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May 26, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:37
1076 Procrastination and Crushed Ambition (listener convo - video recommended)

How the cynicism of the father crushes the dreams of the son... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0M2PD2OvDo

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Time Text
Okay, hello? Hi, how's it going?
Ah, good. Let's see.
Where did it begin? Your major issue, if I remember rightly, was this question around procrastination?
Yeah. Let's see.
I guess I was thinking I could start with the...
Email I was going to send?
Sure, that would be great.
Okay. Yeah, and this is an email that I wrote, like, oh, I don't know, last week.
And it went through two major revisions, so you can see procrastination at work.
Or perfectionism, one of the two.
Perfectionism. Well, it seems that that's often the same thing for me.
Okay, let's see.
Motivation, procrastination, or something like that.
Alright. Hey Steph, I feel like I'm wasting my life.
Wow, that sounds like a heavy way to start off an email.
I've been in China for nearly two years.
While in China, I wanted to become fluent-ish in Chinese and write a novel, or at least a few good plays.
I've made Little progress on either.
I know you've done podcasts on procrastination slash motivation in the past.
I've listened to all of them.
I've also read books and websites on procrastination.
In fact, much of my interest in psychology stems from my various issues with procrastination and self-esteem.
But in the end, it seems like I'm in the same place I began.
Let's see. I feel very anxious thinking about these topics, especially When I shoot a sideways glance back at some of the insults and slights that my dad framed as encouragement to deal with procrastination.
Like saying, in effect, some people are self-motivated, but you've never been, and I don't know why.
I don't know what to do.
Someday, maybe you'll figure out how to be motivated, but it certainly has nothing to do with us.
I think I embellished that comment a little, but...
Probably not. Probably not too much.
But anyway, let's keep going.
Even from a very young age, it's my fault that I'm not a self-starter at 8.
I wrote the first draft of this email on paper, and I'm deviating a little bit.
I think my false self is pushing back the anger at this point, because I was feeling it, and now I'm just feeling anxious.
Which, by the way, I'm feeling anxious at the moment.
As it is! Talking.
Okay. Let me take you on a journey.
I have wanted to write novels since I was quite young.
This ambition was poo-pooed by my parents because I seldom finished or turned in school essays.
Being a shy kid, I read a lot and naturally sought to emulate the authors I liked.
But while occasionally I felt like I could write and be very affected, it seldom lasted, and usually I would feel a sort of internal resistance to writing, like I was pushing against some immense boulder, and it was a struggle to get more than a few sentences written.
In high school, I wrote all kinds of poetry and a few beginnings of stories, but a little else for my own enjoyment.
The poetry was enraged, random, impressionistic, kind of a...
Oh, I forget the name of that poet.
You know, she's kind of crazy.
Sylvia Plath? Yes, Sylvia Plath.
And probably a little bit of Arthur Rimbaud, thrown baked in for good measure.
Yeah, I suspect.
Let's see, I wrote, let's see.
Poetry was enraged, random, and impressionistic, like a butterfly flitting about above a raging river, occasionally touching it, but never staying in place long enough to get pulled under.
I think that fully focusing my mind or really giving myself completely to something is dangerous.
Like if I do that, I can't say, oh, I was just kidding, haha, if I fail.
I'm reminded of the podcast where you were talking about the little girl trying and repeatedly failing to push the baby carriage.
I wonder what happened to me that made me as a man of 25, and for as long as I recall, infinitely more terrified of failing than that little girl.
The summer after my first semester in college, I wrote an actual full-length play.
I wrote it in under a month and while writing, I felt little of the usual stress and it felt fairly easy.
It seems like then I've been trying to reproduce the same relaxed and non-anxious mental state and only occasionally achieved it.
But one thing this play proved to me was that I could write and, well, if only I could find the right state of mind.
And perhaps the mental state isn't at fault here?
I don't know. I've assumed that that's the reason for a long time now.
In college, I got by Writing award-winningly bad essays and writing some fairly good short stories and plays.
One of the plays was produced by our theater company at the school.
At least somebody thought it was okay.
Alright, where was I?
Sorry.
The essays were always a chore because you need to write out your thoughts in an organized way that I often struggle with.
But even the fiction and plays have been a chore to write or start writing.
I've started about a hundred times the number of things that I've finished, which is a fine ratio if you actually finish anything.
Starting in 2006, I haven't written much other than starts to stories or plays.
In 2006, I started listening to FDR in February, I think.
I graduated from the university in May, then I came to China in August.
And I think I did write a little before I came to China.
It's hard to say. Okay, so while the desire to write has fueled my pursuit of psychology and I guess to an extent philosophy, it has not fueled me to put pen to paper.
So at this point in the email I just said, It's quite late at night.
I wrote the first draft on paper.
I've been changing stuff as I type, and now I'm not feeling like typing anymore.
Like, the stuff I have written down is whiny and boring.
My motivation is really gone.
I think in this moment I'm feeling the same sort of feeling that usually stops me from doing productive things.
It seems like kind of dread.
Okay, I've just spent half an hour watching stuff in the chatroom.
This is the same sort of thing that happens when I want to write or study Chinese.
Okay, I'm gonna try to see if I can trudge along with typing up the stuff I wrote earlier.
Alright, then I wrote some more.
