Comparing Yourself to Others, Solved

We all compare ourselves to other people—our friends, coworkers, strangers on the internet—and most of the time, it makes us feel like shit. But why do we keep doing it? In this episode of Solved, we dig into the uncomfortable truth behind social comparison, how it quietly ruins our self-worth, and why most of what we envy in others is a projection of our own insecurity. We also get into the brutal paradox of success, the toxic loop of chasing status, and how the constant measurement of our lives against others is one of the dumbest things we do as a species. If you’ve ever felt not good enough, or like you’re falling behind, this one’s for you. Get your free PDF guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/socialcomparison CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:05:29 Evolutionary Roots 00:16:20 The Emotional Toolkit 00:20:18 Philosophy and Social Comparison 00:23:31 The Buddhist Path 00:24:58 Aristotle 00:34:34 Stoicism 00:36:24 Existentialism 00:40:06 Myths 00:48:37 The Psychology of Social Comparison 00:58:54 Downward Comparison 01:22:19 Digital Technology and Social Comparison 01:44:20 The 80/20 of Managing Comparison 01:57:40 Hidden Costs 01:58:48 Takeaways ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ 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://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 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?

  You know Drew, I think it's very appropriate we're doing this episode today. Why is that? A little ironic, actually. So I came into the office this morning, and for listeners who don't know, the podcasting data situation is a disaster. Yeah. It's like, you would actually think for an industry that's exploding and growing so quickly, there would be a single dashboard somewhere that actually fucking measures who listens to a podcast. And does it accurately. But apparently, that's a lot to ask. Yeah. And so, long story short, we came to this realization that our audience was not quite as big as we thought it was.

• 0:39Mark Manson?

  It's still very big, to be clear, but, you know, it's not quite as big as we thought. And it's like, instead of being one of the, I don't know, 50 biggest shows in the world, we're only like, one of the 300 biggest shows in the world. But it was funny, because I felt like, I like, spent a good five minutes talking you off a ledge. You did. You had to. I didn't even make this connection to you. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you got me. It's such, but it's, by the way, I've been there many times over the years. But it is such a, it's like such a, it's such a ridiculous situation. Yeah.

• 1:21Mark Manson?

  Where it's like, in your head, you're like, I thought we were as good as these other podcasts that were, you know, in the top 10 and doing all these, like, winning awards and all this stuff. And it's like, oh no, we're just, we're only the tier below. Yeah. You know, we're only one of the 300 biggest shows in the world. And then you get really bummed out about it, and you start feeling very insignificant and inadequate. And, uh... Just by that one little... And basically, the summary of this story is that being human sucks, and it never stops. The comparisons never stop, and there's no, there's no end to it. And I think that's why this episode needs to be made, is, how do we wrestle with that? How do we cope with this fact?

• 2:05Mark Manson?

  You know, like, I would say, one of the single most common questions, or problems, or emails that I have gotten throughout my career, is, essentially boils down to, how do I stop worrying about what other people think? Or how do I stop comparing myself to the people around me? And...

• 2:24Mark Manson?

  Of course, my answer is always, you don't. You just change the nature of that comparison. You get better at managing those comparisons. And I guess we've already established, two minutes into this episode, that you and I are not immune to this as well.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:39Mark Manson?

  So, we're all in the same boat, folks, and we're gonna do our best to help us all row back to shore, so to speak. What say you?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. It is ironic. No, it is ironic that that's how we started the day off today. But it's a very good example, and can practice what we preach a little bit here.

• 3:01Mark Manson?

  Yes. We are gonna practice what we preach. For regular listeners, this is one of the mid-month episodes, so this is gonna be a shorter episode, you know, only two to three hours, like, very light, listening.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  It's a little mini-episode for you.

• 3:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah, mini-episode. There's only, you know, only like 80 citations in the guide, so this is an important topic, it's a very universal topic, and like I said, it's one that comes up all the time. You know, we just did our large episode on friendship a couple of weeks ago, and then obviously, a huge component of friendship or developing a social life is comparing yourself to others, worrying about your status. Do people like you? Are you good enough? Are you what to do when you're rejected? So, we're gonna cover a lot of these topics in this episode. We're going to get a better understanding of why we seem doomed to compare ourselves to other people, no matter what we do, how to manage those comparisons, how to make

• 3:56Mark Manson?

  better comparisons, and then, of course, like, what is the psychological purpose behind these comparisons? Like, anything, I think if there's one thing that regular listeners discover with us, month after month, is that the things that cause us to suffer are actually quietly serving some sort of hidden psychological purpose.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:18Mark Manson?

  Like, we can sit around and talk about how shame fucks up our lives and ruins everything, but what we learned in that episode is that actually shame serves a very practical purpose, and turns out, social comparison is no different.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  It's no different, yeah.

• 4:33Mark Manson?

  And for those of you who are new to the show... My name is Mark Manson. I'm three times number one New York Times bestselling author. Don't you forget it. You better compare yourself to me, god damn it. This is my co-host, producer, lead researcher, former academic Drew Bernie. And in the Solve Podcast, our goal is to go so deep, be so thorough, over-research everything so completely that by the time you get to the end of the episode, this area of your life will be solved. So just a reminder, every episode of Solve comes with a free PDF companion guide. We have a full summary of the episode, cover everything that we talk about, give some practical takeaways and advice, and of course, show our work, give our citations, references, and follow-up reading.

• 5:16Mark Manson?

  So if you want that, go to solvedpodcast.com/socialcomparison.

• 5:28Mark Manson?

  How do we want to start this, Drew?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Maybe with just a pretty simple question, like, why do we measure ourselves against others? And why does it always kind of have a sting to it? Or does it always have to have a sting to it, I guess, is maybe the better question there. You know, we compare ourselves based on every, like, we find things. If there's nothing to compare yourself to, you find something, right? How much money you make, the partner you have, the house you live in, your, like, bodies. We compare our bodies all the time. Now we follow our accounts or likes, whatever it is, on social media. On the one hand, this can be a very motivating, kind of emotional experience, right? On the other hand, it can be, like I said, a very

• 6:11Mark Manson?

  Tormenting.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  tormenting experience as well, right? What's weird, too, is that even, even when we improve our situation, maybe we get a new job, we get a new partner, we get whatever, that moment we get that, we look around at what everybody else has at that, at that time, right? It's, it's really relative, like, social comparison is always relative. I remember, like, my grandma, she was born in the 30s, and so grew up through the Depression and stuff like that. She said, would always say, you know, "I guess we were poor when I was young, but nobody knew it because everybody was around us." And I was, you know, like, you compare yourself to everybody, everybody was poor, we were fine. You know, that's, that's where you get that. But there is, you know, there's research to show you make more money. Say you're making $70,000 a year. Sounds great unless, you know, your best friend's making 90, right?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  If they're making 50, then you feel a little bit better about yourself. Yeah. So this is all kind of relative. In the 1950s, and we'll get into more of this research too, but there was this guy Leon Festinger. He developed what he called social comparison theory. Okay. Which basically described this whole phenomena. Right. Like, he described the tendency to compare ourselves to other people in relation to them. He described what we, some of the terms we're going to use through this upward comparison. It's like when you're, when you're looking up at somebody else who's doing better. Yeah. Versus downward comparison, looking at somebody else who's worse off than you. Interestingly, each one of the, it doesn't like, if you're comparing upward, you're not always jealous. Sometimes you're like, oh, it's motivating and inspired.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  And sometimes when you're looking down at someone, you're not always like, you don't just feel bad for them. You feel better about yourself. Of course. Maybe too. Of course. It could also lead to kind of some stagnation where like, well, I'm not as bad off as them. So I don't really have to do anything. Yeah. So it's just, there's the human mind for you, right? In a nutshell, it's like we can, we can interpret anything any way we want. Can ruin anything. We can ruin anything. The human mind can absolutely ruin anything. But you know, there's other research that does show that it is important though, because if you chronically experience kind of these, you're one down. Yeah. All the time. If you interpret it that way, if you experience it that way, you're always kind of ranking lower than other people around you. I mean, that, that's linked to like stress disorders.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  More stress hormones, you have more inflammation, even to like biomarkers show that. Higher risk for things like depression and anxiety. Even in clinical context too, you see this, people with like anxiety or depression usually have this very skewed way of comparing themselves to others. Right. In any other situation, usually leading to some sort of like, you know, either desperation or just you're giving up. Because you don't see any point and you can't compete with the people around you. Right? So this is a very like incredibly pervasive, incredibly common. We do it all the time. We just do it naturally. Yeah. Why do we do it that, why, why, why? Like, why do we have to torture ourselves like this so much?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It's, it's really a kind of wild question to even ask because, because it is so pervasive. Right? Well, like we like to do on Solve, we like to go all the way back to the beginning.

• 9:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Let's go way, way, way back.

• 9:18Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, to our ancient ancestors, living on the savannas, living in the forests, hanging out in trees, right? If you look at like primate societies, baboons and chimps and gorillas and all of that, they're obsessed with status.

• 9:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Right? They're obsessed with where they're at in the hierarchy and the pecking order. There's always these little games going on, right?

• 9:38Mark Manson?

  The alpha and yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. That's not just kind of like these mind games that like came out of nowhere, right? There's actually a real evolutionary reason for that. Mother Nature produced this through natural selection because your social position in these hierarchical societies like this, it determines your access to like food and to mates and even protection from the group. Like if you're liked by the group or not, if you're where you're at in the hierarchy is determines whether or not you get protection from an outside predator or something like that.

• 10:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It makes sense.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a strong survival motivation behind all of that, right?

• 10:15Mark Manson?

  Like if you're in a tribe, let's say you're in a tribe of 20 people and you get twice, you're able to gather twice as much food as everybody else.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:23Mark Manson?

  Like, obviously they should protect you first.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 10:27Mark Manson?

  Makes sense.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:28Mark Manson?

  So yeah, you can see how this would naturally evolve.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  There's gotta be some machinery there to compare, right?

• 10:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Of some kind. So that's where, you know, we talked in the friendship episode about Dunbar's number and, and his social brain hypothesis. And just to recap that real quick, if you didn't listen to that, the, the social brain hypothesis is that we develop these huge brains so that we can navigate these social situations.

• 10:51Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  And a huge amount of your brain power, as we'll see, is dedicated to being able to compare.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  This person has more than me, that person doesn't have more than me, this person's higher in rank than me, or lower in rank than me. Huge, huge parts of your brain are dedicated just to that. So it's obviously very, very important. It's not just some like random thing that Mother Nature accidentally did to us.

• 11:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Right? It, it means that we are just predisposed to this social comparison. So Dunbar called it the social radar. It's basically our brains evolved as these like social computers. They're constantly processing social information, environmental information, and figuring out where we stand. Because if you think about it, Knowing where you stand in the hierarchy, in the pecking order, is absolutely also very important to survival. Like if you don't have a good sense, if you overestimate where you're at, if you think you're higher in the pecking order, you're probably going to challenge like an alpha or an alliance that you shouldn't be doing. On the flip side, if you underestimate, then you are probably missing out on opportunities

• 11:57Speaker 01

  within the social group to either advance or secure more resources or more mates or whatever it is, right? And so it's actually really, really important that you can accurately assess where you stand. And you do that through comparison, right? But that's why your brain is such a relative comparison machine. It looks around you, not just like in absolute terms, "Oh, I better my situation." But if somebody else around you is doing better than... I mean, in ancient times, that was a survival mechanism.

• 12:24Mark Manson?

  It makes a ton of sense, right? Like if you're not the person who's able to gather twice as much food, you don't want to imagine that you are because then you're going to start demanding special treatment from people and they're going to get pissed off and it's going to cause a lot of social disharmony. The thing that's super interesting about this and a point that I want to make is this all happens on a very unconscious level. Like this is extremely innate to our psychology, to our... just the way our brain is wired.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  It's part of human nature, yeah.

• 12:58Mark Manson?

  It is involuntary. And it is very much the basis of how we operate within the world. I do want to bring up the point that like the notion of equality, the notion of, I guess, say, a status-free existence or the fact that everybody is on an equal playing field and every life is just as valuable as every other life, that is a very modern invention. That is something that arguably has only existed in the last 2,000 years and really only become popular or predominant in the last couple hundred years. So this kind of, you know, rainbows and unicorns, like, "Hey, we're all equal. We're all in this together. We all deserve the same thing."

• 13:42Mark Manson?

  I think philosophically that it can be very true, but that's just not the way we're designed or wired, right? Like, that's just not how we evolved. And so there is a tension there. And I just want to point that out because I think a lot of why people struggle with this is that they're like, "Well, you know, why can't we all just get along and be happy and respect each other? And like, everybody's different, but everybody's got their own talent. And like, why can't we just celebrate each other?" Again, kind of like a rosy, idealistic picture. I think it's a great intention, but that's not like hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Like, that was not what was most adaptive to the environment.

• 14:25Mark Manson?

  It's only really been adaptive to the environment in the last century.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'd take it even one step further. So there's the psychologist Paul Bloom. If he's talked about this before, but in tribal societies, even modern ones too, but in the past in particular, tribal societies that do exhibit some form of egalitarianism, they're egalitarian precisely because they are so obsessed with status. If somebody's getting a little too big for their britches or something like that, there's these incredibly powerful mechanisms, group mechanisms that they use to put them back in line. That's kind of like the other side of it, too. Like, "Oh, yeah, you can have an egalitarian society by being obsessed with a status within the group."

• 15:09Mark Manson?

  Which tracks.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 15:11Mark Manson?

