Welcome to the Michaela Peterson podcast. This is an episode co-hosted by Jordan Peterson in this episode. We spoke with Mark Manson. Who's the best selling author of The subtle art of not giving a fuck and his more recent book. Everything is fucked a book about hope as well as a very popular blogger. His books have sold over 13 million copies worldwide. We spoke about how to properly set goals the destabilizing effects of social media the value of
it has relationships and responsibilities Mark and my dad compared experiences as best-selling authors that both fit into the self-help category and their search for meaning as men inside and outside of religion. This episode is brought to you by self authoring. I thought mentioning self authoring would be appropriate given the fact that this episode has two best-selling authors in it self authoring is a suite of exercises my dad and his business partners have developed over the last 30 years. They help you organize your head and plan for your future it is
Foods past offering to help you get through past experiences that are probably bogging you down present authoring to help you identify flaws in your current habits and get rid of them and future authoring allowing you to organize your thoughts and plan for the future. You can check these out at self authoring.com and you get 15% off with code MP that makes it 25 dollars or something like that for the entire set and I think there's a buy one get one free deal somewhere on their self authoring.com code MP4.
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Real Salt.com code MP. I'm just trying to help everyone stay salty out there if you enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate and subscribe.
And feel free to join my newsletter to stay in touch without the risk of social media cancellations. Have a wonderful week Mark Manson well,
to the
podcast
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be
here. How many books have you sold?
Oh, I mean if you add them all up, I think it's like 13 million 14
million.
Okay. Okay. So that's a lot. That's a lot of books. I wanted to get you on because you sold a lot of books and online. They usually underestimate book sold. So I wanted to hear the real number and I read the book and look so I'm going to say a couple things one. I don't think it resonated with me like it did to 13 million people and I knew that it's sold a ton of books.
so I figured I'm an outlier and I want to figure out why I'm kind of delve a little bit more into your ideas but one of the things and I think it might be somewhere that you differ from my dad but I also might be misinterpreting what you wrote I'd like some clarification but you talk a lot about how people shouldn't necessarily shoot too high because you can end up chasing some dream and you use the example of the man who left Metallica and formed Megadeath and
felt like a failure and most people would say he's not a failure because he formed Megadeath but he got kicked out of Metallica so the comparison was off so from what I learned growing up with my dad was kind of aim for the highest thing you can reasonably aim for and shoot for that and in my experience that's been that's been that's worked for me so
Is that different from what you say in your book? Hopefully that was clear enough and not to
jumbled.
Sure sure, and then I think there are few questions there. Yallah take them one at a time. But the goal question. It's I'm not critical of necessarily save the distance of the goals. I think there's a lot of there can be many advantages to say shooting for the moon or whatnot kind of the cautionary tale of Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is more of be careful the direction of your goals. You know, it's
I think kind of what I'm critical of and both of my books is people just taking kind of cultural definitions of success in doing good or whatever for whatever that is at face value and not really questioning. If I do achieve these things. Well that actually solve my problems. Will that actually make me any happier will bring any more meaning to my life. So the issue isn't so much.
Don't take on ambitious goals. It's more of be very careful and skeptical of your goals because it's you know, that that that intense dedication to a goal. It's a very powerful thing. And so if your pointed in the wrong direction well in the damage the man who founded Megadeth and who ended up unhappy because he wasn't as popular as Metallica.
I mean he got trapped in a very unlikely situation because he was staggeringly successful but unfortunately compared himself to a group that was even more staggeringly successful reminded me of someone I knew once who was upset about how much progress he had made by the time he was 40 compared to his roommate in college. Yeah, and this person was a successful serial entrepreneur and a mover and Shaker in his own right intellectually.
And practically but his roommate was Ilan moss and to some degree you have to write that off as just bad luck. I think the founder of Megadeth broke a rule that I wrote about in 12 rules for life, which was compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to some to who someone else is today and I wrote that rule partly as a consequence of realizing that you could end up in the situation of the Megadeth founder. No you pick someone
whose attributes are so Stellar in relationship to your own that the probability that you'll make that bar is extraordinarily low whereas you could improve over where you were yesterday and that's actually useful which is necessary, but also attainable
Yeah, absolutely. And I and I just feel like a lot of people's kind of default setting is to you know, in the book I talk about metrics how we kind of invented metrics for ourselves to Define. What success is going to be and I think for a lot of us are default setting is to Define our metric by whatever the people around us are doing or have recently done and and so if you're not consciously questioning that
It can get you into trouble. Yeah. Well, it's a double-edged sword though, too. Because of course the person who doesn't compare what he or she is doing to what other people are doing also can take on the attributes of a psychopath, you know, we can't help but judge our own actions and emotions and reactions against those reactions of the people around us because we have to get along with them. And so we take into account what our family thinks and what our community
at her community thinks and that can lead us astray at times but it also frequently serves as a corrective and stops us from what going down a bad path that's defined by our weakest personal point. So they often get a situation where a perfectly reasonable strategy that works in many situations can produce bad outcomes in certain situations, and maybe that's why you need a diversity of strategies.
yeah, II know I found a lot of the people I've talked to over the years and I'm curious if you found this to be true that some people tend to be very good at using metrics based on themselves and they kind of ignore the world around them and they take on as you mentioned, you know, maybe they're not a psychopath but they kind of develop narcissistic qualities in terms of they just see everything in terms of their own desires and
their own metrics and then there are other people who only see things in terms of the metrics of the people around them. They're very bad at developing metrics of success for themselves and my take is always been that a healthy individuals able to do and hold on to both simultaneously and that's a struggle for most people. I think most people are coming from one of those two directions to get to that healthy place.
well, I don't know if you agree with that or
well it is it is one of the constant.
Battles that everybody undertakes in their life to get the balance between their own self-interest and the interests of others, correct, and it's easy to are on one side of the other. I think agreeable people technically speaking, they're empathic and compassionate and polite and when they make an error, there are is that they sacrifice themselves too much.
brother people's interests now that has some real advantages for example when you're taking care of infants at least to some degree you can't wear yourself to a frazzle but there is a certain amount of soccer self-sacrificial necessity involved in taking care of infants because they're always right and you have to respond to them in that manner doesn't work very well when you're dealing with adults and then people who are disagreeable will they tend to be more self-serving and they can run into problems because they don't take other people into account
it's enough but it's not easy it's not easy to tell
When you're when you've got that balance, right because it also changes to some degree from situation to situation. And so your temperament can give you an approximation. But but that doesn't mean that it's going to be correct in every particular situation.
You talked a bit about surrounding yourself with people and then like figuring out I guess your goals based on everyone around you but something Mark talked about early extensively in his book.
Book was social media and so part of the problem with judging your behavior off of others nowadays is you can surround yourself with weird groups of people and there are like a hundred thousand of them that will agree with you.
Yeah, Mark you talked about that a little bit more in everything is fucked to your book about Hope about the effect of social media and it's destabilizing. In fact, and I mean I've seen that happen more and more over recent years where
You know, we just as Michaela pointed out. We just discussed the fact that you can use other people's opinions to help you defend yourself against your own foolish excesses, but now that can go astray very badly because you can go online and no matter what conspiratorial or paranoid twist. Your thinking has happened to take you can find a group of people a large group of people who share your Viewpoint and who provide all sorts of evidence that it's
True and so I don't know of any hard data on this but I've certainly seen a rise in conspiratorial and paranoid thinking among my family members and friends and I think in the broader Community as well over the last year that means one of the mechanisms that serves as a corrective for us is as gone astray at least in part because of this new technology, but was the
moon landing really real
though. Well that exactly I mean, I haven't seen card data either but I
See something that said that the Flat Earth Society has grown by like 1,200 percent over the last few years to me that just kind of says everything. Right? Right. That's a really good example.
