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Jan. 5, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:51
2578 Bored of Boredom
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So, the topic today is boredom.
I feel I've been doing a lot of work on boredom just with the format and content of the podcast as a whole over these many years, but I've had increasingly lengthy and tedious requests for a podcast on boredom.
Quote I love.
Boredom is rage spread thin.
Don't know who said it.
Couldn't be bothered to look it up.
Too boring.
But that's always struck me as a very interesting perspective.
Boredom, to me, and I struggle a little bit with the need for constant, nay, hysterical stimulation.
Which is to say, hey, I'm driving.
I must be podcasting.
Or, somehow, it just doesn't count.
And that is something that I kind of have to work on a little bit.
Going to the washroom!
Do I really need to bring my phone?
Oh, not that I've ever taken any calls from there.
I go with Rachel's argument.
Joey, don't ever call me from that phone.
So what does it mean To be bored.
Well, I would argue that there are three main causes of boredom.
The first is lack of opportunity.
The second is lack of courage, and the third is lack of connection, and these are often interrelated.
So, lack of opportunity is you want to do something, but massive or insurmountable barriers to entry exist, usually through governmental regulations, laws, licensing, and so on, that makes it virtually impossible, or actually downright impossible, for you to get To do what you want to do.
Let's say you'd really like to be a therapist or a counselor or psychologist or whatever, and you look into it and it's, you know, 10 years of school and mentoring and all that kind of stuff to get to be...
Such a person.
Well, of course you can, I don't know, depending on the legality of where you are, you can set yourself up as a life coach or, I don't know, in some places the word therapist is not regulated.
In other words, you can say, I'm a therapist, and you can just go and do it and hang your shingle out and so on.
But if you want to sort of get the insurance money, then there's this huge hoops that you have to jump through in order to be able to achieve that, and that's We're going to thwart a lot of the desires that you have.
You may want to be a psychiatrist, but you may find the constant pressure to dole out medication to what are non-medical issues to be somewhat off-putting, to put it mildly.
You may want to be a doctor, but the idea of trying to care for people after working for 30 hours straight on no sleep may be somewhat off-putting to you, and so on.
So, there are...
And of course, you know, you may want to be an entrepreneur in Soviet Russia in the 1960s or whatever, but it's all illegal, right?
So, you may want to start a bank with some friends, but you may find that the laws render it virtually impossible to achieve this goal.
And so, there's lack of opportunity is you want to do stuff, but...
You're not allowed.
Or it's so heavily discouraged as to be somewhat tricky, to say the least.
So that's kind of a problem.
And so when your life's ambitions are thwarted or made kind of insurmountable by regulations, controls, or downright illegality, then you're kind of thwarted.
You know, can you come up with a plan B? Can you find something else that moves you sort of, well, maybe, maybe not, right?
But I think that's one aspect of things.
And one of the things that happens, of course, is that as opportunities diminish, you know, we really should have a society that takes care of the less intelligent.
I think that's really, really important.
I mean...
Somebody estimated my verbal IQ at 170.
I don't know if it's true or not.
I have no real particular intention of getting it tested.
I prefer to go and sing rather than do scales and see how high I can sing.
I just prefer to sing songs and so on.
Maybe it's high, maybe it's not.
I mean, it's obviously pretty high.
So I'm going to do okay in most societies.
I'm going to do okay as a smart guy, right?
But there are lots of people around who, you know, ain't so much with the smartness, right?
And they need jobs that are, you know, they can sort of work with their hands more and that kind of stuff, right?
That's, you know, and unfortunately, you know, our society has taken a lot of the sort of lower rungs of the ladder away from people who aren't so smart.
People with an IQ, you know, as George Carlin says, you know, think how dumb the average person is.
Well, half of them are dumber than that, right?
Now, I think that's not particularly fair.
I find the average person to be quite intelligent.
I mean, I'm not saying they use their intelligence for good.
They generally use it to defend evil and error and so on.
But they do it with great agility, right?
I mean, if you're a gymnast good at dodging the bullets of reason, or you do it in a gymnastic fashion, then clearly you are quite limber.
