5 Ugly Truths That Make Life Beautiful

So many people seem to be obsessed with feeling good all the time. They’re always looking for “hacks” to an easier, happier life. But what if the easy way actually makes it harder to have a life full of meaning and purpose? Today, Drew and I take on the ugly truths that give life its beauty. Some of these might be a little hard to stomach at first. But if you see them through, you might be surprised at what’s on the other side. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Beauty Is Pain: The French Philosophy of Suffering 00:01:22 Choose Your Suffering: The Path to Meaning 00:03:42 The Columbia Protest Paradox: When You Don't Realize What You Chose 00:05:26 The Price of Being Public: Criticism, Hate, and Thick Skin 00:12:13 Post-Traumatic Growth: The Research Nobody Talks About 00:15:16 Maya Angelou's Pencil: Channeling Trauma Into Greatness 00:18:32 Evil People Don't Think They're Evil: The David Foster Wallace Insight 00:22:14 The Manosphere Trap: When Self-Help Becomes a Black Hole 00:24:21 Death Casts the Shadow: Why Mortality Gives Life Meaning 00:33:57 The Sailboat That Never Sailed: Don't Wait for Someday 00:35:48 You Do Not Exist: The Buddhist Concept of No-Self 00:39:54 I Am Avoidant vs. I Feel Avoidant: The Language That Changes Everything ⇨ 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?

  Drew, I'm feeling very French this morning.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Why is that?

• 0:03Mark Manson?

  Very, uh, very tout le monde.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:06Mark Manson?

  Very, uh, merci beaucoup, souffle, wah wah, oui oui. Well, it's just, I feel like French people, they have this saying where they say, beauty is pain. That if you want to talk about what makes life beautiful, then there's a certain degree of discomfort that's required in observing that beauty. I actually have this argument with my wife oftentimes about music. I will play an absolutely gorgeous song that's in a minor key and she'll complain that it's sad. And I'm like, it's not sad, it's beautiful. It's fucking beautiful. It's the melancholy. It's the Instagram meme of, don't be sad it hap- wait. Don't be sad, wait, how does it go? Don't be sad, be happy it happened?

• 0:51Mark Manson?

  Oh, I remember. It's the Instagram meme. Don't be sad it's gone, be happy it happened.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:57Mark Manson?

  That's what today's episode is about. It's about French people and Instagram memes. No, it's actually, we're gonna talk about how, how ugly and painful truths are actually what makes life feel rich and beautiful. And I should probably stop, so why don't you kick us off?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Let's get off of that train real quick, yeah.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Bro, do you even podcast like bro? This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Well, the first one, uh, if you want a life of meaning, at some point you have to choose a life of suffering.

• 1:40Mark Manson?

  Why? Says who?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  I think you've said this before, actually.

• 1:44Mark Manson?

  Fuck.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45Mark Manson?

  God damn it. All right. I guess I'm stuck here. All right. No, I mean, this is, this is one of the big points that I made in subtle art of not giving a fuck. And I think it resonates today because I think so much of our culture is optimized for pleasure and kind of superficial, meaningless pleasure, empty calorie pleasure and-

• 2:07Mark Manson?

  The truth is, is that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. I have a section in the book that I talk about how people mistake highs for happiness. Highs come from very temporary, short-term, meaningless, pleasant experiences. Whereas generally lifelong happiness emerges out of a consistent commitment or sacrifice, or willing to suffer for some greater cause or purpose. So it's this counterintuitive ability to step into challenges and discomfort. It sucks in the short term, but it ultimately, it's the Instagram meme, Drew. It's, "Don't be sad it happened. Be happy."

• 2:49Mark Manson?

  Wait, no, "Don't be sad it hurt. Be happy that it happened." Yes.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  No, but there's a difference here between chosen suffering and suffering you didn't choose.

• 3:00Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Too, right? So I think a lot of people, you know, life is suffering, or choose your suffering, or whatever. Chosen suffering is really what imbues our lives with a lot more meaning than just say, random suffering or trauma that we face, right?

• 3:15Mark Manson?

  Which, I think, there's, so there's two things here. One is kind of legitimate victimization situations where you are, pain is thrust upon you, completely outside of your control, you know? So if some terrible tragedy happens, or you get a cancer diagnosis or something. But I would argue that most of this actually comes down to how we define choice for ourself. And I think what often happens is that we choose one side of an experience while either denying or remaining oblivious to the other side. I saw, there's this hilarious thing that went viral a couple of days ago. Right now, as we're recording this, there are a bunch of student protests on campuses. Students protesting the Israel war in Gaza.

• 3:57Mark Manson?

  Regardless of what you feel about the situation, there were a group of students at Columbia who were occupying the quad, occupying the administrator building for days and days and days on end. And then they were demanding that the school give them food, and they were complaining that they were hungry. And the reporter was like, "Well, wait, I thought you wanted to be revolutionaries. Now you're asking them to feed you."

• 4:20Mark Manson?

