Mark Manson and Rationality
As those of you on the Less Wrong chat may know, Mark Manson is my favourite personal development author. I thought I’d share those articles that are most related to rationality, as I figured that they would have the greatest chance of being appreciated.
Immediately after writing this article, I realised that I left one thing unclear, so I’ll explain it now. Why have I included articles discussing the terms “life purpose” and “finding yourself”? The reason is that I think that it is very important to provide linguistic bridges between some of the vague everyday language that people often use and the more precise language expected by rationalists.
Why I’m wrong about everything (and so are you):
“When looked at from this perspective, personal development can actually be quite scientific. The hypotheses are our beliefs. Our actions and behaviors are the experiments. The resulting internal emotions and thought patterns are our data. We can then take those and compare them to our original beliefs and then integrate them into our overall understanding of our needs and emotional make-up for the future.”
…
“You test those beliefs out in the real world and get real-world feedback and emotional data from them. You may find that you, in fact, don’t enjoy writing every day as much as you thought you would. You may discover that you actually have a lot of trouble expressing some of your more exquisite thoughts than you first assumed. You realize that there’s a lot of failure and rejection involved in writing and that kind of takes the fun out of it. You also find that you spend more time on your site’s design and presentation than you do on the writing itself, that that is what you actually seem to be enjoying. And so you integrate that new information and adjust your goals and behaviors accordingly.”
7 strange questions that can help you find your life purpose:
Mark Manson deconstructs the notion of “life purpose”, replacing it with a question that is much more tractable:
“Part of the problem is the concept of “life purpose” itself. The idea that we were each born for some higher purpose and it’s now our cosmic mission to find it. This is the same kind of shitty logic used to justify things like spirit crystals or that your lucky number is 34 (but only on Tuesdays or during full moons).
Here’s the truth. We exist on this earth for some undetermined period of time. During that time we do things. Some of these things are important. Some of them are unimportant. And those important things give our lives meaning and happiness. The unimportant ones basically just kill time.
So when people say, “What should I do with my life?” or “What is my life purpose?” what they’re actually asking is: “What can I do with my time that is important?””
5 lessons from 5 years travelling the world:
While this isn’t the only way that the cliche of “finding yourself” can be broken down into something more understandable, it is quite a good attempt:
“Many people embark on journeys around the world in order to “find themselves.” In fact, it’s sort of cliché, the type of thing that sounds deep and important but doesn’t actually mean anything.
Whenever somebody claims they want to travel to “find themselves,” this is what I think they mean: They want to remove all of the major external influences from their lives, put themselves into a random and neutral environment, and then see what person they turn out to be.
By removing their external influences — the overbearing boss at work, the nagging mother, the pressure of a few unsavory friends — they’re then able to see how they actually feel about their life back home.
So perhaps a better way to put it is that you don’t travel to “find yourself,” you travel in order to get a more accurate perception of who you were back home, and whether you actually like that person or not.””
Mark Manson attacks one of the biggest myths in our society:
“In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life’s problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life’s ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
When we believe that “all we need is love,” then like Lennon, we’re more likely to ignore fundamental values such as respect, humility and commitment towards the people we care about. After all, if love solves everything, then why bother with all the other stuff — all of the hard stuff?
But if, like Reznor, we believe that “love is not enough,” then we understand that healthy relationships require more than pure emotion or lofty passions. We understand that there are things more important in our lives and our relationships than simply being in love. And the success of our relationships hinges on these deeper and more important values.”
6 Healthy Relationship Habits Most People Think Are Toxic:
Edit: Read the warning in the comments
I included this article because of the discussion of the first habit.
“There’s this guy. His name is John Gottman. And he is like the Michael Jordan of relationship research. Not only has he been studying intimate relationships for more than 40 years, but he practically invented the field.
His “thin-slicing” process boasts a staggering 91% success rate in predicting whether newly-wed couples will divorce within 10 years — a staggeringly high result for any psychological research.
...
Gottman devised the process of “thin-slicing” relationships, a technique where he hooks couples up to all sorts of biometric devices and then records them having short conversations about their problems. Gottman then goes back and analyzes the conversation frame by frame looking at biometric data, body language, tonality and specific words chosen. He then combines all of this data together to predict whether your marriage sucks or not.
And the first thing Gottman says in almost all of his books is this: The idea that couples must communicate and resolve all of their problems is a myth.”
