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Oct. 24, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:31
The Truth About Luck!
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Alrighty, great questions from the noble crew at freedomain.locals.com.
I hope that you will join the conversation.
It's a great place to be.
So, would you expand on the me plus concept?
So, I first talked about this in my presentation on the death of Robin Williams, and it goes a little something like this.
So, let's say that you're lonely, you want friends, but you feel like you have to do something other than be yourself to get your friends.
So, you have to be You have to be compulsively jokey.
You have to be paying for everyone's drinks.
You have to be the wingman.
You have to praise them.
You have to make them look better.
You have to, whatever it is, something that's more than just yourself, you have to also kind of manipulate them by providing value other than who you are.
So, you plus, right?
The foundational example of this is, if you want a woman to sleep with you, that you have to pay her, then it has to be you plus money to get her to sleep with you.
So, that's the me plus concept.
And, the listener goes on to say,"...it seems to be entirely appropriate that my still theoretical wife would not like me in a pure world of form sense, but only for that which I am and do for her." In other words, what is the essence of me but the sum of the parts, some of which serve the children, wife, community, self-guard, some of which do not?
A ridiculous example, what could it possibly mean to love a girlfriend if she's chosen obesity, cruelty, verbal abuse, to sterilize herself from ever procreating, and to obstruct everything good about me?
Of course, this would never happen, and how can one separate loving her from all that which she is choosing?
The same. How can she love, quote, me, irrespective of what I seem, am, and do?
Isn't the threat of losing the other's affections a great incentive to stay good oneself?
My position, I'm a man, early twenties, excited to be me plus, because without the plus, there is no me to be valued.
What am I missing? It's a great question.
It's a great question, and me plus does stray dangerously close to the mental territory of I don't need to provide value to people.
They should just love me for who I am, you know, regardless of what I do and what value I provide and so on.
Right. So, I'm going to blow your mind.
And I say this with all the dim humility of those long-ago days when I was in my early 20s and believed things that were false or had been told things that were false and accepted them.
Right. So, you...
Qua you, are never going to be loved.
I, qua me, like just because of me, am never going to be loved.
Identity is not love.
So, you have to ask yourself, what is love for?
Why do we have love? Why have we evolved the capacity to love?
Well, we have evolved the capacity to love because of pair bonding.
And because of virtue.
So love is, in sort of the Bermalian sense, a biochemical bond that creates an environment where children can be best raised.
So when you fall in love and you get married and you have sex, you get all of this dopamine and oxytocin and all these wonderful chemicals that bond you With your spouse.
And that bonding means that being with your spouse, chatting with your spouse, sex with your spouse, all of that sort of stuff is going to be better than some other person.
So it welds you together.
Now, why do we weld things together?
So that they won't break apart and damage or break people or things, right?
So we weld the girders of a bridge together so that the bridge doesn't Fall apart and kill people.
So, love at the...
and we see this with other creatures as well, like swans and geese and other sort of lifelong pair-bonded creatures, not so much rabbits, a little more wolves, of course, R versus K. We've talked about this before.
So, why do we have this pair-bonding?
Because it's best for the children.
Or, to put it another way, Those people who had sex and produced children without pair bonding, those children did not survive nearly as well.
And again, I'm talking a bit more colder climates where you have to plan for winter and all that kind of stuff.
Pair bonding doesn't so much exist in sort of the history of Tahiti or things like that.
At least according to Marlon Brando's biography, which is really my anthropological go-to book.
Those who don't know. Anyway.
So we have evolved pair bonding For the sake of children.
So if you say, I want to be loved just for me, you're saying, I want to hijack something that is there for the children and use it solely for my own benefit.
And I'm not saying this is you, I understand, I'm just talking about how it plays out that way.
You say, I am going to hijack that which is designed for the best raising of children and use it to make just me happy.
So men often complain that women love them for their resources.
What do you think love was developed for?
Love wasn't developed to make you happy.
I mean, evolution doesn't care about your happiness.
It cares about survival, which is why when you're threatened you tend to get angry, which is not the same as being happy, because being angry will help you survive if you're threatened, fight or flight, right?
So love is not about your happiness, but about that which is best for the children.
And in general, if we align ourselves with...
How things evolved will probably end up doing better as a whole, right?
Just align yourself with, sort of listen to the people who say, we didn't evolve to eat this, that or the other.
So if you align yourself with evolution, you're probably going to do better than going in mass opposition to it, which is kind of like the socialist communist thing, right?
Going in opposition to evolution if people respond to incentives.
So, love was not evolved for you to feel good.
It was not evolved for me to feel good.
It didn't evolve for us to feel needed or treasured or valuable or special or anything like that.
Pair bonding love evolved to cement people together so that their children would have the greatest chance of survival.
So that's what love is for.
And I suppose you could use your muscles to generate electricity in some manner, but that's not what they have developed for.
They have developed to move you around to gain resources, avoid predators, and have sex, or whatever, you know, eat food.
So, men say, oh, women only love us for our resources.
Well, That's true because that's what love evolved for.
And these same men, of course, who say women only love us for our resources are often addicted to female beauty.
And then women, of course, can say with equal veracity, well, men only love us for our resources.
Beauty, our physical beauty.
Men only love us for sex, right?
And that's the great fear, right?
Will you still love me tomorrow?
It's the woman's great fear, like after you have sex.
Will you still have any affection?
Or are you basically faking it to get sex?
And for the men, of course, it's what happens if I lose my money, if I lose my status, will you still?
Love me. And all of that is sort of this modern cult of love wrestling, of love hijacking, of love hijacking, that love isn't there to pair bond you for the best raising of children and to have comfort and succor in your old age so that you're around for longer in order to care for your grandchildren.
No, no. Love is there to make me happy.
Which makes about as much sense as saying, the spleen evolved to make me happy.
My little toe evolved to make me happy.
I don't know what the spleen does, apparently it's disposable, but your little toe evolved, of course, to help you with balance.
It doesn't care about your happiness, only cares about your balance, so to speak.
So if you say, I want to be loved for me, you're hijacking love because the purpose of love is to create a stable pair bond for the better raising of children.
Now, I also mentioned virtue earlier, so I've said love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
It is virtuous to raise children well.
Virtuous to have a stable pair bond in order to raise children well.
We have developed this capacity for universals, and creating arbitrary exceptions or oppositions to these universals creates stress, strain, unhappiness, misery, and also gives you the pleasure of conformity when you conform to other people who are aggressively pushing exceptions or opposition to general principles like Don't use violence.
Oh, but you can hit your kids and blah, blah, blah, right?
So, love, what are you loved for?
Well, just coincidentally, certainly in the modern world, that which promotes the best raising of children also coincides with virtue.
So what does your wife love in you?
She loves your virtue.
And your virtue means that you're a good father, you're a good partner, you're a good provider.
Does she love just the provision of value?
No, she does not just love the provision of value.
I mean, I suppose some women, particularly single moms, kind of faux pair bond with the government, but nobody would say that they love the state.
They say that they're addicted to it or whatever, right?
So what does she love in you?
That which serves the family, that which serves pair bonding, that which serves the best interests of the children.
And virtue happens to serve the best interests of the children.
Non-aggression principle, consistency, integrity, honesty, compassion, affection, protection, provision.
These serve The children, they serve the family, and so she's going to love you for your virtue.
Now, of course, you can be virtuous without a family.
The principles still apply. I get all of that.
But, I mean, this is the old, like, you can drive a bicycle on a road, but the road wasn't built for the bikes.
So, me too.
is when you try to put on a show or fake something in order to hijack the love intended for the stability of the family in the pursuit of virtue for your own personal sense of value and feeling needed.
So you pursue virtue and through the pursuit of virtue you act in a manner That is good for your family, good for your wife, good for your children, and actually even good for your parents, whether they're good or not.
So, yeah, there is no platonic you that can be loved.
So, yes, you do need to be in service of virtue.
You do need to be in service of your family because that's what love is for.
Love is to give you the emotional feedback that makes you want to Care for your family.
And the best way to care for your family is, you know, I talked about this in a show recently, the difference between a virtue and a wisdom.
A virtue is knowing what to do and wisdom is knowing when to do it.
So yeah, you take care of your family.
That's what love is for. If you put on a show in an attempt to divert the natural flow or the rivers of Love to gratify your own ego.
It's not going to work and that's usually the me too plus thing.
Alright. Long time subscriber here.
I have trouble not getting down with things out of my control.
My truck I just paid off got totaled by some uninsured guy and the payout was quite unfair.
A 70% value of a $21,000 vehicle.
For my insurance company I had full coverage.
This was out of my hands, but I still got depressed for a couple of months because I felt cheated by the situation.
Any advice for you or philosophy on how to prevent this from happening?
Thank you for everything you do.
My life has been one thousand percent improved since I started listening to you ten years ago.
