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Oct. 8, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:01
1478 College Ambivalence -- a Conversation

A musician's educational choices go from major to minor...

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So... Yeah.
So, school is...
Yeah.
I'm back and forth on it in the middle of the semester now.
Right, right. What are you taking again?
Class-wise? Or, like, major?
Major. Music education.
Right. Right, right, right.
And when did the thoughts and feelings or the ambivalence begin?
I think like two to three weeks ago.
Right, right. And did anything happen specifically that you can recall or was it just a general kind of thing that arose?
Just a lot of feelings of like lack of motivation.
And it would hit me a lot when I'd go to write a paper just because I don't like writing papers that much.
Right. And I would find leaving the compound, my friend's house, that it was just like, it was miserable coming back up to live next near school and in the college sort of environment.
Like, I couldn't figure out why I was so sad leaving.
Right. So when you left school and came home, when you left where you live and went to school, you felt more sad.
Is that right? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Right, right.
Alright, well, this is just some amateur philosophical feedback.
As you know, this is not my area of expertise, although I think most of us have wrestled to some degree with ambivalence around education, particularly, of course, if we have significantly different opinions than those who are teaching us.
Right. Now, I don't know much about music education, But is there much difference?
When you write a paper, do you feel that you can express honestly what you think and feel about the topic?
Or do you feel that you have to modify it for the sake of others?
No, I feel like I can write what I want.
Alright. So when you're in class and when you're writing your papers, you don't feel that you're censoring yourself.
Is that right? No, not at all.
Okay. And when you look, how far are you from graduating?
Two years. Three years, is that right?
Two years. Two years, okay.
So you're, let me just get myself oriented here.
So you're just going into, you're sort of halfway through the second semester, the first semester of your second year, is that right?
Halfway through the first semester of my third year.
Third year. It's a five-year course?
Just two. I mean four.
Four years. Okay.
I've done three years and I have two left.
Right, right, okay. And you've not had these feelings before about the course?
I mean, we all get the school blues from time to time, but you're saying it hasn't been particularly strong before?
No, it has.
It's happened every semester.
Does it happen around the same time?
There's usually at least two times, and one is consistently around finals time.
Right, right. A bit of a thumping.
Sorry? I just heard a bit of a thumping, but it doesn't matter.
Okay, so I'm just going to ask a bunch of questions that would sort of pop into my head when I'm facing the blues, and you can tell me if these questions make any sense or not.
When I hit the sort of ambivalent blues, what I will sort of ask myself is, is what I'm feeling about the past, the present, or the future?
And, you know, often it's a combination, but if I had to sort of narrow it down to one, right?
So if I have something unprocessed from my own history or my past, then I may feel sad and Because of something to do with the past, right?
And maybe something in the present has triggered it, like I met someone like someone who hurt me in the past or whatever, but it's fundamentally about the past.
It's tougher to say it's just about the present, but what I mean by that is, you know, if I've got the flu, right, then I'm going to be down based on something that's happening in the present.
Or if I'm just tired, if I just haven't been getting enough sleep lately, then to me it would not be primarily something to do with my self-knowledge or self-honesty, but it would just be due to something in the present.
Or if I have to sit down and do my taxes and I've not been looking forward to doing it for two weeks, so then it's more around the present.
And the other thing that I look at, which as your self-knowledge grows and your self-empathy grows, I have found it more useful to look towards things in the future.
In other words, I feel down because whatever it is that I'm doing in the present is leading me towards something that or someplace that I don't particularly want to be or I might want to actually avoid.
Right. Well, I don't know what I want to do, so it doesn't seem to make much sense to me to be a specific program to become a music teacher specifically, you know?
So is it that you don't want to be a music teacher, or you don't particularly want to be a music teacher?
I don't particularly want to be a music teacher.
And how did you end up in the degree?
I mean, you didn't just throw a dot, right?
Yeah, I originally applied for elementary ed, and Then one day I was like, oh, I still want voice lessons, and I didn't want to have a life without music, so I switched to music ed at the last minute.
I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand that reasoning process.
I'm not saying it's not reasoning, I just didn't quite follow that.
So you were taking elementary ed, which I guess would have made you a teacher, a primary school teacher?
Yeah, I wasn't in classes yet at that point.
This was about six months before I entered school.
I decided to do music, because I still had to do the auditions, so it had to be enough time in advance.
But I was set up for elementary ed, and I was sitting with that for a while, and I felt like something was missing, and I felt like that thing was music, so...
That's how I... yeah.
I always wanted to teach, but...
