7 Paradoxes That Will Change How You See Everything

Some of the most important truths in life are found in paradoxes. Paradoxes seem like opposites on the surface, but once you look deeper beneath what are seeming contradictions, there are real grains of wisdom that emerge. In this episode, I cover some of the most life-changing paradoxes I’ve ever come across, and discuss how they can improve how you approach your life. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 | Introduction 00:00:49 | Paradox #1: The more choices you have, the less happy you will be 00:07:25 | Paradox #2: Hard choices, easy life 00:11:45 | Paradox #3: What you hate in others, you’re avoiding in yourself 00:17:35 | Paradox #4: The more afraid you are of failing, the more likely you are to fail 00:21:48 | Paradox #5: The more something makes you uncomfortable, the more you should do it 00:26:15 | Paradox #6: The more connected we get, the more isolated we feel 00:31:10 | Paradox #7: The more afraid you are of death, the less you will enjoy life ⇨ 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 ⁠⁠⁠⁨ 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?

  Paradoxes are amazing because they force us to hold two opposing ideas in our mind at the same time. Now, on the surface, there appears to be a contradiction, but if you look beneath the surface, you often find the deepest and most powerful truths in life. Today, we're going to discuss a few of the most life-changing paradoxes that I've ever come across, like why having more options makes you feel less free, how the fear of failure only makes it more likely that you fail, or how being more connected with the world can make you feel lonelier than ever before. We're going to talk about these and much, much more, so stick around.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 0:47Mark Manson?

  The first one, the more choices you have, the less satisfied you are with each one. So this is the widely known as the paradox of choice. This comes from the psychological literature. I believe it was Barry Swartz, this was his work, great book called Paradox of Choice. And the research studies that this is based on are actually really simple, but I think the impact of this idea is quite profound. So the original studies, they found that basically if you give people, I don't know, say two options of candy bar, they would pick their favorite and they would be relatively satisfied with that choice. Whereas if you give people the option of 20 candy bars, then whatever option that they

• 1:29Mark Manson?

  picked, they actually would be less satisfied with that choice, despite the fact that they had more options to choose from. And so this paradox of choice shows up in a lot of different areas of life. And my personal pet theory, I guess, that I talk about in my books is that a lot of the mental health issues or anxiety or malaise of the modern world is the fact that we're exposed to so much information and so much opportunity that we're beginning to have a paradox of choice about everything in our lives. That you get on social media and you, you, you become aware of 100 different activities you could be doing this weekend.

• 2:10Mark Manson?

  And so whatever you end up deciding to do with your friends, you just feel lame and stupid by comparison. Or, you know, you take a kid who's graduating college, they probably have 10 times as many career opportunities or options as say our parents or grandparents did.

• 2:28Mark Manson?

  And yet, that abundance of opportunity tortures them and makes them less satisfied with whatever they end up pursuing.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Shortly after you got married, though, you wrote a really good article that kind of touched on this about the freedom through commitment. It resonated with me, who I'm a bona fide commitment phobe, think I at least I have this idea that more choice is better, right? But you talked about freedom through commitment, which itself is kind of a paradox around that. Could you expand on that a little bit?

• 2:59Mark Manson?

  So I talk about this towards the end of my book, Everything is Fucked, which is that people have a tendency to confuse freedom with optionality, right? So it's, they think freedom is simply having more choices, but in many ways, more choices paralyzes us and actually traps us because the more choices you have, the more afraid you're going to be commit to any specific one. And so choosing something to commit to, whether it's a person, a career, a place to live, a friend group, it liberates you in a really unexpected or counterintuitive way because it removes the, that, that paralyzing abundance of options.

• 3:44Mark Manson?

  It removes the burden of choosing. It frees you from the pressures of, of having to get it right. You know, when I, I was somebody who struggled with monogamy in my early life. Let's just put it that way. And when I got married, one of the things that really surprised me is that there was a sense of liberation at the fact that I didn't have to think about this stuff anymore. I never had to worry, like I could walk into a party and I never have to worry, what's the hot girl thinking about me? What am I going to say to her? Is there ketchup on my shirt? Like none of these, I don't give a shit anymore because that part of my life is solved. It's handled. And I was definitely surprised at just how freeing that felt.

• 4:27Mark Manson?

