21 Lessons from 999 Episodes

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live To celebrate 999, almost 1000, episodes of Modern Wisdom, I broke down some of my favourite lessons, insights and quotes from the last hundred episodes. Expect to learn how 999 episodes of Modern Wisdom have reshaped my understanding of happiness, success and relationships, what i've learned on losing points from Naval Ravikant & Roger Federer, the best isnights on self-belief from Vincent van Gogh, what Viktor Frankl’s paradox of meaning versus pleasure means to me, the biggest insights I've gained over 7 years and 1 billion plays, why lowering your threshold for joy makes you stronger, how busyness can act as an emotional gastric band, the paradox men face between ambition and self-acceptance, how our culture rewires romantic attraction around emotional unavailability, and much more... - 0:00 Ringing in 999 Videos 4:39 Why We Need to Take Pleasure in the Small Things 11:08 Productivity is the Same as Gastric Band Surgery 20:59 Every Man Needs Love to Thrive 31:16 How Can We Find Balance in Meaning and Pleasure? 39:22 Uncertainty is a Roadblock to Happiness 46:22 Is Modern Culture Pushing Woman to Pick Emotionally Unavailable Men? 01:03:25 The Cassandra Complex 01:18:42 7 Lessons About Worrying and Overthinking 01:29:07 How Can We Slow Down Time? 01:38:24 We Need to Escape Our Old Self to Embrace Our New One 01:45:27 Errors in Hesitation are Equal to Errors in Action 01:50:41 Onwards and Upwards - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:02Chris Williamson?

  999 episodes.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  Don't know what to say, really.

• 0:13Chris Williamson?

  It's a lot and I wouldn't have thought that it was even half that number if it hadn't been for the fact that they were all recorded and numbered. And on Monday, episode 1000 goes live with Matthew McConaughey on the biggest video wall in Texas with a real life airstream reversed onto the set. And I'm about to go on tour. So it kind of all feels, there's a lot of chaos happening at the moment. It's very exciting.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  But it's been interesting getting to do this, preparing for this episode and sort of reflecting on seven and a half years of not really knowing what I'm doing and hoping that something good and useful comes out of it. And we just crossed a billion plays, which is also very flattering. But it's felt like a period of reflection. And today I'm going to take you through some of the best lessons that I think I've ever learned. And it's from the last 100 episodes only, or since February time, stuff from the newsletter, things I've read, ideas that I've taken from the podcast.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  But I've worked really hard. So if this, if 999 is a flop, we'll just throw this one in the bin, chalk it up that I fucked it. And McConaughey's phenomenal on Monday. So you just, but I think this one's really special. I hope it's going to be. I did mention I'm going on tour. A lot of those shows are sold out. So Toronto sold out, Los Angeles is sold out, Austin, no, Nashville sold out and Vancouver are all sold out, but there are still tickets available if you want to go and see me on tour, chriswilliamson.live. I'm doing New York on Thursday, October 23rd at the Town Hall. I am doing Toronto, that sold out, all of those are sold out. Boston at the Wilbur Thursday, November 13th, Chicago at the Vic Friday, November 14th.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  At the Paramount, the adopted hometown show on Thursday, November 20th. Salt Lake City, the complex, Thursday, December 4th. Denver, Paramount Theatre, Friday, December 5th. And that's it, because Vancouver's sold out. All of those are available now at chriswilliamson.live. So you can go and get those tickets. It's a huge show. It's sold out in London. It sold out in Australia. It's an hour and a half long of just me. Zach Talander is warming up, playing music. There's a Q and A at the end. There's a meet and greet. There's, it's all happening. So go and get your tickets now. Also, I wanted to give you a gift. In true British fashion, try and give back after giving 999 episodes.

• 2:53Chris Williamson?

  I have made a playlist of music. This has been something that's been requested for quite a while. And I've made the Modern Wisdom Bangers playlist, which is all of the stuff that I listen to. A lot of tracks that you'll have heard me speak about on the show, use in vlogs that Max, the videographer, will have used in those, plus just stuff that kind of inspires me generally. There is a lot of metal, emo stuff, alternative music, grime, drum and bass. It's everything. And you can get that, you can go and get the brand new Modern Wisdom Bangers playlist at chriswillx.com/bangers. You can go and save that playlist. I hope it's cool. I really enjoyed putting it together and sort of thinking about music taste.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, before we even get started, thank you to everyone who's supported the show. Those of you that have been here from, you know, the early hundreds episodes. Think about this, if you listened, if you started listening to this show on episode 499, you were in the first 50%. 499 episodes, and you're in the first 50% of listeners arriving. Which is crazy. You know, up to that point, we'd already had Peterson on, I think, maybe twice. James Clear had been on, Robert Greene had been on, Rory Sutherland had been on a ton of times. We'd done 30 Lifehacks episodes. Just about moved countries.

• 4:18Chris Williamson?

  So very strange, but feeling the love at the moment. And I'm super fired up. The next few months have got the biggest episodes that we've ever done. The run that we recorded in London is out of this world. So I very much appreciate you all. Enough waffle and retrospective whimsy from me. Let's get into some lessons. All right, first one. I've been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures. It's a quote from Visakhkanth Verasamy that says, "I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things. We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large. The day that we get married, the night that we play the main stage

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  at Glastonbury, the moment that the business sells for $100 million. Anything less and the entry doesn't even make the ledger. We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. And you think, oh, that little thing made your day. That small moment made your week. How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive. You must not have a lot going on. We roll our eyes at the tiny events that others get excited at as though joy must be proportionate to scale.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  And yet, life is made up of little things exactly like this. Not once in a while, always. Your life is entirely constructed out of moments so small they wouldn't even register as events on someone's calendar. So why can't something small be something great? Well, I realized sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should do, including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should do. And also, including the shame of being delighted by little things more than I think I should.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  And I felt like it was as if taking pleasure in something tiny revealed the smallness of my life. But maybe that's exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of a life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil. And here's the payoff. When you lower the threshold for joy, you don't just get more of it, you get it now. Like, who is truly the more impressive person? The one who requires a grand cathedral of bullshit, fanfare and galactic accomplishment in order to get the slightest flicker of pleasure, like some masochist at a sex party

• 7:09Chris Williamson?

  demanding car batteries get clamped onto his nipples before he can even get started? Or the person who can do it with a good coffee and a fresh breeze? This feels like a test of emotional robustness. If the only experiences you allow to bring you joy are big, impressive and rare, then your happiness is brittle. You've made it dependent on external circumstances lining up in just the right way. You have taken your joy hostage until the ransom note of life offers you something sufficiently worth it. We are already primed to be easy to trigger,

• 7:54Chris Williamson?

  just not in the right direction. Like, think about this. We already let the tiniest inconveniences ruin our mood. A slow barista, the wifi buffering, a traffic jam that adds seven minutes to our commute. So our threshold for irritation is comically low, but our threshold for joy is absurdly high. A stranger's smile doesn't count. A great song coming on shuffle is not enough. Throwing a towel into the washing basket from across the room, that's lame. If something as insignificant as a red light can make you snap, why can't a good coffee make you glow? We are already easily tipped into frustration.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  So you have to work equally hard to be as easy to tip into delight. So Joe Hudson says enjoyment is efficiency. The less grandiosity that you need to feel good, the more happiness coins that you get to pick up across your day. So a good challenge is how little of a thing could happen to make your day. That's a great question to ask. How little of a thing could happen to make your day? How much excitement could you squeeze out of clean bed sheets? Or the smell of rain on hot pavement? Or a cool breeze when you step outside? Small wins might seem feeble,

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  but refusing to take joy from mundane victories simply because they're insufficiently grand is the same as refusing a free ride to the airport just because you're getting on a plane when you arrive there. So ask yourself this. What if something small could be something great? Most people already have a high threshold for joy. Do not make it worse by feeling shame when little things break through your defenses and make you smile. I adore this idea because it speaks to, you know, sort of frankly, this odd sense of shame

• 10:03Chris Williamson?

  that I have had about taking pleasure in small things being a comment on not being impressive enough. That there is this kind of embarrassment that, you know, seeing a cute golden retriever on your morning walk is enough to make your morning. Because how small does your life have to be? That that's the thing that breaks through. But it just seems to me that if, if you hold your happiness hostage, you have got the entire idea of how happiness is supposed to work upside down. And even if you have the most grand extravagant life, you're going from private jet to Michelin star restaurant

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  to rock concert to art exhibition to, you know, LSD, whatever it is. Like even in between those things, there are opportunities for you to have your day made by something small. And yeah, I, I've since thinking about that idea more. It has made a huge impact on me. So what if something small could be something great? Similarly to that, I talked about this idea from Joe Hudson that operate a guy to idea guy, which is you need to think about where productivity comes from a little bit more carefully. And I also realized that there is surprisingly an analogy between gastric band surgery and being busy.

• 11:29Chris Williamson?

  So the gastric band surgery of being busy is after ongoing gastric band surgery, people's risk of suicide tends to go up. And that's perhaps unsurprising because gastric band surgery is a big deal and can sometimes have complications, infections, painful outcomes. You're literally like putting a belt around your stomach to make it smaller so that you can't eat as much. It's like the old school version of Ozempic. Like, you know, you're physically getting in there and having to limit the space. But one of the unseen reasons for this increased suicide risk is actually due to the surgery going right, not it going wrong.

• 12:11Chris Williamson?

