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by
Mark Manson
You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.
“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”
Because happiness requires struggle.
People want to start their own business. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing.
What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame.
I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench-press a small house.
But eventually reality must hit, and the underlying problems will once again make themselves clear. It’s just a question of when, and how painful it will be.
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future.
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We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. But it’s the extremes that get all of the publicity.
Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.
if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary—is
This sort of thinking is dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless.
People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.
All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s a message that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain.
“The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”
Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.
These men both chose how they wished to suffer. Hiroo Onoda chose to suffer for loyalty to a dead empire. Suzuki chose to suffer for adventure, no matter how ill-advised. To both men, their suffering meant something; it fulfilled some greater cause. And because it meant something, they were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it.
If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.
the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect.
The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion.
Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, and make decisions based on our emotional whims.
As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, so if your metric for life success is to be right—well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing all of the bullshit to yourself.
Staying Positive. Then there are those who measure their lives by the ability to be positive about, well, pretty much everything.
the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it.
Baba
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Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction.
It’s simple, really: things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us feel like shit. And that’s fine. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health.
See, it’s the punching people in the face that’s the problem. Not the anger.
Baba
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Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life.
wär doch langweilig wenn alles perfekt wäre oder
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
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Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.
These things are side effects of good values. By themselves, they are empty highs.
Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.
Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity. Some examples of bad, unhealthy values: dominance through manipulation or violence, indiscriminate fucking, feeling good all the time, always being the center of attention, not being alone, being liked by everybody, being rich for the sake of being rich, sacrificing small animals to the pagan gods.
Values are about prioritization.
Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances.
We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
Stoizismus
The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always.
Baba
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“I didn’t choose this life; I didn’t choose this horrible, horrible condition. But I get to choose how to live with it; I have to choose how to live with it.”
And I choose to be happy
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And it’s true, it’s not their fault. But it’s still their responsibility.