I'm frustrated.
When I sit down to write these days, I will typically jot down my idea, then fiddle with it for a while, maybe start an outline or write a few paragraphs or pages, but generally I will start thinking I'm taking a good idea and turning it to crap.
Then I will feel anxious and become bored and easily distracted and suddenly carpet lint is fascinating.
Or I have to stare at the screen and go through my list of forums and websites and see if they've updated or have interesting posts.
In this way, FDR is kind of a curse because there's always some new content to download and I can then while away the rest of the afternoon and not confront my anxiety again.
Or I'll sit down without an idea and I can't write anything but nonsense or lame retreaded ideas or stuff that sounds like something Douglas Adams did better.
And then I can't write anything.
It's like there's too much noise in my head.
I feel tremendous anxiety and I'll open a browser and waste the rest of the day reading people's useless opinions on video games or college football blogs.
Then I'll kick myself for later for wasting all my time on trivial nonsense.
I've found that I do my best work when I'm not able to access the internet.
The first play I wrote on a 300 megahertz machine that we didn't have connected to the net.
And my most productive year of writing in college was when I was roommates with a lesbian couple and their cats and didn't bother to pay for any net access.
I wrote two or three plays and a full-length screenplay while living there.
But there was a lot of slog and stress in that.
Now, I'm sorry. I'm going to just stop you for a second, if you don't mind, because I just wanted to give you some feedback on what I'm experiencing while you're talking.
And I think I understand the general sway of what it is that you're experiencing, but I still have to stop you because what you're saying to me is completely heartbreaking.
Like, I'm actually weeping that it's so sad.
And this doesn't mean that you're sad as a human being or anything like that.
But that's what I'm sort of experiencing from what you're communicating.
And this is, of course, in no way a criticism.
I'm just giving you the feedback.
And what it means to me, I'm guessing what it means is that there's a lot of sadness in you that you're not aware of.
Uh-huh.
Hold on.
And now I can either give you a chance to respond to that or I can go on with what I'm sort of thinking and feeling.
I would just say that sounds not...
that doesn't sound wrong.
I mean... I think the poetry that I was talking about was kind of a response to sadness.
I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I don't have...
Other than that, I don't have a response.
Okay, well let me go a little bit further in what it is that I'm receiving, what I think I'm picking up from you.
Because it is really one of the saddest calls that I've had.
And... I'm trying to sort of figure out why I'm getting that feeling and let me tell you a little bit about why I think I'm getting it and then you can tell me if it makes any sense.
First and foremost, whenever we have a yearning for greatness in whatever form we choose to pursue that, there's so many horrible mixed messages in the world as a whole.
And when we have a desire to be great, and you didn't say, I want to write advertising jingles for cereal boxes, right?
Your goal, your thought, based on the people who inspired you and the formats that you wanted to write in, that you wanted to write, you know, like Sylvia Plath, like perhaps Edward Albee, like Eugene O'Neill, like, I mean, whoever it was that inspired you, you wanted greatness, right?
Right. Now...
We have so many mixed messages in the world.
There is this idea that be all that you can be, aim high, go big or go home, have ambition, be great, right?
That's one of the things that we are told is a value, right?
Right, absolutely. And there's lots of reinforcement for that.
But then on the other hand, what happens when we try that in the real world?
Well, people say you can't be great.
Who are you?
Why do you think you can be great?
You don't work hard enough to be great.
Right, as if Sylvia Plath did.
Or Ted Hughes or any of these people, right?
I mean, they were mad, right?
I mean, she killed herself.
Ted Hughes' second wife killed himself and their daughter.
I mean, just a messy, monstrous bunch of people, right?
Tennessee Williams is a great playwright, lived a life of complete chaos and madness and self-destruction.
So, it's not hard work.
That separates these people.
I mean, is it that Shakespeare just happened to work harder than other playwrights?
No, there's just a native talent, right?
And very often, this native talent is co-joined with a kind of self-destruction.
Look at Ben Johnson, great playwright, died in a knife fight in a bar.
I mean, that's not a disciplined and responsible human being.
No, no. I mean, look at Marlon Brando.
Was it that he worked harder than other actors?
No. I mean, everybody works hard.
Everybody wants it, and everybody faces struggles with the creative process.
But Marlon Brando, what, one of his kids committed suicide?
Another one of his kids is in jail for murder?
I mean, the man lived a completely wretched existence.
But it wasn't that he was just so disciplined and worked harder.
Marilyn Monroe was one of the laziest people in the film industry.
Laurence Olivier was driven mad by her when he was working with her because she'd show up five hours late for a shoot.
I mean, they're not a hardworking individual.
No. So it's not hard work that does it, but being criticized for a lack of dedication or a lack of hard work...
Is a very thorny problem when it comes to explicating or working on the creative process.
So I'll tell you why I think I get such sadness from you, and you can let me know whether this makes any sense.
The great challenge with communication that is deep or passionate is vulnerability.
I mean, I've had the comment as people say, you know, well, Steph, you're narcissistic, you're vain, you're whatever, right?
And you seem angry.
But people don't understand. I'm never more vulnerable than when I'm angry.
And people always assume that vulnerability is about, you know, hold me, I'm crying.
And there is vulnerability in that, but there's vulnerability in anger as well.
