Dec. 26, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:21:06
The True Price of Being LOVED! Twitter/X Space
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Hello, hello, my friends.
Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas.
Ah, what's that lovely old song?
Children roasting on an open fire.
Anyway, I hope you're having a lovely day.
And, you know, listen, I'll be straight up with you.
I'm sure that there are some of you out there who are having a tough day.
And I just wanted to drop in, obviously say hi, give you some good Christmas cheer, give you a couple of comforts of philosophy, and just remind you that everyone on the planet who's honest has had one or more bad Christmases.
And if this is a bad Christmas for you, maybe you're alienated from people, maybe you're alone, maybe you had a recent breakup, maybe you're unemployed, maybe you're stressed, maybe you don't have enough money for the holidays.
And I just wanted to sort of reach out, give you a big virtual hug, wish that we were all there together with good food and good cheer and good stories, and just remind you that you're not alone in being alone.
And I thought I might share a couple of stories of a few bad Christmases that I've had over the years, just to remind you that although things are tough, oh, life, life, life.
What is that?
There's this old story.
It's an old story about a ring.
A magic ring.
A magic ring has the incredible power to make you happy when you're sad and sad when you're happy.
And nobody can figure out how the ring is able to do this until at some point somebody looks on the inside of the ring and inside is inscribed the phrase, this too shall pass.
So if you are having a solitary Christmas, if you are having a lonely Christmas, if you are having a broke Christmas, if you're far from home, if you're far from friends, if you feel infinitely far from love, connection, companionship, I just wanted to tell you, to remind you that it will not last forever and you will get to the place that you need.
You will get to good people.
In the very first book I wrote on like pure philosophy, which is called On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, I talked about this journey, this journey that if you want the truth, if you want connection, if you want love, if you want virtue, there's a journey.
And it took me an embarrassingly long time to do this journey, to start on this journey.
I started on this journey about, I don't know, probably about 30 years ago.
Wait, how the heck old am I?
59, 30, 29.
Yeah, yeah, about 30 years ago.
Maybe a little more.
And on this journey, it goes something like this.
And I hope that this will help you if you're having a tough Christmas.
And the journey goes something like this.
You spend your life in a city.
And the city is full of life.
It's full of light.
It's full of energy.
It's full of people.
And you are distracted into a petty series of endless pleasures, right?
You go dancing, you go to movies, you scroll, you go to discos, you go to bright, shiny light malls and finger shiny objects, caress them, sniff them perhaps, and you buy and you consume, and you pass by your days with as much friction and connection as a javelin passing through mist.
Whistles past, doesn't really touch anything, but is very lean and efficient and it's forward momentum.
And then, oh gosh, one day, one day, one morning, the strangest things happen.
And it usually is late 20s.
You're pushing 30, right?
You're entering, you're in the vicinity of entering into your fourth decade, and you wake up.
And there's sort of a funny, slightly sour smell in the air.
The light is a little bit different coming in through your bedroom window.
Maybe you've got those Venetian blinds and you have those golden stripes of bars on the far side of your bedroom.
And details imprint themselves upon your senses.
You wake up and you can see the dust boats floating in the air.
And for some reason, you think of human skin, particles of human skin, of all the people who've lived in the room that you live in before you.
It's a rental place or something like that.
And you get up and you feel a bit funny.
You feel a bit older.
Some of those first creaks of middle age might be popping up.
And you go out in the city and you feel mad.
You feel like you've lost your mind because nothing in particular has changed, but somehow you know that everyone died in the night.
But they did not die and lay still.
They died and continued to move around.
In other words, they had that most terrible form of death, which is where you don't even know that you're dead.
And you go to the diner and there's people sitting there and their skin is a little ashen.
Their teeth are a little yellow.
Their eyes are a little bloodshot.
They're not zombies.
Not zombies, nothing quite that dramatic and obvious.
And you have a funny feeling that if you push your fingers into their necks or their pudgy wrists, you would feel no rhythm, no curusating rivulets of blood coursing to keep the extremities alive.
But they would be like dead bags of red still water.
And they talk.
They talk for sure.
You can hear them talking.
But it's got this Grand Hog Day series of having heard things before.
You know, when you're in a relationship, it could be with friends, could be family, a lover, maybe.
You're in a relationship and you get to a certain point where you've looped back to the beginning and they have no new stories.
They have no new jokes.
Everything is kind of what's happened before, this law of eternal recurrence.
Everything is kind of what happened before.
And when they start a story, you know exactly where it's going when they start a joke.
You know, they have a joke, which is, oh, they can imitate an old guy from The Simpsons.
The same joke, same stimulus, same response.
They see a tall guy and they say, yeah, you know, like those tall guys.
I remember I read about a tall guy.
He had a card.
He said, he handed out the card and he says, yes, I'm six foot six.
No, I don't play basketball.
Yes, the weather is fine up here.
Everybody's NPC questions to tall people.
And he's like, and you know, he sees a tall guy, stimulus response.
Pavlov, dog, drooling, bring, stimulus response.
Everyone's ordering the same things.
Everyone's making the same jokes.
Everyone's got the same statements.
And maybe you hang out with friends, but they're not really alive in the present.
They don't see things and process things in the way that a lively, attentive in the present consciousness would do.
It's just stimulus response.
And it didn't seem like stimulus response because you hadn't really noticed it before.
But you wake up in a city where everybody's functionally dead because there's no new idea, no new thought, no new argument, no new joke, no new story.
Nothing is new.
They cannot create anything afresh.
They can only reassemble, like AI, what has gone before into the simulation Thought in the simulation of thought.
And then, I guess, back in the day, you turn on the radio.
Now you run your Spotify, your YouTube music, your Amazon music, and you say, you know what?
Gosh, things are feeling kind of stale and repetitive.
Maybe I can listen to some new music.
Ooh, some new tunage, spark me up, get my bone marrow dancing again in the way that it used to.
And so you fire up the new music, and it's all like drumbeat, breathy vocals, rap bit in the middle, whining and pining.
Some girl got away, some guy can't feel his face.
Some boy betrayed her.
She's complaining.
Her boyfriend's the vampire.
His girlfriend is a gone goddess.
And it's all the same.
Maybe you pass by a bookstore and you say, Oh my God.
I mean, I know that there's a little corner room in the back with the red bound volume reprinted classics, but I mean, I need something new, man.
You go to the new novels, new books, new sections, and it's all the same shit.
Lesbians by Chapter 2.
Evil capitalists, hard done by workers, valiant striving minorities, evil white males.
It's all the same.
Copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste.
And you realize that you're not living in a free field of opportunities.
You're living on a train track that does the same figure-eight loop of infinity from here to eternity.
Go see a movie.
Oh, it's the same thing.
Plucky girl heroine, 95 pounds can kick ass 200 pound guys, twice her size, three times her strength.
They all come at her in rows.
And it's all the same.
Horror.
Offensive comedy.
Offensive comedy.
Horror.
Love story with gay friend.
Biracial romance.
Horror.
Offensive comedy.
Drugs are fun.
All the same.
All the same.
The music, the art, the books, the people.
And it's almost like you.
When I was a kid, you get these records, these sort of flat discs with plastic indentations on them that the needle would put the needle under record.
The reader would read the music.
And every now and then get scratched and you'd go back.
Sorry, squire, the record's stuck.
Sorry, squire, the record's stuck.
And you almost like want to see that little loop, like in the movie Speed, where they're looping the movie.
You see this sometimes.
Somebody hacks into a security camera and loops the movie so that they can't see the nefarious stuff that's going on.
You start looking for this loop.
Why did I never notice how repetitive everything is?
