Mark Manson's Blog, page 11

Screw Finding Your Passion

Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster.

Nobody told you to do it, you just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement.

And the beautiful thing was,...

How to Break Up Gracefully

There’s that old saying that “breaking up is hard to do.” Well, not only is it hard to do, but it’s hard to handle the aftermath and the emotional complications that burp up out of us when we’re in such a vulnerable state.

Breakups are also difficult because they’re as unique as the relationships that spawn them. Giving advice on breakups can be complicated because breakups are contextual. For instance, I would never advise anyone to break up with someone through a text message, but at the...

The 3 Paradoxes of Life

In life, you often find yourself in no-win situations. You tell yourself that you need to be more social. But then you go out to events and spend the whole time wishing you could be at home. You celebrate the glory of Thanksgiving by eating thirteen slices of pizza… and then proceed to spend the next two days hating yourself for eating thirteen slices of pizza. When you are single, you dream about meeting somebody special. But then, once you find yourself in a relationship, you daydream about...

How to Overcome Your Demons

When I was younger, I used to have this quiet, menacing voice inside me. I was starved for attention and affection, but every time I started to receive attention or affection from somebody, that voice would quietly urge me to get away. “You’ll be trapped,” it would say. “You’re going to lose your independence.” And suddenly, I’d begin to have irrational ideas about never being able to eat steak again because the girl I liked was vegetarian, or how moving in with some friends meant that I’d be...

How to Build Self-Esteem (And Does it Even Matter?)

Imagine there’s a classic movie. It’s called Self-Esteem: First Blood, and it stars James Dean and Marlon Brando. It’s the mid-20th century, post-World War II. Pan across the charred remains of Europe. Show the brave American heroes returning home, buying cheesy houses and making tons and tons of babies.

In the film, we see this: Post-war prosperity made for heady times, more and more people from all walks of life began to buy into the American Dream—the belief that they could be whatever they wanted to be as long as th...

6 Toxic Relationship Habits Most People Think Are Normal

There’s no class in high school on how to not be a shitty boyfriend or girlfriend. Sure, we get taught the biology of sex, the legal ins and outs of marriage, and maybe we read a few obscure love stories from the 19th century on how not to be an ass-face.

Without clear ideas from adults, what we’re left with is basically trial-and-error, and if you’re like most people, it’s mostly error.

One of the problems is that a lot of unhealth...

How to Survive a Long Distance Relationship

“Is he/she worth waiting for?”

“Are they feeling the same way I do?”

“Am I kidding myself thinking this can work?”

“Would I be better off dating the mailman instead? At least he comes to my house every day.”

“Does my boyfriend even exist or is this just an elaborate Nigerian credit card scam?”

Long-distance relationships suck. I’ve never met anyone who said, “Yeah, my boyfriend lives 14 hours away in Finland, it’s great!” On the contrary, everyone I’ve met in a long-distance relationship ends up with that agonizing...

How to Be Patient in an Impatient World

Every introductory psychology class talks about this thing called “The Skinner Box.” It sounds like something out of a Saw movie, but it’s actually a famous psychological method from the golden days of research, back when pregnant women still drank and torturing rats for science was cool.

A Skinner Box works like this: A rat or some other unsuspecting small animal is placed in this box which has a lever and a little feeding bowl. The rat sniffs around the box, and not knowing what the hell is going on (o...

Compatibility and Chemistry in Relationships

A lot of dating advice glosses over the concepts of compatibility and chemistry, assuming most people have an intuitive grasp of what these two words mean and why they’re so important to a successful relationship. We kind of assume we know what compatibility and chemistry mean and whether we have them or not.

Dating advice mostly ignores compatibility and chemistry because they can’t be faked or changed. Instead, most dating advice focuses on the nuts and bolts of dating: what to say, when to say...

5 Tenets of a Negative Self-Help

Look, I know what you want to hear. I know you want to hear that everything is going to be alright—no, better than alright, that it’s going to be fucking amazeballs. I know you want to hear that the pain in your life will one day be gone, that those dreams will one day become reality, that the only thing standing between you and destiny is yourself. *Cue inspirational music* 

I know you want to hear that you’re a “new you,” that your hair looks fucking great, that the nuts in your shit have...