Well, I'm sorry to hear about your truck.
Ladies, you don't understand.
A man's car is essential to his identity and liberty and freedom and Woo-ability and all of that.
So, picking up a woman in a nice car for a date or whatever is a gift from the gods.
All right. So, yeah.
I'm sorry to hear about this, obviously, first and foremost.
So, this is the question of luck.
I have a sort of very complicated relationship to luck, and I don't want to make this about me, but I can sort of show you my thoughts, because I think that they're probably quite common.
Am I lucky or am I unlucky?
I tend to pace with luck in the moment and feel both unlucky or unlucky depending on whether good or bad things happen.
Let's take a sort of silly example.
I actually just played this with some friends and their kids yesterday.
I played Catan. It's a board game and some of it's skill, some of it's trading and some of it's luck.
It's not like chess where there's no luck, there's no dice rolls.
But Catan, if you, you know, when you go through a phase in any board game where the rolls are going against you, so in Catan you put your pieces on hexagonal markers that, when you roll dice, you put it on a six, and you roll a six, you get the resources associated with the six.
It could be a wood, or a brick, or a wheat, or a sheep, or ore, and so on.
You build things and you expand and all of that, and you try to get a certain number of points, and it's a very good game.
Anyway. So, when you, again, I know this sounds kind of silly, but when you Play the game.
You set up your pieces based upon what dice you think you're going to get rolled the most.
Now, of course, 2 and 12 are rare, 6 and 8 are common, and so on, right?
Now, if you build based on expecting a bunch of 6s, and this is actually what happened yesterday.
I built on the game expecting a bunch of 6s, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect, but...
There were like no sixes rolled for the first third of the game.
So I had almost like no cards, nothing to do.
Now, I don't get too bad.
Of course, when I was younger, I was much more volatile this kind of way.
But it's just kind of annoying.
And it's kind of annoying because it's boring.
I don't really particularly care about winning or losing, but it's just kind of boring.
Like, if you're not getting any cars, you can't do any trades, and you just kind of sit there.
It's like this old comedy show from many years ago, a comedian who was talking about life in the backseat, and because I never had a car growing up, I lived in the backseat.
And he said, well, you can't have fun in the backseat.
All you can do is watch profiles of people having fun in the front, right?
Because they're all looking at each other and laughing and they're playing with the music.
And you can't, you're always leaning forward saying, what?
What? Or you can, you know, try and make contact with people trapped in the backseats of other cars and all that kind of stuff.
So it's just kind of boring because you're not actually having a conversation, which is engaging.
You're not actually able to participate in the game much because you don't have any cards.
So it's just, you know, it's just kind of dull.
And so I don't get particularly annoyed, but it's mildly irritating, I guess you could say.
Because, you know, you're trying to have fun, and because of the sort of random dice rolls, you end up not having fun.
I still remember, and oh, I probably think about this a couple of times a year, and this is, I understand, pathetic and ridiculous, but I'll just, you know, and be honest about my experience.
I had a Dungeons& Dragons character when I was, I don't know, 13 or so, called Sereg, and Sereg was a dwarf fighter.
Now, back, and he had eight hit points, and we had a very...
Toilet trained gunpoint anal retentive half-German dungeon master who's like, this is the dice, this is what we have called.
It was just, sort of paraphrasing, he actually didn't have an accent at all.
But to help you understand, he ended up becoming an electrical engineer.
It tells you how kind of fussy he was about numbers.
He was a little bit autistic in the way of like...
To me, when I was dungeon mastering, I would really try and keep the story in as much fun going as possible.
You know, if the dice...
Oh, I guess I could reveal it now.
40 years later. But if the dice went a particular way and a character would have died early in the adventure...
I wouldn't have them die.
I'd get down to like the one hit point or like make it exciting or whatever it is, right?
Just try and keep the story going and keep people engaged and interested.
And people really did like me as a dungeon master.
Now, of course, if somebody did something really ridiculous or stupid, then, you know, let them die and all of that.
But for the most part, I would try and play the edge to keep the story going and keep people sort of excited and all that.
So... It was hard to go up levels, right?
Like, when we played later, it's like, yeah, you can go up a level, right?
But he would actually keep track of each monster's experience points.
Every monster you kill gets you a certain amount of experience.
When you pass a certain amount of experience points, you go up a level.
And so on. And when my Dwarven character went up a level, you get to roll an 8-sided dice to see how many extra hit points you get.