  So you understand gastric band surgery, lots of complications, infections, painful outcomes. But it going right can have as bad of an impact on people as it going wrong. Many patients used food as a way to deal with issues in their lives, emotional challenges, loneliness, anxiety. And after having their stomach shrunk, the ability to use food as a comforting crutch has been taken away. But the emotional challenges that they were using food to deal with still remain. So the coping mechanism has been taken away and it forces patients now to face their issues without a release valve.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  And I think that there is an equivalent dynamic happening when you try to elevate your life, to take your sense of self-worth from things other than your work and your level of busyness. So let's say that in the past you used busyness and chaos as a way to distract yourself from feeling unwanted emotions. It meant that you didn't need to reflect on your decisions or sit in discomfort, that you're moving so quickly that you never fully connect with the things that are happening in your life. Lost relationships, disconnected friends.

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  Poor decisions, accumulated negative character traits that all swept away so quickly that you don't even have time to consider them by manic work rate. So eventually you realize that chaotic busyness is not your highest calling in life and maybe you value different things now, or maybe you've outgrown that phase of your life, or maybe you realize that busyness for busyness's sake is detaching you from connecting to your existence. So the question here is, what happens when this coping mechanism gets taken away? You are forced to face your issues without the highly distracting release valve that you're used to.

• 14:11Chris Williamson?

  The busyness anesthetic that you used to previously rely on has now been removed, leaving you with two choices. One, ignore the lesson that chaos is not fulfillment and go back down the road you just escaped from by force-feeding your way through this figurative gastric band. Number two, actually learn to handle emotional discomfort without distracting yourself with work. And gastric bands, I guess, in the world of Ozempic, are kind of like an old archaic technology, but I do think that the analogy works, that you have this realization that comes in with regards to your busyness. Hey, maybe this isn't where I should take most of my self-worth from.

• 14:56Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I am hiding the deeper levels of connection between me and the world in my chaos and this heavily built-out calendar. What is it? A busy calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness. Okay, so that's kind of the, what do you call like the cognitive gastric band. You've had this thing wrapped around you. Okay, I've really limited my capacity to do that old workload and not feel sick by it.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  Why were you working that hard? Maybe because you just have raw ambition and I, I, I wanna make the most of my life. I'm gonna make a dent in the world. I'm gonna do all of these things. Yeah, and that will be some of it.

• 15:39Chris Williamson?

  But that's not all of it, man. Like, it's a coping mechanism. Like, what are you hiding from? You're hiding from something. And even if you're not hiding from something, you will have hidden things by being that busy. Or maybe more accurately, you will have been a, been unable to notice things by being that busy. So it's either notice, hide, or from being so busy, have hidden. And then when the busyness goes away, start to notice. So either way, if the busyness begins to slow down, stuff tends to bubble to the surface. And look, like, I'm fucking speaking to myself here, okay? All of these are thinly veiled autobiographical notes to self. But it's a challenge. Where do I take my sense of self-worth from now?

• 16:24Chris Williamson?

  How am I going to deal with not being able to hide emotions in?

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  Sweeping them under the rug of bravado and momentum is a good way to think about it. And there's this idea from Ryan Holiday that says, be quiet, work hard and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. And that sounds fantastic. Apart from the fact that working hard often stops you from being able to remain sane, especially if you push it. If, if we accept, and I think this is true, that peace is a performance enhancer, that if you are unpeaceful, if you are in dysregulated states all of the time, you don't get to access creativity, which is the highest lever that you've got. You're not enjoying the work, so your motivation is going to decrease every single day.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Even if, even if each time that you do a thing, it only saps 0.1% of your motivation.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  I'm about to hit episode 1000, I would be at 0% motivation. And there have been times when the way that I have done work has been net negative to my motivation. So if you want to do a thing for a very long time, like over seven and a half years, which is I guess how long I've been doing the show, I've done it a pretty quick clip, right? Like a thousand episodes in seven and a half years is pretty quick. Like even if I'd only lost 0.1% of my motivation each episode, I would, I would be in the red, right? I would be overdrawn by now. It is not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity. And I think that that's because so many people make trades that they, in the moment, seem, it seems smart, but in retrospect, you realize was actually the thing that was supposed to keep you going.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  So given that, we know that dialing back a little bit of the workload, having a little bit of balance. Once you've reached escape velocity, this is not for you in the first five years of doing whatever you're doing. Like end yourself, that's the job. The job is nose goes against grindstone, sleep is out of the window, the candle gets burned on three ends. That's what you're supposed to do. Okay, let's assume you've got to a little bit of escape velocity, there's some momentum. Now you need to ask yourself some deeper questions because the monster that you created inside of yourself to deal with the challenges at the start of your journey is very difficult to handle, becomes super unwieldy and undisciplined later in your journey. And if you don't step in soon enough,

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  it's no longer like a, a dog on a leash pulling you forward. It's more like a parasite that's grown inside of you and is staring out of your eyes. Like the difference between you and the drive is very hard to pull apart. And I think that's why I've been talking about this so much recently, that this last 12 months, I've really tried sort of ask myself the question, who am I if I'm not busy all the time? Or who am I if busyness isn't my primary contribution to the stuff that I do?

• 19:24Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hard question, it's a really hard question to answer. But Mark Manson as well, just had this banger from the start of the year, which was, before you win, everyone will ask you why you're working so hard. And after you win, everyone will remind you how lucky you got.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  Hormozzi twisted that into before you win, everyone will ask you why you're working so hard. And after you win, everyone will ask you why you're working so hard.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  If that doesn't just go to show that most people are not worth listening to, like myself included, right? But I do think that this is true, like the like self grandiosity of every person that's just come upon a, an idea that they can't stop talking about. I think this one's got some legs to it. All right. Most people are not worth listening to, me included, but this one's got some legs. So do your own assessment. Your results may vary, but it's tough. Letting go of busyness, leaning into

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  what would a little bit of calm be like for a while? And then turning that up and turning that up and turning that up? Because why did you work so hard if it was just to allow yourself to work harder in the future?

• 20:33Chris Williamson?

  That's not to say that working hard isn't enjoyable, but that by working hard, you don't fully get to connect with life because it sweeps lots of things under the rug. And it is a coping mechanism. It is an obese person using food as a crutch. You are obese with your workload. You are a workload fatty and you are continuing to eat. And that is how you deal with your problems. So think about what it would be like to go on a diet. Before we continue, you might not realize it, but mouth breathing at night is wrecking your sleep, recovery and energy the next day. And all of that is actually fixed massively by this here. This is intake, which is a nose strip dilator. And I've been using it every

• 21:17Chris Williamson?

  night for over a year now. I tried pretty much everyone in the world. And this is by far the best. It's a hard, plastic strip as opposed to a soft, flimsy disposable thing. Intake opens up your nostrils using patented magnetic technology. So you get more air in with every breath. It means less snoring, deeper sleep, faster recovery and better focus the next day. The problem with most nasal strips is that they peel off. They irritate your skin. They don't actually solve the issue. This sucker is a, I mean, I'm not going to shoot a bullet at it, but it's very, very strong. It's reusable and comfortable enough that you forget it's even there. That is why it's trusted by pro athletes, busy parents, and over a million customers who just want to breathe and sleep better. And I'm one. One of them. I've used them every single night for over 12 months now. They're the best.

• 22:02Chris Williamson?

  There's a 90 day money back guarantee, so you can try it for three months. And if you don't like it, if you haven't got better sleep, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally and offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get 15% off your first order by going to the link in the description below or heading to intakebreathing.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's intakebreathing.com/ModernWisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. All right, next one. This is fucking money. Some advice on how to support men. Men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short. Men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak. Men want to believe that they can be more without feeling like they're not already enough.

• 22:47Chris Williamson?

  Men want to be able to open up without being judged. Men want support without feeling broken. Men want to be loved for who they are, not for what they do. So the TLDR is blending inspiration with compassion is not an easy task. You could even say blending aspiration with compassion is not an easy task. So a question that every guy has asked themselves is how do I set lofty goals? Which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow? And the desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside the mind of everyone.

• 23:32Chris Williamson?

  But men especially. Sure, some men are all drive and goals with non-introspection. And sure, some men are all reflection and inner work with few external desires. But I think most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support.

• 23:56Chris Williamson?

  Inevitably, these two things come into conflict. Basically, every man just wants to hear, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And I'm with you no matter what.

• 24:21Chris Williamson?

  If you, as a person that's close to a man in his life, can say those two sentences to him.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how few men have ever heard that. I know you can be more, but you are enough already. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And I'm with you no matter what.

• 25:03Chris Williamson?

