persuasion and manipulation are fundamental topics that i believe everyone should be knowledgeable about.

if you only study persuasion for when you’re selling, you’re studying it from the wrong end of the table.

you get bombarded with attempts at persuasion all day.

your boss is trying to convince you to take on another project.

your friend is trying to convince you where to get food.

politicians are trying to convince you to vote for them.

sales people are trying to convince you to give them your money.

creators are trying to convince you to give them your attention.

opponents are trying to convince you that they’re right.

and the thing is, it’s mostly just life.

you wouldn’t really describe your daily interactions as being subject to persuasion.

you can go through your whole life without realizing there’s a mechanism behind it.

take this for example.

there are two people interviewing for a job. their resumes are identical. their experience is identical. you ask them both the same questions, and they give you basically identical answers.

the only difference is at some point one of them says, “i actually built something almost identical to this three years ago, and it really broke something inside of me. here’s what i learned.”

now, these two people on paper are identical. but you immediately believe the second candidate more.

why?

one of them borrowed credibility while the other one just spoke.

because of that you trust their claims more and you trust their answers more.

they gave you a glimpse of their life.

and that single sentence can change the entire outlook of the conversation and how it concludes.

over 2,000 years ago, aristotle identified the three main pillars of persuasion:

ethos, pathos, and logos.

credibility. emotion. logic.

these are the three basic parts of all persuasion.

you probably have heard about them during your high school english class while learning persuasive writing.

but it stretches so much farther than just writing.

you use them all the time without even realizing it.

understanding them, and the science of persuasion behind them makes it much harder for anyone to persuade you.

so let’s get into it.

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PEOPLE DON’T JUST BUY ARGUMENTS

before we break it down section by section, i want you to go into it with this in mind.

basically the main idea that sits underneath this all.

a persuasive message usually needs more than one reason to actually work.

you can have two out of the three and not be successful in persuasion.

evidence without credibility may fall flat, logic without emotional investment might not be seen as relevant, and so on.

the three parts of persuasion need to weave together like this:

say a friend is considering a career change because they hate their current role, but they are having trouble finding a new job.

you are helping them decide whether or not they should leave their current job.

you make the following statement:

you should quit your job.

terrible. not persuasive in the slightest.

but you can strengthen your statement by adding some elements of logos (making it reasonable and logical), ethos (lending your credibility to the assertion), and pathos (making your friend want to act based on your assertion).

first, you might include the logos element:

you’ve applied to 47 jobs, received 11 interviews, and your current job has no realistic path toward the career you want. statistically and practically speaking, continuing indefinitely isn’t producing a different result.

second, we add the ethos piece:

i’ve hired people for 15 years, and i’ve seen dozens of people make this exact transition. based on what you’ve told me, i’d seriously consider leaving.

third, we introduce the pathos element:

imagine waking up three years from now and realizing you spent those three years doing something you already knew you didn’t want to do.

once all three elements are working together, we have a persuasive statement:

you’ve applied to 47 jobs without meaningful progress. i’ve helped people make this transition before, and i think you’re capable of doing it. but imagine waking up three years from now and realizing you spent those years waiting for your life to change instead of changing it.

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you know the feeling when you check your phone and there isn’t a message that you’re expecting from a certain someone.

and then you check four minutes later for no other reason. it’s like your thumb moves automatically without any conscious thought.

still no message.

but you open the chat anyway and decide to scroll up to some message that was sent two days ago.

and now you think too much about a period or exclamation mark.

like it somehow grew a whole new meaning overnight.

you start a whole new theory.

“they must be losing interest it me.” or “did they find someone else?”

but then you hear a ping.

“haha yeah” comes through. now you’re grateful as your overworked nervous system is back to normal.

your heart feels light.

you are alive again.

that is limerence.

when people talk about falling in love and the fog of romanticism, it’s usually limerence.

the term limerence comes from relationship researcher dorothy tennov, who in 1979 interviewed hundreds of people about love.

many of the people said they would often call an intense, temporary, obsessive state love.

she called it something else.

limerence.

it’s defined as an involuntary obsessive mental state aimed at one person.

limerence is different from love, even when the feelings start out very strongly and can be mutually felt.

people in states of limerence often mistakenly believe that they have found true and everlasting love.

the feelings don’t always lead to lasting love, and in many cases there isn’t even any attraction or the right match involved.

all you need is physical or emotional proximity and uncertainty to experience limerence.

some say it lasts eighteen months, but that number has been disputed as it can last anywhere from a few weeks to years.

it something that happens to you as opposed to a choice you make to be in love.

limerence is the fog.

it’s what causes intrusive thoughts and hyper-reactivity to minimal positive or negative responses.

the good thing, however, is that limerence fades.

it might take long but eventually you start to get that embarrassing realization that without the ‘fog’ you don’t actually know this person very well.

love takes a lot of work and effort to maintain but limerence is like a drug and is involuntary.

it’s almost instant and extremely volatile.

people experience limerence more than once in their lives, but they mistakenly think it’s love.

limerence and being in love have different definitions and processes.

the next time your friend says their in love after talking with someone for three days, maybe she means limerence…

8:11am as these words land on the screen.

coffees gone cold already because i spent 20 minutes staring at the screen before typing a single word.

it happens sometimes.

this post might hit home for a lot of people.

i see it so often.

people that build a personality around a feeling that has an expiry date.

let’s understand why it happens.

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THE BRAIN DOESN’T FALL IN LOVE WITH THEM

your brain falls in love with the possibility of being with someone.

it’s easier to think you were chosen, that you’re in love, that it was fated, and you’re the protagonist.

we consciously like to rationalize it as destiny.

but what goes on subconsciously?

it’s really a prediction loop.

they ignored you yesterday, but they sent you a cute voice note at 1am calling you baby.

will their next text be as flirty as that? or will they continue on a cold streak?

they seemed distant, but laughed so hard at your joke.

will they ignore you tomorrow? or are things going to go back to normal?

every action becomes a hint about what’s to come. every text triggers your body to figure out the mystery of their late reply.

obsession is about potential and what could happen, not what is.

i’ve written about the anticipation of reward before and how the gambling industry has been built on this.

you can be addicted to the feeling of uncertainty.

think about a test you wrote.

the gap from when you finish the test and when you get your results is usually the most obsessive part of it all.

you go to sleep every night thinking, “what did i get?” or “when will i get my marks back.”

then right after you get the results, usually within a day the obsessiveness has disappeared.

your brain doesn’t obsess over a result it already has. it obsesses over a result that might still happen.

the uncertain feeling of being in love is just another one of those things.

uncertainty is a drug in a way.

they might not feel the same way tomorrow, but do they feel that way today?

if they were totally into you and showing you love all the time, you probably wouldn’t spend all day thinking about them.

if they were totally unavailable and you never talked to them, you probably wouldn’t think about them either.

but sometimes they’re available and sometimes they’re not, sometimes they think about you but other times you don’t exist for them.

that’s where limerence thrives.

THE PERSON BECOMES A SUPER STIMULUS

this starts to become dangerous because once that loop of uncertainty starts, you stop looking at that person in a ‘normal’ way.

when your crush is gone beyond a crush, it’s become an infatuation.

one where you need them.

now you’re compulsively looking for their story, going back over texts to decipher whether they’re interested.

this doesn’t scratch the itch at all, but you’re still thinking about them constantly.

this happens because the cues that relate to this one person become hyper-salient.

hyper salience is when your brain tags one stimulus as more important than the rest of the environment.

so much so that the next time you see their name in the group chat, or hear that song they mentioned, or see them pass you by in their car, your whole environment becomes less relevant than the presence of them.

it’s like a focus lense and everything blurs out behind the thing your focusing on.

and of course your noradrenaline is pumping, so your heart will be racing, pupils dilated, hands sweaty, until you compose yourself and take a deep breath.

our brains little joke.

your body reacting to a text message as if a lion was looking at you, ready to maul you to death.

but here’s where things get really nasty.

liking and wanting are different pathways in the brain.

you can like without wanting.

liking is the warm and fuzzies during interpersonal interactions. hugging the person and laughing with them.

wanting is more of a restless drive that ignites when the object of your desires is out of reach.

in limerence it arises as a ‘itch’ when the person starts to leave.

and this is where dopamine comes into play.

we hear a lot of misinformation about “dopamine = pleasure.”

in this case, the specific person of your infatuation doesn’t make you feel good just by existing.

rather, dopamine acts as a sort of call to action telling you, “this is worth chasing.”

chasing them makes you feel good.

and chances are you also like them, which has an element of oxytocin and vasopressin.

these create that “this feels like home” sensation, which is why without them it feels more than just a loss of pleasure and excitement.

it feels like bereavement.

it’s complex, these pathways inform one another which can lead to the hyper-focus associated with infatuation.

that “that felt good” sensation that we associate with pleasure also comes from the relief we feel when we find the person of our infatuation and the anticipation of more.

so even that fleeting, unsatisfying, small little hit of going over their last dms or seeing that instagram story from them can keep the flame of infatuation burning.

this cycle follows a pattern:

cue: you see them in person or think about them.

urge: a rush of excitement or feeling bereft.

search: trying to interact with them or look for them on social media.

once you have the object of your infatuation you get that sense of relief. that “go get it” signal from dopamine.

and it fades again, and the cycle continues.

this sounds like an addictive behavior, and it is in some sense.

THE VERSION OF THEM THAT DOESN’T EXIST

this is the part that makes you feel insane when it clicks.

when you catch yourself wondering, “am i obsessed with them, or the idea of them?”

think about how much of what you imagine about them doesn’t even exist yet.

it starts with the halo effect.

because they were nice to you once, it’s not possible that they could mistreat you.

and it continues because you don’t know them very well. your imagination fills in the blank spaces with a perfect, idealized version.

the holes in their sentences and the days between their texts are opportunities to speculate and fill in with something meaningful.

i understand why they’re not available. they must be busy.

three days go by…

“they must be going through something.”

you start to act as if you were handed a script to their life and know everything that is about to happen.

and when they finally show a little affection you rationalize it. “see i was right, they do care.”

even if it’s disproportionate to everything else that happened before.

your rich empathy (a perfectly good and beautiful quality) can become weaponized against yourself when you find that it allows you to rationalize a behavior that would have ended a relationship otherwise.

you can even believe two irreconcilable, contradictory narratives about their character at once, weaving justifications that are somehow specific to you and your experience together.

“he’s so sweet” + “he’s a player” = “i can fix him.”

and of course, the fact that the person isn’t always consistent makes it easier to see the version of them you want to see.

the version of them you think you could be with.

WHO CATCHES THIS THE WORST

if you were a child who learned to associate being unsure of love with home, then you may find it easier to feel the same way with love in general.

if you have low self-esteem or an anxious attachment style, you may find it easier to place your entire identity in the hands of how someone else treats you.

and if you were lonely, it’s easy to make small signs of affection and hope too big. easy to file it away as. “they’re my destiny, they’re the one, love might leave, stay alert.”

limerence is not a diagnosis, but if you do have adhd you may be more prone to hyperfocusing on this as well.

one of the creepiest (and maybe most common) ways you can obsess over someone is via the internet, where they don’t have to interact with you at all for it to happen.

social media is a delivery system for limerence to thrive on and it’s the worst possible dose.

you can watch their stories, read their posts and invent an entire narrative about their life, convinced you are close to them.

they seem so happy. you call it intuition without the slightest confirmation from them.

you imagine all kinds of scenarios where you fit together perfectly. and it isn’t even as if you met them or saw them much.

it’s all happening in your head, on social media, and in your heart.

KEY SIGNS OF LIMERENCE: HOW IT USUALLY RUNS

you know this story well. it’s love at first sight. they’re perfect.

you can’t understand how your heart, your life and your thoughts have suddenly become so entangled and obsessed with them.

cupids arrow has struck your heart.

they’re the best person ever.

and maybe your friends are starting to get concerned because they’ve noticed that it seems like you’re sacrificing the use of your brain cells for the pursuit of your new crush.

you rearrange your schedule to fit with their potential needs.

your daily routine starts to focus around them.

you change your jokes and your priorities.

maybe there’s this person that you’re always available for at night.

there are many signals to know whether or not your in love with this person or it’s just limerence.

here are a few of them.

intrusive thoughts - you find yourself constantly replaying interactions and can’t focus on any thoughts that aren’t related to them for an extended period of time.

extreme emotional swings - plenty of highs and lows. a little bit of attention makes you feel euphoric but a little silence and you feel utter despair.

idealization - you ignore their flaws completely and even try to justify them when they’re harmful to you.

physical symptoms - anxiety, racing heart, sweating, feeling nervous just thinking about them.

driven by uncertainty - the lack of knowing keeps you obsessed.

STARVE THE LOOP

if you’ve read this far, you probably already know the move.

stop feeding your limerence loop.

i wish it was as easy as me telling you to “love yourself”

but you have to starve the loop.

cut out your cues.

stop checking their profile. stop rereading old messages. stop looking at their pictures. this behavior is a dopamine hit for your brain.

mute them. unfollow them. stop their retrospective searches.

yes, it will be hard at first, but the feeling will subside.

stop your calculated “accidentally” running into them in the gym/at work/etc.

you’re essentially gambling that you will be rewarded in that instance.

stop feeding your cravings.

do not engage.

each small interaction restarts the extinction process.

this is why extinctions fail so often. it’s boring without stimulation.

cut out your contact. this eliminates the need for the talk.

reduce your digital proximity and physical proximity.

limit your time daydreaming.

be mindful of your thoughts and redirect your focus.

focus on a task at hand. a project. the gym. friends. hobbies. things that will give you immediate, tangible reward (unlike your current fixation).

limit your positive daydreaming, increase negative daydreaming.

you’ve built your fixation into this larger-than-life, perfect, shining being.

include the times they were rude. the times they were hurtful. the times they showed themselves to be less-than.

your fixation is not the shining being that you have constructed them to be in your dreams.

know what you’re dealing with.

you’ve allowed your nervous system to be in control.

that’s why you’re so obsessed and why you want to be around them.

they’re inconsistent, which is likely a familiar pattern from your childhood.

and when a stimulus is highly relevant, it can be associated with importance and that person is no longer your fixation, they aren’t even close to the most important person in your life.

however, your brain has been conditioned to believe they are.

it’s not just about them, it’s about the feeling that they evoke in you.

limerence passes with time.

but fixations can take it much further and longer, which is why it’s important to be aware of it and manage it.

confidence is such a mystical thing.

everybody wants it yet few know what it is.

few know how to get it, and almost none know how to keep it.

yes, you heard me right. keep it.

because confidence isn’t a thing you just get or a thing you’re born with.

it’s more like a habit that can go up and down throughout certain periods of your life.

it’s a weird thing. most of us know it when we see it.

it’s one of those things that’s instantly recognizable.

someone walks into a room and we can almost feel the energy shift.

when we ourselves feel confident, we can feel the change in our own nature in how we approach things.

it’s also extremely misunderstood because a lot of people don’t understand the underlying mechanics of confidence and how they interact to bring forth the fruit we all know and recognize.

most advice you get on the topic is either shallow or plain wrong.

you hear a lot of “fake it till you make it,” but that just doesn’t work.

few people actually study the topic in enough depth to truly understand the nature of confidence, the ways in which you can cultivate it, and the consequences these dynamics have on the way we structure our entire society.

in this post i’ll try to go over the mystique of confidence and give you the right tools to actually acquire this universally desired trait.

i won’t just hand you a principle, but real steps you can start implementing right now.

steps that will sow the seeds of confidence.

but before we get into how to handle confidence we have to understand what it actually is, and most importantly, what it is not…

endorphins and serotonin are coursing through my body and veins right now as i sit here typing these exact words.

that’s what running will do for you.

exercise is one thing that has made me noticeably more confident in life and we’ll get into exactly why later in this post.

ambient music playing softly in the background. snowfall by one heart.

let’s get into this.

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WHAT CONFIDENCE IS NOT

let’s kill the biggest myth about confidence right here.

there’s nothing magical about it

you’ve heard it before in various iterations.

“i wish i had the confidence that person has.” says a hopeful admirer.

“if only i had more confidence like him, i think i’d ask her out” cries the hopeless romantic.

“if only i had that kind of confidence, i would’ve already started my business by now.” complains the ambitious entrepreneur.

“if only i were one of those naturally confident people, my life would be so much better!” says everybody it feels like sometimes.

the confidence myth stems from people thinking about confidence as something that other people have inherently.

some magical quality that is given to them by birthright, something they themselves never had access to.

there is no finish line where you cross over and permanently become a confident person.

confidence isn’t something magical that exists within us all as a permanent trait.

this myth exists only because diluted self-help advice spreads the idea and the effect of believing in it is actually downright dangerous.

it puts a mental wall between you and people who are confident as if confidence is some birthright only “those people” are born with.

you start to put them on a pedestal.

you can be confident at 25, then less confident at 30, and then confident again at 40.

some people are insecure their whole lives and then later than expected find confidence in a place they never thought they would.

some people can stand on a stage in front of 500 people giving a rousing speech and feel confident but in a bar have to have their knees held together to prevent them from shaking when approaching the pretty bartender.

because confidence was never something intrinsic to you as a human.

it was always situational based on the context of your life at the moment, what you’ve experienced, and what you think you’re able to handle.

if you want to learn to have more confidence you need to understand the difference between types of confidence.

here are three:

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the average person meets somewhere around 80,000 people over the course of their life and actually speaks in depth with somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 of them.

that’s a lot of human contact. and somewhere in this mountain of people, you’re going to find people who say shit that does not make sense in the slightest.

and some of these people can hold you back.

especially if you get close to them.

if you get too deep into a conversation with them or if you fall into a long-term relationship with them.

it can be hard to figure out why an interaction with a person can make you feel like you just ran into a brick wall.

and this isn’t even coming from a place of “i’m better than you,” or anywhere near that

this is the understanding that you need to be able to recognize signs of low intelligence in others, so you understand the relationships you have with them and how they might approach it differently.

this is especially true if you’re in the business of building something up and looking for a partner to help you do it.

or if you’re looking for a life partner to share your remaining years with.

if you’re able to notice these traits in people early on, you might save yourself a lot of heartache, headaches, and wasted time in the long run that you otherwise would’ve had to put up with over and over again in a number of different circumstances.

i don’t want this to turn into a checklist of people you should judge by any means and ridicule but rather to understand the characteristics of these kinds of people and recognize them in a timely manner so you can save yourself time.

and potentially help those people in turn later if you really want to.

because at the end of the day your relationships with others are going to define your relationship with your own mind.

and that is going to dictate everything you do, everything you say, everything you believe, and everything you end up becoming.

mood is set for today’s writing session. japanese denim by daniel caesar playing softly through my speakers.

i’ve had a few stimulants to boot so let’s get into it.

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1.) THEY MOCK PEOPLE FOR TRYING SOMETHING NEW

you will never find someone who is actually ahead of you in a given area of life criticizing you, laughing at you, or mocking you for trying something.

you will not find someone who has started their own business and made it all the way to the top, laugh at or mock somebody else for starting their own business.

they’ve been where that other person is at some point in their life and they know what it’s like.

it’s always the person who has done nothing who has the most to say about those who are doing.

the biggest person at the gym never mocks the newcomer who doesn’t know how to do anything, because the biggest person at the gym was once the newcomer who didn’t know how to do anything.

one of the stupidest things a person can do is mock another person for trying something new, and especially for trying it publicly in front of others who can see them.

i think it’s important that you understand that when someone mocks another for trying something new it’s often due to the fact that they themselves repressed the desire to try that thing.

they lash out in mockery at someone else doing it as a means of dealing with their inability to do it themselves.

