The Mindset Mentor - You Aren’t Crazy… Something Is Wrong With People Nowadays

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not, you've done so hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there, you love this podcast. You will definitely love my three-day event that's happening later on this year. There's currently a waitlist that is open. I have not announced all of the details.

So if you want to join the waitlist to be the first to learn about it and get the biggest discount, you can go to freedom waitlist.com. Once again, freedom waitlist.com. Today, we're going to be talking. about the state of the world and the state of other people nowadays. Because have you noticed that it's getting harder and harder to feel like yourself lately? Like your brain is tired even when your body isn't. You feel like you're constantly on. Maybe you're overthinking. Maybe you're constantly consuming. And somehow you might feel more disconnected from yourself than you ever have before.

And the scariest part is that everybody in society seems to feel that way as well. But what if I told that the reason that you feel different lately is because your nervous system is actually rejecting the way that we live nowadays. Well, that's what I want to dive into today and I want to teach you how to fix it. And I'm going to be honest with you. It's going to sound a little bit scary

and doom and gloomy, but I promise you, I'm going to wrap this up in a pretty little bow and give you tips on how to have a better, more joyful, more loving, more peaceful, more peaceful, more successful life than 99% of people in this world. So let's dive in. There's this weird feeling that I think a lot of people have right now that they can't fully explain.

Whenever I get into conversation with people, I feel like there's just everybody's kind of feeling this way. Like you walk into a coffee shop and you notice everybody is looking at a screen and nobody's talking to anybody else. Or like you sit down and you try to have a conversation with someone and it feels like you're talking to like half of a human. Like they're not fully there and present with you. And it seems like people are like exhausted. all of a time and so many people are reactive all the time and people are distracted all the time and everybody's kind of like overstimulated and anxious and people don't really seem like they have a attention span anymore. And if you're like really paying attention to this,

the way that I am, like you will notice it. You can feel it and you can feel that something about modern living is kind of pulling people away from themselves and in like pulling people away from like actually truly being present and living their lives. And I don't mean this in like a conspiracy theory type of way. I don't mean it in like the world is doomed type of way. I mean it in a way of like human beings were not neurologically designed for the pace of technology and the advancement and the amount of input and the amount of noise and the amount of comparison and the amount of stimulation that we all have. That's what I mean. And this is really, really important. I do want you to hear this. I truly believe that the people who are going to thrive the most over the next

decade are not the people who adapt more deeply to this culture. I believe it's going to be the people who consciously choose to separate themselves from everybody else. And I don't mean you like disappearing and becoming a hermit. I mean, I mean you actually going, this is what everybody else is doing. So I'm going to do the opposite. And I do want that. to be you. I want that to be us. I want us to truly thrive in our lives. I want us to feel way more peace and more love, in more joy, in more connection, and more presence. I want us to fully live and experience the depth of this life that we have. And I don't feel like following the crowd in doing what everybody else is doing and following them into the future is going to get us there at all.

And so the uncomfortable truth I think that's really kind of lingering is I think modern culture is extremely dysregulated. Like if you think about it, the average person now feels like they wake up, they check their phone before their feet hit the floor, they consume more information before 9 a.m. than our entire ancestors did in the weeks or months probably. They scroll while they're eating, they watch TV while they're scrolling on Instagram, they listen to podcast episodes while driving. They work and they're distracted the entire time. They can't sit in silence. They feel uncomfortable without some form of stimulation. And then they wonder like, why do I feel anxious all the time? Right? Because your nervous system is drowning. It's just too much for us. And I don't think there's some like weird,

evil overlord that's doing this to us. I think it's just what exponential media and technology growth looks like today. And you have heard me say this many times in a podcast, but our brain was not evolved for this world. It didn't evolve as fast as technology did. Like, your nervous system is ancient. Your brain is almost identical to the brain of a human that lived 200,000 years ago. Do you realize that? Some anthropologists estimate that the structure of modern human brains is roughly 95 to 99% the same as early homocipians 200,000 years ago. That's crazy if you think about it. So it's like taking somebody that was here 200,000 years ago and placing them into today and trying to try, to get them to react and understand the world that we live in. And instead of like worrying about

