21 Lessons from 999 Episodes

999 episodes. Don't know what to say really. Uh, it's a lot and I wouldn't have thought that it was even half that number if it hadn't been for the fact that they were all recorded and numbered. And on Monday, episode 1000 goes live with Matthew McConna on the biggest video wall in Texas with a real life air stream reversed onto the set and I'm about to go on tour. So, it kind of all feels there's a lot of chaos happening at the moment. It's very exciting. Uh, but it's been interesting getting to do this preparing for this episode and sort of reflecting on seven and a half years of not really knowing what I'm doing and hoping that something good and useful comes out of it and we just crossed a billion plays which is also very flattering. It's felt like a period of reflection. And uh today I'm going to take you through some of the best lessons that I think I've ever learned and it's from the last hundred episodes only or since February time. Stuff from the newsletter, uh things that I've read, ideas that I've taken from the podcast. But um I've worked really hard. So if this if 999 is a flop, then uh we'll just throw this one in the bin. Chalk it up that I [ __ ] it. And McConn is phenomenal on Monday. I just But I I think this one's really special. I hope it's going to be. Uh I did mention I'm going on tour. A lot of those shows are sold out. So Toronto is sold out, Los Angeles is sold out, Austin, no uh Nashville sold out, and Vancouver all sold out, but there are still tickets available. If you want to go and see me on tour, Chris Williamson.Live. I'm doing New York on Thursday, October 23rd at the town hall. I am doing to that's sold out. All of those are sold out. Boston uh at the Wilbur Thursday, November 13th. Chicago at the Vic, Friday, November 14th. Austin at the Paramount, the adopted hometown show on Thursday, November 20th. Salt Lake City at the Complex, Thursday, December 4th. Denver at the Paramount Theater, Friday, December 5th. Uh, and that's it cuz Vancouver sold out. All of those are available now at chris Williamson.live. So, you can go and get those tickets. Uh, it's a huge show. It's sold out in London. It's sold out in a sold out in Australia. Uh, it's an hour and a half long of just me. Zack Talander is warming up playing music. There's a Q&A at the end. There's meet and greet. There's it's all happening. So, go and get your tickets now. Also, I wanted to give you a uh gift uh in true British fashion, try and give back after giving 999 episodes. I have made a playlist of music. This has been something that's been requested for quite a while. And I've made the modern wisdom bangers playlist, which is all of the stuff that I listen to. a lot of tracks that you'll have heard me speak about on the show, use in vlogs that Max, the videographer, will have used in those, plus just stuff that kind of inspires me generally. There is a lot of metal, emo stuff, alternative music, grime, drum bass. Uh, it's everything. And you can get that. You can go and get the brand new Modern Wisdom Bangers playlist at chriswilx.com/bangers. You can go and save that playlist. I hope it's cool. Uh I I I really enjoyed putting it together and sort of thinking about music taste. Um but yeah, uh before we even get started, thank you to everyone who supported the show. Those of you that have been here from, you know, the early hundreds episodes, like think about this. If you listened, if you started listening to this show on episode 499, you were in the first 50%. 499 episodes and you're in the first 50% of listeners arriving. Uh, which is crazy. Uh, you know, up to that point we'd already had Peterson on, I think maybe twice. Um, James Clear had been on, Robert Green had been on, Rory Suddland had been on a ton of times. We've done 30 Life Hacks episodes. Uh, I just about moved countries. So, very strange, but uh, feeling the love at the moment, and I'm super fired up. The next few months have got the biggest episodes that we've ever done. The run that we recorded in London is out of this world. So, I very much appreciate you all. Enough waffle and retrospective whimsy from me. Let's get into some lessons. All right. First one. I've been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures. There's a quote from Visakan Verasami that says, "I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things." We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large. The day that we get married, the night that we play the main stage at Glastenbury, the moment that the business sells for $100 million, anything less and the entry doesn't even make the ledger. We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. And you think, "Oh, that little thing made your day. That small moment made you weak. How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive. You must not have a lot going on. We roll our eyes at the tiny events that others get excited at as though joy must be proportionate to scale. And yet, life is made up of little things exactly like this. Not once in a while, always. Your life is entirely constructed out of moments so small they wouldn't even register as events on someone's calendar. So why can't something small be something great? Well, I realized sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should do, including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should do. And also including the shame of being delighted by little things more than I think I should. And I felt like it was as if taking pleasure in something tiny revealed the smallness of my life. But maybe that's exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of a life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil. And here's the payoff. When you lower the threshold for joy, you don't just get more of it, you get it now. Like, who is truly the more impressive person? The one who requires a grand cathedral of [ __ ] fanfare, and galactic accomplishment in order to get the slightest flicker of pleasure like some massochist at a sex party demanding car batteries get clamped onto his nipples before he can even get started. Or the person who can do it with a good coffee and a fresh breeze. This feels like a test of emotional robustness. If the only experiences you allow to bring you joy are big, impressive, and rare, then your happiness is brittle. You've made it dependent on external circumstances lining up in just the right way. You have taken your joy hostage until the ransom note of life offers you something sufficiently worth it. We are already primed to be easy to trigger. just not in the right direction. Think about this. We already let the tiniest inconveniences ruin our mood. Uh a slow barista, the Wi-Fi buffering, a traffic jam that adds 7 minutes to our commute. So, our threshold for irritation is comically low, but our threshold for joy is absurdly high. A stranger smile doesn't count. A great song coming unshuffle is not enough. Uh, throwing a towel into the washing basket from across the room. That's lame. If something as insignificant as a red light can make you snap, why can't a good coffee make you glow? We are already easily tipped into frustration. So, you have to work equally hard to be as easy to tip into delight. So, Joe Hudson says, "Enjoyment is efficiency. the less grandiosity that you need to feel good, the more happiness coins that you get to pick up across your day. So, a good challenge is how little of a thing could happen to make your day. That's a great question to ask. How little of a thing could happen to make your day? How much excitement could you squeeze out of clean bed sheets or the smell of rain on hot pavement or a cool breeze when you step outside? Small wins might seem feeble, but refusing to take joy from mundane victories simply because they're insufficiently grand is the same as refusing a free ride to the airport just because you're getting on a plane when you arrive there. So ask yourself this, what if something small could be something great? Most people already have a high threshold for joy. Do not make it worse by feeling shame when little things break through your defenses and make you smile. I adore this idea because it speaks to, you know, sort of frankly this odd sense of shame that I have had about taking pleasure in small things being a comment on not being impressive enough. like that that there is this kind of embarrassment that you know seeing a cute golden retriever on your morning walk is enough to make your morning because how small does your life have to be that that's the thing that breaks through. Uh but it just seems to me that if if you hold your happiness hostage, you have got the entire idea of how happiness is supposed to work upside down. And even if you have the most grand extravagant life, you're going from private jet to Michelin star restaurant to rock concert to art exhibition to, you know, LSD, whatever it is. Like even in between those things there are opportunities for you to have your day made by something small and uh yeah I I since thinking about that idea more it has made a huge impact on me. So what if something small could be something great. Similarly to that I talked about this idea from Joe Hudson that uh operator guy to idea guy which is you need to think about where productivity comes from a little bit more carefully and I also realized that there is surprisingly an analogy between gastric band surgery and being busy. So the gastric band surgery of being busy is after ongoing gastric band surgery, people's risk of suicide tends to go up. And that's perhaps unsurprising because gastric band surgery is a big deal and can sometimes have complications, infections, painful outcomes. You're you're literally like putting a belt around your stomach to make it smaller so that you can't eat as much. It's like the old school version of Osmpic like you know you're physically getting in there and and having to uh limit the space but one of the unseen reasons for this increased suicide risk is actually due to the surgery going right not it going wrong. So you understand gastric band surgery lots of complications infections painful outcomes but it going right can have as bad of an impact on people as it going wrong. Many patients used food as a way to deal with issues in their lives. Emotional challenges, loneliness, anxiety, and after having their stomach shrunk, the ability to use food as a comforting crutch has been taken away. But the emotional challenges that they were using food to deal with still remain. So the coping mechanism has been taken away and it forces patients now to face their issues without a release valve. And I think that there is an equivalent dynamic happening when you try to elevate your life to take your sense of selfworth from things other than your work and your level of busyiness. So, let's say that in the past you used busyiness and chaos as a way to distract yourself from feeling unwanted emotions. It meant that you didn't need to reflect on your decisions or sit in discomfort. That you're moving so quickly that you never fully connect with the things that are happening in your life. Lost relationships, disconnected friends, poor decisions, accumulated negative character traits. are all swept away so quickly that you don't even have time to consider them by manic work. Right? So eventually you realize that chaotic busyness is not your highest calling in life and maybe you value different things now or maybe you've outgrown that phase of your life or maybe realize that busyness for busyness's sake is detaching you from connecting to your existence. So