5 Harsh Truths That Will Change Your Life

Why is it that the most important truths in life are also the most painful to hear? In this episode, I discuss five of the most uncomfortable truths that have changed my life and will likely change yours—from human suckage to the cheeriest truth of all… death. So put your safety harness on, the ride’s about to get bumpy… CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction: Five Harsh Truths That Will Change Your Life 01:04 Harsh Truth 1: Humans Suck, Try to Suck Less 02:21 The Gorilla Experiment and Our Unreliable Minds 05:23 Compassion Through Shared Humanity and Flaws 08:53 Harsh Truth 2: Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional 11:49 The Two Arrows: Pain vs. Suffering 13:47 Modern Society and the Victimhood Olympics 16:48 Harsh Truth 3: Everything You Believe Will One Day Fail You 18:59 Good Stories vs. Bad Stories: Drew's Framework 21:53 Ego Death and Identity Crisis: Music and Grad School 24:18 Harsh Truth 4: You Don't Deserve Happiness or Anything 26:57 The Self-Esteem Movement's Fatal Flaw 28:08 Imposter Syndrome and the Cosmic Crapshoot 30:32 Harsh Truth 5: Everything You Love Will One Day Be Lost 33:13 Memento Mori: Remembering Death Makes You Happier 36:08 Recap and Closing: Welcome to the Pain Train ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Why is it that the most important truths in life are also the most painful to hear? I would argue that it's because growth requires some degree of discomfort and every big breakthrough in life demands a questioning of yourself. So today I want to help you with that questioning by bringing up five of the most uncomfortable truths that have changed my life and will hopefully change yours. So put the safety harness on because the ride's gonna get a little bit bumpy. Oh, and by the way, welcome to the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck Podcast.

• 0:29Speaker 01

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

• 0:43Mark Manson?

  I'm here with my producer and longtime research assistant Drew. He has gone through my entire archive, hundreds of articles and newsletters. He's read all my books and he has put together five harsh truths based on my body of work that we all need to hear, but perhaps we don't really like hearing.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yes, and I love these because they're a little bit dark. They're a little bit harsh, like you said.

• 1:10Mark Manson?

  Wait, wait, wait. Let me, let me put my eye makeup on before we start. Paint my fingernails black.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Put on some emo music, Mark, if you got it. Let's do that.

• 1:21Mark Manson?

  Everybody get in the mood.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  That's where we're going with this.

• 1:23Mark Manson?

  This is where we're going.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  So yes, we have five harsh truths and this first one is a real cheery one, which is humans suck, try to suck less.

• 1:33Mark Manson?

  Isn't this a great way to start your morning, folks? Humans are terrible. Why don't you try to be less terrible? I think this is super important because I think a lot of people have the assumption that there's kind of this perfect state of innocence that we're all born into and then terrible, icky things happen to us and fuck everything up and that growth or healing is a process of getting back to that perfect state of innocence. And if you look at the psychological research, that is just flat out not true. In fact, I would argue that probably the most significant contribution of psych research over the past 20, 30 years is discovering all the ways that we are horribly, horribly flawed.

• 2:15Mark Manson?

  We have all sorts of cognitive biases, perceptual biases, our memory is completely unreliable. We often aren't even good at knowing what we're specifically looking at or talking about. A perfect example, there was a viral video a number of years ago. I don't know if you remember this, Drew, but there was like a bunch of kids passing basketballs back and forth. And you were supposed to watch the kids pass the basketballs. And you watched them for like 10 or 15 seconds. And then a text comes up on the screen and it says, where was the gorilla? And it turns out while the kids are passing basketballs back and forth, a guy in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the court, stands there for about three seconds and then walks off. And the crazy thing is, is that nobody notices the first time they watch.

• 2:59Mark Manson?

  And the fact of the matter is that this happens in all sorts of different ways throughout our lives. Our perceptions are colored by our emotions. Our logic is deeply flawed and can be easily swayed by our interests. Our memories are completely fallible, like half the shit we think we remember, we actually just made up. The more we learn about the human mind, the more we realize that we're not optimized for truth. We're optimized for self-preservation.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  I think one of those biases we have too, is to think that we're all, we're good. Everybody else is evil. And the people who think that, the people who think that, no, I'm good. I don't contain any evil. Those people just, they scare the absolute shit out of me. Because you can convince yourself to do all sorts of heinous, awful shit if you think, no, I'm good, right?

