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 make their goal, 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.
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 value structure that you 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. 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.
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, 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.
And then the second part of that is well, imagine that many people did that because we’ve done a lot as human beings we’ve gotten a lot of remarkable things and I’ve told you already I think.
That today for example about 250,000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300,000 people had attached to electrical power grid.
We’re making people for lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate than ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin.
And that’s been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000. The UN planned to have poverty solved between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013, so there is inequality developing in many places and you hear lots of political agitation about that.
But overall the tide is lifting everyone up and that’s a great thing.
We have no idea how fast we can multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because you know my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity. I mean you can think about this yourself.
I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week do you waste?
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 are done.
That’s probably 4 hours right there.
Now you think well that’s 20-25 hours a week it’s 100 hours a month that’s 2 1/2 full work weeks.
It’s half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth $20.00 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 $50,000 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 what would happen if just stop 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.
Well then, if we all got their act together collectively. It stops 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 this 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 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 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 like one of the another thing I’ve often asked undergraduate classes.
You know there’s this idea that people have a conscience then you know what the conscience is.
It’s this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something, that you know is stupid. Telling you it’s 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 happens.
So that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident.
“Cause you don’t even know I knew this was going to happen”
“I got a warning it was gonna happen and I went and get 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 5 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 forge?
And you could 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.
And 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 or 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.
Well, it’s more than that too because this is what we’ll close with.
This is why I wanted to introduce Solzhenitsyn writings to you.
See because it isn’t nearly that your fate depends on whether 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 your network with and so you know you think well, there’s 9 billion – 7 billion people in the world are going to peak at about 9 billion by the way and then it’ll decline massively but 7 billion people in the world and who are you? you’re just one little desk mote among that 7 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!
but that’s simply not the case it’s the wrong model!
Because you’re at the center of the network you’re a node in a network, of course, that’s even more true now that we have social media you 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 and 2 persons away from a billion.
And so that’s how you’re connected and the things you do it like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and the affect things in ways that you can’t fully comprehend and it 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 it well, 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 is better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself, would you be so sure if you had the choice I could live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters!
would you be so sure if you had the choice I could 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 you say “well nihilists suffered dreadfully because there’s no meaning in their life and they still suffer”. Yeah, but the advantage is, 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 just allowed them to collapse because it’s a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay some meaningless suffering.
But you can always whine about that and people 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 alternative is to bear your burden properly into live forthrightly in the world!
Bear your burden properly insulin forthrightly in the world well with *Solzhenitsyn figured out in 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 fortitude to do that and you’ll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that’s a place you like to visit or even more importantly if it’s a place you like to visit and take all your family and friends because that’s what happened in the 20th century.
*The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn