Original subtitles

You're going to die one day.

Stand clear.

I know that's kind of obvious,

but I just wanted to remind you,

- in case you forgot. - Push to shock.

You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon.

And if you go around

giving a fuck about everything and everyone

without conscious thought or choice,

well, then you're gonna get fucked.

Everyone in their Instagram post

wants you to believe

that the key to a good life is a nicer job,

or faster car, a prettier girlfriend,

or a selfie at the beach.

The message is that a better life is about more, more, more.

Buy more, own more,

make more, fuck more, be more.

To give a fuck about everything all the time.

Give a fuck about your new TV. Give a fuck about low-fat milk.

Give a fuck about 5G and the G8.

Traffic on the 405 and the balance in your 401K.

Give a fuck about your SPF and the ozone,

the EMI and your BMI.

Avoid gluten, but don't piss off Putin.

Maximize EPS, but don't mess with the IRS.

Is this brand the best? Is it GMO?

Fairtrade? Who's the CEO?

Should we picket? Is this a riot or a fucking parade?

This is me... Mark Manson.

And I wrote a book. It had "fuck" on the cover.

It's about the sufferings

of my not particularly exceptional life.

Shitty teenage years, getting dumped, friends dying,

a culture that sucked me into a drain hole

of my own pain and entitlement,

and ultimately, the "fuck you" spiritual advice

I used to drag myself out.

And by some weird twist of fate, people actually read it.

And now a studio is paying I don't know how much money

to put me in a freezing pool

while girls kick water in my face.

It'd be a hell of a lot easier if I could just hit you

with seven pithy rules or six easy steps to life success.

Yada, yada, yada.

But to really get into this stuff, you've got to feel it.

And to feel it,

well, I guess I'm gonna have to dig up some old painful shit.

So, fuck it. Here it goes.

Oh, my God! It's full on.

Double rainbow all the way across the sky.

Oh!

Oh, God.

So, I grew up just outside of Austin, Texas.

And I had a very happy childhood.

Up until I was probably, like, ten or 11 years old.

And around that time,

my family life kind of started coming apart

and I got very rebellious.

It was Texas.

It was horses and Bibles and football.

And I wasn't really into any of those things.

So, I wore Marilyn Manson T-shirts

and listened to heavy metal and smoked pot and...

mouthed off to adults.

And that was me, you know. That was...

That was the little shithead Mark.

So, it's February 1998.

I'm in eighth grade, and there's a knock on the classroom door.

And I look over

and it's Mr. Price, the vice principal.

I remember he poked his head in and he was like, "Excuse me.

Sorry for interruption.

Mr. Manson, please come with me."

So, I stepped out of class with him,

and I thought, "This is weird. Like...

Like, usually I go to him. He doesn't come to me."

And so I get out in the hall with him

and he's like, "Take me to your locker."

And I'm starting to freak out. I'm like,

"This is not normal. This is not how things usually go."

Which one are we talking about? What locker?

S-27.

We opened my locker,

and he just clears the whole thing out.

See now, I was a middle-school kid.

So I had, like, all sorts of, like, pencils and drawings

and notes from girls in class and stuff, you know.

He just, like, dumps all my shit on the floor,

it just, like, sprays everywhere,

and starts rummaging through it.

And I'm like, "Damn! This is serious."

And as he's digging through all my crap,

there's, like, a very awkward silence.

He looks at me and he's like,

"Do you know what I'm looking for today?"

And so I just play stupid. I'm like, "What?"

And he's like, "Drugs. Do you have any drugs today?"

And in my little, like, pipsqueak voice,

I'm like, "No, no. No. No drugs.

I-I don't know what you're talking about."

And, uh, I can tell he's about to let me go,

but he's kind of looking down on the ground at all this stuff,

and I don't remember if he... if it was an accident

or if he was, like, stepping on the backpack on purpose,

but he steps on my backpack,

and he feels something's still in it.

And he's like, "What is that?" And I was like, "What is what?"

And the truth was that I had cut a hole in the backpack,

between the pockets,

and stuck the drugs in there

and then kind of sewn the bottom shut,

but it was kind of...

it was so you could kind of easily get it open.

And he found that hole and he found the drugs,

and he ripped it out, and he threw 'em on the desk.

I don't remember what he said, but I remember the look,

and it had the look of, "You're fucked."

The next thing I remember, basically, is being handcuffed,

handcuffed and escorted out of the school.

And I remember the cop, he's like, "How old are you?"

And I said, "Thirteen." And he was like,

"What on earth made you do this?"

As we're walking out, this girl, her name was Becca,

this girl's coming in,

this, like, really cute girl I used to flirt with.

And she sees me, and she's like, "Oh, hey, Mark."

And, like, smiles. And I'm like, "Hi."

And then she goes, "Hi, Mr. Price."

And then she looks over at the cop,

then she looks back at me, and she's like...

And, like, completely, like, loses it

and, like, runs down the hall.

In all the rebellious stuff I did,

it always felt like I had an exit.

You know, it's like, "Oh, if shit gets too serious,

I can always just, like,

drop everything and go back to normal."

And that was the first time that I was, like,

"Wow. Things are never going to be normal again after this."

I got thrown in, like, a juvie jail for the day.

And I sat there all day waiting for my parents to show up.

Yeah. I just remember my mom coming in,

tears streaming down her face,

and something fundamentally changed.

My whole, you know, the false confidence,

the bravado of a shithead 13-year-old,

like, it all just deflated.

I just felt empty.

I felt like a little boy.

Just totally helpless.

And I was.

I think we live in a culture today

of what I would describe as "delusional positivity."

It's been very fashionable,

especially in the self-help industry,

but in the wider culture at large,

to simply believe things you want to believe

because they feel good.

And we're encouraged to do this at every turn,

whether it's, you know, beer commercials

or some guru standing on-stage,

telling you that you can achieve

all your dreams, yada, yada, yada.

I find this attitude to be very dangerous and damaging,

because the fact of the matter is

is that life is always going to suck a little bit.

And it turns out, the more we learn and understand

about our psychology, the more it turns out

that our brain is kind of playing this game with us.

Generally speaking, things in the material world

work very algorithmically.