• 3:48Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because I, I think in the literature, this is known as the actor observer bias, right? It's like, if I run a red light, it's because I'm in a hurry and I have a really important meeting to get to. But if somebody else runs a red light, they are an evil irresponsible asshole and they should never be able to drive again. And we do this in all sorts of different ways. But I, I think you raised a good point, Drew, because I think this shift in mindset away from people are naturally pure and innocent and perfect. And then they're corrupted, you know, by society or the government or whatever, whatever boogeyman that you want to pick. I think moving away from that mindset and, and recognizing that we're actually, our cognitive machinery is very flawed.

• 4:30Mark Manson?

  And everybody is constantly battling against those flaws within the world. It opens you up to a lot more compassion, to realize that everybody's starting.

• 4:44Mark Manson?

  From a pretty bad spot. Everybody suffers very intensely. Everybody has had monumental challenges throughout their lives. Everybody suffers from the same perceptual flaws, biases, corruptible memories that we do. And so maybe have a little bit of patience and grace with those people. Maybe when you see that guy go through the red light, don't think, wow, what a horrible asshole. How are you responsible? Maybe challenge yourself to think, hmm, maybe he has something really important going on. Maybe he's panicking right now. I think ultimately, this, this view of human nature, it makes it easier to lead with empathy rather than judgment.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  When people talk about, you know, having compassion for someone else and seeing their shared humanity, a lot of times we think about, oh, we, you know, it's all the good things, all the virtues, that's your shared humanity. But also there's compassion in the shared humanity of our flaws as well. If you see another human being fucking up, you just say, oh, look, they're just like me. Yeah. Right. In a way.

• 5:46Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah, I do that, too.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  So there's, there's that with it, too. It does. It creates that shared sense of humanity. People who have done the most heinous, awful stuff, you know, you go to a maximum security prison and you hear these people's stories. I think if you sit long enough with them, you would probably find some shared humanity there somewhere. And somewhere along the way, they fucked up. Somebody else did something awful to them.

• 6:08Mark Manson?

  I've actually done that. Like when I lived in New York, I was invited by a charity to go speak to inmates at a maximum security prison. And, and I went.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  I don't think I remember this.

• 6:17Mark Manson?

  I don't think I talked to the team about it. I don't remember why. I don't know. Back then, I was doing eight million things a day. But yeah, I went to a prison called Sing Sing, kind of slightly upstate, and talked to a bunch of prisoners there and talked to a group of guys. It was really interesting, actually, because there were a lot of educational programs in that prison, basically opportunities laid out for guys to. Get their GEDs, get their college degrees. And one thing that was really interesting was that the, the COs, the corrections officers, told me that they had spent a long time trying to foster kind of a culture within the prison where guys who were choosing to go back and get degrees were, like there was status attached to it.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 7:04Mark Manson?

  Like they basically, they kind of socially engineered it so that some of like the biggest, baddest prisoners would get nudged into these, these educational programs. And then, once they were in it and seeing the benefits, they would kind of bring all their homies along. And it kind of created this culture of like, oh, well shit, like, I want to go back and get my degree too. I want to take these college courses. So there was an interesting dynamic where a large chunk of the prison population was desperate to get into these, these courses and educational programs. And so I ended up talking to a group of guys who had gotten in, gone through it. One of the guys I talked to, he was, had been sentenced to life. He'd gone through, got, finished his GED, did his college, his entire college education,

• 7:47Mark Manson?

  and did law school via correspondence, got a law degree.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:53Mark Manson?

  And was representing the guy, other guys in the prison who didn't have access or money for lawyers. Yeah, mind blowing shit. But anyway, the point of the story is, I walked away from that, being like, holy fuck, these are like, these are real humans. These are really complicated, nuanced, flawed individuals. And I think for me too, it, it hit particularly close to home because I got in trouble with the law as a teenager. You know, I, I got involved briefly with selling and dealing drugs. And so there was a part of me that was kind of like, fuck, like, there is a alternate universe where maybe I end up in a place like this. And so it was a very powerful experience, actually, that.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:37Mark Manson?

