SOLVED with Mark Manson - Self-Help Junkies, Stupid Experts, and the Worst Life Advice I've Ever Heard

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Are you addicted to self-improvement? Are experts really any better than the rest of us at knowing how to make positive changes in our lives? What are some common pieces of life advice that just don't seem to work? Drew and I tackle all of these questions today in our brand new, updated format for the pod. Find out why self-help can turn into pseudo-religion (and why we should bring back exorcisms), whether or not a huge mega-study by a bunch of fancy experts can tell us anything about behavioral change, and some common self-improvement tropes that just don't do it for us. Here's the study we discuss:Megastudies improve the impact of appliedbehavioural science Let us know what you think of the new show format in the comments below. And sign up for Your Next Breakthrough, my weekly newsletter that will help you be a slightly less awful person:https://markmanson.net/breakthrough Got a question for us? Leave it in the comments below or send it [e-mail] Theme song is "Icarus Lives" by 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. Welcome back, everybody, to the subtle art of not giving a thought podcast. I'm your host, Mark Manson. I'm here with Drew Bernie.

This is a special episode because we are doing a little bit of a refresh of the show. We're about 10 months in, not quite a year end. We've tried a bunch of things. We've had a bunch of different conversations. Drew and I have done episodes. together, we've had a bunch of different types of guests. Some have gone well, some have not gone so well, some have been huge audience favorites, some have not been audience favorites. It's been very educating and interesting, like what has resonated with people and what hasn't. We've decided

to, as any good creative does, double down on what's working and forget what's not. And so we're introducing a little bit more of a consistent talk show format every week. Drew and I are going to go through three different segments. First one is what we're giving a fuck about, what we're worrying about, anything that's going on in the world that is causing us to stress or lose a little bit of sleep. The second segment is brilliant or bullshit where we will talk about studies, trends, interventions, practices, things going viral online and talk about whether it's brilliant or whether it's bullshit. And then finally, we will be answering audience questions. We will not always have guests. We will

occasionally have guests. And when we have guests, we're not going to interview them because we don't give a fuck. We're going to make them do the format with us. We're going to make them share what they give too many fucks about. We're going to make them tell us if they think it's brilliant or bullshit. And we're going to have them help us answer your question. So this is the new show. Welcome, everybody.

We are on the forefront of fuckology here at the fuck podcast. And I'm excited to get into this. This feels like, I feel almost like the last year was like a beta test. You know, it's like we tried all the stuff, all the other shows are trying. You know, there's a bunch of big podcasts in our space. You know, we gave everything a little bit of a test drive. We did the big long intro monologues. We did the big famous guess.

We did like all the fancy shit. You know, at the end of the day, you kind of just learn that you have to go back to being yourself. Yes. We've learned a lot. We have. I feel like we have. Don't you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we fucked up a lot. We've learned a lot the hard way. Just everything from like guest bookings to, you know, prepping for an interview that like does not go the way you expect to, you know, it's given me a lot. I will say this. It's given me a lot more respect for the prep and interview skills of podcasters. Definitely. It's definitely, it's one of those things that looks simple from the. the outside, but you can spend days reading somebody's work and planning a conversation out, and then they sit down in front of you, and it just goes completely off the rails in a

completely different direction than you expected. So here we are. We are in a controlled, we're in a safe space, Drew. We've created a safe space for ourselves. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Let's kick off this inaugural refresh episode. What are we giving too many fucks about this week? Self-improvement this week, Mark. Okay, we give a fuck about, okay. Do you want to start that over? This one was yours, though.

This was when self-improvement kind of becomes religion and what you've seen out here in West L.A. and that sort of thing. So how do you want to do that? Well, introduce it. Well, that's what I'm saying. This was yours. This was yours, Mark.

Oh, I'm supposed to introduce it. Well, yeah. The fuck of the week, right? Oh, the fuck of the week. Okay. Maybe I should have looked at the outline before we started. Maybe I gave two, just one too many, two qubits. You came to me the other day.

You came to me the other day. And you said, one thing I've just been, like, just been grinding on me lately is just how everyone out here is obsessed with, like, self-improvement in ways that it creeps into their lives. Right. And it affects everyone around them. In some ways, it's addiction. In some ways, it's culty.

