04/12/2023, 08:15 How to Grow Up and Be More Mature | Mark Manson

How to Grow ABOUT THE

AUTHOR

Up: A Guide to Mark is the three-time

#1 New York Times

Being Human
bestselling author of
The Subtle Art of Not
Giving a F*ck as well as
other titles. His books
written by MARK MANSON have sold around 20
million copies, been
filed under PERSONAL VALUES | PRODUCTIVITY
translated into more
than 65 languages,
and reached number
one in more than a
dozen countries. In
2023, a feature film

W hen I was like four years old, despite my

mother warning me not to, I put my finger on
about his life and
ideas was released
worldwide by
a hot stove. The stove was red and bright and shiny
Universal Pictures.
and I knew yummy food came from it, so the allure
was irresistible. LEARN MORE
ABOUT MARK

That day I learned an important lesson: really hot

things suck. They burn you. And you want to avoid
touching them again.

Around the same time, I made another important

discovery. The ice cream that my parents would treat
me on occasion was stored in the freezer, on a shelf
that could be easily accessed if I stood on my tippy
toes.

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One day, while my mother was in the other room

(poor mom), I grabbed the ice cream, sat on the floor,
and proceeded to engorge myself with my bare
hands.

It was the closest I would come to an orgasm for

another ten years. If there was a heaven in my little
four-year-old mind, I had just found it. Fucking
perfection. My own little bucket of Elysium filled with
congealed divinity.

As the ice cream began to melt, I smeared an extra

helping across my face, letting it dribble all over my
shirt, practically bathing in that sweet, sweet
goodness. Oh yes, glorious sugary-milk, share with me
your secrets, for today I will know greatness.

…then my mom walked in. And all hell broke loose—

including but not limited to a much-needed bath. I
learned a lesson that day too. Stealing ice cream and
then dumping it all over yourself and the kitchen
floor makes your mother extremely angry. And angry
mothers suck. They are not pleasant to be around.
They scold you and punish you. And that day, much
like the day with the stove, I learned what not to do.

But there was a third, meta-lesson going on here as

well. It was a simple lesson—a lesson so obvious that
we don’t even notice when it happens. But this lesson
was actually far more important than the other
lessons: eating ice cream is better than being
burned.

That might not strike you as profound. But it is. That’s

because it’s a value judgment. Ice cream is better than

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hot stoves. I prefer sugary sweetness in my mouth than a

bit of fire on my hand. It’s a discovery of preference
and, therefore, prioritization. It’s the knowledge that
one thing in the world is preferable to the other and,
therefore, all future behaviors will consider that fact.

And this is the job of drooly little four-year-olds. To

explore ceaselessly. To discover the world around
them—to determine what feels good and what feels bad
—and then create value hierarchies out of this
knowledge. Ice cream is better than being burned.
Playing with the dog is more fun than playing with a
rock. Sunny days are better than rainy days. Coloring
is more fun to me than singing. These feelings of
pleasure and pain become the bedrock of all our
preferences and knowledge going forward in life and
actually lay the foundation for what will become our
identity later.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What It’s Like to Grow Up

How to Be an Adult

If Only There Were More…

What Level Are Your Values On?

Our Culture’s Maturity Crisis

How to Grow Up

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WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GROW UP

A friend of mine once described parenthood as,
“Basically just following around a kid for a couple
decades and making sure he doesn’t accidentally kill
himself, and you’d be amazed how many ways a kid
can find to accidentally kill himself.”

One could say young children are always looking for

new ways to accidentally kill themselves because the
driving force behind them is an innocent curiosity.
Early in life, we are driven to explore the world
around us because our brains are collecting
information on what pleases and harms us, what feels
good and bad, what is worth pursuing further and
what is worth avoiding.

But eventually, the exploratory phase exhausts itself.

And not because we run out of world to explore. Quite
the opposite, actually. The exploratory phase wraps
up because, as we become older, we begin to
recognize that there’s too much world to explore. It’s
too much to take in. You can’t touch and taste
everything. You can’t meet all the people. You can’t see
all the things. There’s too much potential experience
and the sheer magnitude of our existence
overwhelms us.

Therefore, our brain begins to focus less on trying

everything for ourselves and more on developing
some rules to help us navigate the endless complexity
of the world before us. We adopt most of these rules
from our parents and teachers. But many of them we
figure out for ourselves. For instance, after fucking
around near enough open flames, you develop a little

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mental rule that all flames are dangerous, not just that
one on the stove. And after seeing your mom get
pissed enough times, you begin to figure out that
stealing is always bad, not just when it’s ice cream.

