“Meditation is a way for nourishing and blossoming the divinity within you.”
― Amit Ray

People always talk about meditation and its benefits. Some swear by it as utterly transformative, while others say its effects are modest at best.

I’ve meditated on and off for years and I’ve certainly seen good things. But it wasn’t until recently that I became a true believer.

Here’s my advice on how to meditate and the crazy benefits you can gain when done correctly.

How to Meditate

1. First you want to sit down somewhere comfy.

Having something to support your back is good otherwise you might get distracted constantly trying to sit upright. I don’t recommend lying down as I feel like when my head is horizontal I don’t think as clearly, i rapidly lose focus, and worst case I tend to drift off to sleep.

2.Choose an anchor to focus on (your breath, something to look at, a sound etc.)

Now you want to decide what to use as your anchor to the present moment. People often use the breath (the sensation at the nostrils or rising and falling of abdomen). It doesn’t have to be the breath, some people even decide on a visual anchor like a fixed point on the wall in front of them.

Either way, your anchor is literally just a point of focus. As you sit still and relax, you focus on your anchor while letting everything else just happen as you observe it non-judgementally. Thoughts and sensations will bombard you, which is perfectly normal, just think of the anchor as something to focus on at “center stage” of your awareness.

3. Every time your mind drifts off, return to your anchor

Rapidly you will find your mind drifting into thoughts about anything and everything, and you’ll momentarily forget you’re meant to be meditating.

At first you may even grow frustrated about how hard it is to remain focused on your anchor, but this is meant to happen and exactly the point of meditation. Just nonjudgementally notice how your thoughts have drifted, and slowly return your awareness to your anchor. This ability to notice when your mind wanders and reset your focus is the exact muscle that meditation builds.

“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

4. Repeat step 3 for 10 minutes

Continue. Every time you get lost in thought, you’ll eventually remember you’re meditating and return your awareness to your anchor.

This is meditation. Simply relaxing, focusing on your breath (or whatever anchor you choose), and nonjudgementally returning to your anchor every time your attention drifts off.

That’s it.

No need for long drawn out sessions at this stage. Consistency is more important than intensity.

Do this for 10 minutes a day and see what happens.

The Benefits

Deep lessons meditation quickly teaches you

• You have little direct control over your thoughts, they seem to just appear out of nowhere — like weather patterns in your brain.

• You aren’t your thoughts or your feelings, you are the observer. Dwelling in this space of observer teaches you not to identify so heavily with your ego, your thoughts, and your feelings. Over identification causes most of our psychological suffering.

• The present is the only place life exists, yet we are almost never here for it. We spend most our time dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.

“It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.” - Osho

Meditation is a multiplier for growth

In the past when I used meditation, I guess it was probably a form of avoidance. I thought I could use it to develop my self esteem, spirituality, wisdom and happiness, without doing anything else.

This was a mistake…

Sure you’ll still get modest benefits, but meditation is best used as a multiplier, as a powerful supplement to personal growth in an engaged life.

In other words, it’s most beneficial while you’re living a life that’s actively engaging with the things that scare you, building the business, pursuing the dreams, developing your charisma and skills, mastering your relationships etc.

Once you add in a daily practice while actively taking on the world, you’ll see the real powerful benefits.

A-HA moments keep coming

If you’re someone that’s interested in personal growth, do you find that sometimes you have a breakthrough A-HA moment on something? For example you suddenly see an internal pattern in yourself that you never saw, and it changes your perspective.

When you start meditating daily, these moments happen A LOT more. Not necessarily while you’re meditating, but throughout the day you’ll just find that you start to see patterns and reactions in yourself that you were never conscious of.

This mechanism makes growth inevitable.

Control your mind with Pre-frontal power

This probably has something to do with strengthening connections in your pre-frontal cortex, but with daily meditation you start to notice the volume gets turned down on your emotional reactivity.

Daily stressors, social awkwardness, stress while driving, any sudden negative reaction — you feel a sense of space and self-control that wasn’t there before. The negative reactions don’t feel as intense and you feel like you can manage them a whole lot better.

Massive advantage in an age of doomscrolling

This hasn’t been studied yet (as far as I’m aware), but I have a theory that a lot of social media content is having an opposite effect to meditation. It’s burying us in distraction, pulling us deeper into our egos, making us more addicted to emotional negative charge, and killing our ability to focus.

Right now, most people are sleep walking through life, buried in a sea of negative propaganda spewed out by their social media algorithms. This means, not only is meditation more beneficial than ever, but it will give you a massive advantage in life.

Spiritual development

There’s a reason why monks and spiritual teachers have been meditating for millenia. Quiet contemplation of your inner-world is a fundamental component of your own spiritual development.

• Learning to separate from the shallow proclivities of your ego without judgement

• Learning to live in the present moment and weaken the illusions of the past and future.

• Understanding the inner workings of your mind and how it creates the life you live

• Finding joy and love within and disentangling from the hamster wheel of external validation.

Recommended Viewing & Reading

For many people, guided meditation can be great — especially as a starting point. Mainly because it helps remind you to return to your anchor when you get lost in thought. Here’s a good one to start with:

Anything by Jon-Kabat Zinn is great. He really helps cultivate the non-judgemental, low pressure approach to meditation. Youtube has plenty of stuff by him.

Youtube has endless resources for meditation. Whether it’s guided meditation, soothing background music, or experienced meditators discussing their approach.

Naval takes a more aggressive approach with an hour per day, however his insights here are useful. He views it as a form of mental hygeine and self-therapy — like clearing the inbox of the mind.

Despite its mass appeal and association with Oprah and mainstream self help, the Power of Now is actually excellent reading for a meditator.

You don’t need to read it start to finish, you can literally open to any page and read some of its wisdom. I view this book as sort of a supplement to meditation, it helps clarify the perspective you gain from meditating.

“So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in.

As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides” - Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

This interview only came out a few days ago (Late August 2026). Dr Davidson has been a leading researcher on meditation for decades. Worth a look if you’re interested in the growing scientific data behind meditation.

Final Words

If you’re passionate about self development and want to become the best version of you, meditation is a non-negotiable.

Yes you still need to engage with the world, chase your goals, and push your limits in the outside world. But meditation will act like kerosene to the fire of growth, and that’s without even mentioning the health and day-to-day quality of life gains you’ll see.

If you’re still skeptical, just set a timer for 10 minutes a day and follow my protocol for 2 weeks. If you do this, and notice nothing — feel free to come back and leave a comment telling me I’m full of it.

As always, like, subscribe, leave a comment and be well.

Until next time,

Contra-Psych

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Every item on this list is an attitude or perspective on life that I’ve lived on the opposite side of.

I’ve had to learn the hard way how bad life can be with the wrong mental paradigm. I’m grateful to have come out the other side, and now I have seen how beautiful life can be with the right mental paradigm.

Here is some of my hard gained wisdom and hopefully I can help someone in need with these lessons.

1. Most of your “personality” isn’t you

I used to study all the research on personality and after finding out how stable certain traits can be over the life span, I had taken on an attitude of doom and gloom about my ability to change.

It took a long time for me to realise that alot of what we call personality in day-to-day life is just patterns, coping mechanisms, and adaptations to our current environment. After changing my environment, I realised that so many things that I thought were ‘just me’ weren’t me at all.

So if you’ve been stuck in the same situation for a long time, it’s easy to over-identify with your current state and think that it’s just who you are, but this is rarely the case.

In other words, you’re not actually stuck even if you think you are.

2. Your inner-world and social world runs on self fulfilling prophecy.

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" Henry Ford

The belief that you can’t change becomes the reason you don’t. Whereas the belief that change is easy, makes change easy.

The belief that you are attractive and worthy will magnetise people to you, while the belief that you are wretched and unloveable will repel people faster than anything.

Your level of certainty is what makes people want to buy what you’re selling. This isn’t feel-good fluff, it’s the mechanism of our subjective worlds. In other words, the Jedi-Mind-Trick is real if you think it is.

This is why doomer content is genuine poison. Every hour of it is an hour spent installing your own ceiling, training yourself to be a victim, and making yourself repellent to all things good.

Stay the hell away at all costs.

3. Social reality is made of cardboard

Most of the walls you assume are solid are paper-thin.

You can ask for things you assume are off-limits and you can act in ways you assume aren’t allowed.

Most limitation is either self-imposed or a shared illusion others imposed upon you.

Push on the walls and you’ll see that many of them fall over. You’ll see how much of your potential is being capped by walls that don’t actually exist.

4. Logic is the wrong tool for your inner life

Reason is magnificent for the physical world, where reality corrects you. Pointed at your subjective world, it can become a machine for manufacturing limits. You ‘rationally’ conclude what you can’t do, and the conclusion makes itself true through self-fulfilling prophecy.

You self-disqualify from relationships and career opportunities because you think you’re not good enough yet.

Rationality, logic, and doubt is amazing for understanding and navigating the physical world. In this domain, certainty is a weakness.

In our subjective world of relationships, money, and emotions, it’s the exact opposite. Certainty takes you really really far, while logic and doubt hold you back.

5. You’re being brainwashed daily, and you barely notice

Five minutes scrolling a curated feed is closer to a five-minute hypnosis session than you’d like to admit. The algorithm doesn’t just show you the world, it takes some of what you give it, reshapes and amplifies.

While you can opt out of social media, you can’t fully opt out of social influence. But you can become conscious of it, and consciousness is the only thing that lets you reject what you don’t want to be installed.

6. People are mixed bags of competing motives

Almost nobody is purely good or purely rotten, as much as we instinctively like to brand them one way or the other. Most people have violent thoughts at times but they also possess the inhibition that stops them from acting. The decent person isn’t the one without dark impulses. They’re the one whose values prioritise their better angels over their demons.

Everyone is managing an inner committee. Something to be mindful of when trying to understand the behaviour of yourself and others.

7. What you criticise in others is a confession

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves" - Carl Jung

The traits that most irritate you, the things you judge hardest in other people, usually reveal something important about you.

It doesn’t always directly correlate, as in, just because you hate homeless people doesn’t necessarily mean you’re homeless. But if you examine it honestly, you’ll realise there is always some fear or insecurity behind every motivated criticism. If there wasn’t, you simply wouldn’t care enough to criticise.

Next time contempt rises in you, ask what it’s telling you about yourself. The answer is usually uncomfortable yet accurate. It’s a good habit to get into as it builds character, self-awareness, compassion, and wisdom.

8. Your biggest “flaws” are also your biggest strengths

The chaotic, irrational person is often the fun, spontaneous one. The boring, rigid person is often the one who actually saves money and hits long-term goals. Traits don’t come from a pick ‘n’ choose smorgasbord of good and bad. They are trade-offs that are great for some things and bad for others. Think about this next time you’re dwelling on something you don’t like about another person.

You can’t hate someone’s weakness while enjoying the strength it’s the price of.

9. People act in self-interest far more than they’ll admit

“We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those we bore.” - François de La Rochefoucauld

Most people, most of the time, are optimising for themselves. In other words, everyone is the main character of their own story. This isn’t cynicism, it’s design.

The person who understands this leverages it to maximise their relationships both socially and in business.

10. Choose to be the cause and not the effect in all things.

This is about perspective and attitude and has nothing to do with external realities of cause and effect.

The biggest and clearest difference between winners and losers in life is whether they take on the attitude of cause or effect. Whether life happens to you, or you happen to life.

A cynic might respond with all kinds of talk about luck and circumstance, and those things are very real. But this has nothing to do with what’s happening outside of the mind, it’s a chosen subjective attitude with real downstream outcomes.

See yourself from the frame of the cause in all things in your life and see what happens.

11. Nobody is thinking about you nearly as much as you fear

Your most embarrassing moment is a headline in your own mind and a footnote in everyone else’s. Just like I stated in point #9, people are far too busy starring in their own movie to be the audience for yours.

This can be a scary thought if you crave attention, and the most liberating thing in the world if you fear judgment.

12. A lot of kindness is strategy

Plenty of “nice” behaviour is a bid for approval, safety, or leverage, larping as virtue. The genuinely kind person can say no and can tolerate being disliked. The people-pleaser can’t.

Niceness and kindness are not the same thing. The difference is the reason behind why they’re doing it.

13. Nobody is coming to save you (or stop you)

When you’re a baby crying in a cot, for most of us, it’s not long before our parents come to our aid.

This stops when you become an adult…

There’s no perfect moment coming, no external permission, no rescuer who will finally notice what’s wrong and fix it for you.

That being said, no grand arbiter is coming to tell you that you are wrong or that you can’t do something.

The day you truly accept this is the day your life actually starts.

14. Comfort and ‘playing it safe’ kills more potential than failure ever will

Failure means you acted and learned. Failure also means you’re playing to win, rather than playing to not lose. This is a necessary part of growth.

True failure only occurs in 2 scenarios: when you give up or when you don’t try at all. Too much comfort incentivises people to never try at all.

The slow, pleasant surrender is far more dangerous than the dramatic defeat.

15. Cynicism is cope, not intelligence

The doomerist take feels sophisticated. These doomers even have the audacity to accuse optimistic people of ‘coping’. However as stated in prior points, it all works on self fulfilling prophecy.

Fear of hoping, fear of taking ownership and being disappointed, that’s where cynicism starts. It then hands you the self-satisfaction of “I was right” about the bad outcomes you helped cause by never trying.

Being negative isn’t the same as being smart. It only feels that way from the inside. Either way, you’re choosing to be on the losing side of self-fulfilling prophecy.

16. You become whatever you consume (online and elsewhere)

Feed your mind outrage and the world will look enraging. Feed it beauty and it will look beautiful. You’re not perceiving a fixed reality like you think you are, instead you’re marinating in a bunch of negative inputs in a world of infinite possible inputs.

Whether it’s the people you hang out with, the food you eat, or the online content you consume, a healthy diet is everything. Curate your social media algorithm for positivity and education, and avoid negative people like the bubonic plague.

17. Resenting the successful will prevent you from becoming successful.

At some deep level, we can’t become what we resent. Resenting those we envy creates an internal block towards ever becoming like them.

Whether it’s poor people hating the rich. Single people hating those with a beautiful partner. Unlucky people resenting the privileged.

No matter how tempting it may be to resent those you secretly envy, train yourself to be happy for their success/luck. This habit alone will remove internal blocks towards also becoming successful and lucky.

18. Attraction and respect can’t be earned by qualifying for them

The harder you try to prove you’re worthy of desire or respect, the more you broadcast that you don’t believe you have it. Neediness is a smell everyone detects except the person giving it off.

The things you most want from people arrive only when you stop auditioning for them.

19. Your worth can’t be achieved into existence

If you tell yourself you’ll feel enough once you hit the goal, you won’t. External goalposts move the instant you reach them. The feeling of emptiness isn’t an achievement problem.

Conditional self-worth isn’t self-worth, it’s self qualification.

20. My cup runneth over

This is Psalm 23:5 in the King James Bible and an important lesson in love, money, and life.

The idea is that you build value from within and it spills over to others, as opposed to trying to take value from people. Internal abundance attracts and magnetises love and money, whereas internal scarcity repels these things. This builds from list #18 how neediness puts people off and confidence draws people to you.

Apply this rule to all things. Build value internally and it will ‘run over’ into everything in your life.

Read these once and they’re interesting. But if you experience living by them, especially after living by the opposite, your life will change immeasurably.