There's great vulnerability. In anger, because it says that you're hurt and you're passionate about fixing something, which is an open soft spot for anybody to stick their cattle prods of manipulation in if they want, right?
Right. And when you describe your work, the reason that I think it makes me so sad is not anything to do with the quality of the work, which kind of is frankly immaterial.
We don't have much control over the quality of her work, but...
But it's because you have an ironic distance relative to your own work, right?
Well, only?
Yeah, because when you talk about your work, you say, well, I tried this, ha ha ha, I tried that, ha ha ha, and you had a phrase something like, award-winningly bad essays and so on?
Yes, right. So you have an ironic distance to your own work, to your own heart, to your own soul, right?
Yeah. You step back and you judge it, and you evaluate it, and it's with a cold and calculating spark-like eye of criticality, right?
Yeah. That is truly and completely heartbreaking.
Because that's not something you were born with, right?
Children don't do that when they start out learning things in this world.
No child has an ironic distance to learning how to tie his own shoelaces.
We learn things when we're young with great seriousness and great dedication.
Yeah. I mean, when you watch a child, a very young child, concentrating on a task, learning a new thing, Right.
Right. Right. There's extraordinary heartbreak in self-mockery,
and the reality of any kind of aspiration in this world is that whenever you aspire to something great, you draw out these venomous, petty, vicious little predators from the very woodwork, from the very fabric of space-time, it would almost seem.
Whenever you say, I want to do something great with my life, I want to do something great with my abilities, I have high ambitions, I have high hopes, I have high dreams, I wish to stand on the shoulders of giants and see further for the planet, I wish to do X, Y, and Z, whenever you want to do that.
All these vicious little ghostly half-invisible little serpents come out and start hanging off your cartwright artery, your femoral artery, your bloodstream and just start draining you, right?
Yeah. And they want to impose an ironic distance between you and what you love, right?
Right. Well, I get that feeling.
Well, there was a few years back, I was out on a walk with my dad.
He was talking about kind of his regrets because he's a lawyer and...
Some of the people he went to law school with, he reads about them and they're running big law firms and they're multi-millionaires.
And he's worked for the same oil company just for a salary for all of his employed life.
And he was saying, oh, you know, I sometimes look at that and I think...
Oh, well, that's what could have been.
And did he say it like that?
that because I don't know that you're processing how awful that is.
Like I think you're kind of glossing it over even within your own mind or your own heart.
And it's not.
To me, it's, I mean, it's no tragedy that he didn't become a multimillionaire.
Those people who do that pay other costs that your father didn't, right?
Like 80-hour work weeks, like endless travel, like, I mean, so he had a family and he spent time.
Like it doesn't matter that he didn't achieve that.
The question is what is his attitude towards not achieving that, right?
Thank you.
Sure. Well, actually he's invested well and he actually is a multi-millionaire but this is kind of beside the point.
So he feels that his career was wanting or was lacking because he did not achieve the kind of power or fame or success.
And this is true in life.
You can always do this in life, right?
I mean, no matter who you compare yourself to or no matter what you do to compare yourself with others, you can always find other people who are better off than you and other people who are worse off than you.
And even if you become number one, you become the richest man in the world, There's always 10,000 people who are trying to knock you off and achieve your status.
So then you just have anxiety around maintaining the number one.
So there's never any general validity in comparing your achievements to other people.
You can compare them to your own goals and your own.
But comparing yourself to other people, you can look up or you can look down.
And you either end up self-humiliating yourself for no reason or self-aggrandizing yourself for no reason.
No objective or just reason.
Yeah. But when he says the way that you communicated it, like, oh, well, it wasn't such a big deal, but I think about it from time to time.
I mean, that's so unprocessed, right?
And I don't know if when I say processed, if that means anything to you?
Like where you've come to terms with it and come to peace with it?
Yeah. I mean, I understand the idea.
So for you, there is a vulnerability that...
I mean, artists as a whole are vulnerable people, right?
They're raw. I mean, that's how people get access to the creative juice, right?
I mean, there's a rawness to it.
Right, yeah.
And in your family, vulnerability was mocked and derided, I'm guessing, pretty consistently.
Um... I think...
I think so.
Uh... It's hard to say.
I mean... Okay, imagine talking to your dad, for instance, and saying to him that you found something that you truly loved and were passionate about and were working on, whether it's a novel or something, right?
Something that you were just so excited to be working on and so thrilled to be motivated by.
What would your father's response be?
Oh, right.
Gosh, he would say...
Well, he did that with Ayn Rand when I got into Ayn Rand.
He said, you know, well, my college professor When I was in college, he said that, you know, Ayn Rand is, her philosophy couldn't properly be called a philosophy, only called a world view.
And, you know, you shouldn't take everything she says as the gospel truth.
Okay, and let's stop there, because you know that you're imitating him, right?
I mean, that you're conscious of that, right?
Yeah. And you're doing that to avoid the pain of what he was saying.
Right? And the reason that I'm pointing this out is because every pain that you don't experience, other people will experience around you.
And they may not be as aware of that process as I am, or other people who would know this.
And so when you go to your father with something that you love, and he says to you, don't accept his gospel everything that she says, do you experience how fucking insulting that is to you?
Not really, no, I...
I mean, I... Because it is.