You go into the subway, there's the same people avoiding the same crazy guy, the same obese person behind the ticket window, shrugging as various people skip the line.
And there's the same people shouting on the same street corners.
And all the buildings look the same, these vertical ice cube trays with people trapped in like cubed off aquarium prisons.
And you call for help, and it's the same people with the same lack of competence, the same vaguely incomprehensible accents, doing their best to try and help you, but just not being able.
And so you log on to NBC or ABC or Fox News or NPR.
And it's the same stuff, the same repetition.
It's the same thing over and over again.
Nothing is changing.
Nothing is new.
Everything is looped.
And the world died overnight.
But like an eternal fish flopping at the bottom of a boat, unable to know it will never reach again the water, it moves without progress.
It yells without passion.
It sings without innovation.
And you think to yourself, wait a second, hang on, hang on.
I mean, we are in an age of unparalleled opportunities for creativity.
People can do anything, absolutely anything they want.
The barriers to entry have collapsed.
People can create anything they want.
And everything is the same.
And women have been given all these freedoms.
And what do they do?
Take useless degrees, get abortions, do OnlyFans, dress half-naked and complain about men.
Bird hands pecking into the collective gonads of the retreating males.
And men have been given unparalleled opportunities for creativity, expression, and authenticity.
And it's born in video games and the avoidance of challenges.
And everyone's counted the same.
6'7, 6'7.
Broccoli-haired skinny tall youths roaming around, high-fiving each other, being broasters, and avoiding the girls who pretend they don't want the boys, and everyone's the same.
And it's like Christmas packages under the tree.
I mean, the Christmas packages all kind of look the same, right?
Boxes of different sizes, but at least when you open them, you get different things.
But now it's like Christmas packages of different sizes, but you open them and it's all the same gift, which is the same gift you got last year, which you didn't use either.
Here's your volumizer.
A new pair of slippers.
I'll put those in the cupboard for when I need them.
Just along with last year's or the years before, and everything's the same.
And listen, you just think, well, maybe I'm just having a weird day.
Maybe my hormones are out of whack.
Maybe I ate badly, or maybe this is just some very strange dream.
You know, like those cheesy movies where you wake up and then you wake up again.
So you go to bed, you wake up, but things are a little bit even more the same the next day.
The menu options have shrunk slightly.
You have slightly less money.
Maybe you're even slightly shorter.
And there's this repetition diminishing.
Everyone's dead.
Nothing is new.
Everyone pretends.
And if you point out to them that things are repetitive and people seem to not think of anything new anymore, people get highly offended and upset.
And somehow you're racist.
I don't know why.
It's just generally the term that's used.
Now, of course, you keep thinking it's going to get better.
You go to the office and some guy, often named Josh, says, hey, man, working hard or hardly working?
Or you're leaning up against the wall, shaking your head in vague ennui, and he's like, hey, man, thanks for holding that wall up.
And your boss comes along and says, hey, man, we don't pay you to just sit around.
And you go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and put your head in your hands because the bare-naked lady's song, Good Boy, just made you cry for no reason.
At least that was new when it was old.
And everybody seems to be wearing the same clothes.
Nobody's hair seems to be growing anymore.
Everyone's got the same comments.
And there's nothing new.
You've looped.
Or you've outgrown what is.
And to make a relatively medium-sized story slightly shorter, what happens, of course, is that eventually you're like, I got to get out of here.
Like, I can't take this anymore.
I can't take being the only one who notices how everything is looped.
Nothing is new.
Everything is repetitive.
And people are getting dumber.
And the last time you were surprised by anything was so long ago, you can't even remember it with any specificity.
Maybe it's when you went to watch Fight Club and you yourself were having insomnia, but it has been decades and decades.
And even your dreams are boring.
So you have to leave the city.
This is when you wake up to how few people think around you.
It's the problem with thinking: you can get along for a while.
You can do it for a while.
You can do the thinking thing for a while.
And you do it with the optimism that you're going to stimulate a bunch of other people that are thinking too.
Because you're always told, man, critical thinking is important.
But question the power, question authority, question what is, be skeptical.
Science of skepticism.
Democracy relies upon robust debates, conversations, challenges.
Speak truth to power, man.
Be like those noble Woodward and Bernstein reporters taking down Nixon on behest of the alphabets.
And you genuinely imagine that what people say they want and that they absolutely worship and welcome is going to be somewhat in the vicinity of what they want, actually worship and welcome.
Be yourself.
Think for yourself.
Don't be part of the crowd.
Stand out.
Be unusual.
Be authentic.
Be honest.
Challenge the powers that be.
Be like all the heroes that everyone talks about.
Be non-conventional.
Don't just march to your own drum, have a whole brass band.
This is what everyone says they want.
So, you know, you start to think, and this is what everyone wants.
They're going to be inspired.
You're going to challenge them and unseat them off their stale dead zombie horses of conformity and get them to walk on their own two feet, develop some muscles, maybe stiffen their spine, a little turn their bone marrow into quicksilver and have them rocket and spray fireballs of reason, curiosity, and skepticism from their fingernails and light up the worlds.
It's going to be great.
Yeah, I heard that there's that girl just down the street.
And she says that she wants a guy who's tall, dark, and handsome.
Well, I'm tall, dark, and handsome.
I'll go talk to her.
And she pepper sprays you and slams the door in your face.
Ow!
Jesus, that kills me.
You said you like to.
I heard you like you said you like tall, dark, and handsome.
I'm tall, dark, and handsome.
I'm not a stalker.
I'm just blocking at the door.
I'll do it again.
Don't you want tall, dark, and handsome?
Don't presume, patriarch.
And you think, and you reason, and you question, and you're skeptical, and you go to primary sources.
And God forbid, at least in the realm of IQ and COVID, you follow the science.
People say they want something until you actually provide it to them, and then they will try to destroy you.
And you realize, of course, that it is all largely a dream, that the dead city is your former self.
That you are waking up to your own repetitions, to your own automatic thinking, to your own concern with the approvals and opinions of others, and to the fact that you cannot be original unless you're willing to be offensive.
Because originality will always offend people who are NPCs.
Because nobody likes to think that they're an NPC.
So everybody has programmed responses to avoid seeing their own programmed nature and, God forbid, the programmers.
Those up in the near-Earth orbit, middle distance, the space station of whoever programs all of the culture that programs the people.
And it's you that is the dead city.
And it is your own former self that you need to shed.
Because to shed programming and to think for yourself, to shred cause and effect automatic responses and actually look at the world and draw your own conclusions based on reason and evidence puts you in maybe one in 10,000 people.
You have to flee the city of your former self like a shake, a snake sheds its old skin.
Or when the hawks and phoenixes, phoenix eye, come down from the sky to take your soul, you have to give up your tail, like a lizard.
Maybe it regrows, maybe it doesn't.
But giving up the tail, T-A-I-L, is also giving up the T-A-L-E, the tail, the story, that you existed outside of propaganda before you started thinking for yourself.
You didn't.
I didn't.
Maybe you're in that process of leaving the dead city of the old programming to where?
Where?
Maybe this is where you are this Christmas that you woke up in a dead city, which is all the relationships you attract when you're not thinking for yourself, which aren't real relationships.
They're just people who are willing to reinforce the illusion of life.
And you realize, oh my God, I can't be loved if I'm not myself.
You ever see those long driveways?
You can see them out in the country.
These long driveways.
And what they do is they plant trees.
Often it's like fir trees or something like that, pines or spruces.
They plant these trees.
They plant them all the same kind of trees all at the same time so that they grow up in these rows.
This copy-paste, right?
Copy-paste the trees.
It could be 10, 10, 20, 30, or 40 trees in a row going up the driveway.