Okay, and now just again, pardon my ignorance, I'm just trying to sort of get up to speed.
I mean, you can take a teacher's course, right?
You can take elementary ed, and you can still have music, right?
I mean, you can be in a choir, you can be front of jazz group, you can, you know, whatever, right?
There's tons of things you can do with regards to music that would not necessitate you taking it as a course, right?
Yeah. And so I just want to, again, I just want to make sure that I understand why the switch was made.
Yeah, I'm not totally clear on it now, because...
I mean, it may have been a really great idea, it's just that I think it's important to know what the reasoning was behind it, and if there wasn't reasoning, what the emotional impulse was behind it, because again, these things are both very important to know.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the reasoning was.
And this may have something to do with your ambivalence, right?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm just, you know, reaching in the dark here, but, you know, if I had to guess, right, then not knowing why you are where you are may have something to do with having ambivalence about being there, right?
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
All right. If you could go back two years...
Again, it's a useful exercise mentally.
If you could give yourself advice back two years, I guess six months before school started, when you were mulling over your major or thinking about changing your major, what would you say to that person?
Or to you, I guess. I think I would tell myself to just go undecided, take the general courses that everyone has to take, and take some more time to think about What I want to do, not what I want to major in, but what I want as a job someday.
Alright, so you would say think about your career, not necessarily what will give you some pleasure or at least some relief from anxiety in the short run.
Yeah. And what would that career be?
be.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Nothing like these easy questions, right?
I don't know specifically, but I'd love to work with kids.
So if you'd like to work with kids, but you switched out of elementary education to do music, wouldn't that be, I mean, would the advice that you'd give yourself, I mean, just looking at it logically, part of the advice you might give to yourself in the past would be to say, do the elementary education thing?
Yeah.
Yeah. And for God's sake, stay away from that freedomainradio.com because it will mess your head up six ways from Sunday.
Right, right. You get the urge to type that in, bite your hand.
All right. Yeah, I mean, I can still work with kids in music ed.
I'm just certified for more grades of K-12.
So this does not preclude you, but you said you don't necessarily want to teach music, right?
Right. Is there a subject that you would want to teach more?
I'm really confused about it.
I don't know. I'm going to be completely annoying.
And what am I going to say next?
That I do know? Yeah, you do know.
I think. I mean, that would be...
I would start with the assumption that you do know.
And the reason for that is that if you do know but it's not conscious, saying, I don't know, you'll never get there.
But if you say, I do know, and then you work at it six ways from Sunday and you still can't find it out, then you can say that you don't know.
But I don't think that you've earned the ability to say that you don't know just yet, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, that makes sense. Alright, so let's just assume that somewhere down in the layers of our mind is a part of you that knows.
And I'm saying that there must be a part of you that knows, because every time we say no to something, it's because we're saying yes to something else, right?
So if you have this ambivalence, like, I don't really want to do what I'm doing right now, it must be because you're saying no to this.
And if you're saying no to this, you must be saying yes to something else.
Because otherwise, how would you say no to this compared to what, right?
So there's something that is beckoning you that is precluding this.
And you know about the precluding this, but you don't know about what's beckoning you yet, right?
Alright. Is there a dream teaching job that you could imagine in the realm of music that...
You think would be satisfying to you for, I mean, nobody gets to think of a career for the rest of their lives anymore, but is there some that would be satisfying to you to some degree, at least, for some period of time?
Like if you were working in some highfalutin private school with some really great kids, half of whom were there from poor neighborhoods on scholarship, and they were motivated, and you got to set your own class topics, and you got to talk about whatever you wanted, and you made a real difference, and Mr.
Holland's opus was your everyday Is there a job that you could conceivably design in this field that would satisfy your desire to work with kids and make a positive difference in their lives?
Yeah, I would love to teach...
I mean, is this related to musical theatre?
Or just theatre?
Okay, so if you were able to teach kids music and theater in, you know, I just say private school because, you know, we're not so much with the state.
But it could be. It could be a government school.
It doesn't really matter. But in some environment, you had real freedom and flexibility to make a difference in the kids' lives.
And you're obviously not just teaching them, you know, how to, you know, just teaching them the words to grease lightning, but you're actually...
Using theater and music as a way to inspire children to be better, to be greater, to be wiser, to be deeper, to live more meaningful lives.
All of that kind of good stuff.
The kind of teacher where they remember you for years, if not forever, and they tell stories about you.
It was a turning point in their lives when you became their teacher.
That kind of stuff. I've got to imagine that that would be somewhat satisfying, right?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
And that kind of job is possible.
