We tend to think of genius as something you’re born with — a rare trait possessed by the Einsteins and Teslas of the world. But what if many of the abilities we associate with genius — a great memory, quick problem-solving, mental math, creative insight — are actually trainable skills?

My guest today says that’s exactly the case. His name is Nelson Dellis, and he’s a six-time USA Memory Champion and the author of the book Everyday Genius.

In our conversation, Nelson explains why memory is the foundation of thinking well and why having information stored in your head still matters in the age of ChatGPT. He shares a practical technique for improving your memory, how to read with greater focus and retention, and how to study to actually make information stick. We then talk about the importance of developing “number sense” and how to convert imperial measurements to metric in your head, strategies for solving problems more effectively, and even how to gain an edge in the games of Monopoly and Connect Four. At the end of the conversation, we get into more esoteric territory, including intuition, dreams, and the idea of remote viewing.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nelson’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #546 — How to Get a Memory Like a Steel Trap
• AoM Article: 10 Ways to Improve Your Memory
• AoM Article: How to Speed Read Like Theodore Roosevelt
• AoM Podcast #385: Learning How to Learn
• AoM Article: Study Tactics of the Successful Gentleman Scholar
• The CIA’s remote viewing program

Connect With Nelson Dellis

• Nelson’s website
• Nelson on YouTube

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When we fail to make desired progress in life, most of us put the blame on physical and environmental limits. But my guest says that what’s really holding people back is what’s in their heads.

Nir Eyal is the author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. Today on the show, he argues that much of how we think about ourselves, our abilities, and what’s possible becomes our reality, and that getting what we want in life often comes down to changing how we perceive it. Drawing on research in neuroscience and psychology, Nir shares the three powers of belief, and how they direct your attention, alter your expectations, shape your sense of agency, and determine whether you stick with hard things long enough to see results. Along the way, he shares ways to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that can sabotage your goals and relationships.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nir’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #553 — How to Become Indistractable
• AoM Article: How Reframing Builds Resilience
• AoM podcast episode on William James and pragmatism

Connect with Nir Eyal

• Nir’s website

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When we fail to make desired progress in life, most of us put the blame on physical and environmental limits. But my guest says that what’s really holding people back is what’s in their heads. Nir Eyal is the author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. He argues that much of how we think about ourselves, our abilities and what’s possible becomes our reality. And that getting what we want in life often comes down to changing how we perceive it. Drawing on research and neuroscience and psychology Nir shares the three powers of belief and how they direct your attention, alter your expectations, shape your sense of agency, and determine whether you stick with hard things long enough to see results along the way. He shares ways to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that can sabotage your goals and relationships. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/beyondbelief. All right, Nir Eyal, welcome back to the show.

Nir Eyal:

Thanks, man. Great to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So we had you on way back in 2019. You’re out with a new book called Beyond Belief: The Science Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results. And this is about human motivation, and you think you found a missing factor that we need to consider when we think about motivation. How did your struggle with losing weight lead you to explore human motivation? What’s that story?

Nir Eyal:

Yeah, so let’s go all the way back to the beginning. So for me, I struggled with my weight for a good chunk of my life, chunk being the right word that would’ve been descriptive at the time. I was the kid who never went into the community pool when I was a kid. We had one pool in our condominium complex and all the kids in the neighborhood shared it. And I was the one who never went in without my shirt on because I didn’t want anyone to see my belly rolls. And I was super embarrassed by that, and I finally decided to do something about it. And I wasn’t just overweight, Brett, it was much worse than that. I was actually clinically obese and I started dieting and over the next 30 years, my bookshelf became this graveyard of diet books. First I started with low fat, and I don’t know if you remember those days of low fat everything and Snackwells.

Brett McKay:

Yes, Snackwells the Devil Cake. Yeah, yeah.

Nir Eyal:

Alright, so we’re about the same age, if you remember Snackwells. And I would scarf those down. And then after that we determined that was not a good idea anymore. So I became vegetarian and I ate nothing but tofu and potatoes. And then after that the pendulum swung and now it was low carb everything. And I went keto. And then after that, let’s see what came after that. After that it was intermittent fasting. That was the way to go. And honestly, every diet worked until it didn’t. And I was on this rollercoaster ride of yo-yo dieting because as soon as my belief was shaken in that plan, as soon as someone said, oh, keto is bad for you because it’s bad for your kidneys or vegetarians don’t get all the nutrients they need, or whatever the plan was, as soon as my confidence was shaken, I’d abandoned the plan altogether and I’d go for a slice of pizza thinking, ah, it’s not going to hurt whatever one slice of pizza.

And then of course, the what the hell effect kicked in. That’s the real name of that psychological phenomenon where I would say to myself, what the hell? I already had the slice of pizza. I’ll start on a new plan tomorrow, so let me go ahead and chase it with the french fries to compliment the pizza. And what I realized was that after 30 years of dieting, that I got control of my weight. Finally, I’m 48 years old and it’s the first time in my life that I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. And I for the first time consistently watch what I eat and see results. It’s because my beliefs changed is that I had a new conviction that I could do something about the next thing that goes in my mouth as opposed to the what the hell effect that kept saying, okay, I’ll start tomorrow, I’ll start next week, I’ll start in the new year, et cetera.

This has led me to this discovery around why we don’t put good knowledge into action. And we see this all the time. We have all kinds of advice books, we have the internet now we have AI to answer our questions around what we should do. And I think the main problem is that it’s not that we don’t know what to do, the answers are all around us. I basically know what to do to diet. You have to eat right and exercise for the vast majority of people unless you have some kind of severe hormone imbalance. That’s pretty much the plan, but we don’t implement it. And so I think before I wanted to read another self-help book that I didn’t do anything with. I wanted to fundamentally understand what was missing and what was missing is that motivation is not a straight line. We tend to think of motivation as if I want the outcome, if I want the benefit, I have to do the behavior right?

It’s kind of a straight line, do the behavior, get the benefit. But there’s definitely something missing here because I can want the benefit and I can even know what to do, what behavior to do. But if I don’t have the beliefs in place to support what I call this motivation triangle of on one side is the benefit, one side is the behavior. At the base of that triangle is the belief. For example, if I don’t believe that my boss has my best interest and is going to give me that promotion, for example, if I don’t believe in my own ability to do the behavior and that the behavior will reach those outcomes, then the behavior triangle falls apart because the beliefs aren’t there. And I think that was what was missing for me, and I think for millions of other people who basically know what to do, and yet we don’t implement what we know is good for us. And I think that is the reason that we miss out on these powers of belief.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting because I can see that in my own life. So I’ve had instances with my physical practice of weightlifting where I get injured and I’ll go to the physical therapist and they’ll recommend, okay, you need to do this stuff for rehab. And I do it, and I’m like, I’m not seeing anything. This seems so piddly. Why am I doing these little dumb stretches? And I stop believing, I’m like, eh, this is not going to work. And then I stop doing the thing and then I don’t get better. And then finally I have to go back to my physical therapist and he has to tell me, look, I know it doesn’t seem like it’s working in the short term, but I promise you if you keep doing it, it will work. And once I believe him, like, okay, I’m going to trust this guy. I’m going to do the thing, and then the rehab works. It might take a while, but it does work.

Nir Eyal:

Bingo. You really hit the nail on the head here because what you’ve identified is the key determining factor between who reaches their goals and who doesn’t. If you look at, okay, why do people not reach their goals? The number one reason is not that they don’t know what to do. It’s not a lack of resources, it’s not bad timing. The number one reason people don’t achieve their goals is that they don’t persist. How obvious is that. We quit. That’s why we don’t achieve our goals. Why do we quit? Even though we know it’s good for us, even though we know what to do, why don’t we do it? And the reason is, is that there’s a fundamental lack of belief. And so if you don’t know how to use these powers of belief, what I call the power, the first power of belief is attention.

The power to change what you see, power of anticipation, the power to change what you feel, and then the third power, the power of agency, the power to change what you do. If you don’t harness those beliefs and realize how powerful they are, how essential they are to get you where you want to go, you’re going to quit. And that’s what I did year after year, goal after goal. Not that quitting is always bad. I’m not anti quitting. The Lord knows I’ve quit diets, I’ve quit book projects, I’ve quit businesses, I’ve quit relationships. It’s not that quitting is necessarily the wrong thing. It’s that quitting too soon is a problem. That’s terrible when you know persistence could have made a difference and you quit, and now you regret looking back and saying, oh man, if I just had persistent a little bit longer, I would’ve had all these benefits. That’s when we are destroying human capital, and that’s really what I’m fighting against.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so you have this motivational triangle, benefit, behavior, and belief is the foundation of that triangle. How are you defining belief? How is belief different from fact and faith?

Nir Eyal:

Great question. So a fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether you believe in it or not. So the world is more round than it is flat. That’s an objective truth. It doesn’t care what you think, sorry, flat earthers, it’s a fact. Faith is the other end of the spectrum. Faith is a strongly held conviction that does not require evidence. So what happens to you in the afterlife? No evidence is required. God rewards the righteous if that’s something that you have faith in, no evidence is required. That is an element of faith. Now, a belief is something different. A belief is something in between a fact and faith. It is a strongly held conviction, open to revision based on new evidence, a strongly held conviction open to revision based on new evidence. And so the big aha, the thing that blew my mind doing this research was that beliefs, unlike facts or faith beliefs are tools, not truths.

I’m going to say it one more time. Beliefs are tools, not truth. So many of our problems, our interpersonal problems, our personal issues, our geopolitical issues as well, it goes all the way up there are caused because far too many people think that the things that they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs. And we are bound by these beliefs that we refuse to look at, that we refuse to consider thinking that they are our facts. And we put ultimate faith in many of these things. Unfortunately, sometimes while we restrict ourselves to have the freedom to take out these tools, look at them, assess them, and say, Hey, are these helping me or are they hurting me? So for example, it’s like a carpenter. Would a carpenter say, oh, this hammer, this hammer is the one and only ultimate hammer? No, a carpenter says, okay, sometimes the right tool for the job is a screwdriver.

Sometimes it’s a saw, sometimes it’s a hammer, but not always. And so what I’ve learned is that being able to look at those beliefs critically and understand which ones serve me and which one hurts me is a life-changing practice. It absolutely has changed my business. It has changed my relationships, it has changed my physical fitness. Certainly all of these things have been revolutionized because I’m now able to get out of my own head, consider the things that were invisible to me. I think in the metaphor to think about your limiting beliefs, and by the way, limiting beliefs are beliefs that sap your motivation. While liberating. Beliefs are beliefs that supply motivation. And the best way to think about these limiting beliefs is that they’re like your face. You carry around your face all day long. Other people see your face, but you can’t see your own face unless you look in a mirror.

You can’t see your own face. And that’s exactly the same case with our beliefs that the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. They’re the ones we can’t even see. We don’t even realize, just like you can’t see your face the way you could see your hands or your feet, you can’t see your limiting beliefs. Of course other people can see them and I can prove it to you. Think about any random person close like somebody, well your family member or good friend, I guarantee you, you could probably think of at least one limiting belief. They have something that saps their motivation to do the things that they know they want to do. We can see them in others, but we can’t see them in ourselves. That is a huge impediment. The good news is we can learn to take out those limiting beliefs, examine them, and then choose the ones that serve us.

Brett McKay:

This idea of beliefs as tools. And you look at your beliefs and ask, is this serving me or limiting me? It reminded me of William James and the American philosophy school of Pragmatism. Are you familiar with pragmatism?

Nir Eyal:

Yes. Yeah, a little bit.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So their whole idea is, I mean the extreme version of pragmatism is truth is determined by what works in the world, but I think you can take a modified view. It’s like, okay, you look at your beliefs and say, does this work for me? Is it allowing me to achieve my goals to live a flourishing life? If yes, that’s a good belief, if not it’s a bad belief, you need to change your belief. I thought that was interesting. I made that connection when in your chapter describing beliefs.

Nir Eyal:

So many good things in modern psychology come from William James. I mean, he’s really the granddaddy of all this. And I think the wisdom there is that the vast majority of the decisions we make in our life, they’re not based on fact, they’re not even based on faith really. They’re based on beliefs. They’re based on these convictions that we stay open to revision based on evidence. Should I marry this person? Should I take that job? Should I move to this city? Should I read this book? These are all not based on facts. We like to think they’re facts, but they’re not. They’re based on beliefs. And so you better choose those beliefs wisely knowing that they have such an outsize impact on all the important decisions we make in our life.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so you mentioned earlier there are three powers of belief are attention, anticipation, and agency. Let’s go deeper into the attention aspect of belief. How do our beliefs shape our attention?

Nir Eyal:

So this research really blew my mind, and it all starts from the fact that we don’t see reality clearly. If there’s one thing I wish people understood about their beliefs, it’s that your perception of reality is a simulation that we all live in a simulation. We don’t live in the same simulation. We all live in our separate simulation. So it’s not quite like the matrix, but we are creating a simulation in our minds every single second because the brain can only process about 50 bits of information consciously. That’s about one sentence per second. 50 bits of information. That’s your conscious attention. However, your brain is taking in, it’s absorbing about 11 million bits of information per second. So 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information. So you’re only consciously processing 0.000045% of the information entering your brain. What kind of information is not being processed, at least not consciously, the sound of my voice right now compared to the hum of the room or the light entering your retinas or the temperature on your skin.

This information is being collected. And in fact, if you focus on it, if you place attention to those things, you will actually experience ’em. They will enter conscious control, kind of like a security camera going through a surveillance of different cameras. You can pay attention to those things. But the problem that the mind has in terms of conscious attention is that it simply is too much information. It can’t process all this information that’s entering the brain consciously. So what it has to do, it has to create a simulation. It has to predict what it’s going to see. This is called predictive processing rather than what actually is. So we all live in the simulation in our own minds and what the brain decides to filter. And here’s really the key takeaway is how the brain decides what 50 bits of information are entering your conscious attention are beliefs, your past experiences, what we call priors, these lenses with which we see the world that determines your conscious attention, all determining this power of belief of attention, which means that two people can see the exact same thing, literally the exact same thing in front of them and come up with completely different explanations as to why they’re seeing.

For example, there’s an optical illusion. It’s not really an illusion, it’s just an image called the coffer illusion. And I can show this image to one person, and based on where they grew up, they will see rectangles. I can show the exact same image, the same exact image to someone else, and they’ll see circles. Okay? We know that people who are on a diet see food as larger people who are afraid of heights see distances as further away. We’ve all probably experienced going to some kind of athletic event, right? A football game and the ref makes a call and one team, all the fans see the call one way and the other team, all the fans see it a different way. Of course, when you think about geopolitics, the same exact thing can happen in the news, and based on your nationality, you’ll have completely different interpretations of what just happened.

So this goes on and on and on. I mean, interpersonal, there was an instance a few weeks ago where I came home and I wanted to have a glass of water and my wife saw that I was looking for a glass of water and she said something like, all the glasses are in the sink. And I immediately felt judged like she was saying something, as if I was supposed to have washed all the dishes, but really she was just saying a statement of fact. But I heard it differently. I experienced that. I perceive what just happened completely differently than how she did. She was just saying a fact and I was seeing it as being judged. So this goes on and on and on. So what we pay attention to what we believe is happening literally can change what we see. And so unless we gain power over that, we are essentially blinded to what is actually happening. We’re blinded to reality.

Brett McKay:

Alright so seeing isn’t believing, believing is seeing.

Nir Eyal:

That’s exactly right. That’s perfectly said, or at least as much we like to say that I’ll believe it when I see it. But really just the opposite is also true that you’ll see it when you believe it.

Brett McKay:

How can our faulty beliefs limit ourselves and create problems for ourselves that don’t really exist or may not exist all the time? 

Nir Eyal:

We have extensive research around how people see problems that aren’t there. There’s some beautiful classic studies. So for example, they showed people angry faces, a series of angry faces mixed with neutral faces, real images of people, and all you had to do was click a button every time you saw an angry face. And in this experiment they showed it’d be angry face, angry face, neutral face, neutral face, neutral face, angry face, right? So some kind of random appearing order. What the participants didn’t know is that they actually reduced the number of angry faces over time, and yet people saw a consistent number of angry faces in this study because they started creating a reality that wasn’t really there. They literally saw things differently. And we’ve seen this repeated time and time again. We want to replicate these studies. We see this when we show people different colors, so based on what they expect to see, they saw a circle that was more purple or more blue because they were different gradients based on what they expected.

I’ll give you another wonderful example that demonstrates this. There was a study done at Dartmouth where they took women and they told them, we are going to do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements. And so they created this very realistic scar, realistic looking scar on these women, and they got them all ready and they said, okay, you see this scar? They showed ’em in the mirror. Here’s the scar we put on you. Now we’re going to put you into a room with a study participant, and we want you to observe how you are treated. Okay? Note how you are treated because of this scar. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you go to do this, can you just sit back here for just a quick second? We just want to touch up the scar. And what they didn’t know was that the study was on them, was on these women with the scar, not the people they were talking to because in that instant, they actually removed the scar without the participant knowing they didn’t show them what their face actually looked like in the mirror.

So these women went into a conversation with someone they thought they were observing how that person would behave based on their scar that did not exist. There was no scar in their face. And what many of these women reported was what they expected to find. They saw reality differently. They reported that they were discriminated, that people looked at them funny, that some people couldn’t stand looking at their scar and looked away and fidgeted and did all these things that made them feel very uncomfortable because of this scar that didn’t exist. And so in many ways, we see what we believe, we will see, we experience reality in a way that we expect based on what we pay attention to. So many of us unfortunately create problems that don’t even exist.

Brett McKay:

I’m sure people experience this on a personal level. I know public speaking is the biggest fear for a lot of people. And I think what happens is you get really self-conscious about something about the way you speak or the way you look. And so you go into the event thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to be paying attention to my stutter or how I say a lot. And then you’re looking out in the audience and because you have that belief like I am a bad public speaker, you think, oh, that person smiled because they’re laughing at me or that person fell asleep because they’re bored because I’m boring. And usually it’s not that people aren’t really paying attention to those things. In fact, I think studies have shown people in audiences they’re actually rooting for the public speaker. They want you to succeed. 

Nir Eyal:

All the time. That’s so true. 

Brett McKay:

But we have this limiting belief like, oh, these people want to see me fail and they’re going to pay attention to my weaknesses. But that’s not happening.

Nir Eyal:

No, not at all. I mean, one of the first rules I learned about public speaking, which I do quite a lot now, is never apologize to an audience. Most people, they get up on stage, oh, I’m sorry, I have trouble preparing this presentation. I’m sorry to, and that’s not what people want because people want to cheer for you. You’re exactly right. And in fact, what’s so important about this, even if an audience doesn’t like you, I don’t know why. Let’s say you’re delivering bad news and you think, oh, people are going to hate this message. What the research shows, and this is really the takeaway of the book, beliefs are tools, not truths. Even if that is true, let’s say that’s true, and it’s a belief we don’t really know. Does that mean everybody in the room is not cheering for you? No, you don’t have that kind of evidence.

That’s not a fact. But let’s say you have this hunch, it serves you to choose the opposite. It serves you to use these beliefs as tools, not truths and belief. Everybody in this audience wants me to succeed because how much better will you perform? Well change in how you perceive reality and therefore how you act when you believe what serves you. So for example, if you’re running a marathon, is it true that you may not finish? Yeah, that’s true. A lot of people don’t finish marathons, right? So thinking to yourself, I can’t do this. You’re guaranteed not to finish the marathon as opposed to, I can do this, you’re going to persist. So that’s a perfect example of a limiting belief versus a liberating belief. A limiting belief is the one that saps your motivation, whereas a liberating belief is one that gives you more motivation, enhances your performance, helps you persist longer, and of course eventually accomplish that goal. 

Brett McKay:

So something that can amplify these limiting beliefs that will change what we pay attention to and kind of create this vicious cycle of poorer performance is rumination. For those who don’t know what rumination is, what is it? And then how does that just entrench ourselves more in our limiting beliefs?

Nir Eyal:

Yeah, so rumination is when we have an intense focus on some type of past event that we keep thinking about again and again and again. It comes from how a cow chews its cud just to keep chewing and ruminating and chewing and chewing. It turns out the research shows it’s not very helpful. It’s associated with all kinds of bad psychological symptoms to continue to ruminate over and over and over. And the more we ruminate. This also happens with this bad advice that I’m very guilty of venting, where we’ve been told from the popular psychological interpretation out there that you have to get stuff off your chest. You have to tell people how you really feel. You’re not supposed to keep things inside. It turns out, in many cases, that’s terrible advice that in fact, when we vent about people, when we ruminate about how we’ve been injured in some way, it makes us more likely to see those bad elements in people.

Because just like we don’t see reality as it is, we see our beliefs about reality. We don’t see people as they really are. We see our beliefs about people, and we think that’s how people really are. And the really tragic thing is that this happens to the people we are closest to. I see this all the time. I’ll meet somebody who’s so nice, who’s so kind to me as a stranger, and yet when I meet their spouse, when I meet their family, oh my God, they’re so rude to them. They’re rude to the people who they’re closest to because to that person, they see the worst aspects of that person. They don’t see the person as they really are. They see what they have been conditioned over and over. He always does that. She always says that there she goes again. And they’ve built this construct, this effigy of this person that doesn’t really exist.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you have a whole chapter about how this rumination on our negative beliefs can really mess up our relationships. You talk about this experience that was funny with your mother. You sent her some flowers for her birthday.

Nir Eyal:

You want to go there, huh?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Talk about how your faulty beliefs about your mother got in the way of you having a good relationship with her. And then we talk about how can you mitigate our tendency to ruminate on faulty beliefs so that things improve for ourselves personally and with our relationships?

Nir Eyal:

For sure. Yeah. So this has really changed my life in many ways, but it was a long painful road to get there. So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday, and I was in Singapore. She was in central Florida where I grew up, and I wanted to send her some flowers for her birthday. And getting flowers from Singapore is not easy. And so I had to stay up till one in the morning finding the perfect florist with good reviews to make sure they could get it there on time, just the way I wanted it so that I make sure they were, the flowers were fresh and they wouldn’t get burned in the car, in the Florida heat and all that. And I went to sleep at 1:00 AM, I patted myself on the shoulder and I said, okay, Nir, good job. You’re a good son.

I called her the next morning and I said, Hey, mom, did you get the flowers I sent? And she says, yes, I did. Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead and I wouldn’t order from that florist again, to which I saw what she said through a particular lens of belief. And I blurted out something to the effect of, well, that’s the last time I buy you a birthday present. And Brett, that went over about as well as you think, that did not go over too well. And to be honest, I regretted that that was not what I intended to say, but that’s what came out in the moment. So anyway, after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, Hey, would you like to do a turnaround on that? To which I said, no, I don’t want any of your psychobabble hocus pocus nonsense.

I want to vent. I want to tell you how my mom was rude and wrong and how I was right. And yes, maybe I didn’t say the exact right thing, but can you blame me? I mean, come on. You heard what I just said. What mom tells their son that the birthday present they just sent didn’t meet expectations. Clearly, my mom was being too judgmental and hard to please. So I sat down with that for a minute. I didn’t vent because I’d done the research on how venting is not actually all that helpful. And I sat down reluctantly with a piece of paper and a pen, and I did this process called the turnaround, which comes from work by Byron Katie and Byron Katie really channeled thousands of years of practice, even Aristotle, actually, this is a over 2000 year old practice starting with Aristotle of inquiring about your beliefs and seeing are there alternative interpretations.

So here’s how it works. It’s basically four questions that Byron Katie has developed, and I kind of have updated some of them to better suit our needs. But here’s what the four questions are. Question number one starts with, first you write down the belief, okay, the belief is my mother was too judgmental and hard to please. Now, the first question is, is it true? Duh. Did I just tell you what happened? Clearly, I mean, I just told you my mother was very clearly, too hard to please here and very judgmental because of what she said. Okay, next question. Come on, let’s keep moving here. Next question was, is it absolutely true? So in that instance, was she, it absolutely, absolutely means every single time without exception. 

Brett McKay:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

Nir Eyal:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, no other interpretation could possibly be true, other than my mother was being too judgmental and hard to please. Is that absolutely true? I mean, that’s a tough one, right? Maybe there’s another interpretation. I dunno. Maybe there’s a 1% chance that she was trying to be helpful. Maybe she was trying to not be rude, she wasn’t being judgmental, she was just trying to maybe protect me from getting scammed. Could that be possibly maybe in some kind of alternative universe? True. Okay, alright, fine. Okay, I’ll give it to you. Maybe there’s an alternative explanation. Okay, question number three. Who are you when you hold these beliefs? So how do you feel? What do you become when you hold onto that belief? Well, to be honest, when I held onto the belief that my mother’s too judgmental and hard to please, I was short-tempered.

I can’t say I was nice, I was probably pretty rude. And frankly, I was a little embarrassed that that’s what I said. I regretted that I would prefer to not have said that. And then the fourth question is, who would you be without that belief? And if I could let go of that belief, if I really thought about it, I would probably be at peace. I wouldn’t be so angry with her all the time. I would probably be more myself to be honest. And so what we established was just those four questions, which by the way, you can not only use with relationships, I do this at least once a day in some kind of interpersonal relationship, whether it’s with a client, a business customer, whether it’s somebody on the street who did something annoying to me, it doesn’t matter. You can ask those four questions to very quickly ascertain that the way you saw things, that your belief one may not be true, may not serve you.

And getting rid of that belief and adopting an alternative perspective may benefit you. Okay? So what this does is basically just crack open the possibility that there might be another interpretation of what happened. That’s all it does. So now the next step is to actually do the turnaround. And so the turnaround asks us to think about the exact opposite of that belief. It’s not to change anybody’s mind. You’re not trying to change your mind here. You’re just trying to collect what I call a portfolio of perspective, just alternative points of view, whether or not they’re true, it doesn’t matter if they’re true because again, beliefs are tools, not truths. Okay? So we’re just going to collect a portfolio, other tools in our toolkits. So what’s the opposite of my mother’s? Too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite is my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please.

Okay, so in that instance, could that be right that she was not too judgmental and hard to please? Well, the more I thought about it, I kind of had to admit that maybe she wasn’t being too judgmental and hard to please. Maybe she was actually trying to help me just not get scammed. Maybe that was her real intent. So it could be true. I may not agree with it, but there might be an alternative explanation. Okay, so now let’s do another turnaround. This turnaround might sound something like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Oof. How could that possibly be true? I am too judgmental and hard to please not. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? Well, if I’m honest, Brett, when I called my mom and she didn’t respond exactly the way I had scripted in my mind that a mother is supposed to respond, I kind of lost it. And so who was being hard to please? I was because I didn’t get the kind of reaction I had rehearsed in my head that I expected. And when that didn’t happen, I was disappointed and I lashed out. I was actually being hard to please. Alright, there’s another turnaround here. There’s a third one,

A third turnaround might sound like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. So how could that possibly be true? The more I thought about it, what really happened was that I had these very high expectations of how I was supposed to do things for my mom and how I should do things in general. And when I spent all this time and effort and things didn’t go exactly the way I’d planned, that was a statement on my competency that was a sign that I was not doing a good job at this thing that somehow I was lesser because I had screwed up. And so what really I learned was that I had these unrealistic, it wasn’t my fault that the flowers didn’t appear exactly as I’d wanted. And that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, it just means sometimes stuff happens. It didn’t have to get worse from there.

I didn’t have to make all these assumptions, all these beliefs that says it’s called a misattribution of emotion, that I was feeling crappy about myself, about something that had happened. And then I had attributed that crappy feeling with the thing that was right in front of me, my mom. And so I had, through my lens of belief, I had misattributed how I was feeling and placed blame on her, which did not help the relationship at all. Now, now I have four beliefs, not just one. That one belief of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please wasn’t serving me. Why? Because the only way out, the only way that I could be happy was if she changed, she had to do something different so I could be happy. That’s not going to happen. The other perspectives now gave me freedom. Now I could stay on my side of the net.

