3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

Thank you so much to everyone who copped the MW merch. It's so sick and I can’t wait to see you all wearing it!

I’m already grinding on the next designs to come out around UK & Ireland tour. I’ll be working hard to drop the price further too 💜

Also - I’m coming back to the UK & Ireland with a brand new live show in 8 weeks!

​​G​et your tickets before they're gone.​

A friend recently bumped into his ex randomly on the street.

It’s been over a year since they broke up and he’d spent months ruminating about the decision before ending the relationship.

Things weren’t right for a long time, and they weren’t going to change, and he’d considered and weighed up and assessed for far longer than he should have done… and eventually decided that they should go their separate ways.

14 months later he saw her and was immediately was sideswiped. Total head-spin into self-doubt and regret.

How is it that a decision he felt so certain about in the past can be undone in seconds?

Well… there is a belief we all hold that wisdom accumulates over time. That every year we’re alive for makes us a better judge than the one before.

We automatically give the Present Self epistemic privilege, which is a fancy way of saying we believe that “later means wiser”.

We assume that us in the present is more informed than us in the past.

In most areas of life, I think that’s right.

But in matters of emotion, pain and the heart, time doesn’t only add information, it also quietly deletes it.

The mechanism at play here is called the Fading Affect Bias which is kind of like the mind’s psychological immune system.

It says that the emotional intensity of memories fades over time, but negative emotions tend to fade faster than positive ones.

This is great! It allows us to recover from hard experiences rather than permanently living pinned beneath the emotional weight of everything that has ever hurt us.

But our psychological immune system has a side effect - the fading affect bias can be brilliant for surviving the past, and occasionally terrible for learning from it.

It takes the sting out of your memories, but also removes the warning label too.

The entry in your diary says, “She didn’t reply for the 4th night in a row. I can’t keep doing this.”

Six months later, your memory says, “She was busy sometimes.”

Both statements are technically true, but they are not emotionally equivalent.

Time is a terrible witness because it remembers what happened but forgets what it felt like.

The facts survived, their price tag did not. And the price tag is what matters.

What you need is more Borrowed Authority.

We normally borrow authority from experts, institutions and people with more experience than us.

But sometimes the person with more experience is YOU, from a year ago.

The version of you who ended this relationship had more information than you do right now.

That version knew what it felt like to be in it on an ordinary Tuesday.

They remembered the eighth cancelled plan, the fourth unkept promise, the holiday ruined by another argument or the strange loneliness of lying beside somebody you loved but no longer felt safe with.

Current You might remember that these things happened but Past You remembered what they cost.

And the strange thing about healing is that it slowly erases the evidence that made healing necessary.

You see this dynamic everywhere…

Someone resigns from a prestigious job after years of burnout.

Six months later, they miss the salary, the status, the colleagues and the identity.

What they struggle to reconstruct is the Sunday-night dread, the chest tightness, the exhaustion, the inability to think and the mornings when getting out of bed felt like dragging a body from a lake.

The present self remembers what the job gave them while the past self remembered what it took from them.

The version of you who stopped drinking remembered the shame, hangovers, excuses and the collapsing self-respect.

But once sobriety repairs your life, those memories become intellectual rather than visceral.

Eventually, the comfortable sober self starts to wonder whether the desperate drinking self was being dramatic.

“Maybe it wasn’t even that bad. Perhaps I can handle it now.”

The improved life created by sobriety becomes the argument for drinking again.

The success of a decision often erases your memory of the motivation that made it necessary.

Recovering from being ill can create the same strange inversion.

Once a sick person begins to feel better, they can become sceptical of how unwell they once were.

Sometimes people stop the medication, or diligence, or rehabilitation that helped them - precisely because it worked.

Progress destroys the evidence that justified why you started working so hard in the first place.

Of course, this idea can become a convenient excuse to never reconsider anything.

The point is not to treat every previous decision as sacred simply because it was made first.

A more useful question is to ask which version of you had better access to the relevant information.

Sometimes the highest form of self-trust isn't believing your current feelings, it's respecting a decision made by a version of yourself who had access to evidence that has since disappeared.

Past You might not have been abandoning something good, he might have been rescuing you from a situation he knew you would eventually forget.

One of the smartest decisions you might ever make is to trust a past version of yourself who you now disagree with.

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
​

This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Jimmy Carr - how to build confidence, pay the tax man, perform 300 shows per year and not go insane. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Hunter Biden, Duncan Trussell & Matt McCusker - yep. That really happened. Hold on tight.

Saturday.
Daniel Lieberman - an evolutionary biologist tried every diet on earth to see which is healthiest. Fascinating and insanely useful. Do not miss.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​US workers who are functionally illiterate earn roughly the same per hour as the average British worker.

“America is so rich that people who can’t read or count manage to out-earn average and somewhat above-average smarts Brits.

Young people in Britain are some of the most well-educated in the rich world, but economic stagnation means that breeds not growth but frustration.

You cannot understand just how poor Briton is making life for its citizens.” — h/t John Burn-Murdoch & Crémieux

2.
​Do women prefer men with small muscles?

In a recent study the answer is… no.

Every single woman in the sample exhibited a preference for strong men.

“For each female rater, we computed the correlation between her ratings of the men's attractiveness and the men's actual physical strength.

These correlations were examined to see if any women in our samples showed a significant preference for weaker men.

They did not.

None of the 160 women in our study who rated attractiveness produced a statistically significant preference for weaker men” — h/t Macken Murphy

3.
​I got in trouble again with the press this week.

“If we have made a world in which Chris Williamson is a mainline problem, we are winning as a society.” — Angelo

LIFE HACK

Get a sinus ENT assessment if your sleep sucks.

Tons of my friends have gone in (plus me) and had their airways assessed to find out they’ve got Chronic Sinus Infections.

Super common, wrecks your sleep, and just sits there sapping your recovery and energy in the background.
​

Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
You can now leave a note or a voicemail for me and my guests to react to on Modern Wisdom.

Head to https://chriswillx.com/stories to leave a story, problem or question you want me to hear.

Maybe Jocko Willink can advise you on your horrible breakup or Alex Hormozi can roast your chronic flatulence. The adventures are endless!