How One Question Can Change Everything
A Teenager’s Take on Mark Manson’s Philosophy
2020 and the Mind
I’m certain that when people thought about the turn of the decade, 2020 was not what they meant. They wanted to stop violence in the Middle East, they needed the US-China Trade War to finally end, they wanted the kids to get off their phones and finally go play with the family dog.
But instead, it seemed that society lost hope.
Not only did we see millions of acres of forest burned to the ground in Australia and California, but over a billion animals were killed in the process. A black man killed by a policeman in Minneapolis sent the country into massive protests and riots. A vile illness plagued the world and forced people into their homes — no friends, no contact, and for a lot of America, no jobs.
This year has truly been rough.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many family members and friends had their lives figured out before COVID-19 and then suddenly, they could barely function in the new environment. From here on out, there will be older generations that carry a mask with them wherever they go as long as they live — the new normal is here.
I’d like to introduce you to Mark Manson. He’s a New York Times best-selling author and blogger who has dedicated his life to giving advice “that doesn’t suck”. He has been impacting millions for almost a decade by using logical and pragmatic thinking to turn peoples’ lives around. His outlook on life is unique. There’s no sugar coating, no games, and no one trying to sell you something. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
As we continue to get used to this new world, there are a multitude of tools at our disposal. But there’s one tool that we don’t think of using as much that, if reframed and analyzed, could do the human race some good: the mind.
And not only that, if we learn to train the mind in ways that can be used to benefit and not harm, human beings are just that much closer to better communication, relationships, and financial stability. It all starts with one question:
How much pain do you want in your life?
No One Understands You
It’s easy to dismiss the positive things in life when we dwell on the negative. The whole expression “woke up on the wrong side of the bed” proves that. Starting on the wrong foot could very well mean the beginning of a terrible day for you. I know I’m not sounding that encouraging but if you’re having a bad day or a bad week or just a bad run lately, I have news for you — you’re not special.
Now before you click off the article and procrastinate on your work by rewatching The Office for the fourth time, think about this. There are almost 7.6 billion people in the world. In the grand scheme of things, it would seem that you are insignificant, but that doesn’t discount the fact that feelings matter. How you feel can generally change any situation from good to bad, or in this case, bad to good. Taking control of that is the best way to turn your dream life into reality.
When I was starting to enter puberty and the urge to start fights for no reason began to fester inside me, my dad sat me down. He kneeled by my bed and started off by saying, “Valkyrie, your body is going to start changing. You’re going to feel pretty lost. You’re going to feel like no one understands you. But just remember that whenever you’re in a fight with your mother and you feel that way, every other teenager is feeling the exact same way.”
I’m not telling you that I completely understood what he meant but after that conversation, I always thought back to that very phrase. Every time I got in arguments, I would ruminate on this line, “You’re going to feel like no one understands you.”
Everyone has days where they feel like no one gets it, no matter what age you are. We all have problems. We’re not perfect. But the issue these days is that we don’t recognize that we are all the same. That’s not to say we all have the same troubles. But when the cashier at the grocery store is rude to you about holding up the line and you go back to tell your friends all about how the cashier was so irritating, there should be at least one thought in the back of your head that thinks, “I did that same thing two days ago at McDonald’s”.
One Magic Question
Here’s where our engaging idea comes into play.
Mark Manson states in his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F***, that “Happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life”.
People don’t often think about exercising the mind like they do when they go on a 3-mile run or do a hundred pushups. It goes unnoticed by much of the general population. Quarantine has given us a lot more time to grow and develop as individuals but its also given us a lot of scary things to think about. This is why a change in mindset could save so many of our peers.
So why pain? Why think about something that would hurt us rather than focusing on the good things ahead? Well, it’s all about looking at what you have now and expanding on it. As a species, we continuously create problems in our heads that consume our lives as we grow older. But if we could channel that energy into something more positive, those problems would diminish and the severity of those problems would decrease exponentially.
