All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:40
482 Goals and Tension - Stef needs help!

Can we have life goals without tension? For me, at least, not so far!

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Good lord, it's 10 to 8 still.
It's 10 to 8 still.
On the 29th, I think.
It's Monday of October 2006.
And we're heading off to work.
And we are without video.
Which means that I can relax and not have to check whether Windows Movie Maker has crashed or broken or the power cord has come out or Something other.
And also I cannot have to worry about messing up the lighting with eyeshades and sunglasses and all that.
So anyway, I hope that you're doing well.
I wanted to talk this morning.
Actually, I sort of wanted to ask the help of people who are listening to this this morning.
And this is not a plea for donations, though that is a constant undercurrent for me.
But this is something I've had...
Little luck over the years throwing off my personality.
And I'm just sort of wondering if there are people out there who have some other insight into how I might go about approaching this.
The one addiction that I have never really been able to get rid of.
To throw off in my personality, and it seems to sort of settle back into me.
It's like holding a balloon underwater.
I get a certain amount of progress while I work on it, and then when I stop working on it, which of course the purpose of life is not to work on issues, but to be happy.
So when I stop working on it, then it sort of pops back up, almost as if I had never touched it to begin with.
I think it's a fairly common issue.
I don't know if it's just me, but I did want to have a chat about it, throw it out there as something that I've not been able to solve.
I've only been able to solve it in weird cliches that don't lead anywhere.
And so I thought maybe there would be somebody or a number of people out there who might have some insight into how I can deal with this addiction.
And my addiction really, fundamentally, is to the future.
And that was a joke.
Well, not a joke exactly, but somebody asked me, I don't know, early on, one of the first call-in shows asked me, are you talking from the future?
And I sort of laughed. And I sort of remembered that comment because there's some real truth in it.
Nothing sort of grand about it, but...
I do have this terrible addiction to the future.
And I really have a tough time.
And I've talked about this when I was doing the bathrooms last weekend, the weekend before last.
And there was some resonance, I think, with people who had listened to it.
But I wanted to talk about this in a pretty clear way, because I just can't solve it.
I just...
I can't solve it.
And it is the root of...
I mean, it's funny, because I don't think of myself as a workaholic, although lots of other people do.
But maybe that's important as well.
You can't fix what you can't acknowledge.
Because I do relax.
I do relax.
But I think that I have a very, very hard time Staying in the present in sort of a fundamental way.
So I think about abstracts, and of course abstracts fundamentally around the future.
There's very little abstraction in the past.
There are lessons which you can get from the past which resolve to abstracts, but they're really only a value and come to life when you talk about the future.
My childhood is dead and gone, but if I can extract valuable principles for other people, then their youth, and I just looked at the demographics of Free Domain Radio, there's a lot of 18 to 24-year-olds, so those people are sort of in the final phase of childhood, and our brain sort of stops maturing in our mid-20s, and they can be helped through this kind of stuff, but it's only concepts and abstracts in philosophy Don't live in the past.
History is a misnomer.
History is not about the past.
It's about the future. And this is, of course, the great mistake that is made in teaching it, to imagine that it's something about the past.
It's not important to know where we got to in the now, because in a sense there really is no now.
But it is important to know where we're going and that the principles extracted from the past, when looked upon in momentum here, if you want to know where an arrow is going to land, then you look at its trajectory and then you can figure that out.
If you don't know the trajectory, you don't know where it's going to land.
But you don't really figure out the trajectory.
In order to plot where it's already been, because that's unimportant.
But if you can plot where it's going to be, that is important.
Don't study the weather patterns to predict the weather yesterday, because it's come and gone, but you use it to predict the weather tomorrow, which is of value.
So I do have, I mean, I think that this is something that is quite common among philosophers and thinkers and people who like ye olde abstract thinking.
And I was reading some Schopenhauer last night.
And he talks quite a bit about this, that this idea that in the future is a moment that will bring me joy is something that is very common among men, and it makes you look like this sort of Tuscan ass that has a piece of hay suspended or a carrot suspended on a string, and you're running forward to that, and you feel that as soon as you get there, you will be...
You will be content and happy and fulfilled and it will all have been worthwhile that life is an equation that sums up to a moment of achieving a goal and everything is less valuable until you get there.
And that certainly is something that is deeply embedded in my mind and I simply can't uproot it.