That's lined tree driveway.
They're all pretty much identical.
I mean, there's tiny variations of difference, but, you know, from a middle distance, they all look the same.
Imagine looking at this row, 50 trees on one side, 50 trees on the other.
And someone says, hey, man, which tree is your favorite?
I don't really understand the question now.
No, no, you've got 50 trees here, right?
25 on one side of the driveway, 25 on the other.
Which one is your favorite?
Yeah, you have to pick one.
Which one is your favorite?
Like, what are you talking about?
They're literally planted and fucking cultivated to be exactly the same.
No, but which one is your favorite?
That one?
Or which one?
I don't know.
The one on the far side, second closest to the road.
Oh, why did you choose that one?
I don't know, bro.
That's no reason.
They're all the same.
You're making me choose something.
I just, roller guys, pick something random.
They're the same trees.
How can I have a favorite?
But that's love for most people.
It's one person wearing a bunch of different skins.
Some have boobs, some have balls.
It's the same tree.
The branches are slightly different in winter.
The foliage is slightly different in summer.
In fall, the leaves drop at slightly different rates.
Or I guess if they're pine trees, they don't.
It's even more the same, the same summer and winter.
They're planted at the same time.
They raise the same why.
And if one of them gets different, it gets trimmed.
If one of them gets some weird tumor branch coming off the side, throws off the ceiling tree, and they'll go in and cut it down.
Make it the same.
That's education, government crap, propaganda, communist groupthink with wild punishments in university.
You got to pick a tree, but they're all the same.
And you think that you're judging these trees in the distance.
And the real enlightenment, when you wake up to the dead city, that occurs when you look down and see your own evergreen, unchanging sap-cut, bled, and trimmed branches yourself.
And you're just another tree in the row that you're just one driveway over.
And you're looking at all these trees saying, damn, they're the same.
How do I pick one?
Does it really matter?
And then you realize you look down and you're in a row of trees yourself.
And all of the trees over there are looking at you and saying, how do I choose these trees?
There's 25 here on each side.
There's 25 there on each side.
And you're looking saying, damn, those trees are all the same.
You look down, you're just another tree that's all the same.
And you wake up to that.
And you've got to pull your roots out and try to make off like an ant on foot.
And it sucks and it hurts.
That's your only chance to be loved, is to think for yourself.
Otherwise, you're standing on a beach.
A bunch of cupid angels floating around.
Standing on a beach, man.
Which is your favorite grain of sand?
What?
What do you mean?
No, which is your.
Which is your favorite.
Look, look down.
Which is your favorite.
Look, we got a mile up the beach, mile down the beach.
Which is your favorite grain of sand?
It's like, bro, I don't know.
I have no idea.
I don't know how to answer that.
I really don't.
Like, what do you mean?
My favorite?
Because they're all pretty much identical.
No, no, no.
You zoom in and off, they're different shapes.
It's like, yeah, but I mean, there's not enough different for me to choose.
Are you different enough to choose?
No.
Most times, I wasn't.
I mean, I say this, maybe you've had a faster journey than me.
Maybe mine was embarrassingly slow.
I don't know.
But I wasn't different enough to choose.
I was a copy-paste, objectivist libertarian.
Before that, I was a copy-paste socialist.
Before that, I was a copy-paste Christian.
You know, this slur against women.
She's just a pick-me girl.
Pick me, pick me, pick me.
But why?
Why should someone pick you?
Why should someone pick me?
Why should you listen to me?
Hopefully, you get something new and different.
And then one day you wake up in the city of the self and it's repulsive to you and you can't live there another day.
You can't participate in the fakery.
You can't pretend that the dead are alive.
You can't pretend that the profoundly repetitive will never think for themselves.
And you pack up and you get out.
And what's outside the city?
A desert.
That's why people stay in the city, right?
Even though the city is repetitive and boring, and everyone's getting dumber and nothing really works that well anymore, you can make it.
You can kind of survive because what's outside the city is nothing.
Desert.
Swamp.
Flatlands.
Moors.
The Velt, as they call it in Africa.
And you're like, well, that looks pretty endless.
Like you wake up on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
No compass, no map, no sextant.
Which way should you go?
I mean, it appears to be functionally endless.
Everywhere you look, there's no sign of land or smoke.
Obviously, no mountains in the distance, because if there is, it's a tsunami and you toast that way.
I'm outside the city now.
Okay, I'm outside the city and there's no road because everybody just lives in the city of conformity.
There's no road.
So where do you go?
Well, you just got to go somewhere, man.
And to be frank, a lot of people don't make it out in that desert.
Bleached bones, couple of vultures, shifting sand, and you're gone.
A lot of people dive bomb out of conformity into the Mariana trench of gone, baby, gone.
And what I've tried to do, and this has really been my whole adult life, is I've tried to sort of say, look, there's a little village out here.
There's a little village.
It's primitive.
It's not as sophisticated at all.
Doesn't have all the infrastructure.
It's not exactly overpopulated, but it really is good, honest, curious people.
People worth spending time with, people who can genuinely make you laugh.
People who are insightful, but not unkind.
Because a lot of times people are insightful in order to figure out your weak spots and hurt and wound you.
But these people are kind, nice, thoughtful.
They'll tell you the truth, but in a way that is encouraging, not destructive.
They'll welcome the truth.
They want to know.
They want to know.
They look back upon their time in the city as a time in the worst kind of prison.
The one you don't even know has bars on it.
Because at least in prison, you want to get out.
But in the pleasurable, hedonistic, decaying joy city of conformity or prison of conformity, you don't even want to break out.
By the time you wake up to the fact that it's a prison, you're too old to leave.
You're too invested.
You've got nothing else.
And for me, I think it was about 30 years, maybe a little under 30 years, that I just woke up and I had vivid dreams about all of this.
I'm not sort of pulling this out of my armpit, but vivid dreams about the dead cities where everyone's forehead had a scrolling text that said, love me though I'm no different.
Love me though I'm no different.
Choose me though I'm the same.
Because everybody wants to be loved, but nobody wants to earn it by actually thinking for yourself and being virtuous and doing the right thing and being someone that people can actually admire.
And listen, I say this with more humility than I can ever conceivably express.
That I had the least excuse and waited the longest.
And I just want people to not make the same mistakes that I did for many, many, many years.
I was 10 years an adult, 18 to 28.
I was 10 years an adult before I really began to break free.
And I didn't even choose it.
I didn't even want to.
I just woke up with this progressive sense of I'm in hell.
I'm in hell.
And the purpose of the devil is to keep me from realizing it so that I don't try and make a break for heaven.
And the only reason you try to cross the desert outside the city is that staying in the city is a fate worse than death.
Living death, it's a fate worse than death.
They'll take the risks out there.
I couldn't live anymore for approval, which is all the city had to offer.
And approval means no surprises.
No surprises means no thinking, no curiosity, no challenge.
I could no longer live for approval because approval is a prison that doesn't kill you, but just drains you until you no longer lack even the potential musculature of thinking for yourself.
Just sit on the couch, man, watch the TV, just relax, go do the same things with the same friends, making the same jokes.
Just, yeah, do the same thing.
Don't worry about it.
It's fun.
It's fun.
Don't be like a weirdo.
Don't be too eccentric.
Don't be offensive.
Don't be upsetting.
Don't make people mad.
Don't make people mad.
Because there's always a threat.
Conformity is always under threat because it's boring.
And why do people do things that are boring?
Why did you go to school?
Because you were under threat.
So I say this with huge levels of humility.
I don't have sort of self-contempt or any sort of self-hatred for it or anything like that.
I didn't have me or others to sort of emerged in the alternate space of thought and reason and argument and language.