If you were flat Earth or 50 years ago, you know all your friends and family would kind of laugh at you and tell you you're ridiculous and you'd move on with your life. But now, you know, there's all sorts of communities and groups and YouTube channels that you can hop onto and they'll sit there and tell you that you're right was it mrs. Krabappel on The Simpsons who told Ralph that the children were right to laugh at him. Yes. Yeah. Well, I'm one of the things I argue for in my new book.
which is called Beyond order is that we frequently outsourced the problem of Sanity, you know for the psychoanalysts for example and foremost clinical psychological thinkers sanity was a characteristic of the Integrity of your own psychological structures, or maybe even the health of you as an organism, but I think that that's I think that that misses an important source of sanity and that is that if you behave
Reasonably well, so if you're reasonably well socialized and you can hold your tongue and not be too annoying to others and maybe occasionally helpful. Then you'll be surrounded by other people and they will hint to you continually when you're going off on a inappropriate tangent, you know, and you everyone knows people who can't take a social hint when I've taught seminars for example at the University will be 20 kids 20 students in the seminar. There's almost invariably one of them who
is completely opaque to social cues and who will
Kill a conversation Stone dead within seconds of entering it because they don't know how to play the game properly and they're they're not functioning. Well not so much because their internal psychic structure isn't doesn't have the appropriate Integrity. But because they can't Avail themselves of social cues are not acceptable to others and and so they can't they can't benefit from the collective intelligence of the group which is generally but not always telling you how to be sane. Now. It doesn't always work because
Sometimes the group goes insane and then you know the same person as the person yeah everybody and well you saw EC that very often you saw that Nazi Germany, for example, and you see that in these conspiratorial groups that are popping up everywhere as well now.
so you
a lot of
this intellectual Endeavor that you've been engaged in over the course of these last two books was reminiscent to me of what I was involved in when I was I think probably almost exactly your age.
Maybe we started at about the same age. But you you're investigating as far as I can tell the relationship between value structures and emotion. That seems to be your fundamental concern. Is that reasonable and you made the conclusion that yeah, I'd say that's accurate that your values determine your emotional states.
Generally speaking Yeah, and then exhale the question arises what constitutes a valid value in you investigate that even more thoroughly in your second book relying on philosophers, for example, like Nietzsche and and can't so yeah the question of what constitutes an acceptable value structures and Incredibly deep question and maybe part of the reason that your books have been successful is because so many people are asking that question. Now, what what
I think so.
Sorry, I'm I'm I'm I'm anticipating your question, which I assume is why Dwight? Why is that? Well, then what's it done for this investigation?
Well, it's
that's that's an interesting question because it's I've always seen my work, you know in my background is just is blogging. I'm not I don't have an academic background in this stuff like you do but I started blogging in 2008 and it initially I kind of used it as my own vehicle for personal development growth developing emotional intelligence managing relationships all these things and so kind
The way my career career has unspooled is whatever issue. I'm kind of struggling with at that period of my life. I investigated and then I write about it as in the writing is kind of my own personal form of digestion I suppose and there's I just kind of have this faith that if I'm going through it, then there must be a lot of other people going through it as well. I actually think that's the answer to why your book was so successful.
is that it is the case that there's a large population of people who are who have the same questions that you do and and are stumped in the same way that you are or were and that you're leading them through a process of investigation and thought at exactly the level that's there's this idea from developmental psychology that a man named vygotsky originated called the zone of proximal development and adults speak to infants and
toddlers with implicit knowledge of the zone of proximal development and what they do is speak at a level that's slightly more advanced than the infant or toddler can understand and that leads them so they can mostly understand the adult speech but not quite and that leads them further right they can understand but they're also forced to develop further understanding and I've noticed when I was teaching that it was often the case that when I was trying to figure out something out that was the best time to teach it rather than
than after I had figured it out because then I would have forgot what the problem was and also what I didn't know
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. I think part of it is this is kind of the hypotheses. I lay out in the book and it's something I still believe but I think when you when you live in a society where information is no longer scarce where there's essentially more stuff for you to consume and understand and learn about it is humanly possible. The most obvious question becomes what is worth pursuing?
Doing what is worth learning about what is worth trusting and believing it. I think if you look at previous generations, you know information was scarce opportunities were more scarce. And so people had kind of from an early point in their life of a more clear path of what they should be following and what they should be learning about and I think today
Starting with Millennials and even more so with cinzia it's you know, we've grown up with this overabundance of information and an opportunity of paths life paths to choose for ourselves. And so it kind of on paper that sounds like a great thing and it is a great thing in a lot of ways but it also kind of invites these existential questions of what is worth pursuing and I just found that you know myself and a lot of my peers and Friends kind of
went into what most people would call midlife crisis in our 20s and
and and for me writing subtle art was kind of writing my way out of that was as you said investigating these value structures you know going back to the philosophers and trying to understand you know what their ideas around these things were and and it's for me it kind of you ask that you know your original question was what did it do for me for me it gave me a sense of
since that I understood
where I was I guess that I guess it helped me create like a map of how to navigate my life and and so it was with subtle art it was kind of I wanted to provide the right questions for a lay person you know somebody who's not going to go read Nietzsche or somebody who's not going to study existentialism to ask the right questions that will kind of help them do the same thing in a more basic
way
how do you you talk about an the average person in your book what to you what does the average person look like
Are you are you the average person?
I don't think so.
No. Okay, I agree.
Yeah, you know, I think the average person is.
Does not have the time or the interest for a lot of these questions yet. They still struggle with them. I think you know, I think the average person has a generic middle-class job may be partially college-educated but not always in feels these things. They feel kind of the social fabric.
Unwinding underneath them. They see things on social media and on the news that is confusing and upsetting but they don't have the type name and had the time to investigate these things further. And so those are kind of one way. I think of you know, you started this off asking Michaela, you know, you said you didn't identify with my work as much as 14 million other people I mean,
One way I think about it is I'm asking I'll many similar questions are bringing up a lot of similar points to your dad. But I think I'm translating it down further. It's more it's more organized and packaged for for Mass consumption if that makes sense.
Yeah, that was a solid answer. Actually. That was good. Okay, and then one this is just simple.
Wow, maybe what do you mean? Like? What are you supposed to give a fuck about according to you? Is it different for each person or their rules people can kind of follow to figure it out.
