you are introspecting too much
a little bit of introspection is a good thing
introspection is like salt. a little makes things better. any more than a little bit ruins the whole meal.
almost everyone you know is over-salting. the whole point of being introspective is to learn two things: your strengths and your weaknesses.
once you know those, you are basically done.
that is where almost every person alive should stop introspecting. anything beyond that is completely and utterly useless (and self-destructive).
people with high amounts of introspection almost ALWAYS tend to be unhappy. they become unproductive and lose their sense of meaning.
they get stuck.
the advice that so many happiness books give is to be more introspective, which is good advice for a very small number of people (and those people are probably not reading those books). for most of you reading this, it is the exact opposite advice of what would actually help.
for most of you, the right answer is to think about yourself a LOT LESS.
the small number of people who do need more introspection (psychopaths mostly) are incapable of doing it so the entire genre of “look inward” advice is misaimed at the people it would never help and wasted on the people who do not need it.
the best advice is to think about yourself less.
and the people most offended by “stop thinking about yourself so much” are almost always the people doing the most of it.
studying your own feelings makes them worse
Wilson and Schooler (1993) ran a study where they asked people to introspect about why they preferred different art posters before choosing one. the people who introspected made worse choices. they ended up with posters they liked less and regretted more weeks later. just thinking about preferences degraded them.
Nolen-Hoeksema spent two decades showing that “rumination”, the (introspective) habit of cycling through your own feelings and problems, predicts onset, duration, severity, and relapse rate of depression. the more you process, the worse you actually get.
a meta-analysis by Mor and Winquist (2002) found that self-focused attention is one of the strongest single correlates of depression and anxiety in the entire psychological literature. it is more predictive of mental illness than most of the variables clinics actually screen.
what should you do with this information? less.
the goal is narrow and the job is short
the goal of introspection is to understand your strengths and weaknesses and to understand what you actually want in life.
that is it.
it is a job that can be completed quickly. once you have a clean read on what you are good at, what you are bad at, and what you want -- the introspection is done.
everything beyond that is fluff and the fluff is what makes people unhappy.
people who get the calibration right are some of the most effective people in the world. Marc Andreessen rails against introspection but he has an amazingly accurate read on his own strengths and weaknesses. that is the goal of introspection.
a person without that read could not have started a16z the way Marc did.
Marc was the more famous and wealthier partner. he was, on paper, the senior figure. he still divided the firm 50/50 with Ben Horowitz because he understood that Ben covered the parts of the firm he himself was not built for.
a person with zero introspection would have grabbed the bigger share and tanked the company. a person with TOO MUCH introspection would still be journaling about whether to start the firm in the first place.
Marc had just the right amount.
the trick is doing the job and then putting the tool down. most people pick up the tool and never put it down.
most “introspective” people are not actually introspective
people who rank themselves highly on “ introspective” seem to have a worse read on their own actual strengths and weaknesses.
it turns out that people who think they know themselves are weirdly a stranger to the person in the mirror. so no need to even keep trying.
knowing your feelings is not introspection. it is awareness and they are not the same thing.
introspection is a clean read on what you are good at and what you are bad at. anyone who does not understand their own strengths and weaknesses is not introspective…which is most people.
most people who claim to be doing the inner work have spent hours processing their emotions and still have no idea why they have failed at the same kind of relationship for ten years running. they know they are sad. they do not know what they are missing. that is the symptom of someone who is talking about themselves a lot, not someone who has understood themselves.
a small minority of the population is doing real introspection. most of them are super quiet about it. they do the work, get their answer, and go back to building or whatever productive thing they can do in their life.
a much larger group is doing rumination and calling it introspection. those people are less happy. the wellness industry keeps prescribing them more of what is making them unhappy.
spend a LOT less time thinking about yourself
the best way to be consistently happy is to get out of your own head. stop thinking about yourself. that means stop thinking about your feelings.
this may sound harsh or too simple but it’s the most reliable lever there is.
attention is zero-sum. every minute spent auditing your own mood -- “am i happy”, “why am i anxious”, “what does this feeling mean?” -- is like a month not spent on the thing that would actually lift it.
watch the happiest people you know. they are not the ones with the most resolved inner lives. they are the ones who think about themselves the least. they’re usually absorbed in a project, a craft, a problem, a family. their attention points outward and stays there.
the happiest people i know could not tell you their attachment style if you paid them.
