June 24, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:51
4128 YouTube: The Price of Fame
Recently there have been several videos from prominent YouTube Content Creators discussing feelings of stress and burnout, which have prompted a wider discussion of the phenomenon in the mainstream media. Stefan Molyneux discusses the price of fame, and the importance of not being wholly dependent on the opinion of other people. 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
Hope you're doing well. So this article caught my eye.
I wanted to go over it with you guys.
YouTube's top creators are burning out and breaking down en masse.
And the general mantra is that this is all I've ever wanted.
Why am I so unhappy?
Now that is a fascinating question.
So many people want to be famous.
So many people want to be prominent.
So many people want a public persona.
And imagine, of course, that the praise, the criticism, the attention, the money is going to make everything in your life better.
It is the great lure of fame and prominence to imagine that everything is great.
Now, it doesn't seem to matter How many times we see famous, rich, beautiful, talented people kill themselves or get divorced or become addicted to drugs or have their children go off the rails and have a generally miserable existence.
It doesn't really seem to matter. This idea, this goal, this fantasy, that fame is going to make you happy, that popularity is going to make you secure, is Well, it's a very dangerous delusion and something which isn't really talked about as much.
So, the article by Julie Alexander, this is on Polygon, is talking about how this guy Bobby Burns, he's a YouTuber with just under one million subscribers, I guess.
You know, it's funny, I never really think of myself as a YouTuber.
I think of myself as a philosopher and so on, but not a YouTuber, but I have almost 800,000 subscribers.
I have Half a billion views and downloads.
And so, yeah, I guess I'm in that category, which is also, I guess, why I wanted to talk about this.
So this Bobby Burns sat down in Rock in Central Park to talk about a recent mental health episode.
Elle Mills, Canadian.
She has more than 1.2 million subscribers.
Uploaded a footage that included vulnerable footage during a breakdown.
Ruben Gunderson, the third most popular YouTuber in the world with just under 30 million subscribers, turned on his camera to talk to his viewers.
about the fear of an impending breakdown and his decision to take a break from YouTube.
Eric Phillips, 4 million subscribers, Benjamin Cranor Vestergaard, 2.7 million subscribers, have either announced briefed hiatuses from the platform or discussed their own struggles with burnout.
Ah PewDiePie, the great PewDiePie, 62 million subscribers to Jake Paul, have dealt with burnout and There is, you know, there is this algorithm that is like the physics of what you do and what you try and navigate and it really is like trying to drive at high speed blindfolded because obviously YouTube does not reveal the nature and details of the algorithm that helps promote your videos and get you new subscribers and get you views and so on.
And so you are trying to navigate when things are not only obscure but I think constantly And if your views go down because there's been an algorithm change, do you look in the mirror and say, I'm doing terribly, people aren't interested, it's all over!
Or if your views go up because of a change in the algorithm, do you think that you're just naturally gaining success and so on?
It's like trying to play baseball when they constantly dial up and down the gravity.
It's a pretty wild phenomenon.
So yeah, there are changes to the platform.
Of course, there's massive competition.
Out here in social media land and YouTube land, there's massive competition.
Back in the day, when you were running a show, like a television show or whatever, a news show, well, you were pretty much the only game in town, or maybe there was another game or two in town, but when I grew up, there were basically two channels, BBC One and ITV. There was BBC Two, but I think there was just a tax write-off.
Nobody seemed to watch it. And so now anybody with a webcam and ideas and personality and the willingness to take on risk, well, they can be your competitors.
So it is a big challenge.
And so, yeah, the question is, I apologize for the language, but it's the least of the problems here.
The caption is, why the fuck am I so un-fucking-unhappy?
So Elle Mills did a video May 18th.
She said, my life just changed so fast.
My anxiety and depression keeps getting worse and worse.
I'm literally just waiting for me to hit my breaking point.
And this is the big challenge.
This is the fundamental question that philosophy aims to answer in terms of happiness.
So L. Mills said, And she's someone she wanted to be a YouTuber from, I mean, out of the womb, right?
She looked at the video camera, I'm sure, of her own birth, and said, hmm, I'd like more of this.
This sounds good. So she said, this is all I ever wanted, and why the fuck am I so un-fucking unhappy?
It doesn't make any sense.
You know what I mean? Because, like, this is literally my fucking dream, and I'm fucking so un-fucking happy, it doesn't make any fucking sense.