Now I could do something to interpret that situation differently so that it served me rather than hurt me. Even if it wasn’t true, even if it wasn’t true, it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is does it serve me better? And so that type of thinking, that type of practice that now has become part of my daily life has changed everything for my business, for my relationships, for my health and wellbeing. That type of turnaround, again and again, has absolutely brought so much peace, joy, happiness, to my life in a way that I never thought possible.

Brett McKay:

So what these questions do, it gives you a portfolio of perspectives to choose from. And you’d be like, well, that one’s probably better in this situation. I’m going to go with that one.

Nir Eyal:

And again, the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. The easiest thing to do and what the vast majority of us do, the vast majority of the time, is we never question these things because it feels so comforting, right? Of course, that person’s being a jerk. Of course that person messed up. I didn’t mess up that person messed up. But of course it’s our problem. It’s in our head. It’s causing us suffering needlessly. So what I constantly do is to question whether the suffering is needed. And this goes super, super deep. We think about emotional suffering, but it doesn’t stop there. I mean, we have incredible research around how this affects your perception of pain, of physical pain. For the research for this book, I documented these cases of hypno-sedation, which is where patients will go under the knife.

They will have full-fledged surgery. There’s this gentleman that I followed who I saw the entire recording of his surgery, where this guy by the name of Daniel Gissler, 54 years old, I think he was, he had this freak accident. He broke his fibia and his tibula, he had to get metal screws put into his leg, and then a few years later he had to have them removed. And in that time, he learned this practice of hypno-sedation and he managed, he started practicing by just watching a few YouTube videos. And then he started practicing by having this clamp on his hand to test his pain tolerance. And he progressed over time to be able to have these screws wrenched out of his bone, scalpel, cutting into flesh with zero anesthesia, not even local anesthesia, nothing, no general, no topical, nothing. For 55 minutes he went under the knife and he did as much flinch.

And not only does he report that he didn’t experience the kind of pain that you and I would expect to make to experience, we know his vitals never spiked, his heart rate never went up, his blood pressure never went up. All the things you would expect to happen when there was extreme stress didn’t occur. Now, why do I tell this story? Why is this research so important? Because if our beliefs can tune out, the suffering through the power of attention can tune out the suffering of surgery without anesthesia, well then certainly we can learn from that. Certainly when I have this interaction with my mom, I can also choose, wait a minute, is this suffering necessary? Is this something I actually need to suffer from, or is there another belief that can allow me to not have to suffer through this?

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s the belief, power of attention, what you believe will determine what you pay attention to. And so we want to make sure we choose our beliefs carefully because it will frame how we interact with the world, whether in a useful or not useful way. You talk about the belief, power of anticipation. What do you mean by that?

Nir Eyal:

So anticipating what we think is going to happen next. So if the power of belief of attention is about what is happening right now, what we see in reality, anticipation is what we expect to happen. It’s about our internal states. So seeing is about what’s on the outside anticipation, what we feel is on the inside. And it turns out that people think that what they are feeling is the truth. I feel the way I feel. I am what I am, right? No more damaging words have ever been uttered than I am what I am. And we hear it all the time. That’s just the kind of person I am. That’s my personality, that’s my identity, that’s who I am. And of course, that has all kinds of terrible consequences as well, because again, that can be a very limiting belief. I am not a morning person. I’m a Sagittarius. I have a short attention span. The list goes on and on and on.

Brett McKay:

I’m an introvert. I hear that one a lot.

Nir Eyal:

I’m an introvert. Exactly. Exactly. And now we see actually all kinds of labels. This is actually bleeding into the third power belief around agency. All these labels that can become our limits, that when we think we are a certain type of person or now, unfortunately, a certain type of diagnosis, oh boy, that can have all kinds of cos. But let’s get back to that in a minute. Let’s talk about the power of anticipation. So this blew my mind when it comes to the physical properties that our beliefs have, how our beliefs can actually become our biology through the power of anticipation. And one of my favorite pieces of research around this has to do with the placebo effects. Placebo effects are fricking mind blowing, but particularly what I think is was a particularly interesting study was how placebo steroids can actually help you put on muscle.

Isn’t that crazy? We think about placebos as helping you with a headache or maybe with insomnia or anxiety, placebo, ster. So people who were told, here’s a steroid, but in reality it was a placebo can actually help you put on muscle. How does that happen? How could that possibly be? It’s not that the placebo has some kind of magical powers, it’s that it directly affects motivation. How? Well in this study where they gave young men a pill, they told them, this is a steroid pill, we want you to follow this workout regimen. And then they had a control group that did not receive the placebo steroid and they had to follow a similar workout regimen. They wanted to then see who would put on more pounds. Now the difference was that the people who took the placebo steroid worked a little bit harder. They told ’em what exercises to do, but they didn’t tell ’em how much to do or how much weight to put on.

They just told them work out for this protocol. And so what turned out to happen was that people who were taking the placebo steroids did another rep, they pushed a bit harder, they added a bit more weight. And at the end of the study, they had packed on more pounds of muscle because they believed that they were on this miraculous steroid, which they anticipated would give them more muscle mass. So it’s not that placebos are some kind of magic, it’s that they can increase the motivation. Again, back to persistence, back to what really separates winners and losers and people who achieve their goals and those who don’t. It’s all about this power of persistence, which was driven from the power of their beliefs.

Brett McKay:

This reminds me of Dumbo’s magic feather, right? Dumbo. He thought the feather, if he had the feather in his trunk, he was going to fly. And then when he didn’t have it, he felt like, oh no, I can’t do it. But the feather wasn’t magic. I mean, you thought it was magic. So you thought you could fly, but you were actually flying. 

Nir Eyal:

And you did. You could do it all along. And you think, okay, this is a Disney movie. Okay, very cute. It is a matter of life and death, Brett. It is literally a matter of life and death. Did you know that people who have positive beliefs about aging? So what does that feel like? So someone who believes aging leads to inevitable decline. Okay? That’s one potential belief versus someone who believes something to the effect of, I can grow at any age. Okay, I can grow and adapt at any age versus aging involves inevitable decline. Now, both of those could be true. Both of those could be true. But which one is a limiting belief? And which one is a liberating belief? Which one gives you more motivation to go outside and go for a walk as you age? Which one gives you more motivation to join the bowling league? Which one gives you more motivation to garden, to do tai chi, to do the kind of stuff that it can extend your lifespan?

And so people who have those beliefs, this came out of a study from Becca Levy at Yale, people who have those positive beliefs about aging live seven and a half years longer, seven and a half years longer. To put that in perspective, that is more of an effect than quitting smoking, than eating a healthy diet or exercise. Okay? Doesn’t that blow your mind that your beliefs, now, again, it’s not magic, but your beliefs do change your biology because when you believe certain things about aging, you behave differently. You’re more likely to sustain that motivation and keep going and do the things that make you healthy. So for all the talk we have about quit smoking and eat right and exercise, we should be thinking a lot more about these beliefs because they have such an outsize impact on our lifespan.

Brett McKay:

Well, you talk about in this section about anticipation, this idea of the experience loop. What is that and how can we use it to supercharge those liberating beliefs and mitigate those limiting beliefs?

Nir Eyal:

So the experience loop goes like this. So first, we believe something, then we anticipate what we think is going to happen. Then we actually feel it. We have that internal sensation and then we confirm it. And this can affect so many different things in our life. There was a beautiful study done around wine where they put people in an FMRI machine, they connected ’em to a little tube in their mouth, and as they were scanning their brain, they gave them a wine and said, okay, now this wine is a $5 bottle of wine. They squirted a little bit of the wine. They said, what do you think of this wine? And people report, it’s all right, it’s a little flat, not that much of a finish, whatever. It’s okay. And then they looked at the blood flow in their brain as they experience this wine.

Then they said, okay, now we’re going to give you a very expensive bottle of wine. Okay, you ready? Here comes the little squirt of a very expensive bottle of wine. What do you think of it? Oh, this one has hints of berry and I can taste the oak. And this is much smoother finish. They had all these very wine snobby pronouncements about the wine. Of course, there’s a trick here. It’s a psychology study. The trick was it was the same exact wine, but because of their underlying beliefs, what was the underlying belief? When you know that something is more expensive, you anticipate because of that belief, you anticipate that it will be better. And because you anticipate it’s going to be better, you feel it as better. These people. What’s so amazing about this study, it wasn’t just a blind taste test and tell us how you feel, right?

And we would expect people to say to the scientists, yeah, expensive wine tastes better. No, we could actually see it in their brain. We could see blood flow increase in their reward centers differently when they tasted the wine that they thought was more expensive. So they weren’t lying. They actually experienced the wine differently. They felt it differently in their brains. And then finally is the confirmation steps. So when you think about wine, wine is a social experience. And many of the things that we do are social experiences where now we confirm, oh, this is a really good wine. And you tell your friends about it, and you look at wine spectator and you look at, so it’s not that nobody’s lying here, it’s not a fraud. It’s that our beliefs shape the actual experience itself. I think many people misunderstand what marketing is for. People think that advertising is about awareness and okay, advertising does increase awareness.

But how does that explain why some brands advertise to death? How many Coca-Cola ads can we see? How many billions of dollars have they spent on those ads? Well, because it’s not about awareness. We all know about Coca-Cola. We’ve tried it already. Well, why do they do that? Because the advertising shapes the belief, which makes you anticipate a feeling, which then you will confirm by seeing this ad of, oh, look how refreshing, look how wonderful, look, how great it actually changed the experience itself. So the point of display advertising is to actually create that sensation in the first place. And that’s what you’re paying for, not just the sugar water.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so with the belief power of anticipation, how you expect something is going to be influences how you feel about it, which influences how you behave, which influences the outcome of something. So if you think aging is going to be awesome and you’re going to stay vital, then you’re going to keep doing youthful things and then you’re going to stay vital. And I can see other applications of this. If I think going into a hard conversation that’ll strengthen the relationship, then I’m probably going to approach it like that and it will nudge me to act in a more positive way and then it will strengthen the relationship. And this also reminded me of that study they did with housekeepers where when they told housekeepers that cleaning constituted valid exercise, they lost more weight because they leaned into the activity more. So let’s talk about the belief, power of agency. How do our beliefs shape our sense of agency or ability to get things done in the world?

Nir Eyal:

Okay, so the power of agency is the power to have an effect in the world. And we call this an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. So external locus of control is that the world is happening to me, that things are going on that are beyond my control, an internal locus of control. This high sense of agency says that I can control factors in the world that what I do makes a difference. And here’s the kicker. So it turns out that people who have this tendency towards an internal locus of control do better in life in pretty much all metrics. They live longer, they have more friends, they contribute to their community more. All the good things happen when you have an internal locus of control. Here’s what’s really amazing, even when you have every reason to believe the opposite. So even when you are on a low socioeconomic status, even if you’re discriminated against, even if you’ve really drawn a bad deck of cards in life, and you have every reason to say the world has beaten me down and I have challenges that other people don’t have, even if that’s the case, even if that’s the case, you turn out to do better psychologically believing you have a high sense of agency.

Again, beliefs are tools not truth. Isn’t that mind blowing? That your attitude that you’re so much more likely to succeed in life based on these beliefs that if you believe you could do something to get out of that situation to make your world better, guess what? Not a big surprise. You are much more likely to do something about it. And so that’s where we go into some of the research that I talked about a little bit earlier, which I think is absolutely incredible and quite jarring, frankly, about the no SIBO effect. So we talked about the placebo effect. Placebos from the Greek mean I will heal. No, Sibos are the opposite. No Sibos are. I will hurt. And one of the studies that was just incredible that really kind shaped my thinking on this, there’s a guy in the research literature by the name of Mr A. He was anonymized Mr. A. Now Mr. A has this bad breakup with his girlfriend and he decides to commit suicide by taking an entire bottle of pills. At the last minute he takes these pills and all of a sudden he decides to change his mind. He decides he wants to live. He runs over to his neighbor’s house, his neighbor rushes him to the ER room. He takes his bottle of pills, and as he gets into the ER room, he collapses on the floor and all the nurses can hear him say is, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. And he passes out, they put him on a gurney, they rush him into the er, they take his blood pressure, he’s at a critically low level, his heartbeat is plummeting. All these vitals are pointing to the fact that he has a severe overdose.

The problem is that on the bottle of pills, it doesn’t say what medicine he took, what drug he took. All it has is a phone number because Mr. A was part of a clinical trial. And so the doctors have to call this number and ascertain, what was it that Mr. A overdosed on? They call up this number, and it turns out that Mr. A was in a clinical trial for an antidepressant, and he turned out to have been in the placebo group. So nothing that he took had any biological effect. It was a completely inert substance that he took as part of the placebo category of the study. And yet he felt all these physiological symptoms, they tell this to Mr. A and in 15 minutes his heart rate is back to normal. His blood pressure is back to normal, and he’s feeling fine. He’s fully conscious. Is that not mind blowing? Does that not make you think all over your life choices here? Because what this means is that our perception, our beliefs, can have a profound impact not only to the positive. We talked about some of the positive effects, but also to the extreme negative. And I think what we’re doing many times in society, unfortunately, is that we are using these maybe non-pharmaceutical, when we have these labels, when we have these monikers about what kind of person we are and increasingly what kind of diagnosis we have, it is limiting our potential. So we need to be very, very careful. I’m not anti diagnosis, I’m not anti-psychiatry far from it, but I am anti using these labels to define who we are because the common perception is you can’t change who you are. And when your diagnosis becomes your identity, it becomes a limitation. And your labels really do become your limits.

Brett McKay:

You take on a diagnosis if it’s useful. If it’s not useful, then maybe don’t take that on.

Nir Eyal:

It’s a map, not the terrain. So if it puts you on a path to getting to a place that is helpful. wonderful. But you are not the map, you are not the terrain itself.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so we’ve talked about the three powers of belief. There’s attention, anticipation, and agency which shape what you see, feel, and do for good or bad. And I think the big takeaway from our conversation is that beliefs can be tools and we got to figure out whether they’re serving us or not. And as we were talking, I looked up this William James quote that I really like. He said this, be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. And I think that applies to a lot of things in life. Well this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nir Eyal:

Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So on my website, nirandfar.com, Nir is spelled like my first name. We actually have a five minute belief change plan that we’re giving away for free. Anybody can get. It’s one of those things that we couldn’t fit in the final edition of the book, so we decided to give it away. It walks you through day by day by day, a five minute practice that can start you on this path of changing your beliefs and adopting more of these liberating beliefs rather than the limiting beliefs. And so to get that, you go to nirandfar.com/beliefchange. So that’s nirandfar.com. Nir spelled like my first name, nirandfar.com/beliefchange.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well Nir Eyal, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Nir Eyal:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest is Nir Eyal. He’s the author of the book Beyond Belief. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/beyondbelief. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When it comes to building a happy and meaningful life, most of us rely on a grab bag of strategies — habits and goals around work, relationships, and health. But my guest today would argue that in the quest for true flourishing, there’s a deeper element that not only ties together those efforts, but organizes and energizes them: purpose.

Vic Strecher is a professor of public health, a behavioral scientist, and the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. We begin our conversation with Vic’s powerful story of how losing his 19-year-old daughter led him to discover how purpose can fundamentally reshape your life. Vic then unpacks the dramatic impact purpose has on your physical and mental health. He shares some guideposts on finding your own purpose, what kinds of aims foster the most fulfillment, why finding purpose isn’t a one-and-done process, and why becoming purposeful can make life feel less like a tug-of-war and more like stepping into a strong current that carries you forward.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Purposeful app
• AoM Article:The Power of Purpose
• The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
• AoM Podcast #1,051: Man’s Search for Meaning, With Viktor Frankl’s Grandson

Connect with Vic Strecher

• Vic’s faculty page
• Vic on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When it comes to building a happy and meaningful life, most of us rely on a grab bag of strategies, habits, and goals around work, relationships, and health. But my guest today would argue that in the quest for true flourishing, there’s a deeper element that not only ties together those efforts, but organizes and energizes them: purpose. Vic Strecher is a professor of public health, a behavioral scientist, and the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. We begin our conversation with Vic’s powerful story of how losing his 19-year-old daughter led him to discover how purpose can fundamentally reshape your life. Vic then unpacks the dramatic impact purpose has on our physical and mental health. He shares some guideposts and finding your own purpose. What kinds of aims foster the most fulfillment? Why finding purpose isn’t a one or done process and why becoming purposeful can make life feel less like a tug of war and more like stepping into a strong current that carries you forward. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/purpose. All right, Vic Strecher, welcome to the show.

Vic Strecher:

Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you are a professor of public health and you have spent a lot of time researching and writing about the role purpose plays in our overall health and wellbeing. How did that happen?

Vic Strecher:

Well, I am a behavioral scientist. I think for my whole career I’ve been trying to understand root causes of why we do the things we do. And in public health, of course, we may be helping people quit smoking or manage their stress or their weight or get a mammogram or so many different things. So often we end up scaring people saying, if you don’t do this, bad things will happen. If you don’t quit smoking, you’ll die. If you don’t manage your diabetes, you could lose your legs, blah, blah, blah. And the more I approached behavior in that way, the more I realized that people’s defensive shields just kind of pop up. And naturally I do the same thing. Somebody tries to scare me. I say, well, that’s not like me. That’ll never happen to me. And I start even discounting the person saying it. So I started really thinking more about root causes.

And this is through a lot of experience. A person may come into a smoking clinic I’m running and say, I don’t need this clinic. I don’t need this fancy cognitive behavioral program you’re running. Because my kids just stopped me while I was driving them to school and said, dad, your smoking bothers me so much. And I realized, what am I doing? I’m a dad, I’m a father, and so I don’t need your program anymore. And I used to say something like, well, of course you need it because one little simple motivational event isn’t going to change you. Well, I found that those people change and they change for life. So some deeper root cause, some identity shift or understanding who they really are, understanding and appealing to one’s core values that turns out to be really, really important. And I guess in my own life, I went through a difficult experience that kind of caused me to take a dramatic shift in my own behaviors as well.

Brett McKay:

Tell us about that. You start off the book talking about your daughter, Julia, can you tell us her story?

Vic Strecher:

Sure. Well, my daughter, Julia was born healthy in 1990. She used to like to say “I was a 10 out of 10,” and then six months into her life when she was a little baby, my wife and our older daughter and Julia were in the Netherlands. I was on a research sabbatical there. And so doing intense research with people, but at the same time, our daughter, Julia started losing weight. And you’re not supposed to be losing weight when you’re six months old. You’re supposed to be gaining weight. And so eventually after seeing a doctor, then another doctor finally, she ended up in the hospital. A cardiologist walked by after her being in the hospital for a few days and just thought, she doesn’t look right. They did an echocardiogram on her just to see what her heart was like. And it turned out that her heart was completely ruined.

She had gotten a chickenpox virus out of the blue like most of us do, and it causes a fever and a rash usually for a day or two. But this chickenpox virus attacked her heart and it destroyed it. And we were told that she was going to die within a month. So we literally took her out of the hospital in the Netherlands and the next morning we flew home and the people at home, we went to a medical center where I was a professor at the time, and they said she may actually be eligible for a heart transplant. And of course, I was an assistant professor. What did I know? I was living a comfortable assistant professor life, trying to get tenure, writing grants, publishing articles, the standard stuff, and didn’t really take my life terribly seriously, Brett, just to be honest, I was in my early thirties and I just thought, this is pretty easy and I’m enjoying it, and this is going to be a nice easy go of it as a life is concerned, I guess.

And suddenly everything shifted. I started realizing that our lives are all finite and we don’t know how long any of us are going to live, but also I had to take her life very seriously. So we as a family decided to list her for a heart transplant, and she became one of the early children to get a heart. But looking at the research data, which I’m a researcher, so I look at the data and there wasn’t a lot of data, but what did exist showed that kids who are waiting for a heart, only about 50% of them ended up getting a heart. They died before getting one half of them. And then if you did get one, if you’re that lucky, half, then half of those kids ended up dying within five years. So I thought her chances of becoming even six years old are about one in four.

So in deciding to list her for a new heart, we had to decide what kind of life should we give her? And it became an existential question for our family. How do you live a life? And so I started thinking about it then and we started, she did get a heart and new heart, and it was almost like she got a brain transplant because she had more energy. She just turned alive suddenly as opposed to just shrinking. And we as a family, I’m sorry, I get a little emotional thinking about this . . . But as a family, we started saying to ourselves, look, we don’t know when she’s going to pass away, but then we don’t know any of us when any of us are going to pass away. So let’s live our life as if this may be our last day or our last week.

Let’s live every moment, make every moment we can, filled with gratitude and filled with caring for what we care about. And so we started living very differently and suddenly all of our lives, not just Julia’s life, but all of our lives started turning technicolor as opposed to simply being black and white. And I think I lived a black and white life before then. Quite honestly. Things were pretty easy. And suddenly when they became very difficult and challenging, that’s when life became really interesting, quite honestly. She ended up needing a second heart transplant when she was nine, but when she was 19, well, she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to give back. She had been in the hospital a lot. Just getting a heart transplant doesn’t mean you’re fully able to do anything that others are able to do. She was in the hospital a lot.

She had headaches a lot. She had issues that she was immune suppressed, so any illness would really be difficult for her. And my wife took a major caregiving role then, but she wanted to be a nurse and give back. She got into nursing school at the University of Michigan, and her first semester was pretty tough, and she was 19 at the time. We decided to go down to the Caribbean just so that she could warm up. We live in Michigan, it’s pretty cold up here. So we went to the Caribbean. We took our older daughter as well. We were all out on the beach having dinner and being grateful for where we were quite honestly. And when we were all going back, we were just very close. And her last words were, I am so happy that I could die now. And she went back to her room and those were her last words, it turns out.

And so when that happened, when she died, I went through a deep grieving process, as you might expect. I almost thought she had some significant future, that she was kind of a miracle child in a way. And my bubble was burst, obviously. And I went through a deep depression. I went up to northern Michigan. We have a cabin up in northern Michigan, right on Lake Michigan, if you’re familiar with that. And Lake Michigan is almost like the ocean if you’ve never seen it before. It usually has great big waves. And this is a few months after she had died. And I’d been by myself for about a month just figuring things out, frankly. But I wasn’t really figuring things out. I was just eating and drinking myself to death. I was falling asleep in front of the TV. I started just watching things that were stupid, just any dumb TV. I started trying to figure out what Kim Kardashian was doing. And to me, I thought, wow, that’s a sure sign that you’re getting ready to die. That’s all you care about what Kim Kardashian is doing or what influencers are doing or what’s on television all the time, or the latest sporting event. Not that they’re not important, and I’m sure Kim Kardashian is a nice person. It’s just why do I care about these things?

And I went to bed and I had been really drunk the night before. I just went to bed. I had this huge dream early in the morning, and I dreamt that my daughter was with me, and she was only nine. And we were in the Netherlands in this little town called Morich where I was working, and it’s a beautiful medieval town, and we’re on rollerblades and rollerblading around the town. And we saw this beautiful, huge, huge building. And it looked like a church. It could have been a mosque, it could have been a synagogue, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful white marble, and it was glowing. And Julia said, we need to go there. And I said, great. It’s beautiful. Let’s go. And we were rollerblading there. And then we went into the entrance and there was this circular staircase in my dream that went down and down and down infinitely it seemed like.

And Julia said, let’s go. And I said, we’re on roller blades, Julia. We can’t just pop down. She said, don’t worry. And we started floating down and we went into this. At the bottom of the staircase was this huge room. And my daughter, who was rollerblading with me, she had passed away when she was 19, but she was nine in my dream. And she looked up and just looked at me. And then I looked out and there were these three beautiful women, and they’re all wearing these beautiful purple dresses. And they all three approached. And suddenly I turned to my daughter and she wasn’t nine anymore, she was 19, and she was wearing the same dresses they were. And she turned to me and said, I’ve got to go. And I said, no, don’t. And she went with these three women and they disappeared. I woke up in the morning and my pillow was soaked in tears. I was trying to get back to sleep thinking I’ve got to get back to sleep. I’ve got to see her again. I don’t know if you’ve ever Brett had a hyper vivid dream where it’s so vivid that you could swear it was real.

And this was very real to me. It turned out to be about five o’clock in the morning, and I looked out and it was still dark outside. I could hear Lake Michigan a little bit, and I just hopped out of bed. I was just in my boxers and t-shirt and jumped into my kayak, which is out on the beach. And I didn’t bother with any sort of life preservation equipment, which is really stupid because it was still springtime.

Brett McKay:

And you’re a public health professor…

Vic Strecher:

And I’m a public health professor, Brett, right. This is dumb as it gets. And I don’t know why I went out there, honestly, but I just hopped in my kayak and it was beautiful. Unlike the way it’s often where it’s like an ocean. It was perfectly smooth, but it was still dark and it was foggy, and the water was like a slurpee. You could still even feel ice crystals in it. And again, just in my boxers, and I jumped in my kayak and I just started paddling like crazy, like a mad person, which I was, I think straight out straight heading toward Wisconsin. And I found myself, I’m guessing around two miles out when the sun came up and I was paddling and paddling. And then when the sun just came up, all of the water started glowing, just these fleck of light everywhere.

It was magical. And I stopped my kayak and I turned and I just looked at the sun coming up. And actually my thinking before the sun came up was to continue kayaking to Wisconsin, which is 84 more miles. Of course, I never would’ve made it. And like you said, I’m a public health person, but that’s where I was in my head. I saw the sun come up, and I don’t know how to express this other than to say Julia was in me, and she was telling me, you have to get over this. You have to get over this dad. And it wasn’t like, you have to get over this. It was like, you have to get over yourself. You have to get over your ego. And at that very moment, I had this epiphany that I really had a choice. It’s almost like if some street sign lifted up right out of the water, which is hundreds of feet deep already and said, death or life, that’s what was happening to me.

I could choose either one. And actually it was kind of freeing to be able to choose what I wanted to do. Before then, I felt like I wasn’t choosing anything and I was just kind of heading toward my death, whether it was drinking myself to death and watching stupid television or actively dying by kayaking to Wisconsin. But of course I’m here talking to you, Brett. And I decided to turn back and I got back and I was kind of dripping. I didn’t feel any cold. I just sat down at the kitchen table again, I’d been by myself. I almost felt like I was looking down from the ceiling of our kitchen and telling myself, I started just saying, Vic, you’re in some deep trouble right now. You’re in really deep trouble and you’re going to die if you continue on this path. You have to fix yourself.

You’re a behavioral scientist. If you can’t fix yourself, what good are you? Anyway, and I almost looked at my therapist self and said, Vic, you’re right. So I’m going to pull out a sheet of paper, which I did. I started writing just very quickly the things that mattered most to me. And I don’t know why I did that. I hadn’t been thinking in that way. I just started writing them down. I wrote my family, my wife, our older daughter Rachel. I started writing my friends names down. I started writing about what mattered to me at work. My students matter, my work matters. I decided to, for some reason, I circled my students and the university had given me a break. They said, you don’t have to teach this semester. You don’t even have to teach next semester if you can’t do it. I mean, you’ve just gone through one of the worst things a person can go through.

But I started thinking about my students, and I called the university that morning then and called my department and said, look, it’s so kind that you gave me the semester off, but actually it’s not the advice that I need. What I need to do now is teach, and I want to teach every one of my students as if they’re my own child. And I got back, I went back. I started teaching my students as if every single student was Julia, looking out at them. I even would take a couple big deep breaths and I would look at them and just see my daughter’s face in all of them and just tell myself, you’re going to be teaching today as if all of these people have their own needs, their own lives, their own concerns. And when I did that, my teaching changed and my life changed.