Pick the ones that sting.

The sting means it conflicts with your current paradigm. This is where it’s atleast worth thinking about whether your attitude is serving you or harming you.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

Now before I begin, I would like to clarify a few things.

Most critiques of ‘Manosphere’ or ‘Red Pill’ type content are coming from people trying to make a political argument and/or people that haven’t really explored the content and its messages in good faith. This is why so much of the criticism is dismissed (and fair enough).

I on the other hand am someone who has explored these ideas at length and I’ve watched a lot of this kind of content for years, and to be honest I used to believe a lot of the stuff it preaches.

In this article I’m going to mainly focus on where I think it’s wrong (and counter-productive) at the level of male self-help. The political, social commentary, is an article for another day.

Anyway, lets begin…

There’s a theory in psychology called the “extreme male brain” hypothesis of autism.

The idea is that male brains skew, on average, toward systemising: understanding the world as a set of rule-based objective systems to be understood, tweaked, and optimised. While female brains, on average, skew toward empathising: subjective feelings, vibes, and human connection.

Autism, on this theory, sits at the far end of the systemising extreme. This may be part of why it’s diagnosed so much more often in men. Also, it may explain why career paths like engineering and computer programming are stereotypically filled with autistic men.

Obviously there’s plenty of controversy and debate around this theory, so I’m not arguing for the absolute truth of its arguments, but you can notice the pattern it points at.

The reason I bring up this male-brained theory, is that I think it explains many of the limitations of contemporary male self-improvement content, in particular the broad overlapping subniches that sometimes get lumped in and referred to as ‘The Manosphere’.

Men love a system and they love to problem solve.

Give a man a complex problem and his instinct is to find the inputs, optimise the variables, and engineer a solution. This male inclination towards systemising is a superpower when applied to the right problems.

However when applied to the wrong problems, this approach can send men on a wild goose chase that never delivers them what they want.

The thing is, almost everything men actually want from self-improvement content: sexual desire from women, self-esteem, power, and success— plays by a different set of rules.

This is the hidden flaw running underneath this contemporary men’s self-improvement content…

It takes the systemising instinct, which is real and puts planes in the sky, and points it at a set of problems that don’t yield to it. It promises a result to millions of men who work incredibly hard, hit every target, and arrive at the finish line to find the thing they were promised isn’t there.

In other words: too much logic, not enough vibes.

Here are the four myths that male self improvement tells men:

1. Self-Esteem and Sex Appeal are Entirely Engineering Problems

The whole model of most male-focused self-help content is built like a spreadsheet. Acquire the right inputs: this body fat percentage, this income, this jawline, this status, this skill stack, and the outputs will follow.

Self confidence.

Desire from women.

Respect from other men.

Happiness.

But these outputs men want live mostly in the subjective world, and the subjective world does not play by the same rules as the external one.

Sure, a better body and a better income can improve your life in so many ways, and all things being equal, it can improve your dating life, but compared to what’s going on inside, it’s merely icing on the cake for generating desire. And as I will go into later, the reason behind doing them is a bigger determinant of whether or not they are attractive in the eyes of women.

When it comes down to it, you cannot bodybuild and diet your way to feeling enough, you cannot earn your way to inner peace, and you cannot bonesmash your way into being genuinely desired by a woman.

These things run on frame, vibes, presence, and self-perception, and none of those respond to force the way your muscle tissue responds to progressive overload.

The engineering mind hates this, because it can’t be systemised. So it ignores it, and keeps optimising the things it knows how to optimise, and wonders why the numbers keep going up while the result never arrives.

You’re trying to solve a subjective problem with an objective tool. It was never going to work, no matter how disciplined you are.

2. Self-qualification will Get You Self-Worth.

Look closely at the underlying message of most male self-help content and you’ll see the same structure every time:

Do these things and you’ll finally be worthy. Earn the body, earn the money, looksmax the face, achieve the status, and then you’ll deserve the woman, the respect, the self-esteem.

It trains men to qualify for the sexual approval of women by reaching some external metric (usually determined by other men). To treat their own worth as something that has to be earned through accumulation before it can be claimed.

And this is a psychological disaster, because it installs a constant sense of deficit with moving goalposts. You are continually operating from a frame of not enough yet. You’re always one acquisition away from being allowed to feel okay with yourself.

The man operating from qualification is broadcasting, in everything he does, a message: I am not yet enough and I need to fulfill some externally dictated metric to be enough.

And people feel that…

Women definitely feel it, and worst of all, the man doing the work feels it, every hour of every day, no matter what the scale or the bank account says.

How many men out there have spent years building up their bank balance, developing a particular physique, curating their entire life, in order to feel like they’ll tick the necessary boxes to be attractive enough for the kind of girl they desire. Only to go out in public and notice plenty of men who are noticeably poorer, uglier, shorter, or fatter than them dating girls they consider way out of their league.

If your mind is buried deep enough in blackpill or redpill content you probably will rationalise it away: Maybe he’s secretly really rich, maybe he’s got a 9 inch schlong, maybe he’s a passport bro…

But if you spend any amount of time out in the real world, you’ll get this slap in the face constantly, to the point it starts becoming impossible to rationalise away. Perhaps the reason so much of these theories of intergender dynamics have grown in recent years is because so many men aren’t leaving their house to test these ideas in the real world. If your entire world is instagram and tinder, then it makes sense that looks and money would be the only thing in your mind that matter.

In the outside world, the only difference between you and the guys with the beautiful girlfriends isn’t usually some external metric he’s beating you on, it’s the underlying vibe he carries that he’s already good enough. Here’s a great little diagram I saw posted by on X.

Worth was never something you qualify for. The moment you believe you have to earn it, you’ve guaranteed you’ll never feel you have.

3. Winning by Their Scorecard Will Make You a Sexy ‘Alpha Male’

Here’s the one that costs men the most, especially with relationships.

The entire optimisation model is oriented outward. It measures you against markers on a scoreboard devised by other men. Usually these “other men” are some combination of consumer society as a whole, and the most charismatic alpha male influencers on your social media feed.

In chasing these markers, men hand their sense of worth to the outside world. They let someone else define what makes them worthy and then scramble to measure up. And if you really think about it, as much as I hate the term, this is kind of the definition of a beta male. They’re making themselves more suitable as providers (as opposed to lovers), and more desperate for validation, all the while convincing themselves they’re being alpha.

The single biggest driver of genuine feminine attraction is the opposite of this. It’s internal frame, strength of reality, a man whose sense of himself is so solid that it doesn’t need external confirmation, who moves through the world from his own conviction rather than auditioning for the crowd’s approval.

The man playing to society’s frame and the man operating from his own frame can have the same physique, the identical income, and produce completely opposite results. Because one of them is asking the world “am I enough yet?” and the other has already decided, and the world adjusts to whichever answer he’s living from.

Here’s an absolute banger from X that I had to share a passage from:

“Most men are doing all of these assortment of things for reasons that are not their own, working jobs they hate for approval they do not even want, being nice to avoid conflict, lifting weights because internet man told them to, every single move calculated for external validation. You are the last man! Comfortable, safe, optimized for intra-male social approval, and completely spiritually castrated. ” - on X. full post here (highly recommended):

Attraction and respect flow toward the man with his own reality, not the man measuring himself against everyone else’s.

4. The Body and the Cash Will Get You What You’re chasing

If you’re into male self-improvement for reasons other than pulling chicks. For the sake of health, wealth, spiritual growth, becoming a better father, that’s awesome and you’re probably not the person I’m addressing in this essay.

But I think a large portion of the men attracted to self improvement are doing it with the conscious or unconscious motivation to become more attractive to women and become a sexier version of themselves. And who can blame them? Sexual approval is one of the strongest incentives in men and we live in complicated times.

But men are being falsely sold the idea that the body, the money, and the status will deliver real sexual/romantic desire and unshakeable self-esteem. So they chase, and they achieve, and the thing doesn’t come. And instead of questioning the model, they conclude they simply haven’t achieved enough yet. So they set a higher target and run harder.

“15% bodyfat? I need to get to 10%”

“150k per year, i need to get to 250k”

and so on…

That’s the wheel and it never ends, because achievement was never the thing that produced the result they’re chasing. They’re chasing the wrong thing.

Here’s a well-known before-and-after photo that went viral.

This is a famous British popstar Olly Murs who did a 12 week body transformation. Soft in the first photo, lean and muscular in the second. The men who saw it overwhelmingly said he looks better in the after shot (right). Whereas the women largely said he looked better in the before (left). Actual results linked below:

Funnily enough, many men accused the women of lying. I get it, we know there’s often a gap between stated preferences and revealed preferences, but I don’t believe thats what’s going on here.

Here’s what I think is actually going on…

In the first photo, he isn’t trying to impress. In the second, you can feel that he is. One is a man at ease in himself, while the other is a man qualifying. And qualifying, however impressive the result, carries a faint signal of need. Women are seeing the psychological frame (vibe, intentions, the WHY behind his behaviour), men are seeing the objective physical outcomes (muscle tone, bodyfat level etc). And many men are so incapable of seeing outside of their own paradigm of attraction that they simply accuse the women of lying.

It’s not the whole explanation, and it’s not that aesthetics play no role in female attraction. But it points at something the engineering model can’t see.

Side Note: Social Reality is made of cardboard

The male-typical engineering mind doesn’t realise that much of the subjective world, not only feminine attraction, follows self-fulfilling prophecy.

Women (and people in general) will believe about you what you believe about yourself. Once you learn how to leverage this, the world opens up with opportunities in money, love, friendships, and experiences that you never thought possible.

Here’s an exceptional cartoon from that he posted on X. Essentially showing how engineering logic and social reality play by different rules.

So if “improving” doesn’t make me sexier, should I just give up trying?

Hell no.

This is where people misread my argument, so let me clarify…

Build the body.

Earn the money.

Develop the skills and the competence and the discipline.

These things are genuinely good, are great for building a family, raising kids, and a life spent building these things is generally a life well spent. And like all things you’re pursuing, if you’re doing them for your own purpose rather than self qualification, then it’s genuinely sexy and attractive.

The problem was never the building. The problem is the reason why you’re building.

There are two men doing the exact same workout. One is training because he believes he’s not enough, and this is how he’ll finally earn the right to be desired. The other is training because he respects himself, desires a healthy beautiful body, enjoys the process, and wants to express and expand a life that’s already good.

Chase the body, the wealth, the mastery. But chase them from abundance, not deficit. For the joy of the climb, to bring maxium value to others and yourself, not to qualify for entry. Do it as an expression of a man who has already decided he’s enough, not a desperate bid to become worthy.

Do it that way and something strange will happen…

The results come easier, the women become drawn to your internal validation, respect from other men flows easily. The whole thing stops being a wheel you’re trapped on and becomes a valuable life you’re actually living.

The metrics were never the problem, the reason you were chasing them was.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

In any situation, in any problem you’re dealing with, you are standing in one of two positions.

You are either framing yourself as the cause or the effect.

The cause makes you a creator.

The effect makes you a victim.

The cause moves reality.

The effect is moved by reality.

And guess what?

You’re always choosing one or the other.

One position is the energy of creation itself. The other is slow spiritual decay.

A life that happens to you instead of through you.

Most people live almost entirely as the effect and cannot understand why their life feels like an open-air prison.

• Their dreams are distant thoughts that never manifest

• their bad habits are things they’ll quit “one day”, yet they keep doing

• they live their life like a Tee shirt in a washing machine, helplessly tossed around by unpredictable external forces.

The same event, different stories

Two men lose their job on the exact same day.

The first one paints his story in the position of the effect. This happened to me. They did this. It’s the economy, my useless colleagues, the rigged system, god himself wants me to lose.

He marinates…

He waits…

He tells the story a hundred times, and each time it strengthens the neural pathways of victimhood.

Over time it calcifies into a neurotic view of work, authority, and eventually the world at large.

He slowly paints himself as the main character of a deep tragedy.

Then there’s the other man.

The other man puts himself as the cause in his story.

Alright…

What now?

What can I learn from this experience?

What does this free me to do that I was too comfortable to do before?

What went wrong and how can I make adaptations to avoid this in future?

He moves…

This builds his resilience, forces adaptation, and it fills him with confidence that no challenge can stop him.

Within five years, these two men are living completely different lives…

One made himself the cause, the other made himself the effect.

The effect is a form of death

When you take the position of the effect, you hand your power to something external. Your boss. Your ex. The economy. The past. Your childhood. Your genetics. Women. Men.

And here’s the big secret…

You actually make a deal with the devil. You say “I’ll give you all my power of will, and in return you can make it so I don’t have to do anything. So I can sit back in self righteous comfort and blame the world.”

This often feels tempting. But it’s a poison chalice that destroys many lives.

The effect-position is comfortable in exactly the way a padded room is comfortable. Three walls, a roof and nothing expected of you.

But that comfort is slow self-destruction.

Every moment you embrace as the effect, something you are losing something. Your agency, your fire, your sense that you are a force in the world. Instead you’re choosing to be a leaf in the wind.

Victimhood feels like a self-righteous safety. It’s actually a slow demise.

This is not about blame

Being the cause has nothing to do with fault or blame. Terrible things happen to people who did nothing to deserve them. Real victims exist. I am not telling you to blame yourself for the storm. Fault and blame are actually somewhat useless in this paradigm and only expend unnecessary mental energy.

It actually has very little to do with the logic of outside circumstances at all. It’s a chosen subjective reality that creates real downstream effects in our lives.

As humans we often convince ourselves we’re percieving reality “objectively”, but that’s not really what we do. We percieve our worlds through the inner reality we create, and the story we tell ourselves about what happens to us is often far more powerful than the actual thing that happens to us.

This is an inescapable part of being human.

You’re creating your own reality whether you like it or not. The sooner you accept this, and start to leverage it, the sooner you will start creating the life you want.

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are" - Anaïs Nin

You don’t always choose what happens to you. But the story you create about what happens has infinite power.

The energy is real, whether you believe in it or not

Call it whatever your worldview allows…

If you’re spiritual, the cause carries the energy of creation. Of God, of the divine spark, of the force that spoke worlds into being.

The effect carries the opposite. A demonic energy, in the oldest sense of the word. The energy that drags a soul downward into powerlessness, resentment, and decay.

"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life" Deuteronomy 30:19

If you’re not spiritual, fine. Call it psychology, call it locus of control, hell, you can even call it extreme ownership.

It does not matter which lens you use.

The model is pragmatically true from every angle.

The person who lives as the cause thrives. The person who lives as the effect withers. Believe what you will about the mechanism, the end result is the same.

Most people are secretly the effect and calling it wisdom

The sneakiest thing about the effect-position is how often it disguises itself as intelligence.

The online social media algorithms love to seduce people with effect narratives:

“Housing is so expensive so you’ll never get ahead in this economy”

“There’s no good men left so you’ll never marry”

“All women are hypergamous and shallow so you’ll never find a wife”

“You’ll never have it as good as people did in the 90’s”

Every one of them is the effect wearing the mask of realism. It sounds like an uncomfortable reality, but they’re just seductive rationalisations that allow people to unite in their victimhood and give up trying.

The one question that flips you

You don’t need a decade of inner work to change position. You need one question, asked the moment you notice yourself struggling with something emotionally.

Am I painting myself as the cause or the effect?