Again, I don't want to judge your dad, I don't know him, but that statement itself is like a kick in the nuts to you.
Guaranteed. Yeah, well, I think I did experience anger about that episode.
And what was your anger about?
Well, if you're gonna tell me about how this is just a world view, then No, that's not the part that's insulting.
I'm sorry, because I know that this is a really dense and empty part of your personality, so I'm going to just be a little bit pushy and I apologize and you can tell me to stop at any time.
That's not the part that's insulting to you.
The part that's insulting to you is when he says, don't take his gospel, everything that she says, right?
And why is that insulting? Oh, because he assumes I'm an idiot that can't figure out what things to take and what things to leave from another person's thoughts.
Yeah, he says that you're an empty, impressionable, vacuous cult wannabe who is just going to grab somebody almost at random without any ability to think and process through their opinions to reason for yourself.
And that to say to somebody, you should not take what so-and-so says as gospel, is so fucking insulting.
And I'm not saying your father's conscious about anything.
It doesn't really matter. But the reality is, it's so insulting to you.
And it's insulting to him as well, because how on earth did he raise a son?
As you said at the beginning of this conversation, he says, oh, you have no motivation, and I don't know why, right?
So how the fuck did he raise a son who was gullible, empty-headed, retarded, unable to think for himself, would get swallowed up in some crazy cult, had no motive?
Like, where's his ownership in that?
If you can't think, and he's a lawyer, so obviously he can reason and think and argue and debate and so on.
If you can't think to save your life, how can he blame you for that even if it's true?
Because he was your mentor.
He was your teacher, right?
He was your father. Right.
Right. Is. Yeah.
Now, why are you laughing? You said is, was...
Yeah, but you've done that a couple of times, right?
Where something gets uncomfortable and you laugh, right?
Yeah, while you were talking I was thinking about if I would just send this chat to him and See what he thought.
Well, you know what he will think, right?
My concern is that you're swallowed up in this cynicism and ironic distance that came from your family, and it came from their family and so on, but we'll just talk about your relationship with your parents, right?
My concern is that you are enfolded or buried in these cloaks of distance and cynicism and self-criticism and self-regard and so on, and you can't just get behind what it is that you want to do and say, fuck the consequences.
I'm going to write the most passionate, most crazy, best, worst, stupidest, most intelligent stuff that I can come up with, and I'm going to enjoy that process whether it works or not.
It doesn't matter. You have no control over whether your creative process works or not.
You either throw yourself into it, like just one of those guys in a bobsled run.
You run behind it, you get it started, and you just throw yourself into it, and I think what those guys basically do is just pray.
But you're stuck, and this is why it's so sad.
You can't let go of this creative process and achieve enough ironic distance to say, okay, fuck it, I'll become a lawyer or something.
Right. So you can't let it go, but you also can't get in it, right?
So you're kind of running behind this bobsled, and you can't stop running behind it and go and do something else, but you won't jump into it and let it take you either.
Right. So this is why it's so sad, because you're stuck.
Don't you feel like you're stuck?
You're neither X nor Y. You're not up, you're down.
You're in the null zone, right?
Yeah, I mean... Now, this, I can guarantee you that if you were to get behind your creative process and just go for it, you would achieve closure one way or the other.
I guarantee you that. And what that means is that if you found the creative process enjoyable and you were able to come up with stuff that might be able to sustain you in terms of making a living or whatever, right?
Then you would do that.
If you totally gave it your all, Which is a highly vulnerable thing to do.
If you totally gave it your all and you found that you didn't enjoy it and it didn't work for you and it wasn't productive or maybe you enjoyed it but the stuff you produced nobody else wanted to read or whatever.
If you gave it your all and it might take a year or two to do that, what you would achieve is closure because you would find it to be slowly more and more unproductive to the point where – and I can speak from experience, right?
I used to write fiction.
But you would continue to do it until such point as you no longer had the desire to continue because you were rationally evaluated.
But you wouldn't have held anything back.
You wouldn't. Because right now you're stuck because you always have this possibility that maybe you can do it.
And the excuse that you give yourself is, well, I haven't given it my all so I don't really know.
Right? Right.
So if you give it your all, you will be freed from this null zone.
Guaranteed. But the question is, why don't you give it your all?
And the answer has nothing to do with your creative process.
Or whether you will succeed or fail.
The answer, why is it that you don't give it your all?
Well, that's a...
It's a sticky question.
I mean, you've already given me the answer, but you probably haven't given it, which is why I felt so sad, but you probably haven't given yourself the answer yet, consciously.
Well, let's see.
So, not over whether I'll succeed or fail, and not...
I forget what you said, but...
Do you want me to step you through it?
I don't want to just leave you spinning in space.
Yeah. Okay. Commitment is what you're having the biggest problem with, right?
And commitment means you either go for it 150%, Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, when you commit to a relationship with someone that you love, then you gain pleasure and joy and intimacy in that relationship.
If what you do is you just kind of, well, you know, we're kind of around, we enjoy each other's company from time to time.
But if you have that ironic distance, you're just kind of spinning in space and wasting time, which is what your unconscious is screaming at you, right?
Stop wasting time. Right.
Yeah. Why is it that you refuse to commit?
It's not because you're lazy. It's not because you don't have any capacity to commit.
