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Jan. 23, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:16
615 Coincidence and Love Part 1

Preparing yourself for love

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. 23rd of January 2007, I think.
It's a little more civilized time of 8.16 in the morning and heading off to work.
Actually, in Christina's car today, the darling wife has decided, well, has agreed, has offered to take my car in to get it serviced.
And so we switched cars today.
I am in not the Volvo mobile of Studio Madness.
And I actually think I'm going to rename the show.
Actually, I'm quite a fan of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
Erin Sorkin is a very snappy dialogue writer.
And except for the annoying Christian woman, it's got a good cast of characters.
And I think that Matthew Perry's great in it.
So, they have Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
I think I'm going to be Studio 105 on the 407, because I'm actually a studio that's going 105 kilometers an hour on a highway called the 407.
So we're going to rejig things a little bit here.
I'm going to get a cast of backup characters, some live comedians, and all the donations will be spent in about a week or two.
Thank you so much for those who have donated recently.
I really appreciate it.
I've made the pitch before.
I won't make it again, but it'll be good for you.
It'll be good for you.
Yeah, it might sting a little, but it'll make you happy.
So.
I There's been some interesting conversations about the podcast that I did on coincidence.
And it just goes to show how pathetically bad I am at reading the audience.
Because I think that there's liberation in coincidence.
Some people have found it depressing.
And it's really struck an emotional chord in people.
And I would like to just clarify a few things about it.
Because I don't want to make people sad.
I want to make people happy. The sun will come out.
No, I won't do that. First of all, it's January in Canada here, so I'd be lying.
It's the first lie on Studio 100 on the 407.
Studio 105 on the 407.
So, somebody said, somebody wrote and got quite emotional about it, about a couple of emotional posts.
The first was sheer despair, which I can certainly understand.
When you begin to peel back What is earned from coincidence or what is considered to be personal attributes that actually come from mere coincidence from society, what happens is you begin to feel like you're living in a world of ghosts that don't know that they're ghosts, right? You're in that sort of, in the role reversal sixth sense where you're the only Bruce Willis and everyone else is a ghost, right?
It is a really chilling thing to stare down the void, down the abyss as Nietzsche called it, Into the false selves of others.
Now, I've just started to teach Christina.
I finally managed to teach her how to ski.
I've been a skier for many years.
I'm not particularly great at it, but I certainly can take on about every mountain through sheer willpower.
And I have decided, or we have decided, to give skiing a shot because winter is a long and painful time and we have great sports activities for summer.
Mountain biking and badminton and rollerblading and so on, but the winter is just...
You feel a little bit entombed in the house unless you have an outdoor activity.
And so I'm teaching her how to ski.
And she's doing great.
Oh, she's just doing very, very well.
She's very brave. And she's dealing very well with all of the stuff that can be quite emotional.
It's interesting when you learn how to ski.
It's not a tangent?
Oh, okay. Official, sanction, tangent.
This will conclude in never.
It will never conclude. When you learn how to ski and you fall down, as you do, then when you are trying to get back up with your skis on, a lot of people get very emotional.
Some people that I've taught how to ski get very emotional.
And I think it goes right back to infancy, when you couldn't use your own limbs very well and you were trying to get up and so on.
And it just shows the fear and unhappiness that people feel when they're trying to learn something in public view, vulnerability and so on.
It is a real echo of what it was like.
So she actually got quite emotional, though.
I mean, not in any bad way, but got emotional when she was trying to get up because it's hard to help somebody get up unless you take your own skis off and so on.
And I also wanted to because at some point she's going to fall without me around.
And so I wanted to give her some tips on how to get up.
And so I was trying to help her, but not sort of drag her up, right?
So she got to, it's an emotional experience to struggle to try and get up.
It really is. And to not know how you're going to do it with these big skis, especially if they're facing the wrong way, which wasn't the case in this instance.
But I was reminded, and I don't know if this is a true self or false self thing in me.
I think it might be the angry true self in me.
But... My God, let me just say a couple of things about skiers.
Because if you want to look at people who are addicted to coincidence, skiers and snowboarders, oh my God, they're even worse than the skateboarding kids.
They're just wretched and brutal when it comes to this.
So they're so into being seen and being good at skiing.