I mean, we're not saying that you want to be the first stewardess on the space shuttle to Saturn, right?
I mean, we're talking about something that's in the realm of possibility, right?
Yeah, for some reason I've been thinking that they don't really hire musical theater teachers.
Well, and we're not talking about what's realistic.
We're talking about what's possible.
Right, okay. And the reason that I, and again, this is just the way that I work through these things in myself, right?
So maybe it's helpful, maybe it's not.
But the reason that I'm saying that is that if the very best job that you could imagine in a particular field is not of interest to you, then that field is not for you.
That makes sense. Like, I mean, if someone said to me, well, you know, you could be a certified public accountant, and you could run your own accounting firm, and you could set your own hours, and you could do this, and you could do that, and you could ride a pony to work, and all this kind of stuff, I'd be like, yeah, but it's still accounting, right?
So I don't want to do it, because I don't like that sort of stuff.
I don't like regulations. I don't particularly like working with math, right?
So... So, even the very best job in a particular field would, to me, not be enticing, right?
And that's sort of why I asked the question.
Right, right. So, if...
Now, let me ask you this.
If you got this...
Because now we're going to compare this field to other fields.
If you look at the very best job that you could get in this field, right, in musical slash theater teaching...
The very best job in this field, could you imagine another job that would be more to your satisfaction?
Not including stewardess to Saturn.
which we'd all want, I think.
But...
Nothing's coming to mind immediately.
Absolutely.
That's useful, right?
And again, we're not talking for the rest of your life, right?
So we're just talking about something that could be enjoyable for you.
Because it seems to me that it's hard to slog through school without it being a means to some kind of end, right?
If school is an end in itself, then I think it becomes quite meaningless quite quickly.
You know, then it's like studying a language that you're never going to speak.
It's like, well, what the hell is the point?
You might sort of start it as an intellectual exercise, but after a while, you're just going to look up and say, why am I doing this?
Yeah. What is the purpose of this?
Where is this going to take me, right?
Right. And if you're not sure where your education is going to take you, or you believe that it can't take you where you want to go, then I think you will.
You'll lose motivation, you know?
I mean, that's just inevitable, right?
Oh, yeah. I mean, you've got a hole in the hull and you start taking on water and you can't sail, right?
Yeah.
And what are you feeling just now?
I feel a little relieved because my motivation isn't crazy.
Or my lack of motivation isn't crazy.
No, it's not. It's not crazy at all.
And it's very, very important.
I mean, I would not, you know, it's the old RTR thing, right?
I would not judge this feeling in myself.
I would say, what am I trying to tell myself, right?
What communication am I providing to myself?
Because it's really, really, really important what you're going through.
And it doesn't mean that you may change paths, you may not change paths.
But what I'm sort of trying to suggest is the habit of being curious with yourself.
And not saying, oh my god, this is crazy, or oh my god, I'm just lazy, or oh my god, I'm so demotivated, or whatever, right?
And then just sort of coming down on yourself.
That's not listening to yourself in a way that's really important, in my way of thinking.
Now, if you could take steps that, I mean, no one can guarantee you that you're going to get the perfect job, right?
But there's things that you can do that are going to raise the odds of you getting that perfect job, right?
So if there were steps that you could take, and the if is important here, right?
If there were steps that you could take that would start to move you towards or give you a sense of progress towards achieving that perfect job, do you think that would have a more beneficial effect on your motivation in the moment with regards to your degree?
Yeah, oh yeah.
Because that's important, right? Because if taking steps towards your perfect job wouldn't make you any more motivated, then again, something's missing in terms of where you are and where you're heading.
Yeah. No, that would definitely help.
Now, is there anyone in the field that you want to get into, right, who you would consider inspiring or a role model or anyone you've ever heard of?
The guy from Glee, I don't think, counts.
That's a nice inside joke for you, eh?
I've only seen one episode of that, but I thought it was actually pretty funny.
I guess you guys watch that religiously, right?
Yeah, Greg and I do, yeah.
Absolutely. Well, Kristen Chenoweth was on Gleady the other week, but she's always been a...
She's not a teacher, I don't think, but she's amazing at what she does.
And have you thought of performing instead of teaching?
I have. I feel a lot of anxiety around it.
Right, but the anxiety would partly come from desire, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Would you prefer that to teaching?
Possibly.
I mean, if you could overcome the anxiety thing, right?
Right, right. I think it's up there.
It's something I want to do.
And there's no reason why you can't combine the two, right?
Right, right. I mean, a lot of things that you would learn in your degree would be helpful for performance, and it would be nice to have a steady gig while you were trying to break into the performance arena, right?
