Matt Walsh's Most Motivational Moments
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Your perfect match is waiting for you online or in stores at Mancini Sleep World. There are countless perils in life, no matter where you go and no matter what you do.

Those perils follow you around. Your own death, your own impending death follows you around. You can't escape it. Okay, walk around every corner and it's there. Go to sleep at night, sleep right next to your own death because we're all going to die. Every single one of us. And there's nothing you can do about it. Not one single thing. You will be decomposing in the ground in the not too distant future. That is a reality. It just is. I'm sorry, but it is.

No, we really think that like everything we go through, every little thing we say, every little or big thing that we go through, we think it's, well, this is the worst thing ever. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody. And it can be helpful to realize that nothing we're going through is new. People have been experiencing and surviving in spite of all of these sorts of things all through history. There has never been a time of utopian peace and tranquility. That sort of existence is simply not on offer. It's not available to us. It's not in the catalog, right?

of when you're a mortal human being. Life has never been easy. The life that we're given right now is as close to easy as humanity has ever gotten. And we can't stop complaining about it. So what does that tell you? We're so obsessively focused on our own stress. We think about our stress all the time. We talk about it. We like to tell people. We like to say to people, I'm so stressed out. I'm so busy. Here's what's happening in my life. We go around telling people how stressed out we are.

You know, I said earlier that you should go back in time in a time machine and ask somebody in 1862 about their stresses. But actually, you can't do that because, first of all, you probably don't have a time machine, but also because the people in 1862 wouldn't have known what you were talking about. Stress is a modern invention. Prior to the 20th century, nobody talked about their stress. They didn't have that concept.

To ask a person if they're stressed, they would have looked at you like, what does that even mean? That doesn't mean that they didn't experience stress as we think of stress. It just means that they didn't use the word or think of things in that way, which meant that they certainly weren't intensely focused on the subject like we are today. In fact, the entire category of mental health would seem totally foreign and bizarre to pre-modern people. That's not to say that stress and mental health don't exist or are myths or something. Rather, it's just to point out

how we've gone all the way to the other extreme end of the spectrum. We are consumed by the thought of our own stress and our own mental health. We are stuck inside our heads, constantly analyzing how we feel and how we feel about how we feel and how we feel about how we feel about how we feel. This only exacerbates the anxiety and the stress. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. That's why perhaps the best thing to do sometimes, I think, and this is a good thing as we head into the week, turn off the screen, put down the phone,

Go out and get some exercise. Pick up a hobby. Do something. I mean, engage in some kind of actual physical activity in the three-dimensional physical world and think about something else, literally anything else, aside from yourself and your feelings. That's the other advantage that pre-modern people had, which probably...

gave them better mental health in the long run, though they didn't have that category. They didn't think of it that way and their lives were much more difficult. Still, they lived in the world, right? They lived in the physical world for better or worse. They inhabited the spaces where they lived. They actually inhabited. They concerned themselves with what and who was closest to them and spent most of their time thinking about those things. So we should try that for a change. It'll do wonders for your stress and your mental health.

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Your sensitive data is exposed. Your passwords, credit card numbers, personal messages, they're all vulnerable. Here's the scary part. It doesn't take an elite hacker to access this information. Even somebody with basic technology and inexpensive equipment could potentially intercept your data. Now, I'm not suggesting that you need to live in fear or disconnect from the digital world, but you do need protection. That's why I use ExpressVPN.

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Now, I honestly don't know what a statement like I deserve to live comfortably means. To deserve something is to earn it. It's to be worthy of it. Are we all worthy of a comfortable life? Have we earned it just by simply existing? And even if we have, even if we do all deserve comfort, whatever that means, we're not.

What good does it do for you to just talk about how you deserve it? You can cry all you want about what you think you deserve, but to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and also Snoop from The Wire, deserve ain't got nothing to do with it. Now, maybe we all deserve to skip through fields of daffodils while gumdrops fall from the sky, but that's not what life has presented us, okay? That's not the reality. So maybe you deserve something other than the reality? I don't know what that means.