You're just not doing it to win any medals.
You're just doing it to dodge.
And improvements or whatever, right?
And, you know, even if a guy's not that smart, if he's being pressured into getting married and he doesn't want to get married, you know, the number of excuses and avoidances he's going to come up with are going to be legion!
I tell you, legion.
He's going to have more excuses than 300 has abs.
So, for somebody with an IQ of 90 or 95 and so on, you know, what would they do?
Well, they'd go and work in manufacturing and, I think, have a decent life, a fine life.
In some ways, a life preferable to having, you know, extra bits of brain cells floating around.
Ignorance, I'm sure, sometimes is bliss and conformity is empty relaxation.
So, this is the kind of person who...
They're not going to be a college professor or an ad executive or whatever, but they'll go and push some levers and move some stuff and get into roofing or whatever it is.
And unfortunately, unions and licensing and all that and the general driving away of manufacturing from most of the Western countries through hyper-regulation and taxation and controls and the aforementioned unions.
And please, the usual caveats, I'm not talking about unions as voluntary associations designed to improve working conditions and or salaries.
I'm talking about government-enforced and inflicted and controlled unions, which are just another kind of cartel, right?
And, of course, unions are created by governments, particularly on the left, in order to get campaign contributions from union members.
And, kind of important.
And, unions plus the media are the only reason the Democratic Party has any political power whatsoever, in my opinion.
Actually, it's more than my opinion.
It's quite true.
So, a lack of opportunity For people who aren't so smart, and people who are smart, who are more smart, they can generally come up with some kind of something to pursue, some opportunity to pursue, something that's going to be fun or enjoyable, and they probably know other smart people who are starting companies and so on, right?
So people who are smart, they're going to find their own opportunities.
People who aren't so smart, unfortunately, in modern society, and I would argue it's pretty catastrophically, a lot of the jobs...
Through hyper-regulation unions, minimum wage, taxation and so on, a lot of the jobs have been rendered obsolete or outsourced or have been automated.
And this means that the people who aren't so smart, just they don't have the opportunity to get started in a career.
And life in general should be progressing towards something, right?
That's pretty important.
Life in general should be progressing towards something.
Now, it doesn't mean that everybody's got to aim to be the CEO of the company or anything like that.
But life should be progressing towards something, right?
You have some kind of goal.
So it might be, you know, I'm saving to buy a boat.
I'm a factory worker saving to buy a boat.
I am engaged to get married.
I am going to have kids.
I'm going to raise my kids.
Whatever it's going to be.
I mean, I'm going to take care of my aging parents.
It could be any number of things, but life has to have some sense of...
Progress.
Some sense of aiming towards something, working to achieve it, succeeding or failing, blah, blah, blah.
Like, my daughter has now taken four swimming lessons, and she will swim, you know, the length of a large pool.
And she's like, don't help me.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, don't help me.
I want to do it by myself.
She sees a heavy door.
You know, you can spend five minutes waiting for her to wrestle it open.
So that she can open and hold it open for me and for whoever comes after by herself.
She wants to learn all of this stuff And it's great.
So, I mean, everything that she has achieved, she has achieved because she has been working to improve her skills.
And the pursuit of excellence, you know, this is an old Aristotelian argument, which is, I think, pretty good, which is, sorry, pretty good, but a ridiculously non-technical way of putting it.
It's a valid argument that happiness is the pursuit of excellence, particularly in virtue, followed by other things.
And she works hard to To be good, to do good, to be virtuous.
And, you know, I think like all of us, logic comes naturally, but the practice does not always particularly come naturally.
I mean, babies, of course...
Oh, tangent!
Babies, particularly, they're sort of designed to make sure that they get as many resources as possible, particularly when there are clamoring siblings around who also want those resources.
So, you know, sharing and generosity and the submerging of immediate desire for the sake of future social cohesion, not really programmed into babies or toddlers.
They just want shiny stuff.
They want sweet stuff.
They want fun stuff.
They want attention.
And there's no bottom to that hole, right?
So, they want all of that stuff.
And they, you know, not really...
