How Bad Therapy Can Harm a Generation (ft. Abigail Shrier)

If the story of humanity is about loss, privation, suffering, and resilience, why are kids having nervous breakdowns about bad grades? In today’s episode, I talked to Abigail Shrier about what parents and mental health experts are inadvertently doing to rob young people of the resilience and grit that past generations had. It’s a spicy one. Enjoy. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Mental Health Paradox 00:01:14 What Inspired Bad Therapy 00:02:25 How Schools Became Therapy Sessions 00:03:44 Why Therapy Is Different for Kids 00:05:34 Defining Bad Therapy 00:09:29 The Problem With Social-Emotional Learning 00:13:13 The Fragility Epidemic: Mental Health Days and Dysregulation 00:14:16 The Power of Suggestion: How Diagnosis Creates Illness 00:15:25 Trauma Narratives and Post-Traumatic Growth 00:17:11 The Theory of Pain Relativity 00:18:18 The Barnum Effect and Mental Health Self-Diagnosis 00:19:43 Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Acknowledging Pain Without Dwelling 00:20:49 Emotional Hypochondria: Magnifying Normal Pain 00:22:33 Feeling Good vs. Being Good 00:23:39 Parents as Amateur Therapists: The Parenting Book Problem 00:24:13 Why Kids Need Authority, Not Friends 00:26:17 The Importance of Consequences and Dependability 00:30:05 The Trauma Guru Effect: Why Parents Are Afraid to Say No 00:32:15 Threat Inflation: Overprotecting in Real Life, Underprotecting Online 00:33:24 Sending Vulnerable Adults Into the World 00:33:52 How Researching the Book Changed Abigail's Parenting 00:35:32 The Collective Action Problem and Parental Insecurity 00:36:58 The Execution Gap: High Talent, Low Follow-Through 00:38:15 The Western Phenomenon: Immigrant Perspectives 00:39:27 The Latino Immigrant Paradox and Mental Health Outcomes 00:40:25 Political Differences in Mental Health: Liberal vs. Conservative Families 00:42:19 Curated Conversations and the Loss of Authenticity 00:43:40 The Quirks That Make Us Love People 00:46:39 Setting Boundaries: When the Therapist Stands Between You 00:48:16 The Relationship Advice Paradox 00:49:05 Ugly: A Father-Daughter Story About Authentic Love 00:50:17 What Parents Can Actually Do 00:51:28 Scraped Knees and Resilience 00:52:32 The Medication Problem: When Diagnosis Becomes Demoralization 00:54:44 The ADHD Story: Learning to Manage Without Medication 00:56:32 Anxiety as Superpower: The Adaptive Value of Mental Diversity 00:58:05 Emotionally Stable Systems: The Benefits of Being Slightly Crazy 01:00:48 Your Superpower Is Also Your Weakness 01:01:36 Zero Fucks Given: Surviving Irreversible Damage Backlash ⇨ 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?

  Abigail, it's so good to have you here.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  It's great to be here. Thank you.

• 0:04Mark Manson?

  Welcome to the show. The book is Bad Therapy. It is all over. It's blowing up right now. I have to admit, I got triggered. I needed a safe space when I read this book. I was not expecting to be as upset by it as I was. And I think the reason is, I came up in the self-help industry. I think I really built my career by pointing out a lot of the hypocritical and self-defeating tendencies in self-help. You know, the idea that just because something makes you feel better, doesn't mean you are better. And optimizing for your feelings all the time is actually, is kind of counterproductive in a lot of ways.

• 0:43Mark Manson?

  And I guess throughout all of this, I always assumed that clinical psychologists had their shit together and were on the correct side of that dynamic. And reading your book was really upsetting because it showed all the ways that they're not. And so I'm curious, let's start with the idea of bad therapy. What triggered this for you? What inspired you to pursue this research, pursue this book? And what kicked this whole journey off?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  I started by wondering, why was the generation that had received the most mental health, the most wellness tips, the most therapy, the most psychiatric drugs, the most frantic worry over their mental health and happiness? Why were they so unhappy? Because they are. And why did they seem to have no interest in adulthood? Why didn't they show up to work on time? Why couldn't they be relied on? Why did they not want to form families? Why were they living with mom and dad in numbers we'd never seen and they were content to do so? It's not like they were unhappy about living with mom and dad. They seemed pretty happy about it. So I kind of wondered why they weren't thriving generally, but I didn't think it had anything to do with mental health experts

• 1:54Speaker 01

  at the time, because, you know, 40% of them have been in therapy, which is still the highest percentage we've ever seen. But it was less than half. So I thought it had something to do with the way they were being raised. Maybe they were raised more gently and I sold the book to the publisher with that hypothesis. But then I attended a three day conference of public school teachers here in California. And it was all about the mental health of this generation. I thought, okay, let me find out what they're doing in schools. And what I realized was that schools were all playing therapist. Parents were reading the bestselling therapists, you know, parenting books. And I started listening to the way they talked and they're, they never say they're shy. They say they have anxiety or social phobia.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  They never say they're sad. They say they're depressed or they have depression. And they never say, oh gosh, I, you know, I have a bad memory. They say, I have a flashback. That's my PTSD. So I realized this was a generation flooded with what I call bad therapy. They are swimming in the language of psychopathology and it's making them sick.

• 2:54Mark Manson?

  The, the education piece, it's funny because the, the book kind of starts with a more focus on therapy itself. And as I read it, I was like, okay, I, I get this. I mean, there are bad therapists out there. Like I run into plenty of them, but they're also really good therapists out there. And it's still, you know, in aggregate, as you said, it's not the majority of the population that goes to therapy. And especially older generations, it's, it's even less. But when I got to the education piece, that, that was really eye opening because it is introducing a lot of therapeutic concepts and psychological language into a domain where the people delivering it don't have the expertise or the experience

• 3:37Mark Manson?

  to actually be having those conversations, especially with kids. And I think you also make the point that approaching a child with therapy is very different than an adult. Can you, can you explain?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's what I want people to know. It's totally different. It's totally different. You know, an adult can say, listen, I know my mom shouldn't have said that, but I wouldn't call her emotionally abusive. An adult can say, look, I had a bad experience in middle school, but I don't think I have PTSD. And then adults can say, look, I've been with you for two years. I'm just as depressed. I'm sorry. I don't think this is working. A child can't say any of that. And a teenager can't say any of that, especially if she's angry with mom anyway, right? She's not gonna say, "I wouldn't call my parents toxic. That seems over the line." And so it's a totally different experience to put a young person in therapy, because they can't work with a therapist to do the hard work of therapy at its best, right? They can't push back.

• 4:31Mark Manson?

  And that's because they don't have a frame of reference, or...