As a result, some general principles begin to emerge

in our minds. Practice care around dangerous things
so you won’t get hurt. Be honest with your parents
1. Pretty much all of
and they’ll treat you well. Share with your siblings
this article is my own
and they’ll share with you.
spin on the research and
pioneering ideas of the
These new values are more sophisticated because
developmental
they’re abstract. The little kid thinks, “Ice cream is psychologists Jean
awesome, therefore I want ice cream.” The adolescent Piaget, Lawrence
thinks, “Ice cream is awesome, but stealing stuff Kohlberg, and Robert
pisses my parents off and I will get punished; Kegan. My version is

therefore, I’m not going to take the ice cream from simplified, of course. If I
had to recommend one
the freezer.” The adolescent applies rules and
book to dive into the
principles to her decision making in a way that a
subject, I would
young child cannot.
recommend Kegan’s The
Evolving Self.
As a result, an adolescent learns that strictly pursuing
your own pleasure and avoiding pain can cause
problems. Actions have consequences. You must
negotiate your own desires with the desires of those
around you. You must play by the rules of society and
authority, and then you will, more often than not, be
rewarded.

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This, quite literally, is maturity in action: developing

higher-level and more abstract principles to enhance
decision making in a wider range of contexts. This is
how you adjust to the world, how you learn to handle
the seemingly infinite permutations of experience. It
is a major cognitive leap for children and
fundamental to growing up in a healthy, happy way.1

When we’re toddlers, we are learning to see the world

in terms of cause and effect. Of pleasure vs pain.
Touching the hot stove causes pain in my hand.
Therefore, it is bad. Stealing ice cream from the
freezer causes my body to feel pleasure, therefore it is
good. Good is better than bad.

This is why young kids are like little sociopaths. They

cannot conceive of anything in life beyond what is
immediately pleasurable or painful for them at any
given moment. They cannot feel empathy. They
cannot imagine what life is like in your shoes. They
just want some fucking ice cream. NOW!

What happens when we get older is we begin to

understand that there are multiple consequences to
any single action and many of them affect us either
indirectly or at some point in the future. General
rules and trade-offs are understood as the way these
consequences function. Mom and Dad get angry if I
steal something; therefore, I will not steal, even if it
feels good. My teacher will punish me if I talk in class;
therefore, I will not talk, even if I want to.

The knowledge of pleasure and pain is still there in

these older children. It’s just that pleasure and pain
no longer direct most decision making. They are no

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longer the basis of our values. Older children weigh

their personal feelings against their understanding of
rules, trade-offs, and the social order around them to
plan and make decisions.

This is an improvement, but there’s still a weakness in

this adolescent approach to life. Everything is seen as
a trade-off. Older children and adolescents (and a
shocking number of adults) approach life as an
endless series of bargains. I will do what my boss says
so I can get money. I will call my mother so I don’t get
yelled at. I will do my homework so I don’t fuck up my
future. I will lie and pretend to be nice so I don’t have to
deal with conflict.

Nothing is done for its own sake. Everything is a

calculated trade-off, usually made out of fear of the
negative repercussions.

You can’t live your entire life this way, otherwise,

you’re never actually living your life. You’re merely
living out an aggregation of the desires of the people
around you. To become an optimized and emotionally
healthy individual, you must break out of this
bargaining and come to understand even higher and
more abstract guiding principles.

NEED HELP FIGURING OUT

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HOW TO BE AN ADULT
When you google “how to be an adult” most of the
results that come back talk about preparing for job
interviews, managing your finances, cleaning up after
yourself, and not being a disrespectful asshole.

These things are all great, and indeed, they are all
things that adults are expected to do. But I would
argue that they, by themselves, do not make you an
adult. They simply prevent you from being a child,
which is not the same thing as being an adult.

That’s because most people who do these things do

them because they are rule- and transaction-based.
You prepare well for a job interview because you want
to get a good job. You learn how to clean your house
because it has direct consequences on your health and
what people think of you. You manage your finances
because if you don’t, you will be royally fucked one day
down the road.

Bargaining with rules and the social order allows us

to be functioning human beings in the world. But
ideally, after some time, we will begin to realize that

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the whole world cannot always be bargained with,

nor should we subject every aspect of our life to a
series of transactions. You don’t want to bargain with
your father for love, or your friends for
companionship, or your boss for respect. Why?
Because feeling like you have to manipulate people
into loving or respecting you feels shitty. It
undermines the whole project. If you have to
convince someone to love you, then they don’t love
you. If you have to cajole someone into respecting
you, then they don’t respect you.

The most precious and important

things in life cannot be bargained
with. To try to do so destroys them.

You cannot conspire for happiness. It is impossible.

But often this is what people try to do, especially
when they seek out self-help and other personal
development advice—they are essentially saying,
“Show me the rules of the game I have to play; and I’ll
play it.” Not realizing that it’s the fact that they think
there are rules to happiness that’s actually preventing
them from being happy.