It's so stupid. It is so stupid.
Now, this is a form of self-attack for being unhappy, and unhappiness...
Is like physical pain.
We don't like physical pain.
But physical pain is how we know that we're injured and encourages us very strongly to avoid repetition of You know, like all those strawberry knee cuts you got as a kid while skateboarding and biking and so on.
That was a way of teaching you to be careful.
And a book that I read when I was younger really struck me with this.
It was the Thomas Covenant series by Stephen Donaldson.
And the hero has to do what's called a VSE, like a visual search of extremities.
He has to keep checking that he doesn't have any cuts and bruises because he can't feel.
And that is pretty bad.
So unhappiness in general is a way of saying That you are not doing good.
You're not doing good in the world.
You may be popular, but are you doing good?
And we'll get into that in a second.
So then she announced on Twitter she was taking a break from YouTube and social media.
She couldn't keep up with the pressure, told her fans that while she was safe and in good hands, she needed time to recuperate and remember why she loved making videos in the first place.
Sam Schaeffer, and he's a popular YouTuber, took a break from Twitter for similar reasons.
And he said on a video, I've often talked about the pressures of being a YouTuber and it's a tricky thing to talk about because to find success on YouTube is to live the dream.
Like this is the ultimate.
And if you achieve this kind of success on this platform, which so many people try to do, like how dare you complain about it?
It is difficult to talk about because unless you've been in this position, I think it's challenging to empathize with it.
So there is a schedule.
Oh yes, it does feel like a little bit.
In fact, it feels a lot like a treadmill.
Because there's this idea, well, if you don't post for a while, people will lose interest, they'll go to other platforms, they'll go to other YouTubers, they'll go to other social media outlets, and they'll just kind of forget about you.
And also there's this idea that the algorithm rewards you if you're on the hamster wheel of producing videos.
And so this idea that, you know, PewDiePie uploaded at least once a day, He said that the rigorous pace of YouTube video creation led him to his own obsession with the platform.
And then you end up feeling trapped by your success.
And this November 2016, PewDiePie was saying, I'm sure he said whamming, but he also said, I think I have a pretty high tolerance of stress, but it just got worse when it came here.
I'm really sorry. It really sucks for me.
I've always put YouTube first, always.
Even when I'm working on other projects, it doesn't matter.
You guys come first. That's my main thing.
But I can't do that while I'm here.
Keeping the vlogs up is just impossible at this point.
Burnout is highly competitive, creative and front-facing fields like YouTube is common.
I mean, Saturday Night Live has an entire week of professionals and movie stars and singers and so on to come up with a show.
And in general, it's, well, I haven't watched it in a while, but it's generally not particularly good, or at least it hasn't been for quite some time.
So they have a week to produce a show with commercial breaks, with musical acts and so on, couple skits.
And even then, it's really, really tough for them to come up with good stuff.
Imagine doing a half hour a day or an hour a day when it's just you.
It is a big challenge for a lot of people.
Plus, of course, you're working at home.
And when you're working at home, like work-life balance is tough enough when you've got an office, you can at least leave and so on.
But when you're working from home, you know, suppose that Thomas Sanders has that video where, you know, checking your phone at night, right?
Turns on his phone, like a searchlight into his face.
And that is a temptation.
You have to kind of resist it, I think.
You need to have your space away from what it is that you're doing in order to bring something to what it is that you're doing.
So the work-life balance is really tough.
How many hours should you be working?
Is there this feeling that you could be doing better, that you could be doing more?
It's a never-ending treadmill.
And... Yeah, so Ruben Gundersen, he said he could feel the pressure building for years, never took time off to address it.
He had panic attacks, went to visit a doctor, he knew he needed to stop.
Yeah, I've been doing this for seven years without stopping, without being able to see how I'm living from the outside.
I always have in my mind what's going to be next, the next trips, the next project, and it sounds like first world problems, I know, but when you get everything together and you want it to be 100%, you give 100%, and give 100%, sometimes you can't.
Very tough. So Tyler Blevins talks about schedule, right?
The schedule, right? So he says, the schedule is 9.30 is when I start in the morning and then I play until 4.
So that's like six and a half hours.
