Paradox are amazing because they force us to hold two opposing ideas in our mind at the same time. Now, on the surface, there appears to be a contradiction. But if you look beneath the surface, you often find the deepest and most powerful truths in life. Today, we're going to discuss a few of the most life-changing paradoxes that I've ever come across, like why having more options makes you feel less free, how the fear of failure only makes it more likely that you fail, or how being more connected with the world can make you feel loneliness than ever before. We're going to talk about these and much, much more, so stick around. The podcast that's saving the world one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Hanson.

The first one, The more choices you have, the less satisfied you are with each one.

This is the widely known as the paradox of Choice. This comes from the psychological literature. I believe it was Barry Swartz. This was his work. Great book called Paradox of Choice. The research studies that this is based on are actually really simple, but I think the impact of this idea is quite profound. The original studies, they found that basically if you give people, I don't know, say, two options of candy bar, they would pick their favorite, and they would be relatively satisfied with that choice. Whereas if you give people the option of 20 candy bars, then whatever option that they picked, they actually would be less satisfied with that choice, despite the fact that they had more options to choose from. And so this paradox of choice shows up in a lot of different areas of life. And my personal pet theory, I guess, that I talk about in my books, is that a lot of the mental health issues or anxiety or malays of the modern world is the fact that we're exposed to so much information and so much opportunity that we're beginning to have a paradox of choice about everything in our lives.

That you get on social media and you become aware of a hundred different activities you could be doing this weekend. And so whatever you end up deciding to do with your friends, you just feel lame and stupid by comparison. Or you take a kid who's graduating college, they probably have 10 times as many career opportunities or options as, say, our parents or grandparents did. And yet that an abundance of opportunity tortures them and makes them less satisfied with whatever they end up pursuing.

Shortly after you got married, though, you wrote a really good article that touched on this about the freedom through commitment. It resonated with me who I'm a bona fide commitment fobe. I think at least I have this idea that more choice is better, right? But you talked about freedom through commitment, which itself is a paradox around that. Could you expand on that a little bit?

So I talk about this towards the end of my book Everything is Fucked, which is that people have a tendency to confuse freedom with optionality, right? They think freedom is simply having more choices. But in many ways, more choices paralyzes us and actually traps us because the more choices you have, the more afraid you're going to be commit to any specific one. And so choosing something to commit to, whether it's a person, a career, a place to live, a friend group, it liberates you in a really unexpected or counterintuitive way because it removes that analyzing abundance of options. It removes the burden of choosing. It frees you from the pressures of having to get it right. I was somebody who struggled with monogamy in my early life, let's just put it that way. When I got married, one of the things that really surprised me is that there was a sense of liberation at the fact that I didn't have to think about this stuff anymore. I never had to worry. I could walk into a party and I never have to worry, What's the hot girl thinking about me? What am I going to say to her?

Is there ketchup on my shirt? None of these things, I don't give a shit anymore because that part of my life is solved, it's handled. I was definitely surprised at just how freeing that felt, which is weird because I think the last thing that people associate marriage with is freedom, or particularly men. I don't think men associate marriage with freedom, but I found a lot of psychological freedom that came with that commitment. But this is actually, I think, this area is maybe one of the most pertinent applications of the paradox of choice with, say, dating apps, right? As our resident single person drew, I cannot remember a single time that a friend told me, Hey, there's this great dating app that I'm really enjoying right now. Everybody seems to have this sick Stockholm syndrome with their dating apps. They hate it, but they can't get off of it because they don't know what else to do with themselves. Right.

I've sworn them off. I haven't used them in years, actually. And the horror stories are still... I still hear about them, too. So I don't have a good solution for that other than don't use them and get out in more social situations. And yeah, limit yourself, honestly, to those people directly around you that you come into.

Contact with. What convinced you to get off? What was the experience?

It really was a paradox of choice where on both sides it felt like. So you would connect to somebody on these apps, and then you go on a date with them. It was always like, Well, this was okay, but now let me just hop right back on and keep swiping and see what else is out there. I've talked to a lot of people who that's their experience, too. I was just talking with someone the other day who's been on for three years, I think, and still going, but they want to settle down. They want to find a relationship. And I'm like, Maybe you should do something different. I don't know. Yeah, right? The response always is, though, But how do you get out there and meet people? And it's like, Well, you do that by going out and meeting people. And we'll talk about this a little later.

