How to Find Your True Path in Life (ft. Robert Greene)

What are you called to do in life? What is your life’s task? And once you figure that out, how do you pursue it? The one and only Robert Greene sat down with us on the pod to talk about all of these questions and a whole more. We discuss finding and pursuing one’s life task, the nature and causes of “Peter Pan Syndrome”, science vs timeless wisdom on life, figuring out what do in midlife after you’ve taken the wrong path, and a much more. Enjoy. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: Robert Greene in the Flesh 00:00:43 The Resurgence of The 48 Laws of Power 00:05:57 The Dark Side vs. The Real Robert 00:08:11 The Theatrical Nature of Social Life 00:09:22 Finding Your Life's Task: Robert's Journey 00:12:58 Reading the Signs: Positive and Negative Feedback 00:15:10 Persistence vs. Knowing When to Pivot 00:18:00 The Pain You Enjoy: Finding Your True Work 00:21:43 Reconnecting With Your Life's Task 00:25:25 The Five Forms of Intelligence 00:29:13 Brilliant or Bullshit: Peter Pan Syndrome 00:32:00 The Problem With Positive Masculinity 00:37:33 Too Much Talking, Not Enough Acting 00:38:23 Life as a Game: Get Out and Play 00:42:25 Listener Questions: Science vs. Timeless Wisdom 00:44:06 The Problem With Big Data and Algorithms 00:51:09 Starting Over at 35: Building From What You Have 00:57:00 The Midlife Crisis: Is This It? 01:00:37 Finding the Sublime: Robert's Next Book 01:03:26 Closing Thoughts and What's Next ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Theme Song: Icarus Lives by @Periphery , used with permission from Periphery.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Robert Greene in studio, in the flesh. You are actually one of our most requested guests.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 0:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Who's the most requested?

• 0:07Mark Manson?

  Uh, Dr. K, the gaming psychologist.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Don't even know who that is. Wow. Have you had him on?

• 0:15Mark Manson?

  I have not. I've, I've, I've contacted his people, but um.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  What's so amazing about Dr. K?

• 0:21Mark Manson?

  Well, he's a, he's a psychiatrist who uh targets mental health for gamers.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  That's a lot of your audience.

• 0:29Mark Manson?

  I guess so. A lot of YouTube, yeah, a lot of YouTubers. I guess so.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 0:43Mark Manson?

  So my first question for you is actually quite selfish. As a younger author, I, I find your career so fascinating because you have this long history of successful books, but it really seems like there's this resurgence of interest, especially in the 48 laws of power over the last few years. It seems like Gen Z is discovering Robert Greene and you're getting this whole second wave of attention. I'm curious what that experience has been like, what that, what your thoughts on that are and whether you feel like you have any control over that or if it just happened.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Well, um, I don't know. It's probably a confluence of things. Who knows why things happen in this world? It's complex and it's mysterious. But I would say um, social media has played a huge role in it because um, back 10 years ago or so, you know, nobody really knew who I was. I had no Instagram. I was a little bit on Facebook, but I hadn't really gotten into social media at all. I was very, very scant on, on Twitter. And so I think a lot of it is about five years ago, some, some fans said, you've got to get on social media. And he took over and he, he did it himself for me.

• 2:01Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  And we ended up having to fire him because he was kind of a control freak, but. He was a nice guy, but he just wanted to like kind of run my empire. He would call it my empire. He'd say, "Your legacy, I'm going to protect your legacy as if I'm dead," or something. So I got rid of him. Anyway, suddenly, you know, it started growing. I have this guy, Stanley, who's my assistant, who puts clips. And he's very good at choosing certain clips. And so a lot of it is social media giving me a presence. You know, up until recently, I could walk down the street, nobody knew the hell who the hell I was. Yeah. And suddenly, people started recognizing me because of this. It just exploded. Yeah. You know, even in places like London or Paris. It's like I've got this international reach, it was incredible. Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And so I have to thank social media for that, for paying my mortgage and all the other things like that. But then why has it resonated now? And I think young people are dealing with a world that's so much more chaotic and confusing. Some of it has to do with the conditions of the world that we're living in, which is, as I said, much more chaotic than it was maybe 10, 15 years ago. Some of it has to do with the parenting issues, how differently they have been raised, and the culture that they're entering. And so because of that feeling, kind of very lost and confused, the 48 laws of power kind of gives you sort of a grounding in kind of the dark, harsh aspect of life.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Because, I don't know, I'm not Gen Z, so it's hard for me to generalize. Of course, it's ridiculous to generalize. Right. But a lot of them feel maybe they've been a little bit sheltered from that kind of harsh aspect of life. I know when I was 21, if I can remember back that far, I entered the work world out of college. And I was a liberal arts major. Ancient Greek and Latin, you can't get any more irrelevant subject than that. My first job was a real job, because I had many different jobs. My first real job was at Esquire magazine. I was the lowest editor there, an editorial assistant. It was like mind blowing. I couldn't believe power games that were going on because nothing in college prepared you for that.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  All the egos of the writers and the editors, the celebrity, the weirdness. I once edited an article by John Irving, you know, the writer.

• 4:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  He turned in a travel article about Vienna because I was like the travel editor. It was such a bad article. It was like, go to this cafe, turn right and then go here and then turn left and go. It was like that kind of writing. I edited, totally made it like a narrative. And I got essentially fired because of that or got demoted. I had outshone the master, law number one. So it was this rude awakening into this is what the world is really like. I had to school myself very quickly. And then with my 50 different jobs, I learned over time, this is how the world is. Young people are going through that, but times 10 because the world is even more confusing.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  They're not used to dealing with all of these egos, to all the political games. So I think, I can't say for sure, but I think these are some of the components that go into this revival of the book. It's selling five times more than it ever did 20 years ago. So it's insane. Yeah.

• 5:27Mark Manson?

  I feel like cynicism travels on the internet faster than it does in real life. And I think as a generation that grew up on social media and grew up on the internet, what I detect from Gen Z is just, is kind of an embedded cynicism about the world and like.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 5:46Mark Manson?

  Skepticism and I could see why a book about power appeals to that. It's like, okay, well, this book's going to just cut through the bullshit and actually tell me what's going on. So I. The appeal makes sense.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  But I'm not, I'm not a cynical person. I know people think of the book as cynical, but I don't really think of it as cynical.

• 6:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Because cynical is, is basically, you know, leaning into all the bad things in life, et cetera. And it's not very realistic because not all life is bad. There are bad people out there. I just think the book is realistic.

• 6:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Because I'm not a cynical person at heart, you know, I'm actually got unfortunately more of a romantic naive streak. And I think it in some weird way that comes out in the book, but.