There is a reorienting around sort of sharing and generosity and And thinking of the other person's feelings and so on.
Babies, siblings who thought of the other people's other siblings' feelings first would always give away their food and so on and therefore would starve.
That gene for sharing in virtue for babies and toddlers I don't think would particularly last very long, but there is a reorienting around Concern and care and consideration for others.
That I think is pretty important.
I mean, I don't see toddlers sharing their toys.
I see toddlers grabbing their toys away from each other and hiding them and not wanting to, as my daughter says, so-and-so can come over, but she cannot play with my toy cats.
Right?
And, I mean, she's a great kid.
I think that's pretty natural.
So, the sort of reorienting towards sharing and all that kind of stuff.
But she is constantly attempting to acquire skills, as are we all.
You know, one of the great, fantastic, wonderful, amazing, I'm so grateful things about doing this show is that I get to study all of these really cool, amazing, fantastic, enticing, exciting, and occasionally alarming ideas.
And the expansion of my knowledge into hitherto not only unknown but unguessed fields of study is an immense and intense privilege.
And that's great.
I hopefully at least become somewhat better over time at dealing with responses.
Sometimes I don't.
I was having a debate with a guy on my very first Wednesday show and he wouldn't say that darkness is the opposite of light.
Dark is the opposite of light.
And I said, well, if my daughter said...
If I asked my daughter what would the opposite of light be, what would she say?
He'd say...
He said, well, she'd say dark.
And he said, but my niece, if you say who lives at the North Pole, she would say Santa Claus.
And what I realized the next day was that's a completely unfair comparison because in the one, I'm asking my child to think for herself.
And in the Santa Claus example, you're asking the child to repeat lies and propaganda that have been provided to them.
So that's not...
That's not a fair comparison.
One is thinking for yourself, and the other is repeating lies that have been told to you by parents.
So, sometimes I'm good with the riposte and the repartee, and sometimes, you know, it's alright.
It wasn't essential to the argument, and by the way, I did actually, when my daughter asked me what the show was about, I did talk to her about we had an opposite game, and we've never played it before, it was the opposite of this, and she bang, got it.
Light, dark, up, down, black, white, north, south.
Well, north, south, I had to explain to her, because she doesn't really know the compass yet, but everything that could be figured out from her experience, particularly sense data, she got, even though we'd never done the opposite game before.
before.
It's actually kind of a fun game.
And she said actually that the opposite of happy was feeling nothing, which I thought was kind of interesting.
Not that the opposite of happy is sad, but that the opposite of happy is feeling nothing, which I thought actually was a very interesting argument, and I think probably quite true, that the opposite of happy is numb, not pain, right?
The opposite of life is not pain but death, where you feel nothing.
Well, there's nothing to feel.
So boredom is rage spread thin, as the saying goes, and thwarted ambition definitely makes you angry.
Things you want to do that you're banned or barred from doing is not going to make you happy.
It's going to make you frustrated and angry and all these kinds of things.
And so boredom is being thwarted.
It's a lack of opportunity.
Through no fault of your own, in particular.
Now, a lack of opportunity may occur because you have been badly raised, right?
Raising children to have the courage to take advantage of opportunities or to create opportunities is very, very important, particularly for those of us who are liberty lovers, right?
So raising your kids with appropriate social skills and Negotiation skills and all that kind of stuff.
It's really, really important.
And unfortunately, all too many children are not raised with these.
School and religion in particular do not exactly encourage the development of skills in negotiation.
I mean, religion is not a negotiation.
It is a hell and brimstone commandment and school is simply imposed and you're told what to do and you have to raise your hand to go to them.
You don't negotiate with your teacher.
Raising children without the capacity to negotiate and have courage is raising them to be kind of like wage slaves, so to speak.
Not that having a wage makes you a slave, but if that's all you've been raised to be fit for, then it's not the same as being free and having opportunity.
So, boredom is the body's way of saying We can't go further.
This is the end of this road.
Whatever road we're on, this is the end of this road.
Now, some roads you go down, you can still see the fork in the road and go back, right?
You know, on your fourth date, maybe the woman is, you know, nuts.
