Surviving The Collapse Of The Modern Psyche
In this ManTalks episode, Connor Beaton argues that the most pressing crisis of the coming 3‑5 years will be a surge in psychosis rather than a biological pandemic. He defines psychosis as a break from shared objective reality, explains that it is a symptom cluster appearing across diagnoses (schizophrenia, bipolar, major depression with psychotic features, substance‑induced, medical‑induced), and warns that everyday people are beginning to exhibit psychotic symptoms. Beaton attributes the rise to several cultural forces: deconstructive ideologies that deny objective truth, AI and deep‑fake technologies that blur reality, hyper‑polarized political warfare, sensationalist media that pushes intersubjective narratives, and social‑media algorithms that amplify extreme, mentally‑unwell content, creating a contagion effect. He describes how constant exposure to such content overloads the nervous system, leading to a collapse of the collective psyche. To counter this, he offers a practical resilience framework: (1) reconnect with the body and breath – the “bunker” of safety; (2) build a coherent personal narrative that aligns subjective experience with objective and intersubjective reality; (3) seek mentors or guides who model mental stability; (4) “starve” harmful information by cleaning algorithms and limiting toxic media consumption; (5) prioritize real‑world, in‑person relationships over digital interaction; (6) take on meaningful, direct responsibility (“weight”) to anchor identity. He concludes with a call to action for viewers to apply these steps, share the video, and comment on additional destabilizing factors they perceive.
Chapters
I think one of the greatest crises that we're facing in the modern culture and the modern world is the rapid rise of mental illness, that it has become so normalized within our culture. And everywhere you look, you can see the failings of the modern therapeutic industrial complex, that as the number of therapists and psychologists have risen within our— in our culture, in our society, so too have the numbers of people who are mentally unwell just absolutely ballooned out of proportion. They have skyrocketed. And in this video, I'm going to make a prediction about what the coming 3 to 5 years is going to hold for you, for your families, for your friends. And I'm gonna equip you with some frameworks and some tools so that you can develop a kind of psychological resiliency against what is happening within our culture. Because my firm belief is that of course, we're going through big geopolitical changes. There's some social breakdown, there's some political and economic breakdown. All those things are true, but I don't think that the next quote unquote plague is going to be a biological one. I think that the next quote unquote plague is going to be psychological in nature. And so I'm gonna give you a prediction, and then I'm going to back that up. I'm gonna back that prediction and that claim up, and then I'm gonna give you some tools and resources. So my prediction is very simple. My prediction is that in the coming years, specifically in the coming 3 to 5 years, you will see a rise of people suffering from some form of psychosis. And that psychosis is going to be very prominent across most modern cultures and modern societies. And so in short, the next plague, again, I don't think it's biological, although we might see a COVID 2.0. I always hesitate to even say that word on the channel, the great Voldemort of biological diseases, but I think that it's going to be psychological in nature. I think you're going to see people continue to dissolve and deteriorate mentally. And we can see this across the Western modern world. We can see that really people are struggling. But for me, the big crisis is going to be psychosis, and I'm going to lay out why. So let's talk about the rise of psychosis. My name is Connor Beaton. Connor Beaton, this is the ManTalks Show. If you are new here, don't forget to like and subscribe, and don't forget to man it forward to somebody that you think might enjoy this episode, this conversation. So people on average, they are struggling more mentally than ever before. Yes, people are struggling financially and economically. That's not necessarily a new thing in human history. Throughout the course of human history, people have struggled to make ends meet, to procure food, shelter, et cetera. But now more than ever, people, we can see people's mental health is completely falling off a cliff. Rates of depression are skyrocketing. Anxiety is skyrocketing, anxiety disorders, the use of SSRIs and other mental health disorders like bipolar disorder and personality disorder, et cetera, gender dysphoria. All of these things are really skyrocketing. And there's a plethora of reasons that are causing this, which we are going to discuss. However, The one core thing that I don't get, I don't see being talked enough about in mainstream culture, in modern society, in the media, in psychology, is the very real increase in psychosis amongst the younger generations and even the older generations. And so in short, people are really losing it more than ever before, both metaphorically and literally. Now, what is psychosis? This is something that maybe not a lot of you know what it actually is, and what's contributing to its rise within our cultures and our societies, and what can you do to bolster it? That's what this video— bolster yourself against it. That's what this video is really all about. So let's start with what psychosis is, and let's start by defining it. Psychosis is a mental state, and it's characterized by a break from shared and objective reality, okay? So it's a mental state where you psychologically, mentally break from shared reality with the people around you and objective reality. Now, when somebody experiences psychosis, they