You know, it's like if you want X result,

you need to do A, B and C to get there.

It's like a Lego set, like, you find the steps,

and then you follow the steps, and the thing happens.

Where that breaks down and stops working

is in the experiences of our own mind.

So, take happiness, for example.

There's no formula for happiness. There's no X, Y, Z.

"Do these things every day for three weeks

and you'll be happy."

Right? Like, it doesn't work that way.

Happiness is not algorithmic.

It's not a solvable equation.

But our mind plays this game with us.

Our mind tells us that as soon as you get X,

everything is gonna be great.

Or as soon as you get rid of Y, everything is gonna be fine.

And we believe it.

And it's not true.

You know, it's like there's always this little carrot

dangling in front of us.

Man, I just... if I can just get a raise at work

then, like, things are gonna be fine, you know.

And then you get the raise at work

and it's, like, all these new responsibilities happen.

People are reporting to you,

you're having to work on weekends.

You're like, "Shit. If I could just get more vacation time,

then everything will be great."

Then you get more vacation time, and it turns out that,

well, damn, there are a lot of places to go on vacation,

and you're dissatisfied with pretty much any place you pick,

because the one on Instagram looked better.

You're like, "Shit. I need to go on vacation

to the one on Instagram."

And then you go there and it turns out the weather is bad.

And so there's just, like, there's shit wherever you go.

There's always a problem. There's always dissatisfaction.

Yet our mind keeps playing this game with us.

It keeps dangling the reward in front of us,

convincing us that if we can just take that next step,

then we'll live happily ever after.

Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill.

It's this idea that we keep running

to accomplish something that's gonna make us feel better.

But the fact of the matter is

we're spending all this energy yet getting nowhere.

So, this idea that we're gonna

somehow find some magical solution

to dissolve our suffering,

to dissolve our dissatisfaction permanently, it's just bullshit.

Happiness is great, but it's kind of blah,

because when you're happy,

it means nothing needs to change.

And so I think it's important to learn

how to sit with your negative emotions,

because it's like cross-training for your mind.

You're always... everything you try to do in your life,

you're gonna bump up against challenges, setbacks.

People are gonna do awful things to you,

accidents are gonna happen,

and so the more you're willing to sit with those feelings,

the more prepared you're gonna be in the moment,

when something goes wrong.

And this is why I always say

that happiness does not come

from getting rid of your problems.

Happiness comes from solving your problems.

If at any point you believe you don't have any problems,

if you're ignoring your problems

or avoiding them or escaping them in some way,

you're likely harming yourself over the long run.

And this is why negative emotions

are more interesting and useful than positive emotions.

Because you can't always trust your positive emotions.

I remember they got me out of the jail

and there was a McDonald's across the street,

and we went and sat in that McDonald's

for three or four hours,

and they made me tell them everything.

They told me I was never gonna see any of my friends again.

They told me I was never gonna go back to that school again.

Essentially, I mean, for a 13-year-old,

that's basically like telling you your life's over.

So, I lost my friends,

lost my school, lost my legal rights.

And then three months later, my parents got divorced.

And so my family fell apart.

And so in the span of about six months,

everything I understood about my life and who I was

collapsed at roughly the same time.

Like, just everything went to shit at the same time.

From that point, you know,

there was a deep, deep sense of hurt.

I went to basically being a lonely kid

with no friends, no family.

A lot of the other guys start picking on me,

you know, beating me up.

And I spent the vast majority of my time

getting high, playing video games, playing music,

basically being on my own.

People would come over and just...

sit with me and talk, like,

it was like I wasn't there, you know.

It was like there was this... meat robot that was, like,

pretending to be Mark, but Mark was somewhere else.

I had a lot of social anxiety.

I used to think to myself,

"Man, I wish I knew how to talk to people."

I had so many completely irrational beliefs

about how the world worked.

I had trouble believing and trusting

that people actually liked me

or were interested in hanging out with me.

But because I was unaware

that I had created this prison for myself,

I just felt very helpless.

I became this, like, very insecure, kind of...

strangely meek guy...

with a sense that something is fundamentally wrong with me...

but that I'm somehow at the center of the universe.

I once knew this guy named Jimmy.

Jimmy was a real go-getter.

Here we are. Welcome home, baby.

He seemed to always know these incredible people

in powerful places, you know.

He always had business ventures going,

trying to find some new angle.

Always onto the latest new thing.

He was a super-positive guy, a lot of fun to be around.

Great dude to party with.

Mmm. She's tasty to arrive in.

Like the guy was just always on.

I want you to remember this moment.

Don't forget this fucking moment.

He seemed to completely lack

the insecurities that I had so much of.

And for a while,

that was an incredibly empowering thing to be around.

He and I had a lot of fun.

The problem was is that he was a total fraud.

Like, just... full stop, hundred percent fraud, top to bottom.

He would do things like

talk companies into bringing him on as an angel investor,

you know, and giving him advisor equity

because of all these other start-ups

he had supposedly worked for.

But he hadn't actually worked for any of those start-ups,

and he didn't actually have any expertise.

He just talked his way into it.

Next thing you know, these people have given

a percentage of their business to this guy.

He never shows up for work and he never does anything.

There was always some great business idea

that was gonna take off.

It was gonna be the next Uber, or the next Facebook, whatever.

And no, he was just, you know, picking up some girl,

and taking her to some restaurant,

and spending $1,000 on dinner.

So, the question is, is Jimmy a successful guy?

Is he happy?

On paper, he's everything that we consider successful.

But on a moral metric, he's a disaster.

So, how did this happen?

You know, back in the 1970s,

self-esteem kind of became all the rage in psychology.

There were a number of studies that were done in the '60s

that found that generally, kids who felt better about themselves

got better grades in school,

got better jobs after school,

made more money, committed less crime.

Self-esteem kind of...

it became celebrated as this panacea for all the social ills.

Like, we just need people to feel good about themselves.

And then everything else will take care of itself.

And so this is when you start getting

grade inflation in schools,

you start getting participation trophies in sports,

you start getting parents

telling their little Timmy and little Susie

that, "You can be whatever you want to be.

You're brilliant as you are.

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise."