I intentionally don't answer that question because I don't feel it's right for me to impose my values on any of my readers. I do simply at times in the book. I offer kind of what I've discovered.
is better or worse to give a fuck about for myself and I do provide I'm gonna harass you about that in a minute or two so I thought I'd warn okay back so you can prepare for the warded man no problem I do layout I think some principles that I generally I think find to be useful you know so generally it's more it's more useful that focus on
kind of what I fir it's not the most sophisticated terms but internal values versus external about you know so focus on things that occur inside of you focus on your own Integrity focus on your own honesty these are things that you experience internally versus say you know things that you experience externally external markers of validation
what would that be like Fame is that an example you
money yeah money social media followers
Like that having a nice car, you know, there's nothing wrong with those but it kind of it's similar to the discussion. We were having earlier like it's we all like money we all like having nice things but there needs to be you can't only value those things like you have to have a balance of kind of more internally driven things that you care about. So I do think that you impose your values on your readers and but I
I actually pay 12. Okay, I got to make two observations. The first is that I think that apologizing for that is the most predictable thing that a millennial could possibly do because I think your generation and perhaps even more the generation younger than you what they've been taught above. All else is that the Cardinal more moral sin is to judge be judgmental right to be discriminating.
but that's absolutely foolish and you actually make a case for that because you say that one of the most important things that you can do and by you you mean you but you also mean other people is to say no and that as soon as you value one thing which you need to do and hopefully the proper thing you're saying no to a very large number of other things and so this is why the The Stance of the idea that you can raise being non-judgemental to the level of
Of a higher moral virtue is definitely wrong. If your claim is correct that your emotional state depends on your value structure and it's more important than anything else to get your value structure straight. And if you have a value structure you have to say yes to some things and know to others then you immediately admit that there's a value hierarchy and there's some things at the top and some things at the bottom and I think one of the real strengths of your book is that you at least begin to do that. And and and I think you do it explicitly.
Italy so you say quite straightforwardly that there are five things that you've discovered that are of General utility that you found of General utility and you don't say that you're certain that you're 100% right about those five things, but you certainly make the claim that the reader should take them seriously and that they've been useful to you and that was taking responsibility and you do a very careful job of distinguishing that from accepting Universal fault.
Which is a good good piece of intellectual exercise because it's necessary to take responsibility and to discriminate that from assuming Universal fault. You can get cancer and it's not necessarily your fault. In fact, it probably isn't but you still have to take responsibility for it or or or or suffer the consequences you talked about the necessity to accept and cultivate the ability to tolerate to accept uncertainty and to cultivate the ability.
Need to tolerate it you talk about learning to appreciate failure.
You talk about rejection. We already mentioned that in the ability to say no and the necessity of saying no and perhaps the Unapologetic necessity of saying no and you also you make that Concrete in some sense because you talked about for example that you learned as you transition from your 20s to your 30s that saying no to an entire Smorgasbord. Let's say of sexual possibilities.
was worthwhile because you found something deeper in the commitment to a single person
and that's a form of sacrifice you talk about sacrificing your second book and you know you made a sacrifice and sacrifices are actually worthwhile and then you talk about contemplation of your own mortality as a way of discriminating between what's important and what isn't and so and then in your second book you talk about both Nietzsche and Kant in some detail and both of them were striving for for the apprehension of something approximating a universal morality and so I can see that and you also
mention Ernest Becker
You know and and you know better believe they're at you got big. You totally know you are right. It's funny because
so now I'm kind of doing like a check of of my because you are right you are correct, I think.
And it's and I gave you I'm going to admit here. I gave you guys the stock answer there, you know when so it's a dangerous thing to do. I don't know especially with you guys, but you know, I've been asked a million times people. Yo, so what should we give a fuck about and my de facto answer has always been like well, it's not my place to tell people exactly what they're about and I do bullshit. That's definitely yes. That's exactly what you're trying to do now.
Reason you get away with it is because you're trying to do it for yourself to you're not preaching and your kind of
inferring right you say this is what worked for me, but it could work for you,
right? Yeah and let me will let me present some context of this which I think can can be helpful. You know, my background is straight up just the self-help world and generally in the self-help World values are just shoved down your throat, you know, you're supposed to want
then the fancy car you're supposed to want the perfect marriage you're supposed to want to be happy and live happily ever after you know, it's like these are the things that are taken for granted at page one. And so, you know, I when I wrote subtle art, I went through pains to kind of be contrarian a lot of ways to what a typical self-help book is. And so one of those ways was I don't want to explicitly Ram values down people's throats, but I agree with you that
The overarching project of the book is yes. I am. I am imposing even if I don't come out and say it like this is what you should give a fuck about its.
The way I've constructed the book and particularly the second book the book. The second book is much more striving for striving for some sort of solid structure this book by the way. Yeah. It's so everybody knows. Well you you hooked yourself into this project as soon as you made that initial Discovery like you made a quite a profound Discovery in my estimation, which was that values regulate emotion.
so then then as soon as you make that Discovery you're stuck with it a question which is okay then what are the appropriate values that make me happy
well or I
know or even well if it's not happy it's some other metric you know because you can also question whether or not happy is the right
I like to meet value like happiness is I know you you're like it's not about being happy but
we beat the hell out of being miserable if you happiness comes along you should be bloody hell
happy that it's like little it on on your stem in a while yeah yeah but it's yeah and then as soon as you get into that question it's Turtles all the way down right like it's that's that that takes you into you know kind of staring into the void so to speak which you talk about in your work quite a bit of you know how there's
You have to you have to take on the responsibility to create some something that's meaningful in your life. Yes, or to discover it. That's one of the weaknesses of Nietzsche. I think I mean, I'm a great admirer of Nietzsche and he I've never read any one who could think with his much glittering Brilliance as Nietzsche and he's very dangerous to read because he's so unbelievably intelligent. He'll take everything, you know apart sometimes with a sentence. He said once he was bragging in a
Sort of self-deprecating Tory manner in some sense. I mean you never sold any books and so he was sort of bragging to himself. I suppose he said I can say in a sentence what it takes other people and entire book to say what they can't say in an entire book and that's it. That actually happens to be true need you could in fact do that and he believed that we could create our own values, but that's wrong. We can't create our own values we can discover them and we can co-create them but
You know and you know this in your book as well, it comes out again implicitly you wouldn't be able to violate your conscience if you could create your own values.
Right. I let your conscience. Yeah, because you're contacting, you know where this give me a
little bit. Do you you'll do something that your conscience objects to? Okay. Okay, if you were fully capable of creating your own values your conscience would never object. You would just go along with what you'd proposed. Like if we were the sorts of creatures that could do that. But what we find very rapidly is we try very hard to impose our own values and then we then it fails we're not satisfied by what we're pursuing.
we become extremely guilty or become ashamed or were hurt or we hurt other people and sometimes sometimes that doesn't mean we're wrong but most often it does and so this this and you your your search for Bedrock I think is and perhaps the fact that you never do come to any final conclusion is definitely at least in my opinion, so maybe not
but in my opinion
A large part of the reason why your books are attractive, you know, the Millennials, you know, you talk about the consumer literature that shows that people who have an infinite variety of choices are less happy than people who only have one or two and you mentioned at the beginning of this discussion that the millennial generation that you're a part of suffered in some sense because the they weren't deprived enough and had too many choices.
The advantage to being deprived is that it's obvious what to do Ike if you're starving then you eat there's no question. But if you have enough to eat and you have enough shelter and you have enough information, maybe not as much as you could have but enough it starts to become difficult to decide what to do.
And then you have another problem which is that you can't decide what to do.
And and then you have to start to investigate value and that seems to me even from your autobiographical comments seem to be what happened with you and obviously so many other people. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely and I think that plays into kind of what we were talking about the
Kind of the radical subcultures that exist in percolate online, you know, I feel like a lot of people are going through these existential malaise and they're they're searching and so they're just scrolling through social media and they find something that piques their interest seems counterintuitive or exciting and and suddenly they're kind of whisked down this rabbit hole without much awareness of what's Happening one of the reasons that I'm rather.
