- What's up everybody Mark Manson here,
and a big milestone just happened.
We just blew past 100,000 subscribers to this channel.
I, we were like, I think 77 and then
not even two weeks later, boom, 120,000.
So thank you all for subscribing.
I am super humbled.
I've only been doing this for a few months,
so it's it's pretty awesome
to rack up this many subscribers so quickly
and I'm having a blast.
So we've got a lot of cool videos coming up
in the next few months,
a couple of big surprises
and you're definitely gonna want to tune in
and check that out.
So I was thinking, I answer literally hundreds
of questions each week,
whether it's on my website
or through email or on social media.
And I've never done like a full blown AMA on YouTube before.
So this morning I got on YouTube and said,
"Hey guys send me your questions
and I will knock them out before my hair even fuckin dries.
So here we are lets do it.
(upbeat music)
So here's the first question.
Lately I've been overthinking this quote
from Yuval Noah Harari.
He wrote the book Sapiens.
Quote, "The human being who most seeks happiness
is the one who becomes most unhappy.
Do you agree with this?
If yes, why?
If not, why?"
So I absolutely agree with this.
Not only do I agree with it, I wrote about it in my book
Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck.
In fact, I quoted there's an even more famous quote
that's very similar to that Harari quote
comes from the philosopher named Albert Camus.
He said that, "You will never find happiness
if you continue to seek of what happiness consists of."
To me this is like psychology 101 yet
somehow our entire culture has forgotten this.
If you were constantly preoccupied
with what's going to make you happy
that preoccupation will make you unhappy.
In my book, I call this the backwards law
which is that the pursuit of positive experience
is itself a negative experience
and the acceptance of negative experience is itself
a positive experience.
Now I can get into all the nuts
and bolts of why exactly this happens in our mind
but generally speaking, the backwards law applies
to pretty much any sort of emotional experience we may have.
So if you're feeling angry and you wish you weren't angry
it's just going to make you more angry.
If you're sad and you wish you weren't sad
it's just going to make you more sad.
So ultimately the argument that I make in my books
and it's not a new argument
the existentialists have been saying it for years.
The Buddhists have been saying it for millennia.
The stoic said it 2000 years ago
is that emotions are not the point.
The point of life is not to feel good all the time.
The point is to find something meaningful to do
with your time.
And if you optimize for meaning,
then the happiness question
will kind of take care of itself.
Do you plan on writing new books,
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck
and Everything Is Fucked a book about hope,
absolutely changed my life
and I can't thank you enough.
That comes from Anya.
Thank you, Anya.
Absolutely. I'm going to write new books for two reasons.
One is because I love writing books.
Books are fuckin great.
Number two is I'm under a very large contract
with Harper Collins to write more books.
So you will absolutely be seeing more books from me.
I may have a project coming out end of this year 2021
that I'll talk about more later in the year.
It's it's not exclusively my book.
It's a book that I collaborated with somebody else on,
but I will begin writing my next book
at some point this year as well.
So stay tuned for more videos about that.
How do you, or how does one structure their day
while balancing productivity,
free time, shit you have to do and relaxation?
What are your strategies for getting the most of your day?
This is a really good question.
And you know, the productivity topic
there's a lot that's been written
and said about productivity
and there's a million books and YouTube channels
you can find about it.
So I'm going to try to say something a little bit different.
A lot of your productivity,
a lot of the the optimal functioning of your productive life
is actually very individual.
What a lot of people miss
or they don't understand is that
there's no one size fits all model of productivity.
So there are certain principles that are generally correct
so wake up early tends to make people more productive.
Doing the most important things
first in your day tends to make people more productive.
Minimize tasks switching between lots of different things
that tends to make people more productive,
but there's going to be variance from individual
to individual.
Now, let me give you an example from my own life.
So one thing I learned pretty early on
when starting my business is that I don't like routine.
Like it just I mentally do not respond well
to too much routine.
For whatever reason my brain thrives a little bit on chaos.
And so I actually discovered pretty early on in my career
that taking like a random Thursday off
and doing something really weird with my time
or just sitting around and playing video games
and then working on Saturday and Sunday instead
like that actually invigorated me
it made me more productive.
