Mark Manson's Blog, page 6

So you went on a first date with someone you met on Tinder. You made jokes and they laughed. You asked all the appropriate questions and listened attentively as they lit up talking about that job they love and that trip they’d always wanted to go on. It was a good night. But then they didn’t text you back, didn’t return your first, second, or third call. What went wrong?

You did all the things they tell you to do on a first date. You have a good job—even if you don’t always love it. And maybe y...

What do Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and just about any other “ism” that’s survived more than a few Kool-Aid chugging parties have in common?

No, it’s not that they feature old guys dressed up in togas.

No, it’s not that they all rip off each other’s myths and verses.

No, it’s not that they spent thousands of years slaughtering each other in the name of some ethereal deity.

It is this: They each promote delayed gratification as one of the highest hu...

PSA: Setting strong personal boundaries is not a cure-all for your relationship woes (or your lost keys). In fact, they’re more of a side effect of having a healthy self-esteem and generally low levels of neediness with people around you.

Boundaries in relationships work both ways: they create emotional health and are created by people with emotional health. They are something you can start working on today with the people close to you and you’ll begin to notice a difference in your self-esteem...

Ever since the release of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck back in 2016, many people have compared my work to Stoicism. Some have even gone as far as to say that my work is merely regurgitating Stoicism with a couple cool stories and F-bombs thrown in to spice things up.

Initially, I found this amusing. I had read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in college, as well as bits and pieces of Seneca. But other than that, I knew very little about the Stoics when I wrote the book. Since then, however, ...

There’s a fundamental assumption a lot of us make about sex that often causes a lot of skewed perceptions about why we’re not getting the sex/love we want.

Men have a tendency to make the assumption that sex itself is a need, regardless of who (or what) it comes from. Women have a tendency to assume that sex can only be a form of intimacy/love. Both of these are wrong, and they both get a lot of people into trouble in their relationships.

But to explain why, I need to explain psychological need...

Eye contact is important, especially in dating and gauging people’s attraction to you. Everyone should have a basic understanding of what each person is eye-coding to them in any given situation, and it doesn’t take a cryptographer to figure it out. Or if it does, then fuck it, I’m that cryptographer.

In this article, I will decrypt the 11 levels of eye contact for the uninitiated eye. Gone are the days of blindly guessing whether cutie at the bar has the hots for you. You will know. And if you...

I’ve got a friend who used to proudly proclaim he was a perfectionist every chance he got. He took pride in it. If something in his immediate environment wasn’t “right,” he would set out to fix it, almost reflexively. He had incredibly high standards for what he considered acceptable, both for the people around him and especially for himself. It made him good at what he did. But it could also make him kind of a dick.

He knew he could be hard on himself, but he always said it was because he want...

If you’ve ever putzed around the internet, looking for why your relationships might all be screwed up (and screwed up in the same ways, I might add), then you’ve probably come across Attachment Theory.

Attachment Theory is an area of psychology that describes the nature of emotional attachment between humans. It begins as children with our attachment to our parents. The nature of this attachment, and how well it’s fostered and cared for, will then influence the nature of our attachment to roma...

Back in 2010, I set a bold goal for myself. I took one of my websites and decided that I wanted to publish over 100 articles on it that year. I decided that by doing this, my goal was to accumulate more than a million readers by the end of the year.

To do this, I decided to take what, at the time, had been a modestly successful blog, and turn it into a kind of men’s magazine for millennials. I found half a dozen people to write articles for me. I redesigned the site. I created a pipeline of con...

Back in 2010, I set a bold goal for myself. I took one of my websites and decided that I wanted to publish over 100 articles on it that year. I decided that by doing this, my goal was to accumulate more than a million readers by the end of the year.

To do this, I decided to take what, at the time, had been a modestly successful blog, and turn it into a kind of men’s magazine for millennials. I found half a dozen people to write articles for me. I redesigned the site. I created a pipeline of con...