On May 2nd, 2013, Stefan Molyneux publicly announced his lymphoma diagnosis and upcoming chemotherapy treatments. Five years later, Stefan reflects on the overall experience of discovering he had lymphoma, what it was like to announce his illness to the world, and the powerful life lessons he's discovered over the last five years. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So five years ago today, I made a note in my calendar, crossed my fingers, and said, this is what I want to be doing in five years, which is to be recording this video today for you.
To hopefully give you some of the compressed wisdom that I have accumulated from what happened five years ago today, which was five years ago today, I announced to the world That I had cancer.
That I had lymphoma, which is a difficult and dangerous form of cancer.
And the story of how it was found and the misdiagnosis and the delays that went on for a year or so up here in the socialist healthcare paradise of Canada, the system that I had paid into my entire life, I had to flee from and seek Treatment or at least surgery in the United States.
And there's a couple of things I want to talk about out of that experience.
I bring back... News from the edge of death.
I bring back what the deep and empty eye sockets of infinity are desperately trying to tell us before it's too late.
And this is a video I am of course enormously relieved and pleased to be able to do.
Because it sure as hell didn't seem likely at times.
This is what cancer wants you to know.
This is what death wants you to know.
First of all, you'll really find your friends through that process.
You'll find people who will support you and you'll find people who will walk away.
A friend is someone who's walking in the door when everyone else is whistling and strolling out with their hands in their pockets looking away.
First thing I want to say is thank you everyone so, so much for your support at that time.
People stepped up and gave me love.
People stepped up to help me out with bills.
People just gave me an enormous tsunami of love and good feelings.
Through my announcement, I found wonderful new friends.
I found people well worthy of being discarded from my life.
And it was a very clarifying, switch the lights on and see things starkly kind of moment.
And thank you, my beautiful, wonderful listenership so much.
From the very bottom of my heart to the very top of my fuzz, I just want to thank you enormously for what you did during that time.
I believe healing...
Survival is to a large degree a social process.
Your body will kick in if it finds that it's needed and it has value and your life is important to people.
And the love that I got, the support that I got had a lot to do with my survival.
My life was to some degree literally in your hands and I thank you so much.
For giving me the encouragement and perhaps even the very physical opportunity to continue to do what I have done in the world ever since.
So the first thing I want to express is my absolute deep and enormous gratitude for everything that you as the greatest listenership in the history of the planet have provided me During that time and afterwards.
I know there are costs to supporting philosophy, but the rewards, I hope, are very, very much worth it.
Now, the second thing that I want to talk about, and this is why I did this sort of five-year forward note in my calendar back in the day.
I say this to my daughter.
I say, you know, my goal as a father, as a parent, is to deliver you to adulthood, you know, healthy as I can in heart, mind, and body.
You really, really need to think about your future self.
I cast this grappling hook of expectation five years in the future, and here I am.
Here I am.
And where do you want to be five years from now?
Where do you want to be 10 years from now?
Like, I'm 51 years old.
I'll be 52 this year.
I want to make it to 92, maybe more.
Maybe I'll join the undead Silicon Valley entrepreneurship of infinity.
Who knows? What are you going to deliver to your future self?
What are you going to hand to who you are 10 years from now?
That person 10 years from now is helpless.
They can't do a thing other than hope that you will listen to what they need.
Are you going to exercise?
Are you going to eat well?
Are you going to achieve a decent weight and maintain it?
Are you going to have positive, loving relationships in your life?
Are you going to detoxify the toxic around you?
What are you going to deliver to who you are six months, a year, five years, ten years, twenty years from now?
And what are you going to deliver to the world after you're dead?
Who's going to come to your funeral?
Who's going to visit your grave?
Who's going to remember that you were here?
You can leave a livid stamp on the mind of the world.
You can shoot fireworks of truth up to the very stratosphere and have people join you in cloud tripping.
Or you can be that person, he's in the background of some photos, making some Frat boy, spring break face.
And people are like, yeah, he was kind of cool.
It was a fun guy. Pretty good sense of humor.
He liked movies. I don't really know much about what he believed.
I don't, you know, he just was there.
He was carbon-based, I'm sure of that.
He was a body that required oxygen and food.
Beyond that, I couldn't really tell you much about him.
Don't be. Don't be somebody who passes through life.
You know, like you're sitting in a room with two open windows and a bird just flies through.
Wow, that was cool! And the next day you've forgotten.
It's not even a good enough story to repeat.
Don't be erased.
And don't worry so much.
Worry is a form of preparation.
Courage is execution.
Courage is when you do something about it.
You know what worry is like?
Let's say that you have a beautiful chair.
