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July 25, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:19
830 Drinking and Dreaming (respect for women part 1)

A dream analysis, and the crappiness of drinking...

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Good afternoon everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
We're going to have...
It's going to be a media full day today.
Two little points of business.
Just to remind you, I have had...
The book is now on its way, it's winging its way to me through the fabulous USPS, the government delivering the anti-state bomb, I guess.
It's my new book, On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion, which should be available.
Next week, after I check the binding, make sure that the paper is high quality, I just chose a generic cover.
The reason for that...
The reason that I chose a generic cover for the moment is that, well, I just got a quote for the redesign of the webpage, and about $5,000 to redesign the website, and...
Me no like it so much.
So, I am not as yet going to brand.
I'm still going to sort of mull it over, but I'm not as yet going to brand the site.
So, what I'm going to do is just put out a generic cover because first editions are going to be worth more, right?
I mean, I could pay a couple of grand to get a nice cover done, but then the cover wouldn't change even when the book took off.
So, I think having the early edition is going to be worth something if all goes as is anticipated over time.
So, I would suggest grabbing a hold of it.
I think it's going to be quite valuable.
So there's that.
Also, we have, I think, almost two-thirds or three-quarters of the people that we need to make the first ever Freedom Aid Radio live symposium, Christina and I. And you, of course, in Chicago, Illinois, 25th of August 2007, a full day of philosophy and conversation and 200...
And $50 US. And so I hope that you can make it.
Just send me an email. Drop past the board.
Send me a mail through the web system.
And I will put you down.
And we will hopefully go ahead with that.
So that's it.
Oh, I've also started on a new book on universally preferable behavior.
I've worked out, I think, a pretty good framework.
Who am I kidding? I think it's an excellent framework for...
Working with the concept of UPB that hopefully is going to make a lot of the problems that people have with the concept go away.
I hope, anyway, that's the idea.
So that will take a little bit longer than the last book, but I'm 7,500 words into it, and that is a minor plug.
I mean, if you get into it, I have found it to be really interesting.
And enjoyable. I use Dragon, naturally speaking, which takes a little bit of training and you have to enunciate and you have to speak a little slower, which is not the case for me, but since human beings have trouble understanding me at times, I'm not going to blame a computer, but it's a really great product.
I don't know, it's either $99 or $199, but grab a copy, get a decent microphone, and dictate.
It's really great.
And you can train it and all this kind of stuff.
So I found it to be really interesting.
And the other thing that's interesting, if you get a mic with a sort of headset and a long cable, you can pace back and forth and dictate, right?
I mean, I used to smoke a little when I wrote many years ago.
Breaking the habit of that was quite a challenge.
And breaking the habit of just sort of sitting there like a turnip and typing, as Jacques Barzain calls it, heavy lifting from a sitting position because writing is tough.
But standing and pacing and dictating is really interesting.
It's quite conversational.
It's a very different way to activate creativity.
And, of course, because I had never really been a public speaker of any shape or form in the past, And since I have trained my brain, or my brain has trained me one of the two, to speak rather than to type my thoughts, to me it's very interesting to engage that aspect of my, I guess, self-training over the past 18 months or 14 months or 16 months, whatever the heck it's been.
It's very interesting to engage that in the act of creating a book.
So it's a little frustrating, the product, just because of my accent, but it takes a little while to get the hang of things, but I'd really recommend it as a product.
It's something that I've sort of thought about for years and finally got into it a little while back, and I've found it to be really helpful.
Alright, so let's do, we're going to do, I'm going to do three medias today.
I'm sort of in a chatty mood after spending the last little while holed up and writing.
Decating, whatever you want to call it.
So I'm going to do two dream analyses.
I'm going to do aesthetics part two, which is rational art.
Which is going to be a Gold Plus podcast, just because it's pretty advanced.
And also, this afternoon, I'm going to do this Freaks and Geeks leveling thing on YouTube, because I haven't posted a video with intellectual content in almost a month.
And since we've just passed 75,000 video views, I thought it might be useful to throw a tidbit to the YouTubers.
And of course, since a lot of them are younger, I thought I'm going to use a whiteboard to explain the leveling concept that was in the Freaks and Geeks podcast.
