4276 Death by a Thousand Words... (My New Years Gift to You!)
Happy New Year from Freedomain Radio!Many of us have spent a lot of time around family during the holidays – has it been a liberating experience, or a confining one?One problem with historical relationships is that you tend to get labels attached to you, and it can be tough to overcome those labels – in 2019, make a commitment to overcome historical limitations and live your most powerful life yet!▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
I wanted to share with you one of the greatest insights that I ever had about personal freedom, personal liberty, and how to exercise it.
And there's some lack of freedom that we can't do much about in this world.
There are social upheavals, there are demographic changes, there are taxes, there are regulations, and so on.
Cities can decay.
It seems like they're being eaten up by ants right under our feet.
But there are some things that we really can do.
In terms of enhancing our personal liberty, and I want to give you the most powerful one that I've found in my life.
I'm a younger sibling.
The youngest sibling of two.
And when I was growing up, I was a small kid.
I didn't really get into becoming larger until I was in my mid-teens when I began to work out and so on, got taller.
But I was the smallest and I was the youngest.
Now, like most young kids, what I wanted to do was be around the older kids because older kids were cool and magic and had secrets, knew how to do things.
And I really loved to I put my energies, my wits, my speed, such as it was, to the test of competing with older kids.
And I had some scorn, maybe even less interest in kids my own age.
Which was annoying to the older kids, I know, at times, but was quite helpful to me.
So, the good thing about wanting to hang out with my older siblings' friends and wanting to do all of that was that I matured more quickly and I tested myself against people who were older.
And you know, three years is a big difference between 10 and 13 in terms of intellectual development and so on and speed and all that.
So as an athlete, I was constantly competing against older kids.
I mean, you know, like a backyard athlete.
And in terms of debates, in terms of arguments and all that, I was constantly competing against older kids.
And I learned really fast.
Having a conversation with one of my peer friends in school, where the guy said something like, you know, the Coke in a can of Coke only costs a nickel, but they sell it for 50 cents, that's a 45 cent profit.
And thinking, now that can't be right, but not knowing exactly.
And then one of my siblings' friends told me, oh yeah, well you know, you gotta pay the workers, you gotta pay the factory, you got taxes, you got energy, you got advertising, trucking, you know, marketing, you name it, right?
And so, I got to develop quite quickly, I guess because I was interested in all the kids, but the problem was I was always the youngest, always the smallest, always the slowest physically.
And that was frustrating, of course.
Now, the reason I'm telling you all of this is because I began to be categorized In a particular kind of way.
As young.
As somebody who was always a follower.
Because if you're hanging around, for the most part, with kids who are older than you, they're further ahead in life's journey.
They're kissing girls.
They're, you know, doing all these things that I wasn't doing.
So they're ahead.
So you can never feel like a leader.
You can never feel like you're in charge.
You can never feel that people are looking up to you.
That they're trying to drink deep of the well of your wisdom, so to speak.
And so you get an advantage like everything.
Take what you want and pay for it.
In everything in life there are advantages and disadvantages.
So the advantage was accelerated my intellectual and physical development quite quickly.
But on the other hand I always felt like the tin can on the tail of a kite.
I always felt like the tin can being dragged behind a just married car.
I felt like I was always playing catch up and could never take a leadership role.
Being categorized as the young one, as the small one, as the follower, had some empirical evidence to it.
It kind of was how things were in the way that I was growing up.
And I'm still happy I did it.
I'm glad I made those decisions and I'll take the downside with the upside.
But here's the problem.
When you get a label, and the label will generally come in from outside, But then it sticks, doesn't it?
It sticks.
Especially when we grow up without strong values, without a strong community.
I grew up without a father, you know.
You're looking, you're like a thin bag of water in search of some container, some shape that you can put yourself into.
And so the labels stick to us and they define us in a way, they give us shape.
So I was small, I was young, I was the follower.
I felt this into my twenties, my early twenties, that I was forever going to be kneeling at the feet of intellectual and artistic and musical gods far beyond my capacities.
And I guess it kept me kind of humble, but it also kept me kind of crumpled.
You know what?
Sometimes you can compact things down.
You know, you had to fold a suitcase.