Wow, how did people procreate for tens of thousands of years? I have no idea.

Yeah, exactly. And we've talked about this before. I don't know, are we going to talk about dating apps on every single one of these things? I don't know. But there is just this notion that the dating pool is now expanded. And so if there's the slightest thing that's wrong with this person, you may as well just get back on and keep swiping.

It seems to lower people's patience and tolerance for friction. When ironically, I think you need a little bit of friction to figure out how much you like a person. You need to deal with a few annoying things to see if it's worth it or not. But if there's always 10 other people on your phone waiting to talk to you, there's no reason to ever sit through that uncomfortable moment or that obnoxious interaction. I honestly do believe... I mean, I led the show with this for a reason. I honestly do believe this is the struggle of our time, and I don't think it's going away. I think it is a hidden cost of abundant information and digital connectivity. But part of that is the second paradox, which is basically the harder you work, the easier your life gets. The more you avoid hard work or hard decisions, the more difficult your life gets. This can be summed up with this quote that's gone around social media lately. It's a hard choice is easy life, easy choice is hard life. I chased this down. I heard this from Tim Ferris. Tim Ferris got it from another author.

I think his name was Walter Percy or something like that. Anyway, it originated with a Polish powerlifter who was an alcoholic and overcame his alcoholism and then won four gold medals or something like that.

What was his name?

Oh, Jersey Gregoric.

Okay.

Yeah. I like this quote because actually, I think it's subtly or unintentionally gets you to question your definition of what easy and hard are in your life. Our instinct is to assume that anything that's uncomfortable is hard or difficult. When actually, I think the reality is that what's hard and difficult is when we feel like our lives are outside of our control, that we're not having a ton of effect or influence on the direction that our lives are going. Ultimately, the way you take control of the direction your life is going is by having the willingness to do things that are uncomfortable. So if you redefine hard or difficult away from being discomfort and instead redefine it as problems that are outside of your control, it can lead you to a much easier, easieryour life.

You touched on this in a previous episode we did too about, for example, being unhealthy is hard, working out is hard. You made that point. And yeah, so it's not about the difficulty necessarily, it's not about the discomfort. It's more focused towards the outcome. Yeah.

And one is within your control. So in that example- That's the important part, yeah. Yeah, in that example, when you work out, you're choosing the discomfort. Whereas when you're being a couch potato, you're not choosing the discomfort. Of course, you get this backwards law thing that goes on, which is the more discomfort you're willing to put your body through, the more comfortable you become in most everyday circumstances. The healthier, the more agile, the stronger you become. It's the same thing with, say, having difficult conversations. The more depth you get at having difficult conversations, the easier navigating, say, workplace politics or crazy family members at Christmas. All that stuff starts to get much, much simpler.

For you. So this year, I've really cleaned up my diet. I've really focused on that and got rid of a lot of carbs, processed foods, mostly sugar. And somebody will inevitably say, Oh, so you don't have any joy left in your life? As if eating carbs and sugar and processed food is the only way I could get joy out of my life. But I've really had to stop and think about that. I'm like, Actually, no, I feel so much better. And you talked with Derek Sivers about this, the shallow happy versus deep happy, right? Yeah. Shallow happy, he says, is eating the cake. Deep happy is being proud of your sofa not eating the cake and being healthy.

Well, it also maybe unintentionally reveals something about them, which is if they associate junk food with joy, that's the thing that brings them joy. What the fuck is everything else in their life doing? By comparison. If that's the highlight, the Skittles is the highlight of their day, that doesn't say a whole lot about the rest of the day. I used to drink a lot, talked about this in multiple episodes. I've done YouTube videos on it. I was absolutely one of those guys. If one of my friends was like, Oh, I'm not drinking this month, I'm like, Oh, you're so boring. You're killing the vibe. You're ruining everything. Yeah, I genuinely thought people who didn't drink were boring. Now that I don't drink, I just realized that I drank because the rest of my life was boring, and I needed to drink to feel like some stimulation or excitement. When you stop drinking, you actually have to confront the fact that a lot of the things that you're spending your time doing in your life are boring and you should stop doing them or change them. Which brings us to our next one, which is a classic.