Staunch admirer of traditional Christianity say even its Catholic form. Let's say which is the most traditional form arguably is that I think that Catholicism is as sane as people can get like
we have areas of Catholicism that were a little out there.
there still are mean the doctrine is very difficult to understand the idea of the Virgin birth, for example, and all of the this stranger rationality that goes along with a religious belief, but the problem is is that
We we need something structured and irrational to protect us from even less structured and more irrational beliefs. That's my sense of it. We can't live in a fully rational world because we're not smart enough. We need something to fill in the gaps and
the advantage of a codified religion is at least that there's a unifying force behind it and what you get now is this fragmentation and search for
replacement for religious values and there's not much difference while conspiratorial Theory will offer exactly that but none of the true benefits of a religious system, you know one that's evolved over time and that
That has a deep that has a deep basis.
Well Mark, did you argue that some of the values you kind of inferred could potentially replace that?
the religious values you mean or one of the concerns I raised and everything is fucked is that is what Jordan just said, which is I think people
in lieu of religion, they were there taking worldly values things like politics cultural issues social group identities and
behaving religiously around them yeah adopting kind of religious belief systems around them and that's extremely concerning to me I mean I you don't have to read far back in history to see how that ends up bad
Tia could it be an organized religion this is something that Carl Jung really recognized and he was an astute critic of Nietzsche and also an admirer of Nietzsche is that we do have a profound religious impulse and that that I'm not saying that that's good or that it's bad I'm saying that there's something has to be done with it
and the advantage to a genuine religion is that
it's very very complicated
while the Alternatives don't seem great. Yes.
Yes, they do it and it's got It's been back tested for 2,000 years. Well, then there's something at the core of it is an ideal like in Christianity. There's the idea of the ideal human being that's Christ whose whose motive being offers redemption
in a miserable time,
though. Well people do have a miserable time, you know, and that's one of the things that makes it powerful after the happiness thing.
Back to the happiness. So if there's a striving there were two to specify what that ideal constitutes. This is something that Ernest Becker got wrong to as far as I'm concerned. So Becker believe that our attempts to weave together a heroic narrative were motivated by our denial of death, and that's true, but it's not true enough because what Becker didn't understand or didn't didn't realize and I like the denial of death. I thought it was a great.
Book was that a lot of our heroic projects? Actually Stave off death as well.
So they may have the symbolic value of providing us with symbolic immortality, but they have the Practical value of us not dying. And so if you adopt a mode of life that is practical it gives you a sense of meaning but that's not because that's somehow papering over your fear of death. It's because it actually provides you with a meaningful way of being in a world that's Rife with uncertainty and mortality. You can't write that all off his psychological and that comes through in your
you're booked the fact that you know that like one thing I'm really curious about this commitment issue that you raise because it seemed to me and I might be wrong, but tell me if I'm
barking up the wrong tree
It seemed to me that it was quite a revelation to you that being in a committed monogamous relationship would bring you as much satisfaction and happiness as it did compared to a more libertine lifestyle. Is that a reasonable observation? Oh, yeah. Okay huge Epiphany. Okay. So so two questions.
The first is what did you discover that you didn't know?
you know what what is it that being in a committed relationship did for you that you didn't realize it might do beforehand
so there's two there's a two sides of that there's kind of the
the alleviation of the negative and the positive side of it so I think you know back before I had that experience my kind of irrational gut reaction to intimacy and general was I'm going to be trapped this person's going to expect too much of me I'm going to disappoint them I'm going to hurt them I'm going to hurt myself it's better if we just kind of go our separate ways are these better if you keep it shallow
Exactly. It's safer.
so I think the first Epiphany was that that
that's not necessarily true. You're not necessarily going to
You know the world's not going to end if you have a fight and and you're not going to ruin each other's lives and you're not going to be trapped all the time. There's there's this there's a different this kind of leads into the positive side of the Epiphany, which is that there's a different kind of freedom in commitment, which is the freedom to
like one way I described it in an article many years ago was that it felt like it felt like like if my brain was a computer it felt like I had a program running in the background in this program in the background was constantly
thinking and worrying about which women were single which ones were interested in me, which ones were attracted to me which ones I was attracted to and it was kind of just eating up a lot of ram in my brain. And as soon as I hit that point, it was actually almost instantaneous when I proposed to my wife, it's like that program just shut down and suddenly my computer like my brain had like 30 percent more energy to focus on other things and
And I realized it the feeling was of Liberation. It was like wow, I never liked this is solved. I never have to think about this stuff ever again. I never have to worry about it. That's the problem with a too easy divorce route. You know, one of the advantages to being married is precisely what you just described is that it solves a set of problems so that you don't have to consider the many more but if divorce looms as a to easy exit then every time you have a fight you can think well I can just dissolve
This relationship and although in from some perspectives. You could say that that increases your freedom from another perspective. You say well, no, it doesn't it just re introduces you to the whole bloody set of problems that the marriage was designed to solve and it is very perverse in some sense. Although this is part of the meaning of sacrifices that you can give up a whole set of options and focus on something narrowly and what the consequence of that is as whole new worlds open up for you that you
no were there you don't lose any freedom at all in fact you tend to gain it so okay so commitment now you're you emphasize commitment in your book in more than just the marital domain no but more implicitly I would say because your your insistence that people develop the ability to say no and that that's necessary which is your defense for discrimination by the way that also that implies a broadening of
of the appreciation for commitment is you have to commit to
Some set of values or or you while you're swamped by chaos is essentially the situation. Yes.
Yeah, I so that epiphany of kind of commitment and the Romantic space or in the intimate relationships face. I quickly saw that you can apply that in other areas of life, you know, it's a deep commitment to say a career path is liberating in a lot of ways because it removes distractions and extraneous options and things that may you know, waste your energy and so I argue towards the end of everything is fucked.
at that there's that I think are kind of are especially here in the US, you know there we have this worship of freedom for its own sake and I think the definition of freedom in the u.s. Often gets very warped of just having lots of stuff or being able to do lots of stuff and and it's what I discovered is that kind of the traditional ideas of freedom and liberty and
Things like that from the enlightenment was much more of this like virtuous, you know having a freedom to decide who you are having a freedom, you know discipline was seen as a form of Freedom. That's the freedom to choose your own shackles.
Yeah. Yeah and you talk about that with choosing what man I'm not going to say this properly but setting a goal and deciding how much pain you can tolerate to accomplish that goal and being okay with it because he said, you know people want
Want to be a CEO and they don't want to work 80 hour weeks like they don't understand. I don't know. I don't know what that had to do with what you guys are just saying.
No, it's totally a part of that. And in fact, I think this is kind of I think the one reframe if you were to take one kind of reframe from my work that I think is resonated the most it's I've taken care of that Classics self-help.
Motivational speaker question of like what do you want in life? You know. Do you want the corner office? Do you want to have a boat? Do you wanna have 10 kids in an amazing garage, you know whatever you want and and twisting that over and saying okay. What are the problems you want in your life? Yeah, because there's there's no there's no escaping problems like a struggle and it's easy to want the benefits of something without wanting to cost and so you need to ask yourself. What are the costs that I'm okay with?