I simply cannot uproot this addiction to the future, this addiction to the idea of That the culminating joy of my life is to come, not something that I am processing on a day-to-day basis.
You know, there's a feeling that this is the dress rehearsal and it's important to be good and it's important to learn your lines, but the real play is yet to open.
And this is sort of just practice and so on.
And it's a very common feeling, I think, among people.
I remember John Lennon. Talking about this, I think it was shortly before he died.
Life is not just making plans for your real life, something like that.
And it's common in the discontent that we feel relative to goals.
Because if you have big goals, and I have big goals, and...
Then just about every moment can be measured with relation to the pursuit of these big goals or the achievement or lack of achievement of these big goals.
And everything becomes like a stepping stone, right?
So, you know, if for me, changing the world is my goal, which it is, but if changing and I'm, you know, sort of trying to figure out whether this can be done through my will in the present or whether I'm simply casting seeds, For the future, and I think it's more the latter than the former.
But if my goal is to change the world, then the achievement of that goal, which obviously is somewhat subjective, the achievement of that goal is 100.
That's happiness 100, right?
Because otherwise, why would you aim towards it?
You aim towards it to do good, and to do good to be happy, and so on.
And that's 100.
And so, you know, if I'm 10% towards my goal, then I'm happiness 10, relative to that sort of happiness 100 goal.
And when I'm 50% of the way there, then I'm happiness 50, and so on.
And I know that happiness calculus sounds a little odd, and I'm perfectly aware of that.
And it's not that I sort of sit and think this stuff consciously, but...
The spur that kind of whips me on is the idea that the achievement of the goal is going to give me happiness and sort of complete my happiness.
And until I get there, I have to be uneasy.
I mean... This is frankly what goes on for me in an emotional sense.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a happy guy and all that, love my life, but there is a kind of unease in my soul that is because I am constantly, and not consciously, but constantly measuring myself relative to my objectives and finding myself Not there.
And that breeds a kind of mild, it's not sweaty palms or anything, but it's just a kind of mild unease that I would say is pretty constant in my life.
It doesn't interfere with my happiness in very many moments, and it's sort of a minor background hum, but it's pretty constant.
It's pretty constant. For me, it sort of manifests itself as a sort of tension, minor tension around sort of the pit of my stomach.
And I'm sick of it.
I'm absolutely sick of it.
And it's becoming more conscious for me because I'm really working on this whole approach of Don't do what I don't feel like doing.
Like, normally I've got a couple of ideas for articles, so normally this weekend I would have I dunked into the old article Inkwell and ripped off one or two for Lou Rockwell and some other people to drive more people to the side and so on.
And I didn't.
I was like, do I feel like doing this?
Do I really feel like doing this?
Or is this me climbing one more step towards my goal because I feel discontented at my distance from it?
And of course it was the latter.
It was not that I felt positive active joy in sitting down and working on an article or two.
Because I've got it worked out.
And of course even if I don't, then I'll have it worked out in very, very short order and it won't really affect my basic thinking because that all sort of hums along nicely.
But it really was for other people to explain to other people an idea that I had rather than to sort of work it out myself and, you know, advance my life thereby.
In which case, you know, it's like going to the gym, right?
I mean, if you're already in perfect health and you've just worked out, you don't go to the gym.
Again, it's not to say that I'm in perfect health.
That's just sort of an extreme metaphor.
But I... I didn't do it, and I didn't sit down and do the mind-numbing task of gathering emails from the web and sending invitations to Free Domain Radio, and I didn't work on the speech for the Libertarian Party, which is coming up on Saturday, the 4th of November.
I think I'm on at 1 p.m.
And I didn't do any of these things.
And I didn't do one or two things that I could have done for work.
And I was reading a book to do with work, which I found kind of dull, and I just stopped reading it because I wasn't enjoying it.
And so it's funny because I am consciously sort of not doing things out of uneasiness.
I'm not doing things because...
I feel that I should or that my goal-oriented nature is digging the heels into my flanks and making me start off relaxing with whatever I'm doing.
So what I did Sunday, and this is when I did the podcast before the show, was I went to buy some books and a computer game.
Some books, and it's not books on like, here's the calculus of free market ideologies, but some funsy books, some just sort of idiot books that are fun to relax with.