While people who navigate the world through

bargaining and rules can get far in the material world,
they remain crippled and alone in their emotional
world. This is because transactional values create
toxic relationships—relationships that are built on
manipulation. And toxic relationships, as I conclude
in my Healthy Relationships Course in the Mark
Manson Premium Subscription, are devoid of

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emotional nutrition and extremely difficult to get out 2. According to

of. Lawrence Kohlberg’s

model of moral
development, which
When you achieve adulthood, you realize that viewing
much of this article is
some relationships and pursuits as transactions guts
based on, by 36 years
them of all joy and meaning. That living in a world
old, 89% of the
where everything is bargained for enslaves you to population has achieved
other people’s thoughts and desires rather than freeing the adolescent stage of
you to pursue your own. To stand on your own two moral reasoning and

feet, you must be willing to sometimes stand alone. only 13% ever achieve
the adult stage. See: L.

Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an Kohlberg (1987). The

Measurement of Moral
abstract principle is right and good for its own sake.
Judgment. Cambridge,
The same way that the adolescent realizes there’s
Massachusetts:
more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain,
Cambridge University
the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than Press.
the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation,
approval, and satisfaction. The adult does what is
right for the simple reason that it is right. End of
discussion.

3. Delayed self-
gratification is one of
the strongest predictors
of a child’s future
success in the world. See
the famous
“marshmallow
experiments:” Mischel,
Walter; Ebbesen, Ebbe
B.; Raskoff Zeiss,
An adolescent will say that she values honesty— Antonette
because she has learned that saying so produces good (1972).“Cognitive and
results—but when confronted with the difficult attentional

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conversations, she will tell white lies, exaggerate the mechanisms in delay of

truth, and fail to stand up for her own self-worth. gratification”. Journal
of Personality and
Social Psychology. 21
An adolescent will say he loves you. But his
(2): 204–218.
conception of love is that he gets something in return
(probably sex), that love is merely an emotional swap
meet, where you each bring everything you have to
offer and haggle with each other for the best deal.

An adolescent says she is generous. But when she

does favors and gives gifts, it’s always done
conditionally, with the unspoken idea that she will
receive something in return at some later date.

An adult will be honest for the simple sake that

honesty is more important than pleasure or pain.
Honesty is more important than getting what you
want or achieving a goal. Honesty is inherently good
and valuable, in and of itself. An adult will love freely
without expecting anything in return because an
adult understands that that is the only thing that can
make love real. An adult will give without
expectation, without seeking anything in return,
because to do so defeats the purpose of a gift in the
first place.

So the little kid steals the ice cream because it feels

good, oblivious to the consequences. The older child
stops himself from stealing it because he knows it will
create worse consequences in the future. But his
decision is ultimately part of a bargain with his future
self: “I’ll forgo some pleasure now to prevent greater
future pain.”

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But it’s only the adult who doesn’t steal for the simple
principle that stealing is wrong. And to steal—even if
they got away with it!—would make them feel worse
about themselves.

IF ONLY THERE WERE MORE

ADULTS IN THE WORLD
Now, I know what you’re saying, “Geez Mark, by your
definition, most of the people walking around in the
world are shit-brained adolescents, or worse, a bunch
of over-sized children.”

Well… yeah. Have you talked to any humans lately?

By and large, they kind of suck.2

Here’s a sad fact: few ever make it to adulthood. And

fewer manage to stay there. Why is that?

When we are little kids, the way we learn to transcend

the pleasure/pain values (“ice cream is good,” “hot
stoves are bad”) is by pursuing those values and
seeing how they fail us. We steal the ice cream, mom
gets pissed and punishes us. Suddenly, “ice cream is
good,” doesn’t seem as straightforward as it used to—
there are all sorts of other factors to consider. I like
ice cream. And I like mom. But taking the ice cream
will upset mom. What do I do? Eventually, the child is
forced to reckon with the fact that there are
unintended consequences from pursuing pleasure
and avoiding pain.

This is essentially what good early parenting boils

down to: implementing the correct consequences for

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a child’s pleasure/pain-driven behavior. Punish them

4. More about how this
for stealing ice cream. Reward them for sitting quietly
adolescent values
in a restaurant. You are, quite literally, helping them
torpedo relationships
to understand that life is far more complicated than can be found here. Good
simply pursuing one’s pleasure and avoiding one’s books on how the
pain.3 parent/child
dysfunction creates

Parents who fail to do this fail their children in an romantic dysfunction

incredibly fundamental way because, as children later in life are Getting

the Love You Want by
grow up, they will experience the shocking
Harville Hendrix, and
realization that the world does not cater to their
Attached by Amir
whims. This will be incredibly painful for them, far
Levine and Rachel
more painful than it would have been had they Heller.
learned the lesson when they were younger. And as a
result, by having to learn this lesson at an older age,
they will be socially punished by their peers for not
understanding it.

Nobody wants to be friends with a selfish brat.