And it's all just such nonsense.
It's such complete and errant nonsense.
It is a very great false self-temptation when you're good at something and you're teaching someone else or you're around other people who are learners.
You almost inevitably are going to feel a swell of pride and a swell of accomplishment and a swell of superiority.
It's a very tempting brew to take more than a sip from because it's very hard to remember.
Well, I'm not saying it's very hard to remember, but it is...
It is very convenient and pleasurable to forget and to imagine that you're just innately better at things than other people when you've had 20 years of experience and someone is out on the slopes for the first time, falling and not being able to get back up and so on.
Skiing is a tough thing to learn.
It's got a very steep learning curve for the first day or two, and after that it gets a whole lot easier, especially if you know how to skate or have done anything like that.
Even rollerblading, I think, helps.
But I was just reminded how obnoxious and annoying a lot of skiers are.
Twice my wife has fallen.
I watch her go down to see if I can help her with her form.
And twice she's fallen.
The first time she fell, some guy skied up to her and said, you know, you were totally out of control there.
Totally out of control. You should really just start skiing from the bottom of the hill.
It didn't ask her if she was okay.
It didn't ask her if she could help her up.
Anything like that. Just being superior, right?
And then the second person just asked her to pass him one of his poles that he dropped.
Again, didn't ask her if she was okay.
Just kind of annoying people.
And those skiers I find kind of irritating.
And once when we were at Christina's going away party from the hospital, we went to the house of one of the doctors.
And he had a picture of himself.
You know, in those ski goggles, looking oh so cool, coming over the hill of a mountain somewhere, and just, you know, a little superior grin on his face, and oh so cool, and oh man, it's just, everybody thinks that they're living in some kind of commercial, you know, and then mortality comes along with its big bloody fingernail and flicks you right off the map of the living, and all you've done is you've been a plastic cutout for your life.
Oh, it's horrible. And this is one of the things...
It's not like I stopped skiing out of principle.
I just got married, but...
But, boy, if you want to see...
Okay, last rant before we get back to the topic.
If you... And it's vaguely related to the topic and that these people are taking coincidence as personal virtue.
There were two oriental guys.
I'm sure Japanese.
Because only Japanese guys, in my experience, have that real addiction to stony-faced cool and superiority and great clothing and this and that and physical accomplishments that, frankly, don't add up to a pile of shit in a sandstorm.
But we'll get back to that in a second.
But then there's all of these...
Lanky teenagers who are the snowboarders.
And they have their pants hanging down around their knees, even their snow pants.
I mean, that's pretty funny, right? The fashion trend comes from jail where you can't have belts and people lose weight, right?
So that's why their pants hang down.
And to take it to highly privileged snowboarding circles, it's just, oh man, they just don't know.
They just don't know. Put one of these kids in jail for a day where they're getting this tough guy fashion.
Oh my God, can you imagine?
Oh, mommy, daddy!
But these guys really annoy me, and they've annoyed me ever since I was a kid.
And without a doubt, part of it is jealousy.
Of course, I would have loved to have had any kind of stable family or any kind of money lying around.
As I've mentioned before, I was on a swim team, and I had to pay $8 registration, and I had to keep lying about it.
I had to go, oh, I forgot. I had to keep going because there was no money.
There was no money whatsoever.
There wasn't even money for rent.
I had to get a third job.
But Of course I wish that I had had that kind of opportunity, and instead of having to work two jobs over the summers, and during the year as well, if I had had the opportunity to go skiing, well, you know, there's not a whole lot of 16-year-olds who wouldn't rather be on the slopes than scraping gum off the bottom of a convenience store.
So that I found sort of annoying anyway, because I was jealous, but I also really disliked the lack of compassion and humility among the people who have had early privilege.
And in Canada, at least, going skiing is not exactly a super rich sport.
I mean, it's not like you're playing Bacharach in Monaco.
It is, you know, lower middle class people can, you know, they go to the public slopes and you can rent the equipment.
It's not too bad, right?
You can do it. A friend of mine who I went skiing with in Mont-Saint-Anne for a week, he grew up, he was the son of a high school principal in Timmins, and he was an expert skier, and he went all the time.