And so for me, it was really quite interesting to sort of go through that process and to note in myself this absolutely embedded sense of an unconscious measure of where I am relative to my goals and a moving forward Towards these goals, not based on the joy in the moment of the pursuit, but...
Oh, this sort of just struck me that here I was talking yesterday.
It's funny how this all lives together in my brain, but I was talking yesterday on the show about...
Love being respect for the pursuit, not the achievement of virtue.
Love being respect for the subjugation of the individual will to objective rationality and science and logic and so on.
And here I'm talking about that I don't necessarily...
I'm trying to sort of figure this one out.
I don't really do it with myself, right?
I'm going to say to myself, well, you know, you're pursuing this goal, right?
Not right now, right?
And, of course, that seems a bit slave-driving as well and not too compatible with the idea of freedom.
That I must be pursuing this goal.
And when I'm not pursuing it, then my self-respect dips and my sort of sense of ease and comfort dips and so on.
And, you know, as I said, I'm sick of it.
I'm sick of this idea that I sort of sit there foot-tapping sort of critical horn-rimmed glasses and a ruler in my hand, perhaps.
elasticity to my conception of comfort in the moment, right?
So it's like, okay, you can be comfortable in the moment.
Yeah, you've earned some rest.
You can flop.
You can relax.
You can go for a walk.
You can hit the gym.
You can do this kind of stuff.
And yes, there's a sort of hourglass that's upended when that occurs.
It's like, you know, we're on this train to get to the goal, and when we stop, it's only to do maintenance on the train.
It's only to, you know, get some additional fuel.
It's only to go over the passenger roster, and maybe to let the driver take a break because his eyes are tired.
So we could do that, but...
We can do that with the knowledge that this is a timed, unionized break, and by God, we'd better get back on the train and get moving towards our destination, because that's what we're here.
That's what we're all about. And I've never figured out, and I can't figure out, how to do this balance, right?
How to have goals without having unease in my soul relative to my...
Achievement of those goals.
I just can't crack that nut.
And God knows I've tried for years.
And I just can't figure out how to have a destination.
With stillness. I mean, that really is the essence.
I can't figure out how to have a goal in the future and live contentedly in the here and now.
And it is a huge problem.
And I know that there's the Buddhist solution and the Schopenhauerian solution, which is give up your goals, which is fine, I guess, for Schopenhauer, who didn't have to work a day in his life.
And it's fine for the Buddhist monks who were content with rags and bald pates and begging.
But for me, that's not how life works.
I mean, I'm a big fan of doodads and trinkets and housing and food that's pleasant, and I don't believe that a renunciation of the world and the goals therein is the source of happiness, right?
I also don't believe in this sort of, again, this is sort of Schopenhauer slash Aristotle, I don't believe in the maximum.
This doesn't mean that it's wrong, it's just that I don't believe it, and it just doesn't sort of feel right to me, which is not a very good argument, but I'm sort of just talking about what's going on for me emotionally.
I don't believe in this Schopenhauerian slash Aristotelian approach that the wise man does not pursue happiness but merely avoids ills.
You sort of work to avoid want and sickness and unpleasant company and false idealism and so on.
And then you sort of live easy-living, quiet diet, so to speak.
You live this small life.
Of just thinking about philosophy, I guess, or with that kind of idea in mind.
And you don't have any particular goals because as soon as you have goals, it's sort of like...
I mean, to me, it's a bit of a paranoid worldview, which is not to say that mine doesn't have tinges of it, but this is sort of the way that I view that kind of approach to life.
It's sort of like, you know, in every movie or thriller that's to do with bad guys, there's always a hostage, right?
This hostage is basically how the good guy is messed up and destroyed and undermined or whatever, right?
So the girlfriend or the mother or the wife or the kid or something is snatched and the weakness is in the ties to the people in the world, right?
And... That is how people are controlled and manipulated, or as I've talked about before in every cop show, they say, you know, where's Bob?
And then somebody says, well, I don't know where Bob is.
And they say, oh, you run a restaurant here?
Are you sure all your permits?
Do you want to get food inspection or something?
And then they threaten them with bureaucratic red tape and inspections and tax reviews and audits and so on.
And they just, you know, everybody falls into line and so on because they want...