the question here is what happens when this coping mechanism gets taken away. You are forced to face your issues without the highly distracting release valve that you're used to. The busyiness anesthetic that you used to previously rely on has now been removed, leaving you with two choices. One, ignore the lesson that chaos is not fulfillment and go back down the road you just escaped from by force-feeding your way through this figurative gastric band. Number two, actually learn to handle emotional discomfort without distracting yourself with work. And gastric bands, I guess in the world of Ompic are kind of it's like an old archaic technology. But I do think that the analogy works that uh you have this realization that comes in with regards to your busyiness. Hey, maybe this isn't where I should take most of my selfworth from. Maybe I am hiding the uh deeper levels of connection between me and the world in my uh chaos and this uh heavily uh built out calendar. What is it? A busy calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness. Uh okay. So that's kind of the what do you call like the cognitive uh gastric band. You've had this thing wrapped around you. Okay, I've really limited my capacity to do that old workload and not feel sick by it. Why were you working that hard? Maybe because you just have raw ambition and I I want to make the most of my life. I'm going to make a dent in the world. I'm going to do all of these things. Yeah, and that will be some of it. But that's not all of it, man. Like it's a coping mechanism. Like what are you hiding from? You're hiding from something. And even if you're not hiding from something, you will have hidden things by being that busy. Or maybe more accurately, you will have been a been unable to notice things by being that busy. So it's either notice, hide, or from being so busy, have hidden, and then when the busyiness goes away, start to notice. So either way, if the busyiness begins to slow down, stuff tends to burble to the surface. And look, like I'm [ __ ] speaking to myself here, okay? All of these are thinly veiled autobiographical notes to self. Uh, but it's a challenge. Where do I take my sense of selfworth from now? How am I going to deal with not being able to hide emotions in sweeping them under the rug of bravado and momentum is a good way to think about it. And there's this idea from Ryan Holidayiday that says, "Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It's not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity." And sounds fantastic. Uh, apart from the fact that working hard often stops you from being able to remain sane, especially if you push it. I if if we accept and I think this is true that peace is a performance enhancer that if you are unpieful if you are in uh disregulated states all of the time you don't get to access creativity which is the highest lever that you've got you're not enjoying the work so your motivation is going to decrease every single day even if even if each time that you do a thing it only saps 0.1% of your motivation I'm about to hit episode 10000 000 I would be at 0% motivation. And there have been times when the way that I have done work has been net negative to my motivation. So if you want to do a thing for a very long time, like over 7 and 1/2 years, which is I guess how long I've been doing the show, I've done it a pretty quick clip, right? Like a thousand episodes in 7 and a half years is pretty quick. Like even if I'd only lost 0.1% of my motivation each episode, I would I would be in the red, right? I would be overdrawn by now. It is not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity. And I think that that's because so many people make trades that they in the moment seem it seems smart but in retrospect you realize was actually the thing that was supposed to keep you going. So given that we know that dialing back a little bit of the workload having a little bit of balance once you've reached escape velocity this is not for you in the first 5 years of doing whatever you're doing like end yourself. That's the job. The job is nose goes against grindstone. Sleep is out of the window. The candle gets burned on three ends. That's what you're supposed to do. Okay, let's assume you've got to a little bit of escape velocity. There's some momentum. Now, you need to ask yourself some deeper questions because the monster that you created inside of yourself to deal with the challenges at the start of your journey is very difficult to handle becomes super unwieldy and undisiplined later in your journey. And if you don't step in soon enough, it's no longer like a a a dog on a leash pulling you forward. It's more like a parasite that's grown inside of you and is staring out of your eyes. Like the difference between you and the drive is very hard to uh pull apart. And I think that's why I've been talking about this so much recently that this last 12 months I've really tried sort of ask myself the question, who am I if I'm not busy all the time? Um, or who am I if busyness isn't my primary contribution to the stuff that I do? Uh, [ __ ] hard question. It's really hard question to answer, but uh Mark Manson as well just had this banger from the start of the year which was before you win everyone will ask you why you're working so hard and after you win everyone will remind you how lucky you got. Hormosi twisted that into before you win everyone will ask you why you're working so hard and after you win everyone will ask you why you're working so hard if that doesn't just go to show that most people are not worth listening to like myself included right but I I do think that this is true like the the u like self grandiosity uh of every person that's just come upon a an idea that they can't stop talking about I I think this one's got some legs to it all right most people are not worth listening to me included but this Everyone's got some legs. So, do your own assessment. Uh your results may vary, but it's tough letting go of busyness, leaning into what what would a little bit of calm be like for a while and then turning that up and turning that up and turning that up because why did you work so hard if it was just to allow yourself to work harder in the future? That's not to say that working hard isn't enjoyable, but that by working hard you don't fully get to connect with life because it sweeps lots of things under the rug and it is a coping mechanism. It is an obese person using food as a crutch. You are obese with your workload. You are a workload fatty and you are continuing to eat and that is how you deal with your problems. So think about what it would be like to go on a diet. All right, next one. This is [ __ ] money. Some advice on how to support men. Men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short. Men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak. Men want to believe that they can be more without feeling like they're not already enough. Men want to be able to open up without being judged. Men want support without feeling broken. Men want to be loved for who they are, not for what they do. So the TLDDR is blending inspiration with compassion is not an easy task. You could even say blending aspiration with compassion is not an easy task. So question that every guy has asked themselves is how do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow. And the desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside the mind of everyone but men especially. Sure some men are all drive and goals with non- introspection. And sure some men are all reflection and inner work with few external desires. But I think most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support. Inevitably, these two things come into conflict. Basically, every man just wants to hear, "I know you can be more, but you are enough already. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great. But you don't need to be great. And I'm with you no matter what. If you as a person that's close to a man in his life can say those two sentences to him. I I wonder how few men have ever heard that. I know you can be more, but you are enough already. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And I'm with you no matter what. What better of a platform launchpad to begin a limitless vision of what you can do with your life than that this blend of aspiration and compassion Sturgil Simpson's mom He's got this he's got this great line in one of his songs. Sturggil Simpson's mom says, "Boy, I don't care if you hit it big because you're already number one." And I I just get the sense that that this is the the challenge that we have with men, right? We often talk about the challenges that we have with women. um they are emotional and and and hard to understand and what do they really mean when they say that thing and and they passive aggressive but they you know sometimes aggressive but sometimes you know submissive but sometimes dominant and how do I you know okay I get it I get it and I've highlighted enough on this show about some of the challenges of sort of women's uh internal mental states but this is a [ __ ] big one and you as a man need to admit this you need to admit this to yourself and you need to admit it to the people around you because you are hard to deal with. If you're a guy who aims high and is introspective, which I get the sense is a lot of the Modern Wisdom audience. It's between 80% on YouTube and like 70% on audio platforms. Guys, you have not been able to listen to me waffle on about emotions and feelings and introspection and mindfulness and moments of peace and a realistic path to enlightenment if you do not do the reflection thing. But also, there's way too much horos go and [ __ ] end worlds gogggins mode joo stuff for you to not also aim high. So I think I can make a fair assumption even though I don't know you that you're the sort of person who reflects and aspires at the same time. And this is where this comes into land. It it meets reality when you want to feel supported without feeling broken. Like you're able to open up without being judged. Like you believe that you can be more without feeling like you're not enough already. Like your suffering is recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak. Like you can aim high without feeling insufficient if you fall short. Like this is the challenge of a mindful Chad trying to make his way through the world. You understand that you want to achieve lots of things, but you also don't want to look past the present moment. You know that connecting with the world around you is really important, but that too much connection can actually limit your outcomes. That the outcomes are important, but they're also not everything. This desire for self- loveve and high performance comes into contact right here inside the mind of men especially. And uh yeah, I think look, how much can we say this to ourselves? Maybe a bit, but I get the sense that we wouldn't have this type of drive if the people in our lives had said this to us more previously. So, you can do your stuff. You can continue to turn up and and do the work. But if you're someone that is around a guy that is feeling this sort of challenge, I know you can be more, but you're enough already. And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you, and you're going to be great, but you don't need to be great. And I'm with you no matter what. Uh that being said, if you're a guy whose girl listens to the show, which is a lot of them, uh she text you either of those things. Uh so u maybe run that through chat GBT perhaps and like you know get