# The Blue Dot Effect: Why Things Always Seem Worse Than They Are

An episode of [SOLVED with Mark Manson](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247526593), 12 Jun 2024, 37 min.

Audio: https://claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/441/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/episode.flightcast.com/cdbqcckhhbtp8giztisvmeoh.mp3

Have you ever wondered why, despite everything seemingly going well, you still feel a nagging sense of dissatisfaction? Well, you’re not alone. This is actually a fascinating psychological phenomenon I call "The Blue Dot Effect". It’s all about how our brains can trick us into seeing problems and negativity even when everything around us is getting better. Join me and Drew as we unpack this curious effect and explore how it impacts our everyday lives. From the way we perceive our personal achievements to our overall happiness, the Blue Dot Effect plays a sneaky role in shaping our mindset. Let's dig right in. CHAPTERS Chapters • 00:00:00 Introduction: Why This Research Changes Everything • 00:02:08 The Blue Dot Effect: The Original Study Explained • 00:04:56 Why Your Mind Invents Problems When Life Gets Better • 00:07:25 Crime, Safety, and the Paradox of Progress • 00:08:46 The Media Negativity Bias and Information Overload • 00:09:35 Living in New Zealand: When There's Nothing to Protest • 00:11:58 The Psychological Immune System and Problem Homeostasis • 00:13:51 Why We Need People Who've Seen Real Hardship • 00:16:18 How the Internet Compresses the Blue Dot Effect • 00:17:05 The Information Diet: Why Consuming Less News Makes You More Objective • 00:19:41 Economic Perception vs Reality: Why Nobody's Happy Despite Growth • 00:21:28 Personal Health and Fitness: Moving the Goalposts on Yourself • 00:23:59 When Self-Improvement Becomes the Problem • 00:28:36 Mental Health Diagnosis: ADHD, Trauma, and Definition Creep • 00:32:17 The Value of Journaling: Creating a Reality Check Against Concept Drift • 00:34:50 Reading History Instead of News: The Ultimate Perspective Shift • 00:35:57 Progress Tends to Mask Itself: Dan Gilbert's Final Word ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://bit.ly/4w46FMH FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

## Transcript

[0:00] So one thing that happens a lot of times in our job is as we are going through troves of psychological research, we will stumble across a particular concept or a piece of research that I will find particularly profound. I will feel like it explains so much of what happens in the world, so much human behavior, so much of the bullshit that we seem to deal with on a day-to-day basis that,
[0:21] And I personally see it as part of my job is to publicize some of these lesser known research findings that might have wide implications. Now, this happened maybe five years ago. There's a concept called prevalence-induced concept change. It was found by some researchers at Harvard. I included it in my second book, Everything's Fucked, a book about hope. And then I did a short-form video about it maybe late last year, like last December. And it went...
[0:48] Absolutely bananas. Fucking crazy. Like 10 million views. And what's so interesting about this concept is like you can go through the comments underneath that video and you will find examples of people of every political stripe everywhere on the spectrum, every background, ethnicity, belief system, religion. And they are all saying, oh, this explains things.
[1:12] the people I disagree with. It's almost comical how universal this concept applies. And so this episode, what I wanna do is I wanna like dig into the research together, talk about what this concept is, why it's so important, and just talk through a lot of the examples of where we see the blue dot effect in the everyday world, how it explains why people are seemingly upset despite their circumstances being great,
[1:38] why people feel like the world is getting worse, even though by most objective metrics, it's getting better, and why people are just assholes on the internet all the time to each other. 20 million books sold, zero fucks given. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Why don't we start with just a quick summary, Drew, of what the research says, and then we'll get into the significance of it.
[2:08] Yeah, so the original study for this, they called it the prevalence-induced concept change, like you already said. We're calling it the blue dot effect because that's a lot more sexy and easy to understand. And it's because the first study they did in this was using blue dots. They showed people screens with a bunch of blue dots on it, and they told them, pick out the blue dots from all the other dots on the screen. Most of them were like shades of purple and stuff like that.
[2:30] And at first they say, pick out the blue dots. And they pick out the blue dots really well at first. And then slowly over time, they start reducing the number of blue dots on the screen. And people start mistaking more and more purple dots for blue dots. Their concept of a blue dot expands as blue dots become less and less frequent on the screen.
