Welcome back, everybody, to The Subtle Art of not giving up our podcasts. I'm your host, Mark Manson. I'm here with Drew Burnie. This is a special episode because we are doing a little bit of a refresh of the show. We're about 10 months in, not quite a year, and we've tried a bunch of things. We've had a bunch of different conversations. Drew and I have done episodes together. We've had a bunch of different types of guests. Some have gone well, some have
not gone so well. Some have been huge audience favorites, some have not been audience favorites. It's been very educating and interesting, like what is resonated with people and what hasn't. We've decided to, as, as any good creative does, double down on what's working and forget what's not. And so we're introducing a little bit more of a consistent talk show format. Every week. Drew and I are going to go through three different
segments. First one is what we're giving a fuck about, what we're worrying about, anything that's going on in the world that is causing us to stress or lose a little bit of sleep. The second segment is brilliant or bullshit where we will talk about studies, trends, interventions, practices, things going viral online and talk about whether it's brilliant or whether it's bullshit. And then finally, we will be answering audience questions.
We will not always have guests. We will occasionally have guests and when we have guests, we're not going to interview him because we don't give a fuck. We're going to make them do the format with us. We're going to make them share what they give too many fucks about. We're going to make them tell us if they think it's brilliant or bullshit, and we're going to have them help us answer your question. So this is the new show.
Welcome, everybody. We are on the forefront of fuckology here at the Fuck Podcast and I'm excited to get into this. This feels like, I feel almost like the last year was like a beta test. You know, it's like we tried all the stuff all the other shows are trying. You know, there's a bunch of big podcast in our space. You know, we, we, we gave everything a little bit of a test drive. We did the big long intro monologues. We did the big famous guest. We did like all the fancy shit.
You know, at the end of the day, you kind of just learn that you have to go back to being yourself. Yes, we've learned a lot. We have. I I feel like we have. Don't you? Yeah, yeah. I mean. We fucked up a lot. That we've learned a lot the hard way, right? Just everything from like guest bookings to, you know, prepping for an interview that like does not go the way you expect to, you know, it.
It's giving me a lot. I will say this, it's giving me a lot more respect for the prep and interview skills of podcasters. Definitely. It's definitely it's one of those things that looks simple from the outside, but you can spend days reading somebody's work and planning a conversation out and then they sit down in front of you and it just goes completely off the rails in a completely different direction than you than you expected.
So, so here we are. We are in a controlled, we're in a safe space, Drew. We've created a safe space for ourselves. It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast with your host Mark Manson. Let's kick off this inaugural refresh episode. What? What are we giving too many fucks about this week? Self improvement this week, Mark. We we give a fuck. OK? Do you want to start that over?
This one was yours though. This was when self improvement kind of becomes religion and what you've seen out here in West LA and that sort of thing. So how do you want to do that? Well, introduce it. Well, that's what I'm saying dude. This was. Yours. This was. Yours, Mark, this was. I'm supposed to introduce. It well, well, yeah, the fuck of the week, right? Oh the fuck of the week. OK, maybe I should have looked at the outline before we started. Maybe I gave 2 just one too many.
You. You came to me the other day, you came to me the other day and you said one thing I've just been like just been grinding on me lately is just how everyone out here is obsessed with like self improvement in ways that it, it creeps into their lives and, and it, and it affects everyone around them. In some ways it's addiction, in some ways it's culty. So just to give people some context here, I now live in California.
One of the great things about California is people are like super conscious and aware of making themselves better, making the world better, which is great. I love that intentionality. Just going to put it out there, you know, it's, there's a lot of great stuff that goes on in this part of the world, but there's this weird kind of junky culti vibe here where it's almost like people don't know how to just hang out, like. Just be. Like, like, yeah, my wife and I, we constantly get these
invitations. You know, it'll be like, come over for a Saturday brunch with our friends and we're going to have mimosas and we're going to do this and we're going to do guided meditations with our personal guru and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like. Put a gun in my mouth, God. It's like you had us at brunch you didn't like, you didn't need to like introduce a, a whole fucking ideology into our Saturday morning. So like. That's set your intentions.
