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April 17, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:47
1643 Playing Cards with the Dead

A block I have found to my own happiness.

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Oh, hey everybody, it's Steph. I hope you're doing well.
Ah, strange, strange topic.
Sad topic. I hope that it makes some sense to you.
So, in the podcast, The War, or The Wars, I talked about how if reason and integrity and rationality win, then the opposites to those things have to lose, and vice versa, and therefore we are...
Each of us who were in opposing moral paradigms invested in the other's failure.
And where failure is not supplied, it shall be created, right?
Which is why the irrational attack the irrational, while the rational do not spend quite as much time and energy attacking the irrational.
I mean, personally attacking, whatever, right?
Because you have to make people feel bad If they are to fail, and if their failure doesn't appear to be occurring, then you're not above manufacturing that, I suppose, at least within your own mind.
And I was thinking, you know, I'm trying to work on upping my level of happiness.
Because, I mean, I think I'm a pretty happy person.
I feel pretty happy most of the time.
But I have noticed something that's interesting.
That when I have...
Some real and genuine and long-lasting happiness.
My mood tends to sour.
And I tend to worry about something.
Or I tend to feel a twinge in my body and go, ooh, did I do something?
Or am I okay? Or whatever.
I feel something that brings me down.
Or I'm like, oh, nobody's donated in three days.
Oh, you know, what have I done?
What was the last podcast? Has it offended everyone?
You know, all of this nonsense that goes on.
And... I'm beginning to suspect, my very good friends, that I may have a happiness fuse.
A happiness fuse is if you get more than four amps of happiness, it shorts out.
And your happiness then is like pearl diving.
You grip the...knife between your teeth and you go plunging down into the bubbly greenness and you try and find an oyster and you bring it to the surface.
But you can only stay down for so long because you've got to come back up to breathe.
And it's like the air is the poisonous fumes of our history, of my history.
And I can take a dive into happiness, but I can't stay there.
And I've just noticed that a little bit more recently and I wanted to share...
Some thoughts about that.
Why? Because the reality is that that's not the right metaphor.
The reality is that there's fresh air, sandy beaches, a great life, a wonderful wife, a beautiful daughter, great listeners, great friends.
There is all of that.
And there is a dark ocean that pulls me back down.
Thank you.
And, as I talked about before, I mean, I face a lot of hostility for going the inward route, for going the principled route, for going the objectivist route, for going the route of philosophy.
Whenever I had a moral judgment, I was called judgmental.
Whenever I was unhappy about the past, I was called wallowing in my own misery.
Whenever... I talked about the wrongs that have been done to me as a child.
I was playing the victim, right?
There were all of this terrible and horrible and abusive ways of reframing my genuine experience.
So I just learned to... And I don't think I really processed that very well.
I really don't. I think that in the face of that endless opposition, and it was, of course, you know, philosophical and artistic and emotional and familial and friends and all that.
And when I demanded integrity in business, I was told that I was naive.
This wasn't how things worked.
And I just, I really haven't processed that stuff very well at all.
I think I've just really, you know, like a, as my daughter would say, like a total, total.
I just kept my head down, put my shell up, and just kept barreling the fuck along.
And I think that that's had its benefits.
My God, I said it had its benefits, but I think it's had its costs.
And I think that the benefits far outweigh the cost, and I wouldn't want it any other way, but I think now has come time Because the truth is that it is the air and the earth and the beach in which I live.
And I like to swim, but it's the undertow that keeps pulling me down.
The undertow of people's hostility in the past to what I was doing and the path that it took me on.
Because, you know, since I've gotten everything that I want in life, nobody seems to like me who I used to know.
Quite the opposite in many ways.
I don't think it's because I've become insufferable or arrogant or whatever, perhaps no more than I was before, but there's not a lot of friendliness to it, not a lot of curiosity, not a lot of attaboys, you know, well done, good stuff, right?
And I think it's because there was this undertow of hostility towards the approach that I took, because I think they got even sooner than I did, the people around me got sooner than I did.
that it was a win-lose proposition, that if I were to succeed, they must have failed.
And now, of course, they've pulled past the point of no return.
They're in their 40s, wives, kids, and whatever, right?
Or no wives and no kids, but either way, right?
I mean, they're locked into their lives, and the possibility of change diminishes over time, right?
The possibility of change diminishes over time.
The possibility of winning a marathon diminishes over time.
If you can, I guess, start training if you've never run in your 60s, you're probably not going to win, but you might be able to finish one one day.
But the odds go down considerably.
And I think with personal change, you get embedded, right?
Your life is like amber.
The choices that you make when you're young, it's like that tree amber that flows over insects.
They It slowly hardens, and then you can't change.
I mean, I can't not be introspective.
I can't not be self-critical.
I can't not be humble before rationality.
I mean, I can be, but I always sort of reorient myself back to that.
And your life, it hardens around you, and the choices diminish and fall away.
Nobody says, when they're 70, I'm going to become a neurosurgeon.