  Which tracks. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, because when you read about, you know, like, these hippie communes of like the 60s and 70s, or like, the communist experiments in this former Soviet Union or Southeast Asia, like-

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Powerful enforcement mechanisms.

• 15:26Mark Manson?

  They are the most status-obsessed people. The most. Like, they are constantly obsessed with status because you have to constantly be thinking about status to cut everybody down to the same size. So it is- Little paradoxical in that way.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely is. Goes back to that social brain hypothesis, though. There's so much brain power and energy we spend on this kind of thing because it's just, in our evolutionary past, it was that important.

• 15:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Now, that said, you know, the modern versions of this do cause a lot of kind of internal torment, like we've already talked about. If you're obsessing over status in groups that you're really not even a part of, which is kind of what we do a lot of these days, that's not super healthy. Or, you know, we channel this into like career aspirations or something where, and, you know, we've talked about how we're very bad about predicting what's going to make us happy, but we're just, we're running on this software that says you need to achieve and compare yourself, and, you know, that's where we run into trouble with it.

• 16:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  The other thing I want to bring up, the two in this is, you know, we evolved this kind of whole emotional toolkit around this, too. Again, goes to show the social brain hypothesis, just how much we dedicate, just how much brain space and mind space we dedicate to this. There's all these emotions that we have around regulating status or comparison. I kind of grouped them into three different categories. You have like the status promotion emotions, you have status protection and repair emotions, and then you have status stabilizing and hierarchy ones. I can just kind of rifle through some of these, but, you know, emotions like pride, envy, admiration, moral indignation, those are kind of status promoting emotions that we have. You think about pride, you know, if you're proud of

• 17:06Speaker 01

  something, you kind of, you're going to signal that to other people, and that's an attempt for you to kind of up your status within a group, right? Envy, even though it's typically thought of as a kind of a negative emotion, which it is, that is kind of serves a similar purpose where you're at least striving, you're like, that person has this, I want that. How do I get that, right? And there's, the flip side of that, maybe the more positive, is like admiration. You admire somebody, right?

• 17:33Mark Manson?

  It's funny, because I feel like there is a thin line between envy and admiration.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get into that, I think. But, yeah, so like status protection, you have shame, guilt, you know, we did the shame episode, embarrassment, humility. Those are status protection or repair emotions. You do something that would lower your status within a group. If you show those emotions, it's more likely, oh, people are more likely to be a little more empathetic to you and you preserve some status there. The stabilizing ones are contempt and gratitude. If you have contempt for others, it marks a norm violation within the group and you're trying to bring them down a peg. Whereas gratitude, again, you're showing admiration for somebody else in that situation as well. So that's kind of the foundation, anyway, the kind of evolutionary reasons for why we are so,

• 18:22Speaker 01

  so obsessed with comparing. Or is it, we just can't help but compare ourselves to other people, right?

• 18:27Mark Manson?

  It's interesting, I'm looking at the status promotion emotions and the status protection emotions. Like, if you look at the status promotion emotions, pride, envy, indignation, moral outrage. If you think about people who are like, kind of chronically experience those emotions, like, it's a very, it's very much kind of like a grandiose narcissist. It's a grandiose narcissist is like, proud about everything he does, extremely envious of anybody who's like, performing better, and often experiences indignation and moral outrage. And then the status protection emotions are, I think, kind of vulnerable narcissists, chronically experience them. So they're constantly ashamed, they constantly feel guilty of everything,

• 19:11Mark Manson?

  they feel a constant sense of embarrassment, or that they're marginalized. Just made that connection. I'm shooting from the hip on that one.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  No, that's a good one. I really like that.

• 19:21Mark Manson?

  Coming in hot.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's really good. I think, I think it's absolutely right. And taking to their extremes, that's what happens, I think. And so that's a, that's a point to keep in mind as well.

• 19:29Mark Manson?

  You could, you could almost look at those two, they're like, they're kind of like, broken status management systems.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:39Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  All of that is to say that you can't escape this. Okay? This is part of our nature. We have to learn how to work with it. That's, I want to set up the whole episode with that. Comparison isn't necessarily a flaw.

• 19:52Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Okay? It's just, it's innate. We have to deal with it, and we have to learn how, you know, there's, there's a good way to handle it, and there's a bad way to handle it. And that's what the rest of this whole episode's gonna be about.

• 20:03Mark Manson?

  Yes. We're, we're actually gonna get into all of the benefits of social comparison in this episode as well, which definitely don't get the airtime that they deserve.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 20:16Mark Manson?

  All right, Drew. So, given how universal of an experience social comparison is, how innate it is to our human nature, it is no surprise then that philosophers across the world, in all cultures, have been wrestling with how to manage social comparison. And this is, I think, this is an interesting subject because it's a case where east and west differ pretty broadly in terms like, usually what we see is there's quite a bit of overlap between western philosophy and eastern philosophy, or at least like, kind of, slightly different takes on the same, on the same conclusion. In this case, there's a wide diversion, I think. And I'm gonna start with the east, which is Confucianism

• 21:01Mark Manson?

  and Buddhism. So, Confucianism, really, from what I can tell, and I'm not, definitely not as well-read on Confucianism as I am on a lot of other philosophies, but from what I can tell, Confucianism really just decided to own it, and was like, "Look, there's a status hierarchy. Some people are better than you, and some people are worse than you, and that's okay. You should get along with everybody, and you should just do your best to move up and down the hierarchy." You know, Confucianism is very much based on a framework of five types of relationships, and four of those relationships involve some sort of hierarchy or status attainment involved, whether that's through your parents, or your family, or some sort of authority figure.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Right. The one that didn't was friendship, right?

• 21:47Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  The ideal friendship, though, which...

• 21:50Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Doesn't always work that way, but yeah.

• 21:51Mark Manson?

  And the idea behind this is that ultimately, wherever you are on the hierarchy, you have a role to play. And it is, you contribute to the overall social harmony. That it's, even if you are scrubbing the floors somewhere, you serve an important purpose, and you need to fulfill that purpose, and you need to do your work, and be diligent, and contribute to society, and like, that is, that just happens to be your role. So, it's a little bit more fatalistic, I think, than a lot of western thought. You know, you often see these videos, or you read articles and stuff where...

• 22:29Mark Manson?

  I would just call it like kinda anti-Chinese porn, you know, like sometimes you'll see these these takes that are just like, wow, can you believe how they do it in China? And it just feels, as an American, it just feels so foreign and different and like

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Alien, yeah.

• 22:44Mark Manson?

  And also unethical, you know? When you kinda understand the Chinese culture and/or if you read a little bit about Chinese culture and understand their history and the history of Confucianism and just like the kind of the moral order that Chinese and Eastern people see themselves in, like a lot of those arrangements make a lot more sense. Another way to think about it is that the Confucianism take is like, your individual comparison like doesn't really matter that much. Like, yes, some people are better than you, but who cares? You have a role to play and like do your job well and respect your elders and respect the authorities and do your best, essentially.

• 23:29Mark Manson?

  Buddhism, on the other hand, really, I think of all the philosophies, I think Buddhism really struggles with this the most. It's Buddhism, obviously, the basis of Buddhism is a non-attachment and comparison is very much a form of attachment. Like, when you compare yourself to another person and you decide like, wow, she has such pretty hair, I wish I had pretty hair, or wow, that guy makes a lot of money, I wish I made a lot of money. A Buddhist would say that you are attaching your happiness to some external illusion and not reality itself, that everything that you compare yourself to is an illusion ultimately.

• 24:10Mark Manson?

  And so, the more you invest yourself into those comparisons and attachments, the more you're just gonna invite more dukkha or suffering into your life. Now, the Buddha did preach a concept of mudita, which is basically a sympathetic joy, or I guess what we would call like a compassion or a happiness for others. So, the idea is that anytime you are socially comparing yourself to somebody else, somebody's doing better than you, somebody has something that you don't, you envy something in others, that is an opportunity to be happy for that person, which...

• 24:49Mark Manson?

  Sounds nice.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Right, right, yeah.

• 24:51Mark Manson?

  But, uh, like, honestly, like, how, how practical is that? So that, those are kind of the, the two primary eastern schools of thought. In the West, uh, I'm gonna give you one guess, who kinda nailed this first?

• 25:08Mark Manson?

  You know, just based on literally every episode we've ever done on this whole fucking show.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Was it?

• 25:13Mark Manson?

  Who do you think nailed this?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Was it Aristotle?

• 25:16Mark Manson?

  Oh, it was Aristotle, once again.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  I'm real good.

• 25:19Mark Manson?

  You know, guys, maybe you should just go read the Nicomachean Ethics and like skip the podcast, cause it's, it's kind of feeling that way at this point.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:31Mark Manson?

  Aristotle, as usual, nailed it, and he nailed it before anybody else did. So Aristotle, in his, uh, in his work called The Politics, he declared that humans are what are known as a zoon politicon, which is a political animal, which, again, he rightly identified that this is just, just an inherent part of our nature. The same way a bird flies and a fish swims, we compare ourselves to each other. That's just how humans are. And to live well, it, we have to navigate the delicate art of comparing ourselves while living within a community. And so for Aristotle, this meant finding a moral or virtuous form of comparison.

• 26:17Mark Manson?

  So basically Aristotle argued that there are two forms of comparison. One, he called thanos, that's P-H-T-H-O-N-O-S, which essentially translates to envy. Uh, and then there's zelos, which is emulation. And this, I think loosely, we could qualify as toxic and healthy comparison. So the toxic comparison is just pure envy and jealousy and greed. It's like, you have a thing I want, therefore I hate you until I get it. Whereas zelos, or the emulation, is, wow, you, you have done a bunch of things that I wanna do, that's really inspiring, maybe I can learn from you, maybe I can act like you, maybe I can do things that you've done, so I can experience the same benefits.

• 27:02Mark Manson?

  Now, in the rhetoric Aristotle wrote, emulation is a good feeling and belongs to good men, envy is base and belongs to bad men. That's, uh, very deep.

• 27:14Mark Manson?

  That's like, I could have been Dr. Seuss, I'm pretty sure. Very similar, yes. Who wrote that? But in modern psychology, this is what we would today call in social comparison theory, this is what would be referred to as a maladaptive form of social comparison versus an adaptive form of social comparison. So basically, a maladaptive form of social comparison is a form of social comparison that makes you feel worse, that makes you more antisocial, and that decreases your mental health or your ability to achieve something. Whereas, an adaptive form of social comparison is something that inspires you, motivates you, maybe it's a role model, maybe it's somebody you look up to, maybe it's somebody

• 27:57Mark Manson?

  you want to emulate or replicate the great things that they've done. And I guess this really gets into the unsung aspect of social comparison theory, which is, obviously, the dark side is something that we experience all the time. It's what gets talked about all the time. It's why it gets talked about all the time, it's why a bajillion people email me and ask, like, how do I stop comparing myself to others? Whereas, what goes unsung is the fact that everybody who has inspired you, everybody who has motivated you, every role model you've had, every person you've looked up to as a young person, every mentor that you've had, that is also a form of social comparison. That is also somebody that you have looked at and you have compared yourselves to them, and you have said, "I want to be like that."

• 28:41Mark Manson?

  What's fascinating is, I think, that the root of what makes social comparison adaptive versus maladaptive, it is the perception that you are capable of replicating what they've done. So, I think a maladaptive form of social comparison is very zero-sum, right? It's like, okay, you own the Ferrari, I want to own a Ferrari, there's only so many Ferraris in the world, so if you have one, that means I, there's a less chance I'm going to have one, so fuck you, I'm going to take your Ferrari. Whereas, an adaptive form of comparison is, I think, positive sum. It's like, you've done great things, that actually is evidence that I can do great things too. It doesn't diminish the chance that I'm gonna do great things. In fact, the fact that I know you means I'm more likely to do great things.

• 29:26Mark Manson?

  So I'm so excited that I get to know you and hang out with you and learn from you and all that stuff.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  That's a lot harder to put into like a pithy little quote, though, right? Like, comparison is a thief of joy.

• 29:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Right? That's that one of the Roosevelts supposedly said that. I don't remember which one, but how do you put the, well, if you're, you know, if you're aiming up at somebody who is, you know, you admire and how do you, like, there's just no way to put that in a nice quote.

• 29:54Mark Manson?

  Right, right, right.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  You know what I'm saying?

• 29:56Mark Manson?

  It's funny, too, because I also think social comparison gets such a bad rap because I think we generally, the maladaptive form of comparison, like the comparison that feels bad, I think it tends to be very conscious. Like, we're very aware of it, right? When we feel bad about it, whereas all the positive forms of it, we, I think, we do unconsciously. So if you think of, you know, a mentor in your career or something, you're probably not thinking consciously of like, how you're comparing yourself to them. You're probably just like so grateful of like, I'm glad this person's helping me. I'm glad I have somebody to look up to, somebody to reach out to.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it shows up in your motivation, not in your assessment of the whole situation.

• 30:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So for Aristotle, ultimately, comparison, social comparison, it's not a moral failure. It's actually a moral opportunity. And Aristotle argued that a megalosychos or a great-souled person is somebody who is mature enough to only compare themselves for the right reasons and in the right ways. To basically find something honorable and admirable about each person that they compare themselves to, and then use that as inspiration or motivation to improve themselves. That was essentially Aristotle's take. Which, psychology is kind of backed up, but on the other hand, psychology is also based in Western philosophy, which was.

• 31:24Mark Manson?

  Basically invented by Aristotle.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:27Mark Manson?

