i want to take you out to dinner and then i want to
go back to my apartment and watch kung fu do you ever watch kung fu
i love kung fu channel 39 totally you should come over and watch kung fu tonight okay
great okay can we order lunch first yeah okay so i've always enjoyed office space as an
amazing comedy but it was also a movie that to me personally was very inspiring because
of one particular sequence now the story is about peter gibbons he is stuck stuck and
miserable miserable in his relationship miserable in traffic and most of all miserable at his office
job i mean as he talks about his life so that means that every single day that you see me
that's on the worst day of my life what about today is today the worst day of your life yeah
wow that's messed up yet he cannot escape it because just like his friends and co-workers
he feels that he has no choice but to do the work or he will lose all of his stability what if we're
still doing this when we're 50 it would be nice to have that kind of job security
he hates his work yet he is afraid of losing it he doesn't enjoy his relationship yet he is afraid
of losing it hey she hasn't been over here in a while you two still going out yeah i guess i i
don't know sometimes i get the feeling like she's cheating on me yeah i get that feeling too man
what do you mean by that but then he gets hypnotized and for part of the film he is just
completely relaxed and calm everything that is wrong in his life just falls away he stops
worrying and starts to live life authentically relaxed and happy he doesn't go to work anymore
because he doesn't feel like it he calmly asks out the goal he truly likes where before he was
afraid to do it i was asking what you were doing for lunch would you like to have lunch with me
are you are you serious yeah he ignores his bosses and creates a wonderful view for himself
he becomes able to do this only when he lets go of other people's expectations and opinions
and as soon as he does that he becomes free good luck with your layoffs alright i hope
your firings go really well excellent great wow and i think that this is something that
we cannot relate to but that we often forget but before we continue a brief word from our sponsor
now one of my frustrations is something that i noticed when i moved from the netherlands to hong
kong for a year was how different the films and series were on streaming platforms like netflix
due to jira restrictions i would want to watch a film i knew was on netflix in the netherlands but
i couldn't cause it wasn't in hong kong and back in the netherlands vice versa with atlas
vpn you can access every country streaming service library by connecting to a server in that country
of course another important use of atlas cpn is to protect your internet data and online activities
but it might even help to save you some money because not only content libraries of streaming
services are impacted by geography the prices of various services are much higher in some
countries than in others so when booking a flight for example you can use atlas vpn to
connect to a server in the countries where the prices offered are cheaper
now atlas vpn is offering a three-year plan for only one dollar and 39 cents a month
a 86 discount besides that they have a 30-day money-back guarantee so if you want to try it out
click the link in the description below a lot of people know the experience of feeling stuck
discontent worrying too much about stuff that truly doesn't matter about other people's opinions
wait peter peter i gotta postpone it man tell me you've been sick make something up oh no way
no i feel great it's the best day of my life it's no coincidence that office space came out in the
same year's fight club the matrix and american beauty this was the year of the cubicle movie
these were movies that were made in a year of stability and prosperity in the decade after the
cold war ended and before 9 11 the movies of this year aren't about defeating a great existential
threat but about coping with the anxiety and discontentment of a stable corporate job the
middle children of history man no purpose or place we have no great war no great depression
our great war is a spiritual war our great depression is our lives 1999 was about dealing
with the empathy of this stable prosperity now in all these movies the answer to this problem
is different for one main character it was starting an underground fight club gentlemen
welcome to fight club for another it was going back to smoking weed working out and for some
reason fantasizing about your teenage daughter's best friend and yet for another it was taking
a red pill and realizing his entire reality was a lie welcome to the desert of the real
it's for office spaces peter gibbons it's getting hypnotized and just letting go becoming zen
now although since the late 90s where we have seen many companies implement a much more fun
and exciting world culture than the soul sucking gray cubicles of the 90s often this feeling of
anxiety and discontentment is still very much there for us mark manson describes this in his
book the subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] we have a culture today that is obsessively focused on
unrealistic positive expectations be happier be healthier be smarter be faster be richer be sexier
and be more popular more envied and admired yet although these sound as noble aspirations they
constantly put focus on our perception of personal shortcomings if we constantly feel that we should
be making more money it enforces our belief that we don't have enough if we fixate about what
should be better in our lives it only reminds us of what we are lacking which causes anxiety
as he says the desire for a positive experience is in itself a negative experience and the
acceptance of a negative experience is in itself a positive experience and at the core of this
there is the problem of exceptionalism the only thing we're doing is impossible
right everything else is [ __ ] great well you're said to be a philosopher or a king or
[ __ ] shakespeare and this is all they give you this i want unlimited things i want everything i
want a real [ __ ] love a real [ __ ] house a real [ __ ] thing to do every day and i just
i'd just rather die if i don't get it human existence is simply
for the most part a pretty average experience we are all pretty average at most things we do
and if we're lucky we might become good in a couple things and if we are extremely lucky
we may become truly exceptional at one thing rage over the nature an unequal distribution of talent
rage that genius appears where it appears for no material reason at all desiring a thing
cannot make you have it but nobody is great at everything as manson argues brilliant
businessmen are often fuck-ups in their personal lives and extraordinary athletes may be dumber
than a lobotomized rock welcome back dumb duck many celebrities will be as clueless
and insecure about many aspects of their life as the people that worship them at the same time our
experience of life is pretty average as well most of life takes place in the humdrum middle
yet we are continuously bombarded with the exceptional through social media we see the best
food the most beautiful places the most attractive people and the most extraordinary experiences
we are conditioned that the exceptional is the new normal and because our life can impossibly
live up to that standard we suffer the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel