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they don't have any life experience. They have no basis for saying, "Listen, that's not emotionally abusive of my mom, okay? She took away my phone because she thought I was overusing it. I don't think it's fair." I mean, what 14-year-old's gonna say that, right? No, they're gonna lean in. They're gonna lean into that pain. They're gonna lean into the idea they may have PTSD. It's natural to do so. You need to sort of be a grown-up to say, "Look, I have responsibility here, too." It's very hard for a teenager, because first of all, they are struggling. A lot of them are in distress. A lot of them do have angst. We all did. And what they don't know, this is the most important thing, they don't know it's normal. They don't know it's normal. They don't know they can get through it. They don't know that every generation has.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  So if they're sitting with someone who is getting paid regularly by their parents to encourage the idea, or at least talk to them one week, you know, one day a week about their anxiety, gosh, that's better than sitting with a bipolar patient, a schizophrenic patient, or anyone who might be violent in your session, but desperately needs your help.

• 5:34Mark Manson?

  How would you define bad therapy? And how does it differ from good therapy?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Right. So bad therapy is anything that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse. And there's a whole body of really good research on the harms of therapy, which doesn't mean all therapy is bad. Every good intervention also comes with harms. We know this from X-rays to Tylenol. They can offer surgeries. They all can introduce a harm. So the question is, do you really need it? And when they've done research, and they do, you know, with a control group, and actually rigorous research, they have found that people who are burn victims, first responders to catastrophe, breast cancer survivors, people dealing with normal bereavement, have all left therapy feeling worse.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Because sitting around once a week, talking about your pain, can make you feel worse. And the problem is, we're doing this to schoolchildren every day. In school, their parents, their teachers, everyone is saying, "How does that make you feel?"

• 6:38Speaker 01

  How do you feel? Think about your feelings. Dwell on your bad feelings. And, and, and here's the thing, people might say, oh, well, they're asking about their feelings. It doesn't have to be negative. They could be asking about good feelings. Okay, that's true, but that's not how it works. Why? Because if you're going to have something like social emotional learning in school, where the whole point supposedly is to teach emotional regulation. Well, if you talk about a time when you were happy, there's nothing to teach.

• 7:01Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So the whole conversation gets going when they say, okay, let's talk now about a time you failed. Were left out, were rejected, were disappointed, or had your feelings hurt. Now we're talking. Now we got something to talk about. So it leads them towards the negative.

• 7:15Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Always the negative.

• 7:17Mark Manson?

  And there's a, there's a subtle form of social validation, right? So it's like if a, if a kid comes in and notices every time they say, I'm happy, I feel good. They get no attention.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:26Mark Manson?

  But every time they come in and say, well, I'm really upset because, you know, Suzie was mean to me yesterday. That gets them tons of attention. Well, guess what? Now they're like looking for things to be upset about and to come in and talk about.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what would be better for kids than sitting around and talking about their pain before a math test? And here's the thing.

• 7:46Mark Manson?

  It doesn't help with math.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Anything. They could literally be picking up trash around the school, paint the gym. Dancing is really good, apparently, for dealing with mild to moderate depression, better than, you know, you know, psychotherapy or antidepressants. So literally anything we had them do that had an outward focus would be better than sitting around and talking about their pain. But that's what we're inviting them to do all day long.

• 8:10Mark Manson?

  My frustration with a lot of this too, is that I think arguably the most important thing school teaches you is to still take the math test when you feel sad.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:22Mark Manson?

  Or still study for a big project when, you know, you got dumped and your heart's broken, right? It's like, that's where the resilience comes from. So if you keep interrupting the academic pursuits.

• 8:36Mark Manson?

  To accommodate the emotional issues as they happen, then you're robbing the kids of the chance of actually developing a sense of resilience.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And you know, one of the great things about being an adult is that we can pick and choose which emotions to lean into, right? We develop this strength if we go through heartache in life. And we say, okay, I want to, I'm not going to let that derail me now. I'm just not going to. We can make that decision, right? Because we've been through hard things before. But a kid who's being told over and over, no, every bit of pain is important. We need to examine it. They're not going to have the ability, and they don't, to put some of it behind them or to one side so they can get some other things done that might make them feel better long term. And I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing the most fragile generation, and it's because we made them that way.

• 9:29Mark Manson?

  So explain to me, what is socio emotional learning? Because I wasn't familiar with this topic before the book.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  So social emotional learning is the giant project that's supposed to help kids with their mental health. We've had it in schools for at least 15 years now. It's in almost every public school. And the idea is that it's going to teach kids things like emotional regulation and resilience. Well, that all sounds really good, right? I mean, if you can give kids techniques for dealing with hard times, well, why wouldn't we want that? We should want that, except it doesn't work.

• 10:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  It doesn't work. It's worse than that. It's counterproductive. And while I was writing the book, so the book explains why it's counterproductive to have a bunch of kids sit around and talk about their feelings, focus on their feelings, focus on the sad emotions, why it would make kids feel so miserable and sad, and actually focus more unable to ever put aside their emotions. So that's what the book explains. But while I was writing it, I didn't know this, but two sets of researchers in Europe were actually testing it. So a set of researchers in England, they were doing something similar, social emotional techniques, and then a set of researchers in Australia, and they actually had control groups, and they put the kids, they sent some of the kids through these programs, wellness

• 10:45Speaker 01

  techniques, anti-bullying, social emotional regulation techniques, and they had control groups, and in both sets of studies, the kids who went through the program ended up sadder, more anxious, more depressed, and more alienated from mom and dad. And you might say, well, why would they be more alienated from their parents? Well, they're kids. So if you're gonna sit around talking about their emotional injury, well, whose fault is that? Whose job is it to keep them safe, in some sense? So the criticism of the parents is just built in.

• 11:17Mark Manson?

  So when I was doing research on SEL, I came across their website where they cite a 2011 meta-analysis. They claim that all these benefits, over 700 studies, 10% decrease in emotional distress, 9% decrease in conduct problems, 9% improvement in attitude and classroom behavior, 11% improvement in test scores. Although, there was a weasel phrase in the meta-analysis that I noticed, which said, "Gains and outcomes resulted only when SEL program was quote-unquote 'well implemented,' which, what the fuck is well implemented, right? It's like, anytime it doesn't work, you can just say, 'Well, it wasn't implemented well.'" So I'm curious, first of all, how familiar are you with that body of research?

• 12:00Mark Manson?

  And what are your thoughts on it? And second of all, the other thing that I noticed is that most of these studies came from the 2000s, like, they're 15, 20 years old. And so, part of me also wondered, you know, with smartphones and social media and all that stuff, like, maybe it's different?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So, a few things. First of all, there's brand-new research even out of America showing that these things are counterproductive, and it's going along, that it's either ineffective or making kids sadder. But the other thing is, you bring up a really good question. Have things changed? Yes.

• 12:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And it's not just social media, although that's a major driver. The amount of feelings focused on this generation is so intense. These kids are never outside of their own heads. That's why they think they need a mental health day off. Right? These are not combat vets. These are kids raised in Brentwood who need a mental health day off of school and/or work. So I think that the context does matter and that we've never had a generation more focused on its feelings and frankly, not one more tyrannized by their feelings. And they really are. So yeah, I don't think there's been any good research to showing the improvement. By the way, if you interview teachers today, they will tell you the kids are so dysregulated who have been through these programs.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  We've never seen this level of dysregulation. Teachers are quitting. Why? Kids are throwing tantrums in high school, in middle school. And they're just truly emotionally out of control in a way that we haven't seen. So I think it's hard to argue that they've been helped. I mean, I argue that they're counterproductive, but I think they clearly haven't helped for sure.