• 6:32Mark Manson?

  It's interesting, you know, you and I have met in person a few times now. And I imagine the, the image that people get from reading your books versus.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  How they see me.

• 6:43Mark Manson?

  How, how you actually are in person. Like I, do you get people like assuming that you're like trying to pull puppet strings and manipulating them?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if I'm five minutes late for a meeting, it's not because of the traffic. It's because I'm playing some kind of weird game on them, you know?

• 6:56Mark Manson?

  They're like it's Law 27 or whatever.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I know, I've said, I've told this story before, but when I met 50 Cent for the first time before we ever thought of writing a book together. He was like, he later told me he was kind of a little bit intimidated by this. He, he expected an older man, he picked like Henry Kissinger to show up when we first met.

• 7:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And then he was kind of surprised, maybe even a little bit disappointed that I wasn't like that. Of course, I had the same impression about him. I was expecting someone really kind of mean and intimidating and thuggish. And he was the sweetest, gentlest, nicest person you could ever imagine.

• 7:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  But yeah, people expect this, that everything I do is a power move. It's, but it's not true.

• 7:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Do you just kind of see that as the cost of the success of the book, you know, because it's, I, I get this with my fuck books. Like people make assumptions about me that I'm, and then they meet me in person. They're like, oh, you're not like that at all. Like the.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Well, you do, you do give a fuck, don't you?

• 7:58Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:59Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  No, I'm just.

• 8:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah, but you're outing me, Robert. You're outing me.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Sorry. Sorry. You can start being mean to me now. Show people. You know, there's a theatrical element to the social world, which I embrace. And I think it's kind of fun and interesting and it's part of the forty eight laws of power. So when you enter the world, you're not yourself. I think it's something, a mistake people make. They have no distance between their inner self and their public self. So they enter the work world and people are different and weird and stuff. And they take it personally. And I try and instruct people, it's not personal, it's a game. People are wearing masks. It's like something from the eighteenth century where people are in costumes and they're in theater. And they're performing, people are constantly performing. Well, I'm performing as well.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And so if people have this image of me as this dark sinister figure. Sometimes, you know, I don't mind, I might lean into it a little bit, I might give that out, that impression. Because I kind of enjoy that, I kind of enjoy playing that role, sort of thing.

• 9:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  You know, I don't have a problem with it.

• 9:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  But it's not really who I am.

• 9:10Mark Manson?

  Right, right.

• 9:14Mark Manson?

  Tell me about, in your book Mastery, you talk about finding your life task. And from what I know about you and from the bits and pieces I've read about you and talked to you. You seem to know pretty early on that you wanted to be an author. You seem kind of just built to be a writer. Like, what was your process of searching and discovering and finding what you consider your life?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  You know, my story was fairly clear. I mean, like you, it goes up and down, it's not, it's never like a straight path.

• 9:45Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  But when I was very young, I loved writing. I wrote, I believe I wrote something like a novel when I was about nine years old.

• 9:55Mark Manson?

  Oh, wow.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And it was about our early, early humans first entering the scene. You know, walking in the savannas of Africa, and I'm nine years old. And it's told from the point of view of a vulture who's watching them. No, I'm sure it's terrible.

• 10:13Mark Manson?

  But for a nine year old, that's impressive.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was really obsessed with vultures and I did little sculptures of vultures.

• 10:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  So you kind of see the dark side already there when I'm nine years old. But, um, and so, you know, I love, I love words, just the sound of words, the sensuality of words, the weirdness of, you know, I just, I never took language at its face value. I thought there's something strange that we speak in words, that we have these symbols that we take for granted, that we talk so smoothly, but they're not, they're weird. They're these little squiggles that mean something, that have a sound attached to them. As a child, this is really strange. I was obsessed with words, I played with words, I still do that to this day. I love like palindromes and word games and such. So words obsessed me and obviously I wanted to be a writer.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I thought when I was 18 in my drug days, that I would be a wild novelist, you know? That was my real dream. I'm still am kind of a failed novelist, so to speak. And so I tried, as I've told people before, I tried many different types of writing. I tried journalism, I hated it, I failed at it, it wasn't a good fit. I tried writing novels, bumming around Europe with a backpack. I failed at that. I came back to LA, tried to be a screenwriter. I failed at that. These weren't fits for me because I have a weird mind and I'm also a control freak and I didn't have any kind of control in Hollywood.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I lucked into the 48 laws of power by meeting this man. In Italy, we were there to start a new media school for Benetton, some weird project like that. It was, it was kind of a meaningless venture. It really was about being in Italy and having good pasta and espresso and wine. It wasn't about getting anything done, if you know the Italians.

• 12:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  This is the land of Machiavelli. And so he hadios denied the man who did that. We kind of bonded over it. One day I'm in Venice, Italy, because it was near Venice and we were walking. He said, do I have any ideas for a book? And the 48 laws of power, just it was almost like I vomited out of me. I kind of improvised. The gist of it, actually, I told him a story, the story that opens the book. I said, this is how I'd illustrate it. He said, that's fantastic, I'll pay you to live while you write the book. Cause I was very poor. And so.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  I kind of found my way in this kind of circuitous way, manner to what I was really meant to do. But the lesson, I think, for people, because I get so many emails, people telling me, I don't know what my life's task is. I can't figure out what my purpose is. Can you help me? Can you help me? And there are signs, I believe everybody has signs, and these signs come out, a lot of them are negative signs, which you're not paying attention to. Things that you hate, things that frustrate you. So you're in music, it isn't quite working, you feel a little bit uncomfortable, it's not a fit.

• 13:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  So you make the wise decision that it's not for you to get out. Other people, they maybe feel that frustration, but they don't go there. They go, oh, I've already trained as a musician, I gotta stick with it. They go and then they've, then they burn out, they're 30 years old, and it doesn't, it's not working for them. They go, what's my life's purpose? I have no idea. You've got to listen to the signs. Sometimes the signs are physical, they're literally in your body, you literally feel frustrated, you literally feel like you're swimming against the tide, it's not working for you. You get up in the morning, you're not interested in this. So the negative is very important, but also there's the positive, you know? So for me, the negative was, I hate, I actually hate office politics, which is very ironic for me.

• 14:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  You know, who wrote that? I couldn't, I can't stand working for other people. And so I have to work for myself, I have to be an entrepreneur, I have to write books, I have to have control. But then there are the positive signs, there's the signs of things that you love, that you're passionate about, they generally show up when you're very six, seven, eight years old. And so I tell people, you've got to go through that process, you have to reconnect with the child inside of you, because children are dreamers. Every child thinks... I'm gonna be president, I'm gonna write a great novel, I'm gonna do this or the other. Then those dreams slowly get squeezed out of them.