2.) THEY MISTAKE ANECDOTE FOR REALITY

mistaking a subjective, anecdotal experience for objective reality is something you need to watch for.

if a person can't perceive reality or process information outside the lens of their own personal experience that is a sign.

you usually see this in the form of people dismissing statistics and averages with their own personal experience.

for example, on average it’s a better decision to stay in college than drop out because on average college graduates make more money that dropouts over their lifetime.

however, someone who is unable to make the distinction between objective and subjective reality would use the anecdote of bill gates dropping out and becoming a billionaire as an argument in favor of dropping out, simply because they are unable to grasp that an outlier can be an outlier without being indicative of a general trend.

sometimes it’s more subtle and sometimes it’s less subtle.

it really does depend on the person.

an example of the latter would be someone who has never seen the ocean saying that the ocean doesn’t take up 70% of the earth, simply because they’ve only ever seen land, and therefore “it can’t possibly take up 70%.”

on a less blatantly obvious scale, it happens when people confuse opinions with objective reality.

not being able to distinguish between subjective opinion and objective fact is itself an inability that leads to the ability to be easily fooled and is the reason why people fall victim to marketing so easily.

if i say you’re wrong for not liking books and preferring podcast, i’m conflating a subjectively-formed opinion with objective reality.

i’m assuming that there’s an objective right and wrong when it comes to preferring one medium of information consumption over another.

sure, there could be an argument made for which one is more beneficial, but it’s not a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ type of ordeal.

bill gates is not a controlled experiment, your grandfather who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and lived to be 97 is not a controlled experiment, and one data point does not constitute a trend, no matter how much you want it to.

3.) THEY CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION

this one goes hand-in-hand with the previous point.

just because two things happen at the same time does not mean that one causes the other.

if you’ve ever taken a statistics class you’ve probably covered this concept and seen this example.

just because ice cream sales go up during the summer, and so do drowning rates. this does not mean that ice cream causes drowning.

it means that a third factor, the warm weather, causes both of these things to happen.

you see this all the time with people’s reasoning in regards to things pertaining to themselves.

“successful people wake up at 5 in the morning, therefore waking up at 5 in the morning makes you successful.”

maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t

it’s entirely possible that successful people just have a certain set of characteristics that happen to include waking up early as well.

“i started taking this protein powder and i felt better two weeks later, therefore this protein powder healed me.”

maybe it did, maybe it didn’t.

it’s entirely possible that those two weeks were the period of time when their stress levels decreased and their sleep schedule improved at the same time, and they’re conflating the two events.

the human brain loves patterns, and it’ll often fabricate them when there are none, simply so that we can have something to hold on to.

it’s much easier this way, really.

you don’t have to think too hard about something to realize that one thing caused another when they conveniently occur at the same time, and you can move on to the next thing in life without putting much effort into determining the specifics.

life is much more inconvenient and nuanced than we often care to admit, unfortunately.

4.) THEY CONFUSE DISAGREEMENT WITH CONFLICT

i want to be careful here, because to some degree this reaction is genuinely primal in our nature.

doing this isn’t directly a sign of low intelligence but the reason i included this is that the absence of it can indicate high intelligence.

when someone disagrees with us, we feel attacked.

our brain immediately wants to throw out reasons as to why the disagreeing party is incorrect in their stance, to the point that we can often feel physically uncomfortable in the wake of such a disagreement.

the reason we feel this way is that we treat disagreements as though they are conflicts.

we feel as though our personal opinions and convictions are somehow being threatened by a disagreement, which prompts us to defend ourselves.

our opinions are formed through years and decades of our lives, and many of us hold on to them quite tightly.

it can be difficult to accept that we may be wrong about something especially if we feel as though we’ve held a certain belief for a long time.

people who chronically resort to this are the people to watch out for.

they are unable to separate the stimulus (the disagreement) from the response (defending their opinion).

they are unable to see another point of view and they are unable to engage in a mature debate.

they will immediately dismiss the disagreeing party and attempt to shut the conversation down as soon as possible.

disagreeing with people is a deeply personal matter for everyone, and the way we handle disagreement with others defines our ability to have nuanced conversations with people.

the ability to hold differing ideologies in the same room without feeling pressured to immediately walk out the door.

some of this is natural and you will see it your entire life.

when you meet somebody who can disagree with you without feeling the urge to immediately defend themselves, you can recognize them as someone who holds a higher level of intelligence.

they truly saw your statement and formed an opinion on it, rather than feeling attacked and shutting you down before you had a chance to explain what you meant.

5.) THEY CAN’T HOLD TWO OPPOSING IDEAS AT ONCE

this is probably the most important point of this entire article.

the inability to see nuance.

they can’t hold the opposing sides of a debate in their head at the same time, and they feel as though everything has to be black and white.

these people will often use words such as “always” and “never” when forming their arguments, and will always try to push you to “their side” of an issue.

there is a term in psychology that refers to this and it is called cognitive complexity.

it is your brain’s ability to hold multiple points of view at once, rather than seeing the world as a simple “this is good, everything else is bad” type of scenario.

the higher your level of cognitive complexity, the more nuance you are capable of seeing in a topic.

there is another term related to this one, and it’s called dialectical thinking.

it refers to the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and to understand that both are partially correct.

it is an advanced form of cognitive complexity, and it is what a lot of people who are politically involved lack when it comes to discussing their ideologies with people from the “opposing side”.

left versus right is one of the most prominent examples of this one.

there are certain ideas that are “left-wing”, and certain ideas that are “right-wing”, and people believe that anyone who subscribes to one set of ideas cannot ever subscribe to the other set.

no matter how reasonable some of the ideas from the “opposing side” may be.

it comes down to ‘you have to choose a side and stick with everything.’

it’s just not something you should do. feeding fully into that tribal instinct.

in reality both sides have good and bad ideas and you’re not obligated to adopt all the ideas from one side wholesale just because you like a few of them.

and the same goes for the other side.

there is nuance to be found in everything, which is why it’s important to understand that just because you’re taking something from one side of an ideological debate, it doesn’t mean everything from the other side is objectively wrong.

it just means you like this particular idea less.

people who can’t hold two opposing ideas in their head at the same time, see everything as a battle of good versus evil, black versus white, right versus wrong.

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6.) THEY HAVE NO CURIOSITY

as socrates once said, “i know one thing, and that is that i know nothing.”

there’s a type of person who actively doesn’t want to know something, and it’s not because they’ve been denied the opportunity to gain knowledge.

these people are the ones who will never ask questions, who will never seek answers on their own, who will never update their beliefs when presented with new information, and who will hear something once.

they will believe it for the entirety of their lives and never think to question it.

curiosity is the realization that your knowledge is incomplete.

if a person is unable to realize that they don’t know something, they are in a very bad position when it comes to learning new things.

they’re unable to grow.

the smartest people you will ever meet are often the ones who realize they know the least.

7.) THEY CAN’T ADAPT WHEN REALITY CHANGES

one of the biggest sings of actual cognitive intelligence is your ability to learn and adapt to new information.

especially when the old information clearly doesn’t apply anymore.

say you’re trying to find a job

you send out a hundred applications and you hear back from none of them.

at this point, you have two options.

you can either send out another hundred applications, and hope that this time, you hear back from someone.

or you can realize that something is not working and you need to figure out what it is you’re doing wrong.

you update your application, you acquire new skills that you didn’t have before, you send out applications directly to people instead of using the generic job portals, and you apply to jobs in entirely different spheres of industry than the ones you originally intended to enter.

that is adaptation and updating your approach based on what works and what doesn’t work.

it’s an important skill and one you will see demonstrated everywhere once you actually look for it.

people who’ve transitioned from one type of work to managing people have to update their approach when communicating with others, because talking to machinery does not talk to people.

people who’ve gotten fired out of nowhere and have to move on to an entirely different industry because the one they were in no longer exists and they have to update their approach to work.

people who’ve heard feedback about their approach to a certain task and have to update it, instead of getting defensive when hearing that something they’ve been doing wrong this entire time.

it shows up in how people respond to everyday inconveniences, as well.

someone’s flight gets canceled and they rearrange their plans instead of standing at the gate fuming.

money gets tight and they find ways to live within their means instead of pretending it hasn’t happened.

a parent updates their approach to parenting as their child grows up and grows out of childhood and develops needs and wants that they never had before.

an argument begins, and someone updates their approach to talking to the other person in order to stop the argument.

the person who is incapable of doing this stands frozen in place in the face of new information and will fail to update their behavior in accordance with what they’ve learned.

8.) THEY CAN’T LAUGH AT THEMSELVES

this is a subtle one, and i want you to understand that being serious is not a sign of low intelligence.

quite the opposite in fact, as people who are genuinely intelligent often have a cynical view of the world.

what i’m referring to here is fragility.

a lack of the ability to laugh at yourself when you’ve messed up, or are in a situation that you yourself have placed yourself in.

someone messes up a pronunciation in front of someone else and everyone laughs instead of laughing along and moving on, they get angry.

someone points out an obvious mistake they’ve made, and instead of acknowledging it, you have a 25-minute long argument about how that mistake was not actually a mistake at all.

there is immense value in being able to view yourself objectively enough to admit to yourself that you were wrong or embarrassed and move on from that feeling afterwards.

people who can’t laugh at themselves often can’t be corrected either because the correction itself is too humiliating for their ego to handle.

9.) EVERYTHING IS SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT

this one is essentially the accountability umbrella.

i might dedicate a full post to it one day but here’s a short version.

you can tell a lot about someone by how they tell you the story of their life.

are they always the victim in every single version of events they tell you?

are every single one of their exes crazy?

is every single boss an asshole?

is every single business associate backstabbing them?

is every single friend two-faced?

is every single setback a result of the other person doing something intentionally?

sometimes people are genuinely the victim in situations and things genuinely do happen to them.

i’m not saying that people who say things like this aren’t victims in most situations.

but the point is that can they ever find themselves anywhere inside their own story as a cause of anything?

are you ever responsible for anything that’s happened to you?

what are you responsible for?

do you genuinely know what it is that you did wrong?

is it always something else?

is it always someone else?

if the answer to these questions is always something else and someone else in every version of events, it’s worth looking into.

when something goes wrong between you and that person in the future they will always be the victim in that situation as well and they will always blame you for it.

because it will always be someone else’s fault, and it always has been.

BEFORE YOU GO DIAGNOSING EVERYONE YOU KNOW

so what do you do with these signs?

i’ll tell you what not to do.

don’t just go walking around diagnosing people that you just met with low intelligence and as incompetent.

it usually takes more than a couple of conversations to really even see these patterns.

but besides that, everyone does some of this shit sometimes.

i’ve done some of this shit. you’ve probably done it too.

intelligence is a big umbrella that includes cognitive, emotional, social, physical, etc…

these are just things to spot out to see how expanded someones mind is. if you’re able to see these things before committing to something long term, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.

the point was never to catch someone using one bad anecdote a single time and immediately decide they’ve got the cognitive horsepower of a wet sock.

we’re human at the end of the day. one behavior means absolutely nothing.

but years of the exact same behavior repeating in every argument and relationship?

that’s something worth looking into.

because intelligence always shows up eventually, in conversation.

especially the second things stop going someone’s way.

ps. if you crave deeper knowledge, i save my best work for premium subscribers.

the premium side covers how to improve every aspect of your life, neurologically and psychologically. the stuff that changes how you see everything.

it’s in there if you want it. most people aren’t ready for it. it’s easier to choose consumption over action at the end of the day.

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+many more, click this to access the full archive

you wake up tired even though you technically slept.

your body hurts for no particular reason.

you feel anxious more often then before. maybe a little depressed. or perhaps just generally unwell for no discernable reason.

you can’t think clearly as well as you used to. you feel exhausted by 2pm. your digestion isn’t what it used to be. and you catch colds more frequently then the people around you.

and so you begin to rationalize away all these little annoyances

stress, getting older, poor diet, poor sleep, etc…

maybe that’s all it is

but maybe, just maybe, it’s something else. something that has plagued you for years in the background of your life. something that has made you feel this way while you blamed everything else.

a little something called inflammation.

inflammation is a physiological response your body makes to things like an injury or infection.

your body launches an attack on whatever is infecting or injuring you then calms down once the infection or injury clears up.

and it’s supposed to be temporary. that’s how the system is designed.

but chronic inflammation is different.

your body’s emergency response system just isn’t shutting down like it’s supposed to and is instead leaking into the rest of your life in the form of low-grade, persistent, long-term inflammation.

here’s a list of things that can arise from long-term, low-grade inflammation within your body:

chronic fatigue, insomnia or sleeping too much, pain throughout your body, joint and muscle pain, depression, anxiety, unexplained mood changes, constipation, diarrhea, acid reflux, weight gain or loss that isn’t compatible with your diet/exercise, getting sick more often then you should.

the list goes on as it can vary from individual to individual.

and this is where the danger lies.

the fact that many of these symptoms are pretty mild is what’s so insidious about this condition.

you see, a glaring symptom will often cause you to go to the doctor, have tests done and get a proper diagnosis.

but chronic inflammation isn’t quite like that.

it’s more like a slow poison, changing your life for the worse bit by bit until you’re living a life you didn’t realize was abnormal.

the other reason chronic inflammation is so insidious is that it plays a part in, or is a major factor in developing a long list of diseases.

cardiovascular disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, copd, allergic asthma, alzheimer’s disease, chronic kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease.

inflammation is responsible for a significant chunk of the diseases listed above but that doesn’t mean that it is the cause of all of them.

that’s not what any of the studies i’ve seen say.

this is just a list of diseases for which long-term, low-grade inflammation is either a contributing factor or a known characteristic, etc.

it’s a very important distinction to make.

hopefully now you understand why i’ve decided to write this post.

you don’t wake up at 58 years old and suddenly wonder how your body ended up here.

a lot of these processes have been running for years while you were busy calling the warning signs normal.

that’s why when we examine chronic inflammation, we have to look at it as a process.

and once you understand what that process is actually doing inside your body, a lot of problems that seemed completely unrelated start looking a lot less related.

it’s 7:52 am. black coffee, raw honey, candle going. rocket man by elton john playing in the background.

this one's more clinical than usual and more science-heavy than personal, but it might be one of the most important things i write this month.

let’s get into it.

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INFLAMMATION IS NOT THE ENEMY

before we go further, i need to correct something people get wrong constantly.

inflammation itself is not the villain of this story.

acute inflammation is actually a healthy response that allows us to heal.

when you are injured, have an infection, have some kind of tissue damage, or you get foreign organisms in your body, your immune system reacts.

blood flow increases to the affected area to initiate the healing process and your immune cells work to clear out whatever unwanted visitors you have such as pathogens and damaged tissue.

this is perfectly normal and healthy. inflammation is just one part of this process. your body can even exhibit this type of inflammation on purpose.

acute inflammation starts fast and can get severe quickly, but it's meant to be short-lived. think cellulitis or an acute case of pneumonia, lasting days rather than years.

the issue isn’t acute inflammation. your body needs that to clear out infections and heal wounds.

the problem is when your body is inflamed.

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above all else, i value loyalty.

it’s one of those qualities that i value over honesty, kindness, resilience, love and all the rest.

the reason is simple. i think loyalty is one of those things that is incredibly rare.

i see love all the time. love is something that i won’t say is easy to find, but it is common.

i see kindness. i see empathy. i see all sorts of things.

it’s also true that the polar opposites of these traits exist at a magnitude that’s equal or even greater than the ones that are good.

but the one that i find is disproportionately outweighed is loyalty.

it’s just something that i don’t see a lot of in this life.

it’s very hard to find someone that is truly loyal down to their core, that they display and maintain through every high and low, through thick and thin.

there is a reason for that.

loyalty, unlike many other virtues, is one of those things that is extremely hard for a human to demonstrate.

for most positive traits you can have a natural demonstration of said trait.

humans are naturally very emotional beings, and these traits can manifest themselves in moments where our emotions are aligned with the trait.

someone can be extremely kind, loving, or honest because they’re feeling good that day.

all of these traits are somewhat tied to emotion. people always have bad days and their behavior can be contingent on those bad days.

true loyalty is one of those virtues that is exempt from this rule.

it is a behavior that is performed by a person and it has very little to do with emotion.

a truly loyal person will demonstrate loyalty regardless of their emotional state.

they will show loyalty even if they’re angry, even if they don’t benefit from it, even if they have better options, even if they’re completely alone, and even if it’s inconvenient.

it transcends all other virtues and is strictly a behavior that is demonstrated on a repeated basis.

let me give you an example.

when genghis khan died, his burial party is said to have trekked for days through the wilds of mongolia before finally finding the perfect spot to hold his funeral.

the story goes that whoever crossed their path was promptly killed to ensure that no one would know where exactly genghis khan was buried.

when the burial ended, the soldiers who had dug his grave were killed by the rest of the soldiers, who in turn were killed by another group of soldiers.

and so on.

until supposedly no one living knew where the most powerful man in the world was buried.

to this day his tomb has not been found.

can you believe how crazy that sounds?

the man was already dead, so there was literally no point in keeping his burial location a secret.

he couldn’t reward them for their loyalty nor could he punish anyone for revealing his location.

he was nothing to them anymore except an empty shell that had sustained them during their travels.

and yet people still marched into the wilderness and willingly killed themselves to protect his burial site. which is pretty much the ultimate demonstration of loyalty.

this is exactly what makes loyalty so fascinating to me.

it transcends the natural order, and it made me wonder what it must have been like for those soldiers to value his life that much after he was already dead.

i think it’s an extremely interesting questions and it’s the reason why this post was born in the first place.

i want to explore loyalty and why exactly it makes people do the things that they do.

this post is powered by two cups of black coffee. no sweeteners today unfortunately.

but i’m enjoying the bitterness as i type this at 9:28am.

let’s get straight into this.

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LOYALTY VS. LOVE: FEELING VS. DECISION

many people assume that love warrants loyalty and the two are tied together.

the first part of that equation is true but the second is not always the case.

since love is an emotional state that can fluctuate over time. it’s not entirely in someones power to control who they fall in love with.

you can decide to be loyal, but you can’t decide to feel love.

someone can genuinely love their partner and still cheat. you can still experience attraction toward someone else which is exactly what causes infidelity even when you’re in love with someone.

people say if someone cheats on someone, they never loved them in the first place. but that’s not always true. love can be present and loyalty can be absent simultaneously.

that is the main thing i want to differentiate in this section.

feeling doesn’t automatically determine behavior.

we are very emotionally driven creatures. when emotions are at the forefront of our decision making it’s easy to become impulsive.

i like to think of it as the difference between motivation and discipline.

loyalty and discipline are both essentially self-imposed control.

discipline tells you to do something regardless of how you feel, for the sake of your future.

similar to discipline, loyalty always requires some sort of sacrifice.

whether that's rejecting an opportunity, suppressing an impulse, keeping a promise, defending someone, staying consistent even when you're frustrated, or choosing long-term commitment over short-term reward.

the strength of loyalty gets revealed when temptation shows up.

love can be impulsive and tied to your emotions.

loyalty is more disciplined and is something that you decide to do regardless of your emotions.

i think that is the main difference between loyalty and love, with one being much harder to demonstrate.

and there's also a well known idea in relationship psychology, called the investment model.

it states that people's commitment to a relationship is influenced by three things.

how satisfied they are, how much they've invested, and how good their perceived alternatives are.

i want you to pay attention to the third one because it’s where loyalty lives.

satisfaction is just love again. how good things are feeling and moving.

but the alternatives is what’s important. someone staying because they choose to and someone staying because they don’t have anywhere better to go are two different things.

they both wear the mask of loyalty but have a different face underneath.

someone staying cause they have zero good alternatives is not loyalty. there was no decision to be made and no impulse to be acted upon.

but if someone has alternatives and they still choose to stay and honor what they’ve committed to, that is the difference right there.

