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July 20, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:45
Stefan Molyneux: HOW NOT TO WASTE YOUR LIFE!
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Time Text
Do you want to start off by reading me the email?
Or reading the email that you sent?
Yes. Hello, Stefan.
I'm panicking. Here when you talk about the man in his 40s watching television with his mother has hit at something pretty deep inside me.
I'm 30 and I'm just really realising that I could be late for a lot of things.
I've... Only ever had one girlfriend.
I don't have any friends or any kind of support group that I can be close to or confide in.
I'm earning just below £20,000 a year and I'm in a position where I'm not convinced that I have any marketable skills to offer.
I graduated from a top university seven years ago with a poor grade and that has took me five years to do.
And the first job I took after university was a waitering position.
After three years, I moved on to my current position, an abysmal admin role.
I find myself saying a lot of things, a lot of really demoralizing things that my parents said to themselves.
I'm too old for this.
It's too late for me to start this activity or learn this skill.
And I'm alone.
I've always thought of my father as being all talk and wildly overestimating his abilities.
And after last night's livestream, I've suddenly realized that I might well be deeply mired in the same behavior.
And I'm astonished and extremely worried how subtly I've managed to live this way and how much in plain sight it has always been all this time.
I woke up this morning With a deeply depressed, sinking feeling that finally culminated in what seems to be a panic attack.
I may have really ruined my life.
I think there's a creeping and crippling nihilism that's overwhelming me.
I'm fast losing hope.
I'm panicking about getting to the point where I can't change course and all my demoralizing thoughts are set in stone.
And I end up living the lives of my parents.
If not worse, seeing how I believe I'm more capable than they are, And with access to greater opportunities than they had.
Is it too late to be incredibly ambitious?
Is it too late to even get started?
That's a very honest email, and I appreciate that.
And it's funny, you know, because when I'm in a conversation with a particular individual, I'm so focused on that individual, I will often forget about the ripple effects, right?
Of how that conversation goes out.
To others. It was...
Well, I needed...
I really... I think I needed it.
It uncorked a lot of stuff from the bottle.
Yeah, and it's funny because day-to-day life can be kind of hypnotic, right?
I mean, you're just kind of trudging through, you know, like the next five minutes, the next five minutes, and every now and then I guess we need that zoom out moment where we look at the larger picture of our lives and try and figure out Where we are in the journey and where we could go and what kind of life we could have and all of that.
So, I guess I'm glad.
Now, were you listening to the live stream last night or did you?
Yeah, because it hasn't even gone out yet, right?
Okay. And was there a particular phrase or moment?
Like, did the anxiety grow or did it just like, boom?
Oh, it was...
So, I went to sleep that night, that same night.
And I woke...
So, it happened around...
The live stream took place at around 2am.
And right after it, I went to bed.
Well, I tried to, but it took me a little while.
And then when I woke up, I think it took me a while to sleep because I was a bit depressed and I got about five hours of sleep.
And when I woke up, I just felt depressed.
So depressed. And during the live stream, there was one part when you said, Should I mention the part in the live stream?
Oh yeah, it's fine. Yeah, sure.
It was when you talked about how you were in the music concert and you looked to the girlfriend and you were having, I guess, issues with the girlfriend before this concert and you turned to her and she was smiling, she was complaining to you and then you turned around and you said, if I'm so wrong...
Why am I successful when you're not?
It was such a simple question.
The next day I woke up so depressed and anxious and I thought more about that question and about why it struck me so much.
I just realized that it was the last time I saw my father.
The last time I saw my father, before that last time I saw him, it had been seven years since I had seen him before that.
And the last time I saw him, he was talking to me about how smart he is.
And he's divorced from my mother.
And he was talking about how smart he is, how he's managed to pick himself back up again.
But he's...
I think he's barely...
He's not doing so well in his own life.
And so I kind of asked the same question when he was talking about how smart he was.
I asked him basically...
It's not as explicit as that, as you put it in the live stream.
But I asked that same question, I guess, at least subconsciously.
But in asking that question, I find myself right now asking myself the same question about how I've led my own life.
Right, right.
No, I get that. I mean, I've known a number of people, some people I know who've definitely been successful, relatively successful.
I don't really view academia as being very successful when it comes to intellectual pursuits, but, you know, at least they got that far, but...
Some of the people I knew who considered themselves very intelligent and very talented always have this uneasy relationship with the market.
Because, you know, I mean, look, it's not like material, money, success is the only measure.
Of course not, right? But it's not insignificant.
And if you do want to make a change in the world or you do want to have an impact in the world, you do have to find some way of getting your ideas across.
And so people do have this uneasy relationship.
With the market, because we are all such treasures to ourselves, and then we go out into the market, and we put it to the test, right?
It's like dating, right?
I mean, I remember I would always start at the top, you know, the sort of alpha females, and kind of work my way from there.
And, you know, sometimes I'd get the top tier women to go out with me, sometimes I wouldn't, but you just aim at the top, and then...
You kind of work your way down, I think, to see where you land.
And then, with your career, it's different, right?
You get married, you stay married, hopefully.
But with your career, it's kind of different because you kind of aim...
You don't aim at the top like I'm going to be a CEO and then work my way down.
I guess you can start your own company or whatever.
But you do have to figure out...
How much value you can bring to the market.
And yeah, I know people are confused and propagandized and not too smart sometimes, and the market's kind of corrupt.
I get all of that, but it's still a pretty free market, particularly out here on the internet and so on.
So the people who have very high estimations of their own intellectual abilities Which I think you do and your father does and my friend or two or three did or do.
It's really tough to put that to the test.
It's all well and good to sing to yourself in the shower.
How do you fare at karaoke?
How do you fare whatever it is you want to do with regards to singing or whatever it's going to be?
And the higher your ambition...
The more the world, a lot of the world, will try to convince you that you're absolutely, completely and totally wrong.
Because the world loves and hates ambitious people, particularly in the realm of philosophy.
But I don't want to get too much into my stuff because I want to talk about your stuff.
So I have one friend of mine, super smart in math in particular, math and physics.
And he had such high estimates of his own abilities.
And I think intellectually he was right.
Because, you know, he was the kind of guy who got bonus marks every time he turned in a math problem and, you know, could kind of half-dose through the class, and if the teacher said, can you solve this problem, he'd be up and, yep, here we go, right?
Solved the problem on the board without even barely a glance.
He had a really, really great instinct for math, and he ended up going to university taking a math and physics double major, which was mad, I thought, really ambitious.
And it wasn't the intellectual issues, I think, that he had problems with.
I mean, he had an intestinal ailment that was quite challenging, and that obviously had a big effect, but it was stress-related as well.
And I think it was the stress that caused him...
Like, it's one thing to be the smartest kid in your local high school, but then to go among the very smartest kids and...
Attempt to compete with them, it's a challenge.
If you've really founded your self-esteem or self-worth on being the smartest around, then you may be limited in your ability to go to smarter and smarter people.
When I went to theater school, I was one of the best actors in the university, and I was always in demand for the lead roles and all that.
Then when I went to When I went to the acting school, yeah, there were some actors who were better.
There's no question. And some of those actors have gone on to have really good careers and do great work, and I've seen some of them on stage, and it's really neat, and I wished them the best.
It wasn't the life for me, but it is one of these things where you say, okay, as I sort of become...
If I'm a big fish in a little pond, how big am I in a big pond, right?
And I think for my friend, who did the math and physics double major, it became too much of a challenge to deal with the reorientation of, well, I was the smartest kid in my high school, but man, now I'm here among the world's best and I'm barely keeping up.
And he did also have a legitimate grievance, I think, because, I'm sorry, this sounds kind of detailed, but I think it goes into what you're working with, because You know, they had problems with grades, right?