And in my late 20s, my unconscious was in full revolt.
Nothing satisfied.
I was irritable.
I was chomping at a very soft, ghostly, invisible bit that was leading me forever with gentle but irrevocable insistence to the mental grave of never being able to think for myself, never being choosable for myself.
And of course, throughout most of our evolution, conformity is what got you to breed.
Conformity is what got you to reproduce.
Be just like the other guys.
Okay, I'll choose a guy.
Maybe he's a little taller.
Maybe he's a little more handsome.
Maybe he's got a little more money.
I'll choose him.
I'll choose her.
Really, being able to think for yourself is a time slice.
Oh, gosh.
I mean, to be able to talk about it in public in this way, 20 years old.
I've been doing it sort of since my second or third show, but I started talking about childhood back in 2005 or 2006.
It's 20 years plus.
And you head out into the desert, and maybe you see some smoke smudge on the horizon.
You don't know friend or foe.
Because there's a lot of bad people who bail out of the city, too.
They don't like the city's rules.
They don't like the city's structure.
And they set up armed bandit encampments on the edge of society.
And it could be that smoke that you're going towards, and they'll disassemble you for fun and profit, demand you join their gang, or plow you under the sand to be found by archaeologists in 10,000 years studying the fall of a once great civilization.
So maybe you're in the desert.
Maybe you're just waking up with horror at the death of the city that is you and others.
Maybe you're new to the village.
You don't speak the language you don't understand.
You're like the fat guy finally going to the gym.
Don't know the machines, don't know the culture, don't really have the right outfits, don't have the weight belt, don't have the gloves.
That's terrifyingly new, exciting, horrifying.
And of course, in your mind, everyone jeers you.
You're just wandering away from everyone and everything that you know.
You're going to end up nowhere with nothing.
Or, or it's the only chance for reality and connection and truth and love that we get.
If you stop lying, if you stop manipulating, if you stop self-erasing, if you stop conforming, you will be hated.
The passion of the people that they have for me is directly proportional to all the horrifying lies that are written and talked about regarding me.
They don't, it's not personal to me.
They don't care about me.
They just care about keeping people enslaved in the city, right?
That they just have to attack people who leave.
Like neurotic stalkers or obsessed codependents.
When you try to leave, that's when they're the most dangerous.
So if it's Christmas, it is Christmas today, and maybe you're alone, maybe you're in people you're not connecting with, maybe you're an isolated spark of thought in a general wandering, unconscious firefly of repetition and unthinking regurgitation, cause and effect.
Trump, bad, right, bad, male, bad.
And you are waking up to the fact that you're with machines, like this woman that you claim to care about, so that they ruse her faceplate and you see two red electric how eyes and a whirring set of rotating teeth set to the machinery of soul-eating music.
It's a Truman show with machines.
And people have no free will because they've surrendered themselves to cause and effect.
You seek approval, you have no choice to be honest.
That, of course, everyone says.
They want honesty.
No many people.
No, people don't actually want honesty.
Trust science.
Oh, no, no, but not that science.
Oh, no, no, that science is bad.
If you trust that science, you're a racist.
You're a skeptic.
You're a vaccine.
Blah, blah, blah.
You're getting people killed.
I mean, don't trust the priests, say the atheists, but trust the scientists, because that's a white-coated mystery religion that you cannot question or oppose.
So, and I'm happy to take your course, but my point in general is that you may be having a sad Christmas.
Listen, man, I say this with great sympathy.
I really do.
I've had some bad Christmases, man.
When I was in boarding school, me and three other kids had to stay with one lonely, depressed teacher over Christmas.
We played the saddest cards known to man.
We ate just the four of us in a giant cafeteria designed for 600 people.
We had the saddest little corner Christmas tree and there were no presents.
I've had Christmases with the family of a girlfriend I knew I was going to break up with.
Ooh, that's a little dicey, isn't it?
That's a little sad.
Oh, thank you for the present.
Did you keep the receipts?
Because you may not want me to keep having it.
For which, of course, I mean, there's the kid stuff.
I don't blame myself for the adult stuff.
Obviously, I do, or at least hold myself accountable.
When I was growing up, Christmases were, yeah, pretty terrible because Christmas is the time when you have no excuse to not be happy, right?
Like, you know, if you go on vacation with your girlfriend to some tropical paradise, I mean, if you can't get along there, you're toast, right?
Christmas is a time when you have no excuse to not be happy, and it's sort of like your birthday, too.
If you're surrounded by people who are not nice to you, who don't love you, then they tend to be even more negative on your birthday because they feel compelled to fake a positivity they do not want to manifest.
They feel that you have power over them because it's your birthday because it's Christmas.
And things get more negative.
When there's no excuse for unhappiness, the unhappiness is unbelievably vivid.
So I've had my fair share of, and even as an adult, I won't sort of get into details, but there have been times when there have been some really negative stuff happening and not fun.
I would say over the course of my life, it's about 50-50, good and bad Christmases.
We all have them.
And I'm not going to brush it all under the rug and say, oh, but you shouldn't worry.
No, it's a sad thing.
If you're alone, if you're alienated, if you're isolated, particularly in a crowd, if you've got to spend your entire Christmas week biting your tongue because you hold the jagged little pills of uncomfortable truths in your cheeks and you make the choice to let them cut your cheeks rather than say them and behead others.
It's sad.
And I'm not going to whitewash it or say, don't worry about it.
It's no big deal.
It is a big deal and it is sad.
But it will pass.
There are more and more of these villages on the other side of the desert outside the Dead City.
More and more of these villages are popping up.
Please, please, whether you use freedomain.com, whether you use social media to find people who are interested in what I talk about here or other authentic philosophical movements, keep going.
The city is worse than when you left it.
There's no turning back.
The city is worse than when you left it.
Now it's open zombies.
Now they hunt you.
If you think, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they can sniff if you're alive.
And they will hunt you.
Trust me, I've experienced it for many, many years.
The city is worse.
They know that you left.
They know why you left.
And they know why you've come crawling back.
And they will use that power over you to its most negative possible effect.
Can't go back.
Can't stay in the desert.
Just keep going.
But don't keep going blindly.
Go thoughtfully.
Stop.
Scan.
Get the satellite view.
Find places where people think.
Find places where people value self-knowledge.
Places where people are unafraid, or at least less afraid, to say what they think.
The weight of this sad time, we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
Conformity is a point system that leads to depression, emotional collapse, and intellectual decay.
It is a map to an imagined treasure that has you looking so hard at the paper you don't notice when the cliff edge arrives and you step into a void.
Don't let the dead-eyed win.
Don't let the repetitive thought mongus win.
Don't flush your potential into the sewage of the dead city and walk in chant with the rest.
Don't do it.
The world advances on the backs and shoulders and broken bones of those who think.
And the world will curse you and the world will be mad at you and the world will lie about you and the world will insult you and call you all kinds of terrible names and a bunch of sociopaths and psychopaths will rail against you from the very skies themselves.
Fuck them.
Everything we have, we have from original thought and non-conformity.
99% of the planet will never have an original thought.
And if they do have an original thought, they will chase it down and hunt it and kill it and bury it in an unmarked grave in the bottomless corridors of their empty minds.
The world is full of conformists.
You don't need to be one.
It's not like the world is going to fall apart if there's one less of about 8 billion conformists in the world.
You can think for yourself.
The world will survive.
You'll do better.
All you have to do is stop caring about the insults of people who cannot think.
Now, it's not the easiest thing in the world, obviously, but it really is the most essential thing because what I want you to get out of this life is yourself and love.
You cannot get one without the other.
