Mark Manson's Blog, page 10

Coronavirus: Surviving the Looming Mental Health Crisis

This morning I stayed in bed until nearly 11:30AM. Last night, I stayed up until 3 AM watching that mullet trainwreck of a documentary, Tiger King, on Netflix, allowing myself to be shocked and bamboozled into another episode, just one more episode

For the past two weeks, my sense of time and agency has completely gone out the window. Work usually gets done later rather than sooner, and sometimes never. My life now possesses a background ambiance of anxiety, whispering that somewhere,...

6 Books that Will Help You Grow from Your Pain

There are a lot of fluffy, feel-goody, you can do it! self-help books out there. There are far fewer books that take a realistic look at pain, trauma, setbacks, and failures and then honestly discuss how to cope with them in a way that doesnt make you feel like a cheerleader at a high school pep rally.

Ive written before that I sometimes conceive of this rarer style of personal development as Negative Self-Helpa more gritty and raw approach to improving yourself. When I wrote my books, I...

Coronavirus: The Real Risks and Human Biases behind the Panic

Note: This was originally written for my weekly newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Welcome to a special coronavirus edition of MFM, the only weekly newsletter that refuses to cancel its flights and believes eating fruits and vegetables is more useful than wearing a face mask. Each week, this newsletter breaks down three ideas that usually revolve around social psychology, cognitive biases, and some light philosophy.

This week, I’d like to use coronavirus as a case study to talk about...

How to Forgive but Not Forget

On September 15, 2001, four days after the 9/11 attacks, Frank Roques sat in an Applebees in Mesa, Arizona and declared to his waiter, “I’m going to go out and shoot some towel heads.”

Frank then went home, loaded his guns into his truck, and drove around town looking for targets. He passed a Chevron station. Outside, a man with a long beard and turban named Balbir Singh Sodhi was planting flowers in front of the gas station he managed. Frank pulled into the station, got out of his truck,...

How to Let Go of Your Regrets

Imagine this, you’re at a cocktail party where everyone there is a past version of yourself. There’s a kid’s play area with all the little kid versions of yourself. There’s a TV room with your angsty teenage selves watching music videos and playing video games. Then there’s dozens of adult you’s walking around, sipping whatever garbage you drank when you were young and broke, representing each of the distinct periods of your life: the insecure college you, trying to look smarter than you...

Why You Should Quit the News

Everyone kind of already knows that the news sucks. In all my life, I can’t think of anyone who seems to enjoy reading or watching the news every day. It’s a kind of bitter responsibility or endured necessity for people. News is like the societal version of flossing: it’s not fun, yet we continue to do it every day anyway, as a sort of obligation to prevent decay of the social order.

We all get it: yes, the news is overly negative, and yes, it often gets some things wrong. But in the end, we...

The Only Way to Be Truly Confident in Yourself

How are you supposed to be confident about something when you have nothing to feel confident about?

Like, how are you supposed to be confident at your new job if you’ve never done this type of work before? Or how are you supposed to be confident in social situations when no one has ever liked you before? Or how are you supposed to be confident in your relationship when you’ve never been in a successful relationship before?

On the surface, confidence appears to be an area where the rich get...

10 Important Lessons We Learned from the 2010s

intro]Ah, yes, the time has come! A time that only occurs a few times in our adult lives. A time that is completely arbitrary and whose importance is invented for the sake of writing clickbaity headlines like this one.[/stag_intro]

That’s right, it’s the end of the decade, motherfuckers.1

It’s one of those special times when writers and journalists who are whores to the constant internet content cycle get together and decide what the “bests” and “worsts” of the past ten years are. Then they...

Minimalism

For seven years, this was everything I owned: A MacBook Pro, an iPad, an unlocked iPhone, seven shirts, two pairs of jeans, two jackets, one coat, one sweater, two pairs of shoes, a suitcase, a backpack, some gym shorts, bathroom stuff, socks and underwear. That’s it. Everything I owned could be easily packed into a small suitcase and moved within thirty minutes.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden made the bold claim: “The things you own, end up owning you.” Although I think that’s true, I’m not...

The Staggering Bullshit of “The Secret”

I hate The Secret. There, I said it. I know I’m a self-development blogger and I’m supposed to keep everything light and airy and full of poop jokes, but fuck it — I hate it. It’s an awful book. And it needs to be said.

Every generation in the past century has had a breakout self-help book that sells a bazillion copies and bulldozes through a few million people’s wallets. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich did it first in 1936. Then it was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive...