SOLVED with Mark Manson - How to Change Your Mind Without Losing Yourself

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

In this episode, Drew and I dive into some of the biggest beliefs we’ve shifted over the years—and what it actually looks like to change your mind. We talk about Drew’s evolving views on religion, why I’m way less convinced that people are as changeable as we like to believe, and why I think trauma might be getting a little too much airtime in the self-help world. We also get into the loneliness epidemic, the quiet power of community, and why so much of “personal growth” isn’t about becoming someone new—it’s about learning to work with who you already are. Leave a comment below about what you’ve changed your mind about—and enjoy. Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough Follow me: https://instagram.com/markmanson/ https://twitter.com/IAmMarkManson https://facebook.com/Markmansonnet/ https://linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ https://www.tiktok.com/@iammarkmanson Chapters 00:00 Intro: What we've changed our minds about 02:59 Religion 07:40 Where does belief change start? 17:08 Does Mark stand by his books? 18:06 Why change is so hard 30:27 Trauma doesn't determine destiny 37:52 Cautious optimism Theme song: Icarus Lives by Periphery , used with permission from Periphery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. Dot app. Drew, I noticed something very exciting. Okay. Today, this is our 72nd episode.

Oh. No, I probably should know that, but no, I did not. You know how I know that? How do you know it? I opened up the Notion database and counted how many episodes there were in it. Okay. So I probably should know this. I have two thoughts.

One is that's a lot of episodes. It doesn't feel like that many episodes. It feels like way fewer than that. That's my first thought. And then my second thought is when I think about some of the podcasts that have like 1,500 episodes or 2,000 episodes. Right. And I'm like, what the fuck?

Yeah. How do you guys do that? Yeah. That's a lot of work. It's a lot of talking. It's a lot of talking. It's a lot of work. I don't think people do realize how much.

work goes into. A lot of people don't realize how much work does go into these. If you have a show that's been got thousands of episodes, my God. Yeah. I don't know how they, I don't know how they do it. It is a lot. Well, first of all, I just, I think I'm done. I'm not going to do anymore. You're done? What am I going to do? I don't know, you're pretty good. You're pretty good with your hands. We could use some more insulation in the other studio. We talked about AI taking my job last time, but this is a little sudden. Yeah, could you? Didn't think it was going to happen this quickly.

Okay, I have a gripe about podcasts in our space. Yeah. Is that I feel like, and I definitely feel this tendency myself, you know, when you're kind of running through this machine gun of guests who come from all these different places and have written all sorts of different types of books or have studied different things, as a host, you kind of just feel like you're, I don't know, it feels like there's no, intellectual consistency to things.

One of my gripes about the podcast in this space is that hosts just go out and get the most popular guests they can find and they bring them on

and they'll just let them say whatever and they don't disagree and they don't push back and they don't change their mind about anything. And I don't like that and I feel myself getting tugged in that direction

as well and I don't like that either. So in honor of that I would like to do an episode today about things we've changed our minds about significant things, not just like minor things, but like major beliefs or assumptions that we have changed or dropped over the last few years and the consequences of that and also like what that looked like. Yeah, that process. Because I do think the ability to change your mind

is super, super important. Underrated skill. And especially these days. Yes. And it's, it should be lauded and encouraged rather than really, fueled. So I figured maybe we could be our part. Let's do it. Okay. Let's get into it. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. You, sir, what have you changed your mind about? What were you wrong about? Well, okay. This is actually something, um, I don't know if I've changed my mind on it, but it's, I think I see myself in a position to start changing my mind on it. So I thought that was kind of a cool one I could bring up. here. I'm not sure if I'm changing my mind or if I'm in the pre-stages of changing my mind,

maybe. Okay. I have changed my approach to this topic, which is religion in general. Okay. Let's just dive right into religion. Let's start with religion. Um, for the longest time, I just haven't been really. I grew up around religion in religion. I was religious at one point. You know, growing up as a child, you know, because you adopt whatever's around you, right? And then I got older, was exposed to more of the world, and I was like, oh, God, okay, no. This isn't for me. I saw all the problems with it. I've seen a lot of people, a lot of the damage that religion has done, both on an individual

and cultural societal level, too. And then on top of that, too, I think in my formative years, too, which, you know, like kind of came of age in the 2000s, I would say. And there were a lot of, like, kind of very vocal atheists out there. especially in the intellectual realm, and I really wanted to be like an intellectual or at least ally myself with them, you know? Yeah. Atheism became cool.

It was. Right. Like, kind of 2006 to 2008, you had like Sam Harris and Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins. Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to kind of, I wanted to be aligned with them. But it was a very, sorry to interrupt.