Because that's actually a much better indication of a what you're going to be successful at and be what actually makes you different from other people, you know, what actually distinguishes you as a person and kind of conform your identity. You do a bit of Investigation into the sacrificial Motif in your second book. I believe it's mostly in the context of false religions, but you make a case. It's just something I'd like to point out because it's part of
where it seems to me that you're thinking is going is that the case you're making is that you can tell what you want by observing what you're willing to sacrifice for it. Yes and sacrifice modern people have a very shallow notion of what sacrifice constitutes sacrifice is, in fact how you please the gods and archaic people acted that out because they were struggling to bring to Consciousness the knowledge that it was
Siri to give up something that you valued in the present to gain something that you valued even more in the future.
And maybe they acted that out by.
Offering up a choice cut of meat to God and that seems pretty barbaric in archaic to us. But but that was the birth of a tremendous idea and the tremendous idea was the observation that if you gave up something you valued you could bargain with the future and that is that's like the most amazing discovery that human beings ever made. It's like the discovery of the utility of work.
A little pain now will pay off in the future. It's equivalent to the discovery of the future. It's no trivial thing.
So then the question becomes what what is it worth? What what is it that's worth sacrificing for and you found in your own life. That commitment was one of those things.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I've become a an Ardent Zealot for marriage. I you know, it's funny because my career actually started in men's dating advice and I still get emails all the time from young people who you know, they say what's the point of marriage like what's the point of settling down? What's the point of being with one person and I've I've feel like I've become a very unlikely.
just preacher for
for the benefits of commitment the more people that you take to bed the more your with one person and that person is yourself.
Because all those relationships are exactly the same.
The fact that they happen to be different bodies is Trivial compared to the depth of realization that you obtained by getting to know one person really. Well, there's no comparison and it's very sad in some sense that young people.
Have have have a question such as what's the value of marriage that should be if our education system if our socialization systems were operating properly that would be self-evident. It's part of what makes your life worth while to to go all in on something.
One of the things I wanted to ask you in a more personal level in you and I are similar in that we both written books about value and and they're both I suppose in the self-help genre with some detours into philosophy and psychology. I found this very difficult the consequences of this very difficult in some sense. It saddened me terribly because so many people have
Talk to me about how mixed up their lives were.
and how the words of encouragement that I've offered have helped them put their lives together and that's a very positive thing in on the one hand because
I can.
I can be pleased that my work has been helpful, but it's also very painful on the other hand to get a real glimpse into how much of a longing there is out there for guidance of any sort and how much how much of a lack there is of that and that's been very hard on me to see that over and over and over and over and I don't know if you've experienced anything like that delving into the same Realm.
Yeah, it's it can be heartbreaking at times. I
I cut very consciously kind of manage my exposure to
it. How do you do that?
I schedule reader email essentially and I its
I have an assistant who kind of screens everything gets rid of the trolls and the hate mail and the spam and stuff like that. So I have a folder that it's pretty
That that she moves certain emails into and it's when I open that folder. I know that I'm going to get pretty personal and heavy stuff. It's not all negative. Sometimes it's great life-changing stuff. And so there's like there's a mix there. Yeah. Well, it's generally positive the stories that yeah, so most often stopped on the street. And so that's a it's not as easy in the counter to control and I mean, I'm not complaining about it because people who stopped me on the street are almost
probably polite beyond belief and I've had very very few negative interactions, but that doesn't mean it isn't heartbreaking because people reveal the cataclysmic conditions of their life very rapidly in a very intimate way
and
You need a burka
and solve that problem real fast. Can you imagine the headlines Jordan Peterson wears a burka? Yeah. Well, I'm trying to have your sunglasses from time to time, but that's solution.
No, it's it can be heartbreaking and it's
what you know sometimes I
I don't know what to say sometimes and a lot of times I simply respond with.
You know, I am listening. I don't know what to do in this situation, you know, and I my audiences because you know, my little much of my audience to do.
It is it is but it's you know, my audience is very International. And so I you know, I'll get emails from like a girl in rural India who says my parents are making me. Marry a 50 year old man who I've never met before. I don't know what to do. Should I run away and I'm like, you know, but and I it's I struggle with that. Like how do you even respond to that?
And so there's a lot in there. I mean it can go to pretty dark places. And so yeah, I just kind of I've set up set aside a certain time of my week. I'm I'm definitely not as recognizable as you I don't get stopped on the street. I don't do many Live Events so I don't get it as much in person.
But in terms of like the emails and stuff and I've just kind of learned to kind of. Alright Sunday afternoon is
For these few hours, like that's where I'm going to dive into this emotional
space.
Yeah, that's intense. You do get approached quite a bit. Okay, so your second book?
Changing the topic something a little bit later trying to keep it light. It's hard to keep things light with you around into jacket is getting heavy
your your C
your second book about Hope which is something people are seriously having a problem with this year. Like everybody is so depressed you do you have suggestions for
ask maybe suggestions for what not to do might be that might be easier for people than what to
do yeah well it's funny because that book is a bit of a trojan horse I think it lures people in with the promise of hope but what it actually gives people is
a long lesson of be careful what the hope for
you know it's I think
kind of the main point of that book is when you're desperate for hope the more desperate you are for something to hope for I think the more liable you are too
Just grasp it anything that comes with that comes around and just dive in headfirst and I think that can get people into trouble. And so it's it's very much a book of
Trying to provide context for people to be more aware of.
what visions of hope they're buying into what belief systems are buying into what information they're spending their time on and trying to focus more locally focus more on themselves and the people in their immediate vicinity, you know, get off news get off social media don't don't buy into the latest outrage that's you know, being spread everywhere and essentially just focus on the things that you can actually have immediate impact on
Um, when I when I did the speaking events for that book, you know, one of the big arguments I made is I think there's a real argument to say that we are we have become two globally minded the fact that were so aware of what's happening in India and Australia and Japan and Russia and all these places. Like it makes us feel helpless in a lot of ways. I think there's a lot to be said of returning a majority of our attention share to the things immediately.
Italy around us to our family our community the local school the kids down the street things like that. Those are the things that we have actual immediate impact on and though they're not sexy or glamorous and they don't travel well online but those are the sorts of hopes that you can actually see come to fruition. You you also outline something very practical as far as I'm concerned with regards to hopes like to imagine that you're
To someone who's hopeless, but who isn't.
suffering from a fatal painful disease, let's say so their hopelessness is more a matter of disorientation than
a condition brought about by chronic pain or something like that. We'll leave that aside.
The first thing that that might be offered to someone like that is to say that if you don't know what to do, you should try doing what other people have always done.
And so what that might that mean it might mean. Well you have a job and if the answer is no
You might be encouraged to take small steps towards getting a job. Now you you concentrate on doing.
Right. You said when you're in doubt do something even a small thing? Okay, so you could say well look you're not going to
you're not going to generate yourself a functioning value hierarchy that's optimally tuned to your personality in the next week. It's going to be a lifelong Endeavor of approximation and you're going to get a lot of it wrong.
And you talked about tolerance for error in your first books. You're going to get a lot of it wrong, but got to start somewhere. So let's start with what people have agreed upon universally and this is simple. It's like you should probably get up in the morning.
He's brought it go to bed at night.
You should probably have some friends. You probably have a family probably have a job wouldn't hurt to pursue some education and you know, you can raise objections to any of those and you might say that that doesn't stop me from feeling hopeless. But the right answer to that would be well take some steps in the take some steps in at least one of those directions small steps daily steps and don't
Don't upgrade yourself for the mundaneness of your efforts. You just said, you know, you might want to turn your attention more to the local and there's nothing heroic about that. But that's actually not true in most situations. That's where the heroism lies its unheralded, but that's still the adventure of your life.