A podcast of a little while back.
So I hope that you will get a chance to check that out.
It'll be a different way of looking at the same subject, but something with a little bit more visuals.
And because it's Free Domain Radio, you know it is going to be a very little more visual, very few more visuals.
So let's start with a dream which has been sent in And this is from the gentleman who I had a conversation with in Freedom Aid Radio, Podcast 828, Evil Girlfriend.
So this is a dream that has occurred after this conversation.
So I'll start with...
I asked him what else happened the day before.
He said, I'll post what I can remember, don't?
The days all just roll into one when you're job searching.
Well, on Saturday the 21st of July, two days before this dream, I had gone out into town with a group of her friends.
Now, I don't particularly enjoy going out on Saturdays.
I'm more a Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday guy.
I like things to be a little more laid back than they are on Saturdays.
The night was okay, but no one could agree on what they wanted to do because her friends go out in massive groups and there was a lot of obvious fakeness going on.
The new drinking regime seemed to work.
She had about one drink an hour and seemed to find a place where she just got happy drunk without the usual crash into super-depressiveness.
On the Sunday, i.e.
the day of the Night of the Dream, me and McGovern went on a date to the park to feed the ducks.
It was an awesome proper summer date.
We had ice cream laying on the grass and talked about this and that, and everything was great.
Then she went home to have dinner, and later that night we went to the local pub with her friends again, but only stayed there for about an hour because she was tired and had to work the next day.
So, I'm just going to try and read between the lines, because you never quite get enough information.
That's just fine. It's just natural.
Her friends go out of massive groups, and there was a lot of obvious fakeness going on.
And I'm guessing that there's a lot of drinking going on, because it's unusual that your girlfriend is only having a drink an hour.
And a drink an hour is a decent...
I mean, depending on your size and the strength of the drink, is a decent way to stay mildly buzzed without getting drunk, because your body metabolizes about a drink an hour.
So... So there is a lot of socializing that is Not good, right?
So there's a group here which has fakeness and drinking to excess going on.
And, you know, this is the party girls.
Again, I'm just guessing. This is like maybe true, maybe not.
But it seems in the vicinity of those really annoying party girls who you see in limos from time to time in downtown or wherever.
And they are, you know, holding up bottles of tequila and doing that annoying woohoo thing at the top of a Some sort of stretch limo thing.
You know, freebies in the limousines.
That's not what it's about.
But those girls are really annoying.
You know, they're having such a great time, and woohoo, and look at me in my top, and shaking the drink around, and so on, right?
It's really, it's grating.
It's really, really grating, that kind of person.
Colonel Tai's wife, is it?
Colonel Tai's wife? Ellen Tai.
Battlestar Galactica has that same kind of thing, where she's always having a great time, but it's sort of a quote, great time, but it's really, really grating.
So there's my pop culture reference.
So then, here is the dream.
Sorry, sorry. So you have this fake partying, annoying fake people, and then you have a sort of one-on-one that...
There's the Sunday, right?
You have this one-on-one that is great, right?
You chat and so on, right?
One-on-one is the best in so many ways, frankly.
So, anyway, so he says, this is the dream.
I'm at this amazing party having a great time, but my experience is tainted somewhat by knowing that my girlfriend is outside the party and can't get in.
Despite this, I still don't go to her for some reason.
I'm doing shots from a big bottle of really high-class expensive vanilla-flavored vodka, my favorite.
At some point, a bouncer comes up to me and asks if I have a ticket.
I say no, and he tells me that if I don't have a ticket, I'll have to get out.
On my way out, I hide the bottle of vodka and take it with me.
Then I'm outside the party but must be in some other room because I'm sitting on a big brown leather sofa or couch and my girlfriend is sitting on a big brown leather chair at a 90 degree angle to me.
She says, where's the vodka?
I know that she knows I've got it, but I lie and say, the bouncer took it.
She asks again and again.
And I keep lying at first.
I was lying. Sorry, I keep lying.
At first I was lying because I didn't want her to drink it.
Because I wanted it for myself or because I wanted to save her.
Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark.
