Do you spend a lot of time on social media and other time-wasting apps on your phone? 

If you’re unhappy with your mindless scrolling habit, you’ve likely tried different tactics to break it, like deleting apps or using screentime features to set time limits.

While these Odysseian methods of restraint can help break the scroll habit, they’re not always effective.

According to researchers, if you want to break a bad habit, you often have to replace it with a better, healthier one.

In my interview with illustrator-filmmaker Campbell “Struthless” Walker about journaling, he offered a powerful substitute for mindless scrolling: microjournaling.

I’ve done microjournaling on and off for the past few years and found it helpful in breaking the scroll habit.

Here’s what it is and how to do it.

What Is Microjournaling?

Microjournaling is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of setting aside 15 minutes to write in your journal, you’re going to shrink that to a minute or two. A microjournaling session could even last under 60 seconds. It’s just enough time to dash off a thought or two.

What do you write about? Anything! Report what just happened in your day. Record your mood. Write down a thought that’s been continually popping up. Make a note of someone you’ve been thinking about and why. Jot down a worry. List something you’re grateful for. Repeatedly reiterate a goal. Whatever you want.

How to Set Up Microjournaling on Your Phone to Replace Mindless Scrolling

Because microjournaling only takes a minute, it’s the perfect behavior to substitute for mindlessly scrolling your phone. Whenever you have that itch to check Instagram or X, you’re going to microjournal on your phone instead.

Here’s how to set up your phone to make microjournaling your default habit:

Rearrange your homescreen. Put your notes app exactly where TikTok or your other troublesome apps used to live. Hide or delete the social apps.

Start a fresh note each morning. Title it with the date.

Whenever you feel the itch to check your phone, microjournal in your notes app. Throughout the day, dump one to five sentences whenever your thumb itches to check reels. Again, it can be about whatever you want. Random thoughts are fine. Don’t overthink it.

Keep it under two minutes. The moment you feel yourself polishing prose, stop. Microjournaling is about capture, not craft.

Weekly review. Go back through your notes on Sunday night and look for patterns: triggers for bad moods, small joys you’d forgotten, ideas worth developing.

Review with AI. You can use AI to enhance your weekly review and gain deeper insights. Copy and paste your week of notes into an LLM like ChatGPT, and then pose one or more of the following questions:

• What themes or patterns do you notice across these entries?
• Group these notes into categories based on mood, topic, or concern.
• What seemed to occupy my thoughts the most this week?
• Were there any recurring negative thoughts or triggers? Any recurring positive ones?
• Highlight any entries that reflect a moment of insight, clarity, or growth.
• Compare this week’s reflections with last week’s — what changed?
• Is there evidence of improvement in my mood, habits, or focus over the week?
• Are there any notes that can be used for a project I’m working on?
• What action can I take based on my notes that would improve my life?

Less Mindless Scrolling; More Life-Improving Insights

When your thumb gets twitchy tomorrow, open Notes instead of a feed. Write one line about what you ate, what your kid said, or that meeting that went south. Close it. Get on with life.

You’re not fighting the habit. You’re redirecting it. Like putting the veggies where the cookies used to be.

The scrolling itch won’t vanish overnight. But after a few weeks, your muscle memory might actually prefer capturing your own life instead of gawking at everyone else’s.

And unlike the blur of tweets and posts you consume that you’ll never care to remember, these fragments of your own experiences will create a treasury you’ll one day want to revisit. A record of a life — and a potential roadmap for how to improve it.

Listen to my full conversation with Campbell about some other journaling practices that could change your life:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

That Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable.

He came from the middle of nowhere — Abilene, Kansas — had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn’t make general until he was in his fifties.

How, then, did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest?

Today, we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle. We talk about how Eisenhower’s Midwestern upbringing shaped his character, and how his most important education happened outside the classroom. Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike’s development, and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships. We discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche. We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D-Day and what he did the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter
• AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership
• AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later
• The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves.
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Fox Conner
• The Czar of Halfaday Creek by James B. Hendryx

Connect With Michel Paradis

• Michel on LinkedIn
• Michel’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of the medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out?

For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress towards your ultimate goals.

Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like “moving horizons,” creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how understanding your unique attributes will help you understand how you react to uncertainty and how teams can implement “dynamic subordination” to adapt in rapidly changing environments.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Rich’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast — #738: The Character Traits That Drive Optimal Performance
• AoM Article: 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty
• AoM Article: The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times
• The Physiological Sigh

Connect With Rich Diviney

• The Attributes website
• Rich on LinkedIn
• Rich on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of that medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out? For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress toward your ultimate goals. Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book, Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like moving horizons, creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how teams can tackle uncertainty by implementing dynamic subordination to adapt in rapidly changing environments. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty. Rich Diviney, welcome back to the show.

Rich Diviney: Well, thanks for having me, Brett. It’s good to be back.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, The Attributes. I know it was a big hit with our listeners. You’ve got a new book out called Masters of Uncertainty. Is this book a continuation of your thinking in The Attributes?

Rich Diviney: It’s not a continuation. It’s actually the overarching idea. This is the book actually I’ve wanted to write for years and years and years. And as you know, because you’ve read them, I know we’ll get into The Attributes as simply one aspect of understanding oneself in uncertainty, challenge, and stress. And so in a move that was kind of unconsciously genius, I guess, I decided to write The Attributes book first, which was fantastic because The Attributes is such a big topic and it laid a nice foundation for people to understand them, for us to build our assessment tool, and so on and so forth. But understanding how we operate and perform in uncertainty is really where I’ve always had my passion and what it takes to do that, both neurologically, physiologically, and of course, what we need to know about ourselves. And so The Master of Uncertainty is really kind of the overarching idea that I’ve been exploring for a long time. Attributes was a piece and I just happened to write that Attributes book first.

Brett McKay: Yeah, maybe Masters of Uncertainty is the prequel.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Yeah, prequel. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So why have you been so passionate about uncertainty and thinking and writing about it? What’s your background with it?

Rich Diviney: Well, uncertainty on its own really is defined as that which cannot be relied upon or known. You’re just in an unknown, unreliable situation or environment. Now, what we have to understand is that there are different forms of uncertainty. You can have uncertainty with curiosity. That’s every kid on Christmas Eve. There’s uncertainty there, but there’s no fear. It’s excitement that comes from that. What we’re talking about and what I specifically focus on is this idea of uncertainty plus anxiety, which equals fear. So it’s the uncertainty that elicits fear because that’s really where most people focus on when it comes to defining their performance or interrogating the performance or when they fail in performing. And so obviously in the SEAL teams and any spec operations unit, especially in combat, you are very well versed in managing and moving through things that are pretty dangerous and scary and have that uncertainty element in it. So in doing that throughout a career in the SEAL teams, I really began to wonder, okay, what is it we do? How do we do it? I began to kind of explore the neuroscience when I linked up with, who’s now a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman.

This was seven years ago, seven or eight years ago, so it was before his enormously successful and awesome podcast. But we began to, he has his fear lab at Stanford, and we began to kind of explore this together. And I began to realize, or I guess we began to realize together that you could talk about the neuroscience and you could talk about the techniques that guys like us use, and you could fuse those together in a meaningful way that allowed other people, anybody, to really understand that this is actually quite human and we all have the capacity to do this.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you mentioned you are a SEAL. That’s your background, Navy SEAL. How did uncertainty show up during your career as a SEAL? Because I imagine that every time you went on a mission, even if you had done a lot of planning, there was still an element of uncertainty to it.

Rich Diviney: 100%. And I would even say uncertainty shows up in SEAL training. I mean, the day one, I mean, SEAL training BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, is designed to throw you into uncertainty and challenge and stress, all of it, because it’s designed to take you down to zero physiologically and physically and even mentally, and then ask, okay, what else do you got? What else can you do? And can you, in fact, problem solve when things are very, very serious and the stakes are very, very high? And so you start in SEAL training. The guys who show up to SEAL training and make it through were all folks who somehow got good at this prior to getting to the beaches of BUDS. You have to have some level of competency even to make it through the first day, first week, first two weeks of BUDS. But what happens is you hyper develop these techniques, these tools, these skills, if you will, and then you find yourself utilizing them in almost every aspect of SEAL life, whether it’s training, jumping out of airplanes at 20,000 feet, whether it’s in combat, in gunfights, whether it’s scuba diving in dark harbors every one of those environments comes with it, a sense of you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. And so this is why you become masters of the craft.

Brett McKay: What do you think is a common misconception civilians have about how Navy SEALs deal with uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: Well, I think one common misconception is they think that Navy SEALs are fearless, and Navy SEALs are absolutely not fearless. In fact, fearlessness in of itself is a very, very dangerous thing. I was told by a really wonderful officer when I was a younger junior officer, he said, Rich, beware the fearless leader, because that guy is going to get you killed. And so fear is a natural human thing. It’s a human being’s risk assessment tool, and it tells us, hey, pay attention. This is risky. This might kill you. This might hurt you. This might harm you. So Navy SEALs, we experience fear just like anybody else. However, we have the capacity, the tools, and the practice in moving through that very deftly, so it doesn’t sideline us. We use the fear in a very meaningful way by risk assessing properly and planning properly. But then after that, we understand that, hey, things are just going to happen, and we know how to move through it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you used the example of the Osama bin Laden raid. This was something that was planned for months. They even built a replica of the compound he was in to practice.

Rich Diviney: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But whenever the actual mission was underway, things just went completely cattywampus. Helicopter went down, and so they had to adapt, and they still were able to get the mission done.

Rich Diviney: They were, yeah. And just a quick correction there. The mission actually hadn’t been rehearsed or planned for too long. I mean, the decision was made by the president when they got the intel, and so the team had about, I think, three weeks, three or four weeks.

Brett McKay: Oh, wow.

Rich Diviney: Yeah. But in that three or four weeks, they rehearsed ad nauseum and memorized and got prepared for every single detail they could possibly anticipate. And yeah, like you said, as soon as they hit the target, the plans changed. Uncertainty struck, and the plans changed. So it’s a classic example of the idea that, and again, we can talk about planning. I do not besmirch planning at all. I think proper planning is good. What we don’t want to do is get caught up in the paralysis by analysis or paralysis through analysis, where we’re trying to plan every single thing. Because A, it’s not going to let us move, and B, it’s a real energy drag. So we have to get ourselves into a position where we plan a couple things. Hey, this might happen, this might happen. And then after that, if anything else happens, we’ll figure it out along the way.

Brett McKay: At the start of the book, you write this. I thought it really caught my attention. Most people fall short of realizing their potential primarily because our culture promotes a misleading belief that life is predictable. How does believing life is predictable set someone up for failure, falling short of their potential?

Rich Diviney: Well, we are lucky enough to live in a society and live in a time, most of us, I guess, where the environment is structured around us so that or such that we can rely on predictability. I mean, people don’t have to worry about getting killed by the saber-toothed tiger anymore or finding their food or else they’re going to starve or finding proper shelter and so on and so forth. However, what we do have to understand is that even though that is the case, even though life is designed nowadays around predictability, uncertainty is always going to happen. It’s always going to be present. The combination of not knowing and the combination of anxiety is going to bubble up that fear response in us. And to assume that things are going to go as planned is a bad assumption because you’re not going to prepare yourself when things inevitably do not go as planned. So I think that’s one factor. The other factor is that we are, as a species, designed to step outside of our comfort zone. I mean, this is in fact why we have gone from cave dweller to space explorer because the human being, the human species were designed to keep exploring, keep discovering, step outside of those boundaries.

And so understanding how we can do that more effectively not only prepares us for that uncertainty, challenge, and stress that hits us without warning, but it also allows us to take deliberate steps, choose deliberate times to step outside of our comfort zone and explore and grow. That’s where growth and evolution happens. And I think that’s a really powerful aspect of unlocking potential of every human being.

Brett McKay: All right, let’s talk about some of the tactics people can use to get a better handle on uncertainty in their work or their life. I’m sure a lot of our listeners, most of them probably aren’t Navy SEALs, but they’re dealing with uncertainty. We’re living in a work environment where artificial intelligence is upending a lot of industries. If you’re a parent, your kids can come home with problems you got to deal with that you’ve never dealt with before. So a lot of uncertainty. One tactic you talk about is moving horizons. And this is where you progress through uncertainty toward your ultimate goal by repeatedly setting and then reaching for one immediate horizon at a time. And you do this by clearly defining a duration, pathway, and outcome or DPO for each step along the way. Tell us more about moving horizons and DPO.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, moving horizons is a tool that taps into our own, every human being’s neurology. And the neuroscience behind that is that when we are in any environment, our brain is trying to figure out that environment. And it’s doing so along basically three major factors. There’s obviously other things in there. But the three primary factors it’s trying to figure out are duration, how long this thing’s going to last, pathway, what’s my route in, out, or through, and then outcome, what’s the end state of this. And what we have to understand is when we are in absence of one or more of those aspects of those three things, we find ourselves in uncertainty and anxiety and we start to feel oftentimes the fear response. An example would be illness. So say you and I got strep throat. Strep throat is a known disease that we know people don’t really die from and there’s a known antibiotic to treat strep throat. So in the case of strep throat, we are knowledgeable about pathway, the antibiotic, and we’re knowledgeable about outcome, which is we’ll get better. What we don’t know, what is unknown is duration. Because some people respond to antibiotics differently than others.

You might get better tomorrow. It might take me three days. So our anxiety, stress, uncertainty level is mild. Now say we get the flu. The flu is also a known disease that most people, at least in today’s society, don’t die from. However, there’s no known antibiotic or medicine you can take for the flu. And the recovery for the flu is variable. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for someone to recover from the flu. So in the case of the flu, we know the outcome. We will get better, but we are absent duration and pathway. So our anxiety, stress level is moderate. Now imagine a virus shows up and we’ve never seen it before. There’s no known cure or vaccine. There are some people dying, there are some people not dying, and it’s spreading around the globe and we don’t know how long we’re going to be in this thing. Obviously, this sounds familiar to most of your listeners because this is 2020 in a nutshell, right? And in that case, we were absent all three. We were absent duration, pathway, and outcome. And our fear, our anxiety, our uncertainty level was high. So all moving horizons does is it gives someone the ability to, inside of any environment, basically buy down uncertainty by creating a duration and pathway and outcome.

You create what was previously unknown and you do that by, in whatever environment, you’re in asking yourself, what do I know and what can I control in this moment? And you pick something to focus on, a horizon. And once doing so, you’ve created a duration, pathway, outcome. So I’ll give you a quick example of SEAL training. So in SEAL training, you run around with big, heavy boats on your head all the time for hours and hours. And I remember doing this, it was three in the morning or something. We were on the beach and we were running next to a sand berm. And of course, I was miserable, everybody else was miserable. And I remember saying to myself, you know what? I’m just going to focus on getting to the end of this sand berm. And what I realized, well, I didn’t realize at the moment, but what I did at that moment is I picked a horizon. And by picking a horizon, I created a duration, pathway, outcome. Duration, from now until end of sand berm. Pathway, from here to end of sand berm. And then outcome, end of sand berm.

By doing so, I also neurologically created myself a small goal and then a reward at the accomplishment of that goal, which is a dopamine reward. And that allowed me then to, once I hit that accomplishment, to come back out, ask the question again, okay, what do I know, what can I control? Pick another horizon and then do it again. And you can do this cycle over and over and over again through any uncertainty, challenges, and stress until basically one of three things happens. Either you move through the challenge, you’re done. You accomplish the goal, or you gain enough certainty in your environment so that you no longer have any uncertainty in your environment. So the moving horizon strategy, by the way, is the reason why it’s such a powerful strategy, a powerful tool, is because every single human being has done this at some point in their lives, right? So I’m not telling anybody anything new. They’ve done this. They’ve chunked their environment in a way that allowed them to step through whatever they were trying to step through. All we know now is by articulating it and understanding it, you can in fact do it more often. You can practice it and become very, very good at it so that you do it without thinking, which is where masters of uncertainty lie.

Brett McKay: As you were speaking, an example that came to mind where you could use this, is unemployment. Let’s say you lose your job, you get laid off. You can use moving horizons to work through that. I think the uncertainty with job loss is typically duration. How long am I going to be unemployed? The pathway, it’s like, okay, I got to start networking, submitting resumes, things like that. The outcome is obviously I have a job. So the duration thing could be the tricky part. But yeah, you can just keep setting smaller goals for pathways until you accomplish your goal of getting a job.

Rich Diviney: It’s a wonderful example. I would say the initial loss of employment immediately creates an absence of all three. How long am I going to be unemployed? What’s my route? What’s my pathway to get a new job? And then how long, am I going to be able to get a new job? So you’re immediately absent of all three of those. You’re correct. So in those cases, in that case, someone needs to say, okay, what do I know? What can I control? And create a horizon and therefore create a DPO. So it could be, you know what? Okay, I have a buddy. My buddy can link me up with a recruiter. That’s my first horizon. I’m going to call my buddy and see if he can link me up with a recruiter. You’ve created your first horizon. You’ve created your first DPO. You do that. Then whatever that result is, you create your next one. Then you create your next one. But it is very much about working the problem in the moment and focusing only on that which you can control in the moment. One thing you will never, ever see Navy SEALs do is worry about stuff they can’t control in the moment. If they don’t have any control of it in the moment, we’re not going to worry about it. It’s useless.

It’s a waste of energy. And this goes for everything from SEAL training to legitimate gunfights in Iraq or Afghanistan. When you’re in a gunfight in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s so much going on, but you’re in the moment. You’re saying, what do I know? What can I control? What is my thing that I can actually take focus on and control in this moment? And you start moving through that. And slowly, certainty builds, hopefully, and you move through that. But I think unemployment is a wonderful example, and you can see exactly why these strategies are not only reserved for Navy SEALs or super performers. They’re very human.

Brett McKay: Yeah, another example I thought of was waiting for medical test results. So you might know you’re getting results back in three days. So what you do is you set a horizon and you just say, okay, I’m going to research the different possibilities of what I might have and what that might mean. That’s my horizon. And then when I reach that horizon, I’m going to ask myself again, all right, what do I know and what can I control? And maybe set another horizon where I then research specialists who might be able to help me and then just concentrate on that horizon. And that can give you a sense of control. It gives you something to do. And I don’t think not everyone might want to do that because some people just don’t want to worry about things before they’re concrete. And maybe they’re just going to say I’m just going to focus on keeping up my health by making sure I do one of my workouts every day for the next three days. That’s the only thing I control, and that’s the only thing I know has a benefit. Related to moving horizons and creating manageable horizons is creating meaningful horizons. What do you mean by that?

Rich Diviney: So the meaningful horizons describes what the size horizon needs to be. That’s always the next question. Okay, how do I know, like, what should I focus on? Or what’s the best size horizon? And so what we have to understand to understand the answer to that question is dopamine as a neurotransmitter, which is a very powerful chemical. It was for years and years regarded only as a reward chemical, but it’s much, much more than just a reward chemical. It’s actually a motivation chemical. It kind of gets us up and moving. It tells us, keep going. This is good. Keep doing this. Dopamine is what gets us up out of the bed in the morning. They’ve done experiments in the lab with rats where one group of rats is given, well, I guess a whole group of rats is given a device where they tap a lever and a tasty pellet comes out of that thing. And so, of course, every rat will just sit by that thing and just hit the lever, hit the lever and get a pellet. Then they took half of that group and removed the dopamine from that group. And all they needed to do was put those rats who had no dopamine basically a rat’s length away from that lever, and those rats wouldn’t even move to get that pellet.

So what this means is that, and dopamine works in our system, is that when we create a horizon, we are giving ourselves a motivation through dopamine, and we have an amount of dopamine that’s allowing us to keep going. If we create a horizon that’s too far away, that’s too big, we will run out of dopamine along the way, and we will quit. All quitting is is just you run out of dopamine. That’s what it is. So if I’m in a situation, and maybe I’m on that beach in Helwig, and I say, you know what? I’m running with this boat. I’m just going to make it to the end of the week. That’s way too big in that moment. The other side of that is if you pick a horizon that’s too close and too easy, you won’t get enough of a dopamine reward to feel it and be motivated to pick another horizon. And so that would be maybe I’m just going to count three steps. That might be too small, whatever that is. But as you can tell, these are very subjective to the person, and they’re subjective to the intensity of the environment.

The more intense the environment, the shorter the horizon is likely going to have to be. But we can and must modulate this size, these meaningful horizons, as we move through, and it has to be subjective to our own experience.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s walk through an example of doing this. Let’s say someone wants to start a business. They have a 9:00 to 5:00 job. They’ve got a dream of becoming an entrepreneur, starting their own business. What would setting meaningful horizons look like for that?

Rich Diviney: So let’s just work through at least a basic level of subjectivity here, right? So imagine the person has already started some businesses before and is looking to start a new business get out of what they’re doing, looking to start a new one. Their first horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to call my buddy who’s a VC, pitch him an idea, and see if I can get some funding going, okay? Because that’s the first thing. Or their horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to start something up. I’m going to talk to my friends, start something up, and we’re going to see if we can put together something in the next three or four months. That might be the horizon for someone who’s done it before. Someone who’s never done it before and is literally deciding to quit their job and do it, their first horizon might be, I’m going to go to the library and start learning about how to build a business, how to create a business. I’m going to call somebody to ask some questions to do that.

A really good way to describe this, so in the book I talk about a guy I met who was an ultra runner. And when I met him, I said, how’d you get into ultra running? And he said you won’t believe this, but I used to be 400 pounds or so.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Rich Diviney: And I was like, oh no, I was like, my gosh. I mean, tell me that story. He’s like, well I was so heavy and I was so overweight and unhealthy. And I decided one day, I’ve had enough, and I’m going to start running. I’m going to set a goal to run a marathon. And I said, so what’d you do? He’s like, well, the first thing I did is I decided I was going to go home and I was going to order running shoes. So that’s what he did. And then when the running shoes showed up, he said, okay, tomorrow morning when I get up, I’m going to get up and put on the running shoes. He did that. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his front door. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his mailbox and then so on and so forth until he was running a marathon six, eight months, 10 months later, I can’t remember. So the example for him was putting on his shoes and walking to the front door was a meaningful horizon.

Now, I try to run a couple times a week when I’m home and not traveling. I like doing it. If I have to take two or three months off and I haven’t run in two or three months and I decide I’m going to start running again, putting on my shoes and walking to the mailbox is not going to be enough of a horizon for me. It’s not going to be meaningful enough for me because it’s too short. And so we have to understand that this subjectivity matters and we have to begin to modulate our own horizons. You can do this in the moment too. I mean, you can actually in the moment pick something and as you’re moving towards it to decide, oh, wait, that’s way too far and pick something shorter. Or you accomplish this like, actually, that wasn’t far enough. I need to pick a longer one. So it’s not, you don’t have to get it perfect every time, but it must be subjective in whatever endeavor you’re doing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like a skill that you develop on how to measure that. Reminds me of in weight training or even in running, you have this RPE, rate of perceived effort.

Rich Diviney: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And it’s auto-regulation and it takes a while for you to figure out like what’s a 10 for you, like what’s really, really hard and what’s a four. When you first start off, I think you typically underestimate because you’re not fully aware of what your body can do. But then, yeah, once you get the hang of it, you’re able to be like, you know what? My goal is to go for an eight and today this effort feels like an eight. But on another day, an eight could be less or more just depending on what’s going on…

Rich Diviney: 100%. I’m so glad. I went for a run this morning and I was traveling all day yesterday, so I didn’t eat a lot all day yesterday. And so when I went for the run this morning, I started and I just felt completely depleted. And I was like, oh my God, I was slower than I usually am. And so perfect example that you just gave, because my eight today was markedly slower than my eights when I’m properly nourished. So yeah, you’re 100% right.

Brett McKay: Okay, so creating meaningful horizons is about making sure the horizon you set is challenging enough or just like has enough to it to keep you interested, but not so challenging that you give up and quit. So here’s an example. Let’s say you’re thinking of moving somewhere different from where you’re at right now, and you’re not sure about the move. Like you don’t know if you’re gonna like it or not.

I think it takes about two years to really feel settled into a place and be able to feel like you click with it. But telling yourself you’re definitely at the state for two years, that can feel pretty psychologically daunting. And I think you can tell if you’ve got potential with the place in a year. So you set a horizon for one year. You say, I’m gonna do all I can to dig into this place for one year. And at the end of the year, I’ll evaluate if it’s working and whether I wanna stay. So that could be a motivating, meaningful horizon. Another idea you have on sort of modulating and taking control of your dopamine system to stay motivated is this piece of advice that I thought was interesting. It was counterintuitive. It was keep your eyes off the prize. How does that actually help with long-term motivation?

Rich Diviney: Well, this feeds into the meaningful horizon concept. So in other words, we have to have an objective, right? We have to have something we’re moving towards, whether it’s run a marathon, whether it’s make it through SEAL training, whether it’s start a business, okay? That’s the objective that has to be present. However, we know, just because we just talked about it, is that that’s too big, that’s too far away. That’s too much of, that’s the whole elephant. And you need to break the elephant into one bite at a time. So when you are in this process of moving horizons, as you move through these challenges, especially during uncertainty, to keep focusing on the big goal, the big picture is too much, it’s too far away, it’s too much to handle. So keep your eyes off the prize is simply a reminder that, hey, it’s there, it’s driving you, it’s important, but take it down to the chunk and focus on that chunk. Don’t worry about the big goal right now, focus on the chunk. This is what keeping your eyes off the prize means. And it’s important because if you focus on that big thing too much, then you’ll lose focus on your horizon shifting and you will eventually, it’ll be too long and you might give up along the way or quit.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so we’ve talked about some psychological tactics you can do to reframe things in your head whenever you face uncertainty, how to manage it, how to navigate it. You have another section in the book where you talk about actual tactics, like physiological tactics you can do to calm down the arousal system that kicks in whenever we’re afraid, whenever we’re dealing with uncertainty. And this is important because you need to be calm in order to be in the right mental space to choose an appropriate next horizon. And that can be challenging when uncertainty is just thrown right in front of you, right in the moment, like something’s wrong in the moment and you don’t know what’s going on, how’s it gonna affect you, what do you need to do, and you’re just stressed out. So what are some tools people can use to reduce the arousal they feel whenever they’re stressed out in uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, there’s many, although the most powerful, fastest ones that have kind of been discovered have to do with our visual system and our respiratory system. And that’s because our visual system and respiratory system are directly connected to our central nervous system, which is what we talk about, sympathetic, parasympathetic systems when we’re in stress, challenge, uncertainty. And so what’s happening, like you just described, when we have uncertainty, challenge, stress, fear, all that stuff, our anxiety goes up, our autonomic arousal, our sympathetic system starts to climb. So let’s talk about the positives and negatives of this, right? As our autonomic arousal climbs, we’re in sympathetic response, our frontal lobe, the decision-making part of our brain begins to recede, and our limbic brain, our emotional kind of unconscious brain, our lizard brain begins to come to the fore. Now in the extreme cases we encounter what’s called autonomic overload or amygdala hijack which is when the frontal lobe the decision-making part of our brain has receded completely and our lizard brain has taken over and we are acting without thinking okay now this comes in very handy for things like jumping out of the way of a moving train or running from a bear.

Okay but it doesn’t come in handy for 99% of the other things that happen to us in life when we can actually really use some conscious and intelligent decision-making going on and so what we have to understand is physiologically we can bring that frontal lobe back online by decreasing our autonomic arousal. We can do this visually or through breath now like a visual tool that I talk about in the book is open gaze you know when we’re stressed and focused what happens is our gaze begins to focus in very tightly on whatever the threat is that’s why we sometimes get tunnel vision during these phases so what they found is if you go into open gaze and open gaze is simply the technique of just if you’re staring out or even if you’re staring at something you just soften your gaze you’re no longer staring at it anymore you’re just kind of noticing all of your peripheries you’re just taking it all in this is very easy to do with horizons and things like that but they’ve proven that this type of open gaze begins to shift your physiology from sympathetic to parasympathetic and brings down your autonomic arousal.

There are respiratory tools as well I’m not going to go into all of them but when we talk about breath when we get stressed and anxious what happens is our breathing changes it becomes quicker shorter, we’re not taking in as much oxygen we’re taking in a lot of carbon dioxide and so another technique that I lay out is this technique called the physiological sigh where basically you take a full deep breath in, you top it off and then you slowly breathe out and what’s happening there is you’re blowing out the carbon dioxide from your system which is de-stressing you which is taking your autonomic arousal down. And so this is taking your autonomic arousal down it’s shifting our physiology and most importantly allowing our brains our frontal lobes to get back online in such a manner that we can start to ask questions about our environment. And of course the first question we want to ask is what do I know? What can I control? What’s a horizon I can focus on? And so there are physiological ways what’s happening there is when we think about uncertainty plus anxiety equals fear the way we buy down anxiety is through those techniques those physiological techniques.

You can buy that down the way we buy down uncertainty is through the process of moving horizons but as you buy down both of them the fear starts to dissipate.

Brett McKay: Gotcha okay so an example of this let’s say you run a business and you have a website that takes orders the website crashes that can I mean that’s happened to me with some of the stuff that I’ve run. It can just stress you the crap out. Especially when you’re having a lot of high traffic and like this is really important that the site be running and I’ve, whenever that happened I just like freak out, oh my gosh. I would have been better first to just do some of those practices maybe open up my gaze do the sighing.

Rich Diviney: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then that calms things down and then I start doing the moving horizon thing.

Rich Diviney: Yeah although I will say I mean the cool thing about this is even choosing in the moment to do like say five physiological sighs that’s a horizon right there. You’ve just picked a horizon you’ve picked something to focus on you do that and you come back out and you say what can you do again. So you can use even these tools even these breathing tools as many horizons. Sometimes the environment’s so intense that your only horizon is I’m gonna take ten breaths that’s what I’m gonna do. And after that I’m gonna see what’s going on. So yeah it’s a great example and all this meshes in a very very meaningful way.

Brett McKay: Okay in the next section of your book so the first section is all about calming yourself down when that fear starts hijacking your limbic system and then figuring out ways to reduce the uncertainty in that specific situation. The second part of your book you talk about identity. And you return to your framework of attributes which you talked about in your first book in this part. How can knowing what your attributes are help you navigate uncertainty in life? Maybe we start like what are attributes for those who haven’t read that first book.

Rich Diviney: Well yeah so this part of the book just described so I say the first part of the book describes those things that are not unique to us as human beings. In other words all of us have this. All of us have the capacity to move horizons and this is how our brain works ubiquitously throughout the human species. The second part of the book focuses on those unique things that we bring into an uncertain situation. This is when we get into those things about us that are different from everybody else. So the first one is attributes and this idea these qualities that we have patience situational awareness, compartmentalization, perseverance, okay. And where we fall on those qualities like we talked about in the last conversation attributes we all have all of the attributes. We have all of these qualities the difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So adaptability for example if I’m about a level six on adaptability which means when the environment changes around the outside of my control it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it. Someone else might be a level three which means the same thing happens to them it’s difficult for them to go with flow and there’s friction there.

They’re still adaptable because all human beings are but if we were to line up these attributes on a wall like dimmer switches all of us would have different dimmer switch settings. And it starts to speak to our own unique performance not only in everyday life but especially during stress challenge and uncertainty. Because in stress challenge uncertainty we are literally running on our attributes. Because all that other stuff you know personality on that stuff goes out the window when the you-know-what hits the fan. So understanding our unique attribute fingerprint or footprint is very valuable in understanding how we’re going to show up in uncertainty. And that’s why it’s so important in this process.

Brett McKay: Gotcha and where can people go to learn like what their attributes are, is there like a website that you have?