It's and it's the personal adventure of your life. And so that's where hope can be found. You know, can you make your relationships a little bit better? Can you make your career a little bit and maybe that you have a revelation at some time and you decide that?
Standard career isn't for you that happened to you. You took an entrepreneurial route and that's fine. But what you did was replace the traditional route, which would be to obtain something approximating a 9 to 5 job with an entrepreneurial activity. You didn't just say throw up your hands and say well the whole idea of being actively engaged with the world is so questionable that all just cease to do it. So I would say for people they
should adopt a conventional worldview and work towards optimizing their functioning along those conventional dimensions. And then if they discover that they have a really good reason to deviate then they have the right to deviate and I think you you you push it that in the first book when you offer the advice to people that it's okay for them to embrace their averageness it sort of addresses the issue that you had brought up. You may discover that you are.
optional along some Dimension and you can pursue that but
averageness beats the hell out of nihilism. Yeah. Absolutely. I know. I know you hadn't Matthew McConaughey on a few weeks ago and one of the things one of the things that he said in his book that I really liked was he said she said that you've gotta follow the rules before you can break the rules and and I think even he even spoke of it politically you got to be conservative before you can be liberal. You gotta follow the rules before you can break the rules and I think that's called growing up.
Discipline discipline first and then exceptional. Yeah, one thing I found over the years just talking to a lot of people is that and I think this comes back to the emotional aspect is that you know people who are suffering because they're suffering kind of pervades all of their life experience. They they developed this irrational notion that it the solution must be
A massive huge life-altering event, like they have to change everything from A to Z in one go and the opposite is usually the case like it's often the difference between somebody being depressed and somebody not is something as simple as getting a job or making a new friend or moving out of your parents basement, you know, like it's actually very basic things that have compounded.
Facts you want to try those to begin with before you switch to more radical solution, right? You want to switch back to your
that was a good say comes back to your you know, put your own house or in order before you try to change the world. Yes, and you want to rely on incremental Solutions before you switch to revolutionary
ones. It's harder though. I mean part of the reason people don't do that is because it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier saying well, I'm against climate change then not arguing with your husband or trying to sort out the see, you know, the resentment between yourself and somebody else. That's way harder and some way easier.
to focus on something that's far away and out there
well you also get a sort of perverse
boost in relationship to your own self perceived ethical stature you know if if you're concerned about climate change then you're someone taking on a global problem if you're trying to figure out how not to argue with your husband about who's going to cook dinner it's so mundane that it's almost that it's almost laughable right but but the difference between the first situation in the second situation is the second situation is real and real advances can be made there whereas the first situation
Makes You full virtuous
You're someone suffering for a noble cause but the suffering isn't going to produce any benefit to
anyone to put your house in order before you run accomplish those kind of things. Make sure you're not harboring resentment for I don't know your significant other before you try and solve some Global problem.
In yeah you well. The thing is
one of the dangers of tackling a global problem when your house isn't in order is that you don't know what your solution is motivated by
would be the avoid in the problem,
right? It could be motivated by all sorts of things that you haven't dealt with you so mean, there's reasons that utopian political schemes go wrong and those reasons often have to do with the unexamined unconscious motivations of the people who are pushing the ideologies.
Okay Mark. This is this is something this is something that we kind of touched on earlier. And you were saying you had your mind changed about commitment and I think you and I had similar thoughts because I was I kind of had the same perspective was like I kind of had the same perspective. Anyway, one of the things I have a kid. She's three and a half and I I've seen a lot of people my age who are I don't want kids and part of the reason is
because there's a sacrifice associated with it and it's actually quite a large sacrifice like even just being pregnant is hard the whole time and then while some people have it easier but it is hard and then the first year your kind of glued to a baby especially both parents, but especially if you're the mom and so there's a lot of sacrifice and my arguments been. Yeah, but then you end up with a kid like it's a lot of work, but then there's another human they're like, that's pretty that's pretty crazy.
So it's a good payoff.
yeah it's like a crazy payoff principal it's the best relationship you'll ever have it's certainly the one that you have you have more opportunity with that relationship for it to be deep and meaningful than any other relationship you'll ever embarked on
you can force them to do chores
and you can teach them things that aren't true and then laugh when they make a mistake
yes what are what are your thoughts what are your thoughts on
kids well well I agree
free and it's funny because I was one of those people you know back in my Liberty in life you know I was one of those people who's like I don't think I ever want kids a lot of work to a lot of effort and right around kind of just all of these epiphanies this whole period of my life where I came to allow these conclusions or discovered a lot of these ideas it was funny as soon as I kind of cross that hurdle with my wife the kid things suddenly opened up it was like within weeks
Of proposing to our I'm like, wow, I think I want to be a dad. You know, I just felt it like very instinctually in my gut and
One of the things you know, you said people complain about the sacrifice and how much work it is and how hard it is and how much you have to give up and to me. It's like that's the point though. That's for sure man. You have no idea how fortunate you are. If you have a meaningful burden that you can lift its so I've been very ill in the last year and I haven't been able to undertake my normal Ventures and I miss it so much. I'm I'm so grateful now when I can.
a gin something difficult that I have the privilege of being able to engage in something difficult and
you want to thank your lucky stars that that sitting there for you. It's so backwards to say well, I don't want a kid because of the commitment and work. It's like no man the commitment and work. That's where you're going to find the meaning and then you get a kid to this is a deal that your unfortunate person if you're in that situation, but I look back. So when I look back at say like 25 year old bark and back when I had that mentality about kids about marriage, you know, I think part of the problem was I had never
Actually experienced that meaningful depth enough in my own life, you know like it to me. It's I didn't know that that pigs ISTA did that that was possible as soon as I realized it was possible and it existed hell. Yeah, like sign me up for his house because I can handle.
I think I mean I grew up in a dysfunctional family and looking back my relationship with my parents was quite dysfunctional.
And it's my relationship with my parents and my family in general. I don't think became started to become somewhat healthy until my late 20s early 30s.
And that part of that just comes back to you. No, it's not they weren't, you know, they weren't in a healthy Place either like they grew up in Dysfunctional Family systems and situations. And so they were they were giving it their all and doing the best of what they knew, but it wasn't
it wasn't like a emotionally healthy environment you know I have a colleague who studies maternal behavior in rats and one of the findings in her field I can't remember if this is her finding or not was that if you take rat pups away from their mother
and and provide them with the necessities of life but deprive them of that maternal relationship you can see Disturbed maternal behavior in their children and their children's children three three generations later and that's with rats and I mean rats are complicated and if you don't think so you should try to build one and they're pretty good they're pretty good models of people when you compare them to your model of a person
You know when people do ride animal research because rats aren't humans, but they share a lot of similarities but were way more dependent on our maternal and paternal relationships than even something as complicated as a rat and it is a real loss a real catastrophe. It's why it's so painful to me to see that our society doesn't understand that marriage isn't for the people who are married. It's for children.
You know, it's not about you. Once you have a child in a marriage it's about it's about child and that's actually a good thing too. Because then for the first bloody time in your life someone who isn't you is more important than you are and that's such a relief. It's so appropriate. It's such a relief for that to happen.