So a lot of my productivity function is simply
paying attention to my emotional state,
paying attention to when I'm getting kind of burnt out
or ground down by too much routine
and then intentionally spicing it up in some way.
Now that advice is very shocking
and weird to a lot of people.
Generally you're supposed to answer these questions
with things like I get up at fuckin four in the morning
and I fuckin drink kale and beet juice till seven
and I do a million pushups
and I'm completely done with my day by 12
and then I go to my second job
and I fuckin crank that shit out.
I think what a lot of people miss
with the productivity question
is that strategically placing time for leisure
and for turning your brain off maximizes productivity.
I actually wrote an article on my website about this.
I believe it's called how to get more done by working less.
It's all about how there's a diminishing returns
to the amount of hours you put into any task during the day.
Another thing that's particularly personal to me
is I'm just not productive in afternoons.
I don't know what it is.
I'm 36.
I've been trying this shit for like my entire adult life.
A lot of my work days end up being something
like work really hard in the morning, kind of like do email,
social media bullshit in the afternoon,
maybe take a nap, maybe play some video games,
maybe hang out with my wife
and then starting around five, 6:00 PM
start doing a little bit of work again.
And then if I'm feeling up to it, if I'm feeling inspired
then I'll work say 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM
and go to bed around 11.
So that's me.
That's a very personal thing for me
and that's just something that I've discovered its worth.
So I guess my point with all of this
is that this is a personal question.
There are general principles that are true for everybody
but a lot of this is personality based
and so if you're a young person start exploring
different configurations of your time and your relaxation
and try to discover what works best for you.
Another quote this time from Mark Twain.
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
Do I agree?
I feel like it's very fashionable to shit on education
particularly higher education these days.
It's kind of become a meme that college isn't worth it
and you're wasting your time.
As with everything it depends.
And that's not a sexy or popular answer, but it depends
like if you're going into mathematics,
then yeah school is probably very important.
Like mathematics you need to build upon certain foundations
and you need a teacher there to help explain concepts
to you or else everything just falls apart.
With something like history
the curriculum at a particular school, it's very arbitrary.
It's like what we decided is important in history
there's no like, objective answer to that.
And so if you could super interested
in like ancient Chinese history, there's nothing to say
that that's not more useful or correct for you than
whatever they teach you in your high school.
So to me, this is subject dependent.
It's also goal dependent.
Depends what you want to do with your life.
If you want to be a startup founder
or a professional musician,
or go into like nonprofit work, charity work.
Yeah. A lot of schools probably going to be useless for you
if not detrimental in some ways.
If you want to become a doctor
if you want to become an engineer
then school's probably going to be very important.
So it all depends on what you're looking for
and what your goals are.
Generally speaking as a rule whenever people
are like this big social thing is all good or all bad.
It's neither it's somewhere in between.
Next question.
What are your five favorite non-fiction books
on social issues you would recommend us to read?
All right, you made me go to the bookshelf on this one.
The first one I would recommend
this is pretty American centric but Chasing The Scream
by Johann Hari, it's about the drug war.
Long-time readers of mine
subscribers to the email newsletter
know that I am completely for the decriminalization
of drugs.
I think the war on drugs is maybe the stupidest
and one of the most devastating policies
in the United States since like slavery.
Like it's just, it's abominable in so many ways.
Drug addiction, it's a mental health issue.
It is not a criminal issue
and making it a criminal issue just makes more crime.
So fuckin stop it.
Next one I would recommend is called Democracy For Realists.
This is written by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels
they are two political scientists from Princeton I believe.
This is a sobering read.
It's an upsetting read.
It's empirical data on how electorates actually vote
and function.
Spoiler alert.
People are fuckin dumb and they vote for dumb things.
The book kind of looks at
is there such thing as too much democracy?
And some of the answers are a little bit upsetting.
Next book is called Why Nations Fail.
It's by Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson.
You know, there's a lot of foreign policy
and economics in this,
but it's a super fascinating history read as well
and it pulls from all over the world.
So it looks at like colonialism and Zaire and the Congo,
the Mexican revolution in 1911,
it looks at the American revolution,
it looks at the opening of China.
