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April 29, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:25:16
1342 Quit - or Fired? A listener convo

A listener just lost his job...

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Hello. Hello.
Hey, how's it going? Well, let me not ask that question, but rather, why don't you tell me how it's going?
Pretty badly. Pretty badly.
Well, that's an understatement.
Very badly. I got fired today.
Right. And what happened?
Sorry, it's still something I'm having trouble dealing with.
I'll start as much in the beginning as I possibly can think, which is when I got the job about just over a year ago now, I got it.
It was a job which was a bit above my station compared to what I was qualified for.
But I got it and I was doing really well.
At one point I was even offered to head up the US office that they were thinking about opening up after about six months.
But then around Christmas time, and I don't know if this is the direct cause, but my girlfriend and I split up.
And since then I've kind of been in a bit of a, I say a bit, but in quite a bit of a depression.
And as hard as I've tried to kind of get out of that, one of the major things that's been suffering is my work.
I've been publishing articles which are filled with very, very sloppy mistakes and misspellings and poorly constructed sentences.
And over the past few months, I've tried really, really hard Get behind this problem and fix it and solve it.
But everything I do hasn't really worked until today when they fired me.
And what kind of setup was there?
Did you get a warning? Did you get a bad performance review?
What happened prior to the firing?
Well, in February And my boss basically said, what's going on here?
We've noticed that, like, in early February, he kind of said, well, what's going on here?
Because we've noticed your work has really nosedived.
And I kind of said that, I basically explained that my ex and I had broken up.
And he said, oh, okay, well, you know, if there's anything we could do, let us know.
And I said, well, you know, I'm starting to see a therapist on Wednesday lunchtimes.
That's all I really need at the moment.
It's the freedom to go do that.
And he said yes.
A few, like a month or two later, I suddenly got a written warning and I was put on a two-week probation saying basically I need to start sorting this out or they were going to fire me.
After the two weeks passed, everything was fine.
Well, they said everything was fine.
They said I'd improved.
I continued to work until about a few weeks after that when I got kind of a verbal warning and then this.
And was there anything in particular that triggered it happening today rather than yesterday or tomorrow?
Or was it, do you think, just an accumulation Of discontent on the part of your manager?
I think it was an accumulation of discontent.
We hosted an event in London yesterday and whilst I was in the office till five, the main management went up.
The guys above me in management went there early to set up and I think that's when they decided to have the conversation to make the decision.
Sorry, I don't quite understand that last bit.
They made the decision yesterday.
No, I understand that. I just...
I'm not sure what it means when you say you stayed till five, but they went to some other place.
Well, I... They needed some...
Someone had to, I guess, cover the news.
And one of them had to travel down from...
From, I think, quite far away.
So he had to be basically traveling all day and got there early.
And the guy...
Basically, the manager also went down there early to meet people and to set up, because he was hosting it, and the owner of the company also went down for similar reasons.
But I stayed at the office until the office closed to cover off the day-to-day work, and then I joined them.
Right. Okay. I have no opinion, obviously, about this good, bad, or indifferent.
I'm just sort of curious, but it's fairly clear that it's not a shock.
Yeah, no. It's certainly not out of the blue or anything like that?
No. Okay.
And when you were told, what was your initial feeling?
That kind of deep sadness and hurt.
Not surprised. No, I mean, I can sort of see that.
And what was the sadness in relation to?
I don't actually know.
This is one of the things I was really having difficulties figuring out.
Because I think about it and I'm not particularly concerned.
I didn't really enjoy the job, to be honest.
Well, that's not a shock, right?
I mean, you say you're fired, but it kind of sounds to me like you quit.
But we can get to that later.
But sorry, come on. Yeah and you know I asked myself you know well what would it mean if I couldn't do this in the future and it's like nothing really it doesn't it doesn't matter to me at that specific job.
I think I think the word that pops in my head is kind of in a sense shame.
Go on. Just kind of the feeling of like I wasn't good enough to keep the job.
You weren't good enough to keep the job that you didn't like?
Yeah. I mean, you understand.
It's kind of black comedy, but it's a little funny, right?
Sure, sure. Like, I hate my girlfriend.
I can't believe she broke up with me, right?
Right, right. But, I mean, there's an element, though, with this, which is like, you know, I could have...
My plan was to keep the job whilst looking for other things.
And were you looking for other things?
Yes and no.
I was... I'd inquired with one place about a potential job, and I'm actually speaking to them next week about it.
But it wasn't like getting off the Titanic kind of energy, right?
No, it wasn't. Right.
There's a premium cast about a fellow who didn't quit a job that I just posted recently.
I will get the reference for you.
There's a premium. I won't go into any details, but there's a premium cast that, I mean, outside of this chat, you might want to have a listen to.
And let me just figure out where it is.
Yeah, it's FDRP 159 injuries.
It's a conversation. You might want to have a listen to that because this is a guy who's sort of planning to quit his job and didn't and so on.
And if we, I mean, my experience has been that if we don't follow through on stuff, our unconscious will take over, if that makes any sense.
No, no, that does, that does.
And I say this just to give you a feeling of control and a feeling to, because if you feel depressed, it's because you feel You know, helpless and contradictory and so on.
If you can find a way to feel empowered through this or to find a way to feel empowered, that would be kind of to oppose that feeling of helplessness.
And that's all I'm talking about here.
No, no, I understand and appreciate that.
And I think you're right. I actually did listen to that because one of the other things that's been bothering me is...
Since Christmas, I've just been continuously ill as well.
And so when I saw something on injuries, I kind of made a connection there.
Ill? And has it been sort of like minor infection-y, cold-y kind of things?
Yeah. It's just that and just the occasional aching joint for a week.
Right, right, right.
Welcome to being 90, right?
Right. Okay.
So what is it that you disliked about...
Oh, sorry. And I think it's important to be precise...
I mean, in all things, but in particular here, it's important to be precise about what you disliked.
And, I mean, generally there's three things to dislike about a job.
There is the field, there is the people, and there is the job itself, right?
Right, right. And of those three, what, if any or all, what of those did you not like?
Right. I think it was the people chiefly.
There was a kind of a day-to-day monotomy involved, but that I could have dealt with.
I think it was the people I was working with.
And so to further refine it, and this is the bubble tree logic to try and solve these problems, when we dislike people, there's two kinds of people There are two categories, and again, this is all nonsense generalizations, but I think it's helpful. There are two kinds of categories that we put people in who we dislike, and they are unpleasant or immoral, right?
So an unpleasant person would just become a bore or somebody who is just kind of agitated and makes you tense or You know, that kind of stuff.
And this is not particularly pleasant, enjoyable, enriching or relaxing to be around.
And then, of course, the immoral people are the people who are backstabbers and abusive and, you know, all of that kind of snormy stuff that goes on, which can be very ugly in the realm of office politics.
And, of course, management that lies and, you know, all of that kind of nonsense, right?
So if it's the people, I would suggest the first thing to separate is whether...
They are, you know, just people you don't like because they're kind of unpleasant, though not, you know, corrupt or immoral.
Or is it more in the second category?
I think it's more in the second category.
Right. And generally, when we go on strike, and depression is a kind of strike, it is because of the second category.
It is because of people who are immoral.
