The Blue Dot Effect: Why Things Always Seem Worse Than They Are

Have you ever wondered why, despite everything seemingly going well, you still feel a nagging sense of dissatisfaction? Well, you’re not alone. This is actually a fascinating psychological phenomenon I call "The Blue Dot Effect". It’s all about how our brains can trick us into seeing problems and negativity even when everything around us is getting better. Join me and Drew as we unpack this curious effect and explore how it impacts our everyday lives. From the way we perceive our personal achievements to our overall happiness, the Blue Dot Effect plays a sneaky role in shaping our mindset. Let's dig right in. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: Why This Research Changes Everything 00:02:08 The Blue Dot Effect: The Original Study Explained 00:04:56 Why Your Mind Invents Problems When Life Gets Better 00:07:25 Crime, Safety, and the Paradox of Progress 00:08:46 The Media Negativity Bias and Information Overload 00:09:35 Living in New Zealand: When There's Nothing to Protest 00:11:58 The Psychological Immune System and Problem Homeostasis 00:13:51 Why We Need People Who've Seen Real Hardship 00:16:18 How the Internet Compresses the Blue Dot Effect 00:17:05 The Information Diet: Why Consuming Less News Makes You More Objective 00:19:41 Economic Perception vs Reality: Why Nobody's Happy Despite Growth 00:21:28 Personal Health and Fitness: Moving the Goalposts on Yourself 00:23:59 When Self-Improvement Becomes the Problem 00:28:36 Mental Health Diagnosis: ADHD, Trauma, and Definition Creep 00:32:17 The Value of Journaling: Creating a Reality Check Against Concept Drift 00:34:50 Reading History Instead of News: The Ultimate Perspective Shift 00:35:57 Progress Tends to Mask Itself: Dan Gilbert's Final Word ⇨ 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

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  So one thing that happens a lot of times in our job is as we are going through troves of psychological research, we will stumble across a particular concept or a piece of research that I will find particularly profound. I will feel like it explains so much of what happens in the world, so much human behavior, so much of the bullshit that we seem to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And I personally see it as part of my job is to like publicize some of these lesser-known research findings that might have wide implications. Now, this happened maybe five years ago. There's a concept called prevalence-induced concept change. It was found by some researchers at Harvard. I included it in my second book, Everything's Fucked, a book about hope. And then I did a short-form video about it,

• 0:44Mark Manson?

  maybe late last year, like last December, and it went absolutely bananas, fucking crazy, like 10 million views. And what's so interesting about this concept is like you can go through the comments underneath that video and you will find examples of people of every political stripe, everywhere on the spectrum, every background, ethnicity, belief system, religion, and they are all saying, "Oh, this explains the people I disagree with." It's almost comical how universal this concept applies. And so this episode, what I want to do is I want to like dig into the research together, talk about what this concept is, why it's

• 1:23Mark Manson?

  so important, and just talk through a lot of the examples of where we see the blue dot effect in the everyday world, how it explains why people are seemingly upset despite their circumstances being great, why people feel like the world is getting worse even though by most objective metrics, it's getting better, and why people are just assholes on the internet all the time to each other.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  20 million books sold, zero fucks given. It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck Podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 1:59Mark Manson?

  Why don't we start with just a quick summary, Drew, of what the research says, and then we'll get into the significance of it.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the original study for this, they called it the prevalence-induced concept change, like you already said, we're calling it the blue dot effect because that's a lot more sexy and easy to understand. And it's because the first study they did in this was using blue dots. They showed people screens with a bunch of blue dots on it, and they told them, pick out the blue dots from all the other dots on the screen. Most of them were like shades of purple and stuff like that. And at first, they say, pick out the blue dots, and they pick out the blue dots really well at first. And then slowly over time, they start reducing the number of blue dots on the screen, and people start mistaking purple, more and more purple dots for blue dots. Their concept of a blue dot expands

• 2:46Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  as blue dots become less and less frequent on the screen.

• 2:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah, so this is the important principle, is that when you remove the blue dots, people don't recognize that the blue dots are no longer there, they redefine what is blue for themselves.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. Their definition of a blue dot expands to include more shades of purple.

• 3:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  As the prevalence of those blue dots becomes less and less. Okay, big deal, right? That's just with some dots.

• 3:11Mark Manson?

