives you a sense of kind of where Kierkegaard put the mainstream media. The reason this matters, and this is extremely appropriate today, is that he said that it created this social, this kind of widespread media in this like phantom public opinion that everybody is trying to live up to even though like it doesn't really exist. it creates this effect on each individual, which he called leveling, which is that it creates an incentive to not stand out in any distinctive way, to kind of bring all of your impulses and desires back to the baseline medium of the public opinion, right? Like he noticed that people generally outsource their decision making and they outsource how they see things. And so if the handful of newspapers and magazines are telling them that everybody thinks this way, they will kind of default to thinking that way as well.

And so what it does is it takes all the kind of spiky, unique individuality of each person, and it levels them all out so that they have the same opinions about all the same things at the same time about everybody. This prevents an ability to commit because by definition to commit to something, you have to be willing. to suffer for it. You have to be willing to stand out. You have to be willing to do something that most other people are not willing to do. And so if you are constantly being incentivized by this magical public opinion to temper like the more extreme aspects of yourself, then you'll never feel at liberty to make any of those commitments because everything you want to do is what everybody else wants to do. He is a great quote from the present age where he says, a public contrary to an individual is an abstraction. It's a group of spectators who observe and gossip but never make a

commitment. I'll talk, no walk. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because as soon as you commit to something, you are by definition standing out. You are telling everybody like, hey, I'm willing to lose your approval for this one thing. And I think social media is kind of just taking that. First of all, it's globalized it. And second of all, it's kind of put it on steroids because it's available 24-7. I mean, at least back in the 1840s, you could throw your newspaper away and, like, go sit in a corner or something for a couple days. Today is just, it's everywhere. It's in front of you all the time. And his argument is, I mean, this does not exist without mass media, right?

I mean, that's what you're saying. And so he called this 180 years ago, and it's only gotten worse. I guess with that interlude in the middle war, you said about, you know, the centralization of all the information, whatever. But even then, I guess you could argue, there was a homogenizing factor at that point. I think in the case of both of Kierkegaard's main arguments, A, things have gotten worse, and B, they're more true now than they ever were, right? Like, it's, on the one hand, it's like the optionality today is more abundant than it's ever been, right? And that Kierkegaard would say, obviously people are more anxious than they've ever been before. Like, by his definition of anxiety, this is exactly what you would expect in a world full of abundance and opportunity and freedom and infinite information, right? And then on the other hand, he would say, obviously you would expect culture to get more homogenous for people to become more susceptible to group think, not less. Like when you and I were kids, right, and the internet was coming online and everything, like the big kind of utopian promise of the internet was like everybody's going to have access to everything. So everybody's going to think for themselves, right?

Like you're going to be able to see all sides of every issue. And so everybody's going to make their own decisions. and it's going to be amazing. And I think Kierkegaard would actually make the point, no, no, no, the opposite's going to happen because the more interconnectivity people have with each other, the more this specter of an imaginary public opinion hangs over each individual.

And we're just going to go to it looking for... Yes, and the more... The more people feel like they must default to that opinion. It becomes more of a liability to think for yourself under those conditions than less. Our generation, you and I, we opine all the time of like, oh man,

remember before smartphones where you could just like be a fucking idiot and nobody cared, you know, like, maybe you could go get hammered, nobody take a picture

or a video of you like, and make fun of you the next day. Like there was a freedom to it of not having that connectivity. I just heard like, young people don't really dance anymore

because this, I just heard, yeah, because like you're going to get video, you're going to be on video if you're going to dance somewhere. That's leveling. That's leveling.

It's right there. Perfect example of leveling. They don't drink as much anymore. They don't date as much anymore. They don't have sex as much anymore. They don't even ask each other out anymore. Juregard would look at this and he would say, like, we're leveling the fuck out of everybody right now. Because it is the more interconnected everything becomes, the more of a liability it is to stick your neck out for anything.

Yeah, I don't know if you notice this like towards the end of your travel years or whatever, but everywhere I'd go. But if you went to a big city somewhere that had been even somewhat capitalistic, I guess, you know, and its influence, everything was. kind of starting to turn into the same. I think the whole travel boom you were talking about in the digital nomad thing, a lot of that was, oh, we're going to build an infrastructure around this and this is how you live this life. That was a leveling thing even for that, you know, where it once was a thing you did to assert your individuality, it became something that you actually became a part of the public. It's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but I do think that's true. That's actually something than a couple of friends of mine have noted.

I don't travel nearly as much as I used to, but I have some friends in the travel industry. and they still travel all the time. And they've noted that they're like, every place is feeling the same. They all have the same restaurants, the same hotel chains. They have the same amenities. You go to the same parties.

And it's the same people everywhere, right? It's everybody's like taking their Instagram selfie and drinking their bougie martini and eating their gluten-free diet and everything's becoming the same. Let's talk a little bit about some of those modern forces that have continued since Kierkegaard. I want to dig into some of these anyway.

There's probably a ton out there, okay? But there's kind of three big ones that I've come up with, and maybe there's others when you can come, you can name as well. But, you know, there used to be these rituals around going through phases of life, even rights of passage, if you look like traditional societies today, or actually lots of societies up until recently had rights of passages, right? Where it marks some end of one period in your life and then a new period began. Okay, so there was this guy, Arnold Van Ginnett, I think that's how you say his name.

He kind of identified these three stages of a right of passage. that you would go through, and it seemed to be pretty universal. And like, for whatever reason, our minds and our development kind of gravitates towards these. And if we don't have them, something goes wrong. Okay. So the first one is separation from the old identity, you know, a lot of times it's from, you know, childhood to adulthood.

There's some sort of right of passage that happens. Like in traditional societies, there's usually some break. Like, you're taken away from the group for a while and then you're taught the ways of the men or the women or, you know, whatever. So there's some sort of separate. period. But then there's an in-between phase, too. So you don't just go right from, I was this old thing into I am this new thing. There's this in-between phase. And then you do, when you do re-enter back into the group, then you're seen as a new member of the group almost, right? Your old

identity is gone. You have a new identity in this. So him and some other people, this is the other guy, Victor Turner, they argued that like doing away with those rights of passages or those rituals around, you know, transitions in our lives, that's come at a great detriment to us. there's no clear, okay, you were this thing, now you need to be this thing. And you have to commit to that new thing. There was like almost a script for you. Maybe not a script, but there was just an expectation of it in some way. Maybe you had to figure it on your own, but there was an expectation for you. Okay. This Victor Turner guy, though, he argued that what modern culture has done has done away with the ritual, but we never did away with that in between face. So we get stuck in it. And he called it liminality. And this is a big word in anthropology. if you've ever taken any anthropology class, that word liminality or liminal phase will come up. And it just means some in-between phase where you're not quite the old thing,

you're not quite the new thing yet. You know, yeah, okay, go off to university or college. Maybe that's kind of one sort of. Yeah, but it's, okay, so this is really mapping really well onto, I think, conversations of extended adolescence. Like, if you go back to our parents' generation or especially our grandparents' generation, it's like, by the time you were 20,

you were married, you had a house, and you had a job, And you probably had a kid on the way. Like, and you were a full-blown adult. You looked like an adult. You sounded like an adult. You acted like an adult. These days, it's like people are behaving as though they're adolescents, like well into their 20s, sometimes late 20s, sometimes even early 30s.

It is that liminal phase that you're talking about, right? Like they're stuck in that in between where they're like kind of their own person, but they're also like not committing to anything. Yeah. Yeah. And not defining who they become next. I mean, I definitely had that. Me too.

Anyway, you know, went to a, went to you. University, like I said, stretched that out as long as I could. Yeah. And then like grad school and I was kind of like, oh, just keep going here. Let's just keep going. And yeah, I definitely had that. That is actually another thing I wanted to bring up, this idea of emerging adulthood, though. This guy, Jeffrey Arnett, who coined this emerging adulthood term.

This is back, I think probably the 60s, 70s is when this really started to happen in Western societies anyway, for sure. It's this period defined by exploration, by instability in your life, by focusing on yourself. and that feeling of being in between. And one of the markers of this phase, if you go and ask someone like, oh, you know, are you an adult? They won't say yes or no. They'll say in some ways yes, in some ways no,

which is kind of that liminal in between phase that you have. It was a result of cultural forces anyway. So from like the 70s up until like the mid-90s, you know, median age at marriage was 21 in the 70s for women and climbed to 25 in the 90s. I think it's up to it's up to the, almost 29 now in the 2020s. 23 for men back in the 70s,

27 in the 90s, it's 30 for men now. For age of marriage, 6, 7, 8 years for each gender. College enrollment was an interesting one. So that was only like 14% back in the 70s. It reached about 60% in the 90s kind of level, has leveled off since then. So more people going to college, need more education to participate in the workforce.

That extends, that liminal phase of emerging adulthood, age at first childbirth, that when you have your first kid, that's steadily climbed. More women entering the workforce. All of these things kind of came together to produce this new. It really wasn't a thing until the mid-20th century and beyond, where we have this new phase where it's like, you know, this, this, the liminal phase where you're not quite a child, but not quite an adult anymore. Yeah, I feel like there's, there's kind of two sides of this. Like, there is the structural economic side, which is simply that the economy is more complex and well developed than it's ever been, right? So it takes that

much longer to arrive at a point where you were educated enough and skilled enough to to make that career or lifelong commitment. I have sympathy around that. That makes sense to me. Also, women joining the workforce, right? They're joining that elongated process. But then there's kind of the social and cultural side, which is that we were exposed to so much more at such an earlier age.

Like our grandparents' generation, they probably were only aware of like half a dozen life paths that they could go down, whereas we were told, you can be anything. You can be anything. And we were probably aware of dozens of life paths that we could go down. Like kids today are literally aware of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of potential life paths. So the paradox of choice and the anxiety that comes with that excess of life paths and opportunities, I think it weighs on people longer. And then of course, they look for ways to live in bad faith. They look for ways to shirk the responsibility of having to make a choice. And we have way more. access to distractions to avoid making a choice today, too.

Oh, exactly. The last kind of big cultural force is very tied in with this one as well. There was this guy, Zygmunt Bauman. He wrote this book called Liquid Modernity back in, like, early 2000s. And he explained some of that economic and cultural scaffolding. Sounds like an expensive drink at a shitty, shitty nightclub. Liquid modernity. Like a bad marching bar. All the, all of two liquid modernities, please. There were like these economic forces. When the economy became much, more dynamic and required a more dynamic workforce. You know, the old saying about like, oh, people used to work for the company for 30, their entire careers, you know, the 30 year career or

in the coal mine or whatever, that just doesn't happen anymore. And not only does it not happen, but he says it's usually in your economic interest for you not to stay in one spot so long. And he said that that culture, that idea really spread out into the wider culture around relationships or around whatever it is careers or friendships or where you live. Commitment to something he said became an economic liability and people just started applying that to all parts

of their lives. Like one example he gave was, you know, that I guess it wasn't really common for businesses to have return policies before and then that became a very common thing, right? Then we apply that to like a relationship. As soon as it starts you know, not meeting our expectations, take it back.

He kind of names it the shift from marriage to cohabitation. And he meant that in a broader sense, not just marriage and cohabitation. Literally, he meant that on that. There was a big shift from marrying somebody before you cohabitated, and now you cohabitate before you marry, if you marry at all. But he said it was you can apply that to anything, the place you live, the job you're in. I think his big takeaway, though, was that where we went from like this industrialized,

more centralized economy to a more decentralized one and dynamic, there was just a loss of trust across the board, or a loss of trust in institutions, in others, and he said even in yourself too. When you don't trust anyone around you or even yourself, it is a lot harder to make commitments. It seems like a liability to make a commitment when you're in a low trust environment like that.

I just had like a realization while you were describing that, which is that one thing that's very different between, say, an industrial economy and a service economy, is that in an industrial economy, the skill sets that you develop don't really transfer, right? So if you've spent 20 years being a coal miner, it's not like you can just pick up and go learn how to like refine oil next week. Whereas in the services economy, skills are highly transferable. If you are a legal aid for a law firm, like you could probably go get a job at an insurance broker, you know, doing something else, you know,

handling contracts and stuff. There's just so much more mobility across. cross industries, that then it does make sense to not stay in one place for too long. And think about that too. If you think about how somebody as a, as a worker would approach that, they would say, oh, if this is the case where I do have all these transferable skills and this economic landscape is changing so quickly, it benefits me to be quote unquote resilient by kind of building a portfolio of jobs or careers or skills or whatever it is rather than committing to any one thing. So there's a big incentive for that. Yeah, and you probably maximize your earnings by moving around more rather than less. Yeah, I think especially like people in the tech industry, you know,

there's kind of like that idea of the portfolio career. It maximizes, you know, your earnings, your potential earnings throughout your career. You are destabilizing your personal life, your relationships, you're maybe you're moving the different cities and your identity, right? Because if you've, if you've worked in four different industries by the time you're 30, it's like, who the fuck are you? I mean, do you really know who you are and what you stand for? in that case? Those are kind of some of the three big cultural forces that we've seen over the last,

not quite 100, you've 75 years or so, maybe more. There's a lot of incentives out there for you to not commit. A lot of dizziness of freedom. A lot of dizziness. A lot of anxiety. Yeah.

For the rest of this episode, we were going to frame each chapter as one of the three stages of Kierkegaard's framework of making lifelong commitments and finding one's true path. So he had three stages, These were explained in two of his books.

One is either or, which he talks about the first two stages, and then Fear and Trembling, which he talks about the third. And according to Kierkegaard, you can't jump ahead. You have to go through all three. You have to experience the downsides of each of the first two in order to find your way to the subsequent stage. So his first stage is called the aesthetic stage, and this is the person who's adrift.

This is the person who is chasing every option, every opportunity, keeping every door open. It never commits, is not making decisions, is trying to avoid cornering themselves into one option. And Kierkegaard had some, some harsh words for these people. The second stage is the ethical stage. And the ethical stage occurs when you realize that the aesthetic stage is leading nowhere. It is its own subtle form of prison. It is keeping you just constantly anxious and on the lookout for the next new shiny thing. The ethical stage is when you realize, okay, I need to make some commitments. I need to choose some things that matter to me more than others. And so let me make those choices. Let me make those sacrifices.

Now, to live in the ethical stage, you have to be very aware of those tradeoffs and those costs that you're making. If you believe you're committing the things, but you don't really think you should have to sacrifice anything, Kierkegaard would argue that that's not really a commitment. That's just delusion. So the ethical is somebody who is taken on willingly certain sacrifices and compromises to dedicate themselves to something that they believe is important. But what's interesting about his ethical stage is that he kind of frames these commitments as something that is like calculated and very rational, right? There's like an ROI to each of these commitments and the person has kind of sat down and been

like, okay, yeah, I think marrying this person will go well. Let me go ahead and go for it. Kierkegaard would argue is not really a full-fledged commitment. it is like part of a commitment but it is not the full experience that one person can get from giving their life to something or someone and this brings us to his third stage

which is the religious stage and it's funny because I remember the first time I read Fear and Trembling and I realized that the whole book was about Abraham and Isaac I was just like oh God I just had all these flashbacks of like my fucking church groups and Bible study I was like really dude like you're gonna make me sit through this

this actually unbelievably powerful book, incredibly profound. I love that book, and I was very surprised how much I loved it. I think Kierkegaard chose to call this stage the religious stage simply because it is the only word that does justice to what the experience is. This is where you get into the idea of a leap of faith and just faith itself. Probably the best distinction between the ethical stage and the religious stage is that the ethical stage is a rational commitment to something, a religious stage is, by definition, an irrational level of commitment to something. You commit to it, for the sake of committed to it. Yeah.

And if it kills me, so be it. So just to recap really quickly, what we've established here is that Kierkegaard argued that the self is built. It's not found that your life path is carved out with a machete and not stumbled across. We talked about how anxiety is the dizziness that comes with freedom, that it is the unease of too many options, too many potentialities, too many possible selves that you could step into. Because of that anxiety, because of not wanting to close all the doors that we could potentially walk into, we find ways to outsource our decision making. We find ways to live in bad faith,

to shirk the responsibility, to let other people and other things decide for us and then blame them when those decisions go wrong. Then we talked about how this problem is bigger than ever today, how Kierkegaard identified these tendencies in the 1840s just because he thought there were too many magazines and newspapers out. Like imagine if he had access to TikTok. Dude, I feel like Kierkegaard would be the all-time best Twitter account. Like, it would just be scathing and so fucking insightful. We talked about some of the structural changes that have happened over the last 100 years

that have made this experience inevitable. But at the end of the day, it's impossible to form. an identity, a self, and to feel peace with oneself without these lifelong commitments that we've made to a handful of things and a handful of people. So I think all this sets the stage really well of we understand Kierkegaard's basic ideas,

his frameworks, the introduction, the definition of anxiety, the intertension between our potential and the reality of our limitations, and why we feel so adrift, why more potential, more optionality doesn't make us happier, it actually makes us more anxious.

All of these factors, I think, set the stage for really digging into Kurek regard's first stage of commitment, which is the aesthetic stage. Now, in the next chapter, we're going to go deep into what the aesthetic stage is, how we all have to get through it, what the experience of living through it is like,

and how we can get trapped by our own optionality and our own potential. We're going to talk about the many ways that we avoid having to make decisions for ourselves, that we avoid taking responsibility for the decisions that we do make, and the false impression that having more options is always a good thing. We're going to use as an example, another historical figure, who I think exemplifies the aesthetic stage perfectly.

It is definitely somebody that everybody listening to this has probably heard of. Maybe the most famous playboy fuckboy in world history. A full time, yeah. It is Casanova himself. most people are familiar with the name, they're familiar with the reputation, they're not familiar with his actual life and what he went through

and tragically how he died. So we will get into all of that. We will get into the optionality trap, the paradox of choice, surviving the aesthetic stage and finding your way to your life's first basic commitments to get out of that stage.

Stay tuned. But real quick, a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Brain FM. So as you guys know, I'm pretty open about having ADHD, and for years, I thought my focus problem was something that I could out-discipline. You know, I just had to try harder. I just had to focus more. I had to cut more distractions. I had to chug more caffeine.

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I find it interesting that the phrase finding yourself implies that there is something external that you have to go searching or exploring for. That like yourself with a capital S is like hiding under a rack or buried in a closet somewhere. And if you just like signed up for enough class pass gyms or went on enough hinge dates, you would magically find yourself. Yeah. And sure enough, this is often the conventional wisdom, right? People tell you, like, get out there, explore, go to new places, meet new people, try new things. And like, sure, there is some value in that. But I don't necessarily think that is exactly how you find yourself. In fact, I think Kierkegaard would argue that that is a very efficient way of avoiding yourself. And so in this chapter, we're going to talk about what happens when exploration goes too far, when not. novelty seeking prevents you from finding out who you are in your life rather than helping you.