I hope you do the 20-20 rule, 20-20-20 rule, which is every 20 minutes, looking at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
Save your vision. It's important. So then he'll say, then I'll take a nice three to four hour break with the wife, the dogs, or family, we have like family nights too, and then come back on around seven o'clock central until like two, three in the morning, the minimum is 12 hours a day, and then I'll sleep for less than six or seven hours.
That is, I mean, that's Dickensian, that's, you know, early childhood, stuff them up at chimney labor from the Industrial Revolution.
And so, yeah, people, they want AdSense, they have projects, merchandise, sometimes they'll do tours, and this is a big, a big challenge, right?
So, people have tried to read the very foggy Rosetta Stone of the YouTube algorithm, and people say, oh, you've got to make videos longer than 10 minutes.
And frequency. It is strongly believed that YouTube accounts with more than 10,000 subscribers should post daily because YouTube's algorithm favors frequency and engagement.
And that's tough. Can you come up with quality content every single day?
Well, I believe that I can.
But, you know, I mean, you can look at YouTube views, whether it's quality or not.
Certainly popularity waxes and wanes from video to video.
Their growing demonetization concerns is a big problem.
So if you touch on any controversial topics, then you generally have faced that frustration or fear of demonetization.
And Of course, YouTube keeps it under wraps.
Maybe they don't like the way the algorithm is playing out on YouTube, or maybe they don't want people to understand the algorithm and then to work around it or to find ways to bypass it or game it, I suppose, right?
It's a little bunch of intelligent people and so on.
And so, yeah, there really is a very big...
And you can read the whole article, which I think you should.
But let me tell you what I think is the most important aspect of all of this, which is this desire for fame and what it is able to achieve and what it definitely is not able to achieve.
So here's why the pursuit of fame is going to make you more miserable in general.
So if you're unhappy with yourself, if you lack good relationships, if you lack a meaningful purpose to your life, then that's going to give you a sense of hollowness, of emptiness, of nihilism, and you can attempt to fill that.
With the dopamine drug of other people's eyeballs, you can attempt to surf people's eyeballs as a way of reaching the shore of happiness, but you're going to crash and crater.
For the simple reason that either one of two things is going to happen.
Either A, your pursuit of popularity does make you happier, does give you relief from negative emotional symptoms, or it doesn't.
Now, if it doesn't, and this was the big dice roll that you were going to make in order to achieve happiness, you don't have a plan B. And then you have to kind of face yourself in the dark midnight of the soul and say, okay, well, I was hoping that success was going to make me happy.
I have put a huge amount of work into becoming successful.
It hasn't made me happy.
And that's when the depression really hits.
Because if there's a drug that's going to save you, and it's the only drug that's around, and the drug doesn't work...
Well, then what? Then what do you do?
How do you solve the problem of unhappiness?
Now, the other logical possibility is that your pursuit of wealth and fame and popularity and so on, it does make you happy.
Ah, okay.
But now you're addicted because you have to continue to receive that attention.
You have to continue probably to grow because even if you stay stable, the depression is going to probably start creeping back.
So if happiness fails to materialize through your pursuit of fame, then you've got to deal with your unhappiness, and that's a big problem.
Or it does help you diminish for a time your unhappiness, in which case you have to keep getting that attention in order to ward off what Churchill called the black dog, right?
The depression, the anxiety, whatever it is, it's your negative emotional state.
Now, even if it's true that the fame and the money or whatever it is does make you happy, well, the problem then becomes, what are you doing it for?
Now, it is my particular view that, but not just my particular view, it's a very common view among philosophers, which is, That if you want to be happy, you must first be rational and then you must be virtuous and then you will be happy.
That happiness is an end state that you achieve through the rigorous pursuit of reason and virtue.
In the same way that if you want to be buff, if you want to be slender, if you're overweight...
You can't really aim at muscles.
You can aim at exercise. You can't really aim at thinness.
You can aim at dieting.
And so there's particular actions.
You need to learn about how to exercise and how to eat well.
And then you need to rigorously and consistently pursue the actions of exercise and eating well.
And then the end result will be muscularity or slimness.
And so it's the same thing with happiness.
We all want to be happy, but generally we don't really know how to be happy.
And the pursuit of happiness has been taken away from the priests in general and been given to the advertisers.
In other words, there are all of these lifestyles that you're supposed to pursue in order to be happy, that if you're thin enough and you're pretty enough and you have the right accessories and I mean, even Kate Spade's handbags couldn't save her, right?