Nobody wants to work with someone who doesn’t
consider others’ feelings or appreciate rules. The un-
taught child will be shunned and ridiculed for their
behavior in the real world, resulting in even more
pain and suffering.

Parents can also fail their children in another way:

they can abuse them. A young child who is abused
also does not develop beyond their pain/pleasure-
driven values because their punishment follows no
logical pattern and doesn’t reinforce deeper, more
thoughtful values. It’s just random and cruel. Stealing
ice cream sometimes results in harsh pain. Other
times it results in nothing. Therefore, no lesson is
learned. No higher values are produced. And the
child never learns to control her own behavior. This is

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why children who are abused and children who are 5. Shout out to St.

neglected often end up with the same problems as Andrew’s Episcopal

School for turning out
adults: they remain stuck in their childhood value
to be one of the best
system.
things that ever
happened to me. But it
Even worse, if the abuse is extreme enough (or if the
was rough there for the
child is particularly sensitive) this constant pain can first couple years.
become baked into their psyche going forward. Their
normal day-to-day existence will be a state of distrust
and fear, and they will compulsively seek pleasure to
assuage that underlying pain. This is where addiction
and compulsion are born. Alcohol, sex, drugs,
gambling, Instagram—as they grow older they will be
compulsively sucked into these activities because it
allows them to become distracted from themselves, to
momentarily forget who they are and what they feel.

More significantly, many abused children will

subconsciously seek out further abuse in their adult
relationships for the simple reason that abuse is the
only thing that makes sense to them. It becomes an
identity for them. They need it to feel whole.

People get stuck on the second adolescent stage of

values for similar reasons, although the results are
less severe. Some people are incredibly good at
playing the bargaining game. They are charming and
charismatic. They are naturally able to sense what
other people want of them and they are adept at
filling that role. Put bluntly: they’re too good at
manipulating people to get what they want. And
because their manipulation rarely fails them in any
meaningful way, they come to believe that this is
simply how the whole world operates. Everyone is

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like this. Everyone is manipulative and controlling.

Love is bullshit. Trust is a sign of weakness.

It requires good parents and teachers to not allow

themselves to succumb to the adolescent’s bargains. It
is their responsibility to point out to the adolescent
that this sort of behavior is a never-ending treadmill,
that you can only get so much from the world by
bargaining with it, that the only things in life of real
value and meaning are achieved without conditions,
without transactions. The best way to do this is
through example. The best way to teach an adolescent
to trust is to trust them. The best way to teach an
adolescent to respect is to respect them. The best way
to teach someone to love is by loving them.

When parents and teachers fail to do this, it’s usually

because they themselves are stuck at an adolescent
level of value judgments. They, too, see the world in
transactional terms. They, too, bargain love for sex,
loyalty for affection, respect for obedience. In fact,
they likely bargain with their kids for affection, love,
or respect. They think it’s normal, so the kid grows up
thinking it’s normal. And the shitty, shallow,

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transactional parent/child relationship is then

replicated when the kid begins forming romantic
relationships.4

Some adolescents become stuck at the second stage

for the same reason others are stuck at the first: abuse
and trauma. Victims of bullying are a particularly
notable example. A person who has been bullied in
their younger years will move through the world with
an assumed understanding that no one will ever like
or respect them unconditionally, that all affection
must be hard-won through a series of practiced
conversation and canned actions. You must dress a
certain way. You must speak a certain way. You must
act a certain way. Or else.

As adults, they will move through the world assuming

all human relationships are a never-ending tit-for-tat
trade agreement. That intimacy is no more than a
feigned sense of knowing one another for each
person’s mutual benefit. Again, this is because, in the
transactional world of high schools, this person was
mistreated and abused for doing those transactions
poorly. They didn’t dress the right way. They weren’t a
“cool” kid. They got bad grades or had a learning
disability or were scrawny and awkward.

As a result, they are psychologically punished for

decades, as they live the rest of their life in constant
fear of ever fucking up a transactional relationship
ever again. And instead of recognizing that the
problem is the transactional approach to the world itself,
they assume the problem is that it took them so long
6. For more on this
to do the transactions appropriately.
topic, I recommend
Daniel Kahneman’s

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It’s probably an overstatement to say that Marilyn brilliant book,