But after that, I keep lying because I know that eventually having to admit to the truth, after having it squeezed out of me, will have worse consequences than continually lying, even though she knows I'm lying.
Oh, my friend, you are really going to drag me into trouble now, aren't you?
Ha ha ha ha.
Alright, here we go, my friends.
Now, I'm 40 years old.
I will give you a brief history of my own experience with partying and then tell you what...
That means to me. So when I was about 15 or so, I started going to clubs.
And I loved dancing the night away.
Of course, there's always the, when you're single, the hysteria and excitement of the pursuit and the pickup, which I was abysmally bad at for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here.
But I did that for about, probably around 15 or 16 years old, I was...
I went throughout a sort of two-month period with a fellow named Rob and a couple other guys where we just sort of get really, really drunk.
And Bach was the beer.
It had higher alcohol content.
And I would get drunk.
And I'd get disoriented and feel nauseous.
I never found it possible to sort of erase the self.
And it never really had me lose self-consciousness.
That sort of came out of philosophy.
But... For about two months, I'd sort of get drunk to the point where I'd be sick and get the spins and so on, and basically the benefits weren't that great.
There was sort of some cheesy socializing, some jokes that in hindsight probably weren't nearly as funny as they seemed at the time.
But, you know, you'd not sleep well, you'd wake up with a headache, and my Sunday would be shot, right?
So I wouldn't be able to... Sleep.
I wouldn't be able to eat.
I wouldn't be able to read. I wouldn't even be able to watch TV. I just felt kind of washed out.
So I stopped.
Unfortunately, that was considered an implicit criticism of all the drinking.
And there's a real ugliness that occurs when you don't want to drink in people.
There's a real ugliness.
I mean, it really is not a pretty thing to see what happens to people when you say no thanks to the boozing.
Um... And so I saw that and basically just stopped hanging out with these people because I just thought it was kind of gross the way that they reacted to me not wanting to drink.
And of course there is the problem that if you don't drink, then being around drinkers really sucks, right?
You just realize how annoying and vapid it all is and empty, right?
And it's just... Noisemaking and so on.
Me love to dance. I love to dance.
I can get down. But parties, bars, discos, except for the dancing, they suck.
Parties suck. This is my experience.
And it's simply because when you go for something deeper and more meaningful in your conversations with people...
Getting drunk and woohooing to music and yelling stuff and so on.
It sucks. And being at a party is like being trapped in the brain of somebody with ADD while having epilepsy because everyone's on their way through to somewhere.
Everyone wants to go to the fridge to get a beer, or they want to go out for a smoke, or they see someone they want to say hi to.
So you feel like sort of a desperate peddler at a market that's really busy, and there's a stampede and running for bulls at the same time.
So you start talking to someone, and it's like, oh, hey, I'll be right back, right?
It's a constant cycle of...
And there's a real packing order, right?
I mean, whoever's the coolest or most attractive or whatever, they're always, the people will talk to you until they find somebody that they want to talk to you more.
So they suck.
They really suck. Dinner parties are great.
I think you can sit down and actually have a, An adult conversation, but parties, partying, and drinking.
Drinking sucks. Drinking sucks.
Now, I myself will have a glass of wine on occasion at dinner.
After mowing the lawn, there's nothing better than a cold beer, so I'm not a teetotaler, but drinking and the way that it is enmeshed and embedded in social situations, particularly for the young, it sucks big time.
It sucks like a vacuum.
It sucks like a cheap hooker.
And that is not a popular opinion, of course, and I can feel the ire of people rising, but it's got to be said.
It's got to be said. Voluntarily degrading the quality of your mind sucks.
It sucks.
And drinking is sort of in a class on its own, right?
Because it's socially approved of and there's a whole thing about it.
I mean, take away all the emotional crap, but basically you're just disorienting yourself and mildly poisoning yourself.
And look, I mean, I drink coffee.
I drink a cup of coffee a day.
I used to smoke.
I mean, never more than a cigarette or two a day.
So, I mean, I've been there.
I've done the drinking thing and so on.
So I'm not, you know, saying that.
But at least smoking stimulates the mind, right?
It doesn't disorient you.
It doesn't make you fall over.
