The Choice of Hercules. As a young man blinded by rage, Heracles killed his over-critical music tutor with a single blow. After this incident, understandably, he took himself off into the forest to think about his life and reflect on what he was going to do next? To his surprise, two ladies met him in the forest; both were dazzlingly beautiful and taller than ordinary women. The first stood before him in sensuous colours and glittering jewelry, while the other was clad in simple white. The first was called Kakia or (vice), although her friends knew her as "happiness." She said: "Choose me Hercules, and your life shall be a ceaseless pleasure, and no effort of mind or body will be demanded of you." Then the other spoke up, Aretê or Virtue, and she said: "Choose me Hercules, and you will have the honour of your countrymen, but I cannot promise a life without labour, for no man may reap where he does not sow…"Heracles deliberated on the choice, and the benefits which the two Goddesses offered. Finally, he chose the path of Virtue — both the bitter and the sweet. Because of this choice, he faced 12 trials, madness, entering the underworld, and the death of his family but afterwards was deified by Zeus and became a God - the highest honour a mortal can receive. Mental Health in Crisis.Epictetus made the point in one of his lectures that Hercules could never have been Hercules if he stayed in bed all day. Hercules was Hercules because he faced such great adversity. Adversity was what made him great, and yet we all avoid and complain about our own hardship?The Choice of Hercules is ancient and deep story, first recorded by Xenophon in his Memoropilia and comes from at least 400 BC in Ancient Greece, and God knows where before that. The story warns of the temptation of an easy life of pleasure and reward without any effort and the moral difficulty in choosing a life of honourable pain and effort that may or may not lead to achievement. We all know this when our parents as kids poke and prod us to do the right thing and not take the easy way out. But often this kind of simple truth has often become laughable in the modern world.But what is not laughable is that we have a severe mental health crisis at the moment amongst young people, and the data is very clear on that fact. So the question is, why? Why, in a time when people are more entertained, well-fed, and safer than ever, less under threat, and outside the food chain, are we more distressed than ever? The answer to this question lies in the choice of Hercules and Modern Neuroscience. The Answer From Neuroscience."Wickedness can be had in abundance easily: smooth is the road and very nigh she dwells. But in front of Virtue the gods immortal have put sweat: long and steep is the path to her and rough at first; but when you reach the top, then at length the road is easy, hard though it was." - Hesiod, Works and Days.They didn't have neuroscience back in 400 BC, so they had to make do with the insights of literature and Philosophy. Now, in the 21st century, we have empirical research into the brain's functioning that can help us elucidate the central importance of the choice of Hercules and the philosophy within for mental health.One of the most exciting discoveries of modern neuroscience is that pleasure and pain are located in the same part of the brain and behave like a balance; tipping the brain to the side of pleasure causes a mirror symmetric tip to the side of pain because the brain wants to maintain balance, homeostasis. (This is a crude description, and if you want to see Dr. Anna Lembke explain what she calls 'The Pleasure/pain balance', then watch this video here.) The basic idea is summed up in the old expression: what goes up must come down, and the further we go up, the further we go down.Dopamine and Mental Health. "High levels of Dopamine achieved without effort will destroy a person" -Andrew Huberman, American Neuroscientist.Dopamine is the molecule of drive, motivation, and pursuit and is described as the 'molecule of more'; it makes us want more of what makes us feel good. Often times people think, Dopamine is about reward, but Dopamine is about pursuit and craving of reward (The reward itself is more of an opioid in nature). Dopamine supply is finite but also renewable. This means you can 'use up’ your supply of Dopamine but, if you wait, it will return to baseline levels. When we experience unnaturally high levels of Dopamine from exogenous pleasures, drugs, alcohol, and highly-rewarding technology like social media or video games, we create a phasic burst of Dopamine, a sudden increase in the supply, and thus when the high wears off we fall below the baseline level. When we stop using an exogenous supply of Dopamine, we experience 'Dopamine free-fall' which is essential discomfort, dysphoria and irritation. The temptation then is to engage in what is called ‘Dopamine Stacking’, which is when you experience ‘Dopamine Free-fall’ and then immediately add another highly rewarding behaviour on top to prevent the Dopamine drop. Think when you are doom scrolling Instagram so you change to Youtube for something more rewarding. If we continue to do this for a long time, our brains downgrade our own supply of Dopamine because we have what is called an ‘exogenous supply’, and then when we stop using our drug of choice we will experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal: anxiety, depression, irritability, and insomnia, or in other words, the classic symptoms of mental illness.  