That's true, yeah. So, I mean, it's one of these things.
It's not like you say, I want to be an accountant and a ballet dancer, right?
Yes. And next, a cod fisherman, because I'm going through the ABCs, right?
But these two things would be complementary, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Like you wouldn't say, I'm going to teach theater and music, and that means I can never perform in theater and music.
That would make no sense, right?
I mean, when I was at the National Theater School, some of the teachers that we had were performers as well.
Oh, yeah. And it actually gave them a lot of credibility, right?
You can sort of swing back and forth between the two, and I think that sort of works.
So those two, you know, work, I think, in a complementary way.
Yeah, definitely. Right, right.
Okay, okay. And do you feel that we're doing useful stuff in this conversation?
I want to make sure that we're, you know, asking useful questions or trying to uncover useful stuff.
Is this going in a way that's productive for you?
Yeah, it is. Is there anything that I'm missing, or should I just keep asking my endless series of questions?
I think you're good. Okay, okay, good.
If you can find someone in your field, or in the field you want to get into, who you would consider to be some kind of role model, then I would strongly suggest finding out about that person, right? How did they get where they are?
what steps did they take?
I was just reading an interview with a guy who's written a book called Into the Pride or something like that.
He made a movie or something, but he spent six months living with a pride of lions in Africa.
And, you know, I mean, if I wanted to be a guy who made nature documentaries, I would read interviews with this guy and figure out how the hell did you get to do this crazy job, right?
And again, they talk about it a bit.
It doesn't really matter. But find people that you like in the field and figure out how they got where they are.
And if every single person you admire in the field says, I quit my degree and started busking on the street at 7th Avenue and whatever, I was discovered by a guy who gets a bagel there every day.
Then you have some idea of at least a path that's worked for some people.
Whether you do it or don't, at least you've got some path, right?
You can also, and this is something that is underrated quite a bit, you can also write to people.
You can write to their agent.
You can write to people and say, I would love to do what you're doing.
I don't know how to get there because nobody in my circle has ever done anything like this before.
You know, could I talk to you for 10 minutes?
Could I pick your brain?
Could I, you know, could you write me back a paragraph?
Could you send me a book or the title of a book or any resources that you used, you know, just to save me some time?
You'd be surprised how much people want to help others, right?
That's a great idea.
And it's not something that we're often taught, right?
I mean, I get these requests all the time, and I try to be quite diligent about helping people with stuff, right?
They can find out if they like it or not.
I help people say, you know, help people, giving people suggestions on how to start podcasts and how to do these things and how to sort of get...
Where I am, I've detailed my sort of path to doing this crazy job for a living.
So I've tried to sort of help people with that because it's nice.
You know, you really do want to, if you've achieved something that has given you great happiness, then you do want to help other people achieve that as well.
That just makes the world a better place for you to live in as well.
So it's just a possibility.
You can study these people. Google makes it quite easy.
You can, if they have books, biographical books or whatever, that can be very helpful.
And it can help you to sort of figure out how they got where they are.
If you're like Bernadette Peters, or if you even know who that is, you're pretty old now, I guess, but how did she get there?
I think that stuff is really, really helpful and important because it really does give you a sense of how things are possible and puts you on that track over that mountain possibility that seems to be between us and the achievement of our goals so often in life.
I don't even know what to do, I don't even know what to start, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Lots of people have taken the path before, And you can inquire about them or ask them directly.
I mean, you can, for instance, if you want a job at a private school as a music teacher, let's say, let's just say, I mean, it could be anything, right?
Then what I would do is I would look up private schools in my neighborhood, right?
And I would Look up and see if they have music teachers.
And they may double up with their music teacher and, I don't know, gymnastic teachers.
It could be anything, right? And I would now, if none of the schools in my neighborhood have any music programs, that would give me some concern, right?
And I would have to cast my net wider afield or find out why they didn't have these things or whatever.
But you will probably find a number of schools in your neighborhood that have music programs, right?
Yeah. And what I would do is I would, you know, find the name of the music teacher, see if there's anything on the web, right?
But anything you can't find out, just call that person up and say, listen, can I just borrow your ear for 10 minutes?
I mean, here's my situation.
I'd like to get to where you are.
Here's where I am. Can you give me any tips that might help me along the way?
And again, you'd be really surprised how much people actually want to help.
Yeah. You sound woefully unconvinced.
Click. Get lost, punk!
No, no, I believe that people want to help.
But you still, your motivation still sounds a little like, yeah, yeah, fine.
Which is fine, I just wanted to point out that I'm noticing that.
Yeah, it feels that way.
Well, that's interesting. And again, this is more information, right?
Because what I've tried to do is to break down a smaller series of steps that can help you to get to where you want to go.
And if that does not produce enthusiasm for you, like, hey, here's five things that I can do to clear this up for myself.
If that doesn't produce enthusiasm, that's important information, right?
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
If you say, I want to climb this mountain, and I say, well, here's where you go to get the hiking boots, and here's where you go to get the Sherpa, and here's where you go to get the big coats, and here's where you go to get the oxygen tanks, and you're like, eh.
Then we go back to questioning whether you want to climb the mountain, right?
Yeah. I'm actually feeling quite sad now.
Go on. I want to be excited about this or something, you know?
Right. And I hope you understand.
Nothing of what I'm saying is at all critical.
Oh, no. Yeah.
Okay, good. It will be soon.
No, I'm just kidding. I'm just, you know, gearing myself up for it.
So is it true then that you feel a lack of enthusiasm for things in general?
Yeah. Right.
Right, right, okay.
And do you think that it has to do with school or it may have to do with other things in your life? - School's a big part of it.
It may have to do with other things as well.
Right. Yeah, and I think that we have at least, a school is a part of it, but I think that if you get a series of, however useful they may or may not be, if you get a series of things that at least have some utility, and you don't feel any enthusiasm, then I would say that it's still on the list of priorities, but it might shuffle down one or two notches compared to other things.
Because if this was the major thing, and you had some things that you could do that would help you get there, then you would feel some liberation of enthusiasm and energy.
It would uncork a little. Yeah.
Right, so I think this would indicate that there may be something else that is, of which it's kind of showing up in lack of motivation for school, but it might be something else.
Right. And do you have any ideas what that other thing might be?
Or other things? I'm sure that I do.
Is it Greg's fashion sense?
Because I myself have often experienced that very same...
Anyway, we have to come back to that.
Well, I think that's important because if...
You know, there's this old joke, right?
This guy is, this drunk is looking, he's standing under a street lamp at night, and he's looking for something.
Someone comes along and says, well, what are you looking for?
He said, I dropped my keys, right?
And they look around the street lamp for keys.
They can't find any. Finally, after 10 minutes, the guy says, are you sure you dropped them here?
He's like, no, no, no, I dropped them up the street.
And he says, well, if you drop them up the street, why the hell are we looking here?
And he said, because the light is here.
Right?
And sort of what that means to me is if you think it's about school but it's not, then you're looking at the wrong place.
Yeah.
And it may, I mean probably isn't something that, you know, that we would sort of pop up necessarily here, you know, during this call.
But I think it's important to at least have you not face the school thing if it's not the school thing.
Right, right. Or at least if it's not primarily.
If the school thing is a symptom but not a cause, then you won't be able to solve it by looking at the symptom, right?
Right. Right, right.
And, sorry, if I can't recall, are you talking to a counselor at the moment, a therapist?
Yes. No.
Have you thought about it?
I mean, because you can get them through school, right?
Yeah. Yeah, and I was looking the other day, like, two days ago online as well.
But you didn't feel like you had the motivation to get to a therapist and talk about your problems with motivation.
Is that the paradox that we're stuck in?
No, no, I felt excited about it, actually.
But I have, there's like, there's a million pages of these, so...
A million pages of?
Therapists. Yeah, but I mean, you should be able to go to the student center or whatever.
I don't know. It's been a while, right?
They should have some recommendations if, you know, some place where you can go that, you know, would probably be a good fit rather than just someone random.
Right. That would be my first thought anyway.
I mean, it would be nice to go to somebody who's used to dealing with college students, for instance.
Right. As opposed to some 80-year-old person who went to college in the 17th century.
Right. Your humors are out of balance.
Yeah, I mean, I think that would be a good place to go because my experience has been, it doesn't solve everything immediately, but when you hit upon something that you can do when you're feeling a lack of motivation, it usually does uncork a fair amount of energy.
You know, it doesn't necessarily sustain itself, but it does uncork a fair amount of energy.
And if that's not occurring for you, then it means that we're looking where the light is rather than where you dropped your keys.
Right. Right. So, I need to think about what else I might be unmotivated about.
Well, you would have to give me some scope for that, because it could be anything in your life except school, right?
So, I mean, that could be anything, right?
So, I mean, I can't really ask those questions.
I mean, I'm certainly happy to talk about it if something is coming to your mind, but I don't think I could ask and come across something.
Right, right. I meant for, like, personal thoughts.
Yeah, because nothing's coming to me right now.