And you're like, okay, well, that's it.
No fifth date, right?
So you can turn back.
20 years of marriage, a little tougher, right?
Fallacy of sunk costs and all that.
So if your life has led you to a dead end, then you can go, whoa, dead end.
Turn around, start marching back, find a better path.
Or you can just sit down.
And pout.
And so boredom is your body's way of saying there's nowhere further to go this way.
It's a dead end, right?
There's no changing view here because everything, if we keep doing this, everything in the future is going to be the same as the present because there's nothing to do.
Right, so if you graduate high school and...
You don't want to get a job and you go back and live with your parents or you stay living with your parents and you live in the basement and you play video games and you masturbate and you read or whatever it is.
You go dirt biking to the movies with your friends or whatever.
Then you're going to get bored because your unconscious is going to say, That this leads nowhere.
The days are just going to be photocopies.
Nothing is going to change.
And boredom really is not the moment.
It's looking into the tunnel of the future.
So, if you're on your way to do the most amazing thing that you can imagine, whatever it's going to be, I'm on my way to give the biggest speech of my career or something, And then I find that my plane is delayed for three hours.
I'm not going to be bored in those three hours, even though I'm stuck at an airport.
Because the future is still going to be different from the present.
But true boredom, existential boredom, is your body's way of saying, the future is going to be the same as the present.
And therefore, you need to do something different.
Like if you reach a dead end in a forest and you just sit down and look at the trees around you, it's going to get kind of boring, right?
Because the view doesn't change.
Like, nobody who goes hiking and then stands for nine hours in the woods looking at the same thing.
One tree branch.
Because, you know, we're designed to enjoy changing views and changing circumstances, changing life, environments, and so on.
I mean, our essence is adaptability, which means we have to have a changing environment in order to adapt.
Put water in one cup and leave it there, it doesn't form itself to a new container.
And so when you're bored...
It's a kind of low-grade, motivational, subcutaneous panic at repetition.
It's the same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
There is water at the bottom of the ocean.
Indeed there is.
And it's bored too.
Because the view doesn't change.
It's really dark.
And so, boredom is your body's way of saying we are under-stimulated because tomorrow is going to be the same as yesterday and the day after tomorrow is going to be the same as tomorrow.
There's no progress, no growth, no future.
Nothing in the future is going to be different than the present if we don't make different choices or if we go ahead and continue to not make choices.
So, you've heard me on listener calls or Sunday shows, I've said to people, What do you expect your life to look like in five years if you keep doing what you're doing now?
And their immediate answer is it's going to be the same.
I'm still going to be living in my parents' basement playing video games and dirt biking to the movie theater with friends.
Although my friends are going to diminish as they move on with their life.
And the panic of being left behind as people move on with their life to me has always been kind of scary, right?
Other people are not particularly scared by it.
I mean, I had friends, I guess, up until 10 years or so ago still doing the same thing that they kind of did in high school.
Doing judo, playing Dungeons& Dragons, traveling a little, working at the same job.
And so when you're bored, look at the choices that you're making and try and figure out whether different choices Sorry, whether keeping on making the same choices or avoiding making choices, what's your life going to look like in five years?
And if the answer is kind of about the same, then that's why you feel bored.
Because your body's saying, okay, we've stared at this for you long enough.
Let's get up and exercise, otherwise our legs are going to atrophy and fall off.
We're going to lose bone mass, or whatever it is, right?
So boredom is a motivational, subtle panic designed to propel you in a different direction.
If I said you've got to look for a Couterville hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box.
If I said you've got a pan for gold in a children's sandbox, you'd get kind of bored, right?
Because you know you're never going to find it.
So you've got to go look for dates deep in the Everglades.
You're going to get bored because you're not going to find them, right?
Looking tomorrow is going to be the same as looking today.
So, When you're bored, look at your life choices.
Look at your environment.
Is it going to change?
Is it going to be different in the future?
Mine is.
I mean, every day is different for me in this show and as a parent and even in my marriage.
We talk about great new topics all the time.
So, lack of opportunity.
Now, this is tied into the second one, which is lack of courage.