I was nominated to become the professor of the year, for example, at Michigan. All these things that I didn’t expect, didn’t think I really deserved. Suddenly all these things happened because I started caring so much about my students. I also started taking care of myself because I have hundreds of students, and that’s just grown. So I realized I needed energy for my purpose. So I started sleeping better. I started trying to eat better. I meditate every day. I started doing things that would hopefully give me more energy. I’d walk to work every day. I needed energy because I had a big purpose. And I realized, wow, I’m actually changing my health behaviors because I have a purpose. And I started doing research on this. Have other people found this? And sure enough, it turns out the purpose is this. If it were a drug, it would be a miracle drug. It helps so many different things. So I started treating it as a research topic. Luckily, there is a person in the psychology department who is looking for a mentor for his dissertation. He asked me if I would do this, and I said, of course I’d be happy to. And with him, I started learning so much more about purpose. And since then, and that was a long time ago, it’s about 15 years ago, I’ve just simply devoted my life to helping people find greater purpose and metaphorically getting out on the dance floor of life.

Brett McKay:

Well, thank you for sharing that story. That was really touching. And like you said, I think the takeaway from that, your behavioral scientist, and typically when you read articles from behavioral scientists, they always offer these tips on how you can change your use reframing or use implementation intentions.

Vic Strecher:

Oh, wow. Yes. 

Brett McKay:

All of these things. 

Vic Strecher:

Acceptance and commitment therapy.

Brett McKay:

Yes, exactly. But what you learned from your own experience with your daughter, Julia, twice including that first time when she got her heart transplant, is that if you have this purpose, it’s this lever you can pull that just causes you to change. And then you learn that again a second time with her passing, that if you have this overarching purpose that’s going to do more for you than all these little cognitive behavioral therapy hacks,

Vic Strecher:

It’s pretty amazing. To me. It truly feels like, somebody recently asked me, what’s it like to feel purposeful? And I thought, what a great question. I hadn’t really thought about that. And I thought for just a few seconds and said, it’s like jumping into a river that has a strong current and that current is moving forward. And as you’re moving forward in this, things become easier. You’re not fighting against things and you’re choosing clarity. So suddenly the world becomes much clearer and there’s less conflict in your life. You’re not wondering, what should I do here? Should I play with the kids or should I have that old fashioned? It depends on what your purpose is. Maybe your purpose is to be an alcoholic, in which case you pick the old fashioned, but typically it’s not. Typically it’s I’m going to play with those kids. And so you put off that old fashioned and you also start thinking, how can I be a better dad? Which I think is incredibly important. And then from that river, you may find streams that move off of that river and you say, that stream looks really interesting. I think I may jump into that stream. And that’s been my life for 15 years now, since I found a very strong purpose or set of purposes in my life. I’ve found my life incredibly joyful, quite honestly, and very happy.

Brett McKay:

Well, how do you define purpose personally, but also with your research? What does it mean to have a purpose?

Vic Strecher:

Great question. Thanks for asking that too. So having a purpose is being value driven, first of all. And what psychologists or other people who study purpose real carefully, they like these academic definitions often, and they might say it’s a values driven self organizing framework for determining goals and channeling your energy. So working through that values driven meaning, this is led by our core values, and I’d love to talk about that a bit more, meaning it’s not other organizing. Somebody else is not telling you what you should be doing. And you referred to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was all about you creating your own purpose in your life. You’re a camel person. You say, educate me of all the joys and the sorrows of the world. And then that camel metamorphosize into a lion goes into the wilderness and finds this dragon that says, thou shalt on every scale.

The lion defeats the dragon, basically saying, I’m going to create my own purpose. I’m not going to listen to what everybody else says. And sure enough, I tell my students in the first day of class, many of whom are freshmen, say, A lot of you come in here essentially with your resume that’s been written by your parents and your back pocket. You’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be this, you’re going to be that. I want you to pull that resume out, and I want you to tear it up because if you’re going to be a doctor, you need to decide to be a doctor. If you’re going to be a business person, if you’re going to be a lawyer, if you’re going to be whatever, you’re going to be an artist, whatever you’re going to be, you’re going to decide. And that’s essential, or you won’t be happy.

You won’t be successful. You need to create your own purpose in your life. So that’s what’s meant by self-organizing. And then purpose helps you organize your goals. It gives you clarity. In this morass, everyone’s trying to get you to set a certain goal, usually around their own thing, their own cause, their own thing. They’re trying to sell, create your own goals, but those goals come from your values and from your purpose. And that’s where you start channeling this most precious resource that you have, which is your energy and vitality, and you start moving your energy into that. But it becomes easier because sorry for all the metaphors, but you’re in this river with a very strong current and you’re not fighting it, so it becomes easier.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’d like to return to how people can figure out the purpose, and it involves figuring out values, figuring out goals. But before we do that, let’s talk about the research you’ve done on purpose, because you highlight some really interesting research that shows how purpose affects different facets of our health. And you wouldn’t think, well, why would purpose influence my, I mean, people would understand how it influence your mental health, but my cholesterol, my heart disease. So tell us about that. How does having a purpose affect our health? What does the research say?

Vic Strecher:

Wonderful question. Thank you. So first of all, as I was alluding to before, if you have a strong purpose, you start taking care of yourself more. So we find in many, many, many surveys that if you have a strong purpose, you’re less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors and you’re more likely to adopt healthier behaviors, you’re more likely to get screened for cancer, for example, for example, getting a colorectal cancer screen, you’re much more likely to get that. You actually then spend fewer days in the hospital because you get sick less. Well, that’s not bad. So we know those things happen. Also, I’m so lucky to know some amazing neuroscientists. One in particular, Emily Falk, who just wrote a great book on, it’s entitled What We Value, but she’s a neuroscientist who studies people’s core values, and we’ve put people into MRI and have them think about their most purposeful core values.

And there’s a part of the brain that lights up that’s very modern. It’s right in the front of our prefrontal cortex, and it’s a part of the brain that relates to executive functioning, meaning executive decisions, high level decisions that we make. It also relates to the self. Who am I? What am I all about? It relates to our core values. Also, when this part of the brain becomes more active and we’re challenged, usually when we’re scared by something, there’s a part of the brain that’s very ancient, very old. It’s called the amygdala. This is our fear center, and that fear center gets very active and it can hijack our brain. When you think about your purpose, this prefrontal cortex gets active and it actually governs down our amygdala. It governs down our fear. If I think about James Bond, for example, in a Bond movie, maybe he’s being lowered into a vat of boiling oatmeal or whatever’s happening, and he’s going at first, oh God, this is going to be terrible.

And that’s what the audience is thinking. But then he finds some way out of it. So first his amygdala is going, but in this Bond-like heroic sequence, his prefrontal cortex starts lighting up. He’s going, I don’t have to be afraid of this. In fact, I have a solution to it. That’s what happens when you’re purposeful. So we know even what goes on in the brain. We also know that purposeful people have less activation in a part of the brain, a region of the brain that relates to conflict. So they’re less conflicted. They know what to do. As I was saying before, there’s other research that we’ve done looking at longevity, and we’ve looked at longevity a little differently. Now, there are literally almost a dozen studies that have shown that people who have purpose live longer, significantly longer. And this is after statistically adjusting for age and gender and income and education and all sorts of things.

You can’t make it go away. But we wanted to look at people’s biological clocks, what are called in scientific terms, epigenetic clocks. And these clocks are looking at how our proteins are expressed by our DNA. And we find that if you have a strong purpose, your proteins, more healthy proteins are being expressed, and unhealthy proteins are less likely to be expressed. And that can all be put together and form what we would call a biological clock. And sure enough, people with stronger purpose have longer biological clocks. This is really exciting for us because parts of our epigenome may even be inheritable to our children. So this is so valuable. I’ve continued to think all along as we do this kind of research, if this were a pill, it would be a gosh, it’d be a multi-billion dollar drug. It would be a magic pill.

Brett McKay:

And you also highlight research. That purpose is also associated with an increase in HDL cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol, and it seems to have something to do with the reduction in inflammatory cell production.

Vic Strecher:

Yes. So we find that, and this is other people’s research too, not just our own, but other people have found that people with a strong purpose in their lives have fewer pro-inflammatory cells and proteins produced very important because while we want some inflammation, it’s good if you get a cut or something, you want that to inflame and close the cut, right, close the wound. But if we have too much inflammation or chronic inflammation, we start getting everything from arthritis to heart disease, some cancers, and certainly all sorts of other problems. We know, as I said before, that people who have strong purpose take better care of themselves, they eat better, which also may contribute to this higher rate of the good cholesterol that’s in our bloodstream.

Brett McKay:

I’m just going to highlight some other things you highlight in the book, because I thought it was really interesting. People who have low purpose in life were 2.4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those with a high purpose in life. 

Vic Strecher:

There are studies where they combine all the studies, put ’em all together because they say, well, one study may be nice, but it’s not going to convince the scientific community, especially something that’s as strange as well. People with stronger purpose are half as likely to develop Alzheimer’s. That seems crazy. How does that work? Now, there are eight studies of it, and they’ve been all put together, and they find that people with a strong purpose are far less likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and they’ve even autopsied people’s brains after this and found that people with strong purpose have fewer lesions, lesions that cause dementia, and, and in addition, there’s a new study that came out very recently in middle-aged men. So this is an important study for you and other middle-aged men listening to this because in middle age, very often, that’s when dementia or Alzheimer’s starts to form.

Purposeful people have much stronger connectivity within their brain, between different brain regions, far more. If you have a low purpose in your life, you tend not to have the connectivity needed. It’s hard to get the right metaphor, but maybe if you consider it kind of like pipelines, moving from one region of the brain to another, or circuitry moving from one region to another, we want that. We want our brains, different regions to be talking to one another. People with strong purpose have that much more. So, boy, I’ll give you one final set of findings, and this is with a good friend of mine, Ethan Cross, who wrote a really amazing book recently that’s out called Shift. And I think you even interviewed Ethan Cross.

Brett McKay:

We did, yeah.

Vic Strecher:

Yeah. So he’s a good friend and colleague. We did some research together. I said, Ethan, you do all this work on different coping strategies, and you have this cocktail of about 16 different coping strategies that a person could pick from. So we decided to look at those coping strategies, knowing some are not great for you. I’m going to drink alcohol when I’m stressed out. Just think about my own past or maybe really good ones. I know this won’t last forever. I’m going to take a walk in nature. I’m going to engage in a family or religious ritual. I’m going to see a big picture. It turns out that those positive coping strategies are strongly associated with having a strong sense of purpose in your life. Whereas negative coping strategies like I’m going to drink too much or eat too much, or vent, things like that, those are negatively associated with having a sense of purpose.

So you see the different things that it does. I was talking to a person who’s writing a new book related to purpose, and she said, I really think that having a purpose reduces entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, this entropic law that says everything gradually dissolves and gets less and less organized. We see a dead deer on the side of the road the next week, we pass that same deer. If it’s not gone, it’s looking a lot worse. It’s more and more disorganized. That’s entropy. What purpose does is it’s almost an entropy rebel. It almost reverses entropy. So I really think purpose is just that important, and we can build it, we can enhance it.

Brett McKay:

So in addition to all those health benefits, it can make you more resilient than some — that research you did with Ethan Cross. It can help you cope better. So it sounds like what purpose does the reason why it provides all these benefits? It sounds like there’s two things going on. One is having a purpose causes you to take better care of yourself. So you’re going to eat right, exercise, sleep, not drink, not smoke. But then also there are some physiological changes going on in your body.

Vic Strecher:

It sure seems like it. Yep, yep. There’s really good data showing that. 

Brett McKay:

That’s amazing. Well, let’s talk about how do we develop a purpose? What does that look like?

Vic Strecher:

Well, one of the ways to find purpose is to do just what I did when I was coming back on my kayak and pulled it in, ran up to my cabin and pulled out a sheet of paper and started writing down the things that mattered most in my life. And that’s a great way to start. If you start writing down the things that matter to you, what do you care about? Philosophers like to talk about caring about what you care about. So start by figuring out what do you care about? And if you want, the easiest way to do that, maybe you even look on your smartphone wallpaper when you open up your smartphone. How many times do we do that? On average, it’s over 60 to 80 times. So for me, when I open mine, I see my granddaughter, Madeline Julia from our older daughter, and she’s just amazing.

And so I look at her every single day, about 60 times, at least a day. So that’s affirming who I am. It’s affirming who I value. It’s affirming who I care about and what I want to be alive for and active for, and devote my energy to and my goals to. So I teach a lot of physicians, and when I train physicians, I ask, what do you do with a diabetic? Who’s newly diagnosed? How do you get them to start doing the things they need to do because they need to manage their weight very often or work out more, eat better, blah, blah, blah, take their medications. And a lot of ’em say, well, we tell ’em they might lose their legs if they continue on the path they’re taking, or they will die early. Well, what does that do? It sets up this defensive wall.

What if you just simply said, what’s on your smartphone? Open it up. If you don’t mind, show me what’s on your smartphone. Chances are it’s something that matters to them. And then you just sit back and say, so what do you want to do about that? Suddenly, it’s a totally different reframing of the issue. So that’s one thing to do. Write down what matters most. Let’s say you write down 10 things, maybe drop it down to five, and then from the five, maybe drop it to three and you say, I’m here for these people. Usually the things that matter most are not things they’re people, but it may be a cause that you care about. Whatever it is. You may say, those are the things that I live for, and I am going to start building a purpose around those things. I’m here to be on this planet to do this, and now how are you going to end up doing those things?

And you start working that through. You start setting goals around those things. So that’s one way to think about finding your purpose, what we call values affirmation. It’s a part of, you’ve mentioned different theories and approaches. It’s part of what’s called acceptance and commitment therapy, where you are accepting the fact that bad things happen to everybody. I’m by the way, nothing special when I talk about things that have happened to me, things have happened to everybody. All you have to do is live a life and you go through adversity and difficult times. But if you let those hijack, you can do that. You can choose to do that, or you can say, what am I committed to? And suddenly these things become less relevant to your commitment to things that are most important to you. It’s almost like swimming in quicksand. The more you try to get out, the more you sink. So it’s important to not let the stressors in life every day. And we all know we have a lot of stressors in life right now, from everything from politics to media, all sorts of things happening in our lives right now. If you say, okay, those are important. I understand them, but I have a purpose. And that purpose may be multifaceted. You may have a purpose around your family. If you have a family, maybe around your work, maybe around your community, all sorts of domains you could build purpose around or purposes, and then you devote your life, literally, your life to those causes, to those purposes, then suddenly these stressors don’t seem quite so stressful.

Brett McKay:

I think this is helpful. I think a lot of people, when they think about finding their purpose, they think they kind of have to pull it out of thin air. But it sounds like finding your purpose is often a matter of looking at what you already do and finding ways to lean into it and be more intentional about it. Maybe you already have this friendship that’s important to you. How can you lean into it? How can you be a better support for your friend? Maybe you’re already a dad. How can you be more intentional about creating a family culture? What can you do to raise the most excellent possible humans in your job? You can find ways to see a real mission in it. So if you’re a doctor, you can find ways to treat your patients so they feel seen and not like a number. You talked about how you started taking teaching more seriously, treating each student like they were your daughter. If you volunteer in a church youth group, how can you lean into that more and make it the best possible group and create the texture of these kids’, childhood and faith? So yeah, it’s really caring about what you care about. And going along with this, you also talk about what can make purpose more powerful and lead to flourishing is finding purposes that are self transcendent. They move beyond the self.

Vic Strecher:

Yeah, yeah. There’s a big discussion about that in the research community, and there are a few people who say, well, it doesn’t really matter if your purpose is very hedonic or very transcending. A purpose is a purpose, and it’s good. Maybe to some extent that’s true, but there’s enough data showing me anyway very clearly that having a transcending purpose, a purpose that’s bigger than yourself actually makes you much happier. So the more you seek happiness through things, I’m going to sit on the beach for the next two weeks, and maybe that’s great. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you need to recharge the batteries, whatever. But if that’s all you’re seeking, then the next vacation, maybe a little less fun. Kind of like if you eat a great meal every single night, what if you had a gourmet meal every night? After a while, you’d start complaining more.

You’d say, I don’t know about that. I think the chef could have done a better job. Or for golfers out there, if you play golf every single day, after a while, it becomes less interesting, probably. That’s my guess. So yeah, just focusing on things that are focused on you and your own hedonic goals, I don’t think helps as much. Aristotle talked about two forms of happiness. One he called Hedonia, and this of course is pleasure. So he was talking about good food, good wine, good sex, good, all of those things, and those are fine. And Aristotle said, no problem. It’s good that we enjoy those things, but if that’s all we care about, then we are like, and I’m quoting him from his Aristotlian ethics. He said, then we’re like grazing animals. He said, we need to be in touch with this inner God, this true self that’s inside of us, almost this angel that then communicates with these higher order Greek gods.

And he called this angel, the Damon and the Damon in Greek. So it’s this true self, this godlike self. So eudemonia, depending on how you want to pronounce it, is being in touch with that true self, that God-like self, that angel self that the Greeks believe was born with you. It’s part of you since your birth. By the way, Hindus believe this as well. Hindus and Buddhists believe that they’re born with his inner shaman, which is this God, this eternal godlike self that lives in you. I love that idea that we’re born with this godlike self and we’re born good, and we have to keep society from kind of beating it out of us. So the idea here is in being eudemonic, is we care more about things that transcend ourselves, our own egos. We transcend just pure simple pleasures. While we enjoy pleasurable things, that’s fine. We also strive for things that are bigger than ourselves. Things like volunteering, working on causes, helping other people, taking care of other people. Those things are eudemonic. And I think, and research has suggested that those things, those kinds of purposes, eudemonic purposes tend to be much better for you than hedonic purposes.

Brett McKay:

So just to recap here, purpose is you start with your values, the things that are most important to you. Ideally, those values are self transcendent. They’re not just, okay, I want to just lay on the beach and whatever. 

Vic Strecher:

You ask yourself, are all my values equally valuable? Are some valuables more valuable? 

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, you quote Kierkegaard, one of my favorite philosophers. He says, the thing is to find a truth, which is true for me to find the idea for which I can live and die. So I think that’s a good rubric to use. This value is something I could live and die for, just expend all my life for it. And so once you establish those values, start setting goals for yourself on how to realize those. And again, it has to be self-directed. 

Vic Strecher:

Very much self-organizing framework. And this is what Friedrich Nietzsche talked a lot about. And of course, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were proto existentialists, meaning they were really framing the existential movement of the early 1900s. Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, all of those people were influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. And then later, the classic example is Viktor Frankl who went through three concentration camps, but throughout his books, he talks a lot about with great reverence for Friedrich Nietzsche and the importance of finding this bigger purpose that you find and are self-directed.

Brett McKay:

We had Viktor Frankl’s grandson on the podcast. Oh my goodness. That was a great conversation. Yeah, so you talk about purpose isn’t just this one and done thing that you hash out in a cabin after you get out of the kayak. Purpose is a dynamic activity and it’s something you have to live out and you’re constantly refining it.

Vic Strecher:

Maybe can I add to that? Just a second, Brett? Sure. I would say that having a purpose is great. Now, your purpose may well change over time, very much like the rings of a tree. And just think about if you graduate from college, if you get married or not get married, if you get a divorce, if you lose a loved one, if you get sick, if you find a new job, if you retire, all those times may be times you want to rethink and repurpose your life. But what is really ongoing is being purposeful. So you don’t just find a purpose, write it down, put it in your office, tack it up and go, okay, great. That’s all I need. Now. You need to think about applying your resources, your energy to goals that fit with your purpose. Then you become purposeful. And that’s what’s really life-changing. It’s not just simply having a sense of purpose. It’s literally becoming purposeful.

Brett McKay:

What do you tell people? Because I’ve experienced this, people who have a clear sense of purpose, but they have those moments where they’re just like, I don’t have the energy or the mojo or the juice, whatever you want to call it, to keep striving, even if they’re doing things like taking care of their sleep, eating right, exercising. But I feel like I have those moments where it’s like, I just can’t do this anymore where you’re having repeated setbacks or there’s this period happens to all of us. Yeah, periods of stagnation. When you’re trying to pursue your purpose, how do you get the mojo back during these periods?

Vic Strecher:

If I’m in this river that has a strong current in it, in other words, I’m really feeling very purposeful. I’d mentioned this earlier that if you find a stream that’s moving alongside of that purpose, you may want to pop into that stream. You may want to find some new way of still maintaining your sense of purpose and becoming purposeful in just a slightly different domain. You may take up a hobby, you may start to volunteer for something. You may try something that you may even fail in. Purposeful people, by the way, tend to have a more growth mindset. They’re willing to fail, they’re willing to try new things. So going out and challenging yourself I think is really important. When we retire so often, we miss challenging ourselves. So in retirement, very often you need to repurpose your life and provide new, fresh challenges, even if you don’t succeed in those, or even if your body is saying, wait a second, I’m breaking down. I can’t do this as well. Well, you accept that, but you also say, I’m going to continue to challenge myself and continue to maybe risk failure. It’s really essential. That’s a simple answer to it. And I don’t mean to be pollyannish about it. People who stagnate, that’s a tough time. But trying to seek new ways, new purposes, new streams that move off of this river may be an important thing for you to do and consider.

Brett McKay:

So change the purpose, but keep being purposeful.

Vic Strecher:

And one thing, I’m actually working on a new book around purpose. I’ve been asked to write a book that’s almost like a workbook around finding purpose. And one way that’s worked very well for people, especially as you tend to get older, is creating a life narrative. And this is seeing your life as chapters of a book. Literally naming the chapters of your book, like maybe one chapter is Finding my Way. Maybe another one is starting over again. Whatever those things are, they won’t be yours, but those might be chapters. Then identifying turning points in your life as if it’s a book. Then try to learn about the tough times without minimizing the tough times. Learn what the toughest times did to create turning points, finding themes in this book that you have written about yourself. Maybe even name a new chapter. When I wrote my book for Harper Collins, the editor gave me very good advice.

He said, before you write this book, write your book review. I said, I haven’t even written the book. How do I write a book review? He said, write the book review, because then you’ll know what you want people to think and feel about your book. What if you wrote a book review of your life? In other words, you almost wrote your own memorial service. You wrote what’s on your headstone. It may give you certain new ways of thinking about your life to develop a new approach, a new way of thinking about purpose, so it doesn’t stagnate.

Brett McKay:

Well, Vic, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Vic Strecher:

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, my book is entitled, Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. I’ve also spent the last 10 years now developing an application called Purposeful, and you can find this at purposeful.io, and this is an app that really covers just about everything we’ve been talking about. It helps you not only find a purpose, and it uses AI to help you find purpose, but then importantly, it helps you become purposeful. We have real guardrails on this to keep the AI from hallucinating from going off on its own. We didn’t want AI to go into the internet and find things and make stuff up. So everything we put into this is very what we call evidence-based. Very, very carefully done, and we’ve built a framework around helping you become more purposeful as we’ve done in my book as well. So those are two places that I might recommend, and both of them I’ve devoted a lot of time thinking about not just making stuff up, but really making sure there’s a research underlying it, and I just appreciate people like you who have been thinking about these deep thoughts and helping the public think about these deep thoughts as well. I really appreciate this interviewer. You’re a wonderful and very careful interviewer, and I appreciate you.

Brett McKay:

Well, Vic, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Vic Strecher:

Thank you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Vic Strecher. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Kate and I spend many, many hours searching far and wide for the very best guest and shaping the interviews into episodes that are always worth listening to. If you’ve gotten something out of the show, consider helping more people discover it by leaving a review on iTunes or Spotify, or sharing it with a friend. As always, thank for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Many who are reading this are old enough to remember a time when they wrote long letters to loved ones.

Many more can remember that when email was first introduced, people often composed multi-paragraph missives to their friends, discussing ideas and offering in-depth updates on their lives.

Today, not only do few people write lengthy emails anymore, but they frequently struggle to answer the short ones they receive. Even following through on typing out a 30-second reply to a text message is perpetually put off.

This decline in answering messages might be traced to our steadily shrinking attention spans. In a time when we’re used to flicking through nugget-sized pieces of content and entertainment, sitting down to accomplish any task can feel onerous and tedious.

We also might think that we’re stymied in responding to communications because the digital age has made it possible for us to receive such an overwhelming amount of them. But we’re not as unique in this as we think.

It’s easy to underestimate just how inundated people of the letter-writing age were with correspondence; the amount of mail they received and needed to reply to was sometimes voluminous. Thomas Jefferson described his schedule as dominated by answering letters; devoting hours to it each day, he called it the burden of his life and once remarked that correspondence alone was enough to occupy him full-time. The journalist H.L. Mencken, who responded to every letter he received, penned over 100,000 of them during his lifetime.

Of course, even if we’re not more beset with correspondence than previous generations, it may feel that way since, unlike our predecessors, who only got mail, at most, a few times a day, we receive communications during every waking hour (and sometimes when we sleep). Add that feeling of inundation to our shorter attention spans, and that likely does explain part of the reason many people struggle to stay on top of their messages and get back to people.

But there’s another factor at play as well.

We moderns tend to think of responding to emails and texts as ancillary — something to tackle on an ad hoc basis; something to get to in the cracks of time, between primary tasks, when the mood strikes. But in the past, answering correspondence was seen as a fundamental social obligation — a task that was enshrined as a set part of one’s daily routine. People accepted that it was a basic part of life and would take up a significant chunk of their time. They didn’t treat it as an occasional chore, but a fixed block in their schedule.

For example, Charles Darwin answered every missive he received, even from cranks; leaving a letter unanswered weighed on his mind. To stay on top of the piles of mail he received, Darwin engaged in “letters time” at two intervals during his day. After a tightly managed 90-minute work session first thing in the morning, he would come into the drawing room at 9:30 a.m. and open and read the morning’s post with his family until about 10:30 a.m. Darwin would read his own mail, and his wife would read the family’s letters out loud. After lunch, he would sit in a large chair by the fireplace, with a board across his lap that functioned as a desk, and respond to the letters for an hour or two.  

Many eminent figures, who often received satchel loads of mail, placed letter-answering at the end of their daily routines. Seeing it as a necessary but less mentally taxing task, men like Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, and W.B. Yeats, among others, replied to their mail in the afternoon, after their more creative and cognitively-demanding work had been completed.

Some really made it the capstone of their day. Both Jefferson and John Adams not only engaged in letter-writing sessions in the morning, but in the evening as well. The diarist Samuel Pepys wound down for bed by penning letters at 12:00 a.m. Louis Armstrong would answer his mail late at night after his shows, while dining on takeout Chinese (his second favorite food after red beans and rice).

Whenever they did it, answering their mail was something that many men used to set aside dedicated time for each day. We ought to consider doing likewise — reviving what might be called the “correspondence hour”: a recurring time in your daily routine in which you respond to all texts and emails (that truly need a response — not every one does).

Because in our current age, we can receive messages at any time, day or night, this creates the feeling that they should be answered in a similarly rolling and sporadic fashion. But, except for emails and texts that are more urgent in nature, it’s possible to consolidate your responding into a single block of time.

The field-tested practice of answering communications at the end of your day, once your more important work is finished, can be a wise one. But schedule your own correspondence hour for whatever time works for you.

Such batching will free up mental bandwidth. Constantly pivoting from one task, to popping off a message, to returning to the task, frazzles your brain. It will also likely increase your effectiveness in replying to all your messages, so your correspondents won’t be left hanging and can get on with their work and plans.

Even though Jefferson sometimes felt consumed by answering letters — he responded even to those of ordinary citizens, whether from schoolboys seeking advice or farmers looking for guidance — he saw the act as a civic duty, almost a republican obligation. While staying on top of one’s messages may not quite rise to that level for the non-presidents among us, it’s still a worthy social civility. It’s a way to become a class act — and instituting a correspondence hour can get you there.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’re like a lot of men, you’ve probably set some big goals for yourself this year. Lose twenty pounds. Start a side hustle. Finally read Aristotle.

When you set those goals for yourself, you likely felt good. Really good. Setting goals feels awesome. You imagine yourself looking lean in the mirror, seeing that first deposit hit your bank account, or riffing to your friends about Aristotle’s idea of phronesis. You’re riding a high of pure, unadulterated positive vibes.

But then, a week later, you’ve missed a week of workouts, haven’t even bought the URL for your side hustle website, and a brand new, uncracked copy of Nicomachean Ethics sits on your nightstand.