Sometimes you can compact things down, squish them down, and it's actually quite effective and quite efficient.
Other times, of course, what happens is you try and squish something down, and you just kind of break it.
You know, like those guys who can...
Bluto style, break the beer, cans on their foreheads.
Hey look, it's flat, but you know, the beer's all spilt.
So, labels is something I've been thinking about quite a bit lately because you probably have this in your family or in your community or in your church or somewhere that you become the X, whatever X is.
And there may be some empirical evidence at the beginning But then it tends to become self-reinforcing, and that is a great constraint on our personal flexibility and our capacity to assume new roles, which is what freedom really is all about.
You know, the serfs in the early medieval era in some parts of Europe were like bought and sold with the land.
They could choose what to plant to some degree, but they couldn't really choose much else.
Not really much fun having choices.
In one family I know, one of the kids, well, he's the troublemaker.
He's the troublemaker.
He's always getting into trouble.
There's nothing but trouble.
Everywhere he goes is trouble.
And I don't know.
See, the stuff that starts empirical doesn't always stay empirical.
My daughter went through a very outgoing phase when she was very young, and then she went through a year or two where she was very, very shy.
Didn't want to talk to anyone outside the family.
And then she just started chatting with everyone, and that's how it's been going ever since.
So at the beginning, if I'd have said, oh, you see, she's a shy one.
She's a shy kid, right?
So if she's a shy kid, I should probably not put her in Strange or dangerous situations a lot, you know?
I should keep her home and keep her nestled close to the bosom of the family and all that.
And... If I had done that, if I had kept her...
confined, so to speak, or safe, or in the bosom of the family.
I never would have experienced her, or she wouldn't have experienced going through, right?
The outgoing phase.
Well, she was outgoing, ingoing, then outgoing, right?
Extroverted, introverted, extroverted.
So, I don't like the idea that we attach labels to people because then there's also confirmation bias, right?
Confirmation bias.
So, let's say you're a kid and you're You're carrying the, you know, you make, like we all did, right?
You make food for your mom or whatever when you're like six.
And then you carry that, and you drop the tray, and it goes, right?
Oh, it's a big family, there's a big cleanup, it's a big mess, and maybe your family is good-humored about it and all that, but the reality is that it's this thing that you did that was, quote, clumsy, right?
Now, if Like a bird after a long journey landing in a final nest.
If that label sticks to you, now you see you're the clumsy one.
Then what happens is, the 50 times you do things without being clumsy, people don't notice because you see you're the clumsy one and that doesn't fit the label, right?
Labels are around confirmation bias for the most part.
And then you see maybe a month or two after You drop the tray of food you're bringing up to your mom.
What you do is you reach for something and you knock over a glass of juice.
And then, aha!
You see?
He's the clumsy one.
Right?
And then, I don't know, three months later you're snowshoeing and trip over a bramble bush.
Aha!
You see?
So then you get this confirmation bias.
You got a label.
And the label sticks to you.
Maybe because it was empirical.
It just, you're the, you know, oh she's the quiet one.
Oh yeah, she's the quiet one.
She just doesn't really.
So what happens is, you don't generally put the quiet one in much of a social situation.
You don't sit down necessarily and chat with the quiet.
She's the quiet one.
And that's the box.
And it becomes from a label almost to like a noose of other opportunities.
And that is what I really want to Warn you against.
If you look at your own life and your own history and you say to yourself, what are the labels that people use to describe me?
You will learn a lot about yourself and you will learn a lot about how opportunities for different forms of expression have often been stifled in your life.
Right?
Funny story, turns out I'm actually a pretty good leader.
But, the problem was, because I was hanging around with older kids, when I would try to assert any kind of leadership role in those groups, what would happen is, people would, in general, dismiss them.
Roll their eyes, because, you see, I was the younger one, I was sometimes the annoying one, I was the one who was always playing catch-up, I was the one who always had to have things explained to him, and I was the one who was always just sitting, absorbing information rather than contributing as much, so... I just, I wasn't a leader.
And because I wasn't a leader, I wasn't allowed to flex any leadership muscles, to develop any leadership muscles.
And this happened when I went into the business world.
I went into the business world with a family member and the same thing kind of happened.