You cannot be like every other fir tree in a row and ask to be treated as special.
You can't have the same mental configurations of absolutely everybody else and ask to be demanded and demand to be treated as the ultimate special individual, which is yourself.
You cannot ask for a monogamy and a lifelong parabondic commitment, which is to be irreplaceable.
I wish to be irreplaceable.
But, but, I am the same as everyone else.
I'm afraid you got to pick one way or the other.
If you want to be loved, if you want someone to have a passionate devotion to you and you alone, then you have to be authentic, you have to be original, you have to think for yourself.
There is nobody like my wife that I've ever met, and there's nobody like me that she's ever met.
Be yourself.
Be yourself.
And then you can be chosen for love.
And the opportunity in this sad world that we live in, the only opportunity to be chosen for love involves being targeted for hatred.
The pay, the NPCs do not like the competition of authenticity.
All right, we have a caller, Monsieur Le Kipp.
Voice is on your mind.
Don't forget to unmute.
I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
Share my favorite Nietzsche quote with you to kind of bolster what you're saying.
He says, I am a wanderer and a mountain climber.
What returns, what finally comes home, is my own self.
Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk, but whoever is of my kind cannot escape such an hour.
The hour which says to them, only now are you going your own way to greatness.
Peak and abyss, they're now joined together, for all things are baptized in a well of eternity, and they lie beyond good and evil.
They lie beyond all those labels.
You get what I'm saying.
Anyway, bro, I figured that's right up the alley of what you were saying, right?
Certainly, as far as individuation goes, but the idea of Nietzsche was an aphorist and not certainly a moral philosopher.
He was an undoer of prior morals without developing new morals.
So I wouldn't say that any of us are beyond good and evil, but I certainly do appreciate the quote.
There's another one that comes to mind for me, at least sometimes, which is the quote from Nietzsche about being alone.
If you stand against the mob, you will often be frightened, confused, alarmed, uncertain.
But no price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself or being yourself.
Yeah, and it's true.
The one thing that a lot of people say is that you should not hate your opponents.
I really do hate the NPCs.
I really do.
I mean, I'll be straight up.
That doesn't mean I sort of wake up every morning and see Ethan.
But no, I do hate them.
I hate them because of the glorious potential that we get to not exercise the amazing capacities of the human mind.
And I believe that every human mind has amazing capacities untapped by its owner outside of severe mental injury, illness, or deficiencies.
But if people have all of this amazing potential and they refuse to exercise it, I think that's a sin and a crime against really the universe.
The universe is a dead weight of atoms in space.
Pointless, useless, without will, virtue, thought, meaning, purpose.
It's all dead nothing.
You know, it'd be funny.
You know, we go out into space and we just come across these endless dead rocks, circling blind, cat-hissing suns.
Oh, here's some more algae.
Oh, here's some more caterpillars.
Oh, here's another dead rock.
Oh, here's another gas giant.
Oh, look, an asteroid belt.
There's nothing out there.
And that we are, I mean, of course, as far as we know, the only spark of thought in the entire universe.
And if we don't find a way to survive, which it doesn't look like we're doing a good job of, then maybe there are very brief sparks of thought in the universe.
We are about a million years old as a species.
I would argue that the sparks of thought that we can trace back are only about 3,000 years old.
We are nothing.
We are a hummingbird's wing flap in a storm that takes up an entire planet.
We are nothing.
And yet we are everything.
And to have gifted to you a human mind out of all of the vast emptiness and uselessness and blind determinism of the entire universe, to have been granted a human mind and to waste it is a crime beyond measure.
It is a crime of ingratitude beyond measure.
I wouldn't say hatred, maybe just contempt.
Like in the same way, if somebody inherits $100 million, a beautiful singing voice, gorgeous features, and then works as a short-order cook for his whole life, touches nothing, I would say, why would you do so little but the gifts you were given?
That is a crime against opportunity and possibility.
And that is infinitely less of an opportunity than simply being in possession of the three pounds of amazing wetware descended from the expanding embraces of dying stars to be able to think.
And I have real contempt for people who don't take advantage of that opportunity.
You can think you are the only thing in the universe that we know of that can think and you refuse to do it.
I can't tell you.
I have to not be around NPCs because they're too frustrating to me.
Josh, what's on your mind, my friend?
Stefan, can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Am I on the air now?
Yes, you are.
Okay.
I heard someone very, very prescient speech you've delivered here.
I wasn't expecting that.
I was coming into this room to compliment you on the debate that you had not too long ago about parenting, peaceful parenting.
My brother is having a child soon, and I have forwarded him that debate.
I doubt he's going to watch it, but I am an advocate of your position.
But I see that this commentary is extremely prescient for myself because this is the first Christmas of which I'm celebrating, if you want to call it that, without my mother.
My mother died earlier this year, and she was the essence of Christmas for my family.
And that was in June, June, and she had diabetes, and it was a terrible death, I would say.
A lot of suffering, I would say.
But when she closed her eyes for the last time, she had a little smirk on her face.
So I was happy about that.
My dad's off in BC right now with my brother who lives out there.
And as I said, he's got a kid on the way, such as life.
And my sister is with my aunt, and her nephews are there as well.
So I wake up, I live on my own, fully functional man, strong man, the kind of man that could put this country on his back and bring it to the promised land, who knows.
But I wake up this morning and my mom's not here.
And you're sort of left with this symbolic, without the breath of the symbolic itself, like the person who introduced the symbolic to you.
So this sort of patchwork Christmas, if you want to call it that, I wouldn't call it a terrible Christmas.
It's more of, as you were mentioning there, symbolic of being in the desert or coming out of the desert.
I think what you're illustrating there was quite possibly the mysteries of Jesus that we all sort of go through.
The revelation, the redemption, and the recapitulation.
And this is theology is something I'm getting into now, Stephan, for the first time.
And I'm taking it seriously academically.
And it does seem as though the tribe of which you're speaking to now, the people who listen to you, they are on that same journey.
But the symbolic may not be associated with Jesus Christ.
And I think an effective way of identifying with that arc, with what it is we're painting out here, is better understanding that story, the idea of revelation, redemption, and recapitulation.
I do think it's quite humbling.
And just to sort of round this off, is this point that the marriage between philosophy and theology has to happen.
It has happened, but we need to understand it and embrace it for the sake of civilization.
I think philosophy has the ability to establish a relationship amongst varying theological perspectives, coming to a consensus.
You can elaborate on that, but it is absolutely necessary that individuals respect theology and especially.
Sorry, these are sort of platitudes and somewhat generalizations.
Do you mind if I ask you a couple of more specific questions?
Sure.
How old are you?
37.
Okay.
And are you married?
Do you have any kids?
No kids, no marriage.
And why do you think that is?
I was in a long relationship for seven years.
It didn't work out.
I hadn't found my path, but I'm open to it.
Haven't found the one.
When would you last in a relationship?
2019, late 2019.
Oh, so like six years.
Okay.
And what did your mother think of your being single in your 30s?
I think she prayed for me to meet the right woman.
Yeah.
What?
Did she talk to you about it?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
And what did she say?
She said, oh, Joshua, why don't you just go on those dating apps?
You just put in what kind of girl you want, put in Christian, put in blonde, what you want, and you'll just meet someone.
It's that easy.
Why aren't you doing it?
Something like that.
So she had very bad advice.
Naive advice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, no, it's bad advice because she should be saying, I mean, why do you think you're single and pushing 40?
Because you're running out of time, right?
No.
No.
You're not running out of time.
No, I'm not running out of time.
Why do you think?
Because whether time exists or not is up in the air.
I'm sorry, what?
Yes.
Time exists is up in the air.
I'm not sure I follow that.
