sit on your bed one day and ask yourself uh
what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life
and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's
actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to
decide that you want to know there's no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement
of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it
do you really have anything better to do and if you don't well why would you do anything else
if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day that works
i actually think that that's in accordance with with what we have come to understand about human
perception because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim because
you're you're a creature that has a name you look at a point and you move towards it it's
built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim
well then so that sets up the world around you it organizes all of your perceptions it
organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations
so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set
of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that
aim and you can concentrate on the on the on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and
eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the
day if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can
conceptualize well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life
people's lives aren't what they would like them to be and so then you ask why well forget about
tragedy and catastrophe because that's self-evident and we're not going to discuss
that although the degree to which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate but i
would never say that every terrible thing that is visited on a person is something they deserved i
think that that's a very dangerous presupposition especially because everyone gets sick and everyone
dies but one of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually
figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good
for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you might
be wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you
well why don't you because you don't try you can't have everything you can have what would
be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it you know you
may formulate an idea about what would be good for you and then you take 10 steps towards that
and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you
know you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason
that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success and so since success is a
very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly
is zero and so there's a proposition here and the proposition is if you actually want something
you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want
and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that
that will occur as certain as possible you don't get everything but maybe you can have what you
need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or today's wish it's like
you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like i'm taking stock of myself and if
i was going to live properly in the world and i was going to set myself up such that being would
justify itself in my estimation and i don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that i would
aim at what do you say to those viewers that don't pursue their dreams and are locked into their
careers because they are too afraid to take risks and pursue something meaningful well the first
thing i would say is well you should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful
but you should be more afraid of staying where you are if it's making you miserable it's like
the first thing you want to do is dispense with the idea that you get to have any any permanent
security outside of your ability to contend and adapt it's the same issue with children
it's like you're paying a price by sitting there being miserable you might say well the devil i
know is better than the one i don't it's like don't be so sure of that the clock is ticking
and if you're miserable in your job now and you change nothing in five years you'll be
much more miserable and you'll be a lot older if you need to change your job too let's say
you have uh family and and children and a mortgage you have responsibilities
you've already picked up those responsibilities you don't just get to walk away scot-free say well
i don't like my job i quit that's no strategy but what you might have to do is you think well this
job is killing my soul all right so what do i have to do about that well i have to look for another
job well no one wants to hire me it's like okay maybe you need to educate yourself more maybe you
need to update your your curriculum vita your resume maybe you need to overcome your fear of
being interviewed maybe you need to sharpen your social skills like you have to think about these
things strategically if you're going to switch careers you have to do it like an intelligent
responsible person the first thing that you want to do is figure out imagine you were taking care
of yourself like you were someone you cared for which is rule number two by the way essentially
then you should figure out well if you could have what you needed and wanted what would it
be what sort of friends would you have what would your family relationships look like how would you
conduct yourself with your children how would you educate yourself you need to think through how it
is that your life could be properly arranged if you had that ability and then you can aim at that
a lot of you are going to find yourself embedded in bureaucracies and you know and there's that
for better or worse and one of the things that are going to is going to happen to you
is that people are going to ask you to do stupid and ridiculous things and the fact that they're
asking you to do stupid and ridiculous things is going to do two things three things to you
one is it'll warp you so that you'll pretend that you agree with it and then eventually you will and
like good so much for your soul and then the other thing is is that it'll demotivate you because
you'll think why should i be like slaving away at this job when you know i'm being pecked to death
by morons with stupid rules the third thing that it'll do is make you resentful and irritated and
that will also undermine your motivation and make your life miserable and so you might think well
what should you do about that and the answer to that is you should object at the earliest possible
point because first of all you'll find that if you do if you object to radical stupidity when it
first emerges you kind of make people aware of the fact that what they're doing is radically stupid
and they'll usually back off and so then they won't torture you to death so you know you have
to take a risk which is oh no what happens if i complain about this but you know it's another one
of those situations where you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't so if you complain
that'll cause some trouble although usually it causes way less trouble than you'd think because
people are generally not very courageous and if you push them with some strength on a when they're
doing something absolutely moronic they'll usually back off because they don't know what to do when
they're being challenged and then you won't have to put up with it for the rest of your life do not
do things you know to be stupid stand up and say look that's dumb i'm not doing it and if they ask
you why then you can say well a i think it's stupid b if i do it i'm going to get irritated
and resentful and also if i do it it's going to decrease my motivation so i'm not doing it
and then if they push you too hard it's like hey it's time for a different job and that might be
the best thing that ever happened to you because if the structure you're in is going in that
direction and you can't stop it it's like get the hell out of there and find something else so it's
not that hard to find a job when you already have a job that's another thing to keep in mind too
you know whenever you're working and you will be especially in the world that
the world of today where jobs are relatively uncertain you should always have an escape
route plan and it should be active because if you don't have an escape route and you can't get away
you can't say no and if you can't say no you can't bargain and if you can't bargain you're a slave
so those that's how it that's how the world is set out at the moment it's probably always been
like that but it's something that you really need to know because you've got to watch if
you're if your being is objecting to someone to something that someone is forcing you to do
maybe you're right maybe you shouldn't be doing it and lots of people end up living meaningless lives
you know if you take people and i've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that
they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet
their goals their self-defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things
they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because
you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do
by the depth by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created
to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there
are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do
find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were
if they said if they spoke their being forward and they get stronger and stronger and stronger
and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well
in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're
not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and
it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that
perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and the number another way that you
could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it
reflects back to you now my experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51
of our capacity something i mean you can think about this yourself how many hours a day you waste
or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day
you know inefficient studying uh watching things on youtube that not only do you not want to watch
that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done
that's probably four hours right there you know you think well that's 20 25 hours a week it's 100
hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year
and if your time is worth 20 an hour which is a radical underestimate it's probably more like 50
if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting
50 000 a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting fifty thousand
dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because i'm not gonna
last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well
what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you
you'd be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient
that's the burrito distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely
it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse
because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to
make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful
or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all
bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people stop really really trying
just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that
so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential
system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are are
are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility
that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting too is that
you know there's this idea that that people have that people have a conscience and you know what
the conscience is it's it's this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something
that you know is stupid telling you that probably you shouldn't do that stupid thing you don't have
to listen to it strangely enough but you go ahead and do it anyways and then of course exactly
what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happened so that you feel even stupider
about it than you would if it happened by accident because you you know i knew this was going to
happen i got a warning it was going to happen and i went and did it anyways and the funny thing too
is that that conscience operates within people and we really don't understand what the hell that is
so you might say well what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for
ten years what sort of position might you be in what sort of family might you have what sort of
relationship might you be able to forge and you can be bloody sure that a relationship that's
forged on the basis of who you actually are is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than
one that's forged on the basis of who you aren't now of course that means that the person you're
with has to deal with the full force of you in all your ability and your catastrophe and that's
a very very difficult thing to negotiate but if you do negotiate it well at least you you have
something you have somewhere solid to stand and you have somewhere to live you have a real life
and it's a great basis upon which to bring children into the world for example because
you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death
which is what happens in a tremendous a tremendously large minority of cases
you