g'day i'm schedule and stick to it okayso what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison that's thefirst thing that people do wrong is say well i don't like to have follow aschedule it's like well what kind of schedule are you setting up well ishould i have to do this then i have to do this then i have to do this you knowand then i just go play video games because who wants to do all these thingsthat i have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule upso that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay i've gottomorrow if i was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day i could havepractically speaking what would it look
like well then you schedule that andobviously there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go alongwith that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're gonnainsist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than youwere that then at the beginning of the day right because that's a stupid day ifyou have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself ahole and then you bury yourself in it's like sorry that's just not a goodstrategy it's a bad strategy so maybe 20% of your day has to beresponsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that depending on how farbehind you are but even that you can you
can ask yourself okay well i've gotthese responsibilities i have to schedule the damn things in what's theright ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just likeyou'd negotiate with someone who is working for you it's like okay you gotwork tomorrow okay so i want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay wellwhat are you gonna do for me that makes it likely that i'll work for you wellyou could ask yourself that you know maybe you'd do an hour of responsibilityand then you play a video game for 15 minutes i don't know whatever turns yourcrank man but you know you have to negotiate with yourself and nottyrannize yourself like you're
negotiating with someone that you carefor that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's howyou make the schedule it's like and then you look at the day and you think wellif i had that day that'd be good great you know and you you're useless andhorrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beatsthe 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 halfpercent for god's sake or because you're gonna hit that position where thingsstart to loop back positively and spiral you up stop doing the things that youknow are wrong that you could stop doing
right so it's it's a fairly it's afairly limited attempt first of all we're not gonna say that you know whatthe good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense but we will presume thatthere are things that you're doing that for one reason rather you know are notin your best interests there's something about them that you just know you shouldstop they're kind of self-evident to you other things you're gonna be doubtfulabout you're not gonna know which way is up and which way is down but there arethings that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do now some of those youwon't stop doing for whatever reason you don't have the discipline or maybethere's a secondary payoff or you don't
believe it's necessary or it's too muchof a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or or afraid who knows soforget about those for now but there's another subset that you could stop doingit might be little thing well that's fine stop doing it and see what happensand what will happen is your vision will clear a little bit and then somethingelse will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know youshould stop doing and that you could stop doing because you strengthenedyourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you weredoing before that just puts you together a little bit more and you could do thatrepeatedly for for an indefinite period
of time and you know that doesn'tnecessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear andfinal picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean thatyou'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad andyou know well that's not a bad start you know oh i can't sleep at nightbecause i'm thinking about something and usually what i'll do is go write it downi have some writing to do so i get up and i go write down what i'm thinkingand that usually does the trick but because i've been playing with youtube ithought well i'll try making youtube video andtelling people what i'm thinking about
and see if that performs the samefunction as writing and to me the function of writing well it's twofoldone is conceivably to communicate with peoplealthough the fundamental purpose for me is to clarify my thoughts so that i knowtoo you know because if you're if something is disturbing you what thatmeans is that it needs to be articulated it what it's the emergence of unexploredterritory something that disturbs you that that's the right way to think aboutit it's unmapped territory that's manifesting itself it's like a vista ofthreat and possibility and you need to articulate a path through it and sothat's what i was doing it's like i was
thinking well this is bothering me andthis seems to be why and here's what i think is going on and and so i made thevideos and in some sense i didn't think anything more of it will have tonecessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of controlit's a terrifying doctrine but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it stillsays that there's a way forward there's a pathway forward and the pathwayforward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility so that you cantolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someonewho's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability andsuffering and that the pathway forward
as far as the existentialists areconcerned is by well certainly by the avoidance of deceit particularly inlanguage but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions ofexistence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them and the thingthat's so interesting about that is there well - as far as i'm concerned andsome of this is from clinical experience you know if you take people and i'vetold you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they areavoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in orderto meet their goals their self defined goals if you can teach people to standup in the face of the things they're
afraid of they get stronger and youdon't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself likeif for ten years if you didn't avoid doing what you knewyou needed to do by the deaf by your own definitions right within the valuestructure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what wouldyou be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into theworld from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades longperiods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if theyspoke their being forward and they'd get stronger and stronger and stronger andwe don't know the limits to that we do
not know the limits to that and so youcould say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearablycan be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you knowit and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing toconsider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhapsthere's another way that you could look at the world and the number another waythat you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would bemuch better than what it reflects back to you now my experience is with peoplethat were probably running at about 51% of our capacity something mean you canthink about this yourselves i often ask