That's been my experience, and I'm just painting with the broad brush as usual, but that's been my experience that...
When I lose respect, moral respect, for the people that I'm involved in, I can stay, but I'm not really there, right?
Right. And actually, come to think of it, a lot of the major problems happened when I started actually having to work in the office with them, as opposed to from home.
And so what were the issues that What were the issues that occurred for you with the people or what the people did that you found morally objectionable?
Well, I found being around them quite uncomfortable because they were very bitchy about each other.
There was always something quite negative to say about someone else.
And specifically in the case of my management, They were very...
They basically used ridicule as a way to manage you, in a sense.
They're not just like...
Sorry, to manage what? To manage me.
Sorry. Oh, sorry.
I thought you were talking about your co-workers, but you meant...
Because you said your co-workers were gossipy?
I'm sorry, did I miss that? Yeah, sorry.
I was swapping between the two.
My co-workers were gossipy and also...
It's hard to explain. Just give an example statement of what they might say that would be offensive or unpleasant beyond just off-color.
The thing that sticks out is actually something by one of my managers.
The guy who I was actually supposed to be replacing in the role, but he ended up moving to a different position.
He basically, they fired some guy who worked basically in the American office shortly after I joined the company and I just remember having a chat with them when the group,
when everybody at work met up in person for a company meeting and he was kind of like laughing about how the guy Was going through a divorce and had to move house and had all these other problems and on top of that was fired.
And he was kind of laughing about that being a funny story.
Wow. Right, so kind of cruel, not a whole lot of empathy, possibly a slight touch of sadism.
Right, right. And just kind of that whole attitude of...
Nice guys finish last, type of thing, so that excuses anything you do to them.
Right, okay, so it's kind of Nietzschean, if that makes any sense?
Yeah, yeah. Like, there is no right and wrong, there is only the will to power, and ethics, or virtue, or empathy is a sucker's game, which is used by more powerful people to exploit and triumph over you, right?
Exactly, yeah, certainly a few of them are exactly like that.
That's a pretty cold and predatory universe, right?
Yeah. And it seems to be one that's in journalism generally.
Don't get me started on journalists, but we'll talk about that another time.
Journalists, how to make an entire career out of your history of denying verbal abuse as a child.
But anyway, so this stuff was pretty objectionable, and I would imagine that you probably didn't feel all two kinds of comfortable Saying, you know, that seems kind of like kicking a guy when he's down.
Do you guys think that's on?
Yeah, no. That was not on the table for me.
And what would have happened if you had...
I'm not saying you should have.
I'm just trying to understand the environment that you processed it.
What would have happened if you had said that?
I would have gotten either no response from them immediately or kind of like been mocked for what I said.
And then it would have been behind my back, it would have been anything I did would have been blocked.
And do you feel, and I'm getting a sense, and I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth, but my experience has been that when you confront people on their inhumanity, they, I mean, if they truly, I mean, if it's a lapse, you know, like somebody just sort of goes, you know what, that is kind of nasty, I'm sorry, right?
Because we all, you know, sometimes our empathy centers are sleeping in a different time zone or something, like we can all Have those moments where we're kind of laughing at something and then we go, wait a second, why am I laughing at this?
This is not funny, right? Right, right.
Right, so my sense is, from what you're saying, that they wouldn't have done that.
They wouldn't have said, you know what, you're right, that's pretty bitchy.
And, you know, the guy's obviously having a tough time.
Oh yeah, no, they certainly wouldn't have ever said that.
That was just not something that happened.
And so if you point out someone's inhumanity and cruelty...
He or she, and particularly if they're ensconced in a kind of cold and brutal tribe, will almost invariably tend to bend almost every effort to get you out of the environment.
If that makes any sense.
I think that does because like it did go from like you know I joined up I was going to be the deputy editor and I was basically going to have all the deputy editor duties after about four months I had my my initial probation was over and I was given a glowing report and even told that by the end of the year I could be running the US office but by that point the project that the guy I was replacing got cancelled that he was going to move on to got cancelled so he kind of stayed floating around in his position so basically my duties got kind of over time basically pushed to the day-to-day writing and not any of the actual really challenging work and then even then When I joined the office,
I was kind of put at a desk out of the way.
And eventually, they actually moved the office.
They rearranged the office last Friday.
And they literally put, whilst all the other desks were kind of around each other, they literally put mine facing a window with my back turned to everybody.
Huh. Right.
I mean, this is why anarchy works, right?
Because when people group together to exclude, it almost always works, right?
Right, right. Right, okay.
I mean, what I'm trying to do here, because I know that you feel down about this, and I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I'm going to try, and I'm going to try and do it justly and fairly and rationally, I'm going to try and reorient your view of this.
Because I think that you have a feeling of rejection and loss, you know, like the mothership has taken off to the stars and left you on the asteroid.
But I think that quite the opposite is true.
I'm going to try and make that case.
Maybe I can and maybe I can't, but just to let you know where I'm going to head with it.
Sure. Sure, no, please do.
Okay, so the people that you were surrounded by, the people you were surrounded by, or surrounded yourself with, were kind of cold and nasty, right?
Yeah. And were there any exceptions to that reality?
In other words, was there the odd glowing hobbit angel of empathy and openness?
In my workplace?
Yes. I'm trying to think, and I don't believe there is, no.
If there were, anarchy wouldn't work, so I'm glad that there aren't.
So you're surrounded by...
People who were unpleasant to the point of genuine nastiness, right?
Yeah, yeah. And you couldn't be self-expressed about the problems you had with that kind of cruelty, right?
No. Okay.
Now, the content of the stories that you were working on, were you allowed to be self-expressed As far as your genuine thoughts about what you were working on went, or did you have to kind of toe the line?
Well, it was business reporting, so you kind of had to pretty much just report the business.
It was not something where you could really put an opinion in.
Oh, come on. I'm no journalist, but I can guarantee you.
I read the business section.
And I can guarantee you that it's all in the choice of adjectives and who you quote and where you place things.
You can absolutely get your opinion across in any article.
That's true. That's true.
I mean, I was never specifically told not to write anything or anything like that.
I'm trying to think if there was any unconscious kind of...
Yeah, not explicitly conscious instructions I received.
Kind of felt like, yeah, if I had written...
Actually, I'm completely not telling the truth there.
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but that was kind of like the party line.
And I've had some experience with media bias, so I'm not saying that you'd be anywhere along those lines, but it's not the case that reporting is ever objective.
Well, yeah, because I remember I interviewed the head of the BBFC, the British censor, and I really wanted to ask all these questions of basically who the hell do you think you are type of thing, you know?
But I felt like that, you know, I felt uncomfortable doing that to an extreme where I kind of talked about the details, not the what I deeply wanted to talk about.
Right, and Stalinist and Orwellian probably did not make it into the final copy, right?
Right, no. No, not at all.
And this is not a lack of courage.
This is a recognition of the environment, right?
Because we have this thing, right?
Oh, I should just go and march in there and blah, blah, blah, right?
But, I mean, it's not a lack of courage because it takes a hell of a lot of courage to go into therapy, right?
So I just think it's important because you may have a story about that, which is why you dodged the question earlier.
Like, I was not courageous enough.
I didn't stand up for my principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But you don't do that in that environment.