[2:50] Yeah. So this is the important principle is that when you remove the blue dots, people don't recognize that the blue dots are no longer there. They redefine what is blue for themselves. Exactly. Their definition of a blue dot expands to include more shades of purple as the prevalence of those blue dots becomes less and less.
[3:08] Okay, big deal, right? That's just with some dots. Whatever, yeah. The really interesting part about this study though, was that they started to generalize it to other areas too. So like the next study they did with this was with threatening faces. So they show people a whole bunch of faces on the screen, and a lot of them are threatening faces, and they say, okay, pick out the threatening faces.
[3:28] People are really good at this at first, but again, what they do is they start reducing the frequency of threatening faces on the screen, and people start mistaking the not-so-threatening faces for threatening faces. Interesting. As it goes on and on, right? This generalizes to other things, too. They did a series of six or seven studies with this. One of them they did was what they call moral violations,
[3:47] They presented people with stories, so no longer visual information, just stories of, okay, we're going to do this study. Is this study ethical or not? Right? And at first they just have some egregiously unethical studies that they're showing people. And they're really... A high frequency of those studies is what they offer them. And then they start giving them examples of kind of like borderline cases and then cases that are pretty benign.
[4:10] Same thing happens as you give them more and more kind of benign or not so unethical studies. People start thinking that, oh, these studies are unethical too. So this is very generalizable across domains. They find this in all sorts of areas. It's a very robust effect that they find and just absolutely fascinating.
[4:30] So to translate that for listeners a little bit, basically, when you tell people to find threatening things or unethical things, and there are a lot of threatening things or unethical things, people will very accurately identify what's threatening or unethical. But as you remove the threats and the unethical things, people don't recognize that there are fewer threats or unethical things. They redefine what is threatening and what is unethical to continue to see them.
[4:56] This reminds me, like there's a quote in Subtle Art where I actually quote the artist, Jose Marti, who said this. He said that when confronted with a life of no problems, the mind will quickly set about inventing some. Yeah. And to me, this is like a perfect reflection of that, that like the easier our life gets, the more we define smaller and smaller inconveniences and infractions as being unbearable, as being impossible to withstand.
[5:23] It happens everywhere. So it's so insidious. Yeah. Let's actually start broad. OK. And get narrow. Yeah. Because I think when everybody hears this and this is especially gauged by the comments. And I think this is probably why this video went so viral is because people of all political stripes see this and they're like.
[5:42] oh, that explains wokeism or that explains racism, right? It's like objectively there are fewer incidences of racism happening in society, yet the expansion of racism keeps growing. The definition of racism, yeah. Right. Expands. You could make the same argument with censorship. Like censorship as society has become less censored and more free of expression. I mean, we have the fucking internet. Like it is –
[6:11] It's the Wild West. You can literally say whatever the fuck you want. There's always a platform. You can go say it. Yet people's perception of censorship has grown and inflated so that even the smallest things like a tweet getting shadow banned or somebody getting kicked off YouTube is like deemed a violation of freedom of speech. There's all of these political vectors of around political issues that the blue dot effect
[6:36] is kicking in the gear and that people are perceiving drastic threats and infractions where, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, these would have just been, they wouldn't even been a news story. The media kind of feeds on this too, right? The negativity bias in the media, they've even seen this over the last 30 or 40 years, like you just said, more negative reporting has been, has been shown in the data.
[7:00] Over those 30, that 30 to 40 year period. And even though things have gotten better, poverty has gone down. Crime has gone down since then. The media's definition of negativity expands as well. Crime's a great one. That's a paradox that's kind of come up a lot, you know, the last few years is this obsession over a growing crime rate. Yet when you look at long term trends, it's crime is basically the lowest it's been. Especially violent crime. Yeah. Since they've started measuring it.
[7:25] Public safety is an interesting one. Neighborhoods and schools and just society in general is technically, I mean, there's fewer drunk driving accidents. There's fewer car accidents. There's fewer child predators. There's fewer violent criminals. Yet.