Right. So just to give people some context here, I now live in California. One of the great things about California is people are like super conscious and aware of making themselves better, making the world better, which is great. I love that intentionality. I'm just going to put it out there. You know, there's a lot of great stuff that goes on in this part of the world. But there's this weird kind of junkie culty vibe here. where it's almost like people don't know how to just hang out.

Like, just be. Like, yeah. My wife and I, we constantly get these invitations, you know, it'll be like, come over for a Saturday brunch with our friends and we're going to have mimosas and we're going to do this. And we're going to do guided meditations with our personal guru and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, put a gun in my mouth. God. It's like you had us at brunch You didn't need to like introduce a whole fucking ideology into our Saturday morning

So like that's your intentions That's gotten a little bit tiresome and I think it just it particularly it's bugging me a lot Because I'm in this industry and what I found out here too is that everybody out here thinks that they assume that I must be into it They're like well he's like a self-help author so of course you would be Of course, he's going to be totally into the guided meditation sound bath before he eats his eggs at brunch. And I'm like, no, this is my job. I'm off the clock. I don't want to be like thinking about this stuff.

So it's bugged me a little bit. But I do think there's an interesting conversation around here of like when does self-improvement become compulsion? When does it turn into an addiction? You know, it's admirable to always want to improve yourself, but it's also an affliction if you don't know how to stop. Like sometimes the most, like the best thing you can do for yourself is nothing. There's nothing, right. Yeah. It's just enjoy who you are in the moment without any sort of like, you know, production or process or whatever.

So that's been like, that's been gradient on me lately. Yeah. I don't know. Well, you know, we just did an episode not too long ago on the backwards law, right? Yeah. And at what point does like trying to improve yourself only highlight all of the things that are wrong with you? And I think that probably gets lost in some of this too. Yeah.

Right. The irony is I think at a certain point it becomes a form of avoidance. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's like, well, if I just keep booking all these new like gurus and sound baths and all this shit, then it's like I'm always being introduced. into a new modality. So I'm always learning a new modality. So I'm not actually responsible for changing anything in my life because I'm always like, there's like this constant process of like learning the new thing instead of just

returning to your life and living and like trying to integrate all the things you're learning into actually like being a better person. So yeah, I don't know. It's a funny thing of like I tend to write about self-help or self-improvement. Like it's not an intervention. It's not like steroids. It's not like, oh, you went to this seminar and now you're just going to get like 40% more jacked than you would have otherwise Self help is more like hygiene. It's like you're boring. It's boring. It's dull. It's repetitive and if it does get too exciting

It's actually probably not doing a whole lot. And so you think a lot of these like a lot of people who invite you do these things They're trying to put on these like little mini self-help seminars themselves. It almost feels like that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, there's a ton of that here. Oh, it's a ton of that here and it's a ton of that here and it's a lot of that here and it's it's a lot of that here and it's It's actually, and it even gets to the point where it's like, you know, you'll go somewhere, you'll go to like a dinner or something and they'll curate the conversation. So like they'll put six people at a table and then the host will break out like no cards. And like there'll be like a guided conversation of like everybody, everybody's going to take turns and have five minutes where they talk about what they're working on in their life right now. And it's like, can we just talk about like the Netflix show we're watching?

You know, like I don't know. It's, I like some of that. Some of that can be useful and good. but it's just like when it's a constant thing and it never stops. Like when people don't know how to socialize without that, then that's a problem. Right. It's like alcohol, right? Yeah.

They don't know how to socialize it without alcohol. It's like the addiction that you're talking about, that part of it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the lesson here is just like being aware of when the, like, the drive to improve and change yourself is actually part of the problem. You read Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind, right?

Yeah. You remember that part in there that he has this kind of saying throughout it, I think, where he's like, I had to be very conscious of not doing being. Remember that? Like, I'm trying to just be. Yeah. But trying to just be. Yes.

You know? Like, I feel like this is like an extreme example of that. People are like, I'm trying to be and live in the moment. I'm trying so hard that I'm doing being. Yes. You know what I mean? Yes. That's a mind fuck in its own.

But yeah. There are some things that it's, you only improve them by like letting go and not tried. And I think a lot of like psychological based stuff is similar to that. I don't know. I sometimes I have a few theories around this. You know, one of them is like it's funny. I wrote about this a little bit in my second book, everything is fucked.

