Mark Manson

To zoom out on the whole episode again, right?

When people say, I want to change,

what they're usually referring to are their adaptations, right?

They've got some habit, some emotional pattern, or some narrative identity that is not serving them anymore, but they don't know how to stop doing it.

And then the behavioral side effects of that is downstream, right?

It's like the overeating or the inability to sleep at night or not exercising enough.

Like all that stuff is happening as a consequence

of the faulty adaptation.

What people mean when they want to change, like this section is generally what they're talking about.

But I don't think it's possible to completely understand this section until you understand the personality piece and like the traits that are

largely immovable.

The goal with personality is to simply understand yourself and understand this is who you are and come to terms with it, accept it.

The goal with adaptations is to find the most useful adaptations possible.

We're going to talk about William James a little bit later, but William James had a philosophical school called pragmatism, which he basically argued that you should only believe in things that are useful.

I think the approach to pragmatism

your adaptations should be very pragmatist it should be very much like is this emotional pattern serving me if it's not i should probably find a way to replace it or is this belief about the world serving me like is assuming that everybody's untrustworthy is that really serving me probably not so maybe i should find a way to like be more trusting of people it's a belief that you're not sure about anyway you may as well just believe what's the most useful enough like i don't know about you man like i've just seen myself be wrong about so much oh yeah

Nothing makes sense.

I've been wrong so many times.

The older I get, I think that's probably one of the reasons why people tend to get happier as they get older.

One is that the older you get, the more you've seen yourself bounce back from hardship.