Others
I highly recommend these articles. They are based on research to an extent, but also upon his experiences, so they are not completely research based. If that’s what you want, then you should try looking for a review article.
Yes, reading such a “staggeringly high result” like that should make you feel conned.
See one of our favorite Bayesians on Gottman.
Thanks, I probably should have been more suspicious of this.
I have to say that it was one of most influential book in my life, along side with the motivation hacker, Demian, from AI to Zombies (to a lesser extend) and a couple more I can’t recall now.
What is important though? Isn’t that just subjective as well as illusionary? Purely objectively speaking (if such a thing is possible) everything is relative, even importance e.g. what is important for me, might not be for you, what is important in 1765 might not be important in 2015, what is important on earth might not be important on the moon, etc. etc. Is saving someone’s life important? Yes, to that person and those who love that person it is...for a while. 500 years from now, not so much any more. So once you find something important you must also realise that this importance is only important within (your) context. Thus making it unimportant. In order to keep it important you must believe in it. Believe it has importance, believe the context justifies the importance. So in the end aren’t you just rationalizing importance and thus your reason to live?
As I see it (please correct me if I am wrong) everything we do is just to kill time. importance and unimportance are just qualifications we invent so we can avoid feeling bad.
Okay. Not sure what the reason is for the negative points on my last 2 replies. I will admit my response to this article was fuelled by my own frustrations. But still I do not see where my logic fails when I say: “Life is objectively without purpose afawk. The rational thing to do is accept that.”
For the past 30 years I lived a life without meaning, purpose, passion, importance, you name it. Still, I feel no need to end it, nor does that mean I cannot enjoy things. But what that does do is make me feel lonely. I see everyone around me, everywhere, hiding behind their own self-created “purposes”.
To me, it is like everyone is digging holes and trying to find something, totally oblivious to that fact that there is a vast world above ground. It is just an -no doubt biased- observation/feeling. I didn’t respond to disagree with the article, but to see if anyone can give me a logical, rational reason to agree with it (=start digging a hole).
I failed in that. Sorry.
“Thus”? I think that only follows if you take “important” to mean something like “universally important, to all people at all times and in all places, and even in places like the moon where there are no people”. In that case: sure, pretty much anything you care to mention will fail to be “important”. But why should we demand that?
I take “important” to be a human invention. Which is, like you say, not universal. Each importance is individual and at best shared by a group of people. As such I would argue it is a belief which does not relate to an ‘objective’ reality. I suspect that everyone needs a false belief in order to have a drive to live because reality puts us in a catch-22 (programmed to survive, but death is inevitable).
I am not saying we should demand a universal, objective importance. What I am saying is we must demand rationality and truth. There is nothing wrong with believing something is important, as long as you also admit it is a false belief. My problem (personally) is that once I accept it is a false belief, I can no longer believe it thus making it impossible (for me) to find importance in life.
I apologise for not making clear I was replying from a personal point of view.
Being alive is important* to me. And that is probably just my survival instinct talking. I fail to see the rationality behind the ‘urge’ to explain it any other way. If we do, don’t we go the road of religon?
*) Not sure if ‘important’ is the right word. I feel my body and mind wanting to be and remain alive. Not sure if I consciously and rationally would label it as important.
Yup. So is cricket. None the less, there is a definite answer to the question “Did so-and-so score 100 runs in the last game, or not?”.
OK. But it might (like beliefs about cricket scores) relate to a not-so-objective reality. What you certainly can’t rightly do is leap from “is not a statement of objective truth” to “is a statement of objective falsehood”. If “important” is a predicate that only has a definite meaning once you say for whom, the same is true of “not important”.
But that’s exactly what I’m saying you don’t need to do. (Unless the belief in question is that whatever-it-is is universally, eternally important. That might be false. But I don’t see why you need such beliefs in the first place.)
I’m not sure exactly what “it” is here. The urgency you attach to remaining alive probably is just your survival instinct talking. (Though it may also be influenced by, e.g., other people’s interest in your remaining alive.) But whatever sense of importance you attach to things other than remaining alive surely has other origins.
I am sorry. I must word my argument/question very badly because we are drifting away from my gripe with the article. Perhaps I’ll just close with explaining how I experience life:
Life just is. Life just tries to keep alive. To keep alive, humans (and other animals) feel good/bad in certain situations.