Dopamine is essential for mental health. Mental health can be defined as the ability to set and pursue goals (most people enter therapy because they feel 'stuck', either they don’t have goals, or they can’t achieve the goals which they are pursuing). Without Dopamine, pursuing goals is impossible. Rats with a healthy amount of Dopamine will pursue food in their cage even over an electric shock pad. However, a Dopamine deprived rat won't even get up to eat if a food bowl is placed beside it, and will eventually starve to death within arm's length of a decent meal.The mechanics of Dopamine show how an easy life of pleasure with no effort can lead to more pain, discomfort, and ultimately mental health problems. Pleasure is psycho-physiologically costly, and thus the industries of pleasure in the modern world, fast food, rewarding technologies, and endless luxuries, are making us sick and depressed.What Can We do about it?It's convenient to say that this is a modern problem caused by the market. In some ways it is. However as the story of Hercules's choice points out, this is a perennial human problem - a choice between the lower and higher angels of our nature? I don't see any way a human being can be mentally healthy in the 21st century without some awareness of this problem and the functioning of their physiology.Understanding the mechanism of Dopamine and the pleasure/pain balance leads one to conclude that you should spend your Dopamine points wisely and not pursue rewards that lead to no outcome, in religious language, actions that bear no fruit. We are all in danger of living a life of pointless distraction and making ourselves feel good without producing anything to really feel good about. Making the decision to pursue the path of Virtue, effort and reward, rather than reward without effort, is deeply challenging. In my opinion, this is the moral fight of our generation: taking on the responsibility of self-regulating to avoid self-destruction. The problem is that reward is now de-coupled from effort, and we can get endless pleasurable rewards for free. Naturally, as mammals, we seek pleasure and avoid pain, but part of maturing and becoming successful as a human being is being able to endure pain to get real rewards, to achieve, from the French Achever, meaning "gain as a result of effort." No effort, no achievement. The choice of Hercules is more relevant than ever and is essential to well-being, to function well as a human being, which is what well-being really means. Now the environment is being engineered by other humans to distract us and make us addicted, which is making that choice even, to keep us living the easy life. We have to make this decision voluntarily, each of us. We need a culture and leaders who encourage us to overcome cheap pleasures to face honourable pains, to grow and develop ourselves as people. However, we all face the choice of Hercules every day when we experience that Dopamine free-fall and face the choice to go on and become more indebted to pleasure or to say ‘no’ and accept the cold and unpalatable suffering. A tough decision to make, one which I struggle with myself daily, but it is an important decision - which path will you choose?Did you enjoy this article? Share it with somebody!This will be the last post as I usually take the month of August off to refresh myself, gather new ideas, and guests and generally sort my s**t out. So you will hear from me again on September 1st! Warm Regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Sup Monks! (very special podcast today)Donald Robertson is a cognitive behavioural psychotherapist and best-selling Stoic author. He has written seven books on philosophy and psychotherapy, including the best-selling' Stoicism and The Art of Happiness’ and 'How To Think Like A Roman Emperor', and the recent 'Verissiumus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.' (Get your copy of Verissimus here)In this podcast, we talk about Donald's new book, the choice of Hercules, virtues vs vices, Social Anxiety, Worrying, Anger, Social Media and how philosophy teaches you to talk to yourself better. If you haven't already, I highly recommend getting Donald’s books and I consider them an antidote to many of the modern ailments we are experiencing at the moment, see more of his books at: https://donaldrobertson.name/ If you like this podcast and others, please consider sharing Monk with a friend and spreading the good word:Full Audio Podcast:Full Video podcast:Any questions or reflections? Feel free to email me back! I always love to hear from you. Warm Regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Resistance: The Enemy of Mankind. "The more important a call to action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be."