No. It was just for the listener. It was a very, it was a very rigid atheism. Like it wasn't it wasn't like a kind of passive oh we don't believe in God. It was no, religion is a problem and everybody should be atheist. Right. Type of type of vibe going on. Right.

Which I wasn't real familiar with atheism before prior to that. What I understand was it was more just like I don't believe in God just leave me alone. Yeah. Right. And then kind of came this more virulent strain of atheism and it was like jihad atheism basically. Right. Like like there was like they were actively like look this is how. religion is damaging society, people in general.

I think there was a lot around, you know, the first, the second Iraq war. And, you know, there was a big religious undertone to a lot of that. And people were freaking out like, hey, get this out of the discourse right now because it's getting very ugly, very quick. So I understood that. And I kind of, I align myself with that. Lately, though, the last few years, I would say, I look around at some of my family and friends who do. still. They go to church and they have families and they bring their families to church and they

maybe they pray or they celebrate religious holidays and all that. And you see this. There's like there's a community around it. They help each other out. They're service oriented. A lot of them are. Whereas like my non-religious friends, I don't see as much. They're not volunteering.

They're not donating as much. Yeah. Also the other thing I've noticed lately too is they're very locally focused. But people, you know, churches in general are very hyper local. Right. And they care about local issues a lot. And we've talked before on this podcast about how we think, both you and I think that people are over-indexed on global issues and under-indexed on their local communities. Yeah.

I'm like, well, there's a solution right there. But, okay, I'm not fully changed my mind yet, like I said, because I still do see a lot of the damage it's done. The dogma, I really don't like the dogma in any religion. I don't, I think there's just a, there's so many problems with it, but what I'm trying to figure out is, is there a way to incorporate the good parts of religion without the bad? And people have tried to do this, I think, and I just don't see it working the way that, like, religion is this glue that, that binds people together. And if you take out all the supernatural and the mysticism and the magic of it all, what are you, you're not really left with the same. same thing. It's something completely different. I'm not sure if it's a binding presence or not. Well, and the kind of the tragedy of it, too, is that what you find is that the more dogmatic

and judgmental, the religious sect, the stronger that binding is. Yes, which is scary to me. Which is because it's, I mean, that's just human nature, right? It's like the higher the barrier to entry and the higher to barrier to exit, it's like the more and the more, the more sacrifice you have to make to be in the group, the more you're going to care about the group and the more you're going to engage with the group. I'm curious, like, where this started. I find, like, belief change is so interesting to me because I think it idealistically, I want to believe that it's an information thing.

It's like, you know, you come across a data point and you're like, oh, that, I need to change my prior assumptions. But I also know that that's usually not how it works. So I'm curious, like, where do you think this started? Like, what was the, what was the crack in the surface? Well, like I said, just pointing to examples in my life where I've noticed it more. And the older I get, I think my values are changing a little bit too where it's less about I do want to find something that's bigger than myself.

And you get older and those kind of things you start thinking about your role in society and the world and the legacy you leave behind. And so you start thinking about these bigger concepts. And I just can't help but notice that people who have been religious throughout their lives in my life kind of have that sense of grounded sense. sense of purpose and meaning around them. And so that, I mean, there's also, too, what I've also seen is more in the kind of intellectual realm, the intelligista, if you will, especially in the United States, seems to be kind

of having a little bit of a religious resurgence right now. For sure. And so I'm kind of wondering if I'm just, you know, I'm like, oh, the smart people are doing this. Maybe I should look into it too. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know where I really stand on it, but I can feel.

like I said, I can kind of feel myself shifting, at least opening my mind to like, okay, what's going on? Why is this resurgence happening? Is there something to it? Maybe those virulent atheists that I once kind of like looked to for a lot of, I guess, philosophy around life and everything like that. Maybe they don't have it figured out. A lot of atheists are just miserable people too, you know? I mean, there's a lot of just miserable people in general. I get that. But it's like the, it became kind of, like you're angry and and you're angry at the world and kind of there's just like a little bit of a nihilism to it that I'm just like, ah, I don't, that doesn't quite sit right with me. Yeah. So I don't know if I can pinpoint an exact time. Well, it sounds like there's a, there's a handful of factors. One is that your personal value shifted, right? So you start valuing more community. Yeah. So being supportive of people engaging with people relationships. And you started to notice that the people who are really good at those things, were more religious,

coincides maybe with a little bit of this kind of cultural pressure of like, you know, some of the it thinkers at the moment are religious people. It is interesting to, you know, speaking of, I think Harris and Dawkins in particular, now that it's been 20 years,

you know, one of the, I used to be a huge Sam Harris fan and I've met Sam a number of times and he was super nice and we had great conversations. The interesting thing about him, though, is that he is kind of infamous for not changing his views. Right, yeah. And it's actually ironic that he comes up in this episode about changing beliefs. Because I think probably the most appropriate criticism of him is that he really doesn't update his views.