But like now that I'm out here, I definitely feel it. It feels like church. It like feels like. Oh, it is. It feels like. It is church. No, it feels like it's almost like a religious thing. Like it's, it's like everybody, you know, is into the same yoga, does the same meditations, and, you know, takes the same ayahuasca.

And so they, like, get together every week and they like practice rituals around it. That's church. It's totally fucking church. But if you tell them that, like, if you say that, I don't know, it's, it, I think they don't conceptualize it. They don't realize what they're doing is actually quite religious and faith-based. And I feel like if you said that, if I express that to them, they would probably take offense or get very defensive about it. Maybe not. I don't know.

But so that's like, that's one working theory is that it's, it's a church thing. We already talked about the addiction thing. I also think that some of it is just like it's a higher order way of coping with neuroticism. So, you know, William James believe that it's actually impossible to solve. you just replace one addiction with others. And I think in some of these people's cases, is like they are like highly neurotic or compulsive people. And if they're not compulsive towards self-improvement

or like biohacking or meditation or whatever, they would be very compulsive towards like very destructive things. And so this is kind of like, it's almost like this is the least worst. Because I've noticed a lot of, like there's a, There's a for a place that it has a reputation for being very laid back, I actually find a lot of people out here in California are very compulsive. There's a lot of neuroticism. There's a lot of neuroticism.

But again, there's like a lack of self-awareness around it. Like it's because the compulsion is around things that we associate with relaxation, things like yoga, meditation, spa treatments, beauty, nature. I think people assume that they must be very relaxed and low-key. But as somebody who's not from here coming out here, it strikes me as a very neurotic place. So some of it strikes me as like, and part of this too, like this is where I identify with it because it's like I think one of the things that I'm learning

the last couple years is that I'm a lot more addictive or compulsive than I thought I was. and but when I'm here, my, my addictions and compulsions are like quite healthy or fairly healthy. Whereas if you put me in like New York City or Brazil or wherever, I'll just like fucking destroy myself. Right, right. Well, and going back, relatedly, going back to the religion thing, what is self-improvement or self-help? Yeah. If it's not like a form of religion in a way, right?

I mean, if you take a lot of the mysticism out of the major religions, it really looks a lot like self-help. I had a friend one time who, like, made this observation. She went to church. It had been a long time. And she came out. She's like, that felt like a mini self-help seminar. Yeah. Because it is very much prescriptive.

And this is how you should live your life and all that. Well, religion was, it was the original self-help, right? You know, it's like, it used to be, if you had marriage problems, you went to a pastor, right? It used to be, if you had psychiatric issues, you got an exorcism. Yeah. You know, let's bring exorcisms back. Fuck, yes. Let's make that a thing again.

That would be pretty cool, actually. Play some metal music. It would be awesome. I'm so in for an exorcism. Wouldn't that be funny? Be like, you know, I should try this. I should go to like the next California dinner party I go to and everybody starts talking about their shaman.

I'm going to be like, guys, you know what the next, you know what the new thing is? Exorcism. Bring a priest in. Yeah. I found this great Catholic priest. He's fucking, he will, he will pull all. all the demons out of you, it is life-changing.

You guys need to check this out. I wonder if they would bite. I kind of doubt it, but I don't know. I don't know. It's not very California. It's Catholic ex-res. It is really if you do point out to somebody that, hey, this is like really kind of like religious behavior.

Yeah. Or it mimics a lot of things about religion and they get very defensive about it. Yes. That, to me, like, I don't know. If somebody points out. Well, and historically, when I've brought this up in writing, it's a very polarizing thing. And the funny thing is,

I think religious people recognize that. So I've been invited on religious podcasts with pastors and preachers and priests and stuff. Which is insane if you... And they are 100% aware of that. I've had conversations, you know, I've spoken in the Middle East. I've had conversations with audiences of Muslims

and they're like, yeah, everything you talk about, like, we're here for it. There's a crazy number of like Muslims. Muslims who come and say, this is actually, you know, this is all in the Quran. Yeah. So I think religious people get that like self-help is kind of just the secularized version of religion. Whereas the secular people who are like, no, no, this is scientific. Right. Right.

Whereas if you actually go look at the research, there's not a whole lot of science going on. Right. Yeah. And science itself can turn into a religion pretty quickly too. That is true. That's a whole other episode. There's that. What else?