That's gotten a little bit tiresome and it, I think it just, it particularly, it's bugging me a lot because I'm in this industry and what I found out here too is that everybody out here thinks that they assume that I must be into it. They're like, well, he's like a self help author of course. He would be, yeah. Of course he's going to be totally into the like the guided meditation sound bath before he eats his eggs at brunch. And I, I, you know, I'm like,
no, this is my job. Like I'm, I'm, I'm off the clock. I don't want to be like thinking about this stuff. So it's bugged me a little bit, but I, I do think there's an interesting conversation around here of like, when does self improvement become compulsion? When does it turn into an addiction? You know, it's, it's admirable to always want to improve yourself, but it's also an affliction if you don't know how
to stop. Like sometimes the most like the best thing you can do for yourself is nothing. There's nothing, right? Yeah. It's just enjoy who you are in the moment without any sort of like, you know, production or or process or whatever. So that's been like that's been grading on me lately. Yeah, I don't know. Well, you know, we, we just did an episode not too long ago on the backwards law, right?
And at what point does like it, trying to improve yourself only highlight all of the things that are wrong with you? And I think, yeah, right. The irony is I think at a certain point it becomes a form of avoidance. Yeah, you know, it's, it's like, it's like, well, if I, if I just keep booking all these new like gurus and sound Baz and all this shit, then it's like I I'm always being introduced into a new modality. So I'm always learning a new
modality. So I'm not actually responsible for changing anything in my life because I'm always like, there's like this constant process of like learning the new thing instead of just returning to your life and living and like trying to integrate all the things you're learning into actually like being a better person. So yeah, I don't know the, the, it's a funny thing of like I tend to write about self help or self improvement. Like it's not an intervention. It's not like steroids.
It's not like like, oh, you went to the seminar and now you're just going to get like 40% more Jack than you would have otherwise. Self help is more like hygiene. It's like it's boring, it's boring, it's dull, it's repetitive. And if it does get too exciting, it's actually probably not doing a whole lot. And so you think a lot of these, like a lot of people who invite you to do these things, they're trying to put on these like little mini self help seminars themselves.
It almost feels like that. Yes, yeah, yeah, there's, there's a ton of that here. There's a ton of that here. And it's actually, and it, it even gets to the point where it's like, you know, you'll go somewhere, you'll go to like a dinner or something and they'll curate the conversation. So like they'll put six people at a table and then the host
will break out like no cards. And like, they'll be like a guided conversation of like everybody, everybody's going to take turns and have 5 minutes where they talk about what they're working on in their life right now. And it's like, can we just talk about like the Netflix show we're watching? You know, like, I don't know, it's, I like some of that, some of that can be useful and good. But it's just like when it's when it's a constant thing and
it never stops. Like when people don't know how to socialize without that, then that's a problem. Right. That's like alcohol, right? They don't know how to socialize without alcohol. It's it's like the addiction that you're talking about, that part of it. Yeah, yeah. So I think the the lesson here is just like being aware of when the like the the drive to improve and change yourself is is actually part of the problem. You read Michael Pollan's How to
Change Your Mind, right? Yeah. You remember that part in there or that he he has this. I can't kind of saying throughout it. I think where he's like, I, I had to be very conscious of not doing being, remember that. Like I'm trying to, I'm trying to just be, but trying to just be, you know, like I feel like this is like an extreme example of that. People are like, I'm trying to be and live in the moment. I'm trying so hard that I'm doing being.
You know what I mean? That's a that's a mind fuck in its own, but yeah. There's some things that, that it's, you only improve them by like letting go and not trying. And, and I think a lot of like psychological based stuff is, is similar to that. I don't know. I, I sometimes I, I have a few theories around this. You know, one of them is like, it's funny, I wrote about this a little bit in my second book, Everything is fucked. But like, now that I'm out here, I, I definitely feel it.
It feels like church. Oh, it is. It feels like, no, it feels, it feels like, it's almost like a religious thing. Like it's, it's like everybody you know is into the same yoga, does the same meditations and, and you know, takes the same ayahuasca. And so they like get together every week and they like practice rituals around it. That's church.