[7:41] Kids aren't allowed to go outside and play by themselves. Parents are getting arrested for letting their kids wander down the street by themselves. There's this kind of hysteria over safetyism, over protecting young people at all costs. It's another area where...
[7:56] The safer that society has become, our perceptions of it don't stay accurate. We simply move the goalposts back and we start imagining threats where they objectively weren't there before. There's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there though, right? Some people could probably argue that, well, the reason that crime has gone down is because we're more vigilant and we're more aware of it, right? There's probably that argument as well.
[8:21] I think if you look at the data, the lag is the other way, though. Like crime started going down. For sure. First. And then we got crazy about safety and everything like that. Yeah. For sure. Well, and there's also a weird thing that has happened. You know, this kind of ties into the negativity bias in the news media, which is that there are fewer crimes, but a higher proportion of the crimes are publicized in a pretty horrific and spectacular way.
[8:46] You see this in the data, too, just about how many people are killed by police officers every year or how many – if you segregate it by race to how many black people, how many white people, how many whatever. People way overestimate, way overestimate on every single one of those categories, actually, too. Police brutality. You could put into this as well. It's probably the lowest it's been, I don't know, ever. This ties into – it's like –
[9:13] How much of this is the prevalence-induced concept change of like just the lack of bad things happening so you perceive things to be worse than they are versus how publicized and viral the negative events become? I do think it's some of both. Like it's interesting when I think about the time I spent in countries that just objectively have –
[9:35] practically no crime right like i remember i was i was living i spent half of 2021 in new zealand and one of my favorite things was to go to new zealand websites and read the headlines like read like what they thought of as a catastrophe you know it was just i found it absolutely hysterical i remember there was one day where there was like a news broadcast came on people are protesting outside of uh the prime minister's
[10:01] home you know they're upset i'm like oh man like what's going on what did she do and it turned out that there was like there wasn't enough funding for bus lanes or something and people were just up in arms about that and they wanted her to resign like to the point where like they were going and picketing outside of her house and i was like man if that's what gets you to go pick it like
[10:21] I want to know what, like, like, what are, where are the real problems? You know, uh, it's a fascinating part of human psychology though, Mark, if you think about it, like the, what makes us just look for problems constantly. I mean, there's obviously an evolutionary benefit to it, right? Like stay vigilant, everything like that. But that is to the extreme. Like everything could be perfect and we'll, we'll make up things.
[10:43] Problems give us a sense of meaning. We need something to resist against, to feel that sense of progress, to feel as though our life is generating value. The intensity of what the problem is, things get normalized in both directions very quickly. If you live in a war zone...
[11:02] your perception of problems is going to adjust itself accordingly, right? Like a school getting blown up or, you know, a shooting for somebody who lives in South Sudan or Somalia or something like it's not even going to register. It's just going to be a Tuesday. So in this study, they also found that when you add the blue dots back in, you start increasing the frequency of the blue dots. Yeah. People don't.
[11:31] They don't adapt back. They don't adapt back. Right. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm sure that probably generalizes as well. As things get worse, people are like, meh, you know, whatever. Interesting. Yeah. It's really fascinating. And that's the other thing. Like they've done so many things. They'll tell people we're going to reduce the number of blue dots. They'll tell them that in the studies. It doesn't matter. They still mistake the purple dots or go in the other way too. They don't. They're just like, we're going to increase the blue dots. People just don't, they can't adapt.
[11:58] I wonder how much of this ties into... So one of the researchers on these studies was Dan Gilbert, who I'm a fanboy of, and I hope one day comes on this podcast. Dan Gilbert is like one of the originators of this concept of a psychological immune system, which is this idea that our satisfaction with our lives tends to always hover around like a 7 out of 10. Yeah.
[12:18] And a really positive event, you know, you get married, you have a child, you win the lottery, you know, it'll bump you up to an eight or nine temporarily, but there's like this center of gravity back down by a seven, six and a half to a seven. And it's the same thing on the other end. Like, you know, something terrible happens in your life, you dip for a while, and then you eventually get pulled back up. This feels almost like a corollary theory of just pain instead of happiness. Like there's a certain amount of problems
[12:47] that you seem the need to have in your life, that you need to perceive in your life to maintain a sense of meaning and purpose. And when the environment around you gets absolutely terrible and abysmal,
[13:02] your definition of problem will adjust itself accordingly to kind of keep yourself at that moderate amount of problem. And then if there are no problems in your environment, your definition of a problem will also adjust accordingly until you hit that threshold to give you a sense of meaning and purpose. So I don't know if he would agree with that, but I see a parallel between those two things.