  Whatever. Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  The really interesting part about this study, though, was that they started to generalize it to other areas, too. So like, the next study they did with this was with threatening faces. So they show people a whole bunch of faces on the screen, and a lot of them are threatening faces, and they say, okay, pick out the threatening faces. People are really good at this at first, but again, what they do is they start reducing the frequency of threatening faces on the screen, and people start mistaking the not-so-threatening faces for threatening faces.

• 3:37Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  As it goes on and on, right? This generalizes to other things, too. They found, they did a series of like, six or seven studies with this. One of them they did was what they call moral violations. They presented people with stories, so no longer visual information, just stories of, okay, we're going to do this study, is this study ethical or not? Right? And at first, they just have some egregiously unethical studies that they're showing people. And the really, a high frequency of those studies is what they offer them. And then they start giving them examples of, ah, kind of like borderline cases, and then cases that are pretty benign. Same thing happens. As you give them more and more kind of benign or not-so-unethical studies, people start thinking that, oh, these Studies are unethical too.

• 4:19Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Um, so this is very generalizable across domains. They find this in all sorts of areas. It's a very robust um effect that they find and just absolutely fascinating.

• 4:30Mark Manson?

  So to translate that for listeners a little bit, basically, when you tell people to find threatening things or unethical things, and there are a lot of threatening things or unethical things, people will very accurately identify what's threatening or unethical. But as you remove the threats and the unethical things, people don't recognize that there are fewer threats or unethical things. They redefine what is threatening and what is unethical to continue to see them. This reminds me, like, there's a quote in subtle art where I actually quote the artist Jose Marti, who said this, he said that when confronted with a life of no problems, the mind will quickly set about inventing some.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:08Mark Manson?

  And to me, this is like a perfect reflection of that, that like the easier our life gets, the more we define smaller and smaller inconveniences and infractions as being unbearable, as being impossible to withstand.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  It happens everywhere.

• 5:25Mark Manson?

  So.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  It's so insidious. Yeah.

• 5:27Mark Manson?

  Let's actually start broad.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:29Mark Manson?

  And get narrow.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:30Mark Manson?

  Because I think when everybody hears this, and this is especially gauged by the comments, and I think this is probably why this video went so viral, is because people of all political stripes see this and they're like, oh, that explains woke-ism, or that explains racism, right? It's like objectively, there are fewer incidences of racism happening in society, yet the expansion of racism keeps growing.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  The definition of racism, yeah.

• 5:57Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Expands.

• 5:58Mark Manson?

  You could make the same argument with censorship. Like censorship, as society has become less censored and more free of expression, I mean, we have the fucking internet, like, is, it is.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  It's the Wild West.

• 6:12Mark Manson?

  It's like you can literally say whatever the fuck you want. There's always a platform you can go say it. Yet, people's perception of censorship has grown and inflated so that even the smallest things like a tweet getting shadow banned or somebody getting kicked off YouTube is like deemed a violation of freedom of speech. There's all of these political vectors around political issues that the blue dot effect is kicking in the gear and that people are perceiving drastic threats and infractions where, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, these would have just been my, they wouldn't even been a news story.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  The media kind of feeds on this too, right? The negativity bias in the media, they've even seen this over the last 30 or 40 years, like you just said, more negative reporting has been, has been shown in the data over those 30, that 30 to 40 year period. And even though things have gotten better, poverty's gone down, crime has gone down since then, the media's definition of negativity expands as well.

• 7:10Mark Manson?

  Crime's a great one. That's a paradox that's kind of come up a lot, you know, the last few years is this obsession over a growing crime rate, yet when you look at long-term trends, it's crime is basically the lowest it's been.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Especially violent crime, yeah.

• 7:23Mark Manson?

  Since they've started measuring it. Public safety is an interesting one. Neighborhoods and schools and just society in general is technically, I mean, there's fewer drunk driving accidents, there's fewer car accidents, there's fewer child predators, there's fewer violent criminals, yet kids aren't allowed to go outside and play by themselves, parents are getting arrested for letting their kids wander down the street by themselves. There's this kind of hysteria over safetyism, over protecting young people at all costs. It's another area where the safer that society has become, our perceptions of it don't stay accurate, we simply move the goalposts back and we start imagining threats where they

• 8:08Mark Manson?

  objectively weren't there before.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Is there, there's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there though, right? Like. Some people could probably argue that, well, the reason that crime has gone down is because we're more vigilant and we're more, we're more aware of it, right?

• 8:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  There's probably that argument as well. I think if you look at the data, the lag is the other way, though. Like, crime started going down.