  So there is an argument that there's a lot of circularity going on here. But I guess as Western individuals who have grown up swimming in the water of Western philosophical thought, it certainly makes sense to me. And this is, this is certainly like the perspective I've always had on social comparison, that it's, it's, it's inevitable and B, you can do it well and you can, you can leverage it to improve yourself and not hurt yourself.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think there was a little bit in Confucian thought though, too, of that, right? There was a conscious choosing of who you surround yourself with. Right. So there is some of that as well.

• 32:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So to be clear, you know, Confucianism, it's, it is, it's big on relationships, it's big on harmony and, and it's, while it's fatalistic about the hierarchy piece.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 32:19Mark Manson?

  I think the key difference is that Western thought seems to say, you can climb as far as you want on the hierarchy, like anybody's capable of climbing that hierarchy. Whereas I think Confucian thought is a little bit more like, look, your parents are always going to be your parents and you better fucking respect them and obey them. And there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to like surmount that or overcome that. And similar with like a lot of authority positions. Like it's just, this is the way it works.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:47Mark Manson?

  You know, get used to it.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  I think for a long time that Western thought was kind of like that still too, right? You remember, get back like the great chain of being, have you ever heard like of that? And like ancient Western thought, there was this great chain of being, which is very similar to the Confucius kind of hierarchy.

• 32:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Like you, you, there's a place for you in society and it's against God if you don't perform those roles and duties. Your father was a cobbler, that means that you're a cobbler and you just keep the great chain going. I think it's more of a modern invention of Western thought that is like the, the climbing. Yeah.

• 33:15Mark Manson?

  I think.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  The seeds were planted, definitely by like Aristotle.

• 33:18Mark Manson?

  I think, and not to get on to too much of a diversion, you know, we talked about this a little bit in the procrastination episode, but like. The history of Western philosophy is really fascinating because a lot of this stuff originated with the Greeks and Romans, went away with the fall of the Roman Empire, got kind of buried or overwritten, and in the case of Aristotle was lost to Europe and was preserved by Arabic and Middle Eastern cultures, and then only re-entered European culture in the 13th century. And actually, Thomas Aquinas saved, basically salvaged Aristotle. Like, he was the one who came across Aristotle and was like, "This is incredible.

• 34:02Mark Manson?

  We need to find a way to make this kosher with, you know, the clergy and the Pope." And then that was kind of his great work, was like taking Aristotleian thought and then translating it in such a way that the Church wouldn't banish it. Interesting, okay. Like they had banished everything else. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So shout out to Thomas Aquinas. Small boy. That's my boy. You know, saving Aristotle from the clergy. My man.

• 34:37Mark Manson?

  So then we get to the Stoics. The Stoics are super interesting around this because obviously, you know, the Stoic case here is just like, "Don't compare yourself to others." Like, that's kind of the Stoic line. "Don't compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to your past self, or compare yourself to your ideal self." That's the ideal, yeah. That line of thought very much originates, or was at least popularized by the Stoics. The irony here is that some of the most popular Stoics were like racked with envy and insecurity around comparisons, which I think there's an interesting tangent here that we could go on, but, you know, if you read Seneca's letters, second richest man in Rome, favored

• 35:21Mark Manson?

  by the emperor, you know, part of the aristocracy. And he's just like completely insecure about his, his status at all times. He's worried about, is he doing enough? Is he powerful enough? Is he being listened to? It's, it's super fascinating. And then you, you get a similar thing with Marcus Aurelius and Meditations. He's incredibly concerned and insecure about his place in history. How he's going to stack up to other emperors and how, and how he's going to be remembered and what his legacy is going to be. And if like any of the people in his court or any of his subjects are like actually going to appreciate all the things he did for him.

• 36:02Mark Manson?

  I find it fascinating that arguably the two most powerful philosophers, maybe ever, were in some ways the most insecure. Like they seem the most worried about this. Whereas you get somebody like Epictetus, who was literally a slave, who called comparison the disease of the soul. So I don't know. I, I thought that was interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. And then finally, moving up to modern day, we get the existentialists, which as you know, I'm a huge fan of. Sartre actually wrote quite a bit in Being in Nothingness about, he called it the look. Simone de Beauvoir like actually popularized it more of like being othered or becoming

• 36:47Mark Manson?

  the other or, or like the verb version of being the other. And basically Sartre's point about it is that it's our awareness that we're observed that creates, like forces us to create a conception of ourselves in our own mind. Which I think, I believe this predates, I believe Sartre predates the developmental psychologies, like discovery of theory of mind and everything. Yeah. So I think he was correct about this, like multiple decades before psychologists eventually caught up and found the same thing. But it's basically, once you become aware that you're being observed by other people, you, as a form of survival necessity, you start developing a, an identity for yourself.

• 37:30Mark Manson?

  You start constructing an identity for yourself to, as a form of self-preservation, as a way of like, okay, if other people are seeing me and they have a conception of who I am, quote unquote, then I need to have a conception of who I am, quote unquote. I guess the, the kind of revolutionary insight of, from Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialists in general, is that like everything.

• 37:55Mark Manson?

  Okay, yes, you have to compare yourself to others. You have to be aware of the otherness, of your otherness to the people who are observing you. But you still get to decide what that means. You get to decide, you are naturally going to compare yourself to the people around you. You are naturally going to be envious of people who are more successful of you and maybe a little bit resentful or arrogant towards the people who are less successful of you. That's all gonna happen, but what Sartre says is, you get to decide if it means anything or not. You can choose if that actually defines who you are, or if you're gonna define yourself by some other means.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a lot of religious traditions too that have something around, a lot of times they'll call it the fall, like in the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve, them becoming self-aware.

• 38:42Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Right?

• 38:43Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Where you go in there, sorry.

• 38:44Mark Manson?

  No, no, no, I just got excited because you're 100% right.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, yeah. And this happens through, not just in Christianity, but it's a lot of different religious traditions where they have this idea of what they call the fall.

• 38:54Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Right? Which is, in some way, we've become aware, self-aware.

• 38:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Only through relation of, through other people, right?

• 39:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  We only know who we are in relation to other people. And for so many religions, that's the point at which we fall. We've fallen from God's grace or from the purity that we once knew before that.

• 39:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think that's really true.

• 39:16Mark Manson?

  The blissful ignorance of not knowing the separation between self and society.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Right. Like Adam and Eve, when they became self-aware, they realized they were naked and then all sin flowed out of that, right?

• 39:26Mark Manson?

  Right. And I think, I think the exact words in the Bible are something around that of like, of like, they became aware that they were being seen and suddenly became ashamed.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:36Mark Manson?

  Right? Which psychologically speaking is pretty accurate.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. That's one side of it, as I say, yeah, for sure, it's one side of it.

• 39:44Mark Manson?

  You know, as we've talked about, like, we talked about in the shame episode, it's like, it's only as the, as the conception of separate self emerges in childhood that we start processing and understanding all the ways in which we're inadequate or we don't live up.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:58Mark Manson?

  Or that we must hide ourselves, right? And so, yeah, it's just super interesting.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:04Mark Manson?

  I do want to touch on a couple myths. Before we move on, these are just common beliefs and assumptions that a lot of people have around social comparison that are not necessarily true. So, the first myth is that there's some level of wisdom, or enlightenment, or success, that you stop comparing yourself to others. There is no evidence of that. In fact, I find it very amusing how much like pop spirituality and pop self-help, when you actually look at what they idealize, it's basically just being a psychopath. Yeah, they're peddling this idea, yeah. Like, it's basically like, "I never care what anybody think, I only do what I want,

• 40:47Mark Manson?

  I'm like completely confident in myself at all times, and..." "I'm a self-contained miracle of some sort." Exactly, and it's like, "There are no repercussions or trade-offs to any of my behaviors." It's like, well, you know, yeah, that's actually what a psychopath believes, and things don't turn out well for them, generally speaking. Yeah. It's funny too, because, I mean, it's, this is something that you see, you know, if there is a form of enlightenment, I think what it is, is probably more of what like Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness, which is like, you're aware of the comparison, you feel the comparison, but you don't necessarily identify with comparison, you don't, you choose not to make it meaningful.

• 41:29Mark Manson?

  I know, like, the Dalai Lama has said stuff around this before, like, it's funny, because sometimes you'll see the Dalai Lama get interviewed by like a journalist, and they're like, "Are you ever sad?", and he just like laughs at them. He's like, "Yeah, of course I'm sad, like, all the time." Right, right. You know, but he's like, sadness is still beautiful in its own way, and I'm still like, just because you feel something doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't mean it's meaningful, it doesn't mean it's permanent. Like, I think, you know, what the Dalai Lama exemplifies is that, yeah, he's very human, but those, the thing that's unique about him is his constant awareness of how transitory his humanness is. Right, that's the, that's the real wisdom, yeah. Right, like, he feels sad, but he understands, like, "Oh, this isn't gonna last, so..." Right, right.

• 42:14Mark Manson?

  "Don't buy into it too much." It is funny, though, like, I mean, as you know, I was very much into Buddhism in my twenties, and I did a lot of retreats, and meditated pretty seriously for a while, read a lot of books, and one of the things that I think kinda turned me off from it, is I noticed that the more I got into it, the more...

• 42:36Mark Manson?

  The Buddhist practice itself turned into another status game. So

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:41Mark Manson?

  What I noticed is that I started becoming attached to how well I could detach from other areas of my life. Like, how much was I meditating? How equanimous was I feeling on a regular basis? And I noticed it in some of the other, the other students that were like really getting into it as well. They're like, you know, they, they started kind of measuring their own self-worth in terms of like, how many retreats were they doing and how, how much they were working with the, the teacher and, and all this stuff. And I was like, isn't this exactly what we're trying to get away from? Like, aren't we just kind of signing up for the same race, but just?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Look how little ego I have.

• 43:17Mark Manson?

  Exactly. I have less ego than you. No, I have less ego.

• 43:22Mark Manson?

  There were just very subtle wisps of, of envy and comparison showing up even, you know, in a, in a Zen retreat.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  That's just how pervasive it is. I mean, even when you, when you spend your whole life

• 43:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  trying to detach from it, you still find little, little nooks and crannies to attach to.

• 43:39Mark Manson?

  It's, it never completely goes away. It really never does. So second myth is that comparison always harms us. I think we already covered this, but one thing that you do see across all of these philosophies and schools of thought is that comparison is always an opportunity for, for something good, right? Like in Buddhism, it's a, it's an opportunity for greater compassion and joy for others. In Confucianism, it's a, it's an opportunity to improve relationships and social harmony. You know, with Aristotle, it's an opportunity to improve yourself and, and inspire yourself. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and I think it is probably useful to sit and think about all the ways that social comparison has actually been useful for you in your life.

• 44:25Mark Manson?

  And then the final myth that I think you see pop up quite a bit is that The only way to be free of comparison is to isolate yourself. And this is a little bit hardcore, but you see this quite a bit of people who, you know, go off grid, they go out to the countryside, they get rid of all their devices, they delete all their online accounts.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  I'm not going to participate in society.

• 44:48Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And it's because I don't want to compare myself to everybody else.

• 44:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Like that comparison disease that I have.

• 44:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it's, it's.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  It's gonna cut the cancer out type of thing, yeah.

• 44:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think it would be interesting sometime to meet or talk to a person like that and like, see if they struggle, how much they still struggle with it. You know, it's interesting, we did a YouTube video with a guy, so there's a guy, this guy named Brent Underwood, who, he's, uh, used to work with Ryan Holiday, or still works with Ryan Holiday, um, a little bit. And, uh, he bought a ghost town out in the middle of the valley in California.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:22Mark Manson?

  And so we drove out there, he's been living out there for like two or three years now, I think, mostly by himself, a few people come in and out of the town. But he's basically in this like abandoned ghost town, it used to be a silver mine. He owns the whole thing, it's pretty rundown, but he's been up there by himself, probably for the majority of the last three years. And we went up there and shot a YouTube video with him. And it was, uh, I actually loved that video, like it was very, it came out very philosophical and very kind of meditative. He's a very interesting, well spoken guy. But it's funny because like one of the first things he told me when I interviewed him, he said, he's like, anybody watching this who thinks that like running off to the middle of nowhere is gonna solve your problems? He's like, let me just tell you, it doesn't.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:05Mark Manson?

  It doesn't, it doesn't at all.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Probably makes them worse.

• 46:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, he said some of them, it makes them worse. He's like, you know, it helps some of them, but, uh, it makes others of them worse. Uh, and I, like, I think in, in this case, you know, cutting yourself off from things.

• 46:22Mark Manson?

  You're not necessarily solving a problem. You're probably just replacing one problem with another, which is the trade off here is the more isolated you become, the more lonely you're gonna feel. And so you pick your poison. Do you want to feel lonely and isolated? Or do you want to struggle with insecurity of having to be around others?

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:44Mark Manson?

  And isn't life grand?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I saw something slightly tangential, but I saw something recently where a guy, he tried to go out and make his own chicken sandwich from absolute scratch.

• 46:56Mark Manson?

  Oh, I've seen this. It's amazing.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Took him six months and $1,500.

• 46:59Mark Manson?

  Yes, it's amazing.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  For a chicken sandwich. Right? The point, though, is that we're, as humans, we are very socially interdependent. And that's like part of our nature as well. And that's where this comparison comes from. And so it's not about getting rid of it. It's learning how to manage it more. So that's the point we keep hammering on, I know, but yeah.

• 47:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And look, I mean, we're gonna talk about digital stuff later. There is something to be said if you feel overwhelmed by comparison, or if you are, say, surrounded by assholes, which, you know, one of the, I think, the defining characteristics of an asshole is that they encourage or promote unhealthy forms of comparison.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or force them on you, yeah.