THE LOYAL BRAIN: WHEN LOYALTY BECOMES YOUR IDENTITY

repeated action turns into commitment, and that commitment turns into your values.

people tend to define themselves by what they say rather than what they do.

if you say that you’re always doing a certain thing, then that thing becomes part of your identity.

if you repeatedly go to the gym and you start to identify as someone who goes to the gym. saying "i am an athlete," becomes who you are.

the behavior becomes the default.

saying “i am loyal to you” is very different from “i am a loyal person,” since the second statement starts to become part of your identity.

you’ve decided on a certain level of self-commitment which is where loyalty comes into the picture.

that is essentially the whole point of building loyalty within yourself if you think you’re not a loyal person.

you have to start showing acts of loyalty and consistently doing it with people because then breaking your commitment doesn't just feel like you're hurting one person. it feels like you're violating your own self-concept.

it’s much easier to say that you’re “not that type of person,” rather than “this decision didn’t align with my values.”

that is actually how some research in moral identity has described it. researchers have found that people base their identity around certain values they carry with them through most of their lives.

if you were to describe yourself, you’d probably say things like

“i’m an honest person.”

“i’m someone who keeps my word.”

“i’m loyal to the people i care about.”

“i’m a kind person.”

the reason these values feel so automatic and the reason you're consistent with them is because they're part of your identity.

the behavior has no friction. if you were to violate them you'd feel like you were violating who you are, which is something you never want to do.

that is the point where loyalty turns into something more meaningful.

it moves away from being a decision that you make and becomes something that you feel is right.

there’s neuroscience underneath this too.

loyalty pulls in a lot of broader mechanisms in the brain as well.

things like self-control, reward, decision making, social bonding, and value-based behavior.

i’ve written about this before so i won’t go too deep here but your brain is constantly weighing immediate reward against long-term consequences.

it’s a battle we fight every day, all day, starting the moment we wake up.

impulse versus commitment.

you wake up and check your phone, or you wake up and go do what you’re supposed to do.

we do the same thing with loyalty.

we look at each situation in a relationship and evaluate whether there’s any personal gain or social value in it.

and that’s exactly why loyalty plays such a big part here.

it points toward a long-term commitment that has no immediate value attached to it and it consistently wins those internal calculations even when personal gain is almost completely wiped out of the equation.

i see this a lot with my friends and myself.

a friend asks me to help them and i don’t feel like doing it.

no one’s forcing me. there’d be no punishment if i didn’t. i could easily make an excuse.

but i show up anyway and they show up for me. every single time.

because it’s apart of our identity. i’ve decided i’m keeping my word on this and on who i am.

that’s why you start to see this pattern bleed into other parts of your life.

once you decide you’re a loyal person, it doesn’t stay contained to one relationship.

it shows up everywhere.

THE DARK SIDE OF LOYALTY: WHEN A VIRTUE BECOMES A LIABILITY AND BLINDNESS

up until this point i’ve been speaking about loyalty as this amazing thing, which it is.

but there’s a contradiction worth mentioning.

loyalty can become extremely complicated.

it isn’t inherently a moral thing that’s always good to do, like kindness, for example.

as i mentioned before, loyalty is a behavior.

more specifically, it’s a mechanism of commitment. and so far in this post, i’ve been talking about being committed to good things.

but you can also be deeply committed to doing something terrible.

the research on this is a fascinating dual finding.

in one set of studies, researchers primed people with loyalty before giving them a chance to cheat on a task for their group’s benefit.

and loyalty made people cheat less.

in one study, only 20% of the people primed with loyalty cheated, compared to 44% of a control group with no loyalty priming.

a second version of the same study found nearly identical results.

15% versus 43%. people primed with loyalty were also more likely to blow the whistle on unethical behavior they witnessed even when doing so could hurt their own group.

so loyalty in the absence of any real conflict actually makes people act more ethically.

it makes the ethics of a situation more present in their mind.

but then the researchers introduced competition into the picture. they told one group of loyal participants they were competing against rival groups for a prize. and the entire pattern flipped.

when competition was low, the more loyal someone was to their group, the less likely they were to cheat.

but when competition was high, the more loyal someone was, the more likely they were to cheat, and to actually lie outright to help their group win.

that’s the interesting finding.

loyalty isn’t a fixed moral compass.

it’s a commitment mechanism.

and when that commitment collides with a clear “us versus them” stake, it stops asking whether the action is right and starts asking only whether it helps the group win.

that’s where loyalty bleeds into tribalism.

i mentioned genghis khan’s soldiers dying to protect his burial site at the start of this post.

i used that example because it’s an extreme illustration of where loyalty can go.

it isn’t necessarily a good example of loyalty, because genghis khan wasn’t exactly a angel.

for the soldiers to go to those extreme lengths, genghis khan had to use extreme manipulation tactics to build that level of loyalty in the first place.

and you can see this same pattern in places far less extreme than mongolian warlords.

you see sports fans defending their team to the point where they become almost erratic and irrational.

you see employees covering and defending a company that wouldn’t give a fuck about them if they died, and would replace them within a week.

you see gangs protecting members while doing obviously illegal shit.

loyalty can get turned inward very easily, and it runs on the same ancient tribal mechanism.

“they’re one of us.” loyalty, which starts as commitment to a good cause or a person, quietly becomes about being “us” versus “them.”

which is exactly why i want to establish a massive distinction here.

healthy loyalty is not the same as blind loyalty.

you can be loyal to someone without agreeing with everything they do.

in fact, the most loyal thing you can do for someone is be honest with them and tell them when they’re wrong.

someone who’s always kissing your ass and playing yes-man isn’t a loyal person.

there’s a difference between constraint and choice.

CONSUMER LOYALTY: WHY BRANDS WANT YOUR BRAIN TO FEEL ATTACHED

your brain does not only demonstrate loyalty to people and concepts, but things, as well.

in fact you’re probably much more loyal to certain things than you are people.

you will often find people who demonstrate far more loyalty to brands than to people in their personal lives.

one of the main reasons for that is a phenomenon that has been dubbed the psychological loop of conditioning and expectation.

whenever you experience something that brings you pleasure, your brain will associate that pleasure with the circumstances in which it was experienced.

it will then expect that the same circumstances will bring about the same pleasure whenever you encounter them again.

and that will motivate you to seek out those circumstances so that you can experience that pleasure again.

that is how you start developing loyalty to certain objects or brands.

you go somewhere and have a good experience, and you start associating that level of satisfaction with the brand that provided it for you which is what leads to repeated visits and your overall loyalty to that brand.

say you go to a restaurant and have a great experience.

you start to associate that great experience with the brand of the restaurant, so you keep going back, over and over.

eventually, that familiarity and expectation starts influencing your decision before you even consciously compare it to alternatives.

you become extremely loyal to that restaurant.

you're out with friends and family and someone asks, "where should we eat?" and you always suggest the same place because you've built this deep admiration and respect for it.

and this can go really fucking deep.

on top, it's just conditioning. but underneath, you can factor this into identity-level change.

brands tend to market to become apart of your identity.

nike, apple, tesla, a sports team, a coffee shop. all of these have deep levels of marketing to make you deeply loyal to them.

they realize that it’s much easier to keep existing customers rather than find new ones.

your brain stops telling you “i should choose this product over these other products” and instead it tells you “other people that are similar to me choose this product”.

people will buy from companies that they feel are aligned with them.

that is why you can say that all these companies essentially sell their customers something to believe in rather than any particular item.

this ties back to the moral identity section.

loyalty becomes the strongest when it becomes identity.

these companies spend millions learning how to build that sense of loyalty because it makes them billions.

which brings me to my last question.

if loyalty is something that can be built and observed, how do you actually know when someone is loyal?

HOW TO SPOT REAL LOYALTY

this should be the most actionable part of this entire post.

first piece of advice. stop listening to words.

it’s easy to look on the surface and think that loyalty is something that is communicated.

but people talk all the time and never act.

you have to look at loyalty in action. don’t judge when everything seems to be going your way. judge when everything is going wrong.

observe their actions.

second piece of advice. consistency

simply put, who are the people that keep their word and who are the people that don’t?

if someone is somewhat consistent in doing what they say they are going to do that’s fine, that’s just being human.

but if someone continually fails to uphold their end of the bargain now that’s something to consider.

third piece of advice. cost

this might be the most important piece of advice, and it might also be the trickiest because it’s a little subjective.

you need to assess, what is their loyalty costing them?

if they aren’t losing out on something by being loyal to you, that’s a pretty strong sign that it’s not really an indicator at all.

if you see this person giving up their time or money, or opportunities, if they are consistently placing themselves at a disadvantage in order to help you out when you need it most that’s a pretty good sign that loyalty to you is something they value.

loyalty is usually most apparent when the cost is highest.

fourth piece of advice. conflict

judge by the actions that people take in disagreement.

in general we have disagreements with people that we care about most.

observe the actions that they take in regards to you while you are disagreeing.

do they turn on you immediately, do they reveal things that you told them in secret and use those things as weapons against you?

or are they at least civil despite the conflict.

or do they avoid personal conflict altogether?

this is a pretty telling sign. anger is when our emotions start to bleed out, when we stop behaving reasonably.

it’s much easier to maintain loyalty when you aren’t angry with someone, it’s much harder to be loyal to someone when you are angry with them.

fifth piece of advice. alternatives

this is the second most important piece of advice, and perhaps even the most telling, i mentioned it briefly before.

do they only have you as an option? that is an extremely telling sign.

if they really only have you as an option, you therefore have power over them.

that is not loyalty.

if they have a million other options and they continue to prioritize you anyway, that is loyalty.

so look around at the people in your life.

find the ones would could walk away easily and decide not to.

and hold onto those people.

they’re rarer than you think.

a lot of people don’t realize that we live in two worlds when it comes to social interactions.

imagine if you needed help with something extremely simple like a favor.

“can you help me move this couch?” or “can you help me change this tire?”

these are all things that are really easy to ask either a friend or a family member to help you with.

you wouldn’t ask your friend or family member how much they charge you an hour for help.

the reason is because with your family member and friend you already have a social frame established.

you’re relying on them to agree to the task because of a pre-existing relationship.

you assume a degree of generosity on their part and you trust that this relationship is somewhat reciprocal.

this is such an important concept because it’s an invisible assumption that underlies every social interaction.

there’s a conceptual difference in your brain when you help your friend out.

if it takes you three or four hours to move the couch, your friend isn’t going to come up to you afterwards and say,

“hey, you did me a three hour favor, so i’m gonna make sure to pay you three hours worth of money when i help you move.”

it’s more likely to be, “we’re the kind of people who help each other out.”

the social exchange doesn’t demand an immediate payback.

if you help your friend move today, you might help them study for an exam six months later. or you might help them drive somewhere. or get some good food with them.

now imagine you ask your mechanic to change your tire.

suddenly, the conversation of payment and how much you pay them per hour is not odd at all because we’ve switched to a market norm.

someone is providing you with a service and you can only provide them with something of equal value which is usually going to be money because money is the universal currency for measuring value for certain things.

we move between these two worlds constantly and we don’t even realize it.

the thing is problems tend to arise when we mix them up.

a lot of people make this mistake not only with money and favors, but they mix up social norms and market norms.

they end up fucking up the vibes of conversations and opportunities, whether that’s in a job interview, a social media post, or a situation where they need to gain value from someone else.

a lot of people don’t understand the art of reciprocation.

that’s what i’m going to be talking about today.

this just doesn’t come into play with favors and services either. it goes deep into your day to day conversation and even body language.

your brain is always making these calculations. so you should understand how to use this information to your advantage.

7:30am as i type these exact words. airpods in. hoodie on.

my notebook next to me has about 200 sticky notes sticking out of it because of this month’s daily posts.

research upon research upon research. my pen rests on top of it.

the monitor in front of me loaded with information we are about to go over.

let’s get into this.

this month’s been loaded with value and it’s not slowing down.

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THE SCIENCE OF RECIPROCITY

reciprocity is much more complicated than people think.

in a lot of people’s heads it’s an exchange. you do something for me and i’m gonna do something for you.

in reality it’s much more nuanced than that.

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all of us to some degree want to be seen, appreciated, loved, and validated.

it’s a primal part of our nature.

when we work on something, in the back of our mind there's always this thought of someone noticing this work, admiring it, loving it.

you want your ideas to matter to people.

you want to walk into a room and feel like people actually register that you exist and that you're someone who's important and needed.

but you want to know something fascinating.

as primal as this urge is, we as humans tend to be scared to fulfill it.

it really is so crazy when you see how many times this plays out.

human beings spend almost their whole life wanting recognition, but they also at the same time hide from it.

part of it comes from a level of self-awareness. the second you actually have to put yourself forward to get all of those things i said above, attention, love, admiration, something in you flinches.

because when you start to do that you come to the realization that people now watch you try.

and trying something publicly is terrifying.

it's terrifying in a way that trying something privately never is.

when you do something in public you risk the fear of being perceived.

you risk the fear of people seeing you fail.

i think the thing most people don’t realize is that they’re not scared of failing in itself but they‘re scared of being exposed when they fail.

other people seeing them fail is what makes them fear failure.

most people think that when they put out something into the world, the world will reject it.

we do everything we can to avoid that and to avoid the feeling of what that rejection represents for us.

but something interesting about all of this is what we fear is often what we already believe to be true on some subconscious level.

when someone rejects something about you or what you put out it doesn‘t create the wound, it only confirms it.

it just gives evidence to something that we already think to be true and we already feel to some degree.

it was just waiting for a signal or validation.

and 9/10 times that ‘thing’ isn’t actually objectively true.

all the stories that we tell ourselves in our heads about why we can't do things, or why we're not enough, or why we're inadequate, or why nobody will love us.

they're not true.

to your subjective experience they might be true but as an objective reality, they're not. they’re variables not constants.

and people need to understand that some part of the world will always reject you no matter what you do. which is why you need to be unapologetically authentic.

you need to step into this world as if you own it. you need to step into this world as your truest self and who you are in your core.

to be authentic is to be rejected by somebody

you will never be able to live the life you want if you let the fear of being perceived sit in the driver's seat and drive you to your destination.

because the fear of being perceived will take a right turn and take you to mars.

it won't take you to where your end goal is.

so let’s explore why the fear even occurs in the first place and most importantly what you can do about it.

beautiful morning to write today. feeling tired and wired at the same time.

this post is in honor of everybody that feels like sometimes the world has every eye on them.

like the world judges their every move and action.

this fear is what’s causing people to be paralyzed from taking action. it can prevent you from doing the stuff you want to do.

it can range from social anxiety to the fear of being physically seen by people walking by. to just the fear of putting yourself out there in a meaningful way.

the range is massive. so let's get into it.

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WHY YOUR BRAIN HATES BEING WATCHED

social connection is a biological necessity for humans and it’s not something that you can opt out of.

you literally need to be able to form functioning bonds and relationships with the people around you for the sheer survival of your own existence.

you need to be able to effectively communicate with others.

if you weren't able to fit in or be a part of a group or tribe, you would literally die.

good luck surviving on your own and trying to kill a bear for some food.

in our modern context, being unable to form bonds and communicate with people doesn’t put you in literal immediate danger but your brain still thinks it does.

which is why when you put yourself out there for people to observe you, your brain views this as a social evaluation and it wants to optimize your behavior for fitting in because your brain thinks that it’s survival depends on it.

this observation from others can be incredibly limiting to us because in the back of your head your subconsciously questioning if the social evaluation could be negative.

the threat response in your brain is primed to deal with that.

your amygdala processes the judgment of others much the same way it would process a tiger walking towards you.

those two things aren’t so different from each other in the grand scheme of the brain, they just have different circuits dedicated to them.

obviously, your amygdala isn‘t going to have the exact same response to seeing a tiger as it would to seeing someone judging you.

you’d probably have an stronger physical reaction like an adrenaline surge and a racing heart.

but your alarm system doesn’t need to differentiate between the two.

all it needs to do is make sure you’re sufficiently aware of the potential threat and it can do that by surging you with neurotransmitters that make you more aware of your surroundings.

this is why people who have a fear of being judged or rejected can become easily startled when someone looks at them with a judging expression.

all it takes is a little side eye or furrowed brow to trigger a full body response.

it’s also been shown that the parts of your brain associated with processing physical pain are the same ones that are engaged when you experience social rejection.

this is why you feel so physically bad when someone ignores you.

it’s why the last unread message you sent feels like a burning fire in your chest.

when your amygdala detects social rejection and danger, it tells your hpa axis to start pumping your body with cortisol and adrenaline which leads to the increased heart rate, sweaty palms, and muscle tension that characterize a fear response.

basically the explanation behind social anxiety in a nutshell.

on top of all that people with a fear of being judged or rejected often have an abnormally strong connection between their default mode network (the part of the brain associated with self referential thought) and their amygdala.

so they’re constantly feeding themself scenarios about how they’re being judged, without conscious control.

and this is a big part of what fuels the spotlight effect.

the spotlight effect is when you believe that other people are paying more attention to you than they actually are.

and there’s research on that too.

which takes me into the next section.

THE STUDY THAT SHOULD ACTUALLY CALM YOU DOWN

researchers ran a study asking one simple question.

it was centered around the spotlight effect and also tied to agoraphobia.

agoraphobia is the fear of being in public spaces where you might be embarrassed or helpless.

it's basically the feeling that drives social anxiety and it gets magnified in public spaces.

the research wanted to show if we overestimate how much people notice the ups and downs in how we look and perform in day-to-day life.

for example, if you’re having a bad hair day, do other people notice?

they had participants in a class seminar evaluate everyone, including themselves, for whether they were having a “good day“ or a “bad day“ based on their appearance.

across several sessions scattered through a semester, people also predicted how they thought their classmates would rate them.

across the board, people expected the bad days to register with others far more than they actually did.

the gap between what people expected and what actually happened was consistent and real.

then they tested it with something more objective.

a college volleyball team rated each other on how well they played during a series of scrimmages, and then they compared their predictions to reality.

people thought their teammates would judge them more harshly than they actually did, and they overestimated the variation between their own performance compared to their teammates’ by about 28%.

in a third variation of the experiment groups of people played a video game and then rated how they thought their performance was based on how they thought a teammate and a neutral observer would judge them.

people way overestimated how much their teammate noticed their ups and downs.

but they didn't overestimate how much a neutral, uninvolved observer noticed.

because the observer who had nothing else to focus on, actually was paying close attention.

the teammates weren't failing to care. they were just busy managing their own performance.

busy being the main character of their own experience, the same way you are of yours.

that's the whole mechanism in one line.

when you yourself are observing yourself and watching yourself do these actions, it's like you're watching yourself in 4k high definition and you're observing every single pixel on the screen.

whereas when people are watching you, they're watching in 180p and 30 frames per second, catching a single pixel at the top of the screen at best.

because in between watching you they're managing their own hair, how they're sitting, how they're looking, their own mistakes, their own internal monologue.

i can prove it to you right now with one simple thought experiment.

think about the last time a stranger did something embarrassing in front of you.

can you even remember it right now? (unless it was really recently, like yesterday, it’ll probably take you a while to think of an example)

in that moment you were thinking about yourself.

that’s the whole point.

people are consumed with themselves as much as you are with yourself.

in fact, we all think about ourselves more than anything else in our lives.

we hyper analyze everything we do and we obsess over it for much longer than we should.

we’re all the main characters of our own lives. our lives are movies and we’re the stars.

to you, everybody else is a supporting role.

to everybody else, you’re a supporting role.

THE PRISON OF THE IMAGINARY AUDIENCE

most of the things that hold us back in life are caused from this same fear of judgment.

nobody is actually stopping you from going after what you want.

it’s all in your head

when you decide not to wear that shirt because people will think you look stupid in it, that’s before anyone has told you that you look stupid in it.

so you’re already predicting the future based on your own self judgment.

every time you don’t post, or do a thing, or say the thing, or approach that person, or quit that job that was emotionally draining.

you did it to yourself. you preemptively judged yourself on your own behalf

you have this imaginary audience in your head that has a face and a body, and you think about how they see everything that you see.

if you’re predicting humiliation, you think about the exact details of that humiliation, and what the worst case scenario is where everybody’s pointing their fingers at you and laughing.

so you change your behavior to avoid that event that hasn’t even happened yet.

so you end up become invisible to everyone.

because that’s the only way not to be perceived by this imaginary audience that you’ve created in your head because you’re afraid of being rejected or judged by people.

you need to realize that if nobody can reject you, nobody can choose you either.

nobody will be able to love the work you‘ve shown them. nobody will be able to hire that version of you that they‘ve never met. nobody will be able to connect to the person you hide behind the curtain because you’re too scared of being rejected, perceived, embarrassed, or judged.