Often the answer will be clear as day. And once you realise you’re painting yourself as the effect, you’ll start to see how much its limiting you and how many downstream problems it’s creating.

If you’re used to seeing yourself as the effect, there will be a lot of resistance. You’ll come up with all kinds of arguments and rationalisations as to why you’re correct to see yourself as a victim. But you have to realise, there is no “correct” in this. It’s a subjective story. You can either embrace a story that empowers you and those around you, or you can embrace a story that rots you to your core.

I know which one I choose.

And the more you practice seeing yourself as the cause, the easier it will get. As you begin to rewire your brain, everything will start to change, and you’ll begin to step back and realise just how toxic your old thinking patterns were.

The victim asks why me.

The creator asks what now.

Same situation, two completely different lives downstream.

I lived on the wrong side of this

I’ve spent far more years of my life as the effect than I’d like to admit.

I told myself a very rational sounding story about why my life was miserable. And with my academic background in psychology, it sounded like an honest, research backed case. It was a beautifully argued position for staying exactly where I was. But in the end it was just another rationalisation of my negative mind state.

The change didn’t come from a new fact or data point.

It came from realising that the subjective world doesn’t play by the same rules as the outside world.

I decided I had the power to create my internal reality. Then the world stopped feeling like something happening to me and started feeling like clay in my hands.

I didn’t become more talented…

I dind’t change my childhood or my genetics…

I became the cause.

Everything downstream of that changed.

The practice

So here is the god-tier advice, stripped to its core.

In every situation, catch which position you’re standing in.

When you find yourself as the effect: powerless, blaming, waiting, explaining why nothing can be done, reframe.

Realise that this is happening between your ears. That’s where it starts and stops. The specifics of the external aren’t actually that relevant. What’s truly relevant is the framing you’re choosing.

Take the position of the cause in all things, and you take on the energy of creation itself.

Stay the effect, and you volunteer for a slow, comfortable, self-narrated defeat.

Both roads are always open and every moment you choose which one you walk.

Be the cause in all things.

Always.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

“To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.” — Saint Augustine, On the Good of Marriage (AD 401)

Recently I posted this question:

Unsurprisingly, I got a lot of replies.

Alcohol is a huge part of our culture and many people struggle with addiction, especially writers. So I’m going to list some of the big themes that stood out in the comments.

Whether you’ve quit the booze and want to see what worked for others, you’re trying to quit and are seeking wisdom, or you love it and have zero interest in quitting, hopefully this article will be at the very least insightful for you.

Before I get to it, I’ll give you my position and where I stand on this stuff, because it shapes what follows.

My position on booze (and other drugs)

Unlike the view of society at large, I don’t think drugs are automatically evil. And I don’t even think addiction is automatically a bad thing. A substance in my view, is only a problem when the trade-off is a net negative. When what it’s taking from you, and from the people around you, outweighs what it’s giving back.

Caffeine is a drug. It’s genuinely addictive, and for most people, including me, it’s a net positive. People go on about giving up caffeine, and for those that get genuine benefits from giving up, like say reduced anxiety, that’s awesome.

But some people give up caffeine and when you ask them why they quit they say “because it’s a drug, and i was addicted”. For me, this answer isn’t a good enough reason to quit something that brings me value, it sounds more just like societal panic and “drugs are bad, mmmkay” type thinking. If a drug only brings you benefits and has minimal downsides, I personally don’t see the point in stopping it.

I make this point not to defend drug use per se, I make it because I think it’s an honest starting point. The reactive “all drinking bad, just stop” script is useless for those trying to quit. It makes no sense to the person struggling with the negatives of alcohol, who also knows there are clear positives (otherwise they wouldn’t be addicted) . It turns the whole thing into a moral panic when it needs to be a rational cost-benefit decision.

If you’re reading this as someone wanting to give up the booze, you’ve probably already run the numbers and noticed your trade-offs are leaning in the wrong direction. That’s the first step in getting clean.

Here are the themes that kept coming up in the thread.

1. It started with a powerful decision

This was the most common theme.

People didn’t quit alcohol because they found the perfect method. They quit the moment they stopped half committing to their decision.

was sitting on his sofa getting drunk again and suddenly decided, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” He stopped there and then, with half a bottle of wine left. That was sixteen years ago.

simply said he “got tired of feeling bad.”

, thirty-three years sober, put the whole thing down to one word: priority. “No one made me get sober. I wanted to stop. As long as my sobriety remains my priority, I stay sober.” This is the power a decision has, when you really really mean it.

There’s a pattern in all of these…

The struggle continued as long as quitting was an internal battle against themselves. The change came when the fight ended, when they stopped trying to control it or moderate it and simply decided to quit.

put it beautifully: “once sobriety became the priority instead of the preference, it stopped being a fight.”

I think we too often underestimate the power of our own mind and our ability to make life-changing decisions in a single moment.

2. The trade-off finally tipped negative

This is what happened for me.

Monk-like discipline can only last so long, especially if you genuinely get a net positive out of something. The following people quit because the trade off became too uneven and the cost turned it into a net negative.

described the turning point as “realizing how much I had lost to alcohol compared to what I had gained.”

said “one night of fun, three or four full days of torture. My body rebelled, screaming in my face that it’s not worth it.”

I can certainly relate to Harry on this one.

In my early 20s hangovers were just mild headache, while the buzz from alcohol was an awesome euphoriant and social lubricant. In other words, it gave me so much more than it took. So I loved it and it was a central part of my social life.

By my late 20s and early 30s, hangovers became a physical and emotional hell that lasted days, and even the high became nowhere near as euphoric or social.

When the trade off gets this unfavorable, it actually gets quite easy to walk away from a drug. And to be perfectly honest, if I still got the same net gain out of booze that I did in my early 20s, I’d still be drinking every weekend.

3. The body forced the decision

For many people in the comments, the decision was made for them by their own bodies.

and both mentioned chronic pancreatitis as their reason for stopping drinking. (I looked up the symptoms, this sounds awful and I feel for you guys).

was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and neuropathy in his feet.

faced a full-blown liver transplant. This one is no joke. My mum had a liver transplant - definitely a long, difficult road.

There’s no romance in this category, just hard truth .

The mind can rationalise all it wants, but if the body files a serious objection like what we see here, you can’t argue with it. So if you’re lucky, you make the decision before your organs make it for you.

4. You have to replace it with something

I’ve heard this advice many times from wise people. If you want to give up the booze, you need to replace it with something else. Especially if you’ve built a lifestyle and identity around it.

Subtraction alone tends to fail.

As put it, “quitting something isn’t enough. You’ve gotta replace it with something worth showing up for.”

, a man with 87 years of life experience, described reaching a point where it was beer or cycling. He chose the bike and never looked back.

Others swapped the bottle for coffee, for movement, for meditation, for new hobbies, for weed as a less toxic substitute. summed up her whole strategy as learning to “get high on your own supply.”

The logic is straightforward…

Drinking was filling a hole, whether that hole was boredom, stress, anxiety, or a lack of connection. Remove the drink without filling the hole and you’re just white knuckling until you give in again. The people who made it stick put something better in its place.

5. Community and connection were the real need

A few people cut to the deepest layer of it, and this one stuck with me.

said it beautifully: “There are lots of ways to stop drinking. Only a few ways to connect with others.”

So true and relatable.

Where I live in Australia, alcohol isn’t really the thing they’re chasing, it’s the social connection and presence that alchohol creates. Alcohol makes it easy to get out of your head, open up, and let go in the presence of others. So we become dependent on it for social connection. And that makes quitting terrifying, because it feels like choosing between sobriety and social belonging.

But the drink was never the point, the connection was.

The people who understood this didn’t just remove alcohol, they found other doors to social connection and community. Which perhaps explains why so many recovery routes, from AA to church to a new circle of friends, work through community rather than raw willpower.

6. The root cause was often somewhere else entirely

Several people discovered the drinking was a symptom, and the real fix was lying underneath.

One of the most striking was who realised in adulthood that he’d had ADHD his whole life. He’d been drinking to quiet the noise in his head and to numb the belief that he was a useless failure.

Getting diagnosed and treated changed everything. His mind could focus, the self-image shifted, and the urge to drink simply disappeared. He said he’d never actually enjoyed alcohol. He’d been self-medicating a problem he didn’t know he had.

had started drinking to manage social anxiety before it became a daily necessity.

Others pointed at deeper wounds still. The common thread: for a lot of people, you don’t beat the drinking by fighting the drinking. You beat it by finding and fixing the thing it was medicating.

7. The spiritual route

This can be a powerful one for many. Perhaps that’s why AA has so many religious elements to it and relies on a “higher power”.

Finding faith, converting to a religious worldview, the sense of the desire being lifted rather than resisted. unsurprisingly framed it in Stoic terms: “you stop poisoning yourself the moment you realise your existence is not a property of the bottle but of your own sovereign mind.”

Whatever your beliefs, the mechanism is worth taking seriously.

Faith delivers surrender, meaning, community, and a story bigger than the craving.

8. Mindfulness and meditation

"His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God." — Carl Jung, letter to Bill Wilson, 1961.

Close to my own current path, and one of the most profound answers in the thread came from here.

spent years failing to quit until he stopped fighting the drink and started asking why he was drawn to it in the first place. He realised that early on, alcohol had genuinely given him something. It made him comfortable in his own skin, easy around other people, and made the world feel a little magical. Then he had the key insight: all of those things were about perception. He learned to reach them through mindfulness instead, and alcohol “no longer had anything to offer me.”

His closing line is the best thing anyone wrote in the entire thread: “In a bizarre way, the alcohol was pointing towards what I wanted all along.”

That’s the whole thing in one sentence. The drink was a broken tool for reaching a real and worthy destination. Find a working tool, and the broken one loses its grip.

The honourable mentions

Not everything fit a category. A few worth sharing.

said “Alcohol is boring.” (Forty-five years sober, and the most blunt answer in the thread.)

said “LaCroix is better.”

And my personal favourite for sheer bleak honesty, who quit after “a bad night questioning the toilet about my wisdom and intelligence.”

And AA deserves its own mention. Multiple people credited the twelve steps, one of them thirty-eight years sober. It doesn’t work for everyone, but for the people it works for, it clearly works for life.

Final words for anyone still in it

There’s definitely a pattern here. And you can see that certain things work better on average.

However, that being said, one thing I’d like to say about addiction is that everyone is fighting a unique battle and playing by a different set of rules. People are quick to judge others as weak or morally flawed when they fail to quit, however I think this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

People have different responses to alcohol and quitting might be a walk in the park for one person, and a painful, decades-long journey for another.

For me, quitting alcohol was relatively easy because the joy of it subsided while the hangovers and other negatives got exponentially worse. My best friend however, gets a completely different response from alcohol. After about 2 drinks, he is in a state of pure euphoria, and as a result he can’t stop drinking until all the booze has ran out.

He is now 5 years sober, however his journey was much, much more challenging than mine, because he was fighting an entirely different battle. If I had the same response to alcohol as him, I’d probably still be drinking.

Anyway, enough about me. I want to end with the people who replied still in the middle of it. “I’m still trying to walk away,” wrote. “I like it too much.”

That honesty deserves serious respect.

Only you know where the trade off lies, and only you can decide whether its giving more than its taking.

If you’re someone who is struggling, don’t fall into the trap of self-judgement. Find what works for you and take it one step at a time. If you’ve been drinking heavily for a long time, make sure to get the help of medical and other professionals, because coming off it can be dangerous without support.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

The honesty in this thread was awesome.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

There’s a strange trend in the self development space right now…

Retardmaxxing.

Delusional optimism.

“You can literally just do things.”

All kinds of viral content telling people to think less, stop analysing everything, and just act with the carefree self-belief of a thoughtless simpleton.

On the surface it sounds like a joke, and when I first glanced at some of the content, I thought it was. But when I looked closer, I realised there’s actually something profound there.

Perhaps the reason it’s gaining so much traction, why it’s resonating, is that people can feel the truth of it even if they don’t know why.

Intelligence, rationalism, logic, are all magnificent tools. But as breathing, feeling, thinking humans, we sometimes fail to realise that they are not the whole toolbox. These tools are superb for some jobs and actively destructive when you use them on the wrong ones.

A hammer is perfect for a nail and a disaster for a window.

The most important things in our lives are highly subjective, and our subjective worlds often play by different rules to the purely physical. Self-fulfilling prophecies, placebo effects, dialectics and paradoxes, are the rule of our internal worlds, rather than the exception.

Most smart, rational people never learn this.

They point their rational mind at every problem in their life, including the ones that don’t run on reason at all, and then wonder why the harder they think, the worse things get.

Here are five ways being too rational hurts you:

1. It rationalises your limiting beliefs

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Humans are much better at rationalising than they are at thinking rationally. And the smarter you are, the better you are at rationalising.

For example, there’s an old saying in marketing:

“People purchase based on emotion and then rationalise their decision with logic”.

Many of our seemingly “rational” beliefs and opinions work the same way. We feel our way to our opinions, then use logic to rationalise them, all the while convincing ourselves we arrived there on pure reason.

We also do this with our limiting beliefs.

The less rational person who wants to do something scary just... does it, or doesn’t. They don’t have the intellectual horsepower to construct a convincing justification either way. Which also means they don’t think themselves into a neurotic story about whether they acted or not.

But the smart person can talk themselves out of anything. They can build a detailed, evidence-based, entirely reasonable-sounding case for why the risk isn’t worth it, why they simply aren’t capable, or why they’re not ready yet.

And despite how wise and reasonable it might sound, it’s really just a clever argument covering a fear of failure.

Intelligent people too often mistake their own rationalisations for objectivity. They think they’re seeing the world accurately when they’re really just seeing their own limiting beliefs dressed in the language of facts and logic. The smarter you are, the better the disguise, and the more completely you fool yourself.

Being “realistic” is where a lot of smart people go to hide from their own potential. It sounds like maturity, when it’s actually just surrender to mediocrity.

2. It kills action through endless analysis

If you’re a hyper-rational person, your mind wants complete information before you move. It wants to run the numbers, see the studies, weigh the probabilities, model the outcomes, and arrive at the perfect decision.

This is a wonderful approach to playing chess or flying a plane, but it’s a catastrophic one for living a life.

Because almost nothing good in life is following these same logical rules. The business, the relationship, the risk, the leap. They all require acting before you have complete information, often before you feel ready at all. And the intelligent mind, faced with incomplete data, does what it’s built to do. It gathers more intel, it analyses further, and it waits for a certainty that is never, ever coming.

I don’t know the original source of this quote, but it always gives me perspective:

“Plenty of highly successful people started while feeling less ready than you do right now”

Let that land.

We so often assume that the people that achieved major success were somehow operating from a different level of “readiness” to us. Like they fundamentally possessed some prerequisite that we don’t. But this is an illusion with few exceptions.

The person who just acts, who moves on instinct and figures it out on the way, has already started, failed, learned, and adjusted while the smart person is still weighing the options in their head.

It isn’t that thinking is bad…

It’s that past a certain point, more thinking is just procrastination and fear posing as strategy. The analysis feels like progress while it’s actually the most sophisticated form of avoidance ever invented.

3. It makes you apply logic to things that don’t run on logic

Some parts of life run on pure reason…

The most important things however, are highly subjective and vibes based. Attraction, relationships, sales, persuasion, confidence, self-worth. These are areas where trying to use objective reasoning often does more harm than good.