begin to experience the world in ways that other people around them don't, while typically lacking any understanding that this delusion, that this hallucination is actually happening. And the challenge with psychosis, the problem with it, is that for the person or the people experiencing psychosis, they are so entrenched in the belief that what they are experiencing is real, how they view the world is real, that they try and bring other people into their delusion. They try and bring other people into their psychosis because anybody that pushes back on how they're viewing things or seeing things or experiencing things, that becomes a threat to their psyche. And so these delusions, these breaks with objective reality, these breaks with objective truth and the way that people are sharing reality, they can be simple, right? Somebody could see something, somebody could hear something that's not actually there. So they could see a person or an entity, they can hear something that's not actually there. They can start to believe something about the world, right? It's sort of basic example is, you know, you're looking at the sky, everybody else is looking at the sky, and then John's like, "Oh man, why is the sky red today?" And you're like, "John, the sky is still blue like it has been every day." And he's like, "No, the sky is definitely red today." John's experiencing some form of psychosis. He's disconnected from objective truth and reality. So simply put, psychosis is a break or a kind of cognitive severing from objective reality. Now, when this happens, you can start to experience hallucinations, delusions, wildly disorganized thinking, where you start to believe things that aren't true, or your thought patterns and your speech patterns start to become somewhat incoherent. You can have disorganized or abnormal behavior where your body starts to operate in different ways, or you start to act in sort of incoherent ways. And there's a kind of negative functioning that begins to occur where you cannot function in a normal way. So it's quite common that people that start to struggle with some form of psychosis, they can't do the normal things that they would normally do. One of the markers that I've seen with a lot of people who struggle with psychosis is that everything becomes a kind of overwhelm. So everything starts to become overwhelming for them. Now, I want to note here that it's important to understand that psychosis is not a diagnosis, okay? Psychosis is not a diagnosis. It is a cluster of symptoms, all right? It's a— it's an amalgamation of different symptoms that can appear across different diagnosable conditions, okay? And the different diagnosable conditions are things like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder during manic or depressive episodes, major depressive disorder, sometimes with more psychotic features, and then brief psychotic disorder, where you, again, you have this sort of like brief, huge break from, from reality. And also another one is substance-induced psychosis, so from stimulants like cannabis or other hard drugs. And then there's medical conditions and certain pharmaceuticals that can also induce psychosis, which is insane that we sell pharmaceutical drugs to solve one problem, but can induce psychosis in people. So here's the major issue that I'm seeing. Normal everyday people that you know, that I know, that we interact with, everyday people are beginning to display these symptoms. People who aren't suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are beginning to crack. They are exhibiting symptoms of psychosis. Now, part of that, part of that is that there are ideologies, there are belief structures that have really become prominent and mainstream within modern society and within modern thinking that are deconstructive of objective truth and reality. They do not believe in any form of objective truth and reality. And so, Nothing can be defined, nothing can be categorized. Objective truth and reality isn't a useful tool for them. It's not real because nothing is real and everything can be deconstructed. And that in and of itself is an interesting theory in nature, but it is counter to psychological health and wellbeing. I created a different video that you can go and check out. I'll have the link here in the below and a little thing that you can click on to go check it out. But I talked about the 3 layers of reality. There's subjective reality, how I experience life. There's objective reality, which is, you know, the sort of objective truth and the objective things that are outside of you. And then there's intersubjective reality, which is the shared narrative or the story that we all inhabit. And for a human being, as far as I can tell, after reviewing you know, as many psychological modalities as I possibly can, spiritual literature, religious literature, they kind of all say the same thing. Your subjective experience, you need to have some tethering connection to a congruence within your subjective experience. And that subjective experience needs to, in some ways, align with objective truth and reality, right? So if you internally feel like you are a bird, and you go outside and you try to fly off of a cliff or a building, objective truth and reality is going to interfere because it's another layer of reality and existence that your subjective experience needs to find coherence with. So this is about finding coherence internally in your subjective experience, finding coherence externally within objective reality, and then in some ways finding coherence within the intersubjective reality, which is the reality of narrative and story. Now, part of what's causing, and I'm gonna get into this more, about what's causing this sort of psychosis of our modern times, our society, and our culture, is that we have these ideologies and belief systems that have started to emerge that are