a couple of adjustments or alterations. Um, there's, I guess, an interesting parallel here with a stat that George from the Tinmen sent me to do with uh, male suicide, which is 91% of middle-aged men who died by suicide sought help by the services that we tell men to always turn to. 91% of men who took their own lives in middle age had already opened up to support hotlines, mental health, suicide awareness, stuff like that. So the men need to open up more thing just in some ways is not working. And I don't know what it is. I don't know where the fissure, the crack, the gap is that men are falling through. Maybe it's a lack of understanding about what men need when they open up. Maybe it's that the guys are struggling to use the right language in order to be able to communicate what they need if they do get into these conversations. Like just opening up, right? Seeking help does not mean that you engaged with the help. I'm happy to lay this at the feet of some men, but the one thing that we can say is it's not working. So what does a healthier approach to trying to compassionately inspire men? Like that's it, right? Like compassionate inspiration is what we're looking for. This acceptance of shortcomings whilst a vision for something great. And it's a paradox. It's a paradox. Right? Both of those sentences that I think would make any man melt. They're paradoxes. You are enough already, but you can be more. I will be here right beside you and I love you as you are. And I will still love you even if you become bigger. But I know that you want to become big. But like it's tough. It's tough to navigate and I think it's important for guys to recognize that conflict inside of themselves. I think it's really really [ __ ] important cuz you are difficult in different ways to women. You are difficult and you know to bring this into land for the girls like should you be babying the men in your life. If you see this as babying, you are not the sort of partner that is ready for the kind of guy that listens to this show. However, we do need to put a sort of utilitarian rational justification down on the table. And women need men to be successful. Well, why? Women can look after themselves. They're out earning men. They're out educating men socioeconomically, so on and so forth. Yep. Most of them want to be in a relationship. Most of them want to be in a long-term committed marriage. And male unemployment is not good for marital success. When women lose their jobs, there is no impact on divorce likelihood. When men lose their jobs, the chance of divorce goes up by 33%. That means if you have undriven men, the likelihood that you as the woman in their life gets divorced has just gone up by 33%. It is in your interests both rationally, objectively, subjectively, astrally, [ __ ] karmically. It is in your interests to support the men in your life. Compassionate inspiration is the way to do it. And that was a rant. Rant. I'm all I'm all fired up on episode 999. Another one that I did. This is one of the [ __ ] coolest ideas. All of these I said at the start like I'm blowing I'm filating myself but I've done 999 episodes. Give me give me a break. Also, wasn't 999 like the inverse of the devil's number? Isn't this God's number or something? Cuz 666 is the number of the beast. I don't know. We can say that. Uh I've been trying to work on this idea for a really long time. And again, these are thinly veiled ve actually just totally transparent uh autobiographical notes to self. Um, but I love this idea. Victor Frankle has this famous quote where he says, "When a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure." So Frankle is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void. And perhaps for many maybe maybe even most people this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. And this is Frankle's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. So if ease and grace and joy and playfulness do not come easily to you, one solution is to ignore momentto- moment happiness entirely and just always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. The TLDDR is that you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness does not come easily to you. The problem is that delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. Alan Watts has got this idea. If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them. Everyone is taught that on the other side of discomfort is something valuable. We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain, they would not be worthwhile. And this is how nonvaluable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult. But just because it's difficult does not mean it's worthwhile. Doing something well doesn't make it important. Some people are hyper respponders to that instruction and they go on to become workaholics and insecure overachievers. And from the outside, this looks like you've transcended the shallow need for pleasure. But in reality, it's just cope to avoid facing the fact that you struggle to feel joy. So instead, you perpetually promise yourself that happiness might finally come tomorrow. But like running toward the horizon, tomorrow never arrives. Congratulations, you've managed to subjugate your joy as tribute to your work. Do not mistake humilous and funlacking seriousness with being sophisticated and caring about your pursuit. You took type A advice for type B people and turned it into a [ __ ] religion. Theorough said the price of anything is the amount of life that you exchange for it. And by this logic, many of us are paying into a bank account that we never withdraw from. Permanently winning the marshmallow test results in you never actually arriving at a moment where you cash in your efforts for rewards. And in anticipation, this sounds like building up to some amazingly impressive moment which will make all the pain worth it. But in retrospect, I get the sense that this will just feel like a series of miserable successes where you never stopped to actually enjoy your time on this planet. You need to do at least a bit of what you care about now as opposed to banking on finding time for it in the future. Once the decks are cleared and life's duties are out of the way, life's duties will never be out of the way. And so if you really mean it, when you say that you'd like to write a novel or spend more time with your aging parents or fighting climate change or having fun, at some point you're just going to have to start doing it. That's from Oliver Burkeman. I This is a a suite, I guess, of of challenges that we're talking about today, and a lot of them are in tension with each other, right? this sort of desire for drive whilst realizing that it's a coping mechanism. This uh need for inspiration uh and aspiration whilst also realizing that compassion is something that's important. This understanding that you do need to delay gratification. But if you're the sort of person that takes delay gratification advice to heart, you probably are a hyperresponder and didn't need to hear more of it. who actually need to need needed to hear. Maybe you should cash some of that in. But I I think that idea that Frankle's inverse law, when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. I see in a lot of my friends, that they became serious about pursuits and found that meaning was easier to attain than happiness was. Um that working work was easier than play. Actually there's this idea I think about the ancient Greek word for work was translated as not at leisure. So leisure was the set point and work was the aberration and the people who are ruled by Frankle's inverse law see the opposite. They see work as the set point and and leisure as the aberration. And again like letting go of this like [ __ ] like but I have to I want to build the life that I I want to get out of the country or the the [ __ ] culture or the wealth bracket that I've been born into or that I fell into or that I stumbled backward into. I have to create this special kind of monster inside of me in order to be able to do that. And yes, you do. But if you never let go of it, you end up it's like a dose response curve thing, right? This kind of an interesting idea from medicine. Um, some maybe most drugs have a dose response curve. You can see it as kind of a a U like that. Too little and not much happens. The right amount and something happens. Too much and something bad happens. Like the ensuring that if you don't work hard enough, things in your life will not go well. If you work too hard, things in your life will not go well. If you work just about the right amount, things in your life will probably go great. And working out where that line is is the task of the perennial overthinker. The insecure overachiever has to always be asking the question, "Do I need to put my foot on the gas more or less?" And if you find yourself regularly outworking all of the people around you and then not choosing to do it, I think that maybe you should consider just lifting that foot off a little bit. Another idea, I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and I can see two obvious roadblocks. First one is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state where nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or the future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. And sometimes this is an actual change that you need to make to leave an unhappy relationship, a change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation. And we often will remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain. Second roadblock to happiness is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. And happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination and your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy which is way worse than what could happen in reality. However, this imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans abhore not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. Sometimes these situations overlap. A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and don't know how they're feeling overnight. We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply. So, if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first. I I really think I really think that there's a lot to this these two impediments to happiness, right? That you want things to be different and things are uncertain. I mean, a great description about how anxiety works is you're unable to work out what's going to happen in the future. So your mind imagines, it invests a lot of time and energy into lots of alternative scenarios in the hopes that if you had already seen how those scenarios might occur, if they do occur, you are better prepared for them. If you know that one thing is going to happen, you can still be anxious about it, but the anxiety takes on kind of a different tone. I think that this um prediction error of the future is is perfectly explained by the fact that we would rather genuinely genuinely rather imagine a nightmare than deal with uncertainty. Like it does collapse down. If it's the worst thing, it's it's cancer. It's it's cancer and a gluten intolerance and an infidelity at the same and a divorce at the same time. It's all of those things together somehow. Uh that is horrible and weirdly more satisfying than thinking I don't know what it is. There was this idea around CO called compensatory control. um when people were asked to imagine um an uncertain medical diagnosis in the lab, imagine that this is um the diagnosis that you were given on a a medical report. Uh they were more likely to see uh meaningless