And a whole of generation

of teachers and parents and leaders did this,

believing that they were raising

kind of this psychologically elite generation of people

who were gonna feel great, and do amazing things in the world.

But then you jump 20 years later, and the data came in.

And it turns out that raising people's self-esteem,

it doesn't create a generation

of Bill Gateses and Martin Luther King Juniors.

It creates a generation of Jimmys.

Jimmy was always positive.

Jimmy always felt great about himself.

Jimmy always thought he deserved whatever he got.

And that's insane. That's...

Society cannot function if everybody is like that,

if everybody believes they have a right

to take more than they give.

Jimmy is entitled.

And entitlement,

it's when you feel as though

you deserve the benefits of something

without giving up the cost of something.

When you feel like you should have the results

without having the sacrifice.

You know, Jimmy's problem was that he thought

he should be a total bad-ass and a huge success,

without actually putting the work in,

without actually doing anything.

Fundamentally, entitlement is a way to protect ourselves.

It's a delusional belief to remove you

from the reality of yourself;

the reality that life is fucking painful,

you're limited, and no matter what you do,

it's always gonna be that way.

And so when that is too painful for us to accept,

we create these delusional beliefs

that somehow we're special, we're unique,

we deserve special treatment.

That our problems are problems that nobody else can understand.

That our talents are talents that nobody else can understand.

That it's the world that's holding us back.

That we would be great and everything would be perfect

if it wasn't for that guy or that group or that situation.

It's a protective layer for ourselves because it prevents us

from returning to that point of that intense pain.

It's like a circuit breaker goes off in our brain

and we almost, like, we have to escape it, you know.

We have to find an exit route.

You know, I didn't... I never knew Jimmy well enough

to figure out what had gone on in his life

to make him that way.

But, like, you're talking about a guy...

He didn't seem to even understand

the notion of friendship or trust.

Like, trust to him, like, seemed like a...

like a way to get fucked over, you know.

And so, it just makes you wonder, like,

what in his background hurt him so badly

to make him protect himself?

But, like, to me, it was incredibly validating

to have somebody like that, you know.

I can be that guy who's saying whatever the fuck he wants,

I'm that guy who can walk up to any girl he wants.

Like, just completely shattered

everything I knew about life in reality.

Entitlement is... it's easy to fall into because it feels good.

It's satisfying, in a weird sort of way.

You know, like, we all... we like the idea

that we're somehow the exception in the world, you know.

Like, we like the idea

that our problems are somehow unique or insurmountable,

because it... it suggests that there's something...

uniquely meaningful about our own existence.

We're constantly allured by this message

that we are somehow deserving of everything that we desire.

There's not a conspiracy theory, it's not a nefarious plan.

It's just, I think,

when that happens to be what wins people's attention,

and you've built an economy

off of monetizing people's attention,

you end up with a culture

that is largely built on the message of entitlement.

Traditional self-help says that every single person

is special and unique and can be extraordinary.

I find that tyrannical,

like, I find that to be a very confining idea,

because it promotes entitlement in people.

I think what's actually very liberating is recognizing that

none of us are very special.

We're all very mundane, we all deal with the same problems,

we all suffer in very similar ways to each other.

But the problem is that with social media and the internet,

we are constantly exposed

to the top 0.0001 percent of performers in everything.

And we are good to go.

If you think about most of our existence online

and what we're exposed to, I mean, it's...

You go on Instagram and you're just greeted

by ridiculously good-looking people

in ridiculously good-looking locations

doing ridiculously awesome things...

pretty much 24/7.

And you go on Twitter

and it seems like the fucking apocalypse has just started.

And then you go on Facebook

and seemingly every single person is either getting married

or having a kid at the exact same time.

This is the human highlight reel of social media.

Yes!

Meanwhile, you're sitting in your fucking living room,

hand in your underwear,

wondering what the fuck went wrong.

How did this happen? Why is my life so fucking mundane?

And it's like... you feel like a loser.

But there's no reason to,

because that's what everybody's life looks like.

We're all sitting in our living room

with our hand in our underwear,

scrolling the exact same shit on our phones.

It's just, like, this is not reality.

There's all of these narratives out there that...

that kind of convince us that,

"Hey, you deserve to be this special guy or girl,

and if you can just embody that life,

you'll be problem free.

You won't have to deal with pain again.

You won't have to sacrifice or struggle."

And that's bullshit.

Look, the reason this message, like, "Life fucking sucks,

you're always gonna have to sacrifice,

always gonna struggle,

always gonna have problems."

The reason you don't hear this more

is because it doesn't sell.

You can't sell a car by telling people,

like, "Hey, buy this car.

You're still gonna be miserable, even though you bought it."

Like, that doesn't move merchandise,

that doesn't help the bottom line.

And I don't think the problem is necessarily with, you know,

capitalism or the system or whatever,

the problem is with us.

Like, we just don't understand how our own minds work.

And so we've got to get straight with ourselves.

I think there's an undue psychological pressure

to feel as though we're extraordinary in some way,

that we're doing something extraordinary.

And I think this pushes a sense of entitlement,

it pushes a sense of, "Well, I deserve to have these things.

I deserve to be happy.

I'm great at something. People should know that."

I think if there was just

a simple cultural acknowledgement

of, like, "Yeah. Most of us suck at most of the things we do,

and that's fine," we could escape these things.

But in my case, I covered up my baggage and my insecurities

with a sense of entitlement.

And, you know, because so much of my pain

revolved around intimacy and relationships and trust,

I just became kind of an entitled... asshole

with a lot of relationships in my life.

From that pain, and from that place

of just not knowing what the hell to believe,

not being able to trust anybody, I was, like,

"Well, fuck it. I'm gonna get what I want."

I just went into full over-compensation.

I was kind of your classic, like, selfish player.

You know, I cheated on girlfriends,

I... I was always the guy who would just disappear.

My twenties is just like a fucking battlefield...

with, like, bomb craters where my relationships used to be.

It's just like strewn corpses

of old friendships and romantic partners...

that I just completely decimated...

mostly due to my own entitlement.

I remember one time, in college, I kind of stole my buddy's girl.

