Transcript
0:01 You mentioned anxiety before. imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is is one of yours. And anxiety is the emotion dour of the 21st century. And lots of driven people very anxious, very paranoid. That's what's caused them to be affected. It pays so much attention, detail oriented, not letting things go. Staying up at night thinking about it. That's the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it?
0:26 >> So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when like if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once. So for example, you know, you you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish and you can't reconcile the two and so you're under stress. you want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? These are exampam you you don't want to go to work but you want to make money so you're under stress right so you have two conflicting desires and I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that oh I actually have two conflicting desires and either I need to resolve it I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other or I will decide later but at least just being aware of why you're stress can help alleviate a lot of stress and then anxiety I think is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable able stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why and you can't even identify the underlying problem. I think the reason for that is because you you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are and there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg and that's anxiety. But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things. And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like, okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why. Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see like when does that stress go away? If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. a lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them. So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about >> to indulge them.
2:33 >> Well, if if if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality. you know, one one big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trit. And I know the the we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions. We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young. You know, a little child might ask the big questions like, why are we here? What's the meaning of life?
3:04 What is this all about? You know, is there Santa Claus? Is there God? But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things or we've given up on them. But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero. What's there to stress about? >> Yeah. For better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness?
3:33 >> Enjoy it. Make the best of it. You know, it's it's even briefer than that. Each moment just disappears. it's gone. There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly. So if you're not if you're not there for it, if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you missed it. So you're any moment when you're not in that moment, you're dead to that moment. >> You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or you know living in some imagined reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality. So one of my recent realizations was what is wasted time?
4:12 What is a what is a waste of time? So I don't like to waste time but what is wasted time? And everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. >> but in each moment the thing matters. In each moment it's the only thing that matters actually the what's happening in front of you is literally has all the meaning in the world. And so what matters is just being present for the thing. So if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it, then it's not wasted time. If you don't want to do it and your mind is running away from it and you're reacting against it and you're wishing you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing or you're anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that's wasted time.
4:56 That's time that's being wasted when you're not actually present for the reality in front of you. So my definition of wasted time, yes I do want some material things in life and I you know there there are things that have more value than others within this life but this life is very short and bounded. So the true wasted time is a time that you're not present for when you are not there for it. When you're not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you're immersed in it. If you're not immersed in this moment then you're wasting your time.
5:25 People get worried about dying and no longer being here, but they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case. >> That's right. But and I think people crave being here for it. And and and when you're here for it, you're actually not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the thing, the the moment, the task at hand. >> We don't want peace of mind. We want peace for our mind.
5:46 >> That's right. Yeah. You don't peace. The mind is what can eat you alive if you let it. And there's more to you than the mind. >> How so? Well, I mean the very I don't want to disassemble the body, so to speak, right? Because please go on. Yeah. At the end of the day, like everything arises within your consciousness, right? You you >> got nowhere else to experience it. >> Sorry. >> You've got nowhere else to experience.
6:10 >> You got nowhere else to experience it. And that consciousness is relatively static in the sense that it's been exactly the same from the moment you were born to the moment you die. And everything that you experience from your body from your mind to the world to to everything is within that consciousness. and that thing that base layer of being and this is what the Buddhists will tell you is the real thing. Everything that comes and goes in the middle including your mind including your body is unreal. And trying to find stability in those transient things is is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble.
6:44 >> Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you. And different people interpret them in different ways. Yeah. It's the old line about two people walking down the street. They're having the exact same experience. One is h experience. One is happy, one is sad, right? It's a narrative in their heads.
7:07 It's how they choose to interpret. so I think when I said that, it was a long time ago. I was talking more about having positive interpretations and negative interpretations. But these days, I think it's better just not to have any interpretations and to just allow things to be. You're still going to have interpretations. You can't stop it. and nor should you try. But even that having an interpretation is just a thing you can leave alone. >> Yeah. I really want to try and just dig in a little more to the best way to remind people that they should value their time. just how brief it is that the time that you spend ruminating, being distracted, fears of the past, regrets.
7:48 Well, I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life. I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life, the the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and and be a little not not necessarily critical but be observant of yourself more objectively and then you'll kind of realize your own loops and patterns. It takes time. It's not it's not overnight.
8:17 It's not instantaneous. So >> you mean letting go is not a one-time event. >> Yeah. And and there's letting go is not necessarily even the right answer. Like yes, if you're trying to be an enlightened being and you know you want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect and be a Buddha, sure you can let go. But I think in practice it's actually quite hard to do. I think I would say that it's you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want rather than doing what other people expect you to do or society expects you to do or what you might just think should be done by default. you know, I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms.
9:04 Be selfish. Holistic selfishness. We can clip that little I'm telling you selfish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Keep running back. Bad >> guy. Great. I I had this insight or a question I guess. How much do you think that we should trust the voice in our heads? Because half of wisdom suggests to rely on your sort of bottomup intuition and then half of it has to be sort of top down rational as possible. How do you navigate the tension between head and gut in this way?