  What better of a platform, Launchpad,

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  to begin a limitless vision of what you can do with your life than that? This blend of

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  aspiration and compassion. Sturgill Simpson's mom, he's got this, he's got this great line in one of his songs. Sturgill Simpson's mom says, "Boy, I don't care if you hit it big because you're already number one." And I just get the sense that that, this is the, the challenge that we have with men, right? We often talk about the challenge that we have with women. They are emotional and, and hard to understand. And what do they really mean when they say that thing? And, and they passive aggressive, but they, you know, sometimes aggressive, but sometimes, you know, submissive, but sometimes dominant. And how do I, you know, okay, I get it. I get it. And I've highlighted enough on this show about some of the challenges

• 26:06Chris Williamson?

  of sort of women's internal mental states. But this is a fucking big one. And you as a man need to admit this, you need to admit this to yourself and you need to admit it to the people around you. Because you are hard to deal with. If you're a guy who aims high and is introspective, which I get the sense is

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  a lot of the modern wisdom audience. It's between 80% on YouTube and like 70% on audio platforms, guys.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  You have not been able to listen to me waffle on about emotions and feelings and introspection and mindfulness and moments of peace and a realistic path to enlightenment if you do not do the reflection thing. But also, there's way too much homozygote, go and fucking end worlds, Goggins mode, Jocko stuff for you to not also aim high. So I think I can make a fair assumption, even though I don't know you, that you are the sort of person who reflects and aspires at the same time. And this is why this comes into land.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  It meets reality when you want to feel supported without feeling broken, like you're able to open up without being judged, like you believe that you can be more without feeling like you're not enough already, like your suffering is recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak, like you can aim high without feeling insufficient if you fall short. This is the challenge of a mindful Chad trying to make his way through the world. You understand that you want to achieve lots of things,

• 27:54Chris Williamson?

  but you also don't want to look past the present moment. You know that connecting with the world around you is really important, but that too much connection can actually limit your outcomes, that the outcomes are important, but they're also not everything. This desire for self-love and high performance comes into contact right here, inside the mind of men especially. And yeah, I think, look, how much can we say this to ourselves? Maybe a bit, but I get the sense that we wouldn't have this type of drive if the people in our lives had said this to us more previously. So you can do your stuff, you can continue

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  to turn up and do the work. But if you're someone that is around a guy that is feeling this sort of challenge. I know you can be more, but you are enough already. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. And you're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And I'm with you no matter what. That being said, if you're a guy whose girl listens to the show, which is a lot of them.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  She texts you either of those things. So maybe run that through chat GPT perhaps and like, you know, get a couple of adjustments or alterations. There's, I guess, an interesting parallel here with a stat that George from the Tin Men sent me to do with male suicide, which is 91% of middle aged men who died by suicide sought help by the services that we tell men to always turn to. 91% of men who took their own lives in middle age had already opened up

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  to support hotlines, mental health, suicide awareness, stuff like that. So the men need to open up more thing just in some ways is not working. And I don't know what it is. I don't know where the fissure, the crack, the gap is that men are falling through. Maybe it's a lack of understanding about what men need when they open up. Maybe it's that the guys are struggling to use the right language in order to be able to communicate what they need. If they do get into these conversations, like just opening up, right? Seeking help does not mean that you engaged with the help. I'm happy to lay this at the feet of some men, but

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  the one thing that we can say is it's not working. So what does a healthier approach to trying to compassionately inspire men? Like, that's it, right? Like compassionate inspiration is what we're looking for. This acceptance of shortcomings whilst a vision for something great.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a paradox. It's a paradox, right? Both of those sentences that I think would make any man melt.

• 30:38Chris Williamson?

  The paradox is you are enough already, but you can be more. I will be here right beside you and I love you as you are. And I will still love you even if you become bigger. But I know that you want to become big, but it's tough. It's tough to navigate.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  And I think it's important for guys to recognize that conflict inside of themselves. I think it's really, really fucking important because you are difficult in different ways to women. You are difficult. And, you know, to bring this into land for the girls, like,

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  should you be babying the men in your life?

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  If you see this as babying, you are not the sort of partner that is ready for the kind of guy that listens to this show. However, we do need to put a sort of utilitarian rational justification down on the table and

• 31:37Chris Williamson?

  women need men to be successful. Well, why? Women can look after themselves. They're out earning men, they're out educating men socio-economically, so on and so forth. Yep. Most of them want to be in a relationship. Most of them want to be in a long-term committed marriage. And male unemployment is not good for marital success. When women lose their jobs, there is no impact on divorce likelihood. When men lose their jobs, the chance of divorce goes up by 33%. That means if you have undriven men, the likelihood that you, as the woman in their life, gets divorced, has just gone up by 33%. It is in your interests, both

• 32:20Chris Williamson?

  rationally, objectively, subjectively, astrally, fucking karmically, it is in your interests to support the men in your life. Compassionate inspiration is the way to do it.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  And

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  that was a rant. That was a rant. I'm all, I'm all fired up on episode 999.

• 32:44Chris Williamson?

  Another one that I did, this is one of the fucking coolest ideas. All of these, I said at the start, like, I'm blowing, I'm fellating myself, but I've done 999 episodes. Give me, give me a break. Also, wasn't 999 like the inverse of the devil's number? Isn't this God's number or something? Because 666 is the number of the beast. I don't know. We can say that.

• 33:06Chris Williamson?

  I've been trying to work on this idea for a really long time. And again, these are thinly veiled. I actually just totally transparent autobiographical notes to self, but.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  I love this idea. Viktor Frankl has this famous quote where he says, "When a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure." So Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void. And perhaps for many, maybe, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. And this is Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.

• 33:59Chris Williamson?

  So if ease and grace and joy and playfulness do not come easily to you, one solution is to ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and just always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. The TLDR is that you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness does not come easily to you. The problem is that delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.

• 34:42Chris Williamson?

  Alan Watts has got this idea, "If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them." Everyone is taught that on the other side of discomfort is something valuable. We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain, they would not be worthwhile. And this is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult. But just because it's difficult does not mean it's worthwhile. Doing something well doesn't make it important.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Some people are hyper responders to that instruction. And they go on to become workaholics and insecure overachievers. And from the outside, this looks like you've transcended the shallow need for pleasure. But in reality, it's just cope to avoid facing the fact that you struggle to feel joy. So instead, you perpetually promise yourself that happiness might finally come tomorrow. But like, running toward the horizon, tomorrow never arrives. Congratulations, you've managed to subjugate your joy as tribute to your work.

• 36:07Chris Williamson?

  Do not mistake humorless and fun lacking seriousness with being sophisticated and caring about your pursuit. You took type A advice for type B people and turned it into a fucking religion. Thoreau said, "The price of anything is the amount of life that you exchange for it." And by this logic, many of us are paying into a bank account that we never withdraw from. Permanently winning the marshmallow test results in you never actually arriving at a moment where you cash in your efforts for rewards.

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  And in anticipation, this sounds like building up to some amazingly impressive moment, which will make all the pain worth it. But in retrospect, I get the sense that this will just feel like a series of miserable successes, where you never stopped to actually enjoy your time on this planet. You need to do at least a bit of what you care about now, as opposed to banking on finding time for it in the future. Once the decks are cleared and life's duties are out of the way, life's duties will never be out of the way. And so if you really mean it,

• 37:33Chris Williamson?

  when you say that you'd like to write a novel or spend more time with your aging parents or fighting climate change or having fun, at some point, you're just going to have to start doing it. And that's from Oliver Berkman.

• 37:50Chris Williamson?

  This is a suite, I guess, of challenges that we're talking about today. And a lot of them are in tension with each other. Right, this sort of desire for drive whilst realizing that it's a coping mechanism. This need for inspiration and aspiration whilst also realizing that compassion is something that's important. This understanding that you do need to delay gratification. But if you're the sort of person that takes delay gratification advice to heart, you probably are a hyper responder and didn't need to hear more of it. You actually needed to hear. Maybe you should cash some of that in. But I think that idea that Frankl's inverse law, when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  I see in a lot of my friends that

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  they became serious about pursuits and found that meaning was easier to attain than happiness was. That

• 38:48Chris Williamson?

  working, work was easier than play, actually. There's this idea, I think, about the ancient Greek word for work was translated as not at leisure. So leisure was the set point and work was the aberration. And the people who are ruled by Frankl's inverse law see the opposite. They see work as the set point and leisure as the aberration. And again, like letting go of this, like fuck, like I have to, I want to build the life that I want. I want to get out of the country or the fucking culture or the wealth bracket that I've been born into or that I fell into or that I stumbled backward into.

• 39:31Chris Williamson?

  I have to create this special kind of monster inside of me in order to be able to do that. And yes, you do.

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  But if you never let go of it, you end up, it's like a dose response curve thing, right? This kind of an interesting idea from medicine. Some, maybe most drugs have a dose response curve. You can see it as kind of a U like that. Too little and not much happens. The right amount and something happens. Too much and something bad happens like the.

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  Ensuring that if you don't work hard enough, things in your life will not go well. If you work too hard, things in your life will not go well. If you work just about the right amount, things in your life will probably go great. And working out where that line is, is the task of the perennial over thinker. The insecure overachiever has to always be asking the question, do I need to put my foot on the gas more or less? And if you find yourself regularly outworking all of the people around you, and then not choosing to do it, I think that maybe you should consider just lifting that foot off a little bit.

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  Before we continue, getting mobile data while traveling is still way harder than it should be. Public wifi is sketchy, roaming charges are the worst, and buying SIM cards in a foreign language after a 12-hour flight is about as fun as playing with a dead moth, which is where Saily comes in. It's an app that gives you instant access to eSIM data plans in over 190 countries so that you can get online the moment that you land. No more fumbling around with physical SIMs, no more talking to a human to set it up, and no more holding your phone in the air like Simba, looking for a signal. Just open the app, choose a plan, and you are instantly connected. Best of all, the plans start at just a few bucks. There's no subscription and you only pay for what you need. And if you haven't activated your data plan or installed the eSIM, Saily offers a full refund within 30 days, no questions asked. Right now, you can get 15% off any data plan by going to the link in the description below

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  or heading to sailey.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's S A I L Y dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Another idea, I've been thinking about impediments to happiness, and I can see two obvious roadblocks. First one is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or the future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes, this is an actual change that you need to make to leave an unhappy relationship, a change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation. And we often will remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  Second roadblock to happiness is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. And happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination, and your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality.

• 43:24Chris Williamson?

  However, this imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. Sometimes, these situations overlap. A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis, and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and don't know how they're feeling overnight. We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply. So, if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  I really think, I really think that there's a lot to this, these two impediments to happiness, right? That you want things to be different and things are uncertain. I mean, a great description about how anxiety works is...

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  You're unable to work out what's going to happen in the future.

• 44:32Chris Williamson?