It's not because you don't want to commit.
It's not because you don't clearly get and understand the value of committing to what it is you want to do.
It's not because of any of those reasons whatsoever you want to commit because if you didn't, you wouldn't feel depressed about your lack of commitment, right?
Right. You want to commit to it.
You totally understand the value of committing to it.
You totally taste the joy you will get from committing to it.
You totally understand the freedom that you will get from committing to it.
So the question is, why don't you?
And the answer, if you'd like me to give it to you...
Yes, no? Uh...
No...
Let's see. Yes, I'm not coming up with it.
Because it's late for you, right?
So you're in China. All right.
Yeah. The first place that we should always, always, always, always, always, always look to for why it is that we don't do things that would be beneficial to us is were we praised or attacked for these things as children?
Uh-huh. Right, so, with you, the fact that commitment is what you so desperately yearn for, I mean, you'd love to have the freedom to sit down and just fire off writing or do whatever it is you're going to do and just say, well, fuck it, I've got one life.
Every day that goes by is a day I'll never get back again.
If I'm going to crash, I want to crash with such an impact that I'm going to be thrown clear and never have a desire to fly that particular plane again.
You'd like to have the freedom to fail spectacularly, right?
Yeah. Because if you're not willing to take that risk to fail spectacularly, you can't succeed, right?
Yeah.
Because the higher your goal, the worse you're going to feel when you don't achieve it, right?
But you'd like to have the strength to just throw yourself at it and see if you jump the wall or hit it, right?
Right.
right so the question is well why don't you do that and that is certainly what is required for artistic ambition right you have to be willing to succeed right i mean people even just in the movie industry right they will spend 10 years trying to get a book to the screen right or trying to get a screenplay done right right and then more times than not it's either a mediocre hit or it's a bomb right yeah and so they have to look back and say
well that was 10 years of my life right but but there's no way they can get to that without that right yeah Right. So, when it comes to commitment, the question is, or the answer to the question why you don't commit is, that you were attacked for committing when you were a child.
That the reason you avoid commitment is because you wish to avoid being attacked by your family.
Okay, this is not hitting you in any emotional way.
No, no, it's...
No, not at all.
I can think of the incidents later when I was a teenager.
I can't think of how it applies.
I just, you know, there's a lot of intellectual distance.
I'm just trying to think of how it applies when I was very...
Sorry to interrupt. When you were a child, did you have a desire to communicate about things that were unsettling to other people?
It doesn't mean anything bad or anything like that, but, I mean, did you write little poems and stories as a child?
Did you do drawings?
Did you have that creative side to you when you were a kid?
I want...
I...
Let's see.
I mean, we had a little...
Well, look, I mean, if you think about it, then you didn't, right?
If you have to think about it, then you didn't.
I don't have any wrong answers here.
I'm just trying to figure out the facts.
If you have to think about it, then you didn't.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Okay, so you didn't have any of these artistic or ambitious aspects to your communication when you were a child, right?
So when did it kick in, around puberty or after?
Well, I mean, there was...
I mean, I talked about...
I mean, or at least I thought about writing before puberty.
I just don't recall telling anybody about it.
Why didn't you tell anybody about it?
I guess that would be because I would be attacked for telling someone about it.
Okay, so why is it that you're fighting me so much on this?
I didn't...
I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was...
Well, I don't mean that you're doing anything wrong, right?
But I'm just sort of saying, right?
So I ask you if you had any of these yearnings as a kid, and you say, nope, don't think so, no, not really, no, no, no, no, right?
And then literally, like a minute later, you say, well, yes, I wanted to do it as a kid.
And I say, it's because you were attacked for...
For your enthusiasms or your desire for commitment as a kid and you say, well, that doesn't ring any bells for me.
And then you say, well, I couldn't tell anybody because I'd be attacked, right?
That's not a criticism, right?
I'm just sort of pointing out that you're not...
I mean, you can get what you want out of this conversation, right?
You can either dig in and just open yourself wide to this conversation or you kind of hedge and fog and dodge me, right?
Right. And it's all up to what you want to get out of it, right?
Sure. So you criticized or attacked or diminished for your ambitions and your passions and your desires when you were a child?
Yeah. Okay, can you think of an example?
Well, we had an electric keyboard, and I would play on it, mess around, pretend I was a musician, and I think I said, you know, ooh, I want to be a musician!
And my dad said...
Sorry, I just don't want you to be...
And the reason I say this is for your good, not for my preference, but don't mock yourself as a child.
Yeah. Because you said, ooh, I want to be a musician, right?
But it was a very serious designer for you as a child.
Yeah. No, it was very serious.
I was intent on this idea.
I played on the piano, said, I want to be a musician.
And he said...
Well, he said the same sort of thing.
He said being a musician takes years of training and...
Most people fail if the odds are very much against you.
Most people fail. I got it.
Okay. So, I mean, we can go around for many examples to do with this, right?
So you did have artistic desires and ambitions as a child, which were mocked or minimized or derided or put down by...
By your family, right? Yeah.
So for you, commitment equals humiliation, right?
Yeah. Sorry, there's a kind of background noise here.
I'm trying to figure out what it is.
Oh? Yeah, I hit the kind of...
Finger drumming, or I don't know if you've got anything going on on your side, but it's just a bit of a noise.