• 14:41Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  But you have to return back to that, you have to have a little bit of that expansive quality, that little bit of imagination, even a little bit of naivete, and go back to who you were and go back to the things that excite you in a way that you can't even explain, you know?

• 14:57Mark Manson?

  The negative feedback thing, one thing I notice in a lot of people, you know, there's this narrative around grit, persistence, hustle culture, right? Like, what I notice with a lot of people is when they start running into that resistance and it doesn't feel right, it feels painful, the first thing they tell themselves is like, oh, well, I just need to toughen the fuck up and keep going, because this is, this is what, you know, all my heroes did, is they just kept fighting through it. And it's, I think it's such, it's so much more nuanced than that, of like, understanding when to push through and when to let go.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Well, the subtle art should be actually the title of your next book, because it is subtle, it is nuanced, life is not so obvious. So sometimes grit and persistence is the right way.

• 15:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  So for me, writing, I failed at all these different aspects. I didn't give up. I didn't say, alright, my parents wanted me to go to law school, wanted me to settle down, wanted me to take these awful television jobs that I had. You know, and I can, I've had the worst television job you can imagine, I won't even say that. They want me to settle down, you know? I had to have the persistence to go, no, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna stick with it, I have faith in myself, even though I got very depressed. But also sometimes persistence can be exactly the wrong thing.

• 16:17Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  And the key is, the key to everything in life is knowing what you really, truly love, what you were meant to do, why you were born, why you're a different individual. You know, I know it sounds like a cliche, but everybody, your DNA is unique, there's never gonna be another Mark Manson. The way your brain is wired, the way your parents raised you, your early experiences, you are unique. And so that is where your power lies. And connecting to that is, is, is the source of everything in this world. So if you connect to it, if you know who you are, you know what you love, you know what you were meant to do, and it's not a cliche, it's actually very real,

• 16:59Speaker 01

  then that persistence will become an actual positive thing in your life, because you'll know. I can't keep kicking against a wall here. It's not what I was meant to do. I gotta get out.

• 17:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  You know, so I was 25, 26 years old. I was in New York, working in journalism. I had a meeting with an editor after I wrote an article. And I didn't know what the meeting was for. And he was kind of an alcoholic. He was like on his second or third martini at lunch. And he was saying, basically said, Robert, you're not a good writer. You're not gonna make it in this world. You need to go to business school. You're not disciplined. You're all over the place. You don't understand your audience. Right? And so I could have like, said, fuck you. I could have like stayed in journalism. I probably would be dead by now. I'd probably be an alcoholic because it wasn't right. But I listened to it and I go, you know, there's something true there.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  It isn't right. It isn't a good fit. I'm hitting against a wall. I gotta get out and I gotta try something else. But if you don't know who you are, if you don't know what marked you as a weird person when you were a child, then you're lost in life. You have no radar.

• 18:10Mark Manson?

  One thing that I tell people all the time is, is I ask them,

• 18:15Mark Manson?

  what's the form of pain that you enjoy that most people can't tolerate? Right? Like it's

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And you don't mean like in a kinky way?

• 18:22Mark Manson?

  No, not in a kinky way. No, no. Well, you know, we don't judge here at the Solo Art Podcast, but, but um,

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Just wanted to clear that up.

• 18:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Mark Manson?

  Keep it a PG 13, Robert.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 18:38Mark Manson?

  What is the challenger struggle that, that you kind of relish? Like you kind of, you know, like, I know for me, and I imagine it's similar for you. Like when I'm in the hole with a book, when I'm like just deep, deep, deep in a mess of a draft. And I'm like agonizing through it. I'm laying awake at night. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about. There's still kind of a sick part of me that like likes it.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:06Mark Manson?

  Like, there's something thrilling about it.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:09Mark Manson?

  And, and, and I think most people, they can't stomach it. Whereas like in music school, like, I remember the moment I, I decided to drop out of music school. I remember I was practicing four to six hours a day.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  What, what did you play?

• 19:25Mark Manson?

  Uh, guitar. Uh, so I was practicing four to six hours a day on top of all my classes. And I remember I went into one of my private tutors and tried to play a song for him. And he just looked at me and he's like, you know, your problem is you don't practice enough.

• 19:43Mark Manson?

  And like, that was the moment I was like, I'm done. I, I like, I can't.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And, and, and was the practice painful, but not in a good way?

• 19:51Mark Manson?

  Correct. Correct. It was, it was drudgery.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:55Mark Manson?

  Um, and it, to me, that was a very profound lesson, you know, cause I loved performing. And I loved getting attention because I could play some song or some solo. But I didn't like practicing and musicianship is actually practicing.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  It's all practice.

• 20:13Mark Manson?

  It's a 99% practice, 1% performance, right? So, um, it, it was a very painful lesson of like, you think you like this, but you don't actually like it.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Wow, that's very interesting. Yeah. Well, um, you know, when, when you love something, when you really are, when you have that connection like I'm talking about, then the practice, you, you, you enjoy it, you enjoy learning.

• 20:35Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Because you enjoy the process of getting better and you can feel your brain kind of tingling and things are happening inside. And I tell people, if you have found the right path, if you are like an artist or creative, and you feel frustrated and you feel blocked, that's a good thing, right? That little bit of pain, that little bit of frustration, it's often a signal that you're actually on the verge of turning into the right direction. You know, cause it's a signal that things aren't quite working out and you're listening to it. But if you get anxious and you don't listen to the frustration and you can't be creative, you can't go into it.

• 21:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  But you'll learn at a much higher rate and you'll enjoy, because anything, as I said in mastery, everything involves a degree of pain, a degree of practice, a degree of drudgery.