Which is, the more you hate a trait in someone else, the more likely you are avoiding it in yourself. I love this one.

Freud called this projection. Carl Jung talked about this as the shadow self. Basically, the aspects about ourselves that we bury or deny or don't want to look at, they tend to stand out to us most in other people in the world and drive us fucking crazy. I like this one just because I think there's a lot of practical wisdom. If you find yourself consistently getting annoyed or pissed off at people in your life for doing the same thing, as they say, the only thing all of your relationship problems have in common is you. Maybe that's actually where you should start looking. I wrote an article a long, long time ago, which I think relates to this. I think the title of it was, We judge others the same way we judge ourselves. Basically, it's like whatever metric we've adopted in our own lives to measure our self-worth, that's generally how we project that same metric on the other people. It cuts both ways. It's like if I value people being of high integrity, obviously, I'm going to judge other people for having high integrity. But if I have a lot of insecurity around an area, let's say I have a lot of insecurity around sex, then I'm going to be obsessed and obnoxiously nosy in other people's sex lives because it's something I'm trying to avoid in myself.

So I'm projecting it onto all sorts of other people around me. I think we've all known people in our lives who do this. They have these weird obsessions and insecurities that's like a magnet. You can't get them off of it. No pun intended.

Mine is I can't just lose it, basically, when I have to deal with incompetent people or lazy people. And it's because those are the two things I hate in myself. And I do this all the time. And I've known about it for a long, long time too. But in any of these situations, like you said, it's a diagnostic tool. And what I've tried to do is step back and say, Okay, what's actually going on here? For the longest time, I was like, Just have some compassion for other people. But I think more recently, I'm like, Wait, what you really need to do first is recognize that in yourself, whatever it is you're projecting on other people, recognize it in yourself. Have some compassion for yourself first, and that seems to help it.

It's funny. I never made the connection. So to all the listeners, Drew is the Mark Manson team's Karen. We actually call him that in the Slack.

We call him-I'm the head of the anger management department.

Yes, the head of the anger management department. He is the team's Karen. So anytime a service or product... Anytime something is wrong and we have to deal with customer service, Drew is always first up to bat. He always wants to speak to the manager. He always wants a month discount on our next installment or whatever. He's always fighting to get refunds and stuff for us. And you are a bona fide perfectionist. So it all makes sense now.

Yes, it should. I feel.

Like I understand you on a much deeper level. Like a lot of young men, I had these status obsessions. I had these weird delusions that there is this pecking order of how cool or important people are in the room. I had this perpetual insecurity of where I fit in that pecking order. Because I had that perpetual insecurity, I assumed everybody else did as well. Whenever a lot of social interactions I had or I observed between people, I always assumed ulterior motives. It's just became... I had this very bizarre Machavelian mindset of like, Oh, well, he's just being nice to her because he wants to make her jealous because he thinks she's cooler because his friends like her sister and all this shit. Meanwhile, I'm literally just writing fucking fan fiction in my head the entire time. It's like nobody's thinking about this shit.

I think this happens on an individual level, like we're talking here too. But I think there's also a case to be made that happens on a cultural and societal level, too. One thing that's been a point of contention, I guess, over the last couple of years, especially on social media, is narcissism, right? Everybody's like, The narcissist in my life has ruined my life. Whether it's my parents, they were narcissists, or my boyfriend, ex-boyfriend was a narcissist, whatever it is. And if you stop and think about it, we're all a little bit narcissistic. We all have those tendencies. And I think it's a reaction against that self-loathing a little bit around narcissism and thinking you're a little too important. They don't want those things to be true in themselves.

Well, totally, because a narcissistic person is going to perceive everybody else to be a narcissistic person. Because a narcissistic person believes everything is fundamentally about them. And so when they see everybody else in their life not caring, not empathizing, not being compassionate towards them, constantly having conflict with them, what one legitimate explanation is like, Wow, I'm just surrounded by narcissists. You see this a lot of times with people who are addicted will perceive others around them as being addicts and not themselves. People who are depressed will perceive other people around them as being depressed and not themselves. They'll be like, Wow, everybody's such a downer around me. I think everybody in my life is depressed or something. It's like, Well, what do they have in common? All right, so next one. The more afraid you are to fail, the more likely you are to fail. The more you're okay with failure, the less likely failure becomes. I have a lot of thoughts about this. This is commonly known as self-fulfilling prophecy. It's basically the thing that we are most afraid of is the fact that we're so afraid of it makes it more likely to be true because a lot of our behaviors will unconsciously make it more likely to be true.

