Mark Manson gave millions of readers a pretty brutal reality check on how to get through the toughest times in his New York Times bestselling book, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.” His work has been described as much of a slap in the face as it is a pat on the back. In this interview, Mark reveals the meaning behind his brand new book that he says is about hope, called “Everything is F*cked.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I guess one way to describe my work is its pessimistic self-help, which sounds like an oxymoron, but I actually find it to be a lot more liberating.
And the whole thing with the coffee cup, it's a joke early on in the book that I said that, you know, I wouldn't write people's names.
I would write, you and everyone you know is one day is going to die.
And other than a few things, nobody's going to remember any of this.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz podcast. and this is the Dr. Oz podcast.
you Mark Manson gave millions of readers a pretty brutal reality check on how to get through the toughest times in his New York Times bestselling book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving...
Well, a fuck is what he said.
His work has been described as much of a slap in the face as much as a pat in the back.
I think it's right.
I think we've overreacted to the use of...
Not savory words, but there's so much wisdom here I wanted to have Mark on.
He's back at it again with his brand new book that he says is all about hope.
It's called Everything Is, well, you want to say it?
Fucked.
Exactly.
So it's fairly counterintuitive.
A lot of moms wouldn't want their kids reading this book.
In fact, it would scare lots of folks away, yet it's exactly the book you want people to read whose parents are trying to protect them.
Yeah, it's funny.
The profanity is probably the most common criticism I get, and I've gotten it for years.
But the point I keep making is I say that profanity exists for a reason.
The shock value, there is a value in it.
It causes you to let down your defenses and maybe consider other perspectives that you wouldn't otherwise.
You say you want to take us to a place of happiness.
Is that right or is it more hopefulness?
I would say actual psychological healthiness.
Because I think you can be a healthy person psychologically without necessarily being happy all the time.
And I think that sometimes we conflate Those two things.
And people start, because they're not happy all the time, they start blaming themselves and they make themselves feel worse.
And what's wrong with happiness?
I ask this as a leading question because I have concerns about it as well.
Sure.
But it is the goal for many.
It's not that there's anything wrong with it, but I don't think it can't be the goal itself.
No matter what you do with your life, reality is going to hand you your ass sometimes.
And that's normal.
In fact, that's actually...
That's where we develop a sense of meaning and purpose, is through overcoming obstacles and struggles.
And so, if you're constantly looking for happiness, you're not going to be willing to engage those obstacles and struggles as well as you should be.
Do you think I'm too happy, Lisa?
Too happy-go-lucky?
The happy surgeon?
That's your new title.
The happy surgeon.
Yeah.
No, you just become so risk averse because that's uncomfortable.
And I think people see discomfort as the opposite of happiness.
Now, if what you're really searching for is hope, hopefulness, then how do you find a life where you're not all fucked?
Is what you're searching for hope?
Is that what your premise is?
My premise is that we need to be careful about our hopes.
So in subtle art, I kind of attacked happiness.
I made the point that we all assume that happiness is good, that we should always be pursuing it.
I do the same thing here with hope.
I point out that hope has a destructive side to it.
Hope has a side that's uncompromising and can potentially hurt others.
And so...
The same way we need to be skeptical if we're being happy for the right reasons, we should be asking ourselves if we're hoping for the right things.
So both books seem to have a theme of personal psychological dishonesty, because your first one, you made people reevaluate their values.
Yes.
And so that they would place time on what they truly valued, not...
And if those values were actually lousy, they would shift them.
And this one is, I guess, about misguided placement of hope.
So it's both reassessment of your...
It's still reassessment of values.
It's another side of the value equation.
Unwrap that a little bit, though.
So if I'm hopeful about an outcome, how is that a disservice to others?
Is that because I should have challenged them and said, no, we're headed in the wrong direction, we've got to turn back?
It's not necessarily a disservice to others.
It's just...
That you can hope for things...