Well, we ought not to say that.
So you're 37, but you don't believe that there's time.
Time is a very complicated subject.
You know this, but I would say.
No, no, it's not really.
Are you 37?
Yes.
Okay, so that's 37 orbits of the planet around the sun, right?
So that's 37 years.
That's not super complicated, is it?
Yes, because 37 isn't urgent.
It has no weight on decisions for me.
No, but you want to have kids, right?
Yes.
Okay, so let's just do some basic biology, right?
Do you want a woman who's somewhat your own age?
Somewhat, probably mid-20s.
Okay, so you want a woman who's 12 years younger than you?
Figuratively.
You know, one can only.
No, no, don't, don't ever complicate things.
What do you mean figuratively?
I mean, you just said mid-20s.
And I said, you're 37.
25 is 12 years younger.
That's simple math.
How is that figuratively?
Well, I just don't want to be concrete.
I'm open to someone a little bit older or younger.
Well, no, 12 years younger is a lot younger.
I'd take a third of your age.
Age could be a state of mind.
It's the maturity that I'd be after.
And a woman that's 21.
Hang on, hang on.
If you want to have kids, does a woman's physical age matter?
Yes.
Okay, good, good.
So that's not figuratively.
Okay.
So if you want to have, say, three kids, it's a 40-year-old woman what you're looking for.
No.
Okay, good.
So we got, so when I say you're running out of time, what I mean is that things get progressively more difficult as you age if you want to pin a bond.
Because as you start to push 40, you're going to need a woman who is considerably younger, right?
I think they're getting easier, to be honest.
Sorry, what's getting easier?
I mean, I'm the total package here.
So, I mean, I wasn't the total package when I was younger.
I didn't have things figured out.
You know, I was very immature, but I have a wealth of experience now.
And I think with the passing of my mother, there's a lot of, you know, yeah, I'd probably be a lot more open now, I would think, after this.
So sometimes.
That's very confusing to me.
So you're the total, total package, meaning that you have everything that a woman would want.
Oh, yeah.
I asked Grock.
Okay, and tell me.
I'm sorry, Steph.
Sorry?
Sorry, you're one.
Sorry, you said you're one in a, how many?
Grok would say that I'm one of one in the entire world.
I'm more rare than you.
According to calling me at this point, I mean, no, no.
I put in some of the moral decisions of which I've made throughout my life.
I've put in my circumstance of being 37, a practicing Catholic, in the field of work of which I'm in, independent, unvaccinated, et cetera, et cetera, six foot one.
And yeah, I still have hair.
Okay, so you are a tall guy with hair.
I'm not sure why that matters so much, but I guess it does.
So you're a tall guy who's a practicing Catholic and you're unvaccinated.
So you believe that you are the, when you say one in the whole world, I mean, technically, genetically, that's true for all of us.
So you believe that you are just about the most attractive man around.
Is that right?
Grok, Grok said this.
I don't believe that, but Grok says statistically, I am the most attractive man in the world, at least a nine and a half.
I know.
The most attractive man in the world?
It's Grok.
I mean, let me ask you this, because I think you're trolling.
Maybe you're not.
But would you say that humility is a Christian virtue?
I would say so.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Would you think that a woman who believed in the virtue of humility when you said, I'm the most attractive man in the world, might have questions about that?
Yeah.
And to that, I would say it's Grok who's making the assertion, not me.
I know, I know.
But no, but you're accepting that, right?
So and I'm curious about this, really curious about this.
How does Grok tell you that you are the most attractive man in the world?
Like way past Brad Pitt in his prime, who's got $100 billion and way past all the Beatles combined in 1966, back in the day or whatever.
I guess he's talking temporaneously.
But how does Grok tell you that you are the most attractive man in the world?
Because Grok seems to have put a lot of value in sound moral decision making.
And the moral decisions of which I have made have required quite a bit of courage, self-sacrifice, and fortitude.
And I'm sort of on the back end of that, of those decisions.
And Grok is saying, wow, you've made these really courageous decisions for other people, for a higher cause.
And you're still single.
You're, you know, you're attractive.
By looks-wise, it says I'm at least like a seven and a half, seven to seven and a half.
And then it puts all this moral stuff on there.
I don't have a lot of debt.
I live on my own.
I listen to Stefan Molyneux, like you said, only a small person.
I mean, a lot of women like income.
Is your income good too?
Well, there's a lot of potential there.
Not really.
I mean, if you're 37, you should have achieved your potential, at least to some degree by now, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I would say so.
Okay, do you make six figures a year?
No.
Do you make more than 50?
No.
Okay.
Do you make more than 30?
We're getting close.
Yeah, I'd say north or south of that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you make about $15 an hour.
So you make minimum wage at 37.
You could say that.
Okay.
You are trolling me, right?
No.
No.
No, you are.
No, I'm not.
You can't be this deluded.
Like, that's not.
No, no, no.
It's not possible.
But were you your mother's favorite?
Did she always pump you up or what?
Well, yeah, there's just, yeah, I would, yeah.
I would, yeah, probably.
Okay, so, so your mom thinks you're special and you understand that teenagers make what you make and you're 20 years past.
I mean, but I have a title.
This is the problem.
You don't know what the title is.
Okay.
So like my title would far surpass your title, right?
Like my amount of title.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like you have a date.
This is fun.
Sorry, go ahead.
But you, you have a name.
You have a lot of followers and everything like this.
So a lot of women who would see that would say, wow, like Stefan Molyneux, this man has aura, right?
Yeah.
I basically have that.
So this monetary value thing doesn't matter because I have title, I have name, and I have aura.
So if I'm- So what does title mean?
I'm not sure what you mean by title.
Well, if you say you're an executive of a company, right?
Then that's a title, the executive of such and such Microsoft, right?
Okay, so you're an executive who makes minimum wage.
Well, yeah, you could say that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And when was the last time that a woman asked you out?
Oh, almost unnatural.
Like, this doesn't happen.
Well, actually, no, you're the most attractive man in the world.
Come on.
Yeah.
It happened the other day at the gym.
And I do work out a lot.
But she's really nice.
She's about a six, so I couldn't do that.
Okay.
Listen, I appreciate the comedy routine.
Obviously, he's not serious, but that's a good bit of Christmas comedy.
All right.
JJ, what's in your mind?
Are you now more attractive?
Please, please be the most attractive person in the galaxy.
This most attractive person in the world is now, it's just chicken feed at this point.
So we've got to up our game quite a bit from there.
Yes, sir.
Going once, going twice.
JJ, it will not be.
Madame Carrie, Merry Christmas to you, my friend.
How are you doing today?
Merry Christmas.
I'm having a great one.
Good, good.
I'm glad to hear it.
What are you up to?
Well, I had an epiphany while you were talking.
Ah.
And, you know, my life is so good now.
And I was thinking back on the bad relationships.
And when you were talking today, I was able to look back at my very first one in sixth grade and what I did and how that was basically repeated for years.
And what I did was I grew up in the underworld, you know, and I had a house that seven people lived in.
And it was very embarrassing and didn't want friends over anything.
But sorry, it reminds me of the underworld part.
Oh, just very dysfunctional family, very poor, very, you know, a lot of abuse and stuff going on.
Neglected, you know, type of things.
So.
Okay.
So not like the criminal underworld, but like the class and functionality underworld.
Yes.
Sorry.
Okay.
Got it.
No, no, it's fine.
So I was dating this guy in sixth grade and he was from a really wealthy family.
And all my friends were.
I just somehow was able to, you know, get into their world, even though I wouldn't ever let them in mine.
Because you're pretty.
Probably.
Yeah, yeah.
So go ahead.