Rich Diviney: Yeah. Our website theattributes.com we have it all there. And we have an assessment tool there that you can take and you can figure out where you stand on all 41 attributes and it gives you a readout and gives you some information on how and why you behave the way you do. And so yeah, check it out at theattributes.com.

Brett McKay: Well let’s say you take the thing and you realize, oh man, I suck at adaptability, how should you prepare yourself for times of uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: So first of all, knowledge in this case is power, right? Because if I know I’m low on adaptability, then automatically when the environment starts to change, uncertainty starts to come into the fray. And because the environment’s changing, I immediately can say to myself, oh, wait, this feels bad because I know I’m low on adaptability. And just that conscious thought, by the way, is bringing your frontal lobe back online, or at least keeping your frontal lobe engaged in the process because you’re having a conscious thought. But I would say in those environments, if you know you’re lower on adaptability, you can say, okay, well, when the environment shifts, so say you’re traveling, okay, and you have a couple connections and you’re at the airport and you’re told the flight’s delayed and it’s going to affect your connections down the line. It’s also going to affect the engagement that you were supposed to be at. So you’re not going to get there in time anymore, so on and so forth. Now you are in an environment of uncertainty and it’s because the environment’s changing rapidly. And so the same process applies. You just begin to pick horizons that are meaningful for you.

In the case of low adaptability, just know that it’s going to feel uncomfortable and more stressful and more uncertain because you’re low on it. When I’m traveling, because I do so all the time and the plans start to shift around me, the environment starts to shift around me, I’m pretty high on adaptability. So the difference between me and someone who’s low on it is not that we don’t DPO the situation or shift horizons through that situation. The difference is I just feel less stressed about it. I feel less uncertain about it. So just understand that the attributes we’re a little bit lower on, we’re going to feel more uncertainty, challenge, and stress when those things are exercised due to the environment versus other ones. But the opposite is true. If you’re high on stuff, the attributes you’re high on, when the environment goes uncertainty and the environment requires whatever that attribute is and you happen to be high on it, you’re going to feel less uncertainty and challenge and stress. But that’s one way to look at it is that these uncertain environments that are asking for the attributes we’re lower on, those are likely the ones that are going to cause us more work.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I imagine too, if you’re high in adaptability, if you don’t have enough uncertainty, then you get bored. And that can be a problem too.

Rich Diviney: Yeah. Any of these attributes to their extremes, too high, too low can be bad. Right. But we also understand that any of these attributes, whether you’re high or low is not a bad thing or a good thing. These are completely nonjudgmental. In fact, there are advantages to being high adaptability. There are disadvantages to being high adaptability. And there’s advantages of being low adaptability and disadvantages. So in the normal spectrum of these things, there’s always pros and cons. But at the extremes in any of these attributes, it certainly gets to be a bad thing.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think knowing your attributes can help you design better horizons. So if I’m low on, say, perseverance, that’s one of your attributes. If I’m low on that, I can’t just set long, vague goals. I’ve got to make my horizons shorter, more defined, more frequent, so I don’t run out of gas halfway through. The same thing goes with compartmentalization. That’s another one of those attributes you talk about. So if you struggle with that, you probably struggle to block out noise, stay focused when things get chaotic. So if that’s your problem, then your DPO might need to be even more simple. And so basically, your weaker attributes don’t mean you’re doomed under uncertainty, but they do mean you need to tailor your horizon strategy to how you’re wired. And that just makes the whole system work better. And you also talk about the role that identity plays in motivation and staying the course during times of stress and uncertainty. Talk to us about that.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, identity has always been fascinating to me because it’s always been something on my mind. And it’s because I’ve witnessed and certainly researched and seen examples of people acting in ways that are confusing to them when they look back at it. So take the sports fan who beats the crap out of another sports fan and then is suddenly in front of the judge and like, I don’t know what I was doing. I was out of my mind. They’re confused as to why they even acted that way. And one of the reasons is because our performance, our behavior sits and relies upon the identities that we collect along the way. So we are, as human beings, a collection, a collage of different I ams. They can be everything from benign to very, very important, very powerful. I went to this high school. I am this type of sports player. I am a Navy SEAL. I am a husband, father. I’m a Metallica fan, whatever that is. Okay, we have a collection of these things. And each one of these I ams, each one of these identities comes with it, some conditions, some rules, some behaviors that describe how you act in that identity.

And we align to those. That’s why we chose those identities in the first place. What we have to understand is in uncertainty, challenge, and stress, we are always going to behave towards the identity that we align to, that we prioritize in that moment. And this can be an advantage. It also can be a disadvantage. So the example would be as a Navy SEAL, that’s a very powerful identity. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, that was the priority identity that I was aligning towards, as were my teammates. However, sometimes the target would change, and we’d suddenly have to put on our husband, father hats because maybe we have to deal with some civilians or kids. This is an example where a fluidity in your identities can actually be very beneficial. Now take this sports fan. I mean, say you’re a fan of whatever ex-sports team, and you find yourself in an argument with a fan of another ex-sports team. And if you continue down that track, depending on the sports teams, you and I could probably comment on some that are worse than others, but if you continue that track, you may find yourself in a physical altercation because that identity is driving you. Or you could calm yourself and ask yourself, okay, I’m also a husband and father.

I’m a professional business person, and so getting into a fight in the street right now is probably not good for that identity, and you can shift. So all this to say is understanding that identities really are very powerful in the way they drive behavior, especially during uncertainty, challenge, and stress, to start to get a handle on those identities we carry, and we all carry a lot of them, we really do. Again, some are really important and powerful, some are fairly benign, but there are a lot of them. Get a handle on what they are and begin to use them in a more effective, proactive way, because you can begin to shift into identities that actually more appropriately fit whatever situation. You’ll often find, if you do the diligence, you might find some identities that don’t matter to you anymore. They’re like, oh, actually, I’m not that anymore. I can discard that one. And then we also find ourselves in situations where we’re building new identities. Entrepreneurs do this. I did this coming out of the Navy. The Navy SEAL identity, very powerful, but once I’m not a SEAL, I’m not a SEAL, and so I put that on the shelf, obviously in a position of honor and respect.

However, now I’m going to build a new identity, and that is author, entrepreneur. And that’s another way to actually actualize this stuff, is to have an understanding and move and flow in a positive way towards whatever you’re looking at.

Brett McKay: All right, so we’ve been talking about how to deal with uncertainty as an individual. So the DPO, moving horizons, using those tactics to calm yourself down, knowing how you typically navigate uncertainty by knowing your attributes, having that identity to help you stay grounded and motivated when things get hard. Let’s talk about teams, how to navigate uncertainty as a team. And you introduced this key principle that you got from the SEALs called dynamic subordination. What is that?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, dynamic subordination is simply, if you were to think about how this looks on a chart, it’s not the pyramid task work structure, which we all know, the leader sits on top and barks orders. It’s not the flat line where everybody’s in this together, we don’t know actually who’s in charge. And it’s not even the upside-down pyramid where the leader’s at the bottom in service to everybody, because the burden is not supposed to sit only on one person. And so what it really is is a blob, it’s an amoeba. And the position of leadership in that amoeba can be anywhere at any time. It’s wherever it needs to be in the moment. And so dynamic subordination is an idea that the team understands that challenges and issues and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does, the person who’s closest to the problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead, and everybody follows and supports. And then the environment shifts, and someone else steps up and takes lead. And so this is how all the highest-performing teams operate. Listen, I was an officer in the SEAL teams.

 I went on hundreds of combat missions, and I was in charge of every single one. It did not mean I was always being supported. In fact, most of the time was the opposite. I was supporting other people, whether it was my snipers or breachers or whatever, or assaulters. Sometimes the environment shifted, and they were in support of me. But it was all based on the environment and what was needed in the moment. So it’s a very important concept that tells us that our role on a team has nothing to do with our hierarchy or rank. It has everything to do with what we are there to contribute to the team. And this is how the highest-performing teams operate. And this is the key to operating in uncertainty challenges and stress, because uncertainty by its very nature is we don’t know what’s coming. We don’t know what angle things are coming at. So we need to adjust and focus on whatever we can in the moment, and that might be at any angle.

Brett McKay: And just to be clear, I want to, kind of touch on this, there’s still a leader whenever you have dynamic subordination, correct? Like someone who’s responsible.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I understand the question, but what we have to do is I can’t answer it if I use the colloquial definition that we all think of as leader. A leader is a behavior. Being in charge is a position. There’s two very different and distinct things. And we don’t get to self-designate, by the way. We don’t get to call ourselves leaders. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny, all right? People decide whether or not you are someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. And I remember being in situations in the military at least a couple times where I’d look at a person in a hierarchical position above me, and I would say, I would not follow that person anywhere. Meanwhile, there’d be someone over to my right or left who had no hierarchical position whatsoever. I’d be like, I would follow that person to hell and back. It’s because of the way we behave. And so leadership is defined as someone who others choose to follow based on behavior, which means everybody on a team can be a leader in the moment. Now, if you’re talking about the person who’s in a position of being in charge, who is responsible for the team holistically, now you’re talking about someone whose leadership role should be to create a dynamically subordinating environment.

That’s the whole role of the leader in terms of the person who’s in charge. You need to create that environment because if you don’t, you’re not going to create a team that can in fact deal with uncertainty, challenge, and stress. So yeah, every team is going to have a hierarchical nature to it. That’s the nature of a team. But the role of the person in the highest position of hierarchy is to create a dynamically subordinating team. It’s not to have the big office, big desk, get the big paycheck, and be deferred to on everything. It’s to create a dynamic subordinating team that actually moves fast, moves efficiently. And I always kind of told my junior officers when I was talking to them, you have to get used to what I call the irony of leadership. And that is if you do your job correctly, you eventually work yourself out of a job. You create a team that can run without you and in many cases run faster than you, outrun you. That should be the goal of every true leader because every true leader should aspire to that. You want to make your team so good, so much better that eventually, oh man, they’re so good, I got to withdraw.

They’re moving way too fast than I could ever move. And it’s because of the things I’ve allowed and helped them do.

Brett McKay: So let’s say you’re in a position of authority. How do you develop that environment where dynamic subordination exists? I’m sure there’s a lot to it, but one or two things that people can do.

Rich Diviney: Well, I mean, first of all, you empower an environment of trust. Trust is the foundational element. And trust is all about behaviors as well. You can’t make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to choose to trust you. So as a leader of a team or a hierarchical position, the highest hierarchical position in a team, you must be behaving in ways that promote that environment of trust, making people cared for. You listen to them. You practice empathy. You’re consistent. You’re competent. You tell the truth. You’re accountable. These are all behaviors that will allow for others to look at you and say, ooh, this is someone I trust. By the way, the behaviors that define great leaders are almost synonymous with the behaviors that define trust. So they’re very, very similar. So we have to build that environment by doing, by modeling the behavior we want to see more of and then rewarding the behavior we want to see more of in terms of trust. Now, part of that trust, part of that trust building is that as the person in charge, you need to give opportunities for the people on the team to extend themselves, go outside their comfort zone.

To actually step up and be in charge, to take those positions, even if they might fail because we learn a lot from failure. But when they fail, that’s really important because if you have their back when they fail, they will learn rapidly, they feel that trust and that safety, and they’ll be ready to do it again and do it the right time this time. So we have to, as people in charge, really take responsibility and accountability for creating that environment, both through the way we act, through the way we reward, and through the way we allow our teammates and those in our span of care to really extend themselves and, of course, have their back when they do it.

Brett McKay: Besides developing that trust, another thing you talk about that’s important to have this dynamic subordination take root in a group is really being intentional about the culture in a team. How can a person who’s in a position of authority, not a leader, a person in a position of authority, help develop that kind of culture?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, a culture is kind of, I mean, very close to the identity of a team. Whatever that culture is, is close to the identity of the team. And those things can be intertwined. In other words, what are the behaviors that this team expresses because we’re part of that team? That’s what the culture really is. And so why we have to be very cognizant of this is because culture in any group of people is going to emerge regardless of whether or not the leader has anything to say about it or not. Whether you’re deliberate about it or whether you’re not deliberate about it, some sort of culture, some sort of identity will emerge. And if we are not deliberate about it, then we might not like what we see that emerges. And so the challenge is to be deliberate about the culture, be deliberate about whatever identity you’re creating for that team. Include the team in that process, of course, because it’s not just you as the person in charge. But what are those things that define us as a team from an identity standpoint and a culture standpoint? The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts do this well.

The Marines do this well. The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have a creed, and their creed is really just a list of rules that define their behavior. That’s what it is. That’s the culture. And you talk to any Girl Scout around the world, they are all aligned on that very same rule list of things, that culture. So we can do the same thing in organizations. We just have to be deliberate about it. But rest assured, if you’re not deliberate about it, it’s going to emerge whether you like it or not, and you may not like it.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about once you establish that culture, you have to start being picky about who you let in to the group to make sure that they match up with the culture.

Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, and this is a lot of the work we do with organizations and teams around attributes. Every culture, every identity is going to have a set of attributes that are prioritized. And I say set, it’s probably one or two or three top things that are prioritized. And so what we have to do as people who are bringing new folks onto a team is make sure that the people we’re bringing on are aligned with that from an attribute sense and from a value sense, from an identity sense, all those things, so that they come in and they’re like, okay, this person actually fits, they’re a culture fit. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what the culture is. So you got to start there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think in times of uncertainty, it really does help to know what you’re about. Well, Rich, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, the best place is theattributes.com, like I said. So it’s theattributes.com. So there’s a the in front of the attributes. And there you can find both books. You can find the assessment tool, you can find everything we do for businesses and organizations and teams, kind of a one-stop shop. And of course, the books are also, you can find them on Amazon as well. And I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn under Rich Diviney, but theattributes.com is the best place.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Rich Diviney, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Rich Diviney: Thank you, brother. Great to be back.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Rich Diviney. He’s the author of the book, Masters of Uncertainty. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, theattributes.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Figuring out the pitfalls and best practices of adulthood can be tricky. It’s helpful to have some pearls of wisdom to guide you along the way.

My guest today has spent decades collecting these kinds of helpful truths and has crafted her own guiding mantras of maturity.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Happiness Project, and her latest, Secrets of Adulthood. Today on the show, Gretchen shares how she came to write hundreds of aphorisms on how to navigate life, and we dig into some of my favorites of these concise, sage sayings. Amongst many topics, we discuss why “happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy,” the best strategy for changing ourselves, a very useful heuristic for making decisions, why you should wear a favorite sweater more often, and even why big top tables at restaurants are one of my pet peeves.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Gretchen’s books
• Gretchen’s “What’s the next new habit that will make you happier?” quiz
• AoM Article: The Self-Deception Destroying Maxims of Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• AoM Article: Nietzsche’s 66 Best Aphorisms
• AoM Article: Just Go to Sleep
• Sunday Firesides: Life Is for Living

Connect With Gretchen Rubin

• Gretchen’s website
• Gretchen on IG
• Gretchen on FB
• Gretchen on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Figuring out the pitfalls and best practices of adulthood can be tricky. It’s helpful to have some pearls of wisdom to guide you along the way. My guest today has spent decades collecting these kinds of helpful truths and has crafted her own guiding mantras of maturity. Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Happiness Project and her latest, Secrets of Adulthood. Today on the show, Gretchen shares how she came to write hundreds of aphorisms on how to navigate life, and we dig into some of my favorites of these concise, sage sayings. Amongst many topics, we discuss why happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy, the best strategy for changing ourselves, a very useful heuristic for making decisions, why you should wear a favorite sweater more often, and even why big top tables at restaurants are one of my pet peeves. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/secretsofadulthood.

 Gretchen Rubin, welcome to the show.

Gretchen Rubin: I’m so happy to be talking to you.

Brett McKay: No, likewise. So we were talking before we got on, we go way back.

Gretchen Rubin: We go way back.

Brett McKay: Way back. So both you and I started off as bloggers. We still blog. Do they still call it blogging?

Gretchen Rubin: I call it my site. I’m posting on my site.

Brett McKay: That’s what I say, because I feel kind of silly when I say I’m a blogger.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, that feels very retro.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you have The Happiness Project. That was what you started off with, got the art of manliness. We were part of this community of other self-development writers back in 2008. So yeah, you’ve been writing about personal development for almost, it’s been almost 20 years now or over 20 years. As you look back on your career, what would you say is the connecting thread through everything you’ve written and put out there?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, if I had to say what my subject is, I would say my subject is human nature. And in fact, before I started writing about sort of happiness and good habits, I wrote a book called Power Money Fame Sex, A User’s Guide, which is my first book. Then I wrote kind of a short unconventional biography of Winston Churchill and one of John F. Kennedy. And to me, I think to a lot of people, those books seem very different from the books that I’ve written sort of in the last while. But to me, they’re all about human nature. So you learn about human nature by studying Winston Churchill because he’s just this gigantic figure. So I think that is my subject. Like, who are we? How do we understand ourselves better? How do we change if we want to change? How do we understand other people?

Brett McKay: And then, yeah, you started The Happiness Project, started off as a blog, turned into books. It’s kind of become this media empire. And there you’re just trying to explore, it seems like, what does it mean to live a flourishing human life?

Gretchen Rubin: Exactly. Like, can you make yourself happier? And if so, how? That’s my question, yes.

Brett McKay: When you say happiness, how do you define happiness?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, I started out my career in law, as did you, Brett. And maybe you also have happy memories of spending an entire semester arguing about the definition of contract. And happiness is an even more elusive concept to define. There are something like 15 or 17 academic definitions of happiness. And I think that for the layperson, it’s just, it can be whatever you want. Joy, peace, bliss, satisfaction, well-being, whatever you conceive of as being happiness for you. Because I think that it’s more useful to think about being happier. Whatever that means for you, what can you do with your conscious thoughts and actions starting tomorrow, without a lot of time, energy, or money to move yourself in the right direction? So next week, next month, next year, can we make our lives happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? And I think that’s much clearer to understand. Like, is this going to make me happier? It’s much easier to answer for the average person than like, can I achieve happiness? Because when I think about that, I’m like, what does that even mean? It feels so abstract that it’s hard to grasp even what that would look like.

Brett McKay: Well, something you’ve done recently, you come out with a new book called Secrets of Adulthood, where you’ve put together a collection of aphorisms that you’ve developed to help people make sense of this topsy-turvy, complex world we live in. And at the beginning of the book, Secrets of Adulthood, you talk about your lifelong love of aphorisms. You’ve been collecting them since you were eight years old. What draws you to the aphoristic style?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, first, let me say what an aphorism is, because I think a lot of people don’t know. That’s why I didn’t use the word aphorism in the title or subtitle of the book. So an aphorism is a short, usually a sentence or two, insight observation about human nature that’s meant to be sort of a general observation. And it’s attributed to a particular person. Maybe it’s Mark Twain, maybe it’s Oscar Wilde, maybe it’s Warren Buffett, maybe it’s Montaigne. And then that way it’s different from a proverb. So a proverb is folk wisdom. These are ideas, you know, reminders, things that have been kicking around for centuries. Like you can’t push a rope or sailors fear fire more than water or you’re only as happy as your least happy child. These are pieces of folk wisdom. But an aphorism, we know who said it. And I’m very drawn to aphorisms because, well, first of all, they’re short. And I love, I think there’s so much power in keeping things brief and really having to crystallize ideas to distill them down into like just a sentence or two. That’s very creatively challenging. And it’s also intellectually challenging because to write that way, you really have to be able to think that way. And that’s hard.

 And then I think that they’re just, they have more power in the mind because we can grasp them. So for the last while, I have been really pushing myself when I have a big idea to see if I can express it in an aphorism.

Brett McKay: Are there any famous historical aphorists that you like?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, I do love Oscar Wilde. If you read something like The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it’s like reading Hamlet. You recognize so many lines because so many of them are so famous. One of my hopes with writing this book is to bring back into the spotlight one of my favorite aphorists who is a 19th century Austrian aphorist named Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach, who’s amazing. Like one of my favorites of hers is, you can fall so fast, you think you’re flying. Which I’m like, whoa, that’s powerful. And then there are people who, like I mentioned Warren Buffett. He can invest and he can also really write. There are many really funny, thoughtful aphorisms in his letters to shareholders. So I’m looking for them all the time. And so those are some of my favorites. Oh, Andy Warhol. I don’t even really like his art, but he said these extremely unpredictable, thoughtful aphorisms that just keep your mind warm.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, he’s come up with like, you know, everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, exactly. He’s extremely famous for that. And then he has like, my favorite kind of atmosphere today is the airport atmosphere. And I’m like, I know exactly what you mean by that. Or I can’t remember how he said it exactly, but he said something like the most old fashioned thing that people do is get pregnant. And I completely understand that. It does feel so old fashioned to like actually get pregnant. I’m also like volcanoes. Haven’t we all kind of outgrown volcanoes? That seems like kind of an ancient Rome thing. Are they still happening? Every time there’s a volcano, I’m like, huh, I thought these things were sort of out of date. I don’t know. But again, it’s like, what do I even mean by that? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. But Andy Warhol helps me have these odd thoughts. So that’s one of the reasons that I love his writing so much.

Brett McKay: Yeah, a few aphorists that I enjoy. Nietzsche, he had some killer aphorisms. I think his writing style, his best writing style is his aphorisms. I also like Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the French author.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, he’s great. He’s amazing.

Brett McKay: He’s kind of like cynical, which is interesting.

Gretchen Rubin: The aphorism is a very judgmental form. When you’re writing them, you find that you… I see why he is so cynical. It’s a form that invites you to write that way. Okay, so what are some of your favorites?

Brett McKay: Well, here’s some I brought up. We did an article highlighting some of his maxims. Here’s one. Fortunate people rarely correct their faults. They always think they are right while fortune is favoring their evil conduct.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, is that so true?

Brett McKay: That’s true. That happens.

Gretchen Rubin: It’s so true. Yes.

Brett McKay: Another one. This one’s really cynical. No one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad. Every other form of kindness must often merely be laziness or lack of willpower.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, that is cynical.

Brett McKay: It is, but I kind of think there’s some truth to it. I mean, for being good to mean anything, you have to have the capability to do otherwise.

Gretchen Rubin: Wait, if you give me a second, I can read some of my favorites, hang on, from my collection of his, hang on, let’s see. Those who apply themselves too much to small things ordinarily become incapable of great ones. Well, here is one that I really think is true. However dazzling an action may be, it should not pass for great when it is not the result of a great design. And I think that’s very true. Like sometimes people do things accidentally. You don’t really get credit for that because you didn’t do it on purpose.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that reminds me of Machiavelli, where he talks about the difference between virtue and fortune. So sometimes we confuse the two.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes.

Brett McKay: Another aphorist that I like, G.K. Chesterton is another one.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I love Chesterton. I’m so glad you mentioned him because I feel like he’s kind of fallen out of the spotlight. And I love the writing of G.K. Chesterton.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he does this thing where he kind of inverts the sentence.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes.

Brett McKay: And so he comes up with these little witty sayings about life. So in this book, Secrets of Adulthood, you developed your own aphorisms. Did you find that challenging? And if so, what was hard about it?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, it is very challenging because first you have to have a thought. And I don’t know about you, but I find it very hard to have thoughts. And then you have to really distill the thought into a succinct form and to aim for elegance. Because, you know, we’re talking about La Rochefoucauld, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde. You know, they express their ideas very beautifully. There’s, as you say, there’s often inversion. There’s often paradox. Often with an aphorism, there are things to kind of increase the writerly elegance of them. So that’s very challenging. So I have been working on these for years. Certainly I’ve been collecting them forever from other people. And then I started writing them myself and collecting them myself. And, you know, this is not the kind of book that I could have sat down and written in like, you know, just like done it. Because they had to come to me in moments. And some of them arise out of my previous books, like The Happiness Project or Better Than Before. Like the aphorism, The Secret of Adulthood, Habits Are the Invisible Architecture of Everyday Life. That was something that I wrote for my book Better Than Before.

 That was an idea that I had when I was thinking about how we make and break habits. But a lot of these are things that I’ve just noticed along the way and been gathering up for a really, really long time.

Brett McKay: So as you were putting together the book Secrets of Adulthood, how did you figure out which ones made it?

Gretchen Rubin: So I had this giant trove that I’d been working on for years, but I decided I wanted them to be Secrets of Adulthood, meaning there was something in them that could be useful as you were facing a challenge of life. So maybe you were facing procrastination or you were finding it hard to make a decision or you were perplexed by a relationship or you were trying to know yourself better. All of them are aimed to help give insight into something that is a challenge of adulthood. Because many of the aphorisms that I wrote were just observations, like a dog doesn’t gaze at a waterfall. I think that’s interesting. It’s true. Or the tulip is an empty flower. I believe that. The tulip is an empty flower. What is up with that? But those are mere observations. And then I had a lot of bleak aphorisms. As we were saying, the form kind of pushes you in a dark direction. And I had a lot that were very dark. And I thought, oh, you know, nobody wants my dark aphorisms. Let me distill this into the Secrets of Adulthood.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, maybe you should release the dark ones as a secret item somehow.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, you know what’s funny? Gretchen Rubin after dark. What’s funny is on my book tour, a lot of times it would come up that I had written those. Everybody said, I want to read your dark aphorisms. And I think that’s the negativity bias, right? People are always interested in the dark things or the negative things. And so I should figure out what to do with them. Because I worked on them just as hard as I worked on the ones that ended up in Secrets of Adulthood. Brett, I am sure you know the feeling. It’s so painful to leave anything on the cutting room floor.

Brett McKay: It is.

Gretchen Rubin: It’s always very exciting if you think, oh, maybe there’s a way I can use this stuff after all.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig into some of your secrets of adulthood. I really enjoyed reading through your aphorisms, and I’ve kind of picked out some that I like, and let’s just riff on them. I’ll talk about them, and let’s just riff on it together. So the one that really stuck out to me is one of the very first ones. Happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, because I think when I was first writing The Happiness Project, I was really struggling to understand, like, how do you even think about happiness? What’s a framework for even contemplating it? And I realized that if you’re thinking about how to make our lives happier, we want to think about feeling good, feeling bad, feeling right, and an atmosphere of growth. So feeling good is enthusiasm, love, friendship, energy, all the things that we want to have more of. And then there’s feeling bad. So that’s things like anger, resentment, guilt, boredom. Those are things that make us feel bad. We want less of those. Then we also want to feel right, which means we want our life to reflect our values. We want to put our values into the world, and we want to demonstrate our values through our actions. And then also we want the atmosphere of growth. And so the atmosphere of growth is when we’re growing, learning, teaching, fixing, solving, where we feel like we’re growing or we’re contributing to the growth of others or to the growth of the world. And the fact is, sometimes when we do things to help us live up to our values or to cultivate an atmosphere of growth, we don’t feel very happy.

 Like an atmosphere of growth, when you’re learning to do something, often you feel insecure or frustrated, even angry. When you’re feeling right about living up to your values, often you might be doing something that you don’t enjoy. Like I remember a friend telling me how he went to go visit his very, very difficult father in the hospital, and his two brothers refused to go. They wouldn’t see their father. But he said, I really don’t like to go. I dread going. And we’ve never gotten along, and he was a terrible father, but he’s still my father. And so I feel like I have to go. And I’m like, well, yeah, it made you feel bad, but you feel right because you’re like, I’m living my values, which is we’re still father-son, and I feel like I need to do this. And so happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that, I love Aristotle. So immediately I thought of Aristotle.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, talk about aphorism. Yeah, got a million of those.

Brett McKay: But he talked about his idea of happiness, the way it was defined was flourishing or eudaimonia. And it meant just living a good life all around. And it didn’t necessarily mean feeling good. It wasn’t hedonism. And even Epicurus, he makes that argument that sometimes in order to live a pleasurable life, you have to do unpleasurable things in the short term.

Yeah, exactly right. There’s some things that don’t feel good in the short term, but if you do them, it’s going to lead to something bigger, and it’s going to make you feel good in the long run. Kind of related to this, another one of your aphorisms, there is no right way to create a happier life, just as there’s no best way to cook an egg.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, this came from an experience that I have often, which is because I write about happiness, people are always like, okay, what should I do to be happier? What’s the secret to happiness? And I always say, well, you know, it depends on you. It depends on your nature, your challenges, your interests, your values. There’s no one best way because we’re all different. And then they say to me, okay, well, which is like, what’s the best way? And so now, and I can never think of a satisfying answer. And so now I say, well, what’s the best way to cook an egg? And they say, well, there is no best way. It depends on how you like your eggs. And some people say like, I don’t even like eggs. And I’m like, that’s right. There is no best way to cook an egg, just like there’s no best way to make your life happier because it depends on each of us what we want.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea of like the secret to life, everyone’s just looking for it, reminds me of, you ever see City Slickers?

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, Curly, you know, the guide on the ranch trip.

Gretchen Rubin: I’m not sure I ever actually saw it. Is this the one with Billy?

Brett McKay: With Billy Crystal?

Gretchen Rubin: Crystal?

Brett McKay: Yeah, he has like a midlife crisis and decides for his 40th birthday.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. I don’t think I actually ever saw it.

Brett McKay: Okay, well, it’s a great, I would recommend it. It’s a fun baby boomer movie about midlife that was made in the 90s.

Gretchen Rubin: You have me. Okay. I’m convinced.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But, you know, Curly is just like hardened trail hand who’s taking these guys on this dude ranch trip. And he said, the secret of life is just one thing. And he never says what that one thing is.

Gretchen Rubin: That’s funny.

Brett McKay: Because the answer is, well, it’s the one thing to you. You got to figure that out.

Gretchen Rubin: Right, right. Well, it’s funny because since so many people are like, but what is the habit I should work on the most? I actually did create a quiz that will tell the individual because I can’t like meet you and just from that tell you the right thing but this quiz which is just on my site will tell each individual like what right now is the thing that would move the needle the most on your happiness based on your answers. And of course it might be different in a month, but it is kind of uncanny how often people are like, oh yeah, you know, that is really where I feel like I need to do the most work. So there are definitely individual answers, but there’s no one size fits all answer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and related to that is the idea that what makes you happy is gonna change throughout your life.

Gretchen Rubin: Absolutely, absolutely.

Brett McKay: That’s something I’ve learned. Like what worked for me when I was in my 20s does not work for me in my 40s.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, and related to that is something called hedonic forecasting, which is the ability to predict what will make you happier in the future. And turns out we humans are really, really bad at this. We are not good at thinking, okay, what is the happiness consequence of this decision? And so that’s one thing, if you’re working on your happiness is to try to improve your hedonic forecasting because we tend not to be very good at it.

Brett McKay: All right, here’s another one that stood out to me because I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Accept yourself and expect more from yourself.

Gretchen Rubin: Okay, this is a good example of something that took me months and months and months to wrap my mind around, because I got caught in like, well, it’s really important to accept ourselves and to show ourselves self-compassion and not to like be unrealistic and set ourselves up for other people’s expectations. But then I would also think, but we also have to try to get ourselves out of our comfort zone. And we do need the atmosphere of growth. And we don’t want to be complacent. And we don’t want to fall short of our potential. And then finally, I thought, well, both are true. And then I was like, okay, I could write about that for pages. But is there a way to distill those two truths that are in tension to distill that into a single sentence? And so saying, accept yourself and also expect more from yourself, that took me months and months and months, really, to write.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I’m spending like my entire life trying to figure out, am I accepting myself and expecting, like, am I being content, but not being complacent?

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: And sometimes I have to ask myself, you know, when I think I’m being content, well, actually, am I just being complacent?