patterns in random static on a TV. Uh they basically saw trends where there were none. They tried to bring order even into situations that were chaotic. And the connection to this and COVID was that even before the lab leak had uh sufficient evidence behind it. Uh like the people that say that they were precient and understood that this was a thing other than there is a place in in Wuhan that does this and the virus started in Wuhan. like other than those two things which is quite a bit but not everything um nobody knew because there weren't any stats and now it seems that like the zoological origin and the the RNA sequence all this stuff like there's maybe a little bit more. My point is a lot of the people that were early on that were, I think, leaning heavily into compensatory control because it is far easier to believe that a pathogen exists because of some malign scientist than the transmutation of some silly little microbe. Uh, and even if this is the case, even if it is a lably lab hypothesis is true, you can't deny that it is much more comforting to be able to work it out by human motivation and and and uh carelessness or evilness or the CCP trying to take over or whatever. Like that is a story that we can all understand. What we can't understand is asteroids are random and sometimes they hit Earth. Well, do we did we deserve it? Like think about the the personification of the reason for this happening. Oh, this is judgment from for something that we have done. This is righteous retribution. Why why do we need that story? Well, some people's beliefs. But on top of that, it wrangles randomness into certainty. And this is obviously an impediment to happiness as far as I can see. [ __ ] plainly gets in the way of our happiness because how are you supposed to be happy if you want things to be different if you are unhappy right now? You're ruminating about the past. You're dreaming about the future. You're never in the present. You you're holding your happiness hostage again. And if you've got uncertainty, that just that's like a [ __ ] multiplier. And like I say, sometimes uh you you argue with your partner and you don't know how they're feeling overnight. So, you want to not be arguing and you've got uncertainty about how they feel. Uh, a family member gets an uncertical med medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. I want it to be different and I have uncertainty together. And I think this is like a real potent cocktail of uh dissatisfaction that often occurs in our lives. Uh, next one. I I wrote a pretty spicy article. Uh, I think is pop culture teaching women to choose emotionally unavailable men. Maybe what's the weirdest propaganda that you feel like movies have tried to push on you in your lifetime? For me, I grew up with tons and tons of movies that kept saying that the worst thing a man could be is a grown-up. You'd see a love triangle of romances where the guy you're supposed to be rooting against, his only sin is that he's kind of normal. He's got a job and stuff, but then some other guy, a bad boy, would come along and it doesn't matter that he sleeps in his car. Or if both of the guys are financially stable, you're supposed to root for the one that is less emotionally stable, the one that's more childlike. Jason Paran just broke my brain with this insight. I think it's so right. Like modern romance culture isn't just telling stories. It's shaping selection criteria. Across movies, media, even mainstream dating advice, women are being subtly conditioned to seek out emotional unavailability and volatility as signs of desiraability. And the result is a generation of women confusing conflict with compatibility. and drama with depth and and brokenness with misery. Rather than choosing partners based on emotional maturity or shared values or long-term compatibility, many are drawn to conflict, aloofness, and unavailability. It's the he's hard to love, but I can fix him fantasy repackaged and repackaged in everything from films to novels. Uh, in the notebook, Alli chooses Noah, the poor, impulsive, deeply emotional man, over Lon, her secure and respectable fiance. What's the conclusion? Stability is boring, and true love is obsessive, chaotic, and all-consuming. In Titanic, the scene that makes you like Jack more than Rose's wealthy fianceé, Cal, is that for fun, Cal just sits and has quiet conversations with his friends, whereas Jack has fun with big, loud parties. And the movie portrays this as him living more authentically or living life to its fullest. But really, he's just living like a teenager. He has nothing to offer Rose in terms of reliability or safety. Yet, this brief fiery connection is portrayed as more authentic than anything she could have had with a professional fiance. In in Twilight, Edward Cullen is dangerous and obsessive and emotionally tortured, and that is precisely what makes him desirable. Bella's rejection of Jacob, who's warm and grounded, underscores the trope, right? Safe is boring, danger is hot. Beauty and the Beast takes it even further by literalizing the fantasy. Love turns rage and violence into virtue. Uh similarly, A Star is Born presents Alli's Rise and Jackson Maine's spiral as tragically intertwined. Her love is deepened, not diminished by how much he unravels. This is a a twist on something called the byonic hero. It's a literary archetype based on the persona of poet Lord Byron. He's usually emotionally isolated or unavailable. He's often morally ambiguous or anti-heroic. He's at odds with society or authority. Possesses a tragic past or trauma. And and women are often drawn to him despite his destructiveness. Even modern women's advice keeps repackaging difficult as passionate. Teen Vogue runs headlines like, "Super Bad, why are smart girls drawn to bad boys? The sun gushes about why the sexiest stars go for the bad men." The takeaway is if he's cold, complicated, or broken. He must be worth it. Safety is sterile and suffering is sexy. There's a neuroscience trick being played on us all here, though. Things that are valuable are often hard to get. But just because something is hard to get does not mean it's valuable, which is why scarcity and unavailability are often mistaken for worth. Romance stories reward the woman who wins the affection of the aloof or emotionally damaged man. The harder he is to access, the more meaningful his eventual affection feels. In reality, sure, perhaps there is a noble savage who can be saved by the right woman. But realistically, this just prioritizes partners who are not capable of commitment over ones who already are put together and ready to go. Typically, coinus isn't love. It's emotional immaturity masquerading as romantic spark. The problem is that intermittent reinforcement is the exact mechanism that drives addiction. You are not in love, you're hooked. Variable schedule reward is the bullseye of dopamine. It's how slot machines work and why social media is so compelling. Our brain says if something is scarce, it must be more precious. And we take this economic dynamic into our love lives. So if someone stops texting us or we feel like they're drifting, all of a sudden our brain says they must be important. If they say here I am, I genuinely like you and very much want to commit. Our brains respond with what's wrong with you? If you treat me like crap and you're in and out of my life and you text me a bit and then you go cold and I don't hear from you. Many people think they might be the one. It is no coincidence that so many modern relationships do not begin with mutual understanding but with a chase. We have taught women to interpret emotional inconsistency as romantic tension. to pursue the man who offers breadcrumbs of affection instead of consistent support. To believe that love is meant to be hardearned, not freely given. And this has real consequences. It normalizes dysfunction. It rewires attraction around trauma. It sidelines healthy men and glorifies emotionally stunted ones. And it leaves women feeling like emotional burnout is the price that they have to pay for passion. emotionally mature, transparently keen, and immediately available men are ignored in place of someone who amounts to little more than an effective dopamine trigger. This is why so many guys have so little sympathy for the where are all of the good men at question. Whether it's through painful personal experience or by being subliminally reminded of it in pop culture, men who are ready to commit are fearful of doing so because they've noticed that many women seem to like them more and soften up when they're mistreated and kept guessing. I saw this comment from a guy on Instagram which encapsulates this perfectly. He said, "I'm trapped in a generation where I don't know whether to buy her flowers or ignore her to get her to like me. Men will do what women demand of them in order to get laid. Women set the standards for sex and men meet them." There's this idea from Roy Balmeister. He says, "Although this might be considered an unflattering characterization, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex and perhaps not a great deal more. One of us characterized this in previous work as if women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks. If in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community or lie or amass riches by fair means or fowl or be romantic or be funny, then men will do precisely that. So similarly, if men need to be broken, flaky, non-committal, and inconsistent, they will meet these standards appropriately. Women's Mate Choices. Modern romance culture and girl magazines are not at fault for emotionally unavailable behavior in men. But they're not totally unrelated to it either. What is needed is a clearer picture of healthy connection. Alander Boton had this wonderful insight where he said it can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic sounding realization. We should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us from the start without the need for persuasion without any call for begging or chasing or strategic withholding of affection or visits to therapy. just plainly and simply keen, open, and ready from the get-go. We may tolerate a prospective partner who tells us that they like us a lot, but that they will be only available to see us again in a month, or someone who casually mentions they are presently trying to decide between us and three other suitors, or a compelling career abroad, or someone who can never bring themselves to initiate sex or hold our hand in public. A bit deeper into our relationships, we may similarly not spot that it might be less than ideal to be trying to convince someone that they should go to therapy so that they'll finally see that they want us or that we are in fact just as much fun to spend Saturday evenings with as their friends are. To cut through the nonsense, we may be in need of a robust awakening. The only person we should for a moment ever contemplate being with is someone who at the start of the journey can already be at the table with a conviction to match our own. We can be forgiven for being for a long time deeply charmed by all the others. Those who are koi and troubled, those who don't reply to our messages, and those whose difficult childhoods render them enchantingly off-kilter. But this is a game we can in the end ill afford. It is not love if you need to keep messaging and they rarely reply. It is not love if they are evasive or surreptitiously liking someone else's posts. It is not love if they get defensive or describe your legitimate requirements for attention as too