trying to deconstruct objective reality to such a degree that they overemphasize on subjective experiencing and intersubjective truth or reality. And intersubjective reality is really the stories that we inhabit. And unfortunately, the times that we're living in right now, intersubjective reality has become the sort of battlegrounds, the warfare grounds, right? I mean, you just look at modern news as an example. News doesn't talk anymore about objective reality. It does not talk about here is what happened. It talks about the story. Of what happens. So if you look at CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or any of those channels, what they are telling you is the intersubjective reality. They're saying, here's what you should think. Here's the story that you should believe or think about what happened, not here's what happened. So, so many people have become fragmented away from any type of objective truth and reality. It's being deconstructed in a lot of ways within people's minds, within culture, within modern thinking, to such a degree that it is fundamentally destabilizing the average person's psyche. Because when your psyche, when your subjective experience has no objective truth or reality to press against or to test itself against or to know itself with, then it begins to collapse and erode. Because when we are disconnected from truth, and objective reality is a truth, you can see it, it's there, we all experience it. When we do not have that anchor point any longer, the psyche begins to spiral. And it begins to operate, believe, and act in ways that are incoherent with the truth of reality. And you don't have to go far to see this. You can scroll through social media and you will, regardless of your political leaning, you will likely be shown content of people who are behaving in ways that you would objectively say are psychotic to you. And now you might be thinking, okay, what's causing this? You've given one example. I'm gonna break down some of the ways that culture and society are creating this sort of psychotic time. So what do we do? How are we living in a sort of psychotic culture and time? When you couple modern societies, sort of hate-filled rhetoric, political division, you add in a pretty strong gender war, the rising costs of absolutely everything, and then you attempt to untether people from biological reality in every single way, what you get, the result of that, the end result of that for a lot of people is the collapse of the individual and collective psyche. And one where, this is one where conspiracy theories come true, right? So we can see this, you can see like a lot of conspiracy theories that 15, 20 years ago, people would have talked to you about and you were like, "That's ludicrous." And then here they are, they're true, you can see them. This sort of new brain-breaking event continues to happen every single day. A war, collapsing economy, Epstein files, you know, the White House released stuff about how aliens are real and all that kind of stuff. It gets puked out onto social media, through media every single day and into your mind daily. And what ends up happening is that your mind is infiltrated with so much data and information. On the daily basis that is polarizing, that is extreme, that is decentering of your psyche, that what ends up happening is your psyche begins to collapse under that weight. So again, you look at the media cycle in the last several months, right? Epstein files, aliens, war, environmental existential collapse. They're all being smashed into your face daily. And when you couple this with ideologies that cause people to cheer for the literal end of their bloodlines, to cheer for the end of their lineage, of their families throughout modern culture, what you get is a destabilizing force, a destabilizing culture and society that you are inhabiting. So for many of you, regardless, again, of the political place, because this is not a political commentary. Regardless of the political leaning that you have, you will look out at the modern world, you will look out at your mainstream media, and what you will see is a very destabilized culture and society. And let's face it, this is where the real rubber hits the road. Your brain, your nervous system all of our brains, all of our nervous systems, they were not designed to deal with the volume, the extremism, the intensity, the polarization of the information, of the violence, of the catastrophe, of the craziness, of the existential dread that most people are inundated with on today's daily lives. And so, hell, half the people losing their minds in, in life today are losing their minds because they're spending too much time watching other people who are mentally unwell. And this is one of the challenges with social media and even mainstream media is that you can go on and you can interact with a large amount of people, unknowing to you, who are very mentally unwell. And the algorithms unfortunately push this, right? Rage bait, you know, raging your nervous system, getting you to feel worked up and whatnot. That's all part of what keeps you engaged on these platforms. But the challenge is that what you don't realize is that you're interacting constantly and continually with people who are largely mentally unwell. And what we know about the psyche is that it's not a wall, it's not a solid, form, it's very permeable, it's very flexible. And what we know about many mental health diseases or issues like schizophrenia, like bipolar disorder, is that the more time you spend with people and around people who have those disorders, the more susceptible you actually become to that disorder. So another way, if you can think of this, is that the more time you spend interacting with content from people who are not mentally well, the higher likelihood you will have to being susceptible to those same issues, to those same mental