I was at a mutual friend's place,

and I was sitting on the couch with her, holding hands,

and he walked in the room, he took one look at me and her,

and immediately turned around and walked out of the house,

and he never spoke to me again.

And I just remember being like, wow.

Like, this dude just, like, he's just jealous, you know,

that I can get his girl, and he can't get her back or whatever.

Like, I... to me it was...

I couldn't see it through, like, a normal human's eyes.

I can only see it through, like,

my kind of obsessive, entitled eyes.

I basically have this, like... four-year period in my life,

where I have no friends from that period.

I have friends from before that period.

I have friends from after that period.

But there's four or five years there

where none of those people talk to me anymore.

So, I'm a huge metal fan.

One of the interesting things about heavy metal is that

arguably the two greatest bands were originally one band.

you want to say to everybody out there?

Metal up your ass!

Dave Mustaine

was the original lead guitarist of Metallica.

And he wrote a lot of the songs

on Metallica's first and second records.

The problem was that both Dave Mustaine and James Hetfield,

who was the lead singer and songwriter of Metallica,

they're both rebellious kids.

And so they would both get drunk

and just beat the shit out of each other.

And so in the midst of recording Metallica's first album,

Metallica just decided, "You know what?

Let's get rid of Dave Mustaine."

So, they woke him up one day by just handing him a bus ticket.

And so mid-album, like, the day before

they're gonna start recording,

Dave wakes up with a hangover,

and they just hand him a bus ticket

and say, like, "Get the fuck out."

That's how he found out he was out of the band.

And so he rode this, like, three-day bus back to L.A.

And on the bus, you know,

this fire started to build up inside him.

And by the time he got back to California, he had decided,

"You know what? I'm gonna start a new metal band.

It's gonna be a better metal band,

and it's gonna fucking kick Metallica's ass."

And so sure enough, he got back,

he found better musicians, he started writing better songs,

found better producers to record with,

and he produced what became known as Megadeth.

You guys ready for Megadeth?

Now, Megadeth went on to sell millions of albums.

They've toured the world dozens of times.

They've played in stadiums.

They're one of the biggest rock arena acts there's ever been,

yet...

The band he got kicked out of was Metallica,

an even bigger rock band that sold even more albums,

and played in even more stadiums,

and was even more famous.

And so, this put Mustaine in a really bizarre situation,

where he had achieved unimaginable success

by almost any stretch of the imagination.

But, like, the defining value

that was kind of steering his career,

which was to be better than Metallica, was never achieved.

He was giving a fuck about the wrong thing.

He was so focused on one-upping these other guys

who had insulted him, who had hurt him,

that he missed all the amazing things

that went on at the same time.

It puts a person like him in a situation

where he can sell 20 million albums,

and play to 100,000 people, and feel like a failure,

whereas any other rational person

would feel like a great success.

My first girlfriend I ever had,

we were doing long-distance, doing the phone thing,

seeing each other, like, every few months or whatever.

It sucked.

But, you know, we were madly in love

and when you're that age,

you think love conquers everything.

You're, like, "It's gonna be all right.

We're gonna make it."

And we did this for... quite a while.

And suddenly one week, she's not... she's not around.

You know, she's giving excuses and...

She's always got... Something's always come up.

She's not answering her phone, which never happened before.

So it started to feel really weird

and I would try to confront her about it

and she'd kind of blow me off or, you know,

make a big thing out of it,

so I didn't know what was going on.

And then one day, I just get a phone call

from a number I don't recognize,

and I pick up the phone and it's this guy...

I can't remember his name. It's Derek or Eric or something.

Anyway, he's like, "Hey, man, we don't know each other,

but I know your girlfriend, and we need to talk."

I'm like, "OK."

He's like, "She's been cheating on you." And I was like, "OK."

Obviously I'm skeptical at first,

and so I'm like, "How do you know?"

"Well, I know because she was cheating on you with me first

and now she's cheating on you with another guy."

I'm like, "What the fuck?"

He's like, "Don't worry. I'm gonna prove it to you."

And so this guy,

he's in front of her house with the phone,

knocks on her door

and he's holding the phone by his side with me on it.

He knocks on the door,

and she comes to the door and he confronts her.

He's like, "What the hell are you doing with this guy here?

I thought you were with me," or whatever,

and they start arguing.

She's like, "I'm not with you anymore, I'm with him."

And then he's like, "What about your boyfriend, Mark?"

And she's like, "Oh, you don't know anything about him.

It's none of your business," blah, blah, blah.

And then he pulls out the phone

and he's like, "Mark's right here."

And she's like, "No, he's not."

And then, like, he makes her take the phone,

and then I'm like, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

So she and I are screaming at each other and all this stuff,

and then she dumps me right there on the spot.

I laid on my bed crying and I think I was just in shock.

Obviously I was crying for her,

but I was grieving just this loss

of this naive view of the world,

that if you were in love, everything was going to be OK.

All of that just got smashed in that moment.

I thought I had a really great relationship with my girlfriend

and so the fact that this could happen,

was, like, just too much.

It was, like, caving in on me.

I don't think I told anybody how angry I was.

I didn't know how to express it without, like, losing myself.

You know, you start developing these beliefs of, like,

"I'm fine. She was just a horrible person,

and I didn't deserve this."

And there's this perverse kind of certainly that emerges.

You know, each failed relationship I had,

I just used that as further evidence of,

"Ah, well. This is just... this is just how things are.

People are shitty. Nothing... Love never works out, you know."

It was... That's how I saw things.

You know, it's the classic victimhood entitlement.

What happened with Dave Mustaine is a great example

of how we all react to extremely painful situations.

You know, the pain of getting kicked out of his first band,

and feeling like... like he wasn't worthy of them,

it forced him to construct this world view.

This world view of, "I'm gonna be better than them.

Everything I do has to be better that Metallica."

And we all do this in one way or another.

We suffer a great amount of pain,

we create a world view to help us escape that pain,

and then we forget that we created the world view,

and so we're doomed to repeat a lot of our failures.

In the closing months of 1944,

after almost a decade of war,

the tide was turning against Japan.

Defeat seemed inevitable.

The Americans arrived with overwhelming force.

Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese Imperial Army

was deployed to Lubang

with near impossible task of defending the island.