I just want more of the inheritance to be Julian like I've 5
So I think look let me ask let me pour toss out another possibility here and you tell me what you think about this. Well, you know, I've been trying to figure out why.
my book was popular my lectures and I think part of the reason for that is that I've made a very strong case for the association between responsibility and meaning
Starting from the proposition that you need meaning in your life because life is hard. And so if it's meaningless, it's meaningless suffering and no one can tolerate that. So you need meaning you need sustaining meaning and the place to find that is in the adoption of responsibility and that makes responsibility a solution rather than a problem and you know people might think of responsibility as the enemy of Freedom, which we talked about already, but if responsibility is seen as the as the source of meaning and I really believe that that's
Not only true but testable then responsibility starts to become a good thing very rapidly. And that's actually why you should grow up. It's because when you grow up and you adopt responsibility your life is actually way better than it was before.
So your ear and you talked about?
Growing up. And you said you need to get disciplined before you become free. That's a nietzschean observation. By the way, that was something he stressed not only in the individuals but in cultures, so he believed for example that the attempt by Europe to explain everything under the rubric of a single monotheism was a disciplinary strategy that enabled the modern mind to emerge is once you become disciplined enough to explain everything under one framework you could
Start adopting other Frameworks and do the same thing.
It's brilliant, but it was Nietzsche. So it's not surprising your book looks to me like it's
likely to be particularly useful for people who are making the decision about whether or not to grow up.
I think so to cut was the term. You used earlier proximal development. Yeah, you know, I think it's
It's very much speaking to people who are on that cusp kind of similar to how I was on that cusp in my 20s of like of like, okay, I'm achieving all of my worldly goals. I'm doing all the things that I imagine myself doing. You know when I was young. I'm I'm doing well in the world, but why why does it all seemed so pointless? Why does it all seemed so fleeting and superficial and so I was very
Hungry for these ideas and this investigation and I think there are a lot of people who are on that cusp of between say childhood and adulthood of recognizing that this the the way I described it in everything is fucked is this is transactional nature with the world of everything is about what can I get? You know, if I behave this way will I get appreciation or validation if I behave that way will I get more money or more status? You know, I think people
Eventually Tire of that world view or skiing everything in those terms and they feel like there must be something deeper and more profound or more important than that. And there is it but it requires these things that we're talking about commitment sacrifice radical responsibility and it's very counterintuitive in that way because in the truth, you know, the trick the transactional nature of you in the world, everything is about getting more, you know, like getting gaining.
advantage in business getting an advantage in your relationships getting more status and popularity and you know and but to reach that kind of maturity and intimacy, you have to be willing to give up you have to be willing to sacrifice you have to be willing to let go of a lot of things and
and I think that's that's you know, when I I just look the more time I spend online and interacting with readers and especially talking to young people it just it feels like that is the message that needs to be out there and it's not out there enough and I think I definitely have, you know, you're preaching that message in a certain way and towards a certain demographic and I think it you know it
Caught fire among some groups of people. I think I did this similar thing with a certain demographic. I think there's a lot of overlap. I
mean, you know, what you're doing is just out of curiosity or the main buyers of the
book.
yeah, it's so it's about
55 45 women the men 55 women in the some 55 women. Okay, which in the when the self-help world is a lot of men may self-help books. It's like 80% but it's slight majority women. It's generally it's primarily a millennial audience. Although it does kind of drift up into Gen-X and also down to gen Z
it's about
50/50 North America and international lot of people in India a lot of people in Brazil a lot of lot of people and kind of the developing world that is coming into its own, you know, so India Russia Brazil how many languages has it been translated into?
About 60. Yeah, so that's pretty much all the languages that there is a book Market in.
Yeah. Yeah. It's
I just I think the last language I sold was Uzbek. So I don't think you can get more obscure than in the Uzbek Market. Oh now you're in trouble Who's Back hate mail? But yeah, you know, I think it's this is the message. I believe very passionately that this is the this is the message the world needs and want to know when I look at
Hey your work Jordan. I think that you are also speaking to a part of why you took off so much was you were speaking to?
Kind of an underserved demographic. I think it's one thing. I've noticed and a lot of press and media that I've done and events I've done is that people are consistently shocked at how many young men show up and how enthusiastic they are and it's and it's a shock.
It's a shock of like, you know, wow, why are all these Meatheads here? You know, I know that's so appalling. It just a read books makes me nauseated that attitude and if it is so contemptuous and so dismissive it is and it's I think it's such an important, you know, in terms of this sort of information. I think exposing young men to these questions about maturity responsibility.
Emotional intelligence commitment, you know, I think it's an underserved demographic and I think it's it's a demographic that was incredibly hungry for this material and nobody realized it until a couple years ago.
well
You know, it seems to me that men have to adopt responsibility voluntarily in a way that isn't precisely true of women.
And I think that's because responsibility is thrust upon women in a way that it's not thrust upon men. For example, once they hit sexual maturity. They have to contend with the probability of getting pregnant now men have to contend with the probability of getting someone pregnant, but that's not something of the same magnitude and then when a woman has a baby the baby either makes her responsible or tortures her to death
And it's not like having a baby is.
Isn't also responsibility for the father, but it's a much more escapable responsibility.
And so what that means to me and I've argued this for a long time is that men have to be convinced.
and this is the role of culture men have to be convinced to grow up and take responsibility and you can convince them by threatening them and by finger-wagging at them and by punishing them if they failed to do so and perhaps all those things are necessary to some degree, but it's much more effective to convince them in the manner that you were convinced which is to say look you don't understand the game you're playing which is Adolescent and immature is not
Best game in town and although you might be cynical about the Hallmarks of traditional maturation. That's a big mistake because you're going to miss out on the adventure of your life if you stay that way for too long and there's nothing it's very very sad to see someone who's 40 and who is still adolescent.
And people who are in that situation suffer like mad, they're usually desperate enough to be depressed and suicidal. It's no picnic.
Okay, so
your book The subtle art of not giving a fuck is an investigation into values which isn't nearly as good at title.
And that'd be
the way those two things are related is in stop me if I'm wrong. Okay, because I want to summarize what you've been doing and and and and and develop from there.
What you're basically making the case that you have to get your values together and what that means from. My perspective is that you have to engage in the construction of a True Value hierarchy and not giving a fuck means that doesn't mean that you don't care about anything. It means that there are some things you really care about and a lot of other things that you cease to care about because you have to because you wouldn't be able to concentrate on those other things if you didn't so it's a matter of getting your priorities straight.
Exactly. Okay, and then and all this and this is partly a test tube by your concentration on Ernest Becker. So Becker concerns himself with the impact of our mortality on our Consciousness and and its backers observation and many others that the fact that we're limited and finite means that our life is composed in large part of suffering anxiety uncertainty pain shame guilt and we're very sensitive to the negative emotion. We need something to offset.
Set that so we need something of value to offset that it's not optional if you don't have that you spiral downhill so you can you don't have the option of believing in nothing.
because then you get swamped by your pain
all right there's then you investigate you say well you need to put your value hierarchy together and you you outline for your readers at least in part how that might be done you say taking responsibility okay so there's some things that you should focus on and try to change you can do that incrementally
so if you don't know where to start you aim at something and you try to do something and maybe you're not very good at that to begin with that's the acceptance of failure and you probably won't be but that doesn't mean you shouldn't start it's self-correcting so the fact that you're I have a chapter in my new book that concentrates on a union idea that the fool is the precursor to the savior
And what that means is that if you're not willing to bumble around and make mistakes, you can never improve.