It doesn't make you crash into people in a car.
Smoking is something which clarifies and sharpens the mind.
I had an amazing creative breakthrough when I started smoking when I was writing.
That's why it was hard to give up. I was afraid that I was going to lose that, but it turned out that it wasn't the case.
So... Drinking sucks.
And drugs suck, too, but we can get into that another time.
I've never taken any drugs.
I've never tried marijuana.
I've never tried anything, but, you know, it sucks.
Again, do I care particularly if somebody has...
I have friends who have partaken of the weed, sucked back on the MJ from time to time when they were younger.
One of my friends used to do it quite a bit when he was younger and has written a book about it.
But it sucks.
It's a mark of intense loneliness.
And it's a mark of a desperate need for acceptance by the herd, which is the lowest common denominator, which is the mindless.
And it is a great social temptation.
So... So, yeah, I... I don't mind going to karaoke and having a beer once in a blue moon, and I don't mind having some, even a, I don't really have more than one drink ever at any particular sitting.
I have on occasion had two, if they're light beers.
So it's not a black or white thing for me, it's just that drinking and partying and going out and hitting bars and that, it sucks.
Going to... Christine and I, a little while back, went to learn salsa dancing.
And that was great fun, right?
And yes, she had some wine, and I had a beer, and nothing wrong with that.
I mean... But as part of a compulsive and automatic social lubricant, it totally sucks.
And you waste time so much when you drink.
And I don't even mean...
Because everybody then, you know, the automatic defense is...
Oh, well, I just drink to have a little bit of fun, and you're saying, that's bad, and, you know, screw you with that, frankly.
You know, like, don't go to that ridiculous nonsense, right?
I mean, that's the temptation, but it's complete nonsense.
If that's where you're going, don't bother telling me, because that's not where I'm coming from.
If you take away the drinking...
If I were to go to a bar where there was no alcohol served, but there was great dance music, I'm having a great time.
I've got no problem with that. When I get together with my friends, we rarely touch a drop.
Why? Why would we need to?
What's wrong with our brains and their natural state?
There's nothing to escape from.
There's nothing to get away from. I don't need to drink and do drugs because...
I'm happy with the way things are.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
I mean, if you're standing on the beach looking at a beautiful sunset, feeling calm and beauty and wonder, you don't sit there and say, geez, I've got to get back to the office.
You just drink it in and enjoy it.
You don't need to change your environment if you're happy with your environment.
You don't need to change or degrade your brain if you're happy with your brain.
And if you're not happy with your brain...
then it is a huge procrastination device to alter your consciousness.
If you have a crappy job and you daydream about being on a beach and that makes your crappy job less crappy, that sucks.
That's a bad idea.
It's like taking aspirin for a toothache.
No. Go see a dentist. Go change.
Go get something done. Don't numb yourself.
Don't try and gain the achievements of integrity and virtue and so on, which is happiness.
Don't try and gain those artificially, because then that lowers your desire to achieve those things.
It's a shortcut. It's a cheat.
It's like stealing money rather than earning it.
The more you steal, the less you want to earn.
You degrade your work ethic.
And when you try and achieve the fruits of happiness, which is the results of virtue, which is very hard...
If you try to achieve those, or you do achieve those through some biochemical means, whether it's drinking or it's drugs or whatever, if you try to achieve happiness without going through the work of achieving happiness, you are less likely to try to be happy.
The real, honest way, right?
Right? The real nice way.
I mean, if you could take a pill that made you muscular and lean and healthy, who would bother going to a gym?
Well, the problem is, of course, that what happens is you take a pill that makes you think that you're muscular and lean and healthy.
And so you don't go to the gym.
But in the real world, out of the matrix of this sort of environment, you're getting flabbier and more unhealthy, in reality.
So, don't take any shortcuts to happiness.
Because they'll then guarantee that you'll never achieve it.
Guaranteed. You will never achieve it.
If you look in the mirror and you think that you're lean and muscular or fit or whatever it is your goal is, you ain't going to go to the gym.
If you just take a pill. Or some shots of high-class, expensive vanilla-flavored vodka.
So earn happiness the honest way.