It's totally fucking church. But if you, if you tell, tell them that, like if you say that, I don't know, it's it, it, I think they don't conceptualize, they don't realize what they're doing is actually quite religious and faith-based. And I feel like if, if you said that, if you, if I express that to them, they would probably take offense or get very defensive about it. Maybe not, I don't know. But so that's like that's one working theory is that it's it's
like a it's a church thing. We already talked about the addiction thing. I also think that some of it is just like it's a higher order way of coping with neuroticism. So, you know, William James believe that it's, it's actually impossible to solve addiction. You just replace one addiction with others. And I think in in some of these people's cases is like they're, they are like highly neurotic or
compulsive people. And if they're not compulsive towards self improvement or like biohacking or meditation or whatever, they would be very compulsive towards like very destructive things. And so this is kind of like, it's almost like this is the least worst. Cause I've noticed a lot of, I think there, there's a, for a place that it has a reputation for being very laid back. I actually find a lot of people out here in California are very compulsive. Like there's a lot of
neuroticism. There's a lot of neuroticism and but again, there's like a lack of self-awareness around it. Like it's because the compulsion is around things that we associate with relaxation, things like yoga, meditation, spa treatments, beauty, nature. I think people assume that they must be very relaxed and like low key. But as somebody who's not from here coming out here, it strikes
me as a very neurotic place. So some of it strikes me as like, and I part of this too, like this is where I identify with it because it's like I, I think one of the things that I'm learning the last couple years is that I'm a lot more addictive or compulsive than I thought I was. And, but when I'm here, my, my addictions and compulsions are like quite healthy or fairly healthy.
Whereas if you put me in like New York City or Brazil or wherever, I'll just like, fucking destroy myself, right? Right. Well, and going back relatedly, going back to the religion thing, what is what is self improvement or self help if it's not like a form of religion in a way, right. I mean, if you take a lot of the mysticism out of the major religions, really looks a lot like self help. I had a friend one time who like made this observation. She went to church.
It had been a long time and she came out. She's like that felt like a mini self help seminar because it is very much prescriptive and this is how you should live your life and all. That religion was, it was the original self help, right? You know, it's like it used to be if you had marriage problems, you went to a pastor, right? It used to be if you had psychiatric issues, you got an exorcism. You know, let's bring exorcisms back. Fuck yes, let's make that a
thing. That would be pretty cool actually. Play some metal music. It would be awesome. I'm so in for an exorcism. Wouldn't that be funny? Be like, you know, I should try this. I should go to like, like the next California dinner party I go to and everybody starts talking about their shame and I'm going to be like, guys, you know what? The next you know what the new thing is. Exorcism. Bring a priest in. Yeah, I found this great Catholic priest. He's fucking.
He will. He will pull all the demons out of you. It is life changing. You guys need to check this out. I wonder if they would, if they if they would bite. I I. Kind of doubt it, but I don't know. I don't know something. It's not very California. It's Catholic. It is.
Really interesting that way if you do point out to somebody that hey, this is like really kind of like religious behaviour and or it mimics a lot of things about religion and they get very defensive about it. Yes, that to me like I don't know if someone. Well, and historically, when I've brought this up in writing, it's a very polarizing thing for sure. And The funny thing is, is I think religious people recognize that.
Like so I've been invited on religious podcasts with pastors and preachers and priests and stuff. Which is insane if you. OK. And, and, and they are 100% aware of that. I've had conversations, you know, I've spoken in the Middle East, I've had conversations with audiences and Muslims. And they're like, yeah, everything you talk about, like we're here. For it, there's a crazy number of like, Muslims who come and say this is actually, you know, this is all in the Koran. Yeah.
So I think religious people get that like self help is kind of just the secularized version of religion where it's the secular people who are like, Nah, no, this is scientific, right? Right. Whereas if you actually go look at the research, there's not a whole lot of science going on, right? Yeah, and science itself can turn into a religion pretty quickly too. So that is true. That's a whole nother episode. There's that. What else? I think that's it for that. Yeah, yeah.