And of course, the more hit points you get, the safer your character is, the better you can fight and so on.
And I think...
I can't remember if it was a 1 or a 3 or a 3 and a 1, because I went to 3rd level.
And I could have gotten up to, you know, 24 hit points if you roll 8 twice.
You start with 8 maximum, you get 16 to 24.
I rolled a 1 for my second level and I rolled a 3 for my third level so I went from 8 to 12 hit points and because we had this kind of real by the numbers Like a tax accountant by the number of Dungeon Master, I ended up covering our party's retreat from a bunch of bugbears and got killed.
And this was long before you could get resurrections or anything like that.
We weren't powerful enough.
And of course, if I'd had a few more hit points, I'm sure I would have survived.
So anyway, I died.
And it's alright. Later I had a character called Argoth who was a paladin who did so well, eventually he ended up becoming a demigod.
So the first round guy was not great.
The second round guy was fantastic.
I mean, this dungeon master, we invited someone to play, and he decided to be a thief, and he decided to wear chain mail.
And the dungeon master didn't say anything, right?
And then the thief tried to use his sneak ability to sneak up on some creature, and the dungeon master said, oh, your sneak ability doesn't work because you're wearing chain mail, and, you know, basically they rolled some dice and he died.
And he had nothing to do for the rest of the night.
I remember he did a little bit of biking on a bike machine that was in the guy's basement, and that was about it.
He listened to us play, and he never came back.
And even at the time, I was like, dude, come on.
The game is supposed to be somewhat...
Like, it's a role-playing game.
Now, if you're trying to sneak up, like, imagine, I said, remember, I said, imagine you're trying to sneak up on someone, you're wearing a bunch of spoons, wouldn't you notice the spoons making all this noise, and then not try and sneak up on them?
And he's like, hey, those are the rules.
And, you know, it's just, you know, we didn't let him be Dungeon Master much after that, because it was just a bad idea overall.
So, I just remember feeling I had bad luck.
Now, these are random dice rolls from many decades ago.
I'm not going to say it sort of sat with me or like I felt cursed.
You know, like my daughter has this great word.
Oh, this character is so cursed.
She said that about the guy.
I guess he's this kind of famous Hollow White actor.
He played the...
In the show Psych, he played the coroner.
And he said, oh, this character is so cursed.
That's actually a very funny phrase.
I love the slang that she comes up with or absorbs from her peer group.
So, do you feel cursed or do you feel blessed?
Do you feel lucky or do you feel unlucky?
You know, my wife, when we're playing Catan, if you're holding a bunch of cards and you roll a seven, then you have to give up half your cards.
Like, if you're holding eight or more cards, you have to give up half your cards, rounding down.
And of course, if my wife has a fistful of cards, she'll sort of, oh, here comes a seven!
You know, she's just sort of, yeah, great attitude.
So, with regards to good luck and bad luck, it's quite complicated for me.
If I have a run of bad luck, and I do, right?
I think like everyone, your luck clusters, and there's a bell curve of middle luck, good luck, and bad luck in your life, and every now and then your bad luck is going to cluster.
Every now and then, like in a game like Catan or Monopoly or whatever, right?
You will win through the virtue of your own.
Because the dice rolls just happen to go all your way.
I don't find that particularly interesting either.
Like if you're playing with a couple of other people and the dice rolls just happen to go your way, it's kind of boring, right?
Because it's not like any particular skill, the dice rolls.
And that's why my daughter is less keen on Catan, because she just says there's too much chance involved.
And she prefers a game like Among Us or other things that she will play where there's less chance.
Less chance. It's more skill.
It's more like chess. There's no dice rolls.
And so if the dice rolls are going your way, I guess you feel kind of lucky, but it's not particularly fun because the other people aren't particularly enjoying the game and you're not winning through any skill of your own.
It's like the game War, you know, where you just...
It's not really a game, right?
You just flip cards and the high card wins.
Not really a game. There's no skill involved whatsoever.
So... That's a real chance.
That's a real 100% random.
Assuming you've got an honest shuffle.
So... If dice rolls are going your way, if life is going your way, if things are going your way, oh, I'm so lucky.
I remember Julia Louis-Dreyfus was on some hair ad.
She's got a thick mane of hair and she was on some hair ad.
Oh, I'm so lucky because she's got all this thick hair and all of that.
There are times where luck clusters and you feel lucky.
And if you feel good about being lucky, you will feel bad about being unlucky.
So I've sort of tried to move more towards the middle and say, well, you know, like donations, right?