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, it’s the great challenge of our lives, I think, is to recognize. And people are always like, okay, but then how can you tell? And I’m like, that is what’s hard about adulthood. There’s no magic answer to tell you, is this something where you should accept yourself and just say like, hey, that’s not my thing, and spend your time doing things that are more in line with your true nature? Or are you like, no, this is something that’s reasonable for me to expect for myself. I can do this. I can expect this for myself. I want to push myself, even if it doesn’t feel good.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about change. You write a lot about change. We want to expect more for ourselves and get better. One of your aphorisms is, it’s easier to change our surroundings and our schedules than to change ourselves.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Oh, my gosh. I so firmly believe this because people will often, and I saw this when I was writing Better Than Before, when I was really focusing on habits, is people will be like, well, I want to be a completely different kind of person. And I’m like, I don’t know if that’s possible, but if it is possible, it’s very hard. And then I’m like, but you could just change your schedule. You could just change your surroundings. You could work on the things around you and your conscious thoughts and actions. And that’s much easier. I remember I was doing an interview with a reporter in front of an audience, and there was this, to me, very poignant moment where she said, I want to be the kind of person who loves to get up and go for a five-mile run every day. And I was like, I don’t think you ever will be that kind of person. Like, I don’t want to be discouraging, but knowing you as I know you, I don’t think that’s who you are. I don’t think that’s how you’re wired. And in some ways, we just have to say to ourselves, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

 And like, I’m me. I’m like, but if what you want is you want to be fit, if what you want is to have a healthy body, if what you want is to be consistent in your promises to yourself to do something that’s going to be really good for your life and your mood and your immune function and your memory, that you can work on. You can put it in the schedule. You can set yourself up for success to keep that habit. But saying like, well, I want to be a different kind of person so that this behavior will come easily, that’s not a good way to succeed. You have to say, given who I am, what can I do to get where I want to go? Instead of, can I transform myself into an utterly different kind of person and therefore live a different life?

Brett McKay: No, I totally agree. I see it in my own life. So going back to Aristotle, if you want to be fit, you have to do fit things or put yourself in a fit environment will get you, help you out a lot.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, exactly. Excellence is a habit. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Speaking of change, another one you talk about is changing other people. Because in adulthood, you’re going to deal with just so many frustrating, frustrating people.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes.

Brett McKay: And we’re just like, why can’t you just be like this? But you have an aphorism for that. It’s, we can’t make people change, but when we change, our relationships change, and so others may also change.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. What got me thinking about this was when my daughters were very young, I’m an irritable person. I’m a cranky person. I’m a carping person. I’m a high-strung person. I’m a rigid person. Like, that’s who I am, right? And if you have little kids, that’s a hard way to be because they are disorderly and messy and throw your schedule off. And I was just a more irritable kind of parent than I wanted to be. And I would get frustrated and kind of crabby, and they would get frustrated and crabby, and then it was just, it all went downhill. But then when I was like, okay, I’m going to get up earlier, so I have a bigger margin in the morning, so I can get up in just sort of like my own quiet way, get dressed and get organized and have my cup of coffee. Thoreau said, I love a broad margin to my life. I’m a person who needs a broad margin. I’m going to build in more margins so that I don’t feel rushed or pressed for time, and so I’m not hustling them along. We have plenty of time. When I started doing all these things to make my…

 And then just working on staying patient, staying good-humored, seeing the funny side, and not constantly depressing. When I relaxed, they relaxed. When I had a warmer, more tender attitude, they also became calmer and more cheerful. And so I didn’t do anything to change them. I only changed myself. But because I changed, they responded. And so then the atmosphere of our household changed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This reminded me when I read that aphorism of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Are you familiar with Bowen Family Systems Theory?

Gretchen Rubin: A little bit. I mean, I know that it’s, yeah, but in what respect?

Brett McKay: Yeah, so there’s this idea, this thing developed by this guy named Murray Bowen back in the 50s, 60s, and his idea was that, you know, we carry over our relationship dynamics that we developed when we were kids in our family of origin to other relationships. And one of his big ideas is there’s often a lot of what he calls anxiety in a relationship. I mean, anxiety isn’t like nervousness. It’s just kind of like stress. Everyone’s just kind of freaking out about stuff. And he says in order to change that dynamic, one person in that relationship, they have to be differentiated. So they have to not catch the anxiety of the other person. He says you have to be a calm, non-anxious presence. And then his idea is that, well, if you change, if one person changes themselves in the system, then the system becomes more calm.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes. That’s interesting. I think that’s 100% true. In my own family growing up, my father is just this very calm, unflappable, cheerful, enthusiastic person. Like whatever you want to do, that’s great. And I realized much later in life how much I had taken that for granted and how much his attitude really did act as a buffer for other people’s agitation or, you know, that he could kind of absorb it and then let everybody kind of calm down or reach equilibrium. And it’s only, you know, with much greater maturity that I was like, that’s a lot of work. I always thought that’s just his nature. And I’m like, that’s not easy for anyone. Like that is a way that he is choosing to be. And I realized how valuable it was and probably how much energy it took to be always that person in the system who was able to be like, let’s just chill out a little bit here. Like, let’s have a sense of humor about it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. I’m like you, I’m very high strung. Not super high strung, but I’m cranky. I mean, that’s why we went to law, possibly.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, cranky. Yeah, it’s good for cranky people. Yes.

Brett McKay: It’s good for cranky people.

Gretchen Rubin: It’s a cranky profession, yes.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One of the hardest things, or can be really hard about being an adult, is being a parent. Super complex. Actually, I’ve noticed this. Maybe people talk about how being a parent is hard, like when they have babies, little kids. I actually didn’t think being a parent of babies or little kids was that hard. It was just because you have to make sure they’re fed and safe, and it’s fun, and sometimes it’s tiring. I’m finding it’s getting harder and harder to be a parent as my kids have gotten older, because their problems have gotten bigger and more complex.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, they say little children, little problems. Big kids, big problems. Yeah, that’s a folk proverb. Well, I think when they’re young, it’s physically demanding. And when they’re older, it’s more emotionally and intellectually demanding.

Brett McKay: Yes. So you’ve got some aphorisms about being a parent. And one of them is, I really resonated with this, we can’t change our children’s natures by nagging them or signing them up for classes.

Gretchen Rubin: Right. I mean, it’s just, again, it’s like you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Like, of course, we can help people reach their potential, and we can help them accept themselves and also expect more from themselves. But in the end, you’re not going to change people’s natures. You know, with a lot of these aphorisms, there was kind of an origin story, or there was something that happened to me or something that I read, which really caught my attention and sort of had me thinking and turning it over in my head, like a dog with a bone trying to understand it. And in this very funny encounter with somebody that I hardly knew, she was the mother of somebody who had a son that was my daughter’s age. And she was talking about how he had gotten all this money for his birthday. And he was young, like a young teenager. And he wanted to start one of these, I don’t even really know what it is. It’s some kind of account where you can put your money in and you do kind of pretend investing. It’s the kind of thing that if you were the kind of kid that wanted to grow up and become a finance person or investor, you’d be very interested in.

 Like, he wanted to learn about the stock market and he wanted to place his bets and everything. And she was like, you know, though, I just think, wouldn’t he be better off spending that time doing something like learning ceramics? And I was like, let me stop you right here. I think you would like to learn ceramics. I think you should let your kid do what he wants. That’s a totally reasonable thing for a child to want to do. He’s not actually risking his money. He’s interested in a subject that’s, you know. So why would you say like, oh, no, I mean, it would be the rare child who would like to do both of those equally. And I think that that’s just what sounded fun to her.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As my kids have gotten older, I’ve noticed this more and more, is that they have their own personality.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, they do.

Brett McKay: And no matter how much I nag them about something like, hey, it doesn’t do anything. So it’s just trying to figure out, like, what can I do to harness that in a more positive direction is what I’m trying to do.

Gretchen Rubin: But I also think that there’s a difference. And I think about this a lot because I think it’s one of the big challenges of parenting, which is there’s helping people do something that they want to do, but they’re dreading doing either because it’s so much work or there’s so many steps to it or there’s something about it that just makes them really uncomfortable. So like, I live in New York City and neither of my daughters who are like 26 and 20, neither of them have a driver’s license because it’s so hard. They have to learn how to drive and it’s hard to practice because we live in New York City. And then it’s really hard just like to take the test. And one of my daughters failed the test. So then she has to take it again. And then it’s just, there’s so much paperwork. There’s so many steps. It’s so awful. So I am kind of badgering them about that because I know in the end, this is something that they want. They both know how to drive. It’s just like a lot of steps. But that’s different from saying, oh, I think you should.

 I’m going to badger you to take up scuba diving, even though you have no interest in it, just because I think it’s something that would be cool for you to do or something. Or what’s really hard, I think, is when, because the parent loves something, they want the child to love it too. And they become angry when the child doesn’t love it. Like everybody in our family loves University of Nebraska football. We’re all Cornhuskers. You should love University of Nebraska football too. And if you don’t love it, then there’s something wrong with you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you can’t do that.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, you know, you can try to expose them. You can try to get them people interested. But at a certain point, it’s like people have their own. I mean, I don’t like the Olympics. And I can’t tell you how many people are constantly trying to convince me to like the Olympics. And I’m like, I’m just here to tell you, I’m not interested in the Olympics.

Brett McKay: Not doing it.

Gretchen Rubin: You know?

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think as a parent, what you can do is you can kind of think of yourself as a gardener instead of a carpenter.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, that’s the Alison Gopnik book.

Brett McKay: So you’re a gardener. You kind of create an environment where they can flourish because they come with these seeds of personality and talent and potential already embedded inside. And you can’t just reconstruct them and build them differently. All you can do is create an environment that nurtures those seeds. And then you see where it goes because it’s up to them after that.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Brett McKay: So here’s another favorite one of mine. My wife liked this one a lot, too, because she’s been talking about this for a long time. But I love how you really put this in a succinct aphorism. Before declaring that something is superficial, unhealthy, inefficient, dangerous, disgusting, or immoral, we should consider, maybe this just doesn’t suit my taste.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, so in my collection of aphorisms, I have a giant list of things that in previous times in cultures, people considered inefficient, dangerous, immoral. And it’s just bananas what people will take into their mind to oppose. I mean, when postcards were introduced, people were violently opposed to postcards. You know, it’s like, maybe you just don’t like postcards. You don’t have to decide that they’re immoral. And I remind myself of that when I’m thinking like, oh, it’s terrible that people are doing X, Y, Z. I’m like, well, maybe it’s just because I don’t like to do X, Y, Z, so I don’t understand why somebody else would like it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, as a person who’s been putting out articles and podcasts for almost 20 years, you’ve probably experienced this too. There’s people who are going to like criticize you. And the way they frame their criticisms like, you know, this is wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then you’ll have people who say, I love what you’re doing. This is great. I think it’s the greatest thing in the world. And so this aphorism reminds me of that. And it reminded my wife of a story from Ben and Jerry’s, the ice cream example. And one of the guys, Ben or Jerry, was doing an interview and he talked about how they would get letters from people saying, your chunks are too big and this is why the ice cream is bad and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s awful. I’m not going to buy your ice cream anymore because your chunks too big. But then they’d also get letters saying, oh, I just love how big your chunks are. It’s one of my favorite things about your ice cream. Keep doing that. In fact, I want them bigger. And Ben or Jerry says, I wish I could just somehow swap the letters so that the people who were complaining about the big chunks would get the letters from the people who love the big chunks and then vice versa. So people could see like, oh, you know, it’s just taste. There’s nothing wrong with the ice cream. It’s just that your taste doesn’t suit it. And that’s fine.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. Well, in terms of creativity, to your point, I always remind myself that a strong voice repels as well as attracts. And that if you’re so innocuous that nobody objects to you, you’re probably catching nobody’s interest either because you’re right. Everything, somebody doesn’t like something. One of the funniest tourist slogans, my whole family grew up in North Platte, Nebraska. So I have a real fondness for Nebraska. And their tourist slogan for a period was, honestly, it’s not for everyone. And I think that’s so funny because it’s like, we love Nebraska, you know, but honestly, it’s not for everyone. And right. And so you can just say like, that’s just not my taste. You don’t have to say like, oh, there’s something wrong with that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Objectively wrong.

Gretchen Rubin: The chunks are too big. The chunks are too small. It’s like, I like a chunkier ice cream.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s so true. Another one that I liked, by trying to save things for a special occasion, we may squander them. Spices go stale, white shirts turn yellow, wine turns to vinegar.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. No, I mean, I have kind of a hoarding nature. I will save things like I’ll buy a new shirt and I’ll save it or I will get new stationery and I will save it. And I have to remind my, it’s one of my 10 personal commandments is to spend out, meaning like put things into use, like use things up. Because by saving them, you’re often wasting them.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so true. Life is for living, money is for spending. Use the good dishes, the good china, don’t save, don’t wait for it.

Gretchen Rubin: Use the good China. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so yeah, that’s a good lesson for adulthood to make it more enjoyable.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, I had a pair of pants once that I loved so much that I saved them and wore them very sparingly because I wanted to like keep them in really good shape. But then, you know, fashions change. And then all of a sudden I’m like, they’re not great pants anymore. I could have worn them like 10 times more than I did, but I felt like I had to hold them back. But I feel this way creatively. I don’t know if you ever have this where you’re like, I can’t put out all my good ideas. Like if I put in all my good ideas, maybe I’ll run out of ideas. Maybe I need to hold an idea back. My sister, Elizabeth, who’s the co-host of the Happier podcast with me, she’s a television writer. And she said, they always remind themselves, put every good idea in the pilot, put in every good idea that you possibly can. Don’t say like, oh, we’ll put this in episode four, because you may never get to episode four. Use everything up right away and then trust that there will be more. So I think it’s true for the good dishes. It’s literally true, but it’s also true creatively, which is the more that we create, the more we will create.

Brett McKay: All right, here’s another one that I liked. It’s about doing well in life, making a change in the world, an impact on the world. To respect us, people must first notice us. We can’t earn trust and admiration from the sidelines.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, I mean, maybe that’s a little bit of a dark aphorism. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes people are like, oh, I’m silently working away and nobody notices me. Why am I not getting a promotion? It’s like, I think you’ve answered your own question.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’m sure you’ve noticed that as with your career putting out content, you can put out really great stuff, but if you’re not actually promoting it, no one’s gonna know how great the stuff is that you’re putting out.

Gretchen Rubin: I know, I know. I remind people of that all the time because they’re like, well, I don’t like to do that work. I’m like, well, that is part of the work. That isn’t like icing on the cake. If you wanna reach people through your work, you have to do what needs to be done to reach them.

Brett McKay: You gotta hustle. I think Ernest Hemingway is a good example of that. Like he really dedicated to his craft of writing, but the guy knew how to do self-promotion.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh my gosh.

Brett McKay: He created a myth around him.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, and that is, if you read biography of great artists, you usually see that they are tremendously self-promotional. You know, it’s not an accident that they are in the spotlight.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, there was a biography I read about Emerson. You know, we think of Emerson as this kind of sage that he was kind of above self-promotion, but that guy hustled. He was constantly promoting himself, getting himself out on the Lyceum circuit, speaking because he wanted to make a name for himself. And Thoreau, he wasn’t comfortable with that, and he didn’t have the success in his lifetime that he wanted. He actually kind of felt bad about it. I think he felt kind of bad that he didn’t have the admiration that he thought he deserved. Because he was a great writer, he had these great insights, but he just didn’t want to promote himself. And Emerson would get on to him, he was like, you need to get out there, man. But Thoreau was like, I just don’t want to do it. And Thoreau had to die, and then maybe 100 years later, he became famous.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, you know, it’s interesting. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Transcendentalists. So you’re inspiring me to dig up some book and read about them. Because I know a little bit about them, and I certainly admire their writing, but I don’t really know that much about their relationships. And that sounds really interesting.

Brett McKay: Oh, they’re interesting characters. There’s just a lot of bickering between them and sort of envy and comparison going on.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, didn’t Thoreau live with Emerson for a while?

Brett McKay: Yeah, Thoreau was his kid’s babysitter, basically, and handyman. And they were like best friends, but then they would have these falling outs. They’re really interesting characters to read about.

Gretchen Rubin: Okay, you’ve inspired me. I want to, I mean, as an aphorist, you would think I would have spent a lot of time studying the Transcendentalists because those characters are writing aphorisms left and right. And I love their writing, but I have always wanted to know more about their relationships. Okay, you’ve inspired me.

Brett McKay: All right, so another one I liked kind of hit home to me at this point in my life. It is, do you need more time or do you need to make a decision?

Gretchen Rubin: I remind myself of this all the time because the way that I postpone the difficult work of decision-making is sort of saying like, oh, I need to consult someone about that, or I need to talk to my husband about that, or I need to do more research about that. And it’s like, no, you don’t. You just need to make a decision. It’s just a form of procrastination.

Brett McKay: Yeah, usually you already know the answer.

Gretchen Rubin: Or you don’t know the answer, but you know you need to just decide.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. At that point, you probably just flip a coin. You have to do something.

Gretchen Rubin: You have to do something.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, another one that I liked. Oh, yeah, this was, I really like this one. This is about if you have a decision to make and you don’t know what to do, you have a heuristic and aphorism for it. When uncertain about how to proceed, make the choice that allows you to choose the bigger life.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, this is extremely helpful. I would say of all my secrets of adulthood, this is one of the ones that people most often will say to me has been useful to them. I can’t even remember where I wrote about it first. Maybe in Better Than Before? Anyway, and I’ll give an example from my life where my daughters were begging for a dog and my husband was like, okay, I’d get a dog. He grew up with cats, but he was open to it. But to me, it was a perfect balance because on the one hand, I knew all the happiness research about a dog and how much dogs bring happiness and actually even good health. I knew I had a dog growing up and I love my dog, but then I thought, oh, it’s all those errands and all those responsibilities and then we have to worry about the dog every time we want to leave town and we live in a New York City apartment, so it’s like a whole thing. And I just felt paralyzed because the pros and cons felt very equally balanced. And then I thought, well, choose the bigger life.

 And then the answer was immediately obvious to me, which was that for our family, the bigger life was the life with the dog. Now, somebody else might say, no, the bigger life is the life without a dog because then you could travel, you can be spontaneous, you have more money to spend, like you’re freer. And so that might be the bigger life. But for us, I was like, the bigger life is to get a dog. And we did and we were so happy we got the dog.

Brett McKay: I find that I have to be more intentional about that as I’ve gotten older. Because as you get older, you kind of get complacent, you become a hobbit where you’re just like, I just want to stay in my little hobbit hole and not do any things that’s comfortable. When I was younger, I was like, oh yeah, go do big things because I got nothing to lose. As you’re older, you’re like, oh man, if I do that, there’s going to be a lot of complications, I get the risk. So yeah, I need to make that my mantra. Choose the bigger life.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, well, for me relatedly, and this came to me after the book was already done, so I didn’t make it into the book, but I was realizing exactly what you were saying. I would have opportunities to do things, fun things, and I’d be like, gosh, I just don’t even want to deal with scheduling it. It’s like, well, pick a day, then one of us will have to reschedule and it’s just going to be this whole thing and then I’ll have to figure out how to get there. And oh my gosh, in the end, wouldn’t I just rather stay home and read in bed? But then I thought, scheduling is life. Like I say, I hate to schedule, but scheduling is life. Everything that I want to do needs to go onto my schedule. And if I’m not scheduling, then I am just staying home and binge watching The Office, which is, in a sense, my favorite thing to do and certainly the easiest thing to do. But that’s not a good life. Scheduling is life. So that’s how I try to embrace it for myself now.

Brett McKay: I like scheduling. That’s another great aphorism. Scheduling is life.

Gretchen Rubin: Scheduling is life. Volume II.

Brett McKay: Volume II.

Gretchen Rubin: Secrets of adulthood, volume II.

Brett McKay: Let’s do a few more because there’s so many. How many did you include in the book?

Gretchen Rubin: I think there’s a couple hundred.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s awesome. You could just flip to a page and like, here it is for you. I thought this was an interesting one because I think it’s true, but I couldn’t figure out why it’s true. To understand a new place, visit a grocery store.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I just think this is such a fun thing to know. If you’re in a new place, it’s just fascinating to visit the grocery store. Like, what is the food? How is it presented? How is it different? It just gives you an insight into a new place. It’s a very fun thing to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we go to, our family would go to Vermont for the summer, and we’d always go to the, first thing we do when we get there, before we go to the Airbnb, stop by the local grocery store. And it’s always interesting to see what foods they have in New England that they don’t have in Oklahoma. It’s like devil dogs are a thing in New England, not a thing in Oklahoma. Maple cream donuts, thing in Vermont, not a thing in Oklahoma.

Gretchen Rubin: Maple. Everything maple.

Brett McKay: Everything maple.

Gretchen Rubin: But it’s funny because I remember when I went to college, I didn’t realize that there were like regional brands, that there would be brands that other people thought were huge that I had never heard of, like Entenmann’s. This is a thing, and they may have it now, but in Missouri when I grew up, we didn’t have Entenmann’s. And everybody, when I got to college on the East Coast, they were like, how do you not know this? It was like not knowing, you know, Coke. They thought it was this ubiquitous brand, and then there were brands that I knew that they didn’t know. So it is, and then like maple. You’re like, I’m in the land of maple now, and everything will be maple, maple, maple, or I’m in the land of lobster, or I’m in the land of, you know, whatever it might be. It’s fun.

Brett McKay: Here’s another fun one that I agree with. Once a group includes five people, a single conversation is very hard to maintain.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, so you’re reading now from the Simple Secrets of Adulthood. So I have my Transcendent Secrets of Adulthood, which is most of the book, which are what I hope are like deep insights. But as I was writing the book, because I just love hacks, I love a practical tip, I just couldn’t stop myself from making a list of those as well. And when I submitted my manuscript, I thought my editor would be like, Gretchen, these Simple Secrets of Adulthood just don’t belong with the other ones that are so much more transcendent. But she said, oh, these are fun. Let’s include them, like the one about the grocery store, or the one about the five people. This is something that I learned from writing my book, Life in Five Senses. This is called the dinner party problem. It’s a very well-established psychological phenomenon that once a group includes more than four people, it will almost inevitably break into smaller conversations unless you make enormous effort to keep people unified. And if you’ve ever been to like a single topic dinner party or something, you have to tell people that that is the rule and then really enforce it because people just will naturally break into smaller conversations. So it’s a useful thing to think about when you’re approaching a social occasion that that is something that you will encounter.

Brett McKay: I read into this, I agree, I’ve been in conversations where there’s more than five and it just doesn’t work. But also I relate to this rule because I was a waiter in college. I absolutely hated big tops where people get like 20 people and we had to smoosh tables together because it’s just like, why are you doing this? No one’s talking to each other. You’re only talking to the people in front of you and it makes it harder for the waiter. And so whenever I see…

Gretchen Rubin: You know, that is a great point. I guess it’s you want to feel like you’re together, but maybe you’re like, you’ll actually enjoy it more.

Brett McKay: Yes, you’d enjoy it more because after like, you know, two people over, like you have no idea what the other people are saying. And it makes it… Go ahead.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, and also talking across the table would be easier. So in a way you’re less, you feel like you have access to fewer people, but you might actually have access to more.

Brett McKay: Yes, and it’ll make the experience better for you and the waiter because the waiter can actually… It’s just easier to manage. So whenever I go into a restaurant, I see a big top, I’m just like, ugh, people don’t know what they’re doing. They need to stop that. That’s my pet peeve. No big tops.

Gretchen Rubin: But that’s interesting because I do think that our impulse is like, oh, well, we all want to be together and we don’t want anybody to feel like they’re stuck at the wrong table. It feels very high stakes.

Brett McKay: You could be in the same area.

Gretchen Rubin: Right, you could be next to each other.

Brett McKay: Next to each other, but you don’t need to smoosh all the tables together.

Gretchen Rubin: Interesting, I like that. See, and there’s room at the back of the book for people to write their own secrets of adulthood. So that would be what, like, you know, I’m going to write that down myself as a hack. So a lot of times reading these will inspire people to realize that they have their own.

Brett McKay: All right, last one, because I relate to this one a lot. If you don’t know what to do with yourself, go outside or go to sleep.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, I just feel like that works. That’s just like, that is, to me, one or the other or both. I always am going to feel better.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I have this tendency. You probably have this tendency too. Everyone has this tendency. At nighttime, you’re tired, and then you get stuck on something that you’re just upset about and depressed about. And then because you’re tired, you start ruminating and go down this death spiral. And then my wife usually tell me, just go to bed, just go to bed. And then in the morning, you feel great and you have the answer.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Brett McKay: Well, Gretchen, this has been a lot of fun. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Gretchen Rubin: Gretchenrubin.com. There’s links there to my quizzes, the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, the books, all my books, my writing. I have a newsletter, Five Things Making Me Happy. I have an app, I have products, I got all the things. And I love to connect with people on social media. I love to hear people’s observations and questions and resources that they suggest. So follow me on social media. I’m Gretchen Rubin in all the places.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Gretchen Rubin, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Gretchen Rubin: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Gretchen Rubin. She’s the author of the book Secrets of Adulthood. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website Gretchenrubin.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/secretsofadulthood, where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for men and women alike. It’s a great way to support the show directly. You can learn more at dyingbreed.net. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think there’s something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought-provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition.

If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work, will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the “burnout society” and why so many of us feel tired from participating in what he calls “auto-exploitation” and “positive violence.” We then discuss how our burnout society is also a “palliative society” that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s “last man.” We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual, contemplation, and an openness to the mystery of others.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Byung-Chul Han’s books, including The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society
• Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford
• New Verse Review
• Steven’s work at The Lamp
• Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• Dying Breed Article: What Nietzsche’s Typewriter Brain Can Tell Us About Twitter Brain
• Sunday Firesides: Protect the Sanctum Sanctorum of Selfhood
• Sunday Firesides: We Need as Much Meaning Extension as Life Extension

Connect With Steven Knepper

• Steven at VMI

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition. If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the burnout society and why so many of us feel tired for participating in what he calls Auto-Exploitation and Positive Violence. We then discuss how our burnout society is also a palliative society that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s Last man. We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual contemplation and an openness to the mystery of others. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/han.  All right. Steven Knepper, welcome to the show.  

Steven Knepper: Thanks for having me. It’s honored to be here.  

Brett McKay: So you co-authored a book about a modern philosopher that I’ve been seeing more and more of in my readings. This guy named Byung-Chul Han, he’s a German Korean philosopher. For those who aren’t familiar with this guy, who is he and why am I seeing him more and more in my philosophical reading?   

Steven Knepper: Yeah. He is popping up everywhere today on the internet, on social media. So Byung-Chul Han, he is a Korean German philosopher, as you’ve said. He was born in Seoul, Korea. He’s living, I think that’s important to to point out. He’s continuing to write all the time. So, he’s very much a thinker on the move. He’s born in Seoul, Korea. As a younger man he studies metallurgy and is really into engineering, kind of material science. But as a young man studying those, he becomes more and more interested in philosophy and philosophical questions and literature. So he travels to Germany to study abroad and he lets his parents under the impression that he’s gonna continue his material science studies in Germany, but he makes this big move into studying theology, literature, and especially philosophy at the graduate level. So I think that’s just kind of a fascinating thing in and of itself.  

 About 15 years ago now, he had this breakthrough book that is really his turn to more topical problems, problems of the day. And that book was called “The Burnout Society.” And it was a big hit in Germany but it also was relatively quickly translated into a whole bunch of other languages. And Byung-Chul Han, some of your listeners may be familiar with Matthew Crawford, who wrote books like “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” And they might be familiar with arguments about how more and more we live in a society where there’s this war for our attention, where our attention is commodified. And you’ll be in the line at the service station and you get up there to pump your gas and suddenly the gas pump starts talking to you and giving you ads, or even above the urinal there might be ads. So, our attention’s getting pulled more and more in by these digital technologies and certainly all of those kind of more real world examples like the gas pump and the urinal pale beside the smartphone, which is algorithmically tailored to harvest our attention. 

 So Han is a really sharp critic of those kind of dynamics, and I think that’s a big part of the appeal. But he really zooms into on the ways in which, while acknowledging that all these things are designed to catch us, we also kind of catch ourselves. We go along with it, we are very easily encouraged into binge watching or going deeper into email. And he talks about how we auto exploit. And I think that’s what’s really captured people’s mind because I think a lot of people can recognize that in themselves. I know I can. The ways in which we don’t have to be checking work email but we do. The way in which we have a down moment and we pull out that smartphone. I think he’s really an astute critic of that. 

Brett McKay: Okay. So I hope we can talk more about these ideas, these criticisms he has of modern life in depth. And yeah. I’m sure our listeners are familiar with Matthew Crawford. We’ve had him on the podcast a few times, talking about “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” “The World Beyond Your Head.” So I think this will be right up their alley. I’m curious, you’re a professor at the Virginia Military Institute. So, how did a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, where they do drum outs, take an interest in this Korean-German philosopher?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I love VMI. I love working with cadets. As you might expect, they’re very ethically serious and they’re very disciplined and they live in a system that encourages discipline and virtue. But cadets are not immune from some of these same dynamics. They too struggle with screen addiction. They too struggle with being able to focus their attention. And a subset of cadets come to a place like this because they want that structure. They know they need it to succeed. So, in one ways, I think that working at VMI gives me some insight into some of the ways we can deal with these things because VMI, for instance, during their freshman year, what’s called the rat year here, cadets aren’t allowed to use their cell phones. But on the flip side, I think just like if I were teaching anywhere, I can see how my students are struggling with some of these dynamics.

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s dig into Han and his philosophy, kind of bigger picture. How would you describe his approach to philosophy? Like what school of philosophy would you put him in? Is he a Aristotelian, an existentialist? What’s Han’s philosophy? How would you describe it? 

Steven Knepper: Yeah. There’s lots of different ways I could answer that question. And he draws on some very different sets of philosophical resources, including Zen Buddhism, including Christian theology at times. But I think I would answer that question for right now in the way that I think really focuses, why he resonates so much with people, is that he comes out of this tradition, especially in German philosophy, that’s very techno skeptical. Sort of earlier critiques even before the digital age that are concerned about instrumental reason, about how we tend to approach the world and other people as things, as objects, as machines. How there’s that reductionism involved in that. How bureaucracy and this technical reason rationalize our lives and organize it but then also might seem like they’re squeezing out room for freedom. So, some figures here you might think of on the left would be someone like Theodor Adorno and on the right would be someone like Martin Heidegger but also German Catholic thinkers like Romano Gordini or Josef Pieper, and Han draws on all these thinkers.  

 But more recently, there’s this turn toward thinking especially about technology and how it shapes the world. So someone like Heidegger is gonna talk about how technology inframes the world, it determines how we see the world in each other itself. There’s something about the way the technology restructures our world and that gets taken up in media theory by people like Marshall Mcluhan outside of Germany and a lot of other media theorists that Han is in dialogue with, who are looking at the ways in which, yeah, technology isn’t just sort of this passive transmitter of information or this tool that we use. Technology and especially communication technologies shape how we see the world often in ways that we’re not aware of and I think we’ve all seen that with the digital. Think about how the experience of smartphones has reshaped how we experience the world, how we experience time. So he’s certainly a philosopher that picks up those concerns and takes them in very interesting and precise ways into our digital present day. 

Brett McKay: Okay. So, yeah. He’s kind of taken a turn towards media theory. And yeah, he does talk about Marshall McLuhan. I’m sure people have heard that phrase, “The medium is the message.”