intense. We need to get the wavering defended ones out of our lives immediately. And that will mean ejecting the majority of people that we meet. All the more reason to focus on the very few with native enthusiasm. We need to hone our skills at recognizing the keen ones and clear everyone else out of the way. Stop imagining that they might be shy or that you haven't made your intentions clear enough. Let's say it again for good measure. The only worthwhile lovers are ones who don't need persuading. Those who like us a lot already. Those who never leave us wondering where they might be or when they might reply. Those whose commitment to us flows so easily that all the focus can be on the difficulties of living dayto-day. The dayto-day of living life is tough enough already without the difficulty of convincing someone to commit to us in a way that we are already prepared to commit to them. The others may be fascinating, lovely looking and about to change their mind in 15 and a half years or after a trip to India or capable of generating lots of late night arguments and ideal for a movie or a psychoanalytic case study. They are also just a plain waste of our precious time. Is this everything wrong with the modern dating market? Obviously not. Is it a big part of it? I think so. I had this conversation with Gay Hendrix uh the a few weeks ago and I kind of explained to him this journey that I'd been on when trying to understand human mating. You know, you start off and you see these big macro trends and you realize lots of people aren't having sex and the birth rates declining and and look at the the amounts of people that say they don't want to even couple up. This seems strange. And then the next step you go to is okay well what is it that human psychology how does that work? And that's the evolutionary psychology approach. You're thinking well I'm I'm going to learn about ultimate and proximate reasons for behavior and mateguarding and male parental uncertainty and intraexual competition and status and you know the sort of the the mechanism by which our mating works inside of our own minds and between us. But that's not enough right? You've got big macro problems and then you've got an understanding of what the system is in the individual. Then you need to combine those two together which is okay. So given the stats that we're seeing and our underlying psychology, what is going on in the modern world and that's mismatch, right? So that's, you know, the tea app and [ __ ] female dating strategy and u like sex ratio hypothesis and red pill and cucks and soy boys and incelss and stuff like that's all of that linked together trying to apply what you've learned from evolutionary psychology into the stats. Okay, so maybe that's an explanatory mechanism in the modern world unfit for purpose thing. And like all of that was cool and sort of captured me for maybe about three years, three or four years perhaps. But then I realized at least in my own life and in the lives of my friends, I I wasn't ever seeing this stuff actually come into land. Like there was no point where I interacted with the socioeconomic status of another person. almost all of it was mediated by emotions. And sure, a lot of this um the emotions are the end point, like they're how all of this stuff comes into to land, right? The way that you show up emotionally for somebody is going to be impacted by their socioeconomic status. It's going to be predisposed by your evolutionary psychology underpinnings, etc., etc. I get that. But the most direct interface that you have during dating is your emotions. It's your emotional state. It's how you relate, right? So it was all about relating and that's where this insight came from that what what are we teaching people to look for when it comes to relating and women specifically given that they are the ones who for the most part are doing the choosing right men are sexual protagonists and women are sexual selectors mating protagonists mating uh selectors. So, if you're the one that's doing the selecting, what are the sort of rules and pieces of advice that you're being given about how to select? And I do think that there's a lot to that theory. Uh, intermittent, very, very intermittent reinforcement gets confused for emotional spark and it results in good committed men being seen as broken. Because the subtext every woman has been told is if he's there and ready for you from the get-go, transparent about his needs and wants, there's got to be something wrong with him because love is not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be effortful. And uh I I it disincentivizes men from being open about what it is that they want. Again, either through personal experience or from watching culture or from hearing stories from friends that have been through stuff. um they adjust their behavior appropriately and if the choice is between I don't know whether to get her flowers or ignore her texts to make her like me um like be careful what you wish for. Again, women are not entirely to blame for the way that men show up in relationships, but they do everybody responds to incentives. So, be careful what incentives that you give the people that you say you want to be emotionally open to you. All right, next one. There are few feelings worse in this life than being right but early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth, or important area of focus only to be castigated for how shortsighted, xenophobic, judgmental, outofouch, leftwing, right-wing or alarmist you are. The Cassandra complex, as it's known, is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them, and they're often dismissed, ignored, ridiculed. It's named after Cassandra, figure in Greek mythology. The god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. But after she rejects Apollo's advances, he curses her so that no one would ever believe her warnings. and she foraw the fall of Troy, warned everyone, was met with scorn, and the city burned. Anyway, Rachel Carson writes this book in 1962 called Silent Spring. She warns about the environmental damage caused by pesticides, and she gets mocked by chemical companies and even some scientists. But her work eventually led to the environmental movement and the banning of DDT. Ignes Samweis in the 1840s realized that doctors were transmitting child bed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands. He begged his colleagues to adopt handwashing. They laughed at him. He died in an asylum. Decades later, germ theory proved him right. Edward Snowden warned about government surveillance. Some people saw him as a hero. Many called him a traitor. His warnings were initially dismissed until proof emerged that governments were spying on civilians. Being right but early happens on much more personal scales, too. Someone sees clear warning signs in a work environment and warns others, "This is toxic. It's going to implode." They're brushed off as negative or paranoid until it does implode. In a relationship, one person sees the correct course of action that their partner should take, but is labeled controlling for trying to convince them of it. Eventually, the other partner does come around to it, but only after the price of bruised faith and wasted time has been paid. In short, history doesn't reward the first to see clearly. It often punishes them. The people who glimpse what's coming are rarely welcomed. Basically, Cassandra's bleed first so the rest of us don't have to. And we resist because every new truth asks the existing world to die a little. It happens because people don't want to believe uncomfortable truths. Cognitive dissonance because we trust stability and get suspicious of those who challenge it. Status quo bias. And because if the person warning us isn't seen as credible, they're ignored no matter how right they are, which is the messenger effect. The main issue beyond progress being held back, is that it genuinely disincentivizes people from speaking up when they could have an insight that could benefit others. Capernicus and Galileo are a perfect example of this. I love this story. I think it's such a great comparison. Capernacus early 1500s quietly proposes something radical. The Earth orbits the Sun. Humans once the unmoving center of God's design were now spinning through space on one planet among many. But Capernicus hesitates. He delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades. His great work, the revolutionibbus, only came out as he lay on his deathbed, likely to avoid the wrath of the church and academia. His truth was too disruptive. And so, for most of his life, it went unheard. Galileo a century later took that same Capernac spark and shouted it from the rooftops. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the faces of Venus, the imperfections on the moon's surface. all evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught. The church responded with fear. Galileo gets dragged before the Inquisition. He's forced to recant under threat of torture and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. In retrospect, it's not surprising that Capernicus kept his mouth shut given how Galileo was treated. This is a core truth of the Cassandra complex. Being right isn't enough, and being early can feel like being wrong. Anyway, I've been on the sidelines. I might as well put some skin in the game. Here are some things I might be right, but early about. Number one, birth rate decline is a huge deal that everyone should be worried about. Number two, climate change should not be an existential risk priority compared with AGI, bioweapons, pandemics, and nuclear war. Number three, widespread hormonal birth control use is a large contributor to the mental health issues of modern women. Number four, normalizing egg freezing for 21-year-old women is a positive social change. Number five, the UK is unreoverably broken and will not be a future world power. Number six, China is not the massive threat that everyone thinks it is. Number seven, LLMs are not the architecture that AGI will be launched from. Uh, I am totally open to being wrong and late about all of these, but the Cassandra complex thing actually came about because I got popped uh in a uh long form video essay that was very well done about birthright decline and about how it is sort of uh right-wing coded. It's reactionary. A lot of the time it is tangential or on the outskirts of sort of trying to restrict women's freedoms. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but you know, the outcomes kind of end up with women's freedoms being restricted. So perhaps it's like blast radius side effect stuff or maybe it's actually what they're trying to point at directly by pointing at something else that gets to it. And uh I thought it was really really well done. But I I knew that my position on birthright decline is right. And I do think it's a huge deal. And given how everybody's worried about [ __ ] national debt and issues of inequality, if you have fewer people, the growth that you need in order to be able to drive the economy out of the deficits and debts that you're in becomes harder because where are you getting the [ __ ] productivity from? And if what you're going to say is we're going to rely on AI and robotics to supplement the lost productivity from halfing the global population over the next couple of centuries, fine. But who's going to capture all of the gains of AI and robotics? That creates more inequality cuz it's a small number of companies that own all of that. So I felt like it it's mad. I I I really don't understand how birth rate decline has become a rightcoded I I do I do I was going to say I don't understand how it's become a right-coded talking point. I do understand because it sounds sort of pro- family, Christian adjacent, traditional, not forward thinking, not open. Like I I I I'm trying to be as even killed as possible here. I get it. I I I genuinely do. But like I'm just right. And it's not like I'm right. People way smarter than me are right. But this is a big [ __ ] problem. And for for the first thousand episodes of this show, I've always equivocated, I've always had this sense that, well, is it really that, you know, like I don't think I I've always tre treaded carefully partly because it's a protection strategy. You know, if you don't plant a steak too hard in the ground, then you don't tend to be sort of attacked all that much. But then I realized that I had equivocated like [ __ ] on these uh podcasts that I've done about birthright decline and still got castigated anyway and still been like the darling of the birth control right. I'm like [ __ ] me. This is a big deal. Especially if you want to think about the fact that political affiliation is heritable. So your political affiliation is impacted by your parents independent of the environment that they brought you up in. like everything, it's at least partly heritable and it's not insignificantly heritable either. So, if you are the sort of person that wants liberal values, progressive ideology, forward thinking, left-leaning stuff to continue in the future and you are part of a group of people that does not think that birth rate decline is an important problem. You are sewing the seeds of your own future demise from an ideological perspective because your kids that you have fewer of will be left-leaning. But the conservatives or the fundamental religious people that you say are the [ __ ] enemy or that you're just slightly worried about or even that you aren't worried about at all but think that there should be a fair counterbalance to, they are not going to slow down. Who do you think inherits the future? Ideologically, culturally, I think that that is not something that we should I think we should have a balance of this as balanced as possible. Okay. What else? [ __ ] economically, it is not a good idea. You're going to end up with entire towns that are just left. South Korea, for every hundred Koreans that exist right now, there will be four great grandchildren. That is a 96% loss over the next hundred years. In whose [ __ ] world is this not a big deal? And I I've equivocated so much and I've [ __ ] caveed my way through stuff and still got [ __ ] slammed for it a lot. I'm like I with this point I'm really [ __ ] done on it because it's just correct. Demography is destiny and you can see what is coming down the pike. like this is something that we should be really worried about. The reason that I say about climate change should not be an existential risk priority. It's very carefully, slightly, cheekily put together words. It is a priority, but it is not when you compare it with AGI, bioweapons, pandemics. [ __ ] birth rate decline is happening right now. It is locked in. I think AGI, bioweapons, pandemics, maybe some nuclear stuff is actually ahead of birth rate. Um, birth rate is not a a true existential risk as it's called. An existential risk is defined as permanent unreoverable collapse. So that's either everybody is dead, all humans are gone, no chance of recovery or what somehow permanently locked into a lower a regression back to a type of um society that we can never escape from. It's kind of hard to imagine what that might be. Um you could imagine maybe if like some really insane damage was done to the biosphere where um humans would have to subsist live for the rest of time and they would never be able to get it back to the point where they could be multilanetary and you know like permanent unreoverable collapse is the term. climate change just it doesn't have the pace as far as I can see for that to be a an a priority on par with some of these other ones like AGI I I flip-flop about this on a daily basis could be a big deal might not be a big deal people smarter than me are trying to debate this at the moment bioweapons and natural pandemics I think we can already see well COVID was one of the two uh that seems like something that we should pay attention to. Uh [ __ ] birth rate decline, like all of those things actually, this a good point. Birth rate decline does not wipe us out entirely. It seems very unlikely because you're going to end up with small part like the [ __ ] Amish or you know like Israel or whatever. Like these people are going to continue. So it's not permanent and recoverable collapse. All of the others you're rolling dice on to see is this going to happen? Is AGI going to be misaligned? Are we going to have another pandemic? Are nuclear weapons going to be set off? Uh are we going to be able to develop technology that can reverse climate change? We know that birth rates are going down. It is one of the only risks challenges that we're facing at the moment that has such a short-term impact that is already locked in. Yes, climate change is also you can do the numbers, you can see sea ice melting, you can do all the rest of this stuff. It is not happening on the same time scale. And I just wish that the same energy or even a portion of the energy that is applied to climate change could be moved over to something which is happening right now. There are not too many people on the planet. If there are, wait 100 years, 150 years, you're going to be really [ __ ] happy. Or go to Korea now. There's bags of room there. Uh go to Japan. Go to China. Like go in fact, go anywhere in the world except for like a few countries. Everybody's birth rates declined anyway. Like the right but early thing got to me because I feel like I'm right but early on the birth rate problem. And there's this sort of special kind of what do you say resentment, bitterness that you feel when the when you're saying that there is going to be this huge [ __ ] catastrophe happening, no one listens and then Troy burns anyway. If in 30 or 40 or 50 years time, people who were too pigheaded to be able to see this is an issue then begin to campaign around things like how how do we have so few people on the planet? This needs to be fixed because the economic indicators are going down the tubes. The productivity is through the floor. I hope I'm [ __ ] dead. I hope I'm dead because the level of I told you so that's going to want to come out of me is that's going to be like a a super massive black hole. That's a singularity sized event. Uh anyway, I'm ranting. Being right but early is bad. It happens across your personal life. It happens in big political movements. I'm probably wrong about almost all of this. I'm probably a [ __ ] idiot. Um, but if I was the least idiotic about one of the things, I think it's declining birth rates. All right, now we're out of culture war, Chris. Uh, seven lessons about worrying and overthinking. Number one, stop worrying. Your fear of looking stupid to people you don't know is holding you back. Number two, put down your ruminating brain. Overthinking invents more problems than it solves. That's from Gwinder Bogle. That one hit me in the [ __ ] throat. Uh, overthinking invents more problems than it solves. This sort of weird self-perpetuating self-fulfilling prophecy where as you think more, you have more things to think about and it is not solving the problem. uh that sort of like actions the antidote to anxiety type thing. Uh your fear of looking stupid to people you don't know is holding you back as well. It's just a lovely reminder that you your social embarrassment gauge is off because most people aren't going to remember you. They don't pay attention. You're not actually looking as stupid as you think that you do. But also it is uh calculated. It it's it's the scope is aligned for you and a 30 person pod that's part of 150 person Dunar number tribe. You meet more people than that on the bus in a day. So these people aren't going to remember you. They're not paying attention to you. You don't look as stupid as you think you do. And you have this miscalculated sense of how much these people are affiliated with you. They're not. They're just other people. You're just not used to meeting other people that weren't an important part of your life. Anyway, number three. Your brain is a machine gun at overthinking. It has been found that we can talk to ourselves at the equivalent of 4,000 words per minute, which is the rate of an M134 assault rifle shooting bullets. 4,000 words per minute. That is what you can talk to yourself at the pace of. Uh, and that was again it's like it's just such a for the insecure overachiever perennial overthinker person. It's such a [ __ ] asymmetric war. Like you just your brain is so much better at overthinking than you are at controlling it. Like even with all of the meditation and breath work in the world. um some rules that I came up with about overthinking. Five and six, four maybe, whatever number we're on to now. Number four, some rules about overthinking. You can't think your way out of a feeling problem. Overthinking is under feeling. Trying to think your way into feeling emotions is like trying to drink your way sober. Similarly, trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. Uh, your brain ruminates because it hates uncertainty so much that it would rather fantasize a catastrophe than deal with not knowing what the future holds. That's that uncertainty thing again, collapsing the future down. It's this idea of uh thinking in superp positions. You know, you got uh two potential futures that could occur at the same time. you collapse that position down into one, even one that's horrendous. Uh, an unpopular opinion is that your brain ruminates because you're getting something out of the rumination and finding out how it secretly serves you is the first step toward overcoming it. I do think that that's true. Like, well, when I ruminate, my bitterness goes away. Or when I ruminate, I feel like I take back a bit of control in my life in a life that I feel doesn't have all that much control. Or when I ruminate, I feel less powerless with the situations around me. You are getting something out of your rumination, which is typically one of the the big sources of overthinking. So working out what it is that you get out of that is a really good idea. It's interesting that you never get paralyzed by overthinking positive outcomes. You only overthink about terrible ones. So fear doesn't keep you safe. It keeps you trapped. Whatever you fear establishes the boundaries of your freedom. So if you're afraid of heights, you stay low. If you're afraid of people, you stay alone. And such a good asymmetry. You can think thoughts at 4,000 words a minute and you tend to only get paralyzed by overthinking negative outcomes. You're not I wish you these 4,000 words a minute, they're just all about great things that might happen in my life. Like that's not that's not the way that it works. Another really sort of weird asymmetry is that most people don't think about things enough and you are probably not one of them. Most people should think about stuff more, not you. If you're the sort of person that this kind of stuff resonates with, that advice is not for you. In my experience, the more that you think about yourself, the harder it is to access happiness. So, in this way, reflection and personal development is this weird double-edged sword. You need to self assess to know what to work on, but intense self assessment is restrictive to your quality of life. So another tension that we're playing with here, you need to do the reflection. You need to work out where the shortcomings are. What should I be working on? But also, if you do too much of it, not only does it take up a lot of your life, but I think it actively makes the quality of life outside of the thinking worse as well. And that's explained by just realizing the amount you overthink is directly inverse to how much you live. So don't trade the thing that you want, which is living, for the thing which is supposed to facilitate it, which is thinking. Number six, perfection is impossible. Roger Fedra played 1,526 singles matches across his career. He won nearly 80% of them, but he won only 54% of all the points he played. 