So, lack of courage is...
Rather than pry yourself away from the immediate self-gratification of media, porn and video games, you actually have to go out and start risking stuff.
Well, every time you take that slippery slope towards immediate sense gratification or sexual gratification, then you are diminishing your courage, right?
Whatever you feed gets fatter and whatever you starve gets thinner.
And if you feed immediate gratification at the expense of courage, then The elephant that sits on your chest gets bigger, and the muscles that get it off get weaker.
And, you know, if you have something that you need to do that involves or requires courage, do it now!
Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you if you're falling asleep.
Go back to sleep, I promise not to yell again.
But do it now, because it's not going to get easier, right?
Like, if you're on a runaway train that's getting faster and faster, And you need to jump off it, you have to do it now.
Because every moment you delay, the train gets faster and it becomes more dangerous to get off the train, right?
So whatever you need to do that involves courage, Like, we all know that.
If you get some horrible injury and you're losing blood and you've got to climb upstairs to get to a phone, you know, you don't wait until you feel stronger because you're losing blood, right?
So you've got to go now.
And it's the same thing with courage.
I mean, obviously, planning and blah, blah, blah.
But everything you postpone diminishes your capacity.
To do it.
And procrastination is self-enervation, self-weakening.
And particularly with courage.
I mean, you just, you have to do it now.
You just have to do it now.
And so, if you feel boredom, I mean, I'm not just saying, like, you know, this movie is kind of boring, but I mean, if you feel boredom like it's a real problem in your life, Then it is a kind of...
I think boredom is a kind of suppressed panic.
And the reason we've suppressed panic is we don't think we can do anything about it, right?
Like, if you freeze to death in some godforsaken hoth hole, then you get nummer and nummer.
And then towards the end, apparently, you feel warm.
You feel, oh, finally, I'm getting one.
Then you die.
And so there's kind of...
Like, nature's kindness is that once you ain't gonna live, then she puts you out of pain before she puts you out of your misery, right?
And the reason that we feel boredom rather than panic is because we feel hopeless to change our circumstances.
We feel that it's impossible.
Never going to happen to change our circumstances.
Now, if we have a shred of courage, then we will say, it's impossible for me to change my circumstances.
But if we are too cowardly to take ownership for our lives in any way, shape, or form, then we say...
It's impossible because of society, because of this, that, and the other for me to achieve any goals or any happiness or whatever.
And, you know, of course there's some truth in that.
And when I say cowardly, I don't mean that you're, you know, if this is your...
I don't mean that, like, you're a coward and then that makes you bad or wrong or immoral or something.
I don't mean anything like that.
What I mean is that if you avoid the truth, that's a cowardly action.
It doesn't mean you are a coward.
It just means it's a cowardly action to avoid the truth.
And to mistake the world for yourself is the fundamental evisceration.
It's a harikari of self-knowledge.
So if you feel helpless and hopeless and bored and depressed and you say, well, that's because of the world, the world is the way it is.
I can't find love because all women are evil, right?
Then you've got the relief of it not being your responsibility, but you also have the paralysis and genuine self-fulfilling hopelessness of it's not your...
If it's not your fault, it's not your responsibility, and therefore you get relief from a lack of responsibility, but you absolutely cannot change it, right?
I don't think it's my responsibility that I can't levitate, right?
So I'm not going to try and change it because it's physics, right?
If I can't find love because all women are evil, guess what?
I'll stop looking for love.
Or if a woman's attracted to me, I'll provoke her into being nasty so I can fulfill my prophecy.
I'll never get love.
The panic of lost opportunity of a wasted life Is very, very important.
It's a very healthy and helpful anxiety to have.
And we generally have it to the degree to which we have abilities that can help the world.
In the movie Epic, there's a little throwaway joke where the slugs ask a fruit fly, what's it like having such a short lifespan?
And he says, it's great, mister.
I love it.
I wish I'd done more with my life.
And then he dies.
He starts off as a little boy, and literally the conversation, arm falls off, leg falls off, and he dies.
I wish I had done more with my life.