- Stephen PressfieldLast week, I spoke about our inner daimon, an inner spiritual guide that can help us grow and develop in life. However, this wasn’t completely honest, as I left out the shadow side to that ability. An inner enemy that wants to stop us from growing and developing and wants to keep us weak and afraid, called: Resistance.A lot of people have messaged me previously asking about motivation and procrastination and how they can actually sit down to do their creative work? This is the topic of a book called 'The War of Art’ by reformed procrastinating writer, Stephen Pressfield. In this book, he coined the term Resistance. An inner antagonist we all must face to sit down and do something significant. Resistance manifests as an inner voice that rationalises, it tells you you aren't good enough, It tells you the work isn’t good enough, it tells you why bother? Resistance tries to divert you from your destiny; Pressfield says Resistance is a con-man whose only goal is to stop you from doing the work and realising your potential. Resistance is the source of procrastination and resistance is nothing other than fear, the fear that prevents you from living a full life. An example of how Resistance maims a person in this way is the life of Adolf Hitler. Hitler wanted to be a painter and architect. He applied to art school, but the Resistance standing between him and his goal was too great. He struggled with criticism and was scared to put his dreams on the line. In the end, it was easier for Hitler to start a world war and oppress an entire population than go through the pains of committing to his art. Facing Resistance is no joke. As a writer, I face procrastination all the time. I’ve planned entire careers and lives to avoid facing resistance. Pressfield points out people live entire lives designed to avoid facing Resistance, start pointless jobs, and relationships, have endless dramas and seek mindless pleasure-seeking to avoid the task. We are all in danger of living fake and chaotic, disorganised lives to avoid facing Resistance. The true path, Pressfield says, involves using Resistance like a compass - resistance points North in the direction of maximal growth and development. Makes sense? Where you least want to go is where you will find what you need. This is the old mythological idea of the dragon's cave and the dragon's gold - under the biggest problems lies the biggest reward. So, in other words, Resistance, where you are procrastinating, is where your heroic life really is. But then, the real question arises, how do you go after it?Becoming a Warrior."Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance."― Steven PressfieldFor Pressfield, defeating Resistance and procrastination involves a permanent change in attitude. The problem is we are, what Pressfield terms, ‘amateurs' - easily intimidated and scared off the field and fail to fearful rationalizations and the promises and diversions of Resistance. Resistance is a liar and means to divert us from our destiny, and Pressfield says we have to turn 'Pro' to face it. That means the same way you peel yourself off the couch to go to work to put food on the table, is the same you have to approach your creative work. Seth Godin, best-selling author and marketing genius, used to say ‘writer's block can only happen if you're thinking like a writer - plumbers don't get plumbers' block.’ You just have to get the job done. Pressfield points out that life is a sport you have to play hurt. Everybody is all hung up on healing these days and finding the perfect moment where you feel completely perfect to start the work, when really really you have to accept that it will never be perfect and just get going. Overcoming Resistance is about bringing your God-given gift into this world and giving birth to that sucker. Instead of letting Resistance push you away, let it call you forward. Pressfield compares this ideal attitude facing resistance to the Navy Seals. If you put the Navy Seals in cold water, they'll rub sand in their eyes to make it worse. If you starve them; they dehydrate themselves too. In other words, if it gets tougher, they want it to be even tougher again! This is because they know that the more challenging the conditions, the more they will grow. They cultivate a mindset that enjoys the pain, the suffering, and misery because it is a creating an immovable spirit, a point of pride and honor in the strength of their character. In my life, the same has been true in martial arts, the bigger the challenge, the more fear, the more progress. Mostly in life, pain, fear, and discomfort means we should stop and need to go the other direction. But this is a logic of a prey animal, an amateur, to become a Pro and beat Resistance, you need to be able to head into the eye of the storm.What you learn in martial arts is that making a habit of facing fear and practising courage is the best way to live. It never gets easier but resistance is never tougher than when you quit for awhile. Practise helps you identify what are excuses and rationalisations and ignore them and cultivate an attitude of getting the job done, no matter what. When an interviewer asked Elon Musk if he ever thought getting to Mars was too big a job? Elon said he didn't think of it that way. In his mind, human beings had to get to Mars at some point, and failure wasn't an option - the job simply had to be done, and so he was doing it. This has to be your attitude facing Resistance; there simply isn't a plan B, you have to be all in.   Develop a Growth Mindset."Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it."