It looks at all of these historical examples
and it pulls certain commonalities to why certain countries
or nations fail, but also looks at why some nations thrive
and become very economically prosperous.
So the next author, I'm a huge fan boy,
this is called the Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
The subtitle is the modern denial of human nature.
I just, I love Pinker.
He's become kind of controversial on the left recently,
which is fuckin ludicrous.
Anybody who thinks Steven Pinker's controversial
has not read Steven Pinker.
Pinker is just a genius
at collecting a vast amount of research and data
and then systematically explaining it
to push like a very big picture argument or idea.
And the Blank Slate is all about kind of politically
not politically motivated
but ideologically motivated denial of genetics
of how genetics affect life, how genetics affect people,
how it affects gender, how it affects economic outcomes
things that we don't really like thinking about.
But unfortunately the science shows us over
and over again is true.
Another Pinker, favorite, Better Angels Of Our Nature.
This thing is, I mean, you could kill a small child
with this book if you want it to
but this book is about violence and it's basically
about why the world is becoming less violent
and more prosperous and more empathetic
despite all of our perceptions to the contrary.
It'll definitely shift your perspective
about humanity quite a bit.
So those are five,
but I have to I can't do a recommendation list like this
without throwing these other books in.
The other person I'm a huge fan boy of his
is a political scientist named Francis Fukuyama.
This is kind of his magnum opus.
It's a two-parter Origins Of Political Order
and then Political Order and Political Decay.
And what Fukuyama does is he basically traces the emergence
of modern civilization beginning in ancient China
through ancient India, the Middle East
all the way up through the enlightenment
and the American French revolutions.
And then the second book really gets
into why certain political systems prosper
and why certain political systems fail
and it is endlessly fascinating.
I mean, it is like 1200 pages.
So you really need to be kind of like a history
and political dork, like I am to enjoy it,
but it is one of those big picture books
that seemingly just kind of explains everything
about human politics in a nutshell.
So huge recommendation for that.
Do you know the MBTI personality test?
If yes, what is your opinion about it
and about personality tests in general?
Thanks for your content.
I am familiar with MBTI.
I actually made like a 30 minute video
for my website members on markmanson.net.
So if you're a member of the site,
or if you want to sign up for the site,
you can check that out.
I break down in detail.
The MBTI, why it became popular
why it's seen as authoritative, even though it's not.
So MBTI, I hate to break it to guys.
I know it's fun.
I know it's like really interesting to talk about
but the MBTI is basically a very fancy horoscope.
There's almost no empirical data backing up its utility.
It was invented in the forties
and quickly dropped by psychologists
by the sixties for the big five model of personality
which there is a ton of data for.
Yet the reason MBTI survives
is that the business consulting industry picked up on it
and started making a shitload of money
telling CEOs and presidents of companies
that they could increase productivity
and efficiency by matching employees
and creating teams based on MBTI types.
It's all bullshit.
Look, it's fun and I get emails fuck
every week people ask me what my MBTI type is.
I'm an INTP.
Don't take it too seriously.
On the other hand, you know
there's a whole field of psychology personality psychology.
The big five model is kind of the preeminent model
in that field of psychology.
There's a lot of data on the big five model.
There's a lot of predictive data on the big five model
that said, it's still not without controversy.
Let me just put it this way.
Like if I asked you a question I said,
"Do you like hanging out with people every you know?"
And you said, "Yes."
Then I'd be like, "Oh, so you're a type of person
who likes hanging out with people."
Now the data would be significant
and it would match up, but it might actually
telling you anything original or useful about yourself.
Like that's kind of the criticism of personality data
is that we basically invent these models
and then create questionnaires
that only like push people to fit into the model.
And so that doesn't actually tell us how useful
the model is.
I don't know if I buy that.
I tend to think that given what we know about genetics
and everything
that there probably are fundamental personality types
and those do have consequences on outcomes.
But I think it's just important to say
that it's an area of psychology
that is still debated quite frequently.
Have you any familiarity
with David Foster Wallace's commencement speech.
This Is Water.
Have you any thoughts on set speech?