Donations cluster, and some days there are good donations, and then sometimes there can be days with few, if any, donations.
I try not to feel good when there are donations and then feel bad when there are no donations because, I mean, other than trying to produce as much quality as I can and asking for support at freedomain.com slash donate, there's nothing I can do.
I mean, there's nothing I can do other than produce quality content and ask for donations.
I can't. And even if I could make people donate, I wouldn't, right?
So I can't do anything.
So if for some reason I happen to get a cluster of donations, that's nice.
If there's a couple of days with no donations, that's, you know, I try not to get too happy if there are donations or too unhappy if there are Not donations.
And I'm fairly okay with that now.
Of course, it's been, you know, a long time to get used to it.
And knowing it will often, you know, often it will even out over time.
So, it's not too bad that way.
So, are you lucky or are you unlucky?
I try not to feel lucky or unlucky.
Because that's predicting an outcome that is random.
Now, fortune favors the bold.
You know, preparation is everything.
99% of success is showing up or something.
I think that's a Woody Allen quote.
God help me for quoting that guy.
But I try not to think too much about luck.
And I work on the things I can control.
So when you have...
And look, listen, I don't want you to feel alone in this.
I've had some great luck in my life.
I've had some terrible luck in my life.
And I won't get into it, but let's just say there's been quite a bit of money involved in both situations, and it's rough, man.
When the downside hits and you get sort of bad news, you know, like the contractor comes over and says, oh, you're going to need X, Y, and Z, and it's going to be this, that, and the other, and it's like, oh, God, right?
So bad luck, right?
It's bad luck. So, when you got totaled by some uninsured guy, the payout was quite unfair, you felt cheated by the situation.
Right, right.
So, let's say...
Well, I assume that you weren't cheated by the insurance company, because then I'm sure you would have raised a complaint or had an appeal or something like that.
So let's say that you signed an insurance policy that said you get 70% of the value of the vehicle, right?
Or maybe they say, well, because it wasn't brand new, we're going to take 30% off or whatever it was, right?
But then it's, you know, $21,000 to replace it, right?
So, you have to pay a couple of grand to replace the car over and above what you lost.
Okay. So, assuming that you weren't cheated, but it was just bad luck.
Now, are you cheated because, you know, maybe there's a lot of people in your neighborhood who aren't, you know, let's say they haven't gone through the full legal immigration process, and maybe they're uninsured partly because of that, or maybe there's People who are uninsured don't pay penalties, right? So, of course, a just legal system would be that if somebody without insurance totals your truck, that person has to pay for the new truck, and insurance wouldn't even be involved.
At all. But, you know, let's say that even in the current system that if some uninsured person totals your truck and it's worth $21,000 and the insurance company pays 70% of that, then the other 30% comes from the guy who totaled your truck, right? He has to pay the difference, right?
And maybe a little bit extra for your sort of time and money.
So, yeah, there's a bunch of bad systems that are set up, and we're all captive and subject and held, in a sense, hostage by those.
So, but let's say you were cheated.
So let's say you were cheated.
And, you know, I hate to sort of say the obvious or give people spoilers, but, I mean, let's be frank.
You are going to get cheated Over the course of your life.
And you're going to get cheated more than once.
And some of the sums of being cheated are not going to be small.
You know, some people you give money to will use that money wisely and pull themselves out of their problems and either thank you or pay it back or something like that.
Other people you give money to will blow it and waste it.
And you'd have been better off keeping that money for yourself or giving it to someone better.
Some people you invest in are going to work hard and diligently and produce returns.
Some people you invest in are going to take that investment and go to St.
Bart's. Now, you know, as you age and you grow, you get some wisdom and all of that, then hopefully you can figure this stuff out better.
But, eh, it's going to happen.
People are going to cheat you.
Now, how do you avoid that?
Well, you just never get involved with anyone in any way, and you're going to lose more, right?
So if, let's say, you never invest in anyone or anything, then your money's going to be stolen through inflation, and it's going to end up largely worthless, okay?
So you've avoided being cheated by the stock market or by people you invest in, and you end up being cheated by central banks, and that's a certainty, right?
I mean, 90% of investment is an inflation hedge, and so we're all herded into the stock market at soft, foggy fee at gunpoint, right?
So what, you know, so yeah, you cannot invest any, let's say that there even wasn't such a thing as inflation really, and you don't invest in the stock market, then you're just going to end up with your savings.