  And which is weird because I think the last thing that people associate marriage with is freedom.

• 4:34Mark Manson?

  Particularly men. I don't think men associate marriage with freedom, but I I found a lot of psychological freedom that came with that commitment. But this is actually, I think this area is maybe one of the most pertinent applications of the paradox of choice with, say, dating apps, right? And as our resident single person, Drew, I cannot remember a single time that a friend told me, hey, there's this great dating app that I'm really enjoying right now. Like, everybody seems to have this, this like, sick Stockholm syndrome with their dating apps. Like, they hate it, but they can't get off of it because they don't know what else to do with themselves.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Right. I've sworn them off. I haven't used them in years, actually. And the horror stories are still, I still hear about them, too. So I, I don't have a good solution for that, other than don't use them and get out in more social situations. And yeah, limit, limit yourself, honestly, to those people directly around you that you come into contact with.

• 5:33Mark Manson?

  What convinced you to get off? What was, what was the experience?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  It really was a paradox of choice, where on both sides, it felt like, so you would, you know, you would connect with somebody on these apps, and then you go on a date with them. It was always kind of like, well, this was okay, but now let me just hop right back on and keep swiping and see what else is out there. I've talked to a lot of people who that's their experience, too. I was just talking with someone the other day who's been on for like, three years, I think, and still going, and they, but they want to settle down, they want to find a relationship, and they, and I'm like, maybe that, maybe you should do something different. I don't know.

• 6:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  The response always is, though, but how do you get out there and meet people? And it's like, well, you do that by going out and meeting people. And we'll talk about this a little later.

• 6:18Mark Manson?

  It's, wow, how did people procreate for tens of thousands of years? I have no idea.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. And we've talked about this before. Maybe, I don't know, are we going to talk about dating apps on every single one of these things? No. But there is just this notion that, yeah, that the dating pool is now expanded. And so if there's the slightest thing that's wrong with this person, you may as well just keep, get back on and keep swiping.

• 6:42Mark Manson?

  It seems to lower people's patience and tolerance for friction when ironically, I think you, you kind of, you need a little bit of friction to figure out how much you like a person. You know, you need to deal with a few annoying things to kind of see if it's worth it or not. But if there's always 10 other people on the, on your phone waiting to talk to you, there's no reason to ever like sit through that uncomfortable moment or that obnoxious interaction. So I honestly do believe, I mean, I led the show with this for a reason. It's, I honestly do believe this is the struggle of our time. And I don't think it's going away. I think this is, it is a hidden cost of abundant information

• 7:22Mark Manson?

  and digital connectivity. But part of that is the second paradox, which is basically the harder you work, the easier your life gets. And the more you avoid hard work or hard decisions, the more difficult your life gets. This can be summed up with this quote that's kind of gone around social media lately. It's a hard choice is easy life, easy choice is hard life. I chased this down. So I heard this from Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss got it from another author. I think his name was Walter Percy or something like that. Anyway, it originated with a Polish powerlifter who was an alcoholic and overcame his alcoholism and then won four gold medals or something like that.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  What was his name?

• 8:05Mark Manson?

  Oh, Jersey Gregorik.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I like this quote because it actually, I think it subtly or unintentionally gets, gets you to question your definition of what easy and hard are in your life. Our instinct is to assume that anything that's uncomfortable is hard or difficult. When actually, I think the reality is that what's hard and difficult is when we feel like our lives are outside of our control, that we're not having a ton of effect or influence on the direction that our lives are going. Ultimately, the way you take control of the direction your life is going is by having the willingness to do things that are uncomfortable.

• 8:50Mark Manson?

  So if you redefine hard or difficult away from being discomfort and instead redefine it as problems that are outside of your control, it can lead you to a much easier life.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  You kind of touched on this in a previous episode we did too about, you know, for example, being unhealthy is hard, working out is hard, right? You made that point. And yeah, so it's not about the difficulty necessarily, it's not about the discomfort. It's more focused towards the outcome.

• 9:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And one is within your control. Like, so in that example-

• 9:21Speaker 02

  That's the important part, yeah.