Yeah, I am a David Foster Wallace fan boy.
I read all of his work.
Actually David Foster Wallace is probably the person
that made me want to become an author.
Actually, if you go to markmanson.net/archive
scroll all the way to the bottom,
you will find that in August, 2010,
I posted the entire This Is Water speech on my website.
So not only am I familiar with the speech
it is been on my website for over 10 years now.
It's, I've probably read it
or listened to it 10 or 15 times.
It's one of my favorite things ever written.
I think there's so much wisdom in it.
He's just such a brilliant mind and amazing author
and I, yeah, I'm just, I could gush for hours
and hours about it, but yes, it's an amazing speech.
I love it.
It's been very impactful for me
and I agree with pretty much all the points in it.
Have you read any of Jordan Peterson's books
and if so what are your thoughts on them?
I have, I've read 12 rules for Life.
I have Maps of Meaning I have not read it.
It's funny.
I get asked about Jordan Peterson all the time.
I would describe myself as a mild fan.
Let me put it this way.
I really, really agree with him
on like 60 to 70% of what he says
and then I just kind of flat out disagree on maybe 30 to 40%
with everything he says about existentialism, values,
when he talks about Dostoevsky, Nietzsche responsibility
I'm 100% on board, 100%.
And in fact, I actually I got a chance to meet
and talk to him for a few hours for the first time,
a couple of weeks ago and he and I just riffed
on existentialist ideas and responsibility
and personal accountability pretty much the whole time.
He's a pretty serious dude, very intense.
But yeah, I like him and I think he gives good advice
obviously super knowledgeable.
He comes from a
like a very well-read well-studied background.
I think a lot of the media criticism of him
is hyperbolic and exaggerated.
The stuff that I'm not so on board with
is the religion stuff.
I'm not as much of a Jung as he is.
Jung didn't do a whole lot for me
and then he really has a thing about Christianity
and the Bible.
And that's cool.
I totally respect that.
A lot of people obviously like
over a billion people on the planet do .
I don't, I'm more skeptical of the religion stuff.
So yeah, it's a mixed bag.
I really like what he's saying, what he's putting out there.
I don't agree with all of it, but that's fine.
One of the things that's so mesmerizing
about Peterson is like
he seems to bring this like religiosity out of people.
Like either people are like like psycho fan,
like pro Peterson zealots
where everything he says is fuckin gold
and he's saving society or people are like
he's the antichrist and he's evil
and he's a bigot and he's all these things.
And it's like, neither is true.
He's a really smart guy
with a lot of really interesting ideas.
And I really like a lot of them
but I don't like all of them.
And that's pretty much true
with like every interesting thinker
and author I've ever read in my life.
It's been very interesting.
I find his work interesting, but then I also find
the brouhaha around him quite interesting as well.
All right.
Last question.
Hi Mark.
I would like to know if you think
that we can use our anxieties
as a super power to push through adversity?
I would say you have no other option
but to use your anxiety as a superpower
to push you through adversity
it's either that, or just crawl in a corner and give up.
This is the thing about anxiety
and this this is one of the points that I make frequently
throughout my books is like
there's no such thing as a positive or negative emotion.
There are positive and negative contexts
and reactions to emotions.
So like anxiety is incredibly useful.
Anxiety is your nervous system, mobilizing your body
and preparing you for an important situation.
And you can either live up to that important situation
and perform well or you can crumble.
It's interesting.
You know, the research on anxiety it finds it
that like say athletes like Michael Jordan,
who just like hit game winners left right and center.
They still feel as much anxiety as other people.
It's, what's different about people like Michael Jordan
is their response to the anxiety.
So my answer is you have no other option,
but to use your anxiety as a superpower,
because guess what?
The anxiety is not going anywhere, man.
It's part of you.
It's part of life.
It's not going to end.
So might as well fuckin get used to it
and leverage it a little bit.
All right.
So that's all the time we got.
Stick around, got some really
cool shit happening over the next few months.
I've been really enjoying this channel.
I'm actually making it kind of one of my primary focuses
of 2021.
So very excited for the content we got coming.
Thanks for all the questions
and I will see you in next week video.
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