Or doesn't seem to, at least as a public observer of him, he doesn't seem to update his views dramatically. And Dawkins is like very proudly not updated his views on religions. And so it, I don't know. I just, I always, my default, when I see, when I notice that somebody has gone 20 years without changing their mind about anything, I trust them less. And it's, to me, that's a little bit of a signal that there's like a little, there's some closed mindiness going on there. Um, I'm interested if, you know, on this show, we've had a number of guests who, have come on. I mean, you and I have talked quite a bit about like the loneliness epidemic and the loss of community. You know, David Brooks came on and we had a whole episode about the lack of

community in American life. And he and I talked quite a bit about church and like the lack of religion. Arthur Brooks came on, talked about some similar stuff as well. I'm wondering how much, you know, the research that has gone into this show, seeing the data points around loneliness, fragmentation, isolation, lack of purpose and meaning the mental health crisis. Like how much do you think that has influenced you?

Definitely, yeah. That was a point I wanted to bring up. Especially like the loneliness epidemic and I'm like, well, people are looking for community. Why don't, and I'm like, well, why don't people have community?

You look back and it's like, well, yeah, I mean, it was, you had a built-in community when the church was more central to people's lives or mosque or synagogue, whatever. And that, yes, That absolutely influenced me.

I'm like, okay, well, but the thing is, is I still keep going back to, can you, can you build that community? Can you build that sense of community, that sense of belonging without all the downsides? You know, you talk a lot about, like, the best thing about a place is usually the worst thing about a place where there's a country or a city or whatever. The best thing about a person is usually also, that's a double-edged sword. It cuts both ways. Sure. Is that true of religion? I don't know.

My gut says yes. It's funny because my wife and I have had a number of conversations around this because it's like we've had very honest conversations between ourselves that like kind of the one thing that we feel like we lack at the moment is community. Like everything else in our lives is going great. And we do have friends and we have people that we hang out with. But yeah, there's like that lack of communal solidarity in our lives at the moment. And we've tried all sorts of things.

We've gone to like different clubs and activities. And my take on this is that it is exactly what you said. The bug is the feature, right? Like it is the fact that religion is bound to these supernatural cosmic existential beliefs. It's what causes the problem. It's like people are literally willing to die for that group or that community, which that causes many problems. But that's also the benefit. because like I don't care how cool your pickleball group is.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly where I go with it. Like you're not going to die for them. You should try out these groups or you should. It doesn't work. Go volunteer for a local cause or something like that. And I'm like, yes, those things are important. I get that.

And they help, but it's not the same thing. It's not the same. And so I don't know. I'm just really torn by all of that because it would be great if you could have all the benefit without the cost of it. But I'm just not sure if that's, that's how that works. And, you know, Tim Urban came. on two and he said, you know, we're, it looks like we're a religious species. Like, like you said, it's a,

it's a feature not a bug. Right. I think it was Pascal said there's a God-shaped hole in us. And if it's not filled with religion, it will get filled with something else. Right. Right. And we've attempted to do that before, too. Like all the atrocities of the 20th century were, you know, we were trying to replace religion with politics and we're still trying to do that to some extent today. And it's not working out, right? It's not working out. And you could argue it wasn't really working out with religion either. There was a lot of atrocities in the name of religion as well. I don't, I don't, like I'm in the process.

Like I said, I'm in the process of just kind of wandering and figuring out how does the, what is the, is there a way to go about harnessing all of the good things of religion without having to, you know, just like get into. this really tribal mindset. Yeah. Around it. And I just, I don't know. I don't think there is. And so. There was a period where I thought Buddhism could do that.

Because Buddhism is really not very, at least in the West, it's not very dogmatic. And you don't kind of have all these like supernatural judgments going on. But it's funny, I never found that. Like I've been parts of a number of different Buddhist groups and places that I've lived and done a bunch of retreats and gone to a bunch of meditations. and gone to a bunch of meditation sessions and stuff. And I don't know. Like you said, it feels very fragmented and isolated. The people are super nice, very sweet.

Some of the events are really nice. But like, I don't know. I think about like my parents when I was a kid in their church community. And it was super tight-knit. And people really relied on each other in a way that I don't see my generation. Right. doing. Yeah.