• 13:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's funny, this paradox is something that we have come back to on the podcast multiple, multiple times with multiple guests of there has never been a moment in history with as much mental health information and intervention. And there has never been worse mental health since we began recording these sorts of things. Clearly, something's not working and yeah, the medicine might be part of the poison.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I think so. I mean, think of it this way. It's not that I don't respect the mind. It's the opposite. The mind is so strong, it can convince you of almost anything. The suggestion that you might be ill. That you might have anxiety that's debilitating, that you have trauma is so strong and you will begin to manifest if you believe you have those things. See, if you think you're shy, you can overcome that. But if you think you have social phobia, now you need a pill. That's why it's such a big deal to start going down the, you know, mental health pipeline, because now you don't have agency. You can't do it on your own if you buy that. There's an amazing new study out by this, I think, British researcher, I don't know if she's British or American, but I believe British, named Kathy Wytham,

• 14:50Speaker 01

  who's just amazing. I've never met her, but she does these incredible prospective, very rigorous studies. And she often looks at childhood trauma, traumatic events that affect kids. And her most recent study that came out in the last couple of months showed that she had taken kids where she verified the traumatic event. So it was real, wasn't just a misremembered event. She and then followed them 15, 20 years later and sent in blind researchers, meaning researchers who didn't know which camp they fell into. And what she found was that some of the adults had made the potentially traumatic incident a major part of their narrative. And those were the adults who were suffering

• 15:32Speaker 01

  in adulthood. And the ones who had decided whatever they went through wasn't a big deal. They didn't build a narrative of their life around it, and in fact, were dismissive of it. They were thriving. They had gone through the same kinds of things in childhood. But it's really important, if we are going to attribute a lot of importance to a hard time, we're likely to make it worse for us. And that's what we're doing to kids today. We're telling them everything they went through that's hard is could be with them forever, could imprint their bodies with trauma.

• 16:04Mark Manson?

  I still feel like the research around post-traumatic growth is just way, way under broadcast. And I don't understand why. Actually, there's a great author, I should try to get him on the show, who's done a lot of the research around this. But it's actually, if you experience a traumatic event, I think you're six times more likely to actually later attribute that event. To being a growth related event than like a PTSD.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Left, left alone, left alone. If you have a therapist come in and tell you've been traumatized, no, then you're going to say, oh, I've been injured, but that's right. That's the lie that gets called. That's so upsetting. We're telling kids that they aren't resilient, that their trauma is so important, we all have to address it. No, actually, the story of human beings, of humanity is loss, right? Privation, suffering and resilience, overcoming it. And if you talk to anybody who's old, right? Talk to anybody in their eighties.

• 17:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  God, they went through a lot.

• 17:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And most of them overcame it and actually thought it made them stronger.

• 17:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  That's what we should be telling kids.

• 17:11Mark Manson?

  I talk about this in my second book. I call it like the, the, the theory of pain relativity, because it's, you know, if you grew up in a war torn country and you watch your entire neighborhood get bombed, that will be one of the worst experiences of your life and that will affect you extremely negatively. If you grew up in Brentwood and the worst thing that ever happens to you is you get cut from your high school JV team, because you have never experienced anything worse than that, you will experience that, the pain of that experience will be proportional to the person who grew up in the war torn country, watching their neighborhood get bombed, right? Like it's all, pain is ultimately relative to the other experiences we've had in life. So if we're always preventing ourselves from having adverse experiences, we don't build

• 17:52Mark Manson?

  up that library of resilience and we don't build up that context, understand like, oh, getting cut from my JV team, it's, it's not the end of the world. There are a lot of other things I can do. I've bounced back from other things before. There's not like an objective metric of what is traumatic and what's not.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Right. And if someone suggests to you, either the culture or a school counselor, that you've had trauma, you won't get over it. It will be like you lived through something significant.

• 18:18Mark Manson?

  There it's it's a little bit of like a Barnum effect where, you know, you you read a horoscope and it's it's like you're gonna feel lots of passion this week and you're like, oh, my God, I am feeling passionate this week. We have a tendency to just adapt our experiences to whatever we read or hear about us. I had Lori Gottlieb on and she was describing this as like anytime you get a headache and Google, you know, headache in back of your head, you're like, oh, my God, I have cancer. Oh, my God, I have this. Oh, I have this. Like every symptom that you see online, you like immediately convince yourself you have that disease. And that works with mental health as well, right? It's like if if I'm feeling anxious in this kind of awkward social situation, well, let me Google that. Oh, my God, I've got this. I've got a phobia. I've got anxiety. I've got a disorder, you know?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Well, what if you talk to your shrink about it once a week?

• 19:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that too. I mean,

• 19:06Speaker 01

  You know, let's go back to that relationship you had in the seventh grade. How did it feel when you were dumped? You know? I mean, that's what they're doing.

• 19:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Um, in the culture and and literally in their offices. And I think parents are effectively reinforcing it by being way, way over solicitous of focused on kids' feelings.

• 19:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  And you know what? I'm not saying ignore a kid's feelings. You know, you deal with a kid who's suffering. The problem is we're treating everyone as a patient.

• 19:35Mark Manson?

  I'm glad you brought that up because it seems like there's a Goldilocks zone, right? Because if you look at, say, our parents or our grandparents' generation, they were completely like their pain was completely ignored to to a point that was probably unhealthy. Now we've got a generation that their pain is indulged to a point that it's unhealthy. So it's like ignoring the pain, you know, it's like let's pretending the trauma never happened or pretending that that horrible event in your childhood never happened. That's not healthy, but also dwelling in it, creating personal stories around it, building your identity around it, validating it constantly. That's also not healthy. So it's like, it's this tricky tightrope.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:14Mark Manson?

  Of like acknowledging that the pain exists, but not allowing yourself to be defined by it.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  That's right. And there's no balance today. That's the problem is that there's no

• 20:22Mark Manson?

  We've overcorrected.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Way over. I mean, think about it this way. You haven't heard, no one has heard the phrase, you'll live in a generation. No one says that. It's not that. The problem isn't that everyone doesn't say it, is that literally they will never hear, you'll live. They don't know sticks and stones. They can't complete the sentence, right? They don't. No one is telling them, you'll live. You'll live. You're fine. No one. And so they believe they're there sitting around crying over paper cuts. And by the way, this is hypochondriasis or being a hypochondriac, right? I interviewed the world expert on this, Arthur Barsky of Harvard Medical School. And I asked him, like, what is what they now call illness anxiety disorder, somatic symptom disorder. But what is being a hypochondriac? And he said,

• 21:08Speaker 01

  it's not people faking it. It's people applying hyper focus to the normal pains we all feel and magnifying them. And then if you make it an organizing principle of your life, you'll never get over it. Right? And that's what they're doing with their emotional lives. They are absolutely having mom call their boss because of something said to them at work. Their emotional pain is always front and center. It's always magnified. It's been magnified by their parents since they were little. And now they show up at work and all they are is feeling pain all day long. And unfortunately, that means they also can't get through a normal day. And the way that we're used to seeing generations, just show

• 21:49Speaker 01

  up on time. Just do the job. Just take feedback. Right?