And we're going to start with the historical figure that took exploration and novelty seeking to the logical endpoint. You've probably heard of him. His name is Casanova. Yes, that Casanova. And while his story is exciting, it is maybe a little bit more tragic than you would suspect. So Casanova was born in 1725 in Venice. His parents were two actors. His father, he never really knew, died when he was eight, was never around in the first place. And then his mom was touring Europe all the time. So she basically just left him with his grandmother and he barely ever saw her. Now at the time, Venice was kind of like, I don't know, like the Las Vegas or New York City of Europe. It was where all of the fun was happening. It was where carnival originated. It was full of parties and masks and big feasts.

and festivals and celebrations. And so young Casanova grew up in this world and this environment. It was a very hedonistic culture at the time. He got a law degree. Then he went to seminary. Then he got expelled for sleeping with too many people. So then he tried to become a soldier, decided it was too boring, too structured. He tried to go back to the clergy, but he passed out drunk one too many times,

he got kicked out again, studied violin for a while, tried to join an orchestra. and then supposedly, as he claimed, he saved a rich nobles life, and that noble became a patron of his. Started giving him tons of money. Casanova immediately began spending all of his money, spent it gambling, spent it going out chasing girls, spent it traveling, buying expensive clothing, basically just burning through everything.

Eventually, he gets kicked out of Venice. He travels around Europe for a while. it's the same pattern everywhere he goes. He shows up. He's incredibly charming. He's incredibly charismatic. He looks like a noble. He acts like a noble. He's extremely well-dressed. So he ingratiates himself with the local aristocracy, seduces a bunch of guys' wives, creates a scandal, gets kicked out, and then has to move on to the next little fiefdom or kingdom where the whole pattern plays itself out again. Now, while all of this is happening, There's just like an endless array of fantastic stories, ridiculous stories.

I mean, stuff that like if it didn't happen, you would just read and be like, yeah, there's no way that happened. Like at one point he got arrested by the Venice Inquisition and put in Pianbe prison in Venice. Nobody had ever escaped Pionby before. He was there. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was the first person to ever escape. from Piawimbi prison. He carved this way. It was like an Andy Dufrein from Shoshanic Redemption. He found a metal spike and like slowly chiseled his way out of the prison. Supposedly he claims that he slept with over 120 different women. He contracted venereal disease 11 different times. He met Voltaire, Pope Clement, the 13th, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and Mozart. At various points, he was a spy, a diplomat, a mathematician, and a partial translator of Homer. obviously.

Casanova is perhaps an extreme example of what Kierkegaard would call an estete. An estete is somebody who lives in Kierkegaard's first stage, the aesthetic stage. Now, estates are all about sensation, novelty, stimulation. They generally have a refusal to commit to too many things. They like having their options open. They like seeing if anything better comes off. long in the danger of the aesthetic life is that it is so easy to justify to ourselves, right? We can convince ourselves that we are maximizing our potential, that we are maximizing our freedom,

that we are having a great time, and we're doing so many interesting things, and we're learning so much, and we're finding so many opportunities. Like, there always seems to be an explanation beneath the service that we can point at to justify these kind of instinctive automatic behaviors. Now, in his book, Sickness Unto Death, Chirkegaard points out that this sort of despair, this kind of despair of optionality, of freedom, of indulgence, it is the most dangerous kind of despair because it largely goes unnoticed by the estate, right? They are comfortable, they are entertained, they're surrounded by opportunities, but they feel completely empty. none of it seems to mean anything, none of it seems to matter.

And so as soon as you sit with that emptiness, you desperately look and crave some new form of stimulation or entertainment to fill that void for you. There is an essay, it's actually a speech that I absolutely love. You are well aware of this because we've posted it so many times over the years. This is Water by David Foster Wallace. I think he describes this perfectly. He actually, this is where I get the term, the default state. He describes this as the default state. Our default state is always impulsive. It's self-serving. It is indulges. It seeks entertainment. It seeks novelty. It seeks stimulation. And a lot of Wallace's work was very preoccupied with the role of mass entertainment and the aesthetic life. You know, infinite jest and a lot of his essays really dig into. kind of the addictive qualities of modern stimulation that comes with modern entertainment.

And it's interesting because, you know, in last chapter we talked about how prophetic Kierkegaard was, particularly around media. But I don't think he foresaw the impact that mass entertainment was going to have, right? Like Netflix and social media and, you know, having like literally 500 channels available to you 24-7. Like it is the ability to distract yourself is available in every single moment. And so the gravitational pull of the aesthetic life, I think you could argue is stronger now

than it has ever been. Yeah, and easier to access. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. In every facet of life. Yeah. Yeah. But I do want to take a moment

and I want to go through five predictions that Kyra Thigard made that actually did turn out to be true. and we actually have the modern psychological research to back it up these days. And I think by going through these one by one, it will help us get a better understanding of the water we all swim in and hopefully how we can navigate this gravitational pole a little bit better going into the future. The first prediction he made is he said that more reflection without commitment just produces paralysis. It doesn't actually produce wisdom. like there's a certain inflection point that thinking about your choices more doesn't help you make them. It actually prevents you from making them. It's interesting because I think at the time this was probably a pretty revolutionary idea. He actually, in the present age, he talks about how there's, he kind of divides the world up into kind of two eras. There's like the revolutionary era and then there's the present age. And he said that prior to being inundated with information, people just act. And,

acted. And if they wanted to see change in the world, they would just go do it. They would just make it happen. But he complained in the modern era, in the present age, which was the 1840s, he said, people were so inundated with useless information and constant analysis and reflection that they were forgetting how to act in the world, that they were forgetting how to just throw themselves out there and make the change that they wanted to make. Yeah, it was endlessly possible to talk and not act. Like that was kind of his thing about the present age, right? Everybody's talking about this.

Everybody's going up to the edge but never taking the plunge. Right. And that was his whole thing, is this endless possibility for that now, especially with the informational environment that he was seeing the changes for. And now what we see on steroids? Yeah. Also kind of like the paradox of choice, right? This Barry Schwartz's work on the paradox of choice.

He wrote the book on this, but he did this whole body of research around it too, basically showing that the more options you have, the less satisfied with any one of them you end up choosing. Because you're like, oh, there was this other one over there. So I had to sit here and I had to think about all these other options in front of me. You know, it's the classic example. You go to grocery store and buy toothpaste and there's a whole aisle full of toothpaste and like which one are you supposed to buy, right? And you're never satisfied with the one you buy.

That's a simple example. When you have abundance in front of you, all these options in front of you, that plays out on steroids itself. You're never satisfied with any one decision because you consider all the others, all the other lives you could have lived in that realm. Schwartz, too, some of his later work, I love this concept. And I think we've talked about it several times maybe before too. But in that same realm, you have the maximizers and the satisfacers. So when given a set of options of any kind of choice, there's kind of people tend to split into

two different camps. Maximizers, they will try to over-analyze it, just like, like what you're talking about, like analyze it to death and make sure they're getting the absolute best option. They're making the absolute best choice for them in that situation. Then you have the satisfacers who they seek a good enough solution or a good enough option. What's interesting about this research too is that, yeah, if you look at them objectively, right, maximizers tend to have like a better, have better outcomes. Like if they pick the better product or they make more money doing something or a better investment, whatever it is. But they're less happy than the

satisfacer's are. The satisfacer is like, I pick good enough. I could have weighed well, could maybe not. Yeah. And they end up being happier over the long run. Also in relationships, too, this happens. You get a maximizer. Think about that, right? Yeah. Get a maximizer in a long-term relationship and they're going to be miserable because they're just going to sit there and think, well, I'm... They're going to think about all the other potential people they could have gone out with, but they didn't or maybe they stopped talking to or whatever, yeah. Research shorts and others bear this out too. I mean, they're less satisfied with their relationships and satisfacers are. So yeah, Kierkegaard was, he was on the nose here. So this brings us to our second prediction, which is that Kierkegaard argued that the benefits of optionality are in many ways an illusion. When we were given more options, it is easy to perceive the benefits of those options, but we don't realize the costs that those extra options are going to weigh on ourselves once we are forced to choose something. He talked about.

this in either or is having spectacles with two lenses. Like, for some reason, we are only able to see the upside of each additional option, whereas we're unable to see the downside of having to give up each additional option. So we continue to pursue optionality for its own sake. We just want an abundance of options and everything we do no matter what without considering the caught, the emotional and psychological costs that we're inviting on to ourselves. Yeah, it's almost like a bias, right? Like we just have a bias towards optionality. Yeah. There's this one really interesting study. One of the authors was Dan Ariely, actually, MIT professor. It was this door keeping open experiments, I guess, for lack of a better name. But basically what they did is they had people come in. The details of the game don't really matter, but basically you could open one of three doors. Okay. And there was a reward associated with each door. Okay. It changed every time you chose a door. But one of the doors clearly had a better reward and stayed that way. during the whole thing. They would change up the reward so it wasn't super obvious, but if you chose

the door that had the highest reward, you should be able to figure it out after a while. The rational response here is literally to open that door over and over and over again. The little catch was is that if you didn't open certain doors after a certain number of poles, like they would go away. You would no longer get the option to open that door. But again, the rational response was to find the highest reward door and just hit that the whole time and you get the most points or money or whatever they were giving them, right? Didn't matter though. People, like, they were just scared of one of those doors disappearing after a little while. So they would open doors with worse prizes, just to just to keep that door. Just to have the opportunity to open the door again in the future.

And then they did these follow-up experiments too, where they would basically train them to, like, look, it's this door, right? Just open this door. Just open this door and you're going to get the maximum reward out of all of this. They still wouldn't do it. So it is, it's some kind of bias we have to just like, oh, we want more and more optionality. We'll get into Y here in a little bit, but it's just like this hardwired bias we have towards keep your options open. You know, the more the better, right?

This brings us to prediction number three from Kirkegaard. This is also from either or. In a life of endless abundance, everything becomes equally interesting and equally boring. This hits close to home for me. So we talked earlier about how I lived as a digital nomad for six or seven years. One of the reasons I stopped, and this is going to sound insane, especially to people listening to this who have not traveled much, I eventually reached a point

where countries started feeling the same, which is like completely illogical. But like, I'd spend a month in like Peru and then I would go to Vietnam and it would feel the same, which is kind of defeats the entire purpose of traveling. But it's interesting. I think what Kierkegaard correctly observed is that when everything is novel in some different way, that novelty stops meaning anything. No matter what country you go to, well, there's going to be a new different country coming up next. So who cares? Like, whatever is unique and distinctive about this country, it kind of stops mattering and you end up just focusing on the experiences that are the same everywhere. The way I always thought of it is that novel experiences have a diminishing return.

to know, right? If you've only been to one country, then going to that second country, it's going to be a hugely novel experience because everything is completely different. But if you've been to like 30 countries and you go to 31, that 31st country is just going to be like, eh, it's like a little bit different compared to my entire sample of 30 countries that I've been to. So it's like each additional novel experience you add, the marginal novelty diminishes becomes less and less and less to the point where it's, everything levels, right? Every, every experience, every interaction, every person you meet, every date you go on feels like the same date, it feels like the same interaction, it feels like the same experience. Not because the novelty is not there, it's because the novelty has lost any meaning or significance. Because it's so, it's so abundant or it's so cheap. Yeah, you almost get desensitized to it. It's another version of the hedonic treadmill. Right. Like we usually think of the hedonic treble of like buying stuff, which is that that definitely happens. You know, it's usually in the context of, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses or whatever it is.

But in this case, it's more your just the novelty itself is what you're chasing and it ends up just not not delivering. Yeah. That's what you're saying over time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, there's all that research on the hedonic treadmill. The interesting thing, though, too, you know, we talk about, you hear the phrase thrown around a lot about like dopamine, you know, you're just, dopamine detox or dopamine detox or dope, you're just, you're in it for a dopamine mix or whatever it is, right? And I think we've maybe made this point before too,

but the thing is about dopamine is it's not, it's not a reward signal. It's a search signal. It's a pursuit signal. Yeah, and you can get addicted to that pursuit. But again, it's like you're saying each time takes a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more.

It's like a drug. Right. It is a drug. Right. Technically, when you get down to it. Like every new experience is like, okay, now what's the next one, right? That's what dopamine is. Where's the next one?

Where's the next one? And when that wears off, that's why you go searching again is because you're trying to look for that payoff, which is never there. Yeah. Because dopamine isn't the reward signal. It's the search signal. It's the pursuit signal. Yeah.

When we've talked about this in the past, we've talked about how the concept of dopamine detox is a misnomer, right? Like it is when people like they raw dog a nine hour flight or they like go no phones for a week. I think what they're actually doing is they're they're just resetting their like their optionality baseline, right? It's or their novelty baseline, right? They're getting rid of they've been leveled because they've experienced too much novelty. And so when they remove novelty from their life, suddenly novel experiences start to feel significant again because it's each subsequent experience is compared. relative to your recent set of experiences.

Yeah, that's another way to put it to dopamine as a comparison molecule, I guess, too. And it really depends on what happened directly previously to what you just did or achieved or got in some way. Well, next prediction, and we talked about this a little bit in chapter one, is that Kierkegaard did not say this explicitly, at least not to my knowledge. But I'm sure this would not surprise him that the most free. generation in world history with the most access to the most stimulation and information would also be the most anxious, the most alone, and the most dissatisfied. I don't think this would surprise him at all. In fact, the entire basis of his philosophy very much predicts it. The book of the concept of anxiety is based on this, yeah, this phenomenon. I talked about

this in my second book, Everything is Ficked. It's funny actually, like, I had not read Kira Kegard before I wrote everything is fucked. I actually wonder if I would have approached that book a little bit differently if I had. That book really wrestles with this paradox. What I was trying to kind of get my brain around when I was writing that book is like, why is it that the better off people seem to be, the more anxious, lonely, and depressed they seem to become? And the research data, it's often called the Easterland paradox, which is that they find that the greatest rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicide, are, tend to be in the wealthier

countries, and that even if you go kind of within countries, you see the highest rates of mental health issues in the wealthiest neighborhoods, cities, counties. So a lot of that book was just trying to, like, I guess, kind of independently get at what Kierkegaard was talking about. But all that is to say is that there is a wealth of mental health data at this point, really hammering home this fact. There is such a thing as too much. optionality and too much opportunity and it seems to torture people at a certain point. Yeah, it does. And you know, like the, the Surgeon General's report that came out, I think it was 2023 about the loneliness epidemic. You know, 50% of U.S. adults report being lonely. There's all these stats, you know. Americans gain 24 extra extra extra hours a month spent alone, spent alone, spent alone, that's a lot. That is a lot. It's a part-time job. And that's before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic. There's all these stats. I'm sure we've heard of all of these. It's been called a loneliness epidemic. Yeah. We several times have mentioned Robert Putnam's bowling alone. That book came out in the 90s, like early 90s, I think even too. And it was looking at data from the previous 50 years about how just Americans were spending less time together together.

And institutions were decaying and all of that. And this is at the same time as we were becoming wealthier. Yeah. And more connected and had more options and more freedom, more freedom of like movement around the country too. Like you could change jobs much more easily. All of that. That loneliness epidemic came along. There's one interesting thing. And I think I brought this up in the friendship episode. You know, Derek Thompson, who's a journalist and podcaster too, real smart guy. He's not so sure you could call it you should call it a loneliness epidemic, though. The phrase he uses for it is an aloneness epidemic because people are choosing this. Yeah. People are complaining that they're lonely, but they're also choosing lifestyles that isolate themselves or self-isolating in a way. That's also interesting, too. That could be part of it is as you get wealthier, as you get more secure and a material sense, you're for whatever reason, more likely to engage in these keeping my options open behaviors. You know what I mean? There's also a certain amount of friction to engaging with other people, right?

Like, it's, you got to get in your car and drive their house. And, you know, it's like, am I going to know anybody there? I don't want to, like, make small talk. I'm tired. Like, that was Derek Thompson's point, too. It's like, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, everybody got a car and moved to the suburbs and we were away from each other. And then television came along and we stopped going to, you know, downtown and going to the theaters and we stayed home. And then the smartphone came along.

And not only where we're not watching TV with our families, we weren't even interacting with their families at all. So it was just every step along the way, we got more and more isolated. and chose it was his pull point, too. Yeah, that's another one of those trends that's, I think, just kind of like went right alongside this whole optionality thing. You know, so on our old podcast, the subtle art podcasts, I interviewed Jonathan Haidt. And I remember I was kind of challenging him with some of the international data, right? Because his big argument is smartphones are causing all the mental health issues among young people. And that is true in the U.S. It seems to be true in the U.S., in the U.K., in Australia, and a few other places,

but I was kind of pushing back on him of like, well, why aren't we seeing this in Italy or Germany or Sweden, like a bunch of other places? One of the theories that I kind of threw at him, just to gauge his response, is that there are more collectivist cultures where there are expectations to spend more time with family, to live with family for a longer period of time, to spend more time with grandparents and grandchildren. there's something about those cultures that kind of inoculates people to the the hazardous effects of social media and smartphones. I still find that that explanation very compelling. It's not necessarily that smartphones themselves fuck us up, but it's like if you don't have the proper support system in place of social connection, then you're susceptible to it.

It's almost like an immunodeficiency or something, except it's like a social immunodeficiency. Okay, last prediction, and we also talked about this quite a bit at the top of the show, Kierkegaard argued that without commitment, you never really become a self. Without consciously choosing the sacrifices you want to make in your life, making the difficult tradeoffs, sticking with something even when it's not pleasant, even when it's not fun, you rob yourself of self-definition. You remove the ability to know what you stand for and to find meaning in your own person. personal life. I think this is something that we talked about. I mean, we did a last year, we did a whole episode on purpose for like four hours. And I feel like this was the bulk of that episode is that purpose requires some degree of struggle and sacrifice to experience in your life. To put it in another way is finding purpose and meaning is not a fucking five-day spa retreat. It is ugly and messy and painful and uncomfortable.

And it is the messiness and discomfort that ultimately makes it meaningful in retrospect. Yeah. And forms a self, forms an identity for you. You form an identity around that, a much stronger identity around that. Yeah. And we'll get into a lot of that research. That's going to be the whole next chapter. Yeah.

A little tease there. But there's a lot of theories and research behind that, too, that we'll get into. We talked a little bit about how we have a bias towards optionality. I think that we are in a very early stage of a little bit of backlash towards abundance. You know, Jin Zier is kind of going back to flip phones and digital detoxes and raw dogging flights and all this stuff. I'm starting to see it kind of percolate through the culture a little bit more. Like I'm meeting a lot more people who are just kind of casually, you know, deleting social media for periods of time, going through digital fasts, trying to actively kind of remove some of the optionality from their lives. I mean, you got off dating apps entirely.

I've met a lot of people who have done that lately. Why do we cling to optionality? Why does optionality just seem to be this drug that we can't say no to? Well, okay, I can give you the nerdy perspective. That's why I'm asking. Okay. We'll start with that. That's why you're here.