So in university, people don't mind being graded up, but they never want to be graded down, right?
And most people will end up grading to a curve, right?
So everyone's got to get 75 or 70 or 80 or whatever it is, the median in the class.
And so what would happen is the tests would be ridiculously hard.
And then people would get graded up, right?
So you'd get 30% on a test and you'd end up with like an 80.
And he was like, that's crazy.
There's no way to teach, right?
And listen, I kind of get where he's coming from.
I think the test should be somewhat objective.
But he was not able to adapt himself to that environment and ended up bombing out a school, partly because of medical issues and I think to some degree because of stress and All of that.
So the collision between...
I don't want to say vanity, because confidence in your abilities is not vanity.
Vanity is when you are confident, but you don't want to put it to the test.
That, to me, is the real...
That's where the danger comes in, right?
So if you have...
Listen, if you're listening to this show, as I said, I'm always going to grant people...
High IQ and high capacities and high abilities to listen to this show.
I'm not that entertaining, so it's got to be something in the content that speaks to you.
But the big challenge is when you try to put it to the test and you say, okay, well, I'm smart, so let me go and...
Say smart things on the internet or let me go write a blog or let me go start a company or whatever it's going to be.
Enter into debates or whatever.
Have you had that issue where you have an estimation of your own abilities and then, okay, let's try and put it to the test and see what happens.
How does that feel? I think you touched on something really accurate.
You hit the nail on the head somewhere.
Well, I've been I've been trying to teach myself.
So I said I graduated seven years ago.
Well, I didn't say what kind of degree.
I graduated with a math degree and it took me five years to graduate.
Sorry, that's just one extra year though, right?
Two, sorry, two. Well, no, no.
Sorry, it was a master degree.
It was an MSc course, but it was downgraded to BSc, a bachelor's, and so it was downgraded to a three-year course and a four-year course.
Oh, so originally it was supposed to be a four-year course that included a master's degree, but you downgraded it, or they downgraded you, was that right?
They did. The university did.
And that was because your marks weren't up to scratch, is that right?
That's right, yeah. Okay, and so you ended up coming out with a BSc, right?
Yeah, that's right. And what happened for you in school relative to what your ambitions were?
When I first got into university, I was really expecting myself to get high marks, and I... Well, there's a long story behind it.
If I just touch on the first year of university, I think I was in a hell of a place, a pretty depressing place, I think.
So I didn't make the grade.
I think I tried really hard in the first year and then towards the end I thought, I'm slipping and I'm not Meeting my own expectations, and so I started really procrastinating.
Well, boy, you can do that in university, eh?
I mean, I remember one year of university, I started to play Macbeth, I did a whole bunch of other plays, I was working on writing my own plays, and yeah, I really, really began to slip behind, and it took a huge amount of catch-up.
And I was still up until, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, I was still having dreams about, I've taken some course, I know I've got some reading to do, I can't remember where it is, and I would just distract myself.
So yeah, it is really easy to procrastinate in school, and that's what gets a lot of people, right?
Yeah, I think mine was particularly chronic.
It just got worse throughout the years.
I think my grades really started picking up only maybe a Maybe when I did my second year, I think.
Yeah, second year. And then I did a really good third year.
I got a couple of...
So the best grades you can get in Britain here, the UK, and the best grade would be a first class degree and a second grade would be a 2.1.
So I got 2.1s and a couple of courses in the third year.
And I guess I was really picking things up.
But then overall, I just wasn't doing very well.
Wait, so, but after you had improved your marks, that's when the university said, we're going to downgrade you?
No, that was long, Demi.
That was after the first year. Oh, after the first year.
Okay, they said, listen, this isn't for you.
And was there any chance to recover that?
Was there like a wait and see, or it was like, nope, you're going down to the BSC? I think there was an appeal, but nothing, I can't remember anything else aside from that.
Was your family involved in this particular process?
Did they chat with you?
Did they ask you how things were going?
Did they make suggestions? No.
None of that, no. I think they were when I was...
To provide more of a back story about my history, I wasn't always in tough schools.
I was in a pretty bad school during my secondary school years.
So that would be, I think, junior years in high school or something in North America.
And I was in a pretty dangerous and feral school and there were fights every week.
It was really gangsterism and all that stuff.
It was horrible. But then I worked really hard.
I spent five years in that school and then I worked very hard, I think, in the last three years.
And then I got myself into a pretty, a top grammar school.
A top grammar school.
And then, but then, it's like when you talked about how, about exploring the reasons why you moved to Canada at the age of 13, I believe.
Is that correct? 11, but yeah, go ahead.
11, yeah, sure, sure, yes.
And then you try to uncover the motivations behind the move.
And I think my parents really started to When I began at that grammar school, the things really took a turn for the worse.
The relationship between my parents and they were having rows.
I spent two years in that grammar school before university.
It's called sixth form in the UK. So that would be years 16 to 18.
And I think it was in my first year, I was two weeks away from my Oxford University interview and then my parents got really crazy.
Like my mother, oh yeah, my mother was, I think I was the only one at home.
My mother was just drunk off her.
She couldn't stand. She had to prop her head on the wall.
It was the police that brought her back.
She was out on the streets drunk.
The police brought her back.
Then I saw my mother.
She was just popping her head on the wall.
Then out came my brother as well.
My brother came along. My brother had to witness all that.
My younger brother. Like I said, I was the only one at home.
So for that night when my mother came back, I had to watch her throw up.
And then the next day, I think my father returned.
I think there was something about...
I think my sister arrived home soon after my...
I'm sorry. I'm throwing a lot of information at you.
No, I'm following. Go ahead.
Okay, sure. Okay, so my sister arrived soon afterwards.
She was in a nightgown.
But I don't think anything happened to her.
But my father, I think, arrived the next day of the day after that, and something was said about two guys stomping on his head or something like that.
But he was drunk as well.
No, you probably got into that kind of fight.
I don't think he fought back, but I think he was too drunk to fight back in there.
I think he was on the ground and then one of the guys stomped on his head or something.
But he looked fine when he arrived home, but I remember that being quite important.
I think they started divorce proceedings after that or something like that.
I think they separated.
They lived in separate places. And so that really characterized the two years.
And then when I started university, all this residual, I was expecting, I wanted to really get into Oxford, and I was pretty damn close as well.
So I carried all the shame about what was happening at home.
And my faltering academic life or career Sorry to interrupt, but you're Asian, right? I don't know if this occurs in the UK where East Asians have their university marks downgraded.
Oh, well, I've not really thought about that.
I know it happens in certain places in the States, and I was just wondering if you were close, and I'm just wondering if they monkey around with the scores of various ethnicities in an attempt to gain some sort of equality, but if you don't know, I was just kind of curious, so please continue. Well, I say I was close because generally they tell people to go back home after the interview process, so I think I spent two or three days in university going through the interview process.
It was And, you know, with what happened two weeks before, I felt quite alone.
I felt quite alone in the university and during the interview process.
And then I think they usually send people home after five interviews.
I got about six.
I got to six, so I think I was pretty close.
So, I mean, given how upset you were about what was happening at home, you must be pretty good at that kind of dissociating and just getting on with things.
You could say so.
Yeah, you could say so.
Right, okay. And was your father okay?
I mean, a stomp to the head can be pretty bad.
He didn't speak very much of it after that.
I don't remember him really...
I think it might have just been a story, but that's the only thing I heard about my father, about what happened to him when he was out drunk that night.
And did your parents have a long history with drinking?
My father especially, yes.
My mother, she gets drunk pretty easily, but I've seen her drunk a couple, but not that drunk, not as drunk as that night, as she was that night.
And did it go back, I guess, did it get worse or was it part of the early childhood but not as bad or how was that?
I know my father, he's almost, well many nights I've seen him leave empty bottles behind.