So we tend to always assume that our hopes are positive and they're good for the world.
That is by definition what a hope is.
I hope the other team fails.
Yeah.
But it's...
If you look at every destructive force in the world, if you take extremists or somebody like terrorists or something, they're motivated by hope as well.
And so it's...
I have a quote in the middle of the book that I talk about.
The same way we tend to assume that love is always a beautiful and healthy thing, they're actually very damaging and unhealthy forms of love.
Love can cause the most destruction in your life as well as give it the most value and meaning.
Hope is kind of the same way.
If we're not careful, hope can become...
Incredibly destructive and damaging, both to ourselves and the people around us.
Let's take it one step back.
You wrote that, if you could, on every Starbucks coffee cup, which iconically we're all walking around with, you'd say, everything is fucked.
So, give us a little bit of the philosophy about how that frees us, how that gets us past the vapid search for happiness, the misguided search for the wrong kinds of hope.
Yeah.
So, I kind of...
I guess one way to describe my work is it's pessimistic self-help, which sounds like an oxymoron, but I actually find it to be a lot more liberating.
And the whole thing with the coffee cup, it's a joke early on in the book that I said that, you know, I wouldn't write people's names.
I would write, you know, you and everyone you know is one day is going to die.
And other than a few things, nobody's going to remember any of this.
And it's like, it's just this very bleak and dark statement that Can I just read this because I wrote it down?
Go for it.
Go for it.
One day, you and everyone you love will die.
This is a New York Times bestselling book, by the way.
This is how you write a bestselling book.
Blunt honesty.
And beyond a small group of people, for an extremely brief period of time, this is the ultimate insult, an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say and do will ever matter.
We imagine our own importance.
We invent our purpose.
We are nothing.
Enjoy your fucking coffee.
Yeah.
This is why I'm not very employable.
It's this dark focus.
At least not at Starbucks.
Yeah, right.
So it's...
I call that the uncomfortable truth in the book, and it's something that I talked about in Subtle Art as well.
It's that, you know, most people, they avoid thinking about their own mortality, thinking about the vastness of the universe and how insignificant most of their life seems in comparison, because it's frightening, and we're afraid to let go of all of the meaning and hope that we place on certain things in our lives.
I come at it from the other angle, in that If none of this really matters, then there's absolutely no excuse to not act with courage and integrity.
There's no reason to not love people close to you fiercely.
There's no reason not to sacrifice yourself for causes that are greater than yourself.
It's almost like this kind of nihilistic idea is actually a liberating force for us to choose at all times what is most important in our lives.
Why, though?
Because if you have no reason not to do it, you have no reason to do it either.
Right.
But those are the things that at least give you the feeling and the perception that your life matters and is important.
So the motivation is an illusion?
Yeah. - Well, the knowledge is an illusion, essentially.
The knowledge that we all think what we do is very important and it's going to last for a long time.
That's an illusion.
But knowing that that's an illusion helps us not buy into the wrong illusions.
If nothing matters at all, if you go completely nihilistic and you go full-blown Nietzsche on us, why get out of bed?
Why not get out of bed?
So then just stay.
Okay, but it's going to be...
You know why not?
Because it's easier.
Because if nothing matters, inertia is a bigger force, right?
Yeah.
So you need something to counterbalance the inertia, because inertia will win if there's no other force.
Sure, and that's what our hopes do, is we create these hopes for ourselves, and that's what gets us out of bed in the morning.
But I thought our hopes were fucked.
Yeah.
Well, they are fucked, but it's important to know that they are inventions.
They're psychological inventions designed to get us out of bed.
And that way, when we recognize that this is kind of the game that our brain is playing, it's much easier to look at our hopes, understand, be critical of them, understand which ones are helpful, which ones are hurting us, and then switch them out for each other.
So basically you're saying this whole thing is made up.
If you're making it up anyway, make up a better game.
Pretty much.
Right?
Pretty much.
That's one way to put it.