tigers, now your brain is reacting to like notifications and headlines and doom scrolling and emails and texts and dating apps and video games and all of this stuff. And so now your nervous system does know the difference between like a lion is chasing me and I just got a passive aggressive email or slack message from Nancy in accounting. And stress is just stress in the body. And I think millions and millions and millions of people are unknowingly living in low-grade survival mode 24-7. Like, their nervous system is responding as if it's in fight or flight almost all day long. And so, I don't think any of that is normal at all. And so what I think is you and I, we need to become comfortable from this moment forward

being the weird-ass people, right? Like, it doesn't, people don't even have to see our quote-unquote weirdness. We just need to know that we really don't want to fit in with everything. everybody else. Like this is the part I really want you understand. For you, I want you to learn to enjoy silence. I want you to learn to enjoy reading a book instead of scrolling on Instagram. I want you to learn how to journal and discover yourself. I want you to enjoy to meditate and sit there. I want you to not constantly need attention and not to have to post your entire life on Instagram or TikTok. I want you to be able to think deeply. I want you to be able to think deeply. I

want you to be able to spend time alone. I want you to be able to protect your peace. I want you to be able to sit down with your child and have 100% of your presence with them instead of thinking about work or emails or whatever might be. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. Like if we do that, if we love those things, if we start becoming those people, we will feel abnormal in modern culture. And that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with us. Right? which I think leads to the most important question of today, like what if fitting into modern culture is actually the problem? Think about that.

Like what if us fitting into modern culture is the problem? I don't think the goal, our goal, at least it's not my goal going into the future, is not to fit in. It's not to be normal. It's not to do what everybody else is doing. It's definitely not to think like everybody else is thinking. because honestly, if you look around, like, do you want the average person's attention span?

Do you want the average person's emotional regulation? Do you want the average person's relationship quality? Do you want the average person's stress levels? Do you want the average person's self-worth? Like, do you want the average person's nervous system? Do you want the average person's mental clarity? I sure as hell do not. And I think one of the healthiest things that you and I can do right now is probably.

wildly, just walk away from the crowd and become the weird ones. You don't need to announce it to anybody. You don't need to say that you're getting off of Facebook and tell everybody that's on it. Just notice what everyone else is doing and go, I don't want to be like then. I'm going to do the exact opposite. Because personally, like, I am seeing what everyone else is doing and I am consciously choosing the opposite. Like, if everybody else is glued to their phone, I'm going to delete some maps. If everybody else is chasing attention from other people, I want more connection to myself. If everybody else is overstimulated, I want more stillness. If everybody else is performing for everybody else so that they're liked, I want to be more authentically me so that I like myself.

If everybody else is reacting emotionally to everything, then I want to try to master my emotions, like my emotions with anything else. If everybody else is consuming content nonstop, I want to read a book at night instead of scroll and see a bunch of people's lives that I don't know. And frankly, I don't really even care what they're doing in the first place.

Everybody else is numbing themselves. I want to feel my life, like all of the good and all of the bad. I'm not trying to be like a rebel and be like, oh my God, I'm so badass. I just want to be me. Like, I'm just trying to master myself. I don't want to be anybody else.

and I've seen so many studies that prove that that's what you and I should do. Studies have shown that constant stimulation weakens your immune system. It weakens your attention regulation. It increases cortisol levels over time, which is your stress hormone. So like chronic oversimulation has been linked to anxiety, emotional dysregulation, sleep disruption, depressive symptoms. That doesn't sound like something I want to sign up for. And then meanwhile, look at other research, research on mindfulness and silence and boredom and reduced

stimulation shows improvements in emotional regulation, in memory, in focus, in stress recovery, and creativity. Because your brain needs to recover the same way that muscles do. But modern culture almost treats stillness as like laziness. Like if you want to sit alone without stimulation, like we, feel like there's something wrong. Like we feel like we're missing out. We feel like we're not, I'm not being productive. I felt that so many times. I can't sit and do nothing. That's so fucking unproductive. I have a business. I have things that I have to do. No, sometimes the most