He's the drinker, I think he's mostly the drinker in the household.
Yeah, I might have just normalized it.
I think it was pretty normal to me to see my father drinking, doubting bottles of beer every night.
Do you know why he drank?
He did. Actually, the last time I saw him, he did say when I told him that I don't drink.
He asked me champagne. I told him I don't drink.
And then he said everyone he knows Drinks.
I don't know how you can go through life without drinking.
You have to drink, is what he said.
So I think he has a strong attachment to drinking.
Well, no, he's got, I mean, technically it would be because he has crap friends.
Sure. So because he has crappy friends, he can't stand them sober.
That's good. And they can't stand him sober.
I mean, this is just... It's a kind of vortex or a gravity well that you get caught in socially if you have friends who drink, who do drugs, who, you know, do crazy stuff.
Then, if they're around and you're the only person not drinking, they look completely retarded to you, right?
I mean, just look stupid and wastey, right?
It's a huge waste of time, money, health, energy, resources and all that, but...
So what happens is if you are trapped in this underworld of dysfunctional people, you all kind of hate each other, and the only way you can pretend to stand each other is by drinking.
And if everyone's drinking and you're not, well, it all gets revealed to you.
Then you've got to start climbing up, and then if you start climbing up, You're trying to climb out of that well.
Everybody's going to attack you.
Oh, you're too good for us. Oh, you don't drink anymore.
Oh, you're some kind of prude.
You should loosen up or relax.
All of this general cry of relax that people have when they want you to dissolve your own integrity.
I would imagine it's social that way.
Yeah, I understand. I think you're right.
I don't remember him surrounding himself with any Yeah, it's going down low, going to the down and outs, right?
It's pretty tragic.
So did your parents split up?
Before I... I think you asked a different question.
I don't know whether I've answered it.
I think I moved into my father...
But yeah, my parents, they've split up.
After the stomp to the head incident, I think you mentioned that.
I just wanted to make sure I got the timeline down.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, so then you graduate and then you decide to get a job as a waiter.
Yeah. So tell me about that.
Well, I was of the belief that there wouldn't be an employer.
I come from...
The university that I graduated from, they are very close to the corporate world.
And people would be doing internships when they're in their second, third years.
And I missed all that.
Okay, yeah.
So I... I really wanted to become a mathematics professor.
I saw myself as sort of like an academic, more fundamentally than that, an intellectual, and I didn't bother with the internships.
I think part of the reasons why I got such bad grades was because after the first year, I sort of wanted to...
I chose more complex courses.
If I do well and use more complex courses, I make up for the bad performance in the first year.
And then I did badly in the second year, and I thought I'd do all the complicated courses in the third year to make up for the second and first year.
And then, you know, but...
It's kind of like me playing Doom.
I can't finish a level, so I up the difficulty.
Hmm. All right.
But no, this is what they call a Hail Mary pass.
You know, like at the end of a football game, you just throw something in the hope that it gets somewhere.
And if you're doing badly on the medium courses, then...
I mean, I can certainly understand the strategy because then you could sit down and say, hey, look, you know, clearly I wasn't up to my earlier abilities, but I'm obviously doing well now because look at me.
I... I took all these complex courses and did really well.
So, yeah, I can understand that.
It's risky, right? Obviously, I can understand it.
I look back now and think, yeah, it's pretty risky, knowing that I had such a bad problem with procrastination, you know.
Sorry to interrupt.
Did you not enjoy the work?
Was that one of the major issues?
I think by that point, I was really also overcome with pressure and trying to meet deadlines and trying to be prepared for all these tests.
But yeah, I think by that time, it's what you said in a recent livestream.
If you aim for the artificial goals, pursuit of status, money, and so on, then you risk losing that Innate creativity and the love for the pursuit in itself.
I mean, in high school, I had a mathematics teacher who talked about how he would pick up a piece of paper and he'd just work on some quadratic equations after dinner for fun, right?
Now, when it came to computer programming, I would do that for sure.
I loved it. It was fascinating.
But I would never imagine doing that with quadratic equations or whatever it was that he was, you know, he was, I don't know, maybe he idly was working on Fermat's law theorem before it was solved or whatever.
But so there are some people, it's like, yeah, just sit there and work on some math problems for fun.
And I'd be like, oh, that's incomprehensible to me.
But of course, in the same way, other people would look at me and say, what, you get up at six in the morning to work on a screensaver on your Atari 800?
It's like, what are you crazy? They wouldn't understand that either.
And that's just the giant diversity of human impulses or desires.
But did you have that love of math before you went to uni?
No, no, I think, no.
So what the hell were you doing there?
I guess there might be a… I think it was due to momentum.
Like you were kind of good at this stuff in high school?
That's right. Maybe there's also an interesting backstory to this.
I was never...
The period I spent in grammar school, I was never a very good student.
I was quite a mediocre student, I think, until...
Well, it was a bloody war zone, right?
How are you supposed to be a good student with criminals roaming the hallway?
Oh, yeah. Not just that.
My father was also physically abusive, so I had to go home.
When you talked about the thing about dissociation, I think I had quite a lot of that going on.
I mean, I remember...
I even remember the guy's name now to this day, you know, like almost 40 years later.
But this guy...
Yeah, I was in a bowling alley...
And I was playing Defender.
I was doing really well. Some kid wanted to play it.
Unplugged the machine, and I called him a jerk for doing so, right?
And I guess he ran to his big, scary, psycho brother.
And big, scary, psycho brother cornered me in school.
And this is the age.
He was like 16. I was like 12 or something.
And, you know, it's night and day.
It's child versus adult, right?
There was no possibility of having any kind of fight.
Not that I really would have done it either way, but...
He was like, you're dead!
You know, I think his brother had said that I'd hit the brother or something like that, so this guy was just spoiling for a fight, and I was like, no, I didn't say any of that.
I just told him he was a jerk for unplugging my computer game.
That's not what he says, and I choose to believe my brother over you.
Anyway, so, I don't know, for maybe a week, I'm sure you've had that experience too, if you've been targeted by a bully for, I don't know, like a week, you, uh, You just keep your eyes...
You keep your head on a swivel, as Dan Bongino says, right?
You just keep looking around.
You make sure you don't drop your guard.
You make sure you don't end up in the washroom alone.
You dart out after school.
You go places. And I think only one time...
I was going up the stairs, he was coming down, and he punched me in the shoulder, and it didn't really hurt, but that was, I think, the only time in school when I was, like, alarmed about...
Well, there was one other time.
It doesn't really matter. But the point is that it's really tough to concentrate.
I remember sitting...
Listening to Queen's, I guess the first song they did, which didn't have harmonies really in it, Spread Your Wings.
And I was playing harmonica, and I was figuring out how to play taps.
You know, this sort of boot-heel death music.
And I just remember, you know, there was no one to go to.
There was no one to help solve the problem.
It was all on my little shoulders to try and figure out how to deal with this stuff.
And strangely enough, many years later, not many years later, maybe six years later, I ran into him visiting a friend and didn't remember me at all.
Of course, I'd changed a lot since then.
I'd started to work out. Or maybe he just pretended he didn't remember me at all.
And he seemed like an okay guy.
So, you know, you never know what kind of pressures are.
But, I mean, I just remember that week.
And it all just kind of faded away and died down.
And... I just remember that week, like, I mean, it's really tough to concentrate when you are in that kind of fear, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
There was a thing back when I was in secondary school, there was a thing called happy slappings.
You know, you could be walking around a corner and then if there were a gang, if you weren't watching yourself and there were a gang behind you about to About to do a happy slap, what that would involve is slapping the person from behind and filming it.
So there was that to watch out for.
Yeah, of course, because when I was a kid, there was no social media, no cell phones, and no cameras really, but in school.