So it's not, you know, a super, super rich sport, but I mean, it was certainly far outside of...
What I was capable of doing, I finally started learning when I was about 17 or 18 when I'd sort of gotten rid of my mom.
We'd taken in a roommate or two.
Both my brother and I were working, so we had a little bit of extra scratch.
We had no car, but we had people who had cars who would give us lifts to the ski slopes, so And of course, when I started to learn, I was much older than most people.
Most people in Canada, you'll start to learn to ski when you're 4 or 5 years old.
So of course, by the time you get to 7 or 18, you can slalom, you can do spins, all this kind of stuff.
Ski backwards and jumps.
Moguls. Moguls are my nemesis.
And the same thing occurred for me when I came to Canada when I was 11 or so and started to learn how to skate.
You know, people just give you all of these contemptuous and scornful and mocking glances.
It's irresistible for people.
And this, of course, is merely the scar tissue of their own childhoods.
Our parents will often laugh at the most amazing dexterity that children have while they're still learning and fumbling and stumbling.
Parents will think it's cute or will laugh or will mock or, you know, this is not at all uncommon.
And, you know, it seems almost inevitable that one child in a family gets the label of accident prone.
Which has always been really annoying to me.
I think I was called accident prone for a little while.
But it's a really annoying label to get.
Because it implies psychological deficiency or evil luck.
None of which really is the case.
One sec.
Coffee sip time.
So these kids who are out there snowboarding and jumping up and down on their snowboards and doing all the same pointless and stupid and totally retarded, quote, tricks with their snowboards that you see these idiots doing with their...
With their skateboards.
I mean, there was a skateboarding fad when I was a kid, and what we did was we actually went down hills for speed.
It was quite exhilarating.
And then we would sit and go down, and we would grab twigs, and we would drop twigs behind us in the hopes of stopping other people because the skateboard hits a twig.
It sort of stops pretty quickly.
And it was a lot of fun, so we had races and that kind of stuff.
What we didn't do, and I'm not sure how this became important, but it does seem to be very important for people who are younger these days, is we didn't sort of say, hey, you know what would be great?
Let's get our skateboards and flip them around six times and then ride the pipe, go down an armrest pole going down a set of stairs and then come down on the bottom.
I mean, that's completely stupid.
That's just exactly the same as driving your car into a ditch over and over again and seeing if you can roll out all right.
I mean, that's not what cars are for.
And so you see this.
And they always fail.
I mean, I guess there's Tony Hawk and there's one or two other guys who can do it well.
But these guys always fail.
And when I used to work at a bank as a programmer...
I would take my lunch out in the atrium, especially in the summer, and there'd be an area where these, you know, long-haired, slouchy-pants kids were trying to do all of these skateboarding tricks, and it was just ridiculous.
They would literally be... I would sort of have lunch for 45 minutes, and I'd watch them be out there for an hour.
Oh, sorry, 45 minutes or so, and they'd never get one right.
I mean, what a complete waste of time.
It's got wheels, so make it go somewhere.
I mean, good lord, you don't buy a Humvee just to roll it, right?
But these kids are really annoying to me because, especially the kids on the snowboards, Because they're just so into being cool.
And I know that cool has always been a thing.
I think that stuff like MTV and teen movies really play to it now, that there's nothing better than being cool and competent physically.
Nobody ever talks about being competent morally or being wise or being kind or being tough in defense of virtue or any of those sorts of things.
But this nihilistic...
And skateboarding culture is very nihilistic this way.
But this nihilistic... A horror that is attempting to impress others.
And, of course, when you get a little older and you look at these kids doing it, part of me feels very sorry for them, right?
Because this, of course, is the most that they've ever gotten to.
This is the best that they can get, is denigrating others through passive-aggressive impressing them.
That's the best. That's the closest they can get to happiness.
That's a very, very sad thing.
It's a very sad thing.
These are the scraps and leftovers and dominance that...
They have left.
It's really, really, really sad.
The hills that we go to, of course, are total bunny hills.
So, not exactly the double black diamonds that give me a challenge.
They are pretty much just bunny hills.
And so, to cruise down, you know, yo, cruise down in a competent, kind of cool way.
Hey, how's it going?
Just skating past here.