• 9:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah. In that example, you're choosing, when you work out, you're choosing the discomfort. Whereas when you're being a couch potato, you're not choosing the discomfort. And of course, you get kind of this backwards law thing that goes on, which is, you know, the more discomfort you're willing to put your body through, the more comfortable you become in most everyday circumstances, you know, the healthier, the more agile, the stronger you become. It's the same thing with, say, having difficult conversations. The more depth you get at having difficult conversations, the easier navigating, say, workplace politics or crazy family members at Christmas, you know, all that stuff starts to get much, much simpler for you.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  So this year, I've really cleaned up my diet. I've really focused on that and kind of, you know, got rid of a lot of like carbs, processed foods, mostly, most sugar. And somebody will inevitably say, oh, so you don't have any joy left in your life? As if, you know, eating carbs and sugar and processed food is like the only way I could get joy out of my life. But I've really had to stop and think about that. And I'm like, actually, no, I feel so much better. And you talked with Derek Sivers about this, the shallow happy versus deep happy, right?

• 10:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Shallow happy, he says, is eating the cake. Deep happy is being proud of yourself for not eating the cake and being healthy.

• 10:41Mark Manson?

  Well, it also maybe unintentionally reveals something about them, which is if they associate junk food with joy, like that's the thing that brings them joy.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:51Mark Manson?

  What the fuck is everything else in their life doing? By comparison, like if that's the highlight, the Skittles is the highlight of their day. That doesn't say a whole lot about the rest of their day. I used to drink a lot, talked about this in multiple episodes. I've done YouTube videos on it. And I was absolutely one of those guys. Like if, if one of my friends was like, oh, I'm not drinking this month. I'm like, ah, you're so boring. You're, you're killing the vibe. You're ruining everything. And yeah, I genuinely thought people who didn't drink were boring. And now that I don't drink, I just realized that I drank because the rest of my life was boring. And I needed to drink to feel like some sort of stimulation or excitement.

• 11:33Mark Manson?

  And when you stop drinking, you actually have to confront the fact that a lot of the things that you're spending your time doing in your life are boring and you should stop doing them or change them. So, which brings us to our next one, which is a classic.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Which is, the more you hate a trait in someone else, the more likely you are avoiding it in yourself. I love this one.

• 11:54Mark Manson?

  Freud called this projection. Carl Jung talked about this as the shadow self. Basically, the aspects about ourselves that we bury or deny or don't want to look at, they tend to stand out to us most in other people in the world and drive us fucking crazy. I like this one just because it's, I think there's a lot of practical wisdom. Like if you find yourself consistently getting annoyed or pissed off at people in your life for doing the same thing, you know, as they say, the, the only thing all of your relationship problems have in common is you. So maybe, maybe that's actually where you should start looking. You know, I wrote an article long, long time ago, which I think relates to this. I think the title of it was, we judge others the same way we judge ourselves.

• 12:39Mark Manson?

  Basically, it's like whatever metric we've adopted in our own lives to, to measure our self-worth, that's, that's generally how we, we project that same metric on the other people. And it cuts both ways, right? So it's like, if I value, I don't know, if I value people being of high integrity, obviously I'm going to judge other people for having high integrity. But if I have a lot of insecurity around an area, like let's say I have a lot of insecurity around sex, then I'm going to be.

• 13:07Mark Manson?

  Obsessed and obnoxiously nosey in other people's sex lives because it's something I'm trying to avoid in myself. So I'm like projecting it on to all sorts of other people around me. And I think we've all known people in our lives who kind of do this, like they, they have these weird obsessions and insecurities. It's like a magnet, like you can't get them off of it. No pun intended.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Mine is I can't just lose it. Basically, when I have to deal with incompetent people or like lazy people, and it's because those are the two things I hate in myself. And I do this all the time. And I've known about it for a long, long time, too. But in any of these situations, like you said, it's a diagnostic tool. And what I've tried to do is kind of like step back and say, okay, what's actually going on here? For the longest time, I was like, just have some compassion for other people. But I think more recently, I'm like, wait, what you really need to do first is recognize that in yourself, whatever it is you're, you're projecting on other people, recognize it in yourself, have some compassion for yourself first. And that, that seems to help it.

• 14:09Mark Manson?

  It's funny, I never made the connection. So to all the listeners, Drew is the Mark Manson team's Karen. We, we actually call him that in the Slack. We call him-

• 14:21Speaker 02

  The head of the anger management department.

• 14:23Mark Manson?