• 21:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  There's nothing that's going to come easy in life. So anything is skill that you're gonna learn is gonna involve that. And if you're not connected to it in a deep, late way like you weren't with music, you're never gonna get, you're never gonna learn fast enough, you know? And you're just gonna drive, you're gonna burn out too early, so. Yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  What about, Robert, what about reconnecting with that, that life task and going back and finding that? Because I think you talk about a lot of the negative signs.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  I think people can get stuck. Everything is just a negative sign. They're like, and they completely forget. Mark, you said that you got disconnected from that at one point. You kind of by chance stumbled back into it. Robert, it sounds like you kind of always knew you wanted to be a writer of some kind. There are a lot of people who just, they feel like, they don't even know what that is to begin with. So can you talk a little bit more about like uncovering that, that connection to your life task?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Going back, you know, to childhood or whatever.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  It is a good question because a lot of people, they only know the negative. They only know. And then you kind of beat up on yourself and then you start doubting yourself and you think, well, maybe there's nothing that I'm really good at. Maybe I just need to go make a lot of money, which I'm not against making money. I mean, I'm not telling people to say, oh, I meant to be a poet, which you can't make a living off of. You have to be able to put food on the table if you're supporting a family, et cetera. So being able to make a living is important, right? But you don't have to compromise completely in that. So finding that positive element. Well, the first thing you have to do is it's a process and people are so impatient. They are so unused to being to introspecting.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  And being able to introspect is a very, very powerful tool. And what that means is you have to be able to examine yourself. And in our culture, we're so out of direct, we're so direct towards what other people are doing, toward the social world, that the idea of who am I? What was I like as a child? What do I really love is alien to people. I can't understand it because I've always, I'm a very introspective person. But a lot of people have a hard time with that concept. And I encounter that when I try and counsel them. So I tell people, you have to be patient. It's not going to come in a light and a flash of, wow, I was meant to be a sculptor. Here I go. Right. Okay. So you've got to be patient.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  You've got to take a book and you have to make a journal. If that, you know, I think it works for a lot of people. And you have to start going through this process. And I tell people, look for the signs of things that excited you, that excite you in a way that you can't even really control. Because we live in a culture that is so damn rational. Everything is an algorithm. Everything is generated by data. But this is a feel. This is not data. This is a feel. This is an intuition. This is something that excites you in an intuitive way. And there's no algorithm in the world that I could invent, or any genius could invent, to help you find that. It's a feel. It's subtle. It's inside of you.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  But if you can't go inside of yourself, if you're so not into looking into who you are, all the advice in the world will be useless. And I tell people that. I can't help you unless you're willing to go through that process. And some of that examining is tough. Some of it is, yeah, I had a rough childhood. Yeah, I had these fantasies, but they weren't necessarily positive. You're going to come upon negative things, you know? And I had, you know, I had a lot of negative things in my childhood, too. So you have to be willing to go through that digging. You're like an archaeologist with your own past. You're digging in there, looking for the signs. And they're there. When you were five years old, four years old,

• 25:14Speaker 01

  you were naturally excited by certain things. The other thing I tell people is, we've got to get away from this idea of intelligence as just being intellectual. There's a book I recommend to a lot of people. I've probably over recommended it by Howard Gardner, called The Frames of, The Five Frames of Intelligence. I'm probably always misquoting, but it's something like that. You'll find it. And he's basically a neuroscientist. He's a scientist of some sort. And he said, there are five forms of intelligence. There's kind of a mathematical intelligence that's do with patterns, often related to music. There's a social intelligence that has to deal with dealing with people. There is kinetic intelligence, which is moving the body, right?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Sports or or dance or whatever. There's word intelligence, there's that kind. There's another one, I can't remember what it is, imagery or something like that. Every brain has that natural inclination towards one of these intelligences, right? And you have that as well. I compare it to like a grain that's inside of you. And that you have to move with that grain, you have to find it. And it's one of these forms of intelligence, you have it. Yes, you can have two, but if you have two or three, it starts. I don't know, you're going to get a little bit lost, you're polymath. That maybe you're a genius or maybe you're just confused. But you've got to find that one thing, right?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  And if it's sports, if it's dance, that's intelligence. Kobe Bryant, my my idol, because I love basketball. He is intelligent as as he's a Michelangelo on the basketball court, you know? It's intelligence. Parents like to say, well, no, you've got to go to law school, you've got to be this, you've got to be an academic and blah, blah, blah. No, it's whatever is that grain of your brain that is natural. You've got to find that. And so don't think in terms of I want to be this specific job or whatever. Think in terms of what is that natural form that my brain is veers towards?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And now, if you know that you're somebody who has a mathematical, abstract, mechanical like brain. All right, let's go into that, let's go deeper now, let's find if you're an engineer or if you're a musician or okay. But you got to go back and you got to dig. I could go on for hours about some of the process that I go through people. That should give you an idea of some of the positive things that you can do.

• 27:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, but it is a process, that's what I like about it.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:45Mark Manson?

  It's not the lightning bolt, like you said, it's not.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:48Mark Manson?

  And it also never completely ends. It's not like.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  No, for sure.

• 27:51Mark Manson?

  You don't just like find the thing and you're like, cool, I'm set like it, there's. Every five, 10 years, something happens in your life, or you evolve, or you change a little bit, or

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 28:02Mark Manson?

  Your preferences change, you know, so it is, it's a perpetual thing, for sure.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  You know, some people like, they get tired of the thing they've been doing for 10, 15, 20 years. And then they go try something different. And I often counsel, you don't want to go like, you know, you're a writer, and now, oh, no, I'm going to be like, uh, I don't know, choose something totally irrelevant from that, whatever.

• 28:24Mark Manson?

  Programmer or something.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. That's not, you should, you should go off in a different direction within writing or something. Right? And so you get bored. And the boredom either means I've got to change my job, or it means I have to change something within my job, and I prefer the something within my job. So how I personally deal with it is, every book that I write is on a completely different subject. I never repeat the same book twice. I'm on to something that is not, the book I'm writing now, people are going to be shocked, because it's completely different from anything I've ever written. So I don't get bored. I'm constantly challenging myself.

• 29:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. Cool. We will be right back.

• 29:13Mark Manson?

  All right, we're back. So, Robert, we do a segment that Drew and I love called Brilliant or Bullshit, which is we take recent scientific research, surveys, new theories, things that have kind of become popular, or become talked about, and we discuss whether we think it's brilliant, or whether it's bullshit. So we want to, we want to include you on this round. We want to hear your opinion. We have something selected.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yes, for this Brilliant or Bullshit, Robert, we're talking about Peter Pan Syndrome. Now, there's a lot of talk about how men are checking out, they're not getting jobs, not getting educated, not committing to long-term relationships.

• 29:53Mark Manson?