  Like, to me, that's a perfect example of they chose something without realizing they chose it, right? It's like, okay, if you're gonna choose to protest by occupying a building, potentially illegally, and being aware of those consequences, and being willing to be arrested, and being willing to be criticized and ridiculed for your beliefs, part of that is that your lunch doesn't get catered. Part of that is that, like, you need to figure out how to go get food and water.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  You have to agree, for sure.

• 4:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like, it's, that was part of your choice, whether you realized it or not. Maybe you didn't think about it ahead of time, and that's its own problem, but, you know, don't pretend like you didn't choose this. Like, this is part of what you chose. And I think we, we all do that a certain amount in our lives, right? Like, it's, we tend to choose the benefits of something, and we pretend like we didn't choose the costs. And then when the costs show up, we get really upset and blame somebody else.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. I, I think, too, just watching you over the years, too, I think one thing you've chosen in your life is the ability to be disliked, or I guess just that you've accepted to a degree that a lot of people don't.

• 5:35Mark Manson?

  I've had a lot of practice.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:38Mark Manson?

  I've gotten a lot of practice.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Well, how does that, like, what, how much of that was a conscious choice, or how much of it was just like, this happens, and I, this is, this is part of the game?

• 5:46Mark Manson?

  First of all, let me back up even a little bit further. This is kind of the, the higher version of this question, just removing myself from it, is, you know, I often get approached by people who want to write a book, or start a podcast, or build an audience online. And, and one of the most common questions I get from those people is, like, what do I do with criticism? What do I do with hate comments? How do I, how do I do this and not get blasted by trolls and haters? And my answer is always, like, you don't. That's just part of it. That's part of what you're signing up for. And generally, like, the, the size of your audience is gonna be proportional to the bullshit negativity and hate that you get. And it's just part of the deal. Some people are not naturally disposed to

• 6:30Mark Manson?

  handle that well. Like, I've known a number of peers in this space and other authors who just, they really struggle with Criticism and hate and the bullshit that happens on social media. And then some people seem pretty disposed predisposed to just handle it well. I think I'm predisposed to handle it well, whether that's kind of just my natural personality. Or, you know, I grew up in an environment that I I felt like a fish out of water since I was a young child. You know, so it's like, I was never the cool kid in school. I was bullied. I was called a nerd, a dork, a loser, you know, all those things.

• 7:10Mark Manson?

  So I think I just grew up with a thicker skin and was like, this is just kind of natural, you know, for me. So to me, that wasn't a super hard choice, but it's also easy for me to recognize. Well, yeah, dude, if you want millions of people to see your shit, some of them are gonna hate it. And you're gonna hear from those people. And that's just the price of entry.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:32Mark Manson?

  Essentially.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was, was it Dan Kennedy who said, if you haven't pissed off someone by lunch, you're probably not doing anything interesting or something like that.

• 7:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you said, yeah, if you haven't, if you haven't pissed somebody off by lunch, you're probably not making much money.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah.

• 7:47Mark Manson?

  Which I feel like is truer than ever today.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Mark Manson?

  Truer than ever. I don't know. What is a pain that you have chosen that you think most people have not chosen?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I, I think, I don't know. My whole life is pain, Mark. My whole life is just pain. That's actually not true.

• 8:03Mark Manson?

  Wow, I thought I was being French today.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I do think I've, from a young age, I always kind of have thought differently. I feel like I've thought differently than a lot of people around me. Part of that's just where I grew up and everything like that. I don't know if I've chosen like huge pains or anything like that, but I've always been kind of proud of like just of being different, being like a little bit different or being, speaking out when it's really not popular. I found myself in those situations several times. I remember, you know, I grew up in small town Nebraska and it was a great time and place to grow up there, actually, when I grew up. But I remember in high school, we had a debate, a quote unquote debate. And it was about the death penalty. And I was the only one who was anti death penalty in the whole class.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And I remember like doing that and I was like, oh. It's okay to do that. I remember, I remember doing that and like all of my friends are over there like yelling at me and everything like that and I took it and I'm like, yeah. And, and that's a small example, but I, I've done that throughout my life where it's like, okay. When, when it's something that I feel is right and standing up for it, I'll, I'll suffer that.

• 9:11Mark Manson?

  I think that's a, that's an important thing to realize about yourself. And it's also, I don't know if I always relished it, but I definitely relish it now. Like there's kind of a, as you pointed out, like a pride of, you know what? No one's saying this. I'm going to be the one that says it.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:25Mark Manson?

  Like that's, and I'll take.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  You do that for sure.

• 9:27Mark Manson?

  I'll take the heat.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:28Mark Manson?