Steven Knepper: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The idea is there that the tools that we use for media consumption or communication, it shapes the way we think. I did an article about this on our substack called Dying Breed about Nietzsche and the typewriter.

Steven Knepper: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And actually, there was a famous German media theorist that wrote about this, talking about how Nietzsche went blind. And once he went blind, he had to start using a typewriter. And this guy talks about how his writing style changed once he went from writing out by hand to writing with a typewriter. His writing became punchier, became more aphoristic, more bombastic. And so yeah. The same sort of thing happens. I’m sure people have noticed how their emails have changed since they started communicating primarily via email. I remember when I wrote handwritten letters, it kind of flowed and was more stream of conscious, and it was long sentences, and now with email, the medium of email, it’s gotta be short, punchy, and to the point, because that’s how you do email.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And even text messaging, I think, has refigured how we do email. But you might think too about something like how we’ve had this move that’s ongoing from text to video and then from video to short videos. Like on Google now, you can search for short videos. And there’s lots of research that’s emerging about what that’s done to our attention span, how TikTok kind of rewires our brain. And I think that’s a great example of this dynamic. People aren’t aware of how this technology is reshaping how they experience the world but it’s doing it and Han is part of that tradition that’s trying to make that explicit for us.

Brett McKay: Okay. So Han, he is trying to figure out why modern life can feel just weird, overwhelming, boring. Sometimes you just feel like you’re in this rat race and you can’t get out of it. It feels fast. So let’s dig into this more because I think everyone’s listening to that has probably experienced that. Let’s talk about that book you’d mentioned that was his breakout book, “The Burnout Society.” What is his central diagnosis of modern life in that work?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So he emphasizes in “The Burnout Society” that when it comes to feeling burnout, which is this new phenomenon that many, many people feel burnout, even though if you look at statistics, at least in the developed world, we have more “free time” than any other generation that came before us. But we often have this feeling of being run ragged, of being burnout, and he describes it to what he calls this achievement culture, where we have this sense of an open-ended possibility. There are all these things we could do, so therefore we try to do as many of them as we can. And we get hooked on these little doses of dopamine, on these little often quantified metrics of achievement. So this might play out in social media, where you’re looking for a certain number of friends or a certain number of likes. You post something and then you wait for the notifications to roll in and you get your little hit, but quickly it diminishes and you feel like you need to post something else, and it goes on and on and on and before you know it, how much time have you spent in that sort of strange little dynamic?

 It might play out in sort of being a workaholic at the office, where you’re checking your email even when your boss doesn’t expect you to. You’re answering emails, you’re impatient when other people aren’t answering emails outside the usual business hours. It could play out even at the gym, he says, where you become super fixated on numbers and on sort of micromanaging your achievement there. So, he sees it playing out in all these different areas. And I think it’s particularly interesting how he talks about how it plays out not just in those meritocratic spaces like being a super high achiever at work, but it infiltrates our entertainment. So, you feel like you’re just sitting down to watch a video, you know, to relax at evening, and you end up absolutely vegging out on the couch and autoplay binging half a series in one night. This is a pretty common experience now. And certainly the technology itself facilitates it with autoplay but he sees it too as this sense of, well, we could watch just this next one, it’s all there to stream right now. And so we end up doing it. So there’s a way in which, in pursuing more and more and more, we burn ourselves out.

 And in all this pursuit of more and more and more, what’s missing is a sense of, okay, what’s a good healthy balanced life looks like? What is a good sense of limits when it comes to these things? The open-ended injunction to achieve doesn’t give us any places to rest, doesn’t give us a sense of when we’ve accomplished something, doesn’t give us this robust telos to pursue. And of course, who benefits from this? Well, certainly advertisers do, on the internet. Clicks are money. Attention is money. But he’s very astute about how we have this, what he calls auto-exploitation.

Brett McKay: Yeah. let’s talk about that. So, auto-exploitation or sometimes it’s translated self-exploitation. And then he talks about this idea of positive violence. I think they’re kind of connected. What does he mean by self-exploitation and positive violence, and how does that connect with this idea of the achievement society?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. What he means by positive violence, and that’s a strange little term in some ways. So negative violence would be coercion by outside forces. Someone forcing you to do something, someone threatening you so that you do something. “Check your email at these hours or you’ll be fired.” That would be kind of a negative pressure. Han would say that positive violence is stuff that we do to ourselves. So, it’s when we, in the pursuit of achievement, we just go and go and go and go and go. That’s what he means by positive violence. And he sees this move happening with kind of the dawn of the digital age from what he calls a disciplinary society that’s about rules and injunctions and negative discipline, he sees that giving way in a lot of senses to this positive exploitation. More and more, instead of telling us what not to do, powers that be, economic powers, political powers, are gonna encourage us to do more. And often it’s framed as, this is good for you, why wouldn’t you want to do more? But of course, this just serves some institutions, some companies, really, really well, but it can have a big toll on society and on individuals in the society that suffer burnout, fragmentation, feelings of Isolation, all these things that can come as negative consequences of the achievement society, according to Han.

Brett McKay: Okay. This actually reminds me of this idea of positive violence and self-exploitation in the achievement society and how we’re doing this to ourselves, trying to improve ourselves because we feel like we should because we can. Those are potentials that we can pursue. But then they can be used by other people or other businesses or governments for their own ends. We did a podcast a really long time ago about the happiness industry, about these consultants that come into companies and say, “Hey, we’re gonna develop a wellness program for your employees where we’re gonna have meditation sessions and you can have a nap room.” And it sounds like, “Oh, it’s great. It’s for the employees. It’ll improve morale.” But really,it’s like, well, we want to do that so we can get more out of our employees.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. Precisely. And in the book, The Critical Introduction that I co-authored, we talk about office space. And if you remember that movie, great movie with Jennifer Aniston’s character where she works at this restaurant where they have to wear these flare, like these buttons all over their uniform and be really bubbly and excited as they go about their job. And her manager at one point says to her, “You’re only wearing the minimum allowed amount of flare. Don’t you want to wear more? Don’t you want to wear more?” And it’s pitched as, why wouldn’t you want to do this? But it’s so clearly kind of degrading and coercive underneath the surface. So that’s maybe an extreme example but I think it’s a pretty good example of something that was already going on way back when office space was produced but I think has become much more prevalent in the time since then.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because of the digital technologies, you see social media influencers like, hey, I’m living my best life and here’s what I do. Here’s the routine I follow to live my best life and you can do this too. And it’s like, man, that’s a lot to do when I’ve got a job and kids and other responsibilities, but you try to do it because you’re living in that achievement society.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And I think that one thing I        would like to specify, and I wish that Han would do more of this in his own writing, but I don’t think that the problem, at least from my view, maybe he would disagree with this, but I don’t think the problem is wanting to have a set of disciplines that pursue a goal, like fitness, working out, or trying to learn something new. I mean, all of these can be good things but what makes them pernicious in Han’s view is when you don’t have this ideal that you’re aiming at, which will sort of let you know when you’ve got there. You don’t have this sense of direction. You don’t have this sense that you’re aiming at flourishing. You are just sort of going from hit to hit to hit on these many achievement rubrics. And what gets lost is this rich notion of flourishing or this balanced life. And so, I mean, I think that’s what art of manliness is really good about. Certainly, you give people fitness tips and you give people time management tips. But again and again, you come back to this robust notion of what flourishing should look like. And I think that if you take that seriously, that actually counteracts the achievement society..

Brett McKay: Yeah. Maybe you could put it this way. In the achievement society, we tend to treat means as ends because we don’t have an ultimate end, really.

Steven Knepper: I think that’s a fantastic way of putting it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen this in my own life. I mean, a perfect example, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast and in my writing. You know, I was a power lifter for a while, really got into it. And I was always chasing the next PR. And it was fine for a while but then a couple of years ago, I was getting to the point where in order to increase the weight on the bar, I was just having to train harder and harder and it was just causing a lot of stress, physical. It beat me down. And I got to the point it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. This is no longer enjoyable. So, I still train but I’m not chasing numbers. I’m just training so I just feel good and because I enjoy it.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And one thing that Han emphasizes elsewhere in his works, I mean, so far we’ve talked about his diagnosis of our society’s problems but his books are kind of split between those more diagnostic works and works where he’s recommending some practices that will help counter this. And he’s written a lot about ritual and the importance of ritual. Ritual trains our attention. It allows our attention to be more robust. It gives time a shape. And you think about how traditional practices of exercise, you know, we might think about like, say martial arts, how there’s this ritualistic dimension to it and this communal dimension to it. And I think that’s the antidote, that’s not part of the problem. But there is this tendency for achievement society, if we use Hans terms, to take even good things and kind of twist them away from substantive ends to means, means, means, or many, many goals that don’t provide sort of lasting satisfaction or a sense of closure or pacing but you just chase one after another after another.  

Brett McKay: An example I just thought of as you were mentioning that we, where we take something that we maybe enjoyed for the thing itself and then turn it into achievement society thing, like a hobby. You see this happen all the time where someone has this hobby that they’re really passionate about and then they start sharing it on social media because they love it, but then it turns into a business for them and then their hobby becomes this means to gain influence and money and it kind of kills the joy of the hobby. 

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. And we might think about other things too. So, Han recommends contemplative practices as something that are especially important in our distracted attention divided present day. But you think about how like a certain practice of something like yoga or even daily prayer can be just another thing on the to-do list that you’re using as like a bandaid to sort of manage the worst feelings of being burned out or stressed or to allow you to just squeeze out a little more achievement. And that’s not sort of the transformative practice that Han’s recommending to really counteract this achievement society. But it can be sort of co-opted as part of the regimen.  

Brett McKay: There’s this great phrase that Han has, I think it’s in “The Burnout Society.” He says that people today are tired from not being able to be themselves. What does he mean by that? And how does the achievement society contribute to that tiredness?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that there’s many ways you could approach that but I think that Han has had this qualm about present-day society and the achievement society but he also sees some tendencies towards this in Western philosophy and Western society for a long time. He thinks that there’s often this unconscious kind of egotism to it, where you’re focused on being the best you. And for a lot of people to even question that just sounds insane. This is the mantra by which they live and by which they exhort others. But one of the dangers with that is that you never really know when you’ve reached prime you and also, often by sort of being so focused on you, you don’t open yourself up to other people or to the world or to great works of art or literature or ideas. You know, everything’s about self-maximization or it’s about that next little bit of achievement. And not only is that really bad ethically because we need to be attentive to others, Han doesn’t quote, as far as I know, Iris Murdoch, the great British novelist and philosopher, but he would agree with her that in some ways ethics begins with attention. We gotta be able to sort of give people our attention in order to treat them well. So there’s this ethical downside but there’s also this paradox in which the achievement society, it seems like you’re doing this all for your own benefit, but it feels so thin and you feel like you’re burning out. Whereas really, if you open yourself up to others and you have substantive relationships with other people or if you pursue kind of a disciplined practice that gives your life shape or religious practice, those things open up a depth of meaning and a depth of satisfaction but you only can access those if you let go of the ego, if you dialect the ego, if you make yourself receptive to them. When you get out of the way, then meaning can be discovered.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that phrase, tired from not being able to be themselves, it made me think of Kierkegaard and his notion of despair. And he had this idea that we have this idea of ourself as it should be. And I think he talks about someone who’s really ambitious, and it’s either you gotta be Caesar or nothing.

Steven Knepper: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So it’s like, if you can’t be Caesar, then it’s just you’re worthless. And I think Han would agree with that. We have this idea in our modern world that we got to be the absolute best and if we can’t do that, we’re worthless and then we just fall into this funk and we’re depressed. And yet Han, I think, he argues in “The Burnout Society” a lot of the depression that we see in the modern world, yes, he would agree that maybe there’s some biological components. Some people are just depressed because of something biological going on in themselves. But he argues that a lot of depression, people just feeling down and just in a funk, it’s because we are striving so hard to be this awesome thing that we think we should be because the achievement society tells us we need to be and we’re not reaching that, even though we’re trying really hard, we just get burned out and we’re just like, “Okay. I’m just gonna give up.”

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And my co-author, Rob Wiley, he’s a great Kierkegaard scholar. And I think part of what drew him to Han is that even though Han doesn’t “Kierkegaard that much” there’s a lot of shared sensibility. And I think one of the things is this notion of perhaps the most dangerous kind of despair is the despair that you’re not aware of. You’re not aware you’re in it. And I think he sees that as plaguing a lot of us that are caught up in this achievement society.

Brett McKay: So we mentioned that technology plays a major role in Han’s critique of modern life. How does he see digital technology, especially smartphones and social media, contributing to the burnout society?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a great question. And my other co-author, Ethan Stoneman, this is really his wheelhouse. And one of the things that he points out is that really Han doesn’t turn to engaging digital technology fully until after the burnout society. That’s when you see him start referencing thinkers like Marshall McLuhan. That’s when you see him really giving attention to how smartphones have reshaped our experience of the world. So, I think the burnout society is still a great place to start with Han. But if you’re interested in the technology, you wanna look at some of those later works where he really goes in-depth on how technology is feeding into this achievement society mentality. But even in “The Burnout Society” he’s already talking about how the smartphone can be kind of like a portable, a mobile labor camp where we are just always pulling it out in any down moment and clicking, clicking, clicking. I think too, on social media, one of the things that he is insightful about is that there’s this drive to make yourself transparent on it, to sort of share everything about your life, everything that’s going on. And certainly, that’s really good for marketers because behind the scenes they’re creating intricate profiles for each user that they can then sell to other companies.

 But also cumulatively, it creates the sense that humans are really these thin things, that an online profile captures who we are as a person, and sort of the depth and mystery of the individual gets lost. You might think about something like dating apps, which I know lots of people that have met the love of their life on these, so I’m not trying to sort of just categorically dismiss them but there’s this real danger with them that you think that if you match with some preferences online, that when you meet the person, that you already know them or that you know there’s a compatibility there and you can lose track of that mystery of the other person. And of course, too, when we create online personas, we can either be consciously or unconsciously performing a persona that’s not really us. So, Han worries about how it creates this thinned out version of self and other. And he’s a big proponent of recovering real-world relationships, real-world friendships, where you can’t just sort of ghost each other if you don’t like how the conversation’s going, or where you might have to dwell in silence for a few moments when you’re sitting together at the restaurant, and where there might be this real tension. Where the other person might call you out or you might sort of need to stick with each other through hard times. All of these, he thinks awaken us to a richer sense of ourselves and others as having this unfathomable dimension of otherness or mystery. He thinks we hunger for that. Yeah, I do too.

Brett McKay: For sure. Yeah. Han’s critique about transparency I thought was really interesting because yeah, you see this ethos particularly online and social media, where you got to be transparent. So yeah. It benefits the social media companies. They get more information about you so they can sell ads to you. But also you see this ethos from the people themselves taking part in social media. There’s this idea that if you have a following, like your followers demand transparency from you. You got to let them know everything about you. Like, what are your thoughts about this issue? And tell me about your family life and your problems. And you get rewarded if you reveal things about yourself. Oh, thanks for being real. And you’re just so authentic. And Kierkegaard makes this argument too in the present age. He makes this comment how people, he was writing in the 1800s and he was writing about how people would talk about their personal lives very freely in the public, like in newspapers and essays and things like that but then when they were actually with people face to face, they wouldn’t reveal those things. Like they would just suddenly become very reticent and they wouldn’t talk about those deep personal things, but they had no problem sharing it with the mass audience.

 And Kierkegaard said somehow that that hurts being a self. Like you can’t become a self and an individual unless you have, he calls it a sanctum sanctorum, like a holy of holies that only you can go into. Because if you’re just living your life out in public, you’re constantly shaping yourself to fit what the public wants, so you can get the followers and the likes, et cetera

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. So it’s kind of interesting. This might feel like a bit of a digression but there’s this Emily Dickinson poem that I teach most semesters. It’s very short. It’s called, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Actually, it’s not the title. It’s just the first line that’s taken as the title. But it goes, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell, they’d advertise you know. How dreary to be somebody. How public like a frog, to tell one’s name to live long June to an admiring bog.” It’s a great poem, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Steven Knepper: You know, especially today, students on their own immediately go to social media. But with that idea of transparency in mind, what does the frog do again and again and again? They say their same name over and over. But in this poem, Dickinson suggests that the nobodies that are behind the scenes that have a sense of privacy, they’re the ones that actually have mystery, depth, something interesting and new to say. So I think that that poem like way before we have digital technology is on to something about how always making yourself transparent kind of thins you out and loses something important.

Brett McKay: Another thing that Han explores is the role of boredom in modern life. What role does boredom play in Han’s critique of modern life and what does he mean by boredom?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a fantastic question because there’s a couple different types of boredom at play. One type of boredom is this restlessness that we have no patience for whatsoever. So, if you’re waiting at the bus stop and you have a down moment, probably you’re gonna feel an itch to pull out your phone if you’re like most people. So, we want to fill up every moment with something and we have no tolerance for that restless boredom. But Han actually is a big advocate of this deeper sense of boredom, profound boredom, where you let go of the restlessness and you sink into the moment and you just open yourself up. And he thinks that that kind of state is really important today because that’s the kind of state where new ideas might come from you or where you might notice stuff around you. Certainly if you’re an artist, that’s where inspiration might strike. So he thinks that this kind of profound boredom, that a lot of us that were lucky enough to grow up pre-digital, you know, as kids I think we reached this state often because you go through the restless boredom like, “Oh man, I’ve got all day, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m tired of all my toys.” And you don’t have anything, any recourse. So over time you might come up with like an imaginative game or you might go out on a walk and you sort of sink into this more receptive open state.

 So, those are the two states of boredom in Han. Now I’m not sure this is exactly everything that’s going on and this might be only a partial answer to why he’s interested in that profound boredom. But I think Han, since he’s such a great diagnostician of what’s wrong with society, one of the things that he’s aware of is that, okay, if we’re already feeling really burned out because of this achievement society, what if we just let go of that compulsion to achieve in the midst of the burnout? Maybe there’s not that big of a gap between feeling exhausted and that profound boredom. And if we could just allow ourselves to sink into that, then maybe the antidote is much closer to the state of our problem than we think. So I think that’s maybe part of the reason why he’s so interested in profound boredom. There’s a qualitative leap between the burnout state and profound boredom but maybe the divide in another sense isn’t that far apart.

Brett McKay: Maybe it’s kind of like hair of the dog where you have to kind of lean into it a little bit more to figure out what it is you lack and really need.

Steven Knepper: Yeah, I think so. And you can see him sort of trying out different approaches to our problems. So, post-burnout society, he also starts to talk a lot more about openness to the other, and Eros is this thing that draws us out of ourself towards the other or towards the world. So here too, I mean, I think he thinks that, okay, we’re seeking all this fake community online, and he’ll talk about online community as often seeming like you’re encountering other people but really because of algorithms and really because you still kind of mediate that encounter, he says you’re actually trapped in kind of a mirror world. You’re trapped in what he calls the hell of the same, where if you really want to encounter other people you often have to go into the real world where there’s a little more risk and uncertainty in the encounter but there’s also the sense of depth and a richer possibility of a relationship. Martin Buber is another thinker that’s important to him. And Martin Buber will say things like when you enter into a real relationship with the other person, the relationship itself is bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s not just you and me, there’s now a we. And Han will say similar things. But you have to sort of open yourself up to that for that to happen. And he thinks a lot of people are seeking that on the internet but it’s pretty hard to find on the internet.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So, we’ve talked about “The Burnout Society” so we’re all feeling kind of burned out, according to Han, because we live in this achievement society that has this, we call it ethic of self-exploitation or auto-exploitation, where we’re pursuing things not because we have to but it’s this idea, well, you could do it, so you need to do it, and we have these tools that allow us to measure ourselves and make progress but you can never know when you actually reach that best self. And so you just get tired and burned out and it can cause boredom too because some of that stuff that you’re constantly doing can just wear you down and it can be boring. I want to talk about another book that he wrote, it’s a short one, called “The Palliative Society.” This is another critique he makes on modern culture. What does he mean by the Palliative Society?

Steven Knepper: So, in this book, his main argument is that there’s something seriously out of whack about our relationship to pain as a society. He sees our society as not just an achievement society but one that tries to avoid pain and suffering at all costs. And of course, Han thinks that in many cases, yeah, we want to try to reduce pain and disease, we want to try to reduce pain in all kinds of areas of life, but one of the dangers here is that to be human it means you’re gonna undergo pain. So if we get to the point where we think pain is always a problem, a problem to be solved with a technical solution, then what happens when you run into a situation where the pain can’t be solved? Maybe someone’s dying. And he thinks we’re really bad at accompanying people through painful situations. I think that’s probably true. But then Han would also say that many areas of life require pain in order to reach a higher level. So, you think again about physical fitness. This is one of the few areas in our society where I think that you still see some embrace of pain as a necessary step. In order to become a better athlete, you’ve gotta train hard, you’ve gotta suffer. But Han points out too that in education, you know, he’s a philosopher. To be a good philosopher, he says, you’ve gotta confront ideas that challenge your own. You’ve gotta wrestle with difficult ideas that make you uncomfortable. And it’s hard work and it’s painful.

 I would say the same is true. I’m a words guy. I’m an English professor through and through. But mathematics, you know, mathematics at a certain level becomes really tough. And in order to get through it, you’ve gotta be willing to sort of suffer through the hard work to get there. And then maybe most importantly, think about relationships. Think about a good marriage or a good friendship or with kids. Those relationships, there’s gonna be time when that loved one is suffering and they need you and it’s gonna be unpleasant to go through that with them. So any kind of real love entails suffering. And that’s ancient wisdom, that a lot of people would pay lip service to but actually, our vocabulary and our practices for dealing with that have gotten really thinned out. And he thinks that we basically live in a society that avoids pain.

For him, the COVID pandemic really revealed that because after the opening stages, when we got a better sense of what’s going on with this disease, he saw kind of an overreaction in all kinds of areas. We might think about schools shut down for kids long after we knew that this disease, thankfully, for the most part, wasn’t that threatening to children. And this strange way in which we couldn’t sort of balance that this is a tragic situation, that there’s gonna be negative outcomes no matter which way we go. He saw this as kind of failing the test in a pretty profound way. And he traces it back, at least in part, to this inability to deal with suffering and to sort of think about pain in an adjusted way.

Brett McKay: You mentioned that you think our vocabulary around pain and suffering has been thinned out. What are some examples of that off the top of your head?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we see it in all kinds of areas. And there have been some really good contrary trends to this. But I think that when you think about parenting and how for a few decades now we’ve had the phenomenon of helicopter parents. Whenever your kid has problems, there’s a real not even just temptation but almost expectation from other parents, you might think, to jump in there and smooth it out for your kid. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Sometimes there’s situations the kids are in that they can’t deal with and they need adults to step in. But also there’s a way in which if you want your kid to be an adjusted adult, they’ve gotta learn how to suffer through some situations. They’ve gotta grow in toughness and courage. And I think we’re pretty poor at that kind of vocabulary. I think too. It’s really tough. It’s tough for me. And I’m a religious guy from a tradition that keeps some of these things more alive. But it’s really hard to accompany family members that are in deep sickness and on their way to death. It’s hard to know how to talk to them and it’s probably always been hard. But I think it’s become especially hard in our day where we tend to close that away in retirement homes and hospitals. So, those are some examples.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one that came to the top of my head was you saw this a couple years ago. I think you’re seeing a trend away from it. But the idea of trigger warnings in classrooms when you’re discussing heavy topics like sexual assault or crime or whatever, you’ve got to give a trigger warning to people. I think that might be another example of like, Han would say, this is an example of the palliative society and we want to reduce and eliminate pain as much as possible, even though to really understand an experience, you have to confront everything, even the terrible parts of it.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And Han would say, life itself is gonna throw up these really hard situations. So certainly in classrooms, you shouldn’t handle difficult material flippantly or brusquely. You should try to be sort of sensitive about it. But one of the ways, the reasons to study the humanities is to study the tragic and help you then process it when you have to encounter it in your own life. So, if you just sort of immediately bracket that off, then one of the main reasons that the humanities is important goes away. And people end up suffering more as a result for that, I’d say.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You become fragilized. We had the guy who wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind” or something like that. He writes about that. I would like to talk about this. I think it’s in “The Palliative Society.” Han has this kind of throwaway line. He didn’t really explain it or follow it, and I wish he did because that’s actually really interesting. He talks about this idea of the palliative society and wanting to eliminate pain. He likens it to the last man from Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” And he said that the last man is actually obsessed with their health. Do you know what I’m talking about when he wrote this? Can you flesh that out? Because I think that’s really interesting.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And just a sort of a broader point. I think that one legit frustration that people can have with Han is that since he writes these shorter extended essay-like books, sometimes there will be these lines that almost feel like throwaway lines. You’re like, “Oh, I wish he would have just fleshed that out.” I think that’s a pretty common experience. His relationship to Nietzsche is a really interesting and complex one because one way of thinking about Nietzsche, and there’s certainly abundant textual evidence to think about this, is as this great philosopher of the will and of action. But he brings out a more contemplative side to Nietzsche and he pulls out these passages that show him emphasizing the importance of contemplation, of being able to have real repose. So that’s an interesting thing. But yeah. I think that he thinks that the last man is obsessed with health and obsessed with their own happiness in such a way that it has that unconscious egotism about it and also becomes very fragile and can’t face up to the tragic side of life, the suffering of life, and the suffering of others.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that it made me think of, you know, we live in this world of wellness culture where we have all these devices and supplements we can take and there’s this talk about, we’ve got to extend our lifespan. And I’m thinking, like, why? Like, what are we doing with that? I mean, health is important. I’m not trying to dismiss health but it seems like we’ve made health an end rather than a means to a higher telos.

Steven Knepper: I think that’s exactly correct. And yeah. I don’t think the problem is that you want to be healthy or that you want to reduce suffering from disease or unjust circumstances or things like that. I think that’s all to the good and important. But I do think that one danger of sort of fetishizing health too much is that any risk becomes unacceptable or any difficulty becomes something to avoid. And that just really thins out life because so many of the things that make life most meaningful. And I think too, it’s important to make that distinction between kind of pleasantness and meaning. Often deep meaning, you know, you think about a Buddhist monk or a saint, you know, deeply meaningful life but one that’s full of asceticism and challenge.

Brett McKay: So, we’ve been talking about some of Han’s critiques and sort of diagnoses of modern life, and that’s what he’s most famous for. He’s a diagnostician. But as you said, we’ve been talking about it throughout the conversation, he does offer some potential antidotes to this feeling of burnout, this feeling of boredom, this feeling of flatness in modern life. And one of those things you mentioned was this idea of Eros and that we need to return to this idea of Eros. I think a lot of people, lay people, when they hear the word Eros, they think, oh, sex. But that’s not what Han means. What does Han mean by Eros and how can that help us out of the burnout society?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So his notion of Eros goes back to Plato but I think he definitely puts his own spin on it. But it’s this notion of Eros as this desire that draws us out of ourself towards some other good. So, he would distinguish that from the kind of lower level base desire gratification that often the internet trades on. You want to get those likes or yeah, if we want to talk about sex, pornography, literally masturbatory interaction with the internet. Whereas real Eros, yeah, you’re drawn outside of yourself towards the other and when you really encounter another person or you encounter the world, you realize that it’s bigger than your project. It doesn’t exist just for you. You discover this depth and richness and mystery. And so, yeah. When it comes to erotic relationships, sexual relationships, relationships of erotic love, he’d say that, yeah, there’s a big difference between that transactional kind of pornographic interaction and one where you’re attracted to the other person as a three-dimensional person and as a mystery. But he would also use Eros broadly as, well, we’re attracted to the beauties of the world or we’re drawn out of ourself into friendship. So, it’s much, much bigger than sex for sure.

Brett McKay: All right. So yeah. Eros takes us out of ourselves. So yeah. This kind of goes back to Matthew Crawford’s idea of the world beyond your head. If you really want to become a self, you have to get outside of yourself. And for Crawford, he talks a lot about the role craft can play in drawing you out of yourself, kind of get out of this morbid self-consciousness. But that can also happen through relationships, can come from looking at art, can come from spending time in nature. And another concept related to Eros that I thought was really interesting from Han was that if we want to open ourselves to those erotic encounters where we’re drawn out of ourselves, we have to have this stance of friendliness to the world. I really like this idea. What does he mean by friendliness?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, this is an idea that runs from his thinking from the very early untranslated works in German right through his most recent work. And what he means by friendliness is kind of this intent of openness to the world and to other people. So, sometimes he’ll use this language, especially when he’s drawing resources from Zen Buddhism, he’ll talk about becoming a guest house to the world, where you’re just kind of open to the world. And he sees this as a friendly stance. I think he’s really good at drawing attention to all these ways that when we’re in our phone, we’re literally closed off from other people in the world. Or when we’re all up in our head, again, coming back to Matthew Crawford, you can be walking down the street and maybe you’re not looking at your phone, maybe you don’t have headphones on, but you’re so wrapped up in your head, you’re not aware of anything that’s going around you or aware of anyone around you. So to have this friendly disposition towards the world is the stance of openness.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This made me think of Hartmut Rosa. He’s on my mind because we’ve talked about him on the podcast before but I also did another article from my substack, Dying Breed, about his idea of resonance. And he had this idea of resonance being like, you’re open to the world or the outside world talking to you and it kind of transforms you. And he makes the case that we have a hard time feeling that sense of resonance because we see the world as just aggression points. There’s things we got to do. So, like the example I gave, when I’m in my house, I’m constantly looking around like, all right, we need to fix that thing. This thing needs to be painted. We need to declutter that. I’m hardly ever just thinking, I’m just gonna be in my home and just enjoy my home. We can even see other people as aggression points, things we gotta do things with. Like, what can this person do for me? Or someone’s having a hard time and they open up to you, we think like, well, okay, I got a lot to do, what can I do just to get through this as quickly as possible so I can get on with my life? So we go, they’re there. Okay. You’ll be all right. And we just send the person on their way.

 And Rosa would say like, no, you have to actually kind of have a stance where you’re open to like, okay, just let this person who’s saying they’re sad just be there with them. You don’t have to fix anything. Just be there. And you might have this moment where like both of you feel like you’re edified in some way. I think maybe Han would agree with that. Like, instead of seeing the world as points of aggression, you’re just open to the thing or the person as they are.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And Rosa is a thinker that’s become much more important to me too or that I should say that I’ve just discovered more fully, even after writing this book, even though Rosa gets cited in here. And I think that as you suggest, Rosa and Han are approaching some similar things from somewhat different angles. And I think that’s useful because just like anything, if you look at it from one angle and then look at it from another angle, you’re gonna get a richer picture. But I think Rosa, he has this great insight that as moderns, we really like control. We want to eliminate as much contingency or risk from our lives as possible. We want more and more things to be under our control. And there’s something that’s understandable about that but there’s a real danger when it becomes as exaggerated as it has become for us, in that, to have a really rich relationship with something, to have a true relationship that has a back and forth, a resonant relationship as Rosa would say, then you’ve gotta relinquish control in order to have that sense of a meaningful relationship with a friend.

You can’t be all about controlling everything about the friendship and manipulating it, or that’s just gonna be a disaster in addition to being unethical to the friend. But also, we have this deep hunger to connect with nature but at the same time, we struggle to operate on any level other than, yeah, controlling it. So yeah. So Rosa thinks that we have to let go of this modern urge for control in order to see problems and fix them, in order to open up these richer spaces, these resonant spaces. In your example of someone that’s suffering, you don’t always need to fix the problem, you just need to be with them. That’s a good example of that.