What happened?

Well, you were probably too stinking positive.

According to Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at NYU, pure positive visualization can actually backfire on you. When you fantasize about achieving a goal, your brain starts to think you’ve already accomplished it. Your raring-to-go drive dampens, and when obstacles on your path towards achieving the goal come your way, you wilt. You eat the QT taquito instead of sticking to your macros. You scroll YouTube Shorts instead of working on your business. You read The Daily Mail instead of Aristotle.

If you want to actually accomplish your goals this year, you need a dose of realism. You need to marry a portion of positive thinking with a dose of negative thinking.

A framework that Dr. Oettingen developed can help you do that.

It’s called WOOP.

The Power of Mental Contrasting

If you want to move the needle on your goals, you have to stop indulging in what Oettingen calls “free fantasies.” This is when you only think about positive outcomes and the good feelings you’ll experience when you accomplish your goal. As I mentioned above, her research has found that when we only think about the positive, our brains get tricked into thinking we’ve already arrived, and we lose our drive to actually do the brass tacks work to reach the goal.

To fix this, Oettingen pioneered a process called mental contrasting.

The idea is simple. You don’t just visualize yourself on the mountaintop with your fists up in the air, celebrating your success. You also need to visualize the jagged rocks and the steep cliffs you’ll have to climb to get there. You pepper your positive thinking with a vision of the obstacles that could potentially get in the way of achieving your aim.

This creates what psychologists call “mental tension.” By contrasting the future you want with a realistic picture of the landscape you’ll have to traverse to get there, your brain recognizes a gap that needs to be closed. It suddenly realizes, “Oh, I’m not there yet. I better do things to relieve this tension.” The tension is the fuel that mobilizes your energy and prepares you to act and get stuff done.

But identifying the obstacles on the path to your goal is only half the battle. You also need a plan on how you’re going to overcome those hurdles and barriers so you can keep plodding towards your desired outcome. To do that, Oettingen recommends creating an implementation intention. We’ve written about these “automated” actions before. An implementation intention is an “if-then” plan that links a specific situational cue to a predetermined goal-directed response.

Let’s say you decide one of the obstacles you’ll encounter in your goal to lose twenty pounds is “I’ll be tempted to snack on the donuts left every day in the office breakroom.” An implementation intention to overcome this obstacle would look something like: “If I see the donuts in the breakroom, I will immediately return to my desk and start working.”

By doing this, you’ve essentially automated your response to temptation. Instead of standing in front of the box of donuts, dithering about whether you’re going to eat them or not, and telling yourself you’ll “just have half,” you’ve outsourced the decision to a pre-programmed script.

WOOP There It Is: A 4-Step Framework for Achieving Your Goals

To help people put these two concepts — mental contrasting and implementation intentions — into practice, Oettingen developed a simple, four-step framework. It’s called WOOP, and it stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.

Let’s walk through it:

1. Wish

A “Wish” is something you want to accomplish that is challenging but actually feasible. It’s a goal. It could be something you want to do today, this month, or this year.

Let’s say your wish is to lose twenty pounds by June.

Write that down.

2. Outcome

Now, visualize the best possible result of fulfilling that wish. If you lose those twenty pounds, how will you feel being able to play with your kids without getting winded? Or how would you feel knowing that your glucose and cholesterol levels are in check? Or how would you feel being able to show up to a pool party with a bit more muscle definition? Let yourself feel those positive emotions for a moment.

3. Obstacle

Here is where we pivot from the typical self-help manifesting fluff and start getting real. Ask yourself: What are the things that would hold you back from accomplishing the goal? Is it your tendency to stock your pantry with lots of Chewy Chips Ahoy? Or your tendency to eat a high-calorie meal at lunch sourced entirely from the QT Kitchen? Or maybe you feel like you don’t have enough time to work out?

Identify the biggest potential obstacles. Write those down.

4. Plan

Once you’ve identified the obstacles, it’s time to create an if-then plan for them. In other words, an implementation intention.

The formula is simple: “If [obstacle] occurs, then I will [action to overcome obstacle].”

Let’s use the obstacle of not having enough time for a full workout. Here’s what an implementation intention to overcome that obstacle could look like:

Obstacle: Sometimes I don’t have time for a full workout.

Plan: If I don’t have time for a full workout, then I’ll take a brisk 15-minute ruck around the neighborhood before 8 PM. (Check out our article on other ideas for quick workouts when you’re crunched for time.)

How about your tendency to default to eating QT taquitos and a Big Q soda for lunch?

Obstacle: When pressed for time, I eat lunch at QuikTrip.

Plan: When I go to QT for lunch, I’ll get the cobb salad and a Diet Coke. 

Harness the Power of Negative Thinking

This year, start visualizing negative outcomes with your goals. But then make a plan for how you’re going to prevent those negative outcomes from happening. The WOOP model reminds me a lot of the conversation I had with Kyle Austin Young about probability hacking. The key to reaching your goals, Kyle explained, lies in figuring out the things that will lower your odds of success and then plotting out ways to reduce the impact of those factors to tilt the odds in your favor.

Pick one goal you’ve been struggling with. Spend five minutes working it through the WOOP framework. Identify the snag that always trips you up, and write down your “if-then” script.

And then follow through on it!

Listen to our podcast on probability hacking for even more: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Of all the books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical. Dark, experiential, existential, and unsparingly honest about the human condition, it wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time, and death — and it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern. Whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who’s ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered, Is this really it?

Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jamieson, a pastor and the author of Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonates so strongly in our age of acceleration and control, why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying, and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy — and even embrace — what first appears to be vanity of vanities.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #956: Feeling Depressed and Discombobulated? Social Acceleration May Be to Blame
• Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• AoM Podcast #1,100: Money and Meaning — What Faith Traditions Teach Us About Personal Finance
• The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa
• Jerry Seinfeld on saving time

Connect with Bobby Jamieson

• Bobby on X

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• Surfshark. Go to https://surfshark.com/manliness or use code MANLINESS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Of all the books in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical, dark, experiential, existential and unsparingly honest about the human condition. It wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time and death. And it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern, whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature.

Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who’s ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered, is this really it? Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jamieson a pastor and the author of Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonate so strongly in our age of acceleration and control, why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying, and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy and even embrace what first appears to be vanity of vanities After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/everythingisneverenough. All right, Bobby Jamieson, welcome to the show. 

Bobby Jamieson: 

Thanks for having me. 

Brett McKay: 

So you wrote a book called Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. Ecclesiastes is a book in the Bible that gets quoted a lot by religious and non-religious people alike. I’m sure people have heard that birds hit song, turn, turn, turn, which riffs off Ecclesiastes. What led you to take a deep dive into this book in the Hebrew Bible?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, so I am a pastor and I preached through it at a church. I used to pastor in Washington DC and it really resonated with me. It really resonated with our congregation. When I got to the end of the preaching series, I just didn’t want to be done with the book. It was like the book had grabbed a hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. It’s a weirdly personal, confrontational, challenging kind of book. It’s pretty dark as we’re going to see together in some of the themes we’ve probably talked about, but I just didn’t want to be done, and for me, it really seemed to resonate with a lot of hopes, dreams, trajectories, we chart for our lives that then wind up not working out and it’s like Ecclesiastes saw it first, got there first, and if you’ve had any experience of frustrated expectations, dreams that didn’t plan out or even frankly that you actually got what you were looking for and then you were like, man, is this really what I wanted or what’s next or is this all there is kind of Ecclesiastes has been to all those places ahead of you.

Brett McKay:

Well, so let’s do some background on Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is part of the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature, which includes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. If anyone has ever read the Hebrew Bible, they may have noticed that these books, particularly these three books, they seem really different from the other books in the Bible, like the books of Moses or the books of the prophets. What makes the wisdom literature different from the rest of the Hebrew Bible?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, one thing is it’s in many ways more experiential. It invites you to kind of wrestle with it personally. You have to put work into making sense of it for yourself because it is kind of speaking about all of life from different perspectives. One way to summarize the relationship between Job and Ecclesiastes, Job is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by losing it all. The author of Ecclesiastes is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by getting it all and having it all. And so wisdom literature kind of invites you to really reflect on your life as a whole, and you got to kind of earn it. You got to work for it. Proverbs, the book of Proverbs puts contradictory statements side by side and you got to figure out how to reconcile ’em, and Ecclesiastes actually does something similar. So yeah, not these books in the Bible are probably especially maybe familiar to or appealing to even a lot of people who don’t necessarily believe in God or believe that the Bible is holy scripture because they speak so directly to experience, to things like work, money, sex, power, pleasure, all that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay:

It also seems just more philosophical than the rest of the books in the Bible; existential like you were saying.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s true of wisdom literature in general, and I would say it’s even especially true of Ecclesiastes in particular. A lot of people would say Ecclesiastes is kind of the only maybe pure work of philosophy in the Bible, in the sense that it’s observational. It’s even in a way empirical. The author is kind of testing out these different things by experience, and so there’s really sustained reflection on a lot of life’s biggest questions. Is there meaning how can you find satisfaction, what’s worth doing? What is good? There’s a deep relentless quest for answers in a lot of these realms that frankly resonates with different traditions of philosophy and even philosophy as its practice today.

Brett McKay:

And because it hits all these big issues, work, money, love, success, failure. When you read Ecclesiastes in the 21st century as a modern westerner, you read like, wow, I relate to this. It feels really modern.

Bobby Jamieson:

It does feel really modern. That was certainly part of my experience pastoring a lot of young professionals in DC preaching through the book or even just how it spoke to my own challenges and struggles, but even thinking about a bit more, connecting it to maybe some of the challenges and structures in the modern world, thinking about money, thinking about the economy, thinking about issues of justice. Ecclesiastes has something to say about all of those, and I think part of the way it does that is that the author is speaking from the experience of living a whole bunch of different lives in one lifetime. It’s almost a little bit like Winston Churchill or something where you read a biography of Churchill and you go, how did he live so many different lives before he got to the age of 30, you could do a biography of Churchill that would fill massive volumes from any two years of his life. The author of Ecclesiastes is a little bit like that. There’s this full exploration of the potential, the possibilities of work, money, pleasure, power, and so I think in the modern world is in some ways defined by a lot of options. There’s a lot of freedom, there’s a lot of options. There’s a lot of different paths you can follow, and I think one of the main reasons Ecclesiastes resonates so much is basically he’s like, look, I chased this path all the way to the end. Let me tell you where it got me.

Brett McKay:

So who wrote Ecclesiastes? Do we know that?

Bobby Jamieson:

Well, I don’t think we have a kind of confident or certain knowledge. Historically, lots of Christian and Jewish interpreters have held it to be written by King Solomon, David’s son and to be about his own experiences. I think that’s possible. I’m not convinced that’s wrong, but I’m also not convinced it’s right. The book is technically anonymous. The author just introduces himself as the teacher or the preacher. The Hebrew word for that is like, it’s a title, like a job title, and he just introduced himself as the preacher, the teacher son of David King in Jerusalem. So he could have been any number of other kings of Israel. He’s a little bit hard to place. So I think there’s a little bit of a deliberate mystery, a deliberate, you could even say ambiguity where it partially lines up with Solomon. There’s ways you can map it onto Solomon, but I think in some ways the author is making his experience even more accessible by that degree of anonymity.

Brett McKay:

What’s the overall structure of the book?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, well, Ecclesiastes, some books of the Bible have a pretty clear or transparent literary structure. Ecclesiastes, it’s a little bit harder to discern. Discern, roughly speaking. The first half is more his quest for the good life, his quest for the meaning of life and some periodic reflections and kind of look backs on how it’s all gone. That’s about the first six chapters. Then once you get to chapter seven, especially the end of chapter seven, it’s a little bit more collections of wisdom sayings, kind of like the book of Proverbs grouped around different topics and then kind of a poem about death at the very end to cap things off. So there’s kind of a loose literary structure. As I understand the book though, there’s a little bit of a clearer conceptual structure where a whole lot of the book is his observation, his experience, his just saying what he’s lived, what he’s seen, and frankly, you can agree with that just by experiencing the same things or reflecting yourself.

But then there’s these seven passages in the book where it’s almost like his perspective takes a big step up as if he’s moving from kind of ground floor observation to then going up to a second story where you can see farther. And he talks about life as being a gift. He counsels enjoyment, he counsels rejoicing in your work, rejoicing in your marriage, even the toil of your work taking pleasure in it. And so there’s kind of a tone shift from saying everything is vanity or fleeting or absurd. That’s kind of his dominant message in the first half of the book. But there’s these seven times when he ascends to this higher perspective and calls everything a gift and tells you to get busy enjoying all the stuff that he is just told you is meaningless, fleeting, absurd. I mean, there’s even some perspectives that poke through from an ultimate point of view of he believes that there’s a God who created all things.

He believes that there’s a God who’s in charge of all things even though it doesn’t really look like it a lot of the time, and that God will ultimately hold all people to account and even bring about a whole new world in the end. And so that’s a perspective that only comes through in a few places. So I would say there’s this kind of three story building or view from a three story building type of conceptual structure to Ecclesiastes where he doesn’t always give you signposts, he doesn’t always tell you any switching point of view, but there’s these different voices that emerge from the author throughout the book that I think show us that all of life is absurd on the ground floor. Show us that all of life is a gift on the second floor and show us that all of life has a kind of transcendent or even eternal significance that shines through in just a couple places.

Brett McKay:

Those first two floors where everything’s absurd and then everything’s a gift that’s kind like the imminent frames. Well, this is the life now. And then that third floor is like that’s the transcendent frame.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s right. And there’s a sense in which on the second floor to say that life is a gift does kind of puncture the imminent frame. But on the one hand, it also relates then to just how we live day by day, moment by moment, the kind of stuff he’s still focused on enjoying pleasure, enjoying possessions, enjoying even wealth. He says at one point, drink your wine with a merry heart. God has already approved what you do. So there’s a sense in which it’s a little bit more transcendent perspective to say life is a gift from God. But on the other hand, it very much relates to all the stuff of daily life that we experience moment by moment day by day.

Brett McKay:

Alright, let’s dig into what the preacher has to say to us. The book famously starts off with vanity of vanities, says the preacher vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The Hebrew word that got translated into vanity is hevel, what did the Hebrews mean by hevel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. Well, it’s one of these words that has kind of a basic or literal meaning, which is breath, breath, wind, vapor. So what are some of the characteristics of breath? It’s here one second, gone. The next, you got to take another breath. If you breathe out on a cold day, you can see a little cloud puff before your face, but then it’s gone. So then as is often the case with a keyword like this, there’s all these metaphorical associations that grow up from that. So hevel as breath, well, it’s also fleeting, it’s here, and then it disappears. It doesn’t last, it doesn’t stay. But Kallet uses this word as kind of his summary statement for everything. So it becomes kind of a term of art. It’s like a one word summary of his whole observation of all of life and some of the situations he applies it to are things where it’s not just something like fleeting that’s here one minute, gone the next, but actually something deeply dissatisfying, something that doesn’t meet your expectations.

Even something that’s deeply wrong, like a case of injustice. If you know somebody’s innocence and they get declared guilty, it’s hard to think of something that’s kind of more wrong in the world than that. And actually Kohe will use the word he to talk about a situation like that. Why? Because it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t match. I would actually say a good kind of modern translation of it is absurd. Even inspired by kind of mid-century existentialist philosophy like Albert Camus, the way he uses the word. I think that’s actually a pretty good fit for what Koal is talking about when he says he, because there’s things that don’t meet our desires. There’s things that don’t meet our expectations. There’s a kind of condition of wrongness or of a misfit between what we want and even what we expect and even what we have a right to demand and then what the world actually pays back.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I like how you used absurd because I think that’s a better word to describe hevel — that idea that we’re in this world and things don’t go according to how we think they should go, and it’s just like, this is absurd. This is absolutely absurd that this is happening to me.

Bobby Jamieson:

And you often have that experience. It might be slightly comical. I mean, we have a minivan for lugging our kids around and it had to be in the shop for three weeks. It’s a long story. They were trying to fix a door handle. They wound up having to put a whole new door in because there’s not the spare parts to actually just replace the handle on its own, and the thing barely works better than it did before. After three weeks in the shop, we had to have a rental car and all this stuff. I mean, it feels absurd, and that’s a pretty minor instance. That’s a pretty everyday not that big of a deal, even though now the door’s a different color and it looks funny and all this stuff. But then at a much more serious level too, I think to describe even some more of those shocks of life or things that we suffer, there is an absurdity. It doesn’t make sense. Why did this happen? There’s not really an answer. There’s no obvious answer. It’s not written into your life. It doesn’t show up in the mail and say, here’s why this happened. So I think that idea of absurdity actually names kind of an experience particularly of things we suffer that’s hard to get at otherwise,

Brett McKay:

And it’s not even just unexpectedly negative things that can feel absurd like your life’s going great, and then you get a shock medical diagnosis that turns your life upside down. But as you said, getting what you want and then feeling depressed and not satisfied, that can also feel absurd. You feel just like, why not? Why don’t I feel good? I got the thing. I summoned the mountain. Why don’t I feel like I think I should feel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s maybe the single most relevant insight in the whole book, and it comes from really the biggest extended narrative. Early in the book, he kind of announces his quest for wisdom, and then he talks about this huge project he went on of testing out every conceivable source of enjoyment under the sun, and he gets to the end and he says in chapter two, verse 11, then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. In some ways, that feels like the ultimate absurdity. When you’ve worked hard, you’ve gotten to the end of it, you’ve attained that summit and it just doesn’t satisfy. It leaves you going, well, why doesn’t this dissatisfied? And oftentimes we don’t really experience a clear answer to that.

Brett McKay:

Everything is never enough.

Bobby Jamieson:

That’s the key lesson of the whole book. Some people experience that after winning a Super Bowl or a major golf tournament. I mean, you hear this again and again, people at the absolute pinnacle, they’re literally the world’s best person at this, their team, their accomplishments, whatever it is. And you often even hear this in an interview right after the fact. Right. Okay, well, what now?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you also bring the thinking of sociologist Hartmut Rosa into your exploration of Ecclesiastes. For those who aren’t familiar with his work, what’s his big idea?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, he’s got a few really insightful big ideas. One that’s really relevant for my book is that modernity is a project of control. And so he’s got this great slim little book, The Uncontrollability of the World that’s very accessible and really insightful, and he talks about how essentially the modern world is defined by a relentless ambition to control more and more to control all that we can. I’m in a room right now that has been set to 67 degrees, and if it dips below 67 degrees, the heater will kick back on and keep me at exactly the controlled temperature I want. You can think about increasing control over our bodies, over medical conditions, technology, transportation, communication, being able to fly places, artificial lights so you can be working and awake whenever you want. All those kinds of things have created a world in which we live, the world that we experience.

We have a lot higher expectation of being able to control things than probably any society that’s ever lived, any people that’s ever lived, whether it’s more hunter gatherer or agrarian or even more of a hard scrabble. You’ve got this job and you work in an older city and you’re at the mercy of all these different forces. We expect to be able to control a whole lot of stuff, and we’re surprised when we can’t. We’re kind of shocked when we can’t. And yeah, Rosa does a really good job kind of opening up the disconnect that we experience when control runs out. He also has this fascinating insight that I think is really brilliant where actually a lot of the most meaningful experiences in our lives are things you can’t control. Think about falling in love, getting this woman that you’re incredibly into to actually go out on a date with you and how does it go?

Or you’re at the championship game and your team wins by a kind of last minute three pointer, or you’re at the concert that’s your favorite band and they play your favorite song from your favorite album, and it’s just as good as you thought it would be. All those type of peak experiences are things you can’t control. You can’t control the dates, you can’t control the game, you can’t control the concert. And in a way, the more you try to control it, the more the meaning drains out of it. The color drains out of it. And so Rosa also identifies this paradox where the more we try to control, the less we actually kind of enjoy our lives. And his thick concept he’s developed for that kind of enjoyment is what he calls resonance. And resonance is basically any experience in which kind of the invisible wire that connects you to the world is humming.

It could be a really engaging conversation. It could be being deeply engaged in a craft, kind of a flow state of being challenged by the materials you’re working with and applying skill to it, and kind of experiencing those challenges giving way as you figure out how to get this joint to fit into this part or how you get the right tool to work on this part of wood or whatever it might be. Rosa talks about resonance as basically anything in which you light up with a connection to the world. And resonance is only an in the moment reality. It’s not something you can file away and stockpile. It’s not something you could just pull out of the fridge. You might have a great time making this meal or eating those leftovers, but resonance itself is not something you can just do at your beck and call.

It depends upon your own kind of internal condition. It depends upon the conditions of the world out there. And so the tension between control and resonance, I think Rosa is really insightful in showing there’s an inverse relationship. The more you control, the less resonance there is, but we keep trying to control more. One last really helpful kind of paradigm from Rosa is what do you call social acceleration, which is basically if you zoom out and you think about life as a whole, society as a whole, think about the ways we make our living, think about the kind of circumstances of the tools or technology we use on a daily basis. Think about even basics of morality or expected patterns of life. He identifies three phases. In traditional societies, those things are pretty stable. They change a little bit over time, but it’s pretty much like things have gone on the way they always have.

Once you get into the modern world, particularly in Europe and the early modern era, you might have generational change. You might have change that takes place over 30, 40, 50 years, and your kids are grandkids live in a pretty significantly different world than you lived in. But Rosa’s point about our present moment, kind of late modernity is what he calls social acceleration, which is basically all those fundamental conditions, how you make a living, how technology influences your life, even kind of what’s agreed upon morality or ways of being in the world. Those things change quicker and quicker even within the span of a single lifetime, which means all sorts of stuff that you took for granted or a job you were trained in or a tool you used to use becomes obsolete quicker and quicker. And so there’s this sense of the world kind of disappearing from underneath your feet as you’re trying to live it, which I think is a pretty compelling description of a lot of the challenges that we experience in different ways just in the modern world. I don’t know, defined roughly by the last couple of generations.

Brett McKay:

So I want to take that idea of resonance. We’ll table that. I’m going to come back to that because I think the preacher kind of agrees with Rosa there that the antidote for all this he absurdness can be resonance or something like resonance. But these ideas of we feel like in the modern world we want to control everything when it causes frustration and this idea of social acceleration, I think this really goes to what the preacher has to say about why life is absurd. And it sounds like too that modernity, this idea of social acceleration and we can control things, it sounds like it just makes that sense of absurdity of life more acute.

Bobby Jamieson:

I think so. I mean, that’s one of the things that really settled in more deeply for me as I was doing the research of this book, is that I think what Ecclesiastes is describing simply is the human condition. You could live at any time. You could live in any place in the world, and this book would really resonate with you at the same time, because Ecclesiastes is so much about ambition and aspiration, it’s so much about the things that kind of become magnets for our hearts that draw out huge amounts of effort, huge amounts of planning and strategy and the kind of things we sort of build our lives around. I do think Ecclesiastes, while it’s describing the human condition, those kind of things that Rosa is identifying as hallmarks of modernity are actually intensifications, kind of deepenings or they’re making even more vivid a lot of the exact things that Ecclesiastes identifies. So I do think that’s another way of getting at why Ecclesiastes feels like such a modern book, partly because Ecclesiastes is not just analyzing individual experience, but there’s a whole lot of insightful commentary and judgments about how the world as a whole works. So even though he’s in ancient Israel, I think he’s diagnosing problems that would sort of flower and blossom in the modern world.

Brett McKay:

I mean, this idea of controlling how intense it is in the modern world, just look at our health. We have all this technology, these tools to look at our, what’s going on inside of our body. We can measure our blood. We have all these supplements, we can measure our heart rate variability, and then we end up getting some sort of debilitating disease. You’re like, how could this happen? I’m doing all the things. I’m tracking everything, what’s going on? So I think the frustration is just more intense compared to you go back to 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago, if you got a cold, there’s a chance you might die. It’s not great. And it’s sort of heavy. It’s absurd, but it was sort of a given. That’s a possibility. Now these days when something happens that should not happen, got the technology to prevent it from happening. So you just feel even more frustrated.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. It’s our modern world with the greater degree of control, greater degree of technological sovereignty over our basic bodily conditions. It makes it even harder for us to be reconciled to the realities of accident, injury, illness, ultimately death. If you’re in any kind of pre-modern society, you are just so much more surrounded by death. It’s so much more of a fact of life. It’s a part of the daily fabric of life that’s sad. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it also reconciles you to that reality. Whereas we can sort of put death behind this kind of sealed off door. People mostly tend to die in hospitals. We tend to keep it out of you or you’re not around. If a loved one is dying, typically they’re not in their own bedroom in your own home, you’re not the one sitting by them. And so yeah, I think it also makes it easier to persist in the illusion that somehow we’ll be around forever or even if we don’t consciously think that you can just sort of more effectively keep death at bay as a thought, the kind of illusion of your own. It’s just not part of your daily experience. And Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about death.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll talk about that. And then this idea of social acceleration, I think everyone’s experienced that feeling of they feel like they have to work harder and harder, run faster and faster, but they’re just kind of stand in place and you’re like, what’s going on? I’m doing all this work and I’m not making any progress. This is absurd. This is absolutely absurd. And I have that experience with social acceleration of my own kids. I have a son who’s 15 and he’s trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his future, and he is like, dad, what should I do for work? AI is going to take all of our jobs maybe. And I’m like, man, I don’t know.

Bobby Jamieson:

Honestly, that’s the example that was coming to mind. I’ve got so many friends who work in tech sectors and it just looks like AI is coming to gobble up their jobs. I’m just curious, did you have any advice for your son in the moment?

Brett McKay:

No. I’m like, I don’t know, man. Because when I was trying to figure out my career trajectory, I was able to look at my parents. They did the same thing. It was like, well, you go to college and then you apply for a job. Then you work your way up your career and you’re kind of in the same career for most of your life. My dad was a game warden his entire career for 35 plus years. Me, it’s been a little bit different because the economy’s changed. I’ve had adapt with my career with my kids. I’m like, I don’t know what advice to give you because what worked for me and my parents might not work for you. And it’s tough. That’s an example of social acceleration. You’re like, this is absurd. It should work. It worked before. It should work now, why doesn’t it work?

Bobby Jamieson:

I agree. I think that’s a good example. And even though this wasn’t even really on the radar, I mean, I kind of finished writing the book in 2023. It came out in 2025. I do think AI is the 800 pound gorilla of social acceleration right now, of just, yeah, there could be a career you sort of trained for years in and have put in 10 years of work in and an AI computer coding thing can come over and do in 10 minutes what it used to take you a month to do. Yeah, I think we’re in the early stages of seeing some pretty profound disruptions due to that. And I’m not sure there’s a lot of people out there with great answers.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So Ecclesiastes really speaks to this modern phenomenon of social acceleration where you are trying to do more and more, but we don’t feel any more satisfied. So let’s actually dig into what Ecclesiastes has to say about our relationship to time and feelings of progress and permanence. Let’s read some verses from the book. Some of the most famous verses are in chapter one verses four through nine. Could you read that and then let’s talk about it?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind. And on its circuits, the wind returns, all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full to the place where the streams flow there, they flow Again, all things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done, and there’s nothing new under the sun.

Brett McKay:

How do you think these verses flesh out what the preacher means by hevel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key points is that we try to live our lives as if there can just be this linear series of quests. I want this, I plan for it, I strive for it, I attain it, and it will make me happy. But this is kind of a poem of reflecting on nature’s cycles. A generation goes and a generation comes. Everybody who’s alive today is going to die. They’re going to be replaced by their kind of successors in the next generation. The wind blows around from the south, but then when the weather system blows itself out and things return to normal, it’s going to come back around from the other direction. So it is all these images of repeating of something that you had kind of on one setting, but then it gets flipped to the other setting. And so what happens is that there’s finally no gain.