health issues. So let's break down a little bit further some of the factors that are destabilizing the modern psyche. I'm going to give you a list. There should be a little text wall here. That's going to break that down for you. And then I'm going to talk to you, I'm gonna close out this video and give you the tools of how you can begin to stabilize your psyche, okay? And if this is too much for you, if what I'm about to give you is just like, this is too much, I just wanna know how to stabilize my psyche, totally skip ahead, that's all right, go get the goods. But if this interests you and this is fascinating to you, and for me, this is fascinating because the more I've studied this and the more I've understood it, the more it has helped me to bolster and create a resiliency against some of the onslaught that's happening in modern culture and society, some of the psychological breakdown that's happening, and a lot of the mental illness that is happening. Because when you can spot it and you can see it and you can understand it, then there's a bit of separation that happens between you and what you're observing. So if you can very clearly see, oh, that person is struggling, 'You know, that's some schizophrenic behavior. That's, you know, that's like a bit disconnected from objective reality. That's completely disconnected from objective reality. That's unwell.' Uh, then we can create some space and separation from it. So what is contributing to the collapse of the modern psyche? Let's break it down. The first one: ideologies. And I've touched on this before. Ideologies are belief systems, philosophical systems that collapse or aim to deconstruct reality in a way where definitions, categories, hierarchies no longer mean anything. So in some of these ideologies, when you press them, they literally cannot define anything because it's a deconstructionist ideology. And the attempt there is to claim power because every subjective person in some of these ideologies every individual is subjectively creating their own reality, which again, that is psychotic in nature. That is the definition of psychosis. There is a shared reality that we all inhabit. And if you fundamentally believe that you just subjectively create your own experience and that you can walk through and alter the fabric of objective reality, you will eventually be institutionalized. So these ideologies that aim to collapse or aim to deconstruct reality, are a big contributing factor. The second thing, AI, very clearly. This is a product designed to maintain your attention and to maintain your focus by oftentimes telling you exactly what you want to hear, that you're right, regardless of whether or not what you believe or are saying is connected to any observable truth or reality. So again, we've seen AI-induced psychosis. My guess is that you are going to see a big spike in this in the coming years. This is only going to continue to get worse before it gets better. And when you have the ability for AI to replicate or imitate reality, right? It could create a video of Joe Rogan selling some product or Donald Trump saying some crazy crap or Nancy Pelosi or, you know, whoever it is, right? Joe Biden saying something completely absurd that he never said. But you can't distinguish the content from reality, the AI-generated content from what actually happens. That begins to erode objective reality and objective truth even more and pushes you further into intersubjective warfare, intersubjective story-based reality. The next layer is political warfare and manipulation that's really meant to push you into extreme positions to ensure your vote. And this is the current state of the American political landscape and a lot of the current state of the Western cultures' democratic landscape, where positions, the opposition is actually seen as an ever-present existential threat to your very existence. So when you listen to a lot of how Republicans or Democrats are being positioned to their party base, to their voter base, they are talking about the opposition as an existential threat to humanity, to your existence, to your life. And when you are pushed into that type of thinking and belief system, you begin to justify immoral behaviors and beliefs that begin to collapse your sense of safety and identity. There's a kind of modern-day death cult baked into the culture that believes that the world would be better without human beings in it, that believes that— and this is, this is a sort of extreme version of misanthropy, right? This disdain and hatred for human beings and the disdain and hatred for specific groups of human beings that have started to be in the world. You know, I've noticed this rise in this uptick of commentary around certain races or certain genders. You know, all men are bad. The world would be better if all men were dead. You know, the world would be better if a certain race didn't exist. This uptick in belief system again attacks your mental well-being because you can't walk through the world without looking at people and believing a certain story about them. Then you have, you have this kind of constant shouting online, in person, in conversations about how we're all going to die tomorrow because of AI, because of environmental collapse, because of whatever it is, right? Ebola or the next hantavirus or, you know, whatever have you. So a lot of people's sense of mortality has become very compressed. And you have people in my generation and the younger generation fundamentally believing that the human species is going to go extinct in our lifetime. People fundamentally believe that to the point that they're not having kids, they're not working. They've bought into a type of nihilism that is so potent that they've just completely checked out from life already. They're sort of alive but dead. I call these the alive but dead people. They are living, but they fundamentally