There's lots more when we come back.
So you're walking down the street and you say, have a nice day, which is something that probably most people listening have said today.
Yeah.
You don't like that.
No, you don't, right?
You say, why would you bother saying have a nice day?
What's wrong with that?
What should the greeting be?
Well, my problem with having a nice day is like...
99.9% of the time, you don't actually care.
It's just a thing you say.
It's an empty pleasantry.
I would say have a meaningful day.
Have an impactful day.
Nice can mean a million things.
I could go shoot up a bunch of heroin.
That'd be a nice day.
Burn brightly, but briefly.
Do you consider yourself a stoic?
And what do you think about the Stoicism movement?
I think this whole revival with the Stoicism stuff is super interesting.
I don't personally, I'm not hugely into it, but a lot of my beliefs and values kind of map onto it.
My background's more Zen Buddhism.
And there's a lot of similarities and ideas.
But I think the stoicism stuff is great because I think there's so much noise and craziness going on in the world today with the internet and social media that I think these philosophies like stoicism are helping us simplify and get back to first principles and helping us manage our expectations and our values a little bit better.
You mentioned your background.
Did you live this?
Was your life fucked and you figured this out?
Or did you come across this philosophy through studying?
How did you come up with this new Zen philosophy?
Well...
You know, I practiced Zen for a number of years, and I still meditate on and off quite a bit.
But, you know, I've always, I've struggled with depression on and off throughout my life.
And this book, I started writing this book in one of those places.
I had a very weird experience where subtle art became astronomically successful.
And that messed with my head.
There's a line in the new book where I say that the only way to truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.
And so basically all my dreams came true within like two or three months.
And I freaked out.
I was like, what the hell do I hope for now?
And so it was a very strange experience in that outwardly I was experiencing the most material success in my life.
But inwardly, I felt completely lost and became a little bit depressed.
And so that's what got me thinking about these ideas of hope and meaning.
You know, is any of this going to last?
Is any of it permanent?
And I started writing this book.
And I kind of wrote myself out of a depression, essentially.
It can be cathartic putting words on paper, in part because you have to tell yourself the truth, usually.
It's hard to lie to yourself in print.
Yeah.
And it's a lot of very, I think, a lot of very difficult truths that I had to own up to get out of that place came out in the book.
For example?
For example, you can be a best-selling author, but 200 years from now, chances are nobody's going to remember any of this.
And so it's this thing that I've dedicated my life to, and then hitting the top of the mountain and realizing that there's just...
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter at all.
You know, that is definitely a shock to the system.
And so a lot of this stuff that I write about the coffee cup and the uncomfortable truth, like that's me wrestling with that fact of my own life.
That it's no matter how successful you get, no matter how hard you work, you know, no matter how many awards and credentials you get, you're still just this temporary consciousness running around inventing stories for yourselves. you're still just this temporary consciousness running around inventing stories Is that the paradox of progress?
No.
Well, so this ties into the paradox of progress in a little bit different way.
I think it's...
The thing that really surprised me about my experience was this idea that being more comfortable and secure can actually give you a crisis of meaning and make it more difficult to find meaning and hope in your life.
And...
At the same time, I was doing a lot of research around this.
There's a lot of talk these days about the rise in mental health issues, depression, anxiety, suicides, drug overdoses.
And one thing that I found that was particularly interesting is that it's in the safest and most comfortable and most developed parts of the world that you see these crises of meaning or crises of hope the most often.
And so there seems to be something about Reaching a certain level of comfort and convenience that makes it more difficult to answer these questions of, what do I hope for?
What's the point of all this?
Why get out of bed in the morning?
You can just have Uber bring food to your bed.
So why get up?
Do you have a technique to walk people through so they can figure out what those things are for them?
When they're staring at the ceiling?
Write a book.
Write a best-selling book.
Write two of them.
You're good to go.
Solve everything.
Not really.
I think it's hard...