9:33 I think the gut is what decides. the head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards. The gut is the ultimate decision maker. If it doesn't and and what is the gut? The gut is refined judgment. It's taste aggregate aggregated and it could be aggregated through evolution and it's in your genes in your DNA or it could be aggregated through your experiences and what you've thought through. The mind is good at solving new problems and new problems in the external world that have defi defined edges you know beginnings and ends and and objectives.
10:06 What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions. So when you have a hard decision to make I find it's better to yes you ruminate on it. You think through all the pros and cons but then you sleep on it. You wait a couple of days. You wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right. And when you're younger, it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience. And when you're older, it can happen much faster, which is why, you know, >> and you have less time to >> Yeah. I know people are more set in their ways as a consequence, right? They know what they want. They know what they don't want. so it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment.
10:41 But once you've developed them, don't trust anything else because you can't go against your gut. It'll bite you in the end. usually in relationships that failed, you can look back and say, "Oh, actually, I knew it was going to fail because of this reason, but I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way, right? I wanted this person to be a different way than they are, or I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to than I knew I was going to get, but I just wanted it." So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then trap.
11:08 Yeah. Wishful thinking, it traps you into a into a pathway that just chews up time. I I look at the people and I don't want to offend anybody, but I look at the people who don't like themselves and that's the toughest slot because they're always wrestling with themselves and it's hard enough to face the outside world. and no one's going to like you more than you like yourself. So, if you're struggling with yourself, then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge. And it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem.
11:36 It might be genetic. It might just be circumstantial. A lot of times I think it's cuz they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child. And that sort of seeps in at a deep core level. but self-esteem issues can be the most limiting. one interesting thought is that you know to some extent self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. you're watching yourself at all times. You know what you're doing and you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code. But if you don't live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem. So perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code very rigorously. Have one and then live up to it. another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others. if I look back on my life and you know what are the moments that I'm actually proud of?
12:25 There's very far and few between and it's not that often and it's not the things you would expect. It's not the material success. It's not having learned this thing or that. It's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud. Now that's through an explicit mental exercise. But I'll bet you at some level I'm recording that implicitly. So that tells me that even if I am not being loved and the way to create love is to give love, to to express love through sacrifice and through duty.
12:53 >> And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast. >> It's interesting when you talk about sacrifice because a lot of the time people say, "I sacrifice so much for my job." It's like, yeah, but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost. And yeah, I wonder whether if self-esteem is you adhering to your internal your your actions and your values aligning even when it's difficult or perhaps even more so when it's difficult. I wonder whether there is a price that people who are more introspective, high integrity pay because you think well you've got this heavy set of overheads that you need to pay in some way. Well, if being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it right. So you at some level it does involve a sacrifice. but that sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term. for example the virtues are the set of virtues are a set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody. So if I am honest and you are honest then we can do business more easily. We can interact more easily because we can trust each other. So even though there might be a few liars in the system as long as there aren't too many liars and too many cheaters a high trust society where everybody's honest is better off. And I think a lot of the virtues work this way right? If I don't go around sleeping with your wife and you don't sleep with mine and you know if I don't take all the food that's at the table first and so on, then we all get along better and we can play win-win games. in game theory, the most famous game is prisoners dilemma. But that's all about everybody cheating and the Nash equilibrium, the stable equilibrium there is everybody cheats and you're for the only way you can be you can play a win-win game is if you have long-term iterated moves. But that's not actually the most common game played in society.
14:45 The most common game played as one called a stags hunt where if we cooperate we can bring down a big stag and both have big dinners but if we don't cooperate then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners. >> So most of and and that game has two stable equilibriums and one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit and one could be where we're hunting the stag. So the high trust society is a more most more virtuous society where I can trust you to come hunt the stag with me and show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly. So you want to live in a system where everybody has their own set of virtues and follows them and then we all win. But I would argue you don't need to do that for sacrifice. You don't need to do that for other people. You can do it just purely for yourself. You will have higher self-esteem. You will attract other high virtue people.
15:31 >> Would I go on a stag hunt with me? >> Correct. Yeah, that's right. And if you're the kind of person, if you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and virtues, then you will attract other people who are ethical and virtuous. Whereas, if you are a shark, you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks. And that's an unpleasant existence. But again, this goes back to the equivalent of the marshmallow test. And by the way, the marshmallow test does not replicate.
15:56 I saw it replication crisis hard recently. >> But it is about trading off the short term for the long term. and so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues, there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous. >> Yeah. did you deal with self-doubt in the past? Is that something that was a hurdle for you to overcome? >> Yes and no. I think I I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that, oh, I don't know what I'm doing and I need to figure it out. but I didn't doubt myself in the way of somebody else knows better than me for me or that, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm not worthwhile or anything that I I guess I had the benefit of I grew up with a lot of love like the people around me love me unconditionally. And so that just gave me a lot of confidence. not the kind of confidence that would say I have the answer, but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out and I know what I want or only I am a good arbiter of what I want.
16:54 >> Yeah. That level of self-belief I suppose allows you to determine what is it that matters to me my self-esteem should I chase this thing or not I can make a fair judgment on that as opposed to being so swayed. But it's such a good point about even if you think you're not consciously logging the stuff that