And then it'll stay, and then you'll feel proud, and then you'll have the capacity for love, and all of these great things.
But if you try and achieve it through merging with the herd and drinking and partying and blah, blah, blah, then you are doing bad and dangerous things to yourself.
And you're ensuring future unhappiness.
Real, significant future unhappiness.
Every time that you do something, like every time that I smoked while I wrote, I was creating that association, making it harder.
To break that association.
I ended up having to...
I rode all of Togo, most of Togo, and almost, in a Starbucks.
Drinking the cheapest drink I could find that was any good, which was a Cafe Americano, and listening to an MP3 player.
With sunglasses and a hat on.
I think the crazy guy in the corner.
But at least I couldn't smoke there, right?
So I broke that association, and now I don't feel tempted to...
Smoke while I write.
So, but that was a solitary thing which I used for mental stimulation, and it really did help me with my creativity.
You know, Freddie Mercury starts taking cocaine and comes up with Bohemian Rhapsody, but then, after a couple of years of great fertility as a songwriter, you know, frankly, his stuff mostly sucked.
If you really want to hear a terrible sucking sound, listen to his solo album.
Anyway, So, you think they're giving to you, but they're taking away from your future, right?
Don't take those shortcuts.
I mean, that's not my formal rant on drugs.
That's just a perspective that I think might be helpful for us to understand this dream.
So, you're at a party, you're having a great time, and you're doing shots of vodka.
That's pounding the back, my friend.
That is more than just social drinking, right?
Shots of vodka is not how you...
Keep a mellow buzz on during a dinner party, right?
That's drinking to get drunk.
And you feel that you're having a great time.
You feel like you're having a great time.
But your girlfriend is outside the party and can't get in.
Now, you say party, and this is sort of confusing to me, because you say party and then there's a bouncer.
I don't know what kind of freaky-ass parties you go to, but I've never gone to a party where there's a bouncer.
I've been to clubs and pubs where there are bouncers, but not parties.
And also, at some point, a bouncer comes up and asks if I have a ticket.
I say no, and he tells me that if I don't have a ticket, I'll have to get out.
Now, the interesting thing here is that I don't know what this ticket is, right?
Is it a ticket to get into the party?
Well, they should be checking at the door.
They don't check that once you're inside, any other hand stamp or whatever.
Is it a ticket for a drink?
Don't think so, because you don't have to leave a party or a bar if you don't buy drink tickets.
So, it's a little confusing to me what's going on here, and of course the confusion is not accidental in the dream, right?
Now, the guy doesn't say that...
The bouncer doesn't say, well, you'll have to buy a ticket or you'll have to leave.
He just says, hey, if you don't have a ticket, you've got to leave.
And when you buy a ticket from someone, you're basically giving up something that you have a value in order to gain something that is worthless.
Right? So let's say the ticket is 10 bucks.
Well, you're giving up ten bucks, and what are you getting?
One of those grimy, orange little ticket things with the ink smudges all over the place.
But you're getting permission.
So you're exchanging something of real value, money or whatever, and in return you're getting a worthless little ticket, but in it comes approval to stay in a drinking arena, a drinking area.
So... Metaphorically, this guy who patrols this club where you're having a great time is basically saying, did you exchange real value for worthless approval?
Right? And then you say, well, no, I did not exchange ten bucks for a useless little ticket that simply allows me to stay.
Somebody's approval. Right?
And then he says, well, you can't stay then.
He doesn't say, go buy a ticket.
Because what he's saying is, if you haven't already given up something of real value for something with no value, then you can't stay.
Now, based on my memory of our conversation, my friend, this is sort of what I was saying.
And I'm saying it more explicitly now, right?
I didn't want to dump the whole thing on you at once, right?
But I'm saying it more explicitly now.
Which is, you can't mess around with philosophy and then go drinking with a bunch of vapid, shallow, posing people.
You can't. You can't.
It'll fuck you up beyond words.
I'm telling you, this stuff is radioactive.
I keep telling everyone this, and nobody believes me.
Oh, they do eventually, when it's too late.
But, I mean, you listen to these podcasts your days as a party.
You're numbered, my friend. They really and truly are.
Right? You can't have a little secret mistress called philosophy.