All right. Well, if, if any of you out there know a good Catholic priest, I'm, I'm interested in an exorcist who can, who can give me a good raid on an exorcism. Maybe, maybe give me like, you know, one of those cards when you get like 10 exorcisms, they give you the 11th. Like at your local coffee shop and like like. A punch card like the Jimmy John's, you know, frequent, frequent sandwich card. Yeah, Hit me up, Capri. I think on that note, we'll
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Yeah, we're looking at experts and our experts any better than us common folk at coming up with interventions that actually work to help us change our lives. OK, OK. I have a prediction. OK, OK, Well, there's a huge study, a huge study done by a whole bunch of experts who came up with a whole bunch of interventions and it turns out that like common. This was for what? What was the intervention? Oh yeah, sorry. Like the the goal. Yeah, yeah.
The goal was to get people to go to the gym more. Gotcha. So they got Yeah, there's giant study. Psychologist get together like we think we know how to get people to go to the gym. So here's 50 some different ways that we could get people to go to the gym. Let's test them all out. And they had like 60,000 people in this study. So it's a huge study. It's a lot, yeah, very, very
comprehensive. And it, it solves a lot of the problems with like, you know, you compare one study to another, that they have different sample sizes, They have different outcomes, different whatever this is like we're going to compare all of these huge giant study and compare all these different ones all at the same time, get a nice clean result. Well, it's not quite that simple as you can imagine. So how'd they do?
Well, what they found was that experts were no better than lay people at predicting which interventions were going to work. So you just, you just feed these to people, a man on the street and be like, is this going to get people to go to the gym or yes or no? They're just as good as the experts at predicting which ones will. Work. So is is this a case where the psychologists were because you can frame this in two different ways.
Would you frame it as the psychologists were just as bad as the average Joe at predicting what gets people to go to the gym? Or is it that the average Joe with his like folksy wisdom, common sense is just as good as the expert? Like what was the hit rate on the predictions here? Was it abysmal or was it just kind of like everybody's like, Oh yeah, obviously that would
make somebody go to the gym? Well, the hit rate according to the study, yeah, OK, the hit rate was about 45%, so just less than half of the interventions worked. Yeah, that's not very good. Right. So a coin toss, right? Sure. If you really dig into the data though, it's only like 4 of these interventions worked out of the 50, I think it was 54 interventions that they tried. Wow, that's depressing, right? So it was. Yeah, it was.
So, so basically, yeah, it's like the news gets worse, folks. It does like not only do do like, almost none of the interventions work, but experts were just as clueless as to would the fact that none of them were as as lay people. Were as lay people were, yeah. So everybody was bad basically. OK, there's it wasn't like lay people were good and got you experts were bad or anything like that. Everybody was just bad at it. Yeah. And also worse than a coin flip, Yes. Much worse. Much worse.
So not only not only bad, but like you could literally just flip a coin and you'd get better results. More or less, Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's, there's like these four things that they found. Science. I just love science. Well. It's, it's what's crazy to me is that like they're billing this as you know, oh, this, this mega study is great and we just how we should do all these. And it is, it's, it's a very well done study, but they, it's like they missed the lead
completely. They missed the actual take away, which was, Oh my God, we're really bad at this. And it was one of the one of the least researchers on this is Angela Duckworth to like a, you know, a very well known person in in behavioral intervention and psychology and still. It blows my mind after, I mean, we are what, 150 years into the field of psychology and we are, I mean, psychology was kind of a
quack science. Maybe it's first 60-70 years, but I mean, we're, we're like at this point we're probably 60 years into like 60-70 years into like very serious, well funded psychology programs and, and research and it, it, it blows my mind. I mean, and it's not just psychology either. Like you run into a similar thing in like nutrition and sociology and. All the so-called software. Terminology.
Yeah, like it's just like we still have no fucking idea what why things happen, why people do things and don't do other things. I'm curious, what were do you know the 4 interventions that actually had a really strong effect size? Yes, I got, I got them right here. The, the one that worked the best I think was bonuses after messing up.
So if the way they incentivize these people to go to the gym was they would, I think they'd give them like an Amazon gift card and they would add money to the to the gift card if they, you know, showed up or whatever. If they messed up, if they didn't go, they would give them a little bit of a bonus for going the next time and correcting the behavior, which I, I found very, very interesting. Yeah. That is interesting, yeah. Another one was just getting bigger incentive, simply.