I think that's it for that. Yeah? Yeah. All right. Well, if any of you out there know a good Catholic priest, I'm interested in an exorcism. Who can give me a good rate on an exorcism. Maybe give me like a, you know, one of those cards when you get like 10 exorcisms, they give you the 11th priest. It's like your local coffee shop and like a punch card.

Like the Jimmy John's, you know, frequent sandwich card. Yeah, hit me up. I think on that note, we'll take a break. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. There's something else you're now. Something new.

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All right. It's time for Brilliant. or bullshit, what are we deeming brilliant or bullshit in all of our infinite wisdom today? Yeah, we're looking at experts and are experts any better than us common folk at coming up with interventions that actually work to help us change our lives. Okay. Okay. I have a prediction. Okay. Well, there's a huge study, a huge study done by a whole bunch of experts who came up with a whole bunch of interventions. And it turns out that like this was for what? What was the Oh yeah, sorry.

Or like the goal. Yeah, yeah, the goal was to get people to go to the gym more. Gotcha. So they got, yeah, there's giant study. But just psychologists get together. They're like, we think we know how to get people to go to the gym. So here's 50 some different ways that we could get people to go to gym. Let's test them all out.

Right. And they had like 60,000 people in this study. So it's a huge study. It's a lot. Yeah. Very, very comprehensive. Yeah. And it solves a lot of the problems with like, you know, you compare one study to another.

They have different sample sizes. They have different outcomes, different, whatever. This is like, we're going to compare all of these huge giant study. and compare all these different ones all at the same time. Okay. Get a nice, clean result. Well, it's not quite that simple, as you can imagine. So how'd they do?

Well, what they found was that experts were no better than lay people at predicting which interventions were going to work. Okay. So you just feed these to people, a man on the street and be like, is this going to get people to go to the gym or yes or no? They're just as good as the experts at predicting which ones we're working. So is this a case where the psychologists were, because you can, frame this in two different ways. Would you frame it as the psychologist were just as bad as the average

Joe at predicting what gets people to go to the gym? Or is it that the average Joe, with his like, foxy wisdom, common sense, is just as good as the expert? Like, what was the hit rate on the predictions here? Was it abysmal? Or was it just kind of like everybody's like, oh yeah, obviously that would make somebody go to the gym? Well, the hit rate, according to the study, yeah, okay, The hit rate was about 45%. So just less than half of the interventions worked. Yeah, that's not very good. Right.

So a coin toss, right? Sure. If you really dig into the data, though, it's only like four of these interventions worked. Okay. Out of the 50, I think it was 54 interventions that they tried. Wow, that's depressing. Right. So it was, yeah, it was.

So basically, yeah, it's like the news gets worse, folks. It does. Yes. Like, not only do like almost none of the interventions work, but experts were just as clueless as to, would the fact that none of them were, as lay people were. Yeah. So everybody was bad, basically. Okay. There's, it wasn't like lay people were good and gotcha. Experts were bad or anything like that. Everybody was just bad at it. Yeah. And also, worse than a coin flip. Yes. Much worse. Much worse. So not only, not only bad, but like you

could literally just flip a coin and you'd get better results. More or less. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's, there was like these four things that they found. I love science. I just love science. Well, it's insane. What's crazy to me is that like they're building this as, you know, oh, this, this mega study is great and this is how we should do all these. And it is.

It's a very well done study. But it's like they miss the lead completely. They missed the actual takeaway, which was, oh, my God, we're really bad at this. And it was one of the, one of the least researchers on this is Angela Duckworth, too. Right. Like a very well-known person in behavioral intervention and psychology. And still, it blows my mind after, I mean, we are, what, 150 years into the field of psychology. And we are, I mean, psychology was kind of a quack science.

Maybe it's first 60, 70 years. But I mean, we're like, at this point, we're probably 60 years into like 60, 70 years into like very serious, well-funded psychology programs and, and, like, we're, like, we're, like, we're, like, and research and it it blows my mind. I mean, and it's not just psychology either. Like, you run into a similar thing in like nutrition and,

uh, sociology and all the so-called softer science. Criminology. Yeah. Like, it's just like we still have no fucking idea what, why things happen. Why people do things and don't do other things.