Here’s a wild and contemporary example: The Manosphere.

An entire industry of men applying spreadsheet logic to attracting women and relationship dynamics. You need this height, this jawline, this bodyfat percentage, this income, this muscle mass. A checklist of criteria you must satisfy before you’re allowed to be a “high value man”. It’s engineering applied to something that was never an engineering problem.

What these men fail to realise, is that the belief itself is what repels. The moment a man is internally running the calculation of whether he qualifies, he’s operating from a place of deficit, of needing to earn something, of auditioning for approval. And that neediness will repel women faster than any physical flaw. The rational framework doesn’t just fail. It manufactures the rejection through a self fulfilling prophecy.

Meanwhile the guy who never did the maths, who just talks to her from a relaxed “why wouldn’t she like me,” has the very thing all that analysis was chasing. He isn’t more qualified, he just never convinced himself he needed to qualify. That lack of neediness will attract women (and people in general) more than any “objective” metric.

And intelligence makes this stuff worse, not better.

The smart man builds the more elaborate model, a more compelling and evidence based reason why he can’t get laid and other men can. He finds the statistics, constructs a detailed theory of his own inadequacy, and then feels vindicated when the self-fulfilling prophecy comes true. His intelligence didn’t liberate him. It built him a prison the simpler man was too unbothered to notice.

The same trap runs through money, status, and anything in life where human perception is a causal element. The belief that you must qualify before you’re allowed to move with confidence, is killing your results. Logic is a brilliant tool. However, when pointed at a domain that runs on frame, vibes, and feeling, it becomes a wrecking ball to your own desired outcomes.

4. It trades presence for analysis

I’m not one of those people that thinks analysis necessarily kills joy. I love learning about things and how they work, and think this can genuinely add to the beauty of life.

However, in certain scenarios overanalysis can affect the bandwidth required for optimal performance, optimal presence, and optimal joy.

Since I’ve started meditating, I’ve realised how much of my life I wasn’t truly present for. So many great moments, whether enjoying a delicious meal, making love to a beautiful woman, even something as simple as having a shower. My mind was so often caught up in the past, the future, and the complex patterns of my own ego. Wherever I was, I wasn’t where I was meant to be.

Life only exists in the present moment, so if you aren’t present for it, are you truly living?

This is why so many intelligent people are miserable despite having engineered lives that look, on paper, like they should be satisfying. They’ve optimised everything and can enjoy none of it, because the same relentless analytical engine that built the life is incapable of switching off long enough to inhabit it.

5. It confuses cynicism with intelligence

Somewhere along the way, smart people learn that a dark, skeptical take sounds more sophisticated than an optimistic, hopeful one.

There’s a longstanding cultural trend where optimism gets coded as naive, while cynicism gets coded as clever. The person predicting disaster sounds worldly and sharp and the person expressing hope sounds like they haven’t thought it through yet. So intelligent people, who care about seeming intelligent, drift toward pessimism as a kind of intellectual performance.

The problem is that you become the mental reality you spend time in. Spend enough time taking on cynical persectives to sound smart, and eventually you’re living inside it. Everything you see gets viewed through pessisim-tinted glasses. You start living in a bleak, low-expectation version of reality, and then, because belief shapes behaviour, you get the bleak, low-expectation results that confirm it.

I would argue that despite what so many pessimists think, there is no negative (or positive) slant to the truth. Objective facts are neutral. Whether they are positive or negative comes down to the choices and meaning you decide to filter them through in your head.

So sure, if you want to be pessimistic and negative, that’s up to you. Just stop convincing yourself that you have a more “accurate” worldview, whatever that means.

Most cynicism isn’t insight, it’s a psychologcial defence. It’s the fear of hoping for something and being disappointed, dressed up in the costume of sophistication. It rewards you the ego-boost of getting to say “see, I was right” about outcomes you helped create by never trying.

Being negative isn’t the same as being smart, it just feels that way from the inside.

The point isn’t to be stupid

Let me be clear, because this is where people misread my argument.

I’m not telling you to be dumb (unless you want to, ofcourse). Intelligence is an enormous gift and reason is one of the finest tools a human being has. It’s put planes in the sky, prevented unfathomable amounts of disease, extended our lives, created this very computer I’m typing on etc etc etc…

The problem was never that you’re smart. The problem is that you’re using one tool for every job, including the jobs it actively ruins.

Reason is for the domains where reality corrects you. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, analysis. For these, use every bit of intelligence you have.

But when it comes to anything involving human subjectivity and relationships. These run on different operating systems, and in these arenas rationality should be used sparingly. Obviously you don’t want to become so detached from rational thought that you’re shouting in the street as onlookers run off scared. But you can definitely ease up on the overreach of rational thinking.

The wisest people aren’t the ones who think the hardest. They’re the ones who know when to think and when to stop thinking and simply move, feel, believe, and follow the vibes.

That’s the real lesson hiding inside all the “retardmaxxing” noise. It was never an argument against intelligence.

It was about knowing when to put it down.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

Every single attitude on this list I’ve held at some point and all it’s done is make my life worse. Also, I’ve learned that the only “truth” about any of these attitudes is that they’re self-fulfilling. When you believe the opposite, they’re self-fulfilling in the other direction.

Here they are:

1. “Rich people are evil”

The belief that everyone with money cheated, exploited, or stepped on people to get it.

It feels righteous, but it’s mainly just projection of envy and scarcity thinking.

And the worst part?

In some unfathomable spiritual way, it guarantees you’ll never build wealth yourself, because some part of you believes that becoming successful would make you one of the bad guys.

This also applies to anyone with something you want, not just money. If you demonise those you envy, you’ll separate yourself from the thing you want.

You can’t move toward a thing you’ve decided is evil.

2. “That person is out of my league”

Leagues are imaginary.

Sure there’s some low-resolution, popular opinion on what can make a partner valuable, but it’s ultimately all based on subjective perception.

That perfect angel you think you’re talking to is just another silly human who uses the bathroom daily, has no idea why they’re alive, and is trying their best to find happiness. Just like everybody else.

The man who thinks he’s a six talking to a nine has invented a framework between his own ears where he is an inferior to some divine being, which is exactly what repels her.

Meanwhile she’s had her heart broken by guys shorter than you, poorer than you, uglier than you, the list goes on. The only difference is that those guys connected with her as a person and weren’t just seeing her as some walking validation dispenser.

Remember: the belief creates the result and then congratulates itself for being accurate.

3. “I’ll be good enough when...”

When I make the money, when I get the six pack abs or the big biceps, when they finally see my greatness.

This is an illusion that keeps self-worth permanently in the future and frames your entire existence around not being good enough right now.

It’s a hamster wheel, not a road to glory…

Self-love comes in the present, or it never comes. Pursue what you want from a place of abundance instead, and it becomes a thousand times easier, and you actually get to enjoy the journey.

The journey is where life is.

4. “Everyone else has it easy, I’m the only messed up one”

You’re comparing your behind-the-scenes footage and internal monologue to everyone else’s highlight reel and external mask.

Everyone is struggling with something you can’t see. The people who look like they have it together are just better at hiding their challenges, or you just don’t have sufficient awareness to notice them.

This belief isolates you from connection, causes a sense of entitlement to special treatment, and gives you a permanent excuse to underperform.

5. “My worth is decided by what others think of me”

Hand the verdict on your value to other people and you’ve made yourself a slave to the least stable thing in the world: other people’s opinions.

Peoples opinions of others are retarded (including yours). They fluctuate constantly and they’re 80% projection. They’ll love you one week and hate you the next. Build your foundation on that and you’ll spend your life anxious, performing, and resentful.

The only place self-worth can come from is the self and the only reason it can come from is no reason at all.

6. “My struggles are unique, so the normal rules don’t apply to me”

The belief that your situation is so special that the normal principles of effort, discipline, and consequence somehow bend around you.

Billions upon billions of people have existed on this planet. And at scale, humans don’t differ as much as we think they do. The chances that your struggles are unique are extremely low.

The more people you open up to, you’ll probably find that even in your immediate circle, there are people struggling with issues that you were convinced were just a ‘me thing’.

Everyone feels like their pain is the exception and it almost never is. This attitude is just another way of avoiding responsibility and feeling entitled to special treatment.

7. “Life is about maximising pleasure and minimising discomfort”

Anything worth doing is difficult, the strongest sense of purpose and the deepest life satisfaction come from doing hard things and solving hard problems.

One could even say life IS problem solving.

Pure hedonism taken to its logical extreme is basically just gooning, and it’s a recipe for a soul-dead brand of misery. Chase pleasure as the goal and you’ll get soft, bored, and empty.

Discomfort isn’t the enemy.

You don’t build a better life by avoiding problems, you build a great life by finding the right problems to solve.

8. “I can’t win because of billionaires / women / men/ that group / that race”

Whoever the villain is this week, the structure is identical: the reason for your shitty life is located in someone else.

Sure, life isn’t perfectly fair. And external forces can make things easier or harder…

But the moment your explanation for your situation lives entirely outside you, you’ve handed the keys to your life to people who don’t care about you. Blame feels powerful, but it’s the most disempowering drug there is.

You don’t win a game of chess by complaining about the rules. You accept the terms of engagement and move forward strategically.

9. “Cynicism is intelligence”

Here’s the truth cynics can’t stand: humans create reality far more than they perceive it.

Also humans are much better at rationalising than thinking rationally.

That’s why there’s so many delusional, overconfident, bold, idiots that are incredibly successful. Because they simply act instead of wasting their brain power rationalising all their limiting beliefs.

Most cynicism is just limiting beliefs and laziness hiding behind an intellectual costume. It’s self-fulfilling, and it hands you the ego gratification of getting to say “see, I was right” about the bad outcome you caused by never trying.

Being negative isn’t the same as being smart. Usually it’s just fear of disappointment, dressed up as sophistication.

10. “Being liked is the goal”

Optimise to be liked by everyone and you’ll betray your real self every time it costs you approval. And the bitter irony is that you’ll actually become far less likeable doing this.

The man who needs everyone to like him earns no one’s respect, because there’s no solid person underneath to respect. Aim at connection and authenticity instead, and you will become magnetic.

Being liked is a byproduct, never a target.

11. “It’s too late for me”

Some doors do close, but most of the ones you think have closed are still wide open, and you’re standing in front of them inventing reasons not to walk through.

There’s a version of you still available today that will genuinely be gone in ten years.

“Too late” is the most comfortable lie there is, because it retires you from the fight while letting you feel like a victim of time rather than a volunteer.

Imagine yourself at 90, looking back to where you are right now. Then you’ll start to see just how much power and opportunity you have.

12. “I’ll start when I’m ready”

You never feel ready. That’s not how it works.

Readiness is something you feel in hindsight, after you started, not before. The conditions will never perfectly align, the fear will never fully lift, and the person waiting to feel ready is just the person who never begins.

You don’t wait to become the kind of man who acts. You act, and that’s how you become him.

Just think, plenty of extremely successful people started while feeling less ready than you do right now.

There’s my list.

Realism about the objective world can be wisdom, but so much of what we think is objective, isn’t objective at all.

More often than not it’s rationalisation and projection.

Money, love, relationships, value, connection, success, the things we spend the bulk of our lives obsessing about. They ultimately exist only in the world between our ears. So stop treating them like Newtonian physics, and start creating the mental world you want to live in.

In the end it’s your choice what kind of world you live in. So stop creating a shitty one.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

Surprisingly, it went off. Hundreds of replies, and they're still coming in.

I read every one and what struck me wasn’t any one answer, it was the patterns. Strip away the unique wording and the same things came up over and over again.

So I thought I’d write this article to list the common themes, and credit some of my favourite responses. Obviously, you could just look at the replies yourself, but where’s the fun in that?

Before I begin, it’s worth mentioning that pretty much everything that actually healed these people was free or cheap. It was physical, social, spiritual, or behavioural, and a huge amount of it involved removing something rather than adding.

I did say in the question that the answer had to have “nothing to do with therapy”. However, the response was so overwhelming and passionate that I think we can say that the interventions were powerful and life-changing.

Here are the themes that dominated, roughly in order of how often they came up.

1. Move your body

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." — Søren Kierkegaard

This was the winner and it wasn’t close.

Lifting, running, boxing, BJJ, yoga, swimming, cycling, calisthenics, walking, dancing, football. If you group it all together, movement was close to a third of every serious answer in the thread.

Two flavours of movement stood out…

The first was strength training as a kind of therapy in its own right. As put it, “Strengthen your body, and your mind will find its peace. They go hand in hand.”

described the gym as “a mental game as much as a physical one. You face challenges and setbacks working out that you overcome, and it raises your threshold for what causes you distress.” This point about the mechanism is interesting. You voluntarily take on hard things, survive them, and your baseline for what counts as “too much” rises. The iron recalibrates you.

The second flavour was running as moving meditation. described running distances so absorbing he couldn’t even remember the miles, his mind wandered off solving problems or working through what should have been said. Movement activates parts of the brain in a way sitting still often doesn’t.

The lesson underneath all of it: your mental and physical health are inextricably linked. In many cases they’re the same thing.

2. Get into nature

"In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks" - John Muir

The second biggest theme, and one of the most ignored in applied mental health, is getting out into nature.

Hiking, camping with no phone, barefoot walks at dawn, gardening, being on the water, sitting in a patch of wildflowers watching bees. A few people said the thing that helped them most was hugging a tree. Take that as literally or as metaphorically as you like.

coined a phrase I’ve been thinking about: “nature access disparity.” The idea that a huge amount of the modern mental health crisis might be downstream of how we’ve cut ourselves off from the natural world, and how unequally access to it is distributed. It’s a genuinely sharp concept and I suspect it’s more important than we realise.

We evolved outdoors, under the sun, near trees and water. Then we sealed ourselves in boxes lit by screens, and artificial lighting, and then we started wondering why everyone feels like shit.

3. Quit drinking (and other substances)

If one specific action appeared more than any other, it was giving up booze.

The stories here were some of the most raw and honest in the whole thread. who is 18-plus years sober described it as “seeing the world through new glasses after walking around blind for years.” credited Alcoholics Anonymous with resurrecting him “from the dead,” and restoring his humanity.

One sharp caveat came from : “Quitting something isn’t enough. You’ve gotta replace it with something worth showing up for.” Sobriety works when it’s a rebuild, not just a subtraction. The people who thrive tend to swap the bottle for something demanding and rewarding. Training, a craft, a community, or a purpose.

Having given up drinking myself, I’ll just co-sign the entire category. It all comes down to what it’s giving you vs what it’s taking from you.

4. Cut out the toxic people and situations

"The most compassionate people I interviewed also have the most well-defined and well-respected boundaries... They're compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment." — Brené Brown

Simple but not always easy.

Leaving the bad job, ending the relationship, divorcing the person who was draining your soul. Cutting contact with toxic family members. Setting boundaries and holding them. Over and over, people said their breakthrough wasn’t something they added to their life, but it was something they finally removed.

A few put it beautifully:

• “Walked away from the things that were making me ill.”

• “Excised the emotional vampires, the users, the arseholes, and put me first.”

• learned at fourteen that “some people don’t deserve my friendship,” walked away from friends who treated them badly, and found lifelong ones instead.

There’s a hard truth here. Complacency in a bad situation often does more long-term damage than acute misery does, because acute misery forces change.

This is also referred to as The Region-beta Paradox.