It was really, really wild because I ended up having about, I think it was about 20 people reporting to me.
I was running a whole research and development arm of a software company.
I was chief technical officer and so on.
The people who worked for me really, really respected my leadership.
But others, who knew me from before, did not.
And that's pretty wild.
Because when you start to exercise something that goes against the label, then The people who don't know you from the past are perfectly willing to accept whatever you're doing that's now, right?
If people don't know that you were never the leader, then you exercise leadership, but they're like, fine, because they don't have any history of the labels, they're just long shadows that cast upon you.
And this, you know, don't you have this, you had this fantasy probably, I know I did, you know, when you were a...
Maybe in your early mid-teens or whatever that you were gonna go to some new school.
You're gonna transfer from one school to another over the summer.
You know, you work out like crazy and you get great gel for your hair and your acne clears up.
Whatever is holding you back and you go, you stride in some place as a new person with no history and you can define yourself in the moment.
That is a real thing though.
That is a real thing that can... I know people say nobody changes, nobody changes.
But I wonder why so few people change.
Oh, she's the loud one, you see?
So what you do is you stop asking her to lower her voice.
She's just the loud one.
So then she becomes the loud one, she stays the loud one.
And then what happens is the other kids have to get louder to compete, so she gets louder and becomes, like, the label becomes, the definition becomes the cage of possibility, of opportunity.
So, When you face people who are meeting you for the first time, and you can define yourself based upon your interactions with them, not based upon this long shadow of history and labels, then you have a particular view of yourself that comes back from them.
And the view that I had was I was a good leader, a very good leader.
But the people who had known me from before, they had the label.
I was a follower.
I was always behind.
I was like, always playing catch up.
And you kind of get split because part of you is excited to explore the new opportunities of label-free living, whereas the other part of you is kind of trapped by people's labeling of you from the past.
It's really quite a tear that can occur.
You know like those old funny videos of like people one foot on the pier, one foot on the boat, they're spreading and They hesitate too long, like, you can go on the boat, you can go on the pier, but if you wait, you're just going in the water.
So for me, the question was, and I really, really invite you to ponder this yourself, the question was, do people have a relationship with me, Steph, or do they have a relationship with the label, Steph?
It's a very, very important and interesting question.
What happens to your relationships if you step outside the labels, if you break the mold?
Well, I'll tell you what happened with me.
I shouldn't laugh.
And some of it was tragic, but I'm overall very pleased with the way that it came out.
So, I've been thinking about philosophy for, I guess when I started this show, oh lordy, 20 years, let's say.
16, 26, 36, no more.
Yeah, let's say a quarter century.
I've been thinking about philosophy, mulling things over, reading, debating, and so on.
And when I began to podcast during a long commute and the podcast began to take off and I really began to recognize the quality of what I was able to communicate and the variety of topics that I was interested in and had a good ability to handle.
I realized some of the great benefit of having been the small, young, less competent follower for so long when I was a child, which is that it kept me humble.
And humility leads to wisdom.
Wisdom, as Socrates says, is knowing what you don't know and then being in hot pursuit of that.
But then you have to know all the things that you don't know.
I mean, people call me arrogant, which is just, well, it's an extremely arrogant thing to say.
I'm so insecure about my knowledge that, I mean, I just released a book called Essential Philosophy where I build up the case for The value of reasoning, empiricism, free will and virtue from the ground up, which means I didn't have any confidence in those things, which is why I need to make the case to build them up.
Anybody who's really into philosophy, like all the way from the study of reality to the study of knowledge to the study of ethics and politics and free will, anybody who starts reasoning from first principles, scrubs away everything, the blank slate, wipe everything clean, I'd stop attempting to prop up the building with shaky beams and just raise the damn thing, just start again.
Well, that's just an act of profound humility because it's saying, no, no, no, I don't know.
I don't know why we should be good.
I don't know if we have free will.
I don't know what's real.
I don't know what's true.
I don't know what the value of reason is.
I don't know whether the senses are valid.
I don't know any of these things.
It's a profound act of humility and it came The guy from Chekhov's The Seagull says, I always feel like I'm trying to catch up to a train.
Well, you get a lot of good muscles trying to catch up to a train that's always pulling away.