You can't have a little hobby called the truth.
You can try.
You can try and you will fail in a pretty terrible way.
I'm not trying to scare you or anything like that.
It's just a simple fact. You'll get insomnia.
You'll get depressed. I mean, you can't start digging around into real values, real intimacy, real conversations, authenticity, integrity, virtue.
You can't dig around in all these kinds of stuff and then go woohooing at a bar with a bunch of empty people who, as you say, don't even know what they want to do and they're drinking and so on.
Socrates doesn't do shots!
The Gorgias does not start off with Socrates saying, oh my god, I was so wasted Saturday night.
Do you get how ridiculous that would be?
And we can all be greater than Socrates.
All of us.
We all are, if we simply accept these basic facts.
So then, and so I think I'm the bouncer in the dream, right?
Because I was kind of hinting at this, and I might as well state it openly, because your unconscious obviously picked up on it.
And obviously your unconscious, your true self picked up on what was going on in our last conversation about the emptiness and vapidity of woohoo partying with empty and useless people, while at the same time being very interested in philosophy.
Madness, madness, I tell you.
Your true self picked up on this, and obviously we got past the false self because you're able to have this dream.
So then, you leave the party.
So if I'm the bouncer and I'm saying, dude, if you haven't already given up something of value for something of no value, if you haven't already given up something of real value for the sake of empty approval and a grimy little crappy ticket, then you've got to leave the party.
So you're like, fine, okay, I'll leave the party, right?
Which is sort of, to some degree, the conversation that we had with regards to your girlfriend and her drinking and so on, right?
She was saying, I'll stop drinking if you want me to, and I was sort of saying, well, that's not really a very valid approach to the problem.
But clearly, here, you're leaving the party, which is sort of my suggestion, right?
Don't hang out with a bunch of drunken idiots.
I mean, if you have the potential to be a greater and deeper and more powerful human being, and why not?
Why not? Who told us we had to cram our infinite souls into these little matchboxes?
Who told us we had to fold our greatness into these little envelopes and stick them under a couch and pretend to be just another woo-hoo party animal idiot, which you were not?
Who told us that we had to beg and crawl our way through life, hoping against hope that we were going to get approval from worthless people?
Because you can, I mean, when I say worthless people, I simply mean in their current incarnation.
I try not to write anyone off, though it does happen, but I just mean in their present incarnation.
If you, as the philosopher who knows the cure, is going along with this woohoo, potty, vapid stupidity, then you're just enabling them, right?
They sense your depth, and if they can ensnare and control your depth and turn it into shallow, idiot, grinning, drunken, vodka-laced conformity, well, then they have won, and you and the truth have lost.
And they and you are then, yes, lost.
And not... On a cool Hawaiian island with freaky black smoke in the air, but in a void, in a vacuum.
That's not where you want to be.
So I say, you know, you really should leave this party.
It's kind of stupid, right? And of course, you want to leave the party, right?
If somebody paid you a million bucks to stay at that party, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
That's why people get so mad at me.
Oh, drinking. What are you, head chick of the women's temperance union?
No. I'm not about the mind and I'm about reality.
I'm not about things that eclipse the two.
But you want to leave the party because if you didn't want to leave the party, like if somebody paid you a million dollars to stay at this party, you'd be like, dude, I got to get me a ticket.
Like, how do I get a ticket? Where do I get a ticket?
Let me give you 50 bucks.
Let me give you all the rest of my money.
Let me give you my jacket. Just let me stay at the party.
So if you wanted to stay at the party really deep down, you would have.
But if the bouncer says, oh, if you don't have a ticket, you got to leave.
And you're like, okay. Then clearly, you don't want to stay at the party.
Clearly, you don't want to stay at the party.
And of course it's partly because your girlfriend's not at the party and so on.
That's kind of cruel, right?
I mean, if Christina wasn't allowed into a party, I'd just leave the party.
Nobody would have to tell me to go.
Because there's no more fun anywhere than with my wife.
There's no more laughter, there's no more fun anywhere in the world except where my wife is.
Being with my wife at the dentist is a million times more fun than being with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan on a yacht somewhere.
getting a buzz on that's visible from space.