We'll start with that and I might throw something back at you here, okay? We've kind of been dancing around this a little bit. There's kind of an evolutionary mismatch going on, right? This world of abundance is not the world that our ancestors grew up. in, not the world that our species evolved in, right? The world that our species came of age in was one of scarcity. Right. Right. You didn't have optionality in those. And so in any situation in which you found yourself with multiple options, you better maximize that situation as much as possible, purely out of survival needs, right? We grew up in these small kin-based relationship groups,

for the most part. That's our evolutionary adaptive period. That's when we, we as a species came about. And so there wasn't, there weren't mega cities. We're in the middle of a city that's 12 to 14 million people, whatever it is, right? Right. Right now. That is not, our brains just aren't ready for that at all. We can't even, I can't even fathom the number 12 to 14 million, right? Yeah. In my own mind. Modern stimuli, especially a lot of things that are in, like the mass media, kind of, they hijack this machinery that we have, this old paleolithic brain machinery that we have. One small example, it showed men a brief exposure to 10 attractive faces, 10, 10 women, and then immediately gave them a questionnaire after that of like, how satisfied are

you with your relationship? These were men who were all uncommitted relationships. And they had a measurable decrease. After just seeing 10 attractive women's faces, right? That's like 30 seconds on the internet. Think about this. Think about like, like, now, throw an internet porn into that, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, my God, of course you're going to be thinking about other options when you have this level of access. Dating apps, so like you just mentioned to, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, right? Like, there's just that evolutionary mismatch between the way our species evolved and the environment that we live in now is they're so divergent that our brains just can't even keep up.

And this is what a lot of mass media and big tech will exploit. Sure. And again, we sign up for it, right? Like, yeah, I mean, we sign up for it. Yeah, they are hijacking very primitive, psychological functions within our minds that are, that evolve there for extremely good reasons. And the fucked up thing is that we enjoy the hijacking. Yeah, yeah. Like, it wouldn't really be hijacking if we didn't enjoy it.

So it's hard for us to be too upset. It is interesting, like, I do think of, I mean, Elon buying Twitter is a whole. mess of a conversation. But I do think one of the more interesting things that he pointed out after he took over Twitter is that he wanted to optimize it for, I think it was non-regret-inducing minutes spent. Most social media platforms or most apps in general measure success based on how many minutes you spent on the app. He said that he wanted to optimize for non-regret-inducing minutes, which is interesting because I think all of us have some degree of experience of engaging in apps or media or entertainment that like the next day we're like why did I do that?

Yes. Yeah. Like why did I stay up to 3 a.m. playing video games? Like I didn't even like the game. Yeah. It's the same reason why you binged on sugar on candy here. Right. The night before.

It's not because like your your brain evolved to seek out candy by any means. It was because like fruit in our environment was very scarce. And so whenever you came across fruit, you would you would gorge on it. Yeah. Right. And so now that machinery is being hijacked. And so you regret it the next day. Right.

Because it's been hijacked to such a degree that's just, it's super natural. Right. It's above and beyond what you would have encountered in any other environment prior to, you know, 100 years ago or even. Yeah. So that's one reason. Okay. It's this environmental mismatch that we have.

Um, optionality wasn't a big thing in our evolutionary past. And now that it is, we're like just, we're stepping on the gas for it. There's this other, uh, idea, too. And this list is not exhaustive. Um, but I, I found this interesting explanation for it called the additive bias. Okay. Okay. And this came.

I think the original, um, study was like a, I think it was like a Lego study or something like that where, um, people were, we're trying to improve a design that they were given by these researchers. And the vast, vast majority of people always tried to add something to this design when really they thought the most optimal thing to do was to take away part of the of the contraption that they gave them. Right. And they've replicated this in other domains as well. But if you take that and you think about it, well, when you're dissatisfied with your life, Mark, what's the first thing you usually think of? I need to go. I need to go do something. I need to find something to do. You find something to add in my life. Something I'm not doing today that I should do. Yeah. city. I need a new group friend. I need a new partner. It's this additive bias that we have. And again,

I think that does come a little bit from our evolutionary past where you probably did need to go get something because the immediate environment was scarce. But still, so often, especially in an environment of abundance, what you probably need to do is subtract. You know, remember the huge trend of minimalism for a long time. I mean, I was all in on it for a while. Right. Right. And I don't know. There's something to that. There really is something. that to it's funny because I actually told you this morning before we we got on the mics. We did an episode on friendship last year and I talked quite a bit in that episode about my struggles with like finding, making friends and how I think part of it is my age, part of it's my personality,

part of it is Los Angeles. And my wife has been having a pretty hard time of it as well. And I was telling you this morning, because we were catching up, I mean, it's been a month. So, you know, kind of the new thing for us this last month is that we were saying, yes to all these things that we didn't really want to do. We were, uh, there was like a bunch of people that we had been hanging out with and we're like, well, maybe we just need to see them a little bit more. Maybe we just need to put the time in. Maybe we just need more frequency of exposure and all this stuff. And she and I just kind of hit a breaking point this past month. We're like, you know, fuck this shit. Like, we're just not going to do things we don't want to do. And it's

funny because for the last month, we really only hung out with like three or four people. And, but it's the three or four people we really like. And it's so funny. We're so much happier. It's really amazing, actually. Yeah. Yeah. How, how, how, how much expending resources on people that like you're kind of lukewarm about is is actually just like detracts quite a bit. Yeah. I, there's a lot of the research too that bears that out. You need somewhere between like two and maybe 10 people at the most who you regularly interact

with and have a good connection with. Yeah. Beyond that. Yeah. No. It's hard to know like when you are just arbitrarily enforcing like a standard expectation on yourself or when you actually do need something. It's, it's, there's a fine line.

There's, there's another thing I found too, though, which is kind of interesting about anticipated regret. Okay. So when we actually, if you're given a number of options, okay, and you expect to, and you're forced to make a decision, but you expect to find out how those other options would have turned out in some way, you're actually just really less likely to either be satisfied with the thing that you chose or even choose in the first place. I think part of this is definitely like modern society.

It's a lot easier to find out I didn't go to that party. Oh, but I'm going to find out what it was like. And now I'm going to regret not going or going or whatever it is or at the other party I didn't go to. I'm going to find out what happened there. We can anticipate our regrets probably a lot more accurately now because everything's recorded or everything's documented in some way or somebody's going to tell you you're going to find out somehow about how some option you didn't choose, how that went. Yeah. That makes us kind of just withdrawal altogether because we don't want to choose. Yeah, boy, this is FOMO, right?

Like, it's, I don't really want to go to the party, but I don't want to feel what it's going to feel like to not have gone to the party, and it was really cool. So I'm going to go, even though I don't want to go. Right. Like, it's, it's the condition of our age, for sure. The last thing I want to note, too, is just kind of the decline of cultural institutions. I already kind of mentioned the Robert Utnam work. You know, he talked about this, but decline in church attendance, decline in clubs, decline in just, I mean, just, I mean, just, people getting out of the house, really, just in general.

But institutionally speaking, where there are fewer people going to churches. There's less union membership even, too, like in work. Civic organization, civic engagement is down. Robert Putnam's famous, the title is Bowling Alone, right? Bowling leagues have also declined. People just aren't getting out of the house. We all know this, right? Those institutions, though, used to kind of like force you a little bit, right, into making

commitments, making commitments to other people to your community. to anything in your environment around you, just engaging with it more. Yeah. The disappearance of those has definitely led to people just not committing to things. It is just easier to stay home. Where I really feel the loss of institutions affects this a lot is that, are you familiar with Seth Godin's The Dip concept? Yeah.

So we'll put it on screen, but for those of you listening, Seth Godin's the dip, it actually applies to businesses like, starting a new business or a new venture. It's this curve that initially goes up a decent amount and then it crashes and goes negative for a little while and that's the dip. And then it, you have to kind of sustain through that dip. And then if you sustain, it shoots way up on the other side. And it becomes like two or three times higher than that initial first kind of peak. Okay. He used it in the context of businesses, which is that everybody's excited to start a business when they start. And then the dips, once that excitement kind of wears off and you actually realize

how fucking hard this is going to be, that's when the dip sets in. And it's most people give up somewhere in that dip. But if you can sustain through the dip, that's when you actually hit escape velocity and really experience a lot of success. I don't know how true this is. I'm kind of just winging this. But like I feel like there's a dip sort of curve on a lot of things in life. Right. Like if you think about a new romantic relationship or a new friendship or a new community that you want to join, right? There's always this kind of new anticipation and excitement early on, which that sustains you through the first few weeks. Everything's new. Everything's novel. There's a lot of dopamine going on. But eventually that novelty wears off and you start bumping into the first hard moments, right?

You have the first arguments. You have the first disagreements. You have the first situation where you're like, I don't really want to be here. And that's the dip. And you have to like fight through that dip to get to that second peak on the other side where you actually get the satisfaction of having a deep commitment in your life of like having stuck with something over a long period of time. This is just how I think of these things. I think a lot of what institutions did for us is that they helped sustain us through that dip. Right. Like it's it's like, okay, we're going to put you in a new situation.

and it's it's going to be fun and exciting, but then it's going to be like kind of awkward for a while and you're going to have to like kind of stumble through. But because you signed up for this thing, you know, it's work, we're going to hold you accountable. We're going to keep you here. And you're going to work through the painful process, the pain period.

And then you're going to get to the other side. And it's going to be, you're going to start reaping the benefits of having committed, you know, I like that. Or a year or two years or three years or whatever. So without the institutions kind of binding us to these processes, it's so much easier to bail at the bottom of the dip.

And with infinite optionality, as soon as that initial peak runs out, you can immediately just go to the next peak, right? It's like, well, why am I going to sit through a dip with this person when I can just go meet a new person and it's going to be fun and exciting and sexy and interesting and whatever? And then you get three months into that, and it stops being fun and you have your first fight,

and you're like, well, I think I'll just go find the next person and start all over again, right? And so you have these people that are just kind of chronically chasing low initial peaks, never sustaining the dips. And so they're never actually building that long-term value or meaning in anything in their lives. I think dating is the obvious example, right? Like this is anybody who's been single in the last 10 years is like experiences to some some extent. I mean, I've known people who like they can't even find a hobby because it's like as soon as they hit the dip in any new hobby, they're like, oh, this sucks and they bail. Every time you,

you try something new, there's going to be novelty and excitement early on, but then when you actually realize how shitty you are at it, and you have to practice and, like, put the time in and try to get good, most people don't sustain through that. They abandon it. They go find a new thing to try. You know, you see it, you could see it in careers. I see this, I mean, I see this in applications. I'll get, sometimes I'll get a, I'll get a, I'll get a, I'll get a, resume that comes in and it's like, you know, a guy has been four different industries over the last 10 years and has been entry level at all four of them. And I'm like, yeah, this person can't commit. Like they're not in it for the long haul. They're in it till they get bored and then they're

going to leave. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I think another thing those institutions do too, one of the mechanisms that they help keep you in, get you through that dip. Is there's other people going through it with you. Yes. Right. Yeah. You're bound to those other people. you know, that's why I think, you know, a lot of the, whatever, run clubs and, you know, kind of the, this kind of thing we're trying to social engineer a lot of this community or these old institutions, you know, like churches aren't there anymore, so we're going to start a run club or, you know, something like that where we do have community. They're just not as sticky. Yeah. And you're, you're not going to get through that dip because it's you're, you're treating it like a, this is a trial period. Oh, yes, yep. I'm out. Yep. Right. It's the customer service mindset, right? It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the return return policy. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, this isn't funny. anymore. I want my money back. Yeah. We talked about this on the friendship episode, too, that, like, I talked about, like, why stuff like that doesn't really work, and it's because there's a lack of stakes involved. Yeah, yeah. And, um, and we're definitely going to come back to that in Kierkegaard's religious phase. Yeah. Because that is a key difference between, say, the ethical and the religious

is that there's, like, a very meaningful set of stakes that are involved that, like, bind you to this this path in life, almost, almost to the point of, like, whether you want to be there, or or not. And in the friendship episode, I think it's like, that's where like really deep relationships are built is when you share, you were both invested in something extremely deeply and then can relate to each other on that investment. But I think, yeah, I think it's on the social side, it's just like, I mean, I've joined a million gyms. I've met a million people. They're all really nice. I've never hung out with any of them more than like two or three times. Like it just, it's just like, me. It's not quite there. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just, it's more optionality. Yeah. I've been going to yoga for almost four years now, and I, like, barely know anybody there. It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. You said, you know, dating being the obvious one, what would you tell maybe somebody who's about 41 and has never had a relationship for more than three years?

Asking for a friend? Yeah. Who's sitting in the same chair as me? Yeah. I see what you're saying. I mean, you're absolutely right. That's every time this has happened. Sure.

It's when I hit that day. and I'm like, I'm out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's all that you can, there's the attachment stuff and there's all, you know, I can blame my parents and I can do all of this. But at the end of the day. Right.

Yeah. I would say three years is a good amount of time. Never more than two good years, I would say. So there, there's that. I've always said the most important moment in any relationship, any new relationship is the first fight. Because that first fight is going to tell you more about how long this. is going to last than all of the good times combined. If you can fight well, if you can communicate,

if you can repair, if you can forgive, it bodes really, really well. Like if you, if a fight makes you stronger as a couple, that is like a massive green flag. I think what happens is a lot of people they get in fights. It's not a very productive fight. The relationship does not get stronger, but they've been told their whole lives that relationships are hard and you have to work at it and you have to like keep trying and so they stay in it for years with like even though it's not really the right person it is really about that the quality of in speed of repair after the breaches if if there is no repair or the repair is extremely slow or it's only one person doing most of it like those are all really bad signs yeah but i don't get the sense that

your issue is like novelty seeking like that was my issue and i was just like i'm like She's fine, but what about her? Yeah. What do you think my issue is then, Mark? Please tell me. I told you. I told you. We're turning this into a Drew therapy session.

I think there are some aesthetic elements to it for sure. I could see that, but I don't see your issue necessarily being like you want to go fuck 20 other girls. Yeah, no. You're not that guy. Yeah. From what I know about you, you've definitely got an aspect of like go with the flow. Yeah. let me try out a bunch of different things. Oh, this is fun. Like kind of that novelty. I have a lot of hobbies

too. A lot of hobbies, a lot of traveling, a lot of just like fun, cool little side things, but they're all like side things. There's nothing that's like, this is what Drew Bernie was fucking born to do. That's true. And it's funny because it's like that is what people sink their teeth into. Like that that is what really like binds you with somebody super strongly and allows you. to know in those relationships, like, this is what I'll compromise on. This is what I never compromise on, right? Yep. So it removes a lot of that ambiguity. Yeah. But yeah, I don't, I don't know if that's a dip issue. That's a good point. Yeah. For me, I see the pattern in a couple of different areas of my life, because like, even with career stuff. So had this whole thing around, you know, like I said,

when university had the five year, the super senior year and all that, I loved university because of the variety of it. Yes. And especially like, psychology. I studied psychology. That was my major. I think I'm one credit short of an anthropology minor. Like I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't have taken psychology. I got to study chemistry, biology, neuroscience, physics, like history. They give you a very wide, you know, stats. There's Native American studies. Like, all of it I was fascinated with. Yeah. And I think that's great to a certain extent, but I kind of got hooked on that a little bit. Like, I always say this. I'm fascinated by everything. Well, congratulations. Like, you know.

it's great because I got that breadth. Right. But I never really did kind of like, you know, went into neuroscience. I got into neuroscience. I was like, well, academia, God, this, I don't like this. Right. There were reasons for that. Sure.

Maybe some of those were a little bit, I don't know, motivated reasoning. But, you know, there's the same thing in a lot of my relationships, though, too, where I've kind of swung from more of like the more aesthetic side to the commitment side. and then I'm like, oh, no, give me back. And so again, it goes back, and we'll get into this more in the next chapter, but it goes back to holding that tension. Yeah. Really bad at that.

Yeah, yeah. And I think part of that tension we're talking about, that dip you go through, that's part of the tension, you know, being pulled one way or the other. Yeah. And you've got to navigate that tension to get to the other side. And I don't think I'm good at that. I think most of us aren't. No, yeah.

Yeah, like, it's hard. It's really hard these days. What you said earlier, though, too, is like you just find a few areas of your life. Is it? where you can navigate that tension. And the rest of it might just not be very well balanced. Yeah. And I think some of that is also like self-limitation.

It's there's a chapter and everything is fucked where I write that like true freedom is self-limitation. It is putting guardrails around yourself because you understand I shouldn't go over there. If I go over there, I'm going to lose control of myself. and actually that loss of agency and that loss of control is actually a loss of freedom. Like it's there's a paradoxical relationship between freedom and self-limitation. Like keeping yourself in a lane, that allows you to act freely to become yourself without any doubts or distraction or anything. But it's hard. I still struggle with this.

I think it's something I've gotten much better at in the last, five years. Yeah. Yeah. Outside looking in, I would agree with you. Yeah. Like, to me, this is a very new thing. I think my marriage was kind of the first big wow. Yeah. That was profound. And then my relationship with my career really shifted a few years ago. Yeah. And in a way that it's, I would actually, we'll talk about it when we get to the religious chapter, but like I would, put it in that category and that it, I feel like it chose me. I didn't choose it. I just went through the nerdy, examples of why we why we choose the life of optionality, but you lived a pretty aesthetic like for a long time.

Yes. Why like besides all the nerdy stuff I tried to shoehorn in there, what was it for you that kept you hooked on that? I think it was a combination of two things. I think it was to put it really frugely, ADHD and avoidance attachment. Yeah. Okay. Combined.

And a lot of curiosity as well. Like I think- Openness to Experience. Again, you're very high on openness to experience. Yeah, and I think you and I are very similar in that, like, we love to learn. Yeah.

So I love learning. I love new, like a new country, a new language, a new history. Like, one of my favorite things to do is just like, whenever I landed in a new country, I would just open up the country's Wikipedia. Oh, same, yeah. And I would just go so deep.

Yeah. I would like spend five hours just digging through everything about that country's history. It's people, it's culture, it's demographics, everything. So I think it was a combination of all those things. But I mean, for me, I really, I love novelty. I love new experiences. And I think my brain is kind of predisposed to seek them compulsively. On top of that, I had a lot of attachment issues, avoidance issues. I was a commitment phob. So very early, I was very adept at building a lifestyle, right? Like I had a lot of attachment issues, avoidance issues. I was a commitment. I was a bit of, I had, a nebulous quote-unquote internet business that was really just like a smattering of websites and freelance work. So I was location independent. I could live anywhere in the world. I traveled all over the world. I never really was willing to settle down with a girl. And like the few women

I did end up in a relationship with like I didn't stay faithful to them. I was just like I was bad at relationships. I really struggled to be in them. So I set up a lifestyle for myself where I was always in a new place. I was always meeting new people. I was always dating new women. I was always learning new things. And for, I would say, three or four years, that was really satisfied. It was just like, I was young. You know, I was in my 20s. Like, it was cool as fuck. It was tons of fun. Really learned a lot about myself, had a lot of great experiences. But there was an inflection point after a number of years where, again, that diminishing returns started to kick in, right? Where it's like, okay, the more places I travel, the less satisfied

I seem to be with each subsequent place I travel. The more women I date, the less satisfied I seem to be with each subsequent woman I date. The more businesses and websites I start. The more frustrated and dissatisfied I seem to be with each one that I start. And so it was a clear pattern and that was playing out on multiple vectors in my life. And I realized that, like, I really need to start kind of narrowing here. And I think it happened first on the business side. It's just, like, my dating relationship blog started to take off. And that was like, okay, something's working.