REJECTION IS THE PRICE OF ACTUALLY BEING VISIBLE

i’m not going to sugar coat this because it’s not something that can be sugar coated.

it’s the reality of things.

it's easy for me to tell you, "you're gonna step out and everybody will love you once you put your work out there," but that's not the truth.

even if it were all love, you'd see through it anyway.

some people just won’t like you in this life.

they’ll hate you for no reason. they’ll hate your guts. they won’t like your personality. they’ll think everything you do is stupid, your work. they will actively root against you, and they hope that you fail.

some people will reject you for reasons unrelated to you at all.

and that’s the cost you have to pay for visibility

but i think it’s a price worth paying ten times over.

when you realize your own authenticity then other people’s opinions don’t matter to you at all

think about the alternative.

the alternative is you build a persona that is optimized not to reject you, which makes you impossible to know because everything has been edited out of it.

everything has been curated for other people but you’ve changed yourself fundamentally in the process of doing that so you’re much harder to relate to.

technically to your brain you win because you do everything to avoid that rejection.

but we all know you don’t really win because you never actually were rejected.

nobody ever got to know the real you

that’s the tragedy of this paradox we’ve created that is so incredibly damaging.

you crave to be seen but you spend your life making sure that nobody can see you.

HOW TO ACTUALLY LOOSEN THE GRIP

here’s the practical part. it’s why you’re here.

so here’s what you can do about it

1.) accept the fact that people are going to have opinions.

regardless of what you do some of them will like it, some of them won’t, and most of them will barely think about it at all.

so operate as if no opinions matter. because at the end of the day they really don’t matter.

2.) shift forward and separate observation from judgment

pay attention to conversations and activities as you observe other people instead of focusing on how you think they see you.

someone observing you isn’t the same thing as someone judging you, and someone judging you isn’t the same thing as someone condemning you.

it’s easy to sit in your head and over-analyze a glance from somebody like you‘re in a courtroom and you have to defend yourself but you need to create distance and space between the observation of you and an action.

slow yourself down in that process so that you’re not just reacting in the moment.

3.) separate your worth from others’ opinions

again, as i‘ve said before, people are just going to reject you, and their opinions on you are inherently subjective.

the number one way that humans cope with internal insecurities is by projecting them onto other people when they see it in them so other people’s opinions on you are largely going to be a reflection of themselves and what they see in you.

what do you think. just because other people’s opinions are a reflection of themselves, does that mean they hold a sort of objective truth about you?

of course not.

it‘s a matter of what you think. this is your life. your reality.

they can only see a fraction of you, you’ve seen everything, and you know yourself best out of anybody.

4.) train your nervous system through exposure and understand that embarrassment won’t kill you

embarrassment is not easy to deal with, it’s something that people fear more than most other social emotions.

but people can get desensitized to it just like they can get desensitized to pain.

the more you expose yourself to it the less it affects you and your nervous system will stop responding to it in the same way.

the best way to do this is to simply start putting yourself out there.

post on social media often. post things that are only 60% ready. wear clothes that you think other people are going to judge you for. speak up in meetings that you otherwise wouldn’t, raise your hand in class and ask the silly question.

basically, train your brain to start getting used to the idea that you’re being seen.

because every time you put yourself out there and survive it, your next time will be a little bit easier.

your prediction of disaster will update itself a little bit.

and your nervous system will stop treating it like a tiger walking towards you.

that’s the game.

seduction is one of the most valuable skills a human being can possess.

and the beauty of it is, it can be learned by virtually anyone.

most people mistakenly think that it’s something that is inherent in people that are beautiful, confident, sexually assertive, daring, charismatic, and so on.

however, all of these things and more can be manifested by a truly seductive individual.

a truly seductive person has one quality that transcends all the things i listed above.

that being hyper awareness, or self awareness.

i know it sounds crazy, right?

i wrote a post a while back on the paradox of self-awareness and how much it can cripple you in social situations because you hyper-analyze every single conversation.

what to say, what not to say, how you’re appearing to the other person.

but one thing about life is that a lot of our flaws are like a double-edged sword.

sometimes they cut us. but sometimes they can be used to absolutely amplify us.

self awareness can be crippling but can also make you one of the best social creatures alive.

a seductive individual is someone that is hyper aware of themself and the other person.

they know when to reveal or withhold certain aspects of themself.

when to speak. when to be silent.

they doesn’t spill everything out in the first 20 minutes of meeting someone because they crave validation and attention.

they are aware of the fact that attention is a limited resource.

attraction is one of those topics that i am particularly fascinated by.

not only because i see it manifest itself in real life, but because when i try it out for myself it works.

in fact when you learn to utilize attraction, especially the right kind of it, it can change your outlook on life and relationships with people in general.

take one of history’s greatest seducers for example. casanova.

widely regarded as one of history’s most popular, most seductive person. i saw someone give him the nickname of a sex bomb while i was reading up on him, which was kind of funny, i liked that

he existed in the 17th century and was a man so notorious for seductive ability.

he wasn’t the most objectively attractive man by any means but he was so seductive that he could seduce almost any woman he wanted.

his reputation had nothing to do with physical appearance. it was purely build about how it felt having a conversation around him.

his storytelling and confidence made people feel as if they were enlightened.

which takes us to my first principle.

seduction isn’t about becoming more impressive.

it’s about becoming exceptionally good at making another person feel interesting, like they’re seen and validated.

6:37pm as i write these words.

doing an evening writing session. cloudy outside. just how i like it.

and the music fits in with the ambience.

let’s get started.

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PEOPLE ARE ATTRACTED TO THEMSELVES AROUND YOU

i’ll start off with an idea that’s kind of the underlying principle of being a seductive person.

i read this from robert greene. the idea that people are more drawn to how they feel around you than how much they actually like you.

obviously those are tied, because who you are as a person can make someone feel a certain way.

but the important concept to understand is that you can make someone feel emotions.

attraction is emotion.

as a seductive individual the goal is to not make the other person think “wow that person is amazing”.

that puts the focus on you and spotlight on you. for the person to come to that point it’s likely that you were leading the conversation in a way where you were mostly talking about yourself.

instead you want to make them think “why do i feel so amazing around this person?”

there is a huge difference between the two.

the former is admiration, which is good. but the latter is attraction, which is what you want.

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a lot of people think of things like sports, movies, television shows, etc as a diversion from the political world and what’s going on in the global sphere of things that affect people.

they call it 'bread and circus’, referencing the ancient roman system where emperors used the colosseum as a major political distraction.

whenever important political decisions were being made, the games started and the common people would flock to the colosseum to watch them.

effectively distracting them from the important matters at hand.

this worked well because it took the public’s attention away from things that could potentially anger them, like taxes and corruption.

and the colosseum also provided free or cheap food for the poor citizens so they would be sufficiently distracted and well fed so they wouldn’t riot or overthrow the government, which worked as well.

if you apply this concept to the modern world, a lot of people would say things like sports or theaters are the modern equivalent to the colosseum.

a means to distract the masses from the important things dictated by those in power.

is it true?

i think there definitely is some truth to it because all the things mentioned above are largely funded by the upper class and people in positions of power.

however,

i think the person asking this question and immediately putting the blame on the shoulders of the masses for not complaining enough or rebelling immediately misses the point entirely.

they tend to not allow themselves to enjoy these things completely which i also believe is a mistake.

take the world world cup for example. it just happened last month.

a sporting event that involves billions upon billions of people becoming emotionally invested in something that, materially speaking, actually has almost no consequence to their individual lives.

no matter who wins or doesn't, it doesn't really affect people at all.

some people look at this cynically and say it’s a massive distraction. that it’s a waste of time and whatnot, and that people shouldn’t be doing this.

i disagree.

people are quick to ask the question. why are people so stupid enough to watch sports? how can a meaningless game make a grown man or woman cry, scream, hug a stranger, feel genuine devastation?

it’s all a distraction, right?

but i think there’s something crucial that the cynical person misses.

human beings deliberately enter artificial worlds because ordinary reality doesn’t reliably produce the emotional states we need to feel alive.

the world is a hard place to live in for a lot of people which is why we deliberately enter these places to feel alive.

to escape from reality.

movie theaters do this so well. when you walk into a movie theater and you sit down in your seat with your popcorn, the movie turns on.

suddenly, you’re just disconnected from the outside world, and you’re placed inside this movie.

it’s such a surreal experience, especially when you’re watching a good movie.

the movie ends and you walk out the door and you just feel like you entered a different world. you just came from a different reality.

why is this? why do humans tend to go towards this? why do people dismantle it and try to take a position of intellectual superiority by saying it’s a distraction?

that’s what i’m going to get into in this post.

black coffee next to me with raw honey. ambient music playing in the background.

that’s another thing. music is another escape from reality that people use to connect. we’ll get into it deeper later.

whiteboard next to me is full of every section i want to go through. we’ll cross it off as we go.

let’s go

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SELF-PLACED EMOTION

let’s start with the most important thing of all. an interesting concept, that i personally learned from jonathan haidt called self-placed emotion.

his hypothesis was that humans are unable to generate all the emotions they need on their own.

you can’t simply sit yourself down on a friday night and decide to yourself, “you know what, i think i’m going to feel an immense amount of anticipation, followed by absolute confusion, followed by euphoria. i want to feel all of these things right now.”

you can’t just simply do that. the only thing that can make you feel those things, is an external source.

something placed onto you by other people that makes you feel it.

there are countless examples of these.

music, movies, running, the gym, art, religion, sports, partying, clubs, sex, and so on and so forth.

there are so many things that you can list off the top of your head, where we outsource our emotions to the world around us.

what we do as humans seek to feel every single emotion we can.

it’s much deeper than just wanting to feel good.

that’s what i want to explore with you in this next part.

i want to take you into the world of the movie theater and a sports game.

LET’S TAKE YOU TO THE MOVIE THEATER AND SPORTS GAME

this part is very visceral. no science here. just want to take you into these experiences.

let me take you inside a movie.

once you sit in your seat you look at the walls and it’s almost pitch black. the room almost fades away. the screen is like the light towards the gates of heaven and you just feel a shift in reality.

when the film goes silent you start to hold your breath and feel a heavy ache in your chest.

when you realize the character is in trouble or hurting, you yourself feel that same thing. it’s as if you’re living inside their pain. if the character dies you feel tears in your eyes.

the boundary between where you’re sitting and the world of the movie you’re watching dissolves into one.

you have a surreal emotional experience.

and then the credits roll around. there’s a crash of the music, and you just feel heavy and stiff after in this dark room.

you blink really hard against the lights of the room, and then you feel this strange wonder inside your quiet mind.

you’re back in reality.

or let me take you inside a stadium.

you’re standing around with 80,000 people watching a soccer game.

for 80 minutes, nothing has happened.

the players have just been kicking the ball around, and suddenly someone scores.

before your body has even had a chance to think, it’s gone into a frenzy.

the people around you are screaming. you’re screaming. you’re hugging the person next to you that you just met 30 minutes ago after they asked you to move so they could get to their seat.

feeling intense emotion and it’s becoming amplified with the environment that you’re in.

the whole stadium is synchronized and feeling this intense emotion.

then let’s say the referee steps in and he says he’s gonna review the goal because of a potential offside.

the stadium goes silent and everybody is just holding their breath, staring at the screen. their stomachs drop, and then the referee says it’s offside and the goal is disallowed.

think about what just happened here.

everybody collectively in the stadium went from a feeling of euphoria to uncertainty to dread to disappointment in about maybe two minutes.

there is nothing in this world that can give you that same experience.

nothing of natural origin at least.

this is why i want to make this deeper observation.

when you enter these escapes from reality, they’re not just things that you do.

you’re not just watching a movie or watching a football match.

you’re literally entering an emotional universe. temporary albeit, but an emotional universe that is unparalleled to anything you could experience in the real world.

imagine going from working eight hours at your job, a dead-end job which you hate and you only do because you have to do it to put food on your plate.

and you get the option to enter that world.

people would obviously go for that. humans go towards the path of least resistance and comfort. that’s what people pay for. that’s what people want.

where does this cross the line between being bread and circus, a massive distraction from the outside world, and just being something that we humans crave and want for our souls?

that’s what i want to talk about next.

WE ALL DO THIS

i think that it’s an interesting conversation to have about whether or not some of these things are really just a distraction or whether or not humans really need them in their lives.

i will say one thing that i absolutely hate is the person that looks down on people who enjoy things like sports and think of themselves as better for thinking so.

they think that people who enjoy sports are somehow lesser in their thinking.

to those people, i ask one question.

what do you do then?

they probably listen to music alone in their car while getting transported somewhere, either from work or school.

probably watch movies or tv shows and get emotionally attached to fictional people that don’t exist, like the movie example i gave.

maybe they go to art galleries and stand in front of a painting because something inside them moves, something they can relate to in real life.

maybe they go running because they like the euphoric feeling of runner’s high and how it feels after for the rest of the day.

maybe they go to concerts, reads novels, party, travel, fall in love.

i would say there is little to no difference between these things and sports and movies and all that type of stuff.

they’re simply all things we construct. these little machines for producing emotional states.

we all engage in things that distract us from the realities of our lives.

the only real dividing line between us all is which doors we choose to enter these realities.

and that is the point of this section really.

i am here to defend not shaming people for doing things to distract themselves when they do things to distract themselves because we all do it.

there is nothing wrong with doing so.

there is no dividing line that makes one thing better than another necessarily.

and even if there is, it’s not for you to decide.

THE OLDEST RITUAL WE HAVE

let’s explore deeper into this and speak about collective ritual

humans have engaged in collective rituals from ancient tribes to modern governments, for thousands and potentially millions of years.

sharing symbols, ceremonies, competitions, music, dances, festivals, religious rituals, games, spectacles to create a unified mass experience of something greater than themselves.

the things that we do today aren’t really anomalous in any real sense because it’s something that has existed for a long time.

take all the things mentioned before.

whenever we engage in them our individual self becomes submerged into a larger collective, united identity.

humans are tribal creatures and it’s easy for us to fall into this and it actually feels good.

in fact, quite euphoric.

it unites us on a scale that i think not a lot of other things can.

kind of similar to the engine behind revolution and revolt and the rise of people power in a way.

it’s the same engine as all of these things.

you don’t really know who the guy is next to you who is screaming next to you in the stadium.

you don’t know his ideology. you don’t know his politics or his wealth or his occupation or any of the other things that you might think define him.

but for a short moment while you’re watching a soccer match, your favorite team scores and you celebrate together.

and for that one moment, he is your brother. there is love and a real emotional heart.

i think that’s such an important thing to take away from all this.

we use these as a way to bond. a superficial bond? maybe.

but a bond nonetheless.

THE SMALL ESCAPES ARE THE POINT

all in all, i think we’ve been looking at this all wrong in a lot of ways

i think the fact that we engage in escapes from reality is a part of who we are as humans and it’s how we survive

i mentioned earlier that we live in a rough world. even if you are in a first-world country, we all have our own problems.

no matter how rich you are or how wealthy you are.

sometimes the world just feels really apathetic and it’s hard to get going in the morning and get through the day without feeling really down.

most people fall into this routine of waking up, going to work, eating, browsing emails, worrying about bills, getting stuck in traffic, having to get groceries, your phone and social media constantly bombarding you with stuff before you go to sleep and do it all over again the next day.

it’s a really boring cycle that really entraps you and makes you not feel much emotionally.

but imagine it’s wednesday night and you finish that routine. that same rigid routine that you did for the last two days.

you’re feeling pretty down and your friend texts you or calls you and asks you if you want to go watch the game or do something tonight.

you go out and you drink something. or you laugh and argue about your team for the millionth time or someone says something stupid and everyone laughs.

for that one night, for 3, 4, or 5 hours, you don’t think about any of the things i just said.

you don’t think about your emails or your job or the problems you might have back home.

it’s not something to dismiss. it’s really really important.

these moments are often what we look back on in our lives, they tend to be the moments that make up a good chunk of memory in our brains.

all the moments where me and my friends got together to do something or go somewhere or just hang out and mess around and have those indulgent moments.

we engage in these things to feel good which is what matters.

so i want to ask the cynic that reads this.

i think it’s completely fine for you to think that all these things are a distraction.

it’s not really my place to shame you for thinking so in any case. because there is truth in that statement.

but what are your distractions, then? is all i ask. what circuses do you indulge in?

i think spending your life constantly avoiding engaging in things that aren’t “materially productive, intellectually impressive, economically useful”, etc. is not exactly a great way to live, really.

all of these things are extremely important, but you can’t base your entire existence or well being on them.

because you might actually end up becoming really good at living a life you don’t particularly like.

in the end, a movie probably doesn’t matter to the universe, a song, that sports game.

none of it really matters to the universe, but you don’t need something to matter to the universe in order for it to matter to you.

maybe meaning isn’t found by escaping from artificial worlds but by willingly engaging in them.

want to know a dark secret about humans?

humans can be conditioned and trained the same way as dogs.

you give a dog a treat over and over again after doing the same action and that dog will forever associate the two.

and the dog will continue to do the action even when the treat isn’t given.

it’s how you train it to sit, stay, roll over, play dead. all the tricks.

there’s a ton of fancy scientific terms for it like positive and negative reinforcement, certain cues, habit loops, etc.

we use it on our pets and also when we raise kids. we use it a ton on them in order to make them not do certain things or do certain things.

pain is a huge disciplinarian as most people will say.

the reason being that when you do something wrong and then have something painful happen to you, you associate doing that thing with pain, and will avoid doing it in the future.

pretty simple concept, right?

it’s called behavioral conditioning, or classical conditioning.

it’s obviously not done the same way with humans as we are much more complicated entities than dogs or other animals who can be conditioned more easily.

we have a higher level of consciousness and self-awareness. along with extremely complex thought.

a dog can’t look at the moon and think “maybe i can get up there someday”, but humans can. this is why we are so much more intricate in this type of conditioning on a neurobiological level.

but once you understand the basic concept. you can start seeing it in action all around you.

from people you consider successful, to the ads that try to manipulate you into buying their product, to even your parents or yourself.

you begin to understand your life is made up of “anchors”.

some you choose, more are chosen for you.

once you understand how they work and how to use them, you can start to harness their power for your favor.

for example take tony robbins when he gives speeches. you’ll notice he often touches his heart, his head, then points forward before every single speech.

the average person would probably just file that away as nothing. even if they saw it multiple times they might think it’s an odd quirk.

but this is actually a conditioned response. tony robbins tells himself, subconsciously, that doing that action will make him feel confident and powerful. and it works.

you will actually see him walk up on stage and as he does this little gesture, it visibly drains all self-doubt and he becomes his most confident self.

a simple action, trained on his brain through hundreds or thousands of repetitions before he had control over it.

michael jordan had a similar thing going on where he always bounced the ball three times before taking a free-throw. then he would spin the ball around his hand, and then put it up for the shot.

he did that exact same sequence for every single free-throw he took in his career.

he made 83 percent of his free throws in the playoffs.

i attribute so much of my focus and what i’m able to get done on a daily basis to me conditioning myself.

i wrote a post a couple days ago about how life is really just a video game and if you play it like one you will see absurd returns.

in a video game there are glitches. cheat codes you can use to take an advantage. i’ve wrote about so many of them. neuroplasticity, game theory, the conscious and subconscious mind, health, sleep, diet, reversing cortisol dysfunction, maximizing hormones. the list goes on and on.

so today let’s introduce the next cheat code.

behavioral and operant conditioning.