believe that the world is going to end for some reason, some catastrophe within their lifetime. Then two more pieces: social media platforms. These social media platforms obviously are designed to prioritize the most intense psychological experiences inside of you that are meant to get you hooked on them to then puts you into certain peak states or low states to then sell you products to keep you engaged. And a lot of this is hinged on unhinged human behavior. And so the more content they can feed you from people who are mentally unwell, not doing okay, have completely out there the most extremist ideology, the most extremist behavior, possible, then the more likely you are to continue to utilize that because you're just outraged, right? There's moral outrage or psychological outrage, etc. But again, like I said, the problem with that is that you're continuing to interact with the sort of worst morally behaving people, the most extreme ideologically behaving people or ideologically captured people. And you're engaging with the most mentally unwell people in society. And again, this is— I cannot stress this enough. I want this to really be driven home. Many, if not most, if not close to all of the psychological issues that we as human beings will have are in some ways transmissible. They're transmittable. So if you grew up in a household with somebody who struggles with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, you are exponentially more susceptible to that mental health disorder. If you are in a friend group where somebody starts to exhibit schizophrenic behavior or bipolar behavior and you are around them often enough throughout the day, that can have an impact on you and you will be more susceptible to that mental health disorder than if you were not around people who were experiencing that. So your psyche is, it's penetrable, it's very permeable, and it can take in and adapt itself or sort of adopt external mentalities, external experiences. And so you have to begin to be very, very cognizant of the people that you're surrounding yourself with. And this isn't to fearmonger. This isn't to say that you should cut people out, you know, sell your home in the city and go buy a cabin in the woods and just become a hermit. I'm not advocating for that. What I am saying is, more so than ever, you really need to surround yourself with people who are committed and interested in developing mental resiliency. Because I can tell you that mental fragility, as much as you might look out in the world right now and think, man, people are mentally fragile, my prediction, and I almost guarantee it, is going to get worse. It's going to get so much worse. Now, the last thing that I want to emphasize here, and I kind of touched on this before, that's contributing to the collapse of the psyche in modern culture and society is a steady stream of media that doesn't tell you what happened, it tells you what you should think about what happened. It tells you how you should feel about what happened. And so in a lot of ways, mainstream media and modern media has been turned into a type of emotional response system that is training you to have a certain or specific emotional response based on what outlet you're watching and based on where you stand politically. So your emotions aren't actually your own. Your emotional response to an event, to something that has happened in your country or in your city, are no longer your own. They are outsourced to these agencies. Now, obviously, there's so much more that I could list out. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what you believe is destabilizing the current culture. Obviously, like I said, the economy, inflation, those are, you know, the job crisis, the fact that AI is taking over jobs, da da da da. There's many other factors. I just listed out some of the ones that I think are having a real profound impact on the modern psyche. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Make sure you comment in the video below. What do you think is destabilizing the modern psyche? Okay, now maybe for the moment that you've all been waiting for. How do you safeguard yourself? How do you stabilize your psyche? How do you combat the kind of depersonalization of the modern culture? And depersonalization is another form of psychosis, by the way, where you just cannot tell what's real or what's not. And unfortunately, that is the sort of experience that modern culture is putting so many people into. So many people cannot subjectively or objectively tell what is true, what is real, any longer. And they are breaking— they're having a kind of, uh, psychological and cognitive break from reality. So let's just reframe this from the— let's just frame this from the top. Depersonalization isn't just a sort of clinical term that I'm using here. Psychosis isn't just a sort of clinical term. It is the ambient condition of modern life. It is the water that we are swimming in. It is the air that we are breathing, right? The psyche, the modern collective psyche has become poisoned. The well has become poisoned. And so you probably feel like you're watching your own life through a glass, or you feel like you are looking out in the world and you're like, man, everything's gone to hell in a handbasket, right? I'm sure that you've got different phrases for it, but you're looking out at the modern world and you're like, everything's effed, you know, why bother? You scroll through, you know, a version of yourself online, or you scroll through other people's lives online, wishing that you had their life. And this destabilization has become the sort of core pillar and marker of our modern times, which is why I said at the beginning of this video that the plague that we are living through and going to live through is not a biological one, it's a psychological one. It is the collapse of the modern psyche. So