I should just shut down everything else and focus on that. And I think eventually I just started kind of applying that across the different vectors throughout my life. but like it was hard. It wasn't pleasant. Because most people would see that and they would say, oh, they would do the added bias thing and just keep going. Yeah. You know what I mean? They just, they're like, oh, I was happy. This is when I was happy when I was doing all these crazy wild things. I just need to go find more crazy wild things. Yeah. What was it that you saw? Was it really just the business thing? Like I was like, oh, my business. I, when I focused on that.

Dude, if you go back, I don't know if these articles are even still on the website, But there are a couple pieces back in like 2010, 2011 that I wrote about being a digital nomad. And like, I remember those. Yeah. And they're really melancholy. Like they're really must. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember. They're very melancholy. And I remember having this experience. I was like, I don't know. I was traveling like somewhere in Asia or something and I did this crazy thing. I was like whitewater rafting and Indonesia and I like, I don't know, like met some girl and spent a weekend with her. Couldn't even speak each other's languages. and all this stuff.

And then I remember I flew home and I saw some of my friends from high school and we just hung out and had beers for two days. And I remember realizing I'm like, I actually liked this better than all the shit that I did. I've had some of those points too. Yeah.

And I remember writing a piece about that. And it really mind-fucked me because I was just like, I'm like, wait a second. I'm like, I'm putting so much into finding these novel exciting experiences. And then at the end of the day, it turns out I just like really miss my friends.

And so I started noticing that. I mean, it was a lot of things. The other thing, too, on the dating front, there were probably two or three women that I met. So speaking of the dip, right? Like when I was a nomad, I never stayed anywhere for more than like three to six months because three to six months. That's when you start experiencing the dip. That's when you actually, the novelty wears off, the excitement wears off. And you actually start getting really annoyed about all the shit in that particular country. It just so happens most tourist visas are three or six months too. So. Yes, that too. That helps. That too. Yeah, hard out. So I was never anywhere long term. And there were a couple of women that I met that we had a really great thing going, like a really good thing going.

And then I'd go. And, you know, the first time it happened, it's like, okay, well, that's sad. But okay, you know, life goes on. But then it happened again. And then it happened again. And each time I was like, am I? a fucking idiot. Like, what am I wasting here? Like, I could potentially actually be wasting a lot here. And so I actually promised myself, the next time I feel this, I'm going to stick around and, like, see where it goes. And then that's when I met my wife. So it's like that combined with the friend thing, combined with the business thing, like, everything just kind of led back to the same principle, which was like narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow your options, narrow your focus, narrow what you care about, narrow what you're paying attention to.

And there's a reason why, like, subtle art. I mean, there's a reason that's the central message. It's like, find a few things you care. You really give a fuck about and just go all in on it. Because that, that was like the antidote to everything I'd kind of been experiencing. To aesthetic hell. And I think it turns out that it's like, it was a little bit of a premonition of like where our culture was going. We're doing a 10th anniversary edition of the book.

And, you know, so I just wrote, I just went back. edited the original manuscript. And it was interesting because the things that jumped out to me the most going back 10 years later were the small sections about kind of the aesthetic social media smartphone culture. It's interesting because in the book, they're not a significant part of the book. They're kind of just little asides and observations here and there. And at the time, they were not kind of the conventional wisdom or the accepted wisdom. And at the time, I also just thought they were kind of clever, you know, things that I noticed that I hadn't really seen other people say, coming back in 2026 and looking like those little sections jump off the page.

And it's like, dude, like you had no fucking idea where this was going. It was going to get so much worse. But we really didn't realize. So I do think that book was, I was one of the early adopters, but it was like at the front tail, people kind of experiencing, getting thrown into this online aesthetic lifestyle. Yeah. And all of the hazards and downsides that come with it. Yeah.

Yeah. I remember this transition in the blogosphere from people telling you how to be a digital nomad and, you know, all the pictures and Instagram photos, you know, you're in front of a mountain with. your arms up and all of that. I remember that transition to people saying, here's some of the downsides, too, and it was probably 2016, 17, 18. Yeah. And there is when that started. I think, yeah. I alluded to this in the previous chapter a little bit, too, though. But I think one of the, one of the things I'm hearing from you is that you kind of did this to an extreme degree. Okay. There's a lot of people who do it to the extreme degree that don't get out of it, though, too. I think what you had with it, though, was some degree of, like, the introspection around it.

I think the, what I'm hearing from you is the writing. Yes. And what is what actually really helped you. Yeah. Because you had to sit down and introspect about this kind of stuff. Yeah, it actually might have saved me. Probably. Yeah.

Because I do know people who never got out of it. Yeah. It's interesting. My wife and I, we actually had a conversation about this recently about some of those people who never got out and how now they're, like, in their 40s. They're literally doing the same thing they did 20 years ago. Like, their life has not changed at all. and it's gotten kind of sad. Like it's hard to watch.

Yeah. One of the things that she and I were talking about is that a lot of this stuff, building community, like setting roots somewhere, developing routines, hobbies, rituals, right? Like, these are all soft skills that nobody really tells you that you need to learn. But if you are bouncing around to a new place, every six months or, every year for 20 years, you'll never develop those skills. And like, I see that in these people now. It's like they never learned how to build a real community, build like lifelong friendships, build lifelong rituals. And there's there's a certain groundedness or stability that comes with

that that, that I think is extremely healthy for people. But nobody explains that to you. Nobody tells you. And I think it's just because for most of the human history, it was, it's just a It just happened. Nobody had to think about it. We're the first generation in history that actually has the opportunity to fuck that up. And like ruin it for ourselves. So yeah, I look back and I'm actually like very grateful I got out when I did and enforce myself to kind of learn these things. But it's funny because I actually do think some of my struggle, I guess in midlife around a lot of these questions, around friendships, community, stability, consistency. I think part of it is is that I never got good at those skills. I never developed like that kind of connective tissue to the world around me. Or at least I'm like a late bloomer. Yeah. And like trying to figure it out.

It hasn't really come naturally. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. To bring this back to Casanova, it's funny because I actually read a biography of Casanova when I was a nomad. And I remember just being like, dude, so sick. This guy.

This guy. Holy shit. It really was the most interesting man in the world. The most interesting man. whoever lived. It was interesting kind of coming back to his story for this episode now in my 40s, because it is, it's actually really sad. Like, now I look at his story and I'm like, that's a very lost person who had a lot of fun and excitement in his life, but never, was never happy. It was just a lot of exciting stuff. There was a collection of experience. It's a collection of

experience. It wasn't a life. That's a great way to put it. And it's interesting how he died. So he basically burned every bridge around every court of Europe and ended up alone in a small castle, I think in like present-day Slovakia or something. And he was completely ostracized from high society, broke, living in this castle. He's surrounded by a bunch of kids. And the kids would come around and he would tell him stories from his life. And the kids always thought, like this guy. The crazy old man. You'll never guess what he told us today. At the time, he was, like, writing his memoirs. He wrote, like, 2,000 pages worth of memoirs or something. And it was funny because when he finally died, he died completely alone. Nobody even knows where his grave is. Like, it's very sad. No friends, no family, no partner, nothing. And his memoirs sat for decades. I think it was, like, 60 or 70, 7. years, people just thought it was like a fabrication. It was like a hundred years later or something.

Some historians happened to stumble across records of the crazy things that he did. And then it turns out they went and found his memoirs and they started corroborating all these things. And it turns out it was all true. Yeah. And like he did have this crazy, insane wildlife that wasn't really shared with anybody. That wasn't remembered by anybody. I mean, it's like a fluke that history even went and verified that it actually happened. So I think Casanova is a perfect example of the aesthetic life because it is full of fireworks and sexy adventures. But ultimately it means nothing. It ends in nothing. Yeah. If I remember, right, he spent the last decades of his life just writing about his first half of his life. And he said something along the lines of like, these memories are all I have left.

like the memories of the fun and the pleasure and all that are really all I have left. How sad is that? Decades of that. Yeah. It reminds me of the quote, the famous Benjamin Franklin quote, where he says that some people die and are not buried for another 50 years. It's definitely a case of that. This raises the question of like, how do we exit the aesthetic life? How do we find those commitments, make those commitments?

How do we avoid falling into the optionality trap becoming enslaved by the paradoxical? of choice, being seduced by constant novelties and freedoms. This leads us to what Kierkegaard called the ethical life, the second stage of life's commitments, of finding your life path. And it turns out it's one of those classic, it's not complicated, it's just really difficult type situations. Yeah. It's probably not that you don't know what you should do. It's that it's really hard to do it. And it's not pleasant. It's not fun. And we find ways to to avoid it at all costs. Because ultimately, knowing that you're stuck doesn't necessarily make you unstuck. You have to find the actions that get you out of the situation that you're in. And this is what we will

actually find in the next chapter is that commitment is an action. It's not a belief. It's not an idea. It's not a little note you write down. and send to somebody. Like, it is, it is ultimately the actions that you choose to make and the priorities that you choose to hold. And it turns out, and our guide for this chapter will be a famous Harvard psychologist, my favorite psychologist, who actually only became a psychologist because a creative writing class happened to be full.

So we will talk about his ideas, how profound and life-changing they were for me. And hopefully they will be life-changing. for you all as well. But first, a quick message from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Now, I've taken creatine for years, but I'm going to be honest. My due diligence kind of stopped it reading the word creatine on the label. I had no idea what was actually in the stuff that I was swallowing every morning,

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dot deals slash Shopify to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Manson.com. That's Manson.dolls slash Shopify. Welcome back to the Solve podcast. Let's get back into it. In the 1930s, John Paul Sart was primarily a playwright and a novelist. He hadn't really spent much time doing philosophy or thinking about philosophy, but all of that changed when World War two broke out. In 1939, Sart got drafted into the French army. I believe he was like a radio tower operator. He was a pretty like, slight guy. Wasn't exactly your like burly soldier type. But as we all know, the French got their ass kicked. The Nazis rolled in within weeks, captured most of the territory of the country, and John Paul Sart was taken as a prisoner of war. Now for the next two years,

he spent time in, I don't want to say it was the equivalent of a concentration camp, but it was not fun. He lived in a small, isolated cell. It was probably like six feet by eight feet. He was alone most of the day, and he had nothing to occupy him other than to journal ferociously. And as he was spending all that time alone in the prisoner of war camp, journaling out all of his thoughts obsessively throughout each day, he started to notice something about himself that kind of freaked him out, which was that he started to enjoy the fact that he didn't have to make any choices. Everything was planned for him. Everything he did each day he was told to do. He never had to put any sort of thought into any decisions. He was never having to choose between any two alternatives. And he realized

that there was a certain level of comfort that came with this that shocked him and scared him a little bit. So he started journaling about the nature of choice itself. And he realized that choice is inherently frightening because when you choose something, you are cutting off or negating some other alternative. And as soon as you cut off some alternative, there's always this question of, did I make the right choice? Am I going to regret this? And start realizing that so many people go through life

avoiding making choices for this exact reason. They are afraid of negating or cutting off the version of themselves that they're going to regret, not pursuing. Now, all of these journals and ideas and thoughts eventually became Sart's philosophical magnum opus. It's called On Being and Nothingness. It is maybe the single hardest book I have forced myself to get through. I didn't finish it.

I got about 400 pages in and just like fucking threw in the towel. I was like, I can't take anymore. But in being and nothingness, Sart has this idea called Bad Faith, which is all of the mechanisms and inventions and narratives and stories that we tell ourselves to let us off the hook to not choose, right? It's like, oh, well, I didn't have a choice because my family wanted me to do this. Or I didn't have a choice because all of the people I was with were going over there. So I had to go over there too. Or I didn't have a choice because it's the economy crashed and there's nothing I could do about that. Like, we are always seeking reasons

and justifications for not choosing because by not choosing, we don't have to confront that anxiety, that freedom avails to us. But here's where Sart turned everything on its head. In being in nothingness, he pointed out that the refusal to make a choice is still a choice. That we are all making choices every minute of every day, whether we realize we are or not. And that living in bad faith is not actually the removal of our own choices.

It is simply the subversion of our own choices into our unconscious, into instinct, into impulse. And Sartb believed that this realization that you were choosing in every moment was the single crux of which all agency and ability to live and commit hinged upon.

And it's interesting because if you go back to Kierkegaard, there's a very similar idea in his book, Either or. So he had this character named Judge William. The purpose of the character is to kind of argue against the aesthetic life and promote what Kierkegaard called the ethical life. Now, the argument was not your run-of-the-mill scolding from your grandmother of like, you should settle down and find a wife and have a nice life for yourself. It was actually way more interesting in that, which is that Judge William argued that you

should choose choice itself. Now, on the surface, that sounds a little confusing, but I think that is Kierkegaard's way of saying, take all of those choice. choices that you are outsourcing and to your impulses and your unconscious and make them conscious, make them explicit, walk into them open-eyed, be aware of the trade-offs that are involved in each thing that you do each day. Because as Kierkegaard argued, the self is not determined by the things that you are. It's determined by the things that you chose not to be. The things that you are willing to sacrifice, that other people were not willing to sacrifice.

that's actually what differentiates you both to yourself and to the world around you. If you look at the word decide itself, the etymological root in Latin, it comes from the verb desiderre, which means to cut. The word decide literally means to cut off alternatives, to refuse other possibilities. And Kierkegaard argued that the ability to commit yourself to something, to someone, to negate all the other alternatives, that this would actually make you a much happier, healthier, more whole person. And it turns out that modern research has really backed this up. And what's interesting is that a lot of the fear that we have around choosing, a lot of the anxiety that we have that comes with

freedom, a lot of it's very irrational. Before the choice, there's all these fears of like, well, what if I choose the wrong one? What if I make a mistake? What if I regret not going down this other path, whereas what we find is that after you have chosen, your feelings are quite different. They are similarly irrational, but in a different direction. And so in this chapter, it's probably useful to start out by going through what is the psychological process of choosing and committing? What does that feel like?

How does that actually function within your mind? And how do you end up coming to see it down the road after? after the fact. Now, as soon as we started working on this episode and on this chapter, my mind immediately went to a researcher that I'm a huge fan of, who I think his work is very relevant and appropriate here, and that's Dan Gilbert, who is one of the preeminent happiness researchers, positive psychologists out of Harvard. And Gilbert is a super interesting guy because I think in a lot of ways his life story kind of illustrates a lot of the points he makes about commitment and choice and choosing. So quick bio, Dan Gilbert, he dropped out

of high school at 15. He grew up near Chicago. It sounds like he was a bit of a hippie, a bit of a free spirit, a bit of an esteet, if you will. He started hitchhiking around the country. He was reading a lot of Eastern philosophy. He was meditating. He was into all sorts of woo-woo stuff. And he initially wanted to become a creative writer. So he settled around Denver with his girlfriend and his son and he started writing science fiction on a typewriter. Now at the time he wanted to support his young family so he went back to school and then he started going to community college. And when he arrived at the community college and wanted to sign up for creative writing courses, they were all full for that semester. And so he looked at the course listing and he asked himself,

what class will help me write science fiction better than anything else? And he decided that psychology, that makes sense. Like if I want to be a better writer, I should probably understand a little bit about human psychology. So he took the psychology course. He loved it so much. He just went all in on it. You could say he committed to it. Within a year, he had stopped writing fiction entirely, and he was enrolled full-time at UC Denver. Within 10 years, he had a PhD from Princeton, and within 20 years, he was a 10-year professor at Harvard, doing some of the most popular research that people like you and I talk about today. Did you know any? I didn't know any of this story beforehand. He's written, you know, stumbling on happiness.

his biggest book probably and lots of other books and I've read all those research I had no idea about this whole background of his well it's funny actually I do know one story about him which is why I thought of him for this chapter and we'll get to that story in a second but yeah I didn't know that he kind of came from this bohemian aesthetic life and then like found psychology went all in on it I mean it's actually it's a beautiful representation of kind of what this whole episode is about like he found a thing that resonated decided right he cut all the off the alternatives went all in on it and it paid off in a massive way. He's got this great quote, by the way, where he said,

make a plan for your life and then be grateful when it doesn't go that way. He's full of those, yeah. I love him. So Gilbert is really famous for having a lot of kind of counterintuitive happiness research. He has all sorts of findings that show that a lot of what we expect to make us happy doesn't make us happy. And a lot of the stuff that we expect to make us unhappy doesn't really make us unhappy and vice versa. In a lot of cases, the things that we remember is making us happy actually didn't make us that happy at the time. And that basically our perception of our own

happiness is very unreliable. It's quite relative given the circumstances. Now, this is going to be really important in a minute once we kind of come back to commitment. His foray into this line of research actually totally happened on accident back in the early 90s. He was having lunch with a colleague, and it just so happened that both him and that colleague had endured, like, pretty awful years. They'd both had people close to them pass away. They'd both had some pretty significant professional setbacks. They had some problems in their personal lives, and they were sitting there talking about it, but also kind of analyzing themselves, as I guess psychologists do when they sit and have lunch for a long time. And they realized that both of them actually felt a lot better about their situations than they would have guessed.

beforehand, that they were handling everything much better than they would have predicted, and that looking back, things were actually not as awful as they sounded initially. So this got them curious of like, why don't we try to measure people's forecasting into what's going to make them happy and what actually makes them happy? And this kicked off a series of fascinating findings that Gilbert later kind of packaged together and labeled the psychological immune system. And the idea behind the psychological immune system is that the same way our body will fight off bacteria

and a cold virus, our psychology also seems to have a bit of an immune system to keep unhappiness and misery at bay. So it turns out that we will misremember things in our favor, that we will highlight things in our past that make us happier and, suddenly kind of forget the things that were unexciting or

are uninteresting. We will overestimate things in our future to generate a large sense of optimism and hope. Whereas like once we actually get the thing that we're excited about, it's never as good as you think it's going to be. It's never as good as you think it's going to be. And so he

identified all of these different ways that our mind is kind of irrational and inaccurate in terms of what it predicts and what it expects, and it seems to consistently be irrational and inaccurate in the same direction, which is to make us mildly happier. Our psychological immune system takes many different forms.

It comes in rationalizing post-talk justifications, reframing situations, finding silver linings to terrible things that have happened to us. It also involves a series of cognitive biases that we are just, like, not even aware of when they're happening. So my favorite story involving Dan Gilbert is actually. about one of those biases. He had been with his girlfriend for like 15 years or something. They'd never gotten married. And he was talking to a colleague about some of his recent research. And he actually found that putting constraints on somebody made them more satisfied with their situation than

removing the constraints. Right. It's it's kind of Sart and the prisoner of war camp. It's like he found the more constraints you put on people, the more satisfied they seem to be with that situation after the fact. His colleague said, oh, that's really interesting. That's like a very strong psychological argument for marriage. And Dan Gilbert sat there for a second. And up until that point, he had never really believed in the value of marriage. He saw it as kind of a pointless legal formality. And he sat there and he was like, oh, shit. And he went home and immediately proposed to his girlfriend. And sure enough, he later said, getting married made me happier with my relationship. It's that barrier to exit that makes you more satisfied staying where you are.