Whereas if you invest in the stock market, you know, and this is like obviously just pure theory, but if you invest in the stock market at sort of five or six percent, your money's going to double over time and then double again, you're going to end up with a lot more money.
Now, cheating It's going to take some money away from you, but avoiding the risk of cheating is going to cost you even more money because then you never invest in anyone or anything.
Does that make sense? So you have to look at the larger picture.
You have to look at the larger picture and say, okay, well, the way that I could avoid never having my car totaled by somebody who's uninsured and then only getting 70% of the value, the way I could avoid that is never have a car, take the bus or bike everywhere.
Okay, but I assume that that's a big negative in your life.
So, losing, you know, this money, what was it?
Six thousand, seven thousand bucks?
I don't know. Losing this money is just, it's part of the price of living and the rewards vastly outweigh the costs.
Right? How many, if you're married, right?
How many women did you ask out or go out or were interested in or circled around or floated around with romantic intent?
How many How many women did it not work out with before you met your wife?
I won't get into my number, but it's not small, right?
So how many women were you interested in or dated or whatever or asked out before you met the lover of your life, the mother of your children, the father of your children, whatever, right?
Well, it's probably quite a few.
And I'm also including the women that you asked out who didn't say yes, right?
The women who said no. She said, well, it's quite uncomfortable to go through all that rejection and to go through all of that loss.
It's painful. I understand that.
And you can avoid all the pain of rejection by never asking a woman out.
Never dating, staying home, in the basement, whatever, right?
You can avoid all of that rejection.
And, you know, I think, if you've listened to my call-in shows, you've heard enough guys...
Who are in their mid to late 20s, early to mid 30s or sometimes even older who've taken that path and how miserable they are.
How alone, how desperate, how unskilled and you know for some of them it's you know perilously close to unrecoverable.
So that's not an answer.
So you over the course of your life are going to make how much more money if you have a car?
Right? How much more money are you going to make over the course of your life if you have a car?
Well, a lot, right?
And this doesn't even include the fact that if you have a car, you look kind of cooler when you date girls.
So you may end up with a higher quality girl who's going to be a great wife and drive your income even higher by being so excellent and helpful.
So how much money are you going to make over the course of your life by having a car?
How much better is your life going to be over the course of your life by having a car?
$100,000, $200,000, $300,000.
It's hard to know. And that doesn't even count the sort of soft quality of life issues.
So, you see where I'm going with this?
So you lost, what, $6,000 or $7,000 by having a car and having it totalled.
Okay. So, let's say that you make $200,000 over the course of your life more by having a car, even including the cost of the car.
So you're paying 3.5% tax on $200,000 to pay the $7,000 it takes to restore this car.
So you're still up $193,000.
Does that make sense? Like, let's say you've got a house and you get some assessment and you've got to pay 15 grand to fix your roof or something like that, right?
Okay, that's understandable.
It's kind of annoying, but okay.
But look at the value of your house and how it's gone up over time.
And let's say you sell the house for...
$200,000 more than you paid for it.
Well, that $15,000 is 7.5% of the $200,000.
So instead of making $200,000, you made $192,500.
Now, it's also the case that if you, let's say you have a roof that leaks and you've got to pay 15 grand to fix it, so what that means is if you don't pay that money, your house is going to be worth a whole lot less because it's leaky and crappy and you've got water damage and, right, so you're just, you're paying, so don't have a standard where everything has to go perfectly and every deviation is bad, like you've got half the long and big and deep view, right?
So, to get back to Sarek, my long-ago imaginary dwarf character in Dungeons& Dragons, What did those low dice rolls teach me?
Two things. One, don't set your heart on good fortune.
Because you're just setting yourself up to be heartbroken.
Don't set your heart on good fortune.
If it comes, great. If it doesn't, it's not too bad.
It'll turn around. And, of course, look at the big picture.
Like, look at the big picture. I know this sounds kind of ridiculous, but, you know, bear with me as I sort of worked through what was happening in my brain when I was 13 or 14 years old.
So, my dwarf, if I remember rightly, was lawful neutral, and, you know, fighters are just kind of tanks in Dungeons& Dragons.
All you do is roll dice. Maybe you've got a couple of special attacks, but you don't have any spells or cantrips or cool abilities.
You're just like a tank. Just plow through the monsters.
So, was it bad luck that I rolled a 1 and a 3 for my hit points when I was 13 years old?
No. Because it taught me a lot.
It taught me about how to tell good stories and don't just have the dice roll.