  To like, see, go experience that and talk to those guys and see it.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Fascinating, okay. The next one, Mark, and it's pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

• 8:47Mark Manson?

  This literally is precept number one of the Buddhist doctrine, which is life is suffering, or life is struggle. And it's born out of our propensity to become attached to ideas, and particularly narratives and stories around who we are and what our value is. In a way, I find it very liberating, right? Because it basically says that no matter what path you take, there's struggle in front of you. So the logical conclusion is, is you should always take the right path. Being unhealthy is painful. Being healthy is painful. Having no relationships is painful. Having relationships is painful. Being lazy is painful.

• 9:31Mark Manson?

  Working really hard is painful. It's just different flavors of pain. So you might as well pick the flavors of pain that are going to help you and give you a better set of life circumstances. This is why in subtle art, I talk about how like you don't eliminate problems. You simply upgrade problems into better problems, right? Like being obese and incredibly out of shape is a problem. Being in really good shape and having to work out all the time and being sore from working out and maybe having the occasional injury, that's also a problem. But it's a much better problem to have than being horribly obese and sitting on the couch all day and, you know, having chronic diseases and shit when you're 40. So it's a question of choosing the pain that you want to sustain,

• 10:15Mark Manson?

  choosing the problems that you want to have in your life. And what's powerful about that is that once you choose the problem you want, something kind of magical happens in your head, which is you no longer perceive yourself as a victim. You perceive yourself as like a challenger, a competitor. It's like somebody who's like facing the odds and is set to conquer them. And that's a really empowering mindset. In fact, I personally believe that that is. At the bedrock of where a happy and meaningful life is built is choosing which problems you want to have in your life.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  And you've talked a lot about two, and you've already touched on it a little bit about kind of the evolution, our evolutionary history of this. Humans are just wired to be dissatisfied, right? Like, believe it was Zdofsky, Eske, who said, "If man ever finds utopia, first thing he's gonna do is complain." And that's just wired into our DNA. And it's like you said, this negativity bias, it's a survival thing.

• 11:14Mark Manson?

  Can you imagine Twitter if like, people found utopia? Can you imagine what the tweets would be like?

• 11:21Mark Manson?

  They'd be like, "This is bullshit. I was promised 70 virgins. There's only 60 here."

• 11:29Speaker 02

  What was it, Louis CK? "Everything's awesome, nobody's happy." It's part of our nature. That is not going away. So like you're saying, you may as well choose that pain. You may as well choose whatever discomfort, rather than just let it happen to you.

• 11:43Mark Manson?

  I think there's a really important distinction here as well between pain and suffering. Again, the Buddha has a really great allegory about this. He said that whenever you suffer, it's like getting struck by two arrows. The first arrow is the actual thing that hurts. The second arrow is the meaning that we create around the first arrow. Our skin gets pierced by an arrow and we start saying, "Well, why did I deserve to get hit? Why am I the one that's hurt? Why didn't he get struck by an arrow? He's an asshole. I'm a good person. Why, why does this always happen to me? Why, why, why?" And then it's those narratives that we create around the pain that linger for years, right? It's like,

• 12:23Mark Manson?

  if you physically get cut, that's gonna heal in a few days or a week or two. But the narratives you create around that cut, they can stay with you for your entire life. And so the first part is the pain, and pain always goes away. It's always temporary. But the suffering, depending on how much we buy into the narratives around our pain, we can continue to suffer for decades.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Right. And there's really, I think there's, there's three ways I see it anyway about approaching this. Since pain is inevitable, like you said, it's, it's going to happen no matter what you do. When the pain does arise, you can avoid it. Society, I think, is becoming a little bit more amenable to that as well. But there's also, you can indulge it as well and basically feel sorry for yourself.

• 13:07Mark Manson?

  It's the victim Olympics, right? It's like, my misfortune is worse than your misfortune, so give me the gold medal.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  But then what you're saying here is, is you actively turn towards it and you actively choose it.

• 13:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And that's where growth happens.