  And I get kind of like a sick masochistic pleasure out of doing that. Before we move on, I, I do want to return to this idea of definition of choice. Because I think the magic of this concept is that if you want to be philosophical, you start to realize that you can expand the definition of choice to encompass almost anything, right? So a few minutes ago, I used the example of like a tragedy, you know, you get in a car accident or you get a cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, you could look at that and say, this is so unfair. It's random. Why did this happen? I would never choose this, et cetera. On the other hand, you can expand your definition of choice

• 10:08Mark Manson?

  to a point where everything starts to feel like a choice in your life that you had some hand in. So, you know, let's say you get in a car accident. Well, obviously you didn't choose to be in the car accident, but you chose to drive. And statistically, a certain percentage, you know, everybody ends up in a car accident at some point. A certain percentage of people end up in serious car accidents at some point. And so if you were living in a busy city and choosing the drive and choosing to be engaged on the road at busy and dangerous times, like that in effect is a choice to a certain extent. And that may sound really obnoxious, like just, you know, splitting hairs.

• 10:51Mark Manson?

  But I do think there's value in that because it forces you to recognize the trade offs that you made, right? So there's huge benefits of living in a big city and driving often. And as you're enjoying those benefits, year after year after year, you're not really thinking about the costs. And then when the cost comes, you want to pretend like you never. You never made the choice like that cost was thrust upon you completely outside of your control. And in a sense, it wasn't like you chose to be there. You chose to be in the car. You chose to be driving every day. And statistically, knowing that one day you're likely to end up in an accident. So that's a very philosophical way. You know, it may

• 11:34Mark Manson?

  set that may sound like navel gazing, but I have personally found that very, very powerful in my life when like very unfortunate things that have happened that seemingly were outside of my control. I just zoom out as far as I can until the definition of my choice encompasses whatever happened. And then it removes the power that it has over me.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:58Mark Manson?

  It's like, okay, I chose to be here. I chose to live this way. I chose this lifestyle. I chose to pursue this career, to be friends with these people that has repercussions.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Right. Change is often born from trauma.

• 12:13Mark Manson?

  Yes. I brought this up briefly when I talked to Abigail Schreer, maybe a month ago, but this concept of post traumatic growth, I feel like it's, it's so under publicized.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Underrated. Yeah.

• 12:25Mark Manson?

  Maybe, maybe this is the drum we bang on this year, Drew is is just like, let's bang on the post traumatic growth drum because

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I'm in for that. Yeah.

• 12:33Mark Manson?

  Trauma is just like, it's such a fucking trendy topic these days. And everybody's talking about their trauma and how traumatized they are. And it's like, if you actually look at the research of what happens to people post trauma, a far greater percentage of them will look back after the fact and attribute growth to the traumatic event than people who end up suffering from PTSD. And the reason this is so important is because of the expectation effect is that people, if you tell people that trauma is debilitating, and you tell people that that their trauma is going to fuck up their lives and it's going to hold them back forever. It makes it more likely that the trauma will. And if you tell people that trauma leads to growth and that trauma can be one of the best

• 13:16Mark Manson?

  things that happens to you and that trauma can be leveraged for all these beneficial things over the long run, it's more likely to lead to growth.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  You wrote an article years ago, How to Grow from Your Pain, that we talk about post-traumatic growth in as well. So if people want to check that out, I think that's a good place to start with this. It's a fascinating area of psychology, though, and like a really robust theory that they've tested in all sorts of different areas and everything like that.

• 13:40Mark Manson?

  And again, under broadcast, I don't know why.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:43Mark Manson?

  You would think the self-help industry would be all over this shit, but it seems to be the opposite. It seems to be just telling people how traumatized they are all the time, like almost trying to convince people they have PTSD instead of PTG.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:56Mark Manson?

  And in case anybody's listening to this and is like, oh, well, that's easy for you to say, you know, whatever. This line of research actually started in the 1950s with a guy named Casimir Dubrowski, who took Holocaust survivors and he tracked them the decades after the Holocaust. And he was the first one who noticed that 10 years, 15 years, 20 years out, a majority of the Holocaust survivors said that they were a better person for surviving the Holocaust. And while they would never go back and do it again and they would never choose to have it happen, that ultimately they ended up becoming a better person for having that experience. And so he was, he called it positive disintegration,

• 14:39Mark Manson?

  which is not a catchy term, but, but essentially it was the very early findings of post-traumatic growth.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  And post-traumatic growth, though, too, the whole body of research, I think, does a really good job of explaining, like, there's, yes, you can, there's an opportunity for growth within this trauma, but that doesn't mean you're not still traumatized by it. The two things can happen at the same time.

• 15:01Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Right? They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. We gave the example of, in that article, of Maya Angelou.

• 15:08Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  I love her story. It's, I mean, she's suffered. A great deal of abuse as a child growing up and then she went on to become, you know, an award-winning actress and writer, wrote the first bestselling novel by a black female, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings. Fantastic story that she has. In an interview one time, she said, though, the writing process for her was dragging her pencil over her scars to sharpen it. I love that line. It's so good because it illustrates just how, you know, she's like, this trauma is still there. All of that's still there. And I use it in my, in my life in a way that's, that, that brings me to a different level, even though it's still there.

• 15:50Mark Manson?