  So your mind imagines, it invests a lot of time and energy into lots of alternative scenarios in the hopes that if you had already seen how those scenarios might occur, if they do occur, you are better prepared for them. If you know that one thing is going to happen, you can still be anxious about it, but the anxiety takes on kind of a different tone. And I think that this prediction error of the future is perfectly explained by the fact that we would rather genuinely, genuinely rather imagine a nightmare than deal with uncertainty. Like, it does collapse down. If it's the worst thing, it's cancer,

• 45:16Chris Williamson?

  it's cancer under gluten intolerance and an infidelity at the same, and a divorce at the same time. It's all of those things together somehow. That is horrible and weirdly more satisfying than thinking, I don't know what it is. There was this idea around COVID called compensatory control. When people were asked to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis in the lab,

• 45:49Chris Williamson?

  imagine that this is the diagnosis that you were given on a medical report, they were more likely to see meaningless patterns in random static on a TV. They basically saw trends where there were none. They tried to bring order even into situations that were chaotic. And the connection to this and COVID was that even before the lab leak had sufficient

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  Evidence behind it, like the people that say that they were prescient and understood that this was a thing, other than there is a place in Wuhan that does this and the virus started in Wuhan, like other than those two things, which is quite a bit, but not everything, nobody knew because there weren't any stats. And now it seems like the zoological origin and the RNA sequence, all this stuff, there's maybe a little bit more. My point is a lot of the people that were early on that, you were, I think, leaning heavily into compensatory control because it is far easier to believe that a pathogen exists because

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  of some malign scientist than the chance mutation of some silly little microbe. And even if this is the case, even if it is a lab leak, that lab leak hypothesis is true, you can't deny that it is much more comforting to be able to work it out by human motivation and carelessness or evilness or the CCP trying to take over or whatever. Like that is a story that we can all understand. What we can't understand is asteroids are random and sometimes they hit Earth. Well, do we, did we deserve it? Like, think about the personification of the reason for this happening. Oh, this is judgment from, for something

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  that we have done. This is righteous retribution. Why? Why do we need that story? Well, it's some people's beliefs, but on top of that, it wrangles randomness into certainty. And this is obviously an impediment to happiness, as far as I can see. Fucking plainly gets in the way of our happiness because how are you supposed to be happy if you want things to be different? If you are unhappy right now, you're ruminating about the past, you're dreaming about the future, you're never in the present, you, you're holding your happiness hostage again. And if you've got uncertainty, that's just, that's like a fucking multiplier. And like I say, sometimes you argue with your partner and you don't know how they're

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  feeling overnight. So you want to not be arguing and you've got uncertainty about how they feel. A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. I want it to be different and I have uncertainty together. And I think this is like a real potent cocktail of dissatisfaction that often occurs in our lives.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  Next one, I I wrote a pretty spicy article, I think. Is pop culture teaching women to choose emotionally unavailable men?

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  Maybe. What's the weirdest propaganda that you feel like movies have tried to push on you in your lifetime? For me, I grew up with tons and tons of movies that kept saying that the worst thing a man could be is a grown up. You'd see a love triangle of romances where the guy you're supposed to be rooting against. His only sin is that he's kind of normal. He's got a job and stuff, but then some other guy, a bad boy, would come along. And it doesn't matter that he sleeps in his car. Or if both of the guys are financially stable, you're supposed to root for the one that is less emotionally stable. The one that's more childlike. Jason Pargan just broke my brain with this insight.

• 49:43Chris Williamson?

  I think it's so right, like, modern romance culture isn't just telling stories. It's shaping selection criteria. Across movies, media, even mainstream dating advice, women are being subtly conditioned to seek out emotional unavailability and volatility as signs of desirability. And the result is a generation of women confusing conflict with compatibility and drama with depth and and brokenness with misery.

• 50:15Chris Williamson?

  Rather than choosing partners based on emotional maturity or shared values or long term compatibility, many are drawn to conflict, aloofness and unavailability. It's the he's hard to love, but I can fix him fantasy, repackaged and repackaged in everything from films to novels. In The Notebook, Ali chooses Noah, the poor, impulsive, deeply emotional man, over Lon, her secure and respectable fiance.

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  What's the conclusion? Stability is boring and true love is obsessive, chaotic and all-consuming. In Titanic, the scene that makes you like Jack more than Rose's wealthy fiancee Cal is that, for fun, Cal just sits and has quiet conversations with his friends, whereas Jack has fun with big, loud parties. And the movie portrays this as him living more authentically or living life to its fullest. But really, he's just living like a teenager. He has nothing to offer Rose in terms of reliability or safety, yet this brief fiery connection is portrayed as more authentic than anything she could have had with a professional fiancee.

• 51:32Chris Williamson?

  In Twilight, Edward Cullen is dangerous and obsessive and emotionally tortured, and that is precisely what makes him desirable. Bella's rejection of Jacob, who's warm and grounded, underscores the trope. Right? Safe is boring. Danger is hot. Beauty and the Beast takes it even further by literalizing the fantasy. Love turns rage and violence into virtue. Similarly, A Star is Born presents Ally's rise and Jackson Maine's spiral as tragically intertwined. Her love is deepened, not diminished, by how much he unravels.

• 52:16Chris Williamson?

  This is a twist on something called the Byronic hero. It's a literary archetype based on the persona of poet Lord Byron. He's usually emotionally isolated or unavailable. He's often morally ambiguous or anti-heroic. He's at odds with society or authority, possesses a tragic past or trauma, and women are often drawn to him despite his destructiveness. Even modern women's advice keeps repackaging difficult as passionate. Teen Vogue runs headlines like "Super Bad: Why are smart girls drawn to bad boys?" "The Sun gushes about why the sexiest stars go for the bad man."

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  The takeaway is, if he's cold, complicated, or broken, he must be worth it. Safety is sterile and suffering is sexy.

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  There's a neuroscience trick being played on us all here, though. Things that are valuable are often hard to get, but just because something is hard to get does not mean it's valuable, which is why scarcity and unavailability are often mistaken for worth. Romance stories reward the woman who wins the affection of the aloof or emotionally damaged man. The harder he is to access, the more meaningful his eventual affection feels. In reality, sure, perhaps there is a noble savage who can be saved by the right woman, but realistically, this just prioritizes partners who are not capable of commitment

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  over ones who already are put together and ready to go.

• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  Typically, coyness isn't love. It's emotional immaturity masquerading as romantic spark. The problem is that intermittent reinforcement is the exact mechanism that drives addiction. You are not in love, you're hooked. Variable schedule reward is the bull's eye of dopamine. It's how slot machines work and why social media is so compelling. Our brain says, if something is scarce, it must be more precious. And we take this economic dynamic into our love lives. So if someone stops texting us, or we feel like they're drifting, all of a sudden our brain says, they must be important.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  If they say, here I am, I genuinely like you and very much want to commit. Our brains respond with, what's wrong with you?

• 54:54Chris Williamson?

  If you treat me like crap and you're in and out of my life and you text me a bit and then you go cold and I don't hear from you.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  Many people think they might be the one.

• 55:06Chris Williamson?

  It is no coincidence that so many modern relationships do not begin with mutual understanding, but with a chase. We have taught women to interpret emotional inconsistency as romantic tension, to pursue the man who offers breadcrumbs of affection instead of consistent support, to believe that love is meant to be hard-earned, not freely given. And this has real consequences. It normalizes dysfunction. It rewires attraction around trauma. It sidelines healthy men and glorifies emotionally stunted ones. And it leaves women feeling like emotional burnout is the price that they have to pay for passion.

• 55:48Chris Williamson?

  Emotionally mature, transparently keen, and immediately available men are ignored in place of someone who amounts to little more than an effective dopamine trigger. This is why so many guys have so little sympathy for the "where are all of the good men at?" question. Whether it's through painful personal experience or by being subliminally reminded of it in pop culture, men who are ready to commit are fearful of doing so because they've noticed that many women seem to like them more and soften up when they're mistreated and kept guessing. I saw this comment from a guy on Instagram which encapsulates this perfectly.

• 56:32Chris Williamson?

  He said, "I'm trapped in a generation where I don't know whether to buy her flowers or ignore her to get her to like me." Men will do what women demand of them in order to get laid. Women set the standards for sex, and men meet them. There's this idea from Roy Baumeister. He says, "Although this might be considered an unflattering characterization, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex and perhaps not a great deal more. One of us characterized this in previous work as, if women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks. If, in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic, or be funny, then men will do precisely that." So, similarly, if men need to be broken, flaky, non-committal, and inconsistent, they will meet these standards appropriately.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Women's mate choices, modern romance culture and girl magazines are not at fault for emotionally unavailable behaviour in men. But they're not totally unrelated to it either. What is needed is a clearer picture of healthy connection. Alain de Botton had this wonderful insight where he said, "It can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic sounding realisation. We should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us from the start, without the need for persuasion, without any call for begging or chasing or

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  strategic withholding of affection or visits to therapy, just plainly and simply keen, open and ready from the get-go. We may tolerate a prospective partner who tells us that they like us a lot, but that they will be only available to see us again in a month, or someone who casually mentions they are presently trying to decide between us and three other suitors, or a compelling career abroad, or someone who can never bring themselves to initiate sex or hold our hand in public. A bit deeper into our relationships, we may similarly not spot that it might be less than ideal to be trying to convince someone that they should go to therapy so that they'll

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  finally see that they want us, or that we are in fact just as much fun to spend Saturday evenings with as their friends are. To cut through the nonsense, we may be in need of a robust awakening. The only person we should for a moment ever contemplate being with is someone who, at the start of the journey, can already be at the table with a conviction to match our own. We can be forgiven for being, for a long time, deeply charmed by all the others, those who are coy and troubled, those who don't reply to our messages, and those whose difficult childhoods render them enchantingly off kilter. But this is a game we can, in the end, ill afford.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  It is not love if you need to keep messaging and they rarely reply. It is not love if they are evasive or surreptitiously liking someone else's posts. It is not love if they get defensive or describe your legitimate requirements for attention as too intense. We need to get the wavering, defended ones out of our lives immediately. And that will mean ejecting the majority of people that we meet. All the more reason to focus on the very few with native enthusiasm. We need to hone our skills at recognizing the keen ones and clear everyone else out of the way.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Stop imagining that they might be shy or that you haven't made your intentions clear enough. Let's say it again, for good measure. The only worthwhile lovers are ones who don't need persuading. Those who like us a lot already, those who never leave us wondering where they might be or when they might reply. Those whose commitment to us flows so easily that all the focus can be on the difficulties of living day to day.