To me, nowhere in this, there is anything important, useful or goal-centric. Since we are aware, cognitive beings, we struggle with reconciling our survival-instinct with the fact it is all pointless. So we invent things like cricket, money, importance, life purpose and whatnot.
Personally I think/believe it would be much better if we all just found comfort in the fact we are all useless and we are all struggling with the cognitive dissonance and we are all in the same pickle and help each other deal with it. rather than trying to find solace in external things, or worse; constructs like ‘importance’ . These may help at times, but they should never be elevated to the status of ’truth/solution/whatever). They are just things we do to kill the time, preferably in a pleasant way. That doesn’t make it important. It is just the way it functions.
Then again. Perhaps I just think and feel like this because I have Dysthymia.
I’ll conclude here the same as below in my other reply: Life is objectively without purpose afawk. The rational thing to do is accept that. To invent subjective purposes is to deny the objective truth. that’s all I am proposing.
The idea is that identifying what you consider to be important and not important is more tractable than trying to discover your “life purpose”.
To me, they are the same things… human concoctions; words for things that do not exists anywhere else but in our imagination. Then again, I hope I am wrong about that.
The text states:
It should have read:
Some of these things are important to you. Some of them are unimportant to you.
But even then it still implies that things that are important and unimportant exist for you. It is a statement of fact where no fact exists.
The best way to have phrased that would be something like:
You can make yourself believe some of these things are important to you, and some unimportant.
To me (again, I hope to be wrong) what is said here translates as: ‘You can make yourself believe anything in order to be happy’. And that just doesn’t feel right. Besides, personally I don’t see how I can make myself believe something full knowing it is just a belief.
“It should have read: “Some of these things are important to you. Some of them are unimportant to you.”″
The importance being relative to you is implied and I believe that most people get the implication. Remember the Typical Mind Fallacy.
“But even then it still implies that things that are important and unimportant exist for you. It is a statement of fact where no fact exists.”—what you don’t think people have things they consider important?
On the contrary. I think people are very good at believing in things, including what is important to them. My point is, that that doesn’t make it important because importance doesn’t exists as an empirical concept but only as a cognitive construct. My question is: Why do we need that construct? What is it that makes people need to be able to believe in something before it becomes real to them? Can’t you just enjoy the things you like without giving them an arbitrary value? The problem I have with this, is that importance -like any construct- will get a life on it’s own. Much like economy, politics, religion, ideologies etc. And before you know it, people are wanting for something that is just an idea and any relation to the factual enjoyment is gone.
We need food. We get food in exchange for money. The money itself is just a construct. But most people say money is important because we can exchange it for food. And so money/economics grew into something huge, and now many people cannot get good food they need because they have no money. That is just silly if it wasn’t so sad.
‘Life purpose’? Life has no purpose. That is the bare, harsh truth. Shouldn’t we just accept that and deal with it together instead of trying to believe in our individual mental constructs to hide in?
Perhaps I am missing the point. If so I apologise. But I fail to see the rationality of inventing my own personal purpose or importance. What does that do? I will concede that many if not most people will sleep better and feel good about their lives if they do. But in the end all this means is that you lived a self-created lie.
Is that what life is? Just something we make up for ourselves? is that what this article is telling me?
I’ll conclude here the same as above in my other reply: Life is objectively without purpose afawk. The rational thing to do is accept that. To invent subjective purposes is to deny the objective truth. that’s all I am proposing.
His stuff is good. His ebook on relationships is great. (Mainly aimed at men, though)
I really don’t have much to add.
Are there any good relationships books aimed at women?
I don’t know any and I’d actually go in with skepticism about any I find. That applies to men too, and they seem to fall to all the silliness as well.
The only golden rules I can confirm is that if the book doesn’t tell you:
Keep your apperance in order: This means your weight, your fashion sense, basically everything the beholder sees.
Keep your personality in order: Unless you get naked pretty quick, I can’t see any self-respecting guy staying with a vain woman.
Now that’s just a simplification. I can’t help you with the first, and for the second, you should just sit down with yourself and list the things you want or like to do.
Not much more I can add and I’m not a good enough writer to expand on this. Try lukeprog or HughRistik. (not sure if he’s active, though)
Thanks for the heads up, never heard of this guy before but he’s very good and quite inspiring for me where I’m at right now.
Love may be a narcotic.