  Sitting at home, playing video games, watching porn.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Vaping, watching porn, yeah. There's a female version of it too, called the Cinderella Syndrome, but it's, the Peter Pan Syndrome is really the, uh, in the zeitgeist more and more. And actually, there are some recent studies that are trying to quantify this and, and, and label it a, a, I wouldn't say diagnosable syndrome, but they do call it a syndrome, and they suggest therapy for it. What I would like to ask you, first of all, do you think calling it a syndrome is brilliant or bullshit? I think I know what you would think about that. But what do you think the main drivers really are? Is there a problem of prolonged adolescence? What are the drivers of that prolonged adolescence? Should we be therapizing it so much, too?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Well, you know, syndrome, yeah, that's a bit of bullshit. It's a bit like how people like to talk about things these days because everybody's an individual. Everybody has their own childhood, their own background, their own reasons for wanting to stay in adolescence. And there are plenty of people in my generation, particularly in my generation, who got stuck in adolescence and are still stuck there. So it's not necessarily endemic just to Gen Z. It's a phenomenon that has existed, I'm not saying forever, certainly not, but since the reign of popular culture, probably since the 1950s, the Peter Pan phenomenon has become more and more pronounced. And what was the second part of the question?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  What do you think is driving it?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, right. Well, I mean, as I said, everybody's going to be different. I know that's not a good answer for you, but I think a lot of it is, it's a very strange time to be a male, to be a boy, to be a man. It's a very confusing time. And so I think that's a lot of the source of it. Because when I was growing up, I'm sounding like I'm 100 years old. When I was 30, I hated hearing that stupid ass expression.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Back in my day.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  When I walked 12 miles to school in the snow. Anyway, you know, there was, there was this, being a male was obviously positive because it was a very male-oriented culture. But you know, it was, there was no sense of confusion about it, really, although some people were confused. And there's nothing wrong with that. But You know, there were icons in sports, in in movies, you know, the kind of the rugged masculine hero. But in all aspects of life, you know, I remember as a kid, I was I'm so old that as a three year old, I can remember John F Kennedy on the television. You know, that that got that I was fascinated by him.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  I thought that this was it was a man who was very commanding. He was the president, but there was also a weird kind of softness to him, like a strange poetic side to it. It drew me in. There were these icons, and so you didn't feel you wanted to grow out of adolescence. You wanted to become a man. You wanted to enter the world and be and kind of follow in the footsteps of some of these people that you admired. But now it's like being man, being male, being masculine is almost ugly. It's dirty. It's almost like something you have to wipe off your skin. Oh, you know, toxic masculinity. But, you know, there's something you have to say about testosterone. It can turn ugly, but it's drives you.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  It makes you do things. It's got a positive element. It gives you ambition. It makes you go out and do things. 12,000 years ago, it made you go hunt mastodons and kill them with your with your other members. Right? There should be positive things about being a man. And so then I don't want to stay in adolescence. I want to don't want to stay in this little cocoon with my mommy and my daddy in my home playing games. I want to go out in the world. I want to conquer. I want to have ambition. I think the root of the problem is that there's no kind of positive masculinity out there. And so it doesn't give people an incentive to get out of that little kind of adolescent cocoon. Right?

• 34:01Mark Manson?

  I agree 100%. It's funny, we were joking around about Dr. K at the beginning of the show.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:07Mark Manson?

  I think one of the reasons why he's become so popular is there's this whole demographic of young men who are kind of checked out and they're playing video games all day. And he's one of the only. Popular mental health voices that speaking directly to them saying, hey, you're playing too many video games. Let's talk about it. How can like, how can we get you back out in the world? I definitely see, you know, a big portion of my audience is younger men. I definitely have noticed this over recent years and and I'm becoming a little alarmed by it. I agree that there's, there's a lack of clear role models. There's a lack of, there's, there's not a roadmap, right? Like, it's not obvious to a seventeen year old male,

• 34:53Mark Manson?

  who to be, who they want to grow into, right? And that's, that's difficult and confusing. And then I think the ease of checking out today is Exactly. is so much, I mean, I struggle. I mean, I'll download a game on my phone and and I'll be lost for two hours, right? Like, yeah, it's, it's tough, man. It's, so it's like, and I've got a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Like, imagine an eighteen year old, like, he's fucked. So it's, it's, um, I, I really, really sympathize with a lot of the young guys today. And it's, I definitely see it as a problem. It does seem to be a growing problem. The syndrome

• 35:34Mark Manson?

  thing makes me uncomfortable. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on, on kind of this, there seems to be a little bit of a recent tendency to like, medicalize everything. Yeah. And especially things that were just kind of, not normal behavior, but not necessarily abnormal behavior, say, twenty or thirty years ago either. Like what? Like a Peter Pan syndrome. Like, like when I was, I remember when I was in college, we used, me and my friends, we used to go out with this guy who was around, he was a divorced guy around fifty. Ton of fun. Awesome dude. And we used to go out to parties and clubs with him.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  And we used to joke like, ah, yeah, it's Peter Pan over there, you know, like,

• 36:17Speaker 02

  but he was, you know, he was in this phase of his life. He'd just gotten out of a marriage and, you know, he was.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Well, you can be a functional Peter Pan.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  There are a lot of, there are a lot of people out there who are, you know? People like Bill Clinton was a functional Peter Pan.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  I see them all the time. It's the boomer generation. I'm a little bit younger than that.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  It's full of very functional Peter Pans. I'm a functional Peter Pan.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Very true. It's very true. I'm accused of the same as well, yeah.

• 36:43Mark Manson?

  So, I mean, well, this is exactly my point, right? Is that until, I guess, a few years ago, this was just kind of like something that you would casually talk about in conversation or like, oh, yeah, he's a bit of a Peter Pan, you know? He still goes out to clubs and he's 50.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's researchers now.

• 36:57Mark Manson?

  But now there's a syndrome.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Have a syndrome.

• 36:59Mark Manson?

  Social problem.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  They're making recommendations to therapists.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Are they actually like medicating people for this?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  No, not, not that I know of yet. This, the, the paper that kind of operationalized this as an actual psychological phenomenon, you know, is in 2021. And they don't give any recommendations for like medications or anything like that, but they do say therapists who are seeing this all around the world should be aware of it. And to me, that just, I'm not sure about that.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we can't send all of our kids to therapists, you know, and also, you know,

• 37:36Speaker 01

  it's like, there's too much talking going on in this culture and not enough acting.

• 37:42Mark Manson?

  I fucking love that. I just want to like take that clip.

• 37:48Mark Manson?

  It's just, that's the episode. There's too much talking.

• 37:54Mark Manson?

  It's, I know where you're going with it. It's so true. It's so, sorry, continue.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  No, no, but sometimes you just got to get off your ass and you got to act. You got to do things in this world. And that's the best therapy in the world.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  You know? So I make the analogy in, in my book and in some of my talks that I see how the power and, and the life out there in our, in our work world as a game. It is a power game and I frame it that way. And you're maneuvering, you're constantly maneuvering. It's this fluid game that you're playing where the parameters, nobody really sets. The rules aren't, aren't very clear cut, but there are certain laws, laws of power that you can operate to, to get ahead. It's the most amazing game you could ever play and you should enjoy it and you should have fun. Well, you know, let's start talking about things like that, that like life is a game. Get out there and be active.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  You know, when it comes to dating, stop all this bullshit with your phone. Go out to bars, go to supermarkets, pick up, learn how to pick up on women. Learn how to get over your fears and actually interact with them. So start acting and stop talking and stop over analyzing things, but actually act in the world. That's to me, the greatest therapy in the world.