Um, I'm curious, what were, do you know the four interventions that actually had a really strong effect size? Yes. I got them right here. The one that worked the best, I think, was bonuses after messing up.

So if the way they incentivize these people to go to the gym was they would, I think they give them like an Amazon gift card and they would add money to the gift card if they, you know, showed up or whatever. If they messed up, if they didn't go, they would give them a little bit of a bonus for going the next time and correcting the behavior, which I found very, very interesting. That is interesting. Uh-huh. Another one was just giving bigger incentives simply.

That one's not a big surprise. Shocker. Yeah. you get a bigger incentive to go to the gym, that more people will go. This was an interesting one, too. Information about what's normal. So, like, telling people that the majority of Americans

or wherever you are, exercise frequently, and that the rate is increasing. If you just tell people that, they're like, well, I'm going to follow this trend, I guess, which was kind of interesting to me, too. Yeah. Huh. Just kind of that social pressure.

Social pressure, social proof. Yeah, you want to be one of the cool kids going to the gym. And then this last one was really, interesting too. There was a framing the choice of a gain or a loss. So they gave, they either, they told people they could either choose, you can start out with this much money and you'll lose as you, as you fail to go. Or you start out with nothing and you gain. Either one of those, as long as you just gave the person the choice. Yeah. On that and they picked which one they wanted, that actually

had a noticeable effect on that as a significant effect on that on gym attendance. So it didn't matter if it was which direction. It didn't matter. It's just they had a choice and I thought about this too and I'm like which one of those would I choose. I would choose the give me all the money up front and then I want to see it. I think I would too. I would go to. I think I would

that's more you know the loss of version and everything. I think that's more painful. Yeah but I just so a whole lot of bullshit here. Well I is a really well done study I just think what they learned from it was bullshit. Well it's the irony here is I think the study itself is brilliant, but what the study shows is that

there's a lot of bullshit. Like, we still don't know what the fuck we're doing. And like, we've talked about this before on the podcast. Like, I remember, I think five or six years ago, I got really curious of which modalities of therapy were the most effective for patients. And there's all these meta-analyses, like hundreds and hundreds of studies with thousands and tens of thousands of patients who have been tracked and all this stuff. And when you really, when you crunch all the data together over the past like 30, 40 years and you look at all the modalities of therapy, they basically all work roughly the same. And it's, they're all slightly better than a placebo. Right. Like marginally better than a placebo. And so like that's,

none of them, I think none of them have a hit rate over 50%, which is like, again, in a field that's 150 years old and, you know, just a tradition from Sigmund Freud, the fucking Dr. Phil, like, we can't bat over 50% is still mind boggling to me. So this kind of reminds me of that of just like everybody's kind of throwing shit at a wall and some people are able to throw nicer looking shit. And so they get, you know, they get tenure and they get a best-selling book and, yeah, yeah. You know, like a TV show. But it's like ultimately, I do have to say the more, the older I get and the more well

researched and informed I am about this field, like the more I come to respect just like ancient timeless wisdom. Yeah. Shit that's been around for 2,000, 3,000 years. Like, because clearly that has, that must have some value. Otherwise it wouldn't have survived for so long. Whereas a lot of the stuff, you know, I've been in this industry long enough now to see a lot of quote unquote true psychological findings be proven and disproven. So, yeah, this is just another reason to stay skeptical.

Yeah. Well, there was kind of a parallel in this study with the interventions that you're talking about. They had kind of two control groups in this. Yeah. Which is this is kind of interesting and relevant. the original control group, they just gave them an Amazon card and filled it up.

Yeah. Said, here you go. Go nuts. That was it. Their baseline group, though, they give them an Amazon card,

uh, Amazon gift card and sent them reminders to go work out. And I think like a planner or something like that. And that's, that was their baseline. Just doing that alone. Yeah. Was significantly better than the control group.

Okay. So, so any intervention whatsoever, basically is, is effective. Yeah. And this is one of the reasons why I think they're, some of their conclusions were a little bit bullshit was because they were comparing all these interventions to that original control group.

Yeah. When really what they should have been doing, which this is what Spencer Green pointed out on Twitter, what they should have been doing was comparing it to the baseline. Because we know that any intervention works. Literally just like a text message. A text message said go to the gym. That like had a significant increase in getting people to go. Yeah. Not even incentivizing them.