• 21:54Mark Manson?

  If one of my employees moms called me, I would fire him so fucking quick.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  It's happening. It's happening. Everyone has told me these stories. I'll tell you something else. I had a physician friend tell me the other day. He said, I loved your book, and I want you to know something. He said, they're doing it to physicians now, too. They're constantly giving us surveys about physician burnout. He's like, if you don't tell residents all the time about physician burnout, they'll do fine, most of them. But because they're obsessing over physician burnout, now you've got a lot more people thinking they're burned out.

• 22:26Mark Manson?

  Every, every day they come in and they don't feel 100%. They're like, oh, is this burnout? Right. Maybe I'm burned out. Right. Maybe I should slow down. I think part of what makes it so upsetting, and this is true in the self-help space too. Like, I've always described it as optimized for making people feel good instead of being good, right? It's like you can take a bunch of people, throw them in a hotel conference room, make them dance around, hug each other, maybe share a couple of personal stories, cry once or twice, and they'll leave feeling significantly better than they did when they walked in. But are they a different person? Probably not. Most of them are probably gonna go home and revert back to the exact same behaviors, keep the same identity, tell themselves the same stories about themselves.

• 23:08Mark Manson?

  And that's the problem in my industry. I think most people aren't aware that just feeling better doesn't mean you're actually changing.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Same thing with therapy, by the way. Most people feel purged after they leave a therapist's office, so they say they're better, even when the objective markers of their lives get worse.

• 23:26Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Or stay the same. It's the same thing. And, you know, it's funny, because your book is, you know, I know you write about you're sort of the antidote to self-help books. This is sort of the antidote to parenting books. Because the amount of parenting nonsense by these so-called parenting experts, who are constantly telling parents to act like therapists, "Oh, I see you're having big feelings. Oh, instead of throwing your bowl of Cheerios at mommy, what else could we do?" You know, it's all this, they're aping this therapeutic language, they're pretending to be amateur therapists. So first of all, it's very phony. It's very time-intensive, but it's also very artificial, right? It's making parents crazy. They're like, "Oh, shoot, I gotta go back to page 194 to find out what to do next.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  He just smacked me across the face." And we've done a few bad things for these kids. So, kids need authority. They actually need it. I know no one in our generation wants to assert authority, because they're afraid for some reason, or they feel like it's bad, right? It feels like Principal Rooney, "I don't want to be like him, I want to be the cool friend dad." But kids need authority, they need someone in charge. And when they don't have someone in charge, they really feel scared.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they could go into a kind of panic like I'm in charge here and I'm three or I'm five.

• 24:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Right. And my mom's crying. I just hit her again. Like, there's no consequences. No one even uses the word no. And they show up at school and the first thing the teacher says is your child has ADHD. You should take him for, you know, diagnosis and medication. Because the kid can't control himself. The other thing we're doing that's so bad is we treat every child as totally unique and separable from the world. And I tell the story in my book about I sat on a plane behind, this is so classic, an American family. So two parents and two kids. And this girl starts to scream, and I mean scream, like this was ear piercing. I guess her daughter, her sister had pinched her or something. And their father, who's a very gentleman, is like, sweetie, what's wrong? Can we talk about it? Okay.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And is soliciting her feelings. He was trying to be very empathetic to his daughter. The thing he never said, and I listened to him, okay, well, what else might you have done? The thing he never said to her is, you know, there are other people on this plane. We don't tell kids that they're part of a society. They're part of a community and they need to think about others. So they don't.

• 25:50Mark Manson?

  That their actions have repercussions.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Right. Never mentioned. So I asked a woman I interviewed who was a cross-cultural psychologist. And I said, what would like Japanese parents or, you know, more collectivist cultures think of this? And she basically said they would think that was bananas.

• 26:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Because you have to be told, no, you're part of a society. And by the way, that's really good for our, you know, mental health. It's really good for us to know that we're not wandering alone like free radicals in the world.

• 26:17Mark Manson?

  It was interesting. My wife and I, we read the book at the same time. And we had very different upbringings, you know. So I had a pretty upper middle class, WASP-y American upbringing. My parents were pretty lax. And, and I was very bratty. But she said something really interesting when we were talking about the book. She said, you know, my dad, my dad was awful.

• 26:42Mark Manson?

  But when he said something, you knew it was true. Like if he said, be ready in 10 minutes or I'm leaving without you. You knew he was gonna leave without you. Like there was zero doubt in your mind. She said, if my brother and I, we were in a restaurant and we started acting up. And my dad looked at us, we immediately knew to stop. Like, we knew there were consequences. There was very clear if this, then that. Like if you behave this way, these are the consequences that are gonna happen to you. And it's funny because she said, even though I can recognize that he was kind of an awful person in a lot of ways, I, I have a respect for him that I, I don't have for other people in my family because of that.

• 27:25Mark Manson?

  Because there is like structure and like a certain honesty to it. You can depend on it.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:33Mark Manson?

  Even if you don't agree with him, it's dependable.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and look, certainly I'm not saying that anyone should be cruel or unloving or anything like that to children, of course not. You know, God forbid abusive or anything like that, but that's, that's not what we're talking about. It's like, you know, there are things that kids need and you can be as affectionate and gentle as you want, but what they need is authority. What they need is consequences and high standards for their behavior. So however you wanna deliver those things, they have to happen if you wanna raise a good, sturdy adult.

• 28:05Mark Manson?

  I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition because it's ultimately like my wife is extremely organized and dependable and like if she says one thing, you know, she does it. And I wasn't that way until I was probably 25, you know? Because I, I didn't have structure a lot of the time and I could kind of run loose. And there weren't always consequences if I didn't follow certain rules. You know, you, you, you make the point in the book that there's, I believe there's like a, I guess you'd call it a trichotomy, you know, of the permissive parenting, the authoritarian parenting, and then the authoritative parenting, you know, where it's like the permissive is anything goes or no consequences. Authoritarian is rigid.

• 28:50Mark Manson?

  Unaccommodating, whereas authoritative is, it's almost like you, you draw the boundaries. And then within those boundaries, the kid is free to kind of do whatever they want, be whoever they are. But it's like, hey, if you're not in bed by eight, this is what happens. Right. And it's like, you stick to that. There's no, there's clear rules, there's clear guidelines, there's clear if this, then that.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's really good sturdy research showing that's best for kids. They have lowest anxiety, lowest depression. This is the rule bound, but loving, you know, parents. And today, we don't even have permissive parents. We have something worse. Because permissive parents, this was Diana, this is very old psychological research going back to the 1960s, but it's, it's been replicated hundreds of times. Really good research showing that kids do best with authoritative parents. And today, she was talking about permissive parents. We don't even have that. Why? Because permissive parents usually gave their kids genuine independence. What we have now is the surveillance parenting, where parents just hover. They've never given their kids any rules. They never even say no to a child. And they walk around hovering and monitoring them all the time, and then interfering or

• 29:54Speaker 01

  interceding with the teacher, the coach, the boss even, the second the child's unhappy, and try to smooth away for them. So these kids are in no sense growing up. And it's really bad for kids.