  Yes, the head of the anger management department. He is the team's Karen. So anytime a service or product, anytime something is wrong and we have to deal with customer service, Drew is always first up to bat. He always wants to speak to the manager. He always wants a month discount on our, our next installment or whatever. He's always like fighting to get refunds and stuff for, for us. So, and you are a bona fide perfectionist. So it all makes sense now.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:54Mark Manson?

  I feel like I understand you on a much deeper level. Like a lot of young men, I had, I had these like status obsessions. I kind of, I had these weird delusions that there is this pecking order of how cool or important people are in the room. And I kind of had this like perpetual insecurity of where I fit in that pecking order. And because I had that perpetual insecurity, I assumed everybody else did as well. So whenever-

• 15:22Mark Manson?

  A lot of social interactions I had or I observed between people, I always assumed ulterior motives. Like it just became, I had this like very bizarre Machiavellian mindset of like, oh, well, he's just being nice to her because he wants to make her jealous because he thinks she's cooler because his friends like her sister and all this shit. And like, you know, meanwhile, I'm, I'm literally just writing fucking fanfiction in my head the entire time. It's like, nobody's thinking about this shit.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  I think this happens on an individual level, like we're talking here too, but I think there's also a case to be made that it happens on a cultural and societal level too. One thing that's been kind of a point of contention, I guess, over the last couple of years, especially on social media is narcissism, right? Like everybody's like, the narcissist in my life, you know, has ruined my life, whether it's my, my parents, you know, they were narcissists, or my boyfriend, ex-boyfriend was a narcissist, whatever it is. And I mean, if you stop and think about it, we're all a little bit narcissistic. We all have those tendencies. And I think it's a reaction against that self-loathing a little bit around narcissism and, you know, thinking you're a little too important. They don't want those things to be true in themselves.

• 16:39Mark Manson?

  Well, totally, because a narcissistic person is going to perceive everybody else to be a narcissistic person. Because a narcissistic person believes everything is fundamentally about them. And so when they see everybody else in their life not caring, not empathizing, not being compassionate towards them, constantly having conflict with them. What one legitimate explanation is like, wow, I'm just surrounded by narcissists. You see this a lot, a lot of times with, uh, people who are addicted will perceive others around them as being addicts and not themselves. People who are depressed will perceive other people around them as being depressed and not themselves.

• 17:23Mark Manson?

  You know, they'll be like, wow, everybody's such a downer around me. I think, I think, I think everybody in my life's depressed or something, you know? And it's like, well, what do they have in common?

• 17:34Mark Manson?

  All right. So the next one, the more afraid you are to fail, the more likely you are to fail. The more you're okay with failure, the less likely failure becomes. I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, this is commonly known as self fulfilling prophecy. It's basically the thing that we are most afraid of is the fact that we're so afraid of it makes it more likely to be true. Because a lot of our behaviors will unconsciously make it more likely to be true. Probably like an overly simplistic example of this is like, if I desperately want a job and I think it's my dream job and it's the only job I'm ever going to be happy with in my life. And I go in the interview for that job. The amount of expectation and pressure that I put on myself to get that job

• 18:16Mark Manson?

  is probably going to completely fuck up my job interview. And it's going to make me less likely to actually get, get a job offer. Whereas if I kind of go in with a realistic understanding of like, well, I'm very excited about this opportunity, but you know, I'm a smart person. There's going to be a lot of other opportunities that come along in my life. I'm going to be relaxed. I'm going to be more casual. I'm going to be myself. And I'll probably answer better and have a better, a better interview overall. So that's a very, very simplistic example, but you see this dynamic play out in all sorts of different areas of life over and over again. One of the, the, I guess, more practical implementations of this, this concept that I've seen.

• 18:58Mark Manson?

  Jeff Bezos has this great thing that he wrote. He had something called the 70% rule, which is basically said that the optimal time to implement a new strategy or policy is when it is 70% complete, or when you're like 70% confident that it's going to succeed. His argument was that the amount of effort to get from 70% to 90% is as much effort as it was to get from zero to 70, and that you learn so much from failures that you're actually being less efficient by preventing those failures, by trying to wait to get to 100%. So I, I always love that. It's like the optimal time to act is when you're 70% confident,

• 19:38Mark Manson?

  not when you're 99% confident. Because if you wait for 99%, you've probably waited far too long.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  I could vouch that this is how you approach things. I'm for sure.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Within the business, I should say.

