Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.
— Mark Manson
I'm your typical highly educated, progressive white dude. I've lived my life resisting racism both within myself and in the society around me.
People want to offer opportunities to people they care about. They want to help people they believe are good people or have shared life experiences with.
Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other's faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few years at most.
What I really, really love is writing. If I can just write and make a really nice living out of that, why would I change that?
I think my approach to a creative career was very entrepreneurial. Even though I'm a writer, I've always viewed my work much in the same way as a startup or marketer might view their work.
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.
Life is a big and complex game. It's the largest open world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats, and we're placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages.
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.
'War and Peace' may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.
We start caring way too much about that new TV show or how many likes we're getting on Facebook or what our mother will think of our new house plant. These are bad values that turn us into frivolous people.
I was a big party guy in my twenties, and kind of a playboy as well. I adopted a lot of values and goals that were fairly superficial and, in many cases, self-destructive. They looked cool and sounded sexy on the surface, but underneath, there was no real meaning going on, just a lot of escapism.
At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we're willing to sustain.
We usually think of improving our life by adding stuff - like more things, more success, more friends. I think the starting place should be removing stuff - try a month without Instagram; try a week without looking at fashion pictures. See how that affects your life, your friendships, and your ability to focus on other things.
I think humility - which I think is a very good value to adopt - is basically an extension of understanding your own ignorance.
Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can't be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own.
Self Help is a notoriously crowded market, but I believe that I've successfully differentiated myself in a few ways. For one, most demographic data shows that millennials think/act/see the world differently, and I don't think there's much personal development stuff out there that caters to millennial attitudes and experiences very well.
In a strange way, I feel like we need to cultivate more boredom in our lives: like, boredom needs to be okay again. It needs to be seen as a good thing, and I think it's definitely a good thing for relationships.
Approaching people looking for something in return isn't a relationship, it's a transaction.
My belief is that we all already care about something important. We all already know what is important and meaningful for ourselves. The problem is just that many of us have lost touch with it.
By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship.
The reason we fall in love with certain music and writing is we connect with it on a very personal level.
How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.
You can always do something about the problems life gives you.
It's possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn't treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn't hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
Writing/reading is like visiting another person's brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on.
The first step in making better choices is to simply be brutally honest about your own behavior to yourself. What are the choices you are making? How are you spending your time? What are you neglecting that you shouldn't?
You can't have a pain-free life. It can't all be roses and unicorns.
If I ask you, 'What do you want out of life?' and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,' it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything. Everyone wants that.
One of the problems of modern society, or the post-Internet age, is that there are so many things bombarding us that we could care about. I think it's more important than ever to really get clear and focus on what's worth caring about and what's just noise or distraction.
If everybody just stops caring about politics, we're going to lose the reins on our government.
Be motivated by something beyond simply money or glory.
We all have great aspirations for ourselves, but if you expect yourself to change the world tomorrow, then you're going to just drown yourself in anxiety and constant feelings of inadequacy.
A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.
I started my blog back in 2009 because every Internet business and marketing seminar I watched at the time told me I had to. I had been trying to get a business started selling dating and life advice and was struggling.
True love - that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy - is a choice. It's a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances.
Many people get into a relationship as a way to compensate for something they lack or hate within themselves. This is a one-way ticket to a toxic relationship because it makes your love conditional - you will love your partner as long as they help you feel better about yourself.
I'm constantly obsessing about brand. I think of my books in terms of brand. I think of my blog articles in terms of branding. How does it fit my branding? I think in terms of demographics.
What's interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad, the sadder I'm going to get.
Life is a never-ending stream of problems that must be confronted, surmounted, and/or solved.
Just because you fall in love with someone doesn't necessarily mean they're a good partner for you to be with over the long term.
For whatever reason, when it came out in 1995, 'Infinite Jest' became a cultural event. It was the massive book that was 'cool' for all the Gen Xers to read.
I love massive books: books so big, like bricks, you could drown yourself in a pool with them if you're not careful.
Real happiness comes from discovering a sense of importance in one's actions and in one's life.
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
I think that, pretty much, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing.
I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it's out of fear that they're going to lose control or that they're not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy.
The fear of failure never goes away. In many ways, you could argue that success multiplies the opportunities for failure. It's just more of an argument for becoming more comfortable with it.
Whether you're from Egypt or Argentina or Singapore or Canada, you have a need to feel important, a need to feel secure, and a need to feel loved. The culture and economics just determine how those needs are expressed.
