Mark Manson Audio Articles

Nearly every culture around the world encourages sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. So why is delayed gratification so hard?

There's a lot to like about stoicism, but it falls short in some key areas for me. Here's my take on it and the other influences on my personal philosophy.

Setting goals points us in the right direction and helps us clarify our values. But hanging on to goals when they no longer serve us is a recipe for misery.

Social media is the latest scapegoat to be blamed for all our social ills. Not only are these claims overblown, they're just wrong.

Even if 2020 was one long dumpster fire of a year, we sure learned a lot about ourselves. Here's what nearly 1300 people had to say about it.

Most people can't just sit with uncertainty, with not knowing what will happen. And this fear of the unknown makes us do some strange things.

The Dunning-Kruger effect stems from the ignorance of our own ignorance. But how do you fix something if you don't even know it's broken?

Creative people are anything but boring, but the creative process itself involves a lot of mundane work and boring consistency.

Therapy, journaling, and meditation have all been shown to improve mental health. When you look a little closer, they all share one thing in common.

Our beliefs can put healthy boundaries on questionable behavior. But limiting beliefs hold us back from what we want in life.

Some of the beliefs we hold seem so self-evident that they couldn't possibly be wrong. But if you dig a little deeper, you'll find that the beliefs that serve us in some ways can hurt us in others.

Sometimes the solution to a problem is worse than the problem itself. It's the Law of Unintended Consequences—and it's more common than you think.

Logical fallacies are incredibly common in our everyday lives. Here are some of the worst ones we all fall prey to.

We're all victims of our own biases. Some of them just make us more awful human beings than others.

Philosophy can help us live more meaningful live sand build better societies. We just need a framework of philosophy that fits our modern-day problems.

Achieving success in life has a lot more to do with how you define being successful than it does with doing what others tell you to do.

Decisions in life come down to trade-offs. And it just so happens we're really bad at evaluating trade-offs.

Resilience is the ability to positively adapt to negative events in your life. It doesn't mean feeling good all the time—it means you're okay with feeling bad sometimes.

Social isolation, lack of exercise, and financial uncertainty will almost certainly lead to deteriorating mental health around the world. But you can take steps today to soften the blow.

Like a muscle, forgiveness needs to be exercised consistently over a period of time. And just as our physical muscles keep our bodies healthy and strong, learning how to forgive can keep our emotional lives healthy and strong.

Most people think regret is a universally bad thing. But if you look a little closer, regret actually serves a very useful purpose in our lives.

The news is often heralded as a vital component of a thriving democracy. But here I argue that, in its current form, the news is doing more harm than good.

The 2010s were a decade of tumultuous change, growing pains, and incredible advancement for the world. Here are 10 lessons we learned.

Life is contradictory in many ways. Here are three paradoxes we all must face.

We all have demons, but overcoming them isn't really the goal you should be looking to accomplish.

Self-esteem isn't the silver bullet some people think it is, but it's still important. It just depends on how and where you're getting your self-esteem.

There’s a dark side to our constant stimulation. All of these low-value distractions in our lives have conditioned us to think that patience is for suckers; that we must “move fast and break things;” that if we’re not up-to-date on everything, all the time, we’re going to get left in the dust. This couldn't be further from the truth.

"Negative Self-Help" — an approach to personal growth based not on what feels good, but rather on what feels bad. Because getting good at feeling bad is what allows us to feel good.

No, You Can't Make a Person Change by Mark Manson

Distractions have become so pervasive in the digital age that we've come to accept them as normal. Here's how we can escape their grip and free our minds a little.

Emotional intelligence is a set of skills you can get better at with practice. Here are five skills you can cultivate to make you more a emotionally intelligent person.

What are your most important personal values? Do you actually value what you say you do, or are you lying to yourself? And just who the hell are you anyway?

Many equate self-discipline with living a good, moral life, which ends up creating a lot of shame when we fail. There's a better way to build lasting, solid self-discipline in your life.

Most of us are pretty terrible at making decisions that affect our lives. We have to learn how to deal with the emotional realities of these decisions and see things a little differently. Here are 5 principles I use to evaluate big decisions in my life.

We typically don't think of being an asshole as a good thing, but there's a difference between "good" assholes and "bad" assholes.

Kant was one of the most influential thinkers in modern history. His philosophy of morality doesn't just have lofty, theoretical implications; we can apply it to our everyday lives as well.

Trying to change yourself—that is, who you are—will inevitably lead you to fail and feel hopeless. But if you instead focus on changing your actions without worrying about how it changes you as a person, real change becomes much simpler.

Trying too hard to get what you want in life—like love, respect, and happiness—often has the opposite effect: you end up lonely, dejected, and miserable. Here's why.

It's possible to be self-aware to some degree and still be unhappy and unfulfilled. And while self-awareness has many benefits, it is, by itself, not the point. This is how you can cultivate and develop healthy self-awareness in your own life.

There are many, many things you should stop giving so many fucks about. Here are 6 of them.

Learning how to grow up and be more mature starts with knowing what you truly value. Being an adult means sticking to your values, even when it's not popular or doesn't benefit you.

A difficult lesson in life is learning how to let go of broken relationships, our pasts, and even parts of ourselves. This is how I've learned to deal with loss in my life.

My recommendations for books that actually help with depression and anxiety

Life isn't about feeling awesome all the time.

Here's how I overcame crippling FOMO.

Painful and traumatic experiences suck. But it's possible to come out of trauma a stronger, more resilient person—and it's actually a lot more common than you think.

Many of us allow ourselves to be defined by how much money we have or don't have. But the real value of money is something else entirely.

Constantly striving for happiness in the face of life's challenges can be just as bad as being miserable all the time.

How romantic love came to be a cultural centerpiece in western societies and why it kind of screws us all up.

The ultimate goal of self-improvement can be paradoxically self-defeating. This is what healthy self-improvement looks like.

Feminism as a movement gets a lot right: equality for all shouldn't be up for debate. But feminism as an institution has become regressive in many cases.