Why is it that the most important truth in life are also the most painful to hear?

I would argue that it's because growth requires some degree of discomfort,

and every big breakthrough in life demands a questioning of yourself. So today I want to help you with that

questioning by bringing up five of the most uncomfortable truths that have changed my life and will hopefully

change yours. So put the safety harness on because the ride's going to get a little bit bumpy.

Oh, and by the way, welcome to the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast.

20 million books sold. Zero Fox given. It's the subtle art of not giving a

fuck podcast with your host Mark Manson. I'm here with my producer and longtime research assistant Drew.

He has gone through my entire archive, hundreds of articles and newsletters.

He's read all my books, and he has put together five harsh truths based on my body of work that we all need to hear, but perhaps we don't really like hearing yes and I love these because they're a

little bit dark there's a little bit harsh like you said wait wait wait wait let me

let me put my eye makeup on before we start

paint my fingernails black put on some email music mark if you got it let's do that

everybody get in the mood that's where we're going with this. This is where we're going.

So yes, we have five harsh truths and this first one is a real cheery one, which is humans suck,

try to suck less. Isn't this a great way to start your morning folks? Humans are terrible. Why don't you try to be less terrible? I think this is super

important because I think a lot of people have the assumption that there's kind of this perfect state of innocence that we're all born into and then terrible icky things happen to us and fuck everything up and that growth or healing is a process of getting back to that perfect state of innocence.

And if you look at the psychological research, that is just flat out not true. In fact, I would argue that probably the most significant

contribution of psych research over the past 20, 30 years is discovering all the ways that we are horribly, horribly flawed.

We have all sorts of cognitive biases, perceptual biases, our memory is completely unreliable.

We often aren't even good at knowing what we're specifically looking at or talking about.

A perfect example, there was a viral video number of years ago.

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