[13:22] It's also, it's something that I'm definitely, I'm going to feel like a fucking old man now. But like, I sometimes worry, I was talking to somebody about this recently, about how we're quickly approaching a point where everybody who lived through World War II is going to be dead probably the next decade or two. Because I think within society, it's important to have a certain demographic of people who have that perception, whose baseline level of like what a problem is, is pretty drastic. Yeah.
[13:51] Because it keeps everybody else in check. Like if everybody else is just their lives are like too cushy and comfortable, then they're going to start getting upset over spilled milk all the time. And they're going to generate a lot of political strife over things that are just kind of objectively not there. But if you have that cohort of people who have actually seen some shit and actually live through some serious problems, they can kind of be the check and balance on the rest of the population that hasn't. Yeah. Yeah.
[14:18] Yeah. Well, interestingly, when I was digging around with this too, I found there was a recent study in 2023 that the older you get, the less affected you are by the blue dot effect. Interesting. Yeah. So the more objective you see things. Well, I don't know. See, that brings up the question. Are you just more rigid in your thinking as you get older, which is kind of the stereotype, right? Right. And are you too loose when you're younger, too loose in your subjective moral judgments?
[14:48] Is there a balance of the rigidity of your thinking? And if it varies by age, I mean, yeah, that makes sense. Like, back in my day, this was so much worse or whatever, right?
[14:58] I mean, it's also just when you're older, you have a greater reservoir of experience to draw upon, right? So it's like you've seen thousands and thousands of threatening and non-threatening faces. So you're less likely to be fooled or you're less likely to have your definition of threatening be altered so quickly and easily. Whereas if you're young and you've never really been in threatening situations, your definition of threatening is going to move pretty quickly and easily. Right, right.
[15:26] That balance, and you're right, I think there needs to be a cohort in society that is more rigid in their thinking and holding like, okay, this isn't actually as bad as it is. Young people, let me teach you. We are going to be like a lot of finger waggy at the young people, but I think there is something to that. And it is, if you look at right now, a lot of the kind of civil discourse that's going on.
[15:48] It does seem to be there is a lot of like young versus old kind of rigid thinking versus this is the new way of thinking. And that's how it happens every generation. I know. But yeah, that's playing out at scale right now. One of the things I noted down, which I wonder, I kind of wish we had an old person here to ask them. I wonder if the Internet exacerbates this psychological phenomenon because we are presented with so much information online. You know, it's the equivalent of being exposed to like tons and tons of blue dots.
[16:18] If the effect of this requires a certain, like perceiving a certain amount of phenomena to have your definitions altered, then increasing the quantity of phenomena that you're perceiving is gonna make, is gonna alter your definitions quicker than it would otherwise. Right, right, compresses the time. Exactly. You can literally get on TikTok and within 30 minutes, your definition of what's threatening and what's not has changed. Whereas in past generations, you know, maybe that happens over the course of a year or two years.
[16:45] Well, I think it almost has to be in the studies that you go into the original study with the blue dots. They show them like tons and tons of blue dots and they do, I think it's like a couple hundred trials with each person. So it's over, it is over a lot of trials. So I think you're right. If you increase the amount of information there, you're, you're basically compressing the time needed.
[17:05] So maybe that's another argument for an information diet of like limiting your informational consumption simply to maintain objectivity as much as possible. Definitely. Yeah, I don't know. I know. I know with me, I just don't. I don't watch a lot of news anymore.
[17:22] I don't consume very much of media in general, not a whole lot of social media. And I have just found that I just don't have as many strong opinions as I used to have, for sure. Me too. And it's funny. I stopped watching news a few years ago, and I had the same experience. I felt like I got more objective the less news I consumed. Mm-hmm.
[17:44] And that made no sense to me. And then I remember, because I wrote an article about this, I remember going and digging into some research and actually found across the population that people who watch the most news are the least informed. Yeah. Which makes no sense. Well, yeah.