And that worries me a little bit. Or at least, at the very least, I look back now and I'm a little bit envious of that. Yeah. You know, it was the sort of thing that like if my brother, I was sick and my parents had to go do a thing. It, like, they had 15 people they could call to come watch us. Like, it wasn't even a question. Like, it was just somebody's there, right? And, um, and most people now would be hard pressed to find one or two.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know where I land on that. Yeah. But yeah, I feel my mind changing around that and the process of it has been interesting. Yeah.

They did you say that. Cool. Very cool. What about you, Mark? What have you changed your mind? You get this question quite a bit. Like, do you stand by your books? Do you stand by statements you made?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the quick and dirty answer to that for listeners who care. I do stand by the books. Generally speaking, I stand by almost everything I've written in my books. What I would quibble with is specific instances of language. You know, some things I think are overstated.

Some things I think are understated. Some examples I think don't hold up super well. So it's like when I go back and look at subtle art now, I'm not thinking like, oh my God, I got chapter four so wrong. I think the principles in chapter four or chapter three or whatever are correct. It's just now I look back and I'm like, I would do that sentence differently. Or like, eh, there's a little bit of nuance that should have gone here. So the big thing for me is I have come to the conclusion that people are much less malleable than I used to think and I think most people think.

Like I think most of who we are is pretty much determined by some combination of genetics in the cultural environment we grew up in. And that is something, it's funny. So where my mind has changed on this, I think it has much more to do with time and personal experience because the research around this has been around for a long time. And I remember the first time I was exposed to the research around this was I did a bunch a reading around twin studies in like 2013 or something. And I was like, wow, that's really fascinating. Basically, twin studies is what they did is they found identical twins who were separated

at birth. There was a researcher in Minnesota who just like dedicated his entire life to finding these twins that were separated at birth. And then he would go find them. And then he would run all these tests and studies on them to figure out essentially how much of our, how much of us is nature and how much is nurture. So how much is like baked in at the beginning and how much is affected by parenting and upbringing and all this stuff. And one of the spicier discoveries of this body of research is that parenting styles doesn't really matter a whole lot. And even things like, you know, school system or type of education, like a lot of the stuff that most parents especially, but older people spend their time worrying about, like, you know,

am I raising my kid correctly? Am I sitting? Are they doing their homework? Are they going to the right school? Like, all this stuff is actually pretty marginal. And the most fundamental things is essentially is really just A, genetics and then B, peer group and cultural environment. Right.

And so I was exposed to this a long time ago. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. But, you know, obviously there's still a huge. component of ourselves that is malleable, that can be changed and improved and developed and is alterable, I guess. And so I just stayed focused on that. And I guess really what happened is as my career went on and I had more and more exposure to, I guess, the same people over a long period of time.

You know, being in this industry, I've now met a lot of people who have, I mean, there are people that I coached 10 or 12 years ago that like industry people coached 10 years ago, readers and fans that I've kept in touch with for over 10 years, people in my life that I've helped in the past that I've kept in touch with for 10, 12 years. You just start seeing those data points and you start realizing you're like, yeah, they don't, people don't really change a whole lot. Like it's, and I feel like that is, is an extreme. extremely contrarian take in this industry.

Especially, yeah. Yeah, like, it's, that's not, that's not a very pot, like, that's not something I put on a billboard or my Instagram account. But, like, I, for the most part, I don't think people change a whole lot. I think really, like, if you're, generally speaking, if you're, if you're a highly anxious person when you're 20, you're probably going to be a highly anxious person when you're 40. What changes is your attitude and disposition towards it. Yes.

Your ability to manage it. The behavior. that you attach to it, right? Similarly, it's like if you are somebody who's very detail-oriented and perfectionist, like, you're probably not going to stop being detail-oriented and perfectionist. I think there's this naivete, especially with young people, and especially not to make it political, but I think, you know, left-wing people, that you are, each individual is completely malleable, you know.

So if you're a highly anxious person, you can train yourself to stop being anxious. If you're a perfectionist, you can train yourself to stop caring about details and wanting to optimize everything. And it's like most of this stuff is just baked in. And that doesn't, that's not a death knell. Like that's, that's actually bringing it back. Like the worst thing about somebody is also usually the best thing about something. Like perfectionists, they drive themselves crazy, but they also tend to be very, very high performers. anxious people, sure, they worry all the time, but guess who catches the risks and the problems