To cruise down these and to project this air of hyper-cool competence is kind of funny, right?
It's sort of like me debating four-year-olds and feeling that I'm somehow winning because I'm using bigger words so they can understand.
Oh, look how smart I am.
I can trump the four-year-old.
And so that's kind of funny and sad.
But this addiction to cool is really, really horrifying and kind of gay in a way, right?
There's not a lot of women around when these guys are doing this.
That doesn't mean anything. It's just something I've kind of noticed.
And what is it the result of, right?
What is it the result of?
There's... I can't remember the name of the film.
It's about Prudhomme, the sprinter.
And Donald Sutherland plays the guy who founds Nike.
I've mentioned this once before, but it's been a while, so let's count it as new.
He tells his girlfriend, I win just because I want to win more than the other guy.
Everybody wants to win, I just want to win that little bit more.
And later on, of course, his coach mocks him and says, are you crazy?
Everybody out here wants to win.
We've done exams of you.
You have an enlarged heart, so you can simply pump more oxygen to your muscles.
It's got nothing to do with your willpower.
Everybody out here wants to win.
You just have a very lean body ratio, you have very long legs, and you have an enlarged heart.
And that's your winner's edge.
Everybody has this desire to take mere physical attributes as personal virtue.
And similarly, people have this massive desire to take inherited money and inherited opportunity and inherited privilege as virtue.
So if you're a 17-year-old kid and you're a really good skateboarder, why is that?
Well, it's because you were taken out to ski.
Well, first of all, you just didn't happen to be born Down syndrome or retarded or with a physical defect or with even a non-athletic ability.
So, first and foremost, that was your sort of, you know, your legs happen to be the same length and, you know, lots of coincidences to go into having an athletic frame or athletic ability.
And you were also inherited and born with that.
And part of the reason that occurs, of course, is that the alpha males get the pretty women.
That's one of the, you know, from summertime, from Gershwin's summertime, your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking.
And so you've probably born well-formed physically and you probably are fairly good-looking.
That's just inherited from your gene pool.
And you have opportunities, right?
And you have a status-seeking father who gets you out on the slopes and who trains you and has the money to pay for lessons and ski equipment.
And ski equipment ain't cheap if your kids get into skiing because they outgrow it every 12 minutes, right?
So it's even worse than hockey stuff, I think.
You did that, and then somebody bought you an $800 snowboard and took you out snowboarding, and then you got lessons for that.
It's not just a matter of wanting to practice.
You've got to have the ski lift and the hill, which is not cheap.
Somebody paid for you to do all that practice.
Then, after all of this investment, thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars, These people sort of cruise around saying, hey, I'm just superior to other people who didn't have these opportunities, didn't have these money, who were learning it for the first time because they grew up poor and this kind of stuff.
And no question, it irritated me and angered me and humiliated me when I was younger.
So I have a personal stake in this, but it just does seem to be very common.
And going back on the ski slopes has kind of reminded me of this kind of stuff a little bit.
So I'm sure you can find instances in your own life of this.
And this is why, for me, just because I spent 20-odd years studying philosophy, I try to have at least a good deal of patience with people who are new to the field.
I'm not smarter than them because I know more about philosophy, just as if they've studied Chinese and they can speak Chinese and I can't, or at least not very well.
Then they are not superior to me because they've done, you know, it's all just a matter of opportunity costs, right?
And the opportunity cost that I see is painful for these young men and some young women, but mostly young men, is that all the time they've spent learning how to do pointless human tricks with pieces of wood, they have not learned anything about wisdom and they have not learned anything about philosophy or values or courage or virtue.
In fact, they've gone quite the opposite direction.
They're digging themselves into what would seem to me to be like a perpetual hole of slavery to the scorn and good opinion of others.
And it's also a pretty stressful way to live, right?
I've got to do something good with this halfpipe, otherwise I'm going to get mocked and laughed at.
Not a particularly good and stress-free way to live.
It's a pretty horrible way to live.
So, I just sort of want to clarify that a little bit more.
Also, somebody wrote about love, right?
That I was talking about my love for Christina in the 606 podcast.
And somebody said, well, there was a question about, are you going to be forgotten in life?