And so the pursuit of happiness has now been co-opted by the transfer of money, which is a very horrifying and horrible development.
And it is hedonism and narcissism and materialism.
They are the water that Rushes in to the emptying out of the human soul, right?
So when you don't have meaning, when you don't have purpose, when you don't have virtue, when you don't have love, then you pursue the grim Second prize of happiness when you don't have virtue, which is status, which is people think you're cool and therefore, or people think that you have value or people enjoy your entertainment and therefore you have value.
Now, that's not going to last.
You don't actually have relationships with people on the other side of a monitor, right?
You're watching this somewhere, somehow you're listening to this and so on.
We don't have a relationship.
I mean, I get your feedback, but we don't have a relationship in the same way you have a relationship with your husband, your wife, your mother, your father, your children, and so on.
It's not a relationship. And I think it's great that people enjoy what it is that I do, and I'm glad to be able to be doing it, and I have been doing it now for 11 years.
And it's a real privilege and an honor to be at the center of this kind of Philosophical conversation in the world, and I am very grateful, as I feel literally every day, for the opportunity to have these.
But the question is, the fundamental question that leads to happiness, is the question of why are you doing it?
So Nietzsche said way back, if you give a man a why, he could bear almost any how.
What he meant by that is if there's a purpose to what you're doing that is great enough, then you will find some way to do it and to keep doing it.
So for me, just speaking personally, I do this not because I want to be famous.
I don't really like being known.
I would rather it be completely anonymous.
I'd like to be a talking finger puppet rather than everybody be able to see and hear me, but that is necessary for what it is that I do.
The eye contact, the courage to publicly speak, challenging positions.
It's important. It's foundational too.
The success of philosophy.
So I'm not in it for the fame.
Now, the question of why you're in it, why you're doing it, why do you want to be famous, is really, really important.
If you want to be famous for you, it seems unlikely to last, or certainly unlikely to bring you significant happiness.
So the question is, why are you doing it?
Why I'm doing it is because I serve philosophy.
Philosophy is necessary for the world to be happy, to be healthy, to progress.
And anti-philosophical, anti-rational, anti-virtue forces are busy at work in the world.
And I believe that if you have the capacity to do good in the world, well, you should just kind of do good in the world.
It's the idea that if you're a doctor or you know the Heimlich maneuver, And somebody's choking to death on a fishbone in a seat next to you at the restaurant, you say, well, I'm really enjoying my carrot cake.
I'm not going to do anything. Well, you get up and you help.
If you have the capacity to help, then you should.
And I do have a very rare ability to synthesize abstractions, communicate them, and engage in a positive way for people to understand who aren't trained in philosophy.
So I'm kind of like a babble fish of translation from concepts to actions, if you remember Douglas Adams' old great series.
So I do it in service of philosophy.
I do it in service of the world.
In other words, it's not about me.
It's not about my ego. It's not about people thinking I'm smart or thinking that I'm eloquent or thinking that I'm funny.
It's not what it's about. I will do.
I will make jokes.
I will, as the old Queen song says, I'll sing to you in Japanese if that's what it takes.
I'll rap.
I'll sing. I'll do silly things in order to get people engaged in philosophy.
But what I want to do is to introduce people to philosophy.
I don't really care what they think about me that much, and I think that gives me a certain...
Indifference to people's perspectives on me.
Oh, Steph, you're dumb. And it's like, that's not the point.
I mean, the point is, you know, like if you're introducing a friend, let's say you have a friend, and his name is Bob, and then you have another friend whose name is Sally.
And you think Bob and Sally would be really good for each other.
They would be great partners.
They might even go the distance, become married, have kids, and have all of that great stuff.
And so you set up a meeting.
Let's say they don't know each other.
You set up a meeting between Bob and Sally.
Now, your concern should not be about yourself.
Ooh, do they think I'm good at setting people up?
Do they like my outfit? Do they like the restaurant that I chose?
That would be kind of weird, right?
Your focus is on whether Bob and Sally...
Like each other. And you hope that they do.
But it's not about you. It's about the connection that you can make between Bob and Sally, which will bring them happiness.
Now, Bob and Sally's happiness will bring you happiness and so on.
But fundamentally, it's about Bob and Sally at that moment.
So you understand Sally is philosophy and Bob is you, right?
So I want to introduce you to philosophy, to clear critical thinking.
And I don't really care what you think about me.
I care about what you think about philosophy.