Right. And you said that it happens to you particularly around this time?
Well, no, not particularly.
I think you said it was around finals as well, right?
Yeah. Finals was pretty consistent.
Yeah, I remember that too.
For me it was panic and anxiety because I hadn't done work in so long.
Because all I did was do plays and that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah. Yes. All right.
I'm just trying to think if there's anything else.
I mean, is there anything that's occurring within your family life or in your relationship, your romantic relationship?
Again, these are just the things that I would look at that may be somewhat related.
I mean, I can tell you one of the things that occurred for me that showed up in school and showed up in my professional career.
And I'm not going to say this is the way it is for you, but this is how it was for me at times.
And maybe it's of some use in terms of looking at things that show up in one place but are actually caused by something else.
When I was in school, when I was in undergraduate and postgraduate, and then when I went into the business world as a professional career, What showed up for me, which was really strange, but I thought was very interesting.
What showed up for me quite a lot was the degree to which I was unprepared for life.
I was not prepared for particular kinds of social engagements.
I was not prepared for negotiations.
I was not prepared for being a manager.
I was not prepared for a hierarchy.
I mean, because I grew up in such a crazy environment that I just wasn't prepared.
For things. I wasn't prepared to productively negotiate even with my professors in college.
I really had to work. If I had to be late for something or I wanted to switch topics or something, I found it really, really tough to go in and talk to people and to be self-expressed and feel confident and negotiate about this stuff.
And so it was, in a strange way, my crazy messed up childhood Began to show up when I moved into a different kind of world than I grew up in.
With people who had had much higher functioning childhoods or much higher functioning families than I did.
I mean, if I'd stayed kind of in the be a temp slash bicycle courier underworld, you know, then I would have sort of continued to hang around people, most of whom their childhoods have been, you know, chaotic or whatever in the way that mine was.
But because I moved into a more sort of middle class, sedate, professional environment, I was really coming across people who had enormous advantages relative to me in terms of how they were raised and what they were prepared for.
Like a friend of mine became a professor of economics.
And he's a smart guy and he worked hard for sure.
And one of the reasons, but one of the main reasons was A, his schooling was all free because his father was a professor.
And B, his father was a professor and therefore could take him through every step of the process to getting a tenured academic position because he'd already done it, right?
But I'm not just talking specific things.
For me, it was just much more general.
A lot of the deficiencies within my own childhood only really began to show up when I moved into a more functional universe.
And the tragedy has been a lot of the people that I grew up with who had chaotic childhoods have not, like they stayed in that world.
Like they haven't sort of evolved out of that world because it's really difficult and it's painful.
Because not knowing how to plan, how to negotiate, how to set my goals, how to achieve, how to have discipline, right?
I mean, for me, because my household was so chaotic when I was growing up, I never really got a sense of discipline.
And that doesn't mean that I don't work hard.
I do. But sometimes the discipline involves working less, right?
And thinking more and planning more.
But I was more impulsive and I had to really learn to slow down and plan and this and that.
When I began to sort of turn towards things in my life that required skills or habits or abilities or disciplines that had simply never been Not only they had not been encouraged, but they were often criticized or attacked.
If I showed these things or tried to plan, you know, don't box me in, you know, my mom would say.
If I tried to sort of make a longer-term plan or whatever, or, you know, we would make a longer-term plan and then she wouldn't stick to it.
And then I'd get upset and she'd get angry, right?
So that would almost be punished for making plans.
And so there was a lot in my childhood and upbringing that left me not only unprepared but almost anti-prepared for real success as an adult.
And again, I'm not saying that this is your situation.
I don't know. But I will say that...
You seem to be a little bit dissociated from how to get where you want to go.
Like no one's sort of stepped you through how you achieve your dreams or your goals or ways that you can work towards it.
I think I've just thrown out a couple of ideas in this conversation.
But you may be experiencing some sadness around a lack of preparation that could have come from family or from teachers in how to achieve your life goals.
That might be bringing up some sadness for you as well.
Yeah, that's just really sad.
Right. And the reason I say that is because you said that you felt sad after I gave you some practical and positive steps to help you achieve your goal.
Now, normally when you tell people how to achieve their goals or at least give them some ideas, they tend to feel happy.
But they will feel sad when they realize that this could have been told to them at any time, you know, by family or teachers or whatever, but wasn't.
And that can make us feel sad, right?
Yes. Because what I'm talking about isn't brain surgery, right?
I'm not saying you have to learn, you know, ancient hieroglyphics and how to juggle five flaming cats, right?
I mean, what I'm saying is sort of simple common sense stuff about how to achieve what you want to achieve.