Now, this is important for commitments because it turns out that there are a lot of aspects of our psychological immune system that are kind of geared towards nudging us to be satisfied with our decisions, even if it wasn't the greatest decision in the world, right? So the fear that the estate has, which is like, I can't make a choice,

what if I make the wrong choice, what if I'm not happy, what if this other choice was the better choice? The dizziness of freedom. the dizziness of freedom, it turns out once you've made the choice, your mind will unconsciously start justifying that choice to yourself and finding reasons to be happy about it. And I think this is actually an important part of our psychological software. Evolutionarily speaking, optionality was very scarce throughout most of human history. And so we have a very strong

bias towards maintaining optionality. But then it makes sense, once you have kind of walk through that door and close the other doors, it makes sense that you would have a bias towards justifying that decision and being happy with whatever resulted from it. Opposite biases. Opposite biases. When like that you were talking about that anxiety before the decision versus the different anxiety you might have after it, they're completely different mechanisms. It seems like, yeah.

And I come back to the cold pool metaphor, right? It's like the fear of jumping in is is only matched by the satisfaction once you're already in. Like, nobody ever jumps into a cold pool on a hot summer day and is like, why did I do this? I made the wrong decision. I should have jumped into the hot tub instead. Like, it's, no, you're like, this is nice. The cold pool example, you can't jump out of the cold pool as if you've never done it before, right? It's whereas that door study I was talking about where you get the three doors, always keeping those three options open, there's a difference there.

There's a qualitative difference there, too. Categorical difference there, actually. The reversible versus unreversible. And that's actually something they see in the research is that the psychological immune system actually kicks in the strongest when you have an irreversible decision. So you make a decision and you can't go back on it. You're probably going to be more satisfied with it just because you have no other option in that case. So kind of in the short term, if you're making these decisions, you have these irreversible decisions that you need to make, there is a little bit of an argument for like, just make the decision. Just do it.

And your brain will kind of follow you there. I think in the modern world where there is, it's more like the open door study or it's more like the door study where you can keep all of these doors open if you want to. There might be a better door down the hall almost at all times. I think that's where a lot of us get stuck. We have the optionality to keep all those doors open. Yeah. But the psychological immune system works best when there are these kind of like irreversible decisions or at least ones that we perceive as irreversible. This lends itself to Dan Gilbert's point that like increasing constraints on your decision actually increases your satisfaction. with that decision. Like, the more irreversible you can make something, the more satisfied with it you'll probably be. It's funny, actually, I just saw this yesterday on social media. It was an interview with the sports journalist Stephen A. Smith. He was like, I have a friend whose pre-nup, I believe,

is the most perfect legal document ever written. It's a pre-nup of only one sentence. You want to guess what the one sentence is? Whoever leaves gets nothing. How's that for incentives in irreversibility? Yeah. Yeah. There's been decisions that I've made where it was just like, oh, I got all these options in front of me.

And I felt that dizziness of freedom before. And as soon as I made one, I just instantly almost felt better about it. When I finished my master's degree, I was still like, I don't know what I want to do with my life type of thing. And I said, screw it. I'm going to go live in South America for a little while. And I was so anxious before that. And I was like, I don't know what I wanted to do, blah, blah, blah. And as soon as I made that decision, I was like, there was clarity.

I knew exactly what I need to do. I need to buy this ticket. I need to sell all my stuff. I need to all of these things like just fell into place. I think that's part of it too is it gives you this clarity. Again, almost no matter what it was. That honestly probably wasn't a great decision of mine to do. I probably should have just kept going with,

on a more stable career path at the time. But that said, I made the decision. And it removed a lot of that uncertainty around it. You're alluding to something. This is actually a point I made in subtle art. And it's something that I, I believe very strongly, but it's very hard to communicate. I think people who are very aesthetic in the way they live, like, it just, they don't understand.

What you just described is a very subtle form of freedom in that when you cut off the alternatives, it actually frees you to focus on the thing that you chose on, right? And that's actually a very powerful form of freedom. The example I've given a number of times is when I got engaged to my wife. Like I fretted and worried about that for so many months. I agonized over it. And then as soon as I proposed, it was like this burden was lifted off my shoulders. And the way I described it is that it was like I had this like software running in the back of my head that was always like, where's the hot girl?

Does she like me? Should I talk to her? Even when I had a girlfriend. Like that was it was quietly still kind of operating because you're still kind of, even if you're in a relationship, you're still kind of measuring your. sexual market value, I guess. And as soon as I got engaged, it's like that software shut down and all of this RAM and bandwidth was like freed up for me to focus on things I actually gave a shit about. And the experience was liberation. And I remember that like really fucked with my head because as we talked about last chapter, like I'd spent pretty much all my 20s living in an aesthetic life

and pursuing as much novelty and stimulation as possible. And so then the fact that like the most significant confining choice that I had ever made up until that point in my life, I also experiences the most liberating, like really mind-fucked me. Yeah, what we think of is freedom, that optionality. What you're saying is no, actually making a decision is freedom. You have the, you have the choice, you have the freedom to make that decision, to cut off all these other things. That's a very different way about, of thinking about freedom. I believe John Dewey had this concept of positive freedom and negative freedom. Positive freedom was optionality. It was freedom to do a lot of things, whereas negative freedom was freedom from. It was freedom from impediments. It was freedom from distraction. And I think when you make a choice, you are trading positive freedom for negative freedom. You're trading in lots of options of what you could do for the freedom to only focus on the thing you have chosen to do. In my example, I decided to go live in South America, right? And ran into a whole bunch of issues while I was down there. Like I was teaching English.

the school I was working with was going bankrupt and I wasn't getting paid and all of this. And I remember I was sitting at this hostel and there was this guy there. He's from Iceland. Spoke like five languages. His name was Daniel. He lived all over the world and I was talking with him about my situation and I had decided to, I need to move back. And I kind of fell into the whole bad faith thing. I was like, oh, I have to move back because I can't, you know, there's all these financial things around it and I'm homesick and, oh, I need to get back to my career and all of these things. So I told him, you know, I have to go back. And he says, you don't have to go back.

And I'll remember that. He was very clear-eyed about his life, too. Like, he'd kind of live that bohemian life in a way, but he's like, I choose this and I understand it in a way that I think a lot of people didn't. My point there, though, too, is that even once you make that decision, though, it's not a one-time thing, right? Just like your marriage, your decision to marry your wife. That wasn't actually a one-time decision.

It was in alignment with something that you valued, for sure. But it wasn't just this one-time event that, oh, all of a sudden now I'm just, I don't have to worry about this ever again. The RAM thing you're talking about, all of that, that went away, sure. But you still have to make that decision and that commitment over and over. We mentioned this before. Commitment isn't the one-time decision. It's a mechanism for cutting off all of these other routes and for defining who you are. It's funny.

I had a friend in my 20s, an older friend who's a bit of a mentor figure to me for a while. And it was really annoying, but it was also something that looking back, I kind of appreciate. You know, because I could be like a whiny young person at times be like, oh, I can't do that. It's not fair. You know, all that sort of shit. He was about 10 years older than me. I remember every time I ever said, I can't do this, he would interrupt me and say, you can, you choose not to. And I was just like, whatever, dude. Like, shut up. But it's like, he said it enough times that it started to sink in of like, okay, yeah, I can stay in Chile if I want, right? Like, yeah, I don't have to go back to the U.S. You're refusing to pay the cost of choosing is what you're doing there. Sart made that point as well. It wasn't necessarily that you can do whatever you want. That's not what he's saying. You have the ability to choose how to respond to whatever situation you're in,

whatever life throws at you. I can't choose to be six foot five, right? But I can choose to interact with the world in a way that my height might not matter, or whatever it is, right? I think that's an important thing. He acknowledged that. It wasn't just like, oh, no, your choices are limitless and you can choose whatever you want. yes, you have to cut off these or whatever,

he acknowledged there are limits that you have to work within. I think it's very analogous to the point Annie Duke made on the last episode. You know, she made the point, she was like, look, you are always weighing options

and kind of making decisions based on probabilities or making decisions as bets, right, that like something's gonna work. She said, that's how your brain works anyway. The question is, is how aware of it are you? Because most people who are not aware of it,

they just go with their gut, right? They just do what the people around them are doing. They're just doing what they feel like is expected of them. And so the decision-making process is still happening, but it's happening under the surface. She called it under the hood. It's happening beneath the surface of the threshold of consciousness. It's similar with this of like the willingness to limit yourself

and cut off the opportunities for yourself. You're always doing that anyway. You're always choosing things anyway. Living in bad faith is when you intentionally keep it buried beneath the surface, keep it unconscious for yourself. And when you keep it unconscious for yourself, you don't have control over it, right? You can't manage it or navigate it. It just becomes very impulsive and instinctual. Choosing how you react to your own emotions. Yes. You could even go down to that level, I think, too. You could even argue you're choosing your emotions in many cases. Like that,

that gets hard. I think there's some situations that you, you can't. You know, You cannot choose, right? Like if somebody at love gets hit by a car in front of me, like obviously I cannot, I'm not consciously, I'm not choosing how I feel in that moment, but there are a lot of situations where you are actually choosing to be pissed or choosing to feel sorry for yourself.

It comes down to how you are choosing to see it. Like, what is the narrative that you are choosing the right around the situation? If most of what you're feeling is dictated by that narrative, then to a large degree you are actually choosing that emotion. Yeah. in that moment. One more example I think I'll bring up is actually when I got the job with you. And I've talked about this before a little bit. I kind of like come in and out of academia a little bit.

I took a break and went to South America for a little while, came back to academia, got into a PhD program and all of this. I never quite felt at home with that though, you know. And I always was like, I want to go do something more creative and like I love the internet and all of these things. I got the job offer with you. And like immediately, that was one of those things too where like my psychological immune system like kicked in because there was people all around me like, are you crazy? What are you doing? You know? And I was like, no, you're crazy. Like, I'm fine, right? That was an instance where my, I think my psychological immune system had kicked in and helped me like accept that decision and give me some clarity around it. Can we talk about that feeling? Because I actually think that's really important

when it comes to commitment. It's probably what Gilbert felt when he took that first psychology course. And like, I went to school. I studied international business and finance. I got a job in a bank. I fucking hate it. Like, from the first hour, I hated my existence inside the bank. I used to pass the time by reading books because I just hated being there so much. And one of the books I read was Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week. And I remember reading that and being like, I know how to make a website. I'm a pretty good writer. I'm pretty sure I could figure this out, right? Like, why don't I make a go at it? I remember I worked up the nerve to quit my job, maybe a month later. And I woke up. I, I, The first day at home, I started building a website. I had no idea what I was doing. It was a shit show. I mean, like, the first, like, six months was, I mean, I was just flailing. Nothing was working.

Tech issues, like building sites that nobody visited, working for a month to sell something and, like, literally getting zero sales. But I remember the whole time I was doing it, I was like, I would rather be broke and do this than go back to the bank and have money. I remember just being like, I'm so, there's something about this that I'm like, I'll be homeless. I don't care. I'm like perfectly fine doing this. As long as I get to do this, I don't care how much money I make. I'm never going back to the corporate world ever again. And I also trusted that like eventually one day I'll figure it out. But like what is that feeling? Like we've kind of talked about this on the change episode that like we all have predispositions towards things and a lot of times we're not aware of what those predispositions are. It takes a lot of time and experience to like really understand yourself and understand like what's right for you. A lot of people who struggle to commit to something and like find their path. It's largely because they they haven't had many of those experiences where they've done something and they're like, oh, this is it.

I don't care what anybody else says. I don't care if I go broke. Like this is it. Part of it is just like exercising that decision muscle a little bit too. I want to go back to something here. I mentioned early at the top of the show that you have been a little more extreme in this domain than a lot of people.

You were at your corporate job for what was it, all of like six or eight weeks? At most. Something like that. Yeah. I went in and out of academia for like six or eight years. Right, right.

Like that's what I was doing. I think that's more common, I think is people kind of like, uh, kind of coming in and out. Now I had this, I always had this poll kind of in and out of it and I knew I couldn't sit in there forever.

You figured that out early on. It took me a little bit longer, which I think a lot of people it takes them a little bit longer. That feeling, though, that you're talking about, I think there were a little, like I had little mini revelations along the way. Yeah, there were hints along the way.

It was like, oh, this feels good. And then I kind of like slide back into it and like, pull myself back out. Eventually, though, I think you do get to a point where like, well, fuck it, I'm just doing it. It's unavoidable. It's unavoidable at that point. So, yeah.

I think what I've observed is that people who have lived in bad faith for a long time, who have followed everybody else's rules, done what everybody else wants, done what everybody else expects of them. They've never gotten the reps. Because I think probably what's true in the case of you and I is that throughout our lives, we did things for no other reason than we enjoyed them. And so we learned things about ourselves. Whereas if you're somebody who grew up in an environment where there's zero opportunity to do things because you enjoy them, I'll use my wife as an example. So like she grew up extremely poor in Brazil. Like she couldn't go take an art class because she felt like it.

Like she had to get the fuck out of poverty. So it was every decision in her life had nothing to do with what she actually wanted other than not being poor. Right. Survival. Yeah. Right. Until she was like 28. And so she went through a period where like she really struggled to know like, what do I, what do I actually enjoy?

What do I actually care about? What do I actually want? I've observed this with over the years talking to readers and listeners that like people who grow up in that kind of situation where they've just always done. and what the people around them expect them to do. They've never even asked themselves what they want. They really struggle with this. Like they've never had that experience that you just described of like, oh, this is it.

One of the things I sometimes suggest to them is like, try to go back, ask yourself like, what did you love when you were a kid that for some reason you kind of just dropped along the way? And you probably dropped it because it wasn't cool. Maybe kids made fun of you. Maybe your parents told you it wasn't practical. Or maybe your teachers.

told you it was a waste of time, but like, what got dropped along the way? Exercising that muscle is important, and the sooner you can do it, the better, there's constraints on you, there's going to be constraints on you. Yet, even, as Sartre would say, you even have a choice within those,

even if you're very limited, your wife's example even to, she found a way out, you know, you always have a choice. They might be shitty choices, but you always have that choice. And so exercising that early on, I think the psychological immune system helps us out with that,

because you make a choice and your brain's going to be like, all right, we're doing it. It will increase your good feelings about it. You'll be more focused on it. You'll work harder on it in the short run. Really where the durability comes in is when you're making decisions that are aligned with your values and what you actually want about this. There's some research around this.

It's called self-concordance. It is exactly what it sounds like. It's making these decisions and these commitments that are aligned with what you actually, like, truly you have to listen to that. Like you're saying, maybe it is something for your childhood or what. whatever you want. I'm not saying like go with your gut all the time. That's not what I'm saying necessarily. It's like actually figuring out what you want and making a commitment to that, cutting off all the other outside options. That actually is what leads to a longer sense of,

a longer more durable sense of well-being around these things. You're much more likely to be persistent through a lot of these things. You're much more likely to have just better mental health and really be satisfied with those decisions. Your psychological immune system can get you through the short run. So my example with the chilly thing, I was like, oh yeah, I want like adventure and freedom and all of this. And that was good for a few months. That only lasted me a few months, though, right? It wasn't super durable. I needed something more and I wasn't quite sure, do I really want this freedom? I don't know. Do I need more stability? I was kind of going back and forth between it. So it wasn't like a really fully aligned decision or commitment that it made.

I'm going to work with you or whatever. That was much more in line with this is what I want to do. And it was much more durable since of well being that it got out of that. That's the second step in this system, I think. I'm going to challenge that a little bit, though, right? Because I would argue you had to go to Chile to find that out. Sure. Oh, yeah. I think this is kind of the irony with people who avoid choosing. By not choosing, you only maintain and increase that sense of uncertainty. If you choose and it doesn't work out, then good. Because now you know that's not. not the thing for you, right? Like, that's information. It's valuable. You came back to the U.S. you're like, okay, I did the South America thing. I did the travel to the liver broad thing. I know how that feels. Now that informs my future decisions. People might be listening to this and just thinking like, okay, well, I got to choose something like just out of a hat. You know, it's like, no, no, no, you should, you should really think about like what matters to you, kind of on a deep level and use that as a navigation. The other piece of advice that I often give around this is that I think for a lot of people, it's actually, it's easier for them to start with what they

don't want, right? So instead of like, say, taking all the things they're doing in their life and, like, choosing one to, to commit to or go deep on, maybe just start by picking the one or two things that you're currently spending time doing that, like, it's not bringing a whole lot of value and, like, just cut those out first and then slowly prune until you kind of see what you're, you end up with. you cut off the things you don't want to do. I get that. What happens though when you still regret it, though? Like, if you do come to regret a decision you make,

or how does regret work in this system that we're building here? I'll give you my personal take, and then you can give us the research. It's funny because I have so few regrets. And it's exactly for what I said. It's like even the things that I did that turned out to be stupid, I learned that they were stupid and I learned not to do them again, right? And so, like, those bad decisions provided just as much value as some of my good decisions

because they taught me just as much. What I've noticed over the years, and I've, like, dude, I've done a lot of stupid shit. The only things I regret in the long run is how I've treated people. Oh, okay. I never regret a bad decision. Like, I have done so many stupid. I've wasted so much money on, like, dumb decision. Yeah, yeah.

Bad business ventures. Like, I have made a fool of myself. I've embarrassed myself. I have fucking shot myself in the foot in so many, so many contacts, so many situations. The only things I regret are times that I've hurt somebody I really care about. Sure. Okay. Some people would point to you and say, well, you're just not prone to regret, Mark, I guess.

You're just not a person who regrets things. I would argue, no, that's not actually the case. Because in the research, what they found is that what people end up regretting is the actions not taken. you have this tendency to just take action. Exactly what they find in the research is that in a short run anyway, people kind of like, they make a decision 50-50, they regret it or not, right? In the long run, though, when people look back,

they're like, I don't regret making that decision, even though it turned out horribly. Like, I don't regret making the decision. What they regret is not making a decision is inaction. You know, Warren Buffett points us out too about a lot of the investments. He's like, the ones I regret are the ones I didn't make. It's like, if I lost money, I lost money, whatever, on the ones I made. But it's the ones I didn't make.

that I regret the most. And the same is true throughout life as well. So I don't think you're actually not a regret prone. I thought that for a little while, but then I thought about it more. And I was like, no, he's not regret prone. He just. I compulsively take action. He compulsively takes action. Yeah. I will say this. I do have like very like kind of subtle regrets, but it's always a, it is similar to that. It's around wasted time. Wasted time making a decision. Wasted time making your commitment. Yeah. In my case, it was, it's never like not making a decision. I mean, I've known people who spent years, wasted years, avoiding making a decision. And then once they make the decision, they're like, oh my God, I can't believe I wasted so many years. And they feel really bad about it.