And somebody posted, and I think quite wisely so, said, if I find someone I love to grow old with, I could give a rat's Belt buckle if I was remembered afterwards or not.
And that's entirely true.
I mean, that's entirely right. We are not here to be remembered because remembering doesn't do us any good after we're dead.
If my coming had been foreshadowed in the Middle Ages, it wouldn't have done smack for me in the Middle Ages because I didn't exist.
And if they talk about me after I'm dead, it doesn't really matter.
I would certainly be happy if this conversation, and I have absolutely no doubt that it will, That this conversation stay as part of the constellation of lights that help the human race.
I mean, that is something that I have no doubt will occur.
And I have no doubt that these will be listened to for a long time and discussed for a long time and scorned for a long time and advocated for a long time.
But love is...
Not coincidence. Somebody said, well, if I could find someone that I could love, I wouldn't care about being remembered, but finding someone you love is just coincidence too.
And I would say not. I would say not.
Love is not something that falls into your lap, right?
Love is something that you build.
The potential for love falls in your lap.
But love itself does not fall in your lap.
There's been some significant work that Christina and I have had to do in order to keep our relationship free of clutter.
A relationship is like a...
Like a river in flood, right?
I mean, it constantly gets bunged up with tree branches and, I don't know, dead beavers and stuff like that.
You've got to keep clearing the channels, right?
Just as the way that we're raised creates an undertow in all of us of conformity and fear, and we have to keep fighting that.
At least I do. So... You have to keep working to unclutter things.
In any business organization, inefficiencies accumulate just by the human nature.
And in an efficient business organization, those inefficiencies are consistently cleared away.
In government, they never do get cleared away, which is why you end up with more dead beavers than river in a government very quickly.
Boy, that's something to put on a coffee cap.
Loose the dead beavers of state.
But you can do an enormous amount to prepare for love.
And I'll just sort of start.
Maybe I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but you can do an enormous amount.
You've got to clear up your past.
You've got to get the bad people out of your life.
The major challenge outside of some historical zinging that Christina was used to was the effect that her family and extended family had on our relationship.
That was the greatest challenge, I think, that we had, that there would be conflicts and unhappinesses after we would have seen her family.
And that was a doozy, right?
And if this had been occurring for my family as well, it's quite likely that we would not have been able to get to where we are now.
In fact, I would say it's a virtual certainty for two reasons.
One is that we would have the double negative influences of both families and the second is that we would not be clear enough in our own values To be able to defoo, to identify that as the issue and to defoo.
So because I'd already done that, and I think we saw my family once or twice, maybe three times, before and after we got married, but if I had not clarified my values enough to defoo, Then I would not have been able to identify what she needed to do.
And I also would not have had the values clear enough in my own mind to be able to bring these values to bear on the relationship between Christina and I. If you're still accepting crap from your family, how are you going to reject crap from your wife or your lover?
It's not going to work. The...
The other thing that's important is that you've got to clean up your own thinking.
What are your values? What do you want in a relationship?
What are you willing to give? What's acceptable?
What's not acceptable? What do you think is...
And I'll just go hetero for a moment, if you don't mind.
This could work for non-hetero relationships, but it's just easier to talk about the gender here.
What do you think the role of a woman is in a relationship?
How do you think that role is different from a man?
What do you think the role of a man is in a relationship?
How do you think that's different from a woman?
And if you're dating someone and they answer that question with, there are no differences whatsoever between men and women and everybody does exactly the same thing in a relationship.
Well... You don't both have kids, right?
You don't both breastfeed. You don't both take your time off work to do that.
You're not both pregnant.
You don't both get periods, right?
I mean, there's lots of hormonal and biological differences.
Maybe if you're both 60, there's a little bit more commonality.
But then the woman's had 60 years of experience of being a woman and the guy hasn't.
So there's going to be some differences.
I would suggest that it's important to talk about these things.
So that you don't end up living in the land of Bickertons, right, where you end up just getting nagged for not doing everything the same as a woman or the woman.
Actually, I don't think it ever works the other way around.
So you have to have some clarity on what is different between the roles.
Like, why is it that you're getting married or going out with a woman rather than, you know, a potted plant, a hamster, or a guy?
Well, it's because a woman brings specific things, and the specific things are not a vagina.