But it doesn't sound like your family had that conversation with you on a regular basis about how to achieve what you want to achieve, especially the bigger and more abstract things like a career and so on.
The other thing that you, sorry, let me, I just, I apologize, and I'll just give you one other thing, and then I will absolutely shut up my piehole and listen, but it sounds a little bit as well, like when you were making the decision to switch your major, that you did so in kind of a vacuum.
Like, you didn't mention that, you didn't say, well, I talked to my family, or I talked to my friends, or, you know, I went through this, I went to a guidance counselor, but it sounds like you kind of made the decision, you know, like you were on a desert island and figuring out whether to eat coconut or mango.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah. Which means that you don't have a board of directors.
You don't have an advice group that can sort of sit you down and say, okay, well, let's go through the process about how we try to make good decisions in life.
You put down the pluses and minuses, the long-term and the short-term goals, the benefits, do the spreadsheet of different income potentials versus the amount we spend.
I mean, I've gone through this.
I had to learn all of this stuff the hard way, and it was really hard.
I'm trying to make it easier for others.
But there is something profoundly sad, and I think I feel that sadness, there's something very sad about having to make such a big and enormous decision without feedback from those around you.
Yeah. Is that closer to what you might be feeling?
Yeah. Okay, so I'm now going to stop talking.
It's a shock, I know. That makes a lot of sense, too, because I've also been experiencing a lot of sadness around the general thought of my parents, but there hasn't been anything specific lately, though. Like, even...
I haven't talked to them since the beginning of August.
I don't plan to talk to them anymore.
But I've been, like, missing them.
And now they're just more general sadness lately.
Right, right. And, I mean, of course, you can talk to them anytime, right?
Yeah. They're probably not going to hang up on you, right?
I mean, you can pick up the phone and talk to them anytime you want, right?
Right, right. Yeah, I guess I should clarify by missing them.
I mean, thinking that I miss them.
But I don't want to call them.
So I'm not actually wanting to talk to them, you know?
Right. No, and I think I, I mean, and that, of course, is a very, that's a very fundamental kind of ambivalence, right?
Yeah. Which, again, I completely understand.
I don't want to speak to them, but I still miss them.
Right.
Right.
And again, this is something that is, you know, to me it's not uncommon and it's certainly not crazy.
But again, this is something that I think it would be really, really important to speak to a therapist about because that is a very complex kind of ambivalence around therapy.
I don't want to see them, but I still miss them.
Right. And I think you were saying that the sort of thoughts are racing around your head at night as well, right?
Yeah. Right, right.
And that, again, that has a lot to do, at least that happens to me, when I have unresolved contradictions in my life.
And the more unconscious they are and the more unresolved and the more contradictory they are, the more my mind just whirls around and around like a ferret in an aquarium without actually getting any.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, there's a kind of stuck place to be.
You know, it's like, I broke up with my boyfriend, but I really, really miss him.
But I don't want to call him, but I really, really miss him.
You're kind of stuck there, right?
Right, yeah. Right.
And I think that that's something where, you know, a counselor could, I mean, you know me, I mean, this is a broken record, right?
Just never, never, ever think about taking breaks from family without talking to a therapist for, you know, the entire period that's going on.
I mean, that's, you know, just my broken record suggestion, right?
Yeah. But, yeah, I think that you may be feeling somewhat unprepared for the ambitions that you have.
Like, if you wanted to become a doctor, you'd be on a kind of train track, right?
Yeah. Right?
I mean, it's not that hard.
I mean, obviously, being a doctor is a complicated and difficult business, but in terms of if you graduate with a medical degree and you're licensed, you can get a job, right?
Yeah. It's not like wanting to be a mime or something where it's like, okay, I can be a mime, I can spend as much time learning how to be a mime as learning to be a doctor, and then what, right?
So, the challenge is that you are taking, and it's been my experience that people who come from more chaotic backgrounds tend to go to more risky careers.
I mean, for whatever reason, good or bad, that just does seem to be the case.
Like, nobody I know became a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or anything like that.
I mean, the people who came from sort of complex or confusing family histories tend to go into non-traditional or self-taught kind of careers.
And the weird thing is that, in a way, we're kind of good at that because we know a lot about handling risk.
But in a way, we're kind of not good at it because those things require a lot of planning and a lot of long-term thinking and a lot of negotiation and a lot of other skills that not only we weren't taught very often, but the development of those was actively opposed sometimes.
Yeah, I remember being concerned about My career in like 7th grade and bringing that to my parents and I don't know what I'm gonna do I gotta figure it out before you know 11th grade or something.