That one's not a big surprise. Yeah, you get a bigger incentive to go to the gym, that more people will go. This was an interesting one too, information about what's normal. So like telling people that the majority of Americans or wherever you are exercise frequently and that the rate is
increasing. If you just tell people that they're like, well, I'm going to, I'm going to follow this trend, I guess, which was kind of interesting to me too, you know, just just kind of that social, social pressure, social pressure, social, social proof. Yeah, You want to be one of the cool kids? Yeah, Going to the gym. And then this last one was really interesting too. There was a, a framing, the choice of a gain or a loss.
So they gave they either they told people they could either choose you can start out with this much money and you'll lose as you failed to go as you failed to go, or you start out with nothing and you gain either one of those. As long as you just gave the person the choice on that and they picked which one they wanted, that actually had a a noticeable effect on that as a significant effect on that on on gym attendance. So it didn't matter. What if it was? Which direction?
Didn't matter. It's just they had a choice. And I, I thought about this too and I'm like, which one of those would I choose? I would choose the give me all the money up front and then I I want to see it. I think I would too. I would go that way. I think I would too. I think that would, that's more, you know, the loss aversion and everything. I think that's more painful. Yeah, but I just. So a whole lot of bullshit here. Well I this is a really well
done study. I just think what they learned from it was. Bullshit. Well, it's the, The irony here is I think the study itself is brilliant, but what the study shows is that there's a lot of bullshit. Like we still don't know what the fuck we're doing. And like we've talked about this before on the podcast. Like I remember, I think 5 or 6 years ago, I got really curious of which modalities of therapy were the most effective for patients.
And there's all these meta analysis, like hundreds and hundreds of studies with thousands and 10s of thousands of, of patients who've been tracked and all this stuff. And when you really, when you crunch all the data together over the past like 30-40 years and you look at all the modalities of therapy, they basically all work roughly the same. And it's, they're all slightly better than a placebo, right? Like marginally better than a placebo. And so like that's none of them.
I think none of them have a hit rate over 50%, which is like, again, in a field that's 150 years old and, you know, just a tradition from Sigmund Freud, the fucking Doctor Phil, like we can't bat over 50% is still mind boggling to me. So this this kind of reminds me of that of just like everybody's kind of throwing shit at a wall and some people are able to throw nicer looking shit. And so they get, you know, they get tenure and they get a best selling book and yeah, yeah, you
know, like ATV show. But it's like ultimately I I do have to say the more the older I get and the more it well researched and informed I am about this field, like the more I come to respect just like ancient timeless wisdom shit that's been around for 2003 thousand years. Like because of clearly that has that must have some value, otherwise it wouldn't have survived for so long.
Whereas a lot of a lot of the stuff, you know, I've been in this industry long enough now to see a lot of quote UN quote true psycho psychological findings be proven and disproven. So yeah, this is just another another reason to stay skeptical. Yeah. Well, there there was kind of a a parallel in this study with the the interventions that you're talking about. The there they had kind of two control groups in this, which is this is kind of interesting and and relevant.
The the original control group, they just gave them an Amazon card and and filled it up said here you go go nuts. That was it their baseline group, though, they gave them an Amazon card, Amazon gift card and sent them reminders to go work out and I think like a planner or something like that, that and that's that was their baseline. Just doing that alone was significantly better than the control group. So, so any intervention whatsoever basically is, is effective.
And this is one of the reasons why I think they're some of their conclusions were a little bit bullshit was because they were comparing all these interventions to that original control group. When really what they should have been doing, which is this is what Spencer Green pointed out on on Twitter, what they should have been doing was comparing it to the baseline, because we know that any intervention works. Literally just like a text message. A text message said go to the
gym. That like had a significant increase in getting people to go. Yeah, not even incentivizing them. It's just yeah, there was no incentive. They they, I mean, they got the Amazon card just for like participation. They didn't they didn't get extra incentive. So this is where. I can't help but bring it back to self help our industry like where people are spending 10s of thousands of dollars coaching seminars, training like all sorts of accountability systems
and. And at best, that's an incremental, yeah, you're like 1%. That's taking, you know, it's the 80, the, the, the thing that drives 80% of the result is like getting a text message and like buying a planner, right? And it's like all that other stuff takes you from 80 to 90% or something. I it goes back to it's being boring, it goes back to, you know, you don't need these like mini interventions or huge interventions at at any stage. It just goes back to being
boring and consistent. It really makes me wonder how much of the monetary value that is being spent in this industry is is actually being spent. This comes back to the dinner party thing, right? Like it's actually being spent on something that makes you feel special, right? You know, it feels really special.