Probably an overly simplistic example of thisof this is if I desperately want a job, and I think it's my dream job and it's the only job I'm ever going to be happy with in my life, and I go in the interview for that job, the amount of expectation and pressure that I put on myself to get that job is probably going to completely fuck up my job interview, and it's going to make me less likely to actually get a job offer. Whereas if I go in with a realistic understanding of like, Well, I'm very excited about this opportunity. But I'm a smart person. There's going to be a lot of other opportunities that come along in my life. I'm going to be relaxed. I'm going to be more casual. I'm going to be myself. I'll probably answer better and have a better interview overall. So that's a very, very simplistic example, but you see this dynamic play out in all sorts of different areas of life over and over again. One of the, I guess, more practical implementations of this concept that I've seen, Jeff Bezos has this great thing that he wrote. He had something called the 70% rule, which is basically he said that the optimal time to implement a new strategy or policy is when it is 70% complete or when you're 70% confident that it's going to succeed.

His argument was that the amount of effort to get from 70% to 90% is as much effort as it was to get from zero to 70, and that you learn so much from failures that you're actually being less efficient by preventing those failures, by trying to wait to get to 100%. I always love that. It's like the optimal time to act is when you're 70% confident, not when you're 99% confident. Because if you wait for 99%, you've probably waited far too long.

I could vouch that this is how you approach things, for sure. Within the business, I.

Should say. 70 % of the stuff we put out is fucking...

Yeah, you were 70 % sure about marrying your wife or something. That's not what I mean, no. And more just like, as you've already mentioned, I'm the resident perfectionist, and that can be very paralyzing, as most people know. I think one of the biggest lessons I've taken from you is let's get at 70 to 80 % there, put it out and see what happens. Because what we found, what I've learned over the other years working with you, is that there's usually about a hundred % chance that we're going to change something.

The thing you think is a home run is almost never a home run. And the thing that ends up being the home run is always something that you're shocked it went so well. I've been doing this for 15 years now. I've been publishing online. I am still, to this day, consistently wrong in my predictions of how my work will be received by people. The stuff that takes off, I'm like, Really? That? Okay. Then the stuff that I bust my ass and emotionally invest all this energy and effort and have all these hopes for does okay. What I love about the 70% rule is it just acknowledges that. It acknowledges that what you think is 100% ready is actually not 100%. You're going to be wrong no matter what. So you might as well optimize for the opportunity to learn from the action rather than try to optimize for the perfect action itself.

That's what I think you've been best at, honestly, over the years, is how can we learn the most in the shortest amount of time? I've fulfilled my obligation of kissing your ass in an episode.

Yes, the contract is satisfied for this episode. All right, what's the next one, Drew?

The more something makes you uncomfortable, the more you should probably do it.

I think this is something that people underestimate. I have personally found it very useful within myself to recognize when a particular thought or idea pops up in my head. My immediate visceral reaction is like, Oh, no, don't think about that. I should probably think about that. It took many, many years to train myself to do that because that is not natural, obviously. But I've just seen it so many times both in my own life and other people's lives, that the proportion of impact that something will have on the trajectory of your life is often directly proportional to how afraid you are of doing it or thinking about it. And so whenever you see fear, just instinctually lean into it.

In your late teens, maybe early 20s, you were already experimenting with this where I think I came to this a lot later. So I don't know. Was there an experience or anything like that that led you to this?

It's a good question. I do think from a very young age, I've been very just prone to anything that's exciting. It's pretty novel and novel. Obviously, that can get you in trouble sometimes, which it did. But it also teaches you that at a pretty early age. I think the advantageous thing about doing stuff that most people are afraid to do is that you get disproportionately rewarded for it. If there's a business that everybody else is afraid to start and you go start it and manage to succeed, you're going to get rewarded so disproportionately to, say, the absolute amount of hours and effort that you put in. I just find that most of life works that way, that there's a premium to doing the thing most other people don't want to do, assuming it's valuable. Obviously, there's a lot of things that most people don't want to do that's not valuable. And so there's no premium for that. In fact, it's just stupid to do that. But if you manage to find the valuable thing that most people are not willing to do, the reward is so disproportionate that if you can get good at finding those things and acting on them, you're going to have a good time.