  It's almost like trauma, I'm gonna sound a little woo-woo here. Warning, fair warning, Mark's gonna get a little woo-woo here. But I, I mean this metaphorically, but like, it's almost like trauma creates these like, energy centers, right? Like the, almost like a power plant. Like it's just, it just radiates energy within your, your mind and your subconscious. And you can channel that energy in any direction you want. You can channel it into compulsive behaviors, self-destructive behaviors. Like it needs to go somewhere, right? So if you are kind of on autopilot or in a bad environment, it can very easily lead you down a destructive path.

• 16:33Mark Manson?

  Because you just need to get that energy out in some, some shape or form. But if you manage to channel it in a positive direction, like she did, it can actually propel you. You know, it can actually motivate you and make you more effective, more productive, more energized. I remember I had a, I went to high school with a bunch of guys who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I remember hanging out with a guy.

• 17:00Mark Manson?

  After he got back doing a couple of tours in Iraq and he was one of these guys, like he was. Like going door to door and Mosul and Fallujah, like knocking on doors, looking for terrorists and stuff. So it's like every door, like you just knock on the next door and it's like, you could just get shot.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:15Mark Manson?

  As soon as the door opens and he came back, got an amazing job, started a company, had this incredible career. Like just basically just went from zero to a hundred on the career ladder in like a year. And I remember talking to him about it and I was like, God damn dude, like you're killing it. Like, congrats, amazing. And I remember he just looked at me and he's like, dude, after Iraq, like everything's easy.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:40Mark Manson?

  He's like, there's nothing hard about this.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:43Mark Manson?

  I don't know, it was just one of those moments that like, I felt like a total bitch.

• 17:48Mark Manson?

  I was like, man, I like, what am I doing?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  No, it does put it in perspective.

• 17:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Back to the channeling thing though, um, it's the research, what the research finds is that it's, it's the channeling itself.

• 18:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  It's not the trauma, you know, that, that makes you thrive or get better or whatever.

• 18:04Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  It's the channel, it's what, how you react to it in the aftermath. And so you're right, going back to the Abigail Schreier thing, um, if you're telling people that this is just going to fuck you up, you're, you're channeling that in the wrong direction.

• 18:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And it's the process after the trauma that, that, that makes us, that levels us up.

• 18:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an important point to make.

• 18:23Mark Manson?

  This is one of my favorite quotes. This comes from David Foster Wallace. He said, evil people don't believe they are evil. They believe everyone else is evil. Tell me about this.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  We've kind of touched on this a couple of times. The older I get, the less I trust people who bang on about how other people are doing horrible things. And they don't even try to understand where they're coming from or don't even try to think of what would I do in that situation? Yeah, it just goes back to, there's like that Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote where he says, the line between good and evil runs down every human heart.

• 18:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right? It's all within us. And I think if you convince yourself that you're not evil and everybody else is, you can convince yourself of doing a lot of evil, actually in a weird way.

• 19:07Mark Manson?

  I feel like. I mean, I wonder if there's ever been any research on this, but like, I imagine if you could measure self righteousness in people and then measure fucked up antisocial behavior. Those two things would probably correlate. There's so another great quote around this is that Mary Shelley said that every atrocity is committed in the name of the greater good. She has another quote, which is that no man commits evil because he thinks it's evil. He mistakes it for happiness. I just think that the more certain and closed off we become of what's right and wrong. What's good, what's bad, what's gonna make us happy, what's gonna make us miserable. The less ambiguity we allow, the more justified we're gonna feel

• 19:53Mark Manson?

  when attacking others and treating other people unfairly. When this topic comes up, the thing it always reminds me of, there was like this period in the early 2000s. You probably remember this where there was like over like five years, there was a series of mega church pastors, like basically like the most homophobic evangelical church ministers and pastors. They all turned out to be like hiring male prostitutes and like doing cocaine with like with like gay orgies and stuff. And it's like, these are, these are guys who are on TV every week shouting about how like homosexuality is an abomination. How everybody's gonna go to hell, how the country's gonna be ruined. And then it's, you know, it's like,

• 20:35Mark Manson?

  turns out he was in a hotel with a hooker off Craigslist, you know, giving him a blowjob. You know, Carl Jung had this thing about the shadow self and projection. And I think there's a tendency, that certainty that we develop over what's good and bad. Oftentimes, we develop that certainty because we need it to bury what we don't like about ourselves. Right? So it's like, if there's a part of yourself that you are terrified to confront, one way you can hide it from yourself is just developing this like very strict black and white view of the world and never ever budging from that. Does that make sense?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  That it does. Yeah. And then because then when that shadow comes up, you don't know what to do with it because you've ignored it for so long. And that's where just the heinous awful shit can happen. You see it in politics and everything like that, but I think you could see in your everyday life as well. Just people, I don't know, when I'm like walking down the street and somebody doesn't move over. I'm like, what a piece of shit.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  You know, and I know that's, that's a, that's a mundane example or whatever.

• 21:39Mark Manson?

  Drew's shadow self.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Driving out here in LA.