Having a high end coach checking in on you is like made a personalized plan and it's like, got all these systems for you set up and it's going to like go stand in the gym with you and like watch your forum and everything. And like that, there's an emotional satisfaction that comes with that, you know, that maybe that's actually what you're mostly paying for. I don't. Know yeah, yeah. Well, then it just comes back to like these days I'm just like, if it works for you, go.
For it, yeah, whatever. Just do it. Yeah, fine. Whatever spirit crystals. Yeah, just be happy. Whatever. Yeah, yeah. Who am I to say? That'll be maybe that's the slogan of our podcast. Be happy, Whatever. On brand. It reminds me, it reminds me. I saw there was like there was a viral quote of Keanu Reeves a while ago and he said he's like, I've reached the stage of my life where I don't, I just don't want to argue with people anymore. He said. If you say 1 + 1 = 5, that's
great, man. I hope you're happy. I saw that. I saw that is wise. Very wise. All right, We'll be back after this. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Imagine selling everything from gourmet coffee blends to designer dog collars, right from your living room to the entire world. Shopify isn't just a platform, it's a gateway to global retail, bridging in person sales with an unstoppable e-commerce presence.
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questions here. This one's from John, who submitted this on YouTube. And yes, is there any popular life advice that consistently doesn't work for you or has failed you in important situations? Yeah. That's a great question, John. So when I was younger, I tried a lot of the classic. Yeah. Self help shit. You went to some seminars. And went to some seminars, had a great time, you know, back-to-back to that the original point had a great fucking time didn't really
change a whole lot. You know, the, the stuff that never really worked for me was the affirmations and the positive thinking. And I think it's just like I always knew I was lying to myself. Like the fact that I felt like I had to tell myself something like that something was actually good or that I'm great, I'm smart, I'm I'm brilliant, I'm attractive. All this stuff like the fact that I felt the need to say those things to myself would just remind me that I was lying
to myself. And so I actually found that that stuff made me feel worse and it actually made me more stressed and anxious than than less.
And it's funny because when I was young and immature, I, I, I was like, well, clearly I'm doing something wrong because, you know, all these great famous people on Oprah, like say this is how you do it. And and it just, it never really sat right with me. And then I, as I got older, I started to realize like, oh, maybe those people on Oprah like don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Back to the point of experts not knowing what, what actually
works or not. So yeah, that that would be the main one. That's the main one that comes to my mind. Is there one for you? I've talked before about the gratitude thing that doesn't. That's not really good. I've also just kind of had mixed results with meditation. I don't think it's as cracked up as it is. It's all that's cracked up to be, really. I've found, yeah, sometimes in some situations, it can kind of call my mind. You used to meditate a lot and you don't really anymore, right?
Yeah. What have you found with meditation? I think there's some research coming out too that's like, yeah, for some people it's really not that great. You know, there's this pattern with research and you and I've talked about this before of like when something's new and it's and it's a small sample size and it's like people like really tough cases.
Almost everything looks great. And then as soon as you expand that sample size and get like a lot of people from kind of the normal population into the sample, the effectiveness of almost everything kind of goes away. And I think meditation's another story of that. I I found it really impact impactful when I was young. I, but I mean, I think a lot of that was, you know, our, I was diagnosed with ADHDI found it very effective for like helping
me focus. I also just kind of had this period where like I, I, you know, when I was younger, I really got into Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, psychedelics, basically all the shit that's popular now. You know, like I, I hate to be the guy who was like, I did it before it was cool, but I was really into that stuff.