Brett McKay: Does Han offer any sort of practical… I mean, Han would be like, “You can’t reduce my philosophy to a list of things to do” because he’s like, that’s kind of counter to what I want to say. But are there like some practical ways people can start countering this burnout society, this feeling of tiredness for just the everyday person? We’ve got jobs, families, and phones that never stop pinging us.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think so. And I think there are actually a lot of different practicalities and possibilities that he offers throughout his works. I think that he would bristle against the idea that he’s some kind of high theory self-help, in part because he’s challenging you to not just sort of make these small adjustments in order to achieve better in the achievement society, he’s calling for these more radical transformations and he thinks that’s where you’ll find deeper solutions. And certainly too, he’d like to see some more widespread changes in society to cultivate these things. But that said, one of the things I love about Han is that, he writes like editorials about the problems that teenagers in schools are facing in Germany. And one of the reasons he writes these short books is that he really does want to speak to non-academics about their problems. And I think that’s another reason why he’s become so popular. So yeah. Some of these possible remedies to achievement, to burnout, I think one is just cultivating that sense of openness. When you’re at the bus stop or you’re walking down the street or whatever, and you have this urge or there’s a lull in the conversation, and you have this temptation to pull out the phone, don’t pull it out.

 And if you really struggle with those things, Han doesn’t say this, but I think it’s a corollary of his positions. Yeah, go with a dumb phone or leave the phone at home. I think too, he has like long sections about how to be a good listener in his book, “The Expulsion of the Other.” I think too, things like, okay, maybe you’ve got a friend that’s going through a hard time, put yourself in that situation where you’re accompanying them through it. So these are all some things that come through. One we haven’t touched on much that I’ll add is that Han talks a lot about ritual and certainly talks about religious ritual and how one of the advantages of that is that it gives time a shape. So every day isn’t just the same empty box in which you fill it up with achievement but you have things like the Sabbath or you have festivals that give time a shape. And even if you’re not religious, you can try to recover a more variegated sense of time. So those are some practical possibilities.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He talks about meditation could potentially be one but like he said, well, don’t use a meditation app where it tracks your streak of how many days in a row you’ve meditated. You’re in achievement society mode if you do that. But just take a few minutes where you just sit there and contemplate something. I think looking at art, going to a museum just to stare at something for half an hour, that could do it. Being out in nature can be another source of that as well.

Steven Knepper: Learn how to tolerate silence. Learn how to be alone and not on technology and just be an observer.

Brett McKay: How has engaging with Han’s work changed the way you live personally?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m certainly someone that struggles with screens. And I have my periods where I do really well with it and others that I don’t do so well. So yeah. I think that studying Han is for me too, it’s become a way of trying to get a better grasp of some of these things in my own life. And yeah. I can remember times like, you know, it’ll be a beautiful evening and my kids are in a ballet practice and I’m outside here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are absolutely gorgeous. And there’s this great sunset, and I’m on my phone? Like doing what? That was one of the moments that just got to me and it’s like, yeah, this is bad. Changes need to be made. Changes need to be made for the sake of other people in my life but also for my own sake and having this richer experience of the world. So Han’s been a really important philosopher to me. And I probably got into him in some ways via Matthew Crawford. I knew Crawford’s work first. That really spoke to me. And I could see Han picking up on some similar themes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. Han started off in metal work and then he became a philosopher and Crawford, he’s like a motorcycle guy, motorcycle mechanic, and then he went into philosophy. So yeah. They’re similar in that way. If someone wanted to dive into Han’s philosophy for the first time, where should they begin?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, “The Burnout Society” still is a pretty good place to begin but I think some of these more recent works are great entry points too. I wouldn’t be surprised if many Art of Manliness listeners liked “The Palliative Society.” I think that’s a good book. Another recent one called “Vita Contemplativa” which focuses on contemplation as an antidote to burnout. I think that’s another good place to start. And certainly, I’d put in a plug for our critical introduction. Han’s written over 30 books and some of those aren’t even translated into English yet. So, what our critical introduction tries to do is give some through lines across Han’s body of work, situate him in among some other thinkers, show how he speaks to contemporary problems both in the ones that he addresses in his book and some others that we identify. So, it’s an academic book but it’s one that’s definitely pitched at the general reader with a little bit of background in philosophy should be able to navigate.

Brett McKay: Well, Steven, this has been a great conversation. Besides your book that listeners can find on Amazon, is there some place they can go to learn more about your work in general?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m working on an author website but I don’t have that up yet. But two places they might go. One is I edit this online poetry journal, “New Verse Review” which has kind of an eclectic focus. So, it touches on some of these questions about attention and contemplation for sure. But then the other place that you might look is, I’ve written a few pieces for The Lamp magazine that touches on similar themes, including I have an overview of Han that I wrote for that magazine. So if you go there and just search my pieces, that’s another, I think, good place. .

Brett McKay: Great. We’ll link to those in the show notes. Well, Steven Knepper, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Steven Knepper: Thank you very much. It’s an honor.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Steven Knepper. He’s the co-author of “A Critical Introduction” of Byung-Chul Han. It’s available on amazon.com. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/han, where you’ll find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for both men and women alike. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In the 13th century, philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote about a vice he called “effeminacy.” While the term can sound off-putting or old-fashioned, Aquinas wasn’t talking about mannerisms or gender.

Rather, for Aquinas, effeminacy meant moral softness: failing to persevere in something good because you’d rather be comfortable and avoid pain. The name reflects the ancient association of softness with femininity, but Aquinas saw the vice as a failing in men and women alike — a black mark on the character of both.

Aquinas also believed there was a remedy to this moral softness: fortitude.

Fortitude, or courage, is the virtue that helps you endure adversity for the sake of the Good. It’s the backbone that allows you to do the right thing even when you really don’t feel like it.

Below, we’ll unpack what Aquinas meant by effeminacy, why it sabotages the Good Life, and four ways to strengthen your fortitude.

What Is Effeminacy, According to Aquinas?

In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas writes:

A man is said to be effeminate if he gives up a good on account of difficulties that he cannot endure, because he is too attached to pleasure or too averse to pain.

For Aquinas, effeminacy (mollities, Latin for “softness”) was a weakness in character; it was the inability to stick with virtuous pursuits and withstand challenging circumstances because of a lack of toughness and an inordinate need for comfort.

In short, effeminacy meant being a moral sissy.

Why Being a Sissy Is an Obstacle to the Good Life

According to Aquinas, effeminacy is an obstacle to virtue.

Aquinas was an Aristotelian. So by his reckoning, the Good Life is a life of virtue: ordered, purposeful, and directed toward the highest values.

But sometimes, living virtuously is hard.

It often requires sacrifice, discipline, and the ability to endure discomfort. Sometimes, doing the virtuous thing means going against your personal interests and desires.

Effeminacy folds when the going gets tough.

You don’t need to be a medieval monk or an Athenian philosopher to recognize this in your own life. Just consider the moments you’ve:

• Avoided a conversation with a friend or family member because it would be awkward.
• Skipped a workout because you just weren’t “feeling it.”
• Used alcohol to numb the pain of a bad day at work.
• Snapped at your kids because you were in a bad mood instead of controlling your emotions.
• Didn’t speak up at work about unethical behavior going on because you were afraid of what it would do for your promotion prospects.
• Quit a new, edifying hobby because you were frustrated with how slow your progress was.
• Spent frivolously instead of sticking to your budget.

The Opposite of Effeminacy: Fortitude

The flip side of moral sissyness is fortitude: the ability to stand firm in difficulties. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas explains that fortitude is all about holding fast to what’s good and right, even when danger is breathing down your neck or discomfort is tempting you to quit. Fortitude is the mental and spiritual spine that keeps you from giving up at the first inkling of hardship or fear.

For Aquinas, the ability to endure discomfort while holding on to the Good is a key feature of fortitude.

Sure, you can make the hard choice towards virtue once, but can you do it again and again, day in and day out for weeks, months, or years, when it would just be easier to give up?

Another important element of Thomist fortitude is that it isn’t reckless. It’s about doing the hard and maybe dangerous thing — guided by reason. Like the good Aristotelian that he is, Aquinas sees fortitude as the golden mean between cowardice and rashness.

4 Ways to Strengthen Your Thomist Fortitude and Quit Being a Sissy

1. Get Your Loves in Order

Effeminacy happens when you love comfort more than you love a greater good. It springs from disordered loves: giving your heart too much to things which are not worthy of it, and too little to that which is.

If you say you love strength, but you can’t get up in the morning to lift weights, then you really love your bed more than you love strength.  

Aquinas believed contemplating the goodness of the Good was one way to gain greater love for the things which deserved it. Another was to choose to associate with those who modeled the Good, thereby internalizing their example. But he primarily thought of love as an act of the will rather than a feeling — that the more you deliberately practiced the virtues, the more your desires would align themselves correctly.

Each time you choose courageously (enduring discomfort, pain, or fear for what’s truly important), you’re strengthening your attachment to higher goods and loosening your attachment to lesser comforts. Fortitude is found in the exercise of it.

As you exercise fortitude and your loves become rightly ordered, the attraction of higher goods grows stronger, and the pull of lesser goods diminishes. When you genuinely prefer virtue to fleeting comforts, choosing rightly becomes more habitual and natural, requiring less effort or strain each time.

Fortitude never becomes unnecessary — it will always act as the guardian of the Good. But when your loves are rightly ordered, courage becomes more intuitive.

2. Perform a Weekly Fortitude Self-Examen

We’ve talked about self-examens as a powerful spiritual discipline to improve yourself. Here’s an Aquinas-inspired fortitude/effeminacy examen you can use each week:

• Where did I choose ease over something important?
• Where did I quit too soon on a worthy goal?
• When did I embrace difficulty and do the right thing despite discomfort?

This honest inventory sheds light on patterns of softness and where you can improve, and it shows you where you’re growing in fortitude.

3. Seek Out Small Hardships

If ordering your loves by choosing virtue over comfort is the primary way to exercise your fortitude, performing difficult tasks of any kind can be considered “accessory work” for further strengthening your courage.  

Incorporating small acts of intentional hardship into your life can help develop your resolve:

• Fast from a meal or a favorite indulgence.
• Wake up earlier instead of snoozing.
• Take a cold shower.
• Speak up in a situation at work where you’d usually stay silent.

For more on challenging yourself, check out these AoM resources:

• You May Be Strong . . . But Are You Tough?
• Podcast #640: Weird and Wonderful Ways to Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
• Podcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis
• Podcast #941: How to Avoid Death by Comfort

4. Persevere in the Boring and Mundane

Fortitude isn’t just about facing dramatic challenges. Remember, for Aquinas, a key feature of fortitude is the ability to endure in the Good even when it’s hard. Practice perseverance in small virtuous habits even when motivation flags to help you build up endurance for the big important challenges in life:

• Keep working out even when you stop feeling like it.
• Keep praying/meditating, even when it’s dry or dull.
• Keep budgeting, even when an impulse buy tempts you.
• Keep volunteering or helping a friend in need, even when results are slow.

Little daily acts of endurance like the above can help you to build up your fortitude muscles while burning off your moral flab.

Conclusion

Effeminacy, in Aquinas’s sense, is letting comfort call the shots, causing you to abandon good things at the first sign of difficulty.

Its antidote is the virtue of fortitude: holding steady in adversity to pursue what’s right and worthwhile.

Start small. Choose discomfort over ease in just one instance today.

Then do it again tomorrow.

And the next day.

Stack those hard choices on top of each other, brick by brick, and you’ll build the kind of man Aquinas thought worth emulating: resilient, disciplined, and decidedly un‑soft.

That’s how you build fortitude . . . and quit being a sissy.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about “living your truth” and “being authentic.” These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean.

The concept of identity — how we understand ourselves — has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences.

Today on the show, Carl Trueman unpacks this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers — Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre — who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we’ve lost something essential in moving from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud by Philip Rieff
• Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor
• After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre 
• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
• AoM Podcast #723: Men Without Chests
• AoM Article: 3 Essential Books for Understanding Our Disorienting Modern World
• AoM Article: Why Are Modern Debates on Morality So Shrill?
• Carl’s writing at First Things

Connect With Carl Trueman

• Carl’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about living your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today in the show, Carl Trueman impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian and the author of the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles Taylor, Philip Brief, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discussed how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moved you from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at a aom.is/modernself. Alright, Carl Trueman, welcome to the show.

Carl Trueman: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on Brett.

Brett McKay: So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self, and you explore how our concept of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with this change. First one was Charles Taylor. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before with his book, A Secular Age, Philip Rieff, sociologist, we’ll discuss him. And then Alasdair MacIntyre, he’s popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I’ve read these three guys and I’ve always wondered like, why hasn’t anyone written a book where they’ve synthesized these three thinkers? ‘Cause they’re all hitting on the same idea, and they’re trying to figure out like, what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But before we get to these thinkers, we’ll start with basic definition. What do you mean when you talk about the self?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, good question. I think what I’m trying to get at there is, is how we imagine ourselves as sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find ourselves. What is it that makes us us? So for example, if we would go back to the middle ages and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, who are you or what are you, you’re likely to get an answer to the effect of, well, I’m the son of so and so, or I’m the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated with this particular area. You’ll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you’re unlikely to get quite that sort of answer.

You’re probably going to get an answer that touches on things that relate to inner feelings. I’m a spiritual person, for example, or to go down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book. You might get somebody saying, well, I’m a gay person, or something like that. And the shift there has been towards this inner space, we’re not so much marked. We don’t so much understand ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings as we understand ourselves as a collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I’m really trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are and what we are relative to the world around us?

Brett McKay: And you talk about in the book Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of defining ourself to the inner, he calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for us?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that what makes me really me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera I have inside. And this is where we get the introduction of an interesting term with which we’re all familiar, but which would’ve been meaningless back in the iddyl ages. What makes me authentic is my ability to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that fundamentally I’m an individual. I define myself, I’m defined by my individual desires, passions, feelings. And I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.

Brett McKay: Okay. And we’ll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity ’cause yeah, it’s something I think we take for granted ’cause you hear it so much these days. But something you do in the book is you do a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define ourselves by our inner feelings? And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century, maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, this goes back hundreds of years. I mean, you’d go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch how do we go from a point where we define ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession, to whatever we feel inside of ourselves?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s difficult to answer in a sort of short way without indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level the last 400 or 500 years have witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquifaction of the world in which we live. What do I mean by that? We’re typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a lot more. I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was. And that’s a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness of the world has become highly negotiable. The one side of the story is the old traditional markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial.

On the other hand what moves in to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes. Descartes is wrestling with a difficult question in the 17th century when everything around seems to be changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere? Is there a an archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that? Because that is the one place that is certain. And he finds the certainty, of course, in his own mind. I think therefore I am and Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that’s taking place in the 17th century where that inner space, the one constant we all feel in our lives these days is our self-consciousness. Our psychological lives seem to be the one thing that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it’s that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards I think that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested in the world today.

Brett McKay: And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was Jean Jacques Rousseau in the development of Romanticism. For those who aren’t familiar with the idea of romanticism, what is that?

Carl Trueman: Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, an artist such as JMW Turner, Casper David Friedrich, music, I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Choppa would be a romantic composer. When you compare, say the music of a Choppa to the music of a Bark, you don’t have to know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bark you have a lot of structure and order. If you move to, I know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or to Chopin’s Nocturnes that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It’s not chaos, but it’s really pulling on the heartstrings. It’s attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bark is not. And that’s reflective of romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is really wanting to explore, stimulate and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.

Brett McKay: And then later on the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continued this liquification of the self. And you go into detail about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting ’cause I think a lot of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means to be a self. I’m gonna create, I’m the creator of myself. I’m the artist of my life. And I’m thinking, you don’t realize this, but like that’s Frederick Nietzsche. You don’t know it. So tell us about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, Nietzsche is a remarkable 19th century philosopher. Has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there’s one lecture given on Nietzsche’s philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche is the man who caused the bluff on the enlightenment. If we would take Jean Jacques Rousseau as a typical philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space. And he wants to ground morality very much in sort of spontaneous sympathetic reactions. Rousseau essentially says, as soon as you’ve got laws, you know something’s gone wrong. If you see an injustice taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There’s a human instinct for justice. Rousseau in other words, he’s rightly pointing to the role I think of feelings in ethical reasoning. If you see somebody being beaten up and you feel nothing emotional, you’re a psychopath.

We understand the need for feelings in our ethical decisions, but Rousseau grounds that really in an understanding of human beings as having a human nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute, you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn’t play any positive constructive role in your thinking, but you’ve smuggled something in that plays the role of God. You’ve got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you’ve substituted him with human nature. You still think there’s such a thing as human nature. And human nature has an authoritative moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you can’t do that. If you’ve killed God, if you’ve got rid of God, if you’ve killed God, you’ve really got rid of human nature as well. And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a con trick pulled by the weak to subvert the strength of the strong. And where the features in the sort of the psychological story is, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us shapes our moral thinking. But he’s detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

Brett McKay: And this will have consequences later on. We’ll see that. And Alasdair MacIntyre, we’ll get to him, he grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas ’cause they’re significant, even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity in Charles Taylor’s thinking on that. By authenticity you meant that you had to live your life according to whatever you feel on the inside. And that’s kind of a sort of a given. That’s how you wanna live your life today. And if you don’t do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor think authenticity became a moral ideal?

Carl Trueman: I think it’s really in the 18th and early 19th century, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way. William Wordsworth writes this poem, it’s not one of his greatest poems, this poem, the Idiot Boy, which is this, a poem about a child. We would say today a child with serious learning difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this. Why are you writing a poem that appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his students and friends, he says, basically, I’m not mocking him. I’m using him as an example. We would now say I’m using the Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you have when you go to somebody like that, so we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social cues, et cetera.

What you’ve got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It’s not being corrupted by the conventions of society. With the idiot boy what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would say, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It’s alienated us from that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that’s where you get the emerging notion of authenticity. This idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions to those untamed, untrammeled truly human feelings inside and live according to them, then that’s what it means to be truly human or that’s what it means to be an authentic human.

Brett McKay: And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.

Carl Trueman: That’s the idea. The romantic idea is a sort of a return to a rural idyll, if you like, where you don’t have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness, anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village, I can guarantee you that the rural Italy is not as idyllic as the Romantics thought it was.

Brett McKay: And Nietzsche called them on their blood and was like, yeah, you think that’s what it’s gonna happen. But actually probably not what’s gonna happen if everyone’s living by their inner desires.

Carl Trueman: Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very naive view. We could somewhat simplify, we could say, for somebody like Rousseau, bottom line is it’s society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche you know you’ve got the idea that actually what makes us great of the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here is what Charles Taylor sets up for us, is that there’s this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external, where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy, as we progressed through the enlightenment and things like technology allowed you to travel. You’re no longer tied to the family farm. Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions and political life. The church started losing authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had philosophers like Nietzsche just adding fuel to the fire. So there’s an inward turn. Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self is a sociologist named Philip Rieff. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Rieff lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there’s four ages. What are those four ages of the self?

Carl Trueman: Well, Societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, it’s say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age I think one of the models is dominant. The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public square. So the great example of this might be fourth century BC Athens where being involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing, the polis, it’s the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human. It’s the idea that…

Brett McKay: I was gonna say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you’re an idiot. Like you’re a private person, you’re looked down upon, you weren’t even a person basically.

Carl Trueman: No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, man is a political animal. He’s meaning man is a man of the polis. He’s a man of public life. And as you rightly point out the opposite of politicos is idioticos, the private man. So that’s the first arrangement. And Rieff sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is, that’s an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious rituals. We might think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature that a society where religious man was the ideal. That’s kind of literally, which would be produced in that sort of culture. Where you have the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this rag bagg bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, if you may have Muslim friends, and they go on the Hoge to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.

So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be human. This is replaced for Rieff what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, Charles Dickens’s books are full of economic man. He’s writing about industrial revolution, England. So you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Grad Grind. These are figures who find their fulfillment being involved in economic activities in society. And Rieff sees all three of these as having something in common.

They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this, it is the role of society in shaping you to be a political, religious or economic man to direct you outwards. So education is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role. Rieff sees the present age, and he’s writing in 1966. This is nearly 60 years ago. It’s one of those books, triumphal Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says that what we have at the end of this is what he call psychological man. And Psychological man is the man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the first three.

And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a member of society. And a psychological manner reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society’s role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So one could draw a contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boys school in England. Team sports was central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That’s not child-centered learning that sort of dominates the airwaves today where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man, it’s a very, very different culture to the first three.

Brett McKay: And it seems like it’s similar to Taylor’s idea of expressive individualism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s Taylor’s expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. The romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century. It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human to permeate the whole of society and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And something Rieff talks about, one of the defining characteristics of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the analytical attitude?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a lit has with a lot of things in Rieff, it’s a bit opaque.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He’s a hard read. He’s a very hard read.

Carl Trueman: And I think actually that’s part of the game. He’s trying to disorient the reader sometimes. But I’ll give you his definition and then I’ll try to sort of unpack it a bit. The definition that he gives in Triumph Of The Therapeutic is the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it originates outside the individual in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse. Now, he’s talking there about Freud, and I think what he’s trying to get at is this, that for Freud society makes demands upon us. And it does that, it curbs our inner desires in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms for Freud, males want to rape and pillage.

Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages, but we can’t live together if we’re savages. So there’s a trade off between the desire of the individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates though, those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions. We are never happy. We struggle because we’re not allowed to be who we really are because we need to be civilized. And I think what Rieff is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It’s not that we can ever come to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two, but the goal of therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think to the analytic attitude is there is no objective moral order there, there is no divinely sanctioned moral order.

There are really just social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they’re ultimately, you’re not grounded in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you’re wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are the things you’ve gotta analyze in order to try to engage in in the kind of therapy that Freud is proposing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the big idea from Freud. Like Freud was trying to figure out, he’s there at the late 19th century, early 20th century. This is after Nietzsche, you had Darwin’s theory of evolution. So basically yeah, Freud was like, yeah, God’s dead. There’s no objective moral order, so what do we do? And his conclusion was, well, the best we can do is just you lay on a couch and you talk to a shrink to sort out your inner emotions. That’s about as good as you can do.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s a sort of, it’s a therapy, to use Rieff’s term. It’s therapy. It’s helping you to come to terms with reality and learning where the limits are and learning where you can perhaps break those limits at points. So yeah, it’s a negotiating strategy.

Brett McKay: And one thing too, Rieff talks about, even though Freud’s ideas have been discredited in the 20th and 21st century, like we’re still living under Freud’s shadow. We all are psychological men. I mean, I’m sure all of us have picked up a book on cognitive behavioral therapy or how to manage my anger. And it’s never like, well, don’t be angry because God said not to be angry. It’s like, well, if I wanna have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a hold of my anger. And so, yeah, Rieff says what ends up happening is what the analytical attitude can do is we end up instrumentalizing things that were once ideals like love, faith, hope, courage, et cetera.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. I mean, it’s very much the case. I think there’s a sense in which a traditional religious man was born to be saved. Therapeutic man, psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, classical understandings of love, love has profound sacrificial connotations to it. To love somebody is not to engage in a relationship with them that just makes me feel good. To love somebody traditionally will involve at times a deep sacrifice of the self. As a pastor at times I’ve married numerous young couples, and I always make the point in the wedding homily that it’s easy to love your wife on the wedding day. She’s beautiful, the sexual desire is bubbling away, you love each other’s company, you’re embarking on this lifelong adventure together.

But what about when one of you has dementia and the other one is getting nothing from that person, but is having to help them even with their most basic bodily needs? And I raised the question, where is love most dramatically demonstrated? Is it on the wedding day or is it when one of the partners can no longer provide happiness for the other, can no longer be an instrument? And I think that gets to the notion of the instrumentalizing of love and think about our divorce laws now. No-fault divorce has a very instrumentalized view of love and loved ones in it. Hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy, well, the contract no longer applies. I can just dissolve the contract and take my love to another. So, yeah. But you see that, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love. And I would say a very impoverishing way.

Brett McKay: So again, Philip reached describing inner turn towards defining ourself. It’s all about just what makes me happy, what soothes me. And I think what I love about the book, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I encourage people to read it, even though it is opaque hard to get through, it really does capture, it helps you understand like this rise of wellness culture in the West of everyone that’s worried about their mental health, even if they don’t have like a severe mental illness. But like, everyone’s just concerned about, okay, my anxiety, or I’m feeling nervous, or I don’t have full-blown depression but I’m feeling kind of sad. What can I do to not do that? Like Philip Rieff describes, well, here’s why you have that idea.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. Because I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time, these are not unnatural things. We can’t be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes with life when you are engaged in relationship with other people. To have children is to make yourself vulnerable to distress, frustration at times. It is part of the human condition that we experience frustration, depression, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily the signs of neuroses or illnesses or abnormality. They’re part of being a human being, rubbing shoulders into connecting with other human beings.

Brett McKay: One argument that Rieff makes in the triumphant therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western society so much, or western culture, that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think it wouldn’t be aligned with like religious life. Did you see that when you were a pastor? Did you see the therapeutic or the psychological man creep into religious life?

Carl Trueman: Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form, when you think about, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It’s Joel Osteen down in Houston. I think he has 80,000 in his congregation. Think of the books that Joel Osteen writes, Your Best Life Now, every day of Friday, it’s always confused me that one ’cause I tend to think Saturday’s the best day of the week. But every day of Friday. You think about, why is he the most successful pastor? Because he uses the Christian religious idiom precisely to soothe the therapeutic needs of society but even in more Orthodox Christian circles. Think about how a lot of people choose their church. If you’re Catholic listeners, it doesn’t apply to them. But if you’re a Protestant, a lot of people choose their church on the basis of, does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor sermon scratch where I feel I’m itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship as it traditionally was a matter of, sort of liturgical forms that form you by sort of squeezing you into their mold or is it a way of expressing yourself before the Lord? So there are all kinds of ways in which that reverse in the culture that the rise of the therapeutic represents have grabbed hold of tradition, even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees.

Brett McKay: What are your thoughts Re? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life, or are you kinda like, ah, just get it all out of there?

Carl Trueman: Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very cynical about expressive individualism, but one of the things that, I didn’t do this in the book. I didn’t have space, but I wouldn’t wanna say there are certain things that the psychological turn has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to. Having said, feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness. Sometimes it can be. I think we are more aware now of mental illness than we were before. We are more aware of the importance of that inner life. It’s not the psychological struggles aren’t important. They are. And I think, look back to my education that I mentioned. I’m not sure that having my individuality crushed to be part of the team. It was necessarily the best model of education. It’s very different one to the one that applies today. And I would say there are dimensions of child-centered learning, for example, that are an improvement on the model that I experienced. So yeah, the rise of the therapeutic, it’s not an entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and has shone a light upon certain things that have improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get.

Brett McKay: You didn’t talk about this guy in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but I’d love to get your thoughts on him, Jung. ‘Cause Rieff talks about Jung a lot in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic. And I’d love to get your thoughts on this because you see him more and more in the popular discourse, I think, thanks to Jordan Peterson who’s talking about archetypes all the time. And you even see religious leaders talking about Jung and archetypes. One thing that Rieff argues is that Yung tried to take the analytical attitude of Freud where all you do is you just try to figure out what’s going on yourself. And he turned it into almost like a quasi-religious therapy. What’s your take on Yung?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it seems to me that in some ways he’s a kind of psychoanalytical Rousseau or romantic. I don’t want to make a naive historical connection there, but it seems to me from what I’ve read of Jung, that he’s wanting to harp back to some sort of transcendent universal human nature, some sort of structure that binds us all together. I think Rieff in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic, he refers to Jung as having a sort of a weak God. And there’s that sort of return to something, some level of objectivity that allows you a sort of a framework for understanding these inner desires. And bringing up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that it seems to me, because Peterson, on the one hand seems to want to ground human nature in something. He wants to be able to talk in universal terms about what is good for human beings.

But I’ve never heard him make that final leap to full-blown theistic commitment. So he has interesting things to say about the Bible, but he always seems to be somewhat equivocal to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way that Orthodox Christianity would consider it to be true. So from what I know about Jung, and I’ve not read very much of him, it seems that Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I think Rieff makes some comment somewhere that it’s almost preferable to have Freud’s non-existent, but powerful God than to have Jung’s existent but very weak God. And there’s a sense in which I would look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and say, I’d almost rather be dealing with Nietzsche than somebody who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve read a lot of Jung, and we’ve had guests on the podcast who are big in the Jung and talk about archetypes. And I’ve read all the, especially since I’m in like in the manosphere, there’s a lot of mytho poletic stuff where people go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the warrior. And I read these books and like I always think they’re interesting, but it’s like, what much to do with this? ‘Cause they tell you like, well, you need to harness the king architect. I’m like, what does that mean? And they tell you just, well, you gotta think about Pharaohs and you’ll somehow become, like you’ll harness it. I’m like, I don’t know. And to me it just makes more sense. Okay. I’d rather just like, okay, what’s the specific deity that I need to organize my life around instead of this sort of this vague, weird general archetype?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical question which Nietzsche would raise as well, of, are you not simply trying to grant your own personal preferences a sort of transcendent authority here, your own version of masculinity or whatever it is, you’re sort of trying to find some way of claiming that it has a transcendent truth beyond that which is typically justifiable. It’s interesting you raise it in the manosphere that, it’s fascinating to me that this is the manosphere, because it’s precisely in the manosphere that I think we are seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially constructed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think Jung is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s actually useful in organizing your life just based on my experience. We talked about Taylor, we talked about Rieff, they’ve all described this inward turn, we shape our sense of self by what’s inside of ourself. And it’s no longer external things that it’s helping us define ourself. And this brings us to Alasdair MacIntyre. What does Alasdair MacIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn to defining ourself?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, for McIntyre in his book After Virtues where he sort of lays this out, the results are really pretty bleak at a social level in that when you enter this realm of we might say radical subjectivity, you end up losing he would say the great narratives or the great stories that bind cultures together. And so you end up really unable to engage in significant moral discussion or ethical discussion about things. One could take an example, when you lose a common understanding of what it means to be a human being, it becomes impossible to discuss and adjudicate debates about abortion, for example. Is the baby in the womb a baby in the womb, or just part of the woman’s body? Behind your convictions on those things like two entirely incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it’s virtually impossible to get the proponents of each view to sit down and come to any kind of common understanding relative to the other group. So for McIntyre, society’s ability to have important discussions starts to break down. And that has all kinds of political and social consequences.

Brett McKay: He says that since there’s no longer a common moral language, common objective, moral background, where we’re having these debates, what we had to resort to, he calls emotivism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. And essentially that is that, your moral views are basically expressions of your own emotional preferences dressed up in the language of moral objectivity. So, debates become, you think you’re talking about principles, but you’re actually talking about one emotional preference versus another.

Brett McKay: And I think what McIntyre’s idea of emotivism can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they’d never go anywhere. ‘Cause we’re just yelling past each other, basically.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now get to go by default to the courts, because in the courts you can have a straightforward legal fight. You don’t have to persuade the populist to vote for you in some way. And so a lot of attention in the last few decades, particularly in the United States, has been focused on Supreme Court decisions. The big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided judicially rather than on the debating floor of the Senate.

Brett McKay: What did MacIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution?