what do we do? Number one, get back into your body. Get back into your body. It is the only thing that can't be faked, right? Get back into your experience. I have a body, I am a body. I'm not that body, but I have a body. Get back into your breath, get back into your nervous system. Start to really attune yourself to paying attention to the data and the information of your own personal experience. This is what I call the direct felt experience, your DFE. Because if you are chronically in a state of being disconnected from what you feel, you are more likely to be in your head. And the screen, the screen externally, the social media, the phone, that lives exclusively from the neck up, that lives exclusively to hijack you out of your body and put you into your brain. And so the more time you spend there, the more time you lose contact with what it feels like to be a person, to be you. So breathe, breathe into the gut, move your body. Whenever you feel like you're, you know, you're questioning the world and whatnot, get back into your body, do breathwork, do meditation, move your body, work your body, be physical in some way and reconnect to the safety of being in your own physical form. So when the world feels crazy, it's not that we should retreat from the world. It's that we have a safe house, a safe house, a kind of bunker. The body is the bunker. That's maybe, that's maybe what Bessel van der Kolk should have written instead of The Body Keeps the Score. Maybe that's the second book, right? The body is the bunker. So the body is the, is the safe house. It's the bunker. When all hell is breaking loose in the world or in your relationship or in life, you can experience, you can have safety, trust, security, a safe equilibrium that you can operate from in your body. So repair that relationship. The second thing is begin to build a coherent narrative. Okay, build a coherent narrative. And what that means is build a coherent framework for understanding the times that we are in. Maybe my framework that I've been laying out for you about subjective, objective, intersubjective reality supports— maybe that helps you understand what's happening psychologically. Maybe that's a framework that you can hold. You need congruence subjectively, you need congruence with objective reality, and then intersubjective reality also needs to be in alignment with your subjective and objective experience. So if you want more on that, I can give you more, but build a coherent narrative of here's what's happening. Here is the story, because modern culture is right now fragmented into dozens and hundreds of different audiences and different narratives. And a lot of the times individuals like yourself are also fragmented into dozens of different versions, right? There's the work you, there's the group chat you, there's the dating profile you, there's the comment section you and what you say on Reddit or Instagram on your private profile. And each one is a little sliver, but none of them is the totality of you. So begin to build a coherent narrative about the time that you're living in and about who you actually are. One of the greatest compliments that I've been given is, friends, family members, people that come to work with me, they say, "You're the same everywhere." You know, I've had some guys that have come to work with me that were a part of the Alliance that have come out to men's weekends, and they've said, "You are the same. You're the same at a weekend, you're the same on a call, you're the same on a work call, you're the same to hang out with as a brother. You're just the same across the board." And that is because I have worked to create a coherent narrative of who I am, and then I bring all of me everywhere I go. So I'm not fragmented into, oh, I act this way with my wife and then I act this way with my son and then I act this way at work and then I act this way on YouTube and then I act this way on— that's not how I— that's not how I operate. That type of fragmentation feels very disingenuous. It creates incongruence within your psyche. And what we want to aim for is to create as much congruence as humanly possible. Because in an age of massive psychological fracturing, in an age of political, geopolitical fracturing, economic fracturing, what you want to do is shore yourself against that, stabilize yourself against that by creating a coherent sense of self and narrative that you can bring everywhere. So create a coherent narrative about the world and an understanding about the world that isn't steeped in nihilism, but to understand that this is a part of the cycle. There is a decay happening. In alchemical terms, we are in the descent, we are in the Nigredo, things are falling apart. And this happens in every culture, this happens in everybody's life, this is a natural part of human experience, and it is okay. Okay, so look for the people. This brings me to number 3, which is look for the people who can act as guides or guardians through this path, through this threshold. People that can help you move through this period of descent. Whenever we go down into the Negredo, as things fall apart, maybe your marriage falls apart, relationships, work, career, health, et cetera, Everybody needs guardians and guides to move through that period of life. Unfortunately, in our culture, we want to buck against that. We see it as a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It is just as important as growth, right? It's, it's tough. It's tough. But the recession is just as important as the rise in the stock market. The next one is starve the inputs, that dissolve the self. Okay, now I'm going to explain this in a different way, which is eliminate, eliminate as best as you can the areas, the behaviors, the things that are attempting to deconstruct your psychology, that are trying to pull you apart. The attention economy that we live in, social