Dec. 29, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:10
Why Have THE TALK with your Parents!
|
Time
Text
So exhibit lot six, six, seven, ladies and gentlemen, on why you should talk to your parents about issues that you had with them when you were a child.
And all parents have this.
I said this in the show the other day.
Even if you're a perfect parent, then your children are maladapted to a crazy world.
So they're going to have some challenges and some criticisms.
And that's all fair and right and valid and good.
But so another reason why, though, it's important to talk to your parents is that it helps avoid the scarcity mentality.
So scarcity mentality is left-wing thinking.
It's middle of the winter, running out of food thinking.
It is zero-sum thinking.
If someone has more, someone automatically has to have less.
It's childish thinking.
It's immature thinking, right?
If there's two cookies and your brother gets two, then you get none, right?
So there's that aspect of things.
And it is primitive.
And it is when you have non-cultivated or fixed resources, it's very easy to fall into that kind of thinking.
So if you live in the tropics, there's a banana tree, it has produced 10 bananas, then if somebody takes the 10 bananas, you have no bananas.
It is not capitalistic.
It is not self-generative.
And it in particular does not take into account things like intellectual labor, right?
If I write a book, I haven't stolen a book from you.
If I write a song, then that song has not been stolen from anyone else.
So when there is a fixed amount of assets, generally because they're found assets, then you have a scarcity mentality.
So of course, if you think of two tribes that are hunting in the same area, if one tribe captures or kills an animal, there's less available for the other tribe.
And because they're not marshaling their resources, the skill is zero-sum, right?
If I and my neighbor are both hunting deer, if I shoot a big deer and get the big deer, then he is down one deer.
Now, eventually they'll replenish and replace, but it's not based upon our individual marshaling skill.
You know, one of the great things that happened over the course of the agricultural revolution, like about 10,000 years ago, one of the great things that happened was resources were now win-win based on skill.
So if you have somebody who's particularly talented, like they have a green thumb, they're really good at farming, then their skill means that there's more food for everyone and they're not taking things away from others.
But it's hard to get that mindset because a lot of people evolved with this sort of scarcity mindset that if I get more, you must get less.
And in particular, the cultures that did not have a meritocracy based on farming, they hang on to, and for reasons we can sort of fully understand, they hang on to this scarcity mindset, I mean, almost like biologically.
And this is where the resentment comes from.
If you have more, I have less.
And this is true again in hunting.
If you're competing against a really fantastically skilled hunter, then he's going to take the game and you're going to end up with less.
And yet, if there's somebody who's really great at farming, who gets control of a whole bunch of farmland, then there's more food for everyone, right?
He has, if 10 people produce 10 units on 10 acres, right?
Then you get 100 units.
But if one guy gets a hold of 10 acres and can produce 500 units, then it's true that each individual farmer is down 10 units, but the community as a whole is up 400 units.
And those kinds of productivity gains are not at all unusual in the sort of Pareto principle of the really brilliant people who produce what seem to be almost magical amounts of productivity.
I mean, you think of the great bands and songwriters and so on.
They just do the most amazing things.
It's almost supernatural to hear the songs that have been created.
And of course, the artists themselves don't even know how they did it.
I mean, you see this sort of interview with Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, scowly Bob, Mr. Zimmerman, he does not know.
He says, I can't do that anymore.
I don't know how I could do it.
Or Roger Hudson talking about the logical songs.
Who knows where that came from?
If I knew where the well was of great songs, I'd go back there more often.
But it doesn't, you know, they don't know how it comes about.
Demons.
It's almost never positive messages in these songs.
So the scarcity mindset of a zero-sum game, the scarcity mindset says that what is or isn't in our lives is based on environment.
So if someone says, well, the reason I became poor was because I lost my job because of a recession.
So what that does is it places the responsibility on things beyond your control.
No individual, outside of government, perhaps, but no individual can control whether there is or is not a recession.
If the recession means that you don't have a job, or, you know, I had a, I opened a restaurant just as COVID hit.