That starts with deciding how much of those problems you want to endure.
Say you have a basketball game in two months. Your school basketball team is strong but you realize that you’re the weakest person on the team. You have one problem right now and that’s the fact that you’re the worst player. So what would you do?
You train super hard. Every day, you stay after school and shoot hoops, practice dribbling, play with your teammates, and spend time learning their cues and communicating. The day of the game comes. The game is going super well and you’re about to pass the ball to a teammate when you trip and the team gets the ball and scores. You’re upset but you keep playing. Your team wins! You’re down on yourself about that failed ball afterward. Then you realize that all you have to do is practice getting your footing correct and next time, you won’t get messed up.
Now, look closer at this specific instance. Two months ago, this imaginary player was missing hoops and not communicating with his team and was the weakest link to an otherwise strong chain. Now, that same player is a star and helped his team win a championship game. But that person still has a problem; their footing isn’t quite there yet.
Instead of our imaginary basketball player dwelling on the fact that he wasn’t good at the sport, he took the steps to better himself, even if that meant sacrificing his time and energy to practice. The player chose to take on these problems to improve his game, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get good. But through all of that pain, the end goal was enough to make you want to have more problems (i.e. your footing being off).
Now, instead of the problem being that you’re bad at basketball, the problem is that you’re footing is a little off. In those two months, you’ve improved so much that your problem has, therefore, become much smaller than it was at the start.
A Strange, Introspective Outlook
There are very few things that make you think twice about your existence and life as we know it and very few of those experiences can be shared. One that can be recommended, however, is The Midnight Gospel. This strange and whimsical adult comedy series follows Clancy, a “space-caster” who travels all over the galaxy to interview different beings on the meaning of life.
From the first episode, my attention was immediately drawn to the insane amount of content on screen. The podcast laid over the visuals made for an experience one can only describe as an “acid trip”. There’s nothing else like it. So why is this something I needed to share?
Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussell, the show’s creators, have done something incredible. This show not only amplified what it means to think about your problems but continued to hammer it into my brain that there is no answer to everything. Clancy becomes so entranced in his space cast that he forgets to take care of himself. He stops caring about his personal life and realizes that he’s been neglecting what makes him who he is.
Self-development is not just about reading and exercising and journaling. It’s more about looking at the past and changing a key aspect of your mindset to make a big difference. Life, as we know it, is constantly moving. We can’t change that. But what we can change is how we see our world and the people living in it.
In a society that is full of problems, our goal should be to prioritize the ones that will benefit us the most. To get there, we need to be continuously thinking about how much discomfort we want to feel and how much we’re willing to give up to get there. Clancy realizes that he wants to put everything he has into his work but ends up losing sight of what really matters. He didn’t truly think about the problems he was having and instead of the space cast fixing his bad habits and work ethic, it only disguised them and shielded him from the truth.
Visualizing the Future
Not only does thinking about the pain help us visualize what we’re putting into a problem, but it also makes the outcome more realistic. We can’t keep pretending like solving a problem is going to fix everything in our lives. Every problem is 100% unique. The ability to take a step back and look at that same problem knowing that there’s pain involved turns it into a reality. Of course, it’s going to take some sacrifice to solve it, but speaking it into existence is a lot better than solving the problem and realizing it didn’t make you happy in the first place.
How much pain are you willing to endure to get where you want to be? How much are you willing to sacrifice? What are you willing to give up to get that pay raise or get into your dream college?
Let me reiterate; this isn’t to say we don’t all have problems. Life sucks sometimes, we all know that. And this isn’t to say that sometimes, these problems will tear us down. But it’s all about coming up out of those problems and changing your mindset to the point where you no longer think about the problem. All you have to do is think about how the problem is changing you. The problem, at this point, is just a blip. An independent variable in the ever-changing realm of possibility.
The only thing stopping you is this one variable. So what are you waiting for?
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