• 13:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think you raise a really interesting point about modern society. And there's this sense that back in the good old days, quote unquote, you just had to grit your teeth and bear it. You had to fucking suffer through it and learn the hard way that the misfortunes in your life don't necessarily say anything about your value as a person. And 21st century society complicates that skill in two different ways. One is just the ease of comforts, the amount of luxury and comfort that we have. It's so easy to turn away, distract ourselves, tune out, load up TikTok, start scrolling. And then the second way is that there has

• 14:03Mark Manson?

  emerged this subculture online that celebrates victimhood, that applauds people for, oh, you're so vulnerable. Thank you for sharing. It kind of gets off on the moral outrage that comes with a very public form of victimhood. And I sympathize with why people do that. And I'm sure there's a certain amount of that that is healthy. But I think when you generate a culture around it, it becomes very, very unhealthy. And I guess to put it another way, if there's a person who has experienced a lot of pain and trauma in their lives, I do think there's a lot of psychological power in them stepping up and publicly stating what they've experienced and how they've suffered from it. I think it takes, there's

• 14:46Mark Manson?

  a lot of personal empowerment involved in that. And I think it's good to support that and encourage that. But there's a blurry line that happens somewhere where if you get enough people and enough encouragement and enough support, you start Socially validating and handing out status to people based on victimhood. And, and you get kind of this victimhood Olympics effect. And that's unhealthy. And I think that's actually counterproductive because it starts to encourage people to find, to invent suffering where there wasn't any before. Right? It's like you, it starts encouraging people to sit down and think, well, well, what were all the horrible things that happened in my childhood? And how can I, and how can I talk about that to people? And it creates an incentive for people to create the suffering based narratives, to

• 15:31Mark Manson?

  create the second arrow when it had been dislodged long ago in the first place. So as they say, may you live in interesting times.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Which we certainly do.

• 15:43Mark Manson?

  By the way, last thing, last thought on this one. So this idea of the two arrows, the first arrow is like the actual pain. The second arrow is the narrative and the meaning around the pain. As children, we create a lot of those narratives and meaning, and they stick with us throughout our lives. And if we have shitty narratives, they hold us back. Dad wasn't around, maybe mom was an alcoholic. We spun up a bunch of narratives as a kid to cope with that reality. But now we're in our 30s, we're married, we're having our own kids, and we're just a complete fuck up in our intimate relationships. And the thing that's holding us back now are those same narratives that saved us as children. I think project of therapy in many cases is, first of all, discovering those narratives that we've held on to for far too long.

• 16:28Mark Manson?

  And then secondly, learning to unravel or rewrite them in a more healthy manner. So go to therapy, kids.

• 16:37Mark Manson?

  Especially if mommy was an alcoholic.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Well, you do, this, this leads us right into the next one then, actually. Everything you believe will one day fail you. This is how you grow.

• 16:48Mark Manson?

  I love this because this is, um, this is one of those things that it's so obvious. Like if you're doing science, right? It's just obvious and accepted that you're probably starting out at a place of ignorance or being wrong about something. Yet when it comes to like all these other areas of our life, we don't take that same attitude. If my next door neighbor does something that annoys me and I think he's an asshole, like I never stop and think, well, you know, I'm probably wrong about that. What is a testable hypothesis that I can, you know, repeat a few times and collect data on? Like, we never do that. We're like, I know that guy is an asshole. And it's this like certitude.

• 17:28Mark Manson?

  That we hold on to that I, I think, again, these narratives that causes us to suffer so much. And I think it's such an obvious and practical reality that it is impossible to grow without being wrong about something. I think, if I can pull out my soapbox for a second, I think this is something that the, the self-help industry as a whole does not advertise enough. That, you know, they say, hey, pay all this money, come to my weekend seminar, you're going to be a completely new person. What they don't tell you is, oh, by the way, to be a completely new person, you have to recognize all of the ways that you're wrong and all the dumb things that you've been doing. And, oh, you probably need to grieve an old identity or two. Cause it's not a fun process. The, the reality

• 18:13Mark Manson?

  of taking a belief or an assumption that you've probably held on to for years, maybe decades, and then recognizing that you were fucking wrong about that, and that you based so much of your life on that incorrectly, like, that is not a fun process. But it has to happen. It's very, very, very difficult to actually stop yourself in those moments and be like, wait a second, maybe my neighbor's not an asshole. Maybe I'm being really judgmental. Maybe I'm having a bad day. Maybe I didn't sleep enough last night. Developing those mental habits is a really difficult process.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  So we have all these narratives and these stories we tell ourselves. And you talk a lot about this in a lot of different areas, the stories we tell ourselves. And I kind of came up with, I'm super proud that I came up with, um, kind of, what's a good story and what's a bad story, right? I'm super proud of this. I'm super proud.