• 47:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Like, if you find yourself in those situations, then sure, cutting yourself off temporarily or in some areas of life, like, can make sense. But ultimately, like, I mean, as you and I keep coming back to, episode after episode, there is probably nothing in the psychological literature of over 100 years of research and study and clinical practice, more consistently replicated and proven over and over again that happiness is relationships, essentially. Like, that's, that is kind of the short version. If you were to distill all of psychological knowledge down into, you know, a phrase, it would probably be, happiness is good relationships.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, you can't know who you are except in relation to other people, and that necessitates comparison.

• 48:31Mark Manson?

  Well, we're just about to get into that.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Let's get into it.

• 48:33Mark Manson?

  Let's get into it.

• 48:38Mark Manson?

  So talking about the psychology of comparison, social comparison, you know, the exact same achievement can feel like a triumph or a total failure, and it all comes down to who you're standing next to. So there's an interesting thing known as the silver medal paradox, which is that basically when you go survey Olympic athletes who just won a medal, what you consistently find is that the happiest person is the guy who won the gold medal. The second happiest person is the person who won the bronze medal, and the least happy person is the person who won the silver.

• 49:12Mark Manson?

  Which is kind of sick and twisted, but it makes sense, right? Obviously, the gold medal winner is thrilled. The bronze medal winner is thrilled because they got a medal, right? They were this close to just not even being on the podium, whereas the silver medalist is like, "Man, if I had just pushed a little harder, if I didn't fuck up that one turn, if my form was a little bit better, I could have gotten the gold." Right. And I think this is illustrative of the problem and also of why and how psychology has just been trying to attack for over a century, like, "How do we compare ourselves better? How do we make more? If we're doomed to compare ourselves to others, and if we're doomed to constantly be dissatisfied with what we have

• 49:55Mark Manson?

  or what we've accomplished, you know, how can we do this better?" So it starts in the 1890s with a researcher named Norman Triplet, and he noticed something that is probably pretty obvious to us today, which is that he noticed that when people cycled together, they tended to ride faster overall as a group. And sure enough, you see this replicated all over the place. When you do things together with other people, you tend to do them better, you do them longer, you do them faster, you do them further, you do them more consistently. And that's simply because we're competitive. Like, we like impressing other people. Again, another advantage of social comparison that is largely unconscious and we largely don't think about. I've noticed this this year myself where...

• 50:41Mark Manson?

  You know, for a number of years, when I got into running, I always ran by myself. And I really just ran to like, improve my own times. I wasn't really training for anything. I wasn't really doing anything with it. And then this year, I started signing up for various races and endurance events and stuff with, with friends and people. And it's crazy how much more motivation it gives you. So I'm doing this thing called the High Rocks about a month from now. And it's a crazy endurance thing. I like Google it. It's, it's wild. It's a lot. I don't even know why I'm doing it. Actually, I do know why, because two friends of mine signed up for it and they like challenged me to do it with them. And, and it's funny because it's, it's a thing that if I had been on my own,

• 51:25Mark Manson?

  I would have rolled my eyes. Actually, I know I rolled my eyes because I remember the first time I heard about it. I remember looking at it and being like, why on earth would anybody put themselves through this? Like, this is, this is the stupidest thing. And then jump ahead six months.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are.

• 51:38Mark Manson?

  A couple buddies invite me and I'm like, oh dude, I'm in. And like, of course, what's the first thing I think about? I'm like, I'm going to totally crush them.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:45Mark Manson?

  I'm going to train. I'm going to get a plan. I'm going to like fix my nutrition and I'm going to go fucking crush these guys. And it's fun.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:53Mark Manson?

  It's fun. It's exciting. My workouts get more interesting. I'm more motivated each day. Like the days I don't want to go work out, I force myself to go work out. Why? Because I'm thinking about like, yeah, I don't want to show up for the High Rocks and be, and be the weakest link. So, again, there is an unconscious advantage to this, an advantage that goes, largely goes unnoticed.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Another one I found of this too, was really interesting is Olympic sprinters. When the female Olympic sprinters trained with the men, they actually had better times.

• 52:25Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Which was pretty, pretty wild.

• 52:27Mark Manson?

  That's crazy.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Isn't that wild?

• 52:29Mark Manson?

  That's so interesting.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they're, I mean, again, like a comparative, there's the, I mean, they're highly competitive people.

• 52:33Mark Manson?

  Yes, of course.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And so they're going to try harder in those situations where there's somebody who's better than them, you know, faster than, whatever it is. But yeah, they found that pretty consistently as well.

• 52:42Mark Manson?

  That's so interesting. So then the question of,

• 52:46Mark Manson?

  You know, how do you make sure you leverage this in a positive way and not a negative way? Because we've all had the experience where like competitiveness has kind of turned against us or become unproductive and unnecessarily adversarial. Definitely, yeah. And William James, often considered the father of psychology, put together an equation that tried to analyze this. And I think it's a nice equation. He basically said that self-esteem equals success divided by pretensions. Another way of thinking about that is that your self-esteem is equivalent to what you've achieved or accomplished divided by your expectation of what you can achieve and accomplish. So generally speaking, people who have a very low self-esteem,

• 53:32Mark Manson?

  they either have unreasonable expectations of what they should be doing, which you see this a lot, a lot of depressed people or miserable people. They think they should be able to do everything and accomplish everything and be the best at everything, and they just drive themselves crazy. And then also, you need to have actually like gotten out and done something Right. that you feel good about. You feel a little bit, coming back to the status protective emotions, something that you feel proud of, that you're proud to wear on your identity as a badge or build your identity around as a badge. Now, for William James, he rightly observed that our identity is largely based on how other people see us. Like, we're very influenced by other people's perceptions of ourselves.

• 54:16Mark Manson?

  And this can be both a good thing and a bad thing, right? Like, if a lot of people admire you, then it will cause you to feel good about yourself, and that can be a very healthy thing. Like, it can create a virtuous cycle, right? Like, it's like, okay, people respect me, they expect a lot out of me, therefore, I should expect a lot out of myself. Therefore, I become more likely to do great things. But it can also work against you, right? If you... If you feel like people don't like you, or they have low expectations of you, or they don't expect much of you, it can cause you to have low expectations for yourself. And then, of course, you're less likely to go do great things or improve yourself.

• 54:58Mark Manson?

  So James basically saw this, I guess you could call it a golden mean, right?

• 55:04Mark Manson?

  You don't want, you don't want people who inflate your ego too much and cause you to be delusional, right? Tell you that your shit doesn't stink and you're amazing at everything you do. But at the same time, you know, you don't want the expectation to outweigh the achievement. But at the same time, you don't want people to diminish you or disrespect you or make you feel like you have no achievements at all. So there's somewhere in there, there's a happy medium. So it wasn't until Leon Fesenger in the 1950s with social comparison theory, he really took what William James discovered and posited and tried to add structure around it. And tried to really define like, okay, what is good comparison? What is bad comparison? What is too much of each one? And this is where we get the upward comparison and the downward comparison, as you mentioned before. So the upward comparison is when you compare yourself to somebody that you perceive

• 55:49Mark Manson?

  as being superior or better to you in some way. And there's a healthy and unhealthy form of upward comparison. So a healthy form of upward comparison would be inspiring, motivating. You would be able to learn from them. Maybe they're a role model. Maybe they're a mentor. Maybe they're somebody you look up to. An unhealthy form of upward comparison would be somebody who just is, you perceive as being so good and so great and so perfect that it causes you to feel worse about yourself. What's interesting here is that this gets a little bit back into what we talked about on the resilience episode in terms of self-efficacy. Yeah, oh yeah. So like, when it comes to upward comparison, it really seems like the key ingredient is the perception

• 56:33Mark Manson?

  that this person you're comparing yourself to, that what they have is attainable for yourself. Right? So if you look at somebody and you've decided that they are so perfect and so great, and there's nothing you can ever do to be like them, then you're going to feel worse about yourself. But if you look at that person and you think, wow, they did it. I think I can do it too. Then it's actually going to motivate you and inspire you. And that's super interesting. It's funny, too, because I also think it's interesting. So there's something that like, it doesn't explicitly get talked about, right? Like, but it's a lot of times famous figures or public figures. And they get talked about as role models. They often get talked about as role models because of their, their gender, their ethnicity, their race,

• 57:17Mark Manson?

  their sexual orientation, or whatever. What I like about this is that it kind of explains the big deal around certain role models or certain people that we celebrate in society, right? Like, if you think about somebody like Barack Obama, or Oprah Winfrey, or, you know, people who have like, broken barriers. Often, these people, like, they're celebrated because of, you know, their gender, their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, things that, it's funny that we, as a society, we all agree that like, shouldn't matter. But then it's like, when one of these people shows up and becomes like, uber-successful, we decide it matters.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It matters, yeah.

• 57:56Mark Manson?

  And I think it's because of this. Because it's like, okay, when they see that Barack Obama can do it, then they, anybody who grows up like him, looks like him, is, is black, like, they can look at him and be like, okay, well, that guy did it, like, that gives me more confidence that I'm capable of doing something.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 58:14Mark Manson?

  And it's just funny that, like, that's not really explicitly stated when we celebrate these people. But the reason it is a big deal is that it is, when one of those people breaks through and becomes the first of, you know, XYZ to become president, or be a CEO, or be a billionaire, essentially, it is increasing the self-efficacy across that entire population.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:38Mark Manson?

  In society.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that was one of Festinger's, one of the points he made in Social Comparison Theory, was that we typically, if there was no other objective information out there, we compare ourselves to similar others.

• 58:49Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  That, he was kind of the first one to really outline that and define how we did that. So, yeah, that's absolutely, that drives us, what he found, too, way back in the 50s.

• 58:58Mark Manson?

  Now, let's talk about downward comparison. This is something that we also all do. So it's funny, because anytime people complain about comparing themselves to others.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:08Mark Manson?

  They always complain about the upward comparison. They're like, there's this person that makes me feel bad. How do I stop comparing myself? Nobody says, oh, there are these people that I feel much better than. There are these people that I love talking shit about.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you put it that way.

• 59:27Mark Manson?

  There are these people that I think are fucking idiots and I kinda enjoy the fact that they're fucking idiots. Nobody complains about that.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:35Mark Manson?

  Every, but meanwhile, everybody enjoys that. So downward comparison, again, it's inevitable. Again, I think there's a healthy and an unhealthy way to do it.

• 59:49Mark Manson?

  In the case of downward comparison, I think there, the healthy way of doing it is seeing how far you've come,

• 59:59Mark Manson?

  being grateful for what you have,

• 1:00:03Mark Manson?

  understanding what not to do. Right? I think we've all been there. We've seen somebody in our life like fuck up eight ways from Tuesday and be like, okay, not doing that. So in those ways, like downward comparison can be very useful. But I would say downward comparison becomes unhealthy. Uh, and, and really in two cases is, is one is if it generates a sense of complacency of just like, I'm the best. I don't need to do shit. Like these people suck. Like, I'm

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  At least I'm not as bad off as them.

• 1:00:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You can start resting on your laurels and get, get cocky, arrogant, things like that. And then the other thing I'd say is just being malicious. Like, there is a certain, I hate to say it, but it's like, there's an instinctual pleasure that comes with like, seeing other people fuck up at things that like you would never fuck up. Like seeing people make a mistake that you would never make.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Right, right. Schadenfreude, right?

• 1:01:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And you're just like, what an idiot.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:05Mark Manson?

  And yeah, that can feel good in small doses and it can feel good for like a short period of time. But you, you wanna be careful not to indulge that too much because it, yeah, it just turns you into a dick.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  I have a tendency to go down that rabbit hole sometimes, so yeah.

• 1:01:25Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah, we all do. We all do.

• 1:01:28Mark Manson?

  It's funny, my wife and I, we, for many years, we don't, we don't do it anymore. We, I, we finally grew up enough. Finally matured enough to the point where we stopped doing this. But my wife and I, for many years, we had our, we always had one hate follow. And it was purely like, it was, we each, there was somebody that we would follow on social media. And it was always somebody in our life, somebody we knew.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:52Mark Manson?

  It was somebody that we knew who like, we thought was so cringe and embarrassing. But like, they didn't realize it. And like, we kind of enjoyed how cringe and embarrassing they were.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Because at least I'm not this bad.

• 1:02:06Mark Manson?

  Exactly, exactly. It's just this like, very like, kind of mean girls form of satisfaction that comes with it.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I'm happy to report that like, we both kind of got grossed out by ourselves and stopped doing that many years ago.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  That's such a thing though. Everybody, that's so cringe. You hear that all the time now.

• 1:02:23Mark Manson?

  But it's like, there's part of you enjoys it.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Oh, there absolutely is.

• 1:02:26Mark Manson?

  enjoys it, yeah.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  I see how it's reinforcing for sure, yeah.

• 1:02:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah. No, I definitely, it's funny, I, I have not hate followed anybody in many years, but.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  My how you've grown.

• 1:02:40Mark Manson?

  I've become quite virtuous, if you haven't noticed. I am one of Aristotle's Megalosychos.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No ego.

• 1:02:50Mark Manson?

  You may bask.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Egoless, look how egoless you are.

• 1:02:52Mark Manson?

  The, and there's a, there's a halo appearing on the screen right now as people watch this.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I see it.