[17:59] Until you actually watch the news. Until you actually watch the news, then it makes total sense. When you see how people are consuming news, then it makes sense. Absolutely. And when you see how the news is portrayed, right? Like it's more infotainment than information. It's everything has an angle. Everything has a headline. Everything is, it's optimized for emotional reaction and emotional impact. And in some cases, political impact, more so than actual like sharing of objective information. So that's not...
[18:26] entirely surprising, but it is just such a bizarre thing that it's one way to look at it is like as you raise your threshold of what information can get through to you, it means the only things I get through are things of very high quality that have been vetted, that have been shared and discussed. Yeah.
[18:46] multiple times for a long period of time. It's the same thing as like eating less, more nutritional food. Right. Like you're probably just going to end up healthier. Right. What just like one kind of example I just thought of, of, of that is election polls. I know we're in election year right now. Election polls this early on, like almost none of them historically have ever even come close to being right. Yeah. And yet people like obsess over them now. Yeah. Right.
[19:12] It's like you're not as objective, like you're just saying. You're not as objective if you're paying attention to the micro, if you step back and just breathe. Yeah, you get a little bit more. There's this kind of weird thing going on right now where objectively, you've kind of already alluded to this. Objectively, things are getting better for a lot of people. Yes, inequality. There's this big gap between the haves and have-nots still. But objectively, your average person, if you would go back 100 years or whatever, the median person out there is doing better than they were 100 years ago.
[19:41] I've seen this in a couple of places and it's true. A poor person today, like if you are a, somebody who's on the threshold of poverty in a first world country today, you objectively live better than kings lived in the 19th century. So point blank. So yeah.
[19:58] So while that's happening at the same time, there's a perception that things are getting worse for a large number of people as well. And the kind of standard explanation I've seen so far for it is that gap in inequality. It's that, yes, as our psychology adapts to better things, we look around more and we see, oh, somebody else has it even better than I do. Yeah.
[20:19] I think that explains part of it, but now you have the blue dot effect on top of that too. I think that explains some of this as well, where it's just built in to our psychology that when things get better, we just don't notice it. Things getting better is discounted. So economics is another great example. You mentioned we're in election year right now, and when they poll people about how they feel about the American economy...
[20:42] It's terrible. The polling reflects as if we're in a recession right now. Yet, by all the economic data, the economy is doing great. Yet, nobody's happy. Right. Still. Right. Despite everything. And the blue dot effect seems like that might be carrying a lot of that. Yeah. It seems like, yeah.
[20:58] It's what's actually really weird about the economic stuff is that at least in the US, people's perception. Now we're kind of getting off on a tangent, but like people's perception of how good the economy is maps really well to just which president's in office. Oh yeah. Yeah. Which is fucking depressing as shit. Like, come on people. And that's gotten, that's gotten tighter over the last like 20 years too. Like that, that switch as soon as it just flips. Instantaneous. Instantaneous. It's insane. Well, let's talk about some of the personal stuff.
[21:28] Because there's a lot of interesting kind of individual examples of this. And, you know, this is something I've absolutely noticed with the definition of health, right? Like back when I was really unhealthy, my definition of being unhealthy was like drinking eight cocktails and eating half a pizza at three in the morning, right? It was just absolute abomination.
[21:52] Of a consumption evening. Whereas like today, even I'm like so much healthier on all these metrics, the same amount of guilt that I used to feel when I used to get absolutely plastered and eat like an entire pizza. I feel that same guilt when I like have a candy bar.
[22:08] and maybe eat an extra slice of pizza or something. I don't know. Like, it is so minuscule, the things that, like, trigger guilt in me now, which is weird because you would think that, like, now that I'm healthy, I don't have that food guilt anymore, but I still have just as much guilt. It's just the definition of what makes me feel guilty. The goalposts have moved so far back that, like, the slightest infraction, I'm like, oh, man.
[22:32] Why do I have a third piece of chocolate? Like, I'm disgusting. Yeah. No, I know. I beat myself up for every little bite of dessert that I have or anything like that. I totally get it. I've seen it. I've had some friends who were in the bodybuilding in the past too. And you see it. There's like an aesthetic version of this where I've had friends who were in the bodybuilding. They're like, oh, bro, I'm...