• 30:07Mark Manson?

  Why do you think that's happening?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I think a few things. I think that the trauma gurus really got to us. And they really made us think that saying no to a child, yelling at a child, punishing a child could traumatize the child and leave a permanent mark. Now, by the way, it was never true. Even with truly traumatic incidents, the, the, the majority of kids will absolutely be resilient. Majority of us, adults are resilient. But instead, they made us frantic that if someone teased our child, that could leave a lasting mark. And you hear parenting experts ape this all the time. They're, they're reciting this. It's not true. The best research shows on resilience shows it's not true.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Kids overcome and most kids will leave it will leave no mark if they're made fun of in middle school. Now, you might say, well, things are a little different today with social media, and I agree.

• 31:02Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Because I don't think we're of evolutionary built to have one million people humiliate us. That's different. That's really different. That's like sending a kid to a knife fight, I think. But teased in middle school, sitting next to an obnoxious kid, dealing with a teacher who's really strict, who you don't get along with, that you gotta learn to do.

• 31:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it well, this is one thing that Jonathan Haidt's talking about with his new book is that we are overprotective in the real world and underprotective in the digital world. Right? So it's you let your kid get on TikTok and look at whatever they want and have anything posted about them that they want, but God forbid they go down the street for an afternoon without, you know, checking in every hour or play with the neighborhood kids unsupervised.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Right. And the thing is about the smartphones, we've known they were bad for at least eight years now. Right? You try to take away an iPad from a kid or a phone from a kid and they shriek. They act like addicts. So parents were aware of this. They didn't do anything about it. And I think part of the reason they didn't was because they were afraid to assert their own authority. They were really afraid. They were told by mental health experts that this could inflict trauma if you separate them from their social world. So they were afraid to ever say no.

• 32:15Mark Manson?

  It's I think there's also a little bit of like a threat inflation. There's a lot of really interesting data, like people have less trust and more anxiety about their communities than ever before, even though, you know, crime rates are all time lows. And I mean, you're there's never been a time where you're less likely to die, you know, get hit by a drunk driver or be kidnapped by a sexual predator. Yet I think. Maybe because of social media or just the news media in general, like there's the perception of how dangerous the world is seems to be at an all time high.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think we're really lousy at evaluating risks, right? We think that the risks all come from the sexual predators trying to kidnap our kids. We don't realize that keeping a child in a cage is its own risk.

• 33:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  You're creating a child who will be harmed by normal life events because you've never done anything to help them be resilient to them, to help strengthen them.

• 33:12Mark Manson?

  You've never given them normal life.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Right, right. So like, it's not that child predators are, you know, don't pose a risk.

• 33:19Mark Manson?

  And by the way, most of the child predators are probably on TikTok, so. It's self defeating in both ways.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  That's true too. But you have to know that putting a child out in the world who can't, doesn't have, has never built up any resilience to distress, disappointment, not, you know, getting cut from the basketball team, now you're sending a young adult into the world who's really vulnerable.

• 33:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  So that's why they're, they show up in college campuses and they get a bad grade and they're having nervous breakdowns.

• 33:52Mark Manson?

  I'm curious, the process of researching and writing this book, how has it changed your approach to parenting?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  It's changed it a lot. It really has because I became aware of that. So like, I tell the story, my, my book, my nine year old at the time, my daughter really wanted to walk home from the bus stop by herself. It's a couple of blocks, it's a few blocks and you have to turn a corner and whatever. And I did not want to let her at nine, she was so little and everybody drives these giant SUVs and I just didn't, I didn't want to. I mean, I felt like a nervous wreck about it, but I learned a couple of things. First of all, parents are the number one, you know, vector of anxiety in children. So I realized that if I, yeah, I could easily pass on my anxiety about it to her. But there's something else too. I learned from talking to all these parents and I interviewed a lot of them, that when

• 34:41Speaker 01

  they stopped their children from doing risky behaviors that they could do.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  When they were young, by the time they were older, they didn't even want to leave the house. So there were 12 year olds who had never been allowed to walk around the neighborhood by themselves, who didn't want to be dislodged from the couch. So that was its own risk. I wanted my daughter to get to know the neighborhood. Why? Because there might be a time where I, for whatever reason, know was there and she needs to get home. So I have to give her the strength to have a sense of the environment. There's a sense of the neighborhood. So she isn't like a babe in the woods. The second she's in the wrong block and has no idea where she is.

• 35:17Mark Manson?

  Is there any anxiety around being judged by other parents?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I think that's a lot of it, right?

• 35:24Mark Manson?

  Is it a little bit of like a collective action problem, like a game theory type thing where it's everybody secretly wants to be more, give their, their kids a longer leash, but they're afraid that if they're the ones who do it, all the other parents are going to judge them?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  So I don't think so. I think it's primarily an entire generation that has lost confidence that they know what they're doing because they think that parenting requires a professional. If I don't know about, this is what the, the, the neuroscientists and the, you know, who are parenting experts will tell you, the popular ones. Basically, if you don't understand the fight or flight response and the lizard brain, you can't raise a child. It's ludicrous. It's nonsense. But nonetheless, they've really made insecure a generation of parents who had come from a tradition of pretty good parenting. We're pretty good at this in this country. We have been for generations. We have raised wonderful people to adulthood who are strong and brave, who can take risks and build up great companies

• 36:22Speaker 01

  and do great things. And now we have raised, we are raising a generation that is not producing any tech founders because they're afraid to take any risks. And I've heard that from so many employers that no matter how smart these kids are, they won't take a chance on their own. You have to tell them everything, even though they have great grounding and whatever it is, the sciences or whatever it is, they have all the knowledge they need. They're afraid to do for themselves.

• 36:50Mark Manson?

  It's just from personal experience. I would say the level of talent in Gen Z is the highest I've seen and the level of execution is the lowest I've seen. I mean, it's just, my experience has just been finding these like incredibly smart, brilliant, interesting 22 to 25 year olds who.

• 37:15Mark Manson?

  Don't get things done.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:16Mark Manson?

  That's been my experience.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  By the way, that's a classic side effect of too much therapy, which is you don't trust your ability to do things without checking in with an expert. You feel like you have to check in with a grown up before you do anything. It's the way we've conditioned these kids and it's what they are taking with them to the workplace. If you haven't given me specific instructions, I don't know what to do the second I run into any, any problem or any obstacle.

• 37:41Mark Manson?

  Maybe I should just hire their moms with them.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  That's what people are doing. That's literally, no, no, no, not hiring the moms, but they're hiring the older generation.

• 37:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  You're seeing this from employers. They're saying, I want the older generation. And it's like, it's ridiculous. These kids do have the ability, they do have the skills in theory. They're just afraid to execute.