before anybody else? It's usually the person who's worrying all the time, right? So it's like, I guess this kind of ties into the community thing because I think the things that feel like a hindrance as an individual when you're isolated, if you embed yourself into a community, they actually become useful, right? Like it's, if you are all these kind of weird things that you're prone to in these quote unquote mental health issues or your neurodivergence or whatever, they are, they will feel like a handicap if you're sitting in a room by yourself all day every day, you know, but when you are embedded with a group of people where you can be, you know, your specific brain and personality and individual traits can be leveraged by the group,

it actually becomes the best thing about you. And it, and it actually becomes part of your identity and it becomes who you are. And so I just think I very much become convinced that, um, that, that it's like personal growth, quote unquote. It's not really about changing anything. It's, it's primarily two things. First one is just simple self-acceptance and self-knowledge, just becoming aware of your own shit and being okay with it. I mean, like, yeah, I mean, like, I'm an ADHD motherfucker. And it like, you know, three days out of five, it drives me insane and causes problems. But those two days that it doesn't, man, I'm like cooking, right? So we've all got something like that in ourselves. And you just learn

what it is and you learn how to manage it and you develop a healthy attitude around it. And then you just try to put yourself in situations where you can leverage it. And then two is just skill issues. Like, I just, it's funny, like, getting on social media and looking at content creators in our space, because they will, like, take a very basic thing. And when I say basic, I'm not trying to, like, diminish it at all because I know it's extremely hard for a lot of people, including myself. But, like, something very simple and basic, like, like, saying no to somebody, right? Like, standing up for yourself and just, like, putting your foot down and saying no to somebody that you care about. that's a very difficult thing to do for most people. And I think it is something that we all struggle with at some point in our lives.

And some people struggle with it chronically a lot. And it's a skill. It's a skill. It's like anything in life. Like there was a time in your life where you didn't know how to do your taxes. And it was fucking terrifying and difficult and intimidating and it made you miserable. And then you did it once. And then you did it again.

And then you did it again. And then eventually it just becomes like. like an annoying part of adulthood. And it's like so much of this stuff that people call like healing or transformation or renewal, you know, or like the new you, all this stuff. It's like it's a skill issue. Like you just, you figured out how to say no to people you care about. Which is a really, again, not to diminish it.

That's a huge. It's like a massive, it's a massive fucking life skill. Like it is a very important life skill. But let's not kid ourselves. Like you're not a new person. Just because you can say no. You develop the skill. Yeah.

And underneath inside you are still the same person. Maybe your thought process and your attitudes and some of your emotions around it have shifted. But that doesn't mean you're a new person. And that doesn't mean you should try to be a new person. And I think actually that desire to constantly become a new person to change. to change yourself and transform and all this stuff. Like it can be self-defeating because there is a, there's a subtle hint of,

of self-loathing underneath that. Right. Yeah, we, in a recent episode, too, we did, you talked about, we talked about change. And you said, you think the mistake people make when they're trying to change is changing that disposition. This is what you're saying, again, it's trying to change the disposition when actually what we have to change

is kind of the way we handle it or the way we express ourselves through that disposition. Right. You make the very good point, though, about the self-acceptance thing. And you wrote this, I was probably back about in 2013 as well, when you wrote a critique of the self-help industry, which we also covered recently. And you said that there was this hidden paradox within self-improvement, which is self-acceptance is the end goal of self-improvement.

Yes. Which is, there's no improvement there. It's acceptance of what there is. Yeah. And it's that mind shift, which I guess is a change in itself. But yeah, you don't change who you are. You just accept who you are and learn to work with it. And that's been a huge one for me.

Definitely over the last several years, just like accepting I'm a perfectionist. I'm anxious in certain situations. I'm socially awkward in situations. That's okay. And then the weird thing is when you do experience it, though, it feels like a big change. Yeah. It feels like a huge, huge change. Yeah.

And it's kind of not. There's another paradox hidden right there. Yeah, it is. You do feel like you can feel like a new person, right? I think it's kind of in the same way of like, I don't know, let's say you lose 50 pounds, right? People will say, oh, it's the new you. You know, you could even feel like I'm a new person, right? But like, are you a new person?

Like, I think about that sometimes. Like, am I really a different person than the guy who was 50, 60 pounds heavier? and drinking three, four times a week. Like, no, that was the same guy. It just, I, A, I had a lack of skill set around managing cravings and, you know, lack of knowledge around nutrition and good fitness habits and all that stuff. And, and B, yeah, I had some, like, there was still certain emotional proclivities and impulses that I was blind to.