So, when it began to be clear to me and through the audience's feedback, that I had something of real value to offer the world.
I realized that my being a follower, and being a follower of objectivism, being a follower of Aristotelianism and so on, that being a follower had given me great strength.
That being a follower had very much prepared me for leadership.
And then I realized that I kind of wanted to step through the label, to step past the label, to surmount the label, to outgrow the label, to leap over the label.
And go from a follower, somebody who didn't have leadership abilities among friends and family I grew up with, and I realized that if I wanted it, and I did, and I do, but if I wanted it, the greatest, the greatest captain's chair in the world was mine to sit in and command, which was philosophy.
It's a hell of a thing.
It's a hell of a thing.
It's a hell of a label to outgrow, to go from small, young, less competent, less able, less strong, less fast, less expert, to I'm going to take the greatest lever that is in the world, which is the lever of philosophy, and take control of it in the face of the world.
It's a hell of a thing.
And then what happened was, and this is all stuff that I kind of got to some degree after the fact, but I began to realize what I was capable of.
And what happened was, I began to get a lot of resistance, a lot of pushback, a lot of It was kind of interesting because so often anger veils itself in indifference.
And I began to get a lot of that.
I'd be excited about a show and people are like, you know, I guess it's interesting, you know.
If it's interesting to you, I mean, go for it, I guess.
And that's tough.
Because if you define someone around you as a follower, and that someone is close to you, then they must be following someone.
We don't follow, we don't wander down the banks of a river as a book floats down and follow the book.
We follow people.
And so if you're defined as a follower by someone around you, then they are shadow or echo defining themselves as a leader, a leader of you, your leader.
Now, if they have defined themselves as your leader, not by their own virtue of leadership, but by putting you in the small and follower and less competent label, then they've unjustly gained a kind of self-esteem, a kind of self-regard.
Now, if you then challenge that and say, well, I want to be a follower for the rest of my life.
I want to take on a leadership role.
In fact, I want to take on a big leadership role.
I want to tackle the biggest and toughest subjects.
I want to bring as much reason and evidence to bear.
I want to push back against nihilism and relativism and subjectivism and socialism.
I want to push back against all of this.
A lever big enough to move the world will be mine.
Talk about going from one extreme to another, so to speak.
Inconsequentiality to global centrality.
That's a bit of a step.
There.
Watch your step.
Watch your step.
And I kind of quickly began to realize that what I wanted to do was threatening to people around me.
Threaten them.
Now, the good news about being defined as a follower, as a fool in a way, I mean, that sounds kind of harsh.
I wasn't exactly defined as a fool.
But, you know, relative to a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old's a bit of a fool, right?
I mean, it's just natural, right?
But I realized that for me to break out, to break out of the mold, to break out of the label, tear it off.
I realized that the label was not just an identity for me.
It was an identity for others around me as well.
That was quite something.
But the label, I thought, was just attached to me.
You know, like you got a little labeler, you put the label on, you wander off and you don't have any more relationship with the label.
But if you have a relationship with someone that's ongoing, the label you put on them is also a label you put on yourself.
So if somebody puts the label of you That you're a follower, then they're the leader.
And then if you break out of that follower label, then their label of leader falls.
And then who are they?
Kind of an existential crisis.
So if you have a label that you're uncomfortable with, you grow.
You know, like you ever try this thing where when you're growing, you know, you've got some favorite t-shirt and you put it on, but you've grown.
As a teenager and it's like you've got those camel toe armpits and God knows what's going on, right?
You don't have man boobs, but you sure look like you have man boobs in your preteen t-shirt.
Then you want to rip off that t-shirt, get something more comfortable, right?
You know, crone it!
But... You remove a piece of clothing, put something else on, fantastic, right?
But other people...
Who have defined themselves according to your label.
That definition has become their identity as well.
And when you change your label, when you outgrow your label, when you discard the label, then they have to change something.
They have to have a relationship.
Not with your label, but with you.
And can they do that?
Can they make that transition?
It's a huge question.
It's a huge question.
And it's a chilling question as well, because if people around me when I was younger had a relationship with Steph the follower, then the question is, do they want to have a relationship with Steph the leader?