• 38:02Mark Manson?

  Just imagining doing a job interview with a kid and his mom simultaneously. I'm curious, let's start internationally. Is this an Anglo thing? Is it a North American thing? Is it a Western culture thing?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It's a Western thing.

• 38:18Mark Manson?

  It's a Western thing.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and people who come to our country from other cultures have a lot more sense of, about child rearing and they're generally horrified by what they're seeing in American parents. And they say the same things I interview. I love talking to immigrants. First of all, because they'll tell you the truth.

• 38:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  They don't, they're not so afraid to say the truth, the way Americans are. And they will tell you, these parents have no authority. And by the way, if you immigrant, if you interview immigrants, and it almost doesn't matter where they're from, they generally have much more orderly children who are genuinely much more respectful of adults and their parents. And that's where we used to be in this country and we desperately need to get back to that. Because, look, a child who's never learned to show respect for his parents will then be a child who never shows respect for his teacher and never shows respect for a boss. And I, I, I think that's what we're seeing.

• 39:10Mark Manson?

  I found it interesting when I was doing research for this episode, I, I looked, tried to look up mental health interventions by race in the United States. First of all, extremely difficult data to find, for whatever reason. And then when you do find it, what you find is that. White people have way more mental health issues than other races. But the explanation was funny because the researchers that I found, at least, they were like, "Well, it's because minorities don't feel comfortable."

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Right. They're all repressed.

• 39:41Mark Manson?

  Seeking help, right?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Isn't that nice?

• 39:43Mark Manson?

  They're disadvantaged. I'm sitting there, I'm like, "Wait a second."

• 39:46Speaker 01

  You know why I know that, but that self flattering bit of nonsense? I'll tell you, they actually call this the Latino immigrant paradox in the psychiatric, in the psychological literature. It's a paradox that Latinos who come to this country from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are do so much better in terms of anxiety and depression and mental health.

• 40:06Mark Manson?

  And better mental health outcomes.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  That's not a paradox. They're giving them better lives. They're giving them authority. They're giving the community. They're making them help out with chores and contribute so they feel they matter. They're giving them all the things that we should be giving them. That's not a paradox. It's something to celebrate and admire, but it's not a paradox.

• 40:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah. What about within the country? Do you see this evenly distributed within the country? Or is it worse in some pockets than others?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  It's a good question. So there's some indication. Jean Twenge did some research in her book Generations where she reported that even though teenage girls are the worst demographic in terms of mental health suffering, teenage boys from liberal families were generally had worse mental health than teenage girls from politically conservative families. The question is why? And people speculate on many different things. We know it's not social media because teenage girls are on way more social media, whatever their parents' politics. So the question is why? And I would guess that the answer has something to do with what I wrote the book about, which is that parents from conservative families tend to be more religious. They tend to be more comfortable asserting authority. They tend to be more, have more community around them.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Getting kids to participate and contribute, whether it's showing up for church or whatever, they tend to have more structured lives. Now, they're also not scaring the hell out of their kids about the climate catastrophe, right? Which is another huge problem. I mean, an entire industry has arisen. They're so excited to treat climate anxiety that there are now climate therapists. So if you don't see the conflict of interest in that.

• 41:39Mark Manson?

  We need jobs.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:42Mark Manson?

  Do it for the economy.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, just anecdotally, it's been interesting moving. I grew up in Texas and moving to California in particular. I mean, you know, so I lived in New York City for a long time. New York's a little bit different. It is definitely liberal, but New York, you just, you get shit done. Like, everybody has to get shit done all the time. And so there's not really much time to sit and dwell or worry about certain things. It's been interesting moving to California. I have definitely noticed just socially

• 42:15Mark Manson?

  that there is a lot more self-consciousness around basic day-to-day behaviors. One of the things that I've found really surprising is that I will simply go to a lunch or a dinner party with a group of people and people, they will try to curate the conversation to make sure that everybody feels included, that everybody's sharing something vulnerable, that everybody's like talking about, like there's talking points. I'm like, can we just have dinner? Like, let's just, let's just hang out and have dinner. Like, what's wrong with that? I find that it backfires. It actually prevents me from getting to know people because now, once the conversation becomes curated, now you're seeing, you're kind of seeing a presentation of somebody and it, that's designed

• 42:59Mark Manson?

  to elicit certain emotions instead of just having that spontaneous. And I think there's a lot to human interaction in human life that is only meaningful if it is spontaneous and unconditional in the way it emerges. Like, as soon as you try to control it, and this kind of ties back to the, the school counselor thing or the SEL thing, like, as soon as you try to control an emotional response, it starts feeling inauthentic. It stops feeling as meaningful and purposeful. And I think as well-intentioned as it is to try to intervene in people's lives and mitigate anxiety and promote happiness and joy as much as possible, sometimes the intervention itself

• 43:40Mark Manson?

  Robs that happiness of any sense of meaning, meaningfulness.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  I totally agree. And here's the thing, you know, it denies our experience as humans because as human beings, we have this amazing variety.

• 43:52Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Of personality, of all kinds of likes and dislikes. And you know what? We can roll with it.

• 43:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  You know, we have friends that are nothing like us and that's fun. And when you try to make everything into a group help session, right? So, you know, one of these self-help sessions where everyone says the expected thing. Yeah, you're not friends anymore.

• 44:12Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Those aren't your friends. And by the way, it's the same thing with raising kids. You know why people love their parents? Because they're theirs. Because that's my mom, even if she's crazy. And, and, and that's, that's what used to be. And now instead, we have parents pretending to be amateur shrinks. And by the way, the rising generation is cutting off its parents in rates we've never seen.

• 44:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  They're deciding that their loving parents were toxic. And I'm not talking about abusive parents, because when I interview parent psychologists who treat them, they say it's not abusive parents who get cut off. It's actually loving parents. And the, and the, you know, young adult goes to therapy and they just are like, I can't deal with you anymore. You're toxic. I'm done. You emotionally abused me. And it's over slight, you know, things that were said that hurt feelings and that sort of thing. Or maybe there were, you know, they didn't translate across the generations, you know? And I think what you said is right. Like, all this professionalizing of social relations has robbed those relations of their vitality, of the quirks that make us love them. Right? I mean, sometimes you're

• 45:20Speaker 01

  with friends and you try to explain to someone else why something was so funny, or why, and you can't even communicate it.

• 45:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Because it's so particular to your experience. And we're losing that when we try to mass market all of our social relationships.

• 45:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And I, you know, I would argue that really what friendship is, is having people in your life that you can feel whatever you feel around, right? It's like if I go to dinner with somebody and I'm just in a cranky ass mood and just want to complain and bitch for two hours, that's what friendship is. You're there with them when they're feeling bad. You're there with them when they're feeling good. You're there when they're anxious. You're there when they're, they're happy and joyful. Like it's, it's trying to control the outcome.

• 46:08Mark Manson?

