Bryan Johnson talks to Dan Mace about moving from self-hatred and depression to self-love. He sold his company, got divorced, and left his religion to escape the pressure of what he thought he should do. That shift, he says, changed his emotional baseline from chronic depression to constant delight.
Do you like yourself? I love myself. I love myself so much. And that is coming from a place where I hated myself for most of my life.
How did you get from the one to the exact opposite?
Yeah. In this moment, you're in pain, I'm in pain. Like, we're all in pain over a variety of things in life. And that's just what it means to be human. And we don't need to pretend otherwise, because it's just not true. I'm a person that does well when I'm outside of structures, but when I'm inside of structures and I feel the pressure bearing down on me, telling me what to do and how to do it, that leads to me crumbling as a person. I sold my company, got a divorce, left my religion, and it was in that moment where everything in life before that was about what I should do and what I couldn't do. And then at that moment, it became everything that I could do. And I think that's what switched it for me from a state of constant depression to just constant delight.