To avoid those things, that they are controlled, where, of course, in the Buddhist sense, you don't get married, you don't have a career, you don't have property, you barely have friends, and so there's nothing to be taken away from you, and therefore you are not controllable in that sense, except, of course, by you sort of live in a monastery and have to wear the same clothes and shave your head and so on.
so on.
But other than that, you're not controlled.
So that side of things, just that whole approach has never really made a whole lot of sense to me.
And so I've always tried to not take that renounce the world approach.
I've just never felt that that is a valid approach to dealing with the problem of ambition or of objectives for life.
And I do sort of think that life is an arrow in motion.
And I'm not sure, again, I'm not sure how to have that basic belief that goals are worth setting and achieving without the concomitant unease that occurs because I am measuring myself relative to the achievement of those goals and finding myself short or wanting or whatever.
So... That really is sort of the basic question, and renouncing goals doesn't work for me.
Doesn't work for me, and fundamentally it doesn't work for me because I have a minor Manichean kind of view of the world, which is that there is a battle of good and evil.
There's a battle of good and evil.
And... I'm not going to get into the whole etymology of the terms or the root causes.
I've talked about all those before, but basically, and again, I'm not saying this is correct.
I'm just sort of saying this is what's right at the guts of my soul, that there is a battle between good and evil, and that good does not win by renouncing the world, and the world, in fact, sinks into evil if good renounces the world and renounces goals and objectives.
Because, I mean, just to take sort of a simple example, The growth of the state is not accidental.
People who want the state to grow do not do so just by randomly doing various behaviors.
What am I going to do today?
Am I going to strangle a chicken?
Am I going to make love to a workbench?
They don't just do random actions.
They're sort of very purposeful.
And they're purposeful, of course, relative to the setup of the system and all that.
All of that sort of makes sense to me.
But they don't sort of accidentally do these things, right?
The growth of power from the ideal minarchist state of the early American system.
And that's about as minarchist as you can get it, about as minarchist as it's ever been throughout history.
And it's not like a whole bunch of evil pencil-mustachioed Mr. B.
Burns types are like, ah, excellent, let us grow the state.
It will take several generations, my brethren, but we shall get back the power that was thusly taken from us in the founding of the republic and so on, right?
I mean, this sort of is not how it works.
People are sort of pursuing moment-to-moment things, but with the goal of sort of maximizing their resources in a corrupt system, which means taking from others in an abstract way.
It's abstracted through the hidden violence of the police and And so on.
But these people are not without goals, right?
They're not without goals and desires, and they're not without a step-by-step plan to achieve those goals and desires.
And to a large degree, it's like, damn the freedoms of others.
This is what we're going for.
This is what we're all about. And because they do have these goals and they do have these step-by-step things that they want to achieve, and they do, even when they sort of want to achieve something in the state to do with,
I want mercantilist protection for my cardigans or something, We're good to go.
Those people have sort of goals and step-by-step things, and they're perfectly aware that if they can get the state to give them these mercantilist protections, they can make a lot of money, be heroes, be thought of as business geniuses, and make all their stockbrokers happy, and make themselves rich, and set their children up for many generations.
I call it the sort of primal aristocratic urges that it's like, I'm just going to get my goddamn money to hell with everyone else.
It's a shock. It's a sort of feeding frenzy with a shark pack, and I'm going to get my bites in because if I don't, someone else is going to, and my kids will be left in the lurch.
And people have all of these sort of basic ideas down to this sort of primal, blood is thicker than water, I'm going to get some for my family.
Which is, you know, often driven by the women, or as often driven by the wives as it is hungered for by the husbands.
And so they have all these plans and all these goals.
And sometimes they know that they need to change the structure of the state in order to get what it is that they want, sort of overvault some vestigial appendix of the Constitution and so on.
And they do all of these things, and they have long-term goals for their own self-interest.
And that sort of stuff all grows.
And I don't see, I fundamentally can't see, and this could be, of course, just a blindness of my own, so help me out if you have a different opinion, that would be great.
I can't for the life of me see how withdrawing from the fray...
It's going to do anything but make the world a worse and worse place.
And the fray is philosophical, of course, not military.
But that's sort of the basic issue that I have, that I view the world as a battle between good and evil.
And as, I think as Napoleon said, whoever wins, the army that wins, courage is on the side of better supply chains.
Courage is a goddess on the side of whoever has the most howitzes and so on.