• 8:25Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  First, and then we got crazy about safety and everything like that, yeah.

• 8:29Mark Manson?

  For sure. Well, and there's also the, a weird thing that has happened, you know, this kind of ties into the negativity bias in the news media, which is that there are fewer crimes, but a higher proportion of the crimes are publicized in a pretty horrific and spectacular way.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  You see this in the data, too, just about like, you know, how many people are killed by police officers every year? Or how many, if you segregate it by race, too, you know, how many black people, how many white people, how many, whatever, people way overestimate, way overestimate on every single one of those categories, actually, too.

• 9:03Mark Manson?

  Police brutality, you could put into this as well. It's probably the lowest it's been, I don't know, ever. This ties into, it's like, how much of this is the prevalence-induced concept change of like, just the, the lack of bad things happening, so you perceive things to be worse than they are, versus the, how publicized and viral the negative events become? I do think it's some of both. Like, it's interesting, when I think about the time I spent in countries that just objectively have practically no crime.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:36Mark Manson?

  Like, I remember I was, I was living, I spent half of 2021 in New Zealand, and one of my favorite things was to go to New Zealand websites and read the headlines, like, read like, what they thought of as a catastrophe, you know? It was just, I found it absolutely hysterical. I remember there was one day where there was like, a news broadcast came on, people are protesting outside of the prime minister's home, you know, they're upset, and I'm like, oh, man, like, what's going on? What did she do? It turned out that there was like, there wasn't enough funding for bus lanes or something, and people were just up in arms about that, and they wanted her to resign, like, to the point where like, they were going and picketing outside of her house. And I was like, man, if that's what gets you to go picket, like...

• 10:21Mark Manson?

  I want to know what like, like what are, where are the real problems, you know?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  It's a fascinating part of human psychology though, Mark, if you think about it, like the, what makes us just look for problems constantly? I mean, there's obviously an evolutionary benefit to it, right?

• 10:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Stay vigilant, everything like that. But that is to the extreme, like everything could be perfect and we'll, we'll make up things.

• 10:42Mark Manson?

  Problems give us a sense of meaning. We need something to resist against, to feel that sense of progress, to feel as though our life is, is generating value. The intensity of like what the problem is, you know, things get normalized in both directions very quickly. Like if you live in a war zone, your perception of problems is going to adjust itself accordingly. Right? Like a school getting blown up or, uh, you know, a shooting for somebody who lives in South Sudan or Somalia or something like, it's not even going to register. It's just going to be a Tuesday.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  So in this study, they also found that, um, when you add the blue dots back in, you start increasing the frequency of the blue dots.

• 11:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  People don't.

• 11:31Mark Manson?

  They don't adapt back.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  They don't adapt back. Right.

• 11:34Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm sure that probably generalizes as well. As things get worse, people are like, meh, you know?

• 11:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Whatever.

• 11:41Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really fascinating. And that's the other thing, like they've, they've done so many things. They'll tell people, we're going to reduce the number of blue dots.

• 11:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  They'll, they'll tell them that in the studies, doesn't matter. They still mistake the purple dots or going the other way too. They, they don't, there's like, we're going to increase the blue dots. People just don't, they, they can't adapt.

• 11:58Mark Manson?

  I wonder how much of this ties into, so one of the researchers on these studies was Dan Gilbert, who I'm a fanboy of, and I hope one day it comes on this podcast. Dan Gilbert is like one of the originators of this concept of a psychological immune system, which is this idea that our satisfaction with our lives tends to always hover around like a seven out of 10. And a really positive event, you know, you get married, you have a, a child, you win the lottery, you know, it'll bump you up to an eight or nine temporarily, but there's like this, this center of gravity backed down by a seven, six and a half to a seven. And it's the same thing on the other end, like, you know, something terrible happens in your life, you dip for a while and then you eventually get pulled back up. This feels almost like a corollary theory of just pain instead of happiness.

• 12:43Mark Manson?

  Like there's a certain amount of problems. That you seem to need to have in your life, that you need to perceive in your life to maintain a sense of meaning and purpose. And when the environment around you gets absolutely terrible and abysmal, your definition of problem will adjust itself accordingly to kind of keep yourself at that moderate amount of problem. And then if there are no problems in your environment, your definition of a problem will also adjust accordingly until you hit that threshold to give you a sense of meaning and purpose. So I don't know if he would agree with that, but I see a parallel between those two things. It's also, it's something that I'm definitely, I'm gonna feel like a fucking old man now. But like,

• 13:28Mark Manson?