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PAVLOV’S BELL

let’s start at the beginning because you need this as your foundation before anything else clicks.

ivan pavlov and a dog.

pavlov wasn’t looking to discover this when he did. he was a russian physiologist, experimenting on dogs, studying digestion.

he noticed that his dogs would naturally salivate when they got food.

nothing surprising about that. i do that sometimes when i’m hungry and smell food.

however, he noticed that they would begin to salivate before he even gave them food.

the second his assistants would come into the room the dogs would start drooling.

he began to test this, and found that he could ring a bell, and every time he did, he would give the dogs food. eventually, the dogs learned that the bell meant food, and they would begin to salivate at the sound of it.

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i want you to imagine yourself at 80 or 90, somewhere serene, looking back at your life.

what would that person want you to do today?

what would they want you to have recorded? called? created? stopped worrying about, when you had the time to stop worrying about it?

i’ve found eight of them throughout my life tucked behind the lessons of my parents, grandparents, my friends, who said the right things at the right moments.

these are the eight things i actually collected from all that time spent listening.

i don’t want this to be rules for how to be someone successful.

consider these rules for making a life into something you can actually be happy with as your own.

the most mundane moments are often the most sacred.

and we don’t realize that we’re living through the moments we’ll want to revisit until they’re already gone.

every year, i hear someone say it, “i miss 2016” “i miss 2010, when everything was simpler” and ten years from now, those same people will be saying “man, i miss 2026” “i miss 2030”

we live in this perpetual cycle. constantly manufacturing nostalgia for the past while completely failing to appreciate the present the exact same way in real time, as it's happening.

this is your life, man. this is the time.

the past years were great. this year is great. the future years will be great.

but that same cycle we’ve trapped ourselves in is the thing that’s stealing all the moments we want to revisit from the present

your parents telling you that same stupid story for the thousandth time, your mom laughing in the kitchen for no particular reason, your friend hanging out doing nothing with you, your dog barking at some unseen force outside, driving somewhere with the windows down at night, your childhood bedroom, exactly as it was.

they all seemed perfectly mundane when we were inside them, the kind of things that don’t invoke any deep or reflective thought when you’re in the moment.

the kind of things we barely register as occuring

but as we grow older and we leave them behind, we realize how special they really were

how much would you pay to go back and sit in that kitchen for five more minutes?

so here are the eight things.

eight particular things i think you should actually do, before the moment you’re living in becomes a moment you’re wishing you could revisit.

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1. MAKE SOMETHING THAT OUTLIVES YOU

there’s something strange in the makeup of humans. we intrinsically have some desire to leave evidence that we existed.

i’ve talked about the psychological concept before. it’s called terror management theory.

basically a large part of human behavior is deeply driven by an unconscious fear of mortality.

and i think people always take this and assume that it’s the idea of trying to build something that lasts generations.

that new innovative idea that changes the world or building that massive company that changes lives.

all noble pursuits, don’t get me wrong.

but i think there’s more practical things to do, that in some ways are more important for your soul.

plant trees, write books, make music, sculpt, paint, create art, donate to a cause that continues long after you’re gone

it doesn’t have to be something big. something that will make an impact on humanity at large.

it can be something small and tucked away. something only discovered by your children or grandchildren or maybe someone who found it in your things and reads it, wondering if it was somebody’s father, or mother, or grandfather.

my mom gave me a box a while back of my grandma’s things and it had a book in it with her writing in it.

her notes and journals and random ideas and i was struck by how much of her mind i could see in that one little book. how much she thought about that particular hobby of hers, how much i recognized in her handwriting, since mine was so similar to hers.

i almost asked my mom “when did i write this” thinking maybe it was something i’d written as a kid that had somehow gotten in with her things. and that’s the beauty of this particular rule, right?

she’s been gone for a while, but a part of her mind, her thoughts, her personality is in a book in my possession and it hits me in the gut on some random afternoon half a decade after she died.

and also we live in an amazing time where we have something called the internet.

think about the difference between physical and digital legacies, something you make with your hands versus something you publish online.

something handmade might last a while but something published has a much longer lifespan, sitting on the internet long after you’re gone.

readable by someone who’s never met you.

when i started this publication, it was never with the intent of leaving behind some digital footprint for others to stumble across long after i’m gone.

it was more just a means to put my own thoughts out there, mostly just a dump for my own mind, for things i’ve thought and worked through and want to put out there for others to find and maybe work through with me.

who knows how long i’ll be writing this thing for.

either way, those things will outlive me, sitting on the internet for years and years and years after i’m gone.

and i think it’s neat to imagine some stranger stumbling across one of these particular posts 10 years from now and thinking “man, this is really something special”

the beauty of something that outlives you is that it doesn’t need you to stick around for it to continue.

it exists independent from you, and just by virtue of existing, makes the person who made it feel good, like they were here.

the aim is to make something that quietly reminds you, i was here.

2. RECORD THE VOICES YOU LOVE

we’ve gotten so caught up in taking pictures of everything, of making sure we have a permanent record of everything important in our lives, that we’ve forgotten to record the things that matter most.

sound.

the camera to me is genuinely one of the coolest inventions of all time.

the fact that we can capture a moment and hold on to it, look back on it in the future, and see it exactly as it was when we first saw it.

people thousands of years ago would have killed for the ability to capture a moment like that.

some emperor or pharaoh might have paid handsomely to have his child’s face immortalized in oil paint, so that it might outlive him and serve as a reminder of his son when he was young and handsome.

and now we have that same power in our pocket and rarely use it for anything besides food and landscapes.

so use that power.

record everything, not just the pretty things.

everything that makes up a moment, everything that makes up a person.

a photo captures the look of someone in a particular moment, but a recording captures everything else, the things that a photo just can’t convey.

the thing about memory is that it doesn’t work like a camera.

that every time you recall something, you’re re-recalling it, not remembering it as it actually happened.

and you’ll be surprised how quickly someone’s voice will start to fade if you only ever remember it from memory, even if you heard it a thousand times in your life.

don’t wait until a funeral to discover you only have photos of someone who’s no longer here.

record the voices of the people you love, your parents telling that same stupid story for the thousandth time, your brother being annoying, your lover telling you about something really cool, your kids being bad at pronouncing words.

record it all, because one day, you’ll wish you could go back and listen to it all again.

and i promise you, when you’re watching old home videos and hearing yourself talk, you’ll thank me for this one.

a photo shows you what someone looked like, but a recording shows you that they were real.

3. LEARN WHERE YOUR LAST NAME CAME FROM

your last name is something of a relic, something strange and unimportant that you didn’t really have a say in

but you can trace it backward.

through your parents, through your grandparents, through old records, old jobs, old countries, old languages, old everything

you don’t need to become a genealogist and trace five hundred years of your ancestry for this one but you should acknowledge that this part of your name didn’t come from you, that it came from someone long dead who might not have been anyone special at the time .

whose name you’re likely using every day of your life.

part of it is simply the fact that it’s yours, you have to know it to feel whole in a way since psychologically we form our sense of self from the stories we tell, including the fact that we tell our history to ourselves.

cut that thread and a part of your self-awareness dies with it

so ask your parents. if they don’t know, ask your grandparents, while they can still answer. write it down, because here’s the depressing truth about this particular rule.

one day, you might be the only person left who knows where it came from.

it’s an important part of who we are as people.

something we use to identify ourselves, to attach ourselves to a family history that stretches far longer than we can possibly know or understand.

so why not know where it actually came from?

4. SPEND ONE BIRTHDAY GIVING SOMETHING AWAY

birthdays are strange things, the way we’ve built them around this one question.

what am i getting?

presents and attention and cake and everyone gathered around you, focusing on you and your needs for one day out of the year

and don’t get me wrong, your birthday is your day.

it’s important, it should be celebrated.

but i want you to spend one particular birthday doing something different, doing the thing you rarely do because it’s not really expected of you.

spend one birthday giving something away, giving your time or your attention or your presents.

take your parents/lover/siblings/friends/kids out to dinner.

do something nice for them, instead of the other way around on your special day.

there’s real science behind the fact that giving feels good, stimulating the same part of the brain as receiving strengthens the bonds between the people giving and the people receiving.

but there’s something else that happens when you do this.

when you spend one day out of the year treating someone else like they’re the one special person in the world, instead of treating yourself like you’re the one special person in the world.

it humbles you and puts you in a different headspace and that’s something you can’t quantify, only feel.

another year of life shouldn’t only be focused on what other people give you, but on what you give to other people.

5. MAKE SOMEONE’S LIFE BETTER BECAUSE YOU WERE HERE

this rule is one of those strangely easy things that most people seem to avoid for no real reason.

compliment the barista at the coffee shop, tell the old man in the park that his dog is beautiful, tell your friend what you always appreciated about him or her, something you never really said before.

i know it can be difficult to do.

to approach a stranger and say something nice, but most of that difficulty is manufactured in your head.

you’re imagining the interaction through your own anxious filter, when in reality, the recipient might be carrying that kindness with them for the rest of their day or even for the rest of their life.

there’s a strange sort of ripple effect to this kind of thing.

something that can move outward in waves and influence the people around you in ways you can’t predict.

one stranger’s kindness can shift someone’s mood, which can in turn shift their behavior, which can then influence the next person they meet who might carry that positivity with them for the rest of their day.

it becomes a chain reaction.

and you’ll never see most of it because it’s all outside your perception but it’s all still there.

no less real for being unseen.

think about it from the other angle. about how that kindness affected you personally.

when it came from someone else, out of nowhere, unexpected and unplanned.

you remember it, don’t you? you replay it in your head and think about what it meant to you, disproportionately high compared to the moment itself.

you don’t need to change someone’s entire life to make this rule count. sometimes all it takes is a small shift to make a tuesday feel a little less gray.

i think it’s fair to say that most of us will never truly change someone’s entire life but everyone has the power to make it feel just a little better.

and i think it’s one of the best things you can do.

leaving behind some small kindness for the next person to carry with them even if you never know where it goes or who finds it.

6. GET LOST AT LEAST ONCE IN A NEW COUNTRY OR PLACE

this world is an interesting place.

in that we’re living in a time where every corner has already been mapped, photographed from orbit, turned into another dot on the map we stare at from our couches.

we’ve missed out on the era of discovery. where we had explorers who set sail into the unknown looking for something we couldn’t define, just because it was there.

and i think we’re already looking forward to the next era of that where we start pushing outward into the stars.

only to find ourselves equally incapable of reaching them at least for the time being

so explore the world around you while you’re still capable of doing so. while you’re still young and you have time

and no, it doesn’t have to involve fancy hotels or long treks.

of course you should do those things, when you can, because money and time are both finite resources that we should spend as we see fit.

but you don’t need to go overseas for this rule.

get off the beaten path, miss a turn on purpose, wander until you find a road instead of waiting for the road to find you.

explore the world around you, the places you already know but don’t really see, like the woods behind your house, or the abandoned building you pass on the way to work, or the neighborhood you drive through every day but never spend any time in.

because there’s real value in seeing the places you know from a new perspective.

your brain will thank you for it since things we actively seek out tend to stay with us longer than the things we find without really looking.

the things we do by accident tend to stick with us longer than the things we wanted to stick with us.

the detours are more memorable than the destinations.

7. LEAVE ROOM FOR WONDER

adulthood has this nasty tendency to turn everything into an exercise in value.

calculating how much something is worth and whether we should pursue it based on the return on investment it has in our lives.

it’s how we end up spending our lives doing things that make others rich while doing little to enrich ourselves.

everything we do is calculated, we look at what it gives us and the cost of doing it and decide if it’s worth our time and energy.

and in chasing value, we strip things of meaning, of beauty, of the sheer joy that comes from doing something just because it’s there.

and we forget that life isn’t something we should optimize. it’s something we should experience.

so do things that accomplish nothing. just to have done them.

stare at the stars for no reason. watch the sunset without capturing it. play a musical instrument that serves no practical purpose. read books that don’t teach you anything. visit museums with no interest in the curated collections.

spend some time sitting in beautiful places with no particular goal in mind other than being there

there’s real science behind the benefits of doing these kinds of things, since marveling at the sheer scale of things around us has this interesting side effect of putting our problems in perspective.

it’s all just another way to take something that should enrich your life and turn it into a productivity hack.

don’t optimize the wonder out of your life, you already spend enough time doing things to become more productive as a human.

let some things just make you feel good for no particular reason

8. SAY THE THING WHILE YOU STILL CAN

last one but to me maybe the most important one.

this is the one i wanted to end with, since it’s probably the rule that actually burrows itself into your bones.

i speak from experience when i say that the cats got my tongue too many times in life.

we put off important conversations in our lives assuming we’ll have another opportunity and another time to say these things

i love you. i’m proud of you. thank you. i’m sorry. you changed my life more than you know.

we treat these conversations as if we can put them off indefinitely, as if whatever thing we want to say will still be there when we finally decide to say it.

but they’re not guaranteed. they might not be there at all, might be locked away forever.

the only thing left is a memory of what was, what could have been if only we’d spoken up in that moment.

and that’s a fate that should befall few things in life. least of all the things that matter most to us, the things we hope will bring us joy or comfort or reassurance in the moment that we need it most.

so don’t make the people you love have to guess at how you feel, just tell them.

say the thing while you still can. because once that moment passes, it’s gone for good.

and no matter how much you might have needed that conversation to happen, it’s too late, it’ll never happen now, because the thing you wanted to say will always be something you never did.

i’m telling you i love you

now go tell it to someone else in your life.

you take anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 steps a day. that means, on the lower end, that you repeat the exact same movement pattern nearly 2 million times every single year.

now, that’s a lot. but most of you aren’t really thinking about it, are you?

you’ve been walking like that since before you had any control over your body.

you’ve been running the same gait routine since before your prefrontal cortex was even mature enough for conscious thought.

and you’ve never really stopped to ask yourself “wait, how does this even work?”

and that would be fine if your program was flawless.

but it usually isn’t for 90% of people.

because whatever pattern you’ve been running or whatever patterns your body has adapted to has been written into your neural architecture by thousands of hours of repetitive, reinforcing practice.

thousands of hours of walking a certain way is thousands of hours teaching your nervous system exactly how to move.

and this is, again, all while you weren’t thinking about it at all.

your posture, your knee problems, your hip pain, your lower back pain, your foot pain, the way you hold your neck.

any of these might be side effects of a movement pattern you’ve practiced hundreds of times every day for a substantial chunk of your life without ever stopping to consider how it could be done better.

the way you walk is one of the most important things in the world. there is an optimal gait pattern.

look at the picture above.

all of the greatest athletes of all time move with straight feet, high inner ankle bones, and their heels trailing away to transfer pressure.

if you look at the average person walking today they have crooked feet, collapsed arches, and their heeling moving inwards as opposed to outwards.

this is literally a suboptimal way of walking. it wears down your joints and keeps you from being your healthiest and most athletic self.

the upside to all this is that the same principles can be used to change it.

which is why this post exists at all. a broad look into your gait, the relationships between your body’s parts and how they move, and some interventions that will allow you to write a new subroutine for your nervous system

so you can stop walking like that.

it’s 8:14 am. candles are flickering, music playing softly, the sun is rising.

i’ve just finished my morning run.

part of the reason why i’m writing this post is because since i started running regularly, i got exposed to a whole range of information relative to how my body works that i previously were completely oblivious to.

imbalances, rotational tendencies, points of failure, everything and anything that could possibly be found in the intricacies of your movement pattern will present itself when you start putting in the volume.

so let’s talk about it.

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YOUR WALK IS A DOWNLOADED PROGRAM

let’s begin with the neuroscience, since this is where the whole thing begins.

your brain is not consciously controlling all of your muscles when you walk.

it would fry itself trying.

since walking is a complex motor pattern and a coordination challenge, your brain is not in a position to calculate all of it’s movements and loads of each joint in real time

that’s why the process had to be automated in the first place.

through a motor program downloaded by the brain at some point during early development and it was fine-tuned on an ongoing basis to the point of becoming unconscious and automatic.

this is the same motor program that allows you to type on a keyboard while walking or eat while engaging in a phone argument with your friend

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have you ever stumbled across such a beautiful view that you felt it physically?

you walked around a corner on a street you’ve never been before and the sun hits the building in just the right way and something in your soul says “yes.”

or you’re driving around in the evening and the sky does that thing that it does maybe four times a year. the orange-purple blend. and it’s so beautiful you stop the car and just sit there like a stoner staring at gas in the air.

or you catch the face of a stranger across the room and before and you’ve had any conscious thought about them your heart is already racing.

it’s an odd sensation isn’t it?

because nothing is physically happening to you.

you aren’t getting food, or drinks, or sex, or any of the other basic needs.

all you’re doing is watching things receive light. photons hitting your eyes.

but your brain is giving you little bits of happiness as if you’ve just eaten a meal.

why does this happen?

why does seeing something beautiful provide the same stimulus as accomplishing something?

there’s a whole field to explain that feeling. it’s called neuroaesthetics.

it studies the space between beauty and the feeling of beauty.

and what they found out is going to change the way you look at the world forever.

beauty is not something that exists inside objects waiting for you to notice it.

it’s a value that we put on things.

and if you understand that and how to use it, then you understand why art moves you, why context can make you love something visually, why pretty people get far more attention, and why you can stare at mountains that terrify you and still not look away for hours at a time.

i love mountains, i’ve hiked almost every one near my area and some in the dolomites while in italy. i’ve always wonder why i had a pull towards them.

there is something about standing atop a mountain after hours of climbing, looking out over the earth and seeing the beauty of the plates that collide to make it all.

so i went a found out.

it’s 7:22 am as i write these exact words. couple of shots of espresso down the hatch.

beside me is my paper full of neuroaesthetics research with strange little patterns on the side that i have no memory of drawing,

it must have been while i was hypnotized researching,

anyways let’s get into this.

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BEAUTY IS A VALUE, NOT A PROPERTY

the first thing to understand is that when you look at something beautiful your brain doesn’t turn on some special art module.

there’s no little museum in your skull that only opens for pretty things.

in reality, your brain is using the same circuits for art and beauty that it uses for sex, drugs, food, and anything else you find yourself craving.

faces turn on the orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens, and dorsal striatum. if those terms mean anything to you it’s because i’ve written about the reward circuitry before.

so your brain is basically a giant valuation system, and beauty is just another stimulus it wants to assign a value to.

now, what does that mean for us humans?

you see this at play almost all the time.

conventionally attractive people get rewarded disproportionately and systematically across a range of social contexts.

beautiful people are considered to have better personalities, to be more successful in their careers, to have happier marriages, and even to have better moral character all via the halo effect.

that’s not a value judgment coming from you as a person. it’s your valuation system putting these assumptions in your head.

the same exact circuits are responsible for assigning value to everything from the food you eat to the people you date, and beauty is something your brain has decided to value just as much as those other things.

and it’s not just people you see this in.

the beauty of the space you live in has an enormous impact on your willingness to stay there.

the sheer volume of people trying to hang out in spaces that are considered beautiful suggest that beauty is more than just a superficial preference and it’s actually a deep drive.