So nobody would have to tell me to leave a party where my wife was excluded, right?
I'm going to go back to the next one.
So then you leave and you're sitting at right angles.
You're not sitting with your girlfriend.
You're sitting at right angles to your girlfriend.
That's important. You're sitting on a big brown leather couch and she's sitting on a chair at right angles to you.
That placement is not accidental because nothing in dreams is accidental.
You're not sitting together on the couch and you're not saying to her, you know, I knew you were stuck out here.
I'm so sorry.
I got totally carried away with these vodka shots and so on.
And I wonder if we should do this topic.
I wonder, I wonder, I wonder if we should do this topic.
Let me mull it over. I'll think about it.
It's going to be a long podcast if we do, but it might be the right time.
It might be. So you don't apologize.
You sit there and she says, where's the vodka?
She knows you've got it.
What you don't say when your girlfriend was...
You were out with your girlfriend's friends...
These vapid, empty idiots...
You were out with your girlfriend's friends...
And you don't...
Sorry, she doesn't really drink...
But you don't say anything about yourself.
You don't say anything about yourself.
So if your girlfriend likes to drink...
But is cutting back on the drinking...
You don't say whether you're cutting back on your drinking...
Which would lead me to believe that you're not.
And the dream seems to indicate that in fact you are not.
Well, I must tell you, my friend, huge amount of respect for you.
You've got massive amounts of potential.
You've actualized a good chunk of it.
But in this situation, if your girlfriend is not drinking and you're drinking and having a great time, you're kind of being a jerk.
Right? You're kind of being a jerk, right?
Right? I mean, if my girlfriend was trying to quit smoking and I was taking deep drags in front of her and saying, oh man, that cigarette is so good.
can you see that that's kind of being a jerk so you can let me know But I suspect that you did not limit yourself in the same way that your girlfriend did.
So she says to you, where's the vodka?
And you say, the bouncer took it.
Right, so you're pretending that you don't have any vodka because you want to keep it for yourself, because you want to control her behavior by not giving her access to vodka.
I mean, you're lying. That's not good.
So the question is, why do you lie to yourself?
With, or in regards to, about...
Oh wow, baby deer.
How beautiful. So, what are you lying to?
Sorry. I just, the most amazing experience where these two baby deer came, just standing sock-still in the middle of this wood, and...
Actually, I'm outside a conservation area at the moment, but these two baby deer, literally, like, up to my waist, they came, like, within ten feet of me, eating grass and staring at me, and I was standing sock-still for, like, fifteen minutes so they could come closer.
Just gorgeous. Thank you so much, everyone, for allowing me to do all of this.
I really appreciate it. This is your donations that allow me to see the deer.
So, sorry.
Let me pick up my thought. I'm ready to roll.
What are you lying to about with your girlfriend?
Oh, man. This is the topic of...
I don't know. Should I try and do it quickly?
Okay. Should I not?
I'll try and do it relatively quickly because it leads into this, I think, fairly well, right?
So you're lying to this woman.
You're manipulating her. You are allowing her questioning, her desire to know where the vodka is, right?
Because I kicked you out of the drinking, so to speak, right?
Again, this is just metaphorical.
You let me know if it works for you or not. This is how I think it fits.
It's up to you, of course. I kick you out of the drinking and you sneak the drinking with you, right?
So I said to you in our conversation, That you needed to sit down with your girlfriend and say to her what was going on with you When you thought I called you evil and then you did this, and how is it that I end up in these impossible situations where you're cold but won't warm up, where you don't want to go home but you won't come to my place, right?
So that's a conversation you need to have with your girlfriend, my friend.
It's a conversation you need to have with your girlfriend.
And there's a damn good reason why you have not had this conversation with your girlfriend.
Because you know exactly how it's going to go.
You're starting down this road of philosophy and self-knowledge.
Magnificent. Congratulations.
It will bring you joy.
Just not yet. You haven't mentioned anything about that conversation.
You go and have this wonderful time in the park on the Sunday before you have this dream.
And you're not telling her the truth.
And the truth is that you guys need to talk about this interaction that happened where she got mad at you because she thought or she imagined that you called her evil.