It doesn't matter. Okay. Oh?
So... So, the reason that...
Oh, and here's the other beautiful wrinkle, and this always occurs, right?
this is inevitable to everybody who goes through this process, is that after attacking you roundly for that which you are committed to, what does your father blame you for?
Not committing to anything, being lazy.
Right. Do you see how it's a perfect setup, right?
Perfect.
If my kid is learning how to walk and I keep pushing him over and mocking how he walks, and then I say to him when he's older, I don't know, you just don't like to walk, you're lazy.
That's...
Well, it's horrible.
It's screwy. It's horrible.
Yeah. Yeah. So the answer to the question as to why it is that you're stuck in limbo land is that whether you like it or not, you have a creative soul, for want of a better word.
You don't have an option about that.
That's just who you are, right? And you were attacked for your commitment to your creativity repeatedly as a child in horrible, agonizing, destructive ways.
Yeah. And again, this isn't, like, I don't get the sense that you're fighting for this at all.
I mean, I don't want to be doing a look here.
It's not my problem. Because you just kind of, hmm, and yeah, and whatever.
I mean, if this is the answer, then I have no idea why it's not exciting to you.
Right. Well, it seems like...
But you think that I'm going to attack you if you're enthusiastic about the answer as to why you're stuck in this limbo and wasting your life?
No, not at all.
Okay, so why are you treating me like somebody who's going to attack?
Because you're not giving me anything, right?
You're not responding with any enthusiasm like, wow, this is the answer, right?
Now, maybe it's not the answer, but certainly, if you attack a child repeatedly for doing something, that child is going to have a hampered ability to do it as an adult, right?
We can at least understand that as a president.
Right. Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I'm responding to you like I do any time that my father tries to lecture me about...
Whatever he wants to, whatever it is on his mind to lecture me about.
Well, I'm going to disagree with you with that, and that's going to be completely annoying to you because I could be wrong, but this is what I think is happening.
What is the inevitable result of what it is that I'm saying with regards to at least the short-term relationship that you have with your family?
Like your relationship in the short run.
If your family is toxic to your creative ambitions and you're stuck, unable to let them go but unable to commit to them, and your family is toxic to that process, what is at least the best thing for you to do in the short run?
Will?
Get rid of the family?
I'm not sure why you'd say that in a mocking or questioning tone because it's a very simple question, right?
Yes. No, you're right.
And it's not a question of get rid of the family, but if your family is toxic to your artistic ambitions, and you can't let go of your artistic ambitions and put yourself in the little self-loathing box that they have, then it would seem to me that the next logical experiment would be to say, take a break from your family for a couple of months and see what that does to your motivation.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I assume you mean a deliberate break, not just a not picking up the phone and not mentioning anything.
It doesn't matter how you do it, right?
I mean, if you don't think you should go to Vladivostok, then it doesn't matter how you get there, right?
Right. But what's happening is, what I'm talking about is a kind of toxicology that is flowing down the generations, right?
That your artistic ambitions, which you can't let go of, and which are a core part of your being, are being mocked and derided by your family, and you have internalized that, right?
So when I talk about this, it's not me who sounds like your father, it's you who sounds like your father.
because this threatens the relationship that you have with your father and he psychologically is stepping in to minimize what I'm saying.
Uh-huh.
It's not me who sounds like your father.
No, you know.
I'm not telling you there's anything wrong with you.
I'm not telling you that you're broken.
I'm not telling you that you're lazy.
I'm not telling you that you lack commitment.
I'm saying quite the opposite.
I'm saying that you desperately want commitment.
That you desperately want to commit to your artistic goals.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
You don't sound a bit like him.
Right, so I think that you do, because what I'm coming in is saying, look, you're being crushed by this cynicism and ironic distance of your father and the fact that you were attacked and humiliated for your ambitions as a child.
And that is what is blocking you creatively and artistically.
Now, if you want to rise up and throw off that oppression...
And at the age of 25, it seems like a reasonable thing to do.
You're not 12, right? To claim your own life and you say, fuck it, I'm going to have these ambitions and if people around me mock me for that which I love, guess what?
They can't be around me until they learn differently.
Now, that threatens your father and threatens your family structure.
And the reason that I know that this is all unconscious for you is because earlier you said, well, gee, I want to send this to my dad, right?
Or I went for a walk with my dad and I told him and he was telling me about his failed ambitions, right?
Yeah.
And you didn't learn the lesson from either of those.
If your father tells you, gee, I'm sad that I didn't commit to my career, right, do you get how fucked up it is for him to then mock you for your ambitions when he says the problem with my life is I wasn't ambitious enough?
Thank you.
Yeah. Just take a moment and think about that, right?
He has mocked you for your ambitions and now he is complaining to you that the problem with his life is he was not ambitious enough.
Do you get how fucked up that is?
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
It's not...
Well, it's like me saying to my kid, here, you should smoke, you should smoke, you should smoke, and then I get lung cancer, and with no reference to the fact that I continue and keep urging him to smoke, I say, you know, the problem with my life is that I should never have smoked.
That's messed up, right?
Yeah, that's very messed up.
And you can either live in this shadow of cynicism, ironic distance, and end up in exactly the same place as your dad, though without even the satisfaction of a career of sorts and some financial security.