Particularly when you're young, of course, there is a sense of immortality.
I can waste another day in the same way that I can look away from this wave on the shore, because there'll always be another one.
It's not until you get older that you realize that it is not waves on the shore, but sand and an hourglass.
It ain't getting refilled.
And to miss the bus when no more come is pretty rough.
Well, at least you can then walk.
Not the best metaphor.
But it's tough.
It's scary.
Something I read years ago said, any man seen on the bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life.
Harsh, but not wildly inaccurate.
I mean, if you're 40 and you're doing kind of the same stuff that you did when you're 20, what's going to happen?
Are you going to suddenly become a lawyer or an artist or a novelist?
No, you missed.
You missed.
You missed and it's hard to do over.
And you don't get another life.
And that's always kind of scared me.
Because there is a temptation to live that low life, right?
To be a waiter and have fun doing that.
But, oh man, it's rough.
Avoidance of stress and growth anxiety looks fun when you're young.
Like my friends who had sort of 9 to 5 jobs doing dull stuff when I was doing all this crazy entrepreneurial stuff, I mean, they worked a hell of a lot less than I did.
They were a hell of a lot less stressed than I was.
I did a hell of a lot less excitement too and fun.
But it's all paid off now.
I can sort of develop enough entrepreneurial experience to drive this show to some reasonable levels of success.
But they're still all doing kind of the same stuff, and I'm not doing the same stuff.
I remember being kind of surprised at this.
So a friend of mine I got a job interview for at a company where I was managing.
And the person who interviewed him said, well, he's basically been doing X for like 20 years.
Why has he never...
I'm not going to hire him.
Why has he never become a project lead or a team lead or a manager or anything like that?
He's been doing the same thing for 20 years.
I don't want to hire him.
Kind of interesting and turned out to be a very wise decision as events played out.
There's a lack of growth.
There's a lack of risk-taking.
There's a lack of opportunity seizing or creating.
All the carps remain unseized.
Not good.
And there does come a time where it's almost pointless.
And there's another time where it actually is pointless to attempt to go for it.
You know, I don't see a lot of 50-year-olds trying out for the ballet, right?
Not going to happen.
You missed the bus.
Ain't going to happen.
And boredom is your way of saying, is your body way of saying, it's not too late.
It's not too late.
We can still change course.
We can still achieve something.
We can still get something.
We can still make something.
We can still be something.
We can still exercise our abilities in the pursuit of excellence, particularly in virtue, particularly in the virtue of courage.
It's not too late.
We're not dead yet.
I'm not dead yet.
Ah, you will be in a minute.
Quit your whining.
Oh, minty pea.
Lack of courage.
Just, you know, you won't believe how easy it is to just go and do it.
I mean, we set up all these imaginary barriers to what it is that we believe we're capable of or what we can dream of.
I mean, it's just ridiculously easy to just go and do it.
You want to be an actor?
Just go take some acting classes, get some head shots, start sending it around.
Just go and do it.
You want to write books?
Just write books.
Just go and do it.
I wrote like four novels.
I got one of them published and it was all worth it just because I happened to have got my novel published when I first met the woman who's become my wife and that was her topic of conversation.
It was worth all the thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of research and writing and editing just to get married to this glorious goddess.
You won't believe just how easy it is Just sit down and do it.
It doesn't actually require a lot of courage.
You just have to work yourself like a robot.
There was a woman who used to raise a lot of money for a charity and she said, you just act like it's going to happen and it happens.
Isn't that great?
Isn't that great?
Love that.
You just act like it's going to happen.
You know, you want to put on a big gala Formalware ball with live jazz musicians and you want to make it $500 a plate for charity?
Well, you just act like it's going to happen.
We're going to put this gala on, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Do you want to get involved?
Do you want to hear, here's what I need?
You just act like it's going to happen.
And it happens.
You don't ask permission to make it happen.
You don't request whether other people's support will allow you to make it happen.
All you do, this is the secret of success, all you do is you act like it's going to happen.
And it happens.
Long before podcasting, I used to practice speeches in my car to no one.
I had no idea that there was ever going to be an opportunity to exercise these speeches.