productive thing you could do is nothing because it's giving you more mental space when you actually do go out and do something. And meanwhile, if you look at like the greatest thinkers that have ever lived, most of them wrote about how they very often intentionally isolated themselves so that they would have space to think deeply. Nikolai Tesla, Carl Jung, Einstein, Marcus Aurelius, Da Vinci, like deep thinking requires space. In modern culture, gives us almost no space, especially no space for deep thinking. And I think that most people have really just lost contact with themselves. Like the deeper layer in all of this that nobody really wants to talk about and might not even know is that a lot of people, is that a lot of people,

people aren't actually just afraid of like silence or sitting there or not being productive. They're afraid of what comes up and what the silence reveals. Because when the music stops, when the scrolling stops, when the distractions stop, you finally meet yourself. And eventually what's going to bubble up to the surface? The not so fun things that we've been trying to avoid, the unresolved emotions, our fears, our loneliness, our insecurities, our grief, our confusion. Yeah, you. That is you. The true you is back there saying, please heal these things so we can come back to ourselves. And I think a lot of people

unconsciously, I have done this for many years when I became a workaholic when I was in my early 20s, stay overstimulating because stimulation helps avoid self-confrontation. And my favorite phrase around this is the cave that you're afraid to enter holds a treasure that you seek. The thing that you're afraid to work on is what will unlock once it's healed your entire life. It will unlock everything that you've been wanting to be, but you're afraid to enter that cave. You're afraid to be silent to see what comes up. But your greatness is on the other side of that confrontation. Like, the people who create extraordinary lives usually show a trait that's pretty common.

They have learned how to think independently, and they have created a deep connection to themselves. Like most people's beliefs are downloaded accidentally from parents and culture and algorithms and fears and all this repetition that we see all the time. Very few people sit down and consciously choose who do I actually want to become and what do I need to do to become that person. That requires a lot of awareness and awareness almost always begins in solitude, in silence. So maybe we should be different, everybody. Like if we're noticing that something's weird with people nowadays, we should not want to fit in. It is tribal to want to fit in.

It's built into us to want to fit in. We have to consciously choose, there is no way in hell I want to be like everybody else. So maybe being different is the wisest thing that we could do. Maybe protecting your attention is wisdom. Maybe not wanting to fit in with the chaos is wisdom. Maybe reading books while I'm not. everybody else scrolls is wisdom. Maybe taking walks without headphones and just being in your own head is wisdom. Maybe journaling is wisdom. Maybe deleting apps that steal your attention is wisdom. Maybe saying

no to constant stimulation is wisdom. Because honestly, this is what I think is happening. We are entering an era where calm will become extremely rare. Focus will become rare. Depth will become rare. Emotional regulation will become rare. Independent thinking will become rare. And rare traits become extremely valuable. So the people who can focus deeply and regulate their emotions and think independently and stay in silence and delay gratification and stay grounded, those people are going to separate themselves massively over the next decade from the rest of everybody else. Not because there's some sort of superhuman or because they were born with it, but because everybody else is so unstable that they don't know what to do with themselves.

And so what I want you to do and get from this episode is I want you to stop trying to fit in. Seriously, stop trying to become quote unquote normal because right now normal is distracted and it's getting more distracted. It's anxious and it's getting more anxious. It's reactive. It's getting more reactive. It's exhausted. It's disconnected. It's overstimulated. Does any of that sounds sexy to you? Like, it doesn't sound sexy to me at all. So you have to try to allow yourself to be weird enough to protect your peace, to think at a level of depth that you've never been able to get to before. To question culture in what other people are doing. To be able to spend time alone, but more than just spend time alone, like actually enjoy.

yourself in time with yourself, to read more on deep subjects from some of the smartest humans that have ever lived versus just like reading headlines from what's happening from somebody else and what some celebrity ate yesterday, right? Like scroll less, meditate more, create, like be a creative person, become more disciplined and just like train your nervous system to become okay being different. because I genuinely, with every fiber of my body, believe that the people who learn to reclaim their attention and build a deeper connection to themselves will become the happiest, calmest, and most free people in the future. And in a world that's addicted to noise, being peaceful becomes your superpower. So that's what I got for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it

on the Instagram stories and tag me in it, Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. And as I said earlier, If you are interested in learning more about my three-day in-person event coming up later this year, go to freedom weightless.com. Sign up for the waitlist so that you are one of the first people to learn about it. Once again, that is freedom weightless.com. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way. I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better.

I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.