the unhappiest people do the reverse. they are the main character of every thought. they narrate their own feelings all day and consider that self-awareness.
feelings are not a dashboard you are supposed to check. the more you watch them, the worse the reading gets.
the wellness industry sells the exact opposite of the prescription. check in with your feelings. sit with the emotion. process it. for most people that is a disease rather than a cure.
the cure is to forget yourself for a few hours. build something. help someone. get lost in work that has nothing to do with you. happiness is mostly a byproduct of attention pointed anywhere but inward.
for most people, 100% of the times they are unhappy is from over-introspection.
therapy is a a net-negative
this is going to make people angry. it is also true.
therapy is, on net, bad for the general population. people who go to therapy are less happy than people who do not. the causation runs the opposite of how people assume -- it is not just that therapy attracts unhappy people (it does). it is that therapy is making people less happy.
if you are in acute crisis, therapy can save your life. that is real and it works for a small number of people who really need it.
but for most people, therapy is what a very powerful drug is to a healthy person. you only take it if you are really sick and you stop taking it when you are cured.
a lot of people have been told that therapy is like eating healthy or exercising or getting enough sleep or maintaining strong human relationships. things that almost everyone should do almost always.
that is wrong. therapy is not in that category. therapy is acute – like chemotherapy or surgery … you want to use it sparingly and targeted. it should be used in very specific ways for very specific problems. treating it like a vitamin you take forever is how it starts doing harm.
then there is the second problem.
most therapists are just plain bad.
most people would never hire a gym trainer who was less healthy than them. yet an insane percentage of people go to a therapist who is LESS happy and LESS fulfilled than they are.
on the job, 80+% of practicing therapists are probably worse than AI at the work which is both a wild claim AND a generous one. the bottom half of the profession does measurable harm. the top 15% is excellent and worth almost any price. the middle of the bell curve is doing slightly less than nothing (or worse, actively harming) while charging $247 an hour.
the wellness industry has trained so many people to believe that talking about yourself with a stranger once a week is the equivalent of taking your vitamins when it is not. you do not need more processing. you need a lot less.
the easiest way to be happy is to stop doing things that make you unhappy
“invert, always invert” - Charlie Munger
the most underrated move in the entire happiness literature: explicitly stop doing the things that make you unhappy. write down the three things in your week that consistently make you feel worse, and remove two of them. this is the highest-ROI intervention you can run and almost nobody does it because it does not explicitly feel like “working on yourself.” it is more like cleaning up your schedule.
the bottom line
a little bit of introspection is a good thing. the goal of introspection is to know your strengths, your weaknesses, and what you want in life.
that goal can be accomplished in a weekend.
most people spend a lifetime on it without finishing the job because they massively confuse processing their feelings with understanding themselves. the wellness industry sells the wrong product to most of its customers and the same customers feel worse after every session and keep paying for the next one.
think more about yourself, the worse you are. think about other people. think about ideas. think about things. life goals and accomplishing them. think more about OTHER people and what you can do for them. spend less time thinking about yourself. explicitly stop doing the two or three things that make you unhappy.
the only people who needed more introspection were the ones who could not do it. for the rest of you, the answer is, and will always be less.
note: Flex Capital invests in 50+ seed-stage start-ups per year (1+ per week). typical first check is $500k. please reach out if you know amazing founders that want to change the world.
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Not all of these claims pass the sniff test, but I always appreciate your hot takes!
I suspect Auren's "psychopaths" (echo'ing his point) will not self-identify and quickly share this to explain why they don't need any introspection or therapy ;)
Our highest performing athletes have trainers and sports psychologists. Yesterday I listened to Tom Brady cite a sports psychologist for shaping a lifelong perspective while in college, thirty years after the fact. Executives have always had coaches and therapists (sorry, "mentors"), some of whom were household names (e.g. Bill Campbell).
Regarding regularly-scheduled therapy, think of it like a 1:1. It's a time-box to step outside of your day to day and reflect. The recurrence ensures you have a space reserved for those conversations and exercise the muscle of having them. In a deliberate relationship, the scheduling flexes allowing you to consider the things you've discussed at your own pace. I pull in frequency if I'm working on something acute and extend it when I'm not. Right now I'm working with someone I meet every few months.
I suspect where most folks get into trouble is not realizing they can flex the scheduling, in which case it again, feels like a 1:1 where you're searching for things to discuss.
Reminds me of this:
"it's a real weakness to want to be liked" - Elon