You can't, right? You're either not in that environment, or you are, and you don't do that kind of stuff.
But you can't have both, right?
Right, right. That makes sense.
So, you could not...
Right, and obviously in the business section, the big story in the UK is everywhere, is the financial crisis.
And you probably could have interviewed the British equivalent of the Fed, and talked about how It is the state control of the monetary supply, which is at the root of these kinds of problems and a call for privatization and so on.
And how would that have gone down?
Well, I don't think I could have interviewed the...
Or at least written an article about it, sorry.
Yeah, that would not have gone down well.
Right, right. The only times I ever even came close to just talking about the topic, if we were like...
As a group, a company went out for a drink somewhere or something like that, which always turned into far more than a drink.
I'd kind of mention it and I could immediately feel like, oh dear, I have to be quiet about this now.
Right. More proof of anarchism.
But let's get back to your problems.
So, do you sort of see where I'm going with this?
I think so, yes.
Go for it. That I didn't want to work with them.
That I haven't really lost anything by not having the job.
And that, in a sense, I was unconsciously rebelling against the job itself.
Well, I think that you're halfway there, which is fantastic.
And, you know, what a great, you know, you've stopped going in the wrong direction.
Now we just have to yank you a little bit, hopefully with some gentle fishhooks into the right direction.
Because you said I haven't lost anything by not being there.
That's an interesting point.
If I stop putting my hand into a blender and shredding it, and I say, well, I'm not losing anything by not putting my hand in a blender.
And it's kind of true, you're not losing your fingers, but you are gaining your other fingers, right?
Right. So if you're in a destructive, emotionally abusive environment, and you get out of that, That would seem to me, I mean, and please understand, we're not talking about the financial challenges of paycheck, and I understand, we're just talking about the philosophical content.
I mean, the economic content is a separate conversation, but let's talk about the content in terms of integrity and virtue, right?
Right, right. It would seem to me that you have gained back your capacity to have a soul, to not put too Dramatic a point on it, right?
No, that's very true.
To have integrity, to be self-expressed, to have self-respect, right?
I mean, if you're thrown off the Titanic before it even leaves the United States, do you sit there and say, damn, I can't believe they threw me off, especially when you know the news, right?
Right, right.
No, that's very true.
It's very, very true. In just about any organization, and this is a general principle that I think is useful, look to the person who's been there the longest and say, is that who I want to end up like?
Yeah. There's two people I'm thinking of now, and oh dear no, oh dear no.
Well, but that's important. And also look at the people who are at the top and say, do I want to end up, you know, forget the money, because the money doesn't buy you happiness, but do I want to end up like that person at the top?
Or do I want to end up like the person who's been here the longest?
Right. Because that's where the organization tends to, right?
The people at the top are the people who most perfectly represent the ethics or lack thereof of the organization.
And the people who've been there the longest are the ones who have navigated and been approved of, navigated the rapids of the organizational ethics or lack thereof and been rewarded with basically tenure.
Right. Right.
So it's kind of like...
If you're really keen on smoking, you go to a lung cancer ward and you say, well, is this where I want to end up, right?
Right, that's really...
That makes me feel hopeful and makes me feel happier about it.
But there's a part of me which is a bit worried, though.
Which is like...
There's an element where I'd like to be able to feel angry towards...
Towards the bad treatment.
So we have hope, worry, and a desire for anger.
Yes, kind of. Okay, because we can't do them all at once, right?
Worry, anger wouldn't want to be.
I mean, we can't invent a new emotion, right?
We could, right? But it wouldn't help that much, right?
Now, the worry is twofold, right?
The worry is about more immediate financial practical concerns, and the worry is, where the hell am I going to get a job if this is the world, right?
To be honest, the financial concerns aren't too much because I was thinking about saving up and going to school again anyway.
I can take any job, really.
As I said, I'm in talks with a company doing something very different.
I'm basically in talks with them for some jobs that will be opening up in the future.
They might actually even involve a pay rise, which would be great.
But the worry is like, why don't I feel...
Why don't you feel...
Sorry, what? Angry. Well, because you were participating and wanted this job up to yesterday.
It would be psychotic to feel angry.
You would really be mentally unhealthy if you just turned around and felt angry, right?
Because that would be to completely ignore your own role in the situation.
And I don't mean blame, I'm just saying you stayed there, you tried to work it out, you went to therapy, you tried to negotiate staying on there, you wanted the job, so to just turn around and be angry the next day would be insane, right?
Yes, that would be. So, you know, cut yourself some slack there.
I mean, be curious, right?
Rather than, I now must program myself with the moral outrage module so that I don't have to feel any sadness or complicity or, you know, how did I stay so long, right?
No, that's true.
That's very true. Because you want anger so you can avoid your involvement, right?
No, I want...
Sorry, I don't understand.
Could you explain that again? Well, because if you feel moral outrage, you would feel that, and I think I understand the emotion, but you would feel that because you had not participated in this situation, right?
Right. I mean, if your car gets stolen from some nice whatever place or whatever, then you feel moral outrage, right?
If you leave it unlocked in a really bad neighborhood for two days, it's kind of tough to feel the same level of moral outrage, right?
Right, right, that's very true.
And I was part of the system of that work environment.
Well, you don't know what you were, and I don't know what you were.
It's not like you were a victim, and it's not like you were totally part of the system.
Because if you were totally part of the system, you'd still be there, and you sure as hell wouldn't be talking to me, right?
Right, so it's complicated.
That's sort of what I'm saying.
And, you know, part of...
Part of the problem with depression is it leads us to polarized viewpoints.
I either have moral outrage or I was completely corrupt and part of the system.
Well, you know, the richness of life comes in the complexity and the ambivalence, right?
You hated it and you wanted it.
You disliked the people and you wanted their approval.
It's complicated, right?
Right, right. And accept that it's complicated because that's the empirical evidence, right?
No, you're absolutely right about that.
You're absolutely right. Like, for instance, when the media stopped wanting to talk to me after I put out my factual defense of all the nonsense that was being told, right?
The media stopped. Everything dried up, right?
The documentary went away and so on, right?
And I don't feel any ambivalence about that.
I'm not like, please call me, right?
I mean, I don't feel any ambivalence about that.
I'm like, good riddance, you know, go back to wrecking other people's lives and, you know, glad to get you out of my house, right?
Right, right. But that's not to say I don't have ambivalence in other areas, but in that area I don't, right?
But for you, there was a very deep and rich, right?
I know it's tough, right?
But rich. And you're going to want to...
You're probably too young for this, right?
But there used to be these things in arcades.
You would drop a penny or a five-penny piece or a ten-penny piece or whatever...
And it would go sort of down these little forks, right?
So there would be these little gates or something.
And it would sort of roll down one and then the other.
And there would sort of be a 50-50 chance.
And it would just sort of follow it. It was a way of getting you to give some money with a very small smidgen of entertainment value.
Have you ever seen those things?
Yes, I have. They had them when I was a little kid.
Okay, good. It might still now.
Right. And that is the model of the depressed mind.
Because you put a thought in and it's like, well, it's either this or that.
Okay, now it's either this or that.
Okay, now it's either this or that.
And now it's either this or that. And it's not true.
The truth of these kinds of complex situations is like adding colorant to water.
It's not like dropping a penny down a series of logic gates where it's one way or the other, right?
