Social Media Isn’t the Problem… We Are

When I was a kid, there were serious discussions in churches, schools, and in front of Congress about whether the music my friends and I listened to might be satanic. I remember my friend’s mother making him throw away all of his Metallica tapes. I remember hiding the parental warning labels when asking my mom to buy the new Pantera album. I can...

Jun 2021

Meditation: Why You Should Do It

Take a moment. Breathe. Focus your mind. Slow down and read each word. Become aware of yourself reading this sentence, this paragraph. You, sitting there, focusing on each word, one by one. Become aware of each sound as it echoes in your mind, the one you’re hearing right now, and this one, and again and again and again. The voice in your mind reading...

May 2021

3 Simple Explanations for Why You’re Still Single

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...

May 2021

The Virtue of Delayed Gratification

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...

Mar 2021

Why I Am Not a Stoic

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...

Feb 2021

The Levels of Eye Contact

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...

Feb 2021

Fuck Your Perfectionism

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...

Jan 2021

The Surprising Science of Goal Setting (And Why You’re Probably Doing It Wrong)

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...

Jan 2021

7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose

One day, when my brother was 18, he waltzed into the living room and proudly announced to my mother and me that one day he was going to be a senator. My mom probably gave him the “That’s nice, dear,” treatment while I’m sure I was distracted by a bowl of Cheerios or something. But for fifteen years, this purpose informed all of my brother’s life...

Dec 2020

1,273 People Share Their Best Life Lessons from 2020

We will remember this year for the rest of our lives. We will tell people decades from now, “This is what I did in 2020. This is who I was. This is what changed.” A couple weeks ago, I reached out to my email list and asked, “What have been your biggest lessons from 2020?” Over a thousand people replied, some with multiple pages of thoughts and...

Dec 2020