  I sometimes worry, I was talking, I was talking to somebody about this recently, about how we're quickly approaching a point where everybody who lived through World War II is gonna be dead, probably the next decade or two. Because I think within society, it's important to have a certain demographic of people who have that perception, whose baseline level of like what a problem is, is pretty drastic. Because it keeps everybody else in check. Like if everybody else is just, their lives are like too cushy and comfortable, then they're gonna start getting upset over spilled milk all the time. And they're gonna generate a lot of political strife over things that are just kind of objectively not there. But if you have that cohort of people who have actually seen some shit, and actually

• 14:11Mark Manson?

  lived through some serious problems, they can kind of be the check and balance on the rest of the population that hasn't.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, interestingly, when I was digging around with this too, I found there was a recent study in 2023, that the older you get, the less affected you are by the blue dot effect.

• 14:28Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:29Mark Manson?

  So the more objective you see things.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know. See, that brings up the question. Are you just more rigid in your thinking as you get older, which is kind of the stereotype, right?

• 14:38Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And are you too loose when you're younger, too loose in your subjective moral judgments? Or like, so that brings up the question, like. Is there a balance of the rigidity of your thinking? And if it varies by age, I mean, yeah, that makes sense. Like, you know, back in my day, this was so much worse or whatever.

• 14:58Mark Manson?

  Right. I mean, it's also just when you're older, you have a greater reservoir of experience to draw upon.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:05Mark Manson?

  So it's like you've seen thousands and thousands of threatening and non-threatening faces. So you're you're less likely to be fooled or you're less likely to have your definition of threatening be altered so quickly and easily. Whereas if you're young and you've never really been in threatening situations, your definition of threatening is going to get is going to move pretty quickly and easily.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Right, right. That balance, and you're right, I think there there needs to be a cohort in society that is more rigid in their thinking and holding like, OK, this isn't actually as bad as it is.

• 15:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Young people, let me teach you. This is that we are going to be like a lot of like finger waggy at the young people. But but I think there is something to that. And it is, if you look at right now, a lot of, you know, the kind of civil discourse that's going on, it does seem to be, there is a lot of like, young versus old, kind of rigid thinking versus this is the new way of thinking. And that's how it happens every generation, you know.

• 15:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  But that's playing out at scale right now.

• 15:59Mark Manson?

  One of the things I noted down, which I wonder, I kind of wish we had an old person here to ask them. I wonder if the internet exacerbates this psychological phenomenon because we are presented with so much information online. You know, it's the equivalent of being exposed to like tons and tons of blue dots. So it's it's like, if the effect of this requires a certain, like perceiving a certain amount of phenomena to have your definitions altered, then increasing the quantity of phenomena that you're perceiving is going to make is going to alter your definitions quicker than it would otherwise.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Compresses the time.

• 16:34Mark Manson?

  Exactly. You can literally get on TikTok and within 30 minutes, your definition of what's threatening and what's not has changed. Whereas in past generations, you know, maybe that happens over the course of a year or two years.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Well, I think it almost has to be. And the studies that they do, going to the original study with the blue dots, they show them like tons and tons of blue dots and they do, I think it's like a couple hundred trials with each person. So it's over, it is over a lot of trials. So I think you're right. If you increase the amount of information there, you're you're basically compressing the time needed.

• 17:04Mark Manson?

  So maybe that's another argument for an information diet of like, limiting your informational consumption simply to

• 17:14Mark Manson?

  Maintain objectivity as much as possible.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Definitely. Yeah, I don't know. I know, I know with me, I just don't, I don't watch a lot of news anymore. I don't consume very much of media in general, not a whole lot of social media. And I have just found that like my, I, I just don't have as many strong opinions as I used to have, for sure.

• 17:32Mark Manson?

  Me too. And it's, it's funny, I stopped watching news a few years ago and I had the same experience. I felt like I got more objective, the less news I consumed. And that made no sense to me. And then I remember, because I wrote an article about this. I remember going and digging into some research and actually found across the population, the people who watch the most news are the least informed.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:56Mark Manson?

  Which makes no sense. Well, until you actually watch the news. Until you actually watch the news, then it makes total sense.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  When you see how people are consuming news, then it makes sense.

• 18:05Mark Manson?

  Absolutely. And when you see how the news is portrayed.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:07Mark Manson?