Just to take away the mystery.
Somehow, as a young lady, I was able to move.
And I have a brilliant, a brilliant personality.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
And I'm sure, but that's after the looks.
Men are visual creatures first.
We only care about the personality after the initial attraction.
But sorry, go ahead.
So I found out before Christmas that he bought me a guest watch.
And this is back in late 80s, early 90s.
And that was hundreds of dollars, right?
And I didn't even have $5 to buy him something.
So I broke up with him before Christmas so that he wouldn't give me a nice gift and I would give him nothing.
Right.
Right.
So I repeated that in a way for.
Well, no, because you couldn't be honest.
And I'm not blaming you.
You were just a little kid, right?
But the honesty of saying, listen, I really appreciate this gift.
I'm broke.
Yeah, but I didn't feel worthy even though, like when his family would pick me up in their nice car and take us places, you know, and they'd have to see where I lived.
And I just run out there.
And it was more than money, though.
I think I always felt unworthy because I didn't come from the normal family that had them, you know, the mom and the dad and they did stuff together and they cared where their kids were, you know?
And I always felt more comfortable.
Sorry, why help me understand why is that on you?
But it's not your fault, right?
I mean, you know that, right?
I didn't, though.
And it took me-you did know at some level, because if somebody had said to you, is it your fault that your parents are poor?
What would you have said?
Is it your fault?
Is it a child's fault where they're born?
No.
Right.
So you knew that, right?
Yeah, I knew that.
I think that's why I was able to hang out with those people, but I just didn't feel like I belonged there.
I felt like I belonged with my people.
Did you?
I doubt it.
Sorry to be annoying.
I doubt it.
I think that they just like your people, like the underworld just wanted to hang on to you, right?
As they tend to want to do.
Yeah, they'd make me feel guilty.
You know, you think you're better than us hanging out with them.
Oh, you're, you know.
Right.
So do you, do you know why parents want to hang on to the loyalty of attractive young women?
No.
Because you're gold, baby.
You're cash in the bank.
Because you can marry a guy who makes more money and they can get their hands on some of his money.
You're a lottery ticket.
Well, you know, yeah, I could see that.
Yeah.
But I'm, I'm trying to, besides the money part, though, I'm trying to think like I always seem to gravitate towards people that had problems in their families too.
You know, like even though I could hang out with those people when it came to like a serious, like getting into a relationship with somebody, if they had like the cookie cutter Leave It to Beaver family, I felt like, oh, I'm not good enough.
They're going to eventually find out I can't fit into this, you know?
Well, I would argue, here's my Christmas present to you.
I would argue that you didn't believe any of that stuff, but you had to, like we all had to.
You just conformed to what your parents wanted.
So your parents wanted them.
She want they wanted a boyfriend for you that was going to be rich, but screwed up.
Because rich and healthy, a rich and healthy person is going to say, oh, like you're great.
I'm sorry that you have the family you have, but they're nuts.
Like this is toxic.
This is not good for you.
Well, I didn't have family really giving me any input, any input, but except for to make fun of me.
Except for to make fun of me.
What did you just tell me about what your parents said?
Well, they, my sisters mostly, but yeah.
Well, see, I'm trying to, I'm trying to wrap my head around it.
They didn't give me any advice or any input on who to date.
But if I was hanging out with, like, if some guy pulled up in a brand new truck or something, they would have something to say about it, as in, oh, you think you're better than us now?
Or, oh, you're hanging out with those richie riches.
Yeah, because if you end up hanging out with more functional people, at some point, you're going to really get how screwed up your parents are, right?
We can understand that, right?
Right.
So they're a threat to the functional people or wealthy people or people who are better off, people who are more healthy, are a threat to your parents because they need you to be around dysfunctional people so that their weirdness doesn't get denormalized.
Yes, yes.
And they don't feel bad for not doing better.
It was like a slap in the face to my dad to see a kid my age pull up in a nice vehicle and take me somewhere nice.
Right.
Because we think as a kid that we think this and we think that.
None of it's true at all.
We don't think anything as a kid.
All we do is conform to what allows us to survive, which means doing whatever our parents tell us we need to do.
So I don't like, and the reason I'm saying this is you said, well, I didn't feel worthy and I didn't feel this.
It's like, you didn't have any thoughts going on in your head because all children do is conform to survive.
That's all we do.
So you didn't have any independent thoughts about your value or their value.
All you had to do was probe what your parents approved of or disapproved of and do that because that's what all children do.
It's rare to have a thought of your own before the age of 20.
Okay.
So when you say, well, I, because we personalize it and we say, well, I mean, if my parents locked me in a little cage and I stayed there for 10 years, would I say, well, I spent 10 years being agoraphobic?
I mean, I just paced around in a little tiny room.
I don't know why I didn't leave.
It's because I was locked in.
So you didn't evaluate yourself as a child according to any independent standard or metric.
What you did was you say, oh, my parents don't approve of that.
Well, I guess I better internalize that, or they might stop feeding and protecting me and then I'll die.
Children are just little mirrors of what their parents want.
And so because you didn't say, well, my parents got really mad when I was around someone functional.
So I tried to avoid them to appease my parents.
You said, well, I didn't feel worthy.
And this just is not true at all.
So I'm not saying you're lying, but it's not true epistemologically.
Like it's not true that you just didn't feel worthy for some mysterious reason.
It's like, well, no, this, my parents disapprove, and I need my parents to survive.
So I've got to internalize and do what they want.
Well, that's helpful because I've always beat myself up about it.
I'm like, why was I so dumb?
Why didn't I see my worth?
Why didn't I, why didn't I go for somebody that had more going on?
Why did I, why did I?
Because that's the price of survival.
The price of survival is you do what your screwed up parents want and you internalize it.
Because you can't say, well, my parents are screwed up, but I have to be around dysfunctional people because we don't function that way as kids.
We just, oh, okay, this is what my parents say.
This is, I'll just internalize that.
And this is my gift to you and to everyone who's listening to this is: don't just beat yourself up for surviving, my sister.
That's what you did, but don't say it's somehow, well, mysteriously, I just found myself uneasy around functional people.
It's like, nope, that was, that was the price of survival.
I mean, if you grow up on a banana farm, you're going to eat a lot of bananas.
I don't know.
I had this weird taste for bananas when I was younger.
It's like, no, no, that's pretty much 90% of what there was to eat.
So I ate a lot of bananas and I'm not going to hold myself accountable for that.
And so your parents would be highly uncomfortable around functional people because they have an instinct for control.
And this is why classes tend to stay down there, right?
A lot of kids internalize that and say, well, what they do is they say, well, I just feel weird around functional people and they're weird and it's all a facade and they're even more screwed up because they're pretending to be normal and then they grow up with this sort of anti-bourgeois hatred of the leftists and all that kind of stuff.
And it's like, no, you just, you just did what you had to do to survive.
So I had to conform to my mother's craziness when I was young.
Not because I lacked judgment or wasn't skeptical or didn't think for myself.
It's like, no, it's a surprise of survival.
Is you have to do what your parents want, no matter how screwed up it is.
You have to do it because you have to survive.
And that's all of our instincts.
All of the kids who are like, no, mom and dad are weird.
I don't agree with them.
I'm going to fight them tooth and nail.
Well, how did they do genetically?
Not very well in a time of great predation and scarcity and so on, right?
I mean, you couldn't afford to be sent to bed without supper in a time of great hunger, right?
Because you had to have enough calories to fuel your immune system to stay alive if you got an infection.
So the kids who didn't conform to whatever screwed up things their parents want just had a much lower chance of survival.
So all of those of us who were left, we just almost perfectly internalize whatever our parents want.