• 39:10Mark Manson?

  I, I, I, as someone who, for better or worse, kind of operates within the self-help industry. This is, this is my personal pet peeve. It's the thing that drives me insane is, is there's, seems to be, there's so much emphasis put on awareness. Like, let's be aware of our problems. Let's be aware of our emotional issues. Let's be aware of our mental health problem, you know, and it, and it's, it's people treat that as an end of it in itself. Like, well, the fact that we're sitting around talking about our trauma and our baggage. You know, we're doing the work. They even call it that, doing the work. And I'm with you. I'm like, okay, that's great.

• 39:50Mark Manson?

  We can talk until we're blue in the face, but until you actually go and behave differently, until your behavior has shifted in some tangible way. What is it, what, what is it, Matt, what are we doing?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Well, I, I don't know if I can remember it exactly right, because it's about a chapter I was writing just a few months ago and I've already forgotten it. But there was a psychologist professor at UCLA named Schwartz. I forget his first name. His study was OCD, right? And this is back in the eighties when people were first calling it a syndrome. And so much of the therapy was a talking therapy, right? And giving them these, these certain ideas about, let's talk about it, let's figure it out. He came up with these action strategies. He literally had you go out and do things that were your biggest fear. Because OCD is all about fear, right? So if you're afraid of germs, go out and rub your hands in some dirt or whatever.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  He had them do this over time. He took brain scans and their brains were literally changing. The brain was rewiring itself through these action strategies. So when you take action, your brain changes, it adapts. That's how the human brain is. But if you're always internal, if you're just talking about things, none of that stuff is going on because it's not, it's not how our brains are wired.

• 41:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it's, I feel like the danger in it is that it can, like, let's say you and I have a very profound conversation. It gives you the illusion that something has changed.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:21Mark Manson?

  Even though we're still sitting.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:23Mark Manson?

  On the same damn couch.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:26Mark Manson?

  Doing the exact same thing we were doing 30 minutes ago, right? And so I, I see that all the time, that, that so much of, of this industry is just built around giving people the sensation of having a change happen without any necessary behavior shifting.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  I, I'm going through something similar to you, like questioning and wondering about the, the self-help thing. And whether I'm just part of that problem as well, whether I'm just a bunch of words. But I think that, at least I know that my approach is to give people maps on how to act.

• 42:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  And I'm very much against over analyzing and talking things to death.

• 42:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's, talking is, is necessary, but not sufficient.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  No, definitely not.

• 42:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, for sure. Great. All right, we solved Peter Pan syndrome. We'll be right back.

• 42:25Mark Manson?

  And we're back. All right, we've got, we've got questions for Robert.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  We do, but we do, we have some, some listener questions. This one actually came in from Spotify and Mark and I recently did an episode on behavioral change. And there was this big study where some psychologists came up with all these interventions to get people to go to the gym more. And it turns out they were terrible at it.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Who was terrible at it?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  The, the psychologists were terrible at, at coming up with these interventions that would work. And we got a question in response to this that I think was a really good one for you, Robert. It comes from Ian, who says, as, as bad as modern psychology is at helping people, is our current best bet given that it's at least based on science? Or is this the wrong approach, given that science doesn't tell us what's right and wrong? And we should instead turn to things like timeless philosophy? Basically, the question is, is like, what's the value of science and behavioral intervention, specifically in our lives? You mentioned a little bit already that you were skeptical of, oh, we don't need all this data to make a decision, or we need, we need some sort of guidance from above to help us make these decisions.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  What's your, what's your take on this?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, is it related to like, something like going to the gym or exercising? Or what is it in relation to?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  That was what the question was, but I think the larger question is, how much should we lean on science or, you know, the behavioral science academia in general, I think, for improving our lives?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Well, I'm old school, you know, I'm an old guy, let's, let's not, you know, call spade a spade here. And I think it's bullshit. I mean, look, what happens with big data and with algorithms, and we've seen it with Facebook early on, is you think that you're accumulating big data about how people actually are, but what you're actually doing is you're changing who people are, you're changing their behavior, because now you're feeding them the very algorithms that you think that they are that involve their behavior. And then you're turning them into lemmings, everyone a herd, everyone's now going to be responding the same way. But you're an individual.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  It all starts with who you are as a, as a, as a human being, as an individual, born into your body, with your parents, with your background, with your genetics, okay? Big data doesn't have anything to do with it, doesn't know what that is, AI can't possibly see into that. So I'm more of the timeless wisdom type person, but I really think you have to know who you are in a gut way. And, you know, we're talking about awareness and talking, and talking has, has, has its value, as we were saying, as we were talking, but there's also this very important gut element of knowing what, you know, what makes you different, what motivates you, what, what you were meant to accomplish, what you hate, what you love.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  And if you're constantly looking for science and big data and algorithms to solve all your problems, well, they are not, because you're running away from the only source of your, of your salvation, which is you as an individual.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  I'm gonna sound like a nutty preacher. We do not have enough individuals in this world. We do not have enough weirdos. We do not have enough people who are happy to be unique and different. And no amount of AI, in fact, all of that stuff is turning you into just a glob, a big social glob on social media where everybody is the same. Everybody is told to respond like little mice to this algorithm, to this algorithm. And that we're turning into something that's not human.

• 46:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  So I'll shut up, but that's sort of my answer.

• 46:05Mark Manson?

  We'll take, we'll take your soapbox away now. No, I, I sympathize with this a lot. It's interesting, early in my career, my career kind of began around the confluence of positive psychology. There was this whole movement in the 2000s of positive psychology, where a lot of psychologists felt like they were able to quantify happiness and, and deduce exactly which practices led you to, to, to be happier and feel more fulfilled in your life. And, you know, I was young, I was naive, I bought fully into it, hook, line and sinker. I wrote tons of articles around positive psychology research and everything. And it's been interesting because over the past 10 years or so,

• 46:51Mark Manson?

  something like 80% of those studies don't replicate. Like, they don't, like, they're insufficient sample sizes. They, they can't be reproduced in other studies. And so it, we're, we're kind of back to square one of like, oh, actually, we don't know what makes us happy. And we don't know how much willpower we have. And we don't know how much motivation is external versus internal. And like, it's, it's given me a much deeper, more profound appreciation for the timeless things.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:21Mark Manson?