Things are going to go well.

Yeah. Do you think this is also a useful compass or a useful tool for people who they're like, I don't know what my passion is, or I don't know what I want to do with my life. And it's like, Well, what are you scared of? Is that-Yeah. I mean, obviously within limits and reason, but is that actually... Do you think that's a good compass or a good tool for people to use?

I think so. So Steven Pressfield has this great concept that he calls The Resistance, which capital T, capital R. And he talks about it in the book The War of Art. In the book, he makes the argument that generally it's the piece of work that you're most afraid to work on that is your best work that needs to be made. I have definitely found a lot of truth to that in my own career. But I think when it comes to the grander, What do I want to do with my life type questions, I absolutely think there's a lot of validity to that because I think many people, when we're young, we instinctively suppress any outlier, urges, or desires that we might have. When you're 13, 14, 15 years old, your desire to conform is so powerful that if you have this urge or inkling to do some weird thing that might get you laughed at or ostracized by your peer group, you just bury that. If it's not going to get you into a good college, and if it's not going to get you invited to more parties in high school, you just pretend it's not there.

But when you become an adult, you actually really want to know that it's there because that's the thing that actually defines you and makes you distinct from everybody else. That's your competitive advantage in the world. It took me a long time to remember that I used to write for fun as a kid. I used to write little fiction stories and essays and stuff when I was 10 years old. I think I stopped because it wasn't cool and it wasn't earning me any cool points with my peers. And it wasn't writing for class sucked enough. So why would I write in my free time too? That just seems insane. Next paradox. The more connected we get, Drew, the more isolated we seem to feel. Why is that? Why do you think that is?

I think it's more to do with the actual methods of connecting that we use these days. I mean, it's basically they're empty calories for our social relationships. The hyperconnectivity that we experience through social media and other technologies is a very low friction, easy medium to use both for connecting with people, but also for avoiding people. And so I think you get that. There's less glue to hold us together in a lot of those. And I think that's a big part of it. People are using these technologies as substitutes for real human connection, which is messy and hard and difficult.

I hate to pull this back to the dating app thing, but one thing I've been thinking about a lot more, we just interviewed Oliver Berthman a few days ago, and this is something I think I heard first from him, is that when it comes to human connection, friction is the point. When you talk about that glue between two people, I actually feel like having friction is part of what creates that glue to a certain extent. If there is no friction between two people, then there are no stakes. There's no sense of like, Okay, I gave up something for this friendship or this relationship. If everything's easy all the time, then there's no way to really know that people are invested in you. Now, this isn't to say intentionally go create friction in all of your relationships. Don't be a piece of shit.

They're inherently difficult to begin with, right? So you don't.

Need to add anything there. Yeah, you don't need to create more friction. But I agree with you that the new mediums of communication, they are optimized to create as little friction as possible. Text messaging, WhatsApp, sharing on Instagram, all this stuff. It's very frictionless. You're removing any commitment of time, same place, even same topic of conversation. I can't help but feel that removing that friction makes it feel emptier. Literally, the word invest means that you give something up with the hope that you get more back in return in the future. And so if you're not giving anything up when you're communicating with people, then you're not actually investing anything, and there's no way for it to compound in value. I think the other thing that's happening simultaneously is that people's identities are becoming more globalized. And what I mean by that is people are identifying with things that don't actually have a whole lot of impact on their day-to-day life. If you go back 100 years, most people's identities were very much based around the town they grew up in, the church they went to, the school they graduated from, the five or six neighbors that they hung out with.