80% of matches won. and he only won 54% of every point he played. Which means that even one of the greatest to ever do it lost nearly every other point. I think the lesson here is to treat every iteration like it matters and then let it go. Whether it's an unforced error or a perfect winner, it's still just one point. One failed relationship, one embarrassing interaction, one late wake up time. It's still just one point. What matters most is how quickly you reset and where you finish in the end, not how you performed just now. Another one, perfectionism is killing your happiness. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life. Perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting every step just right, you don't have to die. The truth is, you'll die anyway. And a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you and have a whole lot more fun while they're doing it. That's Anne Lamont. Final one. You should back yourself even if you're at the start of your journey. Vincent Bangov said, "If I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning." All of that together is just a a little paniply, a little collage of how pointless worrying and overthinking are. And maybe one of those hits, maybe it doesn't. There's a lot there. Um, practically one thing that certainly has worked uh is scheduling worry time. So, I guess this is the bonus the [ __ ] bonus round at the end. Um, I think it's Dale Cariegi who wrote uh how to stop worrying and start living. It's a much less popular book than his big one. Um, but in it he has this idea of worry time. I think worrying is is not necessarily bad and and it does serve a function, right? In order to come up with solutions, we need to think about the future. And thinking about potential negative consequences can help us to stop them from happening, foresee them. You know, it allows us to play out our potential futures without having to live them by, you know, project them in our minds. The problem is when the overthinking and the worry is chronic. It's all the time. it creeps into our lives when it shouldn't do. And worry time is at least a practical, it seem, it feels like a sort of CBT inspired type strategy that allows you when the worry comes up through the week. Let's say you've got uh Sunday 3:00 p.m. till 5:00 p.m. scheduled for worry time. Uh I guess that's quite a lot of worry. 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday morning in the gym, worry comes up. It is nice to as that thing arrives, not have to run away from it, not have to deal with it at the moment, not go into it and obsess about it, but to think there it is. That's that's good. Maybe I note it down in my phone. Must remember to worry about blood tests or whatever it might be. And but that's not now is not when I think about it. Now I've I I'm going to deal with you. I'm not running away. I'm accepting, but it's just not your time right now. in the same way as you don't try and sleep when you're awake or you don't try and go to work when you're at the gym like okay there are times for things and by delineating that especially if you're the sort of uh organized calendar type person I think this helps at least in part speaking of the calendar stuff when I first started Modern Wisdom I was obsessed with why life felt like it was going so quickly and how to slow it So, I decided to revisit the topic recently. Why does some days feel like years and some years feel like days? As we get older, life feels like it's moving faster and faster. We look back on a year and can't really remember where it went. Months start to pass like minutes, and we begin to feel so helpless against the passage of time that it almost seems as if we're an observer of our lives, not a participant anymore. The answer to slowing down time, is simpler than you think. The first thing to know is that no matter how boring the Zoom call, exciting the holiday, or old you are, time always passes at exactly the same rate for you. Shock, horror. I know you have the same number of hours in the day as you ever have and they are always moving at the same pace. Even if you are circling a black hole or moving near the speed of light, your experience of time remains the same. 1 second is 1 second always. So if this is the case, why do we feel like time changes speed? Well, there is a difference between present time and remembered time. Your experience of time differs in the moment versus when you recall it. Your present time will always remain at the same speed, but your remembered time can vary widely. So when we say that time is speeding up, we don't mean it actually passed more quickly, but that it seems to have passed more quickly when we recall it. It's not that week went so quickly, but I don't recall what I did during that week. Memory is our way of reliving our past experiences and reexperiencing time. We remember our time with respect to what we were doing, where it was, who we were with, and the emotions that we had. So, here's the first key insight. The more memories you have from a past experience, the more that that experience gets expanded in time. Think back to a holiday you went on 5 years ago, even though it was a long time ago. You will probably still be able to recall a lot of details, making it seem like it lasted for longer and that time moved more slowly for that week. So if time is memory and we want more time, then what we really want is more memories. But this still doesn't explain why our recollection of time speeds up with age until you consider why memories are made. Your brain is lazy. It wants to do as little work as possible and conserve as much energy as it can. This is why it likes routines, habits, and thought patterns because once it's done that thing a few times, it needs to think less and less about doing it again. The thing is, when you're young, almost everything is new information. This is the first time you've been to the park or school or swam in the big pool or kissed a girl or been on a boat. Your brain is constantly recording. Think about how much you can remember from the first day you moved to where you live now compared with any day from the last month. Or think about what happened on your first ever driving lesson. I'm guessing you can recall it quite a lot. Perhaps even the route that you took, the car that you drove. Yet, if you try to remember the experiences in your car from last Monday, you might not even know if you drove it at all. This is the most important lesson to know about slowing down time. Your subjective experience of time is based on your memories. And the best way to ensure that your brain remembers what you're doing is with two things: novelty and intensity. When something new or intense happens, your brain doesn't know what it needs to remember. So, it just holds on to all of it. It's never encountered this before. So, it doesn't know if it will need this information in future. Therefore, it starts recording what's happening. This is why holidays are such a good example to show how time and memories are linked because there's lots of new things and lots of intensity happening. I took a trip to Africa in 2018 and I can still remember the shape of the worn leather shoes that the hotel porter had on and the ornithology book that he was carrying and the sound of his feet on the steps down to the hotel room. This is the holiday paradox. Time flies while you're having fun, but feels long in retrospect. And as we age, our adult life gets into routines where we do the same actions day after day after day. We drive the same route to work. We speak to the same people. We even have the same thoughts. We allow ourselves to be dominated by monotonous routines, passive least resistance, and habituated thought patterns. The TLDDR is that routines compress time. Habitual behaviors are processed with less cortical effort, meaning less attention and fewer stored episodic memories. Childhood is rich with firsts, which become rarer with age. This is novelty saturation theory. The idea that as we age, we experience fewer new things, so our brain stops encoding as many detailed memories, which makes time feel like it's passing faster. And this is the uncomfortable truth. As we get older, days move quickly because we can't remember them. And we don't remember our days because we haven't done anything memorable with them. Our days are forgettable. Therefore, we forget them. This is why I hate it when people say, "That's just the way I am and always will be." To me, that is someone who has internalized the monotony of their thought patterns so deeply that they literally identify with them. Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life. So, in order to slow time down, you have to give your brain a reason to pay attention. Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences that will later be memorable. This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things. Even if you've never wanted to try salsa dancing or yoga or an open mic comedy night, saying yes will guarantee that you create some novel and potentially intense memories. Sure, it might be easier to stay on the couch instead of going out. But you know that you won't recall a single thing if you spend yet another night watching Netflix. Whereas you will have tons of memories if you go and do something new which in retrospect makes time pass more slowly. Doing novel and intense things is entirely within your control. Allow yourself to be immersed in the things that you spend your time doing. Regularly plan new experiences. Talk to different people. Say yes to adventures whenever you can. Walk the dog on a different route. Visit a new town. Eat at a fresh cafe. These are all memory investments that future you will be able to draw dividends from. Each day you can ask yourself the question, what did I do today that will stand out in my memory? And the more that you can answer this question clearly, the slower your time will move. Eventually, you are going to be looking back on your life. The choice is between viewing a beautiful varied art gallery stretching as far as the eye can see or a gray monotonous hallway peppered with the ghosts of Tik Tok dances and Netflix series. If you make your life memorable, you will remember it. I think I got frustrated because I wanted to I wanted to make progress that was based around routine because I understood that it was very important for me. But I also had this realization so early on that felt in conflict with my desire to make progress. So I think another tension in a lot of the conversations today been about tension. Another tension is how do I lean into routine to capture the upsides of uh predictable progress whilst also blending that with the uh variation that's needed in order to give me memory dividends to expand my life to make time feel like it's