I've had it with this mailroom.
I guess opportunities and choices diminish over time, which is why it's so important to make good choices as early as possible and to fight hard for better choices later on where at all possible.
So I think that in my head is a chorus of you must fails.
I mean, I think that there is, in my head, a chorus of you must fails.
And I think that I'm drawn...
Back to less happiness.
It's not outright unhappiness, but it's less happiness.
It's a cloud. I'm drawn back to that, I think for two reasons.
One is that there is that chorus, and I appease that chorus by not being too happy for too long.
I can do a day or two, and then I have to have an hour or two or three of...
right? And I don't think that's...
That's not good enough.
That's not good enough for me.
That's not good enough for me.
I can feel... Like, now that I'm aware of it, I can feel that little short circuit going in.
Like, oh. But what about this?
What about this thing that could be bad or negative or wrong or whatever, right?
Well... So there's the chorus.
And that chorus, because it's not as conscious as I'd like to be, overwhelms me.
And then I... Succumb to it and feel, you know, stress or tension or whatever it is, something negative, something that clouds a very sunny existence.
There's so nothing to be unhappy about.
I mean, if I can't be happy with the most amazing woman, the most amazing child, the most amazing job, I would be doing this for free.
I was doing it for free, right?
And I'm making enough money to eat and clothe myself.
I've got my health. I mean, if I can't be happy with this, what the hell can I be happy with, right?
And then that's the issue, right? It's not going to get better from here, right?
I mean, it's generally true of life as a whole because you can't be sure of where from here is or whether it is hit by a bus.
So I think that's the one aspect.
And I was sort of focusing on that earlier tonight as I was mulling things over.
But I think there's a second and even more important aspect because ever since I've been...
Oh, here it comes again. Ever since I've been Thinking about this stuff, I've been feeling these waves of sadness just welling up and it feels so deep and so old, you know, like the Titanic creaking free of the sea floor and slowly bubbling up to the surface.
It feels that deep and old, like a Peloponnesian slave ship animating and striving for the surface.
And you know why I think I'm drawn back into the ocean, into these depths, into this cold isolation?
Well, it's because there are bodies down there.
There are bodies down there in the dark, you know.
Of those I knew who didn't make it.
And some outright died, and some just didn't make it in some ways in an even darker way.
And I feel the urge, like I feel the need to dive down and swim into these sunken ships and play cards with the bodies and And tip drinks with the corpses.
I feel it's very hard to leave that behind.
It's very hard.
It's very hard to, as they say in hospitals, to call it, you know, time of death, right?
It's very hard to stop trying to resuscitate bodies 20 years dead.
Even if it's just within my own mind.
It's very hard to do that.
And I think I go back or I go down as a kind of homage to those people as a kind of, you know, how you visit graves, even if somebody who caused you pain.
And even if you're just sad for what you lost.
I find it very hard...
To truly let go of those bodies.
Even though they wished me ill and made me laugh and gave me company and introduced me to music that I love and did some other things which have had lasting and real value to me.
Even though they pulled me out of a terrifically shy isolation that I had as a child, even though they First got me drunk, offered me drugs.
They at least let me into their houses.
They at least invited me to their parties.
And this gang of cynical relativists, I mean, they had a charm and an insouciance and a wit.
Thank you.
And a terrible F. Scott Fitzgerald, dangerous shark eye glitter to them.
And it was exciting.
And they were aggressive with their emotions.
And they were harsh with their wit.
And they weren't friendly, but they were stimulating.
And they pulled me out of a well.
Not because they really cared.
And partly, of course, it was because they could feel superior to my awkwardness and my naivete and my shyness.
And partly because I was amusing, I think.
But they really did begin to lash out at me when I began to go inwards, when I began to, instead of being empty, began to introspect.
And there was a lot of spears raised against that inward charge of mine.
Thank you.
And, you know, this is the tough thing, because for all the disasters that followed, I'm still glad they were in my life, these friends.
I'm still, like, if I had the choice, because I don't know who else I was going to spend time with as a teenager, who else might have been available.
And they were funny and musical.
Talented. These fly-by-flash light comets.
I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know who else I would have hung out with as a teenager.
Who would have led me towards the world in the way that I ended up.
I don't know. They were very worldly, these friends.
In a way that I... My first cigarette, people.
And yeah, it was dangerous.
I was dancing on the edge of a volcano.
I could have fallen, for sure.
But it was better than where I was, which was in the Cloud Council of Pure Abstraction, Numbness Dissociation.
I mean, they were like the electricity that Dr.
Frankenstein sends through the body.
It hurts, but it alights.
It lights up. It electrifies.
And that happened to me.
And so I'm really glad that these people were in my life at that particular time of my life.
For want of better companions.
They were my Prince Hal's friends.
But... Boy, oh boy.
What is cool when you're 17 is tragic at 44.
And although the amber of their lives washed over their early choices or avoidance of choices in terrible ways and froze them in horrible postures, I can still see them.
I can still see them in those...
in the water.
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