• 19:52Mark Manson?

  Like, yeah, 70% of the stuff we put out is fucking.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  So yeah, you were 70% sure about marrying your wife or something. That's not what I mean. No. And more just like, as you've already mentioned, I'm the resident perfectionist and that can be very paralyzing, you know, as most people know, you, I think, one of the biggest lessons I've taken from you is let's get it 70 to 80% there, put it out and see what happens. Because what we've found, what I've learned over the, all the years working with you is that there's usually about 100% chance that we're going to change something.

• 20:26Mark Manson?

  The thing you think is a home run is almost never a home run. And the thing that ends up being the home run is always something that you're like shocked it went so well. My, I've been doing this for 15 years now. I've been publishing online and I am still to this day consistently wrong in my predictions of how my work will be received by people. The stuff that takes off, I'm like, really? That? Okay. And then the stuff that I bust my ass and emotionally invest all this energy and effort and have all these hopes for does okay. So it's, what I love about the, the 70% rule is it just kind of, it acknowledges

• 21:10Mark Manson?

  that. It acknowledges that what you think is 100% ready is actually not 100%. Like, you're going to be wrong no matter what. So you might as well optimize for the opportunity to learn from the action rather than try to optimize for the perfect action itself.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  That's what I think you've been, you've been best at honestly, over the years is how can we learn the most in the shortest amount of time? So, yeah, yeah. There, that's, I've fulfilled my obligation of kissing your ass in an episode. So.

• 21:41Mark Manson?

  Yes, it's, it's, the, the contract is satisfied for this episode.

• 21:48Mark Manson?

  All right. What's the next one, Drew?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  The more something makes you uncomfortable, the more you should probably do it.

• 21:54Mark Manson?

  I think this is something that people underestimate. I've personally found it very useful within myself to recognize when a particular thought or idea pops up in my head, my immediate visceral reaction is like, ooh, no, don't think about that. I should probably think about that. It took many, many years to kind of train myself to do that because that is not natural, obviously, but I've just seen it so many times, both in my own life and other people's lives, that the proportion of impact that something will have on the trajectory of your life is often directly proportional to how afraid

• 22:34Mark Manson?

  you are of doing it or thinking about it. And so whenever you see fear, just instinctually lean into it.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  From a pretty, like in your late teens, maybe early twenties, you were already experimenting with this where I think I came to this a lot later. So I don't know, was there an experience or anything like that that kind of led you to this?

• 22:52Mark Manson?

  It's a good question. I do think from a very young age, I've been very just prone to anything that's kind of exciting and novel. And obviously that can get you into trouble sometimes, which it did. But it also teaches you that at a pretty early age. I think the advantageous thing about doing stuff that most people are afraid to do is that you get disproportionately rewarded for it. Right? So if there's a business that everybody else is afraid to start and you go start it and manage to succeed, you're going to get rewarded so disproportionately to say the absolute amount of hours and effort that you put in. And I just find that most of life works that way, that there's

• 23:34Mark Manson?

  a premium to doing the thing most other people don't want to do, assuming it's valuable. Obviously, there's a lot of things that most people don't want to do that's not valuable. And so there's no premium for that. In fact, it's just kind of stupid to do that. But if you can, if you manage to find the valuable thing that most people are not willing to do, you, the reward is so disproportionate that if you can get good at finding those things and acting on them, you're going to have a good time. Things are going to go well.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Is that, do you think this is also a useful compass or a useful tool for people who like, they're like, I don't know what my passion is, or I don't know what I want to do, you know, with my life. And it's like, well, what are you scared of? Is that, I mean, you know, obviously within limits and reason, but is that actually, do you think that's a good compass or a good tool for people to use?

• 24:23Mark Manson?

