Transcript
00:00:00Optimization.
00:00:01"Optimization is stealing our lives."
00:00:03"I had a couple of glasses of wine. It ruined three days of my life."
00:00:06"This is how you level up."
00:00:07"Wake up at the same time."
00:00:08"Go to bed."
00:00:09"Go to bed."
00:00:10"I don't actually care when you go to bed this much if I don't have a lot more."
00:00:13"Hyper-optimization has become a disease."
00:00:17The internet has a way of taking a good idea and squeezing every ounce of nuance out of it,
00:00:21turning it into something ridiculous, and I think that's happened again.
00:00:24It's always been an unspoken rule that improving your life was fine,
00:00:27as long as you don't talk about it.
00:00:29The moment that you mention it to anyone, you become insufferable.
00:00:31Now it appears this trend of anti-personal development is going viral.
00:00:35You've probably seen videos and articles with headlines like
00:00:37"How personal development ruined my happiness."
00:00:39"Why I quit optimization."
00:00:41"The self-improvement trap."
00:00:43It's called grindslop.
00:00:44And it's the idea that personal development has, somewhere along the line, lost the plot.
00:00:48Or, in some cases, that it was always nonsense to begin with.
00:00:52If you've followed me for a while, you'll know that this isn't some abstract thing for me.
00:00:55I have certainly contributed to this industry.
00:00:57And I think that there are legitimate criticisms against over-optimization.
00:01:01And I've been talking about the importance of just chilling the fuck out and the perils of grindslop for years now.
00:01:06Self-development went from exercising a few times a week and eating clean,
00:01:09to HRV, cold plunges, red light therapy, expensive supplements and VO2 max.
00:01:13It became a second full-time job, on top of the side hustle that you're also supposed to be doing.
00:01:18Look, I'm no saint for either religion.
00:01:21I'm a reformed degenerate turned into a reformed optimizer.
00:01:24It's the exact same amount of sweating, just with a slightly smaller risk of accidentally taking fentanyl.
00:01:30I was an adult infant for a long time, and I needed to sort myself out.
00:01:34There's nothing more shameful than someone still playing the game that you do when you're 20, when you're 40.
00:01:41And that is the industry that I came from.
00:01:43And I didn't want that.
00:01:45I had to pay my dues, right?
00:01:47I spent a long time having a very elaborate morning routine.
00:01:50I would get up and go for a walk, get sunlight in my eyes.
00:01:52I would drink salt in water before it was cool.
00:01:55I would meditate and journal and do breath work and yoga and make sure my food was prepped.
00:01:59And I would read.
00:02:00All of this was me basically paying penance for being such an idiot for a long time.
00:02:05Professional party boy, DJ, model, Love Island, take me out.
00:02:10I was all of the red flags you don't want in your future son-in-law.
00:02:13And I needed to recoup that debt.
00:02:16I got to party a lot and run some really cool events in Ibiza and Marbella and Newcastle and Manchester and Scotland.
00:02:22And then at some point I needed to grow up.
00:02:24And I could have grown up slowly over a very long period of time.
00:02:28Or I could have paid this debt to the version of me that would have done a bit of self-improving for 10 years between the age of 18 and 28.
00:02:36I didn't.
00:02:37I decided to do the equivalent of a Navy SEAL Hell Week that lasted for about five years from the age of 28.
00:02:42And that meant that I had to optimize a lot.
00:02:45I needed to pay this penance.
00:02:46And in retrospect, as cringy as it is to see me talk about this incredibly elaborate morning routine, I don't regret any of it.
00:02:55Because it transformed me from being somebody that I wasn't particularly proud of into someone that I was.
00:03:01And it's a period.
00:03:02It's a period that you go through.
00:03:03It's part of the lonely chapter.
00:03:04It's part of going from being a person who you don't like to becoming someone closer to the one that you do.
00:03:08And I think it's easier to do if you do it intensely.
00:03:11I think everybody needs to go through a period like this where they just focus on making themselves better.
00:03:15And unfortunately, that's going to require some isolation and some restriction.
00:03:19From the outside, that can look a lot like fragility.
00:03:21You're basically doing this weird ritual or rain dance that doesn't add anything to your life.
00:03:25This feels unnecessarily complex.
00:03:27It's fragile because if you don't do it, then you're going to feel worse.
00:03:30Can there be a type of personal development that takes it too far?
00:03:331000%.
00:03:34But I don't think we should be too quick to judge people who are doing this to try and pull themselves out of a trench
00:03:40that you didn't see them get into.
00:03:42You know, when I hear anti-grind slop critics say that having a morning routine is gross,
00:03:47it makes me think my morning routine used to be trying to explain to the taxi driver
00:03:51that that stain on the seat was already there when I got in.
00:03:54So I'll happily take my second morning routine over my first one.
00:03:58But this comes back to the point.
00:04:00The edgiest thing that I did for a long time was go to bed early.
00:04:04And somehow that offended people more than anything I did on a reality TV show
00:04:09where the goal was literally to bang everyone.