And I mean, I remember when my daughter was younger, I mean, I've obviously encouraged her independence and all of that.
But when she was younger, I told the story a particular way and I noticed that she told the story using almost exactly the same words.
And it's not because I'm demanding that she, you know, do it my way or say it my way or whatever it is, right?
But she would just say the story, but almost exactly the same words.
Now, of course, she's grown into more independence, thankfully, but there's nothing wrong with that.
So that was just an example of like, this is a punishment-free household.
And she was copy-pasting my wife and I.
So that's just what kids do.
And it's perfectly healthy.
It's why you're here.
It's a natural part of evolution.
It's almost like, you know, I just decided to start smelling one day as a teenage boy.
I just, you know, as a kid, I didn't smell.
And then suddenly I just like, I decided to will hair into my armpits and start smelling.
It's like, no, that's just puberty.
That's just, it's just what happens.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's not unhealthy.
It's perfectly healthy.
And so, yeah, I mean, don't internalize it and think that you're somehow at fault for doing what you needed to do to survive.
That's something we've all inherited that impulse those requirements.
Well, that's helpful because, like I said, I always would just look back at it and go, man, I was dumb.
Man, I could have done better.
Man, I could have chosen better.
I could have, you know.
No, and of course, remember, for most of human history, you couldn't change classes.
Right.
So you had to like the messed up boys with more resources because you couldn't go from, well, first of all, nobody was functional throughout human history, really.
But you couldn't, you know, if you're some poor serf, some peasant, some slave, some whatever, right?
The odds of you making it into the upper classes was so tiny, unless you happen to be born like spectacularly beautiful and with great grace or some staggering talent or what even, I mean, my God, the greatest writer in human history, William Shakespeare, could only make it to the middle class.
So you had almost no chance of changing classes.
And so your genes are like, well, we don't care about anything other than reproduction because that's what genes are.
They're just copy-paste, copy-paste, just blind photocopiers.
And so whatever raises your odds of reproduction.
And so if you're told, oh, you think you're too good for us, what they're saying is not, they're not talking to you.
They're talking to your genes, saying this attitude will cause you to be rejected for reproduction.
Men will look at you as haughty, as superior, as annoying, and they won't marry you and they won't protect you and they won't give you the resources you need to raise your children.
So you better get the hell back in line, young lady, so that you can carry the genes forward to 4 billion in 30 years, if that makes sense.
So, yeah, it's just what you need to do to survive.
It's perfectly conditioned in your system through evolution, through culture, through survival, through Darwinianism, whatever you want to say.
So, it wasn't like, well, I should have done better.
I could have done better.
No, you just, you had to keep your parents' approval and you had to keep their protection and you had to keep getting access to their resources, which means when they say jump, you say how high, and then you just do that.
And that's exactly why you're here.
And it's not something to be ashamed of.
You can say, like, I played the game well, I made it to adulthood.
Because for a lot of us with really violent, dysfunctional families, making it to adulthood was far from certain.
Right.
And not on drugs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, so good for you, right?
I mean, like the stories I've heard over the years where people are like, yeah, my parents introduced me to marijuana when I was like 12 or 13, right?
And I was so stupid.
And it's like, look, it's sad.
And I'm sorry your parents did that, but it's not shocking that you did it.
Because if you just said, no, I'm not, marijuana is for losers.
I mean, what would happen, right?
Right.
Yeah.
I'm so glad you're doing this on Christmas Day because, you know, I used to be that person that didn't have the family to go to and was lonely.
You know, I could, I could go pretend, but then I, at some point, I decided to stop pretending that I had an actual functional family to go spend the holidays with.
And it took a lot of growing, you know, to get to that point.
And it's better to be, to spend it by yourself even than to go pretend with people that are just going to put you down and make you feel bad or make you, like I said, you know, you're better than us.
You're trying to get, you're trying to do better than we are and just make you feel bad about bettering yourself.
Well, and you can't go straight from breaking your legs to the gymnast team, right?
So you have to have a time to recover, to recuperate.
And so when you get out of a highly dysfunctional family situation, you can't just jump into the way the functional people are because you're too jumpy and traumatized, or at least I was.
So you need some time, some therapy, some calming down, some reorienting yourself.
You need to heal before you can join the sort of elite athletes of functionality, so to speak.
And so, yeah, that's sort of the desert that I'm talking about, where you get away from the dysfunctional, you get away from the dead, the repetitive, the soul-crushing people who, you know, take a slow Parisian waitress style pee from great height on any flickering embers of creativity, thought, and originality.
And you've got to get away from those people, but you can't immediately go to the village of functional people.
You've got to cross that desert.
You've got to heal.
You've got to become yourself and you've got to shake the echoes of all of that trauma before you can get into more relaxed relationships with functional people.
So that's sort of one of the reasons I wanted to dip into the into X here today to just sort of give my thoughts and comfort and sympathies for people who are having a more solitary Christmas and it will pass.
And you keep focusing on self-knowledge, you keep focusing on therapy, you keep focusing on being part of more functional communities.
And you will look back and say, well, that was not fun, but oh my gosh, was it worth it?
Yes, yes.
And I took me a little longer to get through that journey than some, but I'm so glad that I did.
No, no, don't.
I'm not, I'm not hearing you put yourself down on Christmas, young lady.
Oh, no.
Don't do it.
I made it.
No, no, don't complain.
Oh, well, I took too long and I'm still somewhat deficient and other people did it better.
But I promise you, I was stupider than most.
Don't do it.
Because you know what happens when you, and I'm not saying you're like big, seriously putting yourself down, but I wouldn't even do a whiff of it.
So when you put yourself down, you're putting out markers for other people to come and treat you worse.
Oh, yes.
Don't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, don't, don't cut your, don't cut your hand in the water and then be surprised when shocks come by.
Right.
Right.
Don't put yourself down.
Yeah.
And be proud of it.
Yeah.
I came from a really dysfunctional background.
I did really great stuff.
I worked hard and I'm doing well.
And that's a huge amount to be proud of.
But don't at the same time say, well, you know, I did it more slowly than some people.
That's just an echo of the undertow, the underworld.
It's still, you know, there's these ghostly tentacles still trying to pull you back and down.
Like you have to appease the screwed up people by putting yourself down a little bit.
Because if you take too much pride, right?
Because if you take too much pride around dysfunctional people, what happens?
They'll just try to put you down harder.
Yeah, they'll attack you.
They take it as a personal insult, like you're losing control, that they're losing control over you.
So stop appeasing these black-hearted goblins.
Stop it.
Just be proud of what you've done and be self-correcting when necessary, as we all have to do.
But don't keep putting out these appeasing things because it is very evident that you still have the ghostly tentacles, you know, like the end of the horror movie where somebody's walking away from the graveyard.
Ah, comes the hand.
Right.
So you're still a piece of the tentacles.
And the sooner you stop doing that, even better, the relationships will show up in your life.
Okay, I will do that.
But thank you.
Thank you for doing this.
You're very welcome.
You're very welcome.
Thank you for the great conversations that we've been having.
And I will stop here because I have to start getting ready for my evening.
And big hugs to everyone out there.
I could give you all a virtual hug and a big, big kiss on the forehead if I could.
I thank you, everyone, so much as we sail into our 21st year of the greatest philosophy show in the history of the world.
And a lot of that's the listeners.
A lot of that is the technology.
A lot of that is me.
And I really do thank you for this amazing opportunity.
Have yourselves a lovely, lovely Christmas.
And if you're alone, if you're lonely, if you're isolated, it will, I know it doesn't give you much comfort right now, but I guarantee you it will get better and it will make the closer connections you have in the future all the sweeter.