I had not figured out about myself yet. and when I figured those out, like, yeah, they're really disappointing to discover those things. Right. And there was definitely was an emotional process of being like, oh, wow, I really just can't control myself around food sometimes, you know, and like that was a sad moment and it was uncomfortable and difficult to kind of work through. But at no point was I a different person. I just learned how to A, accept it and B, manage it and then develop the skills.

on top of that to like, okay, well, let's just not put myself in these situations, really, getting good at saying no to certain things, right? So that's been my perspective. I think it's, it's, and it's primarily just been through like the longevity of my career in this space and the amount of people that I've seen. Like, if you, if you really do dig back in the old blog archive and you probably remember some of this stuff, like, it very much was more optimistic or idealistic around you know, hey, if you do these things, you know, you can change and you can, you know, change your life in this way and that way. And if you believe these things, you know, you can heal yourself and all this stuff. And I think, again, it's not that I, it's not that that stuff

is wrong. It's just I would frame it differently. I would write it differently today. Like, I think the advice is probably still correct. It's just like the packaging and explanation is is slightly off. Mark, what do you believe that most people don't believe or you think most people don't believe? Oh, this is the Peter Thiel question. Yeah. I love this question. Um,

um, so the, the tricky thing about this question is that it's always, it's always so relative. Uh, like who is most people. Um, I will tell you the most salient one recently.

I'm going to stick within the self help stuff. Like while we're kind of on, on the mental health. personal growth stuff. This is definitely a minority position in this industry, which is I think trauma is overrated. Oh. Yeah. I don't think trauma is nearly as.

And again, for anybody listening to this who's experienced trauma and is suffering from trauma, I am not, the intention here is not to diminish or belittle your experience. Like, don't get me wrong. Trauma is definitely a thing. And it definitely causes a lot of problems. a lot of people. It's not good. It's not good. It is, it is a thing and it is not, it is not a good thing. What I'm kind of like, what I'm pointing out is, I would say it's more of the kind of the Gabour Matte view, which is like everything is trauma, right? It's, and I've seen this, especially, this is really starting to proliferate on like Instagram and TikTok and stuff.

Like, you know, it's, I saw an article recently. It said like, if you have 80s. ADHD, it's because of trauma, right? If you have, like, all neurodivergence is a result of trauma. If you have problems sleeping, that's a result of trauma. Like, it's like, everything is fucking trauma. Right. And I just don't buy it. Like, it is, trauma is a thing.

It does mess up a lot of people. But when you actually look at the data, like, the majority of people who experience trauma, they don't experience PTSD or any sort of PTSD like symptoms. They experience something called post-traumatic growth. I think it's 70-30. Like 70% of people who experience a trauma in their life within a year or two will look back and say that they are actually a better person for experiencing that trauma, whereas only roughly like 30% of them will say that they're worse off from experiencing that trauma.

So the majority of people who experience trauma grow from the trauma. And coming back to this point about, you know, the importance of genetics and just predispositions towards certain behaviors or personality traits or proclivities. Like, I think people don't want to accept that. Like, people, I don't know, anxious people don't want to accept that they're an anxious person. Perfectionists don't want to accept that they're perfectionist. People with ADHD don't want to accept that they have ADHD. And so trauma just becomes this kind of perfect, just so story.

You know, because we all have things about our childhoods and our upbringings that we're not happy about that we're like upset about and we all have painful experiences in our past and so if there's it it just becomes such an easy cop out to say you know well I like I don't really do well with pressure at work and it's because you know my my mom was always getting on my case for this thing and that and I think it traumatized me and I've been in therapy for and it's like no you you just don't handle pressure well it's fine yeah it's totally funny. There's nothing wrong with you. It's you're like some people are different. And so I just think that that it's a very seductive narrative that people buy into. It's also a very

seductive narrative to sell to people. It's an easy sell to people. You know, if you basically take anybody who is in a rough patch in their life or who maybe has had a traumatic experience recently, And you can put them in a seminar room and spend an entire day telling them how trauma explains everything that they don't like about themselves in their life. And they'll gladly give you thousands of dollars for it. So I just, I think it's a little bit of a grift. And again, I don't like for the people who are legitimately suffering from it, heart goes out to them. But it's not, it's not the catch-all explanation or problem that it is. And I worry that when you encourage people to identify with their trauma too much, they actually

begin to indulge in it and kind of identify with it. Yeah, I was like we had Dr. Julian just a couple of weeks ago and a clinical psychologist who's seen some things. Yeah. Let's just say she's worked not only with the general population, but also with combat veterans. And her big takeaway from all of it was, I'm not surprised by the things that screw people up. I'm surprised by how resilient people are.

Yeah. And she found it to be her biggest part of her job or one of the biggest parts of her job was to help them realize that. And I've heard other therapists say similar things too. Like when somebody comes into my office, I'm not there to fix their problems. I'm there to show them how they can, they have the capacity to deal with these problems. Even if they're seeking out therapy and there's obviously something wrong going on like you're saying. There's like the human condition is a resilient one for sure. I think it's about kids too.