That there's a fair amount of planning that goes into winning a war, especially a war of ideas.
There's a fair amount of rigor, there's a fair amount of work, there's a fair amount of kind of getting these things done.
And whether or not this is true, I do believe that it is true, but I'm sort of just talking about my feelings, not the syllogisms at the moment.
Whether or not it is true, I really do feel urgency.
I really do feel urgency.
A very strong sense of urgency.
And unfortunately, I think that if people...
And it could just be that there were all these people around, but the media wasn't around.
But I think that there were people around who could have made these kind of approaches that we're making here on this show in the past.
I kind of wish that they had.
I kind of wish that they had.
I sort of feel like the...
The airliner of the jumbo jet of virtue is kind of going down, and it's kind of like if you've seen, and I'm not going to talk about the veracity of all of this, but if you've seen that sort of United 57 or whatever that movie is about,
the passengers who, mythologically or not, take over the plane that's going down over Pennsylvania on 9-11, That I kind of feel like we're breaking into the cabin and, you know, we're like, I don't know, like a thousand feet off the ground and the pull climb of the 747, it can turn around at about 900 feet, so we've got a hell of a lot to do in order to turn this thing around.
And we're still accelerating in the wrong direction and all of the pilots, I mean, it's been a whole series of pilots that have got us into this and so on.
And so I do feel a fair amount of urgency in this.
I don't think that we have all of the time in the world to get the ideas out there.
And by that, what I mean is not so much that society is hanging before a precipice, though that could be the case.
But you never know at what point I'm going to be, in some manner or another, sanctioned or something's going to happen that is going to cut off, in one way or another, the flow of...
And it's not going to take a lot.
I mean, if we've got a letter which said you've called for the overthrow of the state, which is illegal, so pull all of this stuff and we'll now be listening to your show with three guys in suits.
That would be sort of not enough to have me stop doing it, but it would be a chill over it, which would certainly reduce the power of what it is I was saying, right?
Because, you know, you don't want to get tangled up in the cogs of government, right?
That's a good way to have your life be completely ruined, and I'm no martyr that way, because I don't believe in sacrificing myself for the causes of others, and I don't believe in eliminating my own freedoms with the possibility of two generations from now increasing other people's freedoms.
So, there could be, who knows, could be something, could be nothing.
I don't want to sound like, you know, Joe Paranoid, Men in Black, watching me or anything like that.
That could occur. There could be tighter regulation of the Internet.
There could be, who knows, right, what might happen in terms of this kind of stuff.
And, you know, so it wouldn't take much for me to back away from what it is that I'm talking about.
So there's a kind of urgency there as well, right?
Once it's out there and seated, then whoever wants can sort of reproduce it.
So there's urgency.
There's a sense that if I don't act, then bad guys are going to win.
Well, are going to keep winning and win in the sort of final sense, which is where sort of free speech and direct communication and so on is not even a possibility anymore in any sort of real sense, where the sort of chill goes over the intellectual landscape, and it can happen pretty quickly, right?
I mean, the Weimar was free, and then it wasn't, right?
And Russia was liberalizing at the turn of the 20th century, and then in 1917, suddenly it wasn't.
And of course, I'm aware that if it does turn that way, and I'm not saying it's about to or anything, I'm just saying that for me there's a sense of urgency.
If it did turn that way, then everything that I have posted and podcasted would certainly, I don't think it would get me in particular trouble relative to other people, but it certainly wouldn't be looked on kindly by a fairly powerful state apparatus, or an increasingly powerful state apparatus.
So I do feel, rightly or wrongly, I do feel a sense of urgency.
And, of course, I feel a sense of urgency simply because, you know, I'm sort of one slowly growing voice in a wilderness of statism.
And, you know, classical, let's get a party going libertarianism.
And so I feel a certain amount of urgency from that standpoint.
And I just...
I just can't figure out, in a sense, like if you're driving a car and your wife is about to give birth and you've got to get her to the hospital, I don't know fundamentally how to exist in that mindset without a sense of tension in my soul.
I don't know how to have crisis urgency in my practice without crisis urgency in my makeup.
I don't know how to have elevated goals that require strenuous effort to achieve without at the same time not having urgency and a sense of focus and a sense of the hourglasses running out in my life, which again really gets to me to the paradox of being enslaved to freedom.
