This Could Be The Most Life-Changing Video You Watch Today

0:00 Modern life is a disease. You want to get ahead. So why do you always feel behind? You want to be useful. So why do you feel unseen? The problem isn't you? Modern life is like a Trojan horse that arrives as a gift and then takes over from the inside. I've lived as a monk in training, as a Wall Street banker, as a CEO and I found the same exact pattern everywhere. There are four symptoms, but one of them is probably ruining your life or even ruining it. So, by the end of this video, you'll know all four of those symptoms and what to do about each of them. Let's get started. The hardest thing about modern life is how everyone wants to make your life easier.

0:49 We have infinite feed, infinite calories, infinite streaming. Yes, somehow we're the ones being consumed. I'll give you my own example. I had a clear vision of success when I was young. Walking out of Penn Station in New York City, I'm wearing a crisp suit and I'm entering a marble lobby of a top investment bank. And I got there, you know, it was the right suit, the right lobby. But today, all I remember now is that I was sitting at a desk for 18 hours, eating takeout, staring at numbers at 1:00 in the morning, sleeping for four or 5 hours, and on repeat every day.

1:34 I rarely saw my friends. I rarely saw the sun. And that's the irony of modern life. We're surrounded by comfort, but we feel restless. We now run faster than ever, but we still feel behind. We're connected, but we feel alone. We wonder if anything we do matters. These are the four symptoms that I see everywhere I go. Restless, behind, alone, unseen. The real irony of modern life is that the dream and the disease look exactly the same. And to understand why that happens, we have to start with these symptoms and dig into the root causes of each of them from the inside. Let's do that. The first symptom is us feeling restless and anxious. We all live in this hustle and grind culture. No one believes in stopping or even slowing down. In 2018, a Harvard Business School professor named Michael Norton ran a study on more than 2,000 people. Every one of them had a net worth of at least a million dollars.

2:47 Lucky ducks. Many of them were actually far beyond that. And he asked each one of them two questions. How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10? and how much more money would you need to move your happiness to a 10? The second question received the most interesting answer. The person with 1 million said they only needed to get to 3 million to get their happiness to 10, but the person with 3 million wanted 10 million and the person with 10 million wanted 30. No matter where they were on the wealth chart, they all wanted roughly three times more. So, it's never about that number.

3:34 No matter where you are, there's always a bigger number. About a month ago, I was talking to a 24 year old and I asked him what do he wanted to be. His answer was rich. That answer really surprised me because I told him, you know, rich is not a career. But that's interestingly the entire goal for many people. Chase the number first and then hope that meaning will somehow arrive later.

4:10 Our careers, our companies, our relationships, we all do that. We're incapable of feeling happy with what we have or who we have. We feel restless when we don't know our why behind the what. So, here's the action item. Take the thing you're chasing right now and ask, "What was it supposed to do for you? What's that number for? Is it so you can retire and you don't have to work? Is it about safety? Is it about security? Is it about a specific lifestyle that you coveret? Is it about giving your family and kids what you didn't have? All those are great reasons, but when you have that clarity, it helps you become more restful. But there is one more reason money can make us all restless. When you don't know exactly where you stand with your finances, I had that problem. My financial life was scattered everywhere.

5:14 Old 401ks, IRA, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit card. So, my accountant suggested Monarch and I started using that software and I loved it. They're sponsoring this segment, but I was already a customer before they leed out. Monarch pulled my bank accounts, my investments, my credit cards, my loans into one clean dashboard. So instead of jumping across 10 different apps, I can see the full financial picture in one place. It makes me feel very zen. If you know what you have, what you spend, what you owe, the financial fog starts to lift.

5:59 And that matters because clarity creates sanity. You can try it for free yourself. The link is below. There's also a code to get half off your entire first year. Now, let's go to the second symptom, feeling behind. In 2019, Instagram research team found that their app was making body image issues even worse for one in three teenage girls. In 2020, Instagram also found that those teenagers were especially vulnerable to reward driven use and they had difficulty stopping even when they wanted to. So what did Instagram do?

6:42 Nothing much. The company did not fundamentally redesign the product or even disclose the finding publicly until they were leaked in 2021 by a whistleblower. The problem was that the teenage girls who had body image issues were constantly exposed to perfect bodies. But it's a competition those teenagers could never win. Being ahead of everyone alive is an insane condition. And like those teenagers, there is no version of your life or mine where nobody is looking better or doing better than you and me. That's a game we can never win. So we tell ourselves stories about us falling behind because we're not enough. I did that for so many years. My dad and my aunts used to put me down all the time when I was a little kid. They didn't like the way I wore my glasses. I was too skinny. They made fun of my nose. And so I grew up with serious body image issues. But you know what? There is nothing wrong with my nose or with me. And there's nothing wrong with you.

8:06 You are not behind or ahead. You're right where you are. That's what I realized later on. We forget that yes, success requires effort and yes, you have to run fast. But the folks who are ahead of you know that there are some people ahead of them. Someone who's faster or smarter is always going to find someone faster and smarter. That's just the way life works. You did not choose your comparison set. Just like I didn't choose my nose. It was there when I was born. It was what you inherited.