Manson saved my life. But he might have saved my Thinking, Fast and
Slow.
maturity. When I was 13, I was kicked out of my
school and lost almost all of my friends. My parents 7. One of the first things
divorced a few months later, and not long after, my taught in Alcoholics
brother moved out of the house. To get me away from Anonymous is that

the bad influences around me, my parents sent me to addicts are compulsive
liars. But it’s not
a Christian school in suburban Texas5 where I knew
because they want to.
no one. I was an atheist and unathletic geek in a state
It’s because they are so
that worships football and Jesus, in that order.
compulsive with their
actions, that they must
For a while, it wasn’t pretty. I got shoved into some compulsively lie to
lockers. I got laughed off the football field. It took me continue to justify those
almost two years to make any friends. It sucked. I felt actions. They lie so

the compulsion to try and fit in, to buy into the frequently and so easily
that they believe
transactional nature of the high school social life, to
themselves. This is
“fake it to make it.” But, at the same time, it was those
probably the clearest
very behaviors everyone expected from me that I
definition of a child-like
hated so much. pleasure/pain value I
can imagine. All that
Marilyn Manson was an inspiration to me around this matters is the
time because through his music and in his interviews, pleasurable feeling.

he vocally pushed a message of self-empowerment, Nothing and nobody

especially to disillusioned teens like me. It was he else.

who first suggested that I get to decide what is cool and 8. This is what a lot of
not cool, that people shame non-conformists because men don’t understand:
they are afraid of not conforming themselves, and that telling a woman
that daring to not conform and empowering yourself something honest for

to be who you want to be is what gave others the wrong reason is no

better than lying in the
permission to do the same.
first place. Women
implicitly get this, even
though they often can’t
express it. To them, it
makes a guy feel ‘creepy’
or ‘desperate.’ But, at

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the heart of it, is the fact

that the man is treating
his relationship with
her transactionally to
get something from her
(usually sex) instead of
treating her
unconditionally as one
would in an adult
relationship. Much of
feminism is simply
trying to get men to stop
seeing relationships
with women in terms of
Today, Marilyn is often remembered for his cheesy
a transaction and
makeup and his shock rock outfits on stage. People
instead see them as
don’t realize how in-touch he was with the disaffected other adults. The
suburban youth of the 90s. There’s a reason he problem is that most
shocked people with his intelligent interviews as men don’t even see other
much as he did for his stage antics. That’s because men as respectable

there was always a message beneath his madness: adults.

that you don’t have to buy into the transactional game 9. This is the major
if you don’t want to. You are always free to choose. reason why I don’t buy
And not only are you free to choose, but you are into utilitarian ethical
obliged to choose who you are going to be, whether philosophies. This idea

you realize it or not. that you can simply

calculate life in terms of
pleasure-added and
The only question is: do you have the courage to do it?
pain-averted strikes me
Do you have the courage to be an adult? Do you have
as naive at best and
the courage to decide for yourself what your values
misguided at worst.
are? Some of the best
moments of my life were
incredibly painful and

WHAT LEVEL ARE YOUR undesirable. Some of the

VALUES ON? worst moments of my

life felt amazing at the
time. The utilitarian
framework sounds
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The problem with writing about any sort of hierarchy wonderful in theory but

like this is that every reader tends to immediately quickly falls apart in
practice for any
imagine themselves on the top rung, taking discreet
situation of even modest
pleasure in judging the masses of poor, unfortunate
complexity.
souls stuck on the rungs below them.

The fact of the matter is that if you are reading this,

most of your values are likely in the pleasure/pain
stage or the transactional stage. I know this for the
simple reason that the majority of the population is
still floundering in these stages most of the time
(myself included). And let’s be real: this is a personal
development site—you wouldn’t have come here if
things weren’t a little bit fucked up already.

On top of that, these high-level, adult values are the

definition of what we consider to be noble and
virtuous. It’s the CEO who takes the blame for an
employee’s fuck up. It’s the teacher who sacrifices her
vacation days to help tutor a struggling student. It’s a
friend who risks the friendship by telling you that
your partying has gotten out of control.

We all know and revere these stories. And the reason

we know and revere them is that they’re uncommon.
Because we rarely, if ever, are able to do these things
ourselves. Most of us, most of the time, are stuck at
the level of bargaining, of asking ourselves, “Yeah, but
what’s in it for me ?” or worse, at the level of childish
pleasure, screaming, “GIMME THAT, I WANT IT!”

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The truth is, it’s hard to detect what level our values
are on. This is because we tell ourselves all sorts of
elaborate stories to justify what we want. A gambling
addict will compulsively pursue the thrills of making
and losing money, but in his head, he’s invented a
convincing story about how he’s going to win
everything back and show everyone he’s not a loser
(adolescent bargaining) or that he’s actually doing
this for the good of his family (adult virtue).

This is bullshit, of course. He simply can’t help

himself.

It’s clear, then, that we can’t trust our own

interpretations of our actions. There’s a small
mountain of psychological evidence to support this:
we feel something first, then we justify it later with
some story we tell ourselves. And that story is usually
highly biased and vastly overestimates how noble and
selfless we were.6

Therefore, we must learn to distrust our thoughts. We

must become skeptical of the interpretations of our

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own actions. Instead, we must focus on the actions

themselves.

Thoughts can lie. Interpretations can

be changed or forgotten. But actions
are permanent.