  Right? Like it's more infotainment than information. It's, everything has an angle, everything has a headline, everything is, it's, it's optimized for emotional reaction and emotional impact. And in some cases, political impact, more so than actual like sharing of objective information. So that, that's not entirely surprising, but it is, it is just such a bizarre thing that it's, one way to look at it is like, as you raise your threshold of what information can get through to you, it means the only things that get through are things of very high quality. That have been vetted, that have been shared and discussed multiple times for a long period of time. It's the same thing as like eating less more nutritional food.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:53Mark Manson?

  Like you're probably just gonna end up healthier.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Right. What, just like one kind of example I just thought of, of, of that is election polls. And we're in an election year right now. Election polls this early on, like almost none of them historically have ever even come close to being right.

• 19:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  And yet people like obsess over them now.

• 19:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  So it's like you're not as objective, like you're just saying, you're not as objective if you're paying attention to the micro, if you step back and just like breathe, yeah.

• 19:20Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  There's this kind of weird thing going on right now where objectively, you've kind of already alluded to this, objectively, things are getting better for a lot of people. Yes, inequality, like there's this big gap between the haves and have nots still, but like objectively, your average person, if you would go back 100 years or whatever, the median person out there is doing better than they were 100 years ago.

• 19:41Mark Manson?

  I've seen this in a couple of places and it's true. A poor person today, like if you are a, somebody who's on the threshold of poverty in a first world country today, you objectively live better than kings lived in the 19th century.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:57Mark Manson?

  Point blank.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  So, yeah. So while that's happening at the same time, there's a perception that things are getting worse for a large number of people as well. And the, the kind of standard explanation I've seen so far for it is that gap in inequality. It's that, yes, as our, our psychology adapts to better things, we look around more and we see, oh, somebody else has it even better than I do.

• 20:19Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I think that explains part of it, but now you have the blue dot effect on top of that too. I think that explains some of this as well, where it's just, it's just built in to our psychology.

• 20:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  That when things get better, we just don't notice it. Things getting better is, is discounted.

• 20:33Mark Manson?

  So economics is another great example. Like we're, you mentioned we're in an election year right now and when they poll people about how they feel about the American economy, it's terrible. The, the polling is, reflects as if we're in a recession right now, yet by all the economic data, the economy is doing great, yet nobody's happy.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:52Mark Manson?

  Still.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:54Mark Manson?

  Despite everything.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  And the blue dot effect seems like that might be carrying a lot of that.

• 20:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  It seems like, yeah.

• 20:59Mark Manson?

  It's, what's actually really weird about the, the economic stuff is that, at least in the US, people's perception, now we're kind of getting off on a tangent, but like people's perception of how good the economy is, maps really well to just which president's in office.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 21:15Mark Manson?

  Which is fucking depressing as shit, like, come on, people.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  And that's gotten, that's gotten tighter over the last like 20 years too, like that, that switch as soon as, oh, it just flips.

• 21:24Mark Manson?

  Instantaneous.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:26Mark Manson?

  Instantaneous.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  It's insane.

• 21:28Mark Manson?

  Well, let's talk about some of the personal stuff, because there's some, there's a lot of interesting. Kind of individual examples of this and you know, this is something I've absolutely noticed with the definition of health. Right? Like back when I was really unhealthy, my definition of being unhealthy was like drinking eight cocktails and eating half a pizza at three in the morning. Right? It was just absolute abomination of a consumption evening. Whereas like today, even I'm like so much healthier on all these metrics. The same amount of guilt that I used to feel when I used to get absolutely plastered and eat like an entire pizza. I feel that same guilt when I like have a candy bar and maybe eat an extra slice of pizza or something.

• 22:12Mark Manson?

  I don't know. Like it's, it is so miniscule, the things that like trigger guilt in me now, which is weird because you would think that like now that I'm healthy. I don't have that food guilt anymore, but I still have just as much guilt. It's just the definition of what makes me feel guilty. The goalposts have moved so far back that like the slightest infraction, I'm like, oh man, why'd I have a third piece of chocolate? Like, I'm disgusting.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I, I know. I, I beat myself up for every little bite of dessert that I have or anything like that. I totally get it.

• 22:42Mark Manson?

  I've seen it. I've had some friends who are in the bodybuilding in the past too. And you see it, there's like an aesthetic version of this where I've had, I've had friends who are in the bodybuilding and they're like, oh, bro, I'm, I'm, I'm like so out of shape right now. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like you're fucking jacked.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 23:00Mark Manson?