• 1:02:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's worth noting that Fessinger's model was descriptive, not p-scriptive. Basically, he's describing how we compare ourselves to others. He's not saying how we should compare ourselves to others. Because, I mean, let's be honest, we all, we make all four of these comparisons, all of us do. Both healthy and unhealthy, upward and downward comparisons. So basically, William James kind of explained the, the foundation of how our social comparison works. Fessinger explained the mechanics of how it works. And it really isn't into like, the, the, the late 20th, early 21st century that we start getting prescriptive. Of like, okay, how do we actually do this better? Or what are ways that we can kind of steer ourselves towards better comparisons? And you want to guess what the primary finding is?

• 1:03:44Mark Manson?

  What it comes back to?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Um, interpretation? What are we gonna do?

• 1:03:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah? Values.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:03:51Mark Manson?

  Comes back to values, as it almost always does.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Values all the way down.

• 1:03:55Mark Manson?

  Values all the way down. Values and boundaries, it turns out. Uh, so Abraham Testers, uh, in the late 80s came up with the self-evaluation maintenance model.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:05Mark Manson?

  Which, basically, what he discovered, and this makes a lot of sense, is that we tend to, uh, we tend to evaluate people based on things that we care about, right? So, let's say you go and win a golf tournament. I don't give two shits about golf, so I'm gonna be happy for you.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Be super proud of me.

• 1:04:24Mark Manson?

  It doesn't threaten my ego, it doesn't challenge my identity, it doesn't, uh, there's no scarcity involved, whereas, let's say I care very, like, let's say I've been practicing my ass off on my golf swing and I'll, like, care really deeply about it, and then you just kinda casually go win a golf tournament, that's likely to spark a lot of envy, because golf is something that I have chosen to measure myself by, and to build my identity on, and then you go and do the thing that I care about, and you do it better than I do with seemingly less effort, so yeah, fuck you. And you see this kind of play out in all sorts of different dimensions. You know, one of the ways that, I, I wrote an article many, many years ago, I think it was even before you, you started working with me, it was called, "We Judge Others How We Judge Ourselves."

• 1:05:09Mark Manson?

  And it's basically, whatever the, the yardstick that you have internalized for yourself, the, the, the ruler that you use to measure your own success or virtue as a human being, um, that is what you will instinctively apply to others, and then when people drastically outpace you on that yardstick, you will feel threatened, you'll feel envious, you will feel butthurt, and you will be kind of a dick about it.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, and everything's the yardstick, right?

• 1:05:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Right, it's, it could be money, it could be how much ego you don't have, it could be any, anything.

• 1:05:43Mark Manson?

  Anything.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Looks, whatever.

• 1:05:45Mark Manson?

  Anything.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Mark Manson?

  And again, like, coming back to this It makes sense that this is largely rooted in values because if you go back to the values episode, one of the things that we hammer on over and over and over is that you have to value something. It is impossible to value nothing. Right. Not valuing anything is a value. Is a form of value. So, which I guess is what the Buddhist monks find, right? It's like they're attempting to value nothing, which then becomes the new value that they measure themselves and the other monks by. And it becomes competitive and they're like, oh, fuck that guy. He's meditating longer than I am. Values all the way down. That's what it is. Yeah. So, the point here is that there are, there are probably better and worse values. There are better and worse yardsticks to measure ourselves by, right?

• 1:06:30Mark Manson?

  And this kind of gets into, you know, without going too deep into the values episode, but like, you know, there are external and internal status indicators for ourselves, right? Like, I can choose to measure myself by my success in golf tournaments, which is probably a bad way to measure myself. It's not something I have total control over. It's an external and arbitrary metric. It's very competitive. Whereas I can choose to measure myself by something much more internal, something I can fully control, like say, my honesty or my integrity, or how I treat people, or the, how good of a friend I am. That's probably a much better way to measure myself and treat myself. And as a result, I'm going to draw

• 1:07:15Mark Manson?

  better comparisons between myself and others, right? Kind of the simplest way that I've distilled this before is, is I've often written that, you know, the trick isn't to stop comparing yourself to others. It's to compare yourself to better people for better reasons. And ultimately, a certain amount of this is just, it's emotional awareness, it's self-awareness, it's understanding, what are you choosing to make important to yourself? Because- Whatever you choose to make important to yourself, understand that that is going to become the basis of comparison that you make towards others. And again, in the values episode, we went on at length about how important and crucial it is to choose your values and know your values and live out your values and practice your values. This is just another form of that.

• 1:07:59Mark Manson?

  If that like, okay, when you sit down and decide what matters in your life more than anything else, what do you care about? Understand that a side effect of that or a downstream effect of that is that this is going to become the way that you compare yourself to others. This is going to become the yardstick that you measure yourself by, that you measure other people by, and it's going to largely dictate and define the sorts of people that you want to surround yourself with and the sort of people that you're going to look up to.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, choose wisely.

• 1:08:23Mark Manson?

  Choose wisely.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Mark Manson?

  That kind of wraps up the psychological section. I do know that there is some interesting neuroscience that goes along with this, but you are the neuroscientist at this table, so I will shut the fuck up and hand it over to you.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of the neuroscience, anyway, it kind of, it wraps this all up in a kind of interesting way, I think, and put some finer points on a few of the details that you've mentioned already. Back in the 2000s, there was kind of this foundational study. You know, I mentioned that example about if I make $70,000, I'm happy. Or if you only make 50, but if you make 90, there's a social comparison there and I'm not as happy. That bears out in the lab, actually.

• 1:09:01Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  So they did this study where they put people in an FMRI. They had them do some task. It doesn't matter what it is because they would give them money if they performed it well. Right? And not only did they show them how much money they gained from it, they showed them how much money other people got. Another person who was doing the same thing, how much they got. You got the same amount, you were both happy, it was all great. But sometimes they would say, okay, this person gets $40 and you only get 20.

• 1:09:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Then there was a particular spot in the brain, the ventral striatum, doesn't matter, it's involved in reward. It fires more when you're, when you get a higher reward or the same reward as somebody else and then less if you don't. There's like, there's a brain mechanism right there. It's just, your, your brain feels rewards in a relative manner. Yeah. All right, where it's a comparison machine, it's not absolute.

• 1:09:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:09:46Mark Manson?

  And the happiness research on income shows this as well.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Same thing. Exactly same thing.

• 1:09:50Mark Manson?

  It's better to be the richest person in a poor neighborhood than the poorest person in a rich neighborhood.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Goes back to what I was talking about, like my grandma, you know, she's like, we were poor, but we didn't know we were poor.

• 1:09:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Right? Because everybody around us was poor. That was kind of the entryway into this social comparison in social neuroscience. There's, you have distinct neural machinery for comparison, why it feels good and why it feels bad to, downward comparisons, like I did better than this other person, that it's naturally rewarding, just on a, just on a normal basis it is, where upward comparisons are usually like, you know, there's a pinch of like, pain with that, but not necessarily, there's some nuance to that that I'll get into in a second. The, when we outperform others, reward circuits tend to line up, and when we are outperformed,

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  like, social pain tends to light up. So there's completely different systems for these two, it's not just one system. So one system gets activated over the other, okay? Basically, what they kind of gleaned from all of this, and this is getting to the late 2000s, 2010s, they gleaned from all of this is that another person's success or failure, it's meaningful to you, but that could be, it can be motivating, or it can be demotivating.

• 1:11:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  All right. This brings me to, there's kind of like, a fork in the road, and this is what we've, we've kind of already talked about this, but there's like, a neural basis for it, right? I'm gonna use the emotions of envy and admiration here, but they could be similar emotions, or Aristotle called envy and emulation as well, right? So, in envy, your brain kind of has, it assesses the reward versus the pain, but there's also like, a threat component to it as well. So when you envy somebody, there's, it's, it feels threatening to you, right? You're like, that person's doing better than me, I feel threatened, I need to do something about it, right? But there's usually, there's a negative connotation to that, right?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  This occurs in areas like the anterior insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, basically, these are the ones that process the social pain, okay? Whereas if you have something more like admiration, or what Aristotle called emulation, another part of your brain does that as well. So there's like, this fork in the road where somehow your brain You know, this, something comes up and then your brain either assesses it as a threat or as, okay, we're going to go into growth mode now, basically, right? Which is pretty interesting, like there's actual neural machinery that does this.

• 1:12:20Mark Manson?

  Fascinating.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really, really interesting. So essentially that when your brain is kind of in this admiration mode, it's actually, it goes searching for possibilities rather than inadequacies. So like, I think our, our task is to find that fork in the road, right? Is to find that fork in the road where, where we can decide, where we can reinterpret that, whether it's CBT or any other methods that we're going to talk about later, is to find that fork in the road and try to push it towards that more admiration and inspiration and upward spiral that we can find, okay? Now, the neurosciences too have found there's kind of four different things that can influence this, and we've already mentioned a couple of them actually,

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  whether we take that envy path or whether we take the admiration path. One of them you mentioned already was attainability, so like in self-efficacy. Can't, do I actually see myself as being able to do this?

• 1:13:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Okay. If, if another person's success, if it feels like it's within reach, then it's usually inspiring. And so this is where all this stuff comes in about like, be careful who you admire. Who's the target of your admiration, right? Another one is self-security or self-esteem too. So people with stronger self-esteem, they show less of that kind of envy path, which makes a lot of sense, right?

• 1:13:39Mark Manson?

  It's funny because I just see that, especially if you, if you take William James's definition, like I just see that as another form of self-efficacy. Because it's like a person with self-esteem has built up a resume of doing things in their life. And so that's just given them more self-efficacy and belief of like, oh yeah, I could do that.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And related to that too is the closeness of the target.

• 1:14:00Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  This goes back to Fessinger again, so he, you know, he said if, if there's no objective information, we look to people who are similar to us. So it's usually your peers. If you're comparing yourself to your peers and people who are immediately around you, that's usually a better, you have a better chance of going down that admiration path when you do the envy path, okay? And then last is comparison when it's framed, it's the framing of it.

• 1:14:26Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Basically. So if you see this comparison as a chance to learn or a chance to grow rather than, it's just that mind switch really is. Do I see this comparison? Do I see this person achieving this thing that I either envy or admire? Is this a chance for me to grow or is it a chance for me to show how lucky they are or shit on them in some way? So those are kind of the four things that neuroscientists and psychologists together have kind of come together and found that we can kind of nudge ourselves towards the admiration route.

• 1:14:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  More recently, and you've mentioned this already as well too, you've hinted at it anyway, there's this thing what they call temporal comparison.

• 1:15:09Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  So, and you've talked about this a lot actually before, like especially you find yourself very competitive, you're a competitive person, but the person you like to compete with the most is yourself.

• 1:15:19Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:15:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  And we actually do this all the time. I think people, we think of social comparison, we think of comparison in general, we're comparing ourselves to others. We actually do this all the time. All of us do this all the time. We're comparing ourselves. A lot of us though, what happens is, is we're kind of, we're beating up our past self.

• 1:15:38Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  And saying, "Look what you did to me," basically. Maybe not in those exact words, but we're all doing this all the time.

• 1:15:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  But if we can shift that to a, "I'm better than I was yesterday or last year," or whatever it is, that again is another method that psychologists and neuroscientists have found that that's actually a lot healthier, more adaptive, and leads to more motivation

• 1:16:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  towards your goals and your values.

• 1:16:03Mark Manson?

  I think, so this is, this is, this is the cliche that originated with the Stoics of like, "Don't compare yourself to others, compare yourself to who you were yesterday or last year or whatever." It's funny because I feel like this is becoming culturally normalized and encouraged.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:20Mark Manson?

  It's, and I think, I have a little theory around this. I think a lot of it has to do with like data and video games. So I mean, we're going to get into the Yeah.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  The gamification.

• 1:16:31Mark Manson?

  The digital world has affected our psychology and our social comparison. But I think this would actually be the positive side of the digitization of culture and society. Is that like, you actually have a record of how you were a year ago. You can go back and look what you were doing a year ago, right? You could see how stupid you were, or the dumb thing you posted two years ago, or what you bench pressed and squatted last summer. And you can see how far you've come. I remember, it was interesting because I went through all of school writing papers, not knowing that I was a good writer. And I think a lot of that had to do with just how arbitrary the grading was with each teacher.

• 1:17:16Mark Manson?

  Some teachers gave me great grades and some teachers gave me horrible grades. And I never really understood why, I kind of just like took it at face value. And when I started writing online, two things happened. One was, I could actually go look back at things I wrote a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. And what I, after I wrote for a few years, what I consistently found was like, the further back I went, the more I cringed. The more I was like, holy shit. Woof. What was this guy thinking? And while that, in that moment, it felt really bad. It just like, it's such a gratifying feeling to see like, wow, look how far I've come. Just in three years of writing blog posts, right?

• 1:18:01Mark Manson?

  And then the other thing is that you actually get the data on it, right? Like you see, you're like, oh, okay. You know, in 2010, I'm like, okay, a normal blog post for me gets 30 comments. Well, wow, I go back and I look at 2008 and it's like, three comments. Wow, that's come along like, clearly a lot more people like my writing than they used to. And I think you see this with video games as well. As an avid gamer, like, most, most video games like will track your skill and performance over time. They'll give you ratings, they'll give you badges, medals. So you can actually see your progression through games and like how much better you are at certain. games over time. So I and then that doesn't even get into like, you know, apps like Duolingo and Strava.

• 1:18:45Mark Manson?