This was a conversation. You've had a chance to re-listen to it.
I bet you you have re-listened to it.
I know you have at least once. We had the conversation.
You re-listened to it. And people just vanish from this.
And this is a constant thing that I see.
At least more than half the conversations I have with people where I have specific recommendations, more than half the conversations that come out of the Ask a Therapist where we have specific recommendations, they just don't get followed up on.
They just vanish. And people, I don't know, maybe you think we don't notice, but we do.
But that's okay, and the majority of people aren't going to make it through this conversation.
And it's a shame, right?
Because if they knew what was on the other side, or they believed it, they would take it on willingly.
But most people don't.
What they want to do is they want to have the cake and eat it too, right?
So they want the depth and power and self-respect that comes from philosophy, and they also want the shallow social head out of the sunroof and the Limo, woohoo, potty nonsense.
Well, you can't have both.
You can't. That's not my rule.
It's just reality. You can't have the cake and eat it too.
You can't have depth and wisdom and self-knowledge and empty, shallow social evasion, one-upmanship, nonsense, potty, drunken crap.
You can't have them both.
But you want them both, right?
You want to be kicked out of the potty Right?
But you want to take the drink with you.
Right? You want to drink in the presence of your girlfriend.
Boy, if you could only see it.
If you could only see it.
Oh man, this is a complex topic.
We've already been 41 minutes.
42 almost. Alright, I'll do this one maybe in the next podcast.
This is an advanced one.
I'm going to put it out for general consumption.
Because it's really, really important.
The reason you need to sit down and have your conversation about being upset with your girlfriend explicitly is because it's going to happen either like your aggression towards her, you're upset with her, your frustration with her.
It's either going to happen consciously or it's going to happen unconsciously.
Right? So your girlfriend kind of humiliated.
You kind of stuck the knife in there.
Oh, you call him evil? Stuff like that, right?
Volatile, not curious, aggressive.
So you're mad at her. Why wouldn't you be?
Of course you would be. It's kind of a crappy way to treat someone.
And either you're going to sit down and talk with her about it, or it's going to come out in other ways.
And the ways it's going to come out is in you enabling her bad behavior.
If somebody acts badly towards us and we don't talk about it with them, it doesn't go away.
This is the great fantasy.
You've got a toothache, you take heroin, the rot doesn't go away.
Just the feeling goes away.
But the rot then continues unmonitored.
Right? That's why repression is so dangerous.
Not suppression in the moment, but repression.
That's why it's so dangerous.
Because the rot continues. The fact that you have decided not to have this conversation with your girlfriend, which you need to have, and you know you need to have, doesn't mean that you're not going to act on your frustration.
And the way that you're going to act on your frustration is you're not going to call your girlfriend on her shit.
That's really passive-aggressive.
That is screwing her up.
That is enabling. And that is fundamentally disrespectful to her as a human being.
We'll get to that next podcast.
I hope that this helps.
Because you're lying to her. And she knows that you're lying.
There's an unconscious communication that's going on that's informing the shallow conversation about vodka.
You're lying to her. She knows you're lying and you're denying it.
Because you are mad at her. She did kind of humiliate you.
You need to talk to her about it.
But you're having this meta-conversation around, I bet you you're having more fun than she's having when you're drinking.
I bet you that you're allowing yourself to drink while, you know, in a sense, forbidding her to drink or whatever, right?
This passive aggression is going to occur either way.
You either get it under control and talk about it honestly and openly, or it's just going to lay waste to your relationship.
You can't escape the truth.
The alternative to knowing the truth is not not knowing the truth, but living a lie.
Because we know the truth. We know the truth.
Philosophy... I'm not inventing anything here.
If someone hurts and humiliates you, it's not brain surgery to say that you should say, hey, you hurt and humiliated me.
What's going on with that? That's not brain surgery.
We know the truth. And we either speak the truth...
Or we avoid the truth, which destroys our life.
Sorry, it's not making this stuff up.
I'm not just trying to scare you.
It's just a basic fact. So, sorry, I was going to do two dreams.
I only got to one. But it has led me into the next topic, which is respect for women.
And I will get to that next.
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