  Removes the significance of it. It's a weird place. I do think people have such good intentions around it, both in the psychological world, the self-help world, the therapeutic world. Like, I do think all these people think they're doing a good thing. I definitely see it in my industry. I think, you know, the, the straight up like fraud and charlatan, it's the minority. It's nine times out of 10, it's somebody who actually thinks they're doing a lot of good and that they're helping a lot of people. They're just not looking at the second or third order of facts.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  For sure, but, but I think that their role got way too big in our society. I mean, what made, therapists are always giving advice like, now you should say, I'm setting a boundary. Well, if you're in an argument with your spouse and you hear, I'm setting a boundary, now the therapist is standing there.

• 46:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Between you and your spouse, right? I mean, what a bizarre thing to say to someone else, right? Now you're not even relating as human beings, right? Or as friends, or as lovers, or whatever it is. Are they well-meaning? Yes, but what makes them friendship experts? Do they have good friendships? I don't know. And you see the ones who are parenting experts, who either never raised children, or we don't see their children, the product of their great advice. It all sounds good. It sounds intuitively like getting on your knees to a child and saying, I see that you're very angry. Can we talk about that? That sounds like something so compassionate and nice. Unfortunately, it's not what a kid needs.

• 47:37Mark Manson?

  No, that's what you would say to an adult who knows how to process their anger and look at it objectively and understand if it's merited or not. A child has none of those perspectives. The child is just anger.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Right, and also a child wants someone who's with their mom, not a professional, or their mom like a professional inhabiting their mother's body, right? Like, they want their mom. Isn't that what we all want, right? You want your husband, not someone who's like, I'm setting a boundary, you know? Like, it makes our relationships, which we love, so awkward and artificial and professional. And I just don't see a lot of that as moving the ball forward.

• 48:16Mark Manson?

  It's ironic, I guess that's another kind of. Facet of this paradox that relationship advice is at an all time high is more well known than ever before. There's more books on it than ever before, yet people are lonelier, have fewer friends, are getting married less, having children less, keeping in touch with their parents less. They're most more socially isolated than they've ever been.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of like junior high in a way like in junior high, all the boys like the same girl, right? Because they are like, pretty sure they all want the same, you know, the blonde girl, whatever it is. And then you grow up and you're like, actually, I want something different for me. And we're almost going back to this idea of the therapist approved friendship, the there, the mental health approved way to be with people. You know what the truth is? We love people who are really wacky. And, and, and they're just dear to us. And that's okay. Because you know what? We're pretty wacky too. And we lost sight in that somewhere along the line that, that you can be however you want with your kids, as long as you're not abusive, of course, or anything like that. But, you know, we all have different ways. I had this, I'll give you an example. My dad,

• 49:23Speaker 01

  who I've always been very, very close to, he used to call me ugly. Now, he wouldn't call me ugly in an insulting way. He would wake me up and be like, come on, ugly, let's go. And it was always with a smile. And I, as I got to adulthood, I was like, God, I'm glad I never told a therapist that because it was kind of our joke. It was just our joke. I might, like, I know that my dad thought I was beautiful. I never doubted that. He made me more secure and how I looked than anyone, you know, but he always said with a smile, hey, ugly. And it always made me laugh, like, no matter how angry I was or upset I was, it made me laugh. Now, if I tried to explain to someone else why that was okay, it's hard to do. I don't know why it was okay. It worked with his

• 50:06Speaker 01

  sense of humor and mine. It just worked.

• 50:09Mark Manson?

  What right does anybody have to tell you that that's okay, not okay?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:15Mark Manson?

  So what are we supposed to do? What can, what can parents do first? Let's start there.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  So I think parents need to stop obsessing over their kids' happiness and start focusing on making their kids strong. And we're not spending any time on that. And that's everything from giving them skills, letting them go around the block, letting them figure something out. If you could figure something out when you were a kid, if you could handle something, they can handle it too. We need to stop passing on our anxiety to our kids about everything. It's too much, but you do need to be an authority with your kids, which means I set the rules. I know best, I'm your mom, not somebody I hired. I'm your mom. You know, a wonderful psychologist, Peter Gray, told me that when, whenever they're having psychological experiments and they want to introduce the element of stress,

• 51:03Speaker 01

  they do that by introducing monitoring. Monitoring is equivalent to stress. They're monitored in everything they do. We are stressing them out. You know, we need to raise them with rules so they know right from wrong. They need to face consequences if they act badly and then we need to trust them.

• 51:19Mark Manson?

  It's amazing, just thinking back on my own childhood, how many things that my parents let me do that would probably put them in jail.

• 51:31Mark Manson?

  I don't know, my, my brother and I, we would spend an entire day just like trawling through the woods, getting lost, you know, climbing up rock faces and falling down and scraping our knees and stuff. It's, it's pretty wild to think about now.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  But it's essential. It's actually essential for resilience. Like you need to get your knees scraped. You need to.

• 51:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  You need to see that, that, that a scraped knee is not the same as getting your leg amputated and you need to stop screaming out as if your leg's been amputated when you scrape your knee. And that's what we're seeing. Cry, you know, crying out for mental health days long, you know, off. These kids don't know they're fine. You're fine. Congratulations, you have dyslexia. You're not the first kid, you're going to be fine. Dyslexics have gone on to do great things. Instead, a kid gets a diagnosis, they've, they've been told they're dyslexic and now they bring in a therapist and sometimes they put them on psychiatric medication because of the stigma of dealing with their dyslexia. We are making their problems bicker.

• 52:32Mark Manson?

  We didn't even touch on the medication fees, which might be the most upsetting of all. It makes sense to me why there's an over prescription of medication from the pharmaceutical side. Obviously profit incentives and all sorts of kickbacks and whatever. Plenty of documentaries about it. What was interesting in the book was when you talked about how there are sometimes parents and teachers crave it because it validates or justifies their feelings of helplessness, right? It's like they struggle with a kid for a couple of years and they're like, whoa, if he has ADHD, ah, that would explain everything.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:09Mark Manson?

  And then it's not my problem. It's not my fault. Or the teacher feels like, okay, it's not, I'm not the one who's messing this up. It's, he's got a condition, right?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Right. A kid who's badly behaved. They say he has oppositional defiance disorder. So it's not my fault.

• 53:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  He just has this disorder. It's a brain problem. The problem is not only is it mostly not true in a lot of the cases of diagnosis, but you're, when you give a child a diagnosis, a mental health diagnosis, it comes with, you know, common side effect is demoralization. The person feels they don't have agency anymore. They feel limited by the diagnosis. Now, of course, if you have to give a kid a diagnosis because they really need it, then you have to, and it's worth the risk. You don't not diagnose a kid with anorexia if she has it, right? But the problem is, we're doing that immediately. The first time a kid is, doesn't want to sit down for the letter E in kindergarten, he has ADHD. You know, we're, we're, we're learning about the two sounds made by the letter E.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Everyone sit down and the boy doesn't want to, and now he has ADHD. I guess it's the default that needs to change. I mean, start by removing stuff in his environment that might be making it hard for him to sit down, like the tech. You had to get an iPad in the morning. He's not going to find anything interesting in school. And that's the problem. We're going straight to mental health diagnosis and we give him a pill and we're like, oh, great. Now he's bolted to his seat because of the pill with no sense that we're really changing a child in a huge way. And we're also, we're, we're divesting him of the resources of saying, you know what? I used to be a bad student, but then I buckled down and I became a great one.