Yeah. There was no incentive. I mean, they got the Amazon card just for like participation. They didn't, they didn't get. So this is where I can't help but bring it back to self-help our industry, like where people are spending tens of thousands of dollars out, coaching, seminars, training, like all sorts of accountability systems. And at best, that's an incremental.

Yeah, you're like that. That's taking, you know, it's the 80, the thing that drives 80% of the result is like getting a text message and like buying a planner. Yeah. Right. And it's like all that other stuff takes you from 80 to 90% or something. It goes back to, it's being boring. It goes back to, you know, you don't need these like many interventions.

Yeah. Or huge interventions at any stage. It just goes back to being boring and consistent. It really makes me wonder how much of the monetary value that is being spent in this industry is actually being spent. This comes back to the dinner party thing, right? Like, it's actually being spent on something that makes you feel special, right? You know, it feels really special having a high-end coach. checking in on you as like made a personalized plan and it's like got all these systems for you

set up and is going to like go stand in the gym with you and like watch your forum and everything and like that there's an emotional satisfaction that comes with that you know that maybe that's actually what you're mostly paying for i don't know yeah yeah well and it just comes back to like these days i'm just like if it works for you go for yeah whatever just do it yeah fine whatever Spirit crystals. Yeah. Just be happy. Whatever.

Yeah. Who am I to say? That'll be, maybe that's the slogan of our podcast. Be happy, whatever. On brand. It reminds me. It reminds me.

I saw, there was a viral quote of Keanu Reeves a while ago. And he said, he was like, I've reached the stage of my life where I just don't want to argue with people anymore. He said, if you say one plus one equals five, that's great, man. I hope you're happy. I saw that. I saw that. He was wise.

Very wise. Very wise. All right. We'll be back after this. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids. ginger tea and milk. Habaniero. More like Habinier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon.

All right. We're back. What have we heard from the audience? Yeah, I got a couple of questions here. This one's from John, who submitted this on YouTube. And he asks, is there any popular life advice that consistently doesn't work for you or has failed you in important situations? Ooh. Yeah. That's a great question, John. So when I was younger, I tried a lot of the classic. self-help shit. You went to some seminars. Went to some seminars. Had a great time.

Back to that, the original point, had a great fucking time. Didn't really change a whole lot. You know, the stuff that never really worked for me was the affirmations and the positive thinking.

And I think it's just like, I always knew I was lying to myself. Like the fact that I felt like I had to tell myself something, that something was actually good or that I'm great, I'm smart, I'm brilliant, I'm attractive, all this stuff. Like the fact that I felt the need to say those things to myself would just remind me that I was lying to myself. And so I actually found that that stuff made me feel worse. And it actually made me more stressed and anxious than less. And it's funny,

because when I was young and immature, I was like, well, clearly I'm doing something wrong because, you know, all these great famous people on Oprah, like say this is how you do it. And it just, it never really sat right with me. And then as I got older, I started to realize like, oh, maybe those people on Oprah like don't know what the fuck they're talking about, back to the point of experts not knowing what what actually works or not. So yeah, that would be the main one. That's the main one that comes in my mind. Is there one for you? I've talked before about the gratitude thing. Yeah. That's not. really good. I've also just kind of had mixed results with meditation. Yeah. I don't think it's as

cracked up as it is, it's all that's cracked up to be really. I've found, yeah, sometimes in some situations that can call my mind. You used to meditate a lot and you don't really anymore, right? Yeah. What have you found with meditation? I think there's some research coming out too that's like, yeah, for some people, it's really not that great. You know, there's this pattern with research, and you and I've talked about this before, of like, when something's new and it's a small sample size and it's like people,

like really tough cases, almost everything looks great. And then as soon as you expand that sample size and get like a lot of people from kind of the normal population into the sample, the effectiveness of almost everything kind of goes away. And I think meditation is another story of that. I found,

it really impactful when I was young. I, but I mean, I think a lot of that was, you know, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I found it very effective for like helping me focus. I also just kind of had this period where like I, I, you know, when I was younger, I really got into Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, psychedelics, basically all the shit that's popular now, you know, like I hate to be the guy who was like, I did it before it was cool. But, um, I was really into that stuff. And so I remember, like, I found that meditation was like intense meditation for multiple hours. It was kind of the only thing that gave me the same sensation that some of my more profound psychedelic experiences gave me.