But that's a whole new thing now, right?
Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
And it lives forever. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and people get to shame the victim if they're really toxic.
Do you think your parents, I mean, did they know about this violence that you were exposed to?
I think they had a good idea.
I can't imagine them not having an idea, but I think the way they...
So there's an even further backstory than this.
So the way my mother, as I had already said, Me being bullied in school is to I think my first memory of abuse from my parents involved my being bullied in school and then getting beat up and then coming home telling my mother and then my mother denying my experiences and then kind of berating me and shouting at me and And then saying that I was the one busy messing around,
and messing the other person around and I even got hit.
Well, I'm very sorry about that.
I mean, I never got hit other than once or twice in the shoulder, once in the belly, but I'm sorry about that.
That's really... I mean, especially hitting around the face, I mean, it is specifically designed to humiliate and, of course, it can be very damaging.
Oh, no, no, I wasn't...
No, no, no, no.
The bullying that took place, no, no, I... There was a couple of incidences.
One where I fell in...
I think I was pushed over and I broke my arm.
I needed a...
I can't remember what it's called.
A brace or something like that.
Oh, a cast? Yeah, a cast.
And the second time was when I got kicked.
I think I got kicked in the body.
Punched, kicked in the body.
What happened with the arm breaking?
Did you go downstairs or something?
It was on the playground and on concrete.
And I think I was just pushed really hard and I landed it awkwardly, I think.
It was quite a long time ago.
Yeah, obviously. I sort of fell awkwardly, but I can't remember the exact details.
I can't remember much.
How old were you? I was maybe 6 or 7 or 8.
And was it a twist break?
Was it a bad break? Or was it relatively easy to heal?
It wasn't a bad break, no.
I think it took maybe a couple of weeks.
It wasn't a bad break.
I don't remember it being a bad break. Painful as hell though, right?
Especially when you're sleeping. Yeah.
Yeah. I can't remember much from that period.
No, it's something Michael Malice has said that is a very astute observation, in my opinion, which is, you know, that government schools are the places where most people experience institutionalized violence, like whether it's from the teachers, certainly for me it was like canings and stuff like that, but it's the place where people are most exposed to violence, I guess you could say, over the course of their lives.
Yep, yep.
I agree. I've seen that tweet.
As you say, it was a powerful tweet, powerful observation.
Okay, so you didn't have all of the...
Internships and all that set up, right?
And then you graduate, and I guess with the master's in math...
No, bachelor's.
Sorry, bachelor's. With the bachelor's in math, you don't...
If you go back in time and say to yourself, what would you do with a bachelor's in math?
Because bachelor's is one of these kinds of degrees that...
It puts you above the norm but below the top.
It's one of these mid-level sandwich degrees.
I mean, I remember talking once in a coffee shop with a woman who's, you know, she's like, I have a bachelor's degree in psychology.
I'm like, oh, what can you do with that?
She's like, you know what? I actually kind of found out.
Not much at all. Can you be a psychologist?
No. For that you need, I guess, back then maybe you needed a master's, now I think you need a doctorate and you need your years of being mentored and all that kind of stuff, so...
It's like, you know, you got a bachelor's degree in biology.
What do you do with that? Don't know, right?
And math is a little different, I suppose, because you can take those skills and you can go and work for Wall Street or the equivalent of Wall Street in the UK or whatever.
You can start working on financial instruments and, you know, mathematics is fairly high in demand.
And if you have computer skills or even if you're just good at math, financial companies would be interested.
But I guess that's the question.
Like, what do you do with the BSE? Well, the grade I got was the grade one above pass, so it wasn't...
So you just barely cleared the trees, so to speak?
Yeah, yeah. And that's because you kept taking harder and harder courses?
Yeah. So, I guess odds are not your specialty in math.
I... Well, I was never very good at stats.
I applied maths. Yeah, I get it.
I mean, we're joking because, you know, what else are you going to do, right?
Yeah, sure, sure. But I still sympathize just so you know.
I'm not joking at your expense.
I'm just like, oh, okay.
Now, yeah, go ahead.
Well, you touched upon something that was grounded in reality.
Stats wasn't my strong suit.
Right, right. What's your strong suit?
Pure maths.
Pure maths.
Abstract algebra.
Group theory. There were a couple of courses on mathematical analysis.
I was quite good at that. Basically, just pure mathematics.
Nothing really...
Nothing that touches, like pure Platonism, nothing that actually touches the world, right?
Imaginary numbers are my friends.
Yeah, okay. Maybe abstract math, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, got it. Got it.
So you graduate. Was it going to be too humiliating to try and get a job, do you think?
Like you'd go there and say, oh, this is not up to scratch, young man.
Get a job where?
As in university? Well, in something to do with maths, right?
I mean, you know, you say, oh, I've got a BSc in maths, and so, you know, that obviously demonstrates a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of capacity to complete something and all.
But was there nothing that you wanted to bring the math to or nothing that you wanted to do with that degree from a money-making standpoint?
Yeah, I think I was just too much in an abstract realm.
I think I was stuck on still seeing myself as a mathematics professor.
I think I was...
I wouldn't say I was liberal, but I guess I was still kind of propagandizing and thinking...
Oh, like I don't want to have anything to do with that nasty market?
Yeah, things like that.
I was kind of too much of a dreamer, you could say, and I really wanted to just become a mathematics professor and deal with the intellectual stuff and not with the market.
Well, I mean, and to me, the thirst for the abstract realm comes out of a recoil from the brutalized physical realm.
I mean, to me, your focus on abstract mathematics is directly correlated to the brutality that you experienced as a child in your family and in school and, you know, probably in other places as well, right?
Right.
So why do we want to escape to the world of platonic forms?
Right.
I mean, it was the same thing with me with Dungeons and Dragons.
Like, why did I want to escape to this world where, you know, will had meaning, choices had consequences.
You could fight your way or possibly your way through things and you weren't blocked by institutionalized whatever.
Yes. The wounding of the real, if that makes sense.
This is why Plato had a much worse childhood than Aristotle.
I'm quite convinced of that, especially given his predilections for sexual behavior.
So, the abstract realm is of great comfort because in the abstract realm, Things are controllable by thought, whereas in the real world, things are not controllable by thought.
That's always the great challenge.
In the abstract realm, you can move things around.
If I'm writing a novel, I can have the characters do just about anything.
It's my world to take care of.
There are certain rules I have to follow, but there's a lot that I can do in that realm, in that world.
And, you know, I can write a book called Universally Preferable Behavior, but that's different from going door to door and trying to stop people from doing violent things.
You know what I mean? So the abstract realm is a beautiful realm, and it's very important and essential, really.
But the relationship between the mind and the body, as I've sort of been talking about recently, the relationship between the abstracts and the real, In general, the more brutal the real, the more seductive the abstract realm is.
And so for you, to take the abstract realm and apply it to mere mortal reality would be kind of to run in the opposite direction of what it's for, which is a sanctuary from violence.
Yeah. Yeah.
Makes sense. It really does make sense.
Yes. Now, when you decided to do the waitering thing, what was your thought about it?
Because everybody who takes a job has some idea about it.
Oh, this is going to be a temporary thing, or this is what I'm going to do, or whatever it is.
That's it. I think I thought to myself, I'm going to spend some time just trying to figure out what's going on, what I want to do with myself, and And that this is just a humbling experience because that was my first experience with work, having a job.
So I thought to myself, this is just going to be a, maybe I need this.
Maybe that's because I missed it.
Miss Ryan. I missed having a work experience before because I think one of the complications about finding a job after graduation was that a lot of these job positions required experience, internships, and I had no job experience.
I had just that one degree, whereas maybe everybody else had at least some kind of work experience.
At least a degree and a paper route, right?
Yeah, things like that.