Therefore, the only way to get at your values—to truly

understand what you value and what you do not—is to
observe your actions.

If you say you want to go back to school and get your

degree, but it’s 12 years later and you’re on excuse
number 57, then no, you don’t actually want to go
back. What you want is to feel like you want to go back.
And that is completely different.

If you say you value honesty in your relationship

above all else, yet regularly hide your actions and
behaviors from your partner, actively question their
motivations and where they’ve been, and snoop into
their text messages when they’re sleeping, then, no,
you don’t value honesty. You say you do to justify your
lower-level values.

Chances are you’re good at adhering to higher-level

values in some contexts and not others. There are
people who are great friends but shitty parents. There
are people who are great parents but shitty
professionals. There are people who are just shitty
people but holy fuck, are they productive. We all have
our areas of maturity and immaturity.

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Most recurring emotional problems people

experience are simply first- and second-level value
systems that are being held onto despite the fact that
they are failing. A mother who fights with her
children constantly because they don’t call her with a
certain regularity is holding onto a transactional
approach to love—the idea that love can be quantified
and measured. A friend who tells you white lies
probably does so because he doesn’t want to threaten
whatever he’s getting from you. A co-worker who
steals your work and calls it their own is indulging in
a compulsive desire for pleasure (or, in this case,
success).

The only way to get clear about our own values is by

learning to observe our own actions and observing them
dispassionately as if we were neutral bystanders:

Actions that consistently hurt yourself or others,

that you find yourself excusing repeatedly and/or
lying to hide, probably indicate you have a low-
level compulsive pleasure/pain driven value. Lying
is inherently selfish and designed to make way for
our most selfish desires. If I lie to my wife about
where I was last night, then it signifies, by
definition, that I am acting selfishly and
compulsively. Generally, the more lying, the more
compulsive we probably are.7

Actions that are premeditated with the desire to

get a certain result out of someone or something,
are bargaining/transactional values. There’s a
difference between telling someone you’re
interested in them because that’s what you think
they want to hear, and simply telling someone

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you’re interested in them because you’re freely

expressing yourself. The latter is honesty, the
former is manipulation. And the line between the
two is blurry for a lot of people.8
Actions motivated by deeper ethical principles
that you’re willing to suffer for because you
believe they are right in all contexts, regardless of
the specific outcome to yourself, are
representative of higher-level adult values.

These are things you come to understand about

yourself because you question not only your actions
but your interpretations of your own actions. You
must sit and think critically about yourself and about
what you’ve chosen to care about, not through word,
but through deed.

Ultimately, this is what it means to “know thyself”—to

know your own values, to have a clear understanding
of your actions and what motivates them, to
understand what level of maturity you’re operating
on.

Any time you sit down with a therapist or coach or

friend, this is the process that is happening. You are
describing your actions and your interpretation of
those actions. With the guided assistance of the
therapist/coach/friend person, you then sit there and
pick apart whether or not your interpretations of your
actions actually make sense. Or are you just deluding
yourself? Do your actions reflect what you think is
important? If not, where is the disconnect?

It’s this process of aligning your self-interpretation

with your actions that gives you control over your life
and your actions. It’s this alignment that allows you to
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feel a sense of meaning and fulfillment in your life. To

become happy and healthy. It’s this alignment that
allows you to grow up.

OUR CULTURE’S MATURITY

CRISIS
Modern democracy was basically invented under the
assumption that the average human being is a selfish
delusional piece of shit. The belief went that the only
way to protect us from ourselves is to create systems
so interlocking and interdependent that no one
person or group can completely hose the rest of the
population at any given time.

Put another way, the founders and Enlightenment

thinkers understood that the games of politics and
statecraft are inevitably played at the level of
bargaining and transactional relationships, and
therefore systems need to be constructed in such a
way that no one person (or organization) can win too
much, too often.

Most politicians make their names and their livings

by existing in a vast web of transactional
relationships. They bargain with their voters and
donors. They bargain with each other to build
coalitions and alliances. They bargain with other
branches of government and political parties to
jockey for prominence and position. Politics is a
transactional and selfish game, and democracy is the
best system thus far for the sole reason that it’s the
only system that openly admits that.

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There’s only one way to threaten a democratic

system: by demanding one’s own desires and
pleasures are more important than anyone else’s.
That is, by being childish.

This is what extremists are: childish. They’re a bunch

of fucking babies. Because extremists are intractable
and impossible to bargain with, extremists are, by
definition, childish. They want the world to be a
certain way and they refuse to acknowledge any
interests or values other than their own. They refuse
to bargain. They refuse to appeal to a higher virtue or
principle above their own selfish desires. Therefore,
they ruin everything around them.

Extremists are dangerous because they know how to

dress up their childish values in the language of
transaction or universal principle. A right-wing
extremist will claim he desires “freedom” above all
else and that he’s willing to make sacrifices for that
freedom. But what he really means is that he wants
freedom from any other values. He wants freedom
from having to deal with change or the
marginalization of other people. He wants the
freedom to pursue his own impulses and desires.