Like, it would have been way more exciting if I'd just made it out with one hit point and my companions had to grab me and pull me out and all that.
It would have been very exciting. Just dead.
It's not a good story. So I learned something about storytelling.
I learned something about graciousness in narrative.
And I learned something about a personality type that I didn't find particularly attractive or appealing, which was sort of by the numbers rather than by the spirit, right?
By the letter of the law, by the spirit of the law.
The spirit of Dungeons and Dragons is to have exciting adventures.
Not to run every number 100%, in my view, right?
Lots of people differ on that, but...
So, don't get too...
And don't judge yourself by Bad luck.
Because isn't that really fundamentally what most troubles us about, bad luck, is we judge ourselves.
I'm unlucky. The gods have it in for me.
The fate does. Like, I remember when I dated a woman from another culture, I would be happy about something and would be enthusiastic about something, and she would be like, oh, black tongue, don't say it.
The gods will strike you down. And she was kind of joking, but it's like, don't show any positivity, don't show any enthusiasm, because...
The gods will see your hubris and strike you down and all that.
And that's a real mindset for a lot of people.
So, yeah, there's no gods out there who are pushing the dice.
It's just a matter of what are you going to learn and how.
And how hard is the lessons going to have to be before you learn those lessons, right?
So what came out of this whole dice roll when I was 13 or 14 years old was that Sereg died, and then I had his brother Scarab came around for a little bit, and then I created Argoth the Paladin, and Argoth the Paladin I played for the next year or two.
And he was a great character to play.
Much more in line with my values and much more interesting to play.
You know, he had healing spells.
He had protection from evil.
He had divine bless spells.
He could wield particular magic swords.
And he was just much more in lawful good.
It's kind of in alignment with my personality as a whole.
So... Because I had, quote, bad luck, I ended up with a much more interesting character that I played right through to the end of Dungeons& Dragons.
Right through to the end. And it's funny, you know, there's that heartbreaking meme about kids in the evening all on their bikes, and the meme is, one day you and your friends went out to play for the very last time, but nobody knew it.
Yeah, and one day we got together for Dungeons& Dragons for the last time, and nobody knew it, and the last time was when my character...
I finished a great quest and ascended to demigod status, and it was really cool, and that was it, like there was nothing else to do, and I was fine.
I was fine with it. So, was it bad luck that I rolled low?
No. Now, how do you turn bad luck into good luck?
Well, you learn as many elemental lessons as possible.
So I tried to get as many elemental lessons out of rolling badly, lo those many years ago, for my Dungeons& Dragons.
Don't count on good fortune, don't assume things are going to be bad just because they feel bad in the moment, and look for the long view.
You're going to make more money over the course of your life, most likely by having a car than not having a car.
So, yeah, every now and then, your car's going to cost you money.
And in this case, it wasn't your fault.
Okay, so then you say, okay, what can I learn from this that's going to save me more than the six or seven K I have to spend in this situation?
What's going to save me more than this?
So, I don't know.
Here's just some possibilities.
You say, well... Why am I living in a neighborhood where there's uninsured people driving around?
And I get this could be bad luck, but, you know, generally, if you live in a nicer neighborhood, there'll be fewer uninsured people driving around.
So maybe this is nature's way of telling you to move to a safer or better neighborhood, and maybe that's going to work out.
Really well for you in the long run.
Maybe you'll move because you don't want to be in this kind of crappy neighborhood, and you'll meet the girl of your dreams, and so then you'll look back and you say, wow, was it ever great that my car got totaled.
I mean, I know... What can you learn?
Can you... You negotiate a better deal with your insurance company, so if you can't move, at least you pay some extra, but you get 100% of the value of the truck.
Maybe you learn that, right? And maybe you learn a little bit something about balancing risks.
So if you got a cheaper insurance policy because it only pays 70% of the price of a totaled car, then, you know, Then you own it.
You made that choice, right?
So if it was like an extra 50 bucks a month to get full coverage and you decided to save that money, well, okay.
I mean, that's a fair decision and there's nothing wrong, but it just happened to not be the right decision for what happened.
That doesn't mean you made the wrong decision because you didn't know you were going to get totals, but you took that risk.
Right, you took that risk. What's that?
Oh, there's a Canadian commercial about investments.
And it's like, what's your investment risk tolerance?
And somebody's like, I like frying bacon in the news or something like that.
Okay, well, if you took...
And maybe you can learn that, right? So if you're the kind of person...
