Mark Manson

Even your emotions are largely a product of your values.

Two people can both experience the same thing.

One gets really happy.

One gets extremely upset.

Why?

Because they have different values.

One person sees the same instance as a good experience.

The other one sees it as a bad experience.

Similarly, a lot of our ego and identity and belief systems are largely built and dictated by our values.

So the values are kind of like the base foundational layer of all of our adaptations.

And so it makes sense that if you go through an experience that causes your values to collapse, essentially causes you to...

question and doubt what you value in the first place.

Everything exists, you know, all the scaffolding on top of that will just come down with it.

So this experience of quantum change, of everything just suddenly changing overnight, I think what has to happen first is that

that value structure has to fall apart.

And that can fall apart in multiple ways, right?

So in my case, it was a traumatic, sudden traumatic experience.

You actually see this quite a bit in the literature that there's a concept that we've talked about before called post-traumatic growth.

Everybody's heard of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Turns out post-traumatic growth is