  All the gamification that's been built into, you know, education and and different like health and fitness apps and things like that. You know, even even something as simple like, I don't know about you, but like the first 10 years that I worked out. I just went to the gym and just like lift. Yeah, I just went. I just like, like, ah, 30 pounds. Sounds okay. And like, I just pick it up and start doing a lift. It really wasn't until I was probably 30 that I actually started writing down my workouts and then like trying to improve on each lift and tracking my progress across things. And so, yeah, it is, it is, I think it's, it's a fantastic thing.

• 1:19:27Mark Manson?

  I think it makes everybody more effective when you're able to like track progress like this. And I do think it has been enabled with kind of the information revolution. So before I know we're about to get into kind of the disaster of of social comparison in the in the digital age. But before we get there, I just want to.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  There's a silver lining there too.

• 1:19:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, I want to stand on my soapbox and say like, wait, there's something really good that's happened.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going to be personality based, I think, too. I think some people are just more externally focused than internally focused. And so I think it depends a little bit on your personality. If you are one of those people who does get motivation from external sources, I don't think it's such a bad thing. I know that's probably a lot of people don't agree with that. But again, if you leverage it correctly, if you leverage it right and do it in a healthy way and take that admiration path that we were talking about, then that's great.

• 1:20:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  You can use both. You can do both. You're gonna do it anyway. You're gonna, you're gonna measure yourself against your past self, no matter what. And you're gonna measure yourself against other people, no matter what. So it's a matter of, yeah, finding the right the right balance there in the right situation.

• 1:20:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Would you say it's accurate to kind of summarize this entire section with? The way to compare best is to compare in a way to learn and improve. And to compare poorly is when you compare to judge and condemn.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

• 1:20:57Mark Manson?

  Like, I think there's-

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  You're passing a verdict. Yeah.

• 1:20:59Mark Manson?

  It's funny, because it's like, this didn't occur to me when, you know, during the research phase of this episode, but like, now that we're sitting here talking about it for a couple hours, the thing that keeps coming to mind is like, the growth and fixed mindset. Like, it's when I look at like, unhealthy comparison, it just feels very fixed. It's like, oh, man, I'm such a loser. She's amazing. I'm never gonna be like that. There's nothing I can do. Like, that feels like a very unhealthy comparison. Or, she's such a loser, I'm amazing, there's nothing she's ever gonna do to change that. Whereas like, the healthy form of comparison seems to be like, oh, wow, that's really impressive. Like, I wonder what I could learn from her.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Right there, there's curiosity.

• 1:21:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  There's curiosity that comes with it.

• 1:21:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Like, instead of, instead of just like, knee-jerk jumping to a conclusion about why someone was able to achieve something the way they did, or whatever it is, there's a curiosity around it.

• 1:21:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Oh, how did they do that?

• 1:21:54Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  How do they think about that? How do they, how do they go about it? What, I don't know, you know?

• 1:21:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  You can take it too far and be like, what do they eat for breakfast?

• 1:22:03Mark Manson?

  What's their morning routine?

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  What's their morning routine? Which you and I are both not big fans of, like, what's your morning routine questions? But, uh, there's a curiosity there. Get curious.

• 1:22:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  You know, about what's going on with this, in this situation.

• 1:22:15Mark Manson?

  I like that.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah. All right, well, without further ado, let's get into the digital Armageddon.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  The digital landscape.

• 1:22:28Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Online world.

• 1:22:29Mark Manson?

  Hmm. When you connect, when it seems to be okay.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Seems to be doing okay.

• 1:22:34Mark Manson?

  You think it's going well? You think this is, uh, you think this is going well? Like, Drew Bernie, the, the, I'm fine dog in the burning house.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Well, you know what? I'm not really on social media, so for me, it's going all right. But I hear there are some things about the digital world these days.

• 1:22:49Mark Manson?

  You hear that, huh?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  One of those, and we tend to think that actually, yeah, social comparison is probably one of those things. Although I think it might be changing a little bit. I want to get your opinion on that here a little bit. But yeah, so let's talk about what the, what social comparison at scale does to us, particularly on the online scale, right? So, you know, we've kind of already covered, obviously, our evolutionary past is that we grew up in these, or we, we, we developed in these small-scale societies. And we talked about the social brain hypothesis from Dunbar, right?

• 1:23:22Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  We talked about this more in the, in the friendship episode, but just to recap real quick, he, he had this idea of the concentric circles, right? You could have up to about five really close intimate friends, about 15 or so good friends, 50 people, you're like, oh yeah, I associate with these people. And then you know about 150 people that you'd have a relationship with.

• 1:23:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Anything beyond that gets a little hairy, right? Well, obviously, digital technologies kind of scramble that up big time, right? The, uh, those boundaries that we used to have around those, uh, around those concentric circles are really, really blurred now. And I think we've had a really rough time in the last 20 years trying to navigate that, right? So comparison in this world, it's no longer just like, it's no longer occasional. It's no longer just limited to the people around you, right? It's now scaled up, it's constant, it's global, and it's highly curated too, which is another thing to think about, right? So what I want to do is I want to get into some of kind of the mechanisms.

• 1:24:19Mark Manson?

  I want to add a

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Mark Manson?

  adjective to that.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:22Mark Manson?

  It's permanent, which we will, we will come back to this. We will come back to this.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. That's a really good one.

• 1:24:29Mark Manson?

  We will, yes, we will touch on it.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, so what I want to do then is get into some of the mechanisms and some of the kind of just the consequences, just kind of describe the problem of what's actually going on and maybe talk about some of the nuances in there. Um, and maybe talk about where we're headed a little bit with it too. And then we'll get into some of the more prescriptive stuff, how you can maybe like live as a modern person still and not be a total Luddite like me, okay?

• 1:24:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Okay. Old man Bernie, doling out the wisdom, coming down from the mountaintop.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  I'm not alone, by the way. I'm very pro-technology. I just, I think we need to use it in the right way. And that's what we're gonna get into here, right? Basically, though, you know, psychologists have, for a while now, they've called it, we live in what they call a leaderboard society. Right? And what they mean by that is, like, social, especially social media platforms, really mimic this, like, scorecard, this scoreboard.

• 1:25:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  It's very public, it's very out there, it's right in front of your face, and it's constant because we're constantly logged on now, right? Things like likes, followers, shares, endorsements, all of these things. It's, it's very clear, like, where you stand in this, uh, this pecking order that's online. This causes all sorts of problems, obviously. For one, they, it, it causes what they call amplification effects, okay? Um, the frequency and volume with which you are comparing yourself to others, if you're online, is just, your brain can't handle it. Right? Yeah, again, you're used to being around people, for 99.999% of our, our history, we've been around small groups, a small group of people that we know intimately.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  And we occasionally compare ourselves to, I mean, we might compare ourselves to some quite a bit, but it's not, not on the scale that we see now, right? Um, you now compare yourself not just with like, five, 10, 15, 20 people, it's literally thousands of people, right? Um, then you have like all these little algorithmic nudges that we all know about, you know, what's the algorithm doing, what's the algorithm feeding you? What's the algorithm pushing you towards and nudging you towards? So you have, uh, which is typically content that is, um, forcing you to compare yourself, it's forcing you to be morally indignant, like we talked about. It's forcing outrage, uh, and, and yeah, it's, it's forcing that comparison on you when you didn't really even necessarily ask for it. But it's just one big comparison machine.

• 1:26:44Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  I mean, how, how, how else do social media platforms get you to buy things? Anything that's ad-based, right?

• 1:26:49Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  You're gonna, you're, it's gonna sit there, it's going to provide you with some sort of social comparison and then offer you a solution.

• 1:26:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, marketing in a nutshell is, is like weaponizing feelings of inadequacy, so.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  And social media over the last, you know, 10 to 15 years has really perfected that.

• 1:27:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest ad engine in human history.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I used to, when I was on Instagram too, there was a period about 20, I'm gonna say 2018, 2019, where just shit was showing up at my house because I was buying the, like, I was falling prey to these Instagram ads. And it was just the dumbest shit, too. And I'm like, oh, my God, how do they do this? Well, it's through a lot of social comparison, especially something like Instagram, which is all about social comparison, right? Highly curated, right? Virality and visibility, too.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  So when hierarchies are calibrated like in real time, like when you're in a group, a small group, it's, it takes time to, to climb up the social ladder, if you will. It takes time. It takes positioning. It takes intimate knowledge with people. Online, like, something can just go viral right away. And then all of a sudden, that just shakes up the whole, the whole ecosystem that you're in. Maybe, maybe you go viral and like, all your friends are like, oh, look at Mr. Big Bridge is here, or something like that.

• 1:28:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Or maybe you go viral for the wrong reasons, too. That's another consequence of all of this as well. I would say, though, too, one of the biggest things is kind of the context shift that modern digital technologies provide. You go back to the similarity principle that, that have brought up a couple of times about, that Fessinger came up with in his social comparison theory.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  When we lack objective measures of how to, how to measure ourself, we compare ourselves to similar people. Your brain doesn't know the difference, though. When you're scrolling online, I know this sounds weird, but your brain does not know the difference between your peers and your non-piers on that. So if you're following celebrities, or you're following somebody who's doing the craziest things, or the people who do like the wildest, first of all, they're curated in a certain way to make you, make you think that they're one way or not. Your brain just doesn't, it can't, it can't distinguish between who's your, who your peer network is and who you're seeing on a screen. That's how dumb our brains are, I guess, to a certain extent. So this, it's like, it's constant upward comparison that we're subjected to, right?

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  And usually not the good kind.

• 1:29:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Or it's very easy to not, because you're just sitting there, you're not active in any sort of way. You're seeing other people be active in a socially upward way, and you're not part of it. So it's very easy to be like, well, I'm not like that.

• 1:29:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  It can.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  It can lead to, it can enable a constructive rivalry with others, but I think you have to be very, very conscious about curating your feeds and all that.

• 1:29:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I will say this. I do think the feeds are getting better at matching your interests.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  This is kind of where I wanted to go with you, yeah.

• 1:29:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It is interesting. I do feel like things are shifting over the last couple of years. They're getting better in some ways, but definitely not in all ways, like worse in others, I think. But I do think one of the things that they are getting better at is adapting to each individual user's interests. Like everything you're describing about like the constant comparison with like strangers and the just this massive sea or like this like globalized comparison to all these people around the planet that I have nothing to do with. I definitely feel less of that these days than I used to.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  I was getting that out too, yeah.

• 1:30:31Mark Manson?

  But I do feel much more pure comparison.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:30:36Mark Manson?

  So, and I think that's because my algorithms on each platform have become very narrowly focused on the things that I really care about, that I'm really interested in. So whether it's video games, podcasting, writing books, personal development, growth, psychology, you know, it's, that's pretty much like those things I just listed, music, those things I listed are probably like 80, 90% of all of my feeds across all platforms. And so now I am being compared to people for things that I do care about.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06Mark Manson?

  And I think that's both good and bad.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:31:09Mark Manson?

  You know, on the one hand, it's, I do find more inspiration than I used to, right? Like there is, there is like really cool stuff that I'm exposed to that I'm like, oh my God, it's so cool. I found this person and I'm going to learn a bunch of things. But on the other hand, because I'm now primarily being exposed to people who are doing the same things I'm doing.

• 1:31:28Mark Manson?

  It is easier to judge myself for stuff. Like, I don't know, I think back to, you know, what Instagram used to be, say, six or eight years ago. It was just like beautiful vacation photos, beautiful people, like crazy, amazing feats, stunts, all this stuff. I never really cared about that. Like, sure, maybe if you look at it enough times, you're like, wow, my life's kind of lame and boring. But like, I don't know, I don't think that had like a lasting effect. Whereas I think now, because it is so curated and we're so locked into,

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:04Mark Manson?

  Oh, these are all the people who are doing the things that I care about, but they're doing them way better than I am. I think that starts to run the risk of like, oh, man, I'm such a loser.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, where do you even start? Yeah.

• 1:32:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Where do you think it is, it's going then to? Because, you know, there's a lot of data coming out right now that like Gen Z, they're not as on social media as much, they're playing video games instead. And there's always a social component to those that they use.

• 1:32:26Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  And so, and you've said before that social media is way more media than it is social now. That's a big difference from, you know, early social media was, it was your peers to a certain extent. And then you might throw a celebrity or two on there. But now it seems like it's people in far-flung places that you have nothing to do with and celebrities. And the 1% of people who make the content is all getting served.

• 1:32:51Mark Manson?

  So it's interesting. One of the things, you know, I had a long conversation with Jonathan Haidt last year, who's wrote The Anxious Generation. He's like really been spearheading this whole area of like social media, digital life, mobile phones, mental health, especially in young people. I mean, overall, I'm like very sympathetic to his cause and I agree with him on a lot of points. But it is funny, I remember talking to him, I remember like going through all of his research and then, and then having the conversation with him. And I couldn't help but feel like, man, you are. There's a lag here. Like, the social media world changes so fast. Right. The reality today is completely different than it was in 2023 or 2022.

• 1:33:33Mark Manson?

  And, but most of the research that's coming out today was done in 2023 or 2022. And then most of the research that he wrote about, first of all, he wrote it last year, but he wrote it like two, three years ago. Yeah. And then the research that he wrote his book based on came out two, three years before that. So he's working off of like the 2020 version of social media, which was completely different. Yeah. Completely different algorithms, different use cases, different audiences. TikTok had like maybe 10% of the users that it has today at the time. So it is so different. It is becoming more media than it is becoming social. And I actually think from a mental health perspective, that's a good thing. Yeah. Because I think when, when, when you get on an app,

• 1:34:15Mark Manson?

  if you were, if you were consuming content and your perception of it is that it is a, it's a celebrity. It's not like a real person. It's not a peer. It's not somebody that you can actually compare yourself to. I think that's, that's relatively innocuous for your like self-esteem and mental health. Like for instance, when we were kids growing up, like I never went and saw Mission Impossible and was like, man, I'm such a loser. Right, yeah. Like, I can't scale a cliff with one hand tied behind my back. I'm like, I'm, I'm so lame. Nobody's ever gonna like me. No, it was when, like, if you look at where all the negative mental health effects are happening, they generally happen with young people. And young people primarily use social media not as a form of media, but as a form of socializing. They use it to keep in touch with the kids at school.