Because it's such a personal thing.
The first half of the book really maps out, I think, what are the psychological mechanisms that construct these narratives for ourselves.
And it helps people see where their narratives perhaps failed them, where their hopes failed them.
But it's...
We have as many hopes as we do people, so it's hard to just give a one, two, three step-by-step thing.
Would you say a goal is different from a hope?
Because a hope is so passive, and it's just kind of like wishing.
It's almost like Santa Claus.
I hope Santa will bring me a slut for Christmas, whereas a goal is something you have to actively strive for, or do you not differentiate between them?
I would say a goal is a type of hope.
Okay.
That you try to control.
Yeah, you could say a goal is maybe like a hope oriented towards some sort of action.
You know, it's like I hope I sell X many books, so I'm going to go tour.
That's my goal.
Whereas I can just hope that it doesn't rain tomorrow, but there's nothing I can do.
If life is about suffering, you're going to suffer a lot anyway, you're going to feel pain, then how do you suffer successfully?
How do you suffer in a way that builds at least a sense of contentment in your existence?
You suffer for good reasons, basically.
It's...
We all have to suffer.
It's a part of our human wiring, is that we are going to constantly find problems, perceive problems, and perceive things that we wish were better or different.
So the question is, you're never going to reach a place where you don't have problems.
The question is, how do you find the problems that you feel are worth solving?
How do you find the struggles that you are happy you have that struggle?
I think probably the most common and most relatable example is children.
Children are obviously a huge struggle.
It's probably the hardest thing anybody does in their life, but it's also the most meaningful struggle for most people.
And so it's not a struggle that they want to get rid of.
So the goal is to find meaningful struggles in the same vein.
More questions after the break.
I'm going to go back to stoicism a bit because some of the things you speak to and you write about take me through that pathway again.
For example, you speak about the power of self-limitation.
And this is something Lisa has been talking to me about our entire married life.
That the only time you have freedom is when you have the power of self-limitation.
Can you unwrap that for the listeners?
Yeah.
So I think culturally we kind of assume that...
More freedom equals more options.
It's just having the ability to do more stuff.
But what's interesting is, I think, in terms of making choices, our brain only has a certain amount of bandwidth.
Once there are too many options or too much information, The options don't make us feel more free.
They actually make us feel more anxious.
We start freaking out that, oh, well, if I pick this thing, then maybe I picked the wrong one.
Maybe these other 20 things could have been better.
We start experiencing things like FOMO. And it's only by very consciously deciding, like, this is the thing I'm committed to and I'm giving up all of these other options.
I'm giving up the right to do all these other things that actually gives us the real sense of freedom.
Having more options doesn't improve our ability to make choices.
It actually confuses our ability to make choices.
And freedom is the ability to make conscious choice.
Lisa, you often argue that if you're doing drugs, you're not free, right?
Because you're locked into doing drugs.
We assume that the freedom exists in the choice itself, but when you make a compelled choice, there is no freedom.
So it's like with, say, potato chips.
If you're on a diet, you say, I'm choosing to do the potato chips.
There's no choice there.
You're compelled through addiction.
Same thing with drugs.
You're only in freedom when you make the choice that you want to make without the compulsion.
I don't even know how to differentiate those parts of yourself.
But freedom only exists in the right choice, which is ironic.
Like, I see you have a wedding band on there now.
I hear you, like, when you're describing all your other options, I say, he's talking about girls.
I don't know.
Well, it's true, though.
I mean, marriage is absolutely a great example.
But, I mean, it's true in a lot of different things.
I mean, health is another one.
You know, it's like giving up foods actually gives you more freedom to be healthy.
Job opportunities, career opportunities, it's giving up opportunities to do other things is actually what gives you the freedom to excel in what you focus on.
And so it's really...
The real choice is what to give up, not what to experience or indulge.
It's a fundamental teaching of all the faith-based entities we can get exposed to.