It's an ecosystem.
Because you've tried that a few times, right?
Oh, well, it was this. Oh, well, it was that.
Oh, well, I was like this then.
Oh, well, I was like that then, right?
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, right?
You have to expand your horizons and enrich your depth of perception to understand that it was complex.
And it should be complex because it is complex.
How do we make our way in a corrupt world when we have a love for virtue and truth?
It is a bloody complex, messy, difficult, challenging, exciting question.
And it's really hard to answer because, you know, if it wasn't hard to answer, the world wouldn't be corrupt, right?
Right, right. And yes, we do want the approval of people we don't respect.
We want the approval sometimes of people we kind of loathe.
Well, that was something that came up to me quite a lot when you were talking.
It's just all the times I remember really desperately seeking their approval.
Absolutely, absolutely.
and you know where I'm going next right I'm gonna take a guess The family? Not the family as the abstract, but your family in the concrete.
Right, so I can't remember much about your family, but I'm going to make a few guesses that they were not people that you had a great degree of respect for when it came to ethics.
No, none whatsoever.
Right. In fact, probably more along an act of dislike.
Totally. And yet, of course, when we're children, we absolutely need the approval of our parents.
We cannot survive without the approval of our parents.
Yeah, I understand that.
I could say the food, shelter, protection, you know, there's nothing we can do.
If they don't like us, right?
So we desperately need their approval.
Right. So you can take it from here, I'm sure.
Well, and so I have this history of constantly seeking approval from my family who were quite abusive and morally reprehensible.
And I guess this is in a sense why I was worried about the anger issue because I still haven't I've gotten through to the sadness about that situation, but not the anger.
And I kind of get the sense that that's the unresolved feeling that keeps bringing this...
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I was just adding someone. I completely apologize.
That was a really important point, and I was totally rude.
Sorry. Could you just repeat it? That's all right.
Yeah, I was just saying...
I was just saying that...
Where was I? It's gone.
No. Oh, there it is. That this is kind of why I was a little bit...
Kind of upset and worried about the lack of anger I experienced towards my childhood is because it kind of feels like I have accessed the sadness and I feel really sad about it, but yet there's this whole feeling like when it comes to actually getting angry I just suddenly this wall kind of comes down and I stop feeling and I'm finding it really really difficult to get through that and do that because from what I understand that's a really important part of healing through this stuff to avoid repeating it in the future.
Right. Okay. Okay.
And we can talk about that, but I just want to make sure that we tie this back to your work situation, right?
So tell me, and of course tell me the things which don't fit, right?
Of course, right? But tell me the parallels between your experience as a child and your experience in this work environment.
And where it doesn't fit, of course.
Well, my experience as a child was things were...
Any mistake or anything like that that was done as a kid was routinely brought up and routinely used to humiliate you to basically get you to do what the parents wanted.
Which was done in complete disregard to the fact that my mum was just this horrendously abusive alcoholic and my dad did absolutely nothing to To stop her and yet it was like if I didn't do homework or something like that or if I... I remember one time I stopped my mum from attacking my sister when she was drunk and the story became about how basically I attacked my mum and then that was brought up against me over and over again until one day when I was like 16 and talking with my sister and she She asked me why I look so tired and I said,
well, you know, I've not had much sleep because this thing would come up for me quite often and cause almost physical pain.
Sorry, which thing? The idea of me attacking my mum and my sister then actually thanked me and said, no, listen, you help me out then.
But up until that point, it had been kind of an issue which my mum would use to basically shut me up at times.
Like, what are you going to attack me now if you would get upset?
Kind of, yeah. Like, I can't remember, like, one thing that pops to my mind is I remember us talking about anger or something like that, or being angry and something to do with that as a little kid.
I was about probably 10 or 11.
And I kind of remember saying, I don't think I've ever really gotten very angry or attacked someone or anything like that.
And then my mum kind of said, oh, yeah, well, that was this time when X, Y, and Z. So, for whatever reason, she decided to bring that up then.
For whatever reason? Sorry, is there a lack of clarity in you?
I don't mean to make this funny, right?
Because I'm genuinely tragic, and I'm very sad about what you're talking about.
But for whatever reason doesn't seem to me a very cogent response, because you know why she brought it up.
I know she brought it up to make me feel bad.
I'm not sure in that context exactly why.
Okay, well that's good, because...
Because that's what we need to talk about then, if you don't mind.
Right, no, no, please do. But just to quickly link it back to my work...
Please, yeah, we'll come back to that.
...was that I remember when the problem started happening, I was having real trouble with just spotting my mistakes in my articles.
I'd spend an hour on one small article just looking at it over and over again, desperately trying to make sure I caught all the typos or anything like that.
And I couldn't see anything and then suddenly there'd be like a famous brand name or something like that which I had completely butchered the spelling of and like this happened in one particular case I was actually writing the word Mario for I was writing about the sales results of a video game and I spelt it Marion something like that I added an N to the end and it was like A couple months,
you know, it's brought up as one of the things that's like, you know, that's unacceptable.
And then it's like, okay. But then like months later, if I ever made a mistake in further articles, it'd be like, we can't, we can't tolerate things like, and then they'd quote the mistake and then add or Marion or something like that.
And it would just be that, that one thing was constantly brought up again and again and again as a, as something to basically try and, I guess, shame me into performing better in the job.
I mean, yeah. That's not even a parallel.
That's like the same goddamn line, right?
Yeah. It's not like two train tracks go inside.
It's like one train track with something stitched to the end, right?
Exactly. Exactly. Right.
Okay. Okay.
So, I'm sorry.
Please go on. Oh, no.
I was just going to say, and I think the reason the guy who did that is because, you know, from what I understand, he's not entirely popular in the office himself because he was brought in to do a number of things which he hasn't done.
And has been told that there's targets he has to reach by the end of the year, and I think that often he feels, I don't know, I kind of got the sense that he took the stress out on me in that way.
But I don't know, that's pure speculation.
Right, right, right.
And you may or may not be aware, and this is my theory, but could be right, could be wrong, you may or may not be aware of the degree to which you are fighting passive aggression within yourself.
Passive aggression is...
It's a way of, of course, humiliating and frustrating those in charge.
And it is also a way of recreating situations of humiliation for us and so on.
You know, when the unconscious is with us, there's almost nothing we can't do.
And when the unconscious is against us, there's almost nothing we can do, right?
So when it comes to finding typos, it's an unconscious process.
You have to...
I mean, because you're doing this automatic comparison to an ideal spelling or the perfect spelling or whatever...
Or the grammar, or the sentence structure, or the logical flow.
You can't do that by mapping it out.
It is a kind of unconscious, semi-artistic process.
So if you don't like the people that you're working for, then you will get this kind of, even Denisovich Russian serf, resentment towards the whole process.
And yet, at the same time, you will want to get it right, because you will be existing in a state of fear.
But you will also resent existing in that state of fear, And therefore you will not do quality work, right?
Right. So kind of like in your slave master metaphor, kind of as a passive-aggressive thing, I just started doing things that required more and more micromanagement to the point where he was basically serving me, in a sense, right? Yeah, I mean, you were attempting to recreate in them the feeling that you were experiencing, which was, you know, frustration and Annoyance and so on, right?