It’s not like the whole system moves forward. The whole system just kind of returns to its original setting. And Ecclesiastes is observing these different patterns in nature to basically preach to humanity. The message that’s going to happen to you, your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, they’re all going to get reset. Whatever mark you make on the earth, those footprints are going to get filled in time’s going to wear ’em down, the sand is going to blow over ’em, water’s going to wash ’em away. And so we like to think there’s this linear progression toward a goal towards satisfaction, but there isn’t. What’s happened is what’s going to happen again, and it’s going to wipe out your goals, your gains, your satisfaction, and in some ways the key to understanding why are we wired like this? And again, the idea of the absurd, there’s a misfit.

Why is there a misfit between our hearts and the world? It’s there in verse eight. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. We always want more. We always want something more. We always want something better. Our senses are hungry for stimulation, for fulfillment, for something good to come to them. And I think Ecclesiastes would say that’s kind of a window into our deeper condition that there’s something we’re hungry for, there’s something we’re striving for. But the point is there’s this misfit, the world’s not built like that, but our hearts are,

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Kierkegaard said, we’re a combination of the finite and the infinite, and that the way those elements contrast can jar with each other. And that gives us a feeling of anxiety. And then I also think we feel that contrast between the cyclical nature of the world and the fact that we’re very oriented to clock time. I mean, we live by the clock, like, okay, I got to be here at this time. This thing’s got to start at this time. And if it doesn’t start at this time, then things have gone wrong.

Bobby Jamieson:

And clock time obviously enables all kinds of stuff to happen. Time only got standardized in terms of everybody being on the same hour, minute, et cetera, ready, set, go. I think as a kind of international Congress meant to facilitate train travel, it has to be this incredible precision and everybody’s got to be synced up if you’re going to have trains moving at dozens of miles an hour down a track to get to a certain city at a certain time, et cetera. So there are things that it enables this kind of regime of the clock, but it also creates a constant pressure. It creates a kind of constant sort of external accountability, and it can tempt us. Rosa is really insightful on this. It can tempt us to think that we actually have more control over our time. Time is a resource that you can sort of save, spend, invest, reclaim, recoup, not waste time is this kind of commodity that we can do all these different things with.

And in some ways that’s kind of metaphorically valid, but it also tempts you to think, oh, I’m in charge of my time. Time is my thing. I get to spend my way. Whereas actually we’re much more subject to time cycles. We’re much more sort of stuck in time. It only goes in one direction. If you really want to be in charge of time, try to make it run backwards. Try to get a do over for that mistake you just made or try to hit pause when your kid is just having some incredibly sweet, fun, cute thing. You just want to savor. Well, it’s going to end. You wish you could pause it, but you can’t. So I think clock time tempts you. Again, it’s that as you have control to think you have more control over time than you actually do.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. You quote this Jerry Seinfeld bit, we talked about saving times like, oh, I’m saving time. He’s like, where does that time go that I saved? Does it go to the end? He’s like, no, you’re dead. You don’t need to build up that. Save time. You’re going to die. It’s a very Ecclesiastes message there.

Bobby Jamieson:

Totally. And Seinfeld as the kind of prototype observational comic, he resonates so much with Ecclesiastes. I think Kohat is kind of like a standup comic in the way that he squints at the world, looks at it from a certain angle, draws kind of a caricature that then makes you go, oh wow, that actually is my life.

Brett McKay:

So work and making money make up a lot of human life. And you talked about that the preacher talks a lot about work and money. What did he say about work and why did he think it was he or absurd?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. One of the most revealing statements he makes is in chapter four, verses seven and eight, again, I saw vanity under the sun. One person who has no other either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil and his eyes are never satisfied with riches so that he never asks for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure. This also is vanity and an unhappy business. He’s basically diagnosing the workaholic 2,500 years or 3,000 years before somebody coined that term as a psychologist to describe a typical modern struggle. So yeah, he says, that’s motivated by envy. You want to have more than the person next to you. But I think it’s also our hearts are kind of these bottomless desire factories that work is a way not just to sort of earn your basic necessities, but if you can get more money and if more work can get you more money, and if there’s always more stuff that your money can get you, then you never really have an incentive to quit working.

And I think in some ways, even more subtle than money can be the promise of status. We don’t often talk about status or admit it, but status is basically the legitimacy that some institution or group or person confers on you as being worthwhile having standing. And in our society, the only universal currency of statuses work, what you do in your work is the most definitive aspect of where you stand before other people. And so Ecclesiastes diagnoses envy as the big motive that would keep you running on that hamster wheel, that treadmill of always working. And I think envy in some ways, not just of money or of possessions, but frankly even more so of status is a huge motivator.

Brett McKay:

And then this idea of money, like the preacher, he makes a lot of money and he is like, it’s absurd. I didn’t feel good after making all the money. He even talked about all this money I made. It’s going to go to someone after I’m dead and they’re going to waste it away. They’re going to spend it and this is all going to go away because I’m going to have this spin thrift son or grandson. And it was all absurd. All that work I did was for nothing.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, there’s all kinds of reasons. Ecclesiastes finds money dissatisfying, like you said. One is you got to give it all away and who knows what they’re going to do with it. Another is just, you can’t take it with you personally. You leave this life naked as you came into it. Another kind of famous line from Ecclesiastes that gets reused all the time. Another reason is that the more money you have, it frankly brings more problems. There’s people who want to mooch off you. There’s cares that keep you up at night. There’s more things you got to pay for now that you have this money in this property. And of course, the kind of most basic one, the deepest problem is that you can always want more money. The problem is ultimately your love of money that if you start being motivated by money, it becomes your ultimate good.

And so Ecclesiastes in a couple of places warns about being sort of driven or controlled by the love of money. And so I think that’s hugely relevant. I mean, in our society more than ever, money can get you virtually anything and you can sort of monetize anything. I mean, I think it’s great, Brett, that you have this podcast and all other stuff associated with Art of Manliness where you get to build a living doing this stuff that’s helpful for other people. But there’s also kind of a flip side to the sort of ethic of entrepreneurship. You can always have a side hustle. You can always turn this into a gig. You can always be at the back of your mind thinking, is it okay for me to just be enjoying or having a good time or relaxing when, oh, maybe there’s a way to monetize this. You know what I mean? So there’s, in our society more than ever, there’s infinitely more ways you could be kind of enslaving yourself more to money.

Brett McKay:

That’s something I, throughout my career have had to be aware of and sort of do calculus in my head. Am I taking this too far? We monetize, we have advertisements, we’ve sold some things, but there’s other ways I could monetize that I’m, I could become this walking sandwich board on Instagram pitching products all the time, using myself as a brand to hawk products. And I’m like, no, that doesn’t feel good. I’m not going to do that.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s over the line.

Brett McKay:

So the preacher, he says, okay, money and work – it’s not going to make you happy. So he says, well, instead of doing that, I’m going to pursue wisdom. So he tries to get really wise. How did that work out for the preacher?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, his ultimate problem with wisdom, well, there’s a couple of them. One is that basically you see this in chapter two, verse 16 of the wise, as of the fool, there’s no enduring remembrance seeing that in the days to come, all will have been long forgotten. And then he says how the wise dies, just like the fool. And so if you’re looking for wisdom to give you control, if you’re looking for knowledge as a source of kind of mastery over life, sovereignty over the world, if I can get the right answers, if I can get the right philosophy, if I can get the right outlook, this will give me kind of the crowbar to pry open my desired goods I want to get from the world. He says, it’s not going to happen. There’s no control, there’s no guarantees. There’s no sort of this worldly knowledge that’ll give you power over death or freedom from death. So in a way, he really puts and wisdom in the sense of what you can accumulate humanly speaking, what you can learn, what you can discover. He really puts wisdom to the ultimate test and finds it wanting.

Brett McKay:

And then also I think too, the more wisdom or knowledge you gain, it gives you again, that false sense of control. And then things don’t work the way you think they should work. You’re like, oh, I’m really smart. I’ve studied the books and it should go like this and it doesn’t. Like I’m actually more unhappy now because I had this idea of how it should have worked based on my study and my knowledge, and it’s not working like that, and now I’m actually more unhappy. You know what I’m saying?

Bobby Jamieson:

Absolutely. It’s this funny thing where Ecclesiastes is a wisdom book, is a quest for wisdom. But frankly, okay, part of wisdom. And even an ancient philosopher like Socrates, right? What does he know? Well, he knows that he doesn’t know. And there’s a sense in which Khel is kind of similar. Part of wisdom is learning the limits of wisdom, not just the limits of your own wisdom, but the limits of what wisdom can do for you in this world. And frankly, the wisdom of learning. Sometimes our kind of quest for wisdom is really motivated by a quest for control. It’s motivated by trying to have this position of being in charge, being dominant, being sovereign over my circumstances, that actually there’s no wisdom that’s going to do that for you. You’re just as subject to death. You’re just as subject to accident cancer. You name it. As someone who’s never read a single page of a single book.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the preacher, he tries to find happiness in work, in money, in wisdom, but he finds that they’re all vanity that they don’t ultimately satisfy. He also tries general pleasure like wine, food, laughter, but he doesn’t find lasting meaning there either. You mentioned earlier that he also talks about death a lot. What did Koheleth say about death?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, boy, he said a lot about death. Oh, I mean, one thing he says about death is basically you don’t know when it’s coming and it happens at an evil time, which is dark, but is also bracing and can help you really appreciate the sort of limited and fragile gift that life is. Chapter nine, verse 12 is a good passage on that. Yeah. One thing he says about death is you can’t bring anything with you through it. That’s chapter five, verse 15, man, he says so much about death. I mean, one thing he says about death is that death is the end. Like you were pointing out, you could amass this fortune. This is basically at the end of chapter two. You could amass this fortune, but then you got to give it over to somebody and you have no further say about what they do with it.

So death is the hard and total limit of every pursuit, every project, every pleasure, all the things that we give our hearts to that we think is the stuff that makes life worth living. Death is just an absolute end to all of it. And especially death doesn’t discriminate. He would agree to that extent with, what is it, Aaron Burr’s song in Hamilton. So death doesn’t discriminate, meaning you cannot guarantee that you’ll have a long life or a peaceful death by how you live in this world. And Ecclesiastes Kheled experiences that as a kind of insult, like what? Death chops us all down to size, and it doesn’t do so according to any particular kind of merit or rhyme or reason.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So yeah, death makes things absurd. Basically

Bobby Jamieson:

Death. Death is the ultimate absurdity.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so he spends the first part of Ecclesiastes saying, you can work, you can make a lot of money, you can get really smart, become really powerful, indulge in lots of pleasures, but you’re still going to die. And it’s all just chasing after the wind. It’s he. And that’s kind of depressing. But then he seems to totally change course. Can you read verses seven through 10 in chapter nine?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. Go eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart. For God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might for. There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom and shield which you are going.

Brett McKay:

So it seems like he’s saying, do the things that earlier he said won’t bring you happiness. What’s going on there? How can these things that he said were he actually bring us lasting happiness? What’s the shift?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, what is the switch? I think the fundamental one is he is seeing all these things as gifts of God, and then he means that literally God is the creator. God is giving life. God is the one providing this to you. A lot of people will speak about life as a gift or some peak moment as a gift. And I think there’s a real insight there. I think actually Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, trace that insight all the way down. There’s a real reality there that it’s not from you. It’s not ultimately even from this world, it’s from God. So recognizing that life is a gift means I didn’t ultimately create this. I didn’t ultimately deserve this. My work, my skill may have contributed, may have helped to kind of bring this about. But there’s so many things beyond me and apart from me that had to take place.

If I’m a farmer, I know this intimately because it depends upon soil and sunlight and the weather and rain and all sorts of factors that are just clear beyond my control. And I think Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, actually every good thing in your life is like that. So recognizing the limits of your influence, recognizing the limits of your control, even frankly, realistically recognizing the limits of the good thing itself. It is going to end in death. It isn’t going to last forever. You’re not going to have total control over it and be able to make it perfect. When you recognize that there’s kind of a shift in your stance, your attitude, your grip on the thing, you’re not trying to grip it so tight that you kind of choke it. You’re receiving it with open hands. And so I do think Ecclesiastes commends to us, you could say an ethic of gift, an ethic of gratitude, an ethic of recognizing that life is something much more fundamentally that you receive rather than something that you sort of control or conquer. And so once you stop trying to fill your heart to the brim as if this one thing is going to kind of fully and finally satisfy you, you’re free. You’re free to experience all of these things as small good things, small good gifts. So I do think there’s a freedom that comes from trading control for thankful receiving. That’s maybe my kind of summary way of trying to get at what’s happening in these seven passages where Ecclesiastes tells us to get busy enjoying all these things.

Brett McKay:

What does that gift stance look like towards work, for example? What does that look like for you?

Bobby Jamieson:

That’s a good question. I think it looks like learning to treat whatever work I’m getting to engage in even moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, to try to be thankful for it, to try to give myself to it fully, to try to be alert to the opportunities of maybe ways it might challenge me or help me grow. And to try to recognize and be thankful for if this work in any way benefits somebody else. And I kind of get any glimpse of that, to be thankful for that and to not make my stance toward my work depend upon some farther off payoff that may or may not happen. And the payoff could even be some hoped for kind of fruit of the work itself. If I persevere in this for X number of years and I get it to this level and it develops in this way, well you literally dunno what’s going to happen.

You literally have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. And so I think that we can often, of course, we we’re planning creatures, we’re hoping creatures, you have to have some hope for the future to do any work at all. But I think often we can sort of load up our sense of value or worth or expectations really on the kind of compounding future interest that we hope is going to happen. I don’t just mean financially, I mean in terms of the work, its growth, its influence, its development, whatever it is. So I think for me, trying to learn to be present in the moment to whatever challenges there are, whatever opportunities there are, even difficulties in snags and snares as an opportunity to grow in some way. Personally, one kind of one word summary for it would be trying to have an ethic of craft as much as I can.

I’m influenced here by Matthew Crawford, his book Shop Class as Soulcraft or the sociologist Richard Sennett has a wonderful book on craftsmanship, where craft any job that you can both start and finish any job at all that you can do the whole of yourself and have some responsibility for the finished product. There can be an element of craftsmanship. You can control the process, you can control the tools you’re working with. You can respond to difficulties and challenges as a way to actually grow in your skills. So just for me very personally, I write a lot. I preach and teach a lot to try to apply kind of an ethic of craftsmanship to anything at all that I can. When you do that, you actually find that, yeah, the difficulties you run into are ways to get better at working with whatever the materials you are that you’ve been given with.

Brett McKay:

So focus on the process, not the outcome.

Bobby Jamieson:

Exactly. Try to invest as much as you can and learn to enjoy the process, even the more frustrating parts of it. Learn how to become absorbed in process and care less about outcome.

Brett McKay:

Well, what does that gift stance look like towards wealth? Because the preacher says, yeah, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your money. But a lot of scripture can seem kind of down on money or gives a lot of warnings about money. So what does a gift stance towards money and wealth look like?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, I do think Ecclesiastes allows you to enjoy the good things of this life, including things that could come with wealth or possessions with a clear conscience with a true heart. Most of the things the Bible says about money are against love of money against excess, against being taken captive by wealth. But there’s even passages in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul talks about God giving us all things richly to enjoy, and that really resonates with Ecclesiastes. So I think there are ways to wisely, responsibly enjoy good things in this world. I think there’s also ways to kind of set disciplines limits boundaries. Can you use those things in a way that’s generous and really freely letting others partake of them? Well, you set limits to your own maybe standards of consumption or keeping up with the Joneses or not letting your sense of aspirational lifestyle expand to fill your whole paycheck or go beyond it. So I do think there’s practical and spiritual disciplines you can put in place to frankly guardians the dangers of wealth. At the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yeah, enjoy it.

Brett McKay:

And he says, you can enjoy other pleasures of this world too. Even though he said before that pleasures can be, he says that there is a way you can truly enjoy them.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So in chapter six, nine, he says, better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite. This also is vanity and a striving after win, which basically says any good thing in front of you from a meal to a conversation to time with your spouse to whatever it is, any good thing in front of you can be the source of enjoyment, but you have to kind of discipline your mind and heart to actually be present to actually, as it were, consume the meal that’s in front of you. There is this thing in front of you, if only you’ll look at it, it’s right before you. But we so often do you kind of look away from the thing that’s right in front of you and your appetite wanders off into all these directions. So yeah, the modern world, your appetite can wander off infinitely indefinitely. You can get whatever you want. There’s actually a discipline of enjoyment that can kind of serve as a bridge from his more dark sayings to the actual ones about enjoyment. Enjoyment actually takes discipline. You somehow have to tie your appetite to this thing that’s right there in front of you, rather than being like, oh, what if it was this? Or, oh, this could be better. Or, oh, this happened last time, or I wish I was here.

Brett McKay:

And I think this all ties in nicely with Rosa, this idea of taking a gift stance towards life. You can’t control gifts, and if you stop grasping for control, it counterintuitively makes the thing more enjoyable.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Rosa even talks about resonance having the character of a gift, and that’s one way to understand the experience of resonance. So I think Rose is really insightful and I think there’s something about even whatever parts of your work life or your various responsibilities might seem to have the most element of toil. If you’ve got little kids, it might be cleaning up their messes, taking care of their bodily needs. There’s aspects of taking care of little kids that are a grind. It’s donkey work, but how can you learn to enjoy even that, both with your kids and the time you get to spend with them, and frankly, enjoy that donkey work for the sake of your kids. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. And the fact that you’re getting to do this and having to do this because of these gifts of human beings that are in your life, even that it could allow for a little bit of resonance, a little bit of enjoyment to come through in the toil that might come with say, the care of young children.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I do that a lot. Something my kids do, it’s really annoying, but I’ve had to reframe it in my mind is that they’ll get printer paper out of the printer and then they leave it open. And so when I print something it doesn’t work, and I’m like, ah. And I want to yell at them, close the printer drawer. But then I think I have kids. This wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have kids. They come with frustrations, but I’m so glad I have kids.

Bobby Jamieson:

They’re making creations, man. For me, it’s like when they leave that stack, there’s like three pages they’ve drawn on, but then they leave like 45 spread out over the couch. Right.

Brett McKay:

You have kids. This wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have kids, so enjoy it. I mean, how has Ecclesiastes helped you remember that life is for a living? Cause I think that’s the message that the preacher ends with. It’s like this life is for living. It’s not for scheming and gain and all that stuff. It’s just for living.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. I think in some ways that kind of stuff, we’ve been circling around for the last few minutes, like learning to be present for life’s present goods, both that that’s a gift to be enjoyed, and frankly that it takes a certain discipline. Like you’re at the pool with your kid in the summer, it’s three o’clock on a Saturday. Just be there. That is the only place you can be, and boy is it a great place to be. So whether it’s 3:00 PM on a Saturday in the summer, whether it’s having a bonfire in the fall and just roasting a hot dog in your backyard, whatever it might be, that’s the only moment you have. That’s what Martin Luther was commenting on something in chapter five where he basically said, this is the key statement of the whole book. That the present moment is the only moment you have.

It’s the only one that belongs to you, and there really is a choice of receiving it as a gift, enjoying it. And that takes a kind of self-limiting, it takes shrinking yourself down to fit yourself in. Here’s where I am as a Christian. I believe, here’s where God has put me. Here’s the moment he has for me right now. Maybe for a lot of people, they get to a certain age, maybe 35, 40, or maybe if they’re raising a family, their kids get to a certain age. Some of these lessons start to kind of dawn on you. But I think that Ecclesiastes, that learning how to be present in the presence, and that’s the only way to enjoy it. I think it’s maybe been the biggest sort of deepening of that for me personally in all the years I’ve spent wrestling with the book.

Brett McKay:

Well, Bobby, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. Yeah. I’m on Twitter, Bobby Jamieson, the book has a little website with Penguin Random House. Those would be two ways to connect.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Bobby Jamieson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Bobby Jamieson:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest day was Bobby Jamieson. He’s the author of the book, Everything Is Never Enough. It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/EverythingisNeverEnough, where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. Word of mouth is the primary way we grow. As always, thank you for the continuous support. 

Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive, and out of control — getting into fights, pushing limits, and stirring up trouble. Today, the problem has flipped. The more common challenge isn’t reckless behavior, but inert passivity. More and more young men are anxious, apathetic, socially isolated, and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.

Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative — a male-specific counseling center — and the author of Boys Will Be Men: 8 Lessons for the Lost American Male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift. As a therapist, coach, and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30, Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked-out and developed a clear, experience-honed framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives, and move forward with purpose.

In today’s conversation, we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men, and how his approach — which is rooted more in action than in talk — can be applied not just in the therapist’s office, but by parents and mentors. We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men, and how to give them the drive, accountability, and sense of connection they crave. We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life “brick by brick” and helping them find their wild, their thing, and a good group of friends.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #810: How to Turn a Boy Into a Man
• AoM Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood
• AoM Podcast #1,028: The 5 Marks of a Man
• AoM Podcast #886: What the World of Psychology Gets Wrong About Men
• AoM Article: Get Your Son Out of His Bedroom
• AoM Article: How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive, and out of control, getting into fights, pushing limits, and stirring up trouble. Today, the problem has flipped. The more common challenge isn’t reckless behavior, but inert passivity. More and more young men are anxious, apathetic, socially isolated, and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.

Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative, a male specific counseling center and the author of Boys Will Be Men: Eight Lessons for the Lost American Male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift as a therapist, coach, and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30. Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked out and developed a clear experience and home framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives, and move forward with purpose. In today’s conversation, we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men and how his approach, which is rooted more in action than in talk, can be applied not just in the therapist’s office, but by parents and mentors. We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men and how to give them the drive accountability and sense of connection they crave. We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life brick by brick and helping them find their wild, their thing, and a good group of friends. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/boysandmen.

Alright, Vincent Benevento, welcome to the show. 

Vincent Benevento:

Great to be here man. Thank you and happy to be on for sure.

Brett McKay:

So you are a therapist that specializes in working with men between the ages of 16 and 30. How’d you end up working with this demographic?

Vincent Benevento:

So if my wife was on the show next to me, she would say that it all worked out. This is the only thing I’m good at. You know what I mean? So I found my way to something that people would say that I’ve done relatively well. But I mean, the truth was like many people in this field, I have my own story. So I was a lost and wayward young man. I was a guy who struggled with addiction. I was a guy who struggled with pretty profound mental health challenges, came from a broken home, dealt with divorce. My dad came out when I was young, so I had some stuff and my stuff is different than everybody’s stuff, but I had some stuff that required that I had to do some personal work at a pretty young age, and so I needed support. I was very resistant to receiving it personally, mostly because I wasn’t ready to do the work, but I really couldn’t find anything that spoke to me in terms of what I felt engaged to do. And so I started puzzling and being curious around what kinds of things young men would be open to and willing to do. And years later came up with some stuff that has been useful when supporting young men trying to get their lives on track.

Brett McKay:

One of the things you argue at the very beginning of the book is that talk therapy is largely useless for men between the ages of 16 and 30. Why is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, and a pretty bold statement from a therapist of 12 plus years or 15 plus years, whatever it’s been, 15 total, 12 as a licensed practitioner. And so yeah, it’s bold claim, but I stand by it. I mean, I think young men especially don’t have a lot of rich life experience to process through and to pick apart in ways that more mature individuals do. And so I think part of what we practice and preach is the notion that therapy or the therapeutic support process for young men should be much more about doing and not talking. For men and young men in general, this is a generalization but usually true, learn better from doing. And so men, because they learn through experience, gravitate towards frameworks like mentorship and coaching as opposed to traditional talk therapy, which tends to be a little more nebulous.

So we try to impress upon the guys we work with, the setting of small goals, the step work in achieving those goals, the literal experience of going out into the community and doing a thing can be a little more impactful than sitting and talking about something that someone may or may not do in the week in between sessions and just in addition and sort of separately, I think back to when I was 16 and pissed off and I didn’t have the emotional fluency to talk about my issues in the way that I do now. And I would contend that men, as we know, and young men are typically slower to mature than their female counterparts and particularly within the emotional realm. And so I think I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling till years and years later and hours of work in therapy. And so I think if somebody’s not engaged in that kind of process of self-discovery, it may be more productive and beneficial to do a thing rather than talking about a thing that you might not do.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So your approach is a little less conversation, a little more action with these young guys. 

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. For sure.

Brett McKay:

Something you describe in the book is in your career you’ve encountered two types of young men. The first type of guy is acting out, doing dangerous stuff, maybe has an addiction, is drinking, getting into fights. The second type of guy is pretty much the way he described him is anesthetized. He just doesn’t want to do anything. He just wants to sit at home. And you argue that the second type of guy is harder to work with. Why is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, yeah. So on first blush, it seems almost unreasonable to make that assertion. I mean, the second guy is just kind of not doing a lot. He’s not doing anything dangerous, he’s not doing anything risky. He’s not a danger to himself, not a danger to others. So how could that guy possibly be more difficult? I think back to when I was the first kind of guy. I was the fighting, drinking, driving, acting out, getting into trouble, but just oppositional externalizing kind of guy. When I go back 25 years to when I was that kind of guy, I was a mess, but there was energy and momentum associated with that mess. I had a girlfriend, I had a job, I had a car that I paid for money that I saved through my job. I was going to college. So there is progression personally and there’s goals that are being set and achieved and that guy’s doing stuff. He may be doing the wrong stuff, but he’s doing stuff nonetheless. 

The second guy isn’t really doing anything. And this is the curious phenomenon that I talk about a lot in the book. It’s like this sort of, I call him the second wave. I saw the first kind of guy 15 years ago when I started my business and now we see the second profile of just anxious, isolative, apathetic, highly dependent young men who are not seeking to individuate in any way, shape or form. They’re not excited to go get a job. We have guys who don’t want to get their license. They’d literally rather have their mother drive them around in the car because they’re so anxious about driving a car that they can’t even consider the notion of having their own vehicle and taking themselves to and fro. And so the first kind of guy at least was doing a lot of stuff and was busy in the world and had energy and it was misdirected, but you could direct it. It’s very difficult with this sort of second wave to cultivate an active process with a guy who’s so inert. And this is where we have to move in the direction of really connecting with an interest and connecting with the soul of that person to get them engaged in something that they care about so that we can start moving them in any direction whatsoever.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed this as well in my work with young men. So I’ve coached flag football, I’m a leader at my church’s young men’s group. I remember in flag football you’d see those two types of guys. One guy was super aggressive, had just that kind of killer instinct, but he kind of messed stuff up, but I could work with that. It’s like, oh, he’s got this energy, I can direct that. We can refine his skill and he’ll get better. Then you have the kid who just inert had no drive at all and it’s just like, I can’t work with this. And then in church you see the same sort of thing kids where it doesn’t matter what it is, they’ll be engaged, they’re excited, even if they think the activity we’re doing is kind of boring, they’ll try to make something out of it. And then you have the boys where it’s just like it’s pulling teeth. You do everything you can to get them engaged and they’re just like me. It’s so hard. So they lack that. The Romans called it thumos for that fire in the belly, that drive. And I’m seeing it more and more in young men as you are. What do you think is going on with this younger generation? You talk about how you see this a lot in Gen Z guys. What do you think is going on where you’re seeing this lack of thumos in drive in young men?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I don’t think it’s any one thing. I think it’s a crockpot filled with a bunch of different things that make it hard to do this work with young men and make it hard to connect with people in general. I think there’s a tech piece for sure. There’s a tech piece and a subsequent isolative piece in association with that. We see a lot of skill erosion. So as everything has become both automated and immediately accessible, we can have things done for us rather than do things ourselves. And so the old example that I used to give was not so long ago in the early two thousands, I used to know how to get places and now I just don’t because I just throw it in the Waze just like everybody else and I’m not paying attention to where I’m going anymore. And so that’s one very small detail of the day in which we live where we’re not exercising our brain, we’re not exploring, we’re not engaging with our surroundings, we’re just passively moving through our day.