  You know, the, that, the simple principles, whether it's the Stoics or the Buddhists, or the Christians, like, if it's been around for 2,000 years, there's probably something to it. And so we should maybe put a little bit more.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, if you think about, I tell people this all the time. If you think about 2000, if you only go back 200 years ago, I, I like to go back to the world of the writer Jane Austen in like the 1810s. You have no internet, you have no television, you have no radio, you have no, your only form of entertainment is people. So you're constantly interacting with people, day in and day out. That's your only salvation. It's the only thing you have to distract you from the misery of your life, right? So people become these incredible observers, right? And then they write about it. I'm not saying everybody, but the great philosophers, the thinkers, the writers, the novelists. They're so keyed into people and who they are that they see things that we're no longer capable

• 48:18Speaker 01

  of seeing because we're so this oriented, right? We're not human. As I said, we're not so human anymore. So that's why someone like Plato or Socrates could have this timeless wisdom because they're wandering around in their sandals and togas, just constantly interacting with other people, thinking about issues that we don't think about anymore because we take everything for granted. We've lost our sense of wonder. So, yeah. I'm, look, I studied classics, Greek and ancient Greek and Latin. That's my world. I find when I read something from that time, I feel like I'm traveling to another planet. I'm so amazed, I'm so astounded by what their insights, what they're saying, what they're

• 49:03Speaker 01

  talking about humans, about our senses, about what it just means to be alive. So, God, I'm losing track of what our question is.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 49:13Mark Manson?

  Science versus philosophy, science versus wisdom, data versus wisdom. It sounds like we're all team wisdom.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yep, but going back to what you said about we need more individuals. I think I found this in myself when I was, I studied psychology, I studied, I was in academia for a little while too. And so I got very much, I was like, yes, everything should be data driven. And for the longest time, you know, for instance, Mark mentioned willpower. How much willpower do we have? Well, we thought this was this little finite resource that we had to like parcel out and distribute throughout our lives in strategic ways. Well, it turns out if you believe that you don't have a lot of willpower, you probably don't. And I see this over and over and over again. I'm going down the laundry list of things that I've believed for so long. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, that could be complete bullshit too. I'm externally motivated by a lot of things. Is that such a bad thing? No, it's not.

• 50:03Mark Manson?

  It reminds me, there's so much like recursive stuff in psychology. It reminds me of, there's a great one liner from the comedian Imo Phillips where he said, he said, "I used to think the brain was the most amazing thing in the universe. Then I remembered who was telling me that."

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, but I mean, a hundred years ago, there was this, or more than a hundred years, this man named William James, a psychologist.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Big fans.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  He wrote things about willpower that blow all of this bullshit in our culture now out of the water. He nailed it perfectly. If you want to understand will and the power that you have through your willpower, go read William James and throw all those studies out.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. You're here. What else do we got? Yes, we do have some more questions. So these came in. We asked, asked people to ask you questions.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  One of them would kind of get back to the true self one. What is your recommended process to get back to one's true self after getting lost, exhausted, and cynical in midlife? Forty of those came out when you were like thirty eight or nine, right?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Thirty nine.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you were older. We have a lot of people like, I'm thirty five, my life is over. What do I do?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  I felt that way pretty much too when I was thirty five. Well, you know, as I said, everyone's different and I don't know where this person comes from, but hopefully in that period up until your age thirty five, you have done something with your life. You have learned some skills. You have followed some kind of career path. It just wasn't the right one. Okay. But you can't just junk all of that and suddenly start over. You have to build from what you already have. Right? It's kind of an organic process. You can't just suddenly start with from a blank slate and say, I'm going to go completely

• 51:50Speaker 01

  redraw the course of my life. You're setting yourself up for misery because it's not how world works. You have a brain. It has developed certain things. It has functioned in a certain way and it has accumulated some level of skill. So where can we apply that skill that fits you better? So when you're twenty two, twenty three, that process that you, we went through earlier on, it fits more. But now you're thirty five, you're thirty six, it's a different process. And if you're fifty, it's even more different process. If you're seventy, I don't think there is any process anymore. I think it's over. But I tried to see in the, in the seeds of who you are, the thirty five year old, where it went wrong.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And so I like to go back to people and sort of go back where they felt like they made a wrong turn. And often where they made a wrong turn was they decided on a career either because it was money and they needed the money or because people told them that this is what they should go into, right? Like your parents. Yeah. A lot of people who end up becoming lawyers, I don't mean to pick on lawyers because we need lawyers, obviously. But they go into law school for that purpose to make money. And then they kind of burn out because law, certain kinds of law just are so repetitive. And there's no, and after you turn thirty five, shit, I'm trapped in this thing. It's so bored, so turned out.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  So we've got to go back and figure out where you made your wrong turn. And often it's because you listen to someone else or you grab for money. All right. So you grab for money because you're anxious. You feel like you, you, you don't know if you're going to be, make it in this world. You need that, you need to eat and you're worried about your future and your career. Okay. So if you're thirty five and you made a wrong turn and you still have that anxiety about making money, we have to prescribe something that fits you. I don't like telling people to do things that are going to ruin, that are going to make them miserable or that can potentially really screw up their future. I'm very sensitive to that. Mm hmm.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So if money is very important to you, we have to take that path that you're on. We have to deviate it a little bit in a slightly different direction. And I talk to people about that and we've, we go back into their childhood. We go back into things that indicate more of where they would like to be. And even if you're like flipping burgers at, at In-N-Out, there's going to be some other path slightly different from that that will still be better than where you are right now. Okay. So if the money thing isn't so important, if you're not so anxious, then we have a little bit more latitude to explore and go into something that deviation doesn't have to be like this. It could be maybe more like that, but it can't be like this. Yeah. Okay.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  So everything depends on who you are, your psychology. And your level of anxiety plays a very important role in this because making these changes can be very frightening.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  I once had some, some guy who was in his mid twenties, who was basically trapped at a terrible job, kind of like a, a fast food type job. And I was very sensitive. He had a fan, he had a wife and some kids. And I said, all right. Um, we figured out what he really wanted, what he was really excited about, which was great. Because otherwise you never do figure that out. And I said, don't quit your job, but I want you to start studying this new field on the internet. Absorbing it at night in the one or two hours that you have free. And then I want you to go to night school and spend, maybe work four days a week.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  And spend some time there. You still can pay your, your bills and go to night school. He said, just the thought of doing that made him feel a thousand times better. That there was some kind of hope, that there was a path.