• 21:43Mark Manson?

  Get out of my way.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  But that's what I'm talking about. If you notice those little things in, in your everyday life, you're like, oh, I could take this to some dark fucking places if I, if, if I let it happen. It's also, I think, just an argument to just kind of remain more vigilant and, and stand up and, and call, call out bullshit when you do see it, but also I think have a little bit of, give people a little bit of leeway too, when they fuck up. Yeah.

• 22:12Mark Manson?

  I, I, I generally find that people with this sort of certainty and I, I would call it like an, almost like a ideological or religious view of the world and of people. They tend to be full of contradictions. You know, there's this thing called the manosphere and it's the, the red pill community. And it's funny because it's been around forever. Like it was around when I started in men's dating advice in the late 2000s, it was around. It's still around. A lot of the same guys are still there, still posting the same shit, which that tells you something. I always feel like you can judge the quality of a, of a self-improvement community by how many people leave it. If nobody's leaving, then it's a fucking trap.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:54Mark Manson?

  Stay away.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  That is a black hole for sure.

• 22:56Mark Manson?

  So, you know, the manosphere is definitely a trap. It's a black hole, but it's always, I've always found it amusing how these guys, you'll see these guys angrily bang on. I mean, it's, it's just like super sexist and judgmental towards women and they'll write these like long essays digging into evolutionary psychology and giving you every reason why women are terrible and feminism is ruining, ruining the world and things are so unfair for men now and how like, you know, women suck and it's, this is bullshit. And I just sit there and I'm like, okay, if women are this terrible, like why are you literally spending every hour of your free time thinking about them and writing about them? Like, I don't know. The things that I think suck, I just kind of go do something else, you

• 23:41Mark Manson?

  know? Like I don't pay attention to them. Like I go find something more productive to do. There's like this weird fixation that a lot of people develop on what they deem evil. Like there's kind of this fascination or obsession that they develop around it. And, um, and yeah, it just feels very. Counterproductive, counter to everything that they purport to be saying.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and go back to your point, though. It's like you, you reject what could possibly reject you. It's like a protective mechanism as well as going back to that shadow thing. Yeah, that's the whole manosphere is like that, I think.

• 24:16Mark Manson?

  For sure. So manosphere and closeted gay preachers.

• 24:22Mark Manson?

  Thumbs down on today's episode.

• 24:26Mark Manson?

  All right, what's the next one?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Uh, the next one, death is a gift that gives life meaning.

• 24:32Mark Manson?

  Ah, oui oui. This is so French. I love it. Where's my baguette?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  This is, this is very French, very Sartre, very, uh, cameo. Yeah.

• 24:42Mark Manson?

  It is. It's quite existential. You know, my, one of my favorite press or media moments, whatever was. So my books are not big in France. They're, they did okay, but, uh, not, not a huge French audience. And I remember like one of the only kind of big media opportunities I ever had in France. It was a French journalist, like one of the big newspapers there. And I get on the phone with her and she starts asking me a couple of questions, like kind of about the book. And we get like maybe five minutes into the conversation and she's like, she's like, look, I'm really sorry, but aren't these things just kind of obvious?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:20Mark Manson?

  And I was like, yes, you know, you would think so. And she was like, maybe, maybe it's just here in France, but I just feel like everybody knows these things.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I, I do love the French for that too. They're very honest. They're very honest.

• 25:35Mark Manson?

  I was like, yeah, this, I'm definitely not going to get a lot of real estate space in that newspaper. It's like, American guy repeats what's obvious.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. What do the French know about death, Mark?

• 25:48Mark Manson?

  So this is my interpretation of it. This is not what the existentialist said entirely. Although I, I guess this is kind of an extension of it, but like death is the only really permanent thing. Everything else of value is kind of relative or. You can, there are trade offs or interchangeable in some shape or form. Death is the only finality. And so, death is what generates scarcity of everything else. Ultimately, we all have a scarcity of time. We don't know how much time, but the fact that there is a scarcity of time is what makes our time valuable. And the fact that our time is valuable forces us to make value based decisions about everything else that we do and pursue in life. And those value based decisions are what makes life meaningful.

• 26:33Mark Manson?

  The fact that I choose to spend my time on a podcast instead of, I don't know, like gardening in my backyard. That feels like a meaningful choice to me. Uh, the fact that I chose to spend my, my life with my wife as opposed to some other woman I dated. That feels meaningful because that time is scarce. I never get it back. Once it's used, it's gone forever. And one day it'll be used up. So ultimately, death is the, the object that, uh, I was gonna try to do like a very poetic metaphor. And I just, you know, this is why I write, Drew. I, I just, you know, you give me. I get that. If you give me five minutes, I'll, I'll give you a perfect metaphor. But you know, when I just have to sit here and talk, you're gonna end up with a lot of bullshit.

• 27:19Mark Manson?

  So I think in subtle art, I say something like, death casts the shadow by which everything else is measured. Yeah. There, there. There you go. Nailed it. Edit that. We're gonna, we're just gonna make me sound poetic as shit.

