June 19, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:47
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine. | |
| Happy Father's Day 2022. | |
| I wanted to leave you with a few pearls of wisdom on this day. | |
| If you have a great relationship with your father, wonderful. | |
| I am looking forward to spending time with my wonderful daughter and family today, so I hope that you do, and if you don't, I'm going to give you a little tip here. | |
| Based upon a guy, my father left when I was very young. | |
| I was not close with him and he's now been dead for a couple of years. | |
| So I'm going to give you a little tip. | |
| Hard one by my mid-50s execution of life's tragedies and opportunities. | |
| So here's my little tip. | |
| The one thing that you want to avoid for the second half of your life is regret. | |
| Regret. Really, really important. | |
| As I'm sort of surveying the life arc of the people I grew up with, I can see, of course, places where regret has taken over. | |
| And regret is kind of a one-way street. | |
| You get down there and regret is that it's most painful when you can't turn back and change or improve what's happened. | |
| So, to give you an analogy, If you eat well, you exercise, maintain a healthy weight and get good sleep and all of that, it doesn't mean that you won't get ill. | |
| But if you do get ill, you only have the illness to deal with. | |
| You don't have regret to deal with, right? | |
| If you haven't exercised, if you've gained weight, if you're just unhealthy overall, then when you get sick, you are going to blame yourself and maybe reasonably so. | |
| So avoiding regret is super important for the second half of your life. | |
| So when it comes to relationships in your life, my approach has been, I guess, fairly simple, which is if I have an issue with someone, I will sit down and talk about that issue with that person and be as honest and open and clear about what issues I have and what I would like and listen to what the other person likes and try and find some way of accommodating both people's preferences. | |
| In a beneficial interaction. | |
| So that's good. And wherever you can do that, and it's safe to do that, I think you should do that. | |
| And that doesn't mean, of course, that the relationship is going to work out, that everything's going to be great. | |
| What it does mean, though, is whatever happens moving forward, you won't be carrying the burden of regret. | |
| That's really, really important. | |
| Regret is like an acid that just eats you away on the inside and you really, I think, will benefit from acting proactively to try and avoid that. | |
| So you sit down and you try and work things out with people. | |
| And that doesn't mean you can control what they do. | |
| You can have some influence on it by how you approach the conflict, but you can't finally and fundamentally control what other people do. | |
| But the purpose of sitting down and being open and honest and clear in the issues that you have is so that if the relationship doesn't work out, if the other person is just relentlessly gaslighting or hostile or manipulative or whatever, then moving forward, You don't have the relationship probably but you don't have regret and that's really key. | |
| The regret you can control. | |
| Regret is almost entirely under your control but Whether you have a positive or negative relationship with someone, it's not under your control. | |
| So work to connect with people, work to be honest with people, work to be open with people, work to be, you know, honorably vulnerable with people. | |
| And if they recognize and respect your openness and your honesty and your vulnerability and they can move closer to you, wonderful. | |
| I think that's a great thing. | |
| If they view vulnerability and honesty as weakness and openness to exploitation, okay, then it probably is not going to work out particularly well if you're into basic psychological self-protection. | |
| But... With vulnerability and honesty, you get the truth about the other person's nature. | |
| You can tease out the best, or you can reveal the worst, and you can make your decisions based on that. | |
| So, 55 years old, got to be 56 this year, and I have, through some good luck, through some good decisions, I have arrived at later middle age, Don't really have any regrets. | |
| And that is a very positive and I think really the most positive state of mind that you can end up with. | |
| You know, aging is inevitable and so on. | |
| But if you can get to the middle point of your life or past the middle point of your life for me without regrets, That's a good thing because I can see the people around me who are laboring with the curse of regret and it's really tough because there is no rewind. | |
| There's no going back in time. | |
| So with this Father's Day 2022, that's my very strong recommendation. | |
| Can't tell you what to do and never will, but, you know, my particular experience and recommendation is sit down and talk with the people you have your issues with and see if there's a way that you can move everyone closer together. | |
| If you can, I think that's wonderful, then you will. | |
| Not have the regret of the missed opportunity of healing a relationship. | |
| If you can't, if things get worse and more difficult and more problematic because of your honesty and openness, then you can move on without regret, knowing that you did just about everything you could do to improve things. | |
| So I hope this is with your own debt. | |
| Call them up. Try and work things out. | |
| His decisions influence how you go forward. | |
| So I hope you have a wonderful day. | |
| Thank you, everyone, so much for your support for the 16 years I've been doing this in the occasionally beneficial and sometimes soar-unlike public eye. | |
| Have yourself a wonderful day. |
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