If they have a relationship with Steph, who's always kind of uncertain because philosophy is tough, but then when you break through and you capture and you clarify that certainty, do they want to have a relationship, not with Steph the quester, but with Steph who has certainty?
When I was very much mirroring objectivism, then I was Steph the Objectivist.
When I found weaknesses and moved beyond using, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants and all like... Did people have a relationship with me as an independent thinker rather than an objectivist?
It's tough.
And I'll tell you something else too.
It's a little bit more sinister.
Maybe this goes on for you as well.
If people around you have opposite values to you, then those values are rooted and invested in your failure, and your values are rooted and invested in their failure as well.
So, let's say you're an atheist and your friend is a Christian.
You can't both be right.
Now, if the Christian is right, then you as an atheist are going to have probably an unhappy materialistic life of immediate hedonistic pleasures followed by disasters in your relationships, maybe even professional failures, and certainly increasing nihilism, despair, and depression in particularly the last third, maybe in the last half of your life.
If the atheist is right, it could go a different way.
And by atheist, I mean not somebody who just, the only definition is they don't believe in God, but they don't really believe in anything.
So, if you have opposite values, you can't be both happy.
You can't.
You can't.
And if you have opposite value people in your life, They are invested in your failure.
They are committed.
And this may all be subconscious.
But they're invested in you not succeeding.
Because if you succeed it means that they're probably on the wrong path.
So I grew up with a lot of relativists and nihilists and certainly atheists, atheists, atheists.
And when I found objectivism, philosophy and The hot pursuit of deep value and meaning and truth, I was scorned.
And it was considered to be foolish.
Like I was like, hey man, you can't handle just the truth about the lack of truth, so you gotta cling to some ideology and it's sad and it's pathetic and you know, you should just let it go and you should just embrace the fact that we're mammals who like to have sex and take a nap, right?
Now, if this sort of nihilistic view is right, then philosophy is a mistake.
I mean, the philosophy that doesn't lead to valuelessness, which is like, I don't know, medicine leading straight to death or something, but... Now, if... So, if the nihilists and the relativists are right, the postmodernists, then the pursuit of universal values and truth and so on is a form of mental illness.
It's like, you study philosophy the way that You know, some crazy person studies the stain on the wall that they think is a treasure map penned by a pirate, or you work at philosophy the way that an obsessive-compulsive person works at washing their hands 500 times a day.
It's a terrible mistake to do it.
It's a recoiling from the emptiness of existence to create an imaginary cathedral of virtue and value, to replace a god that died in the dust of modern indifference.
Now, on the other hand, if there is truth and there is virtue and there is value, as I know, then the nihilists, the relativists, the postmodernists are going to have terrible lives over time, particularly if your life goes very, very well.
And it's sort of the turtle and the hare that the people who give up on values can achieve a lot of happiness in the short run.
Not, I mean, you know, happiness, right?
They travel, they have sex, they drink, they, you know, may score some great career opportunities.
They pursue, but it eats away.
It eats away.
The valuelessness eats away.
And, I mean, particularly Europeans.
We're just not built to live value-free because value-free meant not Storing things up for the winter.
Those who were value-free didn't survive.
It takes the ridiculous illusory plenty of the modern world and printed money and all that to create within us an African nihilism that cannot support a European personality.
But anyway.
So it may be not just that people need your label more than they love you.
They need their label for their own self-esteem.
You know, if I define someone as you're the clumsy one, I'm by definition saying, well, I'm not.
You see?
I'm not the clumsy one.
You're the clumsy one.
I'm much less clumsy.
I'm not clumsy.
You're clumsy.
I'm not.
You're the follower.
I'm the leader.
Now, if it turns out that the clumsy one is not clumsy, then the person who has defined themselves as the agile one, Can't define themselves as the agile one anymore, and they lose that little metal of vanity, right?
Little vanity metal, right?
I was also considered to be... Oh yeah, yeah, I remember this!
I'm sure you've had this too if you're listening to this, but... I was considered to be too blunt, awkward, and sometimes rude in my questions of people.
I like Socrates, always have.
I like asking important questions.
I like getting to know people by asking them about their lives, about their history, their childhood, their values, what they think.
Small talk is fine.