For me, it's more like I pursued things that in hindsight were kind of dumb, not very aligned with my values or my long term who I wanted to be. And so I just kind of look back and I'm like, all right, that was stupid. In my case, it's actually kind of the opposite. I think there's like, maybe I took too much action on some things. I spent too much time pursuing things that were, like, kind of dumb and ultimately didn't add a whole lot to my life. That gets into a self-concordance thing, but yeah. So it's, it's, like, I look back at the amount of parting I did in my 20s, and I'm like, okay, I'm glad I did, like, 75% of it. There's about 25%.

I'm like, dude, stay home and work, watch a movie or something. You know, I took it too far. Yeah, and this kind of reminds me a little bit to, you know, we had Annie Duke on last time. And in her book, she has a book on quitting. One of the big points I got out of that is people wait too long to quit usually. And I would just generalize that people wait too long to make a decision period. I can definitely point to a lot of things in my life where I was like, I spent way too long considering this. They've shown studies around people trying to make big life decisions around work, school, relationships, right?

And they measure how much they, you know, how much do you think this is going to affect you? This is going to be a bad or a good decision at the time. and then they follow up with them months later and did you quit or not. The people who quit earlier report a lot more satisfaction than people who don't. So it's like you're waiting too long to quit.

And I would just say in general, you're waiting too long just to make a decision, period. I'm not prone to regret, but I do agree with you. I'm prone to action. I would rather just do something and then figure it out along the way. And as somebody who does that kind of compulsively,

I can report from the other side that like, there's never been a time where I'm like, I should have waited longer to do that. I cannot think of a single thing in my life. that I'm like, I should have waited longer. I do things very quickly. I do not sit around and, like,

agonize over many decisions in my life. I cannot think of a single one that I'm like, oh, I should have thought about that for another month or another year. I think you just get better at making decisions, too, the more you make, obviously. It's a volume game at a certain point. Here's the thing, though,

Kierkegaard's ethical life, his argument, you know, that Judge William's character he made up, Judge Williams' argument was not, you're going to feel better about your decisions. if you just make them, right? If you commit to something you're going to feel better about it, that was not his argument.

His argument was that making commitments creates the self. It creates an identity for you, something solid and something like worth standing for is what commitments do for you. Yes, you'll feel better about it. Like, that's a benefit. I think that's the kind of like the psychological sneak in that we have, is that there is some well-being you're going to get from some of this. But ultimately, what Kierkegaard argued was the ethical life has not defined

by feeling good about it. It's about creating a self. You can't create a self without commitments. And the research bears this out, too. There's this guy James Marsha back in the 60s who kind of started this work on identity formation. And he operationalized, like, your identity formation along these two axes, or these two components, really.

One he called crisis, which is really dramatic because all that is is actually exploring. You're an exploration phase. That's your crisis phase, he called it. And then commitment was the second phase, too. So investment in some part of your life and some firm decision in your life, right? And so if you take those two components, you can come up with kind of four different things. If you have low crisis versus high commitment or so on and so forth, right? Okay, so he comes up with these four identity statuses out of this.

Okay. And I'll just run through them really quick here. So the first one is what he calls diffusion, just as low crisis, low exploration and low commitment. This is just somebody who's not thinking about their options and not really committing to anything, right? They're just, it's very much go with the flow. You're not really engaged with life at all on any level. The next one, though, he called foreclosures. That's low exploration and high commitment.

So these are the people who definitely look around and it's like, it's more like, this is what I'm supposed to do and I'm going to commit hard to it. You know, I'm going to take the safe job and marry this certain person. Do what my parents told me. Do what my parents told me. So there's a very high level of commitment. So you might get some psychological immune system benefit from that. But at the same time, you haven't explored that deeply.

And so we talked about the self-concordance thing. You don't have the self-awareness around whether or not that was good for you, right? The next one is moratorium. So this is where there's high exploration but low commitment. This is where the asthete lives. At least for like younger people in this phase, they were a lot more likely to reach the next phase, which he called achievement, which is both a high exploration and a high commitment. So this is someone who's very deliberate, eyes wide open type of decision that they make. And they found through all of this, you know, that the people who do reach that achieved commitment status, they're the ones who have the highest well-being and everything we just talked about to. The psychological immune system kicks in. And then they also like, oh, I have this long-term sense of well-being. It's durable. And I feel good about it. I have good mental health, good relationships, all of that. But also, they have a very strong sense of who they are, a strong sense of self. I think somebody hears that. And somebody who might not have a real strong sense of themselves might not know what that means. Like, what is a strong sense of self?

What is a strong sense of all? I'm going to ask you that first. What do you think that that entails? I think it's a high degree of confidence in knowing what you value, what you prefer, what you're good at, what you're bad at. And I would argue that some degree of self-exploration is necessary for that. You kind of need this exploration phase when you're young to put yourself in a bunch of novel situations to get that information. Like you have to go to Chile to find out that you don't want to live there long. long term, because that teaches you something very important about yourself when you come back. And so that makes it easier to do future decisions. Now you're better able to close off alternatives because you know more about yourself. I think that's what the research bears out too. And you kind of just have a almost no matter where you are or where you go, you kind of feel the same in a way. We all kind of

change who we are in different situations. I get that. But there's still like a sense of yourself that you have throughout those different situations. You know who you are. Right. And if you don't have that sense of yourself, I think a lot of it is because you haven't really committed to something in your life, right? And you don't have that to fall back on. If we come back to my definition, which by the way, I just totally pulled out of my ass, but I feel pretty good about the high degree of confidence in one's values, preferences, talents and abilities, commitments solidify that, right? If I commit to this career and I spend all of my time doing this one thing, that is going to increase my confidence in who I am, right? It's like, I am a podcaster. I am.

an author, right? Like, it's, I've been doing this for 20 years. So I have a high degree of confidence that that is who I am. Whereas, like, if I haven't really tried many things, and if I haven't really had many jobs, and I haven't done anything for more than a year, then I'm going to have a very low degree of confidence in who I am, because I haven't accumulated that evidence to, to gain that self-understanding. It's funny how this is tying into the confidence piece of, like, right, we did a whole confidence episode and one of the big takeaways from that is that actually confidence is it's not the input of performance it's the output of performance and it's it is uh built through accumulating evidence that you're capable of

handling a situation and it's like a positive feedback loop it's like the more i'm able to make a decision and commit to something the more i learn about myself the more i learn about myself the better able i'm going to be to make commitments and decisions in the future and so you kind of get this upward spiral of commitments and self-knowledge and as we'll find in the next chapter or in the next stage, Kirikar's next stage, is that eventually you kind of hit escape velocity with that. And in that you find a commitment that you are happy to take to your grave with you. This episode's called Finding Your Path in Life. But like, it's kind of an airy, fairy thing. But I think that is ultimately what people crave is that they want something that they feel confident. I can do

this till I'm dead. Coming back to that, that liberation, like as soon as you hit that, like, that is actually incredibly liberating. It's almost like a marriage to a vocation or a career or a place or whatever, like a hobby. Once you find that, you're like, cool, I never have to think about this again. But I think it's important to note that like the ethical stage, you're not quite there yet. This is almost like an intermediary stage. The aesthetic stage, you're chasing stimulation, you're chasing novelty, you're trying new things, you're exploring. The ethical stage is where you start coming in with that razor and you're like, no,

not that. Nope, not that. I'm going to try this, see how it goes. It's very intentional. It's very intentional. And Kierkegaard wrote about it in terms of like doing it open-eyed, understanding the trade-offs that you're making. Like if you commit to a partner or you commit to moving to a new city, you're committing to both the good and the bad things about that, that experience. Is it something along the lines of holding the tension between those two? Like you're wide-eyed about that. You're like, I continue to choose this even though I got this thing over here. Like you said, deciding to get married and like shutting down the ram and whatever, there's still though an aspect of that where it's like, I know I'm leaving this all behind. Yes, it's easier day to day

because I have this commitment, but there's still an aspect of I know exactly what I'm, what I'm doing here, what I'm leaving behind, what I'm giving up. I think that's the real weight of the ethical stage is, is that it's not, again, it's not that you're going to feel better about this, because sometimes you're not. There's actually going to be a lot of tension still in the ethical stage. There will be doubt, right? There'll be times where you're like, yeah, did I make the right decision? Yeah.

Like, did I fuck this up? That's part of it, right? Like, if you didn't have that, it wouldn't be a commitment. Ah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's actually a signal to like, you're fully eyes wide open about what you've given up. That's actually, and you have some doubts around it.

Yeah. Let me go through really quick. You know, we talked a bit about, we gave examples of, of the aesthetic life in different domains, right? So the aesthetic who's dating, right? They're constantly swiping. They're constantly imagining that the next person's better, right? They're just cycling through lots and lots of first and second dates.

A person in the ethical stage, they would approach dating and relationships as like, no, I'm going to give this person, I'm going to commit myself to this person and see where this goes, right? It's, it is that cutting off of other options. maybe you're not married yet, maybe you're not like imagining that you're going to die with this person, but like you're at least making the decision of like seeing where this goes. In career, you know, the aesthetic person in their career, they are changing their career every other year. They are going back to school, taking classes every couple of years. They're moving to Costa Rica to become a surf instructor because they're burnt out. There's always something new.

They're chasing kind of the next novelty, the next high. An ethical person has chosen a line of work and they're like, you know what, I'm going to at least pursue mastery at this because I need to become excellent at something. Maybe this isn't the perfect thing, but I like it. So I'm going to go for it. And there's going to be days that it sucks and there's going to be days that I wonder like what the hell I'm doing. But that's part of it. So let's go for it. We talked about the aesthetic life in terms of choosing where you live. You know, an aesthetic person is always traveling, always moving. always changing cities, always in and out of town, going back visiting family, going abroad, like seeing old friends, coming back. The ethical life is a little bit more rooted, right? It's like, okay, it's probably best for me to be here, even if I don't always love it, even though the city has problems, even though there are things I don't like, it's overall, this aligns with my values and this aligns with the other areas of my life. So I'm going to like make a good go at it and understand that the tradeoffs that I'm taking on.

Can I just say there, in recent years, that's probably one of the more salient examples of my life, like choosing where to live. Where I live in Colorado now, I've left twice and I've come back twice. Okay. And then a couple of years ago, kind of, you know, when we started the podcast, you were like, hey, if you want to move out to L.A. I don't know if I've ever really talked to you about this, but I've struggled to that quite a bit. I have a really good community there. We've talked about this before. And I decided that's a big part of what I value.

The thing about that one, though, is unlike a lot of the other decisions in my life, that one I made pretty eyes wide open. I was like, I know what I'm giving up. I give up FaceTime with you. Probably some money. I've left some money on the table for sure. I know you have like your executive meetings out here that I'm not a part of. That is a decision I've made eyes wide open. Now, again, though, it's the commitment isn't a one-time thing.

I've had to like re-up that because there are times where I'm like, ah, you know, if I did move, there's that doubt. There's that like, I know what I'm leaving on the table. There's still a poll over there. At the end of the day, though, I'm like, okay, what do I value? And it's like, I realized like the, how lucky I am on the social side of things and like my friend group and my community that have built there. And I'm like, I'm choosing that. Yeah.

I feel like this is very much a post-pandemic thing for a lot of people. Like, remote work has become so common now props for making that decision. Because just in my life, like, I have. so many friends everywhere I've lived in the last six years, it feels like half of my friends leave within three or four years because everybody's just like constantly finding a quote unquote better place to go. It's really complicated building community, building long term friendships. I've been one of these people too. Like I have sat with groups of friends and we have literally spent an entire afternoon just trying to figure out where we should live. And it's, it's funny

because that is a quote unquote problem that didn't even exist a generation ago. Like my parents never, never, never occurred to them. Like should we pick up and move to another city with the kids? I never occurred to them because my dad's business was always in Austin. And again, there's like a freedom and luxury of not having to make that decision, of not having that optionality that I think our generation, because we have the optionality, we now are blessed with the anxiety of always wondering if we made the right decision. For a lot of people, too, if you are considering you're like, oh, I just need a new,

new city, a new whatever. I'm like, really think about that one. Really, really think about that one. If you can't be happy where you are, outside of like, if you're in, like, I don't know, a war-torn area or, you know, abusive relationship that you need to get away from, obviously, get out of that. Otherwise, if you're just like, oh, I don't know, I don't like this place. I'm not sure about that one. One of the things that I, kind of landed on with my wife and I as we've kind of agonized

over this question at different times over the last 10 years is I've arrived on the heuristic of like there needs to be a better reason than happiness to leave. Right? We can't just go because it's like

oh, this city sounds better. We have more things to do there. Right. Like there needs to be something coming back to that value alignment and that self concordance. Like there needs to be something deeper and more aligned than just like

this will be more fun. So because, the ethical life, like you are making commitments, making decisions open-eyed, like major life decisions with both of your eyes open, understanding the trade-offs that you're making, you are choosing to eliminate possible lives and possible versions of yourself. You are also, in some cases, you are choosing to let go old versions of your life and old versions of yourself. What doesn't get talked about nearly enough is that there is a component of grief and sadness

that comes with this, right? Like it is losing a version of yourself and accepting that like that version of you is never going to exist. It's really hard. It's like letting a friendship go or or letting go of a place that has a lot of sentimental value for you. Change gets marketed as this kind of pep rally like rah, raw, you're awesome. Yeah, it's it's going to be this euphoric epiphany. And the reality is that change often requires you to cut off possible versions of yourself that are going to be incredible. difficult and painful to cut off. And so there is a grieving process that comes with that elimination

of a part of yourself. And I think it's important for people to give themselves space to grieve that version of themselves. To grieve that life that they are leaving behind that they're not going to be able to go back to. I felt this a lot actually when I stopped being a nomad. I didn't want to go back, but like I still grieved losing that lifestyle. And knowing that like, I'm never going to be 20 and like traveling around Asia for the first time again. That experience is gone forever. I'm never going to feel it again. And it is sad.

It is hard. It's hard when you put it that way, it is like it is hard to sit with. And so people avoid sitting with it. Would it be even sadder to keep trying to relive that though? I think that's maybe a Kirkryard's point, right? About the ask the end. Yeah, I would say yes. Yeah.

Because you're going to realize that you can't relive it. And then you just keep doing that to yourself over and over again. That's why Kierkegaard says that the estate lives in despair. Even though they're having fun, even though they're partying, even though their Instagram is really, really sexy, they are living in despair. It's all Kastanova had left, too. Was it right about the past and try to relive it? And got that sad, yeah.

What we've learned in this chapter is that commitment delivers a sense of meaning and a sense of self. even if your decision is not the optimal decision, the psychological immune system will kick in and it will help you sit more comfortably with whatever decision that you made. And the regret research shows that it is far more difficult for us to accept the things we didn't do

more than the things that we did do. Now, these initial decisions, they kind of get that feedback loop kicked off, right? It's like, okay, I'm going to make a decision, I'm going to learn something about myself. Whatever I learn about myself, it's going to make it easier to make further decisions and further commitments in my life, which then is going to teach me more

about myself and then it's going to be easier and so on. As you start to get deeper into this feedback loop, that's where your identity starts to take shape. You've cut off enough alternatives in your life to start to see a kind of an outline of who you are, what you care about, what you're dedicating yourself to. A big piece of these decisions and commitments is making sure that they feel aligned with each other and aligned with your values, that they're in concordance to give that self definition. You know, we did an ego episode ages ago where we talked about that the goal is not to eliminate the ego, it's to develop a healthy ego. And part of a healthy ego is a internally consistent ego, an ego without contradiction within it. But as you go,

as you make deeper and deeper commitments in your life, you'll be cutting off larger and larger alternative selves. You'll be cutting off larger past selves that you'll have to grieve and accept that you'll never get to live those lives. You'll never get to go back and be the 25-year-old again. And you have to come to terms with that. But if the grief is real, that means you did something right. Because paradoxically, the more you make these commitments, the more you narrow your self-definition, the more you actually experience it as a liberation, a liberation to care about the thing that you actually want to be in this life. And Kierkegaard was such a melancholy and emo dude. He never framed this around happiness or well-being. That's a very

20th century concern. He always framed it around finding a real self, defining a real self for yourself, which honestly, 50 years before Freud, like that's a pretty radical gold set about for yourself. Having that strong self-definition, having that clear path for yourself, having that coherent narrative of both your past selves and your future selves, this is really the basis of being a psychologically healthy individual, being somebody who is thriving and flourishing and feeling as though they are getting the most out of life. So everything we've talked about in this chapter has been about choosing well, exploring your options, closing doors, letting your psychological machinery kind of do its work,

building an identity, becoming satisfied with that identity, learning more about who you are so you can make further commitments. Now, all of that is real and it's important, but for Kierkegaard, that still wasn't enough. Like, there was a whole other level to this that these kind of rational, open-eyed decisions still weren't really approaching or getting at. Because ultimately the ethical person is, they're still choosing. Even if they've made a commitment, they're maintaining that commitment. They're re-upping their commitment. They're doubling down.

Some cases, they're backing out of commitments or changing commitments. Sure, they walk through a door and shut it, but they're kind of holding it shut and they're not sure if they maybe want to open it again. Kierkegaard argued that there is a level of commitment that that effort disappears, that necessity of doubling down and re-upping commitments and re-chewing commitments, that it does eventually go away, but it only goes away in these very special circumstances. And Kierkegaard spent pretty much the final years of his life trying to explain how this happens. And what's interesting is that he couldn't explain how it happens without talking about it in religious terms.

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You can go to Manson.com slash waking up to get started today. That's manson.dial slash waking up. Welcome back to the Solve podcast. Let's get back into it. So this episode is about commitment, life paths, but in a lot of ways, it's kind of doubled as a Kierkegaard episode, which I love. I mean, I'm a big fan. But it's interesting because my exposure to Kierkegaard was a little bit awkward.

It was actually funny after subtle art came out, I remember getting an email from a reader asking me if I had read Kirofegard and I said no and he was like blown away. He was like, you have to read this guy because you're just going to love everything that he says. And then I still didn't read them. I had a book club when I lived in New York with a couple good friends and it was a philosophy book club. The whole point of the book club was to like read really difficult books that we wouldn't read otherwise if we just tried to read them on our own. And one month we chose Kierkega it's fear and trembling. It was my first exposure to Kierkegaard. And really all I knew about him at the time was that he was a really sad emo dude who like fumbled his girl and, uh, and that he was super Christian.