You absolute you talked about the ability to discriminate that's part of determining what's important and what isn't and then the necessity of commitment.
Arguing the same thing essentially and then the apprehension of death.
and I suppose that's partly because
To really test your value hierarchy. You have to see if it still retains its function. Even when you consider the finitude of your existence and a lot of values do not yeah. They wanted to give a fuck. Yeah. Well, you know, it isn't just death that does that I mean one of the things there are worse things than death and and if you're fortunate you have values that will see you through that mean. I've been hurt enough in the last year or so that
I learned.
That there were worse things than death.
and
I've been fortunate in that some of the things I valued have kept me afloat. And all of those were oriented. They were all derived from responsibility responsibility to my family and responsibilities to other people that never ceased being important even under the diarist of circumstances.
so I think that you and I not only you and I obviously but we've been walking down the same road in some way have
been fortunate enough to engage in a conversation about what's fundamentally important and that it's reasonable.
To propose that some of the reason for our mutual success is that we did realize that some things are important.
But you're not a sap and a sucker to make the supposition that there are things worth committing to and value is real.
Yeah, there's a there's a great essay by David Foster. Wallace is one of my favorite.
Authors and he had a great essay called Unum pluribus, which is kind of a play on the Pluribus Unum and in it. He talks it. It's actually an essay about like literary critique, but he actually makes a lot of very pertinent observations about North American culture Western culture in general since say the 1960s.
And he kind of walks through how starting in the 60s and 70s irony kind of took hold of Pop Culture this idea of like being a rebel being cool being contrarian. Like these were all things that probably because they gained attention in the in the various mediums. They came to dominate pop culture and within a generation by his generation. He was Gen-X they kind of came.
To define the cultural values to a certain extent of you know, being ironic being sarcastic being too cool for school and the essay actually ends in a very sad place where he he talks about. This was written in 1992. He talks about, you know, if we keep going down this path of
essentially exalting
ideas and narratives that Terror
the cultural structures down that basically say like you know that kind of set things on fire and then laugh about it and say like oh look how cool I am and as long as we perpetuate these narratives that actually taking responsibility for something or genuinely are authentically valuing something publicly saying this is important to me you know as long as we see that as something cheesy and worth the writing
said he's like this is going to take us to a very very dark place and
I actually read that essay recently but it's something I've just been I've been thinking about non-stop for the last six months and it's very similar what to what you were saying that it's you know it's
this authentically choosing something to make important in your life and standing by that and and making sacrifices for it's not going to win you any cool points like it's not going to it's not going to it's not going to get share it on social media all the time it's you know it's all it's funny because it
might yeah looks like it's
fairly popular did for you did for did
I know I know what do you mean I mean that's not the story you know but I had the couch mine in in snide and snarky humor you know it's and I'm not I'm not lamenting that I enjoy my humor obviously but like it's
you know one of the reasons I write the way we wrote one of the reasons it is called the subtle art of not giving a fuck and not called the importance of choosing your values or something similar like that is because it's I found just from years writing online is that you have to you have to package these idea at least I do there's this is what I found that works is that I had to package these ideas and a lot of kind of ridiculous snarky jokes to get people
two
To consume them, you know, it was a sugar that makes the medicine go down essentially for people that's interesting because it wasn't clear to me when I read the book
like that. No problem. That's what yeah, that's kind of the problem I had with it because it doesn't like the idea is appealed to me, but that style didn't just to be yeah, I to be like blunt about it. But I mean, you've sold 13 million books. So it appeals to people
well, I wish
It's
clearly not like it's not a book that's doing harm it is.
Oh no, and it's not the idea is it was just like I was like gee does he need to say fuck all the time? Hmm But I make it just like I'm just old now. Well, it
doesn't it's interesting than one down each. You said great men are seldom credited with their stupidities and what he meant by that was you don't know how much bad has to be packaged along with something good in order for the good to be able to exist.
It and that's not a justification for what's bad but it is an entreaty not to jump to conclusions too quickly and Michaela's observation that you know, she reacted in a particular way to the style of the book but then had to contend with the fact that it's been unbelievably widely read
well and I agreed with like I read it and was like, yeah, I agree with their there are a lot of points in here that I agree with. It was just a really like
I just couldn't exactly figure out what you were doing with the way you were writing was like why it's like they're it's funny too. And I know that you have a bit of a background in comedy, but part of what I was thinking throughout reading it was why is it really this way, but maybe that's active maybe
that is a zone of proximal development issue as
well. But he said it was Market is as Millennial,
right? But what what what what Mark said I believe is that
you know, maybe what you did with your style was give people permission to
to think about the deeper issues that you were raising by adopting an ironic
tone can be made it cool right you made it cool it snuck it in exactly what a cool stuff right yeah right it has a cool title like it the book is cool on the outside too so that was that was obviously a brilliant idea it worked
yeah I mean it's for what it's worth Michaela I mean a lot of people have the same criticism they say the same thing they're like I love the ideas but to really have to be like such a sarcastic asshole the time you know and it's I mean on the one on the one hand it's like okay this is this is just how I like to this is the sort of stuff that I find funny so I enjoyed putting it in but on the other hand it's
apparently I was actually very O2
If they do, but it was it was actually very interesting, you know, because my book came out about two years before years Jordans. It was very interesting watching your book take off so much because it is, you know, some like so serious and like very straight to the point like there's no there's absolutely no ambiguity of what you're getting at in any of your chapters and you know, they're part of me.
read that and it's like
And I was like wow, like how does how does he do this? You know, it's like I've never found a way to not kind of couch it in that language and have people take me seriously. It might just be my style of communicating. Well, it's a hard question because you know, one of the one one I realized something a long time ago when I was teaching in Boston, I was teaching a very very serious course.
The subject material was brutal. It was a course that focused a lot on atrocity and it was based on my first book maps of meaning and I had this voice in the back of my head constantly that said, you know, if you had really mastered this material you could teach it with a light touch you could inject some humor and I know that I'm at my best when I have a sense of humor about what I'm talking about no matter how serious what I'm talking about is and you know,
You did manage to maintain a sense of humor while discussing topics that are very serious and it might be reasonable to debate about whether the humor goes too far or whether it's sufficiently sophisticated or I think that's irrelevant in some sense because the success of the book speaks for the utility of the
approach also, who cares if one person is like now you said fuck too much.
Yes. Well,
It is interesting that you have some conscious sense that by playing by maybe it's also to some degree that you showed that you were able to play the ironic game, you know, sometimes people who are serious are serious because they can't be funny. They can't joke. They can't be one of the crowd they can't be one of the guys and so they make the claim that they're serious.
Should Trump that but it doesn't but by adopting that tone that you adopted you did say well look I can play the ironic game, but I found something better and and maybe that's part of what makes the book convincing.
Yeah, because there are a lot of other books with fucking the title now I can tell you that I've seen that a lot. Congratulations. You've contributed one more generously of North American culture. You're welcome Society.
Thank you so much for coming on that was really fun. That was a very very enjoyable podcast. Where can people go to find you.
Mark Manson dotnet, I've got hundreds of free articles and then obviously the books are bookstore. So just keep an eye out. But yeah, that's pretty much it.
Well, thank you very much for coming on. That was fun.
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Yeah. It was really good to meet you. You too.
