Mark Manson

Yes.

Okay.

So even though you may get less neurotic as you age, so is everybody else is around you as too.

So if you are more neurotic than 99% of people, when you're young, you're still going to be more neurotic than 99% of people when you're old.

Yes.

I do think it's important for people to understand this because again, coming back to understanding what is changeable and what is not is at the core of everything that we can do, right?

Like if you spend your time trying to change something that's not really going to change, right?

Or if something changes naturally, that tells us that it has little to do with our effort.

I think what happens a lot, I can think of some friends and family members who have chilled out as they aged and just naturally become less neurotic.

But they attribute it to all the work they've done or some big kind of epiphany that they've had.

There's some sort of narrative that's created to explain why.

why they've chilled out so much over the last 10 or 20 years when it's like, yeah, you just got older.

And so it is useful to know these things just to understand like, okay, this is the trajectory you're gonna be on.

These personality traits do drift slowly over the decades.

If our goal in this chapter is to really just develop accurate self-understanding, then it's important for us to understand how our personality is gonna drift over time so that we can properly attribute it to just the natural aging process.

I can't tell you how many people I've talked to in say their forties or fifties and they talk about how, you know, something's really different in their life and they're like trying to come up with all sorts of explanations for why it's different.

And I'm like, dude, you're 45.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're not 30 anymore.

Like, of course, of course you don't want to do that thing anymore.