Carl Trueman: Building strong communities, it really points, I think, in a local direction. And in a sense, Rod Dreher as Benedicts option, I think he published the book within 2015, 2016. Rieff’s on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you’re gonna have to return to a kind of local level.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it’s Nietzsche or Aristotle. That’s her choice.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Philosophically. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I would say, Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity. But yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it’s hard. And going back to local, that’s gonna be hard. And I think even McIntyre says he’s not very optimistic about reviving maybe local communities, because I think he argued that people today they’ve forgotten like even how to do that. And so it’s gonna be hard, maybe even impossible.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that was 45 years ago before a lot of our interaction became technologically mediated in the way it is today. I mean, you and I, we’re not sitting in the same room. I’m not even seeing your face. We’re just talking through a computer. So much of our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of real physical, geographical place where you could actually build a local community.

Brett McKay: And I think the conversation so far, what we’ve hopefully painted for our audience is that okay, reason why things can feel confusing, why you just feel weightless or just discombobulated is your sense of self it’s, we no longer have that external order to base our lives around. So we’re all kind of winging it in a way. And that’s why you have existential crises ’cause you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. And then, because we’re deciding how we look at our life, or what a good life looks like based on our own inner life, well, that causes all this debate that’s intractable and goes nowhere because we all have different subjective ideas of what is the good life.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily presence in this. I mean, when you think about rising levels of anxiety among young people, I think some of that’s connected to the disembodied nature of social media. When I was growing up I had a group of friends, they were real presences in my life. Falling out was costly. I never reduced them merely to the beliefs or viewpoints they happened to express. There was real rich, strong interaction because we were actually real presences in each other’s lives. Social media insults are cheap, falling out is cheap. The tendency to reduce the people with whom we’re engaging simply to the views they express is very strong. And I think that makes us all feel less secure about who we are than would’ve been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there’s a strong, it’s not just philosophical stuff that’s going on there’s also technological stuff that is reinforcing and exacerbating this modern sense of the self.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you’re online, you’re a psychological man.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Yeah. You are disembodied.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor Rieff and McIntyre, I couldn’t help but think about CS Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks we’ve been discussing today?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, I think in some ways Lewis could be seen, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea in some ways in The Abolition of Man. I also think that he puts his finger, there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this, Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet is doing a similar thing at the same time as Lewis, putting his finger on the fact that it is anthropology, what it means to be human that is becoming the big question of the age. And I think that remains the same today. I think The Abolition of Man, a bit like the Triumph of The Therapeutic is one of those books that the author could not have known how truly he was putting his finger on things at the time as he actually was.

It’s more true today in some ways than other times. So I think first of all, Lewis is useful because yep, anthropology is the problem. Secondly, I think he offers a note of hope because his notion of the Tao, this idea that there is some sort of moral structure to the universe and I would talk about natural law, for example. I think that’s something worth exploring. I think we’re at a point where we’re beginning to see that yes, we could try to make human beings limitless through the technology we have, but in doing so, we’re actually destroying and not enhancing or improving our humanity because there is some natural moral structure to what it means to be a human being. So I think on that point too, Lewis, he’s not offering all the answers, but he’s certainly pointing us in the direction of the right questions.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, is he helps you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Because we’ve been talking about the romantics, and with the romantics, it was just important to feel, and whatever you felt, that was considered good. But Lewis, he believed in an objective moral order and that some things should make you feel certain feelings. He thought feelings were important, but you had to train your emotions so that you felt the right emotions for the right things at the right time, for the right reasons.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that’s where I think returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on virtue. The old idea of virtues is important here, that yes, we have feelings, but we need to have those feelings shaped by our rational side, by our reason, by our knowledge.

Brett McKay: I think yeah. Role not only for Aquinas, but the great books like reading that can go a long way to training your emotions, training your feelings, training the sentiments, looking at good art. The religious life can play a role in that, helping you order your desires.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, I mean, this is the Enlightenment thinker, Friedrich Schiller has this idea that human beings, we have two drives. You have the rational drive, and we have the Sensuous Drive. And those two, if you allow the one to run amuck, it’s a disaster. If it’s the rational drive, you end up with a French revolution. If it’s a sensuous drive, you end up with a sort of moral chaos going the other way. You need to have each informing the other. And for Shiller art was the answer, as you just said, contemplating great art. That’s what brought the two together. And that’s, I think, not a bad way of thinking about things. It does matter what you read. It does matter what music you listen to. It does matter what art you contemplate.

Brett McKay: Well, Carl, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation.

Carl Trueman: That was fun. Time seems to have flown by for me.

Brett McKay: It did. Well, Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Carl Trueman: I write a, I would say a fortnightly, but for American listeners that’s every two weeks, column at firstthings.com. It actually has a print version, but it’s also an online magazine dealing with religion and public life and culture. And I write a couple of columns a month for World Magazine online as well, which is, that’s a more distinctively protestant thing. Other than that, I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I pop up all over the place, I guess, but firstthings.com Would be the primary place to go and read me.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Carl Trueman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Carl Trueman: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks For having me on.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Carl Trueman. He’s the author of the book, the Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/modernself where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind time listening when podcast would put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Resilience is often touted as the end all, be all of coping with life’s challenges and setbacks. But my guest knows from her studies, executive coaching, and her own life that sometimes resilience just isn’t enough. You need an even more durable source of strength.

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and researcher and the author of Shatterproof: How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos. Today on the show, Tasha explains why the concept of resilience rose to prominence in the 2010s, how resilience can be improved a little as a skill, but is largely an exhaustible capacity, and how you know when you’re hitting your “resilience ceiling.” We then talk about the more sustainable skillset and strength of becoming shatterproof. We discuss the potential to grow forward instead of simply bouncing back, the psychological needs that have to be met to become shatterproof, and research-backed tools for thriving in life instead of just surviving.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Tasha’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #644 — How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness
• AoM Article: On Becoming Antifragile
• Self-determination theory
• Sunday Firesides: You Don’t Have the Time, Not to Take the Time

Connect With Tasha Eurich

• Tasha’s website
• Shatterproof website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Resilience is often touted as the end all be all of coping with life’s challenges and setbacks. But my guest knows from her studies, executive coaching and her own life that sometimes resilience just isn’t enough. Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and researcher and the author of “Shatterproof: How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos.” Today on the show, Tasha explains why the concept of resilience rose to prominence in the 2010s, how resilience can be improved a little as a skill, but is largely an exhaustible capacity, and how you know when you’re hitting your resilience ceiling. We then talk about the more sustainable skill set and strength of becoming shatterproof. We discuss the potential to grow forward instead of simply bouncing back, the psychological needs that have to be met to become shatterproof and research-backed tools for thriving in life instead of just surviving. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/shatterproof.

All right. Tasha Eurich, welcome back to the show.

Tasha Eurich: Thanks for having me back, Brett.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a couple years ago to talk about your book Insight, which is all about self awareness and becoming more self-aware. You got a new book out called Shatterproof that makes the case that resilience sometimes isn’t enough to cope with all the chaos that life can bring. And what’s interesting is that as you started to research this book a few years ago, your life was upended by debilitating health issues. And then your research about resilience and thriving in chaos, it really started to become me-search. So what happened to your health? What was going on in your life at that time?

Tasha Eurich: So the very short story is I’ve had a lifetime of medical issues that have perplexed every specialist I’d seen. Really, really bad pain. Somebody told me I had the spine of a 70-year-old when I was 25, but a lot of things that couldn’t be stitched together. But generally what would happen is I would be resilient. Whatever weird health challenge I was facing, whether again it was pain or I would sometimes have these like full body allergic reactions even though I didn’t have allergies, I would just try to grit through it. And basically until the age of 40, I was able to keep living my life with some limitations, knowing that probably there was something that was diagnosable, but nobody knew what it was and held a pretty good life. But COVID happened. I think all of us were going and going and going, and then when we had to stop, my body was no longer fueled by adrenaline. And what happened over the course of about two years was, it started with a pain in my arms that kind of spread to basically my entire body.

Every time I’d stand up, I would be dizzy or I’d faint. My resting heart rate was 150 beats a minute. Just all of these crazy, crazy symptoms. And eventually, by about mid-2021, I was completely bedridden. I would dust myself off and go do a keynote for 24 hours and come back and pay for it for five days. And so it was really interesting about this process, as you mentioned that, I started this research in 2020 on how do people bounce back when bad things happen. This became something that was so critical for me, and I’ve never been in this situation as a researcher where I have needed an immediate answer to whatever I was investigating in order to save myself. And going back to this idea of resilience, I did all the things I was supposed to do. I put all my resilience practices. So things like gratitude and social support and optimism and trying to reframe my challenges as opportunities, I put them all in a spreadsheet. And at the point where I was like gunning the most on resilience, I would print this spreadsheet out every day and I would check the practices that I had used that day.

But I couldn’t help but notice as my physical health was deteriorating, I was more anxious, more stressed, more depressed than I had been in as long as I could remember. I was thinking to myself, this isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to me. Why can’t I crawl out of this hole? And that was what led me, and we’ll talk about it today, to discover that resilience is actually not the end all, be all solution to helping us cope with hard times. So when I wrote this book, I guess the bottom line is, I was personally experiencing the limitations of resilience while I was going through this physical spiral.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And come to find out, I mean, you ended up… You have, like a rare genetic disease, right?

Tasha Eurich: I did. And so flash forward between when I was about to give up because my resilience practices weren’t working to… Six or eight months when I started to use these shatterproof practices that I talked about, what I ended up getting diagnosed with is a genetic connective tissue disease called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or EDS. And it happens when your body actually doesn’t know how to produce the proteins of collagen and elastin. And the problem with that is those proteins exist everywhere in your body. And most physicians are told that it’s so rare that they’ll never see a case in their practice in their lifetime, but there are estimates that it’s as common as one in 5,000 people. So it’s very interesting and I feel really privileged to be able to talk about it with this platform is, some of the diseases that we think are rare might not be as rare as we think.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you had your career the same time you were trying to figure out what was wrong with you. And that’s another added stressor. So you have to go to different specialists and you talk about in the book, you had to track your own health records because again, a lot of the doctors were like, what is this? I don’t know what’s going on. So you really had to become an advocate for yourself. And then you’re writing a book and yeah, as you said, resilience wasn’t enough. You were doing all the resilience things that people talk about. So let’s talk about resilience first and then we’ll get into Shatterproof. We’ve talked about resilience on the podcast before. We’ve actually written a series about it way back in the 2010s when resilience was hot. What do psychologists mean by resilience? And why do they become such a big thing in the 2010s?

Tasha Eurich: Yeah, that’s a really important question. Psychologists define resilience, particularly empirical scientists as the capacity to cope with hard things. And there’s some debate in the literature about this, but I think that’s kind of the commonly accepted definition. But what that means is, you sort of hear the word capacity and there’s all these practices that we can do to increase our capacity. But if it’s a capacity and not a skill set, it means that there’s a point at which we are going to exhaust that capacity. So I know we’ll come back to that, but I think that’s a really important nuance of this definition. The other way to look at resilience in kind of a more practical way is it’s a tool to keep us together during shorter term crises versus, as we’ll see, kind of a singular strategy for coping with chronic long-term stress. But I think that the reason, in my opinion, that it became so popular in the 2010s is you can sort of argue that we live in a chaos era where every day is another headline, another crisis. There’s more uncertainty than we’ve sort of ever experienced.

That era arguably began with the global recession in 2008 and 2009. And right around that time, resilience went from being this kind of esoteric scientific concept to something that really went into the mainstream. So instead of a capacity, it became a skill that anyone could develop and summon at will. Right? And so this obscure scientific concept was suddenly this empowering self-improvement tool. And there’s a lot of good that came out of that, I think. The last thing I want to do is come on today and say anything negative about resilience. But I think the problem was some people took it too far. I talk about quotes in my book that I wish I could conjure at will. But it’s stuff like resilience is the singular strategy to help us lead a better, happier life. And if you go back to the scientific research on this and including our research that we did, that’s just not empirically true.

Brett McKay: Well, I thought that was interesting. You highlight… I mean, this happens to all concepts, like psychological concepts that become popular. There’s a lot of buzz and people get excited about it. But then consequently there’s a lot of myths that pop up because people misread the research or they’re not explaining the research completely and it contradicts even what the initial resilience researchers talked about. So what misconceptions have grown up around resilience as compared to what the research actually says?

Tasha Eurich: So in my research on this, I looked at several hundred articles, but in particular the 200 most highly cited. So those are the articles that other researchers go back to and find credibility in. And the three myths that came out of this really threw me for a loop. And I’ll just say as a preface, I’m a fourth generation entrepreneur, gridding through is in my DNA. And I was shocked because again, as I said, I first found these patterns in my data, didn’t understand what that meant, where they were coming from. And then when I went back into the research, I said, oh, other people have found this, this has been true. So the first myth is, I think we all think that if we do all of these practices that it’s going to help us thrive. But what the research says is resilience is actually intended to help us survive. And I don’t know about you, Brett, but I feel like we all deserve more than just surviving. And I think, everybody that’s listening to this has their own experience of it of, like, it’s easy to feel like at the end of the day, like, I barely got through today, and then I’m going to do it again tomorrow.

So that’s the first one. The second myth is, I think, with this concept of resilience moving from a capacity to a skill, there’s a thought that, oh, I can strengthen my resilience muscle. I can dramatically improve. I can. I’m in full control of my resilience. But what the research shows is that actually some of us have more resilience than others. And all of these training programs to improve resilience have pretty spotty records in terms of whether or not they help us be more resilient. And this leads to something called gaslighting, right? Of like, well, you should have just spent more time on your yoga mat or, you didn’t do your gratitude affirmation today. And to me, I think that’s really powerful, because if it’s not under our control, in all cases, we can’t beat ourselves up for it. The third myth is, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. What we know from the research is that ongoing or extreme stress doesn’t make us stronger. In small amounts, it does. It’s called the stress inoculation hypothesis. But ongoing stress actually depletes our resilience and makes us more vulnerable to breaking. So I’m curious, how does that strike you? What’s your reaction to those myths?

Brett McKay: I mean, to me, it makes sense. I just experienced in my own life. I mean, I think resilience is useful. I think is the conclusion you make. Resilience is a useful capacity to fall back on in the short term. But then if you’re continually getting beat down, like, you just get worn down, or you’re just like, okay, I’m done, and you quit your job or you got to take a sabbatical or whatever, or even worse, you might resort to drugs or alcohol to sort of soothe the pain. That happens to a lot of people. And that one point about resilience, like, some people are more resilient than others, like, it’s just an inherent. That actually lines up. I’ve seen research. Maybe you came across this as well. A lot of times when people talk about resilience, we always talk about the Navy SEALs. Oh, the Navy SEALs. You can be resilient like a Navy SEAL, but what they found amongst Navy SEALs is that most SEALs, they, they have like, there’s like this peptide neuropeptide Y, I think is what it is, and it helps you be more resilient. I get they’ve made a connection between this peptide neuropeptide and resilience.

And SEALs have more of it for some reason, and they think it’s just like a genetic thing. And so the idea is that what the SEALs are doing with like their BUD/S training, they’re not actually trying to train people to be more resilient. It’s just like they’re trying to filter for the super resilient type. And that’s fine. I think that’s fine because, I know I probably don’t have that neuropeptide Y Navy SEAL gene and I’m never going to make the SEALs. And that’s okay. There’s other things I can do.

Tasha Eurich: Yeah, no, I think that’s a really good, that’s helpful to keep in mind. Right. Because there’s nothing wrong with us when we exhaust our capacity for resilience, particularly people who have had like early childhood trauma or who are experiencing chronic compounding stress in multiple parts of their life, which I think is living in the 21st century, frankly. Those are the things that deplete resilience. And so there’s nothing wrong with you if you, as we’ll talk about, hit your resilience ceiling.

Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk about this. So you talk about there’s like a resilience ceiling. How do you know when you’re reaching your resilience ceiling and what determines our resilience ceiling?

Tasha Eurich: So I think, the first thing is going back to what we were just talking about. Everybody has a different ceiling. And I wouldn’t argue that it’s set in stone because I think there is some evidence that we can improve our resilience, even if it’s just a little bit. But because our physical and mental energy are finite, resilience is something that can run out. Right. It’s an exhaustible capacity. And so when we reach that limit, it’s kind of this idea of like you’re fine until the second you’re not. When I talk to high achieving people, stressed out strivers, I call them, our fellow stressed out strivers about hitting their resilience ceiling, people talk about like, it was the smallest setback or demand or annoyance. And I just suddenly was done. I could not deal. I had a kind of embarrassing moment with scanning my manuscript about a month ago, and I had a moment where I hit my resilient ceiling. It was kind of a minor break, but it was a signal to me that I needed to pay attention.

So I think the signs are, number one, is a sense of lost mojo. You have less energy, less motivation to keep all the plates spinning. It’s kind of this, like, ugh, I don’t even care if everything falls apart. The second thing I mentioned is that little things feel big. So you’re getting unusually worked up by issues that are relatively minor, that maybe even wouldn’t normally send you over the edge. And then probably the biggest signal that I’ve personally found is when your top tools are failing. So everybody has their coping strategies, their resilience practices, but as soon as they start to feel like piling on instead of providing relief, that’s a signal you’re getting close to your ceiling. And for me, with my resilience spreadsheet, when that started feeling like another stressful thing I had to do that day, that was a signal that I needed to pay attention.

Brett McKay: So we all have a different resilience ceiling. There’s different symptoms. If you’re feeling the burnout, the lost mojo, your yoga is not working, your exercise, being outdoors is no longer helping you recharge, then you’ve probably reached your resilience ceiling. So let’s talk about Shatterproof. You argue that if we really want to make it in this world of chaos and stress, we gotta move beyond resilience. We’re not gonna give up on resilience. Again, it’s a useful tool, but we need to start thinking about becoming shatterproof. What does it mean to be shatterproof?

Tasha Eurich: So, put simply, becoming shatterproof means we proactively channel the hard things that happen not to bounce back, but to grow forward. And we do that by harnessing the cracked or broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And this is all based in our research on… We found three different reactions people had to adversity. One was, sometimes it breaks you. Two is you resiliently bounce back. And three is you become better and stronger. And what we discovered with this third group of shatterproof people was when you’re able to be strengthened by adversity, you don’t try to pretend and power through or deny that you’re cracking or deny that you’re struggling. Instead, you use that as a source of insight, of motivation and to pivot to align your life more closely to the life that you want to live. And it was really inspiring to sort of hear some of these stories, big and small, where people were experiencing really tough things and said honestly and genuinely, that brought me closer to my loved ones. It brought me a new source of strength or meaning. It brought me peace, purpose, joy in the worst things that were happening. So I think it’s, if we can all become 25% more shatterproof, I think not only would we all be a lot happier, I think the world would be a better place.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It reminded me, as I was reading about Shatterproof, of Nassim Taleb’s idea of becoming antifragile, where it’s like, you’re not just resilient, the chaos actually makes you stronger. And he kind of talks about it in sort of economic ways. And I think with Shatter, what you do with your book is like, how can you apply this on the personal level? And you talk about one of the things you have to do if you want to start becoming shatterproof is there’s some mindset shifts you got to make happen in your head, to become that. So what are some of those mindset shifts we got to make to become shatterproof?

Tasha Eurich: So there are three big ones. The first is, and this is, they all involve deprogramming for stressed out strivers, in my experience. The first is we have to move from kind of ignoring or pushing through when things get hard, to proactively embracing them and not celebrating them, not platitudes about, oh, there’s an opportunity in this crisis, but truly saying, okay, you know, chaos is swirling around me, it’s starting to break me. How can I channel this to come out on the other side a little bit better for it? The second is kind of moving from the capacity to cope, of like, I just need to keep filling up my resilience reserves to the courage to reinvent ourselves. I think there’s a difference between sort of waiting for things to get better and proactively saying, this situation may or may not change, but I am going to make sure that I change in a positive and proactive way. And then the third is, I think it kind of sums this up, but it’s from bouncing back to growing forward to use these situations as fodder for growth.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that second one can be hard because it’s so easy to get stuck in inertia and kind of stick with the devil. It’s like, well, I’ve always done this. If I make this change, it might not work out. It could be worse. So I’ll just stick with muddling along.

Tasha Eurich: Right. I have this horrible job and my choices are either keep doing what I’m doing with no changes or get a new job and I’m too tired to get a new job. Right. And I think so many of us are just involved in daily firefighting that it feels like that’s all we can do. But what I’ve discovered about this framework, this the Shatterproof roadmap that we’re going to talk about is it takes the same amount of time as white knuckling through it. You know, it does take the awareness to step back and say, okay, I need to pay attention here, but it’s not any more time consuming than the misery of gridding through those situations.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s do some recap here. Resilience is a certain skill set that can help us bounce back in the face of short term adversity, but it functions more like a limited resource that can be depleted when we’re facing ongoing or extreme stress. Being Shatterproof gives you a second skill set that it not only works for dealing with the current challenge, but then it prepares you for your future ones as well. And I also, I think it’s more sustainable. It’s more like a lifestyle that it’s not something you just summon up during a crisis, it’s something you’re doing all the time. And rather than depleting resources, being shatterproof actually generates energy and renewal through the process of transformation. So you don’t just bounce back, you bounce back stronger. You’re to come out better. So let’s get into this. Let’s learn how to be more shatterproof. And you’ve got some research-backed tools to help you do this. And the first one you talk about is to probe your pain. What do you mean by probing your pain?

Tasha Eurich: What we discovered about shatterproof people is they didn’t see their pain as a personal failure. They saw it as a signal to pay attention and specifically a chance to challenge their preconceptions, a way to kind of guide them to new ways to meeting their needs. Because the alternative, you’re pushing through it by denying it exists. And if you’re denying it exists, a couple things happen. Number one is you get what’s called negativity, rebounds, which are when we try to suppress our negative emotions, we are worse off in the long run. And then the second thing is it robs us of the insight that we could get by saying, okay, what’s going on here? Like, this thing is really disproportionately affecting me. I wonder what that’s about. And so it’s kind of… Probing pain is a curious way of examining what’s going on with us in our tough moments.

Brett McKay: And so you’re not wallowing in it, you’re not ruminating in it. You’re not saying, oh, why me? It’s just like, okay, what’s going on? If pain is a signal for something, what is it trying to tell me?

Tasha Eurich: Right. Biologically, pain is a signal that something is wrong. And I got that signal pretty clearly, physically, during my illness, but I also had that signal emotionally and mentally. And I spent a really long time, I spent months and months and months just ignoring it and saying, surely tomorrow will be better, but just hope alone. And as a good friend of mine says, hope is not a plan.

Brett McKay: Hope is not a plan. Yeah. And so it’s not just physical pain. In your case, there was physical pain with your health issues you had. That was definitely there. But this, you’re talking pain could be like existential pain. Kierkegaard talks about this. He’s one of my favorite philosophers. People listen to podcasts.

Tasha Eurich: I love him too.

Brett McKay: They know I love Kierkegaard, but he talked about anxiety. And for him, anxiety wasn’t like, oh, I’m nervous. It’s more like it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you’re laying in bed at night looking to the ceilings like, oh, geez, what is going my life? Something’s not right here. He said, you got to listen to that.

Tasha Eurich: Existential dread.

Brett McKay: Yeah, existential dread. He said, you got to listen to that because it’s telling you need to do something. So, if a guy listening to this podcast is feeling that… Probing your pain means, okay, what is this trying to tell me? What’s going on here?

Tasha Eurich: Right. And by the way, anyone who is a fellow existentialist with you and I might notice a lot of those themes show up in this work as well. So I love that connection.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you probe your pain, trying to figure out, what is it trying to tell me? Maybe my job is terrible. Maybe I need to move, get out of my hometown where I’m at. Maybe that’s what it is. Then you talk about how you can use Self-Determination Theory to start helping you formulate a plan for yourself to become more shatterproof. For those who aren’t familiar with Self-Determination Theory, I’m a big fan of this theory. What is it and how can it help you become more shatterproof?

Tasha Eurich: Self-Determination Theory is the coolest theory in psychology that no one knows about. And I love that you’re familiar with it because part of my mission with this book is to really bring it out maybe into the mainstream a little bit more. But it’s a theory that explains what brings out the best in us and what brings out the beast. And those are not my words. Those are Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s words. And that’s kind of this idea of, what are the things that have to happen for us to live a beautiful life, for our fundamental needs to be fulfilled? And then what happens to us, when we become that worst version of ourselves, when those needs are being actively thwarted or frustrated. And Self-Determination Theory outlines three fundamental biologically programmed psychological needs that all humans have. And the idea is, if these needs are being met, we’re the best version of ourselves. If they’re being frustrated, we become the worst. And if they’re sort of just not there, then it’s somewhere in between of just like a motivation.

But the needs are so confidence, which is a sense that we are doing well and we’re growing. The second is choice, which is feeling like we have agency and authenticity. And the third is connection, which is really just a sense of kind of belonging, a sense that we have mutually supportive relationships and all three matter, and all three are important for not just being the best version of ourselves, but enjoying and really finding meaning in this ride we call life.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s called Self-Determination Theory because it’s the idea that when people have their psychological needs met, they have an innate ability to self-determine their actions and behaviors. So when your needs are met, you’re able to run on intrinsic motivation instead of just extrinsic motivation. So you’re able to direct your life in a self-driven way. And those needs are, as you said, confidence or that it’s competence. Choice, that’s agency. You can also say autonomy there. And then feeling connected to others. So how does Self-Determination Theory line up with becoming shatterproof?

Tasha Eurich: Yeah, so I think fundamentally, if I had to explain, like how do you become shatterproof? It’s about pivoting in the way that you can, under the constraints that you have, to design a life where you’re getting more of those needs met. And it can be kind of a situation by situation thing where if you probe your pain, you say, wow, I’m feeling like incredibly alone and incredibly disconnected. What can I do to restore that sense of connection? Or it can just be sort of generally in life, like, how… Am I making decisions overall in the long term for myself that’s supportive of those needs? Or am I living a life of mustivation, right, Where I’m not actually acting in the interest of my own needs. I’m sort of just trying to be everything to everyone and probably failing at that because no one can do that successfully in my experience. So I think that’s the heart of becoming shatterproof are the insights and guidance from Self-Determination Theory.

Brett McKay: And something you talk about is that sometimes or oftentimes when people are feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, burned out, I think people intuitively know that, okay, I need more. Maybe I need more choice, more autonomy, or maybe I’m just feeling down and need more confidence. But then you say, sometimes what we do, instead of doing things that will actually give us those things, we start chasing shadow goals. What are shadow goals?

Tasha Eurich: Shadow goals are quick fixes for finding self-worth, power or approval. And you see the difference. So the difference between confidence and self-worth, the difference between choice and power, the difference between connection and approval. What’s really interesting is if we can’t sort of get these more intrinsic needs met, we start to look for substitutes for them. So for example, if our confidence is being thwarted, let’s say your boss at work just gave you a negative performance review, we might fall into behaviors that not even consciously where we think we’re trying to get that thing that’s being frustrated, but it’s actually taking us further away from it. So we might start to pursue achievement at all costs, or we might become a perfectionist, or we might start just avoiding all situations that make us feel incompetent. And sort of the classic example. You think about what it’s like to be a young person today, maybe you’re in high school and the friend clique that you’re a part of, doesn’t want you to be a part of it anymore. And so you decide you’re going to become TikTok famous, right? Where that true human connection that met your needs, it’s been taken away from you, but you substitute it with something that will not actually fulfill that need, right? Becoming TikTok famous. There’s a lot of reasons somebody might do that, but it’s not going to necessarily fulfill our need for connection.

Brett McKay: Yeah, a lot of people avoid things like that’s a common tactic. Well, let’s pretend like it’s not happening.

Tasha Eurich: Right.

Brett McKay: Or I’ll just downplay, oh, it’s not that big of a deal. Or they’ll do the escape thing. Well, I’ll just go on lots of vacations even though the problem never goes away.

Tasha Eurich: Agree. Yeah, I think that’s a great example.

Brett McKay: And I think too, I think resilience tools can also become shadow goals or shadow habits. Because these tools, they do give you a sense of autonomy. It’s like, well, I do have control. I can meditate, I can exercise, I can go outside and spend time in nature. And all those things are good, but then they don’t really solve the main problem. It gives you like a sense you have autonomy, what you do because you chose those things. But it’s not actually solving the underlying problem that’s causing the stress.

Tasha Eurich: That’s it. It’s a Band-Aid. It’s not a fix.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So how do we figure out if we’re chasing shadow goals?

Tasha Eurich: So I think a question that I think can be helpful is, I call it a shadow spotting question. How is my current behavior different from when I’m at my best? So for me, with my illness, when I was holed up in bed and eating and drinking myself into oblivion because I had reached my resilience ceiling and I just couldn’t anymore, I asked myself that question. And the answer was, I mean, it was stunning to me because I was doing what you said I was avoiding. And I’m somebody who makes a living wrestling the personalities of CEOs, right? I didn’t get my nickname The Velvet Hammer for nothing. My favorite nickname from my clients. But yet here I was, shuffling from doctor to doctor, just doing what they told me, not taking any agency, not being the CEO of my own medical journey. And that question really helped me understand, okay, this is not the best version of me. I mean, clearly. But then it also starts to get you into, okay, what would the best version of me be doing in this situation? And as I started to examine that, I said, there is no cavalry coming to save me. If I go on like this… At the time, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I was going to not be here anymore. So I said, if nobody’s going to save my life, I need to save my life. And that was when I shifted from a resilient journey, I think, to a shatterproof one.

Brett McKay: So something you talk about is that instead of having shadow goals, we should develop shatterproof goals. What does a shatterproof goal look like?

Tasha Eurich: So this is really cool. So once I figured out that Self-Determination Theory and our three fundamental human needs were at the heart of being shatterproof and building our best life, all I had to do was go into the scientific research and find every goal that has been shown to fulfill those needs. So the Shatterproof six are kind of an organizing framework for the types of goals that if we pivot away from our shadow goals, right, for me it was sort of escaping or going along to get along, towards these goals, then we are automatically going to be in a mindset where we’re fulfilling our own needs. So just some examples. I’ll give you the Shatterproof six and then maybe a couple of goals that might be under it. So we might decide to rise to make ourselves better. We can do that through mastery, focusing on learning something or relearning a skill. We can do it through self-development where we commit to personal growth and we expand our horizons. Others might be, I want to flourish, I want to make my life better, I want to enjoy this experience of living on the earth.

And we might decide we’re going to try to rediscover, like my love of the game, immersing myself in things that I like to do. For me to flourish, I had to focus on my health. I had to focus on maximizing my mental and physical health. So that’s confidence, that’s choice. Right. So rising is confidence, flourishing is choice. Or another example is we might want to relate, we want to maybe make meaningful connections. So things like that might be finding belonging, building positive social bonds. We might try to deepen a close relationship that we have. A controversial but really science-backed example of relating is forgiveness, letting go of old grudges for our own needs and our own well-being. And so this is kind of like a menu. If you want to be shatterproof, you can go through the whole process. But the other thing you can do is say which of these things is going to help me sort of deepen something that, that I’m missing the most right now.

Brett McKay: I want to dig deeper, drill deeper into some of these tools that you’ve uncovered with your research. Let’s talk about that confidence aspect of Self-Determination Theory. What are some research-backed tools that you’ve uncovered to help you increase your confidence when things are spiraling out of control? I’m sure a lot of people experience this like their job is in turmoil. Maybe their home life is, marriage is bad. Maybe the kids are doing something that’s just causing a lot of stress in their life. And they just feel like, I can’t do anything, I’m incompetent. What can people do to feel more confident? But actually, like, it’s not like a fake confidence where it’s like, oh, hey, I got this. And you’re, you actually, you’re just trying to convince yourself. How can people increase their actual confidence?