And that's why my restaurant failed.
Now, again, obviously that's a huge factor and a huge issue.
And there are certainly times when that is the case, that you do something, you open a restaurant having no idea that COVID is about to hit, and then everybody stays home and orders DoorDash and so on.
Now you can adapt your restaurant to be better at delivery and you can, you know, fight and work hard to try and find ways to keep your restaurant alive.
But definitely the sit-down portion is toast for good portions of COVID for obviously for a variety of reasons.
And there are times when things aren't your fault.
I mean, obviously, no individual restaurateur was responsible for COVID.
So there are times when things aren't your fault.
And there are individual circumstances in life as a whole when you can say, this happened.
It wasn't my fault.
You open a sit-down restaurant, you pour all of your money into making the sit-down experience fantastic.
COVID hits and so on.
Now, maybe you can keep yourself alive through various loans or grants or whatever.
But in general, that's a tough situation.
I knew people, of course, who when interest rates were low, and this was, of course, the 07-08 crash as a whole, but I knew people who bought too expensive a house when interest rates were low.
They bought, you know, at 3%, 2.5%, 3.5%.
They bought houses that they could only just afford when interest rates were unusually low.
And they didn't have any buffer as to what would happen when interest rates went up.
And this, of course, was true for people as a whole.
So circumstances are highly variable.
And if you plan, of course, according to optimum circumstances, then you have made a bad choice.
This would be like, well, I'm not going to buy health insurance because I'm going to plan to never need it.
That's not a good plan.
Like, obviously, right?
It's like, I'm not going to buy life insurance because I'm never going to die.
So, knowing that things are highly variable, you should start your business with a buffer.
You should live with, at least, I was always told, and I've tried to stick by this as much as possible, six to 12 months of savings so that you can weather the inevitable vicissitudes and variabilities of life as a whole.
So, is it the external circumstance or circumstances that caused the problem, or is it your lack of willingness to take into account the worst case scenario, or at least a negative case scenario?
I mean, when I was in the business world, right, when I would write my five-year plans or my two-year plans, I would say best case, medium case, worst-case scenario, because it's pretty easy to sell things if everyone only believes your best case scenario.
So, have you got a worst case scenario that you are prepared for?
Now, again, with all due sensitivity, you know, the once-in-a-century pandemic, I get that.
It's a little outside the pale, to put it mildly.
So, I'm not talking about that stuff in particular.
But even still, you should, you know, get your grants and loans.
You should live on your savings.
You should work like crazy to adapt your business to delivery or pickup so that you can survive the slowdown or the turndown so that when business picks up, you're left standing, right?
The recession, the harsh economic conditions, they remove from the equation of the economy the marginal producers, the people who are just, just barely getting by.
Well, they go out of business.
And then when hopefully, you know, as generally is the case, ordinary business activities resume, then you are incredibly well poised to succeed truly wildly.
So people who bought as much house as they could possibly afford when interest rates were low and got low interest rates in particular because they signed up for variable rate mortgages and could not afford their house when the interest rates went up, is that environmental?
I would argue no, right?
Because if you want a 10-year mortgage, you're not going to get 3%.
If you want a 20-year mortgage, blah, blah, blah, right?
So you're going to have to take more.
So if you say, look, interest rates are really, really low.
So I'm going to lock in for a year or two mortgage, and then the interest rates go up and your pass payments, mortgage payments go up through the roof, you can't afford.
Is that the environment?
Do you say, well, the interest rates went up and that was the problem?
I would argue no.
If you say, well, my landscaping business failed because I got carpal tunnel syndrome or I sprained my ankle and my wrist and therefore my business failed because I had to take weeks or a month or two off work.
Is that why your business failed?
I would argue, no, it is not why your business failed.
Your business failed because you didn't have enough savings to tide you over for when bad things happen.
Or if you say, well, my business failed because my star salesman quit, it's like, well, you can't have a business that is utterly dependent on the continued presence of only one person who might quit.