I just enjoyed it.
How do I build the biggest philosophy podcast in the world?
Just act like it's going to happen.
And it happens.
I put my ambitions out pretty early.
Solve the problem of ethics.
End war.
End violence.
That's the plan.
That's the goal.
Just act like it's going to happen.
And it happens.
It's a miracle.
It's magic.
It's a kind of magic.
Oh, Freddy.
Why?
why did you take so much penis and rob me of your voice?
Yeah, like, that's the whole secret to characters.
Just act like it's going to happen and it happens.
It doesn't mean you'll succeed.
The it is not the achievement.
You just act like you're going to be an actor, and that will put you into the room, which gives you the possibility of somebody wanting to cast you in a role.
Ah, well, success is impossible.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
I mean, look at all the movies and TV shows and commercials that get made and Theaters and radio dramas and whatever, right?
Radio dramas?
I don't think they even do those anymore.
Anyway, just look at everybody who's got a speaking role on any kind of media, they decided they wanted to be an actor, and they went through all the steps, took acting classes, got the headshots, sent it out, went for auditions, went for auditions, went for auditions, and just kept doing it.
So yeah, you can still get what you want if you just want to keep working at it.
My acting thing...
I actually went not to study acting, but to study playwriting.
I was more interested in writing than acting, which is kind of what I ended up doing through this show and through my novels and plays and poems and so on.
I actually went for the playwriting program, but for the first year of the playwriting program, I had to do acting, a full acting class.
And I actually ended up going to dinner with my brother and some business colleagues of his who came up from New York.
And the guy said, I think it was after the first summer of my year at acting school.
And he said, oh, what do you do?
And I said, oh, I'm studying at the National Theatre School, acting.
And I really like the acting.
I actually went for a playwriting, but I really like the acting.
I was thinking of maybe switching into that program.
And...
Do you know what happened?
The guy said, oh, that's interesting.
My brother is an actor in New York.
I said, oh, how's it going for him?
He said, well, I can tell you, it's tough.
It's tough.
Like, he gets some roles in some off-Broadway stuff that don't pay much.
He'll get, you know, the occasional commercial and, you know, just kind of enough to get by.
And he's been doing this for 10 years.
He's in his early 30s.
But, you know, he kind of wants to settle down and get married.
And it's tough because he's getting some roles, not really enough to settle down and get married, but he, you know, every next phone call could be his big break and he doesn't want to give up too early and he's really stuck.
Does he give up?
And also, he's got no other skills, right?
What's he going to do if he's not an actor?
He's got to start right at the bottom.
And so, it's going to still take him five or seven years to get any kind of decent income.
So, he's not really going to be able to settle down until it's in mid to late 40s.
Sorry, mid to late 30s, maybe even early 40s.
So, he's really sort of painted himself into a corner.
Although he's quite a good actor, he's just not able, just never caught his lucky breaker kind of thing, right?
Now, I'm a little bit more of the, you know, don't wait around to get your break, right?
I mean, go write.
Write a play.
Write a one-man show.
Write a play.
Make it something great or make it as good as you can.
Just make your own opportunities, right?
Like pull a Matt Damon, right?
Write Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck and, you know, don't wait for the right role to come along.
But this is a sort of...
Maybe you just can't write.
I mean, it's not something that everyone can do.
Oh, certainly if you don't.
So anyway, that kind of...
And I was just frankly terrified by that.
Because I knew I... I mean, I was interested in settling down at some point.
And that was just a bit too scary for me.
And I don't really think I could...
I don't really think I could...
Risk that, right?
In the arts, like 98% of money goes to 2% of the people.
So, anyway, just sort of by the by.
I mean, you can choose not to pursue a particular dream, but then just have something else that your passion is challenging for you.
For me, it was entrepreneurship in the software field and then building this show and so on, right?
But you can still do it.
You can still get what you want.
You may find out when you start to pursue what you want that it's not in fact what you want, just get something else that you want, right?
Now the third aspect of boredom, lack of opportunity, lack of courage, the third is lack of connection.
Have you ever been in a great conversation with someone about something meaningful and been bored?