[22:54] I'm like so out of shape right now. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like you're fucking jacked. Right. They're like, man, no, I'm like, I'm up to like 13% body fat. I can't see my bottom abs anymore. Like, uh, it's, I'm a mess. And I'm like, that's offensive. Like, stop talking to me.
[23:12] No, for sure. Yeah. Fitness too. You can do the same thing with just like work workouts or whatever. Now that I've been working out more and if I don't get a good workout and I'm kind of like, oh, that's such bullshit. Like, yeah. Right. Like a better workout. Yeah. Or like you skip a set and you're like, yeah, you spend the next, the whole drive home being like, why did I skip that set? Yeah. So what, what's considered unhealthy is now expanded to all of these small minor things that really aren't unhealthy.
[23:33] As the unhealthy behaviors become less prevalent, we expand our definition of unhealthy behavior so that we always feel miserable about ourselves. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten from readers and listeners over the years that have just been like, you know, I'm improving my life in X way. When am I going to stop feeling bad for this thing? And really, and my, my answer, I just always want to be like,
[23:59] You're not. Yeah. You're not. Sorry, bro. Yeah. It goes back to, Mark, to the whole, you know, choose your problems, right? Yeah. The solution for it in some ways is, and this is your big thing too, one of your big things, choose your problems really well. Your mind is going to create problems. There's always going to be problems in your life, but you could also get to a point, you know, where if you're in this space and you're working on yourself a lot and you are making progress.
[24:25] There is a tendency to now focus on every little thing. Yes. And things that aren't important. And so like, yeah, you should give a fuck about things that really are important and be very, very cognizant of that as things get better. Well, and it's I think the tricky part is catching yourself when you your expansion of the definition has gone too far. Mm hmm.
[24:45] Yes. It starts when you've become that guy who like can't sleep at night because he hit 12% body fat or when you're the straight A student who hates themselves because they got an A minus on their last exam. When your definitions of something have become so stringent and so just uncompromising.
[25:03] That you are making yourself miserable. It's difficult to catch yourself in those moments. And I think that's where the skill of just learning to let go and just being comfortable with imperfection is really key. Yeah. That was a lesson I took from therapy, I think. Yeah. And we've kind of talked about this before. You've touched on it in a couple other episodes as well with guests. Is that...
[25:23] kind of you go to therapy and once you kind of have like the bedrock and the solid foundation and the big things kind of i'm not going to say under control but you have a grasp of them don't go looking for all the little things i had this experience actually this is how you can tell a therapist for one yeah is that they will tell you they're like look we don't have to solve every little thing and i had a therapist tell me that that was a big like click for me i was like yes okay great she's like i'm here to give you a few tools and
[25:49] That you can use out in the real world to apply to the things when they actually do, you know, when this comes up, you don't have to solve every little fucking thing when you come in here with me. So that's another area where- That's actually, that segues perfectly, I think, emotional problems, right? So it's, you'll see people with like very deep seated insecurities, debilitating anxiety. They work for years to solve it.
[26:13] And their immediate reaction is to look for the next insecurity or anxiety to solve. And eventually you get to a point, and this is where you get into self-help addicts and stuff. I've met self-help addicts that they will obsess over... There'll be an awkward conversation with their partner at dinner, and they will spend the next three days obsessing over it. And it's like, well, sometimes just awkward conversations happen. You don't need to go solve this. You don't need to...
[26:39] do breathing exercises and journal about it. At a certain point, the attempt to solve all your problems becomes the problem. Right. I think a lot of it's just like recognizing when is it enough? Like, when are you good? Right. When are you just like, okay, I've not solved all my anxiety issues, but...
[26:56] I'm good. I'm set. I can make it through life at this level and I'm going to have a good life. Like that's, that's the, the trick is to find that moment. You've talked about that before. You've talked about it. Like even now you're still like, I still get socially anxious. That's still a problem. And definitely for me too. Yeah. The thing that I overdid was like dating and relationship stuff when I was younger. You think you overdid it? Like writing a book about it?