• 19:03Mark Manson?

  Wait, wait, wait. Let me, let me get my golf clap out. I'm waiting for it. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready to go.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  You better tee this one up. This one, though, no, um, I'm, I'm proud of it because I think it's just something you would come up with, honestly. So I probably just stole it from you somewhere and I'm like subconsciously just plagiarizing you here.

• 19:20Mark Manson?

  Hey, I, I pay you to, to plagiarize me.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  That's right. You pay me to plagiarize you and say nice things about you.

• 19:27Mark Manson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Uh, but there's, there's bad stories and there's good stories, right?

• 19:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  I see like a, a bad story is something that it protects you, but it fails you in the long term. And so let me give you an example. So let's say you think that you're whatever it is, not attractive enough, not smart enough, just not good enough in general. Right?

• 19:48Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  In the short term, that's a protective thing. You probably grew up in a family that criticized you a lot or something like that. And so the, the smart thing to do in that situation is to withdraw. So you tell yourself, I'm not smart enough, not good enough, not whatever. You stay facing your social circle. You, you, you don't have to put yourself out there and fail and suffer that embarrassment. It's protective. However, in the long run, let's say five, 10, 20 years down the road, you haven't tried at this point to do anything. Now you're dealing with like deep regret in your life. And so that story that you told yourself, while protective in the short term, has just failed you so catastrophically in the long term. On the other hand, there's, there's good stories we can tell ourselves. And while they, they still will fail you at some point, cause they all do.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  They actually bring you to a better set of problems or a better set of stories later on. Just a quick example, like from my own life, when I was young, I told myself I was smart. Always was always looking for the external validation of that. A lot of that was because I didn't, you know, I grew up in a family that didn't have a lot of money. And I was like, this is one way for me to get out of this is through education and being smart. So I told myself I was smart and that opened up a lot of opportunities for me. It, it eventually failed me though, kind of when I, I think when I got to grad school, actually. And it was because I got there, everybody around me was smart. Almost all of them are smarter than me, actually. And so that identity was now on shaky grounds. And then, you know, I look around and I'm like, wait a second, I'm just doing this to reinforce that identity of being like a smart guy. Right?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  I'm not actually doing this because, you know, I don't, I don't, I'm not going to grad school and going to a, getting into research and all this kind of stuff. Because that's what I really want to do. It's just to kind of reinforce that identity. And so that, that failed me, that story failed me at that point. And luckily, Mark Manson came along and well, I don't know if it was lucky or not. Maybe you ruined my life. I have no idea.

• 21:38Mark Manson?

  Hey, we don't know what's lucky yet. The story's not over.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  We don't. We can't run the counterfactual either. We don't. We don't actually know. We'll never know.

• 21:45Mark Manson?

  You know what's funny, though? I guess I never realized this, but you and I have like very similar stories in that regard. For me, it played out with music.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  All right. Okay.

• 21:55Mark Manson?

  I mean, I do love music, but looking back, you know, I grew up middle of the country, very religious environment. I was not a religious guy. I was very nerdy, didn't play football. And music was kind of the thing that saved me. It's like, well, if I had a guitar in my hands, people were nice to me and they wanted to hang out with me. So music very much became my identity and it was, it was my saving grace in a lot of social situations. And so I started to believe that it's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. And it's funny like that. I feel like a lot of young people have that same experience that you had in grad school, that I had in music school, where you suddenly you're, you go from being a big fish in a little pond to a small fish in a big pond.

• 22:35Mark Manson?

  And especially at that age, your ego just gets fucking steamrolled by it like. You basically, I went from being the best and most talented musician at a pretty small high school to literally just one of 30 dudes with a guitar and a ponytail.

• 22:56Mark Manson?