You mentioned Zen Buddhism, but you hear it in Catholicism, Judaism, which is all about the struggle.
Islam is also about servitude.
Yoga means yolk.
It comes up in all these different flavors, and yet it's somehow gotten lost in a world...
This is not a deep insight to say that you're tempted by many more things than ever before.
How does the mind of a human, which usually changes over thousands of years, not over weeks, cope with the world that's changing as quickly as we are now?
I think that's the million-dollar question right now.
I think there seems to be a lot of evidence suggesting that the amount of variety and options and experiences of our culture today is outpacing our mind's ability to process and handle everything effectively.
That essentially is kind of the root of the crisis of hope that happens.
The richest, wealthiest countries are experiencing right now.
It's just that everything's so quick and easy and there's so many options that we don't know how to handle it.
It actually makes us more anxious and it calls into question more what the point of everything is than ever before.
There are a few points I make throughout the book.
One is I think the same way I think about 40, 50 years ago we made the realization that We have to go on nutritional diets.
You can't just sit around and eat cupcakes all day.
We didn't really figure that out as a culture until probably the 60s or 70s.
I think we're going to go through a process that we've just started now where we need to go on information diets, where we need to be very strict and conscious of the information that we're consuming and also the relationships that we're fostering with other people and with other groups.
I think another thing that is also becoming, and I really think this is why my work has resonated so much, is I think people are realizing that comfort and convenience is not always a good thing.
With some regularity, they become weak and fragile.
Our mental and our emotional health needs some consistent amount of stress applied to it for it to remain strong and resilient.
You're seeing a lot of movements and groups and discussions about leaning into struggles and pain and conflict and doing those things consciously but also doing them better.
And then the last thing I call for at the very end of the book is I make the point that I feel like up until now, technological innovation has essentially been geared at...
Taking advantage of our psychological weaknesses, leveraging our psychological flaws to get more user engagement or drive profits or whatever.
And I kind of make a call that our technology needs to start reorienting itself to compensating for our psychological flaws.
We know where our weaknesses are now.
We know what we're susceptible to.
And we're definitely capable of developing the technology to...
Help us, you know, overcome those weaknesses.
So what would that look like?
What would the app look like?
A post-hope world app.
How do you do that?
I have no idea.
What?
Well, I'll tell you one thing.
I can't be everything.
I mean, there are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley who are much smarter than I am.
But it's, you know, I'm here to point out the problem, and I hope somebody takes it up.
You can't hope.
We're a post-hope world here.
Don't even hope someone does that.
Just to say.
Either do it or don't even think about it.
Now you know what my life is like.
Mark is witnessing what it's like to be me.
She's right.
I'm encouraging him not to wait around and wait for some moron and brilliant billionaire in Silicon Valley to think up an app.
You need to come up with a solution.
Okay.
Yourself.
I'll get on it.
Please.
And let me know.
I actually think the profit motive works against you.
What's that?
The profit motive works against you.
How so?
Because there's been a lot of money spent on doing exactly what you're describing happened.
How do you hack the human brain?
How do you take advantage of the naturally addictive elements to our brain that allowed our species to survive and thrive for 70,000 years since we left Africa?
Yeah.
And that's, you know, it's just the way you mentioned the food metaphor.
The same research was done in the food industry in the 50s and 60s and 70s.
What foods can you add to give it the right mouthfeel, the right addictive hit to the parts of the brain that's also stimulated by cigarettes?
That was all done in a very thoughtful way.
If you worked in those businesses, you'd do that.
In technology, you'd do the exact same thing.
You're incentivized to do the opposite of what you want.
I totally agree.
It's not evil and nefarious.
It's just you're running a business.
You want people to use your app versus someone else's.
You're going to build tools and they'll notify you at the right time.
So I don't know if it's a big profit.
Without a profit motivation, there is no reason for someone to develop an app that will fail on purpose.
And I agree.
And I think that's a very deep and fundamental problem.