Magnificent, beautiful chair.
Made of wood. But you worry that it's not perfect.
And so you sand a little here.
Sand it down. Ah.
Now the other side seems a little bit off.
Sand it down on the other side.
And you just...
it's just not perfect.
And you sand and you sand and you sand and you sand and you sand and you sand and you sand and what do you end up with?
Thank you.
A pile of dust.
Nothing. Wasted time.
The destruction of the good for the sake of the perfect.
The search for perfection is all very well, but to look for heaven is to live here in hell.
Do not sand away your life with worries.
Act courageously. And you'll find that almost all the things you have worried about will never come to pass, and something will just sideswipe you.
Out of nowhere, and you'll find that you will actually rise to the occasion with grace and dignity and courage.
Worry is this form of self paralysis, the sanding away of all that we treasure for the sake of nothing but regret.
Don't worry so much.
Worry is planning for a war that never comes.
And then you'll find that a battle emerges out of nowhere and you'll find that you fight fine.
You fight well. You fight with courage and honor.
And you acquit yourself magnificently.
When we act, we worry less.
When we worry, we act less.
Which is why. We are infected with worry so much by the world, by society.
Oh, these bad things are happening, you can't do much about it, so you can just worry about it.
And then the worry prevents you from acting, when the worry should stimulate you to action.
And that way you can put the worry behind you, act, and feel the satisfaction of courage.
So, that's my advice.
Worry less. Act more.
Act rationally. Act reasonably.
Do not violate the Aristotelian requirement of the mean of two extremes.
An excess of courage is foolhardiness, self-destruction.
A deficiency of courage is cowardice.
Act in a way that is responsible to the virtues that you hold.
Deliver courage. Self-respect to who you're going to be in the future.
Please, this is so important.
Act in a way now that delivers self-respect to who you're going to be in the future.
Like in the same way with your health.
Act in a way now. Eat reasonably.
Exercise. Do what is necessary to be healthy so that you deliver a healthy body to yourself in the future.
Deliver a healthy mind.
An at ease conscience to yourself in the future.
This word conscience is kind of driving me nuts.
It's just vanished. It's vaporized, being beamed out of social discussions these days.
Maybe it's because I watched too much Jiminy Cricket as a kid.
Maybe it's because I read too much Dusty Esky as a teenager.
I don't know. But the conscience is the empirical part of us that like a court transcriber records our relationship or the relationship between our actions And our virtues.
What we claim, we value and what we actually do.
If you claim to respect courage, but you act in a cowardly manner.
If you claim that love is the solution, but you act from a place of continual hatred.
Then this will be recorded and your conscience will say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
We got a gap analysis going on here, and what you say you value versus what you do are not just apart, they're getting further apart every day.
And that creates discomfort and unease within ourselves.
And if you have self-knowledge, you say, okay, there's a gap between what I'm doing and what I treasure, what I value, between my virtues and my actions.
So that's a complicated negotiation.
Are your virtues unrealistic?
Do you have a standard of perfection that you can't possibly achieve?
Okay, well start adjusting your virtues.
Are your virtues reasonable but your actions falling far short of them because of cowardice?
Well then, act with more courage to close the gap.
And this is the choice that we all face.
We all have these balancing acts to do in the world.
And those around you, maybe yourself as well if you're listening to this, you're uneasy, you're tense, you're anxious, you're frustrated, you're ill at ease, you try and jet off into the other dimensions of video games or binge-watching shows or socializing or drink or drugs or meaningless sex.
You're just trying to escape.
What? What are you trying to escape?
You're trying to escape your higher self.
You're trying to escape your conscience.
And when you see people who are tense and angry and trolly and hostile and attacking and bullying, they are attempting to escape their own conscience.
Because when we have that gap between what we want or what we say we value and what we're actually doing when we have that gap, what do we do?
Well, you can raise the lower or you can lower the higher.
You can climb the mountain, or you can destroy the mountain, or you can blind people around you so they can't even see the mountain.
If you're falling short of speaking the truth, you can either screw your courage to the sticking place and start speaking the damn truth, or you can wage war not against your cowardice, but against your virtues.
You can wage war not against your failures, but the very concept of success.
I value the truth, you say, but you fail to speak it.
Your conscience says, you are a coward.
And you can either then begin to speak the truth and respect the information that your conscience is giving you, or you can say, to hell with you conscience, there's no such damn thing as truth.
I'm not a coward. There's no mountain at all.
And if there's no such thing as truth, no such thing as goodness, if morality is all subjective, if everything is subjective, if everything is relative, then you have nothing to aim for and you are free, as you believe, as you imagine, from the restrictions and punishment of a disappointed conscience.
