(upbeat music)
- So a couple of weeks ago,
I was doing market research on what's called self-care apps.
Now self-care apps can be anything that helps you with
anxiety, depression, stress,
they all promise basically the same stuff,
that you're going to feel good.
Buy the app, use it five minutes a day or whatever,
and live happily ever after.
So I'm checking out these apps and I'll be honest.
I get sad, you know, I like to feel good,
but part of it too is, I'm running a business here.
I'm a brand.
I'm actually checking out these apps to see if there's some
sort of market opportunity here.
Some of them gave pretty good advice.
Someone gave terrible advice.
Some of them had good videos and content.
Others had horrible videos and content.
All in all it was an interesting experience,
but what I forgot, is I left the notifications on.
So, for the next week,
I woke up every single day to a stream of notifications
of just banal platitude after banal platitude.
You have a beautiful smile Mark.
Be sure to share it with the world today.
Every single day.
Bullshit!
On my phone screen, over and over and over.
And I'm seriously asking myself.
I'm like, "I think I'm getting depressed."
Like this is making me feel worse, this is terrible.
Without fail, these apps
immediately put me into a sour mood.
How can a phone know what the fuck my smile looks like?
And by the way, how the fuck can you be proud of me,
if you don't even know me?
I get it.
Like people who feel bad,
one of the reasons that they feel bad
is people never said this to them.
But the way you solve that,
is you do not pay a piece of software on your phone
to say those things to you.
This does not fill that gap in your soul
that you've been missing since your childhood.
In fact, it might just enlargen the hole
because you're sitting there on your phone
and you're like, "wow, this is what it's come to,
I'm fucking paying an app,
to tell me all the things that no human being ever told me."
That is depressing as shit.
Long story short, I'm getting bombarded day after day
with all these notifications.
Telling me how special I am and how unique I am
and how I'm a gift to the world.
I'm sorry, but is this what passes
for mental health advice these days?
I mean, is this really how low the bar has gotten?
Shit like this it doesn't promote emotional stability,
it promotes self absorption.
It promotes narcissism.
I mean, what kind of person walks around all day
looking at their phone Like,
"Yeah, I am pretty fucking special,
yeah, I am a gift to the world."
We don't need to hear more of that,
we probably need to hear less of it.
(cool music)
If you look at all the data,
it's no secret that there is a growing mental health crisis
happening throughout the developed world.
Depression, anxiety, suicide, drug overdoses,
these things are all on the rise
through many of our cultures right now.
I think one way you could frame this crisis is that,
it's not even necessarily a crisis of mental health,
it's a crisis of resilience.
Because it's not like life has gotten worse.
Violence is at an all time low, crime is at an all time low,
wars are an all time low.
I mean, other than the fucking pandemic,
things are actually going pretty decently
when you look at the past hundred years of human history.
(cool music)
The question is like, why do we need to pay a phone
to tell us that we have a beautiful smile every day?
The reason to me is that,
there's a fundamental disconnect of
how we see living a good life
or how we see improving our lives.
I think as a culture, we've erroneously equated,
feeling good all the time with, living good all the time.
And yes, grammar nazis, I am completely aware of that,
living good is grammatically incorrect.
Shut the fuck up.
Put it in another way,
we're becoming less psychologically resilient as a culture.
Everything is a crisis.
I mean, it used to be the word crisis was reserved
for the gulags in a Holocaust or something.
Today, the word crisis gets thrown around
like a fucking football on Thanksgiving.
Everything's a crisis, everybody's having a crisis.
Timmy got an F on his paper, his self-esteem is in crisis,
his future is in crisis.
Call his parents, call his grandparents,
dig up his great grandparents.
Hurry, sign them up for an app
that tells him how beautiful his smile is.
Our aversion to pain and struggle
is so ingrained in us at this point
that it's compromising our ability to learn
and to grow and to just fucking function.
Just to be like a decent human being.
You don't build psychological resilience
by feeling good all the time.
You build psychological resilience
by getting good at feeling bad.
What I mean by that,
is learning how to live with unpleasant feelings,
learning how to live with your insecurities,
learning how to exist and be productive
and do good things and be nice to people
despite the fact that you feel like shit.
The problem isn't that you feel like shit,
the problem is that you're behaving like shit,
and then blaming it on your feelings.
We seem to have lost sight of this at some point.
And this point strikes me as so obvious that it shocks me
when I come across books and seminars
and audio programs and websites,
and now apps that take people
who have a crack like addiction to empty validation
and just fucking snow shovel it in their faces.
And our culture's constant pursuit
for convenience in the customer's always right,
and just feeling good all the fucking time on demand.
We're making ourselves fragile and weak.
I feel like we're giving up.
We catastrophize everything.
We over blow everything.
We just wallow in our self importance.
Because I mean, after all, that's really what all this is.
I mean, if you're making huge problems
over every little thing that happens in your life,
really what you're doing is you're just
sticking your finger up your own ass.
Cause it feels good.
I mean, it feels bad, but it kind of feels good.
(laughs)
Look, if I made a self-care app,
I would do like the anti self-help notifications.
I would have a mental health app
that fucking challenges you,
that actively seeks to make you uncomfortable every day.
Good morning, Jim, you have one day less to live.
How are you going to make your life worth it?
Think of the person you love most in this world.
Now imagine them being attacked
by a swarm of killer Hornets.
Okay, now go tell them how much you appreciate them.
And granted, maybe nobody would download it,
but fuck it, it's what the world needs to hear.
(upbeat music)