You can either go down that same fucking road as the rest of your family and be cynicism, cynical towards your own ambitions.
Or you can throw that oppression off, and you can say, I'm going to follow that which I love.
I'm going to follow that which gives me bliss.
And people can either be with me and enthusiastic about it, or fuck them, they're off the island.
But I'm not going to sit here and piss away my life reading stupid blogs about college football while my life drains down and piss her, right?
Yeah, yeah. You're either on board or you're off board, but the train is leaving the station, right?
Right. So you wanted this to go to your father, right?
Oh. And you weren't at all aware, from what I understood, about how messed up what your father was saying to you about his own catastrophic lack of ambitions.
Well, I... Yeah, I think I was a little bit aware.
It seems to me that I was a little bit aware, but no, it's...
Well, you certainly didn't say to me, and how messed up is that?
Ah, yes.
True. So why, if this is your greatest desire, your greatest joy and so on, and your father has a history of attacking you for this, why would you want to send this podcast to your father?
Help me understand that. Let's see.
What do you hope?
What would be a fantasy of what would happen out of that?
That he would say, "Oh, I'm terribly sorry." I was wrong all along.
It was wrong of me too.
Sorry, I did that again in his voice.
And do you know why you do that?
And this is my theory as to why you do that.
Yeah, you hope that he's going to apologize and change and so on.
And what empirical evidence do you have for that occurring in the past?
None. None at all.
Right. So this is not your fantasy.
This is his fantasy. This is how he keeps you around, by dangling this possibility of change, which is never going to happen, right?
This is like the abusive husband who beats up his wife and then buys her roses and says, I'll never do it again.
But he's doing that in order to beat her up again, right?
Right. Yeah.
Because what I get from you, and this again, I'm trying to make sure I'm sensitive to what it is that you're feeling, but the way that you portray your father and the mockery that you have towards your father indicates to me strong hatred of your father.
Yeah.
And if his cynicism is responsible for your lost years, for your lack of commitment, your lack of joy, the grueling, depressing...
Road that you've had to hoe for the past God knows how many years, then of course you're going to feel hatred, right?
If he mocked and derided that which was most precious, glorious, and beautiful within you, and separated you from what it is that you love, and gave you this ironic distance, and caused you to be trapped in this null zone of wasted life, of course you're going to hate him.
Yeah. Yeah, that's...
That's true. I never really...
I definitely, after leaving home, after going to college, I wondered what...
I wondered why I felt angry, why I felt like I hated him.
Sorry to interrupt. And he blamed you.
He blamed you for that which he created, right?
So he humiliated you for your ambitions and then humiliated you again for your resulting avoidance of ambition, right?
Yeah. I mean, this is sadistic, right?
Yeah. And you're like, hey, you know what?
I'm going to send this podcast to my father.
I mean, that's fucked up on your side, right?
It's like every time I'm vulnerable with this guy, he slips the shiv in, right?
So here, look, I've got a brand new vulnerability and my first thought is to send it to him, right?
Yeah. Yeah. That's...
That's... Very...
That's very weird.
I mean, you know...
You're like the abused wife who's escaped the beating husband and the first thing she wants to do is send him her new address.
Right.
Yeah.
Or the...
Torture...
Oh, that's not hurting anymore.
How about my arm?
It really hurts there.
Yeah, yeah. Here's my most sensitive spot.
Why don't you stick the...
Why don't you burn the cigarette right here?
Use my foreskin!
Right. Yeah, I... And I brought it up with my mom when we were driving and just the two of us as though she wasn't involved with the whole mess anyway.
and it's a very simple thing to do you're in China just write to them and say I'm going to take a show I mean if you want right you can do whatever you want right but my suggestion but you just write to them and say I'm going to take a couple of months off because I need to figure out some stuff for myself and then you just look at the big picture of your life right
Because you get lost in these daily detritus, right?
You get lost in this nothingness of the next five minutes, right?
And how you're going to spend it. But just look at the big picture of your life.
Say, well, where do I want to be when I'm 30 or when I'm 35 or when I'm 40?
Doesn't mean you're going to get there, but you're sure as hell not going to get anywhere if you don't have a goal, right?
Right. And just say, okay, well, every day that falls off the conveyor belt of my life goes into the ashen history, never to be recovered, never to be returned.
And how is it that I'm going to spend it?
There's no prizes for living small, right?
There's no prizes for abandoning your ambitions.
There's no prizes for mocking yourself.
There's no prize for crushing yourself under this religious imperative of perfectionism, right?
Right. That if you throw yourself into life and are willing to get beaten and bruised and mocked and who cares, right?
There's no prizes for living small.
We don't get... The highest seat in heaven for mocking ourselves into atoms in this life, right?
Yeah. I guess one of the reasons that I'm not sounding so excited is that I've told myself similar things about, you know, oh, look at the big picture, set some goals.
Yeah, but I'm not talking about that.
And I understand what you mean. Like, there's a lot of cheesy stuff, you know, like the Dale Carnegie stuff.
You know, like, write down, close the pros and cons.
But what I'm saying is that you actually now, what I'm offering you here is...
Artistic goals, right? So if, for instance, you have untapped reservoirs of anger and hatred and fear of humiliation in you, then your goal could be to write a play about a guy who hates his dad and doesn't know it, right?