I think people don't give kids enough credit for how resilient they are. Totally. So it's like humans are very, very resilient. We're very adaptable, very resilient. We are built to handle a certain degree of, of traumatic events in our lives. We just are. But a lot of that, and this is where this, it starts to concern me, is a lot of that depends on what the person believes about themselves. Yes.

Right. So like when you look at people who experience post-traum people who experience post-traum, dramatic growth versus people who experience PTSD, like one of the biggest indicators of people who see it as something that they grow from is that they believe they can grow from. Right. And when you look at people who like believe that trauma is just a like immutable scar on your life. Yeah. It's a, death sentence. Those are, if you believe it's something you can never get over, then you're never going to get over it. And also on the flip side of that, you can, you can take non-traumatic events, non-traumatic life experiences, and if you tell people that it's traumatic,

they will start experiencing it as traumatic, right? So, and that's where you get stuff like, you know, it's like a college kid has to listen to a lecture they don't like and they say it's traumatic, you know, and it's like, but then they actually start exhibiting the symptoms and effects of PTSD. And it's like, well, yeah, because you can, like the brain is an expectation machine. And so if you, if you, like, program enough expectation for a result to happen into it, it'll start happening. Right. Yeah. And the resilience episode we did recently, too, we talked about that second arrow, right?

Yes. And that's where that all comes in. Yeah. You're taking, the first arrow is the real pain, the second arrow is you're spinning up this narrative around the pain. Yeah. And, yeah, especially in a social media-soaked world where you're getting kind of like a help for those second arrows. You know, here's some, here's some, spin up this narrative about this. You're being validated and encouraged for, for, yeah, so I get that. Terrible second arrows, yeah.

What's your contrarian take? What are you going to get canceled for? Yeah, okay. We've already canceled me. So what are you getting canceled for? So I, this goes back to the relative thing, too. It depends on who you're comparing your contrarian take to. Mine is, though, I'm generally optimistic about the future.

Okay. Um, not just my future. I mean, I'm just saying in general, like for society for humanity. Yeah. I'm generally optimistic and it's not a political thing. I thought this before the elections, I have for years, where every, there's kind of just this doom and gloom nihilism going around, especially if you read too much news. Yeah. Um, I am generally an optimist. Um, I'm not saying that it will be great for everyone. Yeah. There's going to be uneven, uh, distribution of the, um, I'm not saying that. Um, I'm not saying that it will be an even distribution of the, um, great things that I think are to come. Sure. Which there always are. Yeah. I'm not saying that there won't be some dips and some setbacks along the way. I just generally think that the way we're headed and the way we've been headed for a number

of decades is the right direction and that we shouldn't stop. I'm not saying we're at a place of utopia by any means, but we're headed in the right direction in so many different ways. And I wish more people would kind of sign up to that. Or be aware of it, I guess. Just be aware of it. Yeah. Mark, when you and I were born in the mid-80s, 40% of the global population lived in extreme poverty, as defined by the World Bank, right?

Yeah. Which is, it's pretty low bar. It's only a few dollars a day that will get you above that threshold. But still, today, it's eight and a half percent, around eight and a half percent. In just 40 years, that happened. And that's two billion people or something like that. One and a half billion people. That's another point I wanted to make.

When you and I were born, there were about 4.7, 4.8 billion people. There's over 8 billion people now. Yeah. And we've reduced the poverty rate while the population is grown by like 70% in that same time period. So it's insane. So it's literally billions of people. We can do better. Yes, we absolutely can. There's still way too many people living in extreme poverty. See, I thought you were going to go, this is not where I thought this was going. I thought you were going to get into like AI sex robots and you know. I'm getting there. Okay. Okay. That's what I'm excited. I'm optimistic for him. They're going to be cheap and everywhere. It's going to give me a VR headset and a dick glove and I'm good to go, man.