And that happens more readily than we would care to admit. There’s an instant gratification piece where I’m hungry and so I just ordered dominoes and they send me 44 ounce coke and a pepperoni pizza for with the fee is $31 and I just swipe that or my parents swipe that. And there’s no reward-based system where you do a task and you get a reward and then you can subsequently use it for whatever purposes you see fit. So there’s not a lot of delayed gratification and sequencing and work that goes into achieving goals. And I just think more broadly, because we’re so flooded with information and information that scares us, this pervasive culture of fear that we live in has raised the stakes in terms of the cumulative anxiety that we all experience as people, but specifically young men. And so young men are not excited to go get their first car and drive fast.

They used to. Now I’m not saying that that’s behavior that we should relish upon our boys, but boys used to be excited about getting their car and shining it up and driving around fast. They’re not excited about that anymore. They’re scared and they’re scared of things like that. And they’re scared of talking to a girl and they’re scared of getting a phone number and they’re scared of going on a date, which is why they watch porn and lock themselves in their room incessantly. And so this fear that is pervasive in our young men has caused us to opt out of taking healthy risks. I’m not talking about inappropriate risks, like the risks that I took when I was a younger man. I’m talking about healthy risks, age appropriate developmental risks, and that I think has robbed us of some of the heart work and the soul work that is really important to being a young man.

Brett McKay:

You also talk about how parents might’ve unintentionally contributed to creating this second type of young man. What’s going on there you think?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I think it comes from a good place, and I’ve seen over the course of 15 to 20 years of doing this work, 15 years of running my own business, 20 years in mental health in general, I have seen parents’ awareness of mental health skyrocket. Parents are knowledgeable, they understand the resources, they speak the language. They even understand basic symptomology, even parents who haven’t been through or around therapy with a kid or have had a kid with mental health challenges. Your baseline parent understands and speaks the language of mental health. That was not the case when I first started. And so that has bore a lot of fruit in terms of the way we engage with our kids emotionally, but also just in terms of how you triage an issue in a situation. So it certainly comes from a good place. I think the unintended consequence is we pathologize, right?

We pathologize a lot of behavior, parents pathologize. And so if your kid is acting out, he’s depressed, he’s anxious, he’s got a mood disorder, and those things may very well in fact be the case. And so far be it for me to say in all situations that’s not true. But sometimes he’s just not accountable to his behaviors or sometimes he’s acting out and being manipulative or sometimes he just doesn’t feel like doing it and he goes in his room and he games for seven hours instead because he has the autonomy to do so and there aren’t the checks and balances in the system that will make it so that he can’t do those things. And so I don’t think that mental health is always the reason why someone is struggling. And I think parents jump to conclusions sometimes around pointing a finger at their son’s pathology as being the rationale for what’s happening when in fact a behavioral approach can yield better fruit.

Brett McKay:

And going back to the idea of anxiety, I think a lot of parents are anxious these days for their kids because I mean life in the 21st century, it is pretty complicated and complex. And for sure there this anxiety that, oh, my kid is not going to be able to make it. There’s a lot more you have to do to establish yourself in the world economically. So a lot of parents are like, I’m just going to do this for my kid. I remember when I went to college, and here’s a great example, when I went to college, my parents were like, oh, you want to go to college? Great. And that was it. I had to fill out all the forms and I was like, dad, I need this IRS stuff for the FAFSA thing. And they’re like, okay, here you go. But I had to do it on my own. It wasn’t like they were holding my hand. And then I see parents, my peers today who’ve got kids going to college, they’re doing all this stuff to get their kid into college, signing up for these prep classes, doing these elaborate college tours, helping them refine their essays. And I’m thinking that did not happen 20, 30 years ago.

Vincent Benevento:

Not even close. No, not even close. And talk about, it’s a really good call by you, Brett, but talk about contributing factors to the collective anxiety. I remember filling out those applications literally in pencil at my dining room table in the year 1998, so it’s not that long ago. And I did ’em all by myself. And there was no private SAT tutor and there was no educational consultant to pick my colleges for me. And no one filled out my FAFSA stuff. I did it first kid sink or swim, figure it out, go to college. So the world is just not that way. And I mean, listen, I know a lot of people in this space, they do extraordinary work in this space, the college space, the private university space, and the game that is getting your kid into the best school humanly possible to set ’em up on a trajectory for life.

And what I can tell you is the emotional pressure that kids experience as a result of this conveyor belt that has been socially constructed for them, whether they fall alongside it or not. And by the way, I got kids who mostly don’t fall on that conveyor belt and are trying to be shoehorned into it has a lot of challenging consequences for kids and for families. And I see a lot of kids who parents elect to send them to college because there’s no other option. You have to drive around with a sticker on the back of your car that says where junior’s going to college, whether they should be going to college or not. And so I get a lot of parents who call me in November the following semester and say, Hey, he didn’t make it. What do we do now? And I don’t think that the college is for everybody, and you have to go to a top 50 school framework is not one that every single person should subscribe to. Not every parent, not every kid. And I think the people who are having awareness of that in advance are far better suited than the people who are learning that lesson on the backside.

Brett McKay:

And then when parents do, because it comes from a good place again, they want to help their kids succeed.

Vincent Benevento:

For sure.

Brett McKay:

But when they do that stuff for their kids, sort of the unspoken messages, you can’t do this. I got to take care of it. And then that just carries over to other areas they like, well, yeah, you can’t get a job on your own. I got to pull some levers to do that for you. So it just disempowers these young men who are already disempowered.

Vincent Benevento:

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And the job example is a perfect example because most of the people, I mean, I’m in Westport, I’m in Westchester, I’m in West Hartford, Connecticut, like pretty affluent pockets with a lot of high profile, high influence people. And so when their kid is struggling, usually dad will come into the center and say, Hey, I’m going to get my kid a job and such and such, what do you think? And I say, don’t you dare get your kid a job. Instead, let’s support him in the process of him finding it for himself and navigating and figuring out where his strengths are and where his weaknesses lie. And that’ll position us much better to help him down the line than it will if we just scoop something up and put it in his bread basket.

Brett McKay:

So in your book, you’ve laid out several principles that guide your approach to helping young men that come to your clinics, these sort of disengaged young guys. I want to walk through some of these. The first one is brick by brick. And this is about helping young men build a life for themselves. Why is this the first principle in your philosophy?

Vincent Benevento:

Because I think that to do anything of substance in your life, men have to commit themselves to a long focused approach. And I think the world sends quick fix messages. The world sends messages around both instant gratification and overnight celebrity. I’m advocating a different message. I’m advocating that anything I’ve ever built, whether it’s been my marriage or my relationships with my kids or my business or meaningful relationships, any of those things that matter to me deeply were patient in their growth process, were things that were step by step one after the next, next, next. Were filled with trial and iteration and reset and debriefing and learning. We’re messy at times and we’re not a straight line, none of them. And I think that’s the case. When you build something of substance across life, you don’t usually finish exactly the way that you start. And when you make a blueprint for something, typically there’s unforeseen challenges that come up along the way. And as long as you keep working step-by-step, day by day, brick by brick, it’s a good mantra to set you up for success in whatever you’re doing.

Brett McKay:

So how do you help a young man start becoming a builder? So a young man who can look for a job, find a job, apply to college by themselves, build a relationship. How do you help a young man who just hasn’t done that before? He’s one of those passive anesthetized type young men.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you begin with the acknowledgement that at some point every person hadn’t done it. So me, you everybody, we all had to get started somewhere. And so for me, I get really excited about vision work. And what I mean by that is helping a young man get excited about crafting a vision for where he wants to go, young man or man, because we see people as young as 14 and we see guys into their early thirties crafting, co crafting, leading, sharing a vision for what ignites you, what feels right, what have you felt purpose in doing, what have you done that’s been exciting for you, and just dream boarding it and vision crafting and helping them get excited. One, because if this is their first blush with mental health supports, it debunks their preconceived notions about what it is. I want a guy coming into my office and feeling good enough that he wants to come back the next time of his own accord.

And typically this kind of vision work will draw them in that way. And so we start with vision crafting and developing a sense for where you want to go and what you want to do and what you want to be. And from there we get tangible, we do research, we answer questions, we go out and we learn through experience and service and shadowing and job acquisition and all these different processes, and we teach and instruct and we fill in the gaps as needed. So it starts very broad and very opaque to just cultivate enthusiasm, and then we get down to it sort of step-by-step brick by brick.

Brett McKay:

So that’s that action part. You’re not just having a weekly session where you’re talking about things.

Vincent Benevento:

No.

Brett McKay:

Maybe you have that session to lay out the vision, but then you’re going to assign this guy homework and then there’s going to be follow ups. Like did you get that application? Yes. Okay. Did you fill it out and turn in the application? I mean, that’s what it is. It’s a lot of coaching and mentoring

Vincent Benevento:

For sure, and it’s positioning a guy to be better off than when he started. And I don’t just mean broadly around the process, I mean in that hour, part of what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to get you farther in the hour. You come see me that week than you were when you came in. So you come when you go see Vince and you think to yourself, wow, we’re going to get a lot of stuff done today. So one of my favorite processes to do with a guy, and it seems so simple, is to come in and work with a guy who’s never had a resume before, a young kid, 15, 16, 17, now sometimes 18 years old. But listen, let’s bang out your resume and literally hand the kit of paper that reflects to him everything he’s done in his life to walk out of that session.

And it doesn’t have to be sexy and it doesn’t have to light the world on fire. And I’d started doing this 15 years ago, and I know you could throw it in your chat, GBT, you could do it in two seconds, but the co-constructing of that process to build what you’ve done and to reflect to you what you’ve done so you can hand it to your parents and be proud of it, or you could put it in somebody’s hands and go look for a job. Now that’s actually reflecting to you self-worth about your own achievements and positioning you to get excited about the next thing we’re going to do next week. So that’s just one example, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s a very simple exercise that denotes how we get kids moving forward in that very tangible way.

Brett McKay:

I think if you’re a mentor or a parent, you can start doing this with your kids now. Take those basic life skills that you just take for granted and then actively, we’re going to do this. We’re going to make a resume. We’re going to, I did this with my kids. They wanted a bank account. I was like, okay, let’s go to the bank. And I made them talk to the bank teller.

Vincent Benevento:

I love that.

Brett McKay:

You’re going to have to figure this out. And I say, here’s all the stuff you need to get your social security number. You have all this information. And I mean, the thing is, this stuff can be tedious and it’s boring, but it’s important work

Vincent Benevento:

A hundred percent. And I mean, I even think about when my kids were young, we’d go out to dinner and I remember watching people, their kids were like 10 and they would order for their kids in the restaurant. And when my kids were five, four, and two, they were ordering food for themselves just because building that requisite skill is essential for everything. You need to have a conversation with somebody, look ’em in the eye, and to whatever extent is age appropriate, engage with another human being. Right now, the hardest part is the consistent and persistent commitment on behalf of the parents because you’re going to get resistance very often. It’s so much easier to just opt out on one or two or three occasions, and then a habit that you’re trying to cultivate gets extinguished because you don’t consistently curate it. So the bank example that you gave, it’s fantastic. We should be trying to impart these life lessons and skills to our kids beginning as young as is appropriate. It just takes a lot of energy to do that over time.

Brett McKay:

Here’s another example. This is with my daughter. She’s 12 and she got this bad grade on an assignment and she thought, I did the work. I don’t agree with the teacher. And she was really upset and she asked Dad, can you email? I’m like, no, I’m not doing that. And she says, well, I’m just going to write him an email. I was like, no, you’re not going to write an email. I want you tomorrow to have a conversation with him. That night we roleplayed it. I was like, I’m going to be your teacher and you’re going to be, you talk about how you’re going to approach this without getting emotional and accusatory, and we workshoped it, and then she did it. She had this tough conversation with an authority figure challenging him on a grade, and it worked out great. He saw, okay, I messed up there. It was really productive and I was really proud of her, and I could see that she was proud of herself that she did that. Right?

Vincent Benevento:

No, yeah. And that’s how you build esteem. Esteem and purpose and self-belief is cultivated by kids doing for themselves independently with support and with guidance. But had you written the email to the teacher, you’re robbing your daughter of that rep. And part of what we’re always trying to do with parents is helping them support but not do for and enable.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s brick by brick. So just start helping these young people, young men in particular start doing things on their own and it’s going to take a lot of support, but that’s important. The second principle is name it to tame it. What do you mean by that?

Vincent Benevento:

Being radically honest with yourself about your strengths, but also your challenges. And I’m speaking mostly in terms of the realm of mental health diagnosis and stigma. I’m pretty transparent in the book around my own struggles with substance use and my mood, and I’ve had a diagnosed mood disorder since I was 19 years old. I was hospitalized for it when I was 19 years old, and I was an alcoholic for years prior and years post until I was able to kind of clean my life up and get my act together. But it was really my ability to acknowledge and come to grips with those two diagnoses that were the prescription for me getting well and the acknowledgement of the limitations I now faced as a 19-year-old kid in college who was a substance user, who needed to figure out how to manage my life. It was those limitations that actually provided me with freedom and helped me relearn how to exist as a human being in the world. And so that was a very difficult process, that was shameful and humbling for me. But to come to terms in an honest way, which occurred over a series of years, gave me information, helped me take the right steps, helped me understand my boundaries, things that I can do shouldn’t do, and positioned me to be successful really for the rest of my life, truth be told.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you’re primarily focusing on working with young men who have a diagnosed mental health issue. But I think this is applicable, even if a young man doesn’t have a mental health problem, like you said earlier, a lot of young men, you can call them emotionally illiterate, they have these emotions, but they don’t know what they are. And because they don’t know what they are, they don’t know how to manage them. And so helping young men learn how to recognize, okay, I’m feeling frustrated. I might think it’s anger, it’s not anger, it’s just more of a frustration when you frame it like that, it’s like, okay, I can do something about that now. Or I do this a lot with young kids who are feeling scared, nervous about something. A lot of ’em will say, I’m just really anxious. And I’m like, no, hey, look. Yeah, you’re nervous, but that’s good. It’s not like something bad’s happening to you, it’s just getting you ready to take on this challenge of like, oh, okay. Yeah, that reframe helps them be more proactive with life.

Vincent Benevento:

And those clarifying questions, Brett, I think are super important. So okay, you’re angry. What does that look like for you? How does your anger show up in different situations? Are you blowing holes through the wall? Are you yelling at mom? Are you swearing? Are you not doing your homework? What do you do when you’re angry? And from there, we can develop ways to address that in different fashions depending upon how it shows up. But I think like you said, also, it’s the emotional fluency piece. Guys don’t understand basic emotions besides sadness, which they typically can’t articulate and anger. So I mean, I remember being a guy at 19 years old who was so confounded with my emotional world and so limited in my ability to articulate it, that I just showed up as angry literally all the time. And I think it was essential for me to become better equipped at communicating where I was emotionally, right? I’m ashamed because I’m fearful, because I’m sad, because I’m lonely, because these are all nuanced offshoots of anger that boys and young men and men experience, but naming them well and naming them precisely again gives the prescription about how to approach the solution going forward.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s like a Rumpelstiltskin, remember that story? Once you know his name, you have power over him. It’s the same thing with your emotions.

Vincent Benevento:

That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay:

Once you name, it’s like you have power over it.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So it is just all about helping these young men become more emotionally literate and not confuse maybe frustration or shame or anxiety for anger, because I think that’s what a lot of young guys do. Whenever they feel those things, they express it through anger. It’s probably not anger, it’s something else, but help them understand that and those messier

Vincent Benevento:

Ones, the fear and the shame and the hurt and the regret. Those emotions that are dirty words to boys and young men, giving yourself permission to hold the ability to articulate that and to communicate it. And I think this is where parents can move mountains in their ability to model that in a healthy way for their kids in a setting of difficulty or challenge or conflict in the home. When you are fighting in front of your son, how do you speak to your spouse? How do you speak to your son? How do you speak to your daughter? And what do you do to communicate your own emotional response in the moment? These are the ways that parents can do incredible things to support their kid moving more towards emotional fluency.

Brett McKay:

Another principle that you have in your philosophy towards helping young men is you got to help them find their wild. Why is tapping into your, well, first off, what do you mean by your wild? What is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. Wild for me is a rejuvenation of the soul. And I think about it as losing it, right? So it’s becoming reacquainted with the things that make us feel alive. I think there’s a very primal natural peace that is deconditioned out of us as men, as we move through life and as we move from young men, competitive, moving through physical prowess, activities that cause us to evaluate ourselves against other people and compete in large groups or packs. When you’re driving around a minivan, doing a Girl Scout cookie drive and reporting to the same cubicle for 10 hours a day, five days a week, those things are the opposite of wild. So I think that as the lifespan continues, and I talk to guys in their thirties, forties, and fifties all the time, they just don’t feel alive and they feel bored and they feel underappreciated and they feel like their value is waning and they’re not alive. And I think the process of finding your wild is re-engaging with your soul and finding the things that used to make you feel alive again.

Brett McKay:

How do you do that? So this is for older guys, we’ll talk about helping young guys find their wild. But let’s say you’re a middle aged guy and you’re feeling just kind of that middle aged burnout, malaise. How do you capture that wild?

Vincent Benevento:

Again, I think it takes effort. I think it takes effort. So you have to seek it. You have to plan a trip with your kid and go ice fishing somewhere. You have to finally stop complaining about the job that you hate and develop a strategy and walk out and start again. You have to take your wife on a getaway to an island that you plan because she plans literally everything. You have to make plans with a guy and go away. You have to try a new hobby and do a new thing. You have to put yourself out there. And so I think a lot of the men that I talk to are highly isolated and they go through their routine and they sit in their house and they, particularly in the winter, they are not actively doing new things that cause them to reevaluate the world around them and test themselves to be better. Part of being wild is competing against yourself and testing yourself to see what you have the capacity to do. And that requires planning and time and resources, but I think the yield is worthwhile.

Brett McKay:

What about a young guy, one of these anesthetized young men we’ve been talking about that just have no wild in them, maybe they’ve never found their wild. How do you help them find their wild?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I think when we think about what has been lost in the society that we live in now, it’s this male mentorship, male specific mentorship. So 200 years ago when you decided that you wanted to become a blacksmith, your dad was a blacksmith and your grandfather was a blacksmith, and your great grandfather and his father were also blacksmiths. So you grew up learning everything from them and mentoring under them, which not only showed their favor and their investment in you, but it taught you all the requisite skills that you need to learn. Now, we’ve deconditioned men. They don’t do physical things. Young men, especially young men, are not often doing physical things or many of them can kind of extricate themselves from doing physical things by just doing work behind a screen behind a door. So I think we mentor young men and show them and teach them and reflect our favor and investment in them. We take them literally out into the world, into nature like our predecessors, and sit around and tell stories and blaze a trail and hike and climb and grab a pole and fish and engage in nature to be reacquainted with their physical wild. And we communicate with them in ways where we demonstrate what they have the capacity to do. We teach them a skill, we let them learn a skill, we show them that they are capable of a thing, and they begin to believe in themselves over time by trying new things and succeeding.

Brett McKay:

I think as a mentor, as a father, one thing you do for boys, teenage boys is to expose them to as many different things as possible so that they can find, you talk about this in the books, they can find their thing because a lot of young men, they might not be excited about anything. They haven’t found the thing that excites them, and they might not know they’d be excited about something until they actually try it. So I do think as a parent you might have to sort of nudge kind of like, Hey, you’re going to do this thing even if you don’t think you want to do it because there’s a chance you might like the thing that I’m having you do.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I saw this. We did this. We took some boys rock climbing at church one night, and this one kid, he was kind of a little passive, not confident, and he didn’t think he was going to like it, but then he ended up liking it. He actually signed up for a membership later on. It became like a rock climber. That was great. That’s a perfect example of finding your wild. You have to expose ’em to stuff. You talk about relationships in your book and this idea of mentorship, but also relationships between just having friends, men having friends, and you talk about a lot of the young men you work with, they don’t have any friends. Why are young men so lonely these days? What’s going on there?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s really sad, but the number one reason for referral documented by the client coming into Causeway is to make friends. And we have countless kids who come through the center who set the goal of having one friend. I’m not talking about girlfriend, I’m not talking about boyfriend, I’m talking one friend. And so to me that just speaks to where we stand, where it is difficult for young people to connect authentically with one another. It is easy for people to remain isolated. And so I think we have to work to practice relationship. And I think we see a lot of guys who are marginalized socially and who struggle socially. Guys on the spectrum, guys who have social challenges, guys who’ve been bullied, guys who are depressed and anxious, guys who haven’t had a lot of success in making friends. But our message to them is to find their tribe and find their people and cultivate the relationships from there.

So if it’s an online community of people and those relationships are fostered predominantly online, we can start there and then potentially scale up to person to person engagement from there. If they’re kids who have a specific interest, be it in Legos or in music or in building something out of wood or in fishing or in whatever, there are communities of people who can develop relationships with them, with shared experience, with shared interests, which makes it a lot easier. And so part of where I think mentorship as we do it is effective is we can model those skills that have eroded over time. We can take Junior to grab a cup of coffee down the street and just kick it with him and get him feeling comfortable talking to someone in a public space. We can have him go down to the town green and throw the Frisbee disc around and have him do an activity that he can then do with someone else.

We can have him just walk around the grocery store and chat with somebody and get a sense of what the body language is as we’re watching him so that we can help him read a conversation more effectively. So when we’re doing mentorship with guys who struggle socially, there’s a didactic component where we’re teaching and we’re gap filling, and we’re helping them understand the things that they can do differently through feedback exchange, but there’s a heavy, heavy relational component because we’re leveraging the relationship and the trust that we’ve built with somebody to get them to do a thing that they wouldn’t otherwise try. And I think that’s the difference. Parents struggle with their kids because they can’t just get them off the dock, they can’t get ’em to try the thing. We’re typically successful because we have the quality of the relationship where we can get a kid to buy in and at least try something. And hopefully he’ll like it more than he thought he would.

Brett McKay:

I’ve got a friend, he doesn’t have any sons, but he has a son-in-law, and he noticed the son-in-law didn’t have a lot of male friends, and he’s like, this is a problem. You need to have friends. You’re a young guy, you should have friends. And he’s like, well, I don’t know how to do it. I’m just so busy with work and I just don’t know where to connect with guys. And he says, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to host, we’ll call the mastermind group at my place once a week and just invite some guys, you know, don’t have to be best friends with them, invite them over and we’ll just talk shop, we’ll talk about work, we’ll talk about life. And he has to model. He is this 50-year-old guy, basically. He says, I’m doing remedial work here with these young men. I had to model what it looks like, and it’s a lot of work, but he’s like, it’s paying off. These guys are starting to connect. They’re starting to form some friendships and it’s enriching their lives.

Vincent Benevento:

For sure, for sure. And I got to be honest, Brett, I actually did it in my life. So when I started to reevaluate the way in which I was spending my time and I really dialed back my commitment to work, I found out that I was almost spending too much time at the house and started working from home more, and me and my wife were around each other too much. I was around the kids maybe a little too much, and I felt that there was this sort of missing piece for me, and it was in the name of relationship with other guys. And so I just started asking guys to go grab coffee, and it was something that I didn’t do for a decade professionally, and I just started. If I met a guy and I hit it off with him at the ball field or in town, or our wives were friendly, but we never really hung out before, I would just grab coffee with somebody and it got to the point where four or five, six hours a week, I’m just having a coffee with a friend, which is good.

It’s good balance for me as a man. It helps me getting out into the community and meeting and talking to people. It makes me visible. It gives me things to talk about in instances, some of them. It allows me to help somebody and see a need and meet a need. So I think male relationship as guys is something that we must continuously practice, even if we’re decent at it or pretty good at it because the force that the accountability provides is also very important. We need to have other guys reflecting how our decisions feel to them, and it makes us better versions of ourselves.

Brett McKay:

Yeah it’s the whole iron sharpens iron.

Vincent Benevento:

That’s right. Yeah. 

Brett McKay:

Well, Vincent, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, appreciate it very much and it has been awesome. Thank you. So you can check us out at our website, causewaycollaborative.com. That’s the organization. I have a personal website, which is sharperformen.com. My Insta is @VinceBeneventolpc, and obviously the book is available on Amazon, and we hope you guys check it out and enjoy it.

Brett McKay:

All right. Well, Vince Benevento, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Vincent Benevento:

Thank you, Brett. Really appreciate the time, man. Thanks.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Vince Benevento, the author of the book, Boys Will Be Men. It’s available on amazon.com. You can learn more information about his work at his website, sharperformen.com. Also, check out our show notes where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When I played football in high school, our head coach had one refrain that he’d hammer into us over and over again: act with class.

It meant no trash talk. No showboating. Help the other guy up, even if he just tried to take your head off. Don’t scream at refs. Don’t throw your helmet. When you win, act like you’ve been there before; when you lose, don’t sulk and pout.

I’ve tried to carry that refrain with me even after taking off my football pads for the last time. For me, acting with class is a way of moving through your social world with dignity, respect, and a little heartening warmth and charm.

For most of Western history, class was about economics and where you sat in the social hierarchy. Centuries ago, your class was determined by what family you were born into, how much land you owned, or how much armor you could afford for battle.

But beginning in the late 1800s, the word “class” started being used in another way — as a signifier of bearing rather than birth. It was used to describe comportment, especially for athletes and entertainers who carried themselves with skill, decency, and poise. To perform well under pressure, to exude grace, made you a “class act.”

Today, “classy” can describe anyone who evinces magnanimity and self-possession. Someone who’s generous, but not a show-off — decorous but not stilted. A class act is governed by standards rather than moods or incentives; even when circumstances would excuse poor behavior, or a boorish move might gain them advantage, they still do the right and fair thing. Wherever they go, they elevate life a bit. They leave situations better than they found them.  

We like classy people because their steadiness and consistent good graces can be relied upon. They inspire you to live a little better without preaching. Classy fellas make the world a bit more pleasant with their everyday civilities.

Below are 25 of those small courtesies that you can practice to be known as a classy SOB.

1. Say hello first

A classy fella doesn’t wait to be acknowledged. He initiates eye contact. He gives a warm “hello” to the neighbor, the cashier, or the guy at the gym he sees every morning. It’s a small thing that can brighten people’s day.

2. Use people’s names — and remember them

As ol’ Uncle Carnegie said, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” So regularly use people’s names. Be natural about it. You don’t have to say it after every sentence. That just comes off as forced.

When you meet someone new, make a point of remembering their name. When you see the person again, use it (“Hey, Chip! Great to see you!”), and you’ll leave them thinking, “Man, what a classy guy!”

3. Hold the door open for the person behind you

Holding the door open used to be a chivalrous gesture reserved for men to offer women. Now it’s a way for one human to acknowledge the presence and reality of another. It’s a way of saying, “I see you, fellow person; we share in the collective struggle of existence; and I’m going to make life a tiny bit easier for you.”

4. Let people merge in traffic

A classy SOB doesn’t treat driving like a zero-sum moral contest. He waves people into a busy traffic line. He understands that getting home 12 seconds earlier is not a victory worth defending.

5. Write handwritten thank-you notes

We’re big proponents of the handwritten thank-you note here at AoM, and in this day and age, when most communication is conducted digitally, a handwritten thank-you note really sets you apart as a class act. Whether someone gives you a gift or you just appreciate some small gesture, let them know with paper and pen.

You don’t need to be verbose with your thank-you notes. Two or three sincere sentences will do the job.

6. Don’t bad-mouth people behind their backs

Trashing people when they’re not around is easy, and it might get you some kudos from your peers; who doesn’t like to hear salacious rumors about others? But it’s also how you earn a reputation as someone who can’t be trusted. Everyone knows that if you bad-mouth some other person, you’ll probably do the same to them when they’re not around.

If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it when they’re not there.

7. Compliment people behind their backs

This is the inverse of the above rule and an underratedly classy move.

When you say something kind about someone who isn’t there — and especially when there’s no strategic reason to do so — it enhances that compliment. It creates goodwill that often travels back amplified to the person you praised. And to the people who heard that third-party compliment, you seem like the kind of guy who sees and dwells on the good in others and not some two-faced, backbiting grumbletonian. Class act!