  They're like, man, no, I'm like, I'm up to like 13% body fat. I can't see my bottom abs anymore. Like, uh, it's, I'm a mess. And I'm like, that's offensive. Like stop talking to me.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  No, for sure. Yeah. Fitness too. You can do the same thing with just like work, workouts or whatever. Now that I've been working out more and if I don't get a good workout in, I'm kind of like, oh, that's such bullshit.

• 23:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Like a better workout.

• 23:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Or like you skip a set and you're like, you spend the next, the whole drive home being like, why'd I skip that set?

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what, what's considered unhealthy is now expanded to all of these small, minor things that really aren't unhealthy.

• 23:33Mark Manson?

  As the unhealthy behaviors become less prevalent, we expand our definition of unhealthy behavior so that we always feel miserable about ourselves.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure.

• 23:44Mark Manson?

  I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten from readers and listeners over the years that have just been like, you know, I'm improving my life in X way. When am I going to stop feeling bad for this thing?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, really?

• 23:57Mark Manson?

  And my, my answer, I just always want to be like, you're not.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:00Mark Manson?

  You're not. Sorry, bro.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it goes back to Mark to the whole, you know, choose your problems, right?

• 24:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  The solution for it, uh, in some ways is, and this is your, your big thing too. One of your big things, choose your problems really well. Your mind is going to create problems. There's always going to be problems in your life, but you could also get to a point, you know, where if you're in this space and you're working on yourself a lot and you are making progress, there is a tendency to now focus on every little thing.

• 24:28Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  And that things that aren't important. And so like, yeah, you should give a fuck about things that really are important and be very, very cognizant of that.

• 24:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  As things get better.

• 24:37Mark Manson?

  Well, and it's, I think the tricky part is catching yourself when you, your expansion of the definition has gone too far.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:46Mark Manson?

  It, it starts, when you've become that guy who like can't sleep at night because he hit 12% body fat, or when you're the straight A student who hates themselves because they got an A minus on their last exam, when your definitions of something have become so stringent and so just uncompromising that you're, you are making yourself miserable. It's difficult to catch you, yourself in those moments. And I think that's where the skill of like, just learning to let go and just like being comfortable with imperfection is really key.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a lesson I took from like, like therapy, I think.

• 25:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Um, and we've kind of talked about this before. You've touched on in a couple of other episodes as well with guests is that kind of you go to therapy and once you kind of have like the bedrock and the solid foundation and the big things kind of, I'm not going to say under control, but you have a grasp of them. Don't go looking for all the little things.

• 25:34Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I had this experience, actually, this is how you can tell a good therapist for one.

• 25:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Is that they will tell you that like, look, we don't have to solve every little thing.

• 25:41Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  I had a therapist tell me that. That was a big like click for me. I was like, yes, okay, great. She's like, I'm here to give you a few tools that you can use out in the real world.

• 25:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  To apply to the things when they actually do, you know, when this comes up, you don't have to solve every little fucking thing when you come in here with me.

• 25:58Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  So that's another area where.

• 26:00Mark Manson?

  That's actually, that segue is perfectly, I think, emotional problems.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:04Mark Manson?

  Right? So it's, it's, you'll see people with like very deep seated insecurities, debilitating anxiety. They work for years to solve it. And their immediate reaction is to look for the next insecurity or anxiety to solve. And you eventually you get to a point, and this is where you get into like self-help addicts and stuff. Like I've met self-help addicts that like they will obsess over, you know, there'll be like an awkward conversation with their partner at dinner and they will spend the next three days obsessing over it. And it's like, well, sometimes just awkward conversations happen. Like you don't need to go solve this. You don't need to like do breathing exercises and journal about it. At a certain point, the attempt to solve all your problems becomes the problem.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:46Mark Manson?

  I think a lot of it's just like recognizing, when is it enough? Like, when are you good?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:50Mark Manson?

  When are you just like, okay, I've not solved all my anxiety issues, but I'm good. I'm set. I can make it through life at this level and I'm gonna have a good life. Like, that's, that's the, the trick is to find that moment.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  You've talked about that before. You've talked about it. Like even now, you're still like, I still get socially anxious. That's still a problem. And definitely for me too, yeah.

• 27:11Mark Manson?

  The, the thing that I overdid was like dating and relationship stuff when I was younger.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  You think you overdid it? Like writing a book about it?

• 27:21Mark Manson?

  Like running, running a web business for five years around it.

• 27:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, writing hundreds of articles.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Slightly overshot that one.

