3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

I’m coming back on tour in the UK & Ireland with a brand new live show 🚀

​Presale signup is now live for first access to VIP, meet & greet and standard tickets.

A few months ago I was on tour in Nashville with my manager Luke and he was telling me how he sometimes gets in trouble with his wife at 1am because he’s still on his phone. Messaging, emailing, sending voice notes, just… coordinating shit.

For clarity, she is entirely justified as Luke has the highest phone use of anybody I know, but he gave an excuse:

That sentence stuck with me.

Because it seems to me that the world is split into two types of people: those who struggle to ever solve problems, and those who don't know how to stop.

Luke has a Problem Solving Brain.

And so do I, and so do a lot of you guys too.

You’re the high-energy, obsessive, pattern-seekers.

Always turning the Rubik’s Cube in your head. Always trying to make sense of something. Always looking for friction you can reduce.

This is incredibly powerful when directed toward useful problems, and absolutely destructive when left to direct itself.

The worst position to be in is having a Problem Solving Brain with nothing constructive to point it at.

Because the impulse doesn’t disappear, it just degrades.

The brain doesn’t stop wanting to solve, it just starts solving worse problems.

That’s when people get consumed by politics or porn or their ex.

Not because those things are especially meaningful, but because they’re available and emotionally charged and endlessly unresolved.

A problem-solving brain with no worthwhile problem will happily chew on junk.

Look, maybe with enough mindfulness you eventually loosen your grip on the need to solve anything at all and reach some monk-level detachment from mental friction.

That’s probably the end goal, perhaps.

But it’s unrealistic to suggest most people can simply drop that instinct right now.

Pattern-seeking isn’t a habit, it’s a default setting.

You can interrupt it, create distance from it, aim it better, but you don’t really get to switch it off.

So a more effective interim strategy is simpler and far more honest: accept that you’re going to try and solve problems anyway, so just give yourself great problems to solve.

That drive is inevitable.

You don’t get to opt out of it - you only get to decide where it points.

If you don’t choose the target, your brain will.

And it won’t choose wisely. It’ll grab whatever is closest and loudest and most emotionally charged and hardest to resolve.

That means you don’t focus on the best problem - just the stickiest one.

So the real question isn’t whether you’ll solve problems.

It’s whether the problems you’re solving are worthy of the effort.

MODERN WISDOM

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

This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Matthew Hussey - how do you know if you should break up with your partner, why do we struggle to commit to ending things with someone who is bad for us and how can you move on? Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
4.1M Q&A - I shaved my head and answer questions about not having a wife, what to think about before chasing success, forearms, alcohol, supplements & Iran.

Saturday.
James Sexton - it’s Valentine’s Day so I brought on NYC’s #1 divorce attorney. Absolute fire. Enjoy.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Can you protect victims without protecting criminals?

“1% of the population is responsible for more than 60% of violent crime.

And a disproportionate share of that 1% happens to come from marginalised or dispossessed groups.

And because of this the logic some people seem to think ‘well we just shouldn’t enforce laws anymore’.

But the problem is, criminals usually victimise people around them.

And the people they’re victimising also tend to be disproportionately poor, disproportionately marginalised and disproportionately from deprived backgrounds too.

Compared to Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the lowest-income Americans are:

• 7x more likely to be victims of aggravated assault.
• 7x more likely to be victims of robbery.
• 20x more likely to be victims of sexual assault and homicide.

Virtually every crime you can think of — the poor are the most likely to be victimised by it.

And what gets lost is that poor people are much more likely to be victimised by crime than to be perpetrators of crime.

But we focus so much of the attention on the perpetrators — and how they come from marginalised and deprived backgrounds — and we just don’t think nearly as much about the victims and what happens to them and what their lives look like afterward.

And I think that’s a shame.

I mean, if there’s a criminal who commits an act, it seems reasonable that we should spend more time thinking about how to help the victim than the perpetrator.” — Rob Henderson

2.
​A tweet that I’ve been puzzled by.

“Men hate Sabrina Carpenter and love Sydney Sweeney.

Women hate Sydney Sweeney and love Sabrina Carpenter.” — Maggie Moda

Why?

3.
​Finessed by a little black mirror.

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” — Jay Alto

LIFE HACK

Modern Wisdom Valentine's Review.

This has been breaking people's brains on Instagram.

I collected a list of 50 of the best, most viral and evidence-based questions to connect more deeply with your partner.

And 25 to help you work out if you should leave them.

​​75 of the Best Relationship Questions​.​
​

Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
I can't wait to show you the announcement video for the UK & Ireland tour this week.