  In my freshman class, it was really rough. It took about a year for the story to unravel enough for me to actually have the thought of like, maybe I don't want to be a musician. And when I finally did allow myself to have that thought, it felt very catastrophic. It felt like, like a death almost, like a breakup.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, yeah, it is. It's ego death in a way. Yeah.

• 23:19Mark Manson?

  For sure. And especially at that age where it's like you and I were both young enough that we had only had one identity up to that point. Like from age 12 to 20, I was the music guy and this is who I was going to be for the rest of my life. And then suddenly you stop and think, well, maybe I'm not the music guy. And then the next thought is, well, then who the fuck am I? And that, that is, it's a very, very scary question, but the, I guess the kind of the profound moment for me and I imagine you would have similar experience as well as like, when I finally cut the cord and left music school, it was like a thousand pounds came off my shoulders and.

• 24:00Mark Manson?

  It felt so liberating.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Golf clap.

• 24:05Mark Manson?

  We did it. We stuck the landing.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Oh, let's keep moving then.

• 24:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Since we're doing so awesome here.

• 24:15Mark Manson?

  While we're patting ourselves on the back, let's uh, I'm sure we'll find some way to fuck this up.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, here's a good chance for you. You don't deserve happiness. You don't deserve anything. These get cheerier and cheerier.

• 24:29Mark Manson?

  I am available for children's parties, folks. Okay, so this one sounds much worse. This is one of those situations when I say you don't deserve happiness. It sounds like I'm saying you deserve unhappiness. You deserve to suffer and die. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying this whole idea of deserving, I think creates more problems for ourselves than it solves. There, I do believe there's a very fundamental psychological mechanism going on in our brain all the time, which looks at how good we feel. And if we feel good, we start spinning up narratives to justify feeling good. Like, ah, I'm such a good person. I'm such a nice guy. Ah, everybody should like me. That's why I feel good. And then if we feel bad, we also spin up all these narratives to justify why we deserve feeling bad.

• 25:12Mark Manson?

  Oh, I'm a idiot. Nobody's gonna like me. Shucks. First of all, those narratives and justifications 90% of the time are wrong or deeply flawed. What happens when we spin up a narrative to justify something in our lives? We become very married to it. We start defending it. We act like it's plot of lands and, and if people attack it, we have to like pull out our sword and defend its honor. And that's stupid because it's just a fucking narrative. It's like, it's just a thing you made up to justify why you felt good last week. And so if somebody comes and starts peeing on your lawn, like whatever dude, just let them pee on your lawn. I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here, but stay with me.

• 25:55Mark Manson?

  The point is, you know, if we accept the previous points, which is we don't really know what's going on most of the time, mostly the narratives that we invent for ourselves generate more suffering. And so we should try not to be attached to them. And instinctually, we always like to think, he did a bad thing, he deserves bad things, or she did a good thing, she deserves good things. But we don't always know what's actually good or bad.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  It really gets to the, the idea that you talk a lot about, you talked about it in the subtle art and lots of other places, but the idea of entitlement as well, right? When you can be entitled, I'm awesome, and so therefore I deserve everything, or I deserve special treatment. I'm awful, therefore I deserve special treatment. You know, there's kind of those two narratives you talk a lot about.

• 26:46Mark Manson?

  Right. I'm glad you brought this up because I think what happened maybe 50, 60 years ago with the self-esteem movement was well-intentioned, but it was a little bit misplaced. Because what early researchers around self-esteem discovered is that people who are really successful, contribute to society, do good things, they tend to feel really good about themselves. And then people who get in the trouble, can't hold down a job, don't make any money, are alcoholics or whatever, they tend to feel really bad about themselves. Classic fucking academics, they didn't stop to think that maybe correlation is not causation. So they started going out and preaching like, well, we just need to make everybody feel better about themselves. And the truth is, is that the people who

• 27:29Mark Manson?

  had accomplished a bunch of things probably felt better about themselves because they accomplished a bunch of things, not the other way around. They didn't accomplish a bunch of things because they felt good about themselves. And I think what happens is if you train people or teach people to try to feel good about themselves without doing anything, You develop this sense of entitlement. You develop this sense of person who's been sitting on their couch for six days scrolling on TikTok, thinking like, well, I deserve to be happy. So people should show up and just deliver me happiness as if it's DoorDash. And when that doesn't happen, they get really upset.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  I'll give you, I'll also give you a third narrative here though, too, which is an interesting one, which is, man, I'm so lucky I don't deserve this. There's that deserving again.