[27:21] Like running a web business for five years around it. Yeah. Writing hundreds of articles. Slightly overshot that one. You think? Yeah. It was interesting because I remember after I wrote Models, I kind of had this moment where I was like, I'm retiring from this industry. Yeah. Yeah.
[27:38] And when I left the industry, I kind of shut that part of my brain off as well. You know, like that part that I used to go on dates and I've like analyzed everything that was happening on the date. It's like, oh, she laughed really hard. It was like, was that a genuine laugh? Or like, maybe I should say this again because I'll get her to laugh again. You know, like all that like kind of over analysis that was happening. I just stopped doing all that stuff. And it was funny because my dating life got better than I'd ever gotten before immediately as soon as I stopped doing that stuff. That was like kind of the big...
[28:06] aha of that experience of like, oh, I, I, I passed, there's a threshold where the attempt to solve the problems becomes the bigger problem than the actual problems. And I passed that threshold a long time ago. And so giving up actually makes you better at that point. Yeah. It's hard to find that spot, I guess, for a lot of people, especially it's a, you're a fish in water at a certain point too, right? Like that you're surrounded by it and you can't quite see the forest for the trees. Right. You don't know that that's not normal. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
[28:36] What else? Just more like we're kind of on the subject of mental health here, just more in the mental health realm. This happens as well. And actually in the medical community in general, but specifically in the mental health world where expansions of definitions of things like depression, trauma, ADHD, all of these things where we've identified the problem. We know how prevalent the problem is. We think we have a grasp on the problem. And then we start applying it to...
[29:03] edge cases or less severe cases. And all of a sudden, the definition expands into all these other areas. For example, ADHD, you were diagnosed with ADHD and you're pretty sure you... Like that's a legit diagnosis, right? And you had it developmentally and everything like that.
[29:18] There's a lot of debate right now. There's a few camps in the psychiatry world about whether it's being overdiagnosed or not right now. And there's ways it's interesting in the medical community, the mental health community, they have ways of trying to figure out if something is being overdiagnosed. And basically one of the criteria is...
[29:36] that they don't call it this, but is the blue dot effect taking over? You know, do we have a hammer and we're just looking for nails at this point? Yeah. And there's some people who think, you know, ADHD is being overdiagnosed in some populations and maybe underdiagnosed in others, but there's a big debate going on around it. And if you read it and you read it, knowing the blue dot effect, you see this, this whole backdrop to it. Well, something funny happens too when, when the, it.
[30:01] And I think medical diagnosis is a good example of this. Like when the definition of something expands to become so broad that it envelopes like a very significant percentage of the entire population, it kind of loses its meaning as a disorder. Like if 40% of the population has something, is that a disorder? Yeah. No, it's just a trait. Right.
[30:22] Right. It's just a difference. I mean, you see this in everything, right? Like you see this, the definition of trauma, if trauma, if anything painful is a trauma, then the meaning of trauma has no significance. Right. It's like, okay, well, cool. Everything's trauma. Who gives a shit? Right. Right. Trauma has the definition of trauma has expanded to include stress as well.
[30:41] It's interesting because I generally think that the people who push for the expansion of definitions do so with good intentions of like not enough people are recognizing their trauma. More people should work on their trauma. Let's make people more aware of their trauma and then –
[30:58] And then the definition of trauma expands to the point that people are like, well, if that's trauma, then there's no point in paying attention to it. Right. Because it's such a quotidian, insignificant, banal thing that happens all the time. And you see this over and over again. You see it in politics. Like you see it in everything. Definitions are funny.
[31:18] Right. Yeah. And the damage comes in over-treatment too. Yes. Right? So especially like something, a developmental disorder like ADHD, if you're going to be treating teenagers who are, you know, they don't even have a frontal lobe in their brain, basically, you know, and you're giving them psychoactive drugs.
[31:36] For these edge cases, you know, that's the worry. Whether that's going on or not, that's the debate. I don't know for sure where that line is being drawn. Some people think it's, we're over-diagnosing and over-treating. But that's where the damage comes is when the intervention is worse than just leaving it alone and dealing with it in a way that can be, you know, not as invasive. So, yeah. Rub some dirt on it.
[32:00] Rub some dirt on it. Again, our old man wagging our fingers at the kids here. I know. I know. So this is something I've been thinking about lately is journaling. And I think speaking of being an old man, I think this is something I haven't appreciated until recently. I know.