That's not a good business plan or a good business model.
Or, you know, this happens in particular with sort of home-based business or small entrepreneurial concerns where you say, well, my business fails because I finally got burned out of working 70-hour weeks.
Well, it's not a good business plan to rely on 70-hour weeks for your business to survive, right?
That is not a good plan.
So scarcity mindset is when you say everything's a zero-sum game or a negative sum game, and resources or lack of resources are 100% the environment.
Environment changes, you know, you have a bad, it's like a farmer saying, well, I went out of business because I had a bad harvest.
It's like, well, every farmer knows that you're going to have bad harvests and you need to plan for that.
My business failed because there was a fire and I didn't have fire insurance.
Well, no, the business didn't fail then because you didn't have a fire.
Not that because you had a fire.
The business failed because you didn't have fire insurance.
So the more you can take control of your environment, the more you can make good decisions knowing that the environment is sometimes going to go very harshly against you, the more you can do that, the more control you have over your life.
And then you go from a scarcity mindset, which is always operating at the edge of survival and crossing your fingers that the environment doesn't turn negative.
That's a scarcity mindset.
You then change to an abundance mindset, which is, I have the skills and the ability to produce what I need in order to survive.
I'll find a way.
So I could have said, well, I closed down my show five and a half years ago because I was deplatformed.
Because I was deplatformed and my viewership tanked and my income tanked.
So because of all of that, my podcast failed.
Now, obviously, NGL, not going to lie, that was a tough transition for sure.
And I had to scramble and work crazy hours and contact people and, you know, try to get the business back in the black.
That was a challenge, right?
But I can't say my, if it had not worked, I wouldn't say my business failed because I was deplatformed.
I would say my business failed because I was unable to convince the listeners to move over.
I mean, I worked very hard to convince people to move over and so on, but the business failed because I failed to convince people to move over and to continue supporting the show.
So a scarcity mindset is an irresponsibility mindset.
And an abundance mindset is a responsibility mindset.
I will find a way.
Now, of course, I understand there are times when you can't find a way.
You're in some totalitarian dictatorship.
I'm not talking about people in North Korea or Yale or something like that.
So in general, if there are some vestiges of the free market around, in general, you can do something.
You can always do something.
You can always do something.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
It's something that I was told when I was a kid.
And I've really tried to live my life that way.
Where there's a will, there is a way.
So the reason why you talk to your parents about deficiencies that occurred in your childhood, lack of love, lack of attention, lack of care, lack of feedback, lack of peace, like whatever it is, right?
Because you need to probe, I mean, A, be honest and so on, but also you need to probe your parents' mindset to find out if it's scarcity or abundance.
Is it a lack of responsibility or is it responsibility?
Is that the mindset?
So if you say to your dad, why were you working 70-hour weeks?
And your dad says, well, I had to pay the bills and the bills were somewhat exorbitant.
Maybe they had new cars, maybe a lot of vacations, maybe an expensive house or something like a really expensive house or something like that.
Say, well, I had to pay the bills.
So that's scarcity mindset.
Because if you have kids at home and your job and your bills require you to work 70 hours a week, then you need to change the variables, right?
You need to lower, you can't really up your income because you need some sleep and you'll just burn out, but you need to lower your expenses or find another job or both.
So if the maintenance of your lifestyle requires you to work 70 hours a week, then obviously you need to change your lifestyle.
You need to sell your house.
You need to say, oh, well, but the house market is down and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, I get that.
I understand that.
In which case, maybe you can rent it or maybe you can sell a car or two and get a beater or something, like something like that, right?
There's always things that you can do to lower your expenses.
You know, you take a cheaper cell phone plan.
You don't eat lunch out.
Like, I mean, there's tons of things that you can do to lower your expenses.
And they add up.
You get rid of your streaming services, get a cheaper internet, whatever, right?
Use a hotspot for a while instead of, you know, $80 or $90 or $100 a month internet, whatever, right?
There's things you can do to lower your expenses so you can spend more time with your family.