• 27:32Mark Manson?

  Death casts the shadow by which everything else is measured. And I think that is the reason why, I think most people have the experience that either when somebody close to them passes away or when they have a health scare themselves or a mortality scare themselves, like a near death experience. It clarifies their values. It clarifies all those decisions that they've been making and maybe the decisions that they haven't been making well. So we started the show talking about the importance of choice and how often we make choices without being aware of the repercussions of those choices or the, the full extent of what we're choosing. Death is the thing that makes you aware of the extent of what you're choosing.

• 28:15Mark Manson?

  Death is what makes you aware of like, oh, I've been wasting my time with people that don't really care about me. Or, oh, I'm investing in a career that, yeah, it makes me a bunch of money and gets me a bunch of status and prestige, but. It doesn't feel impactful and it's not making me happy. Like, death clarifies those things in a way that nothing else seems to. And I think this is why the Buddhists and the Stoics had this practice of contemplating your own death and find, seeing the value and importance of that, just because it, it helps you align your internal compass towards whatever you should be pointing at.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  There's also, in this space, I think there's people, they make a similar point, but I think it's a little more superficial, just like, "Yeah, you're gonna die someday, your time is limited, so get busy." That kind of thing, which, you know, that's, there's value in that for sure.

• 29:04Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  There's a number of different ways you can respond to this though, too, right? You could, you could just turn to just abject nihilism, too, right? Like, "We're all gonna die, so what's the point?" Anyway, there's a whole nother body of research, too, terror management theory, that talks about like, when you're aware of your death, and they do all these experiments where they, you know, they call it mortality salience, where they remind people you're gonna die, and then they give them all sorts of different tests, and they find all sorts of interesting things, and, you know, "We wanna leave a legacy, because we're aware of our deaths, and it's a way for us not to die," and all that kind of stuff. But there's also, there's another side of it, too, where, um, yes, that can make you more charitable, it can make you think about your purpose more, all that. It could also make you more materialistic.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  It can also make you more pleasure-seeking and short-term-seeking, like, "Well, I'm gonna die, I may as well get it all in really quick, too."

• 29:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  So I think, that's a point that doesn't get made a lot, too.

• 29:55Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  You have to really be careful with this one, because I think there is a way, but like, you know, there's like a, you know, YOLO, "Fuck it, just whatever," hedonism, all to the max.

• 30:06Mark Manson?

  You know what this reminds me of? I don't know if this is a true story, but I remember reading about it years ago, is that there was a guy who was suicidal. He had basically planned to end his own life. But, at the last minute, he was like, "Well, you know what? I should go blow all my savings first." I remember this. So he went down, he went down to Mexico and spent all of his money on cocaine and hookers, and just like, had this insane, like, two-week bender. And then, at the end of it, he was like, "Wait, I wanna live, this is awesome."

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Okay, maybe I'm wrong. Okay.

• 30:41Mark Manson?

  I don't know what conclusion we take from any of this, but I think that's a signal to move on.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  So bring it back down to earth a little bit here. What are there any experiences you've had with death that have really brought that home for you? I mean, obviously you've talked about the one about your friend Josh.

• 30:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Early on in life, that's a big impactful one. Were there any others that you can think of that brought that home for you?

• 31:06Mark Manson?

  I think a lot of this happened early in my life without me realizing it. Like I had a number of family members and people in my life who died around me. I didn't realize till I was an adult and I actually met other people who said that they had never had anybody close to them died to realize how kind of strange my. So like three of my four grandparents died when I was growing up. I had two classmates die. My friend Josh died, like all that happened before the age of 20. And then even in my early twenties, I knew a couple of other people who passed away in like tragic circumstances. So I think I was exposed to this more than most people growing up.

• 31:48Mark Manson?

  And maybe without even being conscious of it, kind of took some of these lessons from that. I'm seeing this a lot now with my parents and that generation of my family, my aunts and uncles and everybody. They're all hitting that age where, and sorry, mom and dad, if you, when you listen to this, but it's true. It's like they're all hitting that age where it's like, okay, there's probably less than 10 good Christmases left.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16Mark Manson?

  You know, there's probably less than a half a dozen family reunions left with these people or all of these people. Like it's, we're getting down where you can count, probably count the times on two hands of like, how many really good years you're going to have with them before the health really kind of deteriorates and falls apart. So that's made me a lot more conscious of take the time. Spend the time, you know, the little things, maybe when my stepmom or my mom say something that, you know, 10 years ago would like set me off. Now I'm just like, you know what? Let it go.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:55Mark Manson?

  And just basically be grateful and try to really take advantage of the time that I have with them.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what the difference was because I feel like I was exposed to a lot of death too at a pretty young age. It seemed like I went to a lot of funerals before I was 20 as well.

