Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 44 - The Feelings Economy

The TEDxChat podcast discusses the concept of holistic success and personal development. The host shares a quote about building a beautiful life and then introduces the topic of the "Feelings Economy" based on a chapter from Mark Manson's book. The chapter explains how Edward Bernays revolutionized marketing by appealing to people's emotions and insecurities. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, understood that tapping into insecurities could sell products. The podcast highlights the impact of marketing messages on individuals' psychological well-being and emphasizes the importance of understanding one's identity in order to make positive changes. Hello, hi, welcome to this installment of the TEDxChat podcast with me, your host, Cheo. The podcast where we focus on holistic professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Before we jump into this week's installment, I want to read you something that I came across on Instagram just now, and it reads, A beautiful life is not stumbled upon, it is built, it is chosen, it is nurtured over the years. A beautiful life is made from the heart, not the head. It is not one we can rationalize our way into, it's one that must be felt. A beautiful life is not one that is immediately comfortable, but one grown through the acknowledgement of what is worth being uncomfortable for. It is not one that is easy, it is one that is worth it. A beautiful life is composed of the things our ninety-year-old selves would have wished we had done with the years in which we were so young, but didn't realize, before the decades piled up and passed us by, and we came to find out how little time even the luckiest among us have. It is made of all the little whispered prayers they would have for us as they looked back, the same way we imagine our younger selves now, and wish we could impart and instill so much guidance, so often leaning in the direction of, Go where your heart already calls you, move toward the truth you already know. It's written by Brianna West, and it is shared on her Instagram account. I read it, it spoke to my heart, and I absolutely had to share it with you. From there, we go into this week's installment, which is entitled, The Feelings Economy, and it's informed by a chapter in Mark Manson's book, Everything is F'd, a book about hope, and the chapter is of the same name. As I read through this particular chapter, I thought to myself, as it is, this chapter is so worth sharing, and the way Mark Manson delivers it, his ability to wield a story in delivering the points that he's making, made me teeter on the very edge of making this a crafting an unforgettable present story, but I thought not. I thought best not to dilute the fundamental message in it, which is understanding what the feelings economy is, how it came about, and how it affects you and the choices that you're making. As Mark Manson tells it, in the 1920s, women didn't smoke, or if they did, they were severely judged for it. It was taboo, like graduating from college or getting elected to Congress. Smoking, people believed back then, should be left to the men. If you smoke too many, you might hurt yourself, or worse, you might burn that beautiful hair. This posed a problem for the tobacco industry. Here you had 50% of the population not smoking their cigarettes for no other reason than it was unfashionable or seemed to be impolite. This wouldn't do. As George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, said at the time, it's a goldmine right in our front yard. The industry tried multiple times to market cigarettes to women, but nothing ever seemed to work. The cultural prejudice against it was simply too ingrained, too deep. Then in 1928, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, a young, hotshot marketer with wild ideas and even wilder marketing campaigns. Bernays' marketing tactics at the time were unlike anybody else's in the advertising industry. Back in the early 19th century, marketing was seen simply as a means of communicating the tangible, real benefits of a product in the simplest and most concise form possible. It was believed at the time that people bought products based on facts and information. If someone wanted to buy cheese, then you had to communicate to them the facts of why the cheese was superior. Freshest French goat milk, for example, cured for 12 days, shipped refrigerated. People were seen as rational actors making rational purchasing decisions for themselves. It was the classic assumption that the thinking brain was in charge. But Bernays was unconventional. He didn't believe that people made rational decisions most of the time. He believed the opposite. He believed that people were emotional and impulsive and just hid it very well. He believed the feeling brain was in charge, and nobody had quite realized it. Whereas the tobacco industry had been focused on persuading individual women to buy and smoke cigarettes through logical arguments, Bernays saw it as an emotional and cultural issue. If he wanted women to smoke, then he had to appeal not to their thoughts but to their values. He needed to appeal to women's identities. To accomplish this, Bernays hired a group of women and got them into the Easter Sunday parade in New York City. Today, big holiday parades are cheesy things you let drone on over the television while you fall asleep on the couch. Back in those days, parades were big social events, kind of like the Super Bowl or something. So in other words, he bought the halftime show. As Bernays planned it, at the appropriate moment, these women would all stop and light up cigarettes at the same time. He hired photographers to take flattering photos of the smoking women, which he then passed out to all the major national newspapers. He told reporters