So, you got the job as a waiter, and did they know, did your hiring manager know, did the manager know that you had this BSc?
No, yeah. They were taking in anybody.
There were a lot of European students, people from New Orleans, just new arrivals into Britain.
Immigrants. Were you graduating in an economic downtime?
You know what?
Like in the business cycle, were you?
Was it an afternoon? Yeah, yeah.
Maybe... It was maybe...
I could have been. I don't know, but I don't remember.
That's fine. I was just curious if that was, you know, because that can make a big difference.
It might have been around 2008. It could have been around 2008, 2007.
That's pretty bad, right? I mean, there was a whole economic turndown, not just in the U.S., but of course it affected the world.
So that's just kind of a one-two.
It's a double win. No, no, sorry. Seven years ago, it would have been 2013.
So no, no, never mind. Sorry.
No, sorry. Never mind. All right.
Got it. No problem. Now, how long did you work at the waitering job?
Three years. Wow.
And then? And then my current role as a back office in a company, a big company.
What's your phrase there? I heard I could role, but I'm sure that that's not what you said.
An admin role. Oh, you've got an admin role.
Okay. Do you mean like secretarial, like answering phones and scheduling meetings and arranging flights and stuff like that or something else?
There's a lot of processing payments involved.
Right. It's the back office of a financial company.
Okay. And do they know you have a master's?
Sorry, I keep getting that wrong.
The BSE in math?
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
And has there ever been anyone who sat down and said, you know, I feel like you're being a smidge underutilized here?
There are people who have said, you don't belong here and you should be doing something better, but no.
But not a manager? That's just like co-workers?
That's right. Right.
And how long have you been working there?
I'm sure I could do the math, but it's not my specialty.
I'm on to my fourth year.
Right. Right.
And is there any capacity for progressing the job or moving up?
It's a dead end job.
It's a possibility, but it takes quite a long time.
And not much as well.
Not much of a bump in salary.
Right. Okay. Okay.
And when I was talking last night...
It's a while to get this kind of direct feedback, which is great.
But when I was talking last night...
The panic that you had was the panic, I suppose, of time, right, of time passing.
I think the panic comes in sort of many layers.
And the panic came, I think it took me overnight to process it.
So I think, but the panic, I can see it from different ways.
Several different perspectives.
One would be the fact that I was repeating the way my father led his life, which I was so unaware of.
I thought I was going the opposite direction, but in many ways I'm not.
And yeah, a strong element of it was the passing of time.
The fact that I've...
I see myself as having not applied myself better during my 20s.
Right, so you're out of school seven years or so, is that right?
Yes. Okay, so the good news is, it's not too late.
That's the good news. That's why.
Part of the panic, I think, is that there's a chance that I might waste it.
Right. Now, generally, if it was too late, you wouldn't feel panic.
Yes, yes. If that makes sense.
That's such a great point you made, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think we did that in the DMs, right?
So, yeah, if it was too late, you wouldn't feel panic.
You'd feel nihilism, you might feel rage, you might feel whatever, right?
But it would not feel depression, I suppose.
But the panic is, it's not too late.
And... It's sort of like if you're, I don't know, you're stuck in some snow cave, Luke Skywalker style, and you're freezing to death.
The moment you start to really feel your limbs go numb, and you can still survive or still make a go for it somewhere, you'll get up and you'll struggle for whatever, but, you know, when it's really creeping along and you don't really have any chance, you just start to feel warm and you go to sleep, right?
So the panic is good, right?
Panic is... It means there's life in there and there's possibility in there and that's great.
I mean, good for you for having the panic and also for having the wisdom to not, you know, because a lot of people just talk themselves out of this panic, right?
Yeah. I just simply couldn't.
No, it's too big, but that's good.
Thank your panic, right?
I knew I had to experience it.
I knew it. I had to go through this.
I should also say, I had a psychological crisis after my first year and then right after I graduated.
I had such a psychological crisis during both moments and And there was, back then, there was feelings of, you know, ending it, you know.
But you had suicidal thoughts, right?
Yeah, that's right. That's it.
Yeah. But on this occasion, I mean, the crisis is more, I would say, even more massive because, you know, I'm seven years older and so on.
But I was very resolute in saying to myself, I'm going to fight through this.
Well, yes, and I think, you know, to pat myself on the back just a tiny bit, I think that the clarity with which the issue was described helped your panic not become self-destructive.
And look, I've also watched maybe hundreds of your videos, so it's not just a pat on the back, it's major, you know, many, many pats.
I've really absorbed your material.
Yeah, I thank you entirely.
Well, I thank you. I appreciate that.
Okay. So, what's your relationship like with your parents at the moment?
I sort of...
I left home, I should also say, I left home...
So, I was living with my mother right after I graduated until the age of 27.
So, that was the last time I saw my mother.
Well, she's got to be quite the quicksand then if her son is not able to get started in life.
I mean, did she help you with it at all?
Did she talk to you about it at all?
She's the same woman who beat me when I got bullied in school.
She doesn't have a lot of parental motherly instincts.
That's my impression anyway.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, obviously, what...
You don't have to tell me what subset of East Asian you are, but it doesn't sound...
I'm sorry?
Ethnic Chinese. Ethnic Chinese, okay.
So it doesn't sound like she's getting all tiger mom up in your grill, right?
She was...
When I was growing up, she was pretty ferocious about...
Well, she kept...
I think... Well, yeah, the thing...
The reason why I mentioned my...
The fact that I graduated from a top university is because it was a thing that they really pushed me to get throughout all my childhood.
So see, I was in a pretty thorough school.
I jumped from one of the worst schools in the city to one of the best schools in the city and one of the best schools in the country.
And it was because my parents pushed me to get there.
And I got there from being a pretty mediocre student to being a grammar school student, a student in a top grammar school because they got me a tutor, a mathematics tutor, around the age of 14, 13. And then I was noticed in school, I was noticed in secondary school, putting a class full of exceptional students.
And that was when I got a real boost in confidence and self-esteem.
But before then, I think before then, I had really not much of an identity.
But then when I managed to get myself put in this class, I was a new person.
I think for a while, I... For the three years before grammar school, I thought everything I touched turned to gold and I thought I was just...
I was unlike my parents who were pretty negative and demoralized.
Yes, but here's the problem, my friend.
Here's the problem. The problem is that being good at something is not the same as having an identity.
I mean... Before compared to, I'm not saying I did, because I knew that.
Of course I knew that when I graduated and I thought I'm not as good as master as I thought I was.
I knew that. I get that.
I just give you a really vivid example.
If you've been following this, this Anne Boleyn and Johnny Depp libel case that's going on in the UK at the moment.
And, you know, Johnny Depp basically got swindled out of 650, or it seems that's what he claims, right?
That he got swindled out of $650 million.
So he's really good at acting, he's really good at making money, but he doesn't really seem to have much of an identity.
He allows himself to be in this abusive relationship that he claims is abusive.
He claims that she threw a vodka bottle at him and severed his fingertip.
Then he wrote on the wall how she was sleeping around with someone.
It's just in blood.
He's a good actor.
He's obviously very good at making money.
But he still doesn't have an identity.
Marlon Brando was a great actor.
A complete disaster as a human being.
I mean, his kids all get involved in various levels of criminality.
I think one of them killed herself, if I remember rightly.
I mean, it's just a complete disaster as a human being.
That's a good point. So yeah, just being good at stuff.
Freddie Mercury is a great singer, great songwriter, great entertainer.
Just lift this empty life of sex and drugs.
So just having a skill, being good at something will get you approval.
But approval is usually the opposite of identity.
Because identity is having, in a sense, an outboard motor where you can go whatever the hell you want.
Whereas approval, navigating by approval is just like having a sailing ship and you've just got to go where the wind blows.
Yeah. That's a great point.