undergraduates how many hours a day youwaste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like4 to 6 hours a day you know inefficient studying watchingthings on youtube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't evencare about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're donethat's probably four hours right there know what you think well that's 2025hours a week it's a hundred hours a month that's two and a half full workweeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twentydollars an hour which is a radical under estimate it's probably more like fiftyif you think about it in terms of
deferred wages if you're wasting 20hours a week you're wasting fifty thousand dollars ayear and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wastingfifty thousand dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be forme to waste it because i'm not going to last nearly as long and so if your lifeisn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen ifyou just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of youyou be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times moreefficient that's the pareto distribution you haveno idea how efficient efficient people
get it's completely off its off thecharts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop makingthings worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only dothey not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt tomake things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant ordeceitful or or homicidal or genocide allure all of those things all bundledtogether in an absolutely pathological package if people start really reallytrying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would getjust because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of theexistential system of ideas between
human vulnerability social judgment bothof which are our major causes of suffering and the failure of individualsto adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt it isn't merelythat your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to whatdegree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn'tonly your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so youknow you think well there's nine billion seven billion people in the world we'regoing to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidlybut seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one littledust mote among that seven billion and
so it really doesn't matter what you door don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you'reat the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even moretrue now that we have social media you'll you know you'll know a thousandpeople at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand peopleeach and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away froma billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do therelike dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affectthings in ways that you can't fully comprehendmeans that the things that you do and
that you don't do are far more importantthan you think and so if you act that way of course the terror of realizingthat is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might saywell that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for itto matter but i mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you hadthe choice i can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price ipay is that nothing matters or i can reverse it and everything matters but ihave to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obviousto me that people would take the meaningful path now when you say welldenialists suffered dreadfully because
there's no meaning in their life andthey still suffer yeah but the advantages they have no responsibilityso that's the payoff and i actually think that's the motivation say well ican't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's likeyeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell ofa lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaninglesssuffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for youand you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a prettygood deal all things considered especially when the are when thealternative is to bear your burden
properly and to live forthrightly in theworld well what solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th centuryit's not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live apathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do thatthen it's hell really really and you can read the gulag archipelago if you havethe four tit fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like andthen you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit or even moreimportantly if it's a light if it's a place you'd like to visit and take allyour family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th century istarted to pay very careful attention to
what i was saying i don't know if thathappened voluntarily or involuntarily but i could feel a sort of splitdeveloping in my psyche and the split and i've actually had students tell methe same thing that has happened to them after they've listened to some of thematerial that that i've been describing all of you but split into two let's sayand one part was the let's say the old me that was talking a lot and that likedto argue and that liked ideas and there was another part that was watching thatpart like just with its eyes open and neutrally judging and the part that wasneutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going that isn'tyour idea you don't really believe that
you don't really know what you'retalking about that isn't true and i thought that'sreally interesting so now i've and that was happening to like 95% of what i wassaying and so then i didn't really know what to do i thought okay this isstrange so maybe i've fragmented and that's just not a good thing at all imean it wasn't like i was hearing voices or anything like that i mean it wasn'tlike that it was it was well people have multiple parts so then i had this weirdconundrum it's like well which of those two things are me is it the part that'slistening and saying no that's rubbish that's a lie that's you're doing that toimpress people you're just trying to win
the argument you know was that me or wasthe part that was going about my normal verbal business me and i didn't know buti decided i would go with the critic and then what i'd tried to do what i learnedto do i think was to stop saying things that made me weak and now that i meani'm still trying to do that because i'm always feeling when i talk whether ornot the words that i'm saying are either making me a line or making me come apartand i think the alignment i really do think the alignment is it i thinkalignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because i think ifyou say things that are as true as you can say them let's say then they come upthey come out of the depths inside of
you because we don't know where thoughtscome from we don't know how far down into your sub structure the thoughtsemerge we don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessaryfor you to speak from the core of your being we don't understand any of that wedon't even conceptualize that but i believe that you can feel that and ilearned some of that from reading carl rogers by the way who's a greatclinician because he talked about mental health in part as the coherence betweenthe the spiritual or the or the abstract and the physical that the two thingswere aligned and and there's a lot of idea of alignment in psychoanalytic andclinical thinking but anyways i decided
that i would start practicing not sayingthings that would make me weak and what happened was that i had to stop sayingalmost everything that i was saying i would say 95% of it as a hell of a shockto wake up and i mean this was over a few months but it's a hell of a shark towake up and realize that you're mostly dead wood it's a sharkyou know and you might think well do you really want all of that to burn off it'slike well there's nothing left but a little husk of you it's like well ifthat 5% is solid then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen
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