g'day I'm schedule and stick to it okay so what's the rule with the schedule
it's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong is say
well I don't like to have follow a schedule it's like well what kind of
schedule are you setting up well I should I have to do this then I have to
do this then I have to do this you know and then I just go play video games
because who wants to do all these things that I have to do
it's like wrong set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's
the trick it's like okay I've got tomorrow if I was gonna set it up so it
was the best possible day I could have practically speaking what would it look
like well then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of
responsibility that's gonna go along with that because if you have any sense
one of the things that you're gonna insist upon is that at the end of the
day you're not in worse shape than you were that then at the beginning of the
day right because that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you
just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it's
like sorry that's just not a good strategy it's a bad strategy
so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe
it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can you
can ask yourself okay well I've got these responsibilities I have to
schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward
and you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone who is
working for you it's like okay you got work tomorrow okay so I want you to work
tomorrow and you might say okay well what are you gonna do for me that makes
it likely that I'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know
maybe you'd do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15
minutes I don't know whatever turns your crank man but you know you have to
negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're
negotiating with someone that you care for that you would like to be productive
and have a good life and and that's how you make the schedule it's like and then
you look at the day and you think well if I had that day that'd be good great
you know and you you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it
with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero
right and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for
51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're
gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral
you up stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing
right so it's it's a fairly it's a fairly limited attempt first of all
we're not gonna say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any
ultimate sense but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that
for one reason rather you know are not in your best interests there's something
about them that you just know you should stop they're kind of self-evident to you
other things you're gonna be doubtful about you're not gonna know which way is
up and which way is down but there are things that you're doing that you know
you shouldn't do now some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason you
don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't
believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or
resentful or or afraid who knows so forget about those for now but there's
another subset that you could stop doing it might be little thing well that's
fine stop doing it and see what happens and what will happen is your vision will
clear a little bit and then something else will pop up in your field of
apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could
stop doing because you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the
particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together
a little bit more and you could do that repeatedly for for an indefinite period
of time and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to
ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the
truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away
from what's untruth and what's bad and you know well that's not a bad start
you know oh I can't sleep at night because I'm thinking about something and
usually what I'll do is go write it down I have some writing to do so I get up
and I go write down what I'm thinking and that usually does the trick but
because I've been playing with YouTube I thought well
I'll try making YouTube video and telling people what I'm thinking about
and see if that performs the same function as writing and to me the
function of writing well it's twofold one is conceivably to communicate with
people although the fundamental purpose for me
is to clarify my thoughts so that I know too you know because if you're if
something is disturbing you what that means is that it needs to be articulated
it what it's the emergence of unexplored territory something that disturbs you
that that's the right way to think about it it's unmapped territory that's
manifesting itself it's like a Vista of threat and possibility and you need to
articulate a path through it and so that's what I was doing it's like I was
thinking well this is bothering me and this seems to be why and here's what I
think is going on and and so I made the videos and in some sense I didn't think
anything more of it will have to necessarily have done anything wrong for
things to get completely out of control it's a terrifying doctrine but it's not
a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward there's
a pathway forward and the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that
has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have
some respect for yourself as someone who's capable of standing up in the face
of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the pathway forward
as far as the existentialists are concerned is by well certainly by the
avoidance of deceit particularly in language but also by the adoption of
responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part
to actually rectify them and the thing that's so interesting about that is
there well - as far as I'm concerned and some of this is from clinical experience
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 ten years if you didn't avoid
doing what you knew you needed to do by the Deaf 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'd 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 were probably running at about 51%
of our capacity something mean you can think about this yourselves I often ask
undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste
and the classic answer is something like 4 to 6 hours a day
you know inefficient studying 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
know what you think well that's 2025 hours a week it's a hundred 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 twenty dollars an hour which is a radical under
estimate it's probably more like fifty if you think about it in terms of
deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week
you're wasting fifty thousand dollars 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 going to
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 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 off its 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 genocide
allure all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological
package if people start 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 our major causes of
suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they
know they should adopt it isn't merely that your fate 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 it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone
that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's nine billion
seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by
the way and then it'll decline rapidly but 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 because 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 you know you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your
life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away
from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're
connected and the things you do there like dropping a stone in a pond the
ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully
comprehend means that the things that you do and
that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act that
way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to
matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a
meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask
yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice I can live with no
responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing matters or I can
reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility that's
associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the
meaningful path now when you say well denialists suffered dreadfully because
there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the
advantages they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and I actually
think that's the motivation say well I can't help being nihilistic all my
belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed
them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and
the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about
that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the
pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered
especially when the are when the alternative is to bear your burden
properly and to live forthrightly in the world well what Solzhenitsyn figured out
and so many people in the 20th century it's not just him even though he's the
best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your
society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really and you can
read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the four tit fortitude to do that and
you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's a place
you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a light if it's a
place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends because that's
what happened in the 20th century I started to pay very careful attention to
what I was saying I don't know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily
but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche and the split
and I've actually had students tell me the same thing that has happened to them
after they've listened to some of the material that that I've been describing
all of you but split into two let's say and one part was the let's say the old
me that was talking a lot and that liked to argue and that liked ideas and there
was another part that was watching that part like just with its eyes open and
neutrally judging and the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part
that was talking and going that isn't your idea you don't really believe that
you don't really know what you're talking about
that isn't true and I thought that's really interesting so now I've and that
was happening to like 95% of what I was saying and so then I didn't really know
what to do I thought okay this is strange so maybe I've fragmented and
that's just not a good thing at all I mean it wasn't like I was hearing voices
or anything like that I mean it wasn't like that it was it was well people have
multiple parts so then I had this weird conundrum it's like well which of those
two things are me is it the part that's listening and saying no that's rubbish
that's a lie that's you're doing that to impress people you're just trying to win
the argument you know was that me or was the part that was going about my normal
verbal business me and I didn't know but I decided I would go with the critic and
then what I'd tried to do what I learned to do I think was to stop saying things
that made me weak and now that I mean I'm still trying to do that because I'm
always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either
making me a line or making me come apart and I think the alignment I really do
think the alignment is it I think alignment is the right way of
conceptualizing it because I think if you say things that are as true as you
can say them let's say then they come up they come out of the depths inside of
you because we don't know where thoughts come from we don't know how far down
into your sub structure the thoughts emerge we don't know what processes of
physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your
being we don't understand any of that we don't even conceptualize that but I
believe that you can feel that and I learned some of that from reading Carl
Rogers by the way who's a great clinician because he talked about mental
health in part as the coherence between the the spiritual or the or the abstract
and the physical that the two things were aligned and and there's a lot of
idea of alignment in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking but anyways I decided
that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak and what
happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying I
would say 95% of it as a hell of a shock to wake up and I mean this was over a
few months but it's a hell of a shark to wake up and realize that you're mostly
dead wood it's a shark you know and you might think well do you
really want all of that to burn off it's like well there's nothing left but a
little husk of you it's like well if that 5% is solid then maybe that's
exactly what you want to have happen