Mark Manson

And I remember her telling me she was like, I'm worried because I want to have kids, but I don't feel like it's responsible to have kids until I'm financially secure.

And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, well, that sounds very reasonable and mature.

And she said, I'm afraid that I'm running out of time.

And I was like, okay.

And then she and I started talking and I was like, okay, so what does financially secure mean to you?

And it was like having $2 million in the bank and like a summer home and, you know, like being essentially in the top 0.1% financially of the entire population.

And I was like, okay, time out here.

Like, let's look at this definition of financial security because...

the the belief that you should be financially secure is not a problem like that's very rational your definition of financial security is absolutely irrational right so i think that's one area where like it can be very easy to kind of be misguided um or belief can kind of lead you astray that woman i remember like grew up in poverty right so like that belief was an adaptation her definition of security was also probably an adaptation that was not serving her anymore the second

form of this i think there's just a lot of beliefs and assumptions that we adopted early in our lives and we forget they're there you know they're it's the water we swim in and it really isn't until one of them fails us catastrophically that we even consider to like stop and ask ourselves like oh is this true right right uh never thought i never considered this just absorbed it never questioned it yeah so the final category of adaptation

that we're going to talk about is honestly, I mean, this is you could even say this is kind of a subset of beliefs, but it's basically our ego identity, which is largely a narrative that we tell ourselves about who we are.

And there's a lot of different aspects of that narrative.

So there's kind of the basic factual level of that narrative, right?

It's like, my name is Mark Manson.

I was born

Outside of Austin, Texas, I'm 42 years old and I'm a podcaster, like all these things.

But there's some narratives that we adopt and we hold on to that are...

highly intangible and very abstract, right?

It's like telling myself that I am a selfish person, right?

A lot of us internalize a narrative like that at some point, and we often forget that we did.