Those are kind of like the only two facts that I understood. And so we, we got fear and trembling, and I started reading it. And fear and trembling is about the Abraham and Isaac story from Genesis in the Bible. And the story for people who are not familiar is that very early on in the Bible, God calls on Abraham, who's kind of like the father of the three Abrahamic religions, to take his favorite son, which is Isaac, to the top of a mountain. And once he's on top of the mountain, he commands Abraham to sacrifice his son in the name of God. And this is a test because Old Testament God is extremely insecure and needs to be reassured at all times that his his his adherents love him and believe in him and then abraham is about to go

ahead and do it he's about to like plunge a knife into his his son's chest when god interrupts and is like jk uh just just checking making sure you're like my number one dude and of course i grew up i grew up going the church and bible study in sunday school and i went to a christian high school and I went to a Christian high school. We had theology class. So I was very familiar with the Abraham stories. I thought they were absolutely ridiculous. When I was young, I was like, this is the most insecure, fucking gaslighting, narcissistic bullshit.

Like, what a shitty god. Why would he do this? And so I remember when I opened up Kierkegaard and I started reading and I realized that the entire 300-page book was going to be about the Abraham and Isaacs. Yeah. I was like, no fucking way. I'm doing this. No way I'm doing this. This is awful. If I didn't have those friends who were going to read the book and we were going to hold each other accountable, I would have stopped after page five. Yeah, yeah. Slowly but surely, as I got through the book, Kierkegaard won me over. And by the time I was halfway through, I was like, okay, this is like some serious, profound shit. And while Kierkegaard was extremely religious and very Christian, fear and trembling and the religious stage of life, it can be read in a way that is quite secular. I think all of these concepts apply, regardless of what religion you are, regardless of whether you even believe in any religion. Because they point to a very deep and powerful psychological mechanism within us that I think is very powerful and profound. And I don't really see it talked about.

anywhere else. Definitely not in psychology. So a quick summary of fear and trembling, Kierkegaard's framework was written across two different books. There's either or, which explains the difference between the aesthetic life and the ethical life. And then fear and trembling was written later as kind of the third stage. It was Kierkegaard's argument that, wait, there's a whole other level to commitment and that the ethical life is necessary, but it's not sufficient to live a life that you feel is well-defined and deep and meaningful. The reason that he chose the Abraham and Isaac story is because he uses it as a metaphor or an analogy for Abraham's faith in something. In this case, it was God, but basically he had a degree

of faith and a degree of commitment to something to such a level that it was completely absurd and irrational. And in the book, Kierkegaard calls this the virtue of the absurd. And the idea is that the strongest commitments in our lives, we've committed to them so wholeheartedly to such a massive extent that they break into irrationality. Like, you can't really explain them to somebody else. There's no reasoning or justification. And it's important that to differentiate this from the ethical. stage and that the ethical stage, you are making commitments, but there's still like a, there's a cost-benefit analysis kind of going on behind the seats. There's like a, there's a questioning of like,

does this represent my values? Is this really who I want to be for the next 10 years? Yeah. And those are important questions. Like Kierkegaard's not negating the importance of those questions. He's just pointing out that there is another level of commitment that can only be taken on sheer faith, that there's not really any sort of explicable, rational justification for somebody wanting to do that. They're just doing it for the sake of doing it. Yes. Right. And whereas like in the ethical life, like we said, it's the mechanism.

It's the actual mechanism of continuing to choose over and over again. You're saying this goes beyond that. Yes. Okay. So I'm going to actually kind of explain this in religious terms first because this is how it's initially explained in fear and trembling. And then I'm going to try to apply it to. kind of secular commitments. So Kierkegaard's argument, and this is a religious argument,

is that blind faith in something is not faith, right? Just kind of assuming something, like just believing something, because that's what your parents told you to believe. That's not faith. That's just living unconsciously. That's another form of the aesthetic life. Real faith is recognizing the absurdity, the irrationality, the complete impossibility of proving whether something's true or not, and then still choosing to believe in spite of all of those things. Like, that is what faith actually is. You had Arthur Brooks on the old podcast. He came on, and he's religious. He's about Catholic. And you had a discussion with him about this. And he called it the childish version of religion and faith, which was just, yeah, you just believe and don't question it.

And he said actually the much more durable, much more kind of rock-solid version of it is doubting. continuing to choose it anyway. There's, that's religion. That to him, that was a religious belief anyway. Just growing up in the church, I think there, you do see that more mature version of faith show up in places. Like, I have vague recollections of certain people in my church is kind of talking about that that like, you're supposed to doubt.

That's what makes it faith. If you don't doubt, that's not faith. That's just blind, you know, kind of stupidity. The doubt is actually part of the process. And it is part of what makes it so powerful and meaningful is like knowing. is like knowing that this makes no sense, but you're going to live by it anyway. Now, how to apply this to secular life? For me, the most, kind of the clearest example of this that I can give is, is back when I was in music school, it was very interesting because if you're going to go into music,

and this applies to any of the arts, right? Acting, art, whatever it is. It is so overwhelmingly likely that you are not going to make a full-time living doing that, that it is. It is, it, is something you have to really wrestle with. And I remember it was something I really wrestled with in music school and most of my fellow students wrestled. I mean, we would talk about it. We would kind of joke about it. There was a joke that went around music school quite a bit, which was a, what's the

difference between a professional musician and a pizza man? Pizza man can feed a family of four. Okay. Okay. So there's like a very intense awareness. And coming back to it being an ethical commitment versus a religious commitment, I think music for me was very much an ethical commitment. It was something that I enjoyed very deeply. I was very passionate about it. I got a lot of social validation from it, a lot of satisfaction from practicing and becoming better. But ultimately, it was a cost-benefit analysis in my life. And once I started hitting that dip, and the dip in the arts is like very long and very long.

It made me start questioning, why am I here? Am I going to make it? I'm not as good as that guy or that guy. Like, there's only so many jobs, right? And so I dropped out. And most people do drop out. In fact, the music school that I went to the dropout rate, I believe, was like 87%? Probably. I was going to say 90%. Yeah, yeah. It's staggeringly high. So I've kind of kept tabs on some of my classmates. And a few of them have made it. And a few of them have developed careers in music, but it's, but it's, you know, you wouldn't, from the outside, you wouldn't necessarily call them like successful, right? It's kind of your, your wedding band musician, your high school music teacher, that sort of thing. Looking back, I think the thing that was really apparent is that the people who were going to make it in music felt like there was nothing they could do other than music. When I think about the people who did end up making it in the music industry, they were never the people in music school sitting around joking about a pizza man, you know, asking themselves like, is this going to go anywhere? it was unfathomable to them to do anything else.

They couldn't imagine themselves. Whether I went to them where or not. Right. Right. Broke, rich, happy, sad, successful, unsuccessful, anonymous, famous. Like, I don't think of any of that registered with them whatsoever. They were just like, this is what I do. I can't imagine not playing my instrument eight hours a day.

So I'm going to play my instrument eight hours a day. I remember we had a conversation in the office once, Steph, who works on the podcast, went to acting school. And she was saying the same thing about a lot of the acting students there. You see this in entrepreneurship. There's a famous line where Elon Musk was like giving a talk somewhere. And there was a Q&A with the audience. And somebody stood up in the audience and asked Elon. They said, what words of encouragement would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? And he said, I would give none because if you need encouragement, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. There's kind of this sense that entrepreneurship. you don't choose to be an entrepreneur. You are chosen by entrepreneurship. Like it is baked into you and you don't really feel like you have a choice but to do it. Yeah. Mark Andreessen makes that point to Andrews and Horowitz famous, you know, venture capital firm. He says the the people they look for when they're getting pitched is he can just tell at this point, too, he's got so much experience with this. You can tell it's these people,

they can't do anything but this. Right. They can't not be an entrepreneur. If like if they're not going to do this thing that they're presenting to me right in private. They're going to go find something else to do it no matter what. Yeah. But he says you can tell the people who come in and they're like, I came up with this idea and I think it's a good idea. We're going to make a bunch of money. And yeah, he's like you can tell. So purpose, you know, my AI app, my co-founder, Raj, I remember when we were having lunch meetings early on to like decide if we were going to start the company or not. So Raj is like a serial founder, entrepreneur. He's had a number of successful businesses, a number of exits. And he was kind of approaching the conversation as if like, okay, this is my next business, we'll probably exit or sell it or I'll step out or whatever. We'll hire a CEO. And he was doing the responsible thing that every, every co-founder pair, every group of co-founder should do, which is like talk about exit strategies. So I remember we were sitting at lunch and he was like, well, let's talk about exit strategy. Like, what is your like desired endgame for this for this business? And I like, I looked at him and I was like, what do you mean? And he said, like, well,

where do you want this to end up? Like, do you want to exit three years, five years, ten years? Like, do you want it to be cash flow? Do you want to, like, outsource, you know, higher managers? And I just looked at it and I was like, dude, I'm going to die in this industry. So I don't really care. Like, if you want to do something, like, if you want to get out after five years, like, we can figure that out. But I'm in this for life.

It's funny because he later told me he said one of the biggest reasons he decided to go in the business with me is because of that answer. But it's something, it's true. It's something I feel like very deep down at this point, which is that I don't have a choice. Like this is my life. Like this is what we're doing right now. Like this is my life's work. And it always will be. And I'm going to do this till I'm dead. There's a certain amount of peace that comes with that, with that certainty. There is any irrationality about it. Right. Like you could easily sit here and make all sorts of arguments. So like, well, Mark, you could. You could. you know, go start a multimedia company. You could become a serial founder. You could go into venture capital. There's a lot of things that I could do. And there was a period where I thought a lot about that. I worried a lot about that. And I would say about like three or four years ago, I kind of arrived at this conclusion of like, for whatever reason, call it the universe, call it God, call it fate, call it chance. I was put in this situation. with this incredible opportunity and privilege of like speaking to millions of people, being listened to by millions of people,

I have a certain set of talents and abilities. Like it chose me, right? Like at a certain point, it's like, I didn't choose this anymore. This is just who I am and this is what I'm destined to do. At that point, it just becomes faith. Like, it's like there's an absurdity to it, I guess, you could say. You know, you kind of mentioned this before. I guess too, though, that you kind of had to come to this, though.

And it wasn't, you didn't have this lightning bolt necessarily moment. Or maybe you did at some point. But at first it was music. And I think you held on to that even for a while. Yeah. Beyond even getting out of music tool and everything, right? Yeah. Well, it's funny because initially when I started my online businesses, the idea was,

oh, if I can make some money on the internet, then I'll have the financial security to go do the music thing. And time. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was completely like a horse trade, right? It was like, I didn't. All this online shit, it was totally a means to an end. But as I got deeper into it, A, I realized how fucking hard it is. Like there is like nothing.

Yeah. It takes a lot of time and effort and a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of skill building, a lot of like understanding so many subskills and different like areas of study. And then of course, the more I did it, the more I liked it and the better I got. And then of course, you reach this inflection point of like, okay, this is actually the thing I'm best at. And so it would be kind of stupid to like go and do music now. The success of the books like really kind of reignited this. Like I, you know, I did the books in the late 2010s.

A bunch of money came in. I kind of burnt myself out. And so I was sitting in a position where I'm like, okay, I'm like, I can do whatever I want. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not even 40 yet. got a ton of money in the bank. I've got infinite opportunities in front of me, right? Like, what do I want to do? And it was funny because it felt like anything I started kind of playing with or leaning into, it almost felt irresponsible. I don't think I really appreciated how special this situation we have is until like three or four years ago, right? Like, how long

many people are ever put in a situation where millions of other people will listen to them and trust them. Like that is such an honor and such a, such a privilege to have. So I started feeling a lot of responsibility towards owning that. And I think it's like that that responsibility piece, like that's when it starts to feel like I'm not choosing it anymore. Like I'm being chosen by it. And then yeah, around the same time I came to the realization of like, this is just, I'm going to do this till I'm dead. And that was freeing. And the same way, like, getting engaged was freeing. Yeah, it's funny, though, you, like, you went through the relationship things and getting married first, and then the career thing, even though the career, you started that first. And yeah, the timing of that's

kind of interesting to me. I don't know. I don't know. There's two points that Keirkegaard makes about this level of commitment that differentiates it from the ethical commitment. One is the irrationality, right? The absurdity of it. Chirth regard calls this the leap of faith. This is actually where the term leap of faith comes from, is that you, he compared it to like, you know, jumping off a cliff and just trusting that something's going to catch you, even though that you have no evidence that anything's going to catch you. Like, it takes that degree of faith and belief to achieve this kind of level of commitment. The second thing that he talks about is he called it infinite resignation,

which is that you have to be willing to commit to the thing, knowing full well that it may not work. It may not go the way you want it to. It may fail absolutely miserably. And this is kind of the music school thing, right? It's like the people who can't not play music all day, right? Like they totally understand that they might be, end up teaching a bunch of fifth graders, you know, band in some small town in Texas. or whatever, but it's like, they're okay with them. They're like, this is just what I do, right? So the ethical is still kind of bargaining in a lot of ways. It's like, am I really going to get everything I want out of this? Is this really going to represent who I am? Whereas the religious is like, you feel like you have no choice, which is ironic because you kind of arrive back where you started. The aesthetic feels like they have no choice, but it's because they refuse to choose. They're afraid of choosing. There's an anxiety of choosing. The ethical is trained themselves. to choose and has gotten good at choosing, but they're still evaluating every choice in terms of

cost, benefit, and who they want to be. Once you get to religious, you have found yourself in a commitment that, like, you are so deeply embedded in, your identity is so merged and meshed with that it no longer feels like a choice. It just feels like who you are. It does remind me a little bit of that Bukowski quote. When John Martin went to him with this measly deal. Like, if you don't want to write, I'll give you a few hundred bucks a month or whatever it was to live. And Bukowski wrote in his journal, I think it was, you know, I have the choice I can stay at the post office where he was working and be miserable the rest of my life. Or I can come out here and play it writer and starve. Yeah. And I've chosen to starve. Yeah. Like that's, like, a religious level of dedication that he took. And he just, he understood. He's like, you know what? Might not work out. I might starve literally. Yeah. Whatever. He has one of my favorite lines ever. I know it's one of your favorite lines too, which is perfectly appropriate for this, which he said, find what you love and let it kill you.

That's the level of that we're talking, right? It's almost like choosing the vehicle towards your own death. You have to give your time to something. Like Sart would put it in these terms. You would say you have to spend your times on something. In every moment you are already sacrificing. The only question is, what are you choosing the sacrifice for? and the religious level of commitment is,

is once you have found that thing in your life that you were willing to literally give your entire life to, I will give all of my time to this thing because why? I'm just because. Yeah. Yeah. That's just who I am. I saw I interview with Mick Jagger recently. And, you know, he's getting old.

Yeah. So he was doing a lot of reflection back on his life. And he said, you know, people in this industry, you have to have a big ego, he said. to be in this industry. I actually think what he meant, though, was this blinding faith in yourself or just in the fact that you're like, this is what I'm here to do,

screw everybody else. He called it a big ego, but I'm not sure if that's exactly what he meant about it. I think anytime you enter an industry like that, like you have to be delusional about yourself. Or you just have to not care. Yeah.

Like genuinely not care. Like Bukowski. Right. And it's funny because I think with music, A, I did not have that ego. I did not have a delusional belief in my own abilities. And B, I did care. I was like, I don't want to, dude, I don't want to be fucking broke and, you know,

plain dive bars when I'm 45. Like, that sounds awful. I would rather have a real career and a real job. Whereas I think a lot of people in music, like, they're fine with that. Yeah. They're totally fine with that. Whereas with writing, I didn't care. I was like, cool.

I mean, this is fun. I'll publish a bunch of stuff and we'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and if we do want to explain kind of this from a secular way of instead of religious way, there's a lot of research around like having a calling and a vocation, right? Like finding your calling and finding your vocation or at least choosing that, I guess, is probably a better term for it. There were these two researchers back in the 2000s, Dick and Duffy.

They kind of did a lot of these initial studies around it. Dick and Duffy. Shout out to Dick and Duffy. 2009, maybe. What a researching. duo, man. They define a calling. It's like this, they use a little bit of religious language. A transcendent summons towards purposeful work. Okay. So it is that it's, you're called towards it. Like you said, you're chosen by it almost. These people who have what they think of as a calling, again, they feel like they're chosen by it. And it's associated with a greater sense of self-concept clarity like we talked about. You have a more defined self around this. Higher well-being, professional commitment around it, life satisfaction, you're more persistent and resilient. like all of those things come along with it right just searching for it isn't enough obviously and that's another thing they say you know there there's a lot of people who out there who do they search for the

calling just searching for it isn't enough you do actually end up having to commit you're like well okay what if you don't have a calling in the first place right then how are you supposed to if it chooses you and you can't find it really what i think i don't i don't think the research really specifically says this but if i'm reading between the lines there is some degree of commit first and then you kind of develop the calling around it very much what your story is telling to, I think. Right. Is that at a certain point, I think you do feel like, oh, this is what I was put here for. We're talking a lot about, you know, creative pursuits. And this is, people think of these

things when they think of callings, you know, oh, I don't want to be a writer or a musician or an artist of some kind or, you know, something that's creative in some way, shape, or form, right? I had somebody come in and work on my furnace one time. This, guy. He was an H-FAC guy. Okay. And he comes in and immediately I could just tell this guy was super, super into heating and air conditioning. Okay. I mean, I get to talking to this guy and I'm like, kind of just watching him and he just starts explaining things to me. Like he's teaching me. Right. In that moment. And I didn't ask him at all. Yeah. And then he just sits here and he starts talking to me about H-VAC stuff. Yeah. And I could just immediately tell him like, this guy is super

into what he does. And then I just start talking with him. And I'm like, how did you get into this and this and that? He's like, oh, I'm just kind of always been interested in it. And I really keep up on it. I go to classes on the weekends almost every weekend on HVAC. I'm like, hold on, you spend your nine to five Monday through Friday doing this. And then you go on the weekends and you keep doing this. I don't think it has to be these like pie in the sky, you know, pursuits that we have. If you have one of those, that's great. Don't get it wrong. But like, I have an immense amount of respect and like aberration for that guy for finding what it was. And I think a lot of us see that in our lives, right? You see somebody out there who's like they love being a teacher or they love whatever it is sewing. I don't know. You know,

I own a small business that makes a little bit of money for them and they're able to live that way. But they're super, super into it. And they're like, this is what I'm here for. I worked with, I worked at a bakery one time in a mall. And one of them, we got a new manager. And she was so, like, her passion was decorating cakes and cookies. Like, so far, like, she was like, this is what I'm here to do. Just obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with it. And so I don't think we got to get like super crazy about this. Again, it goes back to that, like, when you commit to something that, like, self-coalesces around it.