• 1:35:00Mark Manson?

  They're on Snapchat, they're on WhatsApp, they're posting TikToks to each other. And that's where you see a lot of these negative effects. Yeah. And when you get into the older generations, people like us, who kind of just get on and passively scroll, like I basically use Instagram the same way I used to use television. Like, I used to, I used to come home from school, I'd turn on the TV and I would just kind of passively leave it on and not really think about it. And it would just kill time or like help me relax or whatever. I use Instagram the exact same way these days. And, uh, and I definitely don't feel that comparison or pressure the way I used to say with Facebook 10 years ago. Right. And Facebook 10 years ago or 15 years ago at this point.

• 1:35:43Mark Manson?

  It was all my friends, all my friends' friends and all my peer group, all the people I went to college with, all the people, you know, people in the same industry as me. And so when I saw them doing cool shit, I was like, oh, man, Becky from English class is living in Switzerland. Like, ah, I'm so jealous, you know? It was like, that stuff actually hit and hurt a little bit. Whereas like now I get on Instagram and it's like, I don't know, some, some guy's dog parachuting out of a flying van or something. I'm like, whatever.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:17Mark Manson?

  This is fun for five seconds, swipe to the next thing.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Goes back to what we were talking about is you, you get, you will negatively evaluate somebody else who's like, if it's in the same domain as, as you value or are operating in.

• 1:36:31Mark Manson?

  We measure others by the way we measure ourselves.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:33Mark Manson?

  Right? And so when we're more exposed to, you know, people who are either in the same peer group, or, and sorry, I'm like totally hijacking your section.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  No, I wanted to ask you about this because when I was going through the research for this, I'm like, yeah, we've been talking about this for a decade, you know, like we, and a lot of the research I found was from about a decade ago.

• 1:36:53Mark Manson?

  It's funny because, okay, so we did two or three episodes on this on the old subtle art podcast a few years ago. We did, I did the Jonathan Haidt episode last year with him, which I really enjoyed. He and I had a great conversation. And it's funny because this is actually one of the things I told him is I was like, I was like, dude, my whole business is on social media. I'm like, it is different. It's completely, every two years.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  There's a huge.

• 1:37:14Mark Manson?

  It's all different.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Mark Manson?

  It's all different. And, and he was like, actually really curious about that. He was, he was like, oh, how has it changed? Like I explained to him, I'm like, dude, the for you feed, most of this research was done when the for you feed didn't exist.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Right, right. Before TikTok, yeah.

• 1:37:28Mark Manson?

  And this is, this, and this is what we're talking about, right? The for you feed changed all of this, right? Like now you're actually, the majority of the content on most social platforms is people you've never heard of and that you'll never see. And so there is, I think, a separation. I think with the for you feed, you're actually less likely to make social comparisons, but because it is in the same domain that you're in.

• 1:37:52Mark Manson?

  You know, it changes the nature of the comparison. And you start, now it's not just like a random anonymous person in some part of the world, like doing something cool that you're like, oh, man, I'll never do that. Now it's like, oh, this is a thing I really care about. Like, I'm a guitar player and like, I can't tell you how many times some fucking 18 year old shows up on my feed and he is a god. He's an absolute god. There's some good guitar players out there. And every time I see one of them, I'm like, I'm so glad I quit music.

• 1:38:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'll finish up my hijack here and then I'll hand it back to you. So my fury with this, and I have no data to back this up, but this is kind of where I'm, my head's at with the social stuff these days. Like I said, I think you're mostly seeing, seeing the deleterious effect with the younger generation. Younger generation primarily uses it to socialize. They're not, you know, high schoolers aren't getting on and, and, you know, scrolling through people's Europe vacations and, you know, cool television clips from South Korea or whatever. Like, young people are spending most of their time sending TikToks to each other, following each other, sending Snapchats to each other.

• 1:39:08Mark Manson?

  And I do think the social media as a form of social communication, I actually think the initial, the initial intention of social media, which was to connect everybody digitally, is actually what fucks us up. And because it's, that's when you're getting the highlight, everybody's highlight reels. So it's like, let's say you're in a WhatsApp group with everybody from your high school. Everything that's getting posted is everybody's best moment or worst moment. So you're only being exposed to all of your peers at their absolute best or their absolute worst. And those are the people that you care, you actually do care about. Those are the people that you actually are basing your self-esteem on. Not some random dude in Switzerland or whatever.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Mark Manson?

  And, and because you're being exposed to the extremes of their experience, you are going to get a very skewed and fucked up perception. On top of that, um, there is the permanence aspect. And this is, this was the big thing that Jonathan Haidt brings up that I think is huge and like completely understudied and underappreciated.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  And still a problem.

• 1:40:11Mark Manson?

  And yeah.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  A massive problem. Has been a problem and still a problem.

• 1:40:13Mark Manson?

  Massive problem. So when you and I were in high school, if we went up to a girl at a dance and like awkwardly asked her out and got shot down, we would be really embarrassed for, you know, maybe 20 minutes, we would be embarrassed, you know, maybe there's like four or five other kids in, in the vicinity.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  And a near shot, yeah.

• 1:40:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And they like, they're like, ooh, Drew got shot down. You know, like it's, it's embarrassing in front of them. Maybe some people talk a little bit of shit at school the next Monday, uh, but then that's it. It's gone. A week later, nobody remembers, nobody cares. You go on, you ask the next girl and you, you learn a very important fact of life, which is that rejection doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It sucks, but it's like, nobody remembers. None of it matters. Today, if you get rejected and it's being filmed, which it often is.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:06Mark Manson?

  That gets posted to the school WhatsApp group, or it gets posted on somebody's TikTok. It gets sent around the school. Everybody's commenting. Everybody's trashing you and then it's fucking there forever.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:18Mark Manson?

  Sophomore year, junior year, senior year, people are still, people can, anytime somebody wants to rag on you, anytime somebody wants to diminish you, shit on you, it gets brought back up. And so what do, what do young people do? They become risk averse. They stop taking chances. They stop asking each other out. They stop going to parties. They stop doing drugs. They stay at home. They play video games together.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, they, they get off social media.

• 1:41:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  They're not using it.

• 1:41:46Mark Manson?

  They're starting to.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  They're starting to now.

• 1:41:47Mark Manson?

  They're starting to.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or like you were saying, it's going more private than to, you know, whatever it is, WhatsApp groups or, or whatever, because the, the risk is so high. Same thing like, um, you know, all these, uh, like VR glasses that are coming out that have cameras on them.

• 1:42:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  And you don't know that like now. Think about that. If, if those become so ubiquitous within just a few years, nobody's even going to want to leave their house at some point.

• 1:42:11Mark Manson?

  Dude, I like.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  And forget the privacy concerns. I didn't realize how little people care about privacy, but forget all of that. Just like the

• 1:42:18Mark Manson?

  The social.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Risk of going viral for the wrong reasons.

• 1:42:22Mark Manson?

  That, so, okay. I agree. I don't think people actually care about privacy. I think people care about that.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:28Mark Manson?

  And it's like, I have yet to meet somebody who's like wearing the Meta glasses like in a social situation, but if and when I do, I'm gonna be like, dude, take that shit off.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:37Mark Manson?

  Don't do that. But I think everybody senses that, so nobody wears them, right? Because it's like, everybody knows, because it completely changes the dynamic. If I have any inkling that I'm being recorded, I'm going to completely censor myself and change how I present myself. Especially if I'm around people I don't know, right?

• 1:42:57Mark Manson?

  It's also like, why are you recording this?

• 1:43:01Mark Manson?

  There's, it's interesting. So there's a AI product. It got massive funding, like raised tens of millions of dollars. It's called, it's called friend.com and it's super fascinating. So basically what it is, is it's a wearable. It's like a necklace that you put on. It records everything, records like everything you listen to, everybody you talk to, where you go, everything. And then basically the idea is that it collects all the data on your life, on your day, whatever. And then anytime you're lonely, you can just talk to it. And it's, it's an AI. And it like, it can be your friend. And this, this company like ran a massive promotional campaign, like billboards all over LA, New York,

• 1:43:43Mark Manson?

  like just Times Square, all this like crazy, you know, production quality stuff being posted, going viral. And it's funny, if you go to the App Store, A, like nobody's downloading it, and B, like it's, it has like a two-star rating. Because people are just like, fuck this. Like, like, do you really want to ruin the last thing that we have? Which is like face-to-face in-person spaces.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Mark Manson?

  Like it's already, everything else has already been ruined, right? The last sanctuary we have is when we're in a room together alone with no devices. So like, now you want to ruin that too?

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  They're gonna try to figure out a way.

• 1:44:23Mark Manson?

  They'll find a way. They'll find a way.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, okay, where do you think that's going in terms of social comparison? If we all, if AI does take over the world?

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, if we do, there are some people out there who think, actually, what we're about to do is go back to a time where we do converse more face to face and we do, we live much more like our ancestors did, only with a lot more technology, a lot more safety.

• 1:44:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Do you think that's, do you think that's around the corner, or at least in the future at some point?

• 1:44:57Mark Manson?

  It's basically gonna come down to two things.

• 1:45:00Mark Manson?

  Do you have enough impulse control? Slash? Lack of social anxiety? To force yourself out of the house, into these communities, into these events, into these environments? To build a healthy social life? To maintain your sanity and your happiness? And I think that's gonna become much more important. It's gonna become much more reinforced and encouraged. And and I think it's even gonna become more of a status symbol. If you actually have places to go in person, full of people who you like and respect and like and respect you, like, it's gonna be a bit of a status symbol. Then I think there's gonna be a portion of the population that just like succumbs to the dopamine madness.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:46Mark Manson?

  And doesn't have the impulse control, has too much social anxiety, and it's, I think there's gonna be a very clear delineation between the two, because it's like, both are spirals. One is an upward spiral, one's a downward spiral, right? It's like, the more sucked in and compulsive you get with all like, the dopamine madness. The more socially anxious you're gonna become, the more distracted you're gonna become, the more focus you're gonna lack. And the harder it's gonna be to get out of it. Similarly, it's like, the more you get out of the house, the more...

• 1:46:14Mark Manson?

  Social life you have, the more relationships you have, the more confidence and self-esteem you're gonna have to like go out and do it more. So that's kind of my take. Like I, I could keep going, but like we're gonna get way off topic.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I feel, I've felt the tug to, and let me see if I can bring this back.

• 1:46:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  I've felt the tug to, because even though like I'm not really on a lot of social media, I think I got YouTube, I like to, you know, YouTube shorts, they're pretty addictive. There, it's like TikTok, you know? And I think it was one or two weeks ago, I had some friends, they were like, hey, we're going to this, there's like a little concert. It's actually, it's at like somebody's house who's kind of built like a, like a backyard, that's like a big compound for concerts and stuff like that. And it's small concerts, but still. And I felt the tug, cause I was like, ah, I kind of just want to stay home and scroll. And when I scroll, what I'm doing, especially like on YouTube shorts and stuff, it's, it is, it's other podcasters, okay? It's a lot of podcasters. I'm like, ooh, I should, I want to do something like that. Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Or, oh, that's a really good way to present something, or whatever it is that I do with that. Or it's like, yeah, things I'm really into. And, and there is that like dopamine chase that you have. I forced myself, I got out and I was like, I was kind of dreading it almost. And so I get it, like, and I'm not, I'm not in it like, like younger people are.

• 1:47:34Mark Manson?

  Right, you're, you're pretty, you're pretty limited.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37Mark Manson?

  You're pretty limited in your digital diet. No, I mean Fernando and I talk about this quite a bit, like we both feel it, like it's, it is that, that feeling you just described of like, oh, do I have to get up and go to this thing?

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Mark Manson?

  Like, we are noticing that we're feeling that very consistently.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Mark Manson?

  With, with social events. Like it's almost every single day, we're like, ah, do we have to go to this dinner? Or like, oh, yeah, we agreed to do this party, didn't we? And then.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  And then you go.

• 1:48:06Mark Manson?

  Nine times out of 10, we're like, oh my God, I'm so glad we went.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Luckily, luckily, I've had a few of those in the last few months, like, like a wedding party I went to, I went to that concert. A couple of other things, a couple dinners that I went to where there was that tug and I get there and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so glad I came to this. And I got away from my phone and look at this and I had a great time and I connected with people and it was awesome. And I think people are gonna see that at some point.

• 1:48:26Mark Manson?

  But well, then it's funny, because then it's like, we go back home and then like two days later, it's the exact same thing.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Mark Manson?

  It's like, ah, should we cancel? Like, do you really wanna go? Like, ah, I should make up a reason not to. But it's, it's.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there is a comparison, we'll bring this home, there is a comparison element here too, right? Because you're comparing that experience that you might go and do this and it's like, ah, it's gonna be like, you know, parking's gonna suck, there might be some assholes there, there's gonna be, you know, all this. I could compare that, or I can sit here and I can know that I'm gonna get some dopamine hits. I know that I'm gonna get some, some, some feedback loops that are just gonna keep me hooked. I know what that experience is like.