And that's why it didn't solve your problem, right?
Because if you feel an emptiness in your identity because you're being drawn to that which you're praised for and that which you're good at, you're going to have a very ambivalent relationship to success because success has got to be self-destruction in a way.
I see. I'm not sure if I made that super clear.
Let me just take one more run at that.
So if you do things just because you're good at them, you get praised for, you get paid for them, then that's not the same as having an identity and being who you are.
And the more you invest in approval, whether it's financial or social or whatever it is, right?
It's like all these social justice warriors who are signaling all of this stuff, right?
They're just doing it for approval, and they cease to exist every time they do it.
They become a little bit more of a mirage, a little bit more of a fog bank, a little bit more of a cloud every time they do it.
And success in this realm, I mean, to go back to Johnny Depp, right?
I mean, he is a very eager-to-please guy.
He grew up in a pretty tragic household and got into drugs at a very early age and all that.
So he's never really developed an identity of his own, which is why he's able to slip into these other characters so well, because he doesn't exist in any fundamental way.
And so because he's so eager to please...
Others. He's very compelling on the screen, right?
Because he's an entertainer, right?
Actors are entertainers, right?
So he wants to please us as the audience.
We are pleased. We give him the money, and the money seals his fate, right?
The money seals his doom. Because if he hadn't been famous, or, you know, there's nothing wrong with being famous if you have integrity and identity and all of that.
But at least according to some of the reports coming out of the trial, Amber Heard is by some people considered to be just this tragic gold digger, status climbing guy who puts up with the rather bloated and stragglehead 50-plus-year-old Johnny Depp because he's rich and famous and gets her avenues to starring in Aquaman status climbing guy who puts up with the rather bloated and stragglehead 50-plus-year-old Johnny
So if he hadn't been so eager to please, if he hadn't become so successful, he wouldn't have ended up in this horrible destructive relationship that now seems to have destroyed his fortune and his career.
So success is a failure.
Marlon Brando got so disgusted, he referred to acting as an empty and useless profession, and he got so disgusted with being an actor that he bought an island and retreated off the face of the earth.
And ate himself into oblivion, right?
And he was disgusted by his own success.
He was revolted by the industry he was in, and for a variety of reasons he went into in various interviews, which we don't have to talk about here.
But a lot of times, a lot of times, you know, what...
What you succeed in erases you.
I mean, this is part of what's underlying the Me Too movement from a couple of years ago, that these women gave up sexual access in return for fame and found it was a very bad deal.
It was a very bad deal. Or Mira Sovino, who was a very, I guess, a breakout actress in Mighty Aphrodite, who then ended up crossing Harvey Weinstein and he got her blacklisted for like 20 years.
Probably saved her life, or at least saved her soul, so to speak.
So I'm not trying to counsel you, don't be successful.
I absolutely want you to be successful.
But if you're like, I went from non-existence to being good at something, you listen to this show, you will have too much wisdom to milk approval at the expense of identity because that leaves you hollowed out as a human being.
In other words, you may not have failed at all.
That's right. Yeah, right.
Because if you had succeeded...
That would have succeeded my fate.
I'll give you a personal example, right?
I talked earlier about being in acting school and studying acting, and I wrote 30 plays.
Anyway, so now if I had succeeded at that, Or if I had worked harder at that, what would have happened is I would have become very much dependent upon people liking me.
You have to like an actor in order for that actor to succeed.
And it doesn't mean that you can like them in their bad guy roles, that they're really good at playing bad guys or something like that.
But you have to like... An actor.
And so as an actor, you have to be dependent upon being liked.
And as a philosopher, you have to be dependent or you have to be indifferent to not being liked.
So if I had succeeded as an actor, I would have failed as a philosopher.
And I'm pretty sure the world needs more philosophy and not another person who speaks lines well.
So if I had succeeded at what I wanted to succeed at originally, I would have failed not just myself, but I think the world as a whole.
I think that was part of my worry.
You mentioned in the livestream about procrastination and being susceptible to being motivated by bullying, self-bullying, and then getting successful and then becoming more susceptible to being manipulated.
That was part of the panic of not wanting to go ahead in case I do go ahead and become successful and then And then end up in my forties and being maybe in a worse state, maybe having my wealth lost and then my career gone and being hollowed out in that way.
Or you become successful and maybe some woman targets you for that success and you end up in a bad relationship.
You end up divorced and dragged through the court system.
I mean, who knows, right? I mean, success has become increasingly complicated in a postmodern world.
Yeah. It's a huge point you make, yeah.
Yeah. So, I would certainly go easy on yourself and say, because you were badly raised and society gives you bad cues a lot of times, I would not, at the age of 30, be too hard on myself and say, I've absolutely wasted seven years or six years or whatever it is, right? Because...
There's no guarantee that if you had pursued the kind of success that you wanted that it might not have turned out much worse.
At least now you have a blank slate to start with as opposed to an accumulation of errors that you need to detach from.
That's a great point. That's a great point.
So I'd certainly be easy with myself about that.
Why did you want to become a math prof?
I think you nailed it when you said I prefer the abstract to away from people and Away from the market.
At least I thought I really enjoyed maths.
Yes, but do you enjoy teaching?
I think I enjoy reciting my knowledge.
Yeah, reciting your knowledge is not the same as teaching.
Because you talked a lot about wanting to become a math prof, but you never talked about any pleasure in teaching or wanting to inspire other people to love math or anything like that.
It seemed kind of like just about you.
Yeah, yeah. I think I had a preference for just submitting papers and maybe contributing to the field, but not the actual people.
I imagine myself as being one of those eccentric Sort of isolated hermit intellectuals.
Yeah, that's not a math prof though, right?
It's a math prof. It has to interact with people.
It's got to be part of department meetings, committee meetings.
It's going to be on the diversity panel and it's going to have to interact with students a lot.
And, you know, it's a lot of face-to-face time, right?
I mean, pure science you can hide out in the lab more, but maths, I think you've got to be out there.
And your love of maths doesn't seem to be something that you want to inspire other people.
Like, I love philosophy and I love inspiring people to pursue philosophy and that's sort of why I do what I do.
But that didn't seem to be part of the math prof thing, so I think the math prof thing was largely an illusion.
I think you nailed it.
And it would have been a very bad illusion, too, because you then would have invested a huge amount of time, money, and energy into getting a doctorate and trying to become a math prof, and then you find out you don't even like it.
It's better to do nothing than do the wrong thing.
Yeah. Right? That's why they say you get lost in the woods.
You just sit and stay where you are, man.
Just don't wander off somewhere.
Yeah. Well, no, one thing I've been repeating myself is – I suppose this isn't the same thing.
One thing I've been repeating to myself is – no, no, it's not the same thing.
Never mind. It's all right.
Right. So, I guess the question is, can you at least think of forgiving yourself for waiting until you have some idea what you genuinely want to do before committing to it?
I don't... I... Not completely.
I know, it's a big thing to say, but that's why I said, can you think about that process, right?
I mean, can you snap your fingers?
because you have a pretty harsh view of yourself for the last seven years, right?
Yeah.
And it could be that you're...
I mean, geez, I didn't start this show until I was in my 40s.
Late 30s. Late 30s, right?
There's lots of people who achieve a lot of success later in life.
Grandma Moses didn't start painting until she was 80.
I don't know, something like that, right?
There's lots of people who succeed later in life.
There's nothing wrong with that. And lots of people way older than 30.
I think Hugh Lewis didn't really get his first big hit going until he was well into his 30s okay so it's certainly It's certainly possible. But the one thing you have to do to succeed is you can't go from inaction to frenzy.
Oh. So if you let panic drive you, it's going to drive you into the ground.
It's sort of like if you haven't exercised for a while and you say, that's it, I'm going to go run a marathon, all you're going to do is hurt yourself.