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  The day to day of living life is tough enough already. Without the difficulty of convincing someone to commit to us in a way that we are already prepared to commit to them. The others may be fascinating, lovely looking, and about to change their mind in fifteen and a half years. Or after a trip to India, or capable of generating lots of late night arguments and ideal for a movie or a psychoanalytic case study. They are also just a plain waste of our precious time.

• 1:01:25Chris Williamson?

  Is this everything wrong with the modern dating market? Obviously not.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Is it a big part of it? I think so. I had this conversation with Gay Hendricks a few weeks ago. And I kind of explained to him this journey that I'd been on when trying to understand human mating. You know, you start off and you see these big macro trends and you realize lots of people aren't having sex and the birth rate's declining. And you look at the amounts of people that say they don't want to even couple up. This seems strange. And then the next step you go to is, okay, well, what is it that human psychology? How does that work? And that's the evolutionary psychology approach. You're thinking, well, I'm going to learn about ultimate and proximate reasons for

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  behavior and mate guarding and male parental uncertainty and intersexual competition and status. You know, the sort of the mechanism by which our mating works inside of our own minds and between us. But that's not enough, right? Because you've got big macro problems and then you've got an understanding of what the system is in the individual. Then you need to combine those two together, which is okay. So given the stats that we're seeing and our underlying psychology, what is going on in the modern world? And that's mismatch, right? So that's, you know, the T app and fucking female dating strategy and like sex ratio hypothesis and red pill and cooks and soy boys and incels and stuff. Like, that's all of that linked together, trying to apply what you've learned from

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  evolutionary psychology into the stats. Okay, so maybe that's an explanatory mechanism in the modern world, the unfit for purpose thing. And like, all of that was cool and sort of captured me for maybe about three years, three or four years perhaps. But then I realized, at least in my own life and in the lives of my friends, I

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  I wasn't ever seeing this stuff actually come into land.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Like, there was no point where I interacted with the socioeconomic status of another person. Almost all of it was mediated by emotions. And sure, a lot of this, um, the emotions are the end point. Like they're how all of this stuff comes into to land, right? The way that you show up emotionally for somebody is going to be impacted by their socioeconomic status. It's going to be predisposed by your evolutionary psychology underpinnings, et cetera, et cetera. I get that. But the most direct interface that you have during dating is your emotions. It's your emotional state. It's how you relate, right? So it was all about relating. And that's where this insight came from, that what, what are we teaching people to look for when it comes to relating?

• 1:04:17Chris Williamson?

  And women specifically, given that they are the ones who for the most part are doing the choosing, right? Men are sexual protagonists and women are sexual selectors, mating protagonists, mating selectors. So if you're the one that's doing the selecting, what are the sort of rules and pieces of advice that you're being given about how to select? And I do think that there's a lot to that theory.

• 1:04:43Chris Williamson?

  Intermittent, very, very intermittent reinforcement gets confused for emotional spark. And it results in good, committed men being seen as broken. Because the subtext every woman has been told is if he's there and ready for you from the get go, transparent about his needs and wants.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  There's got to be something wrong with him because the love is not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be effortful. And, uh, I, it disincentivizes men from being open about what it is that they want. Again, either through personal experience or from watching culture or from hearing stories from friends that have been through stuff. They adjust their behavior appropriately. And if the choice is between, I don't know whether to get her flowers or ignore her texts to make her like me. Be careful what you wish for. Again, women are not entirely to blame for the way that men show up in relationships. But they do, everybody responds to incentives. So be careful what incentives that you give the people that you say you want to be emotionally open to you.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  All right, next one. There are few feelings worse in this life than being right, but early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth, or important area of focus, only to be castigated for how short-sighted, xenophobic, judgmental, out-of-touch, left-wing, right-wing, or alarmist you are. The Cassandra complex, as it's known, is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them. And they're often dismissed, ignored, ridiculed. It's named after Cassandra, a figure in Greek mythology. The god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but after she rejects Apollo's advances,

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

  he curses her, so that no one would ever believe her warnings. And she foresaw the fall of Troy, warned everyone, was met with scorn, and the city burned anyway. Rachel Carson writes this book in 1962 called Silent Spring. She warns about the environmental damage caused by pesticides, and she gets mopped by chemical companies and even some scientists. But her work eventually led to the environmental movement and the banning of DDT. Ignace Samuelwise, in the 1840s, realized that doctors were transmitting childbed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands.

• 1:07:15Chris Williamson?

  He begged his colleagues to adopt handwashing. They laughed at him. He died in an asylum. Decades later, germ theory proved him right. Edward Snowden warned about government surveillance. Some people saw him as a hero, many called him a traitor. His warnings were initially dismissed until proof emerged that governments were spying on civilians. Being right but early happens on much more personal scales too.

• 1:07:45Chris Williamson?

  Someone sees clear warning signs in a work environment and warns others, "This is toxic, it's going to implode." They're brushed off as negative or paranoid until it does implode. In a relationship, one person sees the correct course of action that their partner should take, but is labelled controlling for trying to convince them of it. Eventually, the other partner does come around to it, but only after the price of bruised faith and wasted time has been paid. In short, history doesn't reward the first to see clearly. It often punishes them. The people who glimpse what's coming are rarely welcomed.

• 1:08:26Chris Williamson?

  Basically, Cassandra's bleed first, so the rest of us don't have to. And we resist because every new truth asks the existing world to die a little. It happens because people don't want to believe uncomfortable truths. Cognitive dissonance. Because we trust stability and get suspicious of those who challenge it. Status quo bias. And because if the person warning us isn't seen as credible, they're ignored no matter how right they are, which is the messenger effect. The main issue, beyond progress being held back, is that it genuinely disincentivizes

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  people from speaking up when they could have an insight that could benefit others. Copernicus and Galileo are a perfect example of this. I love this story, I think it's such a great comparison. Copernicus, early 1500s, quietly proposes something radical. The Earth orbits the Sun. Humans, once the unmoving centre of God's design, were now spinning through space on one planet among many. But Copernicus hesitates. He delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades. His great work, De Revolutionibus, only came out as he lay on his deathbed, likely to

• 1:09:51Chris Williamson?

  avoid the wrath of the church and academia. His truth was too disruptive, and so, for most of his life, it went unheard.

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  Galileo, a century later, took that same Copernican spark and shouted it from the rooftops. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the faces of Venus, the imperfections on the moon's surface, all evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught. The Church responded with fear. Galileo gets dragged before the Inquisition, he's forced to recant under threat of torture, and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. In retrospect, it's not surprising that Copernicus kept his mouth shut, given how Galileo was treated. This is a core truth of the Cassandra complex: being right isn't

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  enough, and being early can feel like being wrong. Anyway, I've been on the sidelines, I might as well put some skin in the game. Here are some things I might be right but early about. Number one: birth rate decline is a huge deal that everyone should be worried about. Number two: climate change should not be an existential risk priority compared with AGI, bioweapons, pandemics, and nuclear war. Number three: widespread hormonal birth control use is a large contributor to the mental health issues of modern women. Number four: normalizing egg freezing for 21-year-old women is a positive social change. Number

• 1:11:28Chris Williamson?

  five: the UK is unrecoverably broken and will not be a future world power. Number six: China is not the massive threat that everyone thinks it is. Number seven: LLMs are not the architecture that AGI will be launched from. I am totally open to being wrong and late about all of these, but the Cassandra complex thing, actually...

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  Came about because I got popped in a long form video essay that was very well done about birthright decline and about how it is sort of right wing coded, it's reactionary. A lot of the time it is tangential or on the outskirts of sort of trying to restrict women's freedoms. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but you know, the outcomes kind of end up with women's freedoms being restricted. So perhaps it's like blast radius side effect stuff, or maybe it's actually what they're trying to point at directly by pointing at something else that gets to it. And I thought it was really, really well done. But I knew

• 1:12:32Chris Williamson?

  that my position on birthright decline is right. And I do think it's a huge deal. And given how everybody's worried about fucking national debt and issues of inequality, if you have fewer people, the growth that you need in order to be able to drive the economy out of the deficits and debts that you're in becomes harder because where are you getting the fucking productivity from? And if what you're going to say is, we're going to rely on AI and robotics to supplement the lost productivity from halving the global population over the next couple of centuries, fine, but who's going to capture all of the gains of AI and robotics? That creates more inequality because it's a small number of

• 1:13:14Chris Williamson?

  companies that own all of that. So I felt like it, it's mad. I really don't understand how birthright decline has become a right coded. I do, I do. I was gonna say, I don't understand how it's become a right coded talking point. I do understand because it sounds sort of pro-family, Christian adjacent, traditional, not forward thinking, not open. Like I'm trying to be as even keeled as possible here. I get it. I genuinely do. But like, I'm just right. And it's not like I'm right. People way smarter than me are right. But this is a big fucking problem. And for the first thousand episodes of this show, I've

• 1:13:58Chris Williamson?

  always equivocated. I've always had this sense that, well, is it really that, you know, like, I don't think, I've always treaded carefully.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  Partly because it's a protection strategy. You know, if you don't plant a stake too hard in the ground, then you don't tend to be sort of attacked all that much. But then I realized that I had equivocated like fuck on these podcasts that I've done about birthright decline and still got castigated anyway and still been like the darling of the birth control right. I'm like, fuck me.