Just 22 years old, Onoda had trained

with the elite Futamata Commando Unit.

He was given the express instructions

to halt the enemy advance, to never surrender,

and under no circumstances take his own life.

Within days, most of the Japanese soldiers

had either been killed or taken prisoner.

But Onoda, his burly sergeant,

and two young privates evaded capture,

and stole away into the mountains.

From there, they launched a guerrilla campaign

attacking supply lines...

stealing food,

- and harassing stray patrols. - Incoming!

August the 6th,

the first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima.

The representatives of the Emperor of Japan...

Half a year later, Japan surrendered,

and the deadliest war in human history

came to its dramatic conclusion.

The US Military dropped leaflets

announcing that the war was over,

and that it was time for the Japanese soldiers to go home.

Onoda read these leaflets,

but he was convinced they were fake,

a trap set by the Americans to flush them out.

The Philippine locals, sick of being terrorized,

armed themselves.

Local police patrols are stepped up

and in a bloody skirmish,

Onoda's sergeant is shot and killed.

Onoda and his last remaining companion

vow to avenge the death of their friend.

The attacks escalate, and for the Japanese government,

the exploits of the fugitive lieutenant

were kind of becoming a diplomatic crisis.

A massive recovery operation is funded.

Letters and pictures from the missing soldiers' families

were scattered across the island,

along with a letter from the Emperor himself,

imploring the two men to give themselves up.

But once again,

Onoda refused to believe the information was real.

Once again, he believed it was all a trick by the Americans.

Once again, he stood his ground, and continued to fight.

In a desperate last-ditch effort,

Onoda's brother is flown from Japan,

and escorted into the mountains.

Onoda watches as his brother calls out his childhood nickname

and sings their old school song.

Could he have been wrong for the last 15 years?

Could his comrades have died for nothing?

Could the Filipinos that he killed have been innocent?

It's too painful to consider.

Onoda dismissed his brother as a convincing fake

sent by the enemy to confuse him.

A decade later, a shootout with local police.

Kozuka is killed.

Onoda, having spent half his life waging an imaginary war

in the jungles of Lubang, was now alone.

So, the only real job I've ever had is, um...

I got a job at this bank

and it was absolutely soul-destroying.

We were going around one afternoon

and people were saying,

"What are you..." People were asking each other,

"What are you gonna do once you start making six figures?"

And everybody was like, "I'm gonna buy a BMW,"

or, "I'm gonna get a boat on the lake,

and I'm gonna take it out in the summer," and all this stuff.

And then it got to me and I was like,

"Well, I think I'd take a year-long sabbatical

and travel around the world."

And they're, you know, it was like... crickets.

You know, like everybody was just looking at me like...

"What's wrong with you, man?"

And it was at that moment that I kind of realized, like,

I shouldn't be here.

And so, in 2009, I set off to live around the world.

I did want to see the world

and understand different cultures,

and meet different types of people, but there was also...

kind of this compulsive avoidance of commitment.

I was afraid to get too close to people.

I was afraid to be over-committed

to a single place or person or community or even city.

And so I just kind of bounced around the world

like a lottery ball.

You know, spending three months here,

and two months there, and six weeks here and one week there.

I ended up visiting, like, 60 countries,

learned a couple of languages,

met hundreds of people, had a lot of great times.

My life was organized

around maximizing quantity of experiences.

You know, go to more countries, do more things,

go to more parties, date more girls.

Like, it was always more, more, more, more, more.

There was almost this compulsive desire, you know.

It was this constant urge, like, it was never enough.

There was never enough attention

or affection or sex or love...

that could ever, like, satiate my craving for it.

But then it led to these insane situations

where I actually would find somebody,

that we would have a little bit

of functional intimacy and chemistry

and that scared the living shit out of me.

And I would run the other direction as fast as I could.

If, like, a cocaine addict

stumbled across a snowman made of cocaine,

you'd just, like, bury your fucking head in it.

I think socially and emotionally,

I felt very lost and, um...

and I was too young to really understand why.

In the course of writing all these years, I always...

I was jealous of people who had rules and laws named after them.

And I was like, "Well, I want to be a cool kid,

so I'm gonna name a law after myself."

And so I created something

called Manson's Law of Avoidance,

which is essentially this.

People will avoid an action or an experience

in proportion to how much

it threatens their identity and their world view.

And the interesting thing about Manson's Law of Avoidance

is that it's true for both positive and negative actions.

And so on the positive side, you get people self-sabotaging,

like, "No, I don't want to be too successful.

I don't want to buy something that's too nice.

I don't want to live somewhere too fancy.

Like, that will... That's too threatening for my life,

for the security of my life right now."

And similarly, they avoid things that involve a lot of risk.

It's like, "I don't want to take a chance in another city.

I don't want to break up with this person.

It might hurt too much, it might make things too difficult."

Essentially what Manson's Law says is that the...

the resistance to change is proportional

to how fundamental something is to how we see ourselves,

and how we see the world.

You know, in my own case,

my relationships were all dysfunctional,

every single one of them.

And part of that is just because I thought

dysfunctional relationships were normal,

that that's how all human relationships were.

And so I couldn't even correctly identify the problem

because I had constructed a world view

that prevented me from seeing the problem.

It was too fundamental for my identity.

In 1972, a young man named Norio Suzuki

first heard of the legendary Lieutenant Onoda.

Suzuki was an adventurer,

an explorer and a bit of a hippy.

Many Japanese thought

Lieutenant Onoda sounded too insane to actually exist.

Others thought he was the stuff of fairy tales,

invented by those who yearned for a Japan

that had long since disappeared.

But for Suzuki,

the idea of finding Onoda was a new and worthy adventure.

Sure, local forces had been scavenging the jungle

for almost 30 years with no luck.

Thousands of leaflets had been met with no response.

But fuck it, this deadbeat college dropout hippy,

he was gonna be the one to find him.

Unarmed and untrained

for any sort of reconnaissance or tactical warfare,

Suzuki traveled to Lubang,

and began wandering around the jungle by himself.

His strategy? Shout out Onoda's name,

and tell him that the Emperor was worried about him.

He found Onoda in four days.