that these women were not just lighting cigarettes, they were lighting torches of freedom, demonstrating their ability to assert their independence and be their own women. It was all hashtag fake news, of course, but Bernays staged it as political protest. He knew this would trigger the appropriate emotions in women across the country. Feminists had won women the right to vote only nine years earlier. Women were now working outside the home and becoming more integral to the country's economic life. They were asserting themselves by cutting their hair short and wearing racier clothing. This generation of women saw themselves as the first generation that could behave independently of a man, and many of them felt very strongly about this. If Bernays could just hitch his smoking equals freedom message onto the women's liberation movement, well, tobacco sales would double, and he would be a rich man. It worked. Women started smoking, and ever since, we've had equal opportunity lung cancer. Bernays went on to pull off these kinds of cultural coups regularly throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He completely revolutionized the marketing industry and invented the field of public relations in the process. Getting sexy celebrities to use your product, that was Bernays' idea. Creating fake news articles that are actually subtle advertisements for a company, all him. Staging controversial public events as a means to draw attention and notoriety for a client, Bernays. Pretty much every form of marketing or publicity we're subjected to today began with Bernays. But here's something else interesting about Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew. Freud was infamous because he was the first modern thinker to argue that it was the feeling brain that was really driving the consciousness car. Freud believed that people's insecurities and shame drove them to make bad decisions, to overindulge, or to compensate for what they felt they lacked. Freud was the one who realized that we have cohesive identities, stories in our minds that we tell ourselves about ourselves, that we are emotionally attached to those stories, and we will fight to maintain them. Freud argued that at the end of the day, we are animals, impulsive and selfish and emotional. Freud spent most of his life broke. He was the quintessential European intellectual, isolated, erudite, deeply philosophical. But Bernays, Bernays, his nephew, was an American. He was practical. He was driven, a philosophy. He wanted to be rich, and boy, did Freud's ideas, translated through the lens of marketing, deliver in a big way. Through Freud, Bernays understood something nobody else in the business had understood before him, that if you can tap into people's insecurities, they'll buy just about any damn thing you tell them to. Products are marketed to men as ways to assert strength and reliability. Makeup is marketed to women as a way to be more loved and to garner more attention. Beer is marketed as a way to have fun and be the center of attention at a party. That is all marketing 101, of course, and today, it's celebrated as business as you do. One of the first things you learn when you study marketing is how to find customers' pain points and then suddenly make them feel worse. The idea is that you needle at people's shame and insecurity and then turn around and tell them your product will resolve the shame and rid them of all that insecurity. Put another way, marketing specifically identifies or accentuates the customer's moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them. On the one hand, this has helped produce all the economic diversity and wealth we experience today. On the other hand, when marketing messages designed to induce feelings of inadequacy are scaled up to thousands of advertising messages hitting every single person every single day, there have to be psychological repercussions to that, and that can't be good. Feelings make the world go round. The world runs on one thing, feelings. This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good, and where the money flows, power flows. Just a quick pause here to point out that we have referenced ideas from at least three books in discussing this thing from Mark Manson's point of view. See, Mark Manson has talked about identity and the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. I would remind you here that it is a cornerstone of the argument that James Clear makes in Atomic Habits. James Clear argues that in order to change your habits and your behaviors, you must understand what identity you have chosen for yourself and what identity you reinforce. It's important to remember that choosing your identity may be conscious or unconscious. So whoever you identify as, consciously or unconsciously, you seek evidence of, and that evidence confirms your bias that that story applies to you. And here, Mark Manson shows us how marketing or Bernays showed the marketing world how to appeal to the stories that people tell themselves about themselves as a means to make money, how to manipulate the stories people tell themselves about themselves in order to make money. Am I a macho man? Yes. Does a macho man then drive a big truck? Yes. Do I make a lot of money? Yes. Do I want people to know I make a lot of money? How would people know that I make a lot of money? Maybe I must drive a big fancy car so that they can see it. Maybe I must live in a particular neighborhood so they can see it. Maybe I must spend in particular shops so that they can see it. And this is how you find yourself spending money to confirm to yourself the truth of the story that you've told to yourself about yourself. Now this flows very easily into Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money. The psychology of money is, yes, we must budget, yes, we must talk about all these great