• 1:49:05Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  And I think, especially with like, with social comparison, that's, you, you have to think about that.

• 1:49:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it is, a big part of it is, I think, just the, the anxiety or the insecurity around,

• 1:49:20Mark Manson?

  you know, like, okay, first of all, I don't know half the people who are gonna be there.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:24Mark Manson?

  And, and then maybe in a lot of cases too, it's like, some of the people, like, I don't know about you, but like, there's very few people in my life that I have like, very, I universally feel good about, like, there, you know, most people that I know, I'm like, I really like them, but like, there's, you know, there's a little thing that bugs me, or like, I hate it when she does that. And it's funny, because it's in those moments, you're like, uh, like, those, those things kinda get amplified in your head.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:49:49Mark Manson?

  And you're like, yeah, that guy, yeah, um, so it's, it's, uh.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in an awkward group hug when I went to that concert, so yeah, that was a little weird.

• 1:49:59Mark Manson?

  I'm sorry, you had to endure such a thing.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  That was the only awkward moment.

• 1:50:05Mark Manson?

  So that's good.

• 1:50:07Mark Manson?

  You should try living in LA.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  This guy was very drunk.

• 1:50:15Mark Manson?

  Anything else we want to hit on? I feel like we just threw half of this section.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  We kind of did. I mean, there, you know, the prescriptive stuff, I don't know if we want to get too far into that. Like I, since I have pulled back from so much social media, I definitely have noticed. Here's the thing about it though, too, is that I'm, I'm a person who is very much prone to social comparison. Okay. And I noticed that more and more, I mean, we all are, as we've been harping on this whole time. I, I've just noticed that I don't, there's certain areas of my life where I just don't have as much of that anymore. I don't have as much of a comparison mindset or anymore. It's usually around, a lot of it is around like the people I hang out with. It was like, oh, is this person cool? Is this person not cool? How is this person going to affect my social standing or anything like that?

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  I, maybe that's just getting older too. I don't know.

• 1:51:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  Or, you know, just things that I have, like the like material possessions. I, I don't see a whole lot of that anymore because I'm not inundated with really highly targeted ads as much, you know? So, I mean, I think if you are, like taking a break is good. Sure. You know, I know that's the standard advice, but yeah, I don't know. I, I, it's just going to be really interesting to see where this goes and how, how we're supposed to navigate it. I don't know. You got any advice on that?

• 1:51:36Mark Manson?

  I mean.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  You're on social media a lot. The, the other side of it though, too, is that recently, like I logged on to a social media network that I, I forgot that I even had an account not too long ago. I was like, what was that? Like, I forget what this is even like. I found some really cool stuff on there. I was like, oh, this is awesome.

• 1:51:52Mark Manson?

  Again, I think the.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Highly tailored.

• 1:51:54Mark Manson?

  The benefits of social media are largely unconscious and the, the costs are very conscious. So I think a lot of it goes under the radar. Like I've exposed, I, I've, I've been exposed to. Tons of incredible musicians and bands that I love.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  That was the biggest thing that I miss from social media is I don't find as new music as.

• 1:52:12Mark Manson?

  I've discovered tons of great books. I've heard a bunch of interesting interviews. I've learned so much about business through social media and YouTube. So, I mean, it's again, there's like, there are a lot of benefits that kind of go unsung. I will say one last thing, and this kind of ties into the for you feed thing, right? So it's like, I do think the for you feed has kind of killed the problem of that global comparison and localized it a little bit more again. But the problem is, is that that that localization is not accurate. It's not reflective of reality in a lot of cases. So I think what has happened since the for you feed is that, okay, each person is getting served a narrow band of content based on the topics that they care about or they're interested in.

• 1:52:58Mark Manson?

  The problem is, is that it's kind of like the criticism of the news media. It's not that they're not factually correct. It's that it they're not, they're only presenting you certain facts. To like shape and mold your perception of an issue. The exact same thing is happening on social media, but it's happening to each one of us individually. So it's, it's, and this, it is true politically, but it doesn't have to just be true politically. Like you could be getting served things about nutrition and health that are, because it's very much based on your preferences and your viewpoints. You are developing a distorted perception of reality. And therefore you are drawing social comparisons based on something that is not actually accurate or reflective

• 1:53:42Mark Manson?

  of the thing you actually care about. And, and so I, I see this happen a lot, like, um, you remember like a year or two ago, a bunch, a bunch of journalists were talking about the vibe session?

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Mark Manson?

  Or a bunch of economists were talking about the vibe session, which is basically like the economy was doing great. But when you surveyed people, they thought it was doing horribly. And it was very interesting because they pointed out that generally speaking, like. Consumer surveys are have been historically accurate predictors of recessions and how well the economy is doing, except for in the last three or four years.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Mark Manson?

  And I personally think it's the for you feed because the people who are currently down on their luck, you know, lost a job or things aren't going super well, or like inflation hit them hard or whatever, they are being curated content and information that reflects that reality back to them. And so they are erroneously developing a perception that the whole world is experiencing this, that because it's everybody on their feed is showing up is complaining about inflation too. And everybody else has lost their job that they're they're watching and they're getting served all this content from people who are complaining about the economic situation. Meanwhile, like the the actual data is showing that things are fine. So it's it's I think that's like a microcosm of the issue and you can run that through. There's tons of political issues that it like we're literally to a point where that

• 1:55:01Mark Manson?

  people on different sides of a political issue like literally don't agree on on the facts.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:07Mark Manson?

  Like there's just there are like different facts for each side.

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:11Mark Manson?

  And you don't really like you don't really know what to make of it.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't like I said, it's gonna be crazy going forward. It's just gonna be like one difference, I think that you just pointed out from the like new media, so social media, you're saying is there's no more media than social now. Using it, if you're using it like TV used to be or whatever, there wasn't that wasn't the case. There was kind of one narrative that everybody you just kind of had, right? I mean, yes, as cable television got more channels and like all of that, there sure there was there was dissemination of different opinions, but it's now it's like everybody's got their individual little.

• 1:55:48Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  Universe almost. And I guess one thing that does flow from that is that you you you do have some power over the curation of who you are comparing yourself to in that ecosystem to. If it's more distributed, you can kind of now you can go find your little your little pocket.

• 1:56:02Mark Manson?

  Your little niche.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Everybody can have their own little universe. There's trade offs there again too, like you're saying. But you can you can curate if you're if you're conscious more conscious and intentional about it, you can curate.

• 1:56:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Who you're comparing yourself to.

• 1:56:16Mark Manson?

  And. You can, you can and should also, it's the same way you can and should curate the people in your life. Right? Like to bring this full circle into, you know, how to compare yourself to better people for better, better reasons. Part of it is simply surrounding yourself by better people, by people you admire, by people that you want to emulate. The people that make you a better person.

• 1:56:39Mark Manson?

  You know, ultimately Aristotle, as usual, had it right. You know, it's like this, this machinery is part of your brain, so you might as well leverage it. And the way you leverage that is to find people you admire and you want to emulate and who make you a better person.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Mark Manson?

  I guess that's the 80/20. Do you think there's another 80/20?

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  I, I think we did kind of cover all of it right there.

• 1:57:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, like, sure, you could argue, oh, compare yourself with yourself, your past self. You can argue all of those things, all the things we went over, sure. If those resonate with you, go for it. But at the end of the day, I think it is just a matter of intentionality. Yeah.

• 1:57:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I, I think you can and should compare yourself to your, your past self, but I don't think you can only compare yourself.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  It's impossible. Yeah, no, no. You will always be compared. That's, it's part of your nature.

• 1:57:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  And you're going to do both.

• 1:57:31Mark Manson?

  You know, again, being aware of any comparisons you're making that make you feel bad, like that's probably an area that you should set a boundary in your life. Either expose yourself to that, those people less, or, or take yourself out of those situations to a certain extent. Hidden costs of social comparison, of comparing ourselves well. I will say this, a lot of toxic relationships thrive on unhealthy social comparison.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:00Mark Manson?

  Right? Like if you look at kind of what's at the, the core of a toxic relationship, it's often, you know, an insecure individual who is measuring themselves, comparing themselves in an unhealthy way to somebody else.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:58:13Mark Manson?

  So I feel like, you know, I guess that's not a cost. I guess, you know, when you set boundaries with unhealthy people in your life, there's often fallout and drama. So I guess maybe that's a cause, but is there a cost to comparing yourself more health, like more healthfully?

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  I try, I've racked my brain. And I, because if we start with the premise that it's going to happen no matter what.

• 1:58:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  Like unless you can completely get rid of it, which I, I don't think you can, I don't think you want to, first of all.

• 1:58:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, you don't.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  Because then you're You have no identity at that point, I think. So, yeah, I don't know. I think this is one of those where it's like, just get good at it.

• 1:58:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:58:48Mark Manson?

  It's a skill issue.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  It is a hundred percent.

• 1:58:50Mark Manson?

  It's a skill issue. Yeah, it's not about, it's not an understanding issue. It's a skill issue.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:55Mark Manson?

  Any takeaways for you personally?

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so I mentioned this earlier, I kind of, I let the cat out of the bag already, but the curiosity thing, I think, is what really, really resonated with me in this and doing research around this. It's not that, like, there is that, that fork in the road you can take. And that fork in the road is curiosity.

• 1:59:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  When you see something and you are envious of someone else, get curious about it.

• 1:59:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  What is it about them that led them to this place that you want to get to? What is it about the decisions they made? What is it about their character? What is it about the way they see the world?

• 1:59:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Like, get curious about those kinds of things. But then also get curious about, like, the thing that you're comparing yourself to, the specific thing. If it's because they're successful in some area or they've accomplished something in some area that you want to, dig down underneath that, get real curious, because there's probably a value underneath that.

• 1:59:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's interesting as you're saying that. It's like, have you ever had the experience of, you know, maybe you see something online and it really bothers you? And then you, like, stop and ask yourself, you're like, why does this bother me?

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:01Mark Manson?

  I've had that happen so many times. I'm like, what is this? Like, what is it about this that pisses me off? Like, I don't understand, like, why do I care what this person's doing?

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:00:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that's super interesting. I would say too, like, for me, the big aha here was like the connection of, of the values piece. It's funny too, because, I mean, it's one of those things that it makes sense and it feels obvious in hindsight. But I definitely, I feel like this is something that I've always been very good at. Like, I've always been very good at not comparing myself to people I don't really give a shit about. And then I also feel like the people I do compare myself to, it's like in a very healthy way. It's because I admire them or I want to get better. And, um, and yeah, I think it's really, at the heart of that is, is an understanding of what you want and what you care about and what's worth caring about.

• 2:00:53Mark Manson?

  I think it's, if you don't have clarity around the values piece, then that's when you fall into just like...

• 2:01:01Mark Manson?

  Becoming a validation junkie.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:03Mark Manson?

  That's when you-

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  You're grabbing values from all around you.

• 2:01:05Mark Manson?

  That's when you, that's when you, that's when you just start adopting the values of, of the people around you. Right. It's like, well, I don't know what I care about, so I'm just gonna do what other people want.

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:15Mark Manson?

  So I'll just care about what they, what they care about.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:18Mark Manson?

  Cause that'll make, that'll get me, that'll make me feel liked and appreciated and, and whatever. So I, I think ultimately, you know, like one of the pieces of advice that I've, I've often given at talks is like, you know, the best way to stop worrying about what other people think about you is to have something more important than what other people think about you.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:38Mark Manson?

  Right. Like, I remember I was, I was giving a talk in Australia and a, a young woman got up and asked this question. And, and she was like, yeah, I just care so much and I'm like very sensitive and I worry about all these things. And like, she gave me some scenario, I think she was like a university student. She gave me like some scenario that like she was like, kept her awake at night. And I was like, okay, it's like, let's do a thought experiment. You know, that, that, that situation that you just described, that you were embarrassed in, and like, you, you wanted to die with embarrassment. It's like, okay, let's imagine your mother had terminal cancer and the only cure requires you to go through that embarrassing experience. How willing would you be to go through that experience?

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Sign me up, right?

• 2:02:23Mark Manson?

  Exactly. It's like, do it in a heartbeat. And I just think it's like, that's an extreme example that illustrates a principle. Which is that if you have something going on in your life that feels so important to you and that you care about very deeply and you like, it, it, it needs to matter more than other people's approval, then you will no longer be dictated by other people's approval.

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just one more thing on the values thing too. When you're clarifying that value, like if you, if you admire somebody, why, why do I admire them? Or why am I envious of them, whatever it is, the- A lot of times, the value isn't the thing that you actually think it is, right? Like, for instance, for a long time, I was like, I want to make a whole bunch of money, right? And I want to be super, super successful. And I look at that, and there's some people who want to do that because they want the validation of others, or they want to feel loved. Me, I was like, I just want the freedom that these people have. I look at that, and I'm like, these people can do whatever the hell they want. That's amazing, right? And so there's probably, like, there's that underlying value is usually one step further than you think.

• 2:03:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's one layer deeper. Yeah. Well, that's it for this episode, everybody. As always, check out the PDF guide, softpodcast.com/socialcomparison. Be sure to like and subscribe. Follow us on whatever platform you're listening to. Give us a great rating because Drew and I need validation.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:03:43Mark Manson?

  We compare ourselves mercilessly to the other podcasts in our space. And if we don't have enough five-star reviews, Drew and I will not sleep tonight.

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  I'm not going to sleep, anyway.

• 2:03:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah, Drew never sleeps, but, uh, so anyway, please leave a review. Thank you for tuning in, and we will see you next time.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Bye, guys.