A dick glove. Give me the AI porn. I'm okay, but that is another thing. Sorry, go back to the starving, the two billion starving children. Right, right. Well, okay, another. So in 1800, let's just say, okay. almost one and about one and four children died before the age of five yeah okay now it's down to like

one and two hundred uh something around there so we've reduced that by a factor of 50 yeah that's insane in 200 years we've done that the the the the when i start to do this though i can already hear the people being like well you know it's not evenly distributed or whatever and that's true it's not like all these benefits have not been necessarily evenly distributed and we have access now to clean water, the health care that we have, electricity, all of the things that kind of undergird a modern society are miraculous marvels. Like, kings didn't have these a couple of years ago, right? Yeah. That argument always seems to fall short with a certain group of people, though, who say, well, it's still, like, you know, whatever it is, somebody has more than you still,

so it still doesn't count or something. I don't know what that. I don't quite get that. Yeah. I've never quite understood that. So, but if you just look at the general arc of history, and again, this is not a political thing. I didn't magically change my mind because of some election or anything like that. I just think that this is actually where the world is going. Poverty, literacy, equality, like education, health, life expectancy. Life expectancy is another one. A big part of that. Yeah. Across the board. Yeah. Things have gotten better. So I'm I'm generally optimistic about that. Again, we could screw this up and it could go the other way. And that was kind of Stephen Pinker. Yeah.

You know, when he wrote, what was the book? Better Angels of Our Nature. Better Angels of Our Nature. That one, yeah. He has, it's a laundry list of this is how things have gotten better. Death rates have gone down, murder. Even in the 20th century with all the atrocities, murder rates were still lower than they were, you know, even a few hundred years ago.

And I think there's other people who are very, I think they're more politically motivated. They're like, yeah, it's going to be great because my guy's in office now and we've turned around. And as soon as they get voted out, oh, everything's terrible. I haven't thought that. I think just generally speaking, this is way bigger than any political movement. It's more,

we should continue doing these things and figure out better ways to continue doing these things as well. It's like a market, right? It's like generally up into the right, but it's like, it's jagged all the way up. And it's,

we're so present bias, recency biased, that like all we notice is like the short term oscillations. We don't notice the general up until the right movement. I've had this discussion with people before. I mean, I'm generally on the same page.

The thing that people always throw at me is climate change. And I'm curious, where's your optimism with that? So the solutions of today create the problems of tomorrow. I think that's like a Kevin Kelly thing or something like that. He talks a lot about that. But we're like the climate crisis, the climate change fiasco that we're facing right now was created because of the Industrial Revolution back in the 1800s, right? Yeah.

That revolution, though, brought a whole bunch of people out of that abject poverty. What we were talking about in 1800, I mean, it was something like 90-some percent of people lived in poverty all around the globe. Yeah. And the Industrial Revolution was a huge force behind bringing people out of poverty. We could feed, clothe, house people. It created another problem, though. Yeah.

So I think we're on our way, though, too. We are now, we're able to technological advances in agriculture. For instance, we're using, we're figuring out ways to use less land to produce more food to, to support the populations that we have right now. Agriculture too is getting a lot more precise. So they're developing different types of machinery that can go through like a field. Look at each plant individually. Use some AI. Yeah.

Look at each plant individually. Okay, this one needs a shot of some pesticides. or herbicide here, this one doesn't, this one's fine. So instead of just blanketing, you know, a whole field with pesticides or herbicides, whatever, we can be more targeted about it, saves money, makes food cheaper, makes it more accessible, we use less land, we use less inputs, we use less carbon. I think we're going to figure this out. I really do.

We're going to create new problems that we haven't even thought of yet. And nobody thought of the environment in the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution was going on. Yeah. But I think we figure things out. Again, we're resilient. People are resilient. Yeah. We'll figure this out.

It's one thing that I heard about this is that actually if you just kind of isolate the Western countries, like the North American and Western European countries, um, are net emissions have actually been declining for like 20 years. And, and actually a lot of Western countries are actually net positive carbon, uh, in terms of carbon emissions. Net negative. Or sorry, net negative in terms of carbon emissions. Um, and actually if you look at like who's emitting the vast

majority of the carbon, it's, it's China. And they have been, I believe they're currently building like 50 to 100 nuclear power plants. They've just built the biggest dam in the world. Like, they're going all in on clean energy. Yeah. But it just takes 10, 20 years to like ramp it up. So same thing. Like fusion technology. Like we're like tantalizingly close. Like we might be to a super, super clean and safe energy source. Now we're turning into a tech podcast room. What are we doing? I know. What are we doing? I'm sorry. That's our rant. I just said. So what's the wisdom of the week?

Oh, I didn't come. You didn't come over you. Don't we get like a Willie Nelson blowjob joke. No, no, no, no. That we, no. I'm sorry. I wish I had a dirty joke. I should have prepared something.

Maybe that should be our sign-off from that one. Is this the dirty joke? It's just the dirty joke corner. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's just what people start listening to us for. Yeah. Here's the wisdom of the week. Keep an open mind.

But not so open, your brain falls out. That's right. That's Carl Sagan, by the way. That's who it was. That's right. Okay. Great quote. All right, guys.

The subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishamura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.