00:04:11The reason that I think I can talk on this is that I have been at the extreme of both of these ends, right?
00:04:16I've partied more, drank more and paid less attention to my personal development than almost everybody.
00:04:21And I've been more obsessive than almost everybody as well.
00:04:24I've seen both sides of this barbell and I get it.
00:04:27If you have spent years or decades on the self-optimization train only to find yourself burned out and miserable
00:04:33or your friend has lost his banter and you can't bear to hang around with them anymore, I feel for you.
00:04:37I really do.
00:04:38At those moments where it feels like you've turned your entire life into a performance review and homework that never ends, I get it.
00:04:45Now is the time for you to open up and give yourself some balance.
00:04:49But I don't think that we should be judging people when you have no idea how far along that journey they're on.
00:04:54There's this idea that I've been regurgitating over and over because I think people need to hear it.
00:04:58The type of person who consumes this sort of content most often isn't the lazy guy on the couch.
00:05:03It's the person who's already anxious, they're already disciplined, they're already lying awake at night, running an audit on their own day, tallying up everything that they did wrong.
00:05:11And when you pour more optimization onto something like that, it turns into burnout and sort of curdles into this type of bitter resentment.
00:05:18But at the same time, we are living in by basically every measure the most anxious, depressed, medicated, loneliest, most confused time in human history.
00:05:26And when anti-optimizers with good intentions trying to make people more robust publish stories about how self-development doesn't work,
00:05:32it can leave a lot of people with the message of just stop trying, throw the whole thing out.
00:05:36Self-improvement is a scam, log off, touch grass, eat a pizza, hit a bong and just do whatever you want because trying is pointless anyhow.
00:05:43And look, I understand the appeal of that, I really do.
00:05:45After years or decades of permanently being told that you're not doing enough, someone coming along and saying you're fine as you are is probably what you need to hear.
00:05:54But you don't fix the problem of "I tried too hard in the wrong direction" by just putting your head in a hole in the complete opposite direction.
00:06:01Or in my case, a K-hole.
00:06:03But here's my point: guidance never lands evenly.
00:06:06The people who least need a particular piece of advice are usually the ones most likely to overdose on it, while the people who desperately need it are somehow completely immune.
00:06:14"Fuck your feelings, just work harder" is rocket fuel for a genuinely lazy person who probably does need to have David Goggins screaming in his face.
00:06:21But it's poison for someone who's already grinding themselves into the dirt while they work too hard.
00:06:26Like, "Be kinder to yourself" is a lifeline for a perfectionist who's already tearing himself up.
00:06:30But it's a permission slip for the man who already lets himself off the hook every day.
00:06:34It's the same words, it's the same advice, but it doesn't have equal impact.
00:06:38And the one thing I want to get across is that it's not helpful to ask, "What works?"
00:06:43A better question is, "What works for me right now?"
00:06:47I'm never going to mock somebody for trying to become better than they were.
00:06:50The only thing that I'll ask of you is to be a little bit careful about where you go looking.
00:06:54Because the searching is noble.
00:06:56It's the landscape that you're searching in that's an absolute minefield.
00:06:59Which is why I got into this industry.
00:07:02My goal was to talk to the smartest people in the world and learn as much as I possibly could.
00:07:06And even then, I still have to remember that we can't just go off everything we hear and blindly follow advice.
00:07:11There is no miracle cure that will dissolve the fundamental difficulty and balance of being human.
00:07:18Underneath it all, I think it comes back to obsession.
00:07:20It's the greatest gift and the worst curse at the same time.
00:07:23If you're an obsessive person, and I am deeply, it's wired into me,
00:07:26then I can't actually help you with that.
00:07:29It's not a setting that you can dial down.
00:07:31If you are built to fixate, you are going to fixate on something.
00:07:35And the question is, "What are you going to fixate on?"
00:07:37An obsessive mind that's left to its own devices will always choose the path of leadership.
00:07:41At least resistance.
00:07:42Drinking, scrolling, porn, rumination.
00:07:44My goal when I started Modern Wisdom was, and always has been,
00:07:47to understand myself and the world around me.
00:07:50To offer you something slightly more positive to aim your intensity at.
00:07:53But please take this next piece to heart.
00:07:55It was never meant to be a set of instructions.
00:07:58I've always thought of it more like a library.
00:08:00A big, sprawling, slightly chaotic, autistic library that you're free to wander around in for as long as you like.
00:08:06You don't walk into a library with the mission of following every protocol from every book.
00:08:10You don't need to agree with every author.
00:08:12You're not supposed to.
00:08:13All you have to do is absorb new ideas, keep the ones that you like, and discard the rest.
00:08:17Whatever you decide to do, please be gentle with that part of you that's still trying.
00:08:22Don't beat it out of yourself.
00:08:24Take strength and courage to be searching at all.
00:08:27That's it.
00:08:28That's all I've got.
00:08:29- Welcome.
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