Now, why Onoda, after 30 years

and millions of dollars of rescue operations,

decided to reveal himself to a lowly backpacker is hard to say.

Perhaps it was the loneliness,

or perhaps he saw in Suzuki his own adventurous younger self,

a self that was still worth saving.

On the 9th of March, 1974,

Hiroo Onoda was finally ordered to terminate hostilities

by this long-retired commander.

He crumpled under the weight of his pack

and began to weep uncontrollably.

"Am I the chosen one?"

We all love to believe that we're the chosen one.

Because we're all kind of living out our own little story,

our own little hero's journey.

And so, in our own minds, we are the chosen one.

And it feels good.

But this is the cheeseburger and fries for your brain, you know.

Like, that's... That's the junk food for your mind.

It tastes, like, really good going down,

but it makes you unhealthy and lethargic.

And, at some point, this world view will fall apart.

Like, that falling apart has to happen.

Something funny starts happening as you get away from heartbreak.

For one, you start dating other people,

and you start noticing patterns.

And for me, it was I started noticing

that a lot of the shit that I blamed my first girlfriend for

was popping up with other women I started seeing.

And it made me start asking myself, huh!

Maybe it's not their fault.

Maybe it's something I'm doing.

And so it caused me to start reflecting on my behavior,

and my intentions.

It took a number of years for me to look back

and realize, like, "Wow. I was such an asshole."

And, um, there was a lot of, like, guilt and shame of like,

"Wow. I can't believe I did that.

Like, who does that?"

And as awful as that shame and guilt felt, it was useful.

Like, I needed that.

A 58-year-old woman has filed a civil suit

against a local Mexican restaurant

after she fell off the eatery's

famous plastic donkey statue.

Two men who rushed in

to help a woman trapped in her SUV as it burned

are now suing that woman.

A lot of people recoil from this idea

that we're responsible for everything

that happens in our lives.

But it's true. We just are.

You hear stories of people like this.

All these terrible things that have been inflicted upon them.

They don't want to accept

that, like, life is always going to suck a little bit.

And everybody has their shit.

But it's up to us as individuals

not to blame others for this stuff.

Adios!

People do get offended or upset

when you imply that they're somehow responsible

for a tragedy in their life.

I mean, again, it's not their fault,

but it's their responsibility.

You know, you get a horrible disease,

somebody gets cancer, a family member dies.

Awful things do happen in this world.

The problem is, is that people who fall into this mentality,

they disempower themselves

from actually doing anything about their problems.

Their goal is to simply find new outlets to blame,

like new people

to push their responsibility for themselves onto.

Why is it OK for women to say,

"Oh, you're five feet?" on dating sites,

"You should be dead"? That's OK?

- Who said that to you here? - Nobody.

You think I'm making that shit up?

Everywhere I go, I get the same smirk.

With the biting lip.

They're doing it because they're in pain,

because something really hurt them

at some point in their life.

And even though

we kind of detest their behavior and their attitude,

they're still deserving of empathy and understanding.

Due to our legal system, we're accustomed

to equating fault and responsibility

as being the same thing,

but they're not.

Jennifer Connell sued the boy

over an injury she received

during his eighth birthday party,

when he leaped into her arms to hug her.

We're not always at fault for our pain,

but we are always responsible for our pain.

We are always interpreting our pain.

We are always reacting to our pain.

While it's not my fault when my first girlfriend dumped me,

I shared responsibility in the failure of the relationship.

I paid for my sandwich. I'm getting my sandwich.

Call the police. I paid for my sandwich.

I'm grabbing my sandwich.

I'm right! You're wrong!

Dude, want to step outside? You want to step outside?

No. Can you...

you!

Every awful thing that happens in our lives,

you have a choice to make.

How are you going to react to it?

How can I make this meaningful?

What can I do about it? How can I move forward?

And that... that's like...

That is a tough pill to swallow and it takes...

It takes a long time for most of us to swallow that.

But it's true.

And in my case, it was a very, very hard thing

for me to admit to myself.

But once I did...

it was so powerful.

It forced me to take responsibility for my choices,

and for how I behaved.

It freed me to change

to not make those same mistakes going forward.

Responsibility is essentially admitting

that you can make a different choice next time.

And so until you adopt that responsibility,

you're gonna make the same choices

over and over and over again.

Lieutenant Onoda arrived home to a hero's welcome.

He became a kind of celebrity.

He was shuttled around from talk show to radio station.

Politicians clambered to shake his hand.

But despite the adoration,

he was confronted by an undeniable truth.

The Japan he had been fighting for no longer existed.

Thirty years of life wasted.

Hiroo Onoda's is a precautionary tale about certainty,

of being too sure of how things work.

He's a man who,

despite the fact that the war ended, the Empire collapsed,

and the modern world completely changed, he never left the past.

Every event that occurred, he simply reinterpreted it

to fit his prior world view.

I think most people tend to see the world

in terms of right and wrong. Who's right, who's wrong,

and there's kind of no middle ground.

I prefer to think of it

in terms of everybody is wrong all the time.

And it's just a question of who's slightly less wrong.

And I don't think

we ask that critical question of ourselves very often,

because it's not just true of society,

it's also true of us as individuals.

Things that I was certain were true ten, 20 years ago,

now I look back at and I laugh at.

I was certain that my relationship

with my first girlfriend was perfect,

and we were in love, and everything was gonna be great.

I was completely wrong about that.

So instead of constantly looking for certainty,

it's more effective to look for doubt.

What can you potentially be wrong about?

What beliefs could be improved upon?

What could potentially change?

Those are the more effective questions.

It's paradoxical, but the most functional

and healthy relationships,

it's two people who are able

and allowed to say "no" to each other,

to disappoint each other.

If you need to feel certain about everything in your life,

then you're not gonna have the ability to trust people.

You're gonna try to control people,

you're gonna try to manipulate them

into doing exactly what you need them to do.

Like, finding out you're wrong is... it's...

it doesn't feel good, but it's necessary.

It's necessary to become a better human being.

One of my favorite psychologists and researchers

is a guy named Kazimierz Dabrowski.

He was from Poland during the Cold War,

so he was behind the Iron Curtain.