But it doesn't work now, does it?
If you are overweight, blobby, you don't exercise.
You can either become more healthy or you can say, there's no such thing as health!
Fit at any size!
Does that change the biological reality of what you're doing to yourself?
No. In fact, it ensures that the worst outcome that can occur will occur because you won't change your behavior to match an ideal standard of health or healthy behaviors.
And the nihilism that is currently infecting the younger generations comes out of this.
Comes out of this reality that...
Instead of aiming for the higher, instead of saying, I will conform my behavior to objective standards of courage and integrity and truth and virtue, instead of that, we are going to collectively try to destroy all virtues.
To destroy the conscience by destroying the ideals.
There is nothing better that we need to strive for.
And everything then becomes, instead of striving for virtue, we then end up collapsing into a mere Darwinian striving for power.
Kennedy style. We strive for power rather than for virtue.
Because we have stripped ourselves of that which is fundamentally and elementally human about us.
What is it that differentiates us from all other creatures?
Our capacity for abstractions, our capacity for universals, Our capacity for language that contains concepts.
That is what makes us human.
Not the reptile brain.
Not the hypothalamus.
Not the medulla. It is this front post-monkey beta expansion pack of rationality and universality.
That is what makes us human.
And if we strip that out, we turn our most powerful capacity for virtue, which is philosophy, universals within us, we turn it into a manipulative, world-destroying power that seeks only resources, power, domination, the subjugation of others.
We turn those who we can converse with about the truth and virtue into livestock.
Into those who we bully and subjugate using concepts in order to feed our dopamine lust for power.
Virtue or Darwin?
These are the polls that we face.
Don't let it happen to you.
Don't let people tell you there's no such thing as truth.
Don't let anyone tell you there's no such thing as goodness.
Don't let anyone tell you there's no such thing as virtue.
Those people are trying to blind you so they can rob you blind.
Don't let it happen. To you, to those around you, to others, to your civilization, to the world.
It doesn't work. I have seen enough people traverse the giant arc of life to know that it doesn't work.
It is such a cowardly act, it condemns you within your own mind.
And the conscience... You can drive it out if you want.
You can drive it away from your consciousness, but it doesn't go.
It doesn't vanish anywhere. It doesn't disappear.
It doesn't cease to exist. It goes underground and starts to disassemble you from the spine up.
It is larger than you. It is before you.
It is broader than you. It is deeper than you.
You inherited it. You cannot control it any more than you can command your liver to stop functioning.
You cannot command your conscience to cease its operation.
And so, do not destroy the high values and virtues that you can achieve for the sake of avoiding the discomfort that you feel for failing to achieve them.
Negotiate. Rise above.
Be better. Be better.
And avoid those who wish to dismantle the truth, who wish to dismantle objectivity and reality and rationality.
They are a plague. Some can be saved.
Others must be fought or avoided as best you can.
They are the nihilistic predators of self-dissolution.
They invite you to an easy grave of avoidance.
They invite you to non-existence.
They invite you to conformity in the present, which is always invisibility to the future.
I didn't really know what he believed.
Seemed like a nice enough guy.
Twelve minutes later, your entire existence is forgotten.
So I wanted to say that.
When you face death in this kind of way, it's funny, you know, there is this push into a grave, like a very deep grave in a hole.
And you can't really avoid it because in your mind you go there anyway.
You fall into that grave.
Nothingness. Anyway, can't fight it.
We are the animals conceptually able to visualize our own deaths.
And when you face something like cancer, that's what happens.
And you fall. Can't help it.
And either you fall in or you bounce.
Like the little trampoline over the coffin.
It's a silly way to put it. There's a trampoline over the coffin.
If you're falling, what can you do?
You can shed the unnecessary.
You can shed the extraneous.
You can become lean and clean and maybe even mean.
What falls is very different from what rises when you face death.
What falls into the grave is very different from what comes out of the grave.
What comes out of the grave of the mind with the knowledge of death Is someone who has much less to fear?
Because once you face that fear, is there really much left to fear?
And once you have conquered that drive-by, once you have dodged those bullets, what is there left to fear?
I mean, people are amazed at the courage with which I bring challenging and sensitive information to public view.
Mean typing ain't got nothing on the Grim Reaper, my friends.
And I want you to have that courage without having to go through what I went through.
That's what I'm sort of trying to transfer to you as best I can at the moment.
You are far stronger than you think you are.
You are far more courageous than you think you are.
You are far more powerful than you think you are.
You are far more full of meaning than you think you are.
And people will try to shame you into avoiding the little courage that builds to the big courage.
The little pushback against somebody who's bullying someone else.