principles, yes, you must invest in the stock market or in property, whatever it is that you elect. But far more important, according to Morgan Housel, is understanding what stories are driving you, is understanding what is underlying when you make those decisions. Because we would like to think that we are all entirely rational people who think that they should spend less than 60% of their monthly income on day-to-day expenses and be able to save the rest or to do this with the other or whatever. But a lot of us are not doing that. And why aren't we doing that? A lot of it lies within the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Then we speak of Gumbutto, I think it was Gumbutto, Julio Gumbutto, I'm trying to remember his name, but the book is called Please Unsubscribe, Thanks. And this speaks to the next point that Mark Manson has raised. Please Unsubscribe, Thanks. The premise of the book is that you need to know when to step away from the information that you're being fed, from the stories that people are appealing to in you, and from the appeals themselves. Ask yourself what you're subscribed to, the thousand emails that you're receiving. Are they necessary? Which story about your identity are they feeding? Are they feeding the right one? Are they growing the parts of you that you would like to grow, or are they growing your insecurities for the purpose of growing somebody else's pocket? The idea here is to be conscious. Do not underestimate the role that the feelings and the stories that you have in you, that you have built up day after day after day for every day of your existence, are contributing to the way that you act day after day after day now. This is one of those episodes where I tell you something, not because I can change it, but because awareness is half the battle. Understanding how these things work might stop you from buying the next dress you see on Instagram. And so like Mark Manson says, to go back to Mark Manson's point now, feelings make the world go round, right? The world runs on feelings. This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good. And where the money flows, power flows. So the more you're able to influence the emotions of people and the world, the more money and power you'll accumulate. Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people. Money is its own special universal mini-religion that we all bought into because it makes our lives a little bit easier. It allows us to convert our values into something universal when we're dealing with one another. You love seashells and oysters. I love fertilizing soil with the blood of my sworn enemies. You fight in my army, and when we get home, I'll make you rich with seashells and oysters. Deal? Deal. That's how human economies emerged. No, really, they started because a bunch of angry kings and emperors wanted to slaughter their sworn enemies, but they needed to give their armies something in return. So they minted money as a form of debt or moral gap for the soldiers to spend, in other words, equalize when or if they got back home. Not much has changed, of course. The world ran on feelings then. It runs on feelings now. All that's changed is the gizmos we use to do these things to each other. Technological progress is just one manifestation of the feelings economy. For instance, nobody ever tried to invent a talking waffle. Why? Because that would be creepy and weird, not to mention probably not very nutritious. Instead, technologies are researched and invented to make people feel better, to prevent them from feeling worse. The ballpoint pen, a more comfortable seat heater, a better gasket for your house's plumbing. Fortunes are made and lost around things that help people improve upon or avoid pain. Here we are now in Glennon Doyle and Brene Brown territory, but let's continue. These things make people feel good. People get excited. They spend money. Then it's boom times, baby. There are two ways to create value in the workplace currently. Innovations, in other words, upgrade the pain. So the first way to create value is to replace pain with much more tolerable or desirable pain. The most drastic and obvious examples of this are medical and pharmaceutical innovations. Polio vaccines replaced a lifetime of debilitating pain and immobility with a few seconds of a needle prick. Not surgeries replaced, well, death with having to recover from surgery for a week or two. Number two, diversions. So we said there are two ways to create value in the marketplace. One is innovations. Innovations upgrade our pain. So if you leave, another way of discussing or considering innovations is in the context of the size of the house that you live in. So you might be unhappy about the size of the house that you live in and you think you might want a bigger one. So instead of a one-bedroom, maybe you move into a three-bedroom. Then you realize, oh, this is great. Now I have the space that I wanted, but I have to pay slightly more in levies. Oh, and now I have to clean all over this place. So there is discomfort, but there is an upgrade of the discomfort. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes. Number two, diversions. In other words, avoiding pain. The second way to create value in the marketplace is to help people numb their pain. Whereas upgrading people's pain gives them better pain, numbing pain just delays the pain or often makes it worse. Diversions are a weekend beach trip, a night out with friends, a movie with someone special, snorting cocaine. There is nothing necessarily wrong with diversions. We all need them from time to time. The problem is when they begin to dominate our lives. I do not support snorting cocaine, but Mark Manson likes to shock people, so we're here. The problem is when they begin to dominate our lives and wrest control away from our will, which cocaine will do, so don't take cocaine. Many diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive. I'm hopping on the cocaine, but Instagram does the same thing. TikTok does the same thing, so be wary. The more you numb the pain, the worse that pain becomes. It's impelling you to numb it further. That's how addiction works. At a certain point, the icky ball of pain grows to such great proportions that your avoidance of that pain becomes compulsive. You lose control of yourself. Your feeling brain has locked your thinking brain in the trunk and isn't letting it out until it gets its next hit of whatever, and the downward spiral continues. When the scientific revolution first got going, most economic progress was due to innovation. Back then, the vast majority of people lived in poverty. Everyone was sick, hungry, cold, tired most of the time. Few could read. Most had bad teeth. It was no fun at all. Over the next few hundred years, with the invention of machines and cities and the division of labor and modern medicine and hygiene and representative government, a lot of poverty and hardship were alleviated. Machines and medicines have saved billions of lives. Machines have reduced back-breaking workloads and starvation around the world. The technology innovations that upgraded human suffering are undoubtedly a good thing. But what happens when a large number of people are relatively happy, healthy, and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain. One of the reasons for this is that true innovation is risky, difficult, and often unrewarding. Many of the most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute. If someone is going to start a company and take a risk, going the diversion route is a safer bet. As a result, we've built a culture in which most technological innovation, in quotes, is merely figuring out how to scale diversions in new, more efficient, and more intrusive ways. As the venture capitalist Peter Thiel once said, we wanted flying cars, instead we got Twitter. Once an economy switches over primarily to diversions as we have, the culture begins to shift. As a poor country develops and gains access to medicine, phones, and other innovative technologies, measurements of well-being track upwards at a steady clip as everyone's pain is being upgraded to better pain. But once the country hits first world level, their well-being flattens or in some instances drops off. Meanwhile, mental illness, depression, anxiety can proliferate. This happens because opening up a society and giving it modern innovations makes the people more robust and anti-fragile. They can survive more hardship, work more efficiently, communicate and function better within their communities. But once these innovations are integrated and everyone has a cell phone and a McDonald's Happy Meal, the great modern diversions enter the marketplace and as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility is introduced and everything begins to seem disastrous. As we make our way through Mark Manson's argument, I think it is necessary for us to consider the world that we are living in now, to consider the degree of anxiety we are all struggling with. Let me not say all. To consider the extent to which we avoid dealing with pain, to consider the extent to which we seek diversion over walking through the discomfort, to consider the extent to which we are unconscious in participating in the day-to-day patterns of the life that we have chosen. You see, the commercial age commenced in the early 20th century with Bernays' discovery that you could market to people's unconscious feelings and desires. Bernays wasn't concerned with penicillin or heart surgery. He was hawking cigarettes and tabloid magazines and beauty products, stuff people didn't need. And until then, nobody had figured out how to get people to spend copious amounts of money on stuff that wasn't necessary for their survival. The invention of marketing brought a modern-day gold rush to satiate people's pursuit of happiness. Self-culture emerged, and celebrities and athletes got stupid rich. For the first time, luxury items started to be mass-produced and advertised to the middle classes. There was explosive growth in the technologies of convenience—microwavable dinners, fast food, no-stick pans, and so on. Life became so easy and fast and efficient and effortless that within the short span of a hundred years, people were able to pick up a phone and accomplish in two minutes what used to take two months. Life in the commercial age, although more complex than before, was still relatively simple compared to today. A large, bustling middle class existed within a homogenous culture. We watched the same TV channels, we listened to the same music, we ate the same food, relaxed on the same type of sofa, and read the same newspapers and magazines. There was continuity and cohesion to this era, which brought a sense of security with it. We were all, for a time, both free and yet part of the same religion. And that was comforting, right? Despite the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, at least in the West, we tended to idealize that period. I believe it's for this sense of social cohesion that many people today are so nostalgic. Then the Internet happened. The Internet is a bona fide innovation. All else being equal, it fundamentally makes our lives better—much better. The problem is, well, the problem is us. The Internet's intentions were good. Inventors and technologists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere had high hopes for a digital planet. They worked for decades towards a vision of seamlessly networking the world's people and information. They believed that the Internet would liberate people, removing gatekeepers and hierarchies and giving everybody equal access to the same information and the same opportunities to express themselves. They