The slow, tolerable drain is the one that can eat away the years that make up your life.

5. Log off

Closely related, and dead on a theme I write about regularly: the content we consume is making us miserable.

Deleting the apps, turning off notifications, quitting Twitter, turning off the mentions and tags.

said it best: “Deleted the apps and accounts where I performed a version of myself I didn’t respect. The silence that followed was the first honest thing I’d felt in years.”

said it drier: “Turning off notifications. Amazingly, civilization continued.”

Your feed is an environment, and you become the environment you marinate in. Just because a room is virtual, doesn’t mean the negativity doesn’t penetrate your thoughts.

A striking number of people discovered that the fastest route to feeling human again was simply to stop pouring the world’s garbage into their heads all day.

6. Get an animal

"Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out." - Mark Twain

This group was the warmest in the whole thread. said: “Not even from your family will you get the unconditional love that you get from a dog.”

simply called animals “ascended beings.”

There’s something real here beyond the sentiment. As a couple of commenters noticed, animals dissolve the ego. It’s very hard to stay locked in your own anxious internal monologue while a creature that lives entirely in the present is demanding you throw a ball. They pull you out of your head and into the now.

7. Faith and prayer

Bigger than a secular reader might expect, and impossible to ignore.

Finding Jesus, prayer, scripture at sunrise, the baptism of the Holy Ghost, listening to adhans, time alone with God.

with a family history of depression and addiction described how, after coming to faith, the problems didn’t vanish, but the loneliness did. “I finally was no longer alone. I had someone I could confide in all day, making the mundane feel extraordinary.”

You don’t have to share the belief to take the point seriously. Faith reliably delivers several things the research says protect mental health: community, meaning, ritual, surrender of control, and the sense that you are not fundamentally alone in the universe. Those are load-bearing, whatever their source.

8. Meditation, stillness, and presence

Daily meditation, silent retreats up to a month long, contemplation, breathwork, and the beautifully blunt line from : “sit in silence and cease all doing.”

described a daily discipline of contemplation that taught them “to step outside the noise, observe rather than react.”

said the whole thing was learning to stop over-identifying with their emotions, conditions, and experiences. To take a step back and watch, instead of being swept away.

I’ll add a personal note…

I lost faith in meditation for a while, because I’d been doing it instead of taking action in my life, and it felt only mildly beneficial. I later reintroduced it alongside massive action rather than as a substitute for it and the benefits multiplied. For me personally, stillness works best as a complement to a life in motion, not as a hiding place from one.

9. Make something

"Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating” - Nietzsche

Writing, music, drawing, photography, drumming, producing, playing an instrument you’d abandoned years ago.

Creative output came up constantly, and the accounts were striking. made music through a dark period and put it on YouTube, using it to understand what was happening in their own head, and came out the other side writing poetry.

sat down to write a fantasy novel as a side project and found that grief and trauma they thought they’d dealt with started surfacing onto the page. The fiction, they said, “turned out to be the door I could actually walk through when the front one was locked.”

That one stuck with me, because it maps onto something I write about a lot. We are, ultimately, the authors of our own inner worlds. Sometimes building an outer one on the page is how you finally get access to the one inside.

10. Fix your sleep

Smaller in number, but the people who raised it were emphatic. “Mastered sleep.” And said (translated to English)“Without a doubt, taking my sleep seriously.”

It’s the least glamorous item on the list and possibly the highest-return if it’s something you’re lacking. Nearly every psychological symptom is worse on no sleep and better on good sleep. It’s not a cure for everything. But it’s the foundation almost everything else is built on.

Honourable mentions and glorious wildcards

Not every answer fit a category. Some I have to share purely because the thread would be a lie without them.

talked about how they became a “humanitarian clown” who travels the world bringing a warm meal and a friendly face to the forgotten, and is heading back to Guatemala in October. Genuinely one of the most inspiring messages I’ve received.

bought a casino, which in turn helped him create the world’s greatest pick-up line.

“identified as a ninja” (cheaper than therapy, they explained, for all the murders they have to do for the Daimyo).

A few people, with varying degrees of seriousness, nominated masturbation. At least one nominated marijuana with real conviction. And a fair number quietly pointed at psychedelics, which can be huge benefit for many people.

The pattern nobody wants to say out loud

Step back from the whole thread and something obvious emerges.

Almost none of what actually healed these people is what the mainstream mental health industry primarily sells. The winners were movement, nature, sobriety, cutting toxic people, logging off, animals, faith, stillness, creativity, and sleep. Free or cheap. Physical, social, spiritual, behavioural.

And notice how much of it was removal. Take away the booze. Take away the toxic relationship. Take away the feed, the bad job, the people who drain you. Many people found their answer not by adding a treatment but by subtracting a poison.

A number of people volunteered that the single best thing they did was step away from the clinical model itself. Quitting therapy or coming off medication that dulled their emotions. As put it, “I stopped believing that I was broken or sick.”

asked the question the whole industry is built on avoiding: “Who therapies the therapists?” Now that’s a question worth sitting with. Perhaps worth its own entire article.

Obviously, I need to be fair. Therapy helps many people and medication genuinely saves some lives. None of that is in dispute, and a couple of therapists in the thread made that point well.

But the pattern is impossible to unsee…

When you ask hundreds of people what actually moved the needle, they describe a life. Movement, nature, sobriety, connection, meaning, rest, and the courage to remove what was hurting them.

Most of what a struggling person needs turns out to be things you can’t easily package, bill by the hour, or put on a prescription pad. Which is probably exactly why nobody’s selling them.

Thanks to everyone who replied. The best ideas in this piece were yours.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

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"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again...

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly." - Theodore Roosevelt

There’s an argument about men that never seems to end online.

One side says men need to be more vulnerable. The bravest thing a man can do is open up, drop the armour, show his soft underbelly and let people see his emotional side. Stop bottling it all up.

The other side says male vulnerability is a weakness. A fast way for a man to get walked on, cheated on, pitied, or seen as pathetic. Keep it to yourself and stay strong.

Both sides have compelling examples and both sides are certain. And they’ll go around in circles forever, because they’ve dismissed the one thing that would end the argument.

They’re using the same word for two different things.

One word, two opposite meanings

Vulnerability isn’t one thing. It’s two, and they happen to share a name.

Here’s the line that separates them:

One kind is about extraction, the other is about risk.

Extraction-vulnerability exposes your pain to get something from other people. Attention, sympathy, reassurance, rescue. You’re offloading a burden onto someone else and asking them to carry it for you.

Risk-vulnerability exposes you to potential cost, and asks for nothing. You put yourself out there knowing it might blow up, and you do it anyway, without demanding that anyone catch you.

One is a withdrawal and a plea to be rescued, the other is leaping forward while risking attack.

Once you see that distinction, the entire debate about men and vulnerability dissolves. Both sides are right. They’re just pointing at different things.

The weak kind

This is the vulnerability that earns the word a bad name, and it’s the one men are right to be wary of.

The constant oversharing. The guy who turns every conversation into a wound he needs dressed. The dramatic display of emotion aimed squarely at getting others to respond, reassure, and rescue. The bid to make his feelings someone else’s responsibility.

This isn’t brave. It’s a strategy, and not even a conscious one most of the time. The confessions and the emotional displays are a tool for extracting a specific reaction from the people around him.

And here’s why it’s genuinely weak, not just unsexy: it makes other people responsible for your inner state. You’re not handling your pain, you’re subcontracting it. You’ve turned the people around you into a vending machine for the emotional support you can’t give yourself.

People feel this instantly, even when they can’t name it. It’s why being on the receiving end of it is draining. They can sense they’re being used as an emotional resource rather than related to as a person.

The men who call vulnerability a weakness are looking at this.

And they’re 100% right.

The strong kind

Now the other one.

Asking a woman out, knowing she might say no and you’ll have to stand there in the rejection.

Stepping into a boxing ring, knowing you’re going to get hit, and possibly embarrassed in front of everyone watching.

Being honest about a real weakness of yours, not to fish for sympathy, but knowing it exposes you to attack, and saying it anyway.

Starting the business, publishing the work under your own name, telling someone the truth that might cost you the relationship.

This is vulnerability as courage.

You’re taking a genuine risk, with something real on the line, and you’re not asking anyone to soften the landing. You’re exposing yourself to the possibility of loss because the thing is worth doing, because you believe in something more important than your own fear of attack.

That’s why it’s strength. It just bears the same name as the weak kind, which is why men get told to avoid vulnerability entirely, when the truth is more precise than that.

Why men resist the advice (and why they’re half right)

This is where the confusion does the most damage.

There’s a constant cultural push telling men to be more vulnerable. Open up, talk about your feelings, go to therapy. And there’s a constant male resistance to it, which usually gets diagnosed as emotional constipation, toxic stoicism, or fear of feeling.

I think that diagnosis is wrong, and men are picking up on something real.

When a man hears “be more vulnerable,” he often correctly senses that he’s being invited into the weak kind. The oversharing, the performed woundedness, the bid to be comforted, blame others, and cry victim. And he recoils, because on some level he knows this genuinely would lower his self-respect and wouldn’t actually help him solve anything. His resistance isn’t cowardice, it’s an accurate read.

And don’t even get me started on romantic relationships. There’s literally online memes and endless anecdotes about men “being vulnerable” with women, and how quickly it kills sexual desire and polarity. See below:

The problem is that people never specify which form of vulnerability they’re talking about, they just lump it all under the same word.

Because the strong kind would help him enormously. Saying the hard true thing, admitting a real failure, and owning it without excuses. Facing a fear in the open, taking an emotional risk without demanding rescue. That’s courage, and courage has always made men stronger, not weaker.

So the whole debate is two groups talking past each other.

One side says “men should be more vulnerable, open up,” meaning courage. The other side resists, hearing an invitation to neediness. Both are half right, and neither realises they mean different things.

This is also, I suspect, the real reason so many men hate the idea of therapy. Not because they’re afraid of their emotions, but because the version of vulnerability on offer often sounds like the weak kind, and it often is. Point those same men toward the strong kind, framed as courage and ownership rather than unburdening, and the resistance tends to vanish.

So which one are you doing?

The next time you’re about to expose something, there’s a simple test.

Ask what you’re actually after. If you’re doing it to be caught, comforted, reassured, or rescued, that’s the extraction kind, and it’ll cost you more than it gives. If you’re doing it knowing it might hurt, and you’re doing it anyway because it’s true or because it’s worth the risk, that’s the brave kind.

One asks the world to carry you.

The other says the true thing, takes the real risk, and stands there ready for whatever comes.

Men don’t need to be more vulnerable, or less. They need to run hard at the risk kind and stay well away from the extraction kind. And most of them, if they’re honest, already know the difference in their gut.

Only one of them was ever a strength.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

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I love a good quote…

Reading a sentence or two that gives me an A-HA moment and says something profound about life. On the whole I’m fundamentally pro-quote.

Timing is extremely important too. A motivational quote can be bland and uninspiring when you read it at one point in your life, and then be a complete game-changer at a different stage, so keep that in mind before I start listing the quotes that I think suck.

These five below I have never resonated with…

Sure I can see there’s some truth in them, and perhaps this is why they got popular, and maybe one day I’ll see their profundity, but for now I think they are crap.

For each of these, I’ll do something the people sharing them never bother to. I’ll give the quote its due, steelman the part that’s genuinely right, and then explain exactly where it turns into bullshit.

Let’s go…

1. “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” — Alan Watts

Where I agree

I love Alan Watts, so I’m definitely not coming at this one as a hater. And in this quote, I concede that Watts is making a deeper point about presence, about not drowning the only moment you actually have in dread about a future that hasn’t arrived. And on that level, he’s right. Chronic, marinating anxiety about things you can’t control is pure suffering with no payoff. Most of what people worry about never happens, or they had no control over, and the worrying did nothing but cause excess suffering.

Where it’s bullshit

When it comes to anything performance related, he’s plain wrong.

Anxiety absolutely changes what’s going to happen, and there’s a well-established mechanism for it. Performance follows an inverted-U pattern on a graph. In other words, a certain amount of nervous arousal sharpens you, focuses you, makes you better. Too little and you’re flat and careless, too much and you fall apart. Anxiety isn’t a passive observer of the outcome, it’s an input to it.

Examples where this is the case include: Talking to someone you’re very attracted to, competing in a championship sporting event, a tense job interview, speaking in front of an audience, and any moment you’re trying to perform under pressure.

Excess anxiety doesn’t just feel bad, it can eat the mental bandwidth you need for quick thinking, smooth reflexes, social fluidity, and any other high level skills that affect desired outcomes.

So no, anxiety isn’t irrelevant to what happens next. Sometimes it’s the one thing getting in the way of what you want.

2. “First impressions last.”

Where I agree

First impressions are real and they carry disproportionate weight in specific contexts.

Job interviews, meeting your girlfriend’s parents, auditioning for a movie role…

How you show up in the first few seconds can genuinely create good or bad outcomes that affect your life. You should care about how you land.

Where it’s bullshit

Treating first impressions as permanent shapers of perception in long-term relationships is false.

Some of the best relationships of my life, close friends, lovers, people I now can’t imagine being without, started with me having a bad read on them. First impressions change rapidly with only a little exposure.

You can literally put four strangers in a group. Get them to privately write down their first impressions of each other. Have them spend some time together, and then afterwards read back what their first impressions were, and most people will be staggered at how incorrect they were.

A more accurate version of this quote would be something like “First impressions last when all you get is a first impression”. Not as punchy as the original though.

3. “Just be yourself.”

Where I agree

This one is both profoundly true and completely wrong at the same time depending on how it’s interpreted. It’s true in that the best version of you deep within, is exactly who you should be, and nobody else will do that better than you. So in that sense, definitely this quote is accurate.

Become the best version of you, and don’t try to be anybody else.

Where it’s bullshit

The problem is what people think “yourself” is.

Much of what you identify as YOU is just accumulated limitation. Your insecurities, your defence mechanisms, the masks you built to survive, the fears you’ve mistaken for personality. When someone anxious and self-sabotaging is told to “just be yourself,” they hear “keep doing the exact thing that’s holding you back.”

There’s a huge range of potential inside you, and the authentic self isn’t the frightened, limited version running the show right now. It’s what’s underneath all that crap. The real work isn’t expressing your current identity. It’s shedding the layers that were never really you to begin with, and finding what’s beneath them. That’s the version that gets the best results in your life.

“Be yourself” tells you you’ve already arrived. But you’re capable of so much more than you are right now.

4. “Follow your passion.”

Where I agree

Finding your meaning and purpose is an exceptionally important part of a life well lived. If you know what your passion is, and you know your life’s mission, follow it with all the intensity you can muster. Straight forward and simple advice.

Where it’s bullshit

Most people don’t know their “passion”…

And passion often follows competence. For some lucky folk it precedes it, but this isn’t the norm. You don’t discover a pre-existing passion and then get good at it. You get good at something, start winning at it, feel that positive reinforcement, and the passion grows out of the mastery. Almost nobody is passionate about something they’re terrible at.

“Follow your passion” sends people on a hopeless search for a calling they’re supposed to feel before they’ve done the work. So they wait, they sample things, feel no magical lightning bolt, and quit, because the quote told them passion comes first and they’re still waiting to feel it.

The truth is less romantic and far more useful. Pick something promising, get genuinely good at it, and let the passion catch up.