And it's really interesting

because if you look at the psychological research

that was happening during the 20th century...

in the West, it was very much focused on positivity.

How do we make people feel better?

How do we improve people's self-esteem?

How do we make people happier?

Whereas in the East, it was much more about negative experience.

It was about how does pain and suffering affect people?

How does trauma shape them or change them in various ways?

And Dabrowski, by being a researcher in Warsaw,

he had access to World War Two survivors

and Holocaust survivors to study.

And so he ended up interviewing hundreds of them.

And he found something incredibly startling.

The majority of people

who survived the war and survived the Holocaust

eventually attributed those experiences as benefitting them.

They basically said that those experiences,

as awful as they were,

made them better people.

It made them more grateful, it made the more compassionate.

It improved their sense of self-respect.

This always presents like a very uncomfortable thought,

which is, like, that something so horrible

could produce a good result.

One way to think about it is,

it's kind of like the pressure that forms a diamond.

Like, you can't form a diamond

without a certain amount of pressure on something.

Everybody wants the same things.

Like, all of the positive experiences in our life,

they're pretty universal.

We all want to have money.

We all want to have great relationships.

We all want to be liked by others

and be super popular and be rich and have cool shit,

and everybody is clapping when we walk into the room.

But that's not very interesting.

What's interesting is what struggles

we're willing to take on to achieve those things.

Everybody wants to change, right, like, everybody...

everybody buys a self-help book,

or goes to a seminar or whatever, because they're like,

"Yeah. I want to change."

And they're kind of marketed this idea

that change is like a party, you know.

Like, you can fucking sing and dance,

and walk out of the building, like, you know,

twirling your feet or whatever.

It's, like, no, change is fucking brutal.

Because if you actually change,

if you actually fundamentally change your world view,

you are forced to give up

so much of what you believe to be true.

You're forced to sacrifice huge chunks of your identity.

That's not fun shit.

It's fucking hard.

I mean, think about people who run marathons.

Look at these guys at the 18-mile mark,

and they're still going.

If they were being forced to do this,

you would be calling the Human Rights Commission.

But marathon runners love this shit,

and their triumph is only possible

because they chose this struggle.

I chose this, I chose to take on this suffering,

I chose to take on this struggle,

therefore that choice makes that struggle meaningful.

It makes it something important or powerful for you.

It's because you struggle,

because you suffer, because you sacrifice

that they end up standing out

as the most worthy and meaningful moments of your life.

You know, life is always gonna have pain,

it's always gonna have struggle.

But if you can train yourself

to not give a fuck about the pain...

you become unstoppable.

The emotional difficulty of change

is always directly proportional to the scale of change,

or to how core it is to your identity.

It's not fun. It's not fun at all.

So, if I could create a superhero,

I would create Disappointment Panda.

Have you ever seen those viral Egyptian cheese commercials?

Disappointment Panda is kind of like that.

But instead of making people eat cheese,

you'd be making them eat harsh truths about themselves,

that nobody wanted to hear.

You know, he'd say,

"Making a lot of money might make you feel good,

but it won't make your kids love you."

Or he'd say, "You're not really sick,

you're just avoiding the pain of having driven your wife away

by your constant complaining."

And then if you didn't listen...

Well, he'd have ways of making you listen.

The fact is that we need to eat our problem cheese.

If we're not willing to face and admit our problems,

then we can't change and we can't grow.

Disappointment Panda is the hero

that none of us want, but we all actually need.

Because we all have truths in our lives that we avoid hearing,

that we don't want to confront

or don't want to admit to ourselves.

Yet, it's by confronting or admitting them

that we can actually open the way to become better.

A lot of people don't like hearing this.

Like, we like to hear that our problems can be solved forever,

we like to hear that there's some formula to be happy,

live happily ever after.

But I'm sorry, but Disappointment Panda says,

"No, there's not. This is simply how life is."

And so if we're forced to have problems,

then we might as well find the problems

that we enjoy having in life.

You know, when everybody hears this idea

of, like, not giving a fuck,

you kind of imagine this, like, cool dude kicking back, like,

"Yeah. Fuck it, man. Like, whatever."

Like a beach bum or something, and it's...

That's not what it is.

You know, you have to give a fuck about something.

You have to care about something in your life.

The question is, what are you choosing to care about?

Because when you choose your problems in your life,

when you find problems that you like having,

that's when you suddenly find yourself not giving a fuck.

When you don't give a fuck

that you're making these sacrifices for your family.

When you don't give a fuck

that it's hard to practice for another hour.

When you don't give a fuck

that you have to get up early in the morning

and put in more time at work.

When you've found the struggle that enlivens and enriches you,

that's when you've achieved non-fuck-giving mastery.

There's one thing I started to realize

after traveling quite a bit is that at some point,

there's diminishing returns to new experiences.

In that moment, like, that's a terrifying thought.

It's a really terrifying thought.

But what you discover is that there's actually

a newer, more subtle kind of freedom in that commitment.

I eventually was forced to face my commitment issues.

for the simple fact that there was nowhere else left to run.

I had literally run around the world...

escaping any sense of commitment to a person or a place.

So, when you run out of places to run,

it's like, "Well, shit. I've got to pick something."

When I was 19 years old,

I went through probably the most transformational experience

of my life.

Josh, I met him at music school.

He was actually kind of the first friend

I made at music school.

He lived across the hall in the dorm from me.

He was kind of like an older-brother figure for me.

Very extroverted,

bigger-than-life energy, you know.

He was a natural performer.

Like, at music school, it's a very strange dynamic

because there are a lot of status games that are going...

People are very competitive.

"Oh, this band is more obscure and technical

than the band you're into."

"I prefer late-period Brahms versus early-period Brahms."

And, you know, all this kind of pretentious stuff that happens.

And I'm hanging out in my dorm room,

and all of a sudden,

the guy across the hall, like, blasts "Billie Jean".

Like, full blast.

It kind of makes a statement.

It kind of says, "I don't give a fuck."

Like, "Fuck your pretentious music."

He was just this big, boisterous, fun-loving guy

who just wanted to sing and play drums

and, like, have a good time

and just didn't buy into all the bullshit.

To me, it was just magnetic to hang around him.