Obviously, by doing a bad job, you're putting them in a difficult situation.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be there, right?
But you're in a difficult situation because you've got all these nasty people around and you can't speak the truth and you can't ask questions in alignment with your philosophy.
And so it's like, do it to me, I'll do it back, right?
Right, right. That makes a lot of sense.
And in the only way I can because I'm not a manager, so I can't I kind of was, but I wasn't their manager, so I couldn't yell at them.
And I wouldn't have anyway.
It would have probably just been passive aggressive even then.
Right, and I certainly don't condemn any of this, right?
I totally understand it. To a small degree, I mean, I have the same thing with the true news stuff, right?
Right.
Because there seem to be a bunch of hobbyists who circle around looking for any perceivable, conceivable errors in the true news or, you know, contradictory information and then sort of jump on me.
So I was doing another true news and I was like, you know, geez, I should triple check all of this stuff.
And, you know, I was like, no, fuck them.
Right.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to do a reasonable amount of checking.
I'm going to, you know, always try to get two sources that are not someone's blog and all that kind of stuff.
But I'm not going to sit there and spend the rest of the day out of fear of people attacking me, triple checking every conceivable source.
Right.
Because I'm just not going to let nasty trolls run my day.
Right.
Right.
And that's exactly what I was doing with the articles was.
I was spending and I was feeling so much anxiety every time I clicked publish.
Oh yeah, it's terrifying.
I can completely understand that.
I've been in situations where it feels like I have an alternate personality that is waking up in the middle of the night and making errors in work that I've triple checked already.
Right. And there's an incredible feeling of helplessness and anger and frustration and humiliation because it just feels like you can't get anything right.
And you feel yourself starting to slide down this slippery, gravelly slope of endless error causing stress, which causes more error, which causes more stress and that kind of stuff, right?
Right, right. That's absolutely right.
And that occurs when you don't like the people that you're working for.
Yeah. So I kind of just wanted to give you that perspective, which, I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't solve everything, right?
But I just wanted to sort of provide that to you, to give you some sense of context about what happened.
Because when you say, I'm so sad because I got fired, well, you know, I would actually reframe that, and I think quite justly too, to say something like this.
It's not, I'm so sad because I got fired, it's You know, this was really great because I managed to get a whole bunch of extra pay working at a place when I quit quite some time ago.
Right, right. That's a really good point.
Right, because there's no way you would have stayed there.
What do you mean, sorry? There's no way I would have stayed there.
There's no way you would have stayed there.
Right. No way!
Like, seriously, would you have stayed there for 20 years?
Oh no. So you didn't want to be there.
And yet you managed to get a bunch of pay, extract some very interesting self-knowledge, and get some therapy, which you of course paid for with the money these jerks were giving you, right?
Yep. So, you know, you got more experience, you learned more about the kind of environments that you can be productive in.
Because Philosophy is all about expanding choice, and expanding choice and freedom is really about understanding where we don't have choice and freedom, right?
And we don't have the freedom to be enthusiastic for evil when we become virtuous.
And again, I'm using the term evil here rather loosely.
Let's just say corruption or nastiness or whatever, but you understand what I mean, right?
No, no, I really do. If you study virtue, you simply cannot be enthusiastic about corrupt environments.
You just can't be. You might want to be, but you can't be.
I guess my question is, how do I avoid getting into a situation like this in the future, then?
Well, by studying the immediate past and the distant past, right?
Because you know the concept of secondary gains, right?
Which is, what do you get out of these environments?
Sure.
In other words, what did you avoid by not quitting?
I think I avoided solitude to one degree.
I'm sorry, you mean by surrounding yourself with corrupt and nasty people you avoided from solitude?
Not quite following that one, but perhaps you could...
Well, because I was getting quite...
after my ex and I split up, I was getting quite...
kind of very, very incredibly lonely, actually, in my flat alone.
And it was shortly after my holiday ended up for Christmas, which...
when I started going into the office more regularly and actually...
Actually being there, and I think the fact that there were just people there, I don't know, I think that was something that I found value in, or at least maybe it was just a case of me trying to get them to value me, which alleviated some sort of anxiety about that.
Well, what anxiety, right?
Because clearly saying I'm so uncomfortable with myself that I'm going to surround myself with corrupt people is not a statement of self-esteem, right?
No, that's very true. I don't think it is.
And this is an extreme way of putting it, and I certainly don't mean to put you in this category objectively, but codependent people would rather be in an abusive relationship than spend time with themselves.
Right, right. And that could potentially be the category I'm in.
I wouldn't necessarily describe my old relationship as abusive entirely, but it certainly wasn't working.
And that is a relationship which, to many degrees, I would find I still want to be in.
Right, right.
And that means that for you, the exercise of self-assertion, the exercise of making choices in accordance with your deepest desires and highest values, is The equivalent of dying.
That is not hyperbole, at least in my opinion or in my perspective.
It is a historical reality that we have all experienced, if we've come from these kinds of households, that self-assertion Acting in accordance with our deepest desires and our highest values is death.
In other words, we are terrified of parental abandonment or attack that might lead to injury or death should we consistently and energetically act in accordance with our deepest desires and highest values.
I think that makes a lot of sense because I mean one of the things I kind of realized over a period of time was you know if as a kid I had tried to stand up for myself by maybe going to someone and saying hey look look at the way my mom behaves I have literally no clue how she would respond to it other than potentially getting more drunk and doing something really stupid well yeah I mean you throw alcohol Through alcohol,
mental illness, extreme rage problems.
Children get hurt and killed in these kinds of situations.
Babies know this, right?
Because you can break the will of a baby through abandonment or physical force very quickly.
Because babies If you shake a baby, you can kill a baby or render it extremely physically damaged, both physically and mentally, within about five seconds, right?
Yes, yes. And so babies that did not have the ability to process parental rage and change their behavior just died, right?
Right, because they infuriated their parents to the point where they killed them.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we don't say that when a gazelle is running away from a lion that it's being cowardly, right?
No, no. That's what it's programmed to do because those that didn't have that programming ended up as muffin tops around lion swimming trunks or something, right?
I think that's us right.
It has been something I really wish I could find out, is how I was treated as an infant.
To me, this is easy.
If you have a big scar that exactly matches a knife, you don't need footage of being stabbed, right?
Right, that's a good...
And the scar that you have is self-assertion equals that you respond to self-assertion as you would respond to jumping out of an airplane, right?
And this is really important for people to understand.
This is why this conversation, I think, is important.
Well, very important. More so even than most.
Is that people, you know, you've read this on the board and you've heard this in shows, right?
People say, well, when I sat down to do X, whatever it was, right?
That had to do with some kind of self-assertion.
I literally felt like I was going to be sick.
My hands were sweating and shaking.
I felt nauseous.
Do you understand, right? No, no, totally.
That's the experience I've had, oddly enough, in press conferences when you have to raise your hand and say where you're from and ask a question.
That's totally the experience I have there.
Right. So, you understand, that is the scar tissue that arises from the fear of injury or death.
Right. And this is, you know, it's very important that we not apply labels, I'm not saying you have, but this is just in general, that we not apply labels to these kinds of reactions, you know?
Right, like cowardice or...
I'm insecure, I'm cowardly, I'm just not good at standing up for myself and blah blah blah, right?