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  This is a big deal, especially if you want to think about the fact that political affiliation is heritable. So your political affiliation is impacted by your parents, independent of the environment that they brought you up in. Like everything, it's at least partly heritable and it's not insignificantly heritable either. So if you are the sort of person that wants liberal values, progressive ideology, forward thinking, left leaning stuff to continue in the future and you are part of a group of people that does not think that birthright decline is an important problem, you are sowing the seeds of your own future demise from an ideological perspective because your kids that you have fewer of will be left leaning. But the conservatives or the fundamental religious people that you say are the fucking enemy or that you're just slightly worried about,

• 1:15:21Chris Williamson?

  or even that you aren't worried about at all, but think that there should be a fair counterbalance to, they are not going to slow down. Who do you think inherits the future? Ideologically, culturally, I think that that is not something that we should, I think we should have a balance of this, as balanced as possible. Okay, what else? Fucking economically, it is not a good idea. You're going to end up with entire towns that are just left. South Korea, for every hundred Koreans that exist right now, there will be four great grandchildren. That is a 96% loss over the next 100 years. In whose fucking world is this not a big deal? And I've equivocated so much and I fucking caveated my way through stuff and still got fucking slammed for it a lot.

• 1:16:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, I, with this point, I'm really fucking done on it because.

• 1:16:16Chris Williamson?

  It's just correct. Demography is destiny and you can see what is coming down the pike. Like, this is something that we should be really worried about. The reason that I say about climate change should not be an existential risk priority. It's very carefully, slightly cheekily put together words. It is a priority, but it is not when you compare it with AGI bioweapons pandemics. Fucking birth rate decline is happening right now. It is locked in. I think AGI bioweapons pandemics, maybe some nuclear stuff is actually ahead of birth rate. Birth rate is not a true existential risk, as it's called. An existential risk is defined as permanent unrecoverable collapse.

• 1:16:58Chris Williamson?

  So that's either everybody is dead, all humans are gone, no chance of recovery, or we're somehow permanently locked into a lower a regression back to a type of society that we can never escape from. It's kind of hard to imagine what that might be. You could imagine maybe if like some really insane damage was done to the biosphere where humans would have to subsist live for the rest of time and they would never be able to get it back to the point where they could be multiplanetary. And you know, like permanent unrecoverable collapse is the term. Climate change, just it doesn't have the pace, as far as I can see, for that to be a priority on par with some of these other ones.

• 1:17:43Chris Williamson?

  Like AGI, I flip flop about this on a daily basis. Could be a big deal, might not be a big deal. People smarter than me are trying to debate this at the moment. Bioweapons and natural pandemics, I think we can already see, well, COVID was one of the two. That seems like something that we should pay attention to. Fucking birth rate decline, like all of those things, actually, this is a good point. Birth rate decline does not wipe us out entirely. It seems very unlikely because you're going to end up with small part like the fucking Amish or you know, like Israel or whatever, like these people are going to continue. So it's not permanent and recoverable collapse. All of the others you're rolling dice on to see, is this gonna happen?

• 1:18:28Chris Williamson?

  Is AGI gonna be misaligned? Are we gonna have another pandemic? Are nuclear weapons gonna be set off? Are we gonna be able to develop technology that can reverse climate change? We know that birth rates are going down. It is one of the only risks, challenges that we're facing at the moment that has such a short term impact that is already locked in. Yes, climate change is also, you can do the numbers, you can see sea ice melting, you can do all the rest of this stuff. It is not happening on the same timescale. And I just wish that the same energy, or even a portion of the energy that is applied to climate change could be moved over to something which is happening right now. There are not too many people on the planet.

• 1:19:12Chris Williamson?

  If there are, wait a hundred years, 150 years, you're gonna be really fucking happy. Or go to Korea now, the bags are room there. Go to Japan, go to China, like go, in fact, go anywhere in the world, except for like a few countries. Everybody's birth rate's declining. Anyway, like the right but early thing got to me because I feel like I'm right but early on the birth rate problem. And

• 1:19:39Chris Williamson?

  there's this sort of special kind of,

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  what do you say?

• 1:19:48Chris Williamson?

  Resentment, bitterness?

• 1:19:52Chris Williamson?

  That you feel when

• 1:19:55Chris Williamson?

  the, when you're saying that there is going to be this huge fucking catastrophe happening, no one listens and then Troy burns anyway?

• 1:20:06Chris Williamson?

  If in 30 or 40 or 50 years' time, people who were too pigheaded to be able to see this as an issue, then begin to campaign around things like, how, how do we have so few people on the planet? This needs to be fixed because the economic indicators are going down the tubes, the productivity's through the floor.

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  I hope I'm fucking dead. I hope I'm dead because the level of I told you so that's going to want to come out of me is that's going to be like a super massive black hole. That's a singularity sized event. Anyway, I'm ranting. Being right but early is bad. It happens across your personal life. It happens in big political movements. I'm probably wrong about almost all of this. I'm probably a fucking idiot. But if I was the least idiotic about one of the things, I think it's declining birth rates. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Jim Shark, Skims, ALO, and New Tonic, which is why I

• 1:21:16Chris Williamson?

  partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions by up to 50%. They've got award winning support there to help you every step of the way. Look, you are not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with New Tonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading

• 1:21:56Chris Williamson?

  to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom or lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom to upgrade your selling today. All right. Now, we're out of culture war, Chris. Seven lessons about worrying and overthinking. Number one, stop worrying. Your fear of looking stupid to people you don't know is holding you back. Number two, put down your ruminating brain. Overthinking invents more problems than it solves. That's from Gwyneth Paltrow. That one hit me in the fucking throat. Overthinking invents more problems than it solves. This sort of weird, self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy where...

• 1:22:44Chris Williamson?

  As you think more, you have more things to think about. And it is not solving the problem. That's sort of like actions, the antidote to anxiety type thing. Your fear of looking stupid to people you don't know is holding you back as well. It's just a lovely reminder that you, your social embarrassment gauge is off. Because most people aren't going to remember you. They don't pay attention. You're not actually looking as stupid as you think that you do. But also, it is calculated. It's, it's, the scope is aligned for you and a 30 person pod.

• 1:23:25Chris Williamson?

  That's part of 150 person Dunbar number tribe. You meet more people than that on the bus in a day. So these people aren't going to remember you. They're not paying attention to you. You don't look as stupid as you think you do. And you have this miscalculated sense of how much these people are affiliated with you. They're not, they're just other people. You're just not used to meeting other people that weren't an important part of your life. Anyway, number three, your brain is a machine gun at overthinking. It has been found that we can talk to ourselves at the equivalent of 4,000 words per minute, which is the rate of an M134 assault rifle shooting bullets. 4,000 words per minute.

• 1:24:09Chris Williamson?

  That is what you can talk, talk to yourself at the pace of. And that was, okay, it's just such a for the insecure overachiever, perennial over thinker person. It's such a fucking asymmetric war. You're just, your brain is so much better at overthinking than you are at controlling it. Like even with all of the meditation breath work in the world. Some rules that I came up with about overthinking. Five and six, four, maybe whatever number we're on to now. Number four, some rules about overthinking. You can't think your way out of a feeling problem. Overthinking is under feeling.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  Trying to think your way into feeling emotions is like trying to drink your way sober. Similarly, trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  Your brain ruminates because it hates uncertainty so much that it would rather fantasize a catastrophe than deal with not knowing what the future holds. That's that uncertainty thing. Again, collapsing the future down. This idea of thinking in superpositions, you know, got two potential futures that could occur at the same time. You collapse that position down into one, even one that's horrendous. An unpopular opinion is that your brain ruminates because you're getting something out of the rumination and finding out how it secretly serves you is the first step toward overcoming it. I do think that that's true. Like, well, when I ruminate, my bitterness goes away. Or when I ruminate,

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  I feel like I take back a bit of control in my life, in a life that I feel doesn't have all that much control. Or when I ruminate, I feel less powerless with the situations around me. You are getting something out of your rumination, which is typically one of the big sources of overthinking. So working out what it is that you get out of that is a really good idea. Interesting that you never get paralyzed by overthinking positive outcomes. You only overthink about terrible ones. So fear doesn't keep you safe, it keeps you trapped. Whatever you fear establishes the boundaries of your freedom. So if you're

• 1:26:34Chris Williamson?

  afraid of heights, you stay low. If you're afraid of people, you stay alone. And such a good asymmetry. You can think thoughts at 4,000 words a minute, and you tend to only get paralyzed by overthinking negative outcomes. You're not, I wish, in these 4,000 words a minute, they're just all about great things that might happen in my life. Like, that's not, that's not the way that it works.

• 1:27:00Chris Williamson?

  Another really sort of weird asymmetry is that most people don't think about things enough, and you are probably not one of them.

• 1:27:11Chris Williamson?

  Most people should think about stuff more. Not you. If you are the sort of person that this kind of stuff resonates with, that advice is not for you. In my experience, the more that you think about yourself, the harder it is to access happiness. So in this way, reflection and personal development is this weird double edged sword. You need to self assess to know what to work on, but intense self assessment is restrictive to your quality of life. So another tension that we're playing with here. You need to do the reflection. You need to work out where the shortcomings are. What should I be working on? But also,

• 1:27:55Chris Williamson?

  if you do too much of it, not only does it take up a lot of your life, but I think it actively makes the quality of life outside of the thinking worse as well. And that's explained by just realizing the amount you overthink is directly inverse to how much you live. So don't trade the thing that you want, which is living, for the thing which is supposed to facilitate it, which is thinking. Number six, perfection is impossible. Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches across his career. He won nearly 80% of them, but he won only 54% of all the points he played.

