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April 19, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

09:44

Grief Part 2

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	Boy, thank you.
	Thank you so much. Thank you guys so much for your thoughts and your shared experiences as I talked about the death of my father yesterday.
	And it means the world to me.
	I've read the messages and I return the sympathy for those of you who've talked about difficult parents yourself.
	I return The love, the care, the sympathy, the empathy.
	I'm sorry. And I wanted to keep you guys up to speed about what is going on.
	For me, because obviously I struck a very deep chord in my video yesterday, and I wanted to go over with you some of the thoughts I've had as I've processed some of this stuff.
	First of all, fly-by-family manipulations are appalling.
	Family of origin manipulations are appalling.
	I won't go into any more details other than to say it has reaffirmed my decision of many years ago to strike my own path.
	But I will say this.
	There's a funny kind of balance to life, which is the suffering that I had when I was younger in the absence of a father has to some degree being compensated now by the lack of overwhelming grief at his passing.
	That's, I mean, it's a strange thing.
	But it kind of makes sense, right?
	So if you grow up with a father and you love him very much and he's there for you and he supports you and he loves you and you love him and he gives you wisdom and sets you on the path to life and adulthood and masculinity or femininity, then that mountain of meaning, that mountain of connection becomes a canyon of loss when he's gone.
	And I've really, you know, I'm so moved and I'm so amazed at the people who've written to me and said, I lost my father 30 years ago, I still think of him every day.
	You know, my father, he was my hero, I loved him, he was taken from me too soon, people are saying, and my heart aches to this day.
	That's a powerful thing.
	So the benefit in the past is the loss in the present when he goes.
	The loss in the past doesn't translate into a benefit in the present, but it means that the passing is less painful.
	The one thing I've always really despised is sentimentality, this loss.
	It's kind of hard to define, but it's archetypical feelings that have no relationship to individual experience, like Buzz Lightyear father.
	He's your father, and therefore you should feel something.
	She's your mother, therefore you should feel something.
	Well, that's an archetypical relationship, mother and father.
	Which translates into a should or an obligation on the emotional apparatus.
	And yes, our emotional apparatus does work on archetypes.
	Otherwise, movies wouldn't work.
	These kinds of stereotypes wouldn't work.
	But at the same time, our emotions do have to and do have a strong relationship to the empirical evidence of our own experiences.
	So yes, there is an archetypical father, there is an archetypical mother, and there is an archetypical Hamlet-style loss in the passage of father and mother.
	These are archetypes.
	The personal experience, though, can wildly deviate.
	And people who substitute archetypes for experience have always struck me as extraordinarily sentimental, and it's kind of a manipulation of one's actual emotions.
	Like, You're supposed to mourn the death of your father.
	You're supposed to mourn the death of your mother.
	And that's just what you do.
	There's no individual connection to actual lived experience in the world.
	And I've always really, really resisted that.
	It's like the people who, they're moved by something, and then they're moved by the fact that they're moved for something, and everything becomes kind of sophistry and manipulation and so on.
	That's terrible. That's...
	That's terrible because it's just not authentic, it's just not genuine, and people who have a very complicated relationship with their own pretend emotions are practically inaccessible to others.
	You just wander into a maze of minotaur-laced narcissistic self-regard and you can never actually just have a clear connection to the person himself, the person herself.
	It is a Gordian knot, a Mobius strip, a flatland of unidimensional conformity to expectations and social pressures rather than like, what is your lived experience?
	So my father dies and I'm like, how am I going to feel?
	And I do feel sad.
	I do feel drained because I'm in any contact with that family of origin is draining because there's just no directness, no honesty.
	But I'm curious about how I feel, but I'm certainly not managing how I feel, and I'm not giving myself any expectations as to how I should feel.
	And that's really, really important.
	The pain in the past is less pain now.
	That's really what I want to get across.
	The pain in the past, the loss in the past.
	You know, somebody wrote to me and said, well, you've already been grieving your father for many years, 50 years.
	Three years. You've already been grieving your father for many years, and therefore there's not that much grief left.
	And that's a very wise and very true perspective.
	So I did want to mention that you can take comfort in the passage of a parent you weren't close to, despite my many attempts to achieve that closeness.
	You can take some comfort in that The pain that you will feel upon that passage is far less than the pain of someone who loves will feel.
	The pain in the past is less pain in the present.
	That's the deal. The love in the past is more pain in the present.
	So the suffering is in the rear view.
	The less suffering is in the moment, is in the process, is in the here and now.
	There's some comfort in that. The other thing I wanted to say is that Because I didn't have a template for masculinity, manhood, fatherhood, for being a husband, because I didn't have a template for that, I have been given the gift of an extraordinarily blank canvas on which to draw the personality of my adulthood.
	That is A great and terrible gift to receive.
	It gives you the gift of originality, or potential for originality, combined with an extraordinary potential for loss and chaos.
	It's like, you know, there's a path in the woods, right?
	You take the road less traveled. If you go off the beaten path, a lot of times you'll get lost.
	But you also might find extraordinary treasure there.
	And you may bring it back to the people who set you on that path.
	I did not have a template for masculinity, and therefore I had the capacity to invent masculinity, to invent fatherhood and being a husband in the world.
	In my home, I had a chance to invent that from a blank canvas.
	A lot of times you'll just make a mess, and sometimes I certainly did that.
	Not so much in being a husband and a father, but younger when I mistook fatherhood.
	Dating a lot for being masculine and, you know, all of the garbage that gets, this hysterical, promiscuous garbage that's thrust upon us, so to speak, from the media.
	So, I did have an extraordinary opportunity to define myself for myself, to individualize and think for myself in a way that I couldn't have.
	If I had a template for better or for worse of masculinity.
	It's kind of like if you're doing a math problem on paper or in your head.
	If someone is kind of whispering numbers into your ear, you really can't do the problem.
	It's too distracted. So I got to work out the equations of my identity in a silent room with the capacity for great and detailed concentration.
	And that pain of the past, of the absence of my father, has translated into an extraordinarily rich capacity to think for myself in the present.
	I won't necessarily say that I'm grateful for that because it was not a gift that was given to me by anybody's choice or decision, but I will say this.
	I think that capacity...
	For individual thought and self-definition has had extraordinary benefits for me and based upon these wonderful messages I'm getting for which I thank you again.
	Great benefit for the world as well.
	Let me know what you think below.
	I'll keep you posted.

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