5. “Comparison is the thief of joy.” - commonly misattributed to Theodore Roosevelt

Where I agree

On the surface, this is true. Obsessively measuring yourself against other people is a reliable way to be miserable, and the person constantly scrolling and ranking themselves against everyone else is stealing their own happiness. As far as this goes, fine.

Where it’s bullshit

It doesn’t go nearly far enough, and the shallow version does damage.

Because the quote subtly accepts the premise. It treats the rankings as real and just advises you to look away, like telling someone to avoid the scoreboard because they won’t like the score. That’s crap. It leaves the whole rotten framework intact and just asks you to close your eyes to it.

“Yes those people are superior to you!! Just don’t look at them, it will take away your joy!”

Bullshit.

The deeper truth is that ranking human worth (especially when based on some shallow nonsense) is an illusion in the first place. There’s no cosmic scoreboard. The hierarchies we torture ourselves with, who’s more attractive, more successful, more impressive, are human constructions built on projected insecurity. You don’t need to avert your eyes from the ranking, you need to see that the ranking was never real, and learn to laugh at it.

One distinction matters here, so I’ll be precise.

Comparing performance is useful. Your lift versus last month, your revenue versus a competitor, that’s data. But comparing your worth as a person against someone else’s isn’t measuring anything real. It’s the same disease as sourcing your self-worth from other people’s approval.

Don’t look away from comparison. See through it.

So there’s the list of five quotes that I think are bullshit. As I’m usually a big fan of popular quotes I couldn’t think of more than five that I hate.

Do you have any you’d like to add in the comments? Be my guest.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.” — Marcus Aurelius

Your brain is a filter, not a camera…

Every second, your senses take in an estimated 11 million bits of information and your conscious mind handles maybe 50 of them.

Everything else gets filtered out before you’re even aware of it, and what makes the cut isn’t random. Your brain prioritises what you’re already focused on, and discards the rest.

Therefore it has one simple rule: show me more of what I’ve already been looking at.

It’s why you suddenly notice a certain type of car everywhere after deciding to buy one.

But here’s where it can get dark…

Feed your brain outrage, and you’ll start to feel outrage everywhere.

Feed it threat, and the world turns threatening.

Feed it evidence that everything is broken and getting worse, and that becomes your reality.

Feed it victimhood, and you’ll start casting yourself as the victim in every story of your daily life.

Whatever you consume regularly becomes the lens you view everything through.

And this can get dangerous…

Because something out there has worked out exactly how to exploit this filter, and it does it billions of times a day.

The social media algorithm.

On social media, the posts that trigger the strongest negative emotions and the most arguments get the most engagement. So that’s what gets shown to you. It has no concern for what’s true, or what’s good for your mind. It just prioritises whatever keeps you reacting.

I call this kind of content “OutrageSlop”.

It’s always the same kind of controversial topic. Familiar examples include:

• Trans men in women’s sports.

• The male or female loneliness epidemics.

• Israel is good/Israel is bad.

• Trump is good/Trump is bad.

• Men are the problem. No, women are.

• The patriarchy ruined everything. No, the feminisation of society did. No, the Jews did. No, Muslims did. No, mass immigration did. No, it was the billionaires.

• This movie is woke and that’s why it’s bad. This movie is woke and that’s why it’s good.

• Why gay people should/shouldn’t adopt kids.

• Why abortion is good/evil.

It’s endless.

There’s a new trending topic of OutrageSlop every week and people always buy into it.

You almost certainly have a passionate opinion about some of the above, and that’s the entire point. But having been sucked into this trap myself, I no longer care to engage with this kind of content because the truth or falsehood of each claim isn’t the real issue.

The real issue is what this consumption is doing to your mindset. It’s training you to think like a miserable loser.

Day after day, you’re training your brain on content specifically engineered to provoke your strongest emotional reactions, which are almost always negative ones.

And your brain’s filter obeys…

It learns that the world is hostile, adversarial, broken, and full of enemies, because that’s the input it’s been fed. And probably the most destructive mindset it pushes, is the idea that you are a helpless victim of some pernicious, omnipotent force.

Despite how seductive it can be, this victim mindset has destroyed more dreams than polio.

You need to remember that the only world you will ever live in is the one between your ears. And right now, something with no interest in your wellbeing is choosing the colours this world gets painted in.

It Feels Like Thinking. It Isn’t.

Here’s the part nobody wants to hear…

Political and cultural outrage feels like intellectual engagement. It feels like you’re a person who pays attention, who cares, who isn’t sleepwalking through history. The people around you who don’t follow current affairs feel naive, checked out, and part of the problem.

But there’s a difference between thinking and rationalising and most political discourse online is the latter.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt spent years studying how people form moral and political opinions and his conclusion was not flattering. He concluded that we don’t reason our way to positions and then defend them, we feel our way to positions, and then use our intelligence to construct the justification afterward.

And guess what? The smarter you are, the better you are at this.

Which means high intelligence in a tribal context doesn’t make you more accurate, it makes you a more convincing advocate for whatever your group already believes.

What feels like critical thought is often just elaborate group membership. The argument isn’t the point, the point is the signal: I am one of us, and they are one of them.

The algorithm didn’t create this tendency. It just found it, realised it’s an extremely potent tool for manipulating human attention, and then built a business model on top of it.

What OutrageSlop Is Actually Giving You

Let’s be honest about what’s actually on offer here.

OutrageSlop done at scale through social media, gives you almost everything meaning is supposed to provide. An in-group with shared values, a clear enemy, moral stakes that feel enormous, a sense of participation in something larger than yourself.

Many of us recognise that warm, bonding comfort of shared doomerism, friends gathered around the fire of civilisational collapse, agreeing that yes, it really is all going to hell.

For example, spend any amount of time on Reddit or 4chan and you’ll recognise a core similarity. Despite the fact they’re both at opposite ends of the scale in terms of political and social views, they’re both near identical in the level of victimhood and shared doomerism.

Humans are tribal animals and we are wired for belonging, for purpose, for the feeling that what we do matters. When those needs aren’t being met elsewhere, we find substitutes.

Outrage is a meaning substitute.

It mimics the feeling of mattering without requiring you to build anything, change anything, or take any risk in your actual life.

And this is the part that stings if you let it:

The intensity of your political feeling may be in inverse proportion to how much agency you feel in your own life.

Not always, but often enough to be worth looking in the mirror, and seeing if you’re guilty of this.

The Cost Nobody Calculates

I want you to think of someone you know, maybe a family member or close friend. Someone who follows the news obsessively, who is constantly updated on the latest political catastrophe, who wants to talk about it, who gets angry about it, who shares it.

Now ask: what is the actual effect of all that engagement?

Are they happier? Are the things they’re angry about improving? Are the people around them lifted by the energy they’re bringing into the room?

I think about a close relative of mine…

I love her dearly. She’s been through serious illness, spends most of her time at home, and has found in social media a window onto the world. She follows the Israel-Palestine conflict with an intensity that consumes significant mental bandwidth, and I understand the impulse, these are serious human issues, and caring about them is not wrong.

But she has no effect on the outcome…

Zero.

The only effect is that she’s stewing in emotional negativity, regularly, on a schedule set by an algorithm that knows how to push her buttons. These negative feelings spill into her day, her conversations, and ultimately her quality of life. She views a significant portion of the world as an evil, all-powerful force stomping on the little guy, with no hope in sight.

She ignores her health, her finances are a mess, and many of her relationships are chaotic at the best of times. She has zero sense of agency and blames all her issues on external people or forces.

Sure this is only one woman, and perhaps she was like this anyway. However I’ve seen enough of the effects of regular OutrageSlop consumption in my own life, and the lives of those close to me, to know that there is something causal here.

That's the cost nobody calculates. Not whether the issue matters, but what your engagement is actually costing you, and what it’s actually changing in the real world.

For most people, most of the time, the honest answer is: it’s costing you your mindset. And everything in your life is downstream of your mindset.

This Is Not an Argument for Apathy

Stepping back from political outrage content is not the same as not caring about the world.

There is a version of civic engagement that is grounded, local, and effective. Voting, community involvement, donating to serious causes, conversations with real people on the ground. Work that actually produces something, these things have leverage.

Engaging with OutrageSlop does not…

It produces the feeling of meaningful engagement while quietly consuming the resources you’d need to actually do anything.

The people I know who are genuinely improving the world are not the ones most plugged into the outrage cycle. They’re too busy trying to bring value to their immediate environment, or if they are significantly concerned about a global humanitarian or political issue, they are actively involved in it. They are too busy taking action to be caught up in online arguments and outrage bait. They’ve made peace with the fact that they can’t fix everything, and channelled that energy into the things they can actually move.

Since stepping back from political and outrage content, my own experience has shifted in ways I didn’t expect. I’m way more positive, all of my relationships are improving, I’m moving faster toward the things I actually want, and like a stone landing in a lake, the ripples of this will extend out into the greater community. And perhaps the biggest irony, I’m now coming from a mental place where I am far better equipped to help those in need.

For the majority of us, the best way to change the world is simply to bring more value to those around us.

Something else I’ve noticed after taking time off the OutrageSlop, when I talk to people who remain heavily involved in it, I notice how much of their conversations revolve around how bad everything is, and I notice how little that conversation ever changes anything they’re actually worried about.

All it does is bring negative energy into their lives, and just like positive energy, this negativity compounds and spreads.

What You’re Actually Choosing

Every time you open the app and let the feed wash over you, you are making a choice about what your brain gets trained on. You are deciding, in a very literal neurological sense, what kind of world you will experience.

Marcus Aurelius didn’t have a social media feed, but he understood the mechanic. The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.

Outrage content is not making your mind sharper, and it’s probably not making you more informed in any way that helps you. But it’s definitely making you angrier and more tribal. It’s making you feel more like a victim, decreasing your personal agency, and reducing the positive energy you bring to the world.

That’s not civic duty, it’s a destructive hobby dressed up as virtue.

The meaning-shaped hole is real, the need underneath the outrage is real, but there are better ways to fill it. Ones that don’t require you to outsource your emotional state to an algorithm, or to spend your one life feeling bad about things you cannot change.

Build something, fix something close to you, get better at something that matters, and bring value to people that are actually in front of you. If you’re going to use social media, curate your algorithm. Follow and like positive, uplifting and educational content, and cut out the OutrageSlop.

The world has enough negativity, it doesn’t need you adding to it.

Be the rebel who offers a shining light in the darkness.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

“Always a hidden agenda, always a sense of ‘not enough yet,’ of insufficiency and lack that needs to be filled.” — Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

In my twenties I knew a guy named Jack…

He was an Australian country kid, he loved fast cars, and by 28 he’d built a web hosting company that blew up and left him sitting on a net worth somewhere around twenty million dollars. By any reasonable measure, he’d made it, and he’d made it young. I didn’t know him too well, he was a close friend of a friend of mine.

But one story about him stuck with me…

In high school, Jack knew a kid who constantly bullied him. At one point, according to Jack, this kid pulled a prank on Jack where he secretly ejaculated in Jack’s water bottle (I know, weird, right?), and then Jack drank the water bottle without realising it. Afterwards, Jack was the laughing stock of the entire school.

Around ten years later, after Jack had made his fortune, he spotted his old high school bully working at a supermarket, stocking shelves.

When he saw it, it felt like a grand achievement for him. It filled him with joy, seeing his high school bully working an “entry-level” job at a supermarket, while Jack gloated in his material success. He often told this story to others to inspire them to get rich and prove their haters wrong.

To many people, this story sounds like a major triumph, a classic “I’ll show them” story with a happy ending.

And at first when I heard it, that’s exactly how I reacted. But when I thought about it for a while, it told me something else entirely.

Jack still hadn’t escaped his bully…

Twenty million dollars later, the kid who made him feel small was still living rent-free in his head, still the yardstick he measured himself against. The fortune didn’t dissolve the wound, it just gave it a nicer frame.

Because if he’d actually moved past it, the supermarket scenario wouldn’t have meant anything. The fact that it still delivered a strong hit of pleasure proved the scoreboard was still running in his head, and he still needed to prove himself to someone or something outside of himself.

The “I’ll be good enough when” trap

Here’s the trap, and I’ve lived in it as much as anyone. So see if you can relate.

You quietly tell yourself that you’ll be good enough when…

When I make the money.

When I get the body.

When I get the sexy babe girlfriend or handsome boyfriend.

When I finally impress my parents.

When I prove the people who doubted me wrong.

And lets be honest, our capitalist system runs on this model, but that’s an article for another time.

I’ve spent more of my life than I’d like to admit running internal commentary based on the imagined opinions of other people. Picturing their faces when I succeed, rehearsing the moment they finally see my worth. It feels like motivation, and it can definitely drive one towards their goals.

But eventually you realise it’s more hamster wheel than road to glory.

Because the moment you hit the milestone, something strange happens. The feeling you were promised lasts about a week, and then the goalpost quietly slides further down the field. The number that was going to make you feel secure stops being enough, the body isn’t lean enough, there’s now a new person you need approval from to feel okay, or a new arbitrary future milestone is created, and on it goes.

You never arrive…

You just change your target while spinning on the same old wheel.

“You’ve already achieved things you said would make you happy” — Alex Hormozi

Conditional worth isn’t worth at all

Here’s the part most people miss…

Self worth has a location component and a temporal component. The only location it can come from is within you, and the only time it can happen is right now.

When your self-worth is conditional on a future achievement, or the approval of another person it isn’t really self-worth.

Because all things come and go…

Some people will love you, some will hate you - even the same people will love you sometimes and hate you at other times.

Material success fluctuates. Job situations change, you inherit money, you lose money, that’s life.

Our bodies grow old and frail. One minute we’re sick and delicate, the next minute we can be strong and able.

Our looks don’t last forever.

If you depend on these things for self love, then you are doomed to an exceptionally chaotic and dysfunctional relationship with yourself and others. Your neediness for validation will leak out and corrupt your reality.

Therefore the only good reason to love yourself, is for no reason at all, and the only time you can do it, is right now.

The second you attach a reason, and the second you’ve attached a time that isn’t right now, you’ve turned your worth into a performance with an audience that’s never satisfied, for a time that never arrives. Drop the condition, and there’s nothing left to chase. There’s just you, here, right now, allowed to be enough.

“You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is the now” — Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

But doesn’t that kill your ambition?

This is where people get nervous. If I’m already enough, why would I ever strive for anything?

It’s the wrong question, and it assumes the only fuel for ambition is feeling inadequate.

It isn’t.

There’s a version of striving that comes from lack and scarcity, and a version that comes from overflow and abundance. The first says I’m not enough yet, so I have to achieve to become worthy. The second says I’m already awesome, and I’m on a journey to becoming more awesome.

This is a completely different engine.

The man running from inadequacy never escapes it, because he brings it with him to every finish line. The man building from a place of self-love gets to enjoy the climb, because his worth was never on the line in the first place. He’s not trying to fill a hole, he’s expressing something that’s already full.

Jack was running from the bully and he’ll never run far enough.

The goal isn’t to stop wanting more, it’s to stop holding your worth hostage to getting it.

So give yourself permission to be awesome now, because there’s no where else it will come from but you, and there’s also no when else it will happen but now.

And then go build something awesome, not to finally become enough, but because you already are, and you want to share it with others.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

What you see in others has more to do with you than them.— Unknown

People are mirrors…

When you walk into a room, they don't respond to who you're pretending to be, they reflect what you're actually carrying underneath.

