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Mark Manson Biography

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“When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then nobody ends up feeling good. And our relationship falls apart without our even knowing it. Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man. If Disappointment Panda were here, he’d tell you that the pain in our relationship is necessary to cement our trust in each other and produce greater intimacy. For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no in here no. Without that negation, without that occasional rejection, boundaries break down and one person’s problems and values come to dominate the other’s. Conflict is not only normal, then; it’s Absolutely necessary for the maintenance of a healthy relationship. If two people who are close are not able to hash out their differences openly and vocally, then the relationship is based on manipulation and misrepresentation, and it will slowly become toxic. Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship, for the simple reason that without trust, the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything. A person could tell you that she loves you, wants to be with you, I would give up everything for you, but if you don’t trust her, you get no benefit from those statements. You don’t feel loved until you trust that the love being expressed toward you comes without any special conditions or baggage attached to it.”

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“Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some care and attention you can put it back together again. But if you break it again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces, and too much dust.”

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“The aims of safety-ism were noble. They saw that young people were experiencing greater amounts of anxiety, stress, and depression than previous generations and sought to remedy their angst by protecting them from anything that could potentially harm or upset them. But this is not how the human mind works. The human mind is not fragile—it does not need to be protected and cushioned from the hard surfaces of reality like a vase or piece of fine china. The human mind is antifragile—that is, it gains from discomfort and strain. That means to grow stronger, the human mind needs to regularly be confronted with difficult and upsetting experiences to develop stability and serenity for itself.”

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“Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. But pleasure, while necessary in life (in certain doses), isn't, by itself, sufficient. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect.”

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“People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them. ...Entitled people, because they are incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way. They are left chasing high after high and accumulate greater and greater levels of denial.”

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“Fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representatives of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential. ...If you just chase after highs to cover up the pain, if you continue to indulge in entitlement and delusional positive thinking, if you continue to overindulge in various substances or activities, then you'll never generate the requisite motivation to actually change.”

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“The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion. The person who denies his Feeling Brain numbs himself to the world around him. By rejecting his emotions, he rejects making value judgments, that is, deciding that one thing is better than another. As a result, he becomes indifferent to life and the results of his decisions. He struggles to engage with others. His relationships suffer. And eventually, his chronic indifference leads him to an unpleasant visit with the Uncomfortable Truth. After all, if nothing is more or less important, then there's no reason to do anything. And if there's no reason to do anything, then why live at all?”

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“All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life, but those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionally more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man, that we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.”

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“Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make... once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. ...The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion.”

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“For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and deservedness. ...Evil people never believe that they are evil, rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.”

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“Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they're feeling. Their goal is to get back to "feeling good" again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values. Learn to sustain the pain you've chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.”

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“All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Nonstop. Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that's what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That's the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average.”

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“War is but a terrestrial test of hope. The country or the people who have adopted values that maximize the resources and hopes of its peoples best will inevitably become the victor. The more a nation conquers neighboring peoples the more the people of that conquering nation come to feel that they deserve to dominate their fellow men and the more they will see their nation's values as the true guiding lights of humanity. The supremacy of those winning values then lives on and the values are written up and loaded in our histories and go on to be retold in stories, passed down to give future generations hope. Eventually, when those values cease to be effective, they'll lose out to the values of another newer nation and history will continue on, a new era unfolding. This, I declare, is the form of human progress.”

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“Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. Many people would also throw in there “Be more human,” but no—be a better human. And maybe, if we’re lucky, one day we’ll get to be more than human.”

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“We are all going to be dead soon. In the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone - well, you're going to get fucked.”

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“The acceptance of my own death, this understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier - untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems - suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failures and embracing rejections - it has all been made lighter by the thought of my own death. The more I peek into the darkness, the brighter life gets, the quieter the world becomes and the less unconscious resistance I feel to, well, anything.”

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“The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all. (p.171)”

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“The Law of Fuck Yes or No states that when you want to get involved with someone new, in whatever capacity, they must inspire you to say “Fuck Yes” in order for you to proceed with them. The Law of Fuck Yes or No also states that when you want to get involved with someone new, in whatever capacity, THEY must also respond with a “Fuck Yes” in order for you to proceed with them.”

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“Why would you ever be excited to be with someone who is not excited to be with you? If they’re not happy with you now, what makes you think they’ll be happy to be with you later? Why do you make an effort to convince someone to date you when they make no effort to convince you? What does that say about you? That you believe you need to convince people to be with you? (Hint: it implies that you wouldn’t even want to be with yourself.) You wouldn’t buy a dog that bites you all the time. You wouldn’t be friends with someone who regularly ditches you. And you wouldn’t work a job that doesn’t pay you. Then why the hell are you trying to make a girlfriend out of a woman who doesn’t want to date you? Where’s your fucking self-respect?”

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“And this is the ultimate dating advice lesson — man, woman, gay, straight, trans, furry, whatever — the only real dating advice is self-improvement. Everything else is a distraction, a futile battle in the grey area, a prolonged ego trip. Because, yes, with the right tools and performance, you may be able to con somebody into sleeping with you, dating you, even marrying you. But you will have won the battle by sacrificing the war, the war of long-term happiness.”

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“There’s a grey area in dating many people get hung up on — a grey area where feelings are ambiguous or one person has stronger feelings than the other. [...] Most dating advice exists to “solve” this grey area for people. Say this line. Text her this. Call him this many times. Wear that. Much of it gets exceedingly analytical, to the point where some men and women actually spend more time analyzing behaviors than actually, you know, behaving.”

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“People with strong boundaries understand that it's unreasonable to expect two people to accommodate each other 100 percent and fulfill every need the other has. People with strong boundaries understand that they may hurt someone's feelings sometimes, but ultimately they can't determine how other people feel. People with strong boundaries understand that a healthy relationship is not about controlling one another's emotions, but rather about each partner supporting the other in their individual growth and in solving their own problems. It's not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about. It's about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That's unconditional love baby.”

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“The problem here is that most people who get caught cheating apologize and give the 'It will never happen again' spiel and that's that, as if penises fell into various orifices completely by accident. Many cheatees accept this response at face value, and don't question the values and fucks given by their partner (pun totally intended); they don't ask themselves whether those values and fucks make their partner a good person to stay with. They're so concerned with holding on to their relationship that they fail to recognize that it's become a black hole consuming their self respect. If people cheat, it's because something other than the relationship is more important to them. It may be power over others. It may be validation through sex. It may be giving in to their own impulses. Whatever it is, it's clear that the cheater's values are not aligned in a way to support a healthy relationship. And if the cheater doesn't admit this or come to terms with it, if he just gives the old 'I don't know what I was thinking; I was stressed out and drunk and she was there' response, then he lacks the serious self-awareness necessary to solve any relationship problems.”

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“As noted before, we’re unfairly biased toward what we already know, what we believe to be certain. If I believe I’m a nice guy, I will avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief always takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change. In this way, “knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgements and accepting of the differences in others.”

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