So if you start panicking, I've got to do X or Y and throw myself at it and the alternative is doom, well, that's not organic.
That's not based on pleasure.
That's not based upon a richness of experience.
It's not going to be sustainable and you're just going to burn yourself out and just add another pain here and waste another year or two.
I've burned myself out, I think, in university.
Yes, yes.
And that's because it wasn't love that was driving you.
It was status and it was also avoidance and it was maybe a bit of an F you to be better than your parents.
It could be any number of things, right?
It could be all.
It wasn't the love of the thing itself.
And that's like, you know, I mean, everybody knows this and I've done it and everybody knows someone who's done this has dated the girl just because she's pretty.
I mean, you've heard these calls a million times, right?
She was crazy. Why did you date her?
She was pretty. I mean, that's an example of going for approval or status rather than the virtue of the person or the thing itself, right?
Yeah. So what you have to figure out is what do you love?
You can't build a life on what you fear.
I mean, you can, but it's going to fall down, right?
So you can't try and build a life on, I'm panicking, it's too late, I've got to act, right?
Now, you don't have to answer this.
Obviously, it may not be at the tip of your tongue, right?
But there's something that you love.
Maybe it's philosophy. Maybe it's self-knowledge.
Maybe it's... I mean, who knows what, right?
Maybe it does turn out to be teaching.
I don't know. But there's something that you love.
I have been juggling quite...
I think part of my inertia is due to the fact that I... I guess I have so many...
I think to myself that there are so many maybe possible areas I could...
I could delve into, but I can't seem to settle my mind on one thing.
Right. And that may be because you're burdened with an over-responsibility for a childhood and a youth that you just had to survive.
Yeah. I mean, if you were listening to a caller who called in with your history of violence and drunken parents and abuse and danger and all of that, and in being in a terrifying, violent school, would you...
I mean, what level of sympathy would you have for such a person?
Quite a significant deep sympathy.
And do you have that for yourself, my friend?
Not enough.
No, not enough.
Thank you.
Alright, 10 being maximum sympathy, where are you on a 1 to 10?
Hey, let's give you some math. It's probably about 7.
I don't know that I agree with you, which doesn't mean anything because it's your life, right?
I think your instincts are right.
Yeah, I'd put you at a 2 or 3.
Well, that's surprising to me, but I think maybe because I'm not accessing something.
Well, so you've told me some of the adversities that you had in life, but you haven't cut yourself any slack for it.
You haven't given yourself a break for it.
Now, giving yourself a break doesn't mean that you excuse everything you do forever or whatever it is, right?
But, you know, if you'd been in some terrible car accident and it took you three years to learn how to walk again, I assume that you'd have sympathy for yourself for not walking much for three years, right?
I'm actually asking myself whether I would.
Yeah, yeah. You would, right?
No, no, I'm actually asking myself whether you would or whether you'd be like, yeah, yeah, the sooner.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's it.
I think maybe I don't know how to have that additional sympathy for, well, the right amount of sympathy for myself.
That's key. Yeah, it's really, really important.
Because if you don't have sympathy, if you've gone through difficulties, extreme difficulties, as you have, if you don't have sympathy, like for every scoop of sympathy you take out, you replace with a giant flaming scoop of blame.
And sympathy or blame, that's all we got when we have difficult childhoods.
We have sympathy or we have blame.
There's nothing else. We can either sympathize with ourselves or we blame ourselves.
I've heard some causality from you about the difficulties you faced as a child, but I've not heard any sympathy for yourself or compassion for yourself.
I think one thing that I worry more about than pursuing a good career is one of the things, and one of the main things, but maybe an even bigger one is that Well, the clock is ticking for me in the formation of connections and relationships.
But I've been avoiding people for so long, I guess, because of how much I want to hide in the abstract.
Well, no, I get that.
I get that. But if you have sympathy for yourself, you won't need to hide in the abstract.
Right. Right.
Because I feel shame. Right.
I mean, how on earth are you supposed to date or have friends if you're full of shame?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like inviting someone you care about to come on a boat with you that's surely going to sink.
Or as you say, I had it rough...
I have great sympathy for myself.
I trot water because society is so bad with us.
And it is terrible. I mean, what society defines as success is just terrible.
And you say, yeah, I didn't know where to go and I had the wisdom to not go anywhere.
And the sum total of all of this, and you're still a relatively young man at the age of 30, the sum total of all of this It's that I learned how to have genuine compassion for myself so that when I do find friends and a wife, it will be permanent.
permanent.
It will be without repetition of trauma.
You were a smart guy in a violent school, in a toxic culture, in a dysfunctional country, with alcoholic, violent, and abusive parents.
You tell me... You put it really well.
No, you tell me where that doesn't get you a big, giant space hug from the universe, man.
Yeah, but you put it really well.
Yeah, you have a really strong...
You make a really strong case that...
Hey, I'm just echoing back, man.
I'm just repeating what you said to me.
Well, it's still, you know, just hearing it, right?
So, yeah, have some compassion with yourself.
You got a degree.
Man, good job. Good job.
You didn't pursue academia.
Can you imagine? I mean, you crazy son of a bitch.
If you're listening to this kind of show...
No, no, but that was before.
No, no, no, but let's say you tripped across this kind of show, right?
And you then start to learn some of the unspeakable truths about the world, right?
And you're in university.
Oh, yeah, sure, sure.
How's that going to play out?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just go after Stephen Su, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That would be torture. And a much worse torture than what you're facing now.
Is it? Oh yeah, absolutely.
If you're in a situation where you want to be honorable and honest and have integrity and speaking the truth is going to cause you a professional or financial destruction, that's a nightmare.
It's a complete nightmare. But I would imagine at least he has something to lose and he's built something and he has people.
No, I get that. I'm not saying it's a direct analogy.
Yeah, sure. But it's not an easy transition.
Sure, yeah. Yeah, sure.
Yeah, okay, yeah.
I suppose if I were in his shoes, I'd be in my 40s and then I'd just be, I guess I'd have a different kind of issue.
It's a challenge. It's a challenge.
Yeah. It's a challenge. So, I would just say, you know, have some compassion for yourself because if you have compassion for yourself, then you won't have things to hide from others.
others and if you don't have things to hide from others you don't need to be lost in abstract land okay but the compassion is key We are extraordinarily badly raised collectively these days.
It's really bad out there.
Almost every social, intellectual, media queue is the exact opposite of what it should be.
Not to mention the significant challenges of being a smart person in a sometimes increasingly dumped-down world.
It's dangerous. And if you can get that compassion, then you can forgive yourself.
Not that I think you have much to forgive yourself for.
And then your energies can be opened up.
But you can't love anything in the world if you have a kind of contempt for yourself.
And the only way to combat that contempt is with kindness, with compassion for the self.
Yeah. And don't rush.
Recognize that you've hit a turning point in your life, but don't dash in some new direction.
See, we want to work on the effects, but the only way to work on the effects is to work on the course, right?
Like we look down, we see, oh, I've got a belly roll in my belly or whatever it is, right?
Or something like that.
And then we get mad at the effects, right?
And it's okay. Well, what do you got to do?
Why don't you just eat less and exercise more, right?
That's all you got to do. And...
You now want to fix the effects, and I'm saying go to the root of the issue, go to the cause, which is that you were trained to have a lack of compassion for yourself.
And if you can replace that lack of compassion with...
Genuine self-regard and admiration for what you've been able to achieve.
And these days, getting to 30 without any disasters is pretty good.
It is.
It is.
You didn't fall off some statue in Portland, Oregon and break your neck.
So good job, man.
You know, it's like if you've gotten through, you know, the first two years of the Second World War without a scratch.
Do you call yourself a failure? I don't think so.