Tasha Eurich: So let me give you two tools that I really like, that I use with my clients and frankly, personally. One of them is kind of how you measure success and competence. And then the other is getting some data to maybe give you a clearer picture of your strengths. So let me start with the second one. It’s called the Reflected Best Self Exercise, and it’s been insanely supported by research in terms of all of the benefits that this can give us. And it’s all the stuff we’ve been talking about. But essentially what it boils down to is you pick 10 to 20 people from as many different parts of your life as possible. You want to get a super wide range. And you send them each an email and you say, whatever preface you want to give, ask them for two to four examples of when they’ve seen you at your best. And a lot of people say, oh my God, I can’t ask my family and friends that. They don’t have time. I think what you’ll discover if you try it, if you take a leap and try it, is that they will be thrilled to help you.

It’s such a positive, positive, feel-good experience for everybody. So the responses start rolling in. You start to look for themes. What are the things that I’m hearing over and over and over and what strengths do those point to? And then the third step is you basically sit back and you write a portrait of you at your best. When I am at my best, I am. I was talking to a CEO today that I coached about two years ago, who I actually feature in this chapter in the book. I was talking to her about an hour ago and she told me that she has her feedback report, which is kind of a version of this, where I get, I interview everybody that they work with and all their friends and family and say, here’s a picture of you. But she said, I read the positive comments more often than you think. And to your point, this isn’t an ego boost. This isn’t a feel-good woo-woo exercise. Like, come on, nobody needs that. What this is is a chance to see yourself through other people’s eyes when you’re struggling to find a sense of self-worth. Because especially when lots of people see these strengths, it’s kind of hard to deny that they exist. So that’s the first piece is really kind of feeding that need.

The second thing is mindfully paying attention to your standard. So a lot of times people who struggle with confidence are perfectionists. Right. That’s a shadow response to thwarted confidence. And so I talk about a tool called the 10% buffer. It’s really simple. And by the way, it doesn’t work if you are an air traffic controller, a surgeon, an accountant, like in the technical aspects of your job. But it can still work in your life. Whenever possible, give yourself permission to be excellent only 90% of the time. And what’s behind that is almost no one expects perfection from other people nowadays. Right. We’re all just getting by. So, like pretty good, even like great. Like 90 out of 100 is an A minus. And people have lots and lots of data on how you show up, such that the difference between 90 and 100 might be one mistake. What happens if you make a mistake? The world doesn’t end. Right. People have other data and you have other data to assess sort of how you’re showing up and your worth and your value. So those would be the two tools I’d start with.

Brett McKay: I like that first one you talked about because I think maybe you’ve probably seen this with other stressed out achievers. You’re so freaking hard on yourself. And when you’re going through a hard time, you just feel like, man, I am a loser, I can’t do anything right. But then you completely discount or just overlook all the good stuff you’ve done, the success you’ve had. I think it’s a really great practice of bringing those, the good things that you’ve done to the forefront of your mind. Like, oh, yeah, I have done hard things in the past. I can do this again.

Tasha Eurich: Right.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’m gonna have to do that because I’d sometimes get down on myself like that. Okay, so those are things we can do to increase our confidence during a period of a lot of stress and overwhelm. Let’s talk about that shrinking sense of agency that we can have when we’re going through a hard time. Now, I imagine you experienced that firsthand with your health Issues because you kind of felt like you’re beholden to insurance companies and doctors. But everyone has felt this where they’re going through a hard time, and it’s like, well, it’s the economy, it’s corporate shakeups. Just these things. They feel like they don’t have any control. So what can people do to start taking back a little bit more control during a difficult situation? But not in a way where it becomes like a shadow goal where you kind of like faking yourself that you have more control than you do. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. You’re not just like, oh, I’m just meditating. I can do that. Well, that’s great. But is it actually helping you solve your problem?

Tasha Eurich: Yeah, I think that’s a really important distinction you make. And I think the difference between sort of false choice and true choice is, does it fulfill our need or is it just like window dressing? Right. Is it just trying to convince ourselves that we have it? So a couple things. The first is, we all are constrained by so many things. I always make this joke, like, the employees in an organization are constrained by their supervisors, like, all these people, all I do is what they want. The supervisors are constrained by middle managers. Middle managers are constrained by executives. Executives are constrained by the CEO. The CEO is constrained by the board. The board is constrained by shareholders. So on and on it goes. Almost no one feels a complete sense of agency in their lives.

So the question becomes, what is it that’s within my control that I can start to take choice back? So, an authenticity check question, like, am I doing this because I want to or because I have to? If it’s something that I have a choice over. It’s really simple. How do I feel about doing this? Do I feel like positively, or do I feel… Am I dreading it? Am I feeling like I want to put it off? Am I feeling like it’s just an obligation, or I’m doing it to make someone else happy? Those types of small questions throughout our day can help us make micro choices more in the spirit of our best interest. Because what’s been shown, particularly with choice, is just taking a small moment and exercising agency and authenticity and kind of what we really need boosts our choice overall. So you might even think of it like, I can’t control what my boss is asking of me necessarily. I can influence it. But I can control all of those little choices I’m making every day. So I think the authenticity check is important. Do you want to talk about the 2-2-2 method now?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that. That was a cool, cool one that I really liked and resonated with.

Tasha Eurich: I like this one, too. I actually came to it out of desperation. Since we’re talking about my health journey, early on in the process, I managed to talk myself into a clinic that diagnoses EDS, because by that time, I knew what I had, because I was dedicating 30 minutes a day to reading all the rare disease research, and I thought this was going to be my ticket. I thought I was going to come in, they were going to take one look at me and say, ah, EDS. But unfortunately, I left with a, what doctors call garbage can diagnosis of fibromyalgia. And they ignored a lot of objective signs of EDS which was unfortunate. And I remember leaving the clinic and walking back to my hotel room that day and just feeling like this is the lowest I have ever been in this journey. I’m trying to be shatterproof, but I just don’t even know what to do at this point.

And so the tool that I’d been developing at the time is this idea that in the moments where we are struggling, particularly if we’ve been shatterproof and we face a setback, is to pause and ask ourself, what do I need in the next two minutes, two hours and two days to get my fighting spirit back. And the idea here is it’s an act of confidence, of saying, like, I know what I need. It’s an act of choice. It’s saying, I am going to take 48 hours for me, and it’s an active connection with ourselves, right? And saying, like, what is it that I truly need? So, two minutes is immediate psychological first aid. I got into my hotel room, I went under the covers, and I started taking deep breaths, just taking deep breaths and just trying to center myself, feeling the ground beneath my feet, feeling the sheets on my legs.

And then two hours is what’s a small thing that I can do to make me feel a little bit better. So I realized I needed Thai takeout, so I got Thai takeout. And I didn’t just eat it while I was working. I actually let myself have a meal and enjoy it and take a minute. And then in the next 48 hours, two days, I think this is the most important one. It’s giving yourself permission to not agonize or troubleshoot or solve this problem, because nothing… I didn’t need to figure out my next move immediately. Every once in a while, we need an immediate response to something like this, and that’s okay. But just saying I’m going to give up for two days. I’m going to give up trying to save my own life, and I’m going to come back to it on day three. It’s pretty amazing. I use this tool more often than I wish I had to. But it’s pretty amazing how powerful it is in getting us back on track.

Brett McKay: No, I think it’s a good one. That’s something I struggle with when I’m feeling overwhelmed. My tendency is just to power through it. And I just tell myself, I don’t have time. I don’t have time to take a break. But my wife’s like, you need to go sit in the sauna. Go take a nap. She has all these suggestions of things to do. I’m like, I don’t have the time to do that. And she’s like, you don’t have the time to not take the time.

Tasha Eurich: Your wife is very smart.

Brett McKay: Cause, what ends up happening is when I try to power through it, it just makes things worse and I just crash out even worse than if I just taken an hour to take a nap or something. So, yeah, I like that. The 2-2-2 rule. So what can you do in two minutes, two hours, two days? So that can help you increase your sense of agency. Let’s talk about connection. What can we do to increase the amount of connection in our life when we’re going through a really hard time?

Tasha Eurich: I think the first thing to know is what fuels our connection. And there’s two things that researchers have found. So the first is belonging. And this comes from frequent positive social interactions that can be everything from like, somebody at the grocery store to our soulmate in life. Right. And everything in between. So I think the first thing about building connection is, especially in the world that we live in, where it’s just so much easier to stay home in your pajamas and order it from Amazon than go out and do things in the world or doordash. Right. Even if I don’t feel like it, am I making sure that I’m getting those sort of common, frequent positive interactions, like, go run some errands. Right. Most people in the world are good. You might have one annoying thing happen to you. But I don’t know, especially lately, I feel like the world is so hard. You can find a lot of positive interactions in just the everyday kindness of other people.

The second component of connection is relationship depth. And this thrives on trust and vulnerability and giving and getting support. What’s interesting about relationship depth is it has to be a two-way street. There’s been research that’s shown that when we’re giving more than we get to a relationship or getting more than we give, it doesn’t fulfill our connection need. So that’s one way to think about it is like equalizing my relationships. I’ll give an example. I’ve been in my book hole. I spent five years writing this book pushing off my poor friends and family who have been more understanding than I ever could be, I think. To say, like, okay, now that I have a little bit of time and space and the book is done, how can I give back to all of these people who have been so generous and understanding with me? That’s an example of sort of balancing the scales a little bit.

But another piece of this just to sort of move away from those two building blocks more generally is to pay attention during the toughest times in your life, who shows up for you and who is unwilling and unable to. This is something I learned from a CEO I worked with a couple years ago. He calls it backers and barnacles. So backers are those people who show up and stick by our side, however imperfectly. And barnacles are the ones who act just the same during good times. They’re really hard to distinguish. But when things are tough and you really need somebody to show up for you, they’re simply unwilling or unable. It’s unfortunate that tough times can be that like relationship litmus test, but I think it’s one of the most powerful ways to figure out who our people really are. And you’re probably not surprised. I found out during the period of my illness who those backers were. And by doing that I was able to shed the barnacles and give that sort of precious time and energy to the people that are backers.

Brett McKay: Okay, I love this. We’ve got some great tools that people can start using today to increase their sense of self-determination. I’m curious. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? This is… We just really scratched the surface with this stuff.

Tasha Eurich: We did. Well and I just want to tell you, you have taken us through this entire book, which is so exciting. But yeah, we have only scratched the surface. So if people want to learn more, you can go to shatterproof-book.com and there’s actually one tool that we’re launching with the launch of this book. It’s a free five minute assessment of how close you’re at to your resilience ceiling. We’re just finishing it now. It’s I think it’s going to be really, really cool. So you find out by the five dimensions of your resilience ceiling and you get a couple of really practical tools that you can start doing right away to restore and renew those reserves.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Tasha Eurich, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Tasha Eurich: Always great to talk to you and thank you so much for this, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Tasha Eurich. She’s the author of the book Shatterproof. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, tashaeurich.com. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/shatterproof where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. Sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The human urge to explore has taken us to every corner of the planet. From the highest peaks to far-flung islands to even the deepest dimensions of an idea, our species has an innate drive to venture into the unknown.

But what exactly drives this need to explore? Is it genetic, cognitive, or something else entirely?

Here to unpack this question is Alex Hutchinson, author of The Explorers Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Today on the show, Alex shares the fascinating science behind our exploratory tendencies, from the dopamine-driven “explorer’s gene” that varies across populations to the universal cognitive frameworks that govern how we navigate both physical and mental landscapes. He explains the delicate balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know, and why we sometimes find meaning in difficult challenges. We also discuss why younger people explore more than older people do, how this decline in exploration doesn’t have to be inevitable, and how to keep exploring throughout your entire life.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #382: How to Lift More, Run Faster, and Endure Longer
  • Episode #538: Research-Backed Answers to All Your Fitness FAQs
  • Episode #1,021: You Were Born to Run
• AoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us Human
• The Wundt Curve

Connect With Alex Hutchinson

• Alex’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The human urge to explore has taken us to every corner of the planet. From the highest peaks to far flung islands to even the deepest dimensions of an idea. Our species has an innate drive to venture into the unknown. What’s behind this need to explore? Is it genetic, cognitive or something else entirely? Here to unpack this question is Alex Hutchinson, author of The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Today on the show, Alex shares the fascinating science behind our exploratory tendencies. From the dopamine driven explorer’s gene that varies across populations to the universal cognitive frameworks that govern how we navigate both physical and mental landscapes. He explains the delicate balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know and why we sometimes find meaning in difficult challenges. We also discuss why younger people explore more than older people do, how this decline in exploration doesn’t have to be an inevitability, and how to keep exploring throughout your entire life. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/explore. All right, Alex Hutchinson, welcome back to the show.

Alex Hutchinson: Thanks Brad. It’s great to be back.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. I’ve known you and I’m sure a lot of our listeners know you as the endurance and running guy. But something I didn’t know about you is that you also enjoy backpacking, but you like to backpack in really, really remote places. What’s been the most remote trip you’ve been on?

Alex Hutchinson: That’s a good question. And I should clarify that. I’m not a real exploring guy. I don’t go like parasailing to the South Pole or anything like that. But I definitely like to go places where I can imagine that I’m in the middle of nowhere. I did a trip with my wife on the south coast of Tasmania. The whole southern part of Tasmania is basically like empty. And there’s a route called the South Coast Track. It was originally blazed in the begin… Early 1900s as a way for shipwrecked sailors. ‘Cause the ocean’s really crazy down there and so people would sometimes wash up on the south shore of Tasmania and then they’d have no way of getting back to civilization. So there’s a track that just basically follows the whole south coast of Tasmania to get back to the the one road that leads down there. So you drive down to the south east east corner. Then you take a little two seater plane out to the southwest corner and land on a little patch of gravel and then you hike back for a week. So that was a trip where it was like, yeah, if something goes wrong, there’s no way of hiking out. You need to be rescued, basically.

Brett McKay: And then some of these trips you’ve taken your kids on as well.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I don’t know if anyone from Children’s aid is listening to this podcast please press mute now so I don’t get in trouble. Yeah, we definitely dial it down for the kids. But both my wife and I love, we just love being out in the backcountry. And so we didn’t want to just like turn that off for 10 years while our kids were young. So we tried to find ways of having adventures that have become steadily, frankly, steadily a little more crazy as the kids have gotten older. But at the very beginning, I remember like when our youngest kids were still like, I don’t know, six months old, we did a camping trip, for example, where it was a 400 meter walk in or 400 yard walk in to camp. And so 400, it’s not a long way to travel, but it’s still enough that instead of camping where you’re 10ft from the next tent and 10ft from the one after that. We were just trying to find ways of feeling like we’re in the forest. And yeah, we’ve started to push it a little farther and we go on hiking trips and camping trips with them.

Brett McKay: So how did your backpacking hobby get you thinking about what causes humans to explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, it’s funny. So for a while I was writing adventure travel articles for the New York Times. And so basically every time my wife and I would go for a crazy vacation, I’d then write about it for The Times. And I started to notice a pattern. Like you don’t want to write the same article over and over again. But in every article I was like, we’re in whatever, Nepal or we’re in Papua New guinea or we’re in Australia and there’s this beautiful hike that everyone does. And so we decided not to do that hike. We decided to go to this miserable place that’s covered in leeches and is hard to get to and do this hard thing to get away from everybody. And I started to wonder like, what is it that’s driving me, like, the reason people go to the popular places is because they’re really nice. Why am I going to the less nice places just to get away from people? Because I’m not, I’m generally like, I actually quite like people. I’m not like a people hater or anything like that. But somehow on these trips, I was really drawn to the idea of getting out into the unknown.

And I didn’t really know why. I didn’t know what I was looking for. And I started to see connections with other parts of my life in whether it’s career choices or ordering in a restaurant or whatever, that I have this drive to find out, to try the new thing, to try the unknown thing. And I wondered what that was all about.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you talk about this in your book. You’ve kind of explored with your own career. You started off as a physicist, and then you moved to writing about outdoor adventures, writing about sports, science. And, I mean, there’s been this constant shift in your career.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And it was like, I feel like everyone gets one mulligan. Right. So I started out studying physics, and I went pretty far in that. I did a PhD and was working as a researcher. And then when I was 28, I was like, yeah, this is not for me. And I went back and did a journalism degree and became a journalist. And so, fine, okay. Well, it took me a while to find myself, but then in my mid-40s, I’d kind of gotten where I wanted to go as a journalist. I was writing about topics that really interested me, the science of endurance. And I had a book that came out in 2018 called Endure, which was really kind of bringing together all my reporting on the science of endurance. And it did actually quite a bit better than I expected. And so it set me up to kind of like, okay, my career is that I can be the science of endurance guy for the rest of my working days and kind of milk that and I should get to work on Endure II. And it all made sense, except that I just… The subtext was like, it doesn’t sound that fun to me. I don’t want to write Endear 2. I want to do something different.

And at this point, I was like, well, I had a career swerve in my 20s going from physics to journalism, but to do it again, it’s like, hang on, maybe I’ve got something wrong with my wiring that I just can’t settle down and enjoy what I’ve worked hard to achieve. And is this a good thing? Is this helping me discover the world or is it meaning that I’m going to be wandering around, never actually finding what I’m looking for? So that kind of seeded the idea of the book.

Brett McKay: Oh, let’s talk about humans and exploration. So, humans, we’re everywhere on planet Earth. Most animals, they kind of like an area where they’re at. They might expand across a continent, but then they don’t go any further. Like, humans are everywhere. Even in the most remote places where you wouldn’t expect humans to be, they’re there. Are humans the only animals that explore, or are there other animals that explore in the way that humans explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, there’s a debate on this. So on one end of the spectrum, there’s a view that humans are unique. Not that they have, like, some trait that nobody else have, but just in terms of the degree to which we explore, that we’re maybe the only species that even when things are good, when we’ve got enough resources and enough space, we’re still pushing on to find somewhere else. So you can imagine, like, how did we get from Europe to Asia? Well, maybe there was a bad weather, a famine, or it was crowded and people spread out. But when you’re looking at, like, how did we get to Easter Island? It’s like, yeah, no, nobody gets to Easter island because it was a little too crowded where they were. You only get to Easter island by being like, I want to know what’s over that horizon, and I’m going to go sail in that direction. And so to what extent are other animals like this? You know, I talked to some scientists who are like it’s same like maple trees have spread pretty far across large swaths of the planet.

They’re not exploring. They just have seeds that blow in the wind. And so I guess where I would come down on this is that humans are uniquely exploring, but it’s a matter of degree, not that they have some gene that nobody, no other animal has.

Brett McKay: Well, one thing you do in this chapter where you try to figure out if humans are unique in the way they explore, is that you look at Polynesians and how they spread and settled across islands of the Pacific. And I love this chapter because my family, we went to Hawaii for the first time last year, and I remember there, being there and thinking, man, this is kind of crazy. Like, how did humans end up on these islands way out in the Pacific? So how could understanding how Polynesians spread across thousands of miles in the Pacific help us understand how humans explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so in this debate that I was just talking about of like, is there something different about humans? Water crossings become this crucial test of, like, okay a maple seed can blow in the wind, cross a long distance, but it’s not crossing the ocean. And so what size of water crossing tells you that it’s not just someone drifted off, but that they’re like, let’s go see how far we can get. And even getting to Australia, some people view that as the first concrete evidence of, like, modern humanity. Australia was separated. Even in ancient times, when sea levels were different, there was enough water crossings that someone had to have, like, technology and the kind of thinking ahead and planning and imagining what life might be like in a different place even to get to Australia. But if you move beyond Australia, then it’s like, okay, once you get to Polynesia, the distances are so crazy that one could argue that you can only get there if you’ve got some desire to sail off into the unknown. Because it’s not just like, hey, in the distance, I see a dot there. It’s like, no, there’s nothing there.

And you can take your boat and you can sail out three days and there’s still nothing there. And so then either you turn back because you need to fresh water or whatever, or you’re like, no, we’re going to stock up for a long voyage and we’re going to keep going. And there was a really famous academic debate in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s between people who thought Polynesians, to get there, they must have had this voyaging culture where they could figure out where they were going without the benefit of GPS, and they could sail long distances, like more than 300 miles in their little slender catamarans built with… They didn’t necessarily have big trees on their islands. So a lot of cases, it’s like little pieces of wood kind of sewn together, and there was a strong view. There’s a guy named Andrew Sharp, a historian, who was like, there is no way. The only way they made it to these islands was by being blown off course or by being banished. And most of them died. But occasionally someone would make it to one of these islands.

And that led to this famous voyage. In the 1970s, there was the Polynesian Voyaging Society. They built a traditional boat, and they’re like, we’re going to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti, which is like 900 miles or something like that. We’re going to do it with no technology. We’re not even bringing watches, because being able to tell time is useful for navigating. We’re going to navigate by the stars and we’re going to prove that, yeah, it’s possible to navigate using traditional knowledge. And they did it, they made it. That doesn’t prove that that’s what happened in the past. But I think the general consensus, based on sort of all the lines of evidence, is that, yeah, it required deliberate exploration to go and settle these islands again, to, like to the extent of places like Easter island, where it’s like, no… It wasn’t just random chance that people ended up there.

Brett McKay: So with human exploration, there’s intention behind it. It’s not just like a wolf who kind of happens to wander into new territory. For humans, it’s like the Moana lyrics. See the line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me.

Alex Hutchinson: It calls me. Yeah, exactly. Because lots of animals spread out and normally it’s like, yeah, you’re looking for food you don’t see any here. Let’s try over there. Oh, over here’s pretty nice. Maybe I’ll actually make my den over here. To set out on a water crossing. It’s like, there’s another concept that I came across in the book, which is this idea of expanding the adjacent possible. So if they look at patterns of how people discover new music on Spotify or even how they write new articles on Wikipedia, most of the way people expand into new territory, whether it’s intellectual or physical, is you take where you are and you take one step beyond the border of what you know you’re expanding. And so when you’re expanding on land, you can expand the adjacent possible, but you can’t get to Easter island by expanding the adjacent possible. You have to stand there at the border of your island or your shore and imagine what might be completely out of sight and why it might be nice to get there, what you might get out of it. So it’s a real imaginative leap, and it requires, like, there’s a lot of reasons not to get on a boat and sail out into the ocean, not knowing where you’re going or what lies over the horizon. So there has to be some strong intrinsic drive that pulls you to take on this seemingly crazy challenge.

Brett McKay: Oh, let’s talk about that intrinsic drive. So your book is called The Explorer’s Gene. Is there a gene in humans that nudges people to explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. I will confess that the Explorer’s Gene was maybe a slightly deliberately provocative title.

Brett McKay: The editor picked that.

Alex Hutchinson: You know, I can’t even blame the editor. I picked it. But I was like, let’s stir the pot. Look, no, exploring isn’t determined by one gene, but there is definitely some genetic underpinning. And where I got the name from is that there is one particular gene that’s associated with one particular dopamine receptor, the DRD4 receptor, which basically there are different variants and some people get a bigger kind of jolt out of discovering something new or experiencing something novel than others do. And this variant seems to have first appeared about 50,000 years ago, which as it happens is roughly when our ancestors started really spreading out rapidly from Europe and Asia and Africa to the rest of the world. You know, moving out to crossing the Bering Strait and getting down into, well, Polynesia and South America and all that. So what’s interesting is there’s a study in 1999, so it was quite a while ago, that asked if you look at populations around the world, do they have different proportions of this so called explorer’s gene based on how far their ancestors migrated? And the answer is yes. It’s basically a linear relationship. The farther a population moved, the higher the proportion of this explorer’s gene they have this dopamine receptor gene.

So at the southern tip of South America you’ve got population groups that have 80% of the people have this explorer’s gene, whereas closer in Europe you have some populations where it’s like 20% or lower. Now the key thing that I want to, the caveat that I have to throw in there right away is this doesn’t mean that some people always want to explore and others never want to explore or that all South Americans want to explore and no Sardinians want to explore. That’s not what we need to take from this because we all have the same kind of reward circuitry, dopamine circuitry, that, and it’s complicated, but that essentially is looking for surprises, is looking for things that it didn’t expect. We all have that. It’s just that some people have a slightly bigger helping than others and over time that can lead to these changes we see in populations, but we’re all wired in… Like I definitely as someone who spent the last five years writing a book about exploring, I’ve had lots of conversations that go along the lines of like, oh yeah, exploring. Well, if there’s an exploring gene, I definitely don’t have it.

I don’t like exploring. And it’s like, no, no, no, you may not like parasailing to the South Pole. But we’re all drawn, I think, to novelty in some way, whether it’s listening to new music or finding books that you haven’t read, or ordering different things in the restaurant or whatever. Exploring doesn’t just mean physical hardship, but what it means is we’re drawn to novelty. All of us have that wiring, that gene, but some of us have variants that amp it up a little bit more.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talked about how some populations have more of this gene than others, it made me think. I know this is reductive, and I know this is not the point you’re trying to make, but it made me think about America. Like, America is like, this dynamic that people are constantly moving like, what’s going on there? And there’s probably a lot going on, the environment and history. But I do wonder if, like, sort of our immigrant past, like the type of people who come to America, they probably maybe, I don’t know, maybe had some more of that dopamine gene, and so maybe that contributed to a bit of, sort of the national character of America. I don’t know.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, well, there’s some… So people have tried to look for this, and the signal for the dopamine receptors is hard to see. Like, these things are subtle. But the piece of evidence that I found really fascinating is someone did a big analysis of the emigration records from Scandinavia in the… I can’t remember the exact, like, late 1800s, early 1900s, where there was this huge, like, millions and millions of people went from countries like Sweden and Norway and settled in, like, Minnesota and places like that. So you look at the… They looked at the ship records of who emigrated and correlated them with their family. So people who emigrated were more likely to have unusual first names than people who… Than families who stayed relative to the general population. And what they think is that having an unusual first name is kind of a marker of these people didn’t want to just do the same old thing and follow the same old path. These families were families where someone in the family valued novelty and trying something new and being different and being individual. And those are the people who left Scandinavia and came to the United States.

So you could say that might have informed the character of the United States and that. I’m sure that was sort of replicated not just in Scandinavia, but who chooses to leave and emigrate to the new world as it was then informs the country, and then it may also have had an impact on the old country. So one of the then sort of corollary theories is why the Scandinavian countries have such strong social programs and a sort of collectivist mindset. Well, the individualists all went to Minnesota and the collectivists stayed behind it. And so those two societies have kind of diverged. And like you said, that’s reductivist. And people and countries are complicated. But it’s interesting to think that there may be some kind of effect like that.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. So nothing you do in this book, besides looking at the genetics, potential genetics, that influence exploration as you get into cognitive science, probability, mathematics, to help us figure out why we have this nudge to explore. And you really brought to bear your experience as a physicist into this book. I thought it was a lot of fun to help us figure out, like mathematically why humans explore. And one area you start exploring and talking about is this idea of predictive processing. What is predictive processing and what role does it play in the human urge to explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, this was a fun little digression for me. I actually didn’t expect to get into that. And then I discovered this literature on it. I was like, oh, this is super interesting. It’s relevant to exploring, but it’s also like a cool topic on its own. So this was kind of news to me. So I’ll give some general background for listeners who may not have heard the term predictive processing, because I think it’s going to be something that people are going to hear a lot about in the next 10 years. Basically, it’s an idea that emerged about 20 years ago in neuroscience as a very small niche idea and has gradually kind of taken over the field to where I think it’s fair to say it’s probably become, or becoming the dominant view of how our brains work, why they’re wired the way they’re wired. And the basic idea is that our brains and everyone’s brains, that all living things, the fundamental goal in order to stay alive is to be able to successfully predict what’s going on in the world around you so that you’re not just like sitting there looking around and seeing what’s happening around you.

Your brain is always predicting, and then basically what your senses are doing is just checking whether your predictions are right. And having good predictions is a good way of staying alive because you know what’s happening. You’re not going to get surprised. So this creates a philosophical problem, which is that if our brains are fundamentally wired, all we want to do is to be able to predict exactly what’s going to happen next. Then what it suggests is we should hate exploring. We should, in fact, want to just go into the closet, turn off the lights and shut the door and stay there, because then we’re going to know exactly what’s happening next at all times, which is nothing in the sort of philosophy and cognitive science world. This is called the dark room problem. Why don’t we just all want to lock ourselves in dark rooms? And there’s been a lot of debate about this for about a decade. But I think where the current thinking is it’s like you need to think about prediction, about learn, knowing about the world. Not just in the sense of can you predict what’s happening exactly right now, or two seconds from now? You want to know what’s going to happen in the future.

You want to be able to predict well in advance what things are happening. And to do that, you need to understand how the world works. And so you need to learn as much as you can about the world. So this idea of having a predictive brain then ends up suggesting that we should be wired to seek out the areas that we know the least about. That when we see a closed door or a road leading over the horizon or around a corner, we want to know what’s around that corner. Because if we don’t, then something might jump out from around that corner and come and chase us. So predictive processing ends up creating this argument that we are wired to pursue uncertainty, to pursue what we don’t know, not because we love uncertainty itself, but because it gives us the opportunity to reduce that uncertainty. And so the kick we get from exploring is the feeling of finding an area where we didn’t know how things were going to turn or know what was going to happen, and then having the satisfaction of reducing that uncertainty.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we explore and we see uncertainty so that we can be more certain in a way?

Alex Hutchinson: That’s right. It’s kind of like, why do we like sugar? Well, we like sugar because ultimately it gave us something good, which was calories. And similarly, we don’t like uncertainty because we like not knowing what’s going to happen. We like uncertainty because we like learning what’s going to happen. We like the result of pursuing that uncertainty.

Brett McKay: And then you bring this idea of the Wundt curve. Pronounce that with W-U-N-D-T?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I’ve been debating how I should be like, should I put on the full Germanic. The Wundt curve. Very important. It’s named for a, I should not do accents. It’s named for a 19th century Wilhelm Wundt, who was the first to kind of look at this idea, but let’s call it the Wundt curve. So I’ll anticipate your question. I’ll jump in and say what the Wundt curve is. Yeah, basically it’s like a bell curve. So it’s an upside down U that’s saying there’s a relationship between how complex or how novel or how unexpected or how complicated something is and how much we like it. And if it’s not complex at all or not unexpected, we find it boring. But at the other end of the spectrum, if it’s really complicated and really unexpected, we find it scary and incomprehensible. But there’s a sweet spot in the middle where it’s… There’s enough uncertainty that it’s interesting and we feel like we can learn something about the world, but it’s not so uncertain that we can’t actually make sense of it. So there’s this sweet spot of uncertainty, which is really a moving target. It’s different between people.

It’s different over time. Wundt curve will shift. I mean, I think a good example of that is musical tastes. You don’t like music that’s just like Mary had a Little lamb after after you’ve heard it a billion times because it’s too simple. You might not like atonal 20th century classical music because it’s like, I can’t figure out what the heck’s going on. There’s a sweet spot in the middle of intermediate complexity. But that changes. If you spend a lot of time listening to music, you’ll generally start to like more and more complex and dissonant and unexpected music. And conversely, like, if my life is really stressed out and I’m I’ve got lots of uncertainty in my professional or my family life. I want to listen to, like, some simple music that I know really well, that I listened to a lot when I was 18 or whatever. I want to go back. And so my Wundt curve has shifted just based on what’s going on in my life.