And I know that when I talk about a minor tension in my stomach and a mild sense of urgency in my life, that it's not exactly the same as talking about enslavement, but it is something that I definitely want to tackle.
It is something that I definitely want to tackle.
So for instance, since the goal of life is happiness, I wonder...
I mean, this sort of just popped into my head, and maybe this is why it's important for me to work on this, or for us to work on this together, if you have things which you can talk about which can help me, which I'm sure that you do.
It is... Important because one of the things that occurs, I think, for people, if the welfare state were to be taken away, right, then one of the things that would occur for people, and this is a speech from someone in Atlas Shrugged that I think is very well written, and I've thought about it intermittently over the years.
One of the things that...
What occurs for people when that safety net is taken away is that they then feel that there's no intervening apparatus between Even if I've got six months of wages in the bank, if I lose my job and the industry goes away for whatever reason, I'm a horse and buggy manufacturer and somebody invents the car, then my life has no soft impact landing.
And yeah, you could buy insurance for these kinds of things and so on.
I'm not talking about that because even that would be expensive and the price would go up considerably.
Of course, if an industry were dying, the price of unemployment insurance would raise considerably.
But in the sort of natural hurly-burly of life, wherein virtue is in many ways subsumed to circumstances, right?
So it's virtuous to gain a profession and gain a trade.
But you can't control the value of that trade for the remainder of your life.
And of course you can't not spend any money because you have some vague unease that in the future your economic value may deteriorate or whatever.
So, you know, there are these sort of balanced risks in life.
And I just wonder if...
If this problem can be solved, then great, I have an answer for this, but it sort of popped into my mind that people might feel that if there is no sort of indifferent source of income, if you're in a charity, they're going to push you to get a job, and if you're an insurance company, there are going to be lots of criteria to make sure that you're not skiving or cheating the system.
But I wonder the degree to which people might not just feel this sense of unease in general, that all of this stuff that we accumulate could be taken away.
And I just don't believe that the answer is not to accumulate anything and live with your kids in a cardboard box.
I mean, that to me is just an impractical solution.
But maybe there's a way to deal with the risks of the future and find ease in the present without eliminating your risks in the future by having nothing in the present, which I just, again, I don't really think is the right approach.
And maybe it's just a natural tension of life.
I mean the answer could be... That there is no answer.
And the answer could be that if you have goals, which I believe is virtuous, especially if those goals involve virtue, and since I'm talking about people's desire, their love being on their commitment to virtue rather than the day moment by moment achievement of virtue.
But of course, I wonder if that's not an incomplete answer because you can't be perpetually in pursuit of virtue, right?
Sometimes you have to go to the washroom.
You know, I mean, it's as simple as that, right?
Some basics of that. Philosophy also has to include bowel movements.
I mean, I think that's, That's sort of important.
So I wonder if a purely free society whether or not...
I mean, I guess people would depend more on more virtuous extended family and people would develop these sort of friendly societies that were going around in the 19th and early 20th century before the welfare state blew them away where they would have insurance.
So, yeah, maybe that would be the case.
And, of course, people's...
People's reliance on the endless munificence of the state is absolutely misplaced, right?
That they only feel secure because they don't know anything about the long-term effects of state borrowing and so on, right?
So the people who are making decisions on the perpetuity of welfare are making extraordinarily bad decisions, but of course they don't know it, and maybe that's why they feel more comfort and so on.
But I know this is good.
I feel better just talking about this kind of stuff.
I mean, it's not exactly been a guilty secret, but it has been something that I have been working on to try and solve myself.
How am I going to have these overarching goals without a concomitant intention for where I am relative to them?
And of course, the other thing that occurs is that...
I mean, let's just take a simple goal.
Let's not talk about saving the world.
Let's just talk about a simpler goal.
I want more people to come to my website.
I want more people to come to my website.
And I've registered with just about every podcast, every podcast site, every search engine.
I've put posts in God knows how many forums about the site.
And I've sent hundreds and hundreds of emails to people inviting them.
And I think we're doing well, right?
We're getting 150 new people coming to the site every day.
And the conversion of those to those who want files and so on, I haven't really tracked and worked out.
But I think you sort of get the idea.
And so I want more people to come to my website.
So, you know, we put in Ask a Therapist and so on.
And please, send stuff in.
We only got one email last week to Ask a Therapist, which is unusual.