media, AI, etc., it doesn't know you. It knows your dopamine. It doesn't know you and what you want and what you like and what's going to help you be coherent and congruent. It just knows, here's how I capture your attention. And I— it captures your attention usually by fragmenting you and giving you things that are highly, highly volatile. So everything that you consume, right? Just like you have to eat good food for your body to be healthy. You have to consume good content in order for your psyche to be okay. So really start to clean up your algorithm. Start to clean up what you are consuming from a social media standpoint. Start to clean up when you're consuming that content, right? Just like you shouldn't eat, you know, a 1-liter tub of ice cream before bed, you probably shouldn't doom scroll through TikTok or Instagram for an hour before bed. Both are equally bad. So start to really address the inputs that are trying to deconstruct or dissolve your sense of self and your psyche. The next piece is just get into real life. We need real relationships. We are, we are over-socialized digitally and under-socialized in real life, in person. And that part needs to flip. So if you are somebody that feels highly over-socialized in a digital landscape, prioritize in-person relationships, prioritize them, because the insanity that you see online can feel so jarring and disconnecting because you can't do anything about it. But when you sit down and have a real conversation with your buddy Jeff or Mark or, you know, whoever it is, and they start talking about the real challenges that they're facing in their life and you can support them, then you can actually make a difference in life. So get back into real relationships, start to adjust the dials between your digital socialization and your IRL, your in real life socialization, and prioritize that more and more and more. The last piece is take on weight, take on weight, meaning reanchors the self, responsibility reanchors the self. One of the most jarring and disorienting parts of our modern culture is the volume of information, the volume of events and circumstances that you will encounter that you can't do a damn thing about. It is so disorienting and disrupting to the psyche. You see the aliens, you see the Epstein files, you see the war in Iran, you see what's, you know, bombing in the different country. You know, you see different countries being invaded and you're like, I can't do anything about any of those things. And for the psyche, that's completely disruptive because what you're seeing is dehumanization, harm, pain. All those types of things are taking place, but you can't directly impact it. So as a man, one of the best things that you can do to stabilize your psyche is to really look at what can I be responsible for in my life? Because modern culture has kind of stripped very clear roles and rites of passage away from men. And so a lot of men are living in a kind of meaning vacuum, responsibility vacuum. And so the more you can take on responsibility, the more you can take on weight that you care about, that you can affect, that you can influence directly, and that's the really important caveat, you need to be able to influence it directly. The more you can take that on, the more stabilizing it is for the psyche. If you are constantly consuming content and interacting with spaces and spheres where you can't affect or influence a damn thing, that is going to be completely disruptive to you. This is why you see people going and throwing like orange cans of soup onto artwork. It is completely asinine, right? It doesn't do anything to stop people from drilling oil. It doesn't do anything but get them arrested. It literally does zero, nothing to affect any type of change at all. But because people have become so conditioned to try and solve problems that they cannot do anything about, or wage war against things that they cannot do anything about, they've been smokescreened and gaslit against any type of personal autonomy of where they can actually influence change in their lives. So disconnect from— and I'm not saying don't pay attention to world news. I'm not saying don't pay attention to the problems in the world. I'm not saying any of those things. But really look at, can I influence this directly or not? And if you can find a way to influence it directly and it's meaningful for you, go do that. Absolutely go do that. But you have to really start to think critically about the truth of whether you can directly influence that, right? Throwing a can of soup or orange paint onto a painting in the Louvre or some other art gallery isn't doing jack shit to stop oil drilling. It's just not. It's not influencing it. We can all agree on that. It's objectively true. If you disagree with that, you're just disconnected from objective reality. Okay. I have not— I don't know what else to say to you. So you can— we have to find ways. You have to find ways where you can directly influence other people's lives, where you can directly influence things in your life, because people have become so inundated with a massive volume of stuff that they can't influence, they can't do anything about, that it leaves them feeling helpless, powerless, and the psyche begins to decay and erode. So the best thing that you can do is look for things in your life that you can take on and be responsible for and things that you can influence and go do them. Go do them today, go do them tomorrow, because responsibility is not a burden to the psyche, okay? Responsibility is the stabilizing force for the psyche. All right, don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode, share your thoughts with me below. Did you like this? Enjoy this? What do you think I missed? What do you think I was wrong about? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.
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