― Steven Pressfield.This attitude of facing Resistance, and becoming a creative warrior, long developed in martial arts and the military, has recently been confirmed by Neuroscience. In her groundbreaking research, psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford University was investigating why people fail. In one experiment, students were given a series of puzzles, ranging from easy to difficult. To her surprise, some kids liked failure and treated it as a learning experience. One ten-year-old boy even yelled out - "I love a challenge." This attitude epitomizes what Carol went on to coin as a growth mindset. A growth mindset thrives on challenge and sees failure as a springboard for stretching existing abilities. As opposed to a fixed mindset that sees failure as final. The difference between a fixed and growth mindset, in my opinion, is believing or disbelieving resistance - and this is something you can control. A growth mindset sounds like a hokey, modern personal development concept. However, what it really represents is an enlivening attitude toward challenges that can make overcoming resistance and procrastination a joy. The secret to developing this mindset is by changing your attitude to challenge. That challenging things are good. This makes the challenge more salient you and motivational because motivation is mediated by Dopamine. When you desire the challenge and difficulty, you attach a dopamine reward to doing hard tasks and create a positive feedback loop - rewarding yourself for taking on the hard task, which in turn helps you take on more hard tasks in general. You can do this by setting clear milestones, it might be writing a page, sitting down for an hour or two hours - whatever the goal, the point is I’m making a habit of sitting down and facing that resistance and rewarding myself for doing so. Habitually facing challenges takes the sting out of resistance and cultivates positive feedback loops. People often say the phrase 'enjoy the process'. In my opinion, this is what they are referring to, discovered by ancient philosophers, artists, and warriors, and now, modern neuroscience - the attitude is to see facing resistance and challenge as the goal. This is a fundamental shift in how you live your life, away from easy pleasure-seeking, and giving into fear and rationalisations and excuses, toward the hard and honourable combat with the forces of Resistance, which is the work of Gods and heroes. The best way to overcome procrastination is to make facing Resistance a way of life, and to remind yourself that when you see resistance it’s your job to go and face it - get it tattooed on your skin if you have to - we don't let the Resistance win. If you want to explore this topic more in-depth, I highly recommend getting Pressfield's, as it explains these truths more eloquently than I ever can, hereThank you for reading Monk. This post is public so feel free to share it.Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

What is a brand?This is one of those ghoulish, new-age internet questions that keeps me up at night. I don’t really understand brands and branding, but thankfully Joe Barnes is an accomplished Brand Strategist, graphic designer, painter and visual storyteller - so he can set me straight!  In this podcast, we are discussing branding, personal versus professional branding, the mechanics of branding, how creativity works, is controversy a good thing? And more. Listen on Spotify:Watch the full interview:Timestamps:0:00 - Intro01:00 - What is a brand?06:00 - The mechanics of branding10:00 - Problems in the marketplace12:00 - How creativity works14:00 - Branding in art18:00 - improving your brand24:00 - Branding & Identity29:00 - What is Creativity?33:00 - What is a good brand?35:00 - Controversy & Branding42:00 - Personal Development & Branding46:00 - Jordan Peterson's Brand52:00 - Being an online creative(If you like the podcast/essays, please consider sharing Monk with a friend :)Warm regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

“You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” — Socrates, Plato’s ApologySocrates and His Daimonion. 15th February 399 BC - The Athenians put Socrates on trial for trumped-up charges of corrupting the youth and worshipping false gods and he is found guilty and sentenced to death. Part of the reason for the charge was Socrates Daimonion, a voice which spoke to him and told him what not to do. The word Daimonion is notoriously tricky to translate, but Cicero refers to it as divinum aliquid — a ‘divine something.’ For later thinkers, like Plutarch, the Daimonion became a Daimon, a personal spirit, which Plutarch related to Conscience. Socrates’ friends urged him to run away when he was put on trial, one even went so far as to bribe the guards, but when Socrates consulted his Daimon on the issue, the voice said ‘no.’ Socrates faced a moral dilemma: Listen to the Daimon and die? Or ignore the Daimon and live? Socrates concluded that the Daimon had only ever told him good things in his life so therefore, death must not be a bad thing. He drank the poison and died, and the rest is history (literally). The Voice of Conscience. For the past three weeks, I’ve discussed personal development on the podcast and the thought occurred that our behaviour is controlled and regulated consciously by the voices in our mind, what Sigmund Freud would call the Super-ego. Of course, we ask other people and confer, but when we make decisions and think something over, this process occurs in the mind as a conversation. The question is, a conversation with who? Conscience As The Voice of Character.“Ethos Anthropos Daimon” (Character is fate or character is to a man, his Daimon) - HeraclitusMy problems with my Conscience started with issues with authority as a teenager. Until my late teens and early twenties, I had no real relationship with my Conscience. I didn’t do some things because I felt it was a bad thing to do, but rather in a calculating sort of way, because my parents or teachers would be mad at me, and that would suck. An actual quote from my writing aged 20, ‘authority is the true enemy of all mankind.’ My parents, teachers, the Gards, the government, and anybody in a position of authority, in my opinion, were illegitimate. As Millennials, in general, we have issues with authority because, of course, once bitten, twice shy. We have seen institutions crumbling around us and felt the anger and cynicism of children who have been let down. My anti-authoritarian philosophy allowed me to reject my own inner authority (Conscience) and to behaviour in any impulsive-pleasure-seeking way that I wanted. This is because when you reject authority outside, you also reject authority inside. My Anti-authoritarian fun was short-lived and I ended up stuck following the group, with no discipline, goals, boundaries of my own, only tons of negative emotion, confusion, existential crisis, inner chaos, impulsive-pleasure seeking, bad poetry, bad relationships, and overall, hell. The Conscience is an authority, and getting back in touch with the Conscience means again justifying that some authority is good and necessary. If you condemn authority outside you, you condemn authority within, and it is the authority within is what guides you through life. The conscience is responsible for personal development, or not. So, How do we improve our Conscience?My central thesis is that individuals should be responsible for their personal development, not me or anybody else. As Cicero said, ‘No one can give you wiser advice than yourself.’ But the problem is, like when I was younger, we aren’t that wise! My counsel to myself wasn’t good, or at least I didn’t listen if it was. So I found myself on a path of destruction, immoral and often downright dangerous. So how do you strengthen the advice that you give to yourself? That seems obvious, education? The job of teaching is to grow and make your own inner guiding voice more sophisticated and to put our childish, ignorant selves in conversation with the greatest minds and lives of human history? Except generally that doesn’t happen in the education system these days and so we are left bereft of that composite character, that inner voice, that can guide our development. The Stoics had a way of dealing with this problem: the contemplation of the ideal sage. The exercise was to imagine someone you admire (for the Stoics, this would often be Socrates) and to internalise their character, what you admire about them, what makes them good, how they act, how they think, how they judge and to ask yourself at times of moral decisions, what would they do? In other words, you emulate their example. But as you grow older, you build on their example with other people’s examples and discern a good example from a bad example and you define what it means to be a good person. Through negotiating with that inner authority, you develop an inner teacher, a mentor like Yoda in Star Wars. But one that has been strengthened with the ideas and thoughts of tradition and thousands of human lives. This is how you guide yourself well through life. Conclusion. There is so much more that could be said about this topic. But Socrates looked at the Daimon as the spark of the divine within and the voice of the Gods, and as a guide, he could rely on - that’s a superpower as far as I’m concerned. But the Conscience is not perfect and must be developed to develop your development! * Rationalisations, excuses, willful ignorance and lies pathologise your conscience and damage your judgement, making you lost and without guidance. * Education should deepen and enrich your conscience and help you internalise figures you admire to bootstrap your conscience. * If you develop your conscience you can trust your own judgement, tell right from wrong, and guide yourself through life effectively.Listening to your Conscience requires courage because it often brings you into conflict with other people. It takes wisdom to discern good advice from bad advice and learn right from wrong - Luke Skywalker eventually has to leave Yoda behind, so at times it is necessary to go beyond your conscience in order to re-vitalise it. There’s no straightforward path here. You have to be temperate to not destroy the voice with impulsive pleasures, and just to balance the demands of the conscience with your own needs and safety. But according to everything I’ve learned thus far, this is the place where personal development begins. This all starts with that relationship with your inner voice, with your inner god, and is something which is under your control. (Did you enjoy this essay? Then please share it below)Thank you for reading Monk. This post is public so feel free to share it.Subscribe for free to receive more insights like this. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Sup Monks! Here it is, the final episode of the 3 part trilogy with psychologist and founder, Mitja Černko on ‘What is Personal Development?’In this episode, we try to synthesise what we have discussed in the first two episodes; delving into the virtue of Sophrosyne, the ideal sage and Mitja’s model of personal development, Attuned Sovereignty, before bringing it all together into a new definition and hopefully, greater understanding. Listen now on Spotify: Watch the Full video on Youtube:Warm Regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Sup Monks! Part 2 of this very exciting chat with Psychologist and Co-founder of the Trainer's Forum, Mitja Chernko is out now!In this podcast we are talking about, the essence of personal development, Relevance Realisation, Attention, Big Five Personality Theory, evolutionary traps, Well-being and the developmental crisis of the future. Audio podcast:Video podcast:Timestamps: 0.00 - Intro 03.20 - Re-cap 09:00 - Relevance Realisation 16:00 - Agent/Arena Relationship 17:11 - Why does essence matter? 