Self-awareness is like great sex: everyone thinks they have a ton of it, but in reality no one knows what the fuck they’re doing.
It’s not always easy to tell if you’re in a toxic relationship. Part of the problem is that many unhealthy relationship habits are baked into our culture, and we just consider them part of the norm.
First fact: At some point during evolution between plankton and Bon Jovi, apes evolved the ability to become emotionally attached to one another. This emotional attachment would eventually come to be known as “love” and evolution would one day produce a bevy of singers from New Jersey who would make millions writing cheesy songs about it.
Roberto Escobar is a short, hunched man. He’s old now and nearly blind and deaf from a letter bomb blowing up in his face years ago. His eye sockets sink into his skull leaving two golf-ball-sized craters in his face. His gaze is lifeless. It passes through you, as if you were some sort of hologram.
It took me 18 months to write The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. Over that time period, I wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000 words for the book (about 600 pages). Most of that came in the final three months. In fact, I can confidently say I got far more done in the final three months than I did in the first 12 combined.
The world runs on one thing: people’s feelings. And no, I don’t mean the coddled, “Oh, we’re spoiling the youth” kind of feelings. I mean emotions. Emotions rule the world.
Welcome, Player One, to a strategy guide for the game known as life.
Problems are a constant in life. When you solve your health problem by buying a gym membership, you create new problems, like having to get up early to get to the gym on time, sweating like a meth-head for thirty minutes on an elliptical, and then getting showered and changed for work so you don’t stink up the whole office. When you solve your problem of not spending enough time with your partner by designating Wednesday night “date night,” you generate new problems, such as figuring out what to do every Wednesday that you both won’t hate, making sure you have enough money for nice dinners, rediscovering the chemistry and spark you two feel you’ve lost, and unraveling the logistics of fucking in a small bathtub filled with too many bubbles.
Two things are abundantly clear: 1) sex education matters, and 2) teaching teenagers that sex is shameful messes everything up.
We sit silently. My friend stares deeply into her empty glass, occasionally shuffling the ice around with her straw. “Wow,” she says. I sit and wait for her to say something else. What started out as a festive night somehow became a long, deep discussion about love, what it consists of, and how rare it actually is.
Years ago, when I was much younger and stupider, I wrote a blog post that ended with something like, “And as a great philosopher once said: ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’” It sounded nice and authoritative. I had forgotten who’d said it. Google turned up nothing, but I stuck it in there anyway. It fit the post nicely.
Success is often the first step toward disaster. The idea of progress is often the enemy of actual progress.
Nobody wins on Valentine’s Day. The holiday puts everyone in an awkward situation.
I asked some of the older and wiser folks around me for a couple quick words of advice from their own marriages
The year: late 2006. The time: some random weeknight. The girl: we’ll call her Kim, a spunky chick with an amazing body and an obsession with ultimate frisbee.
Information is endless, so attention is the new scarcity. To survive in an economy designed to distract you, you must learn to master your focus.
Four years ago on a sunny April morning, I slinked into my new office building, suit slightly too big, 24-years-old, and clueless. It was my first day working at a large, prestigious bank in downtown Boston. The first day of the career that would ostensibly define the rest of my life.
It’s the new year and let’s pretend for a moment that you have decided that you want to become rich. Maybe you’re sick of your student loan debt. Maybe you’re sick of eating frozen waffles for dinner every night. Maybe you recently became overwhelmingly inspired by your favorite rapper, 50 Cent, and like him, you also want to “Get Rich or Die Trying” …and then go bankrupt a few years later.
Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare in the most literal sense. All of its power comes from leveraging the imperfections of the human mind and the tendency for people to make dumb decisions when they’re consumed by fear.
When I arrived in Buenos Aires in the beginning of 2010, I could barely order food in a local restaurant. Two years later, I calmly explained the mechanics of Russian grammar to a Guatemalan friend… in her native Spanish.
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.
I’ve been working with self development advice for a large percentage of my life. I’ve come across a lot of concepts and ideas as well as invented quite a few of my own. But the following is one of the most important ideas I’ve stumbled across in my life:
One day, when my brother was 18, he waltzed into the living room and proudly announced to my mother and me that one day he was going to be a senator. My mom probably gave him the “That’s nice, dear,” treatment while I’m sure I was distracted by a bowl of Cheerios or something.
Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.