8. Pick up trash that isn’t yours

A classy gent leaves whatever environment he finds himself in better than he found it. One way to do that is by picking up trash. If you see it at the park, in your neighborhood, or in the breakroom, throw it away — even if it isn’t yours.

9. Dress appropriately

You don’t have to dress like Fred Astaire 24/7 to be a classy gent. In fact, there are plenty of stylish fops who are completely classless boobs.

But a classy guy dresses appropriately for the situation he’s in. A funeral isn’t the place for a t-shirt. A wedding isn’t the time to test the level of casualness you can get away with. Showing up appropriately dressed is a way of saying, “I recognize the significance of this occasion, and I want to add to it.”

10. Be on time

Tardiness is a form of thievery, as it steals other people’s time. Being on time communicates that you value other people’s schedules as much as your own.

There is an exception to this rule; when it comes to a dinner party, arriving early is the unclassy thing to do and being a few minutes late the classy — it gives the host a little buffer in finishing their preparations.

11. Be a generous conversationalist 

A classy SOB doesn’t treat every exchange like an opportunity to bask in the spotlight. He isn’t always looking for a way to turn the conversation back to him. Instead, he asks questions, listens intently, and adds commentary judiciously. He gives other people the chance to open up and shine. 

12. Return things in better condition than you received them

If you borrow some tools from a friend, bring them back cleaned and sharpened. If you borrowed a truck to move something for your mom, return it with a full tank of gas. If something breaks, even if it was an accident, pay for or procure a replacement.

13. Say “excuse me” and “sorry” without qualifiers

If you bump into someone, say, “excuse me.” If you mess up, say “sorry” with no “buts.”

14. Tip generously (within reason)

There’s a lot of unnecessary solicitation of tips these days, but when a service calls for it, and someone does a genuinely good job, harness your inner Frank Sinatra and duke ‘em. 

You don’t have to be reckless, but err on the side of generosity when you can. It’s one of the simplest ways to practice everyday magnanimity.

15. Put your phone away during conversations

Nothing says “you’re not worth my attention” like glancing at a screen while interacting with another human being. A classy SOB keeps his phone in his pocket when he’s with someone in the flesh. He understands that undivided attention is a form of respect — and true caring.

16. Keep your word — even on small things

If you say you’ll call, call. If you say you’ll show up, show up. If you say you’ll handle it, handle it.

17. Don’t overshare

Class includes a sense of discretion.

Not every thought needs to be aired. Not every personal struggle needs to be psychoanalyzed publicly. Don’t make others cringe because you feel the need for catharsis or are hunting for social media likes.

18. Give credit freely

If someone helped, say so. If an idea wasn’t yours, acknowledge it.

Classy people aren’t afraid of diminishing their own glow by letting others shine. In fact, giving people the credit they deserve lends you a greater luster.

19. Act with dignity when things don’t go your way

Anyone can be gracious when life is going their way. The classy SOB keeps his composure when it isn’t.

No sulking. No public tantrums.

You gotta learn how to lose and “never breathe a word about your loss.”

20. Give people an out

A classy person doesn’t corner others socially. If someone’s late, flustered, or clearly wants to leave a conversation or decline an invitation, he offers them a graceful exit rather than putting them on the spot. He lets people save face. Mercy is a form of manners.

21. Acknowledge service workers as people, not automatons

A lot of service workers spend their workdays being instrumentalized — ignored or treated like machines. The classy SOB doesn’t do that. He goes out of his way to acknowledge the humanity of the people who make everyday life function — cashiers, customer service reps, janitors, bus drivers, delivery people, waiters, garbage men, etc.

Don’t fiddle with your phone while you interact with them. Don’t berate them.

Make eye contact. Give them a warm “How’s it going?” Say “thank you.” Easy stuff.

22. Keep your complaints private and proportionate

If someone does something that upsets a class act, he takes care of it privately and keeps his complaint proportionate.

A classy man doesn’t gripe loudly in public or turn every minor inconvenience into a moral crusade. He handles issues calmly, directly, and without an audience.

Kid not getting playing time on the basketball team? Have a private conversation with the coach instead of airing your grievance in the parent group chat.

Your boss snub you? Set up a meeting with him. Don’t blast him on a Slack channel.

23. Don’t correct people unnecessarily

If someone gets a minor fact wrong, mispronounces a word, or tells a story imperfectly — and the mistake doesn’t matter — a classy guy lets it go. He understands that being right is often less important than keeping the interaction humane and preserving the person’s confidence and dignity.

Correction is sometimes necessary. But most of the time, when we have the urge to do it, it’s just ego and the desire to get one-up on another.

24. Don’t brag

A class act is secure in his own worth and doesn’t feel the need to boast — either overtly, or more subtly in the form of namedropping and humble bragging. He knows it’s off-putting, and he doesn’t wish to induce the noxious feeling of envy in others.

25. Act like a “host” wherever you go

For a classy gent, being a host isn’t limited to those times you initiate and invite others to a social event; it’s a mindset you bring to every place and interaction.

In thinking of yourself in the role of perennial host, your focus is always on making other people feel welcome and “at home” (even when you’re out and about). Your disposition and behavior says, “put up your feet and relax”; you seek to immediately make those you meet feel taken care of and at ease.

As a host, you take the lead in initiating conversation, and picking it up when it lags. You introduce people and help them find their footing. You ensure that others are having a good time and seek to make them comfortable — whether that’s getting them a drink or choosing a conversational topic that makes them feel good to talk about.

A class act becomes people’s atmospheric getaway and carries hospitality with him wherever he goes.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

American football is so big — so braided into our weekends, our language, and our culture — that it can be hard to see it clearly as a whole.

In his new book, Football, Chuck Klosterman helps us see the game from unexpected angles, and argues that football isn’t just a sport, it’s a kind of national operating system. Chuck explains how it became the dominant televised spectacle in America, despite having elements that should count against it. We then explore football as a simulation — of war, of reality, and even of itself — and how its simulation through video games has actually fed back into the sport itself. We also talk about who Chuck thinks is the GOAT (hint: it’s not Tom Brady), and the difference between achievement and greatness. At the end of our conversation, Chuck lays out a compelling argument for why football may be headed for a steep and surprising fall.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #248: Why Football Matters
• AoM Podcast #1,061: Are You Not Entertained? The Myths and Truths About Roman Gladiators
• AoM Podcast #1,044: What Sports Betting Is Really Doing to Players, Games, and Fans

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. American Football is so big, so braided into our weekends, our language, and our culture that it can be hard to see it clearly as a whole. In his new book Football, Chuck Klosterman helps to see the game from unexpected angles and argues that football isn’t just a sport, it’s a kind of national operating system.

Chuck explains how it became the dominant televised spectacle in America, despite having elements that should count against it. We then explore football as a simulation of war of reality and even of itself and how its simulation through video games has actually fed back into the sport. We also talk about who Chuck thinks is the GOAT (hint: it’s not Tom Brady) and the difference between achievement and greatness. At the end of our conversation, Chuck lays out a compelling argument for why football may be headed for a steep and surprising fall. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/football. All right, Chuck Klosterman, welcome to the show.

Chuck Klosterman:

Hey, it’s great to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you have written several cultural explorations during your career and in your latest book Football, you dig into the game of American football and try to suss out how it has influenced American culture in different ways and how American culture has influenced football. The publisher’s description of the book calls football a hyperobject. What is that and why is football a hyper object?

Chuck Klosterman:

A hyper object basically is sort of this philosophical term that means something is so large and so intertwined and imbued in every aspect of society that it’s impossible to see the thing in totality that we only are really understanding the part of it that we’re engaging with. Everything around it is still happening. Everything around it is still sort of informing that idea, but it is pretty much invisible simply due to size. I mean, I suppose an obvious example would be like to say the internet. The internet is a hyperobject. It’s so large that we all understand what it is, but it is impossible to sort of understand it in an all encompassing way unless you step back and say almost nothing in specific. And I think that accurately, that’s sort of an analysis of how football sort of operates in American society, that we certainly feel like we understand it, we can see it on a one-to-one basis and really engage and do it in a really personal way, but it is involved in the larger culture in a way that is not only impossible to see, but sort of unconsciously understood even by those who don’t really care about it as a game.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, football is the most popular sport in America. I mean, you highlight the fact that if you look at the most viewed shows on TV, I think it’s the top 25 are football games basically.

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, yeah, in 2023 of the hundred most watched broadcasts in the United States that year 93 were NFL games. And then I think three more were college games

Brett McKay:

And then I mean also just the football metaphors have just seeped into our everyday conversation. I mean, we make analogies to it all the time in work, in life, et cetera.

Chuck Klosterman:

Sure. There’s obvious examples like people using things like a political football or whatever. That’s kind of the straightforward use of it. This popularity thing though, it’s actually more fascinating I think, than people accept, even though we all know it, right? There are very few, I can’t think of anybody who would be a more than casual follower of sports who would not concede that football is the most popular sport in the United States. 

But its popularity, it’s like a different version of it. I mean, there are many countries in Europe or it is very obvious that not only is soccer the most popular sport in some ways it is all their sports. It is almost their combination of football, basketball, and baseball all put together to this one thing that’s really shared, and yet you would not find 93 of the hundred most popular television broadcasts in France be a soccer match. It just doesn’t happen. I mean, baseball is beloved in Japan. Yet at the same time its popularity is in no way a mirror of the way football is popular here, and that’s also particularly interesting because football is an ethnocentric sport. It’s played in the United States, Canada, a little bit in Germany here and there. There’ll be a few places that’ll play it, but it’s really just in this country and in a sense that makes it particularly reflective of our society, kind of along the idea of American exceptionalism or whatever. It’s like only in America does this thing exist and only in America could this thing have the magnitude that it does,

Brett McKay:

And what’s pretty crazy about football being the most popular sport in America. You talk about this in the book and I was nodding my head the entire time, it’s a really complicated game. You note that football is probably the only sport that you can’t play recreationally. They aren’t pickup football games either. They’re touch football games, there’s flag football, but it’s not actual pads on pad football with 22 players. I mean, I played football in high school. The last time I played football was in high school. I remember my last game as a senior. My coach said, for a lot of you guys, this is going to be the last time you played football. And I was like, wow. And it’s true. What was your experience with the sport? Did you play football when you were in high school?

Chuck Klosterman:

I did. Now I went to a very small high school in North Dakota, so I played nine man football. Now that is a version of 11 man football where on offense, you essentially remove the offensive tackles and on defense you essentially removed the cornerbacks. Okay. The idea of course is to have it be as close to 11 man football as possible. So schematically, it’s actually very similar. It’s just for schools with extremely low enrollment, people play both sides of the ball of the punter as well. But beyond that, coming from a town of 500 people where the high school is really the center of the town, even more so than any of the churches, the town is really built around its school in a place like that, and our football program was strong and it just sort of imbued every aspect of life. It’s hard to even, I can’t really imagine what the experience of high school would’ve been like without sports and particularly football involved.

Now my kids are going to have the opposite experience. It’s not going to be the way it is for them, but I mean that’s how it was for me. Then I went to college and I got into journalism and initially I was a sports reporter and I covered the football team. I then moved into this phase professionally where I was a rock critic and a film critic and more of a straightforward cultural journalist. I never stopped watching football though. That was always there. And then about 20 years ago, I started thinking about the idea of football as having a meaning that despite being impossible to escape is still somewhat underrated, particularly as a way to understand the last half of the 20th century and what you’re saying in general is it’s a very true thing. 

So soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Everyone understands that. One of the keys to this is that it is the easiest sport to play in the sense that all you need is one kickable object and two teams. You can go to the most remote place on any continent except Antarctica obviously, and you can see people playing soccer. That’s very easy to do. Basketball is a sport you can play by yourself. The idea of shooting a jump shot alone in a gym, it’s not like being in a basketball game, but the mechanics of that activity are identical. Baseball takes space and a lot of guys, but yet we’ve built this whole super structure of recreational softball to simulate that through life. If you’re somebody who was a track star in high school, you can still go running. If you were a swimming star, you could still go to the pool. You could bowl your whole life.

You can play golf your whole life, but not football. You and I could go out in my yard and throw a football around. We could even get two more guys and run little patterns, play offense, defense. It has no relationship to the game for real. The only version of football that really matters is the official version. It can’t really be simulated and that should be a detriment If you were inventing football for the first time, if we didn’t have these sports and we were inventing them, the fact that it’s impossible to recreationally simulate should be a real problem. It should make people feel distant from the game, but it appears that the opposite has happened. It feels that this distance has sort of in a weird way democratized the experience of watching it, that we’re all kind of in the same position where we have this understanding that is not really inherent to who we are. It’s not our own experience. It’s just learned information that we sort of all pretend is something that we can easily sort of understand

Brett McKay:

And very few people have actually played football. I think you did the numbers. It ended up being maybe 0.2% of the population in America.

Chuck Klosterman:

Oh, way lower, way lower,

Brett McKay:

Like 0.02.

Chuck Klosterman:

There’s maybe a million kids playing in high school and then you have a couple thousand playing in college and a small number, whatever roster size times 32 in the NFL, if you include the practice squads, you got some people in Canada and that’s, it is not a universal experience in any way. It’s exclusionary by design.

Brett McKay:

So maybe we’ll get to this through our conversation, but first blush, why do you think so many people like watching football if they’ve never played football and it’s this kind of complex game that, I mean even talk about it, there’s not a lot of action in it. I mean, it’s action packed, but there’s a lot of standing around walking between downs while the chains get moved.

Chuck Klosterman:

Okay, so this is the mysterious thing, okay. I’d mentioned earlier if football was being invented now, we would see its exclusionary nature as a detriment. An even greater detriment would be seen during the theoretical pitch meeting if we’re trying to all come up with new ideas for sports is if something were to say, well, in a three-hour game there’s actually 11 minutes of action. There was this kind of famous Wall Street Journal article where they did research on all these NFL games and they realized that the average three hour NFL football telecast involves 11 minutes of activity. Now on paper, that just seems insane. If someone said, Hey, I made a three hour movie, but actually there’s only things happening in 11 minutes of it, people would be like, what is that? That’s the antithesis of what entertainment is. But what is strange is that the way those 11 minutes are broken down into these little bursts of activity with these gaps in between where you can think about what you saw, you can think about what you’re going to see next and you can think about whatever you want, even if it’s divorced from the game you’re experiencing.

That is part of almost the magical quality of football as a television enterprise. It doesn’t seem like what we should want, but, and the evidence of that is overwhelming.

Brett McKay:

You mentioned television, okay, football is a television enterprise. This is one of your main thesis in the book. It’s this line. I loved it. I have a friend who’s a media theory professor here at the University of Tulsa. He loved it. The line is this, you said “football is a purely mediated experience even when there’s no media involved.” What do you mean by that?

Chuck Klosterman:

Oh, yeah. Okay, so that’s the key point to this whole idea. Okay, so football is invented a little bit after the Civil War and the reason for this, it’s arguable, but there’s this sort of built-in belief that there were people in the wake of the civil War who was like, our sons are not going to fight wars. They’re not going to face adversity. Our society will be a failure because they’ll be too soft. We’ve got to create some simulation for this, and they kind of came up with this support of football. Now, whether or not that’s exactly true or partially true, it doesn’t really matter. Regardless for the next 70 or 80 years, football evolves into something that’s close to what we imagine now, and then it intersects with the inception of television and by chance no one made this happen. It just worked out this way.

Football is the perfect product for the television experience, and television is the perfect vessel for showing what football is. No one has ever constructed a better TV experience than the way football worked out accidentally, and it kind of begins with each kind of famous championship game between the Colts and the Giants. The greatest game ever played where even though the game was blacked out in New York, like 46 million people or whatever, for the first time saw this game, and it wasn’t that they were seeing something they’d never experienced before, they just never experienced in this way. It was the merging of those two mediums, and since then, football’s relationship to television is really the driving force between how it has become this kind of cultural monolith. Our understanding of football is through the TV experience, even for people like you and I who have played, if someone were to say to you, imagine a football game, I am guessing the first thing you imagined was the way it looks on television, even though you’ve played it that you almost imagine that shot from that midfield where you can’t really see depth and the game is being played horizontal across the screen.

You can’t even see the free safety. It’s not even the ideal way to see it if you really care, but it is the way we understand it, and this is part of the reason why I really think that in some ways football is the perfect metaphor for understanding America from say 1950 to the year 2000. It may not be going forward in part because of our changing relationship to television.

Brett McKay:

So what makes football the perfect game for television?

Chuck Klosterman:

Okay, so with almost any other sport, the idea of the televised version of that sport is how can we transmit the live experience into the TV experience? Hockey is the one game that we all sort of understand to be better live because part of hockey is the sound and the feeling of guys smashing up against the plexiglass and you just can’t simulate that on that. Now, almost every other sport, it’s kind of debatable. Baseball can be better live if it’s a beautiful day and it’s just like the ballpark is great, but it can also be in some ways harder to watch if you really care about the outcome than when you see it on television. Basketball is great if you’re next to the court, it’s bad if you’re in the rafters. The best seats tend to be actually the ones that simulate the TV camera boxing, auto racing.

Those have palpable energy and it’s like the sound of it’s incredible, but at the same time, you can’t always see everything. Golf and tennis. There’s an intimacy to being live, but it can be monotonous. All these other sports, there’s sort of like a debate, is it better live or better on television to see the actual sport. With football, there is no debate. It’s always better on television. There’s a million reasons to go to a live football game, but one of them cannot be, I need to really see what’s happening. Even the guys in the game, even the coach on the sideline cannot see the game the way a person on television can, and as a result, our understanding of this mediated event is almost like a full-time mediation of the experience that you think about football means to think about how it is presented on TV, and if you want to get down to real specific things, I mean, it’s the fact that unlike other sports that kind of happen when they happen, we know when football’s going on.

We know it’s college games on Saturday, pro games on Sunday, and there’s a Monday night game. We know this. That’s why part of the reason fantasy football that while not as maybe illustrative of the game is fantasy baseball is more popular. People like fantasy football because it’s very easy to do because you understand when you need to watch these games. There’s also the aspect of that when you’re seeing football from its televised perspective, there’s moments where no one knows what’s happening. The quarterback drops back and he throws the ball deep. There’s a split second where the camera has not followed it yet and we don’t know if the guy is open, is the guy covered? It’s this fleeting moment of complete unknown that is kind of an exhilarating rush. The starting and the stopping is a huge part of it. It seems like something we shouldn’t want, but we do. With nonstop action, say like a sport like soccer or whatever, that can be exhilarating when the play is incredible, but it can also be sort of monotonous and almost hypnotic when the action is kind of a lesser vintage and football doesn’t have that problem. The worst football game is still watchable.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I’ve noticed in my experience, whenever I go to a football game in person, I typically spend a lot of time watching the jumbotron. You can’t see what’s going on. Like you said, it’s complicated.

Sometimes there’s a misdirection and you want to see, okay, well how did this running back end up in the end zone? Well, okay, I’m going to watch the instant replay up on the TV because from my vantage point, I completely missed it, and when I look back at the live games I’ve been to at the University of Oklahoma, I remember there’s maybe one instance where I had a great view of Adrian Peterson making this amazing 90 yard run, but that’s it. The other football games I went to, I saw some good games, the Sooners won, but I really didn’t see in person live in real time what was happening. I had to look at the jumbotron.

Chuck Klosterman:

Okay, the thing you’re saying is almost a perfect encapsulation of something I write about. So you had this one play where you see, I’m guessing, my assumption is that Adrian Peterson was running the ball and he was running right at you for whatever, right?

Brett McKay:

Correct.

Chuck Klosterman:

He’s coming at you and you were the only person maybe or maybe the people in your very close vicinity who had that specific experience as if this amazing play was actually built for your vantage point by chance because that’s where your seat were. But for the rest of the game, in all likelihood, what you were usually doing, again unconsciously, is seeing something from your seat and mentally transposing to how it would look on television

Brett McKay:

Yeah.

Chuck Klosterman:

We see these things and we triangulate it in our mind and put it into that kind of television scope, that shot from midfield kind of in the downward angle as the players are moving, sort of like I said, across the field horizontally. Now, there’s some people listening to this podcast who are probably saying, well, that’s not how it’s for me. You can’t get inside my brain. That’s not how it is, that’s true. Okay. This is not something I’m able to really prove. I can’t get inside another person’s head and say, this is how the experience is, but I’m confident that that’s how it is for most people, including most of the people who deny that this is their experience. 

I think that in general, and in fact maybe in totality, the experience of a video screen of the monitor overwrites our understanding of reality. I think that’s just either a consequence or a problem or maybe even a benefit of modernity that we have now sort of experienced a mediated world so fully that the things we like most are the things that best fit into that sort of technological experience, and football is one of them.

Brett McKay:

Well, if football’s better to watch on TV or on a screen, why do people still go to live football games? 

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, there’s a lot of ancillary reasons to go to an event besides, I want to see it in the most lucid way. I mean, in the same way, if you really love Steely Dan, you were never going to get a better experience than you were on the record. You were never going to hear something live that would be as perfect as the way you’d hear it on the record, but you still might even want to go see the show. I mean, you go to a football game, there’s a whole bunch of things going on. There’s the collective feeling of being with a bunch of people with the same ideas and that suddenly you have a relationship with strangers because you all kind of like the same thing, and it is interesting to be in a large crowd, there’s a palpable exchange of energy when that happens.

It might remind you of maybe having gone to a game when you were a kid and now you’re bringing your own kid. I think in some people’s mind, the ability to cheer and sort of act like a different person in a live event is extremely attractive and many live events sort of allow this to happen. These are all reasons. It’s like the idea that maybe if I yell help my team or whatever, that’s sort of an insane thing to think, but people think that, right, and that’s totally fine, but to see the game, if someone says, I’m going to the A FC championship because I really want to see what happened, I mean, that’s insane. That would never be if you really wanted to see it would be the television experience.

Brett McKay:

I was just thinking, so television has made football viewing better. You can view the game better on TV, but I do think in some ways television has made live football viewing worse. Here’s an example, so a few years ago we went to the Oklahoma State-BYU football game. It was cold, it was sleeting, it was raining, the game went into overtime and it was televised, and we were just ready to go home because we were just like, oh my gosh, we’re just soaking wet and it’s cold. But we had to do the stupid TV timeouts. It wasn’t like a timeout because the team needed a timeout. It was like, we need a timeout so we can show commercials on television for the people at home, and it just made the game longer than it needed to be.

Chuck Klosterman:

Oh, absolutely. I think the first time any kid, an 11-year-old kid who likes football goes to his first pro game. It’s always very weird to see that there are these long stretches where nothing is happening. The players aren’t even talking to each other. They’re just kind of waiting around while the sound system plays Guns N Roses or something and just we eat up two minutes and then the game starts again. That’s true. Television has made the live experience worse, but I mean, I guess there’s a lot of people who would say that that is one of the hallmarks of all technology, which is that it detracts from the organic experience. I mean that, this is probably a crazy thing to point out, but go back and read what the Unibomberi, Ted Kaczinski, was writing about. One of the things he was writing about was that technology puts a ceiling on our freedom that we can’t even recognize because we assume the ceiling is normal, that our ability to imagine or experience the world is sort of limited by our mediated understanding of it, and that’s what happens with television and all sports in a way.

I mean, it is interesting to say, go to an NBA game that’s not being televised by TNT or ESPN. When I go to a Blazers game here that’s just being shown locally, the game feels fast. They’re not building in all these breaks. It’s a better experience, but then it is sort of like a risk reward thing. I mean, it’s like if you’re from the NFL, from their perspective, what is more important, the 65,000 people who are in a stadium maybe or the 6.5 million people who are watching it at home, and in many ways subsidizing this sport in a way the people in the stadium are not. Yes, the people in the stadium are buying tickets, they’re paying for parking, they’re eating hot dogs, revenue is being generated, but all sports now, all major sports are built around the television contract with various networks and platforms, and those are the people who matter.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, so this is a perfect example of how football is a hyper object that when we’re talking about football, we’re talking about something bigger than football. I mean, in our conversation, I didn’t see this coming up, but we name dropped the Unabomber.

Chuck Klosterman:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

There you go. Yeah,

Chuck Klosterman:

I do that a lot.

Brett McKay:

So in the book you mentioned that football is an unreality, that it’s a simulation on multiple levels. You mentioned it earlier, football is often seen as a simulation of war. The founding legends that it was started after the Civil War, people were anxious about masculinity, the whole muscular Christianity movement. Teddy Roosevelt’s strenuous life, so the guy we got to develop this game to toughen boys up simulates war, so they have experience with it. I mean, I think Dwight Eisenhower, he played football at West Point. I think he coached at West Point.

I think he even said that football’s the best game to prepare men to fight in war. What do you make of that idea of football as a good simulation of war? Is there anything to that or is that kind of overblown?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, it’s a tricky thing. Is football the best game to prepare young men to later fight in war? I mean, among sports, it probably is. I don’t think that we look at sports necessarily as that should be their purpose, certainly not now. It would be weird in a modern context if someone wrote a book promoting the idea of football based on the idea that this could help us militarily moving forward or whatever. But the same time, it’s an interesting thing. I mean, the thing that I argue in this book is football is a simulation of war. There is no question about it, but it’s a simulation of ancient wars. It’s not a simulation of modern warfare. It’s a simulation of the way wars would’ve been fought in the 19th century or the way that they would work and the board game strati or whatever. It’s not like Don DeLillo had a book come out in 1972 called End Zone, and it’s a football book and it deals a lot with the idea of nuclear holocaust and people, they didn’t really love this book when it came out because they were like, well, it’s kind of too on the nose to say football is like war.

But he was actually arguing something that was really prescient that the other people didn’t get, which is that he was essentially saying that football’s relationship to war kind of ended with the advent of the atomic weapon, that football’s relationship to war is the way wars were once fought, and I think that is the draw. It’s not the draw that I’m seeing something that’s like a war. The draw is I’m kind of seeing a modern incarnation of military history and military history is, I mean, it’s the fascinating thing, particularly to middle-aged men. 

Brett McKay:

It’s true.

Chuck Klosterman:

That as you reach a certain age as a guy for whatever reason, you tend to become more interested in history and particularly the conflicts of history and the modern version of football, even though it in many ways completely divorced from that, you can watch a football game. It’ll never come up, and yet there is a tie back to that because what’s the thing about military conflict? It’s like the stakes could not be higher. You live or you die. A mistake you make isn’t something that you regret. It means that you were killed or the people around you were killed. Responsibility is high. There’s a version of that in the football game as well where you can’t talk your way around getting leverage on the tight end. You can’t make an argument that says, I can run this guy down even though he’s faster than me in football. A lot of the sort of visceral things about being alive are present. It’s a very intellectual game. It’s a very sort of rehearsed and orchestrated game, but when two guys are running at each other and they’re going to collide, the outcome is based on physics. It’s not based on what we want to have happen. What football does in a lot of ways. Football eliminates the possibility of us saying, well, I want the world to be this way. It’s like, this is how the world is.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s a great point that football is a simulation of war, how it used to be because now with the nuclear bomb, it’s like, well, everyone’s hosed. Even the fans, they’re hosed. You can’t do anything about it. 

Or even in a smaller scale, drone warfare or whatever, so drones do real damage, but it’s almost like it would be sort of like if all wars were fought with robots, would the outcome of those wars still matter? I don’t know. There has to be sort of that human consequence and football is a reminder that human consequences are not just constructions. It’s real.

And maybe that’s why I love trick plays because it’s almost like gorilla warfare. You’re flipping the script. You’re not following the typical script. That’s what gorilla warfare their advantage is. You don’t follow what you’re supposed to do. You don’t follow the typical rules of engagement. You do something out of the ordinary. Maybe that’s what a trick play is like, ah, I love seeing that flea flicker. It might not work, but if it works, it’s just devastating.