  I think so. So Steven Pressfield has this great concept that he calls the resistance, which capital T, capital R. And he talks about it in the book, The War of Art. In the book, he makes the argument that generally it's the piece of work that you're most afraid to work on that is your best work that needs to be made. And I have definitely found a lot of truth to that in my own career. But I think when it comes to kind of like the grander, you know, what do I want to do with my life type questions, I absolutely think there's a lot of validity to that because I think so many people, when we're young, we kind of instinctually suppress any outlier

• 25:08Mark Manson?

  urges or desires that we might have. So, you know, when you're 13, 14, 15 years old, your desire to conform is so powerful that if you have this urge or inkling to do some sort of weird thing that might get you laughed at or ostracized by your peer group, you just kind of bury that, you know, it's not, if it's not going to get you into a good college and if it's not going to get you invited to more parties in high school, you just kind of pretend it's not there. But when you become an adult, you actually really want to know that it's there because that's the thing that actually defines you and makes you distinct from everybody else. That's your competitive advantage in, in the world.

• 25:51Mark Manson?

  It took me a long time to remember that. I used to write for fun as a kid. I used to like write little fiction stories and essays and stuff when I was like 10 years old. And I think I stopped because it wasn't cool. And it wasn't earning me any, any cool points with my peers. And it wasn't, you know, writing for class sucked enough. So like, why would I write in my free time too? Like, that's just insane. Next paradox, the more connected we get, Drew, the more isolated we seem to feel. Why is that? Why do you think that is?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  I think it's more to do with the actual methods of connecting that we use these days. I mean, it's, it's basically they're, they're empty calories for, for our social relationships. The hyper connectivity that we experience through social media and other technologies is a very low friction, easy.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Medium to use both for connecting with people, but also for avoiding people. And so I think you get that there's, there's no, there's less glue to hold us together and a lot of those. And I think that's a big part of it. People are using these technologies as substitutes for real human connection, which is messy and hard and difficult.

• 27:06Mark Manson?

  I hate to pull this back to the dating app thing, but one thing I've been thinking about a lot more. We just interviewed Oliver Berkman a few days ago, and this is something I think I heard first from him is that when it comes to human connection, friction kind of is the point. It is, you know, when you talk about that glue between two people, I actually feel like having friction is part of what creates that glue to a certain extent. Like if there is no friction between two people, then there are no stakes. Like there's no, there's no sense of like, okay, I gave up something for this friendship or this relationship. If everything's easy all the time, then nobody, there's no way to really know that people are invested in you.

• 27:49Mark Manson?

  Now, this isn't to say like intentionally go create friction in all of your relationships, like don't be a piece of shit, but.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  They're inherently difficult to begin with, right? So you don't need to add anything there.

• 27:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, you don't need to create more friction, but I agree with you that the, the new mediums of, of communication, they are optimized to, to create as little friction as possible. You know, text messaging, WhatsApp, sharing on Instagram, all this stuff, like it's very frictionless. It's like you're removing any sort of commitment of time, same place, even like same topic of conversation. And I, I can't help but feel that, that removing that friction makes it feel emptier. I mean, you literally, the, the word invest means that you give something up with the, the hope that you get more back in return in the future.

• 28:38Mark Manson?

  And so if you're not giving anything up when you're communicating with people, then you're not actually investing anything. And there's no way for it to kind of compound in value. I think the other thing that's happening simultaneously is that people's identities are becoming more globalized. And what I mean by that is like, people are identifying with things that don't actually have a whole lot of. Impact on their day to day life. So like if you go back a hundred years, most people's identities were very much based around the town they grew up in, the church they went to, the school they graduated from, the five or six neighbors that they hung out with. Like, that was kind of their whole life and their identity. They weren't really thinking about

• 29:21Mark Manson?

  wars in East Asia or the famine that's going on in Central Africa. Like, all this shit that we're constantly occupied with and identifying with. And don't get me wrong, there is a moral argument that we should care about global issues. But if you're basing your identity and a lot of your, the energy of your free time being emotionally invested in these global issues, ultimately, like, those things don't, don't come home and create meaning in your day to day life. It worries me that these sorts of global news issues, it feels like

• 30:02Mark Manson?

  they're becoming sports to a lot of people. And I don't say that, I'm not trying to diminish what's happening in these places, because what's happening in these places is very serious. But for those of us who are not in those places, I see a lot of people who are adopting kind of the same relationship with these issues as hardcore sports fans do with their sports teams. You know, it's like, they wake up every day, it's the first thing they check. They hope their team is scoring points. And whether they are or not, they're gonna get online and start arguing in their, in their side's favor.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  But then they have cover too, Mark, because it's not sports. It's real, real, live,

• 30:45Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  important things. And so I should care about this and look how smart I am, right?