Walk in needy, scanning faces for approval, quietly hoping someone will validate you, and you’ll feel the room close off.

People will become cold, shallow, and untrusting. They will feel like adversaries in a status game you’re losing. Conversations will fizzle, people will be short with you, your jokes won’t be funny, your stories will be boring, and you won’t quite know why.

On the flip side…

If you walk into the same room grounded, warm, genuinely fine on your own, expecting nothing, then the opposite will happen.

People will open up, express their warmth, everything you say will be funny and charming, your stories will be captivating, everyone will want to be near you, and if you asked them, they couldn’t tell you why.

Nothing about the room changed…

The only variable was you and your emotional state.

Other people are mirrors and they reflect what‘s happening inside you and unless you’re a psychopath, it’s pretty much impossible to fake this.

You can learn the power poses, the confident handshake, the forced eye contact, the slow nod…

You can watch every “Charisma On Command” video on youtube…

But the benefits will be marginal at best, and even if you can fake it for a bit, the facade will slip and reveal your true intentions.

Because the mirror doesn’t reflect what you’re performing…

It reflects what you’re actually carrying underneath: the reason behind your actions.

Here’s the thing…

People are far better at reading you than you think. Not consciously, and they often can’t articulate it.

Even kids can sense it…

On some animal level they can feel the difference between someone who is offering something and someone who is trying to take something.

Humans have evolved an innate ability to sense scarcity and abundance. The former repels, while the latter magnetises.

And no amount of technique will cover the smell of neediness.

“As within, so without” — Hermetic Axiom

Why neediness repels

This is the whole game, so pay attention.

Neediness isn’t really about wanting connection…

Everyone wants that.

Neediness is craving something from others that only you can give yourself.

You want the approval, the attention, the reassurance, and you can’t tolerate not having it yet, so you reach for it, desperately. You say something with the primary goal of trying to make them validate your ego.

And this goal, the reason why, is the exact thing that repels…

Because people can feel when they’re being used as a vending machine for your self-worth. They can feel the reason behind the compliment, the want behind the question, the quiet hunger sitting underneath the conversation.

People aren’t put off by your looks or your words. They’re put off by your need.

The problem with all the “social skills” advice

Here’s why the self-help industry takes the wrong approach on this one…

Almost every piece of social or body language advice carries a hidden agenda:

• Stand like this so they’ll respect you.

• Say this so they’ll like you.

• Hold eye contact so you’ll seem confident.

• Speak slowly to display authority.

But these behavioral changes don’t address the underlying agenda.

The agenda is the reason WHY you’re doing it.

That’s the thing leaking out of you. You can fix your posture and fix your words and still broadcast “I am doing this to get something from you”, “I am doing this to make you love me”, “I am doing this so you find me sexy”…

And people can always feel it.

It’s the difference in the schoolyard between the cool kid and the annoying kid who is constantly trying to be cool. They can make the same joke, wear the same clothes, and tell the same stories, but the former attracts and the latter repels.

And it’s all because of the WHY behind their actions.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

When it comes to body language advice, you’re actually better off slouching because you genuinely don’t care about impressing someone than you are standing up straight to impress someone. The slouch with no agenda outperforms the perfect posture with one.

Because the agenda is the repellent, not the posture.

Sure the agenda is correlated with better posture, better eye contact, etc. And there’s a time and a place to be mindful of these things like, say, a job interview. Also in certain cases faking it until you make it can be genuinely useful advice.

But when it comes to real social magnetism, the agenda A.K.A the vibe it gives off — That’s what does all the heavy lifting.

So work on the agenda and the body language will sort itself out.

The Solution: Build your Garden

So what do you actually do?

Well first, you have to stop chasing…

You chase butterflies and they scatter. You build a beautiful garden and they come to you, and they stay, and you didn’t have to grab at a single one.

Cats work the same way…

As do humans.

Stop trying to extract approval from the room and start being the person that YOU approve of.

You have to realise that no person outside of you can give you what you’re looking for, the answer lies within. External validation is like cocaine, sure you’ll get a temporary high, but you’ll just want more, and ultimately it will leave you feeling addicted and worse off.

So learn to enjoy your own company so completely that being around you feels like standing in good weather.

Build a life that’s so interesting that people want to be part of it.

Do things and say things with no agenda underneath them, because the agenda was always the thing putting people off.

Become the kind of person who has something to give rather than something to take.

And as a result, this energy will be reflected back to you in the mirrors of other peoples’ faces.

The needy person enters a room asking, silently, “How much validation can I extract from these people?”

This is a narcissistic move: using others as fuel for your own supply of drug-like validation.

The magnetic person enters asking nothing at all, they’re already full. They’re just there to share the overflow.

So build the garden, find your inner supply, and stop chasing the butterflies.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." — Carl Jung

There’s a feeling I want to describe, and I think you already know it well.

It shows up when everything is quiet.

It’s a Sunday night and you’ve done nothing all weekend. You’re lying in bed, the room is dark, and out of nowhere you feel it.

It’s not quite sadness and it’s not quite anxiety.

It’s something different…

a kind of low, aching meaninglessness.

A sense that you are not living up to something, that you’re not quite the person you could be.

Most people reach for their phone the second this feeling arrives…

because the feeling isn’t comfortable.

But that feeling isn’t your enemy.

It’s an ancient compass, directing you to your potential.

It’s the ghost of who you could be.

There is a version of you that exists only as potential.

The one who did the work…

The one who took the risk…

The one who acted in spite of fear…

Who built the character, the relationship, the body, the life you can clearly picture but somehow keep on failing to build.

These things are not a fiction…

they’re entirely possible…

and that’s why they haunt you.

Because deep within your DNA, you know you could be more.

Most people numb the messenger

Here’s where it goes wrong…

That feeling is uncomfortable, so the modern instinct is to make it stop. Like so many uncomfortable feelings, we forget that they are important signals, and we numb them out.

Yes, you can scroll reels until it goes quiet…

You can drink booze until you can’t feel it…

You can eat tasty food until it shuts up…

You can bury it under content, noise, politics, gossip, outrage, and other people’s lives…

You can even find a therapist who’ll help you “make peace” and reframe your potential as just another unrealistic expectation you should let go of.

But here’s the thing about the ghost…

it knows the truth about you.

It’s an ancient instinct that lies far deeper than your rational mind.

It knows better than anyone what you’re TRULY capable of…

And you can’t numb it away, you can only bury it deeper.

But it will always find a way to come back to haunt you in the form of regret.

The dark truth to wake you up

There’s a darker truth underneath all of this.

The potential self has an expiry date…

everything does.

And this is why successful people are always so hyper-conscious of the value of time.

Your number of breaths is finite, and once they’re gone, you can never get them back.

There are versions of you that are still possible right now, today, that will simply be gone in ten years. Some doors are open at 25 and closed at 40. Many remain open at 40, that will be closed at 60.

The ghost isn’t waiting patiently for you to get around to him.

He’s slowly dying a little more every day you look away and distract yourself.

So turn and face it

Everyone wants the feeling to go away…

but the feeling isn’t the problem.

The feeling is the map and it’s pointing, with brutal precision, at the gap between who you are and who you could be.

And who you could be is your life’s mission.

The discomfort is just the distance, measured in real time…

so stop running from it.

Turn around and look directly at the thing haunting you. Ask it what it wants and it will tell you, immediately, because you already know.

You’ve always known.

The haunting doesn’t end when you silence the ghost…

It ends when you become that person.

That’s the only exorcism that works.

You get rid of it by BECOMING it.

The moment you take one real step toward that potential self, the dread lifts. Not because the gap is closed, but because you’re finally moving in the right direction. The ghost stops haunting you and starts walking with you.

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -W.H. Murray

The ghost was never trying to torment you.

The ghost is an ancient spirit trying to guide you.

So pay attention, before it disappears forever.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

Thirty people have commented at the point of me writing this sentence…

And their answers have so far been sharp, insightful, and probably better articulated than anything I would have written.

What surprised me wasn’t just the volume though, it was the consensus…

Most of the comments involved people circling back to the same overlapping ideas. Different people, some with vastly different worldviews, all coming to similar conclusions.

Cool, right?

So this piece is really theirs.

I’ve pulled out the four themes that came up again and again, and I’ll credit the people who put them best.

But first, a definition.

What I actually mean by “the mental health industry”

When I say the mental health industry, I’m not talking about your therapist, I’m not talking about someone who found genuine relief in medication or therapy, and I’m not having a go at anyone trying to feel better.

To those people, I say GODSPEED.

I’m talking about the system.

At the official level, that’s the pharmaceutical companies, the diagnostic bodies, the ever-expanding DSM, the American Psychological Association, the field of psychiatry, the institutional machinery that decides what a ‘disorder’ is and what counts as a cure.

Downstream from there, it’s the self-help economy, the wellness influencers, and eventually the way all of this trickles down to how we talk about our own minds at the family dinner table.

So when I talk about a “lie”, I’m talking about a set of assumptions baked so deep into the system that nobody questions them anymore.

The four below are the ones my readers kept bringing up in the comments.

1. That ordinary suffering is a disorder

This was the most common theme by far, and it’s the one I feel most strongly about.

put it as well as anyone could:

Somewhere along the way we decided that sadness, anxiety, grief, restlessness, and the general difficulty of being alive were medical problems. Things to be diagnosed, coded, and treated, rather than felt, understood, and moved through.

But these feelings aren’t malfunctions…

They’re evolutionary signals.

Anxiety is a threat detection system, often telling you something is wrong in your environment. Sadness is often a reasonable response to a life, or a society, that warrants it.

captured this in a single line. Her view is that the biggest lie is:

Aldous Huxley saw the same thing back in 1958:

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal... their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Maybe being well-adjusted to a sick society is not the flex people think it is.

Now here’s the part that does real damage…

When you take a normal human struggle and turn it into a diagnosis, you don’t just describe the problem, you can create a new one.

Think of the old Buddhist parable of suffering as two arrows.

• The first arrow is the original pain: the traumatic event, the difficult relationship, the shitty situation. That arrow was always going to strike you.

• The second arrow is the story that gets told about it. You have a disorder. This is a chemical condition. This is who you are now, and who you will always be.

The second arrow is the one that does the most damage.

Because a diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophecy…

It can install a doomed mindset, a belief that you’ll never really get better, that this is just your brain now. It can make someone feel fundamentally broken, when in reality it’s the model that’s broken. And worst of all, it can swap your agency for victimhood.

A label that was meant to help you understand yourself becomes the psychological ceiling you live under.

said it cleanly, the lie is:

asked the question that the whole industry would rather you didn’t:

He was careful not to call it a lie, just a question…

But it’s a really uncomfortable one.

2. That a chemical imbalance is the cause

Here’s the one most people have heard, and the one with the least scientific support.

named it directly. The biggest lie is:

This is the serotonin story. The idea that depression is, at root, a shortage of a particular brain chemical, and that the fix is to top it back up. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s mostly marketing.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a lot of people in my corner of the internet overplay their hand.

Medication helps some people. Genuinely.

For certain people, in certain situations, SSRIs and other drugs are a real lifesaver. I won’t pretend otherwise, and anyone who does is selling their own brand of nonsense.

But the mechanism we were sold was never solidly established. The chemical imbalance theory was marketed to the public as settled fact long after the field itself had largely moved on from it.

That’s the part that bothers me…

Not that the drugs exist, not that they help people. But that a simplistic, comforting, profitable story was packaged as science and handed to millions of people as the explanation for their pain.

went straight at the incentive:

Pharmaceutical company executives and lobbyists have railroaded us all into believing that we need pills and potions to achieve or maintain mental health... If the motivations were purpose-driven instead of profit-driven, the entire healthcare landscape would look and function wildly different than it does now.

It’s also worth mentioning that a treatment working and a mechanism being true are two different things.

“Your brain is broken and this fixes it” sells better than “we’re not entirely sure why this helps, but it sometimes does.”

The latter would be a far more honest portrayal of what’s going on.

3. That the answer is to outsource your inner life

This theme ran quietly under a lot of these comments.

The idea that the solution to your suffering lives outside you, in a professional’s office or a pharmacy, rather than in how you actually live.

pointed at the imbalance directly:

This is the trap…

You’re taught to manage symptoms rather than build resilience.

To outsource your inner life rather than take ownership of it.

The harder, less marketable truth is that a lot of what people need can’t be prescribed or billed by the hour: purpose, community, discipline, honest relationships, and the willingness to sit in discomfort while you grow.

“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

-Carl Jung

None of that fits neatly on a prescription pad and none of it scales into a business model. Which is exactly why the system steers you away from it.

The goal of any healthy process should be to make itself unnecessary.

A lot of the industry is built to create dependence.

Because dependence creates a financially sustainable treatment model. In other words, people that need ongoing therapy and ongoing medication keep paying.

4. That any professional can actually fix you

This is the uncomfortable one, and it took a blunt commenter to say it plainly.

laid it out:

We treat mental health care as though it’s as precise as fixing a broken bone.

And it definitely isn’t.

The treatments are incredibly blunt instruments, far less targeted, and far more dependent on the specific human you happen to get matched with.

Some therapists are excellent.

Some will do very little for you.

Some will actively make things worse.

It’s not that help is impossible…

the lie is the implied promise that the system is precise, reliable, and roughly interchangeable, when the reality is closer to a lottery.

A note on addiction

This comment sat slightly outside these themes, but it’s worth including because it makes a hard claim that follows the same logic.

argued that the biggest lie is:

I’ll leave this one open rather than fully endorse it, because my understanding of addiction is severely limited when compared to my understanding of the other subjects in this thread.

But it fits with everything above.

The same tension between a comforting medical label and the harder question of agency.

Whatever you believe about addiction, the underlying question is the same one:

When does a label help someone get better, and when does it make them worse off?

So what’s the actual truth?

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying mental illness isn’t real…

It is.

I’m not saying therapy is worthless…

It isn’t.

I’m not saying nobody should ever take medication…

Some people absolutely should.

The lie was never that these things have value.

The lie is pretending that most human distress belongs in that category, and that professionals hold the real solution to a problem that is often about how you’re living, what you believe, and what you’re avoiding.

Real suffering exists…

So does the ordinary, unglamorous, deeply human pain of being alive in a strange and demanding world. The industry has a powerful incentive to blur the line between them, because one of those is a condition to be treated, and the other is a life to be lived.

The most useful things a struggling person can hear are rarely the things you can package and sell.

Truth, responsibility. purpose, community, meaning, and the willingness to endure discomfort while you grow.

That doesn’t fit on a prescription pad and that’s probably why nobody’s selling it.

Thanks to everyone who replied to the original note. The best ideas in this piece were yours.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

— Henry Ford

People love to call optimists delusional.

They call them naive…

they call them unrealistic…

they say they’re living in a fantasy…

but I say the ones calling them delusional are actually the delusional ones.

Here’s why…

In the world that actually matters to you: your confidence, your relationships, your career, your status, belief isn’t a reaction to reality.

It’s the thing that creates it.

The human world is a gigantic psy-op.

Most of the things we think are real, aren’t objectively real, they exist only in peoples minds.

Money, morals, relationships, borders, status…

In the subjective world, the story you tell yourself doesn’t perceive reality…

It is reality.

So if you get to choose, which reality would you rather exist in?