And I think we have a lot of admiration and respect for those people, too. It doesn't have to be something wild and crazy at all. Absolutely. It reminds me there was a story in Cal Newport's book, So Good, They Can Ignore You, which, by the way, great book around this, because he makes the point in that book that you don't find a vocation that you're passionate about. What generally happens to most people is they find something that they have a talent for or they have a knack at, they get really good at it. And it's that process of mastery that generates the passion and the sense of purpose around it. And so I remember in that book, he uses the example of there was a secretary at the university that he works at. And he talked to her and she was like absolutely believed fullheartedly that being a secretary at a university was her life's calling, that that that was. was like why she was put on earth. And he asked her like why she felt that way. And she was like,

oh, I'm like the connective tissue between so many departments. And I'm like, I'm like the machinery in between all the different cogs. And if I wasn't here, then like there's so many important people that make very important decisions for tens of thousands of students. Like they wouldn't be able to make their decisions. If I wasn't here handling these administrative tasks for them. And like she felt an extreme amount of purpose and significance around a job. that I think, you know, most young people wouldn't even look at twice. So there's a piece here, we talked about this in the purpose episode, but there's a component here of feeling that there's, there you have something to give. And then I think there's also a component of, of kind of

natural talent, natural ability, or something that is, you are uniquely suited to do that most other people are not. There's a point. I think we'll make this here in a little bit as well, too, but you can't just jump right into this as well. You kind of have to go through that ethical exploration. that we talked about. You know, there's this research out there back in the 2000s as well. Duffy was a part of this as well where like college students who like they'd since they have their, I know I have a purpose. I just haven't found it yet. They were actually more undecided and less clear about kind of their vocational identity, about their identities really, than people who just weren't searching at all. Interesting. So it was like they kind of,

they had that open loop, all those open doors, but they hadn't committed to anything yet. So it's kind of like this evidence that you have to, you really do have to go through this stage and this exploration and this conscious choosing before you can really get to that more religious stage, I think. Okay, there's something really interesting about that because anecdotally, yeah, the most aesthetic people I know are always talking about their fucking calling and their fucking purpose. Like when I think about the most non-committal, impulsive, self-indulgent people I know, They're always justifying their behavior as like, oh, I just feel like this is, this is part of my calling. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm following this. I'm exploring this. Right. And meanwhile, they're just, they're just jumping from one thing to the next because they think the next thing is their calling. It's, it's really interesting. Whereas, like, the people who are actually making commitments, they're just being very practical about it. They're like this, you know, I need to set roots somewhere.

I need to find my lane. They're really good at it. And they don't have to question who they are at that point. Right. Right. And then the calling emerges as a side effect of that. Like, I don't think there's an aesthetic person out there who, like, suddenly shows up in Costa Rica and is like, oh, yeah. I was meant to be a surfer in Costa Rica for the rest of my life.

Like, I don't think that ever happens. Now, again, the commitment isn't a one-time thing, right? It's a mechanism. Right. And it's also, there's a skill aspect. And it's a skill to a skill you build. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, it is, you have to develop the, the skill set of, cutting off alternatives, get good at that. That process of cutting out alternatives slowly winnows down what you find worth doing with your life. And then eventually you arrive on one, two, three things that you're like, oh, this is what I was here for. And it's that what I was here for is that is not like necessarily cosmically true. It is, that's the feeling. That's what it feels like. It feels inevitable. It feels like, right? It feels like you couldn't decide otherwise even if you wanted to. Like at this point, like, I feel like even if I wanted to go get

a different job, I don't feel like I can't. Like, it just, it's so nonsensical to me at this point of like, why would I ever do that? Right. But you have all this evidence from before of making all those commitments and decisions and that's why you've come to that realization. Again, it's not, oh, it just dawned on me one day. Correct. It was a very, it was a, it was a process. It's like a multi-decade process. Right, right. A lot of fits and starts. Yeah.

You know, we talked about constraints with Dan Gilbert's research. I do think there is something about kind of psychologically priming ourselves for some of these commitments. I think you can kind of construct your environment in situation in such a way that you make these things more likely than not. I'll give you an example. Like Stephen Pressfield, who we're both fans of and a friend of mine, he is this concept that. that's called Going Pro. And it's a book, any aspiring creative person, like definitely recommend reading that, reading Going Pro and then also reading The War of Art.

I think they're both must-reads for anybody who wants to be in a creative field. But his concept of Going Pro is basically like people who aspire to have a creative career. They tend to kind of waffle around and wait for inspiration and kind of wait for the world to recognize their genius. and find like the right moment or the right thing to do. And what he points out is that he said, you should just start treating yourself as a professional before you're a professional, right? So ask yourself, like, if I was a professional musician,

what would my day be like? Well, I would probably wake up and I would have a whole practice regimen and a rehearsal schedule. And I would probably study theory at the same time every day. And I would probably do like vocal lessons at the same time every day. Like, you would be extremely regimented with your schedule and your timing and you would, you would treat it like a job in a way that I definitely never did when I was in music school.

And I think most creative people never do. And what Pressfield recognized is that if you get people to act as though they've already made the commitment, then the commitment kind of follows suit. It's like what you said earlier. It's like the action, you don't commit to something by thinking about. about it, you act first and then your brain catches up later to justify it. Right. And so what Pressfield is doing is he's basically giving people permission of like, okay, if you think you want to be a writer, set up a corner of your, your apartment to be your writing studio, set up a schedule every week, write for four hours a day, show up,

have your favorite pins, have your favorite paper, download the writing software that you would use and then play at writer for a certain amount of time to see if it actually sticks. I saw a video on YouTube where a guy was talking about, he was like, you know, there are a lot of people who want the results of an athlete, but they're not willing to actually live like an athlete. If you want elite fitness, then you have to live your life the way an athlete lives their life, right? It's every meal is planned weeks, weeks in advance. every training session is planned weeks in advance you don't miss a day you don't miss recovery he's like people want to just kind of wander into a gym and work out really hard for an hour and be like man

I wish I was like an athlete like I wish I had a six-pack and it was like fast you know like the guy was just explaining he's like it doesn't work that way right like you have to there's you make the commitment first and then the the results follow does that make sense that absolutely One of my favorite quotes, too, is from Chuck Close. He's a portrait artist. He does these huge, like, mosaic portraits. And he was also disabled. But he has this quote.

He said, inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Yeah. He said that all of his inspiration, all of good ideas he ever had, all of the commitments he ever made came through the work itself. Yeah, he sat down and you get to work first. Yeah. And then you'll find the inspiration.

then you'll find the purpose, then you'll find the reason and the commitment behind that. So, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. You're like, Michael Phelps, too, I remember him. I think he didn't miss a workout day for, I can't remember how many years. Every single day for, like, I think it was like three years or more, it might have been more than that. I can't remember. Did not miss a single workout, you know, and everybody's like, oh, you know, but he's got these, like, huge limbs. And he's like a freak of nature.

And it's like, yeah, he's a freak of nature because he showed up every single day. Yeah. Even when he wasn't inspired to do that. Yeah. That's a level of religiosity if you want to talk about that, you know. I think you just made a really interesting connection there and that like once you take a commitment to a certain degree, people use that term that like it's like they got religious about it, right?

Like it's if somebody works out every single day for say seven years straight, you would describe that in religious terms. They are treating their workouts the way some people treat church. Some people treat prayer. Like I imagine a lot of people, I was initially turned off by Kierkegaard's kind of religious language around this. The more you sit with it and the more you dig into it, the more it actually starts making sense, that it's like the same mechanisms in our brain that are kind of responsible for

religious faith and religious belief are also responsible for the deepest, most profound commitments of our life. Yeah. Yeah. We just have religious brains kind of, yeah. You know, we've talked about other areas of life, too, and we're really really. focusing on career paths or, you know, callings, whatever. There's other areas, though, you can apply this as well. Marriage being one of those is like, that's a leap of faith, right? You don't know

what that person's going to be like in 30 years, 50 years, 60 years. That's a leap of faith, right? Maybe the the city you live in could be too. You know, there's some people, you see this a lot with like New Yorkers, right? You're like, I can't imagine living anywhere else. Some people were born there or moved there or whatever, and they're like, this city is part of me. I'm part of the city. Yeah. There's kind of a religious level of commitment there too with that. I've actually got a great story around this. So when I was, when I wanted to propose by my wife, like I mentioned earlier, I was very anxious about it, agonized over it for multiple months. It was also kind of that phase in the relationship where it's like, all right, dude, shit or get off the pot. Like, are you going to buy a ring or what? You know, at this point, you know, I had met her family and everybody loved each other. She had met my family and everybody loved each other. And pretty much every time, I went home and saw my parents, they'd be like, so what are you buying a ring? Do we have a wedding to look forward to? Like, what's going on? And I'd be like, uh, I don't know. I'll get back to you. And this went on for like six months. And then finally, I remember I was having dinner with my dad and my

stepmother one night. And they started getting on my case about like, you bought a ring yet. Like, when are you going to settle down? Like, come on. She's a good one. You know, all that sort of thing. And I was like, yeah, I don't, I'm thinking about it. I think I'm going to do it. I think I'm going to do it. It's just like, I don't know the right time or whatever. And then my stepmom looked at me and she's like, what are you waiting for? Like, what's the hold up here? And I, and I looked at her and I was like, you know, I just, how do I know she's the right one? I mean, it's the rest of my life. How do I know I'm going to want to be with her for the rest of my life? And my stepmother looked at me like I was a fucking idiot. And she was like, Mark Manson, I've been with your father for 26 years. And I still don't know if

I want to spend the rest of my life with them. You just put the ring on the finger and you do it. I was like, all right, fair enough. It's a leap of faith. Fair enough. It is. It's a leap of faith. Yeah.

And it's, it is irrational. By definition, it's irrational. It's completely irrational. Right. Two strangers coming together legally agreeing to share all of their assets to call themselves a family. There's nothing rational about it. It is very deeply irrational and absurd on some level.

But that's what makes it profound. That's what makes it one of the most profound commitments that you can have in life, right, is is the absurdity. It is the value, as Kierkegaard called it, the value of the absurdity. And I think this is what people often, I think it's a mistaken view. They say, you know, whatever, 30, 40, 50, 50, percent of marriages and a divorce and all this. I don't think that's a failure of the institution, right? That's a failure of somebody not seeing that with their eyes wide open, that absurdity. Right. And committing to it anyway. Everyone knows to blame marriage. Right. Oh, marriage. It's a

it's a failed institution. It's too hard. And it's not what humans were meant to do. Well, okay, sure. No, but there's also, I think it's more of a failure on the individual's part not to acknowledge that absurdity, not to acknowledge the commitment itself is something that is not a one-time thing. Well, and to come back to the infinite resignation, just because there's a 30, 40% chance it fails, doesn't mean it's a bad commitment. Right. Yeah. Right. In fact, you would say that for it to be a good commitment, it should still be worth doing even if it had a 30 or 40% chance. It was interesting, not to bring Elon back into this, but he happens to have a couple good quotes around commitment. I remember watching an interview of Elon a number of years ago and they were

asking him about SpaceX. And for people who are not familiar, like, SpaceX should have failed like half a dozen different times. And it really survived purely on the sheer will and ingenuity of him and his core engineering team. So he was being interviewed about it. And the interviewer was saying they were kind of talking about like why, how it should have failed multiple times. and how he stuck through it. And he literally put all of his money into it. So it's like, if it didn't work, he would have been broke. And the interviewer asked him, they said, what was, what do you believe the chances,

like looking back, what do you think the chances were that SpaceX was going to succeed after the third rocket blew up? And Elon said he was like, honestly, probably like five to 10 percent chance. And then the interviewer said, what percent chance do you think it would have had to be for you to walk away? And Elon's answer was really interesting. He said, there's no percent chance that I would have walked away. He said, even if it was a hundred percent chance going to fail, I believed it was worth doing, which is a religious level of commitment to something.

Like say what you want, but it's a religious level of commitment. He kind of went on to say, too, he's like, I think we should actually try to do things that are still worth doing even if we know they're going to fail. like his multiple marriages. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, that was the, that was a blow-low. You had to. Yeah, I mean, that was the cheap chappah. Yeah, he's, he, yeah, he's kind of asking for it.

But, uh, but I do think there's something very profound in that, right? It's like, what is worth doing even if it's guaranteed to fail? Yeah. And I would, again, apply it to, to like, somewhere you live, choosing a place as well. You could, you could say that. I mean, you know, where I live is not perfect. And I know that. And I kind of have committed to it either way.

If there is any doubt that creeps in, then I have to re-evaluate that. And again, it's a process. And the commitment is a mechanism. It has come to a point where it's like, oh, yeah, no, I belong here. I think people are looking for a sense of belonging for somewhere. And I think it's the same thing as like a relationship or a job or whatever. There is a level of you have to commit first. There's a process to it as well.

Then you get the sense of belonging. It's not you show up and oh, I belong here. Yeah. Which I think a lot of aesthetic people are like, oh, they show up in a place and look at this, all these exciting things. and I belong here and then they find out, oh, there's all these shitty parts do it too. Yeah, I think, I think a state's mistake novelty and stimulation for belonging. It's funny. I remember getting in an argument with a friend about this. And he used to claim that certain places had better energy than others. And I mean, you know, how I feel about energy, quote unquote. And so I'd be like, well, what is this energy? Like, you know, because he was speaking in like cosmological terms. He's like, you know, some countries just, a better energy. And I'm like, okay, timeout, you're like making a generalization about tens of millions of people. Like, what the fuck do you mean by energy? It's like, well, I get off the

plane and I look out the window and I just feel it. I'm like, okay, well, what are you feeling specifically? It's like, well, it's just, there's just an energy. I'm like, well, couldn't that energy just be you liking where you landed? Like, looking out the window and being like, this looks cool. Yeah, but it's not that simple. I'm like, okay, well, what am I missing here? And it's just like ascribing like temporary emotional feelings and vibes and making like grand universal claims based on those vibes. It's like, okay, I feel good in Thailand. Therefore Thailand has good energy and everybody should go to Thailand.

Like it's that kind of simplicity and immaturity that that I think just backfires on these people. Three months go by. They hit the dip in Thailand. And they're like, oh, the energy changed. the energy in Vietnam is actually much better. Right. Right.

And you will be in that endless cycle forever. Forever. Yeah. For fucking ever. Yeah. Yeah. What did we learn, Drew, Bernie? Oh, boy.

This was a light and cheery episode. Yeah. Nothing like four hours of Kierkegaard to fucking melt your brain. I mean, he was intense. He was. And I, that's actually one of the lessons I got out of it. It's just the intensity of all of this. If you don't feel some of that intensity,

like he calls it the dizziness of freedom. Like he said, the depth of your anxiety is kind of a reflection of the depth of how spiritual you are. Like, that's how he put it. And I think that's one thing I took away from it is just this is an intense thing to go through. And it should, and it has to be that way. It has to be because it is some of the most fundamental base level feelings and perceptions we have about ourselves.

Yeah. And I look back in like some of those decisions that I brought up, they were very, very intense. And whether they ended good or bad, like it gave me some sort of clarity. like you talked about, you know, even if it didn't turn out well, it still gave you some sort of clarity around it, which is kind of what we're all going for. I'm not so sure I have, I've met that like real religious to the bone kind of clarity yet, you know, where you have a couple areas of your life. Yeah. It's definitely made me like consider like go go back to those times where I was making those commitments or those decisions, really just decisions, even if they weren't a commitment, the power in those moments. The freedom is really exercised through those decisions. Got to pay the consequences of all of it. Right. And they're not limitless.

Don't get me wrong. But if I'm ever feeling lost or whatever, I know that I need to go back to, oh, okay, there's some sort of decision I'm avoiding. There's some commitment that I'm avoiding. There's some way I'm living in bad faith. Yeah. We talked about acting like I don't have the choice here. Yeah.

When I actually do. That was, this was a very, very good reminder of that. And, yeah, just to like lean into that intensity. The dizziness of freedom is anxiety. Like you said, Kierkegaard kind of gave us the modern use of that word anxiety. Yeah, it did. And we see it as a bad thing. But actually, there's a way to kind of turn it into some sort of like activation energy or whatever you want to call it.

That is not comfortable, but turning towards it is really, really important in those moments. I am more convinced than ever that even though he wrote in the 1840s, this is the philosophy. for the 21st century. Yeah, he called it to the present age back then. It's the present age today. Oh, my God. He's describing it words to word, right? It's, I mean, talk about a guy calling his shot.

Like, he is, he had no idea. He had no idea where things were going to go and how prescient a lot of these observations were going to end up becoming. You want to hear something funny I learned actually prepping for this episode that I didn't know. The name Kierkegaard, in Danish, the translation is churchyard or graveyard. churchyard or graveyard. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. You know, it's like sometimes you meet somebody in their name is like literally who they are. And, uh, Kierkegaard is, yeah, it's churchyard or graveyard, just like almost too perfect. He was a fascinating dude. Yeah. Okay. So just a quick recap.

We have three stages of commitment in life. You have the aesthetic stage, which is our default state. It is the gravitational pull of our desire for sensory experience. and stimulation, novelty, excitement. It is a stage of life where we are living unconsciously. Our choices are being made unconsciously or they are being outsourced to the world around us. We are just giving into our impulses and the social pressures and obligations around us without much thought, without much clarity or reasoning. The aesthetic life just leads to a place of pure indulgence. You just end up on this hedonic treadmill of constantly chasing the next high,

And ultimately it leads you to a very bad place, as we saw with Casanova. Eventually, you have to learn to start making reasoned distinctions between the things you want in your life and the things you don't want in your life. You can't just chase novelty and stimulation endlessly. You have to decide that some things are actually worth not feeling good for. Some things are actually worth sacrificing for and giving things up for. There are certain struggles and challenges that you are actually happy to have. in your life. And this brings you into the ethical stage where you start making reason tradeoffs and strong decisions about who you want to be in this world and who you don't want

to be in this world. And as you make these decisions, not all of them will be correct. Some of them will fail. Some of them will be painful. But all of them will teach you something. And you will learn something about yourself, about your values, about who you are, about what you care about. And slowly as you go through that process of making decisions, making decisions, making decisions, you gradually kind of winnowed down your identity and self, and eventually you land on one or two or three things in your life that feel so profoundly important that you're willing to ride them to your grave. And this brings you to the religious stage that Kierkegaard talked about, that there are things that you are so committed to that you cannot reasonably explain them. It is the absurdity of your commitment to them that actually makes them meaningful to you and that they require a leap of faith, a belief without evidence, that they matter, that they're important, and that they are worth doing, even though you can't prove it to anybody or even yourself. And it is that final state, that level of commitment that truly defines our whole self.

in Kierkegaard's framework, that is a spiritual definition of self. This is not merely defining a self in Freudian terms of mental stability and battling neuroses. It is not defining a self in the positive psychology sense of like maximizing flourishing and well-being, although both of those things are true. For Kierkegaard, this is defining yourself in normal spiritual terms of like, I existed, I did something significant, and this is what I did. So that is finding your life path. As always, we have a free PDF guide available with all of our citations, references, more explanation. A lot of the studies that we talked about are glossed over.

You can go to Solvpodcast.com slash commitment to get that PDF guide. Please follow and subscribe wherever you're listening to this show. It helps us. And if you're able, leave a review or recommend it to a friend. Drew and I will be back next month with another topic. Anything you want to say before we go, Drew? Go exercise your freedom and commit to things and choose wisely. Go forth.

And I've got an ounce. I will say this. I did not choose this podcast. This podcast chose me. Oh, there you go.