Right, no, that makes total sense to me not to do that.
Right, I mean, if somebody has his arm amputated, he doesn't say, you know, I'm I'm really bad at clapping, right?
Right. And again, I'm not talking amputation, but as we've talked about in the past, all threats that involve physical violence or abandonment for children are essentially threats of death, right?
Yeah, I understand that.
In a sense, babies are hardwired to respond that way.
Of course, yeah, absolutely, because the biological imperative is not to be happy but to reproduce, right?
Right. There is no biological imperative to standing up to corruption.
The biological imperative is do what you need to do to survive.
And I can tell you, with even a smidgen of authority now, having been a father for the grand total of four and a bit months, that babies have incredible willpower.
They are naturally self-assertive.
Isabella is incredibly assertive.
Naturally. We didn't teach her that.
She is strong-willed.
She has a ferocious focus and desire for things.
She is inconsolable when she doesn't get what she wants.
And of course, she is at the age where you would never deny her anything that she wants, right?
Because she's a baby, right?
Right. And with that fierce assertiveness, which is a beautiful thing to see, though it is saddening at the same time, Because it reminds both Christina and I of what was amputated from us, right?
But with that comes also a fierce happiness and a fierce affection.
And in a sense, if those deep emotions are taken away from you on that base level, you don't have the positive sides, in a sense.
Yeah, you can't be loving without being assertive because you can never be sure if you're there out of fear or desire, right?
Right, right.
That's why we have to face this chasm of death, right?
We have to kind of throw ourselves in the coffin in order to come back to life because the history of the fear of attack, certainly in your situation that seems to be very much the case, right?
Because there was physical violence.
So that is...
An important thing to understand that is...
Sorry, I'm having a bit of trouble hearing because there's a ringing noise.
Well, that is where you were as a child, which is you feared this attack and there was no way to know, or in fact there probably was, right?
But how far would it go?
Would they... Would they then stop and say, okay, well, we're not going to go any further?
Well, you had no guarantee of that because you saw nothing but escalation until you crumbled, right?
Right, right. And the memory that keeps popping up in my head when you say this is me and my sister in the back of a car, absolutely terrified while my mom's driving around drunk, bumping into things.
Right, right. And if you say something, she's going to get more angry and you're going to be at more risk, right?
Yeah. And again, I'm trying not to, I always try never to layer my own experience onto others, but my experience, you know, when I tried to run away when I was four or five years old, and my mother would, she picked me up bodily and slammed my head repeatedly against the front door, I mean, I just, I completely, clearly remember just going limp.
Because I knew that if I resisted, I would likely die.
I think that's kind of the case I had when I stopped my mum, you know, going after my sister.
After I got in front of her, it was just a point of, again, kind of just freezing and letting her just slam the door and leave and just waiting in the room.
My dad came home, which I guess kind of...
He was kind of the...
The catcher that stopped us getting away in a sense, because we'd always be kind of like, okay, well, let's just wait around until Dad gets home.
Right, right. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is important that the secondary gains are, I mean, historically, assertiveness would equal physical danger and extreme physical danger, right?
And you don't Just as a basic biological organism, an antelope who's running away from a lion doesn't just sit there and say, well, maybe the lion just wants to play.
Can't take that chance, right?
Right. Because the ones that do die.
Well, because if he's wrong, he's dead, right?
And what's the upside of being right?
Playing with a lion? Well, that's actually kind of dangerous, right?
Because the next time you might want to play and the lion's hungry.
So, and the reason that I'm saying all of that is that I did not, you know, when I was getting my head pounded against the door, I didn't sit there and say, well, maybe the next one will be when she I didn't sit there and say, well, maybe the next one will be when she Yeah.
Thank you.
Maybe the next one is where she'll stop.
Right. But you can't afford to take that chance as a child, right?
No, I totally can't.
So, yeah, you basically learn to roll over.
You go limp, you roll over, you appease, I mean, because you're programmed to live, right?
And you can't take the risk.
And, you know, if your mom's driving around drunk, And is willing to do that, then clearly she is all kinds of physically dangerous, right?
Totally. She totally was.
She'd drink sometimes to the point where she'd have seizures and have to go to hospital.
I remember one time she got delirious and escaped the hospital.
And I remember like my dad went out driving in the middle of the night trying to find her along with a bunch of kind of orderlies and just I remember being absolutely terrified standing by my front door kind of like even tempted to keep the baseball bat near me just in case mom turned up and was crazy.
No I totally understand and I hope you understand that I know I'm not expressing a lot of sympathy but I mean we've talked about this before but there's a huge amount of sympathy for this absolutely terrifying environment and it's also important to remember I think That this is a society,
you live in a society where healthcare workers were entirely cognizant of your mother's absolutely brutal alcoholism.
And what did they do?
The same as what everybody else did, which was nothing.
Right, which was ignorance, right?
So, I mean, I think it's really important to deal with the immediate family issues, of course, but it's equally important and in many ways more important as adults to recognize that we are now moving out into a world that let all of this happen to us,
right? Because the standard psychological model is, well, you had a tough time as a kid, But you don't want to confuse the world with what happened to you as a kid, right?
But I think that psychological model is fundamentally flawed.
Because there was a world around us when we were kids that did let it happen.
And there were people who took an oath to protect people.
And knew, A, that your mother was piss-blind drunk to the point of hospitalization, that your father let it happen, that there were children in the picture and did nothing to protect you, right?
In the same way, my mother was institutionalized and no one did anything to protect me.
That's 12, right?
Yeah, I mean that's the only point I've ever actually been able to feel.
Anger is the thought that I lived in a tiny apartment.
The next-door neighbors could hear my mom screaming and carrying on the way she did.
The same was true of me, absolutely.
They could hear her from the street.
Right, right. And like, my mom would be kind of like, so when we were living in the States for a couple years, you know, they'd have that whole PTA thing where parents sometimes come in to do jobs around the school, and she'd be just off her face there, you know, just kind of flapping about.
And again, like, none of these people said anything.
Right, right. And this is the society that claims itself to be so virtuous, right?
We have a welfare state, you see, to protect children, but we all went through this hellacious series of concentration camps as children and everybody just left us there to rot and fend for ourselves, right?
Yeah. And that's why it's just impossible to believe in the virtue of society.
One memory that popped into my head which I didn't actually remember until I think a few weeks ago was I remember as a kid like it was during the height of my mom's problems and I was riding my bike around town and for whatever happened my bike fell over but I wasn't I wasn't hurt at all.
I remember feeling fine.
But I remember just refusing to get up and just starting to cry and pretend like I was hurt to see if anybody would help me or see if I was okay.
And no one did.
Right. Now, I remember even, not to put, I mean, this is not the same category, but when we would play war as kids, I would often pretend to be shot and wounded to see if anybody would help me.
And, I mean, they didn't. I mean, and it's tragic, and it's awful, and this is just the state that society is in, and it hasn't changed.
We're not exactly a generation apart, but we're not that far.
And it hasn't changed from when I was a kid.
It hasn't changed from when you were a kid, and we have people even younger who it hasn't changed for either, right?