• 27:29Mark Manson?

  You think? Yeah. It was interesting because I remember after I wrote models, I kind of had this moment where I was like, I'm retiring from this industry.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:38Mark Manson?

  And when I left the industry, I kind of shut that part of my brain off as well. You know, like that part that I used to go on dates and I've like analyzed everything that was happening on the dates. Like, oh, she laughed really hard. It was like, was that a genuine laugh? Or like, maybe I should say this again, cause I'll get her to laugh again. You know, like all that, like kind of over analysis that was happening. I just stopped doing all that stuff. And it was funny because my dating life got better than it ever got before. Immediately, as soon as I stopped doing that stuff. That was like, kind of the big aha of that experience of like, oh, I, I, I passed. There's a threshold where the attempt to solve the problems becomes the bigger problem than the actual problems. And I passed that threshold a long time ago. And so.

• 28:22Mark Manson?

  Giving up actually makes you better at that point.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to find that spot, I guess, for a lot of people. Especially, it's a, you're a fish in water at a certain point, too, right? Like, you're surrounded by it and you can't quite see the forest for the trees.

• 28:32Mark Manson?

  Right, you don't know that that's not normal.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah. What else?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Just more, like, we're kind of on the subject of mental health here. Just more in the mental health realm, this happens as well. And actually, in the medical community in general, but specifically in the mental health world, where expansions of definitions of things like depression, trauma, ADHD, all of these things, where we've identified the problem, we know how prevalent the problem is, we think we have a grasp on the problem, and then we start applying it to edge cases, you know, or less severe cases, and all of a sudden, the definition expands into all these other areas. For example, ADHD, you were diagnosed with ADHD, and you're pretty sure you, like, that's a legit diagnosis, right?

• 29:16Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  And you had it developmentally and everything like that. There's a lot of debate right now, there's a few camps in the psychiatry world about whether it's being overdiagnosed or not right now.

• 29:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, there's, there's ways, it's interesting, in like, the medical community, the mental health community, they have ways of trying to figure out if something is being overdiagnosed. And basically, one of the criteria is, they don't call it this, but, is the blue dot effect.

• 29:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Taking over. You know, do we have a hammer and we're just looking for nails at this point?

• 29:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  And there's some people who think, you know, ADHD is being overdiagnosed in some populations and maybe underdiagnosed in others, but there's a big debate going on around it. And if you read it, and you read it knowing the blue dot effect, you see this, this whole backdrop to it.

• 29:58Mark Manson?

  Well, something funny happens, too, when the, and I think medical diagnoses is a good example of this, like, when, when the definition of something expands, it becomes so broad that it envelopes, like, a very significant percentage of the entire population, it kind of loses its meaning as a disorder. Like, if 40% of the population has something, is that a disorder?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 30:20Mark Manson?

  No, it's just a trait.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 30:22Mark Manson?

  It's just a difference. I mean, you see this in everything, right? Like, you see this, the definition of trauma. If trauma, if anything painful is a trauma, then the meaning of trauma has no significance, right? It's like, okay, well, cool, everything's trauma, who gives a shit?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:37Mark Manson?

  Right?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Trauma has, the definition of trauma has expanded to include stress as well.

• 30:41Mark Manson?

  It's interesting because I generally think that the people who who push for the expansion of definitions do so with good intentions of like not enough people are recognizing their trauma. More people should work on their trauma. Let's

• 30:54Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 30:54Mark Manson?

  Let's make people more aware of their trauma and then and then the the definition of trauma expands to the point that people are like, well, if that's trauma, then there's no point in paying attention to it.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:06Mark Manson?

  Because it's it's such a quotidian insignificant banal thing that happens all the time. And you see this over and over again. You see it in politics, like you see it in everything. Definitions are funny.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. And the the damage comes in over treatment, too.

• 31:21Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Right. So especially like something developmental disorder like ADHD. If you're going to be treating teenagers who are, you know, they don't even have a frontal lobe in their brain. Basically, you know, and you're you're giving them psychoactive drugs for these edge cases. You know, that's the worry.

• 31:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Whether that's going on or not, that's that's the debate. I don't know for sure where that line is being drawn. Some people think it's we're over diagnosing and over treating. But that's where the damage comes is when the intervention is worse than just leaving it alone and and

• 31:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  dealing with it in a way that can be, you know, not as invasive.

• 31:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 31:59Mark Manson?

  Rub some dirt on it.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Rub some dirt on it. Again, our old men wagging their fingers at the kids here.