So, please, if you have questions, you do have a free resource here.
We're more than happy to help.
We're eager to help. You will make us happy by asking for our help.
Or actually asking for Christina's help.
And you can also say that you actually just want Ask a Therapist to be Christina talking without me interrupting with...
Silly-isms. So whatever works for you, just let us know the right format and we'll be happy to comply.
But so let's look at that goal.
But of course it's like pushing string, right?
You take your actions, you throw your seeds out, and you just randomly hope that some of them will grow.
I mean, it's the same thing with donations to some degree, although there's potential to be more proactive about that, which we'll talk about another time.
Even just like I want more people to come to the website.
I want more people to come to the videos.
We've had 10,000 video views in a month.
That's good. Actually, a little more than a month now, about six weeks.
I think that's good. Of course, I want to get up to a million, right?
I mean, who wouldn't, right? I mean, that would be great.
Because with that, I could then have the leverage to go and get a radio show on the Sirius Network or some sort of satellite show because there's no way I would get this on regular radio.
So that would be, you know, and that's one step closer, right?
One step closer to the goal of total media domination.
And one step closer to the goal of getting the word out to more people and having the debate about the uses of violence in social interactions, whether on a collective or individual level, to be part of...
So to sort of normalize the debate, the anarcho-capitalist debate, to normalize that, to make that a valid sort of slice of the pie that you can choose from the dessert tray rather than, here I'd like you to eat these bugs or you can have that cheesecake of the mainstream, right?
I mean, I sort of want to... Normalize the debate, and in order to do that, I have to get from podcasting to radio, or to television potentially, but definitely to radio.
And to do that, I need to drive people to the website, and I need to drive people to download more podcasts and so on.
And so I take my actions there, and I have this goal.
If I get enough people, then I can make a real claim.
And I think if I got... Like, once I get to 100,000 downloads a month, and we're getting close, then I would say that's a good thing.
I also don't want it to be just because I'm stuffing the pint by releasing 40 podcasts and have, you know, 1,000 listeners.
So that's 40,000. That's half the downloads, blah, blah, blah.
It's not exactly like...
I don't think people are going to put together a show and let me do a radio show because I have...
2,000 listeners or whatever.
I mean, I want to have decent evidence that there's more than that.
So I have this sort of drive people to the website, get people to listen to the podcasts, and so on.
So I'm trying to constantly improve what's going on.
I'm a little bit stuck because I don't want to go back and re-record old podcasts because that would be enormously time-consuming.
And I have had a gentleman who's kindly offered to clean up some of the podcasts.
I'm sort of going to get around to that. And so, you know, that's sort of the next step is to go to radio and that's going to require more people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I try to get that done.
But of course, I have no control over that fundamentally.
I have no control over that.
I can do the best shows that I can think of and I can be, you know, as personable and entertaining and so on and personal because I don't just want to talk about politics and philosophy and economics and so on.
I also want to talk about the sort of more blood and gut, soul march towards freedom that we're all involved in.
And so I can be as honest and so on as all GetUp.
But fundamentally, I can't control people coming to the website and so on.
My Google AdWords campaign and so on is all chugging along.
And although I haven't really gotten much, maybe a couple dozen hits a month from the hundred bucks or so that I'm spending at FreeTalk Live.
But... So, I don't have any real control over that, right?
So, there is a certain sense of unease and occasional frustration, as there is sometimes with donations, about how do I get this to work when I don't have any sort of direct lever by which I can make it happen.
And again, this is not anything...
Don't send me a donation based on this, because it's not your job to manage my frustrations or anything, but...
But that sort of question is pretty significant.
I have a goal, and I'm doing what I can to achieve it.
And you constantly have to, if you want to sort of get a goal across, you constantly have to be in a state of evaluating your progress relative to that goal.
That's sort of a fundamental thing, right?
I mean, if you're trying to get somewhere or drive somewhere, you want to check the map and make sure you're going in the right direction.
You haven't taken any wrong turns.
You look for the next town.
Oh, the next town is Albuquerque, and if it's Pittsburgh, you probably have done something pretty wrong.
So, I have all of that stuff going on too, and so it all becomes...
It's kind of complicated. So I have a goal.
I've got to measure where I am relative to that goal.
I have to constantly adjust my behavior to achieve that goal since I can't achieve that goal directly.