WHY MAKING SENSE OF SOMETHING FEELS GOOD

here’s where the science gets interesting, and where i think most explanations get it wrong.

you’ve probably heard the evolutionary explanation for art and beauty, that we like symmetry because it’s an easy marker for health.

done. neat little answer.

sure it’s true to some degree. but what’s more important is that making sense of something feels good.

the reason we gravitate towards things that are easy to predict is less simple than you might think.

what scientists have found is that when something is easy to understand, your brain actually creates a feeling of pleasure at the success of comprehension, and this has a lot to do with processing fluency.

researchers did an experiment where they asked people to evaluate three types of artworks. some with matching titles, some with nonsense titles, and some with no titles at all.

people found the matching titles more appealing, which makes sense.

but what’s interesting is that people who saw the matching titles had their smiling muscles flex more strongly than anyone else.

in other words,

giving a key that lets you make sense of something makes you happier and not just intellectually satisfied.

and if we’re getting pleasure from understanding the world around us, that might explain where some of our aesthetic preferences come from.

order is appealing because we find it easier to process, and ease of processing is linked to feelings of pleasure in the brain.

however that doesn’t mean that randomness is automatically ugly.

pure randomness is boring, it’s the static on the television that makes you want to change the channel.

perfect order is also boring though. too much predictability bores us, which is why pure patterns like grids are just as unappealing as random white noise.

what we’re looking for is something in between.

songs that have a strong groove but surprise you with interesting variations, paintings that have recognizable elements but put them together in a novel way.

all of these things challenge your brain and engage it, since it has to figure out what’s going on, but it isn’t overwhelming because there’s an underlying pattern your brain can use as a foothold.

the feeling you get from successfully making sense of something is connected to why understanding is so important to us.

you’re looking for a puzzle you can solve.

WHY IS NATURE SO OBSESSED WITH SYMMETRY?

look around, at anything, really.

two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, a face that is split down the middle into two matching halves.

flowers, leaves, butterflies, snowflakes, the catalog goes on.

everything has some kind of regularity to it. it’s organized around symmetry.

so ask yourself, with a brain that evolved in a world full of these patterns, wouldn’t it make sense for us to be particularly attuned to them?

evolutionary psychologists argue that beauty is an indicator of health, and by proxy, genetic quality.

and they’re not wrong, but they’re also not telling the whole story.

this is the more complete version.

“evolutionary accounts propose that facial attractiveness may signal things like fertility, gene quality, and health. that's the hypothesis. but attractiveness is clearly influenced by a bunch of factors at once, some stable and developmental, some short-term and plastic.”

in other words, beauty is often an indicator of how fit someone is, but it’s not a perfect indicator. it’s complicated by a range of other factors, both related to long-term development and random fluctuating ones.

the same principles apply to your own perceptions of attractiveness as well, because you’re doing the same calculations your brain does, only unconsciously.

symmetry is generally good but it’s not actually as important as other indicators of developmental stability, and the reason you don’t consciously think about developmental stability is because your brain handles all of that for you.

you’re not sitting there calculating everyone’s attractiveness based on how symmetrical their face is, it’s already been done for you, and you’re simply reacting to the results.

which is actually how most of our perceptions work.

our brains handle all sorts of complex, multi-step calculations for us, and present the result as some automatic, intuitive “feeling”

BEAUTY ISN’T IN THE OBJECT

researchers have an interesting theory about where aesthetic experiences come from.

they believe it comes from three systems interacting with each other, known as the aesthetic triad.

sensory-motor: perception and action, what you’re actually seeing, hearing, touching, feeling. plus, weirdly, your motor system, because looking at art that depicts action fires the same circuits you'd use to do it.

emotion-valuation: how much you like or dislike an experience, and the degree to which it impacts your emotional state.

meaning-knowledge: everything you know about the object, or the world in general, that might make you like or not like it. including cultural associations and memories.

now what makes these interesting is that when you experience beauty, it’s the interaction of all three.

not any one of them happening at once.

you don’t even have time to process what you’re seeing when you’re having an aesthetic experience, because sensory and contextual information begin interacting within 200-300 ms of seeing something, meaning before you’re even consciously aware of it

this suggests that your brain isn’t putting together a beautiful image and then evaluating it, it’s asking multiple questions at once.

what am i looking at? do i like this? what does this remind me of? what has this been associated with? what am i supposed to think about this? and am i motivated to do anything about it?

and then it puts them together in some strange cocktail and presents it to you as an aesthetic experience. all of that at once, and the output is a single feeling that arrives as, “that’s beautiful.”

to demonstrate this, researchers did a particularly neat experiment.

they showed people abstract art images while in a scanner, some of which they labeled as coming from a museum, and some as computer generated.

the images labeled as museum pieces were more aesthetically pleasing than the ones you know were computer generated.

but what’s interesting is that people who thought they were looking at museum art had increased activity in their medial OFC and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the reward centers of the brain.

meaning that they actually found the images more pleasing on a neurological level.

the same pattern occurred when the same images were labeled as being from the museum of modern art as opposed to an adult education center.

when realistic portraits were labeled as authentic vs fakes, the authentic ones increased OFC activity as well.

so the next time you think about something as being intrinsically beautiful, you might want to consider that beauty was manufactured in your brain.

it wasn’t found in the object at all, because the frame around the object changed the way your brain reacted to it.

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WHY YOUR BEAUTIFUL ISN’T MY BEAUTIFUL

if beauty is a computation, and everyone has similar hardware, shouldn’t we all agree on what’s beautiful?

no.

take a case of judging attractiveness on a set of faces.

two people have the same opinion on average once every 2-3 times, which is between 10-25% variance between people.

one study put it at 50-50.

half of what you think is beautiful, is beautiful to all humans on earth.

pause here and think about this.

half of your taste is not universal taste.

think of it like a human aesthetic operation system but everyone uses different apps on top of it.

we get the same default biases from being primates with a certain brain structure, and then the thirty years of living and learning overwrite some of those defaults.

culture, memory, exposure, romantic partners, associations between things, status, repetition, trauma, luck.

all of these things and more can influence your taste and change it dramatically throughout your life.

your taste in art is dictated mostly by how much you’ve studied art.

people who haven’t studied art tend to favor surface features and content in the picture like color content or subject matter.

the more you study art, the less often you like representational art, and the more you are drawn to works that demonstrate structural stuff underneath.

eye-tracking studies have shown that art professionals and normal people look at different things when looking at pictures of art.

the picture remains the same, but the way an art amateur and art professional look at it is worlds apart.

so here’s a thought.

taste is not universal, but rather built up from learned perceptions of the world.

taste is not something you were born with. you learned to see things.

you developed more perception and the world got brighter and richer.

this is actually good news because it means your taste can be improved upon.

if you experience the world as bland it’s probably because no one has taught you how to see the beauty in it.

WE DON’T ALWAYS WANT BEAUTIFUL THINGS

i could go further and say that wanting beautiful things is actually a pretty strange thing for humans to do. if it were strictly about pleasure we’d only seek out pretty things like calm sunsets and pleasant music.

but clearly we don’t.

we seek out horror movies, sad songs, terrifying landscapes, art that disturbs us, stories that gut us.

we do ranges of things from wanting to achieve goals that bring us pleasure to avoiding things that cause us pain.

but the thing is those two aren’t always linked.

wanting and liking are often conflated, but they’re actually separate things.

most of the time, we’re using the same circuits for liking and wanting,, particularly when it comes to our reward system.

the ventral striatum, which drives us to seek out rewards, and the pleasure we get from achieving our goals.

in general the more we experience one, the more of the other we get.

but they’re definitely not the same thing.

especially when it comes to addiction, which can involve vicious cycles of wanting without liking.

deep aesthetic experiences may be a type of liking without wanting.

however, because of the strange way we think about them, they’re often conflated with other experiences.

philosophers like kant and shaftesbury have an interesting concept about art and beauty called disinterested interest.

sometimes when we look at something beautiful we don’t actually want to consume it, claim it, or interact with it.

we simply enjoy looking at it, and the pleasure we get from that has nothing to do with us getting anything from it.

“i once loved a flower so much that instead of picking it up, i let it be.”

if you think about it this way, beauty is a type of pleasure that exists outside of normal reward pathways and your ability to experience it is an extension of your ability to be interested in something without desiring to use it, consume it, or modify it.

which is a strange and wonderful power to have.

interest can be a type of motivation, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the driving factor.

this also explains the strange pull we have towards things that aren’t beautiful, but provide us with a feeling of grandeur and scale.

the idea of the sublime.

the experience of the sublime seems to be it’s own thing neurologically.

researchers found that while the medial OFC was active for both beautiful and sublime scenes, scenes that were frightening didn’t produce as much activity in the medial OFC which is typically associated with value judgments of beauty.

the neurological response to the sublime is distinct enough that some researchers believe it to be a separate phenomenon.

it’s also why we have a strange relationship with sadness.

it’s widely accepted that sad music can be a particularly powerful aesthetic experience, that music with sad themes are both more common and more effective than their happy counterparts.

there’s something particularly interesting about the combination of sadness and beauty in an aesthetic experience.

research suggests that this is partially explained by the fact that sadness is not actually what people are seeking, but rather a context that makes certain emotional states feel safe and accessible.

so when it comes to art, aesthetics, and beauty, it’s important to remember that context is everything.

our basic motivations apply everywhere from sad music to scary movies to art that makes us think.

SO WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT BEAUTY AT ALL

so this is what all of this comes to.

aesthetics are one of those places where perception, prediction, reward, memory, emotion, biology, and meaning meet as one.

we’re constantly evaluating everything in front of us, running complex calculations about its value to us, and storing those calculations as memories, rarely stopping to think about any of it.

and sometimes, when those calculations are particularly interesting, when the balance between prediction and surprise feels especially gratifying, we call the experience beautiful.

which means that the sunset, the building, the person you saw, weren’t inherently beautiful

you were.

or more specifically, the interesting combination of thoughts in your head were.

and the strange thing about that is, if you can upgrade your brain software and improve your ability to have these interesting thoughts, you can have more beautiful experiences.

you can be exposed to more information and notice more things around you, which leads to you encountering more interesting moments where prediction meets surprise.

which are then categorized by your brain as aesthetic experiences.

so go out and notice things, and seek things.

upgrade your ability to have beautiful experiences.

because the world is amazing and you’re already doing it.

so why not do it more?

for years, people thought that running a mile in under four minutes was impossible.

people didn’t consider it to be just a difficult, exceptional feat.

people thought it was a feat that would never be achieved.

the four minute mile was sort of like a psychological barrier around human performance.

people who ran, ran with the belief that this would never happen.

people who ran, ran with the knowledge that those who came before them tried, and failed.

so much failure had been piled upon itself, that this barrier became a fact, not a limit.

then on may 6th, 1954, a man named roger bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4.

he beat it by a hair’s width. but he beat it, nonetheless.

roger bannister proved to everyone that the four minute mile was possible. so what happened next?

what happened next was that plenty of other runners over the years joined in on the fun.

within a few years, the four minute mile went from being an impossibility to a logical feat that could be achieved with extreme dedication.

what was it that changed?

did oxygen concentrations in the air start suddenly pumping up? did our bodies mutate overnight, becoming stronger, more elastic, with greater endurance the moment roger bannister crossed that finish line?

no.

the only thing that changed was our perception of what was possible.

we all had some kind of internal limit, a point beyond which we are incapable of seeing ourselves passing.

roger bannister broke through his, and by doing so, broke it for everybody else.

the next moment, people weren’t saying “this is impossible”. they were saying “this is possible”.

by changing something from an impossibility to a possibility, you make a huge difference.

your relationship with it changes.

that’s what i want to talk about today.

these self imposed limitations we give ourselves.

i think they’re lies. i think almost all of them are.

yes, there are limits to things in life. there are things you cannot do, things you can’t achieve.

for example, i can’t suddenly walk out my front door and start flapping my arms expecting to fly. i can’t breathe in space either.

shit, sometimes i do think i can fly. but that's another conversation about my delusion.

but objectively my body is bound to this earth by gravity and certain biological necessities.

these are limitations but they’re built into the system. there are certain laws of physics that can’t be toyed around with, and certain rules that can’t be bent.

these are real imitations and they’re not going anywhere.

what i’m talking about are the other kind.

the kind that aren’t actually limitations at all.

the kind that are just phrases that sound really good when you say them. phrases like

“i’m not smart enough.”

“i’ll never be rich.”

“i’ll never be able to create something like that.”

“people like me don’t do things like that.”

“i’ll never be able to have friends.”

these are all phrases that are not limitations. these are all predictions.

you’re predicting your future based upon your past. that’s where self imposed limitations come from. by doing this, you’re predicting things so that they become reality.

you’re keeping yourself stuck in a place you don’t want to be.

i’m going to deconstruct all of these and prove to you that they’re lies, that they’re just things you tell yourself. i’ll dissect self-imposed limitations as if i were operating on a patient. i’ll take you through how to dismantle each of them, piece by piece.

i’m going to show you that they’re nothing more than lies in your head.

stack of lined paper beside me.

my notebook ran out of space a couple of days ago and i haven’t had time to grab some new ones. lined paper does the job well enough.

papers are filled with my notes from research for this post.

some papers are from yesterdays post. some for today. even some research for later posts already in the works.

today’s paper is on top of the stack, with the pen resting over it.

my room smells like willy wonka’s factory.

got a cocoa candle lit. mix that with black coffee and it feels like i'm in a different reality.

let’s get to it.

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WHAT EXACTLY IS STOPPING YOU?

i want you to take a moment to think of something you’ve told yourself that you can’t do or you think is unrealistic for you to achieve.

don’t cheat by picking something silly like flying or turning into a car.

pick something that isn’t bound by universal laws.

pick something that you actually want. something that you truly believe you will never be able to achieve.

starting a successful seven-figure business.

getting so ripped you look like a real-life captain america.

having enough self-confidence that you walk into a room like your gatsby.

traveling the world and visiting every country like you were an ancient explorer.

gaining a huge following online.

becoming excellent at whatever you care about most.

whatever it is for you, i want you to bring it to mind.

now i want you to ask yourself this. what exactly is keeping you from it?

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one of the top five feelings in the world, and i think we can all agree on this, is sitting around with your friends or family and simply laughing your ass off until tears are flowing down your face like a river and your stomach genuinely hurts.

that moment where you forget about all of your problems and that laughter takes you away and places you in another reality.

it’s pure bliss and euphoria, it’s something to live for.

humor is an integral part of communication in our day-to-day lives, as well as determining how we form friendships and social bonds with people.

we don’t generally become close to people who have an entirely different sense of humor from us.

and that’s the beauty of humor, it’s subjective.

sure, there are some universal things that the masses can collectively agree are funny. but we all have different senses of humor and different things we tend to find comical.

i find it fascinating that certain people’s brains can find something hilarious that it makes them pee their pants, but another persons brain finds the same stimulus to be incredibly offensive and disgusting.

what gives?

today i want to talk about it because it truly is fascinating.

being funny is a skill that some people have ingrained into their personalities, whereas some people are objectively bad at it.

we oftentimes mistake funny people for people who can give really good jokes, but that’s not necessarily accurate all the time.

an important part of humor and being funny is that it’s a series of different skills that contribute to the funniness of a person.

it’s pattern recognition, timing, prediction, social intuition, and controlled violations of expectations.

think about people in your life that are really funny.

i can virtually guarantee that the funniest people you know aren’t standing around telling jokes they researched online or watched on youtube and decided to tell all day.

they’re more likely just naturally funny, which is something we can’t really control or research, it’s just instinctual.

they just happen to notice certain things that other people don’t, and they happen to make those observations at the right time, which is possibly the most important part of being funny, which we’ll talk about shortly.

but this is the superpower of people who have humor and are funny.

they can make seemingly normal, everyday situations seem extraordinary and impossibly funny.

a couple nights ago i went out to dinner with my cousins and i laughed my ass off, which is pretty much always the case when i’m around them.

they’re my brothers, my people, just people who happen to have the same sense of humor i do.

and that’s what sort of inspired me to write this post, because during the dinner i had laughed so hard that my face actually physically hurt.

if you’ve ever laughed so hard that your face hurts, you know what i’m talking about.

and during this laughing episode, i realized that i’ve never really stopped to consider the neurology and science behind simply finding something funny, because it’s such an integral and important part of our lives that it honestly defines who we are, so i want to discuss that today.

i’m currently fueled with 400mg of caffeine, some ambient music playing. you know the vibes.

let’s go

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WHAT HAPPENS IN OUR BRAIN WHEN WE’RE LAUGHING

laughter is an incredibly complex neurobiological phenomenom that involves networks for affective, motor, and social processing.

our brain utilizes two separate systems to execute laughter and they act as a dual system.

the first system is spontaneous laughter. it involves subcortical structure like the brainstem, the periaqueductal gray, and the anterior cingulate.

this is the system that is primarily responsible for involuntary laughter as a response to stimuli such as humor or tickling. it’s evolutionarily ancient as we share this type of laughter with other animals as well.

the second system is volitional laughter. this is produced by cortical networks that are associated with speech and motor control. (basically it’s largely similar to how we process speech.)

this second system is responsible for laughter as a voluntary expression of social connection.

as a result of these systems, laughter produces so many different neural processes.

prefrontal cortex - analyzing the punchline and managing social response

nucleus accumbens - processing reward and pleasure and managing the surprise associated with the stimulus that made you laugh.

amygdala - controls the emotional response.

hippocampus - recalls the contextual memories associated with whatever made you laugh.

all these little parts working together to make you feel that amazing feeling of laughter.

your brain is a pretty incredible organ right?

and in the meantime your entire brain becomes filled with neurotransmitters such as endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, while also decreasing the amount of stress hormones in your body like cortisol.

which is why i said laughing is euphoric in the intro. it literally induces a state of euphoria neurologically.

we don’t have a central “humor center”. it’s simply a number of systems involved that contribute to laughter.

another important thing to mention is that our brains utilize various expectation systems in order to process humor.

these systems are responsible for detecting violations of our predictions, and they help determine whether that violation is funny or not.

take this for example.

you’re talking with some friends at work, discussing work stuff and how it’s been really stressful lately.

that’s the expectation. your brain has built up a context for the conversation, so when one of your friends decides to change the subject and say something goofy, that’s the violation.

when your brain detects this, it can update its model of the conversation in order to process the laughter and humor.

the sheer pleasure and satisfaction that comes from detecting this violation is responsible for the feeling of laughter and humor.

detecting these violations of our expectations is necessary for us to laugh and for us to find things funny.

but the violation in and of itself isn’t sufficient for something to be funny.

after all, someone could approach you and scream in your ear. that would ruin your day and you’d find their actions reprehensible rather than funny.

humor needs us to interpret these violations of context as safe and non-threatening, and it also needs to have some relevance to the current situation that we’re in.

it’s the delicate combination of violating our predictions and keeping it safe and contextually relevant that allows something to be funny.

missing out on any one of these components means that we aren’t going to laugh.

LAUGHTER AND HUMOR AREN’T ALWAYS THE SAME THING

it’s easy to assume that laughter and humor are the same thing. they’re actually not. laughter is simply a response to something we find funny.

most of the times it’s an involuntary response. sometimes it’s a conscious response.

but either way it’s a reaction to a stimulus that we interpret as funny.

you would be surprised as to how deeply embedded laughter is into our evolutionary history. it’s serves a crucial social function. which is the reason why we share laughter with other people much more often that we laugh by ourselves.

there are certainly cases where we can find something funny when we’re alone like watching a funny movie, or reading a funny book, but we tend to laugh more around people.

we use laughter to communicate to the people around us that we understand them. we share a similar context, and therefore we’re able to laugh at the same things, which makes laughter a really important tool for reinforcing social bonds, or even building new ones.

there’s nothing quite like sharing a laugh around the dinner table with someone.

a single interaction we find funny can make us feel incredibly close to someone, as if we’ve known them our entire lives.

and that’s why i think it’s so important that we recognize that laughter is actually a social bonding mechanism.

it’s the reason why we fake laugh when we hear something that we don’t find funny, because we don’t want to damage our social bonds with the people around us who find it funny.

laughter is really a social lubricant, and we utilize it in our day-to-day lives to strengthen our social bonds.

that’s also why the difference between humor is so important, as we’ll discuss in the next section.