And what what happened with that conversation?
Oh you'll figure it out you have a lot of time and then eventually I didn't have any time and now I have you know I mean like I'm past the time that it's not really but in my seventh grade mind and Well, certainly if the trends continue, 7th grade to now is quite a long time, and you don't want to be in the same amount of time into the future in the same position, right?
Oh, yeah. Right.
Right. Well, I mean, if you did end up talking to your parents again, I mean, a useful question to ask, and you can do this either talking to them directly or in a role play with a therapist, would be to ask, like, why didn't you help me with my career issues?
Yes. I mean, that's a big important question, right?
I mean, it can be tempting to poo-poo children's, you know, 7th grade, what do you know, right?
Forget about it. But it is, you know, it's important to, you know, for me as a parent, it's always important to remind myself that that which is important to my daughter is very important to my daughter, no matter how it shows up in my supposed big scheme of things, right?
Right. Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing part of the reason that mom didn't help is she didn't like her career.
Right. So she wanted to avoid that kind of questioning, perhaps, because she didn't get that from her parents.
I mean, who knows, right? But I think that's really important.
Because if it has to do with, you know, I've been worried about this stuff, you know, after I told my parents in seventh grade, I'm concerned about my career, you ended up making the decision about the major without feedback from your family, right? And your parents are supposed to help with that kind of stuff, I think, right?
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think that you may be feeling some sadness about being unprepared for achieving, which is why when I sort of gave you a bit of, you know, pseudo-parenting, it's not really right, but pseudo-parenting advice, like you could try this or you could try that, you began to feel sad, almost like you didn't know how hungry you were until you saw some food, right?
Right, right. Does that make any sense at all?
That makes a lot of sense. Right.
So that sadness about the lack of preparation, I think that's a very, very important place to go emotionally.
Because you won't really be able to plan productively, I think, or I would guess, until you deal with that sadness of not being prepared.
And after all of that, you know, from grade 7 to nearing college, you still end up having to make these decisions on your own.
I mean, there's a lot to be said about, I think, in that.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. And how do you feel now?
I still feel that underlying sadness, but it's not so overwhelming right now.
That's good. And so, you know, until you talk to a therapist, I think it would be useful to write down, or, you know, some people prefer to dictate, but to write down your thoughts and feelings about, you know, what does it mean to be prepared for adulthood?
You know, was I prepared? How was I prepared?
How was I not prepared?
And how was my innate preparation stymied or pushed back, if that was the case?
So that you can kind of get a mental map of your own relationship with, Being prepared to get what you want.
I mean, to me, that's a fundamental thing around parenting is that you have to...
To be a good parent, a fundamental thing that you have to do is you have to teach your children ways and means that they can use to achieve their goals.
Because we're not born with this kind of stuff.
We have to be taught it.
If you get a chance, I will recommend this book to you if you've not read it.
It's by Malcolm Gladwell.
It's called Outliers. Oh, yeah.
And there's a bit in it where he talks about this preparation versus lack of preparation, and it really is very fascinating.
He says that the biggest single determinant in whether a child achieves his or her own success relative to goals is the quality of parental preparation for adulthood.
So I would really dig into that, and I won't give you the examples because they're very compelling, but he does a huge amount of work in this area, and it's really, really interesting to read.
And I found it made me sad to read about this stuff because, again, it reminded me just how unbelievably unprepared I was for achieving even basic goals in life.
And it really is...
Having to reinvent the wheel while you're already driving the car as an adult because you can't go back and have your childhood over again and be better prepared.
You kind of have to do it as you're already in adulthood.
I would recommend that.
Just write down the feelings you have about preparedness or lack of preparedness or the degree to which you feel competent to achieve the goals that you want.
If you don't feel competent, again, first place I would look is in your upbringing because I don't think people are innately incompetent at all.
But I think that, I mean, my gut says, and, you know, what do I know?
I'm just some guy on the internet with amateur opinions, but my gut would tell me that that would be a pretty productive place to go and to work on.
You can start working on it yourself, and particularly to talk about it with a therapist.
Yeah. Yeah, that's good.
Thank you. All right.
I think I'm being dismissed. Click!
Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?
No, good. I mean, I don't want to, you know, talk your ear off.
I just thought that was a productive place to go, and I think you have enough to go from here.
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about just now, or is it good to go and mull over this stuff?
Yeah, I'm going to mull it over.
All right. Keep me posted if you get a chance, and again, please do go and talk to a counsellor.
All right, I'll do that.
Take care of your help. You're very welcome and all the very best to you.
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