Brett McKay: And I imagine dopamine is interacting with this kind of shifting the Wundt curve. So when it’s like completely boring, there’s no dopamine. And then when it’s just chaotic, you just can’t even make sense of it. So you don’t have any dopamine release. But then that sweet spot, it’s like, yeah, you need to hit this more because you’re getting some good dopamine here.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Well, and one way the dopamine turns out to be super complicated. I was hoping that there’d be a simple dopamine story so I could once and for all say, here’s what dopamine does. But one of the ways of understanding dopamine is that it’s effectively a marker of prediction error. So it’s not that you get a hit of dopamine when something is good. You get a hit of dopamine when something is better than expected. So that’s why the first time you take a drug, let’s say you get this feeling that’s good, and you’re like, that was way better than I expected. I need to do this again. The 10th time you take the drug, you’re like, that was exactly what I expected based on the last nine times I took it. So you don’t get a hit of dopamine, and that’s why you have to then increase the dose. You know, your Wundt curve has changed. I guess you have to increase the dose to make it better than expected. So what this Wundt curve is telling us is you’re looking for ways of finding prediction error that you can then resolve so that you can get that hit of dopamine because something was different or better than expected.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s kind of summarize what we’ve talked about. One reason why humans might explore or have this urge to explore. There’s a gene potentially that plays a role in that kind of nudging some people more than others to explore. But then also cognitively, all of us are wired to look for new things so that we can figure out the world in a way. That’s what the whole predictive processing thing is. Then you also talk about this idea that’s been floating around in cognitive psychology that’s popping up more and more. It’s the Explore vs. Exploit framework. What is the Explore vs. Exploit framework?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so we’ve been talking all about exploring and how great exploring is. And I started writing this book and figuring that the subtitle might be, like, why we should all explore more and that kind of thing. And one of the sort of nuances that I eventually realized is actually exploring isn’t the only option. Exploiting can be a good option too. So exploiting is set up as a classic choice. And exploiting is basically staying on the path you’re on, taking advantage of the knowledge you already have to pursue where you kind of know what the outcome’s going to be. Exploring something is getting off the beaten path where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. And the classic example of this is that it’s often used to explain it is you’re at a restaurant, it’s a familiar restaurant you’ve been to many times. You know that you like the hamburger quite a bit, and you always order the hamburger, and then you see the server walking by with the meatloaf or with the special or something like that, and you’re like, oh, wait, I know I like the hamburger. I know it’s pretty good.

I’ve never tried that. It might be better, but it might be worse. And so do you want to take the chance? And we all wrestle with this, right? And then you order the meatloaf, and then it turns out to suck. And the person you’re with ordered the burger and you’re like, I can’t believe I ordered the thing that I didn’t know was going to be good when I could have ordered something I knew was going to be good. So it turns out that exploring and exploiting are both useful. And trying to figure out when you should do one and when you should do the other is a super, super complicated challenge.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, this problem pops up in big issues, too. Like, you had the explore exploit problem when you were deciding after you rode indoors. Like, all right, I set myself up as the endurance guy. I can write about the science of endurance and fitness and I could have a great life. That’s the exploit. Like, you found something you could exploit, but then you started feeling like, what am I missing out on? Is there something that would actually be better if I did something different and leaving more of a sure good thing to try something else? That was a risk. It’s like that whole a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush type thing. That’s kind of the explorer versus exploit problem right there.

Alex Hutchinson: Absolutely. Yeah. The explore exploit terminology was actually, it came from a 1991 paper by a guy named James March, who was a Stanford University management prof. And he was writing about it in a corporate context. How do companies decide when to, like, spend money on R&D trying to develop something radically new versus why don’t we just spend that money marketing our current product line? You know, we’ve got some good stuff. Let’s exploit what we’ve already done. And so it’s a corporate context, it’s a societal context. Like, how much of our resources do we want to devote to like, blue sky research and development that we don’t know is going to pay off in any tangible way? And James March’s argument was fundamentally that, because when you exploit, you know what’s going to, you’re going to get. And you get feedback pretty quickly. Like, you find out I spent more money on marketing, hey, look, sales went up. Whereas when you explore I gave money to R&D and three years later, we still have no idea whether it’s going to work out. There’s a big chance of failure.

We might get nothing. That we tend to systematically underinvest in exploration because the feedback loop is so much less direct. Even though when you look over time, the return on exploration in the corporate context or in the ordering food from a restaurant context, the return is actually positive. But it’s still hard to take that leap because you’re giving up the bird in the hand.

Brett McKay: So when humans are trying to make this decision of whether to explore or exploit. So imagine there’s a guy, midlife, he’s got a solid career house, and he’s like, man, I’m feeling the… Is this all there is? That I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to jump careers, because that’s going to take a long time. How do we make that decision, whether to explore or exploit what goes on inside of our head?

Alex Hutchinson: Okay, I thought you were going to ask, what should the right decision be? And I was going to say, I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble for the guy leaving his career. What’s going on in our side of our head is actually a really interesting. It’s a deep and interesting question, and one that cognitive scientists have been spending a lot of time working on in the last, let’s say seven or eight years, there’s been a ton of work. So I guess the thing to start with is that… And you know, you mentioned the math trying to “solve the explore, exploit dilemma,” even when you restrict it with very specific conditions so that it’s the kind of thing you can solve in a lab. It is mathematically super, super hard. For decades, scientists were working on this, and then in the ’70s, someone finally came up with a solution called the Gittins index. But it only works under very specific solutions, circumstances, and the math involved is just insane. So it’s like, that’s not what’s going on in our heads. We’re not doing the Gittins index. Instead we have sort of shortcuts that try and help us figure out what we should do.

And you can dig into the math behind them. And it turns out that we actually do a pretty good job in most cases of coming up with good, rough and ready solutions. And one example that I think is a good illustration is, well, okay, let me give two examples. One is that there’s two ways of exploring. One is that you can pursue the thing you know the least about. So when you’re choosing options, exploring is like, well, I know a lot about that. I know a little bit about that. I know nothing about that. Let’s do the thing I know nothing about because I have the most to learn about that. The other way you can explore is you can just basically flip a coin. You can say, I’m going to do what’s called random exploration. It’s like, well, in order to avoid biasing myself by always going with what I know, I’m just going to make all decisions randomly. There’s been some funny experiments where people have tried to live their life that way. It’s like I’m just going to draw a random number every time I have to make a decision. And that’s another way of making sure that you don’t get stuck in a rut.

And so these things happen in our brain. And you can put people in like decision making lab studies and dial up and change the parameters so that it’s more advantageous to use random exploration or more exploration to use uncertainty directed exploration or more advantageous to not explore. And people do respond. And so like random exploration, for example, you can see the variability in the nerve signals in the brain goes up. So you just, basically you’re putting noise in the circuit and your brain is deciding, okay, well, we’re going to follow the usual instructions, but we’re going to add some random noise as I send this signal so that sometimes I’m going to get the opposite answer of what I thought I was going to get. And that’s going to make sure I keep exploring. So there’s really subtle sort of neuroscience that goes on that influences these decisions.

Brett McKay: No. Yeah, it is really interesting. You go deep into it, it’s completely fascinating. But I think you’re right. Like humans just kind of use heuristics. And I think most people, like I’ve noticed in my life, I use that sort of uncertainty directed heuristic to decide whether to explore and exploit. And something I’ve noticed too, that I’ll do is I’ll do both at the same time or try to do both at the same time. I’ve noticed that with my career with the Art of Manliness, I started off just as a website where we just published articles. And then 2009, like, podcasting kind of came up, and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. I’ll try that. But I kept writing articles. I knew that was a good thing. I was exploiting it. So I started exploring the podcast. And then that worked out. This is great. I’m going to exploit that. And then I tried video, explored that for a bit, didn’t like it, so I stopped. I just didn’t do that anymore. So I think that’s one thing that humans do is like they’ll try to explore and exploit at the same time.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and I think that you relate this back to the one curb, a little bit of a sweet spot. But it’s like if you’re always exploring, and I use the example of music too, like, okay, most of us become less exploratory in our musical taste as time goes on. And so you might say, well you’re 28 and you’ve got all the songs you need, so you’re not going out there looking for new music. You might say, well, you’re missing out on something. You should still be listening to new stuff, exploring new stuff, and that’s great. But if you were to push it to the extreme and say, I’m going to always explore everything essentially means I’m never going to listen to the same song twice. I’m going to just seek new music. And once I’ve heard it, it’s dead to me. I need to explore something new. And that’s obviously you can, that’s obviously an absurd example, but it makes no sense. Like, one of the reasons to seek out new music is to find things you like and then to enjoy it, to exploit it, to sit back and listen to this music you’ve discovered that you like.

And so I think career wise, or more generally making these decisions, if you don’t have a mix of exploring and exploiting, it’s clear that you don’t want to be on either end of the extreme, both for the point of view of satisfaction, but also like, risk and safety and like career wise, that I definitely identify with what you’re saying with the Art Of Manliness in terms of how I’ve managed my career. I’ve taken some big risks, but I’ve generally tried to cover My risks so that the downside is not too serious.

Brett McKay: Something you explore too is that, or you explore about exploring is kids, young people are more likely to explore than adults. Why is that?

Alex Hutchinson: Well, it’s a smart decision in a lot of ways. So, I mean, you can think of it mathematically, you can also think of it just logically, that the more time you have in front of you, the greater the time you have to enjoy whatever or benefit from whatever you discover through your exploration. There’s a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, Alison Gopnik, who’s proposed this theory or this idea that childhood really is basically designed as a solution to the explore, exploit dilemma. That the reason humans have an unusually long childhood, even compared to, like, apes, and the reason is it’s a good solution that you learn as much as possible about the world when you still have lots of time to enjoy whatever you learn. And as time goes on, you take advantage of what you learn and you start exploiting more and more to the logical endpoint that in theory, the day before you die, you should not be exploring at all because there’s no benefit.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about that. That’s kind of depressing. As you get older, it’s like, well, there’s no benefit to exploring. What do you think about that? I mean, it sounds like you’re not for that, that we should keep exploring?

Alex Hutchinson: I hate that idea. I hate that idea. Yeah, but I also like, look, I respect the math.

Brett McKay: So, yeah, mathematically it makes sense, right? It does make sense rationally, but I just, I don’t like that.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I hate it. And I asked pretty much every scientist I spoke to, I asked about this and they had various answers. I think most people agreed that it’s like, it is logical that you explore less as you get older. That, I mean, for one thing, when one of them said this quote like, you can’t regrow your expectations about the world when you’re older, you know stuff. So it’s like, for my kids when they were young, it’s like, oh, we’re going to go tobogganing for the first time. This is going to be an act of exploration. It’s going to be so much fun. They don’t know what it’s like to slide down a hill. It’s like, I already know what it’s like toboggan. I still like tobogganing, but it’s no longer exploratory for me and I can’t invent new sports every day. Like, I already know stuff. So there is a logical progression, but the trend or the sort of natural progression of exploring less may not match up well with modern life. And so one of the scientists said if you’re 60 years old a million years ago, when you’re 60 years old, it may have been like, yeah, dude, just kind of, you know where the tubers are.

You keep digging those tubers and just try and stay alive a little longer. Don’t explore anymore. Now if you’re 60 years old, there’s a good chance you’re going to live 20, 25, 30 years. And so how depressing is that if you’re like, well, I’m not going to make any new memories, I’m just going to kind of coast along on fumes. So there’s that argument that we live longer, so you want to keep exploring longer than you might otherwise assume. And there’s the other thing, which is that we can describe the reasons for exploring in two ways. One is that it leads to good things. It’s how we learn about the world. The other is that it feels good and those two things are linked. The reason it feels good is that evolutionarily it led to good things. It was good for us, but now we’re in this world where it’s just like sugar told us where calories were. But sometimes, even if I don’t need calories, I like to eat dessert because it tastes good. And I’m 49 now. I hope that when I’m 75 or 80 or whatever, I still will enjoy the feeling of discovering something new, of the frisson of uncertainty of, of not knowing how something’s going to turn out instead of just doing the same things over and over again.

Brett McKay: Okay, so this is inspiration to even if you’re 40, 50, 60, keep doing new things. You don’t have to go crazy. You don’t have to like just upend your life. Maybe. I mean, if that’s what you want to do. That’s how you scratch your itch and it’s like you can minimize the downside. But yeah, keep trying new things. There is a benefit to it, even though rationally it doesn’t make sense.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so a good example is a few years ago I took up rock climbing and I’ve been a runner all my life. And I pat myself on the back here. I’m a very good runner. And so in terms of like, recognition from other people or even self actualization of like doing something good. Running is the no brainer for me. I can go and feel good about myself. I’m a terrible rock climber. I just suck at it. But there is something amazing about… Because when I took it up, it had been a long time since I’d done something that was just totally new and that I sucked at. And it’s not that I enjoy sucking at things, but I enjoy, I realized that I was kind of missing this feeling of learning something new. Of like every day is a journey of of, not that I’m making tons of progress, but I make little bits of progress and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I’m not an expert in this area. And so yeah, I would absolutely say that you don’t have to go to the North Pole or whatever, you don’t have to take up wingsuit flying or anything like that.

But you should have something in your life that’s new and different, that’s different than you were doing a decade ago where you have the prospect of learning that is… It’s good for your brain on a neuroscientific level, but it’s also just the cool feeling.

Brett McKay: It’s good for the soul. Let’s talk about how we explore landscapes. You go into this. So how does our brain explore physical landscapes?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this is a really neat area of science. And I think a lot of people are familiar with the idea of cognitive maps. That there’s an area in our brain, in the hippocampus that maps areas that we’re familiar with in an actual, like a completely literal sense. You get to know a neighborhood, then there will be one neuron that fires whenever you’re at that particular intersection and another neuron that fires when you’re at a different intersection or halfway down the street. These are called place cells. And in addition to place cells, we have like boundary cells and direction cells and stuff. So we literally have like this GPS in our hippocampus. And there’s famous study from about 25 years ago where they studied London taxi drivers who have to basically memorize the streets of London in order to get their license and found that their hippocampuses are enlarged. That this is a “muscle” that enlarges with use. So we can find our way around the world by wandering around gradually mapping the world and recording it in our hippocampus. We can also get around by just memorizing basically a series of stimulus response directions.

I Want to get to the library? I go two blocks that way until I see the gas station. Then I turn left and go up the hill until I see the church and then I turn right or whatever. That’s called stimulus response navigation. And it’s generally faster and easier and more efficient than this cognitive mapping approach. And we all use both, right? Like there’s context when one is better than the other. But the general trend in the modern world is that we need cognitive mapping less and less. Even if no one has given us directions. We have our phones with GPS and turn-by-turn directions, we don’t have to know anything about where we’re going. We just have to press a button. And when it says turn right, we say turn right, we turn right. When it says jump, we say how high? And it’s just removing the need to actually know where we are or to form a cognitive map.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so GPS uses that stimulus response navigation?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, certainly the turn-by-turn directions, it’s pure stimulus response. A key distinction is like, if I know how to get from point A to point B and I know how to get from point B to point C, if I’m following stimulus response, it’s just a series of turns, then I have no idea how to take a shortcut from A to C. Like to get to C, I have to go first to B because I know the directions to B and then B to C follows directions. If I have a cognitive map, I know where everything is relative to each other. So I can say, oh, I can just cut straight across here to get to C, because I understand where these things are because I have a map in my head.

Brett McKay: What does the research say that this reliance on turn-by-turn directions using GPS, what is that doing to our ability to create cognitive maps?

Alex Hutchinson: This is a small area of research, but the researchers I spoke to are worried about it because like everything the brain responds to how we use it. Stimulus response navigation is mostly dependent on an area of the brain called the caudate nucleus instead of the hippocampus. So the more you use stimulus response navigation, the more you use your caudate nucleus, the bigger it gets, in fact, and the less you use your hippocampus, the smaller it gets. Smaller hippocampus is a risk factor for a whole bunch of pretty unpleasant things. Things like Alzheimer’s and PTSD, cognitive decline. And so there are some researchers who are like, yeah, you should really be wary of turn-by-turn directions on your GPs of being overly reliant and not actually taking time to look around. To explore, to be lost occasionally. And I don’t want to be like again, I don’t want to over hype the findings, but I will say I try to avoid using turn-by-turn directions on my phone or in my car. You know, I will look up where I’m going, I’ll try to figure out where I’m going and then I’ll just turn it off until if I’m not sure where to go, I’ll turn them back on.

So that’s my reading. My reading of the events is such that I’m trying to be more conscious of wandering through my surroundings and knowing where I am, even if that means occasionally getting lost.

Brett McKay: Well, it’s something else that some research have speculated is that our reliance on GPs not only has affected our ability to navigate the physical world, but it also might be affecting how we explore, navigate abstract ideas in our head.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this was a really cool thing that I didn’t realize until I started researching this, which is that the hippocampus, this idea of a cognitive map, I thought of it purely in terms of physical landscapes, but it turns out there’s a growing amount of evidence that we map ideas and people and social relationships. We also map those in the hippocampus in a very similar like sort of map. So that you can think of like two ideas that are close to each other or farther apart and you can have shortcuts between ideas and you can expand the area around those ideas. Or people, for example, there is a study that shows that we tend to map people in the hippocampus based on how well we know them and what sort of interactions we have with them. So that’s like a two dimensional map of like, I know this person really well and they’re a jerk, I know this person not very well, but they seem nice or whatever. And so the hippocampus is important. So on the one hand what this suggests is that even if we use GPS navigation, we’re not going to stop using our hippocampus because we use it for lots of other things.

So we shouldn’t overstate the dangers of GPS. But on the other hand, it suggests that if we do allow our hippocampus to become less, if we use it less and it atrophies to some extent, if we’re compromising our hippocampus, it might be not just that we’re having more trouble finding our way around, but also that we’re having more trouble mapping ideas together. Seeing how things connect, keeping track of people.

Brett McKay: Okay, so maybe the takeaway there, use GPS less, try to navigate by dead reckoning every now and then perhaps. I also, it kind of inspired me. Like I thought about. Because you talk about this in the book, doing orienteering. Maybe that’s something you could do to exercise your hippocampus. Take an orienteering course.

Alex Hutchinson: There we go. ‘Cause there’s a little bit of research coming out on orienteering where it’s like ’cause these are races where you run but you have to navigate with hippocampus and it’s like whatever you’re doing for your brain, you get a supercharged effect because the physical exercise is flooding your brain with things like BDNF, which helps enhance the growth of neurons or the connections between neurons. So you’re getting a double whammy of the exercise plus the cognitive effect. But yeah, just to amend or to follow up on that point, I’d say yeah, GPS is an easy example. And so I use GPS turn-by-turn directions as a thing. That is an example of the way we’re moving towards stimulus response. But I think it’s not just the one specific technology. It’s more the idea of always optimizing efficiency, of always prioritizing getting to the destination rather than seeing where you’re going. So I think that the big picture advice is like be present, look around, know where you are. Like, so I’m looking out my window right now as we speak and it’s like I should know what’s there, I should know what kinds of trees are there and which direction the river is and stuff like that.

I should be aware of my surroundings. I’m willing to get lost occasionally willing to take a wrong turn because that will force you to pay your attention to start forming cognitive maps. So yeah, it’s about being present as much as avoiding your GPS.

Brett McKay: Yeah, this goes back to predictive processing. You want to make errors because it’ll help you in the long run.

Alex Hutchinson: That’s right, yeah. Otherwise you’re just living at the bottom of the Wundt curve where there’s no uncertainty and no prediction error.

Brett McKay: So exploring it feels good, but it can also be uncomfortable and frustrating. Like your explorations might lead to failure, setbacks, disaster sometimes. It’s not exploration if there’s no risk of failure. But we still explore despite knowing that, oh my gosh, like things could end up poorly. Like what’s going on there? Like why do we do this thing that can make us feel bad but we still enjoy doing it?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. This was one of those kind of eureka moments for me when I stumbled across some research in psychology about something called the effort paradox.

Brett McKay: This is from Michael Inslicht.

Alex Hutchinson: That’s right.

Brett McKay: We had him on the podcast. Yeah, we had him on the podcast.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, there we go. So I refer listeners then to hear Michael himself explain this.

Brett McKay: Well, we actually, we talked about willpower. He debunks willpower. But we talked a little bit about the effort paradox. So, yeah, flesh this out a bit more because we didn’t get much into that.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. So the idea is that there are things that we value not in spite of the fact that they’re hard, but because they’re hard. And so this is a kind of mental shift because I’ve been talking about how wonderful exploring feels. And like, we do it because it’s self actualizing and blah, blah, blah. And then it’s like you, you actually get out and take a risk and do something, whether it’s career wise or climbing a mountain or whatever. And it’s like, actually, this is really hard and I’m scared and it could all go very wrong. And so there’s a tendency to assume that we’re willing to put up with the challenge in order to get to the destination. But what Michael Inslicht and his colleagues essentially argue is that that’s not actually a satisfying explanation of why we’re willing to do hard things. We really seem to actually like the hardness of it in some way. You know, we’re eating spicy foods and we’re climbing mountains and we’re buying furniture from Ikea. There’s some hilarious research on something called the IKEA effect, which is if you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA and you spend all this time trying to sort out the stupid pictographic instructions and find all the mismatched screws, you put it together.

If you then want to sell it, you will ask for a higher price than you would have if you had bought the exact same furniture pre-assembled because you value it more because you had to struggle with it. And it’s it’s same with, like, you may start running because you want to get fit, but if you’re running your fourth marathon, there’s something more there. You’re pursuing something different. You know, if you keep hitting yourself on the finger with a hammer, you’re doing it because on some level you like it. And so why do we like it? There’s a whole bunch of theories that probably all have some grain of truth. But I think the big one that encompasses them all is that we tend to find things that are hard, meaningful. And we have trouble defining what it means to say that something is meaningful. Like, why is life something you do meaningful? I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. But this thing is meaningful, and that one’s not. And it tends to be. We find taking on challenges meaningful, and that leads to a feel of satisfaction and a feeling of wanting to do it again.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you experience some difficulty, some discomfort in your exploration, like, lean into it, because you might find meaning in it. But then also, you don’t want to be stupid about this. You know, it might be hard, and it’s… Your brain’s trying to tell you, like, hey, you need to stop doing this because this is not working.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And that’s a subtle distinction. And I don’t have a simple heuristic to know which is which. It’s like with running there’s two conflicting pieces of advice, which is that you’re going to have aches and pains, and you need to run through them because otherwise you’ll never run. But you need to rec… And running’s gonna be uncomfortable, but you need to recognize when you have like a shin splint or a stress fracture coming, and you need to be able to distinguish between those two. And to some extent, you just kind of have to get out there and explore, if you will, and figure out which one is which. But, yeah, something that is challenging, the feeling of challenge or difficulty or struggle, it’s just like if you playing on a soccer team and the soccer team wins 10 nothing that’s much less interesting and rewarding than it is than if you win 4 to 3. And so it’s great to have things that challenge you. If it’s just defeating you, it’s not great to lose 10 nothing. Losing 10 nothing is challenging, but that’s on the far end of the Wundt curve. And so don’t go out there and just take your beating as a masochist. But if it’s hard, don’t view that as a disqualifying factor right away.

Brett McKay: So you’ve been researching and writing about exploration for the past five years. What’s your Explore More playbook for people? What would you recommend people listening to this episode do this week to start exploring a little bit more in their lives?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I would say exploiting is good too. It’s balanced. And that’s one of the things I came away from the book with, which is that it’s not about always mindlessly exploring more. It’s about making sure that you’re finding a role for both, exploring, exploiting in your life. So one of the big insights for me was, and we talked earlier about my sort of backpacking addiction and really trying to get into these crazy places. And after spending a lot of time thinking about exploration and marinating in all this research, I really came to the realization that I still love those places. But fundamentally, what I’m pursuing, this feeling of discovering something that’s new to me does not require that I go to the ends of the earth, that there are ways of exploring in my own neighborhood. There are ways of exploring intellectually, but also even physically. Like, I live in a city of 4 million in Toronto. There’s a river a block from my house. So in the course of writing this book, I bought a kayak and I bought a couple, actually, so I can go with my kids, and we go down and float on the river and it’s like, whoa.

I’ve actually lived in this neighborhood most of my life, and I know that river really well, but I’ve never I’ve never seen it from the water. And there’s places I can go. There’s a marsh near there, just half a mile down the river from from where I live. You can’t access it from land, so until I’d gone on the water, I’d never been there. And then you go in there and there’s like, turtles and deer and stuff. It’s like, wow I’m in a city of 4 million, but I’m having that feeling of discovering something new. So I think in terms of practical advice, it depends on the person. But what I would say is there should be something going on in your life, something you’re doing, something you’re pursuing, whether it’s a hobby or at work or in your personal life, where you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, where you don’t know what the outcome is, where it’s not all mapped out and maybe even makes you a little bit scared. Not in a, like, crap your pants way, but in a, like, I’m nervous about this. So that would be my big call to action.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Alex, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Alex Hutchinson: Probably simplest place is my website which is alexhutchinson.net. I could not get.com unfortunately some kid in New Jersey got it. But yeah, alexhutchinson.net. I’ve got links there to the book, but also to various stuff I’ve written and stuff like that. Social media.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Hutchinson, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Hutchinson: Thank you so much bud. I really appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Alex Hutchinson. He’s the author of the book the Explorer’s Gene. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website alexhutchinson.net. Also check out our show notes at AOM is explore where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed for both men and women. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly and if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to use me up a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. You think we get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay reminds anyone listening to our podcast, but put what you heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When I turned forty a couple of years ago, one of the things I did for that milestone was to go through all the journals I’ve kept from childhood through adulthood. It was a way to do a retrospective inventory at the midpoint of life.

In one of my journals from high school, I had pages of notes from a book I had completely forgotten about but which had a big impact on me during those formative years: How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day by Michael J. Gelb.

The book uses the life of Leonardo da Vinci as inspiration for habits that can enhance your thinking, unlock creativity, and create a flourishing life.

I picked up a copy to re-read it as a middle-aged man, curious whether the book would still inspire and motivate me the way it had when I was a teenager. And to my pleasant surprise, it did!

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci is a really fun read that mixes history and self-improvement and combines philosophical ideas with concrete practices that can be incorporated into your life.

Below, I highlight the “Seven Da Vincian Principles” Gelb lays out in the book, along with some corresponding exercises that both 17- and 42-year-old Brett found useful.

The 7 Da Vincian Principles and Practices to Cultivate Them

1. Curiosità – Cultivating Curiosity

Leonardo never stopped asking questions throughout his life.

Unfortunately, as we get older, we tend to get less curious. We often accept what we know as sufficient and stop exploring the unknown.

To cultivate the principle of Curiosità, Gelb recommends that you:

Keep a notebook. As I discussed with Roland Allen on the AoM podcast episode about the power of thinking on paper, Leonardo always kept a notebook with him. He filled thousands of pages with observations, sketches, and questions. Do likewise. Write about anything that catches your attention in your notebook. Doodle in it. Capture ideas. Write down questions. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci inspired me to keep a pocket notebook on me at all times throughout high school and into my adult life.

Make a list of 100 questions. Write out 100 questions. They can be about anything and everything — whatever you wonder about. Make the list in one sitting. Write quickly, and don’t overthink. This exercise reveals themes or topics that are important to you.

I did this exercise in my teenage journal; here are a few of the questions I wrote down:

• What will I be like in 10 years?
• Where will I live when I’m older?
• What is the measure of a man?
• Am I reaching that measure?
• Is technology the downfall of society?

17-year-old Brett was deep, man.

2. Dimostrazione – Testing Knowledge Through Experience

Leonardo sometimes referred to himself as a discepolo della esperienza — a “disciple of experience.” He didn’t just take other people’s word for things; he experimented, tested, and observed for himself.

To develop Dimostrazione, Gelb recommends that you:

Inventory the origin of your beliefs. Make a list of three beliefs and mental models that guide your navigation of life. After you’ve made your list, examine each belief and consider the degree to which the following sources have influenced them: media, other people, and your own experience.

If you realize that the first two sources, rather than direct experience, have primarily shaped your beliefs, Gelb recommends looking for ways you can validate those beliefs through direct experience.

3. Sensazione – Sharpening Your Senses

What made Leonardo such an amazing artist was his keen observation skills and ability to fully immerse himself in the sensory details of the world around him.

Here are a few Leonardo-inspired sense-sharpening practices:

Describe a sunset. Find a quiet place outside at dusk to observe the sunset. Write down a detailed description of the experience.

Learn to draw. For Leonardo, drawing was a foundational skill for understanding the world. His notebooks are filled with sketches. You don’t have to be an expert artist like Leonardo, but learning how to draw can be a powerful tool for acquiring knowledge. It can help make abstract ideas concrete. After my conversation with Roland Allen about Leonardo’s notebooks, I was inspired to learn how to sketch. Progress is slow, but I’m improving!

4. Sfumato – Embracing Uncertainty

One of Leonardo’s greatest strengths was his ability to be comfortable with ambiguity. The Mona Lisa is a perfect example of this. The word sfumato (which means “smoky” in Italian) describes Leonardo’s painting technique of blending edges, but for Gelb it also reflects his ability to navigate uncertainty and the tension inherent therein.

To develop the principle of Sfumato, Gelb recommends that you:

Cultivate “confusion endurance.” Contemplate paradoxes in life such as:

• Joy and Sorrow — Think of the saddest moments of your life. Which moments were most joyful? What is the relationship between these states?
• Strength and Weakness — List your strengths and weaknesses. How are these qualities related?

5. Arte/Scienza – Balancing Art and Science

Leonardo seamlessly blended science and art. His anatomical drawings are both scientifically accurate and aesthetically stunning. He saw no divide between logic and creativity.

To cultivate arte/scienza, Gelb recommends you:

Practice mind mapping. Inspired by Leonardo’s habit of nonlinear note-taking, mind maps use images and words to connect ideas organically. In your notebook, mind map questions like:

• What do I want to accomplish in the next 5 years
• What should my next article/podcast/project be about?
• What do I know (or need to know) about [topic]?
• What steps do I need to take to reach this goal?
• What should I include in my trip/event plan?
• What areas of my life need more attention right now?
• What are the root causes of this issue?
• What are possible solutions to this problem?
• What are the pros and cons of my two options for this decision?
• What criteria should I use to make this decision?
• What are the short- and long-term consequences of each choice?

6. Corporalità – Physical Fitness and Poise

Leonardo didn’t just exercise his mind — he took care of his body, too. He was known for his strength, endurance, and grace. According to sources, Leonardo was able to bend a horseshoe with his bare hands. He combined brains and brawn!

To cultivate Corporalità yourself, you can practice the many habits that promote physical health and poise, like taking a morning walk, strength training, eating a balanced diet, and improving your posture.

Gelb also recommends two quirkier practices:

Juggle. According to biographer Antonina Valentin, Leonardo was a juggler. Gelb thinks juggling can help your mental and physical acuity.

Cultivate ambidexterity. Gelb notes that Leonardo was naturally left-handed but also developed his ability to work with his right hand. He recommends we follow the master’s example and become ambidextrous ourselves. Spend the day doing your usual tasks like writing and brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Gelb also recommends writing and drawing with your left and right hand at the same time.

7. Connessione – Seeing Interconnectedness

One of the keys to Leonardo’s creative genius was his ability to combine and connect disparate ideas to form new concepts. A famous connection that Leonardo made was between water and hair. He noted that they moved in similar ways, and seeing that connection allowed him to draw both of those things better.

To cultivate Connessione, Gelb recommends that you:

Find connections. Get your notebook and write down three connections between the following:

• An oak leaf and a human hand
• A laugh and a knot
• Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and rain

I enjoyed re-visiting How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. It’s inspired me to renew some practices from the book that I did as a high schooler. I’m feeling a bit more creative already. It’s also just been fun.

If you want to cultivate a more curious, creative, and well-rounded mind and become a real Renaissance man, try some of the exercises above and get writing, thinking, asking, drawing, and juggling yourself.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.