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, because that is sort of the counterbalance where the idea that this is really just a game about size and speed, not on this double reverse. It wasn’t on this, it was schematic. It was strategic, it was intellectual. We have these sort of ideas about what the culture of football means, and very often it’s seeing a pejorative weights that the culture of football is almost like everything we’re trying to erase from the world, but it is a complicated game. It is a game based on sort of an understanding of your opponent and analytics and how much practice you’ve put into it and sort of your own pure originality and creativity. I mean, it’s football art. Well, I suppose technically not because usually when we say what qualifies something as art, there’s all these things that have to intentionality and all these things have to sort of be recognized, and football doesn’t necessarily do that, but the expression of football, the way football is as something we watch works in the same way. It is an artistic experience.

Brett McKay:

There’s a woman that wrote an essay about the forward pass, I forgot the name. It was really good, and she just talked about how it’s just the most beautiful thing in the world to watch an amazing long bomb forward pass, and it’s artistic, unintentionally artistic. But yeah, I mean, I appreciate whenever a team uses artistry. I mean, I’m an OU fan. I still think about that game. I guess it was 2007 when they played Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl and they ran the hook and lateral the Statue of Liberty. It sucked because OU lost, but I’m like, man, that was awesome.

Chuck Klosterman:

Yeah, I mean, I think it could be argued if somebody said to me, what was the greatest five minute span of football in the 21st century? It would be the end of that game. It would be the play, the touchdown, the two point conversion, the player proposing to his girlfriend in the end zone afterwards. The only time, in many ways, an upset of that magnitude has happened on that stage. I mean, obviously there have been bigger upsets, a small school beating a big school, but that was the biggest game of the year for both teams. It was almost everything that we want football to be in that little encapsulation.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so football’s a simulation of war. Another thing you talk about, and I thought this was really interesting, there’s like this reverse dynamic going on is that video game football, which is a simulation of football, has actually changed the real game of football. Tell us about that.

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, it’s strange, but in some ways, I guess it’s also predictable. There was a period in the nineties when there was a realization that the goal of a football video game or really any sports video game, basketball, baseball, soccer, all of these was an attempt to somehow find realism. This was a big part. When Madden, that football game became this kind of juggernaut, John Madden was involved with the creation of that, and his thing was, I want this game to be, I want it to look the way football looks. In fact, EA sports, when they made that game, they wanted to have it be seven on seven because it would be less stress on the computing, it would be less guys, and John Madden was like, no, it’s got to be 11 on 11 or it doesn’t count. So this whole thing became this idea.

It’s like, well, let’s try to make a football game that’s realistic. Now, there are limitations. Of course, you make a football game on a video screen, you’re going to have capabilities that don’t exist in real life, and that’s what any kid or anyone playing the football game does. What are the limits of this? What is fascinating is that many of the things that were only attempted or would’ve only been attempted in a video game in 1997 are now part of football for real. 

A lot of the throws Mahomes makes, for example, in the past, they would’ve only been seen as something that could be done in a video game. You wouldn’t have seen a guy, the throws Patrick Mahomes makes in the past would’ve got a quarterback benched, and now not only does he do it, but a lot of guys do it. If you watch the Ole Miss game in their play, it was like their quarterback made three throws that to me seemed like they would’ve only happened in video games in the past, and in fact, a friend and I, we’ve been playing the college football game for years, and I used to always criticize what he was doing as being too unrealistic that that would never happen. 

Now, a lot of the things that he did in the past are actually part of the way the game is played now, the idea of okay, going forward on fourth down as often as teams do. Now, a lot of people credit that to analytics. They say, well, we’ve just done the math and the value and the risk reward and all this. In some ways, that started with people whose introduction to play calling came through playing video games. I mean, those people are adults now, and they were sort of of the belief that giving my opponent possession of the ball, even if I gained 35 yards on this punt, is not as valuable as the 50-50 odds of me gaining two yards on fourth and two. These are things that start in these video simulations by amateurs, move up to the high school level, eventually are adopted by college coaches and then become part of the NFL. 

Like I say, in some ways it seems strange. It seems weird to imagine that some high school kid in the nineties is affecting football now, but in another way it is predictable because that’s what simulations do. Simulations teach people of new ways to think.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I love playing NCAA college football, and my go-to is if it’s fourth down and I’m in my own territory, like 10 yards from my own end zone, I’m not punting it. I’m just going to do a Hail Mary and see what happens, and oftentimes it works. 

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, what’s weird to see, I’m kind of the opposite when I, I’ve played this game now thousands of times. I dunno how many hours I’ve spent for real, but the guy I play against, the same guy, he’s another sports writer named Michael Winery. He’s the only person I’ve ever played against in my life, I think. But it drives him crazy because I am, he feels I’m just so conservative. If it’s late in the first half and I have the possession of the ball and I’m deep in my own territory, I’ll have my quarterback take knees and go to the locker firm, and he just finds that maddening. He’s like, this is a video game. Why are you doing this? We can do whatever we want. You’re just trying to make it less fun for both of us. But I love the idea of trying to make it as real as possible.

What is interesting in society at least, or the culture of football, has advanced faster than me. I still think that way. I still think like a coach from the seventies. I still think that way. That’s the way when I watch a football game, that’s how I am, and the game itself has moved way past that. Now, if you watch, watch the Rams play whatever McVay is doing things that are far more innovative than I sort of believed were even possible when I sort of got into football, but that’s also kind of in a weird strange way, the conservative draw of the sport is that football is always about the past. In a way, it is tied to the world that we’ve left and it’s still operating in the world that we now inhabit.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so another example of the medium changing football. So television changed, football, video games have changed football. Another simulation of football that’s having an effect on the game that you talk about is fantasy football and then fantasy football. It’s kind of morphed into gambling essentially. What do you think is the appeal of fantasy football leagues? I’ve done one or two when I was in high school. I never really got into it, but some guys, they live for this stuff, and the thing about fantasy football, it is a complete simulation because you’re creating these imaginary teams of players who are not on the same teams trying to create a winning team based on real gameplay. What’s the appeal of this weird simulation of football?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, okay, so fantasy football is really an outgrowth of fantasy baseball. Fantasy baseball starts in the seventies, late seventies and early eighties, and I mean it may have existed before that, but that’s when people started. I mean, there was a big story about it in Inside Sports Magazine. It went a long way to sort of popularizing it, and then when baseball season would end, because baseball is well suited for the fantasy realm, even though it’s a team sport, individual batting, individual pitching, they’re separate from everything else. So statistically, it actually was an accurate reflection. A good fantasy baseball team would’ve been a good baseball team, so football kind of comes out of that. Guys who play fantasy baseball are like the season’s over now what do we do? I started playing fantasy football in 1990, and that was a very, very different time for lots of reasons, but particularly for something like this, it was no yardage, no reception, nothing like that.

It was just touchdowns and field goals. All the math was done by hand from taking the newspaper on Monday and Tuesday and going through all this stuff and what that was at the time. Initially it was almost like, here’s just one more way to experience football. It was additive. You can watch the games, you can read about the games, but now you have this other thing you can kind of play your own little version of it. It was not at the time that connected to gambling, like gambling in 1990, 1991. That’s kind of like when Pete Rose was getting banned from baseball. It was still seen as something only really degenerates did because it was illegal and you have a bookie and all these things. Well, it’s not very clear that fantasy football was sort of priming the pump for this coming world of gambling we now live in.

Because what fantasy football did was something that was really novel. It could appeal to the kind of person who loved football and didn’t necessarily care about the outcome of the game that you could watch a game and care about the tight end. He was on your fantasy team and it didn’t matter to you if they won or lost. In fact, you might want them to lose because that might force the team to throw more in the fourth quarter and your tight end might have more receptions. It individualized the sport and allowed people to think about football in this different way that was divorced, sort of from what used to be the only thing that should have mattered who won or who lost you. Now see this all the time. I mean, that’s what gambling is. I mean, anybody out there, I’m not a gambler really.

I don’t really have the right constitution for it, but I really follow it because I’m really fascinated by it. There’s something very strange about picking a team to win by more than five and a half points and watching them in the fourth quarter when they’re up four and just trying to figure out ways, well, how can they get one more field goal. Here you’re watching this completely different game. It’s still the same game that you would be watching if you had no money involved at all. But now it’s a completely evolved thing where there’s a game inside the game and really the main player is you. Fantasy football sort of did that in a way without now, it was also just, I think in a lot of ways a way for people to connect through a sport even though they might have asymmetrical interest in that sport.

And what I mean by that is I’ve been in fantasy football leagues that are in an office. I’m working in an office and someone wants to start a fantasy football league, and the 12 people involved all have different levels of interest in football. There’s a few people who live and die for it and would watch it every weekend in their life if they could, and a few people who wouldn’t watch it all and only follow it because they have a fantasy team. And yet the way fantasy football operates, especially through the internet, everyone is equal. The internet does the work for you. It tells you who to draft. It tells you to start, so you don’t need to be an expert to win your fantasy league. I’m in a college football fantasy league. The league is called Chanology, we call it we named after Lane Kiffin. This was back when he was not now, this was years ago when he was a totally different kind of figure and a guy who dominates that league. The name of his team is who is Lane Kiffin. He had no idea who Lane Kiffin was when he joined this league, and yet he’s become by far the best owner in this thing because it’s not really about knowing about football. It’s being able to understand the outcome of past games.

Brett McKay:

If television has changed, football, video games have changed football. Do you think gambling, fantasy football is changing football, the actual game?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, I don’t know if it is changing the actual game between the lines on the field. It’s changing everything else though. I think that all the sports leagues, including the NFL, understand that they need to have a relationship with gambling not just to flourish, but potentially to exist in the future. That right now, the NFL is this monolith due to wealth that is mainly acquired and accumulated through advertising that because football is so popular and because it’s a live event and it’s the only thing that if you make Pepsi or you make Volvos or whatever and you want to reach the largest possible audience and expose them to these ads, football is the best means for that. I don’t know if that will always be the case, and if that starts to change, there’s going to have to be a way to continue not just this level of revenue we have now, but to keep increasing it.

Because football can’t operate in a static sense. It can only get larger, and I think gambling might be the only way to keep that happening. I mean, I felt that one of the very, there were many very instructive things about COVID, but one of them was, it was like they still got to play all these football and basketball and baseball games. They got to still play these big 10 football games to no one in the stands. They got to do it, and it was like, wow, this is a little more fragile than I realized that the entire world can essentially shut down, but we still have to make sure Rutgers plays Iowa. It has to happen. I mean, that just shows you how much of the foundation of these things is brittle because it’s not that it’s too big to fail, it’s too big to stop. It’s got to keep going.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the fragility football, maybe the potential future of the game, but before, one question I want to ask because I thought it was really interesting. You have this whole chapter about who’s the greatest player of all time in football. Most people would say Tom Brady because he’s won all the Super Bowls. You make the case that it was Jim Thorpe and as an Okie, I was ecstatic to see this because growing up in elementary school, middle school, high school, you learn about Jim Thorpe, greatest athlete of all time. You hear the story of him rummaging through the trash can to find a track shoe so he could run this race and win it. He played football, he didn’t play football for very long. We don’t have any footage of him playing football. How did you then determine that he was the greatest football player of all time?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, that’s an interesting section of the book that a lot of people bring up to me because on the surface, it’s kind of like chock full of football discussion, discussion of players, discussion of Randy Moss, discussion of Tom Brady. But in a larger sense, it is kind of an ideological point about the concept of greatness and how does one gauge that, right? If we go simply by who would be the most outstanding physical specimen to have on your team right now, it kind of becomes a completely irrelevant argument because what that’s going to mean is that the best player of all time is always going to be who is the best player right now? I mean, any average quarterback in the NFL right now, if you put him back into the 1980s, and he’s a legend. I mean, he’s going to be on par with Marino and Elway and those guys just because the way that physicality changes and skills change and all that stuff.

It’s like modernity is always going to reward whatever is the greatest thing in the moment. But that to me is kind of the wrong way to think about greatness. To me, greatness is the creation of archetypes. It’s the first elite version of something that is still contained through all the latter versions. In other words, it’s almost the invention of the idea of what being a great football player is, and that to me does seem to be Jim Thorpe. Okay, so Jim Thorpe was playing in the 1920s. It’s an 11 man sport at that time. It’s four downs. It’s six points for a touchdown. Yes, the guys aren’t wearing face masks. It’s a primitive version of the game compared to what we do now. It’s a primitive version of the game even compared to the 1950s. But yet, what was great about Jim Thorpe we’re the core characteristics of what we think about a great football player now, which is basically speed, strength, agility, the ability to understand these positions and master them to be the person other players aspire to be like that is the foundation of what a football player is. It kind of goes back to Jim Thorpe. I mean, that is sort of what I’m talking about in that section. That’s sort of the idea of that our understanding of what a great football player is or what a great football player looks like was kind of in the DNA of Thorpe, the experience of Thorpe. 

Brett McKay:

I like how you make the distinction in that chapter, the difference between greatness and achievement. So you mentioned the fragility of the game. People might think, well, how is football fragile? It’s the most popular thing on television. It makes billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars. There’s no way that this thing could go away, but you make the case. We might have a world where football, it might exist, but it’s not going to exist how it exists today. So why do you think football 30, 40, 50 years from now might not be a hyper object anymore?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, I mean the simplest answer is that the world’s going to change, and when the world changes, large objects have a harder time transitioning than small objects. It’s like the largeness of football is both. Its sort of value in the present and its danger in the future. Like I said, football, it’s not just a football’s so big, it can’t in any ways collapse, but it’s like it needs to keep expanding. It’s only set up to become a bigger and bigger thing every year. The revenue has to go up every year, the popularity needs to go up. They need to play games in England and in Germany and in Mexico City. They need to make it larger and larger and larger because the way it is created in the amount of money it consumes, the amount of money the players consume and the franchisees consume consistently goes up.

It just keeps going up and they’re never going to go back. There’s never going to be a point where the players’ union would say like, okay, we’ll take a pay cut because it’s good for the league. That will never happen. So with the NFL and pro football, and all pro sports in general are dependent on is that the amount of money that they earn from ad revenue is always going to be able to outstrip the costs, and that every year, the contract for who gets to show the NFC and the AFC that Fox or NBC or CBS or these places, they’ll always pay more because it’s worth so much to them. But that is dependent on advertisers seeing advertising as the same value it has. Now, I think that this is going to change. I predict that over the next 40 or 50 years, there is going to be a pretty massive sea change over what is seen as the value of a commercial and the value of advertising.

We’ve never really been able to prove that advertising works at all. We know it does in terms of introducing a product to people that if someone has never ever heard of Budweiser before and they see a Budweiser commercial, now they know it exists, but then if they see 15,000 more commercials for Budweiser, it’s not going to necessarily make them thirsty. It’s just the best thing we have. We don’t know that advertising works, but there’s kind of tautology, well, the most successful places spend a lot on advertising. It must work or whatever. I think that’s going to shift, and when it shifts, it’s going to shift really fast that suddenly there’s going to be an understanding that spending a bunch of money on a commercial and then spending more money to have that commercial shown during the Super Bowl or whatever is going to evaporate, and when that happens, there’s going to be this real sort of grinding moment of friction where it’s like, well, now the NFL has to work.

We’re not going to be able to expand. We’re not going to be as much money as we used to do. We contract teams? Do we change these contracts? The players will strike. Now, there have been strikes in the past before in the eighties, but this will be a combination of a strike and a lockout because the owners will see the same thing. They’ll see, well, we’re going to lose money by playing these games, and the players still want more money. They still want to raise, so they’ll be this big stoppage. Now, if that happened right now today, there’d be a national freakout. If football was suddenly gone every weekend, people would be like, what am I going to do on Sunday? What am I going to do on? What am I going to gamble on? What about my fantasy team? What about my, it would be that might not be true, and I don’t think it will be true in 40 or 50 years because the personal relationship to football that we had for most of the 20th century is kind of disappearing.

There’s a bifurcation now between the very small sliver of people who have a personal relationship to the game and the many, many more people who just kind of see it as an entertaining distraction, an entertaining distraction they love, and which that they see as something that’s maybe intrinsic to who they are, but not in a way that sort of touches who they actually are. I guess it’s like it’ll be something like, well, I watched football. My dad watched it. He didn’t play either. My grandpa maybe did. It’ll just separate and separate and separate, so when this sort of work stop, it occurs. People are going to care much less than we would expect them to, much less than they would care today. The comparison I use in the book is how in 1920 or whatever horse racing was one of the three biggest sports, and that was because people still had a relationship to horses in all walks of life.

Even if they lived in an urban area, they had grown up in a rural area and their father had owned horses, or they had a blue collar job where horses did the labor. I mentioned out in Chicago in 1900, it was called the city of Horses. Even if you lived in Chicago, horses were everywhere. So horse racing was a natural extension of that. We had a relationship to the horse for a long time. Most people in America had some relationship to football. Even if they didn’t play, it was something that their friends played or that meant a lot in their high school or college or all these things. It was the one time their family was all together on Sunday watching the same thing. I think when that disappears, a super lucrative hyper object becomes extremely fragile.

Brett McKay:

So fewer people are playing tackle football, so people are going to have less of a personal connection to the game, and I think too, people are going to lose a connection to the game just because with NIL and portal transfers, people are just going to lose their connection to the college game. The teams are always changing. It’s all just so mercenary, so you lose that connection to your hometown team or the team you root for, and then the leagues rely on the networks paying tons of money for the rights to air football games. I think it’s something like 12 billion for the NFL. It’s billions to Air college games. And right now networks are willing to pay that money. They’re willing to pony up because the advertising is valuable enough to justify it. But eventually advertising won’t have the same ROI. So networks won’t pay as much. And the NFL its model is based on the bright’s cost going up and up and up. So when the money stops going up, it all start to collapse. And this reminds me of a guy we had on the podcast a while back ago who’s an expert on roaming gladiatorial games. And he said this is one of the reasons why they disappeared. They just got bigger and bigger and more and more elaborate and eventually they were too expensive to put on so they went away. Yeah.

Chuck Klosterman:

They were trying to do things like they would fill a coliseum with water and have naval battles on this. It was like, I’m sure that was essentially the Super Bowl of its time.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny because people often kind of compare football games to gladiatorial games and the same fate might happen to football, American football. Well, Chuck, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, I mean, if you want to learn about the book, you got to buy the book, I guess in terms of learning about it and learning about me, I don’t know. I guess all my old books, I don’t really view much social media anymore. I do these podcasts when people ask me to be on them, but yeah, I don’t dunno. 

Brett McKay:

You’re a hermit. I love it.

Chuck Klosterman:

Yeah, kind of.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, well Chuck Klosterman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Chuck Klosterman:

Thanks.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Chuck Klosterman. He’s the author of the book Football that’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/football where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. If you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it. If you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

It’s a new year, which means people everywhere are making resolutions about what they’re going to add to their lives. More exercise. New routines. A fresh system that will finally get everything they’ve got going on dialed in.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to add good things to your life. But there’s another, often more effective way to improve it: subtraction. Instead of asking, What should I start doing this year? ask, What should I stop doing?

Nassim Taleb calls this approach via negativa. It’s about improving your life by removing the things that diminish it. In many cases, giving something up delivers faster, more noticeable gains than adding something new ever could.

If you’re looking for some ideas of things to give up in the new year, we’ve got 27 suggestions below, along with plenty of resources to help you take those ideas and put them into action.

1. Keeping up with the news

Think about all the news stories you’ve kept up with in the last ten years — the wars, disasters, elections, and so on. How much did those events affect your life, and how much were you able to influence them by being informed? Chances are, the answer is close to zero on both counts. Staying a little abreast of news is important for being a sound citizen, but you can drop about 95% of its consumption without hurting yourself or society. Your life will in fact improve without this stress-inducing, time-sucking, almost entirely pointless distraction.  

2. Engaging in negative self-talk

You wouldn’t let a friend talk to you the way you sometimes talk to yourself. While it might feel like your inner critic is helping you improve, that negative inner monologue is making you more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to flub a performance. Drop the negative self-talk this year, and you’ll free up the energy needed to navigate life more resiliently and adeptly.

3. Looking at your phone right when you wake up

Rolling over and grabbing your phone first thing hands the steering wheel of your day to whoever emailed, posted, or tweeted overnight. You start the morning reactive, not proactive, and that sets the tone for the rest of the day. Use a real alarm clock to wake up and wait thirty minutes before you check your phone, allowing your brain to boot up on its own terms.

4. Consuming caloric drinks

What a colossal waste of calories caloric beverages are. They simply don’t taste that great (especially if we’re talking about soda), and have little to no nutritional value. If you want a treat, at least consume something you can chew! Switching to nothing but diet drinks and water is the very easiest way to lose weight; people can often drop significant poundage and improve their all-around health profile just by making this move.

5. Mindlessly scrolling your phone

We’ve all been there. You’re bored, so you pick up your phone and start scrolling through your various apps. “Just five minutes,” you tell yourself. But five minutes turns into thirty, and you don’t even remember the content that flicked across your screen during that time. And to make matters worse, instead of feeling refreshed and invigorated after that scrolling-filled brain break, you feel more stupefied. What a waste! Break your smartphone habit this year, and you’ll slowly start to feel your brain come back to life.

6. “Shoulding” on yourself

Constantly telling yourself what you should do is like living your life by someone else’s checklist — a way of avoiding real choices and accountability. When your goals are driven by what you think others expect from you rather than what you genuinely want, you give up a bit of your personal power and head down a path paved with resentment, guilt, and frustration. This year, stop shoulding all over yourself and start making decisions because you choose them, not because you feel obligated by some invisible script.

7. Saying you’re too busy to read books

You’ve got plenty of time to read books. Being “too busy to read” is usually just a failure of priorities. You’ve given up mindlessly scrolling. Use that time to read a book. You can even use the Kindle app on your phone to read books while you’re on the subway or waiting for a doctor’s appointment. You can get a lot of books read when you break it up into 5 to 15 minute chunks throughout the day.

8. Skipping cardio and mobility work

Strength training is awesome. But don’t neglect the other aspects of fitness. Cardio keeps your heart healthy; mobility keeps you moving like a human instead of a rusting Tin Man. It’s not hard to get this stuff in. Take a short walk every morning. Do a quick mobility routine when you get out of bed. Do longer Zone 2 cardio sessions two times a week. Life’s more fun when you feel vital and spry.

9. Letting minor annoyances ruin your mood

Slow drivers, long lines, glitchy Wi-Fi, inept customer service reps. These minor inconveniences and annoyances aren’t personal attacks. Sure, they’re annoying, but those annoyances probably won’t matter in ten minutes, so stop letting them ruin your mood for the rest of the day. No circumstances can make you feel a certain way; you’re in charge of that.

10. Avoiding difficult conversations

That talk you’re avoiding doesn’t get easier the longer you put it off; it just gets harder. Unsaid things have a way of leaking out sideways. Addressing issues directly is uncomfortable, but it usually brings relief. In fact, the awkwardness and discomfort you imagine will exist during that conversation usually don’t arise to the degree you think they will; the exchange typically goes much better than you imagined (here are some tips for upping the odds of that outcome). Rip off the band-aid!

11. Watching porn

We’ve written about the downsides of porn. Porn trains your attention and desire in ways that don’t translate well to real intimacy. Many men find that cutting it out improves their relationships, their mood, and simply how they generally feel about themselves. Why not give quitting porn a try and see if it makes a difference for you?

12. Complaining about things you can’t (or won’t) change

Complaining feels like action, but it’s usually just noise that allows you to slip responsibility for doing something about what’s bugging you. Stop your bellyaching: if you can’t change something, accept it; if you can change it, get to work.

13. Letting algorithms choose what you read and watch

Algorithms are everywhere, from your social media feeds to your streaming platforms, serving up things they think you’d like based on what you already like. But sometimes we don’t know what we like until we’ve tried it. Open your life to new flavors and delight-inducing serendipity. Browse bookstores. Wander record shops. Pick a movie at random. Choose articles and podcasts based on interest, not just recency or virality. Rediscover the joy of surprise.

14. Being cynical

Cynicism masquerades as manly intelligence, but it’s mostly just emotional armor. It keeps you from being disappointed by keeping you detached and aloof. The problem is that cynicism also keeps you from being moved and inspired — from the emotional investments that give life its richness and depth. This year, trade cynicism for love. You’ll notice that your life becomes bigger and more vibrant.

15. Thinking you’re too old to learn new skills

When you were a kid, you developed skills in academics, art, music, and sports, and likely even taught yourself things like how to do magic tricks and skateboard. Now that you’re an adult, can you think of the last new skill you learned? If it’s been a long time, consider ending that drought. That voice saying “it’s too late for me” is lying. It is harder for adults to learn new things, but it’s still very possible. So pick up that guitar or skateboard this year — just make sure to wear kneepads.

16. Drinking alcohol

Alcohol is essentially a poison, and in addition to making you feel like crap the next day and dinging your wallet, more and more research shows that even moderate drinking is bad news for your health. Make this the year you extend Dry January into the next eleven months.

17. Trying to win every argument

Winning arguments often means losing goodwill. Not every disagreement needs a verdict. Sometimes the better move is to try to understand the other person and agree to disagree.

18. Holding on to your anxiety habit

Anxiety ruins your well-being and ability to enjoy life to the hilt. You may think of it as a reaction, a feeling, or a disorder. But perhaps the best way to think about anxiety is as a habit. Like all habits, the anxiety habit can be broken. Here’s how to break yours.

19. Dressing like a boy instead of a man

For most of human history, dressing differently marked the passage into manhood; it helped men take themselves seriously and be taken seriously by others. Clothes don’t make the man, but they do shape how he shows up. Dressing more like a grown man and less like a boy will remind yourself (and the world) that you mean business.

20. Saying yes when you mean no

You’re probably a nice guy. You like to help people and you don’t like to disappoint them. But saying yes to things when you really want to say no is just setting you up for burnout and resentment. This year, learn to say no tactfully without over-explaining. It will free you up to say yes to meaningful, freely-chosen priorities.

21. Settling for a job you hate

You spend at least a third of your life at work. Why spend that time at a job you despise? Enduring a bad job drains more than your paycheck can replace. Even if you can’t leave tomorrow, you can start positioning yourself for something better.

22. Being a conversational narcissist

Conversational narcissists only like to talk about themselves; they don’t ask other people questions, and even when someone else has a chance to talk, they find ways to bring the discussion back to themselves. Conversations are meant to be games of tennis where you each take turns hitting the speaking ball over the net. When you listen as much as you talk, you’ll learn more, come off as more charming, and walk away with stronger connections.

23. Going through your week without a plan

Winging it sounds freeing until the week runs you over. A simple plan creates orientation and reduces decision fatigue. You don’t need a color-coded system; you just need a rough map. Check out our article on how to plan your week; it shares the system I’ve used for nearly twenty years to get stuff done.

24. Being too proud to say you’re sorry

Apologizing is hard; it’s never easy to admit you’re to blame. You feel like you lose status and face. But shirking responsibility costs you more in how people see you. You’d be surprised how much respect you can gain from others with a clean, unqualified “I messed up and I’m sorry.”

25. Not responding to emails and text messages

A hundred years ago, people set aside a dedicated hour or two each day to answer handwritten correspondence. Twenty years ago, people would spend hours each week writing each other long emails. Today, it feels too onerous to dash off a 30-second response to a text. Don’t let your attention span shrink so much that you don’t have time to reply to people who may need an answer to move forward on something, or just feel dejected over being ignored.

26. Blaming your parents for your current life

Your upbringing matters, but at a certain point, you’ve got to take responsibility for who you are now and who you’re becoming. You can’t change the past, but you’re in charge of the future.

27. Thinking good times are just around the corner

You’d like to get together with friends, you’d like to host a party, you’d like to take that trip you’ve been thinking about, but this month is just too busy. You’ll make those things happen a few months from now, when your calendar seems clearer. Of course, when that future time arrives, your schedule will feel just as busy as it currently does. The idea that good times are just around the corner is a mirage; life will always feel crowded. There’s no better or worse time to make fun happen, so why not pull the trigger right now?

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.