You can't manifest what you think you deserve just by talking about it and making demands to the universe. So for all the younger people who lament the state of things and the fact that in many ways it would have been easier to have been born 40 years ago, we might just put it this way. You're right. You get a raw deal. It's not fair.

I don't think you deserve a comfortable life necessarily. Life is simply an uncomfortable thing much of the time. But you do deserve a better country and a better culture and a better economy than the one that you're getting. Okay, now what? We've established that. It shouldn't be this way. This should not be the culture that you are inheriting. It shouldn't be. Okay, what's your next move? What do you do now?

The problem with people in the younger generations is that they correctly diagnose many of these issues, and then they use that diagnosis as an excuse to give up before the game even starts. They decide not to put in the effort at work. They decide not to work hard. They decide to essentially drop out of the dating scene and give up on romantic relationships and marriage and family and everything. They retreat behind phones and screens. And this is just not the way to solve any of these problems.

It's the same kind of criticism that I have of the red pill manosphere types who correctly point out all the ways the system is stacked against men, but then they offer no real solution except for a full-scale retreat recommending that men give up on family life, marriage, legacy, their own bloodline. That's not a strategy. That's despair. And you can't give in to despair, especially at a young age. So yes, you may graduate from college.

and realize that you wasted a lot of time and money on a useless degree. You got scammed into going to college when you really didn't need to go. And you plunged yourself into debt for something that might not do you any good at all. That's also really unfair. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. You may struggle to attain financial security. You may not be able to afford a house or many of the things that your parents could afford at your age. All of that may be the case.

These are the obstacles that you face. Every generation has its own. It's not perfect for anybody. And these are yours. The goal is to succeed and thrive in spite of them. That must be the goal. Otherwise, there is no point. You have to get to work either way. And obsessing over how unfair everything is and how you aren't being handed what you think you deserve will not accomplish anything. You have to work for it one way or another.

Whether you're happy or not, the fact of life is that your life requires work. And if you refuse to do it, somebody else has to. So who's that going to be? Your parents? Johnny Taxpayer next door? Maybe a combination? Whoever it is, if you are not living a life free of the work requirement, nobody can.

You are rather living a life where that requirement has been offloaded to somebody else. You've made someone else your slave, in effect. You don't want to be a wage slave, so someone else is going to be your slave. There's nothing noble about that. It's entitled, it's selfish. In fact, it's evil. The refusal to participate in the difficult aspects of your own life is evil. It's a shameful thing. We hear that all of these younger people are prioritizing their happiness, focusing on their happiness.

giving up work for the sake of happiness, pursuing happiness, thinking about their happiness, talking about happiness, obsessing over their happiness. And yet, shockingly, so few of them are actually happy. There have never been people who talk so much about happiness and yet feel it so little. Isn't that interesting? Millennials and Gen Z are at once the most focused on their happiness and yet also the least happy. Perhaps there's a lesson there which we might consider finally learning at some point.

And the lesson is that happiness cannot be conjured out of the ether like a magical spell. You can't will yourself into it. You can't convince yourself to be it. Happiness is a byproduct of a well-ordered, well-situated, grounded, virtuous, productive life. That's the only way to achieve sustained happiness.

You can find pleasure outside of that. You can go to a back alley somewhere, buy some black tar heroin and find some pleasure that way, I guess. You could derive pleasure from an extra large fast food value meal or a $3 hooker. But you won't find happiness any of those places. And you won't find it in a directionless life free of work, free of challenge. Spend staring at screens while somebody else provides for all of your many needs. As it turns out, life and work cannot be severed and neither can happiness and work. It takes work to be happy.

You have to do difficult things. You have to exert yourself. You have to give yourself over to some cause beyond yourself. Happiness comes then as a side effect, often when you least expect it and always when you aren't thinking about it. You simply fulfill your responsibilities. You live your life. You do your work. And one day you look up and you say, wow, look at that. I'm happy. That's how happiness works. You only find it when you stop looking for it.

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