Look at this Hermès Birkin handbag below:

Fairly ordinary, right?

It costs somewhere between $800 and $1,400 to make. Leather, hardware, a craftsman’s time, and that’s it.

It’s a bag.

It retails from $11,000 to over $200,000, and resells for even more.

And here’s the worst part…

you can’t just walk in with the cash and buy one.

Hermès limits supply on purpose. you’re often expected to spend thousands on other products first just to earn the privilege of overpaying them for this bag.

That’s right…

The privilege of overpaying them.

The audacity of these pricks.

It’s objectively a lump of leather that someone has worked on for a few hours.

Yet Hermès manufactured scarcity and a story about status, and the people believe it.

Value has almost nothing to do with the object, and almost everything to do with the belief around it.

If a company can do that to a handbag, what’s stopping you from doing that to yourself?

Literally, you can just start believing you’re the shit.

“ once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.”

— Muhammad Ali

Ali called himself the greatest before he was anything.

Then he became it.

That’s not delusion…

That’s a man who understood that life is fundamentally a mind game.

Sure you’ve heard this kind of message before plenty of times.

But here’s the part you haven’t heard…

There is no referee.

No objective grand-authority is coming to assess your life and tell you whether your self-belief was correct.

When it comes to self belief there is no “correct”.

You either think you’re the shit or you don’t.

The only people who will ever judge you or call you delusional are running on their own subjective beliefs, which are no more real than yours.

You’ve been waiting for permission from a judge who doesn’t exist.

So stop waiting…

The “realist” will tell you to lower your expectations so you won’t be disappointed.

But lowered expectations don’t protect you…

If anything, they endanger you by capping your potential far below what it could be.

Low expectations become the ceiling you live under.

They condemn you to a life of mediocrity and untapped potential.

Optimism, even the kind that looks delusional from the outside, raises the ceiling.

And raised ceilings have a strange habit of getting filled.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw

This isn’t magic…

It isn’t about manifestation either…

It doesn’t require you to deny objective reality.

It’s just how the social and psychological worlds have always worked.

We underestimate how much we create our own reality, and we overestimate how much of our inner world is based on objective fact.

Most of what we consider objective facts are just someone else’s limiting beliefs that we absorbed.

So stop being so “realistic”.

Start being delusional.

Be the kind of optimist that makes “realistic” people uncomfortable.

They’re not seeing something you’re missing.

You’re seeing something they gave up on.

People see optimism and call it “cope”, but I think the opposite is true.

Pessimism is cope because it gives them a licence to do nothing, give up trying, and then call themselves smart for predicting their shitty outcomes.

Optimists on the other hand have work to do.

So go be delusional and take over the world.

Do it for me and most importantly, do it for you.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

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Everyone knows the classic approaches to self development…

Meditate with an app.

Journal your inner most thoughts.

Practice affirmations.

Read Tony Robbins.

See a therapist and talk about your childhood.

And look, some of these might be useful. But there’s some self development methods that nobody talks about, probably because they doesn’t look like self development from the outside.

These four have done more for the people I know, and for me, than most of the official stuff combined:

1. Becoming an entrepreneur

Nobody signs up for entrepreneurship thinking it’s a spiritual journey.

They sign up because they want cash and freedom and maybe to flex their Lambo on Instagram. But what they get, if they manage to stick with it, is one of the most confronting, all encompassing, self-development experiences available.

This is because building an income stream from first principles forces you to understand yourself and others in a way a 9-5 never will.

You learn sales, which makes you a better communicator, a better persuader, a better seducer, a better reader of what people actually want versus what they say they want.

You learn to keep moving when nobody believes in you, which teaches you something about your own psychology that can only be learned by going through it.

There’s a reason almost everyone who’s been through an entrepreneurial journey, successful or not, comes out the other side saying it changed them.

Economics and human psychology are closer to the same thing than most people realise.

2. Starting a Substack

I only learned this one recently.

I knew journaling was useful and I knew pursuing a creative passion was useful. What I didn’t expect was how much the acts of writing publicly, researching philosophical ideas, and embracing my creativity, would reshape my daily mental state.

Every other platform online is an unlimited supply of negativity, insecurity, and spiritual bankruptcy delivered straight to your brain.

In the words of the new age gurus it’s all “low vibrational energy”.

Whereas the being a creator on the Substack ecosystem: reading notes, thinking about ideas, developing ideas, deepening a philosophy; it all fills your head with something different.

It’s not just content consumption…

It’s an active relationship with ideas that matter to you. A delicate process of consumption, refinement, and creation.

When you compare this to doomscrolling X, linkedin, or facebook, which I’ve largely replaced with Substack - it’s no wonder I feel so much better now.

My brain is getting nourished rather than poisoned.

3. Getting a job that scares you

For years I had growing social anxiety that was bothering me.

Most people wouldn’t have known, I present as an extrovert. But two years working from home made things worse, and despite my best efforts, I reached a point where I knew insight alone wasn’t going to fix it.

Yeah i’d still see my friends socially on weekends, and talk to people at my gym, but it wasn’t enough social exposure and I was slowly becoming more and more withdrawn.

So I got a weekend job as a bartender to face my growing social anxiety head on.

The logic was simple: get paid to do exposure reps. Exposure therapy works because doing the thing that scares you is how you stop it scaring you. I think it was Jung who said everything you want is on the other side of what you’re afraid of (or something like that?), and the bar was my laboratory.

Eighteen months later I feel unrecognisable…

The self confidence, the social ease, the way I move through life, none of that came from reading about it. It came from showing up and doing it, hundreds of times, improving month after month, until it stopped being hard.

So the takeaway lesson is this…

If you have the freedom to choose a job or side job, choose something that makes you uncomfortable in the specific way you want to grow. You’re essentially paying yourself in behavioural reps. And often the thing that scares you the most is a compass directing you to to your mission.

4. Combat sports

Any combat sport or martial art with high intensity sparring will teach you things about yourself that you can’t really learn anywhere else (legally) in our modern society.

Operating under real pressure, someone trying to punch, kick, or choke you - produces a clarity that’s difficult to describe until you’ve felt it.

It lowers the volume on everything else…

The daily anxieties, the social worries, the things that felt heavy before training, they all shrink when you’ve spent an hour in a simple survival mindset. There’s a reason people who train regularly describe it as therapy.

It isn’t just exercise - it’s a form of active meditation and perspective recalibration.

Pick your risk level. Boxing, BJJ, Muay Thai, Judo -- they vary in contact and injury likelihood. But any of them, trained seriously, will change how you see yourself and how seriously you take the things that don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Conclusion

Self development is by definition a personal thing. What’s life changing for one person is just another Wednesday for someone else.

But the four things on this list have changed too many lives, including my own, to be dismissed as hacks or trends or god forbid, a morning routine. They’re not optimisation strategies, they’re tools of philosophical transformation.

And the reason they work is the same reason the official self development industry often doesn’t: they don’t let you stay comfortable while you do them.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

You may have heard of the latest viral trend RETARDMAXXING.

The idea is fairly straightforward: stop overthinking, ignore the voice telling you you’re not ready, and just do things. Stop overanalysing and being a perfectionist about your decisions. Act with the confidence of someone who has zero concept of embarrassment.

Most people laugh at it like it’s just a silly meme…

But it’s actually really, really good advice, especially for the smart people laughing at it.

The Seagal Case Study

Steven Seagal is the quintessential ‘Retardmaxxer’.

Steven Seagal is a black belt in a martial art called Aikido which most people now know is completely ineffective against anyone who doesn’t cooperate with being thrown.

He presents himself as a deadly warrior, a spiritual guru, a serious musician, and even a sex symbol. He made an album where he puts on a Jamaican accent and sings about women’s “punanis”. People who’ve worked with him say he’s a delusional egomaniac who has harassed women on pretty much every film set he’s walked onto.

He also happens to be rich, famous, and has had a career spanning four decades.

Seagal didn’t succeed in spite of his delusion, he succeeded because of it. The man has never once appeared to question whether he deserves to be in the room, so nobody ever threw him out of it.

This is Retardmaxxing in its purest form.

Why Smart People Are Terrible At This

Intelligence is great at detecting threats. It’s very good at generating reasons why something might go wrong, why you’re not ready, why someone more qualified should probably do this instead. And we too often confuse this threat awareness with ‘being realistic’. It optimises for avoiding being wrong, which is the opposite of what action requires.

Smart people read the room, they calculate the odds, and they wait until they’re “ready”.

But the problem is that they’ll never be “ready”.

Meanwhile the guy who didn’t notice the odds, who never calculated the risk, who walked into the room like he owned it. He’s already living their dreams.

The Mechanism Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part that sounds crazy until you’ve lived it…

Your internal reality has more power over the external world than you’ve been told.

What you experience as “the real world” is, to a significant degree, a mirror of your inner world. People reflect back to you what you feel about yourself. Rooms open up or close down based on the energy you walk in with.

I’ll quote myself here, because it’s super relevant, so try not to cringe too hard:

“We overestimate how much we PERCEIVE reality, and underestimate how much we CREATE reality”

- me

So when someone like Seagal operates from a place of total unearned confidence, the world rarely corrects him. Usually most people just... go along with it. His belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. At some point you have to ask yourself “Is it really a delusion if it comes true?”.

This isn’t mysticism, it’s just how social reality works.

Confidence signals competence, certainty creates trust, and the brain, which is wired to take social cues from the people around it, often can’t tell the difference between someone who earned their confidence and someone who just decided to have it.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

An overweight aikido black belt with a Jamaican alter ego and an extensive harassment lawsuit on every film set he’s ever worked on became a Hollywood action star.

This doesn’t mean you should gain weight, put on a Jamaican accent and start harassing women.

Definitely DO NOT do that.

But it does mean that the walls between you and what you want aren’t anywhere near as thick as you think.

Those walls are mostly imaginary…

The competence gap is mostly imaginary…

The permission you’re waiting for was never real…

Maybe the thing holding you back isn’t a lack of talent or intelligence.

Maybe you just need to start Retardmaxxing.

Until next time,

Charles (Contra-Psych)

A lot of self-help is just mental masturbation.

There I said it…

And this isn’t necessarily because the ideas are bad (some definitely are). It’s because of how people use them.

If you’ve read much of my content, I love to critique self help, however I’m actually a huge fan of it when it’s done right.

It can be life changing.

Here are 4 ways to do it right, so that the advice actually helps, rather than just keeping you stuck in a loop:

1. Use it as a supplement, not a solution

The most useful self-help experiences of my life all had one thing in common…

I was already in the trenches.

-Attacking my social anxiety while working a bar job every weekend, getting actual reps in, facing rejection in real time. The theory sharpened what the practice was already building.

-Reading about business and money while building my own business. Learning about marketing and customers while actually trying to sell, upsell, and deal with difficult customers.

Combination of theory and practice is powerful and there’s a reason why so much education is based around this combo.

However, most people don’t treat self-help as theory to be combined with practice, they often just read it in isolation hoping it will magically change them as they sit on their couch.

Self-help is theory and theory requires practice to become anything.

You need to learn ideas then ‘pressure test’ them in order to integrate them into your brain.

Imagine you read 100 books about a swimming technique, but never actually jump in the pool. This is what so many people are doing when they read self-help content.

So if you’re consuming self-help without integrating it into your behavior, you’re not growing, you’re just entertaining yourself and calling it personal development.

2. No guru is perfect, so take what’s useful and leave the rest

Every self-help figure worth anything has a blind spot, a grift, or a set of ideas that have zero use to you.

For instance you might like Jordan Peterson’s psychology content but feel like he goes off the wall with his Christian theology lectures.

You might like Tony Robbins life advice but feel like he loses you with his rock concert like seminars.

You might find David Goggins raw, motivating, and insightful, yet maybe he’s bit of a masochistic maniac with his workouts.

Long story short, these are human beings with genuinely useful ideas buried inside a worldview you don’t need to swallow whole.

The people who get the most out of self-help treat it like a buffet. The people who get the least pick a guru and go all in. Your job is to think, not to convert.

3. Revisit the stuff that resonated

A book that changed nothing at 22 can rewire how you see everything at 28.

The idea didn’t change, but you did.

Often the time and place you receive a piece of advice is just as important as the advice itself. Here’s a great quote to hammer this point home:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

- Heraclitus

Most people read something once, shelve it, move on to the next thing, and they treat a book they read like it’s something they’ve fully absorbed.

The better approach with self-help is revisiting material at different points in your life. You’ll be surprised how much went over your head the first time, and how much hits differently when you’re coming at it with a different perspective.

4. Integrate the A-HA moment before you chase the next one

The A-HA moment feels like the reward.

But it isn’t, it’s the starting line of change.

Most people get a genuine insight, feel the dopamine hit of it, and immediately go hunting for the next A-HA moment. Another book, podcast, or framework. The insight never gets integrated because there’s always another insight available.

One real idea, properly absorbed and applied, is worth more than a hundred that gave you a good feeling and nothing else. So slow down, let it land, live it, and pressure-test it in the real world before you go looking for more.

In conclusion

The greatest irony of self-help is that people use it to avoid the thing it’s actually asking them to do:

• Reading about courage instead of doing what’s scaring you.

• Collecting frameworks instead of applying one.

• Chasing the next insight instead of internalising the latest one.

The problem was never just a lack of information.

The problem is people not actually integrating it into their lives.

So absorb what is useful, take it into the real world, pressure test it, and then integrate its truth into your own personal philosophy.

This is where self-help can change your life.

Until next time,

Contra

Human conversation does two things:

1. It exchanges information

2. It builds relationships.

For most of human history those two things happened together, in the same place, through the same interaction.

Our nervous system is literally wired for it.

When you sit across from someone, relationship development is happening constantly underneath the conversation. In the body language, the tone, the touch, the silences, the expressions you can’t fake and wouldn’t think to.

And this is the part of communication that actually matters.

It’s where the fun is, the connection, and the meaning making. It’s also the part that, when we don’t have it, makes us lonely.

Group chats and instant messaging reduce our social relationships to information exchange.

Sure you get emojis and voice notes and shared memes, and they have their place, but they are still a cheap substitute from the real thing. They’re reasonable enough that your brain might see them as social nourishment. But not reasonable enough to actually provide it.

And the result is a strange modern phenomenon - you can be completely up to date on your friends’ lives and still feel like you barely know them anymore.

Humans are built to share stories around campfires…

To engage our full presence in the lives of the people we care about: reading faces, feeling the room, being physically inside the same moment. When that gets compressed into a thread of text, something essential gets lost.

The story arrives without the felt experience.

There’s also something important in the friction that group chats eliminated. Showing up to things is inconvenient, making plans is effort, and sitting through the boring parts of an evening with people you love is sometimes a little tedious.

But it’s worth remembering that we value what we invest in and perhaps the effort of real friendship wasn’t an obstacle to connection, but a mechanism of it. The group chat made staying in touch effortless, and effortless things don’t build much.

See my essay on effortlessness and meaninglessness below:

So it turns out we’re more connected than ever…

And lonelier than ever…

And we’re constantly in contact with people we’re losing our closeness with.

None of this is an argument against group chats. I’m not anti-technology in the slightest, and I’d be lying if I said I’m not a regular group chat contributor.

As a tool for logistics and staying in the loop they’re extremely useful. The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is using it as a substitute for the thing it was never designed to replace.

Until next time,

Contra