You know, small talk is fine, like pretzels on an airplane are fine, you know?
Yeah, okay, it's fine.
But you can't live on it, for heaven's sakes, right?
It's fine once in a while, if you're trapped in a flying tube of death.
So I was not good socially.
I was kind of awkward.
People thought I, you know, I was addicted to this ideology and blah, blah, blah.
Like all of these things that turned from like, I was just kind of, turned kind of negative, turned a little bit rancid, a little bit problematic for me.
So then, right, you have this right foot on the pier, foot on the boat.
They're going apart.
What are you going to do?
Well, it's funny, for me, there was no real choice.
Because I can't go back into the box.
You can't go back into the box.
You can't.
You can't.
I can't go back to, well, you know, I love philosophy so much and I have wonderful technology and people who are willing to support me to do it.
But I'm not going to do it because it's going to upset people who define themselves as better than me.
Because if I succeed, then they're gonna fall off their high horse of vanity, right?
If I can take a leadership role in the world, in the realm of philosophy, if it turns out that my awkwardness and asking of rude, uncomfortable questions is a great strength and a great value, and like a hundred people a week want to have a conversation with me about these things, well, if it turns out that what people scorned me for was actually an incredible strength, Then their judgment was terrible.
They were bad at judging things.
And they go from feeling superior to being just wrong.
And then they have to ask themselves, why were they wrong?
If they have any integrity, why were they judging me this way?
Why were they so wrong about all of this?
And it's a tough thing.
Do people have a relationship with you or with The perception of you that they have that serves their own ego.
It's a big, big question.
So the people who I grew up with, who thought I was ideological, that I was awkward, that I was a follower, that I was whatever, right?
For them to wrenchingly redefine who I am based upon what I do, That's really, really painful for people.
They have to confront their own vanity.
They have to confront their own emptiness.
They may have to confront their own nihilism.
It's a dark journey.
It's a Jordan Peterson journey.
Into the underworld.
Why was I so wrong?
Not about me.
About values.
About truth.
About goodness.
About opportunity.
About courage.
So this is really what I want you to see.
We don't have individual identities like silos in a field.
We are all interconnected.
We have identities based upon our essence.
You know, like you get a stomachache, you're just uncomfortable and it's biological and it's not ideological and so on.
We have identities based upon What is it?
The bare-forked animal.
I think it's Tom talks to Lear in the Heath.
What is man but a bare-forked animal like two legs and a body?
We have our mammalian natures beyond the reach of labels.
We have our innate characteristics like our intelligence, perhaps our sense of humor, conscientiousness, the big five personality traits and so on and they're fairly immutable.
But we also have these labels and the labels The labels is where the real change can occur.
The language that we use to describe ourselves.
And you can try this.
I am what?
What are you?
What are you?
I am curious.
I am thoughtful.
I am sensitive.
I am high strung.
I am funny.
I am pushy.
What is it that comes out of you when you think of yourself?
What are the adjectives that are used like bricks to build the house of your identity?
And where did those labels, where did those words that you use to describe yourself, where did they come from?
Did they come from you saying, like, I'm verbally acute?
Well, I know that, I got like 4,200 podcasts and so on.
Downloaded and viewed like 650 million times or something like that.
Yeah, I'm verbally acute.
I got it.
I've got that from empiricism.
But there are labels that float around in my head, and I bet your head too, that don't come from your empirical observation of your own actions, but they come from other people who need to put you in a category usually for reasons of their own vanity.
My mother used to say, "You just don't listen." Now, it's not true.
I listened, I disagreed, right?
People have this weird thing, like, if only you really listened, you'd agree.
Two and two make five.
You just have to listen, and you'll... No, two and two make four, so...
Okay, here's the one.
The one comeback that I was too frightened, and with good reason, too frightened as an early teen.
My mother would come in, and go out and come in, and my mother would say, she would say, you're treating this place like a hotel!
I wish a hotel would have clean towels and food in the fridge.
But anyway, my mother would say, you don't listen.
So she was trying to get me to think that I was a bad listener rather than she was just wrong.
Or a bad communicator, or boring.
Or couldn't, like women, couldn't tell a story, right?
Couldn't hold people's attention.