He was much more confident than I was.

Kind of a role model.

There was a place, maybe 45 minutes outside of Dallas,

out kind of near this lake.

And, um, Josh, like, he told me,

"Dude, they just have these crazy parties every weekend."

And there was this...

there was a cliff kind of like overlooking this lake,

and people would jump off that cliff into the water.

So, we go to this party.

And then I asked him if he did it.

And he was like, "Oh, yeah, yeah. I've done it before."

I was like, "Oh, cool."

Then he asked me if I wanted to do it,

and I was like, "Uh... I might watch you first."

You know, like, that sort of thing.

And at some point during the party,

I met a girl and kind of got into her

and we got separated.

And the last time I ever saw Josh,

I was walking up towards the house with the girl

and he was coming down.

And I said, "Hey, I'm gonna go get some food. Do you want some?

He was like, "No, man. I'm good. I'll catch you later."

And so, when I said, "Hey, where can I find you?",

he was like, "Seek the truth for yourself,

and I'll meet you there."

I just, like, laughed and, like, "All right, dude, whatever.

I'll see you at the truth."

You know, as if we all know where the truth is.

And so then, I went up to the house,

and then when we came out, everybody was gone.

And so it's, like, this weird, surreal,

like, "What the fuck?" type moment.

And so we walked down to the water,

and I started looking for Josh and I can't find him.

There's, like, ambulances and police cars and stuff

with the lights going,

and there were a couple of guys in the water, swimming around.

And then I remember I walked up

to, uh, this guy and this girl, and I asked them.

I'd seen them talking to Josh earlier, and I asked them.

And the girl just starts crying, like, just bawl...

As soon as I asked her, she just starts bawling.

And then at that point, I'm like, "Oh, my God.

It's him. Like, he's the one who went down."

And I must have walked around the water

for like an hour, I guess.

And... it just starts dawning on me, like, he's not here.

I remember a police officer came up to me

and asked me if I knew him and I said, "Yeah."

I don't remember what she asked, I don't remember...

I think she gave up.

I got in my car and I started driving back to Austin.

And so I called my dad.

I was working for my dad that summer,

and I called him and I was gonna tell him, like,

"Hey, I'm not gonna make it to work today."

And then I just fucking lost it.

I felt like a little boy...

crying to his father.

You know when you're a little, little kid,

and you just grab your parent,

and just cry everything out into them.

Like, it was like that.

I've been depressed many times in my life, but that was...

I've never, like, felt a bleakness.

Like, just a pure... nothingness.

I used to have dreams of him.

I remember I had this one dream

where he and I were sitting in a Jacuzzi together.

And I remember telling him,

"Hey, man, I'm really sorry you died."

He was like... he's like, "Why do you care that I'm dead,

when you're still so afraid to live?"

And I woke up from that dream

just, like, a fucking mess, total mess.

But I had this very powerful realization that,

if there's no reason to do anything,

there's also no reason to not do anything.

Like, there's no reason to be ashamed,

there's no reason to be afraid.

And so that fall, I really...

it really changed me a lot.

You know, before he died,

I was a very, like, prototypical...

stoner... middle-class stoner kid, you know.

Like, too cool for school, too cool to care.

I thought I didn't give a fuck, you know,

but it's like I actually gave way too many fucks.

And that's why I was scared to really do anything.

And when he died, it was a wake-up call of like,

"Dude, you've got to care.

You've got to pick something and care."

Because it can be gone... any moment.

It doesn't matter how old you are, doesn't matter how...

how fit you are, or whatever, like...

It can... when it goes, it goes fast,

and nobody is prepared for it.

When I think about Josh, I just...

I think he'd be proud of me.

I think he kind of felt like

an older brother to me too, you know.

I think he kind of saw that I needed to be pushed.

And he was that friend who pushed me.

He would fucking love this.

He would love every second of it.

I have this weird tendency whenever I visit someplace...

high.

I want to stand as close to the edge as possible.

There's this unconscious awareness your body has

whenever you're close to an edge that could kill you.

And as soon as you're within, you know, say ten feet,

your body is in alert status.

It just kind of... it sends this jolt of anxiety through you.

And then you're forced to confront that anxiety

and then you take another step.

And each step, the anxiety just start compounding

to the point where your hands are shaking,

your scalp is sweating,

your brain starts flashing...

visions of it all ending.

That's what I find when I get close to a cliff edge.

It brings me back

to that place of pure thankfulness for being alive.

But there's really only a few things in life

that are ever worth giving a fuck about.

Only in the face of death,

all of the superficial and bullshitty values

that we buy into start to fall away.

You start to realize

that the dumb status games you play

no longer mean anything.

Or that the achievements and accolades

that you struggled for so many years for

nobody cares about when you're gone.

When we avoid the question of death,

that's when we get highjacked

by silly and superficial and hateful ideas.

It's when we become certain in ourselves,

even though we have no clue what's going on.

The gravity of our entitlement

pulls all of our attention inwards,

to become obsessed with our problems, to convince ourselves

that our problems are somehow at the center of the universe,

that we are at the center of all injustices,

that we are the ones who are destined for greatness,

that we are the ones who deserve something over others.

Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death,

the superficial begins to feel important,

and the important starts to feel superficial.

Thinking about death removes all that.

It forces you to see

that 99% of the shit going on in your day-to-day life

doesn't fucking matter.

Death is the only certainty in life.

Therefore death must be the compass

by which we orient all of our values and decisions.

How are you using your time?

How are you using your limited fucks?

Who are you going to be with?

This constant remembering of my own mortality,

for me, it's the most effective tool for unraveling everything.

My sense of entitlement, my closed-up identity,

my irrational certainties.

By remembering that it's all a bunch of dust

that will soon be gone,

it's easier to let go.

It's this ability to choose ourselves

in an endless ambiguity that makes us great.

You don't have to go do something to feel these things.

You don't have to go be something

to realize these things.

You simply are them.

The more I think about my own death, the brighter life gets.

The quieter the world becomes.

The easier decisions become.

You too are going to die one day,

but that's because you are fortunate enough to have lived.

And you may not feel this right now.

You may not feel any of this.

But go stand on a cliff sometime and maybe you will.