Because what I'm offering you here is material, not a solution, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Because if you are willing to be brave and honorable and vulnerable, honest and vulnerable about what it is that we're talking about here artistically, there will be great power in that for you, right?
Because you're talking about being a butterfly fluttering over a raging river, right?
Well, that raging river is the truth about your own life, and that's where your artistic juice is going to be.
Right. Yeah.
Wow, you sound unbelievably...
It sounds... It sounds...
It sounds like a good idea.
Yeah, no, I... I mean, at least I'm smiling.
I... I mean, you can do...
I mean, my life continues, right?
And I know that for myself, I'm throwing myself and regularly splatting against the wall of hostility and indifference, and I get unbelievable amounts of angry, cynical, mocking feedback on what it is that I do.
And... I can either choose to sort of be dragged down by all that petty and pathetic nonsense, or I can just continue to forge ahead and hope that the strength of what it is that I'm trying to do here will raise people with me as best I can.
That's sort of my goal and my intent.
But, I mean, basically, I'm not going to let pettiness rob me of the joy and vitality of what it is that I'm doing.
I'm just not going to. I mean, why would I want that to happen?
That's... That doesn't serve the world, that doesn't serve the future, that doesn't serve the species, that doesn't serve humanity.
To make myself small for the sake of the diminished expectations and fears of others is just abandoning a post that strong and brave people need to man, I think.
Yeah, absolutely. And you don't have to do anything.
You can continue to waste your life, as you say, right?
I mean, you don't have to. See, I'm not telling you to do anything, right?
I'm just saying that this is why you don't do it and that you have a lot of just anger and resentment about it, which I fully understand and respect.
I think that's a very healthy and moral part of you.
But I'm not telling you to. You can go right back to check and check.
College scores and people's blogs.
You can go and do that.
I know that if I were to tell you to do something, you would be just enormously indifferent to it fundamentally.
I'm not telling you to do any of that.
You can go back and do exactly what you want.
If, though, you want to live with intensity and vitality and with the resulting joy and pride with your courage, Then you can take a break from the toxic minimizers around you and throw yourself into exploring artistically the ambivalence that you have around your family, the hatred and loyalty that you have towards your father.
There's a lot of very powerful artistic energy in that, guaranteed.
And you can do that because it'll bring you happiness and give you strength and meaning to your life.
But you don't have to. I mean, you can do whatever you want, right?
Yeah. Right, but I really don't want to be reading those forums and waste my time.
No, no, you really do want to do that, because it's easier than the alternative, right?
Right. It's like the guy who puts off going to the dentist one more day, right?
It is easier than actually going to the dentist in that one day, right?
It's just that over time, it gets worse and worse, right?
Right. Yeah, over time.
I just begin feeling like I hate myself and this is, you know, what am I doing?
Just every day, same stuff.
Right, and you're avoiding the really passionate feelings that you have that are just fundamentally inconvenient, to say the least, to those around you, right?
Because when our true self is inconvenient to those around us, we fritter away our existence on inconsequentialities, right?
We can't let go of our true self, but we can't commit to it either, so we end up evaporating, right?
Right, yeah. So who you truly are just is irritating, inconvenient, and unpleasant to your family, right?
That's your natural identity.
It's just something that causes anxiety and hostility to your family, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And so you can either be who you are and say, fuck it, get on board or get lost, or you can just continue to pretend that you aren't who you are and waste your life.
But you don't have a choice about who you are.
I mean, it's just your nature, right? Right.
Absolutely. You didn't ask for this.
It's just what you have to work with, right?
Right. That's what I have to work with.
All right. Yeah, I mean, I might have asked for a perfectly analytical life as an engineer or something.
For sure, but your father would have found a way to mock that too, right?
I mean, your father was a lawyer and he found a way in his own life to diminish his own ambitions and regret it later, right?
So even if you were a lawyer like your dad, he would diminish your ambitions just as he had to himself.
It doesn't matter who you were, your father was going to do that.
It's not personal to you.
It's his thing, right?
Yeah, I get that.
If I wanted to be the best lawyer in the world, he would have said, oh, well, you can't be a great lawyer.
There's so many people in law school.
Well, no, but even if you wanted to get to the next rung of your profession, he would have done that.
It doesn't matter whether you want it to be the best or anything.
If you'd gone for some promotion, one rung up in your company, well, there's lots of other people going for the same promotion.
And you know, when you get up there, you have to work that much harder and you're then competing on a higher playing field and it gets more anxiety producing and you'll have to work more and you might have to travel and it's going to be negative.
There'll be more expectations on you, blah, blah, blah.
You'd find a way to bury every single fucking sparrow under a ton of bricks, right?
Yeah, I hear those things in my head without him around.
I hear those things all the time.
Oh, the infection has passed completely into your system, right?
Which is why I feel such frustration because you don't seem to be raising much of a hand to get out from under the bricks.
But that's just because you've internalized it so much, which would indicate to me again that separation from your family for a period of time to see how you feel would be essential.
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about on this call?
No, I don't think so.
Okay, well, I will send you a copy of this and have a listen to it again, and I will talk to you soon.
Thanks, I feel relieved.
Okay, bye-bye. It was good to have a talk with you.
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