WHY HUMOR IS SO SUBJECTIVE

if you think about it, humor is simply the detection of a violation of expectation in context.

if that’s the case, wouldn’t everybody find the same things funny?

wouldn’t everybody detect the same context violations?

but that’s not what happens.

as touched on earlier, one person can hear a joke and find it absolutely ridiculous, whereas another person can hear the same joke and find it absolutely hilarious .

so what’s the difference between these two people?

when we find something funny, we’re not simply detecting a context violation in isolation.

we’re actually detecting it alongside our internal model of the world, and evaluating it in light of that model.

when we hear a joke, we use two specific things in order to find it funny.

we evaluate it in the context of the situation that we’re currently in.

and we evaluate it in the context of our internal model of the world.

that model of the world was built from all of the experiences that we’ve had up until that point in life, from all of our memories, personalities, cultural backgrounds, age, level of intelligence, interests, and our relationships with the people who are currently telling us the joke.

when it comes to humor, all of these factors contribute to how likely we are to laugh at something.

i personally think of humor as prediction. it’s deeply connected to our ability to predict what’s going to happen next, specifically with context violations.

our brains are basically prediction machines, because we need to predict what happens next in order to survive.

jokes are all about context violations, and context violations are what cause surprise in us, which leads to laughter.

but whether or not we actually interpret that surprise as something funny largely depends on the model of the world that we’re using to make that prediction.

and that’s why i think it’s safe to say that everybody has different humor because everybody has different models of the world.

all of our internal worlds are built using different contexts and experiences.

therefore everybody utilizes different predictions when detecting context violations.

WHY A FUNNY PERSON CAN CHANGE YOUR ENTIRE DAY

let me take a step back from all of the neuroscience for a second.

funny people are typically people who carry an internal calmness with them, who have an incredible ability to deescalate situations, to make things less stressful and less intense.

they can take even the most stressful, awful situations and make them seem a bit more palatable and less awful.

all through humor.

but they can also take even the most embarrassing situations and turn them into a funny story, something that becomes an embarrassing tale that gets recounted for years afterwards.

funny people are the ones that make these better environments for us to be in, and when we’re around funny people, we often just want to be around them more because of that.

if you have a problem in your life a funny person can make a joke about it and make you realize that it’s not the end-of-the-world type of problem that you thought it was.

humor has a way of doing that, of taking the size of a problem and making it feel smaller in our heads.

WHY FUNNY PEOPLE ARE ATTRACTION MAGNETS

humor is generally considered one of the most attractive and sought-after traits in a person.

if someone can make us happy and induce feelings of pleasure, that increases their desirability in our eyes.

what better way to do that than making someone laugh?

especially if they’re the sex we’re attracted to. if they already have other traits that we find desirable then we’re likely to pursue them romantically since they increase our pleasure receptors.

people who make good jokes are also giving information about themselves. as we talked about above, they have to be intelligent enough to make those jokes, socially aware and observant enough to know when to say them, and confident enough to say them despite potentially embarrassing themselves in the process.

you don’t consciously clock all of that when you hear a good joke from someone but something in your does realize it and you feel a pull towards that person.

it’s also worth mentioning the halo effect here. if someone has one good trait we tend to assume everything else about them is good too. since humor is such an important trait, we're often willing to overlook another persons flaws.

someone can be conventionally unattractive but if they know how to be funny they can be the most attractive person in the world.

that’s the power of humor. that’s why it plays such an integral role in our day-to-day lives.

but there is a fine line between someone who’s naturally funny and someone who desperately wants to be funny. it’s oftentimes so easy to recognize which side of that line somebody is on.

people who are really bad at jokes and at being funny oftentimes try to compensate for it by making lots and lots of jokes and shooting them in all directions.

people who are actually good at it only say jokes when they’re appropriate and needed.

since most of their jokes miss the mark and aren’t really funny at all, they come off as desperate for approval, which makes them less likable

but this doesn’t apply to everyone.

there are some people who are actually good at making jokes, saying the right things at the right times in conversation, and delivering their jokes with the appropriate timing so that it lands better.

these people are more attractive to us because of their social skills.

the confidence that they display, and their ability to read the room and utilize humor in order to strengthen their social bonds with other people doesn’t go unnoticed.

WHY TIMING MATTERS MOST

i want to take a moment to discuss why timing is one of the most important parts of humor, and why it’s one of the most under-discussed parts of it.

if you say the same sentence at different times in entirely different contexts, it can be really funny at one time, and it can be completely dry and unfunny at another.

the entire nuance of humor lies in the exact time that it’s delivered.

as you’ve read in the previous sections, much of humor is about context, and what our brain predicts for a particular context.

that’s why it’s so important to understand how timing functions within humor.

in fact, you could even argue that timing could even be the entire mechanism behind humor.

because it’s the difference between delivering the punchline while the prediction window is still open, and delivering it after it’s already been closed and resolved.

naturally funny people tend to do this intuitively, as they have an incredible ability to read the room and understand the emotional and social cues that are currently being emitted and processed by the people in the room.

they can then find an opportunity to insert a joke or a funny remark that catches everyone off guard.

they can capitalize on the surprise and emotions that the situation puts everyone in, and produce humor that is effective in that particular context.

this also explains how you can be genuinely funny with some people, but not really funny to others.

sometimes it’s not that someone’s sense of humor is really different from yours.

it’s just that they’re just not familiar enough with the context and the social cues in a particular situation which makes it harder for them to capitalize on them and produce humor.

by the way, this also explains why stand-up comedy works so well, because they’re performing in an environment that’s specifically built to allow them to utilize these context cues to their advantage.

they’re in a room of people who are all expecting jokes, and everyone’s social and emotional cues are open and accessible to them.

they’re in an environment where everything is primed to make it easier for them to deliver jokes, and therefore funnier.

if you’ve ever watched stand-up comedy on tv or online, you’ve probably noticed that it’s often not as funny as seeing it live, and that’s because it’s harder to deliver jokes to an entire auditorium when you don’t know how they’re all individually reacting to them.

if one person starts clapping, then the entire room will follow suit.

if one person starts laughing, then the entire room will follow suit.

THE REAL ART OF BEING FUNNY

so at the end of the day, being funny was never about memorizing jokes and delivering them.

because that’s not effective. never has been.

it’s more about developing your model of the world, your prediction engine, and your ability to recognize patterns, as well as your sense of timing and social intuition.

the funniest people you know tend to utilize a combination of these things, and they often recognize patterns that other people don’t.

i honestly think it’s a superpower.

it’s like being able to pull people out of their reality and put them in an entirely new one.

they can see the absurdity in a situation and make observations that other people aren’t able to make, as well as understand context in a way that other people can’t.

and most importantly, they understand that being funny is about managing and controlling other people’s perspectives.

they can manipulate that to get people to see the world in slightly different ways for brief periods of time.

when their audience realizes that they’ve been made to see the world differently, they laugh as a result.

that is the art of laughter and humor.

ps. i’ll be posting consistently for the rest of the month, all the deeper stuff i save for the premium side.

it’s for the people who are actually serious about change and implementing this stuff

if you’re interested, click the button to upgrade.

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check out some premium posts:

the one thing our brains crave more than anything else in the world is this.

evidence that your actions are leading to progress.

that, above all else, is what sets everything into motion.

motivation, discipline, addiction, everything.

our brains are always craving this progress. it finds evidence of it, and it rewards us with this hit. encouraging us to do more. if it doesn’t find any evidence of progress, it will completely halt what we’re doing.

one of the better analogies i’ve seen for this is video games.

anyone who has spent 200+ hours grinding their way to level 100, doing the same dungeon over and over again just to farm some XP, and staying up until 4am trying to grind those levels will understand what i am talking about.

no one is telling you that you need to do those things. you don’t have to use discipline or motivation to play video games.

you could play them 24/7, never feel any guilt over anything. after all you’re free to choose.

so why does the same brain that is willing to do such stupid things for video games, reject spending just an hour every day improving themselves, and building their skills in life?

video games figured something out. they feed your brain constant, undeniable evidence of progress.

real life doesn't.

the game shows you the XP bar filling. the number climbing. the level-up animation. new gear every few minutes. every hit says you’re getting somewhere, keep going.

real life hides all of that.

you work on your body for a month, two hours a day, and the mirror looks the same. you grind your business for months and the bank barely moves.

let me show you what it looks like when you flip it.

every game has daily quests. little repeatable objectives that hand you XP for showing up. your life needs the same thing. you wake up and they’re already loaded.

cold shower. +5 discipline, +3 endurance.

morning workout. +10 strength, +5 endurance, +3 discipline.

read 15 minutes. +5 intelligence.

work on your income skill. +10 wealth.

meditate. +5 clarity, -10 stress.

do these every day and they stack. and it gets addictive.

and you don’t want to miss a day because consistency multiplies your gains.

the streak is worth more than any single day inside it. once you feel that multiplier climbing, you’ll do almost anything not to reset it to zero.

that’s one mechanic. there’s a whole system, and once it’s installed you become the kid who can’t stop grinding levels at 4am, except it’s your real life.

let me show you how to run the whole thing.

i just finished lifting and read a chapter of autobiography of a yogi while i cooled down.

in my head that’s +20 physical, +20 knowledge.

not joking, that’s how i see it. two stats went up before 9am.

and the wild part, the day’s not even over and i’m already excited to wake up tomorrow and do it again.

it’s fun as fuck. most addicted i’ve ever been to anything, and it’s building me instead of rotting me.

let me show you how to get here.

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WHY GAMES OWN YOU

let’s break down what a game is actually doing to you.

a game is a machine for manufacturing the idea of progress. that’s the whole point of them. if you strip away all the other stuff, this is the part that makes someone feel like they’re actually achieving something, beating the game, etc.

it gives you the goal. kill the boss, get to the end level, whatever it may be. you always know what you have to do to proceed.

it’ll give you an easy-to-track indicator of where you are in the process.

if it’s some level, you know you’re currently at level 1, 2, 3, 4, or you can see the bar that fills up as you play. every action that you do in the game will contribute to it filling it up or going up and you can track the progress visually.

it’ll reinforce this with immediate feedback. you killed the enemy, you get XP right there and see your level up.

everything is right there with no lag between the action and it’s result.

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our mood is an important part of our daily lives and can dictate many of our actions in our day to day living.

and there are so many places where we feel like a completely different person based on our environment because it puts us in a certain mood.

think about it.

you have a certain way you act at work and a different way you act at home based on the different moods you’re in.

you’re a different person at school than you are with your family.

your family would not recognize the ‘you’ at school.

you act one way around your friends and another way around your family.

that alone changes your mood.

we all wear different masks in different rooms.

that’s one of the most important things to understand here. that constant switching and that constant mask we put on when we enter different rooms can destroy our moods.

but outside of that we also have day-to-day mood swings.

mood swings are a big part of everyone’s life.

that sudden flip in your mood that has you questioning where the good mood went, or where the bad mood came from.

you wake up in the morning and you feel so happy, ready to conquer the day.

you hit that good morning workout, you hit the work session, you eat healthy food, you drink your water, you take your vitamins.

you feel like the best person in the world, happy that you get to do everything you need to today, motivated like you can go get it done.

but then something happens at 8am. a text. a text from someone that makes everything dark and you just can’t understand why today sucks so much now.

or the exact opposite can happen. you wake up in the morning feeling like you got ran over by a truck. you feel like a zombie walking around and you have no idea what’s going on.

but then in the middle of the day something happens. you feel so good, you’re having the time of your life, you’re really in your skin and you want to do everything you need to get done.

you feel so good and can’t understand why earlier that day you were dead.

your mood is a swing. yes, it’s called a mood swing, and a swing is a swing, but a swing on a playground isn’t the same as a mood swing.

i did not mean for that to sound like a tongue twister. but you get the point.

when you’re on a swing on a playground you know when you’re going to stop or when you’re going to slow down.

you have control of it, or at least you can predict it. you know when you’re going to come back down and you feel it on the swing. you know your trajectory.

a mood swing is not that type of swing. they aren’t predictable. they’re not something you control, or even know when you’re going to change.

most of the time they just take you someplace you don’t expect or want to be, and leave you questioning when you’re going to get back.

let me explain to you why this happens and what the science behind it is.

it’s 9:48am as i write this very sentence.

black coffee with raw honey sits next to me, steaming up. i had half of it already before i’ve finished this intro, so i might need another glass before i can even finish.

my vanilla candle is burning, ambient music plays slow in the background. “long whale song” by sympho cat, probably one of my favorite ambient songs of all time.

sun peaks through the window right where my chair is, where i do most of my thinking.

i woke up today in a great mood. fitting for a post about moods, but we’ll see if it can survive writing this post.

who knows, if i hit a writer’s block somewhere i might not feel so good.

either way, let’s get into it.

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WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING WHEN YOUR MOOD FLIPS

so what’s the neuroscience and psychology of the day to day, hour to hour mood fluctuations that all of us experience?

your mood is entirely chemistry. neurotransmitters in your brain, chemicals of various kinds, released in your brain.

there is a whole set of neurochemicals and neurotransmitters that you’ve heard about endlessly, from dopamine to serotonin, endorphins, norepinephrine, and so on and so forth. the entire squad.

the relative levels of these, essentially, are the dials for your mood.

think of it like a dj with his soundboard and he has a hundred sliders on this mixing, and every single slider is a chemical.

there’s one for dopamine, one for serotonin, one for oxytocin, for whatever else you want to include.

your mood is whatever song is playing as a result of the mix. if the levels go up, you feel good. if the levels go down, you feel bad. this is essentially what it is.

the problem is, these dials often get messed with by the stupidest of things.

i think of it as a curse, really.

imagine that you skipped a meal. i’ve done posts on fasting before, on intermittent fasting and the benefits of it, autophagy and so on.

but let’s say that you skipped a meal, and your body was expecting three square meals a day. well, your mood is going to take a hit.

your fuel reserves are going to be low, you’re going to be lacking in nutrition, you’re going to be lacking in neurotransmitter production, which will induce feelings of depression, melancholy, irritability, rage.

but on the other hand, if you were able to engage in some outdoor activity, some nature exploring with your dog, then your dial is going to move upwards.

your mood is going to change in accordance with the dial.

if you played with your dog for four minutes, you’re going to have oxytocin released in your brain, which is going to move that particular dial upwards, and you’re going to feel happy.

you’re going to feel human.

if you didn’t get any sleep, if it was that time of the month, if you had gone out and gotten drunk the previous night, if the weather has sucked for the past three weeks, these are all things that are going to push your dial in various directions.

all largely not by your design or by your doing.

this is why we can have these unexplainable moments where we feel like shit for seemingly no reason.

we look outside and it’s like, “why do i feel this way? what is this all about?” because it’s not about anything in particular. it’s usually not one single thing.

it could be one thing, it’s possible. but it’s more often the case that it’s three little tiny things, little nudges in one direction that your brain doesn’t notice that accumulate.

then all of a sudden there’s this bad mood that you can’t explain, that seems to come out of nowhere.

the sky was grey outside, you got cut off in traffic, your coffee spilled on the floor.

three little things, things that wouldn’t be enough to make you feel like crap on their own, but when they add up, when they all happen at once they push you into a bad mood.

your brain is engaging in this ceaseless, continual chemical experiment on itself, and you are the subject of that experiment.

everybody does this, all of us, every single day.

ups and downs are an inevitable part of being a functioning human, a sentient creature.

but there is something in these ups and downs that most of us miss out on.

YOUR MOODS ARE TRYING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING

this will change everything about the way you view things.

mood is a thing that we like to think of as noise, but if you take a step back, your mood is literally data.

very important data, if you can read it and pay attention.

as i said in the intro, most of these are triggered unconsciously, from little day to day things.

and this is why we think of our emotions as weather.

it’s random and something that happens to us.

something we have to get through until it passes, like we’re standing in a grass field and the storm has to pass by us before we can leave it. instead of trying to get out of the storm and get inside.

here’s something to consider.

your mood can be your second brain.

it can act as an entirely different intelligence than your logical, conscious brain, because it’s constantly feeding you information that the logical part of your brain hasn’t processed yet.

how many times have you had your mood, or some sort of emotion, tell you something, or know something, before you actually knew it?

you meet someone new, and on paper they seem nice, they’re smiling, they’re saying all the right things. but for some reason your mood just doesn’t like them.

you can’t put your finger on why, and six months down the road you find out that they’re actually like a serial killer or something.

that’s a joke. but usually later down the line you find out what triggered that feeling had a reason behind it.

they did something, or they were something, or they are something that set off a little flag in you, and your body and mood sent a message to your conscious to be wary.

people call that intuition. it really is just that.

say you’ve got a job, or an opportunity, or a deal, and logically it all makes perfect sense.

you run through it in your head with your conscious and it’s just a solid, logical plan.

everything will benefit you, or help you out, and it seems great, but for some reason you just have this sort of gut feeling, this feeling of dread and unease about it in the pit of your stomach.

we’ve all seen those situations, and we’ve all felt that feeling.

it’s the reason they always say to trust your gut.

my mom is one of the best people i’ve ever known at this. she has some of the best intuition.

she could always sense something was up or something was wrong. she couldn’t always explain how, but whatever she said was usually always right.

that’s that same feeling of dread, of knowing something’s up.

that is your second brain being used as your second intelligence.

don’t ever discredit your intuition, or second brain, because most of the time it’s processing things your conscious mind could never process, and waving little flags down in your conscious that you just aren’t paying attention to.

that’s a pretty cool perspective to view those things in.

a bad mood that comes out of seemingly nowhere isn’t just something you try to distract yourself from, or numb yourself from, or sleep off.

it can be viewed as a check engine light. you should actually go look at it for a second.

look around at what happened, look around at what changed, what did i just see, what did i just avoid?

most people spend their entire lives just covering up the check engine light and never actually stopping for it.

next time you have a bad mood for no reason don’t just go distract yourself.

stop and analyze it for a second, and try to see what changed. why did i just get this way?

even something as simple as someone cutting you off in traffic, and the information is right there for you to work with.

you can’t let external factors dictate your mood.

usually the information is right there. your mood already processed it for you, and you just need to go up to it and be like, “hey, what’s up man.”

don’t just ignore the storm, don’t just sleep through it, and don’t just distract yourself from it. there’s usually something there, a root cause, and you just need to go acknowledge it.

SOME SWINGS AREN'T YOURS TO FIX

saying that, i think it’s easy to sit here and overanalyze everything that happens to us, our moods and whatnot.

i don’t want you to get the impression from this post that every mood swing you have is something that needs to be analyzed, or something that you failed to solve, or a mask that you need to drop.

a lot of mood swings that we do get are very valid, and they’re just life giving you an uppercut to the jaw.

there’s nothing that you can really do to those that will help.

you can sit there and analyze them, or you can go to work and be authentic, or you could practice breathing.

in reality sometimes none of those will work. in the slightest.

say somebody you love dies. that’s a big thing that happens to all of us. that’s an external thing that will just fuck up all of our moods for a while.

for months, your mood is on that.

it’ll knock you flat the second you think you’re standing back up, especially for something that severe.

one day you’ll be fine and you’ll be chilling, and then you happen to come across a song or a picture or the handwriting of the person that passed away. it’ll feel like the floor gave up on you.

that’s not a sign to decode or wonder where your mood is changing.

i think discernment is really an important aspect of this skill.

to be able to decipher what is actual noise and what is actual data.

that is not noise but it’s also not something to go on top of and be like, “why can’t i control this?”

say you lose your job.

now your whole brain chemistry is going to be running on fear and uncertainty.

you’re going to be thrown into survival mode, because a job provides the security of the idea of putting food on your plate and having a shelter under your head.

if you lose that, you’re going to literally be thrown into survival mode. your amygdala’s probably going to be firing off as if a tiger was gnawing at your leg.

the message i want to get out with all this, is you don’t control every mood, and every mood is not something to analyze.

some of them are data, but some of them you just have to weather. they’re just things that you can’t control.

there are swings you can rig, the one we just talked about, where you can analyze, you can drop the mask, you can read the signal, and you can move the body. and

some swings you just can’t. they’re just the tide coming in like a tsunami.

some of those waves are tsunamis, and some of them are small.

the discernment and understanding is the real wisdom.

if a wave is coming, the only job you have is to not drown, and to not beat yourself up for getting wet, because you’re gonna get wet. just don’t drown.

trying to fix grief, or hormones that actually change your biological level, or a real loss, with a breathing exercise, is not gonna work.

some moods are meant to be decoded. some moods are just ones you’re gonna have to survive. there’s nothing you can really do about them.

