March 22, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:42
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| My wife and I are having a first child this August. | |
| Do you have any tips for first-time parents? | |
| We are super excited. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Just donated at freedomain.com /donate. | |
| So be prepared. | |
| Be prepared for ego death as a parent. | |
| Be prepared for ego death. | |
| When you become a parent... | |
| You get a blissful relief from self-involvement for the rest of your natural born days. | |
| I have a bit of water stuck in my ear. | |
| It's a little crazy. | |
| Anyway, so, yeah, you just experience ego death. | |
| It's no longer ever going to be just about you. | |
| It's about what's best for your children. | |
| It's about what's best for your marriage. | |
| You are now part of a machine. | |
| You are not a self-contained automaton. | |
| You are not a robot. | |
| You are a cog in a larger machine of protection. | |
| And provision and the great chain of being. | |
| You take your place in the link in the chain rather than being the bike to yourself. | |
| It sounds like a diminishment, but it's really not. | |
| Sacrificing your ego for that which is greater than yourself allows you to partake of eternity. | |
| And there's nothing else that can do it. | |
| Everything that is selfish and for your own ego will be voided and consumed when you die. | |
| If you are a sex addict and you go out and have a lot of sex for yourself, Well, all of those memories and all of those experiences and all of that history just die with you. | |
| Right? So, if you do a bunch of drugs, then all of your drug visions and all of your memories and all of that just die with you. | |
| If you're an alcoholic and you don't partake in anything larger, all hedonism is mortal. | |
| All eternity is immortal. | |
| And by... | |
| Sacrificing your ego for the sake of that which is universal and eternal allows you to live forever. | |
| This is why we have the story of heaven, that if you pursue virtue, you do not die. | |
| That's true. | |
| It's true. | |
| It's more than true. | |
| It's vivid. | |
| So ego death is defying mortality and uniting yourself with the eternal, the universal, the unending, and the immortal. | |
| And that's what you're doing as parents. | |
| It's no longer about you. | |
| It's no longer about you. | |
| So, ego death is something to be striven for with great energy and focus. | |
| You should want relief from personal greed. | |
| And you should want to... | |
| I mean, this is what I've done with philosophy. | |
| Philosophy, for me, required, demanded, and enacted a guillotine execution of my ego. | |
| I now bend myself to that which is true, universal, best for the world, best for virtue, best for children. | |
| I have sacrificed greed for immediate pleasures for the sake of virtue in eternity. | |
| That's the deal. | |
| You trade in your selfish pleasures, and in return, you get to live forever. | |
| Do good and get love. | |
| It's a good deal. | |
| So you just have to put aside what you want and focus on what is best for the family unit, what is best for society. | |
| Now through that you get what is in fact best for yourself. | |
| I get it. | |
| It's not a sacrifice. | |
| But you have to let go of petty pleasures. | |
| And that the parents, I'm not putting you in this category, the parents who do badly are the parents who don't do that, right? | |
| As I sort of mentioned many years ago. | |
| My father was in charge of me when I was a toddler, a baby toddler, and he wanted to play tennis, and I was a baby toddler. | |
| I was crawling, so I was probably less than a year old because I remember being a year old. | |
| It's about probably a year, maybe 14 months. | |
| So I was crawling around, and my father was playing his tennis and got distracted or focused on his tennis game, and I ended up crawling into a garden shed and drinking weed killer and almost died. | |
| This was, I assume, one of the final straws with regards to my parents' marriage. | |
| Now, I hope my father had a really, really great tennis match, because that was kind of it for us. | |
| It certainly was it for his marriage, and it was it for his parenting in the immediate or in the moment. | |
| So, he wanted to play tennis, and he viewed me as a baby toddler. | |
| As an impediment to what he wanted. | |
| That's a bad idea. | |
| You put aside what you want and you focus on what is best for whatever machinery you happen to inhabit. | |
| It could be virtue. | |
| It could be proselytizing Bitcoin. | |
| It could be the promotion of peaceful parenting. | |
| It could be a family. | |
| It could be whatever you can do that gives you relief and escape from your own petty self. | |
| Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished to get escape, get away from the infinite grumble and pestilence of immediate needs and moments. | |
| My father wanted to win the tennis match and he lost everything of value. | |
| And he was playing with a person as stupendously selfish as himself who didn't say, Hey, don't you have a kid to take care of? | |
| What are you doing here? | |
| You got a toddler. | |
| What are you doing? | |
| I don't want to laugh. | |
| But it's like, you win one game and you lose everything else. | |
| It's a bad deal. | |
| It's a bad deal. | |
| Like the guys who sleep with other women, you get one rail session and you lose everything. | |
| Or maybe you fake... | |
| The car driving into a wily coyote painted horizon. | |
| And then you lose everything. | |
| Reputation. Now, I don't mind burning my reputation up like a Roman candle or like a nuclear strike zone. | |
| I don't mind sacrificing my reputation because the desire for reputation at the expense of virtue is just another ego greed situation. | |
| You've got to be willing to burn it all to be good. | |
| All of it. |
Export Selection