So what you do is, let's say that you had a dad who worked 70 hours a week, is you say to your dad, I didn't like that 10-year period where you worked 70 hours a week.
Why did you do that?
Now, if he says, well, the reason I did that was your mom kind of talked to me.
I'm too much of a cuck to your mom.
Like your mom talked me into buying a house that was too expensive and then she wouldn't let me downsize and I kind of chickened out and she wanted a new car and I was just weak.
I was weak.
It was bad.
It was dumb.
I appeased your mom that's on me at the expense of you kids and then you go and talk to your mom and blah, blah, blah.
Like you have these.
So do they say bad things happened to you because of bad decisions I made or which is abundance mindset or is it scarcity mindset when they say or if they say I had to work 70 hours a week because the bills had to be paid.
We didn't want to end up we couldn't end up homeless.
Which is to say everything's environmental.
You can't make better or worse choices.
It's a slave mentality.
Why were you happy?
Well, I've got a nice master.
Why are you unhappy?
Well, I have an unpleasant master.
And of course, if you're a slave, you don't really have much control over your master, if at all.
So when parents say, well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had, everything I did for you.
I always wanted nothing but the best for you.
Your happiness is all that matters.
I tried to make the right decision.
Like then they're saying, I did the best I could.
Therefore, all negatives are environmental.
I mean, if you say to your dad, I really wanted you to coach my running team and to coach Little League, why didn't you?
And he says, well, I got a flesh-eating disease on a plane for some bizarre reason and I couldn't come and coach you.
Whatever.
I don't know, like just whatever.
So there's some legitimate reason why, right?
Of course, even if things are totally legitimate, kids still need to understand and process it.
So if your dad is working 70 hours a week for some whatever, crazy, legitimate reason, right?
Something that even as an adult, you would accept as, okay, this was a legitimate reason, then the kids still need to be told why and what's going on.
And I'm really sorry.
And I'm sorry we don't get to spend more time together.
And here's when I think it's going to end.
And here's why it's happening.
And so at least the kid doesn't take it personally.
But scarcity mindsets are always suspicious when they don't explain themselves at the time and then make excuses later.
These are the men or the women who say, well, I had an affair because you weren't paying me any attention and I was lonely and I tried to face, like they then put the onus on other people.
The abundance mindset is, I am responsible for my choices.
The scarcity mindset is I am not responsible for my choices.
And again, this comes back to farming.
If you're a hunter and you're a good hunter and you can't find any game, then that's environmental.
If you've gone out for 12 hours and tracked everything and tried to find everything and your eyes are good and your hunting skills are good and you just can't find anything, that's not your fault.
On the other hand, if you're a farmer and you fail to plant well and you fail to irrigate and you fail to put the manure down and you fail to chase the birds away and you blah right, then the reason that you're hungry is not circumstantial.
It's not environmental.
And it was a dry summer.
Yeah, but you know that there's going to be dry summers why you do the irrigation, right?
So even the best fishermen sometimes are going to come back with no fish.
But if you don't have any milk because you failed to milk your cows or keep them alive, then that's on you, right?
The abundance mindset says deficiencies in resources are on me.
I made bad choices, bad decisions, whatever it is.
That is abundance mindset.
It's the presence or absence of resources is largely, though not 100%, dependent upon me, which is why I always say, who got me deplatformed?
Me.
I got myself deplatformed, knowing that I was dealing with feral, indoctrinated people and took on the most controversial subjects, blah, blah, blah.
So that is the abundance mindset.
Why are we short of food?
Because I made bad choices as a farmer, as opposed to blaming the environment, the circumstances, the threat.
So the scarcity mindset is the presence or absence of resources is entirely due to factors beyond my control.
So if you look at the classic defense of bad parenting, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
I always meant well, blah, blah, blah.
So the scarcity mindset thinks that an absence of knowledge is an excuse.
The abundance mindset says absence of knowledge is not an excuse.
Again, to go back to the typical example of a kid taking a test, right?
