3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

My North America live tour is getting close to selling out - LA, Vancouver, Toronto and Nashville are all gone.

New York City, Austin, Boston, Denver, Salt Lake City & Chicago - limited tickets left.

​Come and see me live.​

The Lonely Chapter has another perspective to it - as you grow you don’t fit in with your friends, but this means that your friends don’t fit in with you either, and this causes a reaction from their side too.

The hardest part of changing yourself isn’t just improving your habits, it’s escaping the people who keep handing you your old costume.

Others don’t just remember who you were, they enforce it - which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of a prison you can’t see.

Psychologists call this dynamic an Object Relation.

When people interact with you, they’re not engaging with you in your full, living complexity.

They’re dealing with the version of you that exists in their head, a simplified character built from fragments of memory and coloured by their own projections.

In Object Relations Theory, an “object” isn’t a thing, it’s the internalised image of another person.

We don’t just carry people as they are; we carry a mental sketch.

Which is why if you make a radical change, you’ll usually meet resistance.

Your transformation destabilises the representation that the people around you are attached to, so they try to nudge you back into the familiar role they know.

Charles Horton Cooley called this the Looking-Glass Self: we come to know ourselves by seeing our reflection in other people’s eyes.

If those mirrors keep reflecting the old you, it’s hard to step into the new one.

In social psychology, Self-Verification Theory shows that people prefer interactions that confirm what they already believe, about themselves and about you.

And if you disrupt this script, you introduce friction.

In one study, participants with poor self-image chose to interact with people who criticised them rather than praised them.

Meaning that even people with low self-esteem often prefer others to treat them in ways that confirm their pessimistic self-view because negative consistency feels safer than optimistic unfamiliarity.

If that’s true for how we see ourselves, imagine how much other people cling to their picture of you.

Before his conversion, St. Augustine was notorious for chasing pleasure, indulgence, and distraction. After his dramatic turn to faith, he struggled to convince old friends that he was no longer the same man. They resisted not just out of skepticism, but because the new Augustine didn’t fit the story they had of him.

In Fitzgerald’s novel, Jay Gatsby began life as James Gatz, a poor farm boy desperate to escape his origins. He tries to reinvent himself into a dazzling millionaire. But no matter how hard he works at it, the people around him reduce him back to the “upstart” outsider. His reinvention collapsed under the weight of their collective refusal to update their version of him.

Nelson Mandela started as a fiery revolutionary, advocating armed resistance against apartheid. When he walked out of prison after 27 years, his followers expected him to emerge hardened and vengeful. Instead, he embodied reconciliation. But that reinvention only truly stuck once he stepped onto the world stage, far beyond the circles that had known the old Mandela.

David Bowie began as a struggling musician in London, trying to make a name for himself in a conventional scene. His breakthrough was constant self-reinvention: Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and more. But each transformation often required leaving behind one circle, one city, one audience, because the people who knew him too well couldn’t help but cling to the previous Bowie.

St. Paul had once been Saul, infamous for persecuting Christians with unrelenting zeal. After his conversion, he became their fiercest advocate. But many believers couldn’t trust him; they couldn’t stop seeing the old Saul. It took years of travel and new communities before his new identity as Paul was accepted.

And in ordinary life, the script repeats.

The friend who quits drinking was once the reliable partner-in-crime but their newfound sobriety unsettles the group and throws everyone else’s bad habits into harsh contrast.

The shy colleague who becomes confident was once predictable in their quietness, so their assertiveness now reads as arrogance.

The young adult who comes home at Christmas was once an awkward teenager, however no matter how much they’ve grown, their family insists on infantilising them.

The podcaster who had a shaved head for 5 years gets tons of stick for having a perm after he grows his hair out despite his curls totally being natural and suiting his face and quite a masculine haircut if you think about it for a while (:

TLDR: many people don’t like you making positive changes because it’s effortful to keep up with and threatening to their shortcomings, so they dissuade you from doing it.

Which is why meaningful change so often requires escaping your environment.

Change isn’t just about building a new self, it’s about escaping the gravitational pull of the selves that still exist in other people’s minds.

​

MODERN WISDOM

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

This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Dr David Spiegel - hypnosis is able to get people to stop a lifetime of smoking after a single session. And performs better than painkillers. And can fix insomnia. Why? How? Wtf? Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Esther Perel - the world’s best known relationship coach on how love, desire and intimacy dies in relationship and how to save it.

Saturday.
Lisa Feldman Barrett - one of the best psychology and neuroscience researchers breaks down the secret dynamic of how our emotions actually work. Fascinating insights.

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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Fewer people can bench 225 than are worth $10M.

In the U.S., about 0.4% of the population (around 1.3 million people) can bench 225+ lbs.

Globally, the percentage is likely below 0.1%, with some estimates as low as 0.075%.

2.13 million U.S. households with a net worth of $10 million or more, constituting approximately 1.62% of all households.

If you can bench two plates, you’re already stronger than 99% of people on the planet, just maybe not richer.

​

2.
​Men and women may struggle to sleep together.

William Costello asked 2334 respondents:

“In an ideal world, would you prefer for you and your partner to each have your own separate bedroom in your shared home?

65% of men said No (prefer to share a bedroom)

54% of women said Yes (prefer separate bedrooms)

Women lean toward space, men toward togetherness.”

​

3.
​Overthinking invents more problems than it solves.

Worrying is just worshipping the problem.

​

LIFE HACK

Upgrade your backpack.

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It literally powers my life and everyone who I’ve converted has had their world changed by it.

The 14L Travel Pack is outstanding, ships internationally and comes with a lifetime guarantee and 30 day free returns so you can buy it risk free.

Honestly, just trust me on this one.

Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom
​

Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
I'm back to London this week. See you at the Gymshark event my pretties!