Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - How to Avoid Being Unhappy in Life
Aired: 2024-12-15
Duration: 06:56


=== Comparing To Imperfect Past (06:56) ===

[00:00:00]  Of course, there are objective states, and you should have ideals.
[00:00:06]  But so much of happiness is in what we compare things to and not the things themselves.
[00:00:11]  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?
[00:00:23]  That is how to be unhappy no matter what happens.
[00:00:29]  Except for that one day when everything goes perfectly.
[00:00:34]  I can think of maybe seven weeks over the course of my life when everything's gone perfectly.
[00:00:43]  There's always some problem, right?
[00:00:45]  There's always some negative.
[00:00:46]  There's always something.
[00:00:47]  Oh, well, donations are down.
[00:00:48]  Oh, well, you know, visitors are down.
[00:00:49]  Oh, but this is up.
[00:00:50]  If your baseline comparison is perfection, everything that happens to you will be flawed and negative.
[00:01:02]  Thank you.
[00:01:02]  you Thank you.
[00:01:05]  If everything that happens in your life is compared to a state of perfection, then you are miserable forever and ever.
[00:01:17]  I'm in.
[00:01:28]  If you find yourself unhappy, ask yourself, "What am I comparing my life to?" Thank you.
[00:01:36]  Again, this is not to say that there aren't better and worse states, but there are some things beyond your control.
[00:01:44]  So, when I had an ankylose tooth a couple of years ago, I had to have it taken out, right?
[00:01:56]  Now, and this was from when I was a kid, the teeth never separated from the bone, so eventually it just became impossible.
[00:02:01]  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.
[00:02:07]  Now, what I can do is I can say, well, the standard is perfect teeth, right?
[00:02:13]  The standard is perfect teeth.
[00:02:15]  Anything that is a deviation from perfect teeth is a disaster, right?
[00:02:21]  Perfectly valid hypothesis, right?
[00:02:23]  Or the way that I approach it is, well, I have an ankylosed tooth.
[00:02:28]  I am very happy that I can get it removed pain-free.
[00:02:33]  And I am.
[00:02:34]  I love modern dentistry.
[00:02:36]  I really do.
[00:02:37]  Modern dentistry is absolutely beautiful.
[00:02:40]  If you have to go in for an operation, you can say, perfect health is the ideal.
[00:02:45]  This is a deviation.
[00:02:46]  It's really bad.
[00:02:47]  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.
[00:03:02]  You know, that old story of the novelist Charles Dickens was going to become a doctor.
[00:03:06]  He saw a bowel operation on a kid, and he's like, well, I can't do that.
[00:03:10]  I absolutely cannot do that.
[00:03:11]  That's horrible.
[00:03:13]  That's horrible.
[00:03:14]  Thank goodness I have painkillers.
[00:03:23]  Thank goodness I have modern medicine.
[00:03:26]  Thank goodness I have modern dentistry, right?
[00:03:28]  You ever known anyone who's had a hernia?
[00:03:31]  Guy, no.
[00:03:32]  Had a hernia repair.
[00:03:33]  He could have had to live with that, as most people do, for the rest of your life.
[00:03:38]  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.
[00:03:50]  And it was.
[00:03:51]  I get that.
[00:03:51]  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.
[00:03:59]  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.
[00:04:07]  You know, most people, almost everyone throughout human history, could not change or fix their bad childhood.
[00:04:19]  Oh, you just had three hernias repaired?
[00:04:21]  Two inguinal and a belly?
[00:04:23]  So, I'm sorry about that.
[00:04:25]  That's rough, man.
[00:04:26]  So, if you think that the standard is perfection, you'll be miserable when you don't reach it.
[00:04:43]  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.
[00:04:49]  I talked about this with regards to the Aborigines when I did my tour of Australia six years ago with Lauren Southern.
[00:04:57]  I talked about how the, in Australia, had the same lives For 40,000 years.
[00:05:08]  You grew up in a bad childhood.
[00:05:10]  You were in a small tribe.
[00:05:11]  You had a bad childhood.
[00:05:12]  You had a bad adulthood.
[00:05:13]  You inflicted bad childhood on your kids and it just went on and on and on.
[00:05:16]  40% infanticide in some tribes.
[00:05:18]  It just went on and on.
[00:05:19]  So for most of human history, you could never escape a shitty family.
[00:05:24]  Never!
[00:05:25]  No independence, no travel, no options.
[00:05:30]  No wealth, no escape.
[00:05:32]  Imagine you're a serf in a tiny village, right?
[00:05:35]  This is what I write about in my novel, Just Poor.
[00:05:37]  It's a great book.
[00:05:38]  You should read it, freedomain.com slash books.
[00:05:44]  You couldn't get out.
[00:05:49]  You couldn't get out.
[00:05:51]  And it was Groundhog Day from Hell copy-paste in the shitty volcanic keyboard of endlessly cycled history you couldn't get out.
[00:05:59]  Now, I had a shitty childhood.
[00:06:04]  I swear to God, I'm not kidding about this.
[00:06:07]  Every day, I'm like, isn't it great?
[00:06:09]  I didn't have to do that forever.
[00:06:12]  Isn't that great that I got out?
[00:06:13]  Isn't it great that I didn't have to keep on that way?
[00:06:16]  Rather than saying, it's so terrible I had a shitty childhood, which it was.
[00:06:21]  And that's it.
[00:06:22]  You can say, thank God I'm out.
[00:06:24]  Thank God I live at a time where I can get out and stay out.
[00:06:29]  I was surrounded by fairly ass-burger-y kind of people.
[00:06:33]  Not ass-burgers, just people whose burgers are made of meat.
[00:06:38]  When I was a kid.
[00:06:42]  Surrounded by mostly jerks and assholes when I was a kid.
[00:06:48]  Number who remain?
[00:06:49]  Zero.
[00:06:51]  Zero, zero, zero.
[00:06:53]  There are none left.
[00:06:55]  I'm out.