Specific things are characteristics that are different from men, right?
I mean, that's why nature makes us different, right?
Vive la différence. That's why nature makes us different, so that we'll fit together, right?
And like a jigsaw puzzle, not just physically, but emotionally, and spiritually, and intellectually as well.
So, I read a good book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, or something like that.
Danielle Crittenden, C-R-I-T-T-E-N-D-E-N, I think it was.
She also wrote a book called Amanda at Home, Things Our Mothers Didn't Teach Us, or What Our Mothers Couldn't Say, or something like that.
Very good book. I read that, and Christine and I read it together, at least most of it together before we got married.
married.
I think it's a very good book on men and women and helps certainly clarify my thing because I didn't have a template.
I never saw a married couple up close.
My parents divorced when I was very young.
So I think it's important to have some understanding of what's doodly and what's doodestly in a relationship.
That was something that I read just before I met Christina, and it was a good thing, too.
Finding ways to open your heart.
That was the hardest part for me.
It's a little like prying open a clam with ski gloves on.
Prying open my heart and being vulnerable was the hardest thing.
Christina was ahead of me on that.
She is a very passionate, emotional person.
She wears her heart on her sleeve, at least in our relationship.
She's a little bit more reserved with other people.
But she was ahead of me.
I remember early in our relationship saying, I'm really trying to catch up.
I'm really trying to learn how to open my heart.
And then I did, and she said, oh God, please close it again.
So what I had to do in order to be able to open my heart was to get rid of the cynics and to get rid of the negative people in my life, right?
I mean, you can't open your heart and then just slam it shut when you're around The cynics.
And this was other guys for me in some ways, guys who were scornful or skeptical about, you know, girly men, emotional lives, and so on.
And so that kind of had to go, right?
I mean, I knew that I needed to open my heart to my wife to be more vulnerable and to be more intimate with her and to let her see everything that went on in my soul.
And I couldn't do that if I was around guys who, you know, the emotional experience was yelling at photons on a TV during a hockey game.
That wasn't really going to work out very well, so that is, I think, very important to learn how to do.
And there's no magic to it.
Therapy helps a lot for me.
I certainly could not have had a successful marriage without spending $20,000 on therapy and two years on the couch, three hours a week, or whatever it was, with some breaks.
But that was an essential, so that's why I keep recommending therapy to people.
Because that declutters, right?
That declutters. It takes the dead beavers and the tree limbs out of the river, right?
It declutters so that you get some emotional flow again.
And you really have to learn to trust your feelings, right?
You really have to learn to trust your instincts in a marriage or in a relationship.
When something feels wrong or your partner is irritating you, Then you need to be able to talk to them about that, not without blame, but to say, this is what's going on.
I could be wrong, but I've got to trust that my feelings...
You don't just say, oh, well, I'm just being immature, or I'm just being childish, or I'm just being petty, or whatever.
You really have to speak out about these things that occur in the relationship that's called intimacy.
I feel ridiculous sometimes.
The other day I had to bring up something with Christina.
Which was so ridiculous.
But she said something that I found mildly irritating and it turned out to be a very fruitful and productive discussion.
But I feel like a complete idiot sometimes.
I just know that I have to because it works out and it's for the best.
But you have to trust yourself to the point where you bring up issues and in the face of somebody's skepticism about the importance of what you're bringing up.
I don't have that as much with Christina anymore because...
It's sort of worked out a whole bunch of times, so she's like, oh, okay, well, normally it works out, but the first couple of times, oh, man, she's like, well, I don't see how this is important.
I mean, I'm trying to, and it wasn't because she was mean.
It's just because, you know, but I had to sort of just stick to my guns and keep pushing on with what I felt was important, and it usually would turn out, I think invariably would turn out to be something.
Very useful. So learning to trust your own instincts.
The ebb and flow of your own emotions.
We have this incredible processing machine that we're sitting on top.
This glorious God-like chorus of true self angels.
And we need to listen to that.
And we need to communicate.
Lead from the heart. Communicate from the heart as well as from the head.
And that's very important.
But reconnecting the head and the heart is not the simplest thing in the world.
I mean, we're That's a fundamental aspect of totalitarianism that you separate people from their instincts, right?