I've since learned and understood that what was happening is that, you know, both psychedelics and intense meditation deactivate what's called the default mode network, which is a sense. your ego, and there are pros and cons to that. I think it is useful to deactivate or, as Ken Wilbur would say, transcend your ego, like see that you are not necessarily limited to your ego, that there is a certain connectedness between you and the universe around you. I think there's a lot of profunity in that. But I don't know, it kind of felt like I hit a point by like my mid-20s where I'm like, okay, I get it. Like, the ego is just kind of this made-up thing. Like, there's a story in my head of, like, who or what Mark is. And I don't have to necessarily believe that story at any given time, especially if it's hurting me. Once you learn that lesson,

or once I learned that lesson, I kind of struggled to see a reason to, like, just keep fucking sitting on a mat for hours and hours every week. Like, I don't, yeah. And I think that that goes for, you've said this about other things as well. Like the point of any self-improvement is to stop doing it. or you stop doing it. Right. Yeah. And there's a lot of people who think, well, no, meditation, you can always find another level. And I'm sure there is.

I'm sure there's different things you can find. But, you know, like with gratitude with me. It's like, for one, like when I did it at first, I was like, okay, yeah, there's some benefit to this. But then I found that I was actually a very grateful person to begin with. So maybe there was some value in that, I guess. Maybe it wasn't a total loss for me, you know. But I was a grateful enough person that I didn't need it.

And so I just don't, I don't have like a gratitude practice. Sure. If you're an ingraithful, ungrateful, ingrate, if you're an ungrateful person, Jesus grace. An ingrate who's ungrateful. If you're an ingrat who's ungrateful and there's nothing great about you, you maybe need to practice it a little bit, right? Well, I think, you know, we all have natural strengths and natural weaknesses.

So it makes sense that, like, certain tools are going to be more effective than others. One thing that I started to run into with the meditation thing that, like, kind of left a bad taste to my mouth is, like, once you get a, you know, you know, Once you get a certain depth into meditation and that whole world, you know, you start going to a lot of retreats and you start meeting Zen masters and gurus and all this stuff, I started to notice that like the people who are really hardcore into it, and it's ironic because the whole basis of Buddhism is non-attachment. I started to feel like the people who were like really deep into that world were quite attached to achieving non-attachment.

Right. Yeah. And I don't know. It just felt like a little bit contradictory. And I think at the end of the day, like you have to go live your life. Like you can't, for me personally, I found that at a certain point sitting for hours and hours and hours in a quiet room was like just kind of another form of avoidance of dealing with life. And that's not to say that that's true for everybody, but I found that true for myself.

Right. And so, I don't know, meditation, I dabble in it. Like, I still kind of go back and forth. Like, I'll go through phases where I do it a bunch again. And I, it feels good. And, you know, I do think my brain is probably optimal on a, at least a small amount of meditation, but it's not really a priority. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, you said one thing. earlier that I want to bring up because I think there might be some subtext in this question about it. You said, you know, like, if something didn't work for you, well, Oprah must be wrong or these people must be wrong, right? Oprah's definitely wrong. I think what happens is a lot of times people have the opposite reaction of that. I think that's not a very common reaction. Yeah. I think

people say, oh, there's something wrong with me if this isn't working for it. Totally. Right. That's the default reaction. That's the default reaction. And it's for whatever reason, your brain works like, now that, maybe you're an asshole about these kind of things or something. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely been like, yeah, maybe it's like my, my anti-authority streak or something. I don't know. But it's my initial reaction, when I was very young, my initial reaction was like, oh, I'm doing it wrong, right?

Okay. And I think it, I had to get older to realize that. Wait, wait a second. Who says, like, this Zen master knows what he's talking about, right? Right. Right. But that is the danger of, I think, this industry in general or like anything around this industry is that whenever you're dealing with vulnerable people, like, whenever you're dealing with somebody who is, say, in a depressive episode or somebody who's deeply insecure or somebody who's dealing with trauma, their natural default tendency is to blame themselves for any sort of disappointment or failure. And I don't know, I just, I think, I think it's, it's really important for practitioners, leaders, thought leaders, authors, speakers, whatever, to be very conscious of that and like, understand that like whatever you're pitching or selling, um, isn't going to work for everybody. Everybody's different. And so if it doesn't work for somebody, there's nothing wrong with them and there's nothing wrong with you. It's just like, it's just not a, it's just, it's just, it's just,

not the right fit. Like, I just don't think that message gets broadcast enough. No, definitely. Like, there's nothing mystical or magical about life and self-help or personal development advice. It's like any other industry. Like, there's, there's, like, dentists and nutritionists that, you know, are going to be great for you and terrible for me and vice versa.