And so rather than improve her communication and find things that were of more interest to me or remotely of interest to me other than her endless, catastrophic, chaotic dating life, Did my mother say, well, it's unfair to say that Steph's just a bad listener.
Maybe I need to find things that are more interesting to him.
Maybe she could talk to me and learn a little bit about computer programming, or Dungeons and Dragons, or science fiction and fantasy novels, or you name it, right?
The things that I was into in my early to mid-teens.
But no, she's just a bad listener.
So she tried to put this label on me, like I'm a bad listener.
And I could then go through my whole life saying, well, I'm a bad listener.
And then what would happen is I wouldn't pay attention to what people are saying because I'm a bad listener.
Like I don't speak Japanese, so when people around me are talking in Japanese, a little bit of extra concentration isn't going to break through to comprehension.
I don't speak Japanese.
Right?
So people put these labels on you.
But what if you're not a bad listener?
What if you're not clumsy?
What if you're not a follower?
What if you're not a fool?
What if you're not a troublemaker?
But what if these labels are wrong?
What if we put these labels on ourselves to protect ourselves?
Because challenging the labels of our parents, of our teachers, can be dangerous.
So, my mom said I was a bad listener.
No, she was boring, but if I would have told her that, she'd hit me.
Or throw things, or scream, or whatever, right?
Or call the cops.
Seriously, I'm not kidding.
So, I had to say, okay, I'm sorry I'm a bad listener.
I'll try and be better.
I'm a good listener.
Now, for what I do on the show is listen to people.
Most.
I realize I've not done that many solo shows lately.
I miss them.
So here's what I want to say.
It's the last thing.
Freedom is going to be freedom from labels.
Even if the labels are empirically true, maybe you have dropped a lot of things, you don't know if they're true because of the label.
If you get called something repeatedly, you kind of become that something.
If you get called a troublemaker, you become a troublemaker.
If you get called clumsy, you become self-conscious, you become awkward.
So even if there's empirical truth to it, it doesn't mean that it's true in a fundamental way.
Yeah, it's true you're a mammal, I'm a mammal.
What else is true?
How many labels do you agree with?
And even if you say that you agree with the labels empirically stuck on you in the past, do you necessarily agree with those labels going forward and forward Until the end of time.
Because you know the funny thing is that when you die, all of the labels that are going to float around you in the eulogy, and when you're like in the coffin, and the flowers, and the picture, and airbrush, all of those labels are going to be lovely.
A warm-hearted, kind-hearted, generous this, that, and the other.
I went to the funeral of a friend of mine's mom years ago.
Who lived a complete dud of a life.
Retired at the age of, I don't know, 50 and just did nothing for 30 years and then died in the toilet.
And people were like, yes, but she always knew which candies the kids liked at Halloween.
Like, okay, so he was good with candy.
Ah, stranger, living alone, good with candy.
Yeah, sounds great.
Those adjectives, are they the true ones?
The ones told at your funeral?
Are the ones attached to you by authority figures with their own agenda?
Are those attached to you by people who are getting vanity dopamine score out of defining themselves as superior to you just by defining you as inferior in some way?
How much of it is true?
How much of it is smothering your potential?
Because we agree with labels.
To protect ourselves.
Yeah, I agreed, I was a bad listener.
Because to say that I wasn't and to say that my mom was boring and creepy with her dating stories, inappropriate, would get me attacked.
So you agree.
Oh yeah, I'm the clumsy one, I'm the clumsy one.
Because if I went from being the follower to the leader, People did not like that at all around me.
And I had to make a choice.
Am I either going to give up being a leader in order to conform to the petty, squashing, claustrophobic, airless labels that people just plastering all over my face all the time?
Or am I going to say, screw your labels.
Screw your labels.
I'm going to be a leader.
And if your ego can't handle that, too bad.
I'm doing it anyway.
Because here's the thing about labels.
Yeah, we do them to protect ourselves.
Little bricks in a wall, little bricks in a wall.
But when we get into that habit of putting bricks all around us, I'm this, I'm that, I'm the other, they go higher and higher and higher and higher.
And then, the labels that were supposed to protect us and keep us safe, Cut us off from the sky, the sun, the air, the birds, the clouds, the weather.