• 1:28:37Chris Williamson?

  80% of matches won, and he only won 54% of every point he played, which means that even one of the greatest to ever do it, lost nearly every other point.

• 1:28:51Chris Williamson?

  I think the lesson here is to treat every iteration like it matters, and then let it go. Whether it's an unforced error or a perfect winner, it's still just one point. One failed relationship, one embarrassing interaction, one late wake up time. It's still just one point.

• 1:29:13Chris Williamson?

  What matters most is how quickly you reset and where you finish in the end, not how you performed just now. Another one, perfectionism is killing your happiness. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life. Perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting every step just right, you don't have to die. The truth is, you'll die anyway. And a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you and have a whole lot more fun while they're doing it. That's Anne Lamott. Final one. You should back yourself, even if you're at the start of your journey.

• 1:29:56Chris Williamson?

  Vincent van Gogh said, "If I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning."

• 1:30:07Chris Williamson?

  All of that together is just a little panoply, a little collage of how pointless worrying and overthinking are. And maybe one of those hits, maybe it doesn't, there's a lot there. Practically, one thing that certainly has worked is scheduling worry time. So I guess this is the bonus, the fucking bonus round at the end.

• 1:30:34Chris Williamson?

  I think it's Dale Carnegie who wrote How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It's a much less popular book than his big one. But in it, he has this idea of worry time. I think worrying is not necessarily bad and it does serve a function, right? In order to come up with solutions, we need to think about the future and thinking about potential negative consequences can help us to stop them from happening, foresee them, you know? It allows us to play out potential futures without having to live them by, you know, project them in our minds. The problem is when the overthinking and the worry is chronic, it's all the time. It creeps into our lives when it shouldn't do.

• 1:31:16Chris Williamson?

  And worry time is at least a practical, it seems, it feels like a sort of CBT inspired type strategy that allows you, when the worry comes up through the week, let's say you've got Sunday 3pm till 5pm scheduled for worry time. I guess that's quite a lot of worrying, 3pm to 4pm.

• 1:31:39Chris Williamson?

  Tuesday morning in the gym, worry comes up. It is nice to, as that thing arrives, not have to run away from it, not have to deal with it at the moment, not go into it and obsess about it, but to think, there it is, that's, that's good. Maybe I noted down in my phone, must remember to worry about blood tests or whatever it might be. And, but that's not, now is not when I think about it. Now, I've, I, I'm going to deal with you, I'm not running away, I'm accepting, but it's just not your time right now. In the same way as you don't try and sleep when you're awake, or you don't try and go to work when you're at the gym. Like, okay, there are times for things. And by delineating

• 1:32:20Chris Williamson?

  that, especially if you're the sort of organized calendar type person, I think this helps, at least in part. Speaking of the calendar stuff, when I first started Modern Wisdom, I was obsessed with why life felt like it was going so quickly and how to slow it down. So I decided to revisit the topic recently. Why does some days feel like years and some years feel like days? As we get older, life feels like it's moving faster and faster. We look back on a year and can't really remember where it went. Months start to pass like minutes and we begin to feel

• 1:33:02Chris Williamson?

  so helpless against the passage of time, that it almost seems as if we're an observer of our lives, not a participant anymore. The answer to slowing down time is simpler than you think. The first thing to know is that no matter how boring the Zoom call, exciting the holiday, or old you are, time always passes at exactly the same rate for you. Shock, horror, I know. You have the same number of hours in the day as you ever have, and they are always moving at the same pace. Even if you were circling a black hole or moving near the speed of light, your experience of time remains the same. One second is one second, always.

• 1:33:47Chris Williamson?

  So if this is the case, why do we feel like time changes speed? Well, there is a difference between present time and remembered time. Your experience of time differs in the moment versus when you recall it. Your present time will always remain at the same speed, but your remembered time can vary widely. So when we say that time is speeding up, we don't mean it actually passed more quickly, but that it seems to have passed more quickly when we recall it. It's not that week went so quickly, but I don't recall what I did during that week.

• 1:34:27Chris Williamson?

  Memory is our way of reliving our past experiences and re-experiencing time. We remember our time with respect to what we were doing, where it was, who we were with, and the emotions that we had. So here's the first key insight. The more memories you have from a past experience, the more that that experience gets expanded in time. Think back to a holiday you went on five years ago.

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  Even though it was a long time ago, you will probably still be able to recall a lot of details, making it seem like it lasted for longer and that time moved more slowly for that week.

• 1:35:11Chris Williamson?

  So if time is memory and we want more time, then what we really want is more memories. But this still doesn't explain why our recollection of time speeds up with age until you consider why memories are made. Your brain is lazy. It wants to do as little work as possible and conserve as much energy as it can. This is why it likes routines, habits, and thought patterns, because once it's done that thing a few times, it needs to think less and less about doing it again. The thing is, when you're young, almost everything is new information. This is the first time you've been to the park, or school, or swam in the big pool, or kissed a girl, or been on a boat.

• 1:35:55Chris Williamson?

  Your brain is constantly recording. Think about how much you can remember from the first day you moved to where you live now compared with any day from the last month.

• 1:36:10Chris Williamson?

  Or think about what happened on your first ever driving lesson. I'm guessing you can recall it quite a lot. Perhaps even the route that you took, the car that you drove. Yet if you try to remember the experiences in your car from last Monday, you might not even know if you drove it at all. This is the most important lesson to know about slowing down time. Your subjective experience of time is based on your memories. And the best way to ensure that your brain remembers what you're doing is with two things. Novelty and intensity. When something new or intense happens, your brain doesn't know what it needs to remember. So it just holds on to all of it. It's never encountered this before. So it doesn't know if it will need this information in future.

• 1:36:56Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, it starts recording what's happening. This is why holidays are such a good example to show how time and memories are linked. Because there's lots of new things and lots of intensity happening. I took a trip to Africa in 2018 and I can still remember the shape of the worn leather shoes that the hotel porter had on and the ornithology book that he was carrying and the sound of his feet on the steps down to the hotel room. This is the holiday paradox. Time flies while you're having fun, but feels long in retrospect. And as we age, our adult life gets into routines where we do the same actions day after day after day. We drive the same route to work, we speak to the same people, we even have the same thoughts.

• 1:37:40Chris Williamson?

  We allow ourselves to be dominated by monotonous routines, passive least resistance and habituated thought patterns. The TLDR is that routines compress time. Habitual behaviors are processed with less cortical effort, meaning less attention and fewer stored episodic memories. Childhood is rich with firsts, which become rarer with age. This is novelty saturation theory. The idea that as we age, we experience fewer new things. So our brain stops encoding as many detailed memories, which makes time feel like it's passing faster. And this is the uncomfortable truth. As we get older, days move quickly because we can't remember them.

• 1:38:23Chris Williamson?

  And we don't remember our days because we haven't done anything memorable with them. Our days are forgettable. Therefore, we forget them. This is why I hate it when people say that's just the way I am and always will be. To me, that is someone who has internalized the monotony of their thought patterns so deeply that they literally identify with them. Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life. So, in order to slow time down, you have to give your brain a reason to pay attention. Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences that will later be memorable.

• 1:39:05Chris Williamson?

  This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things, even if you've never wanted to try salsa dancing, or yoga, or an open-mic comedy night. Saying yes will guarantee that you create some novel and potentially intense memories. Sure, it might be easier to stay on the couch instead of going out, but you know that you won't recall a single thing if you spend yet another night watching Netflix, whereas you will have tons of memories if you go and do something new, which in retrospect makes time pass more slowly. Doing novel and intense things is entirely within your control. Allow yourself to be immersed in the things that you spend your time doing.

• 1:39:49Chris Williamson?

  Regularly plan new experiences, talk to different people, say yes to adventures whenever you can, walk the dog on a different route, visit a new town, eat at a fresh cafe. These are all memory investments that future you will be able to draw dividends from. Each day, you can ask yourself the question, what did I do today that will stand out in my memory? And the more that you can answer this question clearly, the slower your time will move. Eventually, you are going to be looking back on your life. The choice is between viewing a beautiful, varied art gallery stretching as far as the

• 1:40:31Chris Williamson?

  eye can see, or a gray, monotonous hallway peppered with the ghosts of TikTok dances and Netflix series. If you make your life memorable, you will remember it.

• 1:40:45Chris Williamson?

  I think.

• 1:40:48Chris Williamson?

  I got frustrated because I wanted to

• 1:40:54Chris Williamson?

  I wanted to make progress that was based around routine because I understood that it was very important for me.

• 1:41:01Chris Williamson?

  But I also

• 1:41:06Chris Williamson?

  had this realization so early on that felt in conflict with

• 1:41:13Chris Williamson?

  my desire to make progress. So I think another tension, you know, a lot of the conversations today have been about tension.

• 1:41:20Chris Williamson?

  Another tension is how do I lean into routine to capture the upsides of predictable progress whilst also blending that with the variation that's needed in order to give me memory dividends, to expand my life, to make time feel like it's moving more slowly. Difficult one, difficult thing to to balance, but it is important. All right, next one. "You are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they've seen fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves." That's from Gwyneth Boghul. So The Lonely Chapter has another perspective to it, which is as you grow,

• 1:42:06Chris Williamson?

  you don't fit in with your friends, but this means that they don't fit in with you either. This causes a reaction from their side too. "The hardest part of changing yourself isn't just improving your own habits, it's escaping the people who keep handing you your old costume." "Others don't just remember who you were, they enforce it, which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of a prison that you can't see." Psychologists call this dynamic an object relation, so.