If I have a goal called mow the lawn, I can achieve it directly.
I don't have to put out a podcast saying, I'd really like it if you'd come over and mow my lawn and then hope that somebody picks up on it and decides to do it.
So that's sort of the pushing string scenario.
Whereas if I have a goal called paint my house or mow my lawn or whatever, Then I could just go and do that thing.
That's having direct control over these things, and that's quite a different situation.
But when you have indirect control, and you have to sort of...
I mean, this is true of sales as well, right?
If you have goals that can't be achieved except through influence and prayer, so to speak...
Then, you know, there's a certain amount of tension about am I doing the right things to get the right effects in this sort of foggy, third-party, manipulate-the-machine-to-pick-up-the-toy-and-drop-it-through-the-slot with the claw kind of situation.
You are working things in a kind of boss-ackwards kind of way.
And so it is hard to know whether you're doing the right things or the wrong things and what's working and what's not.
And this is true even for experienced marketers, right?
There's a certain amount of mystery and alchemy that goes on in this sort of realm.
So... So it is tough to figure these kinds of things out, and there is a certain amount of tension about, you know, am I doing the right things, and am I achieving my goals that I can't control, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So even on a minor thing like driving people to the website, you know, I'm pleased but not thrilled, right?
So, of course, because I'm pleased but not thrilled, I need to adjust my behavior, and then I need to see how close I am to my goal of however many people per, I can't remember what the plan is, people per site at this time, and so on.
So, it is all quite a challenge.
How do you live with a goal which you can't directly achieve and is only an effect of other things that you do resulting in other people's choices?
How do you go about achieving that without feeling any kind of tension on the journey?
It's something, again, I've never figured out.
And this is the fundamentals of my addiction to the future.
That... I just can't give up the goals.
I do believe that there's urgency.
I do believe that it's a battle of good and evil.
And I do believe that time in a variety of ways, and I haven't really communicated those too well, and I don't want you to get the impression that I think anybody's listening from the state or anything like that, but I do sort of feel that time is of the essence, even if it's just the bankruptcy is looming or something like that.
And so... Given all of that, I have yet to figure out how to have these overarching goals with these levers that I can barely move at times, it seems, to achieve that goal.
You know, you do the best work that you can.
You have the most honest shows that you can.
And you try to be as open and vulnerable and personal and entertaining as possible.
And of course, none of that is particularly hard work for me, so I don't think I'm manipulating you or anything.
You do all of that. You put out your best work, and then you just sort of hope that it strikes a chord with people.
And I'm not saying that I'm disappointed with the chord we've struck so far.
I certainly do think that the initial goal, the initial growth has definitely plateaued.
It dipped later in the summer, I think, in terms of website hits and so on, as people on vacation and so on.
I definitely need to sort of find my way to the next step.
And so I know that I'm not at the next step and I need to get to the next step or I want to get to the next step for the cause of both my own happiness in achieving it and for the general goal of making the world a happier and better place.
And so knowing that I'm falling short of where it is that I want to be, how does that not come with a tension that needs to be corrected?
Is there a way to do that or is that simply just what happens when you have Goals.
And there's no way around it other than to renounce all goals, which I believe would be kind of like a very wrong thing to do.
So I hope that that sort of outlines the question in a way that makes sense.
And I hope that this is not completely baffling.
I'm sure it's not. I think that we all face this tension between the future and the present.
I certainly have gotten rid of the tension to a large degree, to a very great degree, between the future and the past, or the present and the past, but the future and the present still is like an Indiana Jones rickety bridge that I'm crossing, which is not always the most relaxing thing, and I would like it to be, I would like to have the goals without the tension.
And so if you have any thoughts about that, I certainly would appreciate it.
Absolutely putting the call out, you know, from a...
Somebody who's stuck in a mud pit, absolutely putting the call out for somebody to throw me a rope.
Because I can't solve this one to save my attention, so to speak.
And so if you have any ideas, I hugely would appreciate it.
Donation's always welcome. Send some emails to Ask a Therapist if you have questions.
And thank you so much to everyone, of course, who joins on the Sunday shows.
Your feedback and your questions are very, very insightful, very, very intelligent.
And it's quite a challenge, so I really appreciate that, and I hope that you understand how crucial your participation is to this process.
▲
Export Selection