• 30:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, but I mean, what the fuck are you actually doing?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:52Mark Manson?

  Like, yeah, what's, what are you, what are you doing? That's ultimately what it comes down to. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, you posted on TikTok. You got a lot of likes. What the fuck are you doing? Go get a job.

• 31:09Mark Manson?

  All right, last one. The more afraid you are of death, the less you will be able to enjoy your life. This one comes up a lot. I, you know, we talk about this one all the time. It's the memento mori. It's remember your own death. You really aren't able to properly gauge how valuable something is in your life until you're able to imagine being dead, essentially. Ultimately, it's the scarcity of life that makes our experiences valuable and meaningful. And if we're constantly avoiding the recognition of that scarcity, constantly pretending that it's not scarce, that everything's going to be great forever and ever,

• 31:52Mark Manson?

  then we're doing ourselves a disservice because we're removing our ability to properly gauge what's important and what's not.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've, I've noticed too, the number of people who have achieved pretty great things in their lives have had experiences with death early on, you being one of them. Also, you know, we had Morgan Housel on a little while back. And he had a very close call when he was younger as well. And I don't think he talked about this with you, but he's talked about it in other, other areas. He had a close call where he lost a couple of friends when he was very young too, 16, 17. You lost a close friend when you were 18, 19, somewhere in there. And I know of other stories too, of people who have went on to accomplish great things.

• 32:38Mark Manson?

  There is something about being exposed to death at a very young age. You know, so my friend passed away when I was young. Three of my four grandparents died when I was a kid. When I was in ninth grade, one of my classmates had cancer and we all watched him die. When I was a senior in high school, another kid in our class died in a car accident. And then my first year in college, my, my friend Josh drowned at a party. So I didn't realize it at the time, like when I was, when you're that age, you just think whatever you experience is, is normal. And I think it wasn't until like my mid twenties that I started to realize like, wow, I. I was exposed to a lot of this at a very young age. And I noticed it because I started talking to people. Like, I remember I had a friend in college who, one of her close friends died.

• 33:23Mark Manson?

  And she told me, she's like, I've never known anybody who died before. And I was like, well, you're like 24. She's like, yeah, I've never known anybody who died. And I was like, wow, wait, really? It never occurred to me. But death is the only thing that you just really cannot avoid. These questions of what am I spending my time doing? Is it valuable? What should I be doing instead? It's the only, it makes the, the finitude of everything we do so stark and apparent and obvious that even though extremely unpleasant and upsetting, I just think it's, ultimately, it ends up being a very valuable lesson. And, um, and of course, there's the, you know, the Stoic practice of Memento Mori is basically

• 34:08Mark Manson?

  says like, don't wait until somebody dies, just practice this periodically yourself. Steve Jobs had a thing where he, every morning he would look in the mirror and, and ask himself, if today was the last day of my life, would I be happy doing what I'm going to do today? And he said that if the answer was no, too many days in a row, he would basically sit down and drastically change something. And I just think that's a really good exercise, whether it's, you know, you do it through journaling or bring it up in therapy periodically, be a weirdo and talk about it on podcasts like we do every few weeks. It's just, it's like a, it's a useful exercise.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  There's a whole branch of psychology, Teradata Management Theory, that explores how we deal with our own deaths. And it's usually, usually what the research focuses around is like, how, how do people distract themselves from it? But as we've already said in one of these earlier paradoxes, facing the hard things.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  That's probably the way to go.

• 35:09Mark Manson?

  Hard things, easy life, easy life, hard things.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:12Mark Manson?

  That's what she said.

• 35:16Mark Manson?

  Keeping it classy here at the Subtle Art Podcast. That's it. That's all the paradoxes. The last paradox is that the more you like and subscribe to this podcast, the better it gets. Is that a paradox? I don't even know if that's a paradox.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Or the more insecure we get. I don't know. How does that, that might be?

• 35:34Mark Manson?

  The more five star reviews we get, the smarter we become. Please give us your energy, listeners. Give us your power.

• 35:46Mark Manson?

  That's all for the Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck Podcast. For, this is Mark Manson. For Drew Burney, check out the newsletter. It's at markmanson.net/newsletter. Like, share my shit. I don't know. Buy my book. We'll see you next time.