[32:17] I always thought about the value of journaling was in kind of just the therapeutic act of writing your thoughts out on paper and like the way it forces you to organize your thoughts and feelings in a very real way in your mind to help process them, I guess. What I never considered before, probably because I was too young to really consider it, is the value that comes with having a record record.
[32:41] of how you felt and perceived things at a previous point in time. If the blue dot effect is as significant as we're discussing here, then to me that raises the value and utility of journaling. Because if your definition of trauma in your life or your definition of injustice in your life has expanded...
[33:02] And these things usually expand unconsciously. We don't realize that they've expanded. Then having a documentation of how you felt about these things, say, five years ago, before you read all those news stories, before you watched all those TikToks.
[33:17] And seeing like, huh, oh, interesting. Like I didn't feel this way about these things in my life at that time. Maybe that's a reality check. I mean, maybe it's also just like, wow, I was so naive and stupid five years ago. You know, I've had that experience with journals before. And I've talked to a lot of people who've had that experience where it's like their memory of something is terrible. And then they go back and read the journal from when it happened. And they're like, oh, it actually wasn't nearly as terrible as I've
[33:44] kind of built it up to be in my, in my head. So yeah, I don't know. That's a concept that I've been kind of dwelling on. I feel like I should be journaling more. I've started to try to journal more recently too. And I kind of had like, like I've like, I don't know, 12 notebooks laying around and like 13 different notes in my phone and emails I send to myself and stuff like that. And I'm trying to like gather them all into one place because I think that's a good way to do it too. Yeah. Yeah.
[34:07] Yeah, it's I've journaled sporadically throughout my life. It's usually when things are going wrong. Like that's kind of what I'm like, I need to write. I need to write shit down. Yeah. But then things will go well for two or three years and I won't write anything. And I'm reaching an age where I'm starting to like regret that a little. It's kind of like prayer. You only pray to God when things are going wrong.
[34:25] You only pray to God when things are going wrong, right? Hey, God, sorry I haven't talked to you for a while, but I need something. Derek Sivers brought this up, though, too. You remember that? He said that he's been keeping a daily journal for years now. Yeah. And he talked about a relationship he was going through. It's been so good. What happened? And he went back and read it. He's like, oh, no. Actually, it was kind of terrible the whole time. Yeah. That's a perfect example. Yeah. I mean, the definition expansion aside. Mm-hmm.
[34:50] our memories of things are completely skewed as well. Atrocious, yeah. You know, and it's, you see, and again, to kind of bring it back to the political, this is why I started replacing news with reading history. And it was a complete game changer for me because people don't remember history. Like people think whatever is wrong now is the worst it's ever been. It's the worst, it's an absolute calamity. And then you just go start reading some history and you're like, oh my God, like just 40 years ago, it was crazy.
[35:19] 10 times worse. Right. Yeah. You know, and it gives you context to understand what's happening. Right. So it's, I definitely see that now, you know, we obviously we've got two prominent wars going on in the world. People are upset about them. They are terrible, but dude, just go pick up a fucking history. Like read some basic history about both of those regions, Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Gaza. And it's like-
[35:40] There is nothing happening right now that is like particularly unprecedented. Right. You know, or just completely unforeseen. Right. There is like multi-century history behind both of these events. They have been much, much worse and egregious in the past.
[35:57] Yeah, they are now. All right. I think let's let's end this. Dan Gilbert, the one of the psychologists behind this that I referenced earlier. He has a beautiful way of putting this. He said solving problems causes us to expand our definitions of them. When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it. And this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn't actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself.
[36:26] Fucking great, man. He's brilliant. And that is true on the personal as well as the political. Yeah. Progress tends to mask itself. You don't recognize it when it's there all the time. And sometimes when you think it's there, it's not. Right. So awesome. Well, anything else to say?
[36:43] That's all I got. That's all you got? All right. Well, thank you, everybody. Maybe we should expand our definition of a podcast into new and more fun things in the future. So please like and subscribe to the show. Let us know what you think in the comments. Feel free to send us an email. Mark at MarkManson.net. Drew at MarkManson.net. And we will see you next time.

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