- How many hours a day you waste
or how many hours a week you waste?
The classic answer is something like four to six hours a day
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 Pareto distribution.
You have no idea how efficient efficient people get.
It's completely, it's off the charts.
While 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 homicidal or genocidal
or all of those things all bundled together
in an absolutely pathological package.
If people stopped 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 major causes of suffering,
and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility
that they know they should adopt.
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 defying 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 your own definitions, right,
within the valued 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 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 here, right?
Because it means that perhaps there's another way
that you could look at the world
and remember 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.
So you might say well what would happen
if you abided by your conscience
for five years or for 10 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 afford?
And you can be bloody sure that the 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.
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 tremendously large minority of cases.
Because it isn't merely that your faith
depends on whether or not you get your act together
and to what degree you decide that you're going to
live out your own genuine being.
Is it only your fate?
It's the fate of everyone that you're networked with.
And so you think
well there's seven billion people in the world
and who are you?
You're just one little dust mote among that seven billion.
And so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do
but that's simply not the case.
It's the wrong model.
If you're at the center of a network,
you're a node in a network.
Of course that's even more true
now that we have social media.
You'll know 1000 people,
at least, over the course of your life.
And they'll know 1000 people each.
And that puts you one person away from a million.
You're two persons away from a billion.
And so that's how you're connected.
And the things you do,
they're like dropping a stone in a pond,
the ripples move outward and they effect things in ways
that you can't fully comprehend.
And it means that the things you do
and that you don't do are far more important
than you think.