• 55:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Right? So you gotta be, I've got to work with the individual and what, where they are. You know, and, and, and deal with the anxiety about making a living.

• 56:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah, totally. I, I, one thing for sure is I think people definitely underestimate how much a small shift, I think it's when they feel emotionally overwhelmed. Because the emotion is so all encompassing, they assume that they just have to throw everything out and start over from scratch. Whereas it's like, if you just shift a couple of things in the right direction, it's like dominoes. It knocks, it, it, it has like a reverberating effect across your life. It was really interesting though. We ran a survey, maybe three or four months ago on our audience. And one of the questions we asked purely out of curiosity was just, what are you struggling with right now? Like, what is your, the biggest struggle in your life?

• 56:48Mark Manson?

  And it was very interesting, among the middle aged cohort, uh, say people in their forties and fifties. One of the most common responses was people saying, uh, I have a great career. I've got a great family, great spouse.

• 57:06Mark Manson?

  Is this it? I kinda wanna just disappear and go to Tahiti and start over. Like, they kinda had a little bit of this midlife, this can't be it, right? Like, there has to be more. And almost like a little bit of a panic that went on. And I'm curious what you, what your thoughts with somebody like that would be.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Well, my thought is, for those of you out there who are in your twenties, do not get to that point, damn it. Don't ever let that happen to you. Because it will happen to you, and it's terrible.

• 57:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  It's tragic.

• 57:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Right? So don't let that happen.

• 57:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Figure it out before then. But some of it is like unrealistic.

• 57:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're in your mid forties and you've got all these things that you said, maybe you have to find, maybe you have to kind of accept it and find some beauty in it. Now, this will sound completely irrelevant and off track here, but six years ago, I suffered a stroke. Right? And prior to that stroke, I was somebody that swam every third day, rode a mountain bike up into the hills and hiked, and other things. I was just very active because it was my main way of dressing. Overnight, all of that is taken away from me, right? I can't walk, I can't hike, I can't swim. I can't take even a simple walk.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to get pity, but I'm saying, you know, I had to go through, I had to adapt.

• 58:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  And what I had to do is, I meditate every day. And I had to go through this process. And I'm writing a book right now. And I had to find what is beautiful, without being cliched or Pollyannaish about it, what is beautiful about my life as it is. These are my circumstances. This is, you know, if I was punished or whatever happened, it happened. It's just who I am now. I am this person who can't walk. That's who I am. But I'm still able to think, I'm still able to write books. I'm still able to find beauty in my limited world. Yes, I wish I was an athlete. Yes, I wish I could do the things I did before. But that doesn't help me at all.

• 59:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  So my advice to someone maybe in that area is become a little more zen and find a little bit more of the beauty in your life as it is. And don't be thinking that there's some golden ring out there that at forty five, forty eight, some hot model that you can run off to with Tahiti and start over and, you know, have new, you know, all sorts of things.

• 59:45Mark Manson?

  Peter Pan syndrome.

• 59:48Mark Manson?

  There's definitely, there's a connection there for sure. You, you could almost say, I like, to a certain degree, maturity is the, the acceptance of your own limitedness, I think.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  I mean, you can get too accepting.

• 1:00:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that's true. You get complacent, which is different. Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  No, we've talked about, a lot about that, though. I think there's a gratitude piece in that where acknowledging just your existence is a miracle, first of all.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  And I've leaned, the older I get, the more this, the simple things around me are very much like, this is amazing. There, there's literally, that's gonna sound like I'm gloating, but there are literally days where I'm like, I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Well, you are.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  If not the luckiest person on the planet sometimes.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  You are.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  That's the subject of my new book, by the way.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Oh, it is, okay. Oh, we outed you, okay.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:00:38Mark Manson?

  Luck or gratitude?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  No, neither. It's about.

• 1:00:42Mark Manson?

  Drew Burney.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  That would be shocking.

• 1:00:46Mark Manson?

  The biography, the unauthorized biography of Drew Burney.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Everybody would be shocked by that.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  No, it's a book about the sublime.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah, that's it. That's the word I wanted.

• 1:00:58Mark Manson?

  Nice.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  So, you know, I'm trying to say, I have a chapter called Awaken to the Strangeness of Being Alive. And so like being alive is a very strange thing.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  It's so weird.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  It's so weird.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  To think that in this vast universe, there's life here on this one tiny little, little tiny little thing in this vast ocean of darkness, and we're here. And do you know the chances of your parents ever coming together and reproducing each drew? You can never calculate it. It's impossible because, you know, your parents met on some quirk of fate, right? And they may have never met, multiply that by seventy, eighty thousand, all the generations that went prior to them meeting. Yes, maybe a tiny little part of you might have been born if that had gone off seventy thousand years ago differently,

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  but it wouldn't be you at all. Who you are is the strangest thing you could possibly think of. So it's a book about triggering those kinds of thoughts in people about everything around them. Because for me, writing that book is like live or die. If I don't start thinking like that, I'm just gonna get so goddamn depressed, I'll kill myself. I have to think about these things, you know?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Well, there were, there were several questions, people asking, when is the next book coming out? So when is that book coming out?

• 1:02:22Mark Manson?

  Every author's favorite question.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  The worst question ever.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  You know, you know.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  The people want to know though.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Sounds like you're in the midst of the throes of writing it, so, yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  There are 12 chapters. I'm on chapter 10.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  And I was hoping it would be out next year, but I won't, I'm not getting my act together.

• 1:02:41Mark Manson?

  No promises, yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  So 2026.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  It'll be out in two years.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  If I don't die before then. But if I die, they'll still be able to get the book out because I have enough of it out finished. So.

• 1:02:53Mark Manson?

  Well, we'll look forward to it. We'll have to have you back. We'll sit and bask in the miracle of life together when you're here.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  I'm really looking forward to that one, yeah.

• 1:03:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a weird book. It's like. Uh, my wife says it's kind of like taking drugs without drugs.

• 1:03:11Mark Manson?

  Yes. It's funny because when we were sitting here talking about how weird life was, I was like, man, we sound like a bunch of stone kids in a college dorm. Isn't it so weird we're alive?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  It's the kind of thing that you, yeah, I know. I remember seeing that thing I did.

• 1:03:25Mark Manson?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Smoking some pot.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  We did not drop any acid for this episode.

• 1:03:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there was, this was a sober episode. Yeah, maybe we should, maybe next time.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  That's the next one.

• 1:03:34Mark Manson?

  Next time. All right. Thank you so much, Robert.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mark. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  It was a ton of fun. Thank you, Robert.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:03:41Mark Manson?

  The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Burney. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura, Jessica Choy is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.