I mean, that's fundamental to controlling and ruling other human beings, is to separate them from their instincts and get them to doubt their feelings and passions.
That way you emasculate them and you get them to, in this hamlet state of just control, control, control, and not really ever...
Getting their power, right?
Your power is in your gut, not in your head.
Your power as a human being.
I mean, you want to validate your truth, of course, with your head, and you need to be rational, but your power as a human being is not in your head.
It's in your gut.
It's in your instincts. It's in your soul.
It's in your heart. It's in your spirit, whatever you want to call it.
It is in the sum total of your emotional connectedness that you have power as a human being.
I mean, if I droned on these syllogisms that I work with, I would get precisely nowhere.
People listen partly because I'm passionate about what I'm doing, and philosophy is united with feeling.
Thought and feeling, reason and emotion is...
The fact that they're separate is sad, right?
I mean, they shouldn't be, and this is a legacy mostly of religion, but now of state schooling as well.
This is the parable of the apple, right?
This is why the apple exists from an early podcast, right?
They get you to believe stuff that's false, that feels false, and they get you to not, even though it feels false, and they've just started to carve you off from your feelings, right?
And then your feelings are viewed as you have to start second-guessing and doubting, and then they, you know, it just becomes a complete mess, and you have no rudder and no propulsion.
So you can do that to get ready, get the people, get anyone out of your life who frightens you, or who makes you feel upset, or who...
Who mocks you or who scorns you or who is negative?
I mean, you can talk to them about it, but the problem is when people are scornful of you, that if you tell them that it hurts you when they're scornful of you, they just invariably get more scornful, right?
They're already scornful against vulnerability, so when you become vulnerable and ask them to stop being scornful, you're just dialing up the scorn, right?
I mean, at least that's been my experience.
Maybe there's some other key that I never thought of, but...
Usually when you're on a break with someone, the conversation with them, if you even have it, it's just a formality.
I've never had anyone change.
I don't have anyone change their mind.
Oh my God, I didn't realize you were so upset, Steph.
I can totally see where you're coming from.
You have gone through therapy and it's done you a whole lot of good.
And so I'm going to give it a shot too.
I never, never, I never, I will go to my dying day and never hear that sentence, right?
Any more likely than I'm ever going to hear a sentence from a Christian who gets offended at my hostility towards Christians, and then when I point out that the Christian text commands that I be put to death, says, oh my God, I totally understand where you're coming from.
I haven't thought about it like that.
I'm really going to have to think about this and get back to you.
And then they do think about it and get back to me.
I mean, that's never going to happen.
People just... We run away.
We're back into social conformity, and that's pretty much inevitable.
So that's the second thing that you can do.
The first thing you can do is open your heart.
The second thing, through opening your heart, you get in touch with your instincts and learn to trust your feelings.
Analyze your dreams. Write your dreams down.
Take yourself seriously.
That's the most fundamental thing that I can really say about happiness.
Really, happiness is derived from the basic principle of taking yourself seriously.
And it's very hard in this mocking and scornful world to take yourself seriously without becoming precious and hyper-serious, right?
But take your feelings seriously.
Take your dreams seriously.
Take your values seriously.
Not somberly.
But seriously. And that really is the root of love.
Self-love is to take yourself seriously.
To say, okay, well, I've had this dream.
I better figure out what it means.
Because I'm damn well important to myself.
And my instincts are very important to me.
And my true self is radiating up these beautiful movies to guide me in my life.
And if I don't listen to them, then obviously I don't think that they're important or I don't think that I'm important.
So just take yourself seriously.
Take yourself seriously.
And that will give you a kind of gravitas that...
Well, maybe I'm not exactly the person to be talking about gravitas, but I think you know what I mean.
That it will give you a kind of nobility that is very rare in this world.
An ability of laughing and joking and getting along with everyone and mocking and this.
I mean, that's all easy.
That's the fast food of human life that everybody gorges on.
But there is nobility in taking yourself seriously.
And when you take yourself seriously, there's such an implicit criticism to the jabbering idiots of the planet that they will simply attack you.
I mean, in one form or another.
Like, oh my god, don't you take yourself seriously.
Or, oh my god, are you...
Oh, you're so superior to the rest of us.
Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Just... Frightened bullies who tear you down, that's what happens, and that's why people don't stand up, right?
There's this sword swinging over the daisy patch, and any daisy that pokes his head up gets beheaded, right?
That's what happens in society.
It's a brute reduction chamber, right?
It's a brute shave-down chamber.
And I think, though, taking yourself seriously is a good way to get the people out of your life who won't take you seriously, right?
Because those people will kill your ability to love and be loved.
You need to admire your lover, and your lover needs to admire you.
Love is a form of admiration.
It's a sexual and monopolistic form of admiration.
I was saying this to Christina the other day.
I said, it's so ridiculous. I just did a podcast about how silly it is to take your skills as if they're personal virtues.
And I said, but I want you to stand at the bottom of the hill and watch me come down the hill so that you're impressed.
And she's like, oh, Christina said, I love the fact that you want to impress me.
I love the fact that you want my great opinion.
And I said, oh, I live and die by your good opinion.
And that's so very different from social metaphysics as a sort of dependence on the mere opinions of random others.
But it's very different, right?
I mean, you have to, you want your wife to look at you with admiration, and in order to do that, you need to take yourself seriously and you need to live virtuously.
I mean, you just need to. I mean, you don't have to, but if you want love, love is the great payoff for virtue, right?
That's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Love is the great reward for virtue.
And even if it's only self-love, which is still enormously significant, it is, as George Washington said, it's better to be alone with integrity than false in a crowd.
So, that's, I mean, there is no shortcut to love, and meeting the right person is coincidence, but, as Hamlet said, the readiness is all.
If I had met Christina in my 20s, it would not have worked out.
It would not have worked out for either of us.
We weren't ready. You know, there's coincidence in winning a gold medal, right?
I mean, insofar as anyone can do a perfect run who's got any experience, but the people who are the elite athletes can reproduce it more consistently, right?
Anybody can hit a home run at a baseball who's got arms, right, and can swing them and is not old, can hit a home run from a World Series pitcher, But the real ones can do it, like the really good batters can do it consistently, right? And the consistency is the key.
But even for the most experienced athletes, consistency is not perfect, right?
So even the best skaters or skiers will fall once in a while.
And if it just happens to be that you are on the gold medal race when you fall, then you don't get the medal, obviously, right?
So there is coincidence in these things, but there's a lot you can do to get ready for the coincidence, right?
So you train, right?
You train to reduce the mess, right?
To reduce the possibility of failure.
You train, right? So you train yourself to be ready for love, to reduce the possibility of love being a mess for you, of getting involved in relationships and all the opportunity costs that come from getting involved with people who aren't right for you and therefore not being available for the people who are right for you and also then hurting your heart and making you more fearful of the next relationship.
So, You train, and this is what Nate was talking about on Sunday, ask the people about their values, ask your dates about their values.
You train so that you don't waste time and resources and energy doing the wrong thing.
You also train so that...
So you have to show up, right?
You have to show up on the slopes to get the medal.
But you also have to have trained if you want to have anything more than a completely random chance, right?
So the training and the preparation is in your own soul and your own heart to be virtuous, to take yourself seriously, to get destructive people out of your life.
Because there's no price for having them there, right?
Life is short and nobody gets any medals in the afterlife for putting up with bad behavior from those around them.
It is simply... Time that is blindly subtracted with your life, and you get nothing in return but scar tissue and disappointment and self-mockery and low self-esteem.
We stay with these people because we're afraid of them attacking us for wanting to leave or for leaving, and it's nothing to do with virtue.
And so I would just say that love is not just a coincidence.
So you should prepare for love.
And if you meet the right person, fantastic.
If you don't meet the right person, you just end up a whole lot happier.
Because you have prepared for love.
Because the first love, of course, is for the self, and there's no way to create that.
You can't will self-esteem.
You can't will self-love.
Self-love is derived from admiration of our own actions because of a commitment to virtue and taking ourselves seriously.
So that is first and foremost.
And that, of course, will create not only a magic gravity well to draw other virtuous people towards you, but a magic negative force field to keep bad people away.
Once you take yourself seriously and live a life of virtue, bad people sense that and steer clear.
Thank you so much for listening. Sorry, this was such a long podcast.
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