26:00 - Transformation of personality 30:00 - Personality versus Personal 34:00 - Capacities 40:00 - Evolution 45:00 - Well-being 55:00 - Psychological LiteracyPart 3 will be out in two weeks! If you like the content please share and encourage other people to sign up and get involved:Warm Regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Storytime. In Greek Mythology, in the later stories of Theseus, son of Posideon, slayer of the Minotaur, founder of Athens, he is having an identity crisis of sorts. In many of his later stories, Theseus, a once-great hero, mainly misbehaves with his mate King Pirithous. Pirthous (meaning to run around), was born when Zeus turned into a horse and bucked his Ma, and he was well known for causing trouble. One day, the mischievous pair decided they would marry the daughters of Zeus because they were both such hot stuff. Theseus chose Helen, who if you know the story of Troy, was the most beautiful woman in the world and a real heartbreaker (except at the time of this story she was only 12 and they kidnapped her. Pretty messed up). King Pirithous chose Persephone, Goddess of Fertility, even though she was already married to Hades, king of the underworld - yipes. Not the best call. This whole thing was a bone-brained scheme, like your mate tempting you out on the batter looking for women when you know you should be at home in bed. But Theseus thinking he was a good mate, said, 'no bother lad, I'll go to the underworld with you and we get her back,' which turned out to be a terrible move. They left Helen with Theseus Ma and went out on their mission. Somewhere on the journey, around the outskirts of Tartarus, Theseus got tired. He was older and not as youthful as he was before on his adventures. So he decided to sit down on a rock to rest, but when he did, he felt his limbs change and grow stiff. He tried to get off the rock but could not. He was fixed to the rock now! As he turned to cry out to his friend, he saw that Pirithous, too, was crying out. Around him gathered the terrible band of Furies with snakes in their hair, torches, and long whips in their hands. Faced with these monsters, the hero's courage failed, and they led him away to eternal punishment. For many months in half-darkness, Theseus sat stuck to the rock in the underworld, fixed, mourning for his lost friend and himself. By pure chance, he was rescued by Heracles, who came to the underworld for his 12th task, capturing the three-headed dog Cerberus. Theseus persuaded Persephone to forgive him for the part he had taken in the rash venture of Pirithous. So Theseus was restored to the upper world, but Pirithous never left the kingdom of the dead. When Heracles tried to free Pirithous, the underworld shook. When Theseus returned, Helen was gone and had run off with some other young fella from Sparta.  From that time on, he experienced terrible misfortunes, killing his own son, and eventually, some other new upstart hero threw him off a cliff. Overcoming the quarter-life Crisis.‘The Quarter Life Crisis’ is a fairly Millennial concept but not something uncommon for young people to wrestle with, the question of, who am I going to be? I’ve struggled with this for many years and consider myself to be out the other side now and able to offer some useful insights for you too. Life around the mid-to-late twenties, can get very complicated; some people are getting married with kids, others are out on two-day benders, and then you're just sitting there in the middle, eating cereal for dinner. Uncertain times for a burgeoning adult. When in the underworld, moving from one meaning-making structure to another, the temptation is to fall back into old habits and regress to the last place you felt comfortable and safe, to proverbially sit down on a rock. When in uncertainty you don't know how to act and you are in danger of falling back into old habits to stabilise yourself or just defaulting to copying everybody else. Except this doesn’t solve the problem of where you are going, to find a habitable adult identity.  So, how do you get out of the quarter-life Crisis? And what lies beyond? If you want to have clarity about how to act now, you need to decide who you will be in the future. The future self sets the normative constraints for how we act in the present. For example, if you want to be healthy in the future, you have to live healthily now. If you want to be courageous in the future, you have to start practising courage now. If I want to be a philosopher, I have to start talking shite, now... I found out the truth of the future self through hard experience. Being deeply unhappy with who I was in my early twenties and a mile off my ideal. I faced a choice then - Lie, and pretend everything is fine? Keep going the way I was going? Or get really, real? Face facts, that I didn’t really know who I wanted to be anymore and that I had to spend time