Still got all my limbs.
Still got all my fingers. Got both eyeballs.
There you go, right?
Yeah, yeah. And so, you can look at...
You know how, I think it was Jordan Peterson when he was addicted to, I think it was benzodiazepines or something like that.
And to get him cured, they put him in a coma.
Seems kind of radical, but what do I know?
I'm not a doctor, right? So maybe, in a sense, to prevent bad decisions, you put yourself in a situation of stasis, like you put yourself into a coma.
And you're emerging from that coma with the wisdom to make good decisions without having to drag around the bad decisions.
I mean, the number of people I know, a little bit older than you, well, you've heard them on this show a million times, right?
They've got bad decisions and they just have to try and find a way to live with it.
You don't have those bad decisions, man.
That's great. You start from a blank slate.
You start without some addiction.
You start without some bad marriage, some kids, some difficult ex, some whatever, right?
And just to revisit my decision in making, the decision I made to do maths in university, that wouldn't be because I avoided in not succeeding in a sense.
I have succeeded because I have not sealed my fate.
In the same way that, say, Johnny Depp or Marlon Brando did.
Yeah, so if you had thrown yourself whole hog into gaining approval by becoming excellent at maths, then you might have become more prominent, you might have become a maths professor, you might have done any number of things, or maybe you'd have been snatched up by some finance company and sold your soul for money or whatever it was,
right? And so the fact that you avoided that To fail at something that might have destroyed you is not a failure.
I failed to jump out of that plane when it was flying over the city.
I don't think that's a failure.
My whole life I failed to get addicted to heroin.
It's terrible. Totally messed that up, man.
Can't seem to get my ducks in a row.
Can't seem to get my horse in a row.
I've just completely failed.
I've never made it to alcoholism.
You've completely failed at becoming an alcoholic too.
I just wanted to mention that as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Despite two parents who are alcoholics, right?
Yeah, yeah. And I was fapping for...
So I was a shut-in when that crisis was going on in university.
And I just...
I guess I fed myself on porn and fapping.
Right, right, right. But I'm now four years.
I'm on my fourth year of Novap.
You've even failed at that.
Yep, yep. Sorry?
You've even failed at that.
Yeah. At the one giant arm scenario.
After the 12 years of dedication.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So listen, I would take heart.
I would take comfort. I would take compassion.
I would say, okay, the world is my oyster.
I can go anywhere, do anything, and keep casting about, and I'm absolutely positive inspiration will strike you at some point, and it will then become clear, and your life will move in the way you want it to.
But you've got to get the compassion first.
So what about my thoughts about how it's maybe a little too late to start on something, and Thoughts like that.
I'm quite late in the game.
What do I do with somewhat negative thoughts like that?
Well, I mean, when you have negative thoughts, it's the usual solution is reason and evidence.
So reason is, well, no, of course, you're not too late, right?
I mean, you're going to live to 85 or whatever.
So you still got more than a half a century to go.
So that's going to be fine, right?
You got time. I mean, you're already way beyond the average lifespan of people in the Middle Ages, right?
Okay, okay, yeah. You're a long way to go.
You can look up all the people who achieved success later in life, and there are hundreds of thousands of them that you can find those stories.
So you've got your reason, you've got your evidence, right?
Okay. And when you've been raised really badly, spending the first seven years avoiding disaster is a pretty good track record.
And also, to the voice that says to you it's too late, what I would say is, hey man, if you didn't make me panic earlier, you don't get to boss me now.
Right? Like, this is just a form of self-abuse, right?
Oh, it's too late! It's like, where were you three years ago, four years ago, five years ago?
If you weren't saying anything, then shut the hell up now.
Okay. Okay. Okay, yeah.
Yeah, that emotional instinct.
Oh, it's too late. It's like, if you genuinely believe that, oh, voice that says it's too late, then you would have said something earlier.
So you don't genuinely believe that.
That's just fear. And the funny thing is, is that the it's too late is going to cause either A, more paralysis, or B, another disaster.
So thanks, but that's not helping at all.
You're right. I mean, it's a silly joke that I occasionally have with my daughter.
She'll pass me a banana or she'll pass me something.
I'll drop it. And then I'll say, I really think we should be more careful when we pass things to each other.
Because that's after the fact, right?
What's the point of saying that after the fact?
It's kind of a joke, right? Not a great joke, but you know.
I'm sure it's a joke she's tired of by now.
But the 2020 hindsight is completely useless and it's just a form of self-abuse, right?
I mean, if that voice wasn't helping you in the past, it doesn't have the right to boss you around now.
So it should have risen when I was 23, really.
Yeah, of course. Where's all this good advice of the panic voice back when, you know, in the past, right?
Because the panic voice, if it's trying to freak you out now, it's part of the problem, right?
Yeah. And it has no credibility.
You treat your inner voices just like you treat a person, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
You know, credibility is key, right?
Back on the days of Twitter, people would say, you know, you're bad at growing your social media presence, and then they have six followers after 10 years.
It's like, I know it's not an argument, but you don't have any credibility.
And so if there's a part of you that's panicking, and it's like, well, where were you five years ago or seven years ago?
You don't have any credibility, right?
That stuff is really funny. Right.
Right. But, you know, don't be hostile.
The voice is, you know, it's part of you and you can't, you know, you can't just rip out parts of you or whatever, right?
But, yeah, don't let it boss you.
That's no good, right? Because then you'll end up just acting out of conformity to that bullying voice, which only gives the bullying voice more strength.
And, you know, then you'll trail it back to your parents and then you'll just realize you never get to grow up.
And that's no good, right? Everybody in the personality gets a seat at the table, but nobody gets to be the boss, right?
Anarchy exists. Voluntarism exists in the personality before it can exist in society, right?
So the parts of me, yeah, I'm happy to take advice.
Let's all sit at the table and let's figure out the right way forward, but nobody gets to pound the table and terrify or bully or whine or complain anybody else into subjugation.
It's a negotiation, right? And it's the same thing.
I think it should be that way with you as well.
Well, I've been journaling for a long time, and I'm thinking to myself, if I just keep journaling, then I could be maybe about 35, and then would I not freak out more?
I don't know. I mean, for me, the journaling was very much engaging in very strong debates with aspects of myself.
You know, challenging and incorporating and all of that.
Journaling, you know, this is what I think, this is what I feel.
I think it's important, but, you know, what I would do is have that written...
For me, it was written. It could be any number of ways.
Have that discussion.
So, you know, you say, scared part of me says, it's too late.
And then you just say, well, here's what you say, and what does that scared part say?
say and you just engage in that conversation.
I think it's generally good to write it down because otherwise it just kind of floats around in your head and you get distracted.
But you get involved in those platonic debates with the parts of yourself that usually have really helpful things to say, but you've got to get through some static first.
I have quite a fair few notebooks full of my writing.
Oh, that's good. So you have that way of doing it, and that's a good way to go.
All right, listen, I can sort of feel my own inspiration here beginning to fade, and I just wanted to, and there's nothing to do with you.
Sorry, you're breaking up. Oh, can you hear me?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was just saying that I could feel my own capacity to inspire beginning to fade away.
It's nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with you at all.
I've been sitting down for a while and normally I did walk for the first little bit.
And so I'm going to close things down here, but I hope that you will keep me...
Well, first of all, thank you so much for the email and for the openness and honesty in the conversation.
And I hope that you will keep me posted about how things are going.
Absolutely. Yeah. All right.
Well, thanks, man. I really, really appreciate it.
And you should, I think, be proud of what you're doing.
And I no doubt you will do great things with your life.
But yeah, self-compassion.
Don't rush. Listen to yourself and be proud of what you haven't achieved, which probably would have been negative.
So thanks so much for the call.
I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much.
Thanks so much.
Bye-bye.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
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