And so I remember like I, I found that meditation was like intense meditation for multiple hours was kind of the only thing that gave me the same sensation that some of my more profound psychedelic experiences have gave me. I've since learned and understood that what was happening is that, you know, both psychedelics and intense meditation deactivate what's called the default mode network, which is essentially your ego. And there are pros and cons to
that. I think it is useful to deactivate or as Ken Wilber would say, transcend your ego. Like see that you are not necessarily limited to your ego, that there there is a certain connectedness between you and the universe around you. I think there's a lot of
profundity in that. But I don't know, it kind of felt like I hit a point by like my mid 20s where I'm like, OK, I get it. Like the ego's just kind of this made-up thing, like there's a story in my head of like who or what Mark is. And I, I don't have to necessarily believe that story at any given time, especially if it's hurting me. Once you learn that lesson or once I learn that lesson, I, I, I kind of struggled to see a reason to like just keep fucking sitting on a mat for hours and
hours every week Like I don't. Yeah. And I think that that goes for you've, you've said this about other things as well, like the point of any self improvement is to. Stop doing more. You stop. Doing that, and there's a lot of people who think, but I know meditation, you can always find another level and I'm sure there is. I'm sure there's different things you can find. But you know, this like with gratitude with me, it's like for one, like when I did it, at first I was like, OK, yeah,
there's some benefit to this. But then I found that I was actually a very grateful person to begin with. So maybe there was some value in that. I guess maybe it wasn't a total loss for me, you know, but I was a grateful enough person that I didn't need it. And so I just don't, I don't have like a gratitude practice. If you're an ingrateful, ungrateful ingrate. If you're an ungrateful person, Jesus Christ. An ingrate who's. Ungrate who's ungrateful and
there's nothing great about you. You maybe need to practice it a little bit, right? Well, I. I think, you know, we all have natural strengths and natural weaknesses, so it makes sense that like certain tools are going to be more effective than others.
One thing that that I, I started to run into with the meditation thing that like kind of left the bad taste in my mouth is like once you get a, once, you know, once you get a certain depth into meditation and that whole world, you know, you start going to a lot of retreats and you start meeting Zen masters and gurus and all this stuff. I started to notice that like the people who are really hardcore into it. And it's ironic because the whole basis of Buddhism is non
attachment. I started to feel like the people who are like really deep into that world were quite attached to achieving non attachment. Right. Yeah. And I, I don't know, it just felt like a little bit contradictory. And I think at the end of the day, like you, you have to go live your life like you can't. For me personally, I found that at a certain point, sitting for hours and hours and hours in a quiet room was like just kind of another form of avoidance of, of dealing with life.
And that's not to say that that's true for everybody, but I, I found that true for myself. And so I don't know, meditation, I dabble in it. Like, I still kind of go back and forth. Like I'll go through phases where I do it a bunch again. And, and I, it feels good. And, you know, I do think my brain is probably optimal on A at least a small amount of meditation, but it's not really
a priority, Yeah, these days. OK, well you, you said one thing earlier that I want to bring up because I think there might be some subtext in this question about it. You said, you know, like if something didn't work for you, while Oprah must be wrong or these people must be wrong, right? Oprah's definitely wrong. I I think, I think what happens is a lot of times people have the opposite reaction of that. I think that's not a very common
reaction. Yeah, I think people say, oh, there's something wrong with me if this isn't working. Totally right, that's the default. Reaction. That's the default reaction and it's for whatever reason your brain works like, no, that, that maybe maybe you're an asshole about these kind of things or something. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely been like, maybe it's like my my anti authority streak or something.
I don't know. But it it's my initial when I was very young, my initial reaction was like, oh, I'm doing it wrong, right, OK. And I think it I had to get older to realize that. Wait, wait, wait a second. Who says like this Zen Master knows what he's talking about,
right? But that, that is the, that is the danger of I think this industry in general, or like anything around this industry, is that whenever you're dealing with vulnerable people, like whenever you're dealing with somebody who is say, in a depressive episode or somebody who's deeply insecure or somebody who's dealing with trauma, their natural default tendency is to blame themselves for any sort of disappointment or failure. And I don't know, I just, I, I think, I think that's it.
It's really important for. Practitioners, leaders, thought leaders, authors, speakers, whatever, to be very conscious of that and like understand that like whatever you're pitching or selling isn't going to work for everybody. Everybody's different. And so if it doesn't work for somebody, there's nothing wrong with them and there's nothing wrong with you. It's just like, it's just not a, it's just not the right fit. Like I, I don't, I just don't think that message gets broadcast enough.
