Dec. 15, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:56
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| Of course, there are objective states, and you should have ideals. | |
| But so much of happiness is in what we compare things to and not the things themselves. | |
| So, a surefire recipe for unhappiness is to think, life should go well, life should be easy-ish, I shouldn't have any problems, right? | |
| That is how to be unhappy no matter what happens. | |
| Except for that one day when everything goes perfectly. | |
| I can think of maybe seven weeks over the course of my life when everything's gone perfectly. | |
| There's always some problem, right? | |
| There's always some negative. | |
| There's always something. | |
| Oh, well, donations are down. | |
| Oh, well, you know, visitors are down. | |
| Oh, but this is up. | |
| If your baseline comparison is perfection, everything that happens to you will be flawed and negative. | |
| Thank you. | |
| you Thank you. | |
| If everything that happens in your life is compared to a state of perfection, then you are miserable forever and ever. | |
| I'm in. | |
| If you find yourself unhappy, ask yourself, "What am I comparing my life to?" Thank you. | |
| Again, this is not to say that there aren't better and worse states, but there are some things beyond your control. | |
| So, when I had an ankylose tooth a couple of years ago, I had to have it taken out, right? | |
| Now, and this was from when I was a kid, the teeth never separated from the bone, so eventually it just became impossible. | |
| I fought this, like, pocket of, like, eight or nine millimeters for, like, a couple of years, and then the tooth just kind of gave up the ghost. | |
| Now, what I can do is I can say, well, the standard is perfect teeth, right? | |
| The standard is perfect teeth. | |
| Anything that is a deviation from perfect teeth is a disaster, right? | |
| Perfectly valid hypothesis, right? | |
| Or the way that I approach it is, well, I have an ankylosed tooth. | |
| I am very happy that I can get it removed pain-free. | |
| And I am. | |
| I love modern dentistry. | |
| I really do. | |
| Modern dentistry is absolutely beautiful. | |
| If you have to go in for an operation, you can say, perfect health is the ideal. | |
| This is a deviation. | |
| It's really bad. | |
| Or you can say, I'm really glad that I have modern medicine, and in particular, anesthetic, so that I don't have to go through agony when I get operated on. | |
| You know, that old story of the novelist Charles Dickens was going to become a doctor. | |
| He saw a bowel operation on a kid, and he's like, well, I can't do that. | |
| I absolutely cannot do that. | |
| That's horrible. | |
| That's horrible. | |
| Thank goodness I have painkillers. | |
| Thank goodness I have modern medicine. | |
| Thank goodness I have modern dentistry, right? | |
| You ever known anyone who's had a hernia? | |
| Guy, no. | |
| Had a hernia repair. | |
| He could have had to live with that, as most people do, for the rest of your life. | |
| If you had a shitty childhood, sympathies, if you had a shitty childhood with shitty parents, shitty schools, shitty families, shitty friends, shitty neighborhood, then you can say, oh my gosh, that was so terrible. | |
| And it was. | |
| I get that. | |
| I'm not trying to say you can magical thinking your way into thinking that which is good is not good and that which is not good is good. | |
| But what I am saying is you can thank life, the universe, and your lucky freaking stars every day, every day, That you're not still there. | |
| You know, most people, almost everyone throughout human history, could not change or fix their bad childhood. | |
| Oh, you just had three hernias repaired? | |
| Two inguinal and a belly? | |
| So, I'm sorry about that. | |
| That's rough, man. | |
| So, if you think that the standard is perfection, you'll be miserable when you don't reach it. | |
| If you think that the standard is negative, because for most of human history it was, you have a bad childhood, you couldn't escape. | |
| I talked about this with regards to the Aborigines when I did my tour of Australia six years ago with Lauren Southern. | |
| I talked about how the, in Australia, had the same lives For 40,000 years. | |
| You grew up in a bad childhood. | |
| You were in a small tribe. | |
| You had a bad childhood. | |
| You had a bad adulthood. | |
| You inflicted bad childhood on your kids and it just went on and on and on. | |
| 40% infanticide in some tribes. | |
| It just went on and on. | |
| So for most of human history, you could never escape a shitty family. | |
| Never! | |
| No independence, no travel, no options. | |
| No wealth, no escape. | |
| Imagine you're a serf in a tiny village, right? | |
| This is what I write about in my novel, Just Poor. | |
| It's a great book. | |
| You should read it, freedomain.com slash books. | |
| You couldn't get out. | |
| You couldn't get out. | |
| And it was Groundhog Day from Hell copy-paste in the shitty volcanic keyboard of endlessly cycled history you couldn't get out. | |
| Now, I had a shitty childhood. | |
| I swear to God, I'm not kidding about this. | |
| Every day, I'm like, isn't it great? | |
| I didn't have to do that forever. | |
| Isn't that great that I got out? | |
| Isn't it great that I didn't have to keep on that way? | |
| Rather than saying, it's so terrible I had a shitty childhood, which it was. | |
| And that's it. | |
| You can say, thank God I'm out. | |
| Thank God I live at a time where I can get out and stay out. | |
| I was surrounded by fairly ass-burger-y kind of people. | |
| Not ass-burgers, just people whose burgers are made of meat. | |
| When I was a kid. | |
| Surrounded by mostly jerks and assholes when I was a kid. | |
| Number who remain? | |
| Zero. | |
| Zero, zero, zero. | |
| There are none left. | |
| I'm out. |
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