This is just where society is stuck, that it's much easier to pompously proclaim your own virtue, particularly when it comes to taxation and statism, but children can be regularly attacked, assaulted, and brutalized Within the hearing distance of everyone and no one does anything, right? And they cower and they hide and then they go out and talk about how virtuous they are because they vote, right?
And, you know, there's still archetypical stories of people like some woman getting raped in New York in view of, you know, 20 apartments and no one called.
And people are like, oh my god, this is shocking.
And it's like, but that happens once a decade.
I mean, it happens millions of times a day with children.
Yeah, no, it really does.
So this idea that we have this microcosm of the family as children and then we go out into the world and we're supposed to understand the world is different from our family is empirically entirely false.
As children we fully understand that we live in a society because there are lots of people around, we see the news, we go to school, we have teachers, we have doctors, we have healthcare workers, we have priests, we have A huge extended family.
We know. We get that we live in a society.
So the idea that what happened to us in our family should never have any relation to what happens to us or how we perceive society when we get older is insane.
And it's a way of blaming children when they grow up for having problems with society by saying, well, but that's your family.
Society is different. It's like, no, no, no, no.
My family could only do what they did because society was entirely complicit.
Right. So I'm trying to...
I'm not sure what's going on for me.
I'm just trying to... I don't know if I should or not, but I'm just trying to tie it back to the work situation.
Well, let's say that the people in your work situation had been living in your apartment building Or as the French say, your block of flats.
When you were a kid, these people who laugh at someone getting fired when he's going through a divorce, if they had heard your mother screaming and all the violence and so on, would they have rushed over like concerned and moral citizens to intervene and put a stop to it?
No. They would have made jokes about my mum at one point or another, but that's about her.
Right. Your mother would have been a cartoon laughingstock of the The drunken house-frau, right?
Right, totally. Right, so the people who were in your work environment are exactly the same.
Moral, I mean roughly, right? To just paint again with a broad brush, but they're pretty much the same as the people who were complicit in your abuse as a kid, right?
Because if your mother's blind drunk, we can at least say that in that moment she doesn't have a lot of personal responsibility.
I mean, she's responsible for drinking, she's responsible for having children, But she's not entirely in control of her faculties at that point, right?
No, totally. I agree with that.
So the moral responsibility falls to your neighbours who aren't drunk, right?
Yeah, yeah. And my school and the local church.
And the healthcare workers and, of course, your father, most importantly.
But in that moment, right?
And for years, you waited for...
For years you waited for the knock at the door with somebody expressing even the slightest hint of moral outrage at children being regularly attacked and assaulted in an enclosed environment with other people down the hall with walls pressing up against yours perfectly able to hear for years you waited for that knock on the door and your mother to be restrained by some caring citizen anywhere on the planet, right? Yeah, totally.
And we all waited for that, and none of us ever heard it.
And you know all of this deep down.
This is the world that you live in.
I mean, I'm sad that it's the world that we live in.
I wish it were different, but it's not.
That is the empirical facts of the world that we live in.
I have not heard one person who went through loud child abuse In this conversation, and Lord knows we've heard from a few, right?
I've not ever heard of anyone who said, ah, but then so-and-so intervened.
You know, a teacher really went to child services and stuck it out and got my parents into parenting courses, got my dad into anger management courses, the cops did this, the social workers did that, the teachers did the other, the priest did that, the doctor, the nurses, whoever, right?
Yeah, no, that's the one thing I've actually been able to, I think, you know, I kind of got really angry at one.
I remember at one point getting really angry about that kind of early on in therapy and just getting quite, getting, you know, kind of reaching this level of frustration and irritation and selfish anger all at once about that issue that like suddenly realizing that Everyone knew.
Because I always kind of thought it was a secret.
Or at least I told myself it was a secret.
It's absolutely not a secret.
You know, they say, oh, we're good, behind closed doors and this and that.
It's like, okay, yeah, maybe if you're living in the woods or in some gated community on the dark side of the moon, you can talk about...
There are no behind closed doors in most of the environments that we grew up in.
Everybody knew everything. Right, right.
The extended family knew, the neighbors knew, the teachers knew, because kids have very clear signs.
Of abuse. Very clear science.
And, yeah, people don't do anything.
And look, I mean, with all of that, we can kind of understand why.
Because abusive parents can really turn, as I've had some experience with, can really turn on people who try to help their children, right?
It's like trying to take the gazelle away from the hungry lion, right?
The lion attacks you, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so we can say, well, you know, from them, but of course an anonymous phone call wouldn't have killed anyone, right?
It's more than just, I don't want to get involved, because you can make this, you can tape record it, and you can make an anonymous phone call, or you can mail it anonymously to child services and saying, this is what I heard, right?
There's ways to do it that take maybe 20 minutes.
And also, like, what really got me angry was just not even bothered to go up to me and my sister, not even in the hospital, right, and just say, are you okay, you know?
Sure. Sure. No one even thought that would be appropriate.
Right. Right.
Right. Right.
And that is the empirical reality of the world that we're living in.
And you may say, and people may make the argument just by the by, and say, well, of course, people at FDR don't talk about people who intervened in their child abuse, those who talk about it, because those who did get such intervention don't end up talking about it on FDR. But...
And I talk about this in the book that's coming up, and it's simply not true.
And there's lots of empirical reasons as to why.
We do live in a society where the protection of children is not even considered.
And that's why, to me, people saying, well, gosh, in a free society, how will children be protected?
It's like, are you fucking kidding me?
Right, right. Are you fucking kidding me?
It seems almost...
That seems almost...
It's like a perverse statement to make.
Oh, it's completely perverse.
It's completely insane.
The question that just pops in my head now, and it's again one I think you kind of briefly mentioned earlier on, it's like, well, how then do I find a job where I'm not going to respond in the way of just self-sabotaging in a sense to get myself out of it?
Well, but, and this is, again, this is part of what we talked about earlier.
Like you dropped the penny and it has to go binary.
Yeah. I can't, there's no way that I can give you the answer to that, but I can tell you, I can tell you that you need to examine and process this stuff before you can even really think of asking that question.
Right, because what's happening is you're in the woods and you're just getting a glimmering of how lost you are And then you're saying, well, where should I go?
And it's like, well, no, no, no.
You've got to figure out that you're actually last.
And then you've got to plot a destination.
Then you've got to figure out how to get there.
Then you've got to buy a compass. And I know this is annoying, right?
And I'm not saying you've just got to sit there staring at a blank spot of wall.
In the meantime, you can do stuff.
But this is where you need to put your concentration, in my opinion, at the moment.
This is what you need to process.
This is what you need to relax and understand that Because there is no quick fix, right?
There is no snap your fingers and bingo bango bombo, here you go, right?
No, I think that's entirely right.
And that's part of the reason I kind of briefly mentioned to you before the call was I think anger has a lot to do with this, because I've gotten through to this really deep sadness about what happened to me as a kid, and I can reflect that.
And journaling has helped tremendously with that.
But when I try to access the anger, and I try to do that in therapy today, I just couldn't.
It just suddenly, all emotion left.
But why do you have to access anger?
That doesn't seem to me very curious.
It seems like you're saying, I have a destination, and therefore my unconscious needs to provide to me that, right?
Right. And, you know, with all due respect to your, you know, great emotional sensitivity and intelligence, you also had a, quote, destination called, I need to stay in this corrupt environment, right, in your work.