And, like, this, why would this be any different? Yeah. Yeah. So it goes back to what we said earlier. It's like, if you find something that works for you, good for you. Yeah. Do it. Be happy.

Whatever. No, for sure. Okay, I got one more question. Yeah. This is from Arthur. I also came from YouTube. He's got a question that knowing that most of us won't reach the level of success that we see other people have, especially online, like money, fame, you know, YouTubers, that kind of thing. How do we reconcile this fact with our ambitions?

I don't want to give up on my ambition, but I also don't want to be unhappy for not fulfilling it. I think this is a case of like just being careful of how you define success for yourself. Like you don't just because you see somebody online and you maybe look up to that person or envy that person a little bit. Like that doesn't necessarily mean that that is success. I think what often gets lost and this kind of comes back to like the central point of subtle art is that it's easy to see somebody online or on TV or in the movies or something and be like, oh, that's success. I want that. when really you're just seeing the best aspect of that, of that person's life. You're not seeing all of the costs, the sacrifice, the neuroticism, the insecurity, the obsession,

the unhealthiness that went into achieving that thing. So I'm a strong believer that if you are going to desire what somebody else has, you need to also desire the costs and sacrifice that were required to get what that person has. So I would say just think about that. Like don't think about oh, I wish I had as much money as, you know, this dude on Twitter. Ask yourself, do you wish you work as long and hard as this guy on Twitter? Do you think, do you wish you had the same dysfunctional relationships that this guy on Twitter has had? Like there's like so many examples of like insanely successful people who were on their like fourth or fifth marriage, right?

So yeah, that stuff needs to factor into the equation. And I would say that to any young person is like, because we all want to have, like, it's good to have role models. It's good to have people that you kind of aspire to be. But like, you need to pick the full picture. You can't just like, you can't just pick the best, you know, the highlight reel and be like, I just want to have the highlight reel. I don't want to like actually give up anything.

Right, right. Yeah. And I mean, this part of his question, I don't want to give up on my ambition, but I don't want to be unhappy not fulfilling it. I think what you said right away was, well, how are you defining success? Right. That's the issue. It's not that you're not succeeding. It's that you have this definition of success.

Yes. And it's you might feel like you might be disappointing in yourself for not achieving that definition of success when the definition was the problem. Right. This comes back to your point. It's like you're not the problem. The definition was the problem. You chose a bad definition. And so even you chose a definition that is not realistic or does not suit your, your talents, your strengths, your personality.

Your values. Your values. What actually makes you happy, your relationships. And so you need to like recalibrate your definition of success. You know, the way that's phrased to, it's like I would, I would like, fuck ambition. Like, just focus on being slightly better than you were last month or last year. You know, like, it's nice to have like some kind of long-term vision or goal in your head of like, oh, this would be really cool to be here in 10 years. But like, that shouldn't be the thing getting you up in the morning.

The thing that should be getting you up in the morning is like, okay, how do I do better than I did last week? Right. What can I get better at this week? You know, take it in like smaller increments because it's harder to find. fuck up small increments. It's very easy to fuck up like a 10-year vision. Right. And it just, it grounds you a lot more if you're looking right in front of you, right? Yes. Instead, you get lost in these big goals and they seem insurmountable focusing on just like you said, improving from yesterday. Yeah. For sure. Well, that's it for this episode. Tell us what you

think about the new format. Like I said, Drew and I will be doing this every week. We'll have guests come in and out, join us for this format. If you have questions that you want to answer it on the show, please submit them to us. You can submit them to us in the comments on YouTube, or you can email us at podcast at markmanson.net. So yeah, please like, follow, subscribe to the show. Let us know what you think. Leave a review. And we'll be back next week. What is the wisdom of the week? This comes from Tyler Durden. Yes. Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction. That's it.

We'll see you next week. The subtle art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.