Who wants to save 50 bucks a month and then have a less comprehensive insurance policy, and then you get depressed for three months because you lost your car or you lost a lot of money, then you have to say, okay, well, I'm the kind of person who needs to pay more for insurance, so to cover myself for more.
Does that make sense? And then you'll learn about that, and something much more important, you'll prevent being unhappy for a year by learning from that, right?
So lots of things.
To learn about with this kind of stuff.
But yeah, luck is very interesting.
Luck is by its nature random.
But because we're pattern-making machines, right?
We try and figure out patterns.
Because we're pattern-making machines, saying luck is usually ascribing some moral or conscious intent or result out of something that's purely random.
Unless it's not purely random and there's something you can do about it, in which case it's a lesson to Improve things, right?
So, you know, obviously it was bad luck that I got cancer, but I've tried to make sure that I stay out of the sun or stay out of the direct sun or have lots of protection so that at least I can minimize my chances of skin cancer, a sort of blonde, blue-eyed guy.
That's one of the risks that I would have, especially half Irish, half German.
We're not exactly known for our rotisserie-style sun absorption, more like vampires.
So, luck is, oh, I'm lucky or I'm unlucky.
That's to say that the gods are blessing or cursing you, and that's not the case.
Random stuff is just that, random.
And you can do things to mitigate the negative effects of random things, and if you're really harshly struck by the negative stuff...
Then you need to work to protect yourself more or find a way to change your mindset.
If you don't mind the negative stuff as much, like if you're like, well, you know, I saved 50 bucks a month for a couple of years on my car insurance, so yeah, I just happened to roll snake eyes and got plowed, but you know, so maybe if I don't like it that much, I'll pay more for my insurance next time or I'll move or whatever it is, right?
Maybe I'll get a garage and won't park on the street, so maybe if you got, I don't know if you got totaled in the Parking or something like that.
But you can learn from it to try and mitigate the risk next time.
But don't just sit there and feel unlucky and cursed and helpless and all of that because that's not an accurate view.
There's nothing moral in happenstance.
Like the guards weren't pushing my dice to teach me a lesson.
And the guards didn't have someone crash into your car to teach you a lesson or because you're cursed or you were bad.
That's the kind of stuff that's really primitive.
And it's a primitive part of us to look for these patterns.
Like, the rains haven't come because people are taking the Lord's name in vain.
It's like, no, that's not a thing.
But, you know, because people believe that...
Yeah, and if, sorry, because people believe that the rains haven't come because people are taking the Lord's name in vain, they won't work as hard on irrigation.
They'll just stop taking the Lord's name in vain, which doesn't have any effect on the weather.
So when you ascribe things to luck, good or bad luck, or you feel, oh, this really bad thing happened, and I feel bad about it, then what you're doing is you're not learning the lessons.
You're saying, okay, something bad happened to me.
I need to figure out what and why it was and try and figure out how I can minimize impact next time.
Or it helps you to look at the big picture, right?
Bad luck in the moment can help you look at the big picture.
So, as I said, right?
You're going to make more money having a car, even with the cost of this loss, than not having a car.
So just look at the big picture and say, yeah, having a car means you're at risk of accidents.
Having a car means you're at risk of the car failing.
Having a car means you're at the risk of sudden expenses.
Having a car means whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
And you have to look at the cost benefits.
And if the benefits of having a car over the course of your life outweigh the cost, then heed the cost.
Recognize the cost. It's something I learned kind of early on in business.
You know, like, cost of doing business.
The cost of doing business. It's just the cost of doing business.
Yes. In the pursuit of the woman of your dreams or the man of your dreams, yeah, guess what?
You're going to get your heart broken a couple of times.
Maybe more than a couple of times.
And you're going to break other people's hearts a couple of times, maybe more than a couple of times.
That's the price of doing business.
That's the price of getting good things in life.
So I hope this helps.
And I'm obviously curious to hear what everyone else thinks about this luck thing.
But yeah, I've thought a lot about it over the course of my life because it's easy to feel worth more if you happen to be having a bunch of good luck.
Right? Like that Even Steven thing in Seinfeld where he loses 50 bucks and then finds 50 bucks in a jacket, right?
It's easy to feel like, oh, I'm so lucky, everything works out for me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's easy to feel that that makes you better.
The cost of that is when things don't work out for you, you'll feel cursed by the gods rather than blessed, and of course, neither is actually happening.
It's just that you can judo these harsh lessons into...
Better perspectives, more peace of mind, and better circumstances.
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