• 54:44Mark Manson?

  It's funny. I, I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was about 15. Funny, there was this whole wave of ADHD diagnoses in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then I feel like it kind of went away for a while and now it's like back. Like now it's a, it's a huge topic again. I don't know if it's the social media or what, but I remember it, it was very much kind of that dynamic that you describe in the book. I was always a mediocre student. My teachers are always frustrated with me. Parents are always frustrated with me. And the ADHD diagnosis was like, ah, that explains everything. Like, we're all absolved of, you know, dealing with Mark's bullshit. And, and I took medication for about a year. I was actually very, very fortunate in that I had a, a teacher who pulled me aside after

• 55:28Mark Manson?

  about a year and basically talked me into coming off of it. Because he was like, look, assuming you actually do have it, which I think as an adult now, I, I think I do. He said, assuming you do have it, you're gonna have to deal with this for the rest of your life. So you might as well learn how to deal with it now, when the stakes are low. And besides, it's definitely changing your personality and you're young enough that it's probably altering your brain chemistry. Like, it's probably not great that you're, you're taking all these medications as a 15, 16 year old. I started feeling depressed as a side effect and I came off of it. And yeah, it was really hard for a couple of years. And I think by the time I was like 19 or 20, I'd kind of figured out how to manage it. Like, oh, this is how my brain works. If I do these few things when I go

• 56:12Mark Manson?

  to class, or this helps me get through my homework or whatever, like, I can manage it now. But again, coming back to the point of like, letting the kids fail and learn, I had to give myself space to develop the tools and reactions to the condition to actually get to a place where I can function really well with it.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, how many hyper successful adults had something like ADHD as kids? So many. I mean, we could sit and just list them, right?

• 56:42Mark Manson?

  I'm actually surprised these days when I meet an insanely successful person who doesn't have some sort of diagnosis in their history. Like, almost all of them do.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, you know, obviously, like, it probably surprises no one that I'm fairly high anxiety. But you know what? It also is incredibly motivating.

• 56:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  I mean, gosh, I'm perfectionistic. No one's gonna beat themselves up. I mean, any book I come out with is watertight, because no one's gonna beat themselves up more if they get something wrong. Right?

• 57:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  And I, I'm not medicated for it. So I feel it.

• 57:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  I feel the worry. I want to get it all right. And I'm not saying no one should take, you know, because anxiety can be brutal when it's a dis- when it reaches the level of disorder. It's brutal. And as an adult, if you don't want to live with that, or you feel you can't, by all means, that shouldn't be stigmatized, you know? I have no issue with that whatsoever. I think it's a totally, you know, fine choice. But you have to know that there are consequences. And with a kid, if you go in and delete a part of them, which sometimes you're doing, you might be deleting their sex drive with SSRIs. You might be deleting their normal resources for coping with some, with a bit of adversity so that they never develop it as an adult. With anxiety, it not only increases performance, it makes us alert to dangers.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  It's the reason we check both ways before we cross the street. Don't get in there and delete that unless you have to.

• 58:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's, I think people forget that a lot of this stuff is adaptive.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:08Mark Manson?

  In a certain way. I actually wrote an article ages ago, like 10 years ago. I don't even remember what it's called. It's called like the benefits of being slightly crazy or something like that. But anyway, I came across this idea. There's this idea in evolutionary psychology called emotionally stable systems. Basically, what they point out is that if you, if you're a species that evolves in a community like we do, it's not so much that like, oh, this gene is superior to that gene. It's actually like, there's a certain equilibrium of a diversity of traits and behaviors within the community that is optimal, that is like evolutionarily optimal. So an extension of this theory is that people who are depressive, for instance, depression tends to make you more observant and more introspective.

• 58:53Mark Manson?

  And if you're thinking about how we evolved in small tribes of 15, 20, 30 people, you probably want somebody in the tribe who is incredibly introspective and observant and is like always like. Assuming the worst about things because that's going to be adaptive for the tribe.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 59:11Mark Manson?

  And you can run down the list of, you know, ADHD, even like a lot of schizophrenic disorders and schizotypical people, like they tend to imagine things that aren't there or draw pattern, like pattern match way more, they overly pattern match and, you know, make discoveries that other people wouldn't consider. And in the long run, over a large group of people, that's actually extremely adaptive. But you have to be in an environment that is able to leverage it and honor it and take advantage of it.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  But we are in an environment that's able to leverage it. I mean, I love that. That's exactly right. Like, we did develop with this diversity for a reason, for a good reason. And I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, I was always, in any group of girls, I was always the one who was saying things I wasn't supposed to say. People were always like, girls were always saying to me, "You can't say that. It's so rude," or whatever. And I often had no idea what I had just said. Like, "Why can't I say that? I don't know." And I'm not saying that's great at an inner party, because it's not always great at an inner party. But it turned out in journalism, there was a place for me.

• 1:00:21Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Because sometimes true things needed to be said. And it was, and someone who didn't even notice when they were upsetting people, was, it's easier for you to say them. And I think, you know, writ large, as we've, you know, all been handed our scripts, our therapeutic scripts, or "I'm drawing a boundary now," and we go and recite these scripts with our children. No, to make good choices, we're all reciting these scripts. We forgot that it's actually exactly what you said, this amazing diversity that's adaptive.

• 1:00:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  We're all trying to get along, and we're all a little different. And it works. You know, we all have, some people are higher in disagreeableness than others, and it works.

• 1:01:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I'm a big fan of the idea that the best thing about somebody is usually also the worst thing. Like, it's like, the thing that causes most of the problems in our lives is also probably our superpower.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:01:13Mark Manson?

  Right? And it's, and I, yeah, I just think that gets, like, neglected or overlooked. I'm curious, you know, as being somebody who says the things that nobody's supposed to say, your last book, which was about gender dysphoria and all the transgender stuff that's been happening in the last few years, obviously, you got... Just absolutely crucified in the popular culture and the media. I'm curious, how much did that bother you?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  For sure, some of it. First of all, you know, some people sometimes ask me like, "Did you know you were gonna get that blowback?" No, most books get ignored.

• 1:01:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  I mean, so you have to know that like, so many books are published a year and most of them are completely ignored. So did I know I was gonna get that kind of blowback that they were gonna, you know, you still can't find it in most libraries in America. And it's not because people don't donate, they donate my book and the library refuses them in this country. So, so did it, yeah, I'll tell you, obviously, when it affected me personally. So the people who were unkind to my family.

• 1:02:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Or my kids, that hurt. But lots of people angry with me? No, I thought I was right.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  I don't know. I was, by the way. So.

• 1:02:24Mark Manson?

  I love it. Zero fucks given. You are on the right podcast. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

• 1:02:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The book is Bad Therapy. Very eye opening. Check it out. A little bit upsetting. Trigger warning, everybody. Retreat to your safe space. Thanks, Abigail.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Thank you.