• 28:13Mark Manson?

  That's the imposter syndrome.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, imposter syndrome type, type stuff. I've, I've dealt with this, I'm sure you have too, but what do you do? You, you recognize that there is a cosmic crap shoot and you just kind of won that, right?

• 28:26Mark Manson?

  For sure. The issue around imposter syndrome, I think is exactly the same. It's, it's, it's exactly the same as the person who sits on the couch and says, well, why me? Why, I don't deserve this, right? Like, you don't know what you deserve. You don't necessarily deserve anything. What are you gonna do? That's what fucking matters. And it's the same with the person with imposter syndrome. I don't deserve all this money. I don't deserve to like, live in this great place. You don't fucking know what you deserve. What are you gonna do about it? Ultimately, that's the question. So I, I recently was asked this on Twitter and, and the original tweet, it was something like, terrible people never believe they're terrible. The best people never believe they're the best people. Average people never believe they're average.

• 29:09Mark Manson?

  And the first reply was a guy saying, what do you believe you are?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 29:13Mark Manson?

  And I said, I try not to think about it. I just try to think about doing good things. And I think that's all you can do. Because you can argue yourself in circles around, like, if I want to decide I'm the biggest piece of shit on the planet, I'm, I'm pretty smart. I think I could figure it out. If I wanted to convince myself I'm like, the best person on the planet, pretty sure I could figure that out too. If I wanted to convince myself I'm completely average and all this shit is just happening by pure luck and chance, I could probably figure that out. I think it's more useful to just not even ask the question in the first place. And just focus on, what are you doing today to make the world a better place?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that's been my solution to that whole imposter syndrome thing too, is just to recognize it. Recognize, yes, okay, you're lucky.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Fine, but now pay it forward. Maybe you don't deserve any of this, but no, somebody else probably doesn't deserve their suffering either. So alleviate that in whatever way you can.

• 30:07Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  That's done wonders for me.

• 30:09Mark Manson?

  What matters is what you're gonna do with it. You know that saying that it's none of your business, what people think about you? I almost think that's true with yourself. Like, it's, it's none of my business what I think about me.

• 30:21Mark Manson?

  Like, just fucking do good things. Stop worrying about it.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Maybe, maybe you'll take that back after this next one and our final one here. Everything you love will one day be lost. This is what makes life meaningful.

• 30:35Mark Manson?

  Oof. Yeah. Again, very Buddhist, also a bit stoic, although I think it's more Buddhist. You know, Buddhism, it's all about impermanence. Everything is impermanent, and that's why you shouldn't be attached to anything. Or I guess, to put it, to use our terminology, that's why you shouldn't invest yourself in narratives around anything. That's why you shouldn't marry and die on a plot of land based on a narrative. Because everything gets lost at some point. Everything ends, including life, including the life of all your loved ones. And this is actually a very important thing to understand, because it is that loss or that potential for loss that makes certain things

• 31:17Mark Manson?

  more valuable or meaningful than others. Everybody has a finite amount of time that they're alive and they're conscious. I think it's then morally incumbent on each of us to improve the quality of that consciousness as much as we can, as consistently as we can. And the reason that's morally incumbent on us is because consciousness ends. Like, it's, a life ends, and because it ends, you should make it as good as possible. If it didn't end, then who, who gives a shit? By the way, this is why superhero movies are bad, in case you were wondering.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Not a Marvel fan?

• 31:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, no. This drives me crazy. Okay, yeah, they're fun explosions. Robert Downey Jr. is funny, but there are no consequences. Like the fucking alien invasion destroys half the planet. And then everybody like wakes up the next day like, oh, glad that's over and like moves on like nothing fucking happened. There need to be consequences and there needs to be possibility for death. Right? This is why Infinity War was the only good Avengers movie because it you, it actually tricked you into thinking a main character died. And because if a main character dies, suddenly there are stakes and there are consequences and things matter and decisions are actually important. You're not just like waiting for the next action scene. So scarcity

• 32:33Mark Manson?

  is the driver of all sense of value in life. And we can hate the scarcity and fight against the scarcity, which is what we do. But the reason fighting against scarcity is meaningful is because there is scarcity. So I guess a way less philosophical and ranty way of saying this is everyone's gonna die one day and many are gonna die much sooner than you expect. So really cherish and appreciate the moments you have with people.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  It's probably cliche at this point, but the more that I think about my own death, and I've, I've come to do that a lot more the last few years, this weird fucking thing happens, the happier I am.