That was their whole life and their identity. They weren't really thinking about wars in East Asia or the famine that's going on in Central Africa. All this shit that we're constantly occupied with and identifying with. Don't get me wrong, there is a moral argument that we should care about global issues. But if you're basing your identity and a lot of the energy of your free time being emotionally invest in these global issues, ultimately, those things don't come home and create meaning in your day-to-day life. It worries me that these sorts ofglobal news issues, it feels like they're becoming sports to a lot of people. I don't say that I'm not trying to diminish what's happening in these places because what's happening in these places is very serious. But for those of us who are not in those places, I see a lot of people who are adopting the same relationship with these issues as hardcore sports fans do with their sports teams. They wake up every day, it's the first thing they check. They hope their team is scoring points. And whether they are or not, they're going to get online and start arguing in their side's favor.

But then they have cover too, Mark, because it's not sports. It's real, real live, important things. And so I should care about this and look how smart I am, right?

Yeah. But I mean, what the fuck are you actually doing? What are you doing that's ultimately what it comes down to? Oh, that's cool. Yeah, you posted on TikTok. You got a lot of likes. What the fuck are you doing? Go get a job. All right, last one. The more afraid you are of death, the less you will be able to enjoy your life. This one comes up a lot. We talk about this one all the time. It's the memento mori. It's remember your own death. You really aren't able to properly gage how valuable something is in your life until you're able to imagine being dead, essentially. Ultimately, it's the scarcity of life that makes our experiences valuable and meaningful. If we're constantly avoiding the recognition of that scarcity, constantly pretending that it's not scarce, that everything's going to be great forever and ever, then we're doing ourselves a disservice because we're removing our ability to properly gage what's important and what's not.

Yeah. I've noticed, too, the number of people who have achieved pretty great things in their lives have had experiences with death early on, you being one of them. Also, we had Morgan Hausel on a little while back, and he had a very close call when he was younger as well. And I don't think he talked about this with you, but he talked about it in other other areas. He had a close call where he lost a couple of friends when he was very young, too, 16, 17. You lost a close friend when you were 18, 19, somewhere in there. I know of other stories, two of people who have went on to accomplish.

Great things. There is something about being exposed to death at a very young age. So my friend passed away when I was young. Three of my four grandparents died when I was a kid. When I was in ninth grade, one of my classmates had cancer and we all watched him die. When I was a senior in high school, another kid in our class died in a car accident. Then my first year in college, my friend Josh drowned at a party. I didn't realize it at the time. When you're that age, you just think whatever you experience is normal. I think it wasn't until my mid-20s that I started to realize, Wow, I was exposed to a lot of this at a very young age. I noticed it because I started talking to people. I remember I had a friend in college who one of her close friends died. She told me, she's like, I've never known anybody who died before. I was like, Well, you're 24. I was like, Yeah, I've never known anybody who died. I was like, Wait, really? It never occurred to me. But death is the only thing that you just really cannot avoid these questions of, What am I spending my time doing?

Is it valuable? What should I be doing instead? It makes the finitude of everything we do so stark and apparent and obvious that even though extremely unpleasant and upsetting, I just think ultimately it ends up being a very valuable lesson. And of course, there's the stoic practice of memento more basically says, Don't wait until somebody dies. Just practice this periodically yourself. Steve Jobs had a thing where every morning he would look in the mirror and ask himself, If today was the last day of my life, would I be happy doing what I'm going to do today? He said that if the answer was no too many days in a row, he would basically sit down and drastically change something. I just think that's a really good exercise, whether you do it through journaling or bring it up in therapy periodically, be a weirdo and talk about it on podcast that we do every few weeks. It's a useful exercise.

There's a whole branch of psychology, terror management theory that explores how we deal with our own deaths. And it's usually what the research focus is around is like, how do people distract themselves from it? But as we've already said in one of these earlier paradoxes, facing the hard things, that's probably the way to go.

Hard things, easy life. Easy life, hard things. That's what she said. Keeping it classy here at the SubtleArt Podcast. That's it. That's all the paradoxes. The last paradox is that the more you like and subscribe to this podcast, the better it gets. Is that a paradox? I don't even know if.

That's a paradox. Or the more insecure we get. I don't know. How does that.

Might be? The more five-star reviews we get, the smarter we become. Please, give us your energy, listeners. Give us your power. That's all for the Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck Podcast. This is Mark Manson. For Drew Bernie, check out the newsletter. It's at markmanson. Net/news letter. Share my shit. I don't know. Buy my book. We'll see you next time.