So if the kid doesn't study for the test and the kid fails the test, is it enough to say, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had?
No, because the parent would say, you knew you had this test and you failed to study for it.
Therefore, the absence of your knowledge, which is a kind of resource, therefore the absence of your knowledge is your responsibility.
You're at fault for not having the knowledge to pass the test.
And this is why if kids come to their mom like late Sunday night and say, I need a bunch of stuff for a presentation in the morning, the mom's first question is, well, how long have you known about this presentation?
Right.
So because it's Sunday night, it has to have been, well, at least since Friday, because it's not like you get a bunch of sudden homework assignments on the weekend from school, right?
So that's what she's saying.
And if the kid says, oh, it's been a week, then the mom's going to be like, you had a week to tell me.
You didn't tell me now it's Sunday night and I got a scramble, blah, blah, blah.
And if you just don't have the resources and you can't get them, it's like 10 o'clock at night, all the stores are closed, and you can't get them in the morning or whatever, then you go and do your presentation and say, well, I did the best presentation I could with the materials I had, which was like nothing.
Well, then you're responsible, right?
So if a kid does a bad presentation because he didn't have the materials, does he get to say, my bad presentation is not my fault because I didn't have the materials.
It's like, well, no, because you knew ahead of time that you needed the materials and blah, blah, blah, right?
You didn't get them and then it was too late.
So the scarcity mindset is presence or absence of resources is entirely environmental.
Abundance mindset is I am responsible for the presence or absence of resources.
So if you go to your parents and you say, there's this, that, and the other that was wrong or bad about my childhood.
And if they say, that's on me because I chose this, I chose that, I chose the other.
Well, first of all, abundance mindset tends to be proactive.
So if you're working too hard and not seeing your kids, abundance mindset is, okay, well, what's the really important thing is here, not me pleasing clients, but me spending time with my kids.
And so, sorry, kids, I've been too busy.
I've been working too hard.
I'm going to cut back on that, spend more time together.
I really miss you guys.
So it tends to be proactive.
The scarcity mindset is reactive.
And how could it be otherwise?
How could it be otherwise?
Because if everything is dependent upon a blind environment you cannot control, then all you can be is reactive.
That would be like saying to a rabbit, you need to be proactive when you're being chased by a fox.
No, everything you do is in reaction or response to being chased by said fox.
So when you talk to your parents, you need to listen very carefully, very, very carefully to their responses.
And again, almost always the response is a scarcity mindset, which, by the way, they generally didn't give that excuse to you as a kid, but that's, you know, that's in Peaceful Parenting at peacefulparenting.com.
So we don't need to get into that now.
But your parents in making excuses based on scarcity mindset.
Well, we, even if we admit that we parented in a suboptimal way, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
We did better than our own parents, blah, blah, blah.
Then that's a scarcity mindset.
Because they don't say, we did the best with the knowledge we had, but we failed to develop the knowledge we needed.
And again, passive people will give you excuses.
They will not give you, they'll give you excuses later.
If confronted, they will not give you reasons in the present proactively.
These are the annoying people in business who dodge calls when there's a problem rather than phoning you ahead of time saying, there's going to be a problem and here's why and here's what I'm going to do about it.
I can't pay you on the day that I want to because of X, Y, and Z. Here's the commitment I'm going to make.
Here's what I'm going to do about it.
They just dodge your calls when you need the money.
So they take their scarcity mindset and bring it to you.
They recast it into your mind.
Recreated in your mind.
It's what I always used to say to people in the business world.
Do it on time or tell me you're not going to.
Get it right or tell me how it's not right ahead of time.
Don't come to me day off and say it's not ready.
Because if your parents have scarcity mindset, which is excuses after the fact, not responsibility in the moment, then that has infected you.
If your parents have scarcity mindset, that has infected you.
Now, the other thing with scarcity mindset is it gives you either compliance or aggression.
So think of a situation where you have two slaves, right?
The head chef slave and the sub and the cook slave, right?