• 33:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  It's just, it's such a razor for your life. You just cut out the bullshit, right? What do you give a fuck about? Well, put it in terms of your death and you're gonna find that out very quickly.

• 33:25Mark Manson?

  Right. It's, it's like, okay, if you had a month left, would you still worry about this thing? Probably not.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Not even that, Mark. I'm, I'm saying, life is just so fucking short. Sure. Okay. If it ended a month from now, that would really suck. If it ended tomorrow, that would suck. Sure. But even if I lived to be 100, that's still too short.

• 33:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  It's so fucking short. When you really stop and think about it and you, and you, you remember your death, it's so short.

• 33:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  And cliche. I know it, but.

• 33:53Mark Manson?

  It's becoming cliche. It's, I feel like it wasn't cliche. 10 years ago.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 33:59Mark Manson?

  But this is one of those things that I'm happy to see become cliche. Like, I'm happy to see so many people talking about it. I think it's under discussed. It is such a useful tool for deciphering your own values and deciphering what's important. I think, and again, it's a very common experience you see a lot where people are just kind of going through life on autopilot and then suddenly somebody close to them dies. Or maybe they have a health scare, right? Like a false positive cancer screening or something. And then that's the wake up call. That's the wake up call of like, oh my God, I'm spending all my energy on all this shit that doesn't matter. Spending my time with people I don't really care about. I'm working in this career that I don't enjoy.

• 34:43Mark Manson?

  And I think the important thing is, is that if you turn it into a practice, the so-called Memento Mori practice, you don't have to wait around for those unfortunate circumstances to happen. You can, you know, as Steve Jobs did, wake up in the mirror and ask himself, if this was my last day to live, would I be happy doing what I'm doing today? And yeah, it's just, it's an incredibly useful practice. It clarifies a lot of things, puts them in the perspective. And, and ultimately, as you said, paradoxically, I think leads to a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment in life. Apparently at this last Berkshire Hathaway meeting, 16-year-old got up and asked Buffett how to live a good life. And Buffett's answer was so simple and so wise.

• 35:26Mark Manson?

  He said, "Sit down, spend an afternoon, write out your own obituary, include everything you would wish it to say, and then reverse engineer it from there." I was just like, fuck me, dude.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  That's fucking good. That's good.

• 35:43Mark Manson?

  So wise, so wise. I actually want to do that at some point. Like, I've kind of got it on my to-do list to, to sit down and, and spend like a Saturday doing that. But, all right, so humans suck, try to suck less. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Everything you believe will one day fail you. That's how you grow. You don't deserve happiness. You don't necessarily deserve anything. And everything you love will one day be lost. That is what makes it meaningful. Glad we could, uh... Pissing your cornflakes, spitting your coffee this morning. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast. Welcome aboard the pain train. We will be back every week. Please review, leave five stars. Tell the world how much you love me because um.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Cause I'm getting tired of doing that.

• 36:29Mark Manson?

  Cause Drew.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Even though he pays me.

• 36:32Mark Manson?

  Drew's back is sore, so uh, why don't you guys chip in and leave some five star reviews? So my insatiable narrative telling me how much I deserve happiness and success can continue unabated. Uh, but seriously, please review. It's a new podcast. We want to get out there. We want to um, you know, make a good impression on the world and everything. And uh, what else should I promote? I feel like I should, I feel like I should promote shit. What else should I promote, Drew?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Uh, the breakthrough newsletter comes out once a week on Mondays.

• 37:03Mark Manson?

  Every Monday, every Monday we share uh, reader breakthroughs and I answer reader questions. So check that out. I don't know. Read my shit, buy my books. Love your friends and family. Don't forget you're gonna die. See you next week, fuckers.