Because that is the path to happiness.
The relationship that brings us love primarily is our relationship with virtue.
Love is not lust.
Love is not the endorphin that comes from the relief from loneliness that happens when you collide with someone in a fairly random kind of way.
Love is not infatuation.
Love is our involuntary emotional response to virtue manifested in the behavior of another.
It is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
If we're immoral or amoral, then we will generally feel anger, rage, resentment, hostility towards manifestations of virtue.
But if we ourselves are virtuous, and we see virtue manifested in the behavior of another, we will feel love for that person.
It may not be romantic love, it may not result in sexual contact, but we will certainly feel love and veneration, worship, respect, and so on for that.
So if you want love, You have to be virtuous.
Like, if you want love, you have to be virtuous.
Now, communicating that, communicating what virtue is and how to achieve it, which has been really at the center of what I have done, lo, these many years in the public sphere, teaching people what virtue is and how to achieve it, that is The best way to bring happiness to the world.
I want more love in the world.
I want more connection in the world.
I want good people to win and I want bad people to change or lose.
I want virtue to triumph and I want evil to either become virtuous or to lose.
Lose bad, lose hard, lose in a smoking crate or lose irrevocably and be exposed for the malevolent destruction that it is.
So for me, it's not about me.
And it doesn't mean you have to be a philosopher talking about virtue in order to make it not about you.
If you're a comedian, is your goal to have people think that you're funny and that you're clever and that, right?
Or is your goal to bring laughter to the world because laughter makes people happy and you're just a means for achieving that?
If it's about you, it's unsustainable.
And if it's about you, you will never have the leadership that is needed to break new ground.
Because if, let's say, you're a comedian, and the whole reason you do it is so that people think that you're funny and clever and cool and whatever, right?
Then you're actually kind of a slave to the audience.
Because when they laugh...
You're up. And when they don't laugh, you're down.
Whereas if it's about a larger mission, if it's about bringing laughter to the world, if people don't laugh, you're like, okay, well, I failed to bring laughter to the world.
Let me rejig and figure out what I can do to bring more laughter to the world because people need laughter.
It releases endorphins.
It makes us happy. It reduces stress.
So it's just about dedicating yourself to a goal.
And if you dedicate yourself to a goal, Then your own personal highs and lows, they're not irrelevant.
Of course, you go through them and they matter.
But they're not relevant to the larger purpose of what it is that you're up to.
Because if you're a comedian and you want to be thought of as smart and clever and funny and all those kinds of things, then what happens is...
The audience is in control of what you're doing.
The audience has the power to make or break not just your comedy act, but your value and worth as a human being.
It's the same thing on YouTube.
Are your views up? Do people like what you're doing?
Are their views down? Do people dislike what you're doing?
If it's about whether you're liked or not, then you are being flown like a kite by your audience, and you can't be a leader.
In that way. And you can't challenge your audience.
And you need to be able to challenge your audience.
You know, I've joked with my producer that sometimes the goal of this show is make a friend, break a friend, make a friend, break a friend.
Because people come along and they say, oh, I really like what Steph has to say about this.
And then I apply the same objective principles to something else.
And then it's like, oh, that's bad.
I don't like that. That's right.
But the principles are the key because the purpose for me is not to be liked.
The purpose is not to be popular.
The purpose is not to be famous.
The purpose is not to get views.
The purpose is to bring wisdom to the world.
The purpose is to bring philosophy and virtue to the world so that people are virtuous, so that virtue wins, so that people have the capacity for love, so that marriages are stable because when you marry based on virtue, It's stable and it lasts.
I've been married over 15 years and I'm going to stay married until the end because marriage is based on virtue, not on attractiveness, not on coolness, not on money, not on any of these things.
So you understand. So that is a challenge.
In order to be successful, you have to be a leader.
In order to be a leader, you have to have a mission that is not dependent upon your own ego.
Because you can't lead people if you're enslaved to them.
You can't lead people if you're a follower.
You can't lead people if you're dependent upon their good or bad opinion for your own emotional happiness or unhappiness.
And I'm not saying that I don't think it's possible or healthy to achieve this, you know, Ayn Rand protagonist detachment from all negative opinions.
Negative opinions can be helpful.
But they're just not about you.
They're about your mission. They're about your mission.
Like, if you're driving to Vegas with someone...
And that person says, I think you're going in the wrong direction.