pretty darn insecure and desperate so more and more we feel the need to compensate through
entitlement and addiction the internet is not only an open source of information it is also
an open source of insecurity self-doubt and shame the answer to this anxiety is not to frantically
try to get more money or fame or approval or obsessively chase pleasure in the form of sex
drugs parties alcohol etc instead we have to let go of what does not truly matter and this is
beautifully illustrated by peter in office space the funny thing is that as soon as he lets go as
soon as he stops giving a [ __ ] everything starts to go better for him he gets stepped for promotion
but what if you were offered some kind of a stock option equity sharing program would
that do anything for you i don't know i guess he starts dating a new girlfriend who you can watch
kung fu with and although it is paradoxical to get what you want as soon as you stop caring about it
i do think that it is a truth that we have all experienced at least once or twice in our lives
a moment where we have felt completely stuck unable to reach something but as soon as we said
[ __ ] it everything fell into place but there is an important difference between what i think
is the actual experience of letting go and that of peter in office space
i mean it would be very nice if you could just get hypnotized into becoming completely zen yet
this is not reality like mark manson explains when most people envision giving no [ __ ] whatsoever
they imagine a kind of serene indifference to everything a calm that weathers all storms they
imagine and inspired to be a person who is shaken by nothing and caves in to no one
but as he states this is impossible and it is also not preferable we are hardwired to give a
[ __ ] to not give a [ __ ] about anything is to be a sociopath because of this he argues it is
not about not giving a [ __ ] it is about being very selective with the [ __ ] that you give
i would argue that there are two different sides to the art of not giving a [ __ ] or
the art of letting go on the one hand there is developing the ability to let go of what does not
truly matter and this ranges from deep-seated issues like working through and letting go
of childhood traumas to stop caring about things that lead to self-destructive behavior
things that are discussed in david hawking's book letting go but there's also a more lighthearted
aspect to this which is not giving as many [ __ ] about unimportant trivial shite like your
ex-girlfriend's facebook post being stuck in traffic or a printer that doesn't work
if we can stay calm in the face of these daily annoyances this already greatly benefits our lives
and the latter is done by upgrading your problems because it is important to realize that you will
always have problems problems are a constant aspect in life there's no magical endpoint
where you have reached all your goals you'll feel perfectly content and your experience is absolute
bliss every problem solved will generate new problems because whatever makes us feel good
will inevitably come with problems the love of your life is the person you fight with
the dream house you finally buy is the dream house you repair and your job promotion comes
with new stress and responsibilities and if we avoid all these problems if we become nihilistic
and we for example escape into netflix fast food drinking or drugs well we all know the literal
hell of a path that will create so if the first step is letting go or not giving a [ __ ] about
the problems in our lives that are unimportant but simultaneously we know that if we let go of these
they will still be replaced by new problems the next step is to choose better problems now we
often ask ourselves and others what do we want in life but mark manson argues that this is a
rather cheap and irrelevant question because we all want plenty of money great sex we want
to be in tip-top shape have amazing relationships have a good family have amazing travel experience
great food and good comfort basically we want to be happy and to not be suffering yet paradoxically
avoiding suffering creates suffering while actively seeking out suffering and pain ultimately
creates purpose and happiness according to manson therefore we should not ask ourselves what will
make us happy we should ask ourselves what are we willing to suffer for everything worth having in
life comes from overcoming the associated negative experience that is the true and subtle art of not
giving a [ __ ] it is the careful and deliberate choosing of the problems you want to solve what
you are willing to suffer for while still enjoying the process of it it's time for you to look inward
and begin asking yourself the big questions who are you and what do you want now of course this
does tend to fall into the great and true but also very cliche advice of step outside your comfort
zone and you will achieve great things it's advice that most of us have heard before and probably
gave us a warm excited and motivated feeling but i do know if stepping out of your comfort zone feels
like this you're not doing it correctly in fact you're probably not doing it at all because from
personal experience i can't say that the times that i did truly step outside my comfort zone
it had amazing consequences in my life but it was not easy to do in fact it was very very
uncomfortable for example before i went on a solo trip to bali which turned out to be one of the
most amazing travel experiences of my life i was scared shitless it was my first time traveling to
asia and most of all it was the first time that i was traveling alone without friends or family
to a country i'd never been yet it turned out to be the best travel experience of my life
and the same is true when i was about to go on the first date with what now is my girlfriend and
funnily enough she almost didn't show up because she was also so nervous that she wanted to build
yet we both found the courage to go on a date and now we're very happy together and
it worked out great often the best things in life come from doing that which is uncomfortable
scary and painful and there is no magic hypnosis that can make it easy to do this
it shouldn't be and i'm the first to admit that there have been many times in my life
where i didn't break out of my comfort zone where i knew i had to say [ __ ] it and do
something but i was too scared and i know that i've missed out on opportunities because of it
the fact is that stepping outside of your comfort zone is genuinely hard but it is a muscle that can
be trained we do this by gradually expanding our ability of saying [ __ ] it to what is new
and what is uncomfortable simultaneously we also can't step out too far out of our comfort zone
many of us for example dream of being a rock star on stage with millions of fans or being the ceo
and founder of a huge multi-billion dollar company but if we're honest with ourselves if
we were transported into that role the pressure and the stress would likely make us have a full
panic attack and and we would just crumble down and be unable to function stepping outside of
our comfort zone it's something that we must do no matter how hard it is we must therefore do
it gradually and with incremental steps and that is the true and subtle art of not giving a [ __ ]
thank you to atlas vpn for sponsoring this video get 86
off a three-year subscription by clicking the link in the description below