8:40 We'll talk about what to do about all of that, but let's go to the third symptom now. Feeling alone. When I was younger, I co-ounded a band with two of my buddies. And we played hundreds of concerts around the US, around the world actually. But the part we looked forward to the most was what happened after the concert. We would stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning and just talk. We would talk about music, about poetry, about neuroscience, astronomy, religion, atheism, questions none of us had any answers to. There was no audience, just us and our stories. And those conversations are still what I miss the most about demand.

9:28 That's what modern life takes away from us. It confuses us. There's nothing social about social media. They're just media platforms and algorithms who want you to stay on them so they can show you ads. Social media in fact makes you antisocial in many ways. Look around any elevator, any line, any train station, any checkout, and you'll see every head is down just looking at their phones. We're physically there, but our mind is living somewhere else in that digital world. But eventually, we come to realize that your thousand followers cannot replace the one person you're going to need who will sit down next to you when you're hurting. So, that's the third symptom. And by the way, if you like such ideas and frameworks, please subscribe to my newsletter where we go way deeper into these kind of topics.

10:25 One insight, one tool, one practice comes out every Tuesday. It's totally free. And you can also take this episode with you on your morning run or commute because you can follow it on Spotify now, which is super cool. And now the fourth symptom is familiar to all of us and that is almost existential feeling unseen and unappreciated. We all want to be wanted. We all want to know that something changed because we were here. You want your boss to appreciate your work. You want your spouse to pay attention to you.

11:09 You want your real or post to get eyeballs. You want your videos to go viral. All of that is about our want to be seen. We all want to matter. And this is also where AI creates the deepest fear. For decades, we've worked on building our intelligence, our expertise, so we can stand out, right? So we can be seen. But AI can now perform many of the skills we spent years building. And it can do it cheaper, faster, without getting tired.

11:43 And it doesn't care about being seen. It doesn't care about recognition. So what happens to us when the skills that we spend years building become suddenly commoditized? Are we just disposable now? Will our value be repriced in the market? No one knows the answer to those questions yet. No one will know for next 5 years, I think. But that's why it feels a little more personal and existential than it used to because AI is this amplifier.

12:19 So there they are, the four symptoms, the feeling that you're restless, behind, alone, and unseen. What's the underlying root cause for all of them? There are many causes, but one key one that I think is that we tend to substitute the real hero with a stunt double. And that's the problem. You measure the wrong metric, you drive wrong behavior. There is a principle called Goodart's law. When a measure itself becomes a target to optimize, it stops being a a good measure. Our modern lives are full of those broken measures.

13:01 Money is a stunt double for security and freedom. A title is stunt double for being taken seriously. A company may be a proxy for building something that outlasts you. Now the stunt doubles are not meaningless. Money matters. Cash flow keeps your company alive. All that is good. But some of the stun doubles become so convincing that we forget that there is a hero that ever existed. So that's the pattern and here's how you break it. The disease called the modern life requires a four-step remedy and for that we have to go back to the 70s. John Bogle started Vanguard in 1970s and it became one of the largest financial institutions in the world. It still is, but he gave it a structure that's almost unheard of in finance. Vanguard would be owned by its funds and those funds would be owned by their investors. It still works that way. He built one of the largest financial firms in history and never owned any equity in that company.

14:17 He wasn't confused by the stunt doubles and the fake measures. He knew the real thing. So, how do we do the same? Here are the four steps. First, name the symptom. What are you actually feeling? Restless, behind, alone, unseen. Now, this matters because you'll often misdiagnose the real problem. So, for example, when you say you need a promotion, are you feeling behind or restless or unseen or all three? You got to know the difference. Step two, find the need that's underneath that symptom. Each symptom has an underlying unspoken need. When you feel restless, your underlying need might be safety.

15:14 When you feel behind, your underlying need might be adequacy. When you feel alone, it could be belonging. When you feel unseen, your underlying need could be significance. So, go for a walk. Figure it out. Write it down. What is it that you truly need? Step number three, expose the stunt double. What proxy are you chasing instead of that underlying need? Because it's easier to measure the proxy. Followers can be counted. Belonging cannot. You can measure how fast you're running compared to your peers. But your own sense of satisfaction is hard to measure. The stunt double is attractive precisely because it gives you a score.

16:00 It tells you whether the number went up or down, but it cannot tell you whether the real need has been met or not. That's why you need the fourth and final step. Replace your stun double with the real hero. Go after the real thing directly. If you feel restless, write down what the pursuit was supposed to give you. When you get to the top of the hill, remember that all you're going to see there is another bigger hill to climb. And you can still keep climbing, but have the clarity on why you're doing that. If you feel behind, stop using the entire world as your comparison set.

16:43 Compete with yourself. Define what good looks like to you for the life you're actually living. So, those are the four symptoms. But you see that whichever one that you're feeling, the move is the same. It's the same four-step process. One clear definition of enough when you're restless, one race that you run against yourself when you're behind, one person who truly knows you, and one life that changed because you were here. If you have those four things, there's not much else that would matter.

17:17 And if you don't have those, well, there's still plenty of time. Modern life tells you happiness is waiting on the other side of success. It's like you see a a beautiful rainbow and it's gorgeous. It's at a distance. So, you keep running like crazy toward it so you can get close, so you can get to the bottom of it, so you can touch it. But you can run all day long and you'll never get there ever because no one does. The faster you move, the further it gets.

17:57 And the funny thing is the light that made the rainbow possible was coming from behind you all this time. Thank you and I love you.