• 33:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Friends and family alike. It didn't really hit home for me until a few years ago when my uncle passed away. And I was actually the one who called the ambulance for him. He was fighting cancer and thought he had a couple of years left, but yeah, one day I was helping him in the yard and we had to call the ambulance for him. And the next day he passed away and he's my uncle. He didn't have any kids, so he was very much, he was very much an uncle to us, you know, very much a friend of ours. And, you know, I was just talking to my parents about, you know, they were talking about the village it took to raise their kids and everything. And he was part of that village for sure. And I don't know what it was about him. Maybe it was just like the right

• 33:54Speaker 01

  age, you know, I was in my mid to upper 30s at the time. And yeah, it was one of those things he had just retired too. So he had, yeah, thought he had 20 years ahead of him and he ended up only having like a year or two.

• 34:05Mark Manson?

  Dude, that's the other thing.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:08Mark Manson?

  My dad had a guy who worked for him. Great, great guy. He was great. Worked for my dad for like 20, 30 years. Great, you know, worked his ass off. And he had this dream. He was basically saving everything for decades. Cause his plan was to buy, buy a sailboat and just sail. I forget what it was. It was like sail from like North America to the tip of South America and back or something. But like this huge kind of epic sailing trip that him and his wife had dreamed about for like 10, 20 years. And every extra dollar went to saving for that trip, for paying for the boat and buying all the supplies and everything. And he did this for years and years

• 34:53Mark Manson?

  and years. Everybody at the office knew he was doing it. He retired and like two months later, he got a cancer diagnosis.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  God.

• 35:02Mark Manson?

  And it like. That might have been another, because I think that happened when I was probably around eighteen or twenty and

• 35:12Mark Manson?

  I remember just looking at and thinking like, dude, don't wait for stuff like that. Like, don't fucking put it on the back burner and tell yourself one day, like, it's, if you want to do something epic, just fucking go do it.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  No, for sure. I've been thinking about that a lot recently too, just like how fortunate I was to travel when I was young and

• 35:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  and just kind of do it. And I was broke and stupid and whatever, but no regrets about that.

• 35:39Mark Manson?

  In some ways, it's better.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:41Mark Manson?

  When you're broken stupid.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Fantastic, actually, yeah.

• 35:44Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:45Mark Manson?

  You do not actually exist. You do not exist, Drew. You are a figment of this podcast's imagination. All of the listeners right now, you are, you are listening to a concept in a collection of stimuli known as Drew Birding.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  That's right. And Mark Manson. This applies to you as well.

• 36:06Mark Manson?

  No, I'm pretty sure I exist.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  What do you mean? We have you in quotation marks. What do you mean, you in quotation marks?

• 36:16Mark Manson?

  So this is, this is very Buddhist, which is this idea that your conception of who you are is really just this network of beliefs and associations that you've picked up throughout your life. You know, I am a writer. My name is Mark. I am from Texas. I am a podcaster. These are all simply associations that I've decided are true. And I can choose to identify myself by those things or not. And in Buddhism, they encourage you to not define yourself by anything. Like, what's there, when you strip away all of these associations,

• 37:00Mark Manson?

  you know, you have a name. One of the things that Buddhists say a lot is, or my old Zen master used to say a lot is, he would say, you know, you have a name, but you are not your name. You have anger, or you have happiness, but you are not angry. You are not happy. You Have an experience as a student, but you are not a student. So if you are not any of those things, what are you? What's left when you strip everything away? And the truth is nothing. There's nothing there. The same way you invent a concept in your head of, you know, the same way a sports team is just a made up concept of like,

• 37:44Mark Manson?

  somebody went to a field and painted some lines on a field and decided those 11 guys are going to stand there and those 11 guys are going to stand there. And that's this team and that's that team. Completely made up concepts that we all get together and agree are real, quote unquote, real. Your definition of yourself is the same way. You painted lines inside your head. You told yourself to go stand in certain boxes. And then you told yourself that that that was real. And we tend to go through our entire lives not realizing we did that. And it's important because so much of our suffering is derived from those lines and those boxes

• 38:27Mark Manson?

  that we painted in our heads and decided to stand in without realizing like, dude, you can just step out of that box anytime you want. Like you don't have to be that. You can just decide like, okay, I guess I'm not that thing. I'm not anything. And for me, I think this is what most people, you know, when people are introduced to Buddhism and meditation, this tends to be kind of like the first really profound insight that they experience. And it was definitely true with me. I think it's important to kind of tie it back to, I guess, more Western style therapy. It's useful because, you know, essentially what therapy is, is taking

• 39:10Mark Manson?

  these old narratives of what you decided you are or aren't based on prior experiences and helping you evaluate those and question those and and decide whether they're true or not, or whether you want to keep them or not. It's it's essentially like helping you locate where the lines and boxes are that you drew. And then helping you step out of them if you so choose.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  I have a, almost a perfect example of that, I guess, that has happened recently for me. You know, I've talked about this before. I, I have, I tend to have a pretty avoidant attachment and kind of keep people at arm's length a lot. That's a story I've told myself for a very long time. It's crazy because, you know, when I was doing research and everything like that, I studied this kind of stuff. So I knew, you know, attachment styles and attachment science and all the research around it and everything like that. And I, I intellectualize it a lot. And I came to identify as I'm avoidant. I am avoidant, like you're talking, right? That's that identity. I am avoiding and I keep people at arm's length and everything like that.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  What I've come to find, like, when I started questioning that, not only am I not as avoidant as I think I am, but I can just choose not to be. And like, I've gotten to the point where I was like, oh, I can catch myself and choose not to be and like lean into that instead.