You don't sit there and say, oh, you think I'm a bad driver and a bad person?
It's like, no, you check your GPS and you recalibrate, you realign, then you end up...
It's not personal.
You understand the goal is to get to Vegas.
And whatever helps you get to Vegas is great.
And if you have a goal that's larger than, I want attention, I want to be famous, I want money.
If you have a goal that's larger than that, then you can survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
And then the amazing thing is...
Here's the amazing thing. And I don't know exactly how all of this works.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
But here's the amazing thing, my friends.
If you really care about people's opinions, you are giving them way too much power over you, and they will abuse that power.
They will attack you, they will torture you, they will undermine you.
Understand, right? If you have a larger mission, then other people's opinions become somewhat irrelevant.
So, to understand the difference between navigating your life by principles and navigating your life by popularity, think of you've got to walk a mile through the woods.
It's thick woods. It's deep.
It's kind of boggy. Now, if you try it during the day, clear blue skies, it's sunny out, those beautiful leafy green fractals are flowing across your face, birds, bees, butterflies, everything out.
It's an enjoyable hike, maybe a bit of a challenge, but you can see where you're going.
You can step over the logs.
You can skirt the swamp and so on.
You can get where you're going. Now imagine trying to do that at 2 o'clock in the morning.
It's still a cloud-free sky.
There's some stars out and a bit of a crescent moon.
You can kind of see a little bit, but it's going to be really complicated.
There's lots of shadows, and you're going to trip.
You're going to splash into water.
It's going to get really frustrating, and you're probably going to lose your bearings because you can't see very far at all.
So navigating by principles, sunlight.
Navigating by popularity, moonlight.
Now, if you put the two together, you ever see, of course you have, right?
I remember when I was a kid, the first time I saw the moon was out while the sun was out.
It's crazy. The world is imploding.
It's upside down. What's going on?
So imagine this. It's not like you don't care about popularity.
It just is not what you focus on when it comes to navigating your life.
So if you're walking through the woods and the sun is out and the moon is out at the same time, okay, yeah, the moon is giving you a tiny little bit of extra light.
You see it. You notice it.
But that's not what's guiding you.
That's not what you're motivated and moving by.
You're motivated and moving by according to principles.
And it's not like there's no moon in the sky.
It's just not what you guide yourself by.
And so other people's opinions, they don't have the power to alter things.
Your fundamental goal. And when you are not dependent upon other people for your sense of self-worth, they actually don't end up attacking you that much.
Because people attack you in order to feel a sense of power over you.
If you can't control reality, if you can't control your own life, you will end up trying to control other human beings to give yourself a sense of efficacy, a sense of power.
The worst thing for a bully is to be Humiliated.
Now, if a bully tries to attack you and the attack doesn't work, then the bully feels humiliated.
And so the bully will avoid trying to attack you because the bully's powerlessness over a strong person is revealed.
The bully who tries to appear strong attacks a strong person, ends up appearing weak, which is the worst thing for a bully to experience.
So the other reason I'm saying to you, have a goal that's larger than yourself, your self-image, your own ego.
Have a goal that's larger and bigger.
Because then you'll have a lot more fun as a public persona.
You'll have a lot more enjoyment.
You'll get a lot more respect.
You'll get a lot fewer attacks.
And you can bring more truth and be more of a leader to your audience.
So again, it doesn't all have to be about virtue and abstractions and philosophy and concepts and all that kind of stuff.
It can be about doing goofy things that make people smile.
That's perfectly fine. The question is why.
If it's about you, it won't work.
You will slowly be worn down.
Because being dragged around, being flown like a kite, being manipulated by your audience like a Hand puppet is not fun in the long run.
Now, recalibrate yourself and say, okay, why is it that I'm doing this?
What is my larger and major purpose?
If it has something to do with bringing goodness to the world, with bringing joy, happiness, laughter, love, whatever it is, if it has something to do with bringing something good to the world, not only do the haters become irrelevant, not only do you lose the wild ups and downs of success and failure,
But because you are orbiting the sun of truth and love and so on, the stability, the happiness, the passion, the power, and the effectiveness of what you do goes up exponentially.
And then you have something that is truly sustainable, which is the spread of happiness in the world.
It's not about you. It's about goodness.
It's about joy. It's about connection.
It's about love. And if it's about that, They can fire all the weapons they want at you.