Extremists on the left play the same game, the only

thing that changes is the language. A leftie extremist
will say that she wants “equality” for all. And that she
will give up anything for it. But what she really means
is that she never wants to feel inferior or harmed.
That she never wants to feel threatened or unsafe.
Essentially, that she never wants to feel pain. And
demanding that everyone be treated equally at all

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times, in all circumstances, is one way of running

away from that pain.

Extremism, on both the right and the left, has

undeniably risen in the past few decades. There are
likely many complicated and overlapping reasons for
this. But I’ll throw out one idea: that the maturity of
the voting population is deteriorating. American
culture is based on the indulgence of pleasure and
avoidance of pain. American consumerism has
become so good at indulging these childish impulses
that much of the population has come to see them as
rights. Extremists on the right respond to the fact that
they believe climate change is a hoax or evolution is
fake with the claim that they have the right to believe
anything they want to. Extremists on the left respond
to the fact that people are inherently unequal, and a
free, functioning society requires there to be winners
and losers by claiming they have a right to whatever
treatment someone else has.

These are childish views. They deny reality. And when

you deny reality, bad things happen.

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The problem is that the media (again, both on the

right and the left) has discovered that reinforcing the
childish wishes of extremists on each side is good for
business. That’s because extremists, like children, are
compulsive. They don’t know how to stop. They are
addicts for their cause. They throw their lives away
for it. And because they will throw their lives away for
an imagined cause, they make for the most
impassioned audience. And with the internet
squeezing the media’s business models dry, they’ve
slowly had to resort to pandering to the most reactive
and virulent people out there: the childish extremes.
The extremes get the most attention. They get the
most clicks. And they cause the most controversy. So
they dictate the media’s discourse.

Welcome to 2018. Let’s hope we all survive.

HOW TO GROW UP
STEP 1: FAIL
Chances are, if you’re reading this, and you’re still
stuck organizing your life around pleasure/pain
values, or transactional/rule-based values, you
probably don’t need me to explain why they cause
problems—your life is already a fucking mess.

But just in case you do, here you go:

Pleasure/pain values fail for the simple reason that

pleasure and pain are bad long-term predictors of
health, growth, and happiness. OK, yeah, touching
a hot stove sucks and you shouldn’t do that
anymore. But what about lying to a friend? Or
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waking up early for work? Or, like, not doing

heroin. Those are just a few of the millions of
examples where pursuing pleasure/pain values
will lead you astray.9
Transactional/rule-based values rob you of the
trust, intimacy, and love necessary to remain an
emotionally healthy and happy human being. This
is because, when you view all relationships and
actions as a means to an end, you will suspect an
ulterior motive in everything that happens and
everything anyone ever does to you.

Before you can move on and learn from these flawed

value systems, you must experience the pain of them
failing. That means not denying that they are failing.
That means not avoiding the pain of that failure. That
means facing that failure head on and admitting what
is plain to see: that you fucked up, and there’s gotta be
a better way.

STEP 2: SKIN IN THE GAME

People operating on a childish pleasure/pain values
derive their self-esteem from how much pleasure or
pain they feel. Therefore, when they feel good, they
feel good about themselves, and when they feel bad,
they feel bad about themselves. So when a person at
this level fucks up big-time, their first explanation is
likely going to be, “I’m a piece of shit. I’m a horrible
person. What was I thinking?”

This is harmful. This likely makes the problem worse.

The problem is not you. The problem is what you’re
choosing to value, how you’re choosing to see the
world and the way in which it operates. There’s
nothing wrong with pleasure. There’s nothing

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necessarily wrong with pain either. It’s the reason each

occurs that makes them right or wrong.

Recognizing this truth is what gently shoves your

value-system into a more mature
bargaining/transactional level. You didn’t fuck up
because you caused pain. You fucked up because you
caused pain for bad reasons. The reason a drunk driver
hitting another car is so unethical is not because
people got hurt—it’s because the drunk driver is far
more culpable than the other person—i.e., the
transaction was unfair.

A lot of people try to “fix” those who suffer from

compulsive actions and are stuck in the pleasure/pain
value system by bringing them straight up to
adulthood. They want to teach alcoholics the virtue of
honesty. They want to convince violent abusers of the
importance of generosity and patience.

But you can’t do that. You can’t skip stages. That’s like
skipping algebra and going straight to calculus. You
can’t go from a child to an adult without being an
adolescent in between.

People stuck at compulsion need to first learn to think

of things in transactional terms. Alcoholism isn’t bad
because your body is a temple and self-harm is
intrinsically wrong—those are adult values.