• 40:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  And it took me far too long, far, far too long. But I've come to that point now and it's kind of a mindfuck a little bit and it's scary. You know what I mean? Like letting that go, because that was such a protective thing for me, I think, for so long.

• 40:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's one of those things that when you do make that shift, you're almost like angry at yourself. Cause you're like,

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 40:48Mark Manson?

  Wait, this was available to me the entire fucking time and I never took it.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Right. Seriously.

• 40:54Mark Manson?

  But you get so caught up in all these stories and explanations and, and, and theories and that. Yeah. You, you lose sight of the fact of like, yeah, you painted a line here. You chose to stand behind it and you can just step over anything you want.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  I think there's, there's so many instances of that, especially kind of in the modern Western therapy or the way we talk about mental health too. Like I am avoidant or I'm anxious or, you know, whatever your love language is, I need all this. And it's like, well, okay, can you step back for a second? And how much of that are you choosing really?

• 41:28Mark Manson?

  There's a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy there, right? And it's, and this comes back to kind of the trauma thing of like the danger of putting a narrative on the experience before you've like fully had the experience. Like if you tell yourself that being an avoidant is going to prevent you from having intimate relationships. Then anytime you are confronted with an intimate relationship, you're just like, You're probably less likely to be able to commit.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:57Mark Manson?

  Whereas if you remove that narrative, then and you just decide, I'm just going to experience this relationship for what it is and try not to have any judgments or preconceived notions or any narratives around it, then you're probably going to have a much higher probability of success. And I don't know, sometimes I just kind of had this thought on the fly. Like, I think sometimes what is useful in in psychology and personal development, what is useful for description is not useful for prescription. What I mean by that is like, creating these concepts and narratives can be useful to explain to people what's happening, but that explanation can unintentionally prevent them from taking the actions that will make it better.

• 42:38Mark Manson?

  And often, the the explanations and narratives that help people take action and make it better are very poor at explaining what what people are going through. And those two things probably get mixed up.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:52Mark Manson?

  Quite a bit.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  No, but I think you're right. It's the language around it that you use. If you say, I like, in my case, I am avoidant. That's different than the reason I kind of came to this realization was I started saying, I feel more comfortable when I'm the avoidant one in a relationship.

• 43:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  That completely changed my framework, just that little.

• 43:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  That little change right there. And it's like, oh, I'm acting in a certain way in these relationships.

• 43:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Uh, not necessarily that I am predestined to act that way.

• 43:18Mark Manson?

  Because when you change that language, you open up the potential for, like, if you're just avoidant and that's in the story.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:25Mark Manson?

  And it's like, well, there's nothing I'm ever going to do. I'm just always going to feel like anxious and, you know.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 43:32Mark Manson?

  Push people away from me. Whereas when you change that that language, now it's like, well, I'm naturally predisposed to feel one way, but I'm also capable of acting and experiencing other ways.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And what I found was that I actually have a way higher need for connection than I thought before. Yeah.

• 43:50Mark Manson?

  Which maybe is why you're avoidant.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  I was I was denying that. Yeah, no, seriously. Yeah, I think that is, I think that's what it is.

• 43:55Mark Manson?

  I was avoidant my entire life. And I remember linguistic jujitsu I did with myself to get me to commit to my wife was basically like, I kept telling myself. You can always break up with her, but it can't be for a stupid reason. Because I like every previous relationship, I just fucking torpedoed for the dumbest reason imaginable.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:17Mark Manson?

  And I was like, if this one ends, it can't be for a dumb reason. And so there was like all these moments throughout, like the first couple of years of our relationship where I'd like, start getting like really anxious or like worked up about something. And I'd be like, I don't know if I can be with her anymore. And then I'm like, wait a second, that's a dumb reason. Like, just like go, go sleep on it, uh, try again tomorrow. And, uh, when I like created a rule for myself of like, you know, no ending relationships for dumb reasons. What do you know? I ended up happily married for 12 years.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's those, it's those reframes like that, you know, situations around your identities. Just reframe them in a small way and it usually really eventually at least lead to a bigger, bigger shift.

• 44:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah, cool. Well, I'm not feeling any less French than I was an hour ago. Uh, but who knows what we'll feel next time? I think that's it for our episode, so be sure to like and subscribe. Leave a review, leave a comment, comment on my poor, poor French abilities. But seriously, thank you for following the show. We'll be back next week with another guest. Until next time, say goodbye, Drew.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Au revoir.

• 45:26Mark Manson?

  Oh, whoa.