believed that if everyone were given a voice and a simple, effective means of sharing that voice, the world would be a better, freer place. A near-utopian level of optimism developed throughout the 1900s and 2000s. Technologists envisioned a highly educated global population that would tap into the infinite wisdom available at its fingertips. They saw the opportunity to engender greater empathy and understanding across nations, ethnicities, and lifestyles. They dreamed of a unified and connected global movement with a single, shared interest in peace and prosperity. But they forgot. They were so caught up in their religious dreams and personal hopes that they forgot. They forgot that the world doesn't run on information. People don't make decisions based on facts or on truth. They don't spend their money based on data. They don't connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings. And when you give the average person an infinite reservoir of human wisdom, they will not Google for the information that contradicts their deepest held beliefs. They will not Google for what is true but unpleasant. Instead, most of us will Google for what is pleasant but untrue. Having an errant racist thought? Well, there's a whole forum of racists who clicks away with a lot of convincing-sounding arguments as to why you shouldn't be ashamed to have such leanings. The wife leaves you and you start thinking women are inherently selfish and evil? Doesn't take much of a Google search to find justifications for these misogynistic feelings. Think Muslims are going to stalk from school to school, murdering your children. I'm sure there's a conspiracy theory somewhere out there that's already, quote-unquote, proving that. Instead of stemming the free expression of our worst feelings and darkest inclinations, the startups and corporations dove right into the cash. They drove right into it. Thus, the greatest innovation of our lifetime has slowly transformed into our greatest diversion. The Internet, in the end, was not designed to give us what we need. Instead, it gives people what they want. And if you've learned anything about human psychology so far, you already know that this is much more dangerous than it sounds. It must be a really odd time to be a super-successful business person. On the one hand, business is better than ever. There's more wealth in the world than ever before. Profits are breaking all-time highs. Productivity and growth are doing great. Yet meanwhile, income inequality is skyrocketing. Political polarization is ruining everyone's family gatherings. And there seems to be a plague of corruption spreading across the world. So while there's exuberance in the business world, there's also a weird sort of defensiveness that comes out of nowhere. And this defensiveness, Mark Manson has noticed, always takes the same form, no matter where it comes from. We're just giving the people what they want. That's what it sounds like. Whether it's oil companies, or creepy advertisers, or Facebook stealing your data, every corporation that steps in somehow finds itself frantically reminding everybody how they're just trying to give people what they want—faster download speeds, more comfortable air conditioning, better gas mileage, a cheaper nose hair trimmer. How wrong can that be? And it's true, right? Technology gives people what they want faster, more efficiently than ever before. And while we all love to dogpile on the corporate overlords for their ethical faceplants, we forget that they're merely fulfilling the market's desires. They're supplying our demands. And if we got rid of Facebook, or BP, or whatever giant corporation is considered evil when you read this, another would pop up to take its place. So maybe the problem isn't just a bunch of greedy executives tapping cigars and petting evil cats while laughing hysterically at how much money they're making. Maybe what we want is what sucks. For example, I want a life-size bag of marshmallows to live in my living room. I want to buy an $8 million mansion by borrowing money that I will never pay back. I want to fly to a new beach every week for the next year and live off nothing but Wagyu steaks. What I want is terrible. That's because my feeling brain is in charge of what I want. And my feeling brain is like a goddamn chimpanzee who just drank a bottle of tequila and then proceeded to pour it all over everybody. Therefore, I would say that give people what they want is a pretty low bar to clear, ethically speaking. Giving people what they want works only when you're giving them innovation, like a synthetic kidney or something to prevent their car from spontaneously catching on fire. Give those people what they want. But giving people too many of the diversions they want is a dangerous game to play. For one, many people want stuff that's awful. Two, many people are easily manipulated into wanting stuff they don't actually want. See Binet's if you missed that part. Three, encouraging people to avoid pain through more and more diversions makes us all weaker and more fragile. And four, I don't want your Skynet ads following me around whenever I go and mining my life for data. Look, just because I talk to my friend about traveling to Peru or to Bali doesn't mean you need to flood my phone with pictures of Machu Picchu for the next two weeks. And seriously, stop listening to my conversations and selling data to everyone. So this is now Mark Manson going on a little rant in case you're wondering. He does this. Oh, a friend of mine is always correcting my pronunciation of that word, rant, on a rant. Anyway, where were we? Strangely, Binet saw all of this coming, the creepy ads, the privacy invasion, and the lulling of large populations into docile servitude through mindless consumerism. The dude was kind of a genius, except he was all in favor of it, so make that an evil