“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” – Charlie Munger
One of my childhood friends, we’ll call him DJ, is the most charismatic person I’ve ever met.
True story:
He once took a bubble bath, with the door wide open, in the middle of a house party.
He didn’t come out for like three hours.
He just sat ass-naked in that tub, playing with a rubber duck and singing songs at the top of his lungs to anyone who walked by.
Anyway, I’ve never met a single person who doesn’t love DJ.
Which is why I was so shocked, a few years ago, when he told me he’d developed crippling social anxiety.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, man. When I go into work I’m terrified to talk to my employees, so I just sit alone in my office and avoid people.”
At first I thought he was fucking with me, but the look in his eyes was sincere.
“I feel like something’s broken. I never used to get anxious about anything. Now I’m anxious all the time.”
So we started brainstorming solutions…
Everything from medication to herbal supplements to resolving a hidden childhood trauma he doesn’t actually have.
Then a random thought floated through my mind:
“DJ, how much coffee are you drinking?”
“Oh, I dunno. Like six or seven cups.”
“A day? Are you fxcking kidding me?”
“Is that bad?”
“Yeah bro.”
“You think that could be the problem?”
“Yeah, bro.”
So DJ decides to cut back to one coffee a day.
A week later he texts me:
“Oh my god I feel so much better. I haven’t had anxiety all week.”
Moral of the story, DJ wasn’t broken.
He was just being an idiot.
And thankfully, that’s the case with most of our problems:
They’re rarely as daunting as they feel, and the solutions are usually much simpler than we think.
Our lack of motivation, for example, rarely comes from a deep-rooted character defect…
…It usually just comes from doom scrolling, video games and wanking too much.
Our self-doubt rarely comes from an incurable trauma we’ve been repressing our entire lives…
…It usually just comes from repeatedly breaking promises to ourselves and failing to do what we told ourselves we would do.
And our inability to focus rarely comes from a legitimate psychological condition that requires medication to fix…
…It usually just comes from too much coffee and red bull and Zyn and weed and processed sugar and brain rot content and creeping baddies on TikTok when you should be working and most of your other favorite things that don’t feel nearly as good as your dopamine-drunk brain tricks you into believing they will.
Of course, there are exceptions:
Legitimate traumas and psychological illnesses absolutely exist.
But they are far, far rarer than the simple, easy-to-solve problems we inflict on ourselves by doing the obvious wrong thing instead of the obvious right thing, over and over again.
So if you feel broken, chances are:
You’re not.
And the solution, thankfully, is much simpler than you think.
- T
P.S. This track is the solution.
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” – Anais Nin
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