No, alcoholism is bad because it’s a bad trade-off. It

hurts people. People who don’t deserve it. People you
love and want to help. It fucks up other life plans. It
destroys families, finances, and fidelity. It’s
essentially giving up a mountain for a molehill.

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Addicts and criminals often overcome this by latching

onto some transactional value. For some, it’s religion.
But for most, it’s usually a loved one. I once spoke to a
recovered drug addict who said the only thing that got
him through was his daughter. He didn’t give a shit
about himself. But the thought of her losing out on
the opportunity to have a father, when she had done
nothing to deserve it, brought him to his knees and
eventually got him sober.

Addicts often talk about “hitting rock bottom.” Rock

bottom is a place that is so destructive, so painful,
that they are no longer able to avoid the simple fact
that their behaviors are destroying their own lives
and the lives of others. It’s only with this intensely
painful realization that the addict is confronted with
the transactional nature of life. That their choices
have consequences, not just for their future self, but
for others. And those consequences must be
managed.

We move beyond our childish values when we realize

that we have skin in the game—that there are
repercussions for our actions beyond our immediate
self.

This is why research has found that the most effective

ways to break any bad habit is to—you guessed it—to
bargain for it. Try this: write your best friend a check
for $3,000 and tell him if you ever smoke another
cigarette, he can go cash it. It’s shocking how effective
this is. Create consequences for yourself. Create
accountability.

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STEP 3: BE WILLING TO DIE FOR

SOMETHING
Getting a solid footing on transactional/bargaining
values will make you a functioning human being. But
it won’t make you a mature adult. You’ll still suffer
from transactional, toxic relationships and crises of
meaning in your day-to-day life.

The key difference between an adolescent and an

adult is that the adolescent is scared to do anything
unless they feel confident that they’ll get something
in return for it:

They don’t want to risk quitting their job unless

they know they’ll be happier somewhere else.

They don’t want to tell someone they have feelings

for them unless they can guarantee a satisfying
relationship will occur.

They don’t want to risk sharing their ideas unless

they know they will win the approval of others.

To an adolescent, the way they feel about themselves

is determined by how well they’re able to bargain
with the world. And if they fail to bargain with the
world, then they will blame themselves. For this
reason, the adolescent is scared to death of rejection
or failure. To them, to fail or be rejected is a sort of
death because everything they want from the world—
all meaning, all purpose—will be denied them.

It’s this willingness to die that leads to adulthood.

Adulthood occurs when one realizes that the only way
to conquer suffering is to become unmoved by
suffering. Adulthood occurs when one realizes that

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it’s better to suffer for the right reasons than to feel

pleasure for the wrong reasons. Adulthood occurs when
one realizes that it’s better to love and lose than to
never love at all.

An adult looks at that career change and says, “I’d

rather be dead than a zombie who sleepwalks
through a life not his own.” And he quits.

An adult looks at that person they have fallen for

and says, “I’d rather be dead than to hide my heart
from the world.” And she speaks.

An adult looks at their ideas and says, “I’d rather

be dead than to suppress my own talent and
potential.” And then she acts.

An adult accepts that there are some ways of living

life that are worse than not living at all. And because
they recognize this, they are able to act boldly in the
face of their own shame or fears.

In my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck , I

relate a number of painful and traumatic experiences
from my adolescence: the dissolution of my family,
painful social rejections, the loss of my first romantic
relationship, the death of a friend.

Because I experienced so much hurt in my

relationships when I was younger, for much of my
early adulthood, I approached relationships in
algorithmic terms: I studied books on relating to
people and learned how to present myself in ways
that minimized rejection, that gave me more
influence over people’s perceptions of me. I pursued
sex relentlessly, in an attempt to make up for the
depth of my emotional pain with superficial, hollow
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relationships. For many years of my life, I saw

friendships simply in terms of utility: I do this for
someone so I can get something in return. And the
moment a relationship began to cause me pain, I
would find a way to escape it.

I was very successful at this for many years. I created

and then escaped from—literally, I traveled the world
to get away—dozens of relationships with otherwise
good people, some of whom really cared about me,
but who I was not mature enough to handle.

But this escapism was a solution that was as painful as

the problem. The only thing more painful than losing
a significant relationship is not having a significant
relationship. And it slowly began to dawn on me that
happiness was not the point—pain was. That the same
way the struggle and challenge in my professional life
made my accomplishments more meaningful, the
willingness to face pain and discomfort was actually
what made relationships feel meaningful. Not the
sexiness or excitement or satisfaction.

And so, at the ripe old age of 30, I finally came to

understand what it meant to live my life as an adult.
That it’s the ability to choose: what pleasure is
worthwhile, what pain is worthwhile, to pursue and
love unconditionally, without judgment or shame. So
I chose to celebrate. Me and eight of my closest
friends went to Las Vegas and drank about $1,000 of
alcohol in one night. And it was wonderful.

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