atoning, trimming down on vices, making tough decisions, facing uncomfortable truths, and hammering away at those bad habits; the equivalent of moral weight lifting because morally, I was a complete shrimp.For me, a lot of my problems were tied up in the session. Last Christmas, the bad outweighed the good once more, and I decided to cut quit drinking for a year. There's no way to sugar-coat this tough-pill-to-swallow but drinking holds you back. Doing this sober time and drunk time has shown me that drinking gets in the way of just about everything, relationships, productivity, and self-respect. Drinking is fun but comes at a cost.The session became a familiar routine, an anchor in the chaos and uncertainty of life, beyond complicated families and academic pressures, there were friends, stories, status, rituals, weekly benders to look forward to, and hangovers to recover from, and then more sessions to get excited about all over again. But that is why quitting drinking, or any familiar routine, is so hard - It's not just not drinking the juice that makes your head explode; you genuinely have to become a different person. As Epictetus said, "It isn't possible to change your behavior and still be the same person you were before."Sacrifice is the essence of personal development. You can't have your cake and eat it too. We are limited beings, so for something to live, something else must die. As you get older, into your late-twenties, the early thirties, the landscape changes, people get into relationships, commit to careers, move on, values change, and we come face to face with the future and the question for ourselves, who am I going to be?  Getting over the quarter-life Crisis involves sacrificing the behaviours that keep you tied to who you were. For you, the sacrifice might be something different, but the aim is the same. You need to:  * Build a vision for who you want to be that you love and find motivating.* Identify and remove the bad habits that keep you from living in-accord with your ideal.* And cultivate the good habits that will get you there; the right path. It involves sitting down and wrestling with who you want to be, writing, reading, and reflecting. Finding your values and then breaking those abstract values into actionable routines and practices you can implement that will eventually become integrated into new habits.  This seems so simple? Why doesn't everyone just do this?In reality, it is not, and our culture offers tons of distractions and addictions but little to no real guidance on how to undertake this project. The modern marketplace is a comfortable rock making factory; social media, drugs, alcohol, movies, and endless streams of content, all threatening to keep you 'stuck on the rock' in the underworld. Using pleasure and comforting patterns of behaviour to keep you from cultivating your character. But the difference between being a loser and a winner can be sacrificing a couple of bad habits. There is no alternative to this process, and no one can do it for you. With the virtue of time, I realised that drinking was holding me back and keeping me comfortable in situations where I shouldn't have been comfortable, keeping me in physical and mental places I should have left, and repeating the same patterns of self-destructive behaviours, I should have left behind long ago. To be the person you want to be, you have to sacrifice the behaviours, the person, who you were. This is a harsh and brutal process, murderous really; you have to become a beast to avoid getting stuck on that rock in the underworld, forever. (Did you enjoy the essay? Feel free to share and encourage others to sign up)Thanks for reading Monk! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

Mitja Černko is a psychologist, researcher and co-founder of the Trainer's Forum. Mitja’s bio:“My journey as an adult learning provider started when I was 19, beginning with the contrast between "formal" and "non-formal" education. While studying psychology, contributing to various (international) student organisations, and conducting (social) data science projects, I became increasingly impressed by the scope and depth of learning experiences and how reliably they can be facilitated. 10 years later, this insight still powers my involvement with Trainers' Forum (TsF) - an international and interdisciplinary community of learning providers whose collective intelligence continually inspires me with its innovative potential.”In this podcast, we are discussing:* What is personal development?* Cybernetic Personality Theory* Stoicism* Individual evolution* Evolutionary traps i.e technology* Virtues and vices* Maslow’s hierarchy of needsListen on Spotify:Watch on Youtube:If you have any thoughts, feelings, or reflections on the podcast or the topic, please feel free to email me back!Warm regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe

John Sellars is a Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London (where he is an Associate Editor for the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project).He is the best-selling author of numerous books on Stoicism including 'Lessons in Stoicism' and 'The Fourfold Remedy'. (Get a copy of John's incredible books here)In this podcast, we discuss Stoicism's values, history, and tools and how they relate to mental health and well-being for modern people.Video podcast:Warm Regards, Mahon. Get full access to Wisdom Dojo at www.mahonmccann.com/subscribe