• 1:42:40Chris Williamson?

  When people interact with you, they're not engaging with you in your full living complexity. They're dealing with the version of you that exists in their head. A simplified character built from fragments of memory and colored by their own projections. In object relations theory, an object isn't a thing. It's just an internalized image of another person. We don't just carry people as they are. We carry a mental sketch, which is why if you make a radical change, you'll usually meet resistance. Your transformation destabilizes the representation that the people around you are attached to. So they try to nudge you back into the familiar role that they know. Charles Horton Cooley called this the looking glass self.

• 1:43:25Chris Williamson?

  We come to know ourselves by seeing our reflection in the eyes of other people. And if those mirrors keep reflecting the old you, it's hard to step into a new one. In social psychology, self verification theory shows that people prefer interactions that confirm what they already believe about themselves and about you. If you disrupt this script, you introduce friction. In this one study, participants with poor self-image chose to interact with people who criticized them rather than praised them, meaning that even people with low self-esteem often prefer others to treat them in ways that confirm their pessimistic self-view.

• 1:44:07Chris Williamson?

  Because negative consistency feels safer than optimistic unfamiliarity. If that is true for how we see ourselves, imagine how much other people cling to their picture of you. Before his conversion, Saint Augustine was notorious for chasing pleasure, indulgence and distraction. And after his dramatic turn to faith, he struggled to convince old friends that he was no longer the same man. They resisted not just out of skepticism, but because the new Augustine didn't fit the story they had of him. In Fitzgerald's novel, Jay Gatsby began life as James Gatz, a poor farm boy desperate to escape his origins.

• 1:44:50Chris Williamson?

  He tried to reinvent himself into a dazzling millionaire. But no matter how hard he works at it, the people around him reduce him back to the upstart outsider. His reinvention collapsed under the weight of their collective refusal to update their vision of him. Nelson Mandela started as a fiery revolutionary against apartheid. And when he walked out of prison after 27 years, his followers expected him to emerge hardened and vengeful, and instead, he embodied reconciliation. But that reinvention only truly stuck once he stepped onto the world stage, far beyond the circles that had known the old Mandela. That David Bowie began as a struggling musician in London, trying to make a name for himself

• 1:45:35Chris Williamson?

  in a conventional scene. His breakthrough was constant self-reinvention. He does Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and tons more. But each transformation often required leaving behind one circle, one city, one audience, because the people who knew him too well couldn't help but cling to the previous Bowie. Saint Paul had once been Saul, infamous for persecuting Christians with unrelenting zeal. After his conversion, he became their furious advocate, but many believers couldn't trust him. They couldn't stop seeing the old Saul, and it took years of travel and new communities before his new identity as Paul was accepted. And in ordinary life, this script repeats as well.

• 1:46:20Chris Williamson?

  The friend who quits drinking was once the reliable partner in crime, but then newfound sobriety unsettles the group and throws everyone else's bad habits into harsh contrast. The shy colleague, who becomes confident, was once predictable in their quietness, so their assertiveness now reads as arrogance. The young adult, who comes home at Christmas, was once an awkward teenager. However, no matter how much they've grown, the family still insists on infantilizing them. The podcaster, who had a shaved head for five years, gets a ton of stick for having a perm after he grows his hair out, despite his curls totally being natural and soothing his face and being quite a masculine haircut if you think about it for a while.

• 1:47:04Chris Williamson?

  TLDR: Many people don't like you because making positive changes is effortful to keep up with, and it's threatening to their shortcomings. So they dissuade you from doing it, which is why meaningful change so often requires escaping your environment. Change isn't just about building a new self. It's about escaping the gravitational pull of the selves that exist in other people's minds. It is odd to look at the lonely chapter from the other side, right? Okay, I've got this thing, and I am compelled to go back to the old patterns, the old habits, the old ways of thinking. I'm gonna do this thing because it's gonna make me feel more accepted by my friends. Well, acceptance, it makes

• 1:47:49Chris Williamson?

  me feel more accepted by my friends. I am struggling to relate to them. But that means that they are struggling to relate to you, and they have their own motives and motivations also. Like, they are not passive participants in this. They're changing as well, and the change that they have is typically trying to pull you back to the old vision that they've got of you, because it's effortful. And maybe it gives a little bit more empathy around why people are sort of, feels like they're stuck in their old ways a little bit. Maybe it helps us to understand why we get less support for the changes that

• 1:48:30Chris Williamson?

  we want to make than we might prefer. But either way, it's certainly kind of, yeah, if the lonely chapter feels a little bit like you being trapped inside of a glass orb, this is what it looks like peering in from the outside. So I thought that was quite cool. All right, next one. Humans have an asymmetry of errors. We over-index exceptions. We use the things that break the pattern we've come to expect as a serious learning opportunity. But we tend to only learn much faster from errors of commission, which is things that we do, not errors of omission, which is things that we don't do. You only learn the sting of misplaced trust when someone betrays you, but when you refuse to trust and miss

• 1:49:15Chris Williamson?

  out on love, or partnership, or help, the loss doesn't leave a scar to remind you. It's obvious when quitting for a new career turns out to be a mistake. It's far less obvious when staying quietly drains years of your life that you'll never get back. We terrify ourselves with the thought of leaving a relationship and ending up lonelier. We almost never see the equal danger, which is staying forever with someone who never makes us feel fully alive. We recoil from the humiliation of saying something stupid in a meeting, but we don't clock the cost of never raising our hand at all. We treat one bad investment as catastrophic, but rarely tally the unseen compounding of never investing in the first place. We remember the awkward rejection that came from asking someone out,

• 1:49:59Chris Williamson?

  but never name the decades-long regret of not asking at all. We dramatize the scandal of a friend's failed new habits, but forget the corrosive damage of decades of drift and inaction. We exaggerate the embarrassment of publishing a bad piece of writing, but ignore the slower tragedy of never writing at all. We catastrophize the risks of starting a company that fails, but ignore the equally large risk of letting someone else succeed at launching the idea you had a decade ago. We obsess over the fallout of saying yes to the wrong opportunity, but rarely notice the quiet erosion of habitually saying no. History makes the same mistake. Kodak actually builds the first digital camera in 1975.

• 1:50:42Chris Williamson?

  An engineer goes and shows executives a clunky prototype that could store photos on a cassette tape. Instead of running with it, they shelved the idea, afraid that it would cannibalize their film business, for 30 years, they sat on the future.

• 1:50:58Chris Williamson?

  Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Their failure wasn't a wrong bet. It was never placing the bet at all. Darwin had worked out natural selection by 1838, but kept the idea in a drawer for 20 years. Two decades, because he was too cautious to publish it. It took another biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, independently discovering the same thing to jolt him into action. So, evolution nearly stayed hidden because of hesitation. World War I was even at the mercy of this. After the assassination in Sarajevo, Europe still had off-ramps. Austria could have paused before declaring war on Serbia. Germany could have told Austria to stand down.

• 1:51:43Chris Williamson?

  Britain could have made its red lines crystal clear. No one acted decisively.

• 1:51:49Chris Williamson?

  And everyone waited for someone else. And that hesitation turned a local killing into a world war. The TLDR here is we remember the noise of bad choices, but we rarely count the cost of silence. Commission teaches lessons in days and omission teaches lessons in decades. Usually too late to apply them. Like, I'm not saying you won't regret the obvious agony of jobs you quit, loves you lost, words you blurted out. I'm just saying you need to pay more attention to the unseen pains of jobs you never left, loves that you never dared and words that you didn't speak. We wince at mistakes that make noise,

• 1:52:34Chris Williamson?

  but it is silent mistakes that do the real damage. Errors of commission bruise the ego, but errors of omission starve the soul.

• 1:52:44Chris Williamson?

  I love this asymmetry. I see it a lot in my life. I, I, I see it everywhere that we just assume that making a mistake has to be an act. Making a mistake could be not acting. And, uh, yeah, I, I, I don't know how you compel people into

• 1:53:05Chris Williamson?

  seeing, I suppose part of it is the timeline on risk, right? That protracted suffering over a long time, you don't feel the risk ever sort of come into land at one moment. Or if it does, it's sort of down the line. You know, you're in a relationship, you think, ah, this, this just isn't working. I should really end it. Okay, that is an end point. Well, how bad is it? You know, there's like good days and there's bad days and maybe there's more bad than good. And I'm not so fired up. And what am I losing by not being here? But at least at no point does it all come into, you know, there's no,

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  there's no like ground zero moment for it. And I think fear keeps us trapped in this way, an awful lot. So, yeah, that is certainly something to, to motivate people more. It would be.

• 1:54:01Chris Williamson?

  It'll be a really good idea.

• 1:54:04Chris Williamson?

  All right. That is,

• 1:54:07Chris Williamson?

  I think, the longest solo episode I've ever done. Nearly two hours. I really hope that you loved it. Again,

• 1:54:14Chris Williamson?

  episode 999. It's wild. I started this in my bedroom in the northeast of the UK. And on Monday this week, you will see me and Matthew McConaughey sit down on a huge video wall and talk for a couple of hours. And you guys have changed my life with the device in your pocket. So

• 1:54:42Chris Williamson?

  whether you've been here for a minute or seven years. Thanks. I'll see you next time.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to the butcher at your local grocery store. He'd probably talk about trimming the fat, but it'd be about your brisket, not your insurance policies. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They offer personalized assistance in finding the choicest cuts of coverage for all your insurance needs, which means more money for filet mignon, or if you're a vegetarian, tofu le mignon. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit geico.com/ local.