WHAT ACTUALLY HELPS

so what are some small actionable things that you can do to help with the day-to-day mood swings?

realistically they’re not going to stop. you would have to bioengineer human emotion to a level that only some mad scientist in a lab could do.

but we don’t want them to stop. the end goal is just to have fewer, random mood swings.

go outside

so simple yet so effective. staying cooped up indoors all day is not good for you. nature does something to your nervous system that a room can’t.

something as simple as a walk in a park will lower your stress levels and reset your mood dials to a calmer level.

it’s ridiculous how effective this is for how easy it is.

daily walks. non negotiable.

move your body

just talked about it in my post on the art of training. i’ll preach it until the day i die.

working out creates mood-boosting endorphins and gets you to sleep better. that’s half the battle won right there.

a bad mood can sometimes just be a body that hasn’t moved in three days.

watch what you eat

you don’t have to turn into a bodybuilder prepping for a show but you should watch your diet.

a steady diet of processed bullshit and sweets is going to keep your brain on a rollercoaster. lean proteins and colorful vegetables. as simple as it gets.

your whole mood is partly made of the food you eat.

sleep well

short and inconsistent sleep is the number one way to wreck your mood dials before your day even starts.

science shows that one bad night can make you more reactive, irritable, and quicker to spiral over nothing.

get your hours in and while keeping it consistent and half your swings will never even show up.

and if winters get you down and you’re prone to seasonal depression, consider light. bright light boxes are a great tool to get your serotonin levels back up to par.

and finally the best thing that no article like this mentions.

stop pretending to be someone you’re not. every mask you need to take off and put on is a source of energy.

be the same person everyday. the best mood stabliizier available on the market. and it’s free.

your moods will always come and go my friend. that’s simply life. just learn the ability to read them versus fighting them and when to let them pass.

your mood has been trying to tell you that this whole time.

absolute, complete self-control is one of the most admirable qualities a person can have.

go back over the list of those you respect. take a second.

almost everybody there has self-control.

it’s their command over themselves that makes you feel like whatever they’re doing, they’ve consciously chose to. the ability to do the hard thing, skip the easy thing, and stay pointed at what actually matters while everyone around them gets yanked around by every impulse that floats by.

they don’t allow themselves to get swept away by every little desire that passes through. they hold firm through any discomfort until they reach the desired outcome, no matter what happens along the way.

they decide who they’re, and then become that version automatically, no matter the circumstances.

we gravitate towards that.

we’re attracted to that sort of thing because instinctively, we all know how precious and rare self-control really is.

and how much of our own lives get quietly stolen by the moments we couldn't hold ourselves together.

giving into the cookie craving at 11pm. deciding to miss a session. the mindless scrolling session eating up all your hours of the night. starting something new on monday that never came to fruition.

and every single time, you find yourself telling yourself the same old thing.

“i can’t do anything because i lack self-control”.

it’s as if you’re accepting that self-control is an innate trait that can’t be influenced or trained.

here’s something important i want you to realize.

the primary driver of self control isn’t strength.

here’s what happens in your brain every single time when you struggle between temptation and virtue. once you understand, you’ll see everything differently from now on.

every time you're torn between two choices, the healthy thing and the tempting thing, your brain runs a silent auction.

and i mean that literally.

an actual auction where the two choices stand before a judge inside your brain.

if you understand this concept and apply it well it can genuinely change your life.

every time you fell victim to temptation? the unhealthy option simply scored a few extra points more during this silent math process that your mind performs on everything you do.

what should terrify you is how easily this entire process is manipulated.

if there’s math, you can adjust it. shift the odds accordingly.

those whose self-control seems unbreakable and irresistible to admiration? have done that. and did it unconsciously mostly.

by the end of this post? you will understand how to do it consciously.

it’s 7:03am. black coffee with raw honey, as always.

ambient noise softly playing somewhere in the background. raining outside steadily.

the whiteboard in front of me says one thing today. value.

let’s dive in.

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SELF-CONTROL WAS NEVER A FIGHT

let's kill the old picture first, because you're carrying it and it's holding you back.

the picture in most people’s heads looks like this.

there’s you, and there’s the temptation, and you’re locked in a wrestling match. straining against it. holding it back with everything you’ve got. and if you’re strong enough, you win. if you’re not, you cave.

it sounds very real. feels that way sometimes too.

but look at the people who actually have world-class self-control. the ones who never seem to slip. are they visibly straining all day? white-knuckling every hour, sweating through every decision, barely holding the line?

or does everything they do simply align with what they intend?

does it feel effortless for them, the right thing to occur automatically, without struggle, almost seamlessly?

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we live in the weirdest time in human history.

i mean that. not even as a hook to get you engaged. i mean that as a fact.

if you’re young like me, you know that feeling.

the low humming sound of the world slowly squeezing down on you. like everything is speeding up and you’re falling behind and you can’t even tell where the finish line is anymore.

and it makes sense that it feels that way.

because so much is thrown at you from everywhere. every screen, every application, every voice telling you who you need to become, what you should be doing, what you’re screwing up, how badly you are behind already.

and the economy that you are in is not the one that your parents or grandparents have experienced.

no way.

the rules are different, and nobody has a rulebook anymore.

so, young people feel like they are stuck somewhere, and they all give themselves the same answer.

"i started too late, everyone's already ahead of me."

"the economy's rigged, there's no point."

“i just don’t know the right people”

"the people who make it just got lucky."

“i don’t have the right connections”

“i wasn’t born into the right network”

and this diagnosis feels true. it feels right.

the answer is wrong. almost always.

the real problem isn’t who you know. it's that you haven't built enough undeniable value yet.

and i know that one stings a little more. but sit with it, because it's the best news you're gonna get all day.

because “i don’t know the right people” is a prison. and you can’t escape from that one. it’s a locked door that you don’t have the key to.

“i haven’t built enough value yet” is a task list. and it’s all in your hands, it’s totally up to you. this is a door that you can build the key to by yourself.

now here’s the phrase that i want to dig into today.

your network is your net worth

you’ve heard that a thousand times. this phrase is used in almost every event, on every podcast, on linkedin posts. just typing the word linkedin made me want to throw up a little.

it sounds so intelligent and strategic.

and i’m definitely not going to say that networking doesn’t play an important role in any case. that would be idiotic.

relationships are always important, as always people make business with people.

but that’s not my point.

my point is that this phrase: “your network is your net worth” was a perfectly good phrase for a world that is now quietly dying under our feet.

it described exactly how value moved in the industrial economy and the early internet. and back then it was dead accurate.

but the value doesn’t flow through the same pipes anymore.

today, one person with a wifi connection and a good idea can build a much stronger and real influence than a person with 20 years of corporate shaking hands.

the bottleneck is now whether you have built enough value to make people interested.

it’s 8:16am.

no caffeine today. i’m taking my reset. giving my receptors a rest so the next cup can hit harder.

ambient music “stellar” by .diedlonely.

bit of a different one today. less neuroscience, more grounded, more real.

still gonna touch some psychology, because everything's psychological to some degree if you look close enough.

let’s get into it.

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WHERE THE PHRASE CAME FROM

let’s begin with the origin of the phrase because it’s important.

your network is your net worth is a phrase that came from an author named porter gale.

she published a book with exactly that title in 2013 and it became best seller. that was when the phrase burnt itself into the culture.

and here’s something important you need to understand. she wasn’t wrong.

she was an extremely sharp, experienced marketing executive, describing exactly the way the world was moving back then.

the advice was good and completely reasonable for that world.

but that world is changing.

think about how value flowed back then.

corporate promotions were done in the building. you moved up when you were seen by the right people in the right places.

jobs came through referrals. when someone had to vouch for you before you even had a chance to apply.

investors only invested in people already in their circles, and if you didn’t get the intro, goodbye.

gatekeepers controlled the publishing. an editor chose whether your words get to light.

record labels controlled the music. you couldn’t get a contract, distribution and the career.

tv controlled the audience. a few executives decide what millions of people will watch.

newspapers controlled the audience. they had the megaphone.

you see the pattern here?

relationships controlled the access. every single door had a person standing right in front of it and the only way through was to either to know that person or know someone that knows him.

back then it was completely true that “network is the opportunity”.

that equation was right.

if you couldn’t get into the room you didn’t exist. and to get into the room, you needed the network.

so porter gale was right. she was just right about a world that was already starting to crack.

THE DEATH OF THE GATEKEEPER

so why am i saying that the world in which she wrote the advice in is starting to crack?

the old world functioned through one structure.

gatekeeper, then audience.

like i mentioned above there was always the middleman between you and the audience. the label. the editor. the studio. network exec. they controlled the entrance and decided who to let in.

want to reach your audience? you have to get past them.

beg, pitch, submit and pray.

this entire structure is crumbling.

the world is operating through a completely different structure now.

creator, then directly to the audience.

the gate is dead. or to be more precise, each person got their own gate and the key.

look at how it actually plays out now.

justin bieber is one of the biggest musical artists in the world.

he didn’t wait for a record label to find him. he started posting videos to youtube from his bedroom. audience came first then labels came crawling after.

mrbeast is the biggest youtuber on the plant and has built one of the biggest audiences on earth through youtube, long before a billionaire or millionaire ever heard about him. no gatekeeper let him through. he built the gate himself.

pieter levels builds one start-up after another alone without venture capital or anything else, just by shipping product on the internet and watching it works.

writers build huge audiences for their writing through email services like substack, medium, beehiiv, etc… before any traditional publisher would even think to reply to them.

indie developers launch their game from their bedroom and release it in a hundred countries before dinner.

music artists go viral through their songs on tiktok, instagram, etc… which they posted alone and recorded in their rooms and labels run after to give them contracts.

do you see the theme?

no permission is needed anymore. the gates are wide open and half of the people go through not even knowing that there once was a guard.

this completely flipped the order of operations.

the old one was like this:

network → opportunity → reputation

you knew people. they gave you the chance. then you build reputation from that.

the new way is absolutely opposite to that.

work → reputation → network.

you build the work. work earns you the reputation. and the network appears on its own, attracted to the thing you’ve built. you use the network to expand the foundation.

read it again because it’s the entire post in itself.

the network isn’t something you build first anymore.

it’s a thing that forms around you after you’ve built something worth knowing.

WHY DO PEOPLE STILL CLING TO IT?

so if it’s not as effective anymore, why does everyone still swear by it?

psychology. this one’s wired deep.

we evolved in tribes. for a hundred thousand years, your survival was depending on your place in a small tribe.

status back then was dependent on proximity. who you stand next to.

if you were standing beside a chief, it was automatically assumed that you have status. if you were standing near power, you were treated as if you had it.

your brain still operates on this ancient program. never got updated.

it manifests itself in a few unpleasant ways.

social proof. getting that picture of yourself next to important person feels like you made some progress. your brain lights up as if you achieved something.

nope. got a picture. the symbolic victory feels good and actual progress is slow and dull.

action bias. this one is the sneakiest of all. to build real skills, you have to work hard in solitude, silently and slowly. networking feels more productive than building something.

networking satisfies the psychological itch, leaving the actual problem untouched.

and nowhere is this more obvious than networking events.

i think they might be the stupidest thing on earth, honestly.

and i’m totally fine with people disagreeing with that. it’s not a fact just my own opinion.

because to me, you are literally building the shallowest possible connections in a room built for that purpose.

i've been to two in my whole life. one my cousin dragged me to because she's deep in the business world and wanted me there.

every single conversation in the room was the same dead dialogue:

“hey, what’s your name, what do you do”

that’s it. that’s the entire dialogue. each person in the room scanned the other one, calculating who was worth their time. you could see that in their eyes. pure extraction. everybody was there for some profit.

so, i decided to break the dialogue for amusement. someone asked me “what do you do” and i said: “i sell mind enhancing stimulants to people outside of casinos.”

and the script just shatters. they've got no follow-up because their networking brain crashed because i didn’t provide them with the information they wanted.

just showed me that no one was actually trying to get to know the other person.

and look, i'm not saying nobody's ever had a life-changing connection at one of these. i'm sure it happens.

but the connections you will form in this room are purely transactional.

real value is created through trust, mutual support, and connections that mean something. not a bunch of business cards and a lot of pictures of handshakes.

we keep choosing conversations over competence.

and wonder why no conversations turn to something meaningful.

PORTER GALE ACCIDENTALLY PROVED THE OPPOSITE

here’s the part i was laughing about after i realized.

let me ask you something.

why is porter gale famous and wealthy?

is it because of her network?

or is it because of a bestselling book that spread across the world?

because millions of people don’t know porter gale from meeting her at a mixer. they don’t know her because they shook her hand.

they know her because she created something. she made intellectual property. she wrote a book, and that book traveled everywhere she couldn’t.

that book gave her leverage.

you know the ironic part? her network was expanded because of this book. not the other way around.

even if some networking gave her the possibility to publish this book, the fact that spread her name across the entire planet was the book itself.

doesn’t mean her quote was wrong.

means that her own career is the proof that having created something valuable spreads your network many times more than any attempts of collecting connections will ever do.

she built the asset, and the asset formed her network.

THE NETWORK COMES TO THE VALUE

let me make this real.

the old model had you out there chasing. handing out cards. sliding into inboxes. “let’s grab coffee.” “let’s connect.” working the room, trying to get close to people above you, hoping some of it rubbed off.

tiring process. and mostly useless if you have nothing to present.

because that’s the bitter truth about networking without anything valuable to offer.

you were asking. and everybody can smell it.

because when you approach someone successful with your hand held out and empty, they immediately realize that you are trying to extract something from them. you need something from them but you have nothing to pay back in return.

it’s like trying to make a withdrawal from a bank account you never used before.

flip it.

build something. get really good at something. create some work that cannot be ignored. and watch what happens.

those people you were trying to get close to, they started approaching you.

the value becomes the attractor. you don’t need to push yourself towards those people. people are starting to move towards you because you’ve got something that they want to get next to.

this is the entire game now.

you are not networking to gain the value.

you build value and a network assembles itself around it.

i’m literally a real-life example of this, i’ve done that. built this thing completely anonymously and without connections.

i didn’t know a single “right person” when i started. but i wrote and wrote and got better and built content worth reading.

and a network followed. readers, opportunities, people reaching out.

none of it existed before i built value. all of it came because of value.

i didn’t have a network which gives me access to platforms.

i built something which is worth being known, and the network grew like roots from that.

if you’re a software engineer, stop waiting for permission. go build shit. sites, apps, programs, tiny little projects that solve a small and annoying problem. ship them. publish them on github and everywhere else. your code becomes your resume and your resume becomes your network.

if you’re a writer, write. do this every single day. start publishing things even before you’re ready to publish. a blog, a substack, a thread. one post that will actually hit is much more effective than 100 coffees.

if you’re an artist, just upload the work. drawings, designs, music, edits, anything else. the internet doesn’t care who’s dad you know. it only cares if the work is good.

if you’re into fitness, start documenting your transformation process. train, record it and show people what worked.

if you’re a video maker, start making videos. terrible first ones, then slightly better ones. nobody’s starting with amazing videos, everyone gets there by posting and working their ass off to improve.

if you’re a designer, start designing and sharing. or even redesigning existing things and sharing the result. build your portfolio from scratch.

build something so undeniable that being discovered becomes inevitable.

THE NEW FORMULA

let’s replace that old formula with a new one.

out with “network equals net worth”.

in with this.

skill, then proof, reputation, then network, then wealth.

this is the actual order now. you master the skill, you create a proof for your work, the proof makes your reputation, your reputation attracts network. and the network, on top of the value itself, brings opportunity and wealth.

everything starts with mastering a skill. nothing moves without that.

relationships are not scarce. you can connect to anyone today.

attention is not scarce. there’s abundance of attention everywhere being wasted on anything.

then what is scarce now? what is valuable?

consistency. original thoughts. good taste. reputation. proof of work. execution. trust.

these are the new currency. these are what is extremely rare nowadays and what everybody now wants to get.

think about it. anyone can send a dm right now. there’s the messaging platform, ready and waiting for you.

it’s free.

very few people can actually get the attention from the dm

the rare resource is not the dm itself. it’s being worthy of a reply.

and this is the core of the whole shift. reputation scales. networking doesn't.

that single piece of content gets in front of hundreds of thousands of people while you sleep.

that single cup of coffee gets in front of one person, and you have to be right there for it.

this is the difference between creating value and exchanging your time. one compounds. one does not.

relationships will always be incredibly important. but they compound only after the value is created, not before.

once your work is truly exceptional, networking no longer has to be something you have to bang out every day.

because you won’t need to anymore.

it will become effortless.

because people will start reaching out to you first.

BUT NETWORKING STILL MATTERS

now let me pump the brakes and be real with you, because i don't want you walking away with the wrong takeaway.

i know this whole post might seem like be just taking a shit on networking and calling it useless.

it would be completely idiotic for me to sit here and tell you your network plays no role. that it doesn't matter. that would be flat wrong, and honestly a little arrogant.

your network is important.

the right connection can still open the doors to you that you will never be able to break through otherwise.

a good relationship can pull you into meetings that would never see you coming otherwise, simply because you did not prove to be good enough.

people vouch for people.

warm intros will beat cold ones any day of the week.

mentors will still allow you to bypass years of experience with nothing but knowledge they provide.

none of these factors stopped being valid.

the point i'm making in this whole piece isn't that networking died.

what i’m trying to get across is the influence of networking over the years has became less and less pronounced. it started shifting from the main driver towards becoming one element of the process.

networking has gone from the entire game to simply part of it.

i am not here to say never build any connections.

build them. they are invaluable.

i’m just offering you a different lens. a reason the old rule isn’t the law it used to be, and a read on where i think this whole thing is heading.

because the leverage moved. and if you’re young and building right now, you should know which side of the equation actually pays.

WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO WITH THIS

so what does all of it mean for you. because i don’t do theory without an actionable conclusion.

stop trying to meet the right people.

start being a person who is worth meeting.

that's the whole shift, and it changes where you point your energy.

focus on one specific skill and master it. actually master, not “master”. not the way you would put on a linkedin bio. master the skill to the point when your output talks louder than anything else you could say.

then make sure you work in public.

do not try and hide the product until it becomes perfect.

put it out there.

share the post, release the software, sing the song, write that blog.

everything that you make public becomes one tiny beam of light, and beacons are the way that the right people see you in the dark.

let your work make the introduction for you.

one body of work opens the doors for you faster and more effectively than a million handshakes would because your work enters the room and vouches for you.

and once the network starts gathering around you and eventually it will, you will be the kind of person worth staying in contact with.

contribute to other people, take less for yourself.

those connections do matter, but you cannot create genuine connection before creating actual value.

the order is everything.

value. reputation. network.

work in that order.

do it backwards, chasing the network first, and you'll spend years collecting contacts who forget your name the second you walk away.

THE BOTTOM LINE

networking is not your net worth anymore.

it used to be. in the old world of gatekeepers, closed meetings, and megaphones being controlled by few people, knowing the right person was everything. and porter gale said it perfectly.

but the world has moved forward.

the gates have been opened, the barrier to entry has never been lover, middlemen are slowly being cut out from every industry.

and the only thing that will truly matter now is having created something that the world cannot miss.

and if you’re starting out young and feel behind, and keep telling yourself you are behind simply because you don’t know the right people?

drop this lie already. because it is very comforting.

truth is more difficult. and also better.

you’re not behind because you don’t know right people.

you’re behind because you haven’t created the thing.

and this, my friend, is entirely in your power.

stop trying to meet the right people.

go and make the room look for you.

less “networking” and more net “work”.

ps. thank you for reading until this point. it means the world.

i’m going all in this month, posts every single day alternating between free and paid. the free stuff wakes you up, the paid side is where you actually get to work.

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