The little supports that you can provide to someone who's being bullied.
These little butterfly effects build The greater courage.
And they can inspire you don't even know who.
Who could they, who could your actions inspire?
You don't even know!
It could be somebody just passing by who decides to change their life without ever talking to you just by seeing what it is that you're doing.
That is courageous. You are far more powerful.
We are all so intermingled in this world.
We live in a world of socialized physics where every touch We are all caught in a web.
Every tremor transmits, especially with the internet now.
Every tremor transmits to everyone.
Little acts of courage, like little acts of being healthy, add up to robustness.
And a lot of times we want to wait for some big trial in order to display our courage.
When I see someone who's being robbed, I'm going to...
It's the little things that count.
It's the little things that add up.
And we avoid the little things because that's what we can do.
That's what we can act on.
And whatever we can act on is what we're most scared of.
So often. And so speak the truth.
Be courageous. If people don't like what you're saying, invite them to debate.
If they rail against you, invite them to treat you better.
If they attack you, Avoid them.
Save who you can save.
Triage 101.
Who can you save? Who can you not save?
Who's gonna survive without you?
Who's gonna die no matter what you do?
Who can you save? But first of all, yourself.
First of all, yourself.
Deliver a happy conscience, heart and mind of integrity to your future self.
Because here's the thing.
Regret is a very subtle, very dangerous whiplash demon.
Regret is the knowledge of responsibility when it's too late to change it or fix it.
Regret is the self-attack occurs after you can't fix it.
Don't let that happen.
Regret is the punishment.
It's the hell that we live in. When we could have done better, we know we could have done better, we didn't, and now it's too late to fix it.
If you are mean to the woman you love and she leaves you, you will regret it.
But why didn't you regret it enough to avoid that happening in the first place?
Now death, the empty, right, eye sockets of eternity, they stare at you and in the face of death, The courage needed to avoid regret is all-powerful.
And the fears by which we surrender our integrity are invisible.
They cease to exist. If you could go to your deathbed and come back, this is my very first video, if you can go to your deathbed and come back, what would you say to yourself?
Would you say to yourself, boy, I wish you'd played more video games.
Wish you'd binge-watched more empty shows.
Wish you'd spent more time drinking and screwing and taking drugs.
You wouldn't. And we live long enough now, these days, that regret can be a multi-decade demon that sucks out the bone marrow of any joys you might contemplate.
Don't do it. Don't do it.
Act with courage now.
Act with resolution now.
Be bigger than those around you can even fathom.
You know, a lot of times, the people who end up achieving great things in the world, in life, Come from very compressed and dysfunctional backgrounds.
Because to get out of that mess, you have to push and strain and develop your musculature to the point where you seem to have superhuman powers when you finally break out of the icy biodome of dysfunction.
You strain and you push, you break free, and people are like, how can you leap so high?
How can you carry so much?
It's like, well, just to walk among you, I had to become superhuman.
And never underestimate how many people you can inspire by simple acts of truth and virtue and courage and goodness.
We act, of course, because we wish to do good, to be consistent, to speak the truth.
Because I don't want to be self-erased for fear that speaking the truth will result in attack.
You know, once you face the grave where no more truth is possible, the truth becomes all too wonderful.
An entity to hold and to follow.
There's something else I think that's important as well that really occurred for me after surviving cancer, which is, you know, I have this relationship to philosophy that is Kind of the same as, I think, a lot of people's relationship to God.
So what does God want of me?
What does virtue want of me? What would Jesus do?
I have this with regards to philosophy.
That I say, what does philosophy need of me today?
What does the world need of me today?
When you act with courage, you become egoless.
It's not about vanity.
It's not about praise. It's not about approval.
It can't be. Integrity can never be about approval because integrity...
It's required because we're so tempted by our need for approval.
We're social animals. We evolved that way.
But being of service, having the humility to say, well, I have particular talents.
What does the world need of me today?
What does the future need of me today?
What does philosophy need of me today?
What does virtue need of me today?
These are very powerful things.
When you're serving a greater cause, you don't worry as much about your own concerns.
And it's a wonderful thing.
If you worry too much, it's because you're aiming too low.
If you have a high enough goal, your worries will vanish.
You can't see ants from the top of the mountain.
One way to avoid paralysis and worry is to have ridiculously lofty goals and then you get so consumed with the pursuit of those goals that you forget to be afraid.
And that's a beautiful thing. And if your goal, as it was five years ago, was job one.
Don't die! That's my big goal.
Don't die! If you achieve that, what else really is there left to worry about?
So, these are the things that I wanted to talk about when I wrote down five years ago what I wanted to talk about if I achieve job one called don't die.