• 32:05Mark Manson?

  I know. I know. So this is something I've been thinking about lately is journaling. And I think, speaking of being an old man, I think this is something I haven't appreciated until recently. I always thought about the value of journaling was in kind of just the therapeutic act of writing your thoughts out on paper. And like the way it forces you to to organize your thoughts and feelings in a very in a very real way in your mind to help process them, I guess. What I never considered before, probably because I was too young to really consider it, is is the value that comes with having a record. Of how you felt and perceived things at a previous point in time.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 32:46Mark Manson?

  If the blue dot effect is as significant as we're discussing here, then to me, that that raises the value and utility of journaling because if you're definite, let's say your definition of trauma in your life, or your definition of injustice in your life has expanded and it's in these things usually expand unconsciously, we don't realize that they've expanded, then having a documentation of how you felt about these things, say, five years ago, before you read all those news stories, before you watched all those TikToks and seeing like, huh, oh, interesting, like, I didn't feel this way about these things in my life at that, at that time. Maybe that's a reality check. I mean, maybe it's also just like,

• 33:28Mark Manson?

  wow, I was so naive and stupid five years ago. You know, I've had that experience with journals before, and I've talked to a lot of people who've had that experience where it's like their memory of something is terrible. And then they go back and read the journal from when it happened. And they're like, oh, it actually wasn't nearly as terrible as I've kind of built it up to be in my, in my head. So yeah, I don't know. That's a concept that I've been kind of dwelling on. I feel like I should be journaling more, Drew.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  I've started to try to journal more recently, too. And I kind of like, I have like, I don't know, 12 notebooks laying around and like 13 different notes in my phone and emails I send to myself and stuff like that. And I'm trying to like, gather them all into one place. Oh, yeah. That's a good way to do it, too.

• 34:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's I've journaled sporadically throughout my life. It's usually when things are going wrong. Like, that's kind of when I'm like, I need to write, I need to write shit down. Yeah. But then things will go well for two or three years, and I won't write anything. And I'm reaching an age where I'm starting to like, regret that a little.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  It's kind of like prayer. You only pray to God when things are going on.

• 34:25Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  You only pray to God when things are going on, right?

• 34:28Mark Manson?

  Yes. Hey, God, sorry. I haven't talked to you for a while, but I need something.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Derek Sivers brought this up, though, too. You remember that? He, he said that he, he's been keeping a daily journal for like years now.

• 34:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  And he talked about a relationship he was going through. It's been so good. What happened? And he went back and read it. It's like, oh, no, actually, it was kind of terrible the whole time.

• 34:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that's a perfect example. Yeah. I mean, the definition expansion aside, our memories of things are completely skewed.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Atrocious. Yeah.

• 34:54Mark Manson?

  You know, and it's, you see, and again, To kind of bring it back to the political, this is why I started replacing news with reading history and it was a complete game changer for me because people don't remember history. Like people think whatever is wrong now is the worst it's ever been. It's the worst. It's an absolute calamity. And then you just go start reading some history and you're like, oh my God, like just 40 years ago, it was 10 times worse. Right. You know, and it gives you context to understand what's happening. Right. So it's, I definitely see that now, you know, we obviously that we've got two prominent wars going on in the world. People are upset about them. They are terrible. But dude, just go pick up a fucking history, like read some basic history about both of those regions,

• 35:38Mark Manson?

  Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Gaza. And it's like, this is, there is nothing happening right now that is like particularly unprecedented. Right. You know, or just completely unforeseen. Like there is like multi-century history behind both of these events. They have been much, much worse and egregious in the past than they are now. Yeah. All right. I think let's, let's end this. Dan Gilbert, the, one of the psychologists behind this that I referenced earlier, he has a beautiful way of putting this. He said, "Solving problems causes us to expand our definitions of them. When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it. And this can cause us to mistakenly conclude

• 36:20Mark Manson?

  that it hasn't actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself." Yeah, that's a good line. Fucking great, man. He's brilliant. And that, that is true on the personal as well as the political. Yeah. Progress tends to mask itself. You don't recognize it when it's there all the time. And sometimes when you think it's there, it's not. Right. So, awesome. Well, anything else to say? That's all I got. That's all you got? Mm-hmm. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. Maybe we should expand our definition of a podcast into new and more fun things in the future. So please like and subscribe to the show. Let us know what you think in the comments. Feel free to send us an email, [email protected], [email protected], and we will see you next time.