That's absolutely true. That's, yes, that's spot on.
Right, so I would myself, and this is really hard, right, for us strong-willed people, I would really hesitate to order my unconscious to take me to a destination at the moment.
You might not have a lot of credibility with your ecosystem right now.
No, that's absolutely true.
Because they were telling you pretty clearly to get the fuck out of your job, right?
Yes, they have. And when you say order my unconscious, after the train ride they've given me, I don't think I can order them to do anything.
Oh, you can, but you just won't get anywhere, right?
You can order them. It's like, okay, we're going to stay in this job.
It's like, fine, spellchecker goes on strike.
Fine, sentence guy goes on strike.
Fine, assertiveness guy goes on strike.
And we'll be depressed. But yeah, you can order us around if you want.
So, yes, it seems...
I can't help to find humor in the idea that I've been trying to order myself around.
But it's true, right? And that's why, when I said at the beginning of the call, depression is a kind of strike...
It comes from being authoritarian with yourself, right?
And thinking you've got all the answers and your unconscious needs to provide it.
No, that's very true.
It's very true. And whenever you order anyone, you get passive aggression.
That's what depression is, right?
And I think...
I'm trying to figure out why it suddenly happened.
And I think it must have something to do with my ex and I splitting up as to why it happened then.
Maybe just because that was kind of an emotional...
Well, I would guess, and I don't want to get into, because we've been on the phone for a while, I don't want to get into your whole relationship thing, but where I would look is to say, I bet you you ordered yourself to be with this girl against your unconscious desires.
It's potentially very, very true.
Well, there's no one pattern in life, right?
It's not like, well, I'm this way at work and I was completely unconscious of it.
Not to say completely, but largely unconscious of it.
But I was completely the opposite way in my relationships, right?
Because we're the same person, right?
Right, right. So whatever I'm talking about at work, you just replay this and talk about, you know, insert girlfriend here, right?
Right. That's really, really helpful.
That's a really, really helpful way of doing this.
And thank you very much, especially about reminding me that I'm kind of trying to command my unconscious to do something for me, which is not how it's going to work, and is kind of how I got in trouble in the first place.
Right. It's a complex dance, right?
Sometimes we lead, sometimes the ecosystem leads, and sometimes we don't know who's leading, but we feel like we're going in the right direction.
This is why philosophy is very valuable in terms of giving structure and logic to what we're doing, but psychology is equally important and Freud's statement that the ego is not master in its own house.
I used to find that so offensive when I was younger and much more on the objectivist side of things, which is taking your marching orders from Rand the Imperious, which is not healthy.
It is a real dance, right?
The physical... And I talk about this in...
I don't know if you've read The God of Atheists, but I talk about this in...
Yeah, I have. Yeah, so, you know, the body submits endlessly, but resists endlessly.
It's like Gandhi, right? Which is why you're getting colds, which is why you can't concentrate, which is why you feel depressed.
This is the passive aggression that involves...
that results from us ordering ourselves around.
And then the next thing...
because we're binary when we're depressed, so the next thing we say is...
Oh, okay, so I should let my unconscious order me around?
No, no, no, no. It's a relationship.
Which means there's the division of labor, there's specialization in different situations, right?
So in certain situations, such as, I don't know, working out how you should drive somewhere, your unconscious isn't really going to help you very much, right?
Because you go and type stuff in and so on, right?
But in terms of sussing out or figuring out a social situation or a potentially romantic situation or trying to get to the root of someone's personality within a few seconds of meeting them, your conscious mind can do fuck all of that situation.
That's all down to the unconscious, right?
So it's just about understanding the division of labor and the specialization.
Remembering that I can't process my urine, that's why I have kidneys, right?
And let them do that job and I'll focus on yammering away on the internet, right?
That's a really good point.
It's uplifting because I don't feel like...
It's kind of taking the little personal development schedule I wrote out for myself and say, actually, no.
Be more willing to ask my unconscious to reveal things to me, not demand it to do things for me.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, your lowered immune system, your cortisol production is trying to tell you something.
And I swear to you, this is absolutely true, not that I haven't been absolutely true before.
When I have been sick in the past, and I have learned the lessons of that illness, which is not to say that all illness is this, but in terms of, you know, when you're generally healthy, but you know, you get these annoying little things.
I literally have thanked my illness for helping me to understand something.
And that is, I mean, it's not like you want to be ill, but if you're going to be ill, learn what it's trying to tell you, right?
And, of course, stress is the great silent killer, and stress arises from attempting to dominate that which can't be dominated, which is the self, the unconscious, the ecosystem, right?
And not giving it free expression.
And the last thing that I'll say, just to close off here, if that's all right with you, the last thing that I would say is to remember that you are in...
A larger contextual situation.
Because the other thing about depression is you kind of collapse in on yourself, right?
It's harder to look at the world as a whole.
Yeah. It comes about your thoughts, your experiences, your sensations, you know, you're kind of picking at your own scabs, right, rather than looking at the big picture.
No, I think that's a very accurate way of putting it.
So I just sort of would remind you that...
What is occurring for you?
And this is all stuff that I talked about in the opening two paragraphs of my very first book on truthing, that this all messes up everything, right?
This philosophical exploration and examination.
And you are part of, as we all are, part of a movement towards truth and virtue and honesty and integrity that It has historically been 5,000 years in the making and has recently exploded because of the technology that we have available to us and the quality of the conversations like this one,
right? The participants and what it is that I'm doing and the conference calls and the chat room and, right, we have this, you know, philosophy has been gathering its strength for 5,000 years and now it's come pouring out through this conversation because of the technology that we have, which is As important to what we're doing as the printing press was to Protestantism, right?
Or to the Reformation. And so what you're doing here is not, you know, me, my history, and my job.
It is, and I'm not trying to diminish that and say that you shouldn't ever focus on that, because again, that would be binary.
But to remember that the struggle to bring virtue to a corrupt world, to bring truth to a world that lies so habitually it doesn't even really experience it as lying, is a huge and great challenge and there is an inward looking exploration and exhumation of past crimes that is really really essential but there is also a larger context that it's not just about you,
your history and your mom and your job but it is about doing all of this so that we can evolve into stronger creatures so we don't have to spend the rest of eternity Like lemmings beneath the feet of dinosaurs just trying to find some way to survive and not get trodden on, right? But to gain a certain amount of strength so that we can begin to will the world back towards truth, which it is constantly veering away from, right?
So to deal with the depression and to deal with the history is really, really important.
But it is part of a larger context that, you know, the world as a whole needs to heal.
Society as a whole needs to heal.
and we are kind of foot soldiers in that combat and that you train so that you can fight if that makes any sense no that makes a lot of sense um That really makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate the time taken to chat with me about this.
It's been really, really helpful.
I feel very good.
I don't feel sad at all, really, at the moment right now.
I kind of feel quite Quite relieved I'm out of there and looking forward to spending the next month mulling over options of places to go, but also working myself.
Fantastic. Well, I appreciate this.
Do you have any problem with this being posted?
I have no problem with it being posted.
Fantastic. Thank you so much.
And of course, as always, just please let us know how it goes and particularly how it goes next week with your new opportunity.
Yeah, I will do. Thanks very much.
Yeah, again, appreciate it. Thanks, man.
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