Like there's nothing mystical or magical about life, self help or personal development advice. It's, it's like any other industry. Like there's, there's like dentists and nutritionists that you know are going to be great for you and terrible for me and vice versa. And like this. Why would this be any different? Yeah, yeah. So I, I, it goes back to what we said earlier. It's like if you find something that works for you, good for you. Yeah, do it. Be happy, whatever.
Not for sure. OK, I got one more question. Yeah, this is from Arthur, also came from YouTube. He's got a question that knowing that most of us won't reach the level of success that we see other people have, especially online, like money there, you know, Youtubers, that kind of thing. How do we reconcile this fact
with our ambitions? I don't want to give up on my ambition, but I also don't want to be unhappy for not fulfilling it. I think it's this is a case of like just being careful of how you define success for yourself. Like it you don't just because you see somebody online and you maybe look up to that person or envy that person a little bit like that, that doesn't necessarily mean that that is
success. I think what often gets lost and this kind of comes back to like the, the central point of Subtle Art is that it's easy to see somebody online or on TV or in the movies or something and be like, oh, that's success. I want that. When really you're just seeing the best aspect of that of that person's life. You're not seeing all of the cost, the sacrifice, the neuroticism, the insecurity, the obsession, the unhealthiness that went into achieving that thing.
So I'm a strong believer that if you are going to desire what somebody else has, you need to also desire the cost and sacrifice that were required to, to get what that person has. So I would say just think about that. Like don't think about, oh, I wish I had as much money as, you know, this dude on Twitter. Ask yourself, do you wish you work as long and hard as this guy on Twitter? Do you think, do you wish you had as the same dysfunctional relationships that this guy on Twitter has had?
Like there's like so many examples of like insanely successful people who are on their like, fourth or fifth marriage, right? So yeah, that that stuff needs to factor into the equation. And I would say that to any young person is like, because we all want to have like, it's good to have role models. It's good to have people that you kind of aspire to to be, but like you need to pick the full
picture. You can't just like you can't just pick the best, you know, the highlight reel and be like, I just want to have the highlight reel. I don't want to like actually give up anything. Right, right. Yeah. And I mean this part of his question, I don't want to give up on my ambition, but I don't want to be unhappy not fulfilling it. I think what you said right away was, well, how are you defining success, right?
That's that's the issue. It's not that you're not succeeding, it's that you have this definition of success. Yes, and it's you might feel like you might be disappointed in yourself for not achieving that definition of success when the definition was the problem, right? You this comes back to your point. It's like you're not the problem. The definition was the problem. You chose a bad definition.
And so even you, you chose a definition that this is not realistic or does not suit your, your talents, your strengths, your personality, your values, your values, what actually makes you happy, your relationships. And so you need to like recalibrate your definition of success. You know the way that's phrased too.
It's like, I would, I would like fuck ambition, like just focus on being slightly better than you were last month or last year, You know, like it's nice to have like some kind of long term vision or goal in your head of like, oh, this, this would be really cool to be here in 10 years. But like that shouldn't be the thing getting you up in the morning. The thing that should be getting you up in the morning is like, OK, how do I do better than I did last week? What can I get better at this
week? You know, take it in like smaller increments because it's it's harder to fuck up small increments. It's very easy to fuck up like a 10 year vision. Right. And it just, it, it grounds you a lot more if you're looking right in front of you, right? Instead you get lost in these big goals and they seem insurmountable, focusing on, just like you said, improving from yesterday. Yeah, for sure. Well, that's it for this episode. Tell us what you think about the
new format. Like I said, Drew and I will will be doing this every week. We'll have guests come in and out join us for this format. If you have questions that you want answered on the show, please submit them to us. You can submit them to us in the comments on YouTube or you can e-mail us at podcast at markmanson.net. So yeah, please like, follow, subscribe to the show, let us know what you think, leave a review and we'll be back next week. What is the wisdom of the week?
This comes from Tyler Durden. Yes. Self improvement is masturbation now. Self destruction. That's it. We'll see you next week. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will. See you next week.