moving more more slowly. Difficult one. It's a difficult thing to to balance but it is important. All right, next one. You're a different character in the mind of each person who knows you because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they've seen fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves. That's from Gwinder Bogle. So the lonely chapter has another perspective to it which is as you grow you don't fit in with your friends but this means that they don't fit in with you either. And this causes a reaction from their side too. The hardest part of changing yourself isn't just improving your own habits. It's escaping the people who keep handing you your old costume. Others don't just remember who you were, they enforce it. Which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of a prison that you can't see. Psychologists call this dynamic an object relation. So when people interact with you, they're not engaging with you in your full living complexity. They're dealing with the version of you that exists in their head. A simplified character built from fragments of memory and colored by their own projections. In object relations theory, an object isn't a thing. It's just a internalized image of another person. We don't just carry people as they are. We carry a mental sketch. Which is why if you make a radical change, you'll usually meet resistance. Your transformation destabilizes the representation that the people around you are attached to. So they try to nudge you back into the familiar role that they know. Charles Horton Culie called this the looking glass self. We come to know ourselves by seeing our reflection in the eyes of other people. And if those mirrors keep reflecting the old you, it's hard to step into a new one. Uh in in social psychology, self-verification theory shows that people prefer interactions that confirm what they already believe about themselves and about you. If you disrupt this script, you introduce friction. In this one study, participants with poor self-image chose to interact with people who criticized them rather than praised them. Meaning that even people with low self-esteem often prefer others to treat them in ways that confirm their pessimistic selfview because negative consistency feels safer than optimistic unfamiliarity. If that is true for how we see ourselves, imagine how much other people cling to their picture of you. Before his conversion, St. Augustine was notorious for chasing pleasure, indulgence, and distraction. And after his dramatic turn to faith, he struggled to convince old friends that he was no longer the same man. They resisted, not just out of skepticism, but because the new Augustine didn't fit the story they had of him. In Fitzgerald's novel, Jay Gatsby began life as James Gats, a poor farm boy desperate to escape his origins. He tried to reinvent himself into a dazzling millionaire. But no matter how hard he works at it, the people around him reduce him back to the upstart outsider. His reinvention collapsed under the weight of their collective refusal to update their vision of him. Nelson Mandela started as a fiery revolutionary against apartheid and when he walked out of prison after 27 years, his followers expected him to emerge hardened and vengeful and instead he embodied reconciliation. But that reinvention only truly stuck once he stepped onto the world stage far beyond the circles that had known the old Mandela that David Bowie began as a struggling musician in London trying to make a name for himself in a conventional scene. His breakthrough was constant self-reinvention. He does Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and tons more. But each transformation often required leaving behind one circle, one city, one audience, because the people who knew him too well couldn't help but cling to the previous Bowie. St. Paul had once been Saul, infamous for persecuting Christians with unrelenting zeal. After his conversion, he became their fearist advocate. But many believers couldn't trust him. They couldn't stop seeing the old Saul. And it took years of travel and new communities before his new identity as Paul was accepted. And in ordinary life, this script repeats as well. The friend who quits drinking was once the reliable partner in crime, but then newfound sobriety unsettles the group and throws everyone else's bad habits into harsh contrast. The shy colleague who becomes confident was once predictable in their quietness, so their assertiveness now reads as arrogance. The young adult who comes home at Christmas was once an awkward teenager. However, no matter how much they've grown, the family still insists on infantilizing them. The uh podcaster who had a shaved head for 5 years gets a ton of stick for having a perm after he grows his hair out despite his curls totally being natural and suiting his face and being quite a masculine haircut. If you think about it for a while, TLDDR, many people don't like you because making positive changes is ethical to keep up with and it's threatening to their shortcomings, so they dissuade you from doing it. Which is why meaningful change so often requires escaping your environment. Change isn't just about building a new self. It's about escaping the gravitational pole of the selves that exist in other people's minds. It is odd to look at the lonely chapter from the other side, right? Okay, I've got this thing and I am compelled to go back to the old patterns, the old habits, the old ways of thinking. I'm going to do this thing because it's going to make me feel more accepted by my friends. Well, acceptance, it makes me feel more accepted by my friends. I am struggling to relate to them but that means that they are struggling to relate to you and they have their own motives and motivations also like they are not passive participants in this. they're changing as well. And the change that they have is typically trying to pull you back to the old vision that they've got of you because it's effortful. And um maybe it gives a little bit more empathy around why people are sort of feels like they're stuck in their old ways a little bit. Uh maybe it helps us to understand why we get less support for the changes that we want to make then we might prefer. But either way it's certainly kind of yeah the if the lonely chapter is feels a little bit like you being trapped inside of a glass orb. Uh this is what it looks like peering in from the outside. So I thought that was uh quite cool. All right, next one. Humans have an asymmetry of errors. We overindex exceptions. We use the things that break the pattern. We've come to expect as a serious learning opportunity. But we tend to only learn much faster from errors of commission, which is things that we do, not errors of omission, which is things that we don't do. You only learn the sting of misplaced trust when someone betrays you. But you refuse to trust and miss out on love or partnership or help. The loss doesn't leave a scar to remind you. It's obvious when quitting for a new career turns out to be a mistake. It's far less obvious when staying quietly drains years of your life that you'll never get back. Uh we terrify ourselves with the thought of leaving a relationship and ending up lonelier. We almost never see the equal danger, which is staying forever with someone who never makes us feel fully alive. Uh, we recoil from the humiliation of saying something stupid in a meeting, but we don't clock the cost of never raising our hand at all. We treat one bad investment as catastrophic, but rarely tally the unseen compounding of never investing in the first place. We remember the awkward rejection that came from asking someone out, but never name the decadesl long regret of not asking at all. We dramatize the scandal of a friend's failed new habits, but forget the corrosive damage of decades of drift and inaction. We exaggerate the embarrassment of publishing a bad piece of writing, but ignore the slower tragedy of never writing at all. We catastrophize the risks of starting a company that fails, but ignore the equally large risk of letting someone else succeed at launching the idea you had a decade ago. We obsess over the fallout of saying yes to the wrong opportunity, but rarely notice the quiet erosion of habitually saying no. History makes the same mistake. Kodak actually builds the first digital camera in 1975. An engineer goes and shows executives a clunky prototype that could store photos on a cassette tape. Instead of running with it, they shelved the idea, afraid that it would cannibalize their film business for 30 years. They sat on the future. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Their failure wasn't a wrong bet. It was never placing the bet at all. Darwin had worked out natural selection by 1838, but kept the idea in a drawer for 20 years, two decades, because he was too cautious to publish it. It took another biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, independently discovering the same thing to jolt him into action. So, evolution nearly stayed hidden because of hesitation. World War I was even at the mercy of this. After the assassination in Sievo, Europe still had offramps. Austria could have paused before declaring war on Serbia. Germany could have told Austria to stand down. Britain could have made its red lines crystal clear. No one acted decisively and everyone waited for someone else. And that hesitation turned a local killing into a world war. The TLDDR here is we remember the noise of bad choices, but we rarely count the cost of silence. Commission teaches lessons in days and omission teaches lessons in decades. Usually too late to apply them. Like I'm not saying you won't regret the obvious agony of jobs you quit, loves you lost, words you blurted out. I'm just saying you need to pay more attention to the unseen pains of jobs you never left, loves that you never dared, and words that you didn't speak. We wse at mistakes that make noise, but it is silent mistakes that do the real damage. Errors of commission bruise the ego, but errors of omission starve the soul. I love this asymmetry. I see it a lot in my life. I I I see it everywhere that we just assume that making a mistake has to be an act. Making a mistake could be not acting. And uh yeah, I I I don't know how you compel people into seeing I suppose part of it is the timeline on risk, right? That protracted suffering over a long time. You don't feel the risk ever sort of come into land at one moment or if it does, it's sort of down the line. You know, you're in a relationship, you think, this this just isn't working. I should really end it. Okay, that is an end point. Well, how bad is it? You know, there's like good days and there's bad days and maybe there's more bad than good and I'm not so fired up and what am I losing by not being here? But at least at no point does it all come into, you know, there's no there's no like ground zero moment for it. And I think fear keeps us trapped in this way an awful lot. So yeah, that is certainly something to to motivate people more. It would be it would be a really good idea. Uh all right, that is I think the longest solo episode I've ever done. Nearly 2 hours. Uh I really hope that you loved it. Uh again, episode 999. It's wild. I started this in my bedroom in the northeast of the UK. And on Monday this week, you will see me and Matthew McConnA sit down on a huge video wall and talk for a couple of hours. And uh you guys have changed my life with the device in your pocket. So whether you've been here for a minute or 7 years, thanks. I'll see you next time.