No.
Have you ever been bored having great sex with someone you really love?
No.
Have you ever been bored when you have that magic carpet ride of everybody making great jokes and laughing till tears come out your nose and been bored?
No.
Because that's connection, right?
Have you ever been actively trying to solve a problem with someone where you're really brainstorming and you're really trying to figure something out, whether it's in business or sports or something?
Have you ever been in that process of really trying to solve a problem and, you know, compressing like bellows every single brain style you've got in the pursuit of firing up creativity?
Well, have you ever done that and been bored?
Of course not.
This is connection, right?
With connection...
Almost anything is possible.
Without connection, almost nothing is possible.
To surround yourself with the right people is the very definition of what is necessary for success.
I genuinely believe that you cannot achieve anything of significance Without the enthusiasm of those around you, just as those around you cannot without your enthusiasm.
There are so many stumbles and hiccups and stallings and anxieties and all that, so much of that stuff that goes on in the pursuit of anything out of the ordinary that you simply can't do it without the enthusiasm and support.
Of those around you.
And if there are people around you who ignore your goals and dreams or who undermine them or who maybe even actively oppose them, I believe that you will simply not achieve those goals.
You simply won't.
We are social beings.
Our personalities are not in our heads, right?
Our personalities, I mean, yeah, they're in our heads, but our personalities are cobwebs to everyone around us, right?
Our fuel is our relationships.
Our passions plus our relationships.
Passion without relationships is false starts.
Half the page of written lines, as Pink Floyd sing about, And so, success, first and foremost, is success in relationships.
And after success in relationships can come success in goals and dreams.
You know, there's that old line, behind every great man, behind every good man is a great woman.
And it's kind of true.
Behind every great woman is a good man.
This is what even people like Margaret Thatcher would say about her husband, that she couldn't have achieved what she achieved without him.
And so people think you sort of pick your dreams in isolation in some objectivist fashion, but that's not true.
I mean, you may pick your dreams in isolation, but you only get your dreams in a tribe.
So if you do not have connections with people, then you cannot achieve what you need to achieve.
We are all social metaphysicians to some degree.
And the idea of, like, the lonely guy who overcomes all social obstacles with no support, I mean, it's a myth.
Just look around you.
How is it manifested?
How does it show up?
It doesn't.
It doesn't show up.
It doesn't manifest.
At least I've never seen it.
And I've known a lot of people.
And you don't.
You don't see it.
And, um...
This is something underestimated.
People think it's you and your dreams.
No, it's not you.
It's you and your dreams and your tribe.
Picking who you marry, picking who your friends are, choosing whether to remain in contact with family of origin.
This all has to do with their level of support for what it is that you want to achieve in your life.
If they're with you, if they're enthusiastic, if they're critical when necessary and so on, but if they are fully committed to your dreams, then you will almost certainly achieve them.
Because if you're not achieving them, they'll counsel you to change them or whatever if it's impossible.
And that reality check and that support and that enthusiasm, which is mutual, and I'm not saying it's just one way, but in the absence of that, like I can tell you, I'm doing one of the most remarkable things around, which is attempting to goad and entice and charm people into thinking philosophically.
And I don't.
I simply do not Do not have anyone in my life who is not behind what I'm doing.
Doesn't mean they're never critical.
Doesn't mean they don't think I do the wrong thing.
Sometimes that's essential too.
That's essential feedback as well.
You cannot achieve anything out of the ordinary without people cheering you on and cursing you on.
I simply I will not have anybody in my life who is not interested in what I do, who is not interested in my family, who is not interested in my other friends.
I simply will not have anyone in my life who is not fully committed to the extraordinary nature, and largely because of technology, the unprecedented nature of what I'm doing here, of what we as a community are doing here.
Won't do it because I owe it to the world.
I owe it to philosophy to succeed.
And I cannot succeed without the support of people around me.
And I would strongly counsel that to you as well.
I would make that pretty much an absolute.
That if you're bored, it's because you lack support from people around you.
And that's something that you deserve.
But you have to work to earn it.
Thank you so much.
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