genius. Binet's political beliefs were appalling. He believed in what we call diet fascism, some evil authoritarian government but without the unnecessary genocidal calories. Binet believed that the masses were dangerous and needed to be controlled by a strong centralized state. But he also recognized that bloody totalitarian regimes were not exactly ideal. For him, the new science of marketing offered a way for governments to influence and appease their citizens without the burden of having to maim and torture them left, right, and center. Binet believed that freedom for most people was both impossible and dangerous. He was well aware from reading Uncle Freud's writings that the last thing a society should tolerate was everyone's ceiling brains running the show. Societies needed order and hierarchy and authority, and freedom was antithetical to those things. He saw marketing as an incredible new tool that could give people the feeling of having freedom, when really you were just giving them a few more flavors of toothpaste to choose from. Let that sink in for a little while, and then assess where we are as a society now. Are we not here? While some parts of the world, many parts of the world, are somewhat democratic in government, the corporate world has not been so good at giving people what they want in the right way, and they have gradually gained more and more political power for themselves. How did all this happen? They were just giving us what we wanted. Give people what they want is hashtag fake freedom, because what most of us want are diversions. But when we get flooded by diversions, a few things happen. The first is we become increasingly fragile. Our world shrinks to conform to the size of our ever-diminishing values. The second is we become prone to a series of low-level addictive behaviors, compulsively checking our phone, our email, our Instagram, compulsively finishing Netflix series we don't like, sharing outrage-inducing articles we haven't read, accepting invitations to parties and events we don't enjoy, traveling not because we want to, but because we want to be able to say we went, compulsive behavior, aiming at experiencing more stuff. It's not freedom. It's kind of the opposite. Third thing, an inability to identify, tolerate, and seek out negative emotions is its own kind of confinement. If you feel okay only when your life is happy and easy-breezy, beautiful, cover girl, then guess what? You're not free. You are the opposite of free. You're the prisoner of your own indulgences, enslaved by your own intolerance, crippled by your own emotional weakness. You constantly feel a need for some external comfort or validation that may or may not ever come. Fourth, the paradox of choice. The more options we are given, the less satisfied we are with whatever option we go with. If Jane had to choose between two boxes of cereal and Mike can choose from 20, Mike does not have more freedom than Jane. He has more variety. There's a difference. Variety is not freedom. Variety is just different permutations of the same meaningless crap. If instead Jane had a gun pointed to her head and a guy in an SS uniform said, eat the cereal in a really bad accent, then Jane would have less freedom than Mike. That is the problem with exalting freedom over human consciousness. Small things don't make us freer. It imprisons us with anxiety over whether we choose this or we choose that or whether we chose the right thing. More stuff causes us to become more prone to treating others and ourselves as means rather than ends. It makes us more dependent on the endless cycles of hope. If the pursuit of happiness pulls us back into childishness, then fake freedom conspires to keep us there because freedom is not having more brands of cereal to choose from or more beach vacations to take selfies on or more satellite channels to fall asleep to. That is variety. And in a vacuum, variety is meaningless. If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world, but you are not free. The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is learning how to limit yourself to what is enough for you. It is not the privilege of choosing everything, but rather choosing what you will give up in order to have the things that matter to you. That is freedom. And that is this week's episode. This chapter in Mark Manson's book was so thought-provoking for me that I thought, you should read the book. If you can get your hands on a copy, and if you can survive some swearing, and if you can survive some shocking things, some shocking delivery, as Mark Manson's a big subscriber to, what is the word I'm looking for? Clearly, my brain is tired, but he likes to shock his listeners, right? If you don't mind that, and you can hear the stories that he tells and the arguments that he makes, and if they provoke some thinking, if they provoke thoughts, if they provoke an assessment of where you are in your behavior, if you hear that variety is not necessarily better, then maybe you might think about the fact that people struggle with online dating because online dating has presented them with variety, but not necessarily better options. And that variety has resulted in anxiety and paralysis, and we have a huge cohort of single women and a huge cohort of single men, each saying that there are no more good men or good women. Maybe, just maybe. This book should start conversations in your circle that are worth having. And if so, then my job here is done. And I hope you enjoyed this week's installment. If you did, please share the episode with somebody, or rate the episode on Spotify, or rate or review the episode on Apple Podcasts. I mean, I'll take both. If you have time, I will truly appreciate it. Thank you to everybody who does, and thank you for joining me for yet another week. Let's build something beautiful. I wish you an amazing week.