How to Make Fun of Yourself
You sit in a three-hour meeting you should never have joined. Your mind drifts to some dumb thing you did yesterday. It helps pass the time. I have done exactly that.
A waiter sets down your food and says enjoy your meal. You say you too. They walk away. You stare at the table for a second.
You walk out of an elevator, turn left with full confidence, realize immediately you are going the wrong way, and now have to decide: stop and turn around like a normal person, or keep walking in the wrong direction for a few more steps so it looks intentional. I have chosen the second option more than once.
You type your password into the username field, hit enter, and spend three seconds genuinely convinced the system is broken.
Small moments. None of them matter. None of them say anything about you. They are just the daily cost of being a person who is doing a lot of things at once.
A few years ago I said the wrong thing in a meeting. My boss was there, his boss was there. I do not even remember what I said exactly, something that came out a little off, the kind of phrase you immediately want to pull back out of the air. Not offensive. Not a career-ending move. Just... wrong for the room.
I spent the whole day with it. Running the replay. Checking my boss’s face in my memory. Wondering if I should send a follow-up, write a clarification, or just leave it and hope it dissolved. My focus was gone. And that night my HRV tanked, which is basically your body telling you that your nervous system is still arguing with something that already happened.
The next morning I went to my boss to address it. He barely remembered the meeting. It was one of those routine check-ins that could have been an email. He had already moved on before I even walked out of the room.
Which I would have done too, if I did not take myself so seriously.
That is the thing nobody tells you about self-importance. It is not always arrogance. Sometimes it looks like anxiety. You burn real energy on an audience that checked out hours ago.
So what does the alternative actually look like? Not the concept, the actual move.
Something goes wrong. Small or medium, nothing catastrophic. You feel the first pull toward replaying it, building a little case against yourself, calculating the damage.
You catch that pull. Maybe not immediately. Maybe a few seconds in. But you catch it.
You say something to yourself. Not a pep talk. Nothing motivational. Something dry. Of course that happened. Or just: Classic. Or in my case, a quiet acknowledgment that I told a waiter to enjoy his meal too, and life went on.
Then you continue.
That is the whole move. Catch it, say something light, keep going. The humor is not a performance. Nobody else needs to hear it. It is just the fastest exit from a loop that has no useful destination.
One thing to watch: the version that turns mean is not this. If the dry thought becomes a verdict, of course that happened because I always do this, because I am the kind of person who... that is a different road and it goes somewhere worse. Brief and warm is the target. Self-aware without the self-prosecution.
The research on this is pretty consistent, and it lines up with what most people sense anyway.
Treating your own mistakes as material instead of evidence keeps your mood from dropping as hard when things go sideways. A 2020 meta-analysis found that warm, self-accepting humor styles track with higher well-being and faster emotional recovery after setbacks, compared to self-critical or aggressive styles. [1]
A study from the University of Granada found that self-deprecating humor specifically, the version where you notice your own flaws and find them a little funny rather than damning, links to better psychological health over time. People assume making fun of yourself means thinking less of yourself. The data does not support that. [2]
A 2023 study added a physical angle: using humor as a coping tool during stress actually lowers the physiological stress response, not just the self-reported one. Your body notices. [3]
That last one matters if you track HRV or sleep. The story I told earlier was not just about wasted attention. It was a measurable thing. A bad night. All from a meeting nobody else remembered.
Over months, this builds something quieter than confidence. It is more like a shorter gap between the mistake and returning to normal. You stop expecting perfection from someone who walks confidently in the wrong direction and types passwords into the wrong field. That frees up something real.
A few people have said versions of this better than I can:
Naval Ravikant, from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:
“Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.”
Joe Rogan, from his 2009 special Talking Monkeys in Space:
“If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.”
David Shapiro wrote something that stuck with me. In a 2025 post about identity and AI, he said: “If your self esteem is still predicated upon some skill... that’s not just a threat to your livelihood... but also a status threat.” He was writing about AI replacing coders, but the mechanism is the same. In that meeting, nobody was attacking my career. I had turned a slightly awkward phrase into a status threat and spent the rest of the day fighting a battle nobody else showed up to.
The species-level view helps. When you zoom out that far, the wrong phrase in a routine meeting looks exactly like what it was.
You are going to say you too to another waiter. You are going to walk confidently out of another elevator in the wrong direction. You are going to have another meeting that nobody remembers.
The only question is how long you plan to keep attending them after they end.
What is How to MFY?
These essays and videos explain life as I see it, backed by research, and written by someone who has stress-tanked his HRV over a meeting that lasted four minutes in everyone else’s memory.
I write about what interests me. Suggestions are always welcome. We will cover movies, daily life, big and small questions, and try to figure out the world together. Sometimes I will get it right. Sometimes I will tell a waiter to enjoy his meal too. Either way, we laugh and keep going.
Sources
Jiang, F. et al. (2020). Humor styles and subjective well-being: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology. Read here
Torres-Marín, J. et al. (2018). Self-deprecating humor and psychological well-being. University of Granada. Read summary here
Simione, L. et al. (2023). Humor as a coping mechanism during stress. PMC. Read here
Naval Ravikant. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, compiled by Eric Jorgenson. navalmanack.com
Joe Rogan. Talking Monkeys in Space (2009). IMDB
David Shapiro. “On Becoming Nobody in the Age of AI.” Substack, February 9, 2025. Read here