So the master comes in because the soup tastes like crap and yells at the head slave.
And the head slave grovels and apologizes because he doesn't want to get beaten.
And then what does the head slave do?
The head slave then goes to the chef slave and berates him and yells at him.
So in a scarcity mindset, what happens is you are either overcompliant or over aggressive, which is why it's very tough to negotiate win-win.
In fact, it's kind of impossible to negotiate win-win.
You are over-compliant or you are over-aggressive.
And then what happens is if you're being taken advantage of by someone in business, you suck it up, you do the extra work, you swallow whatever.
You're overcompliant, you sympathize, you empathize, and so on.
Like an employee who's always calling in sick or whatever, right?
Oh, I'm so sorry you're sick, blah, blah, blah.
And you're kind of seething, though, right?
So you're overcompliant and then you lose it.
You do all their extra work.
You stay late.
You know, oh, they're sick and whatever, right?
And then if someone says, well, you really got to talk to that person, you have a very tough time talking to that person because you have only two options, be overcompliant or over-aggressive.
You malingering, lazy son of a whatever, right?
Which is too aggressive.
I mean, imagine if your son takes 20 bucks to shovel his neighbor's driveway.
The neighbor gives him the 20 bucks, but he doesn't shovel a neighbor's driveway.
The scarcity mindset either goes and shovels it for his kid, maybe mentions a couple of things in passing, or sits down and says, like, you just stole 20 bucks.
You know that, right?
They go really aggressive, as opposed to trying to understand your kid's perspective, looking at yourself as a parent.
What kind of message did I give to my kid that he's willing to do this kind of stuff?
And, you know, how can I fix it?
Just being curious and looking for some sort of win-win and getting them out of the scarcity mindset and so on, right?
And I'm empathizing that everyone wants something for nothing.
I get that.
It's the root of a lot of our great technology.
There's no problem with that, right?
So the problem with scarcity mentality is you have over-compliance or over-aggression.
You have two Aristotelian extremities, right?
You don't have anything in the middle of the bell bell curves, you just have these two extremities, overcompliance, over aggression.
And the two breed each other, right?
Because you have to cover up the over-aggression, you end up with overcompliance and so on, right?
And to figure out, were you raised by abundance mindset, responsibility mindset, presence or absence of resources is due to my decisions?
Or are you raised with scarcity mindset?
The winds of fate, circumstances, environment, I just have to make do with whatever happens to fall from the tree to eat and I hunt and maybe there's stuff there and there's not, as opposed to the agricultural abundance mindset, which is if there is or is not resources, the first place I look is not to circumstances and excuses, but myself, my choices in the mirror.
Because you need to know whether you have the abundance or scarcity mindset.
If you have the scarcity mindset, it's going to be virtually impossible for you to negotiate win-win situations because it's win-lose.
Scarcity mindset is if I win, you lose.
If you win, I lose, which is why there's overcompliance or over-aggression.
Over-compliance is the other person is one and I need to stay in their good graces.
Over-aggression is I've won, so I can take what I need.
So I need that level of aggression.
And that scarcity mindset, trying to figure out whether you have scarcity or abundance mindset.
I mean, just by the by, I'm sure you know, just to sort of end with me, but I was raised with real scarcity mindset.
And so when I made the decision, which I did sort of very consciously, very early on in this show, like 20 years ago or more, and I said, I'm going to give away everything for free.
I just asked for donations.
It's like no ads, no sponsorships, no nothing, just no charging for books.
And I made that decision to go from scarcity mindset to abundance mindset.
And abundance mindset is win-win.
Scarcity mindset is win-lose.
And you need to talk to your parents about this kind of stuff so that you can figure out what kind of mindset you have deep down and you can start to change and work with it so that you can have a more benevolent and friendly and positive approach to the world as a whole rather than extreme win-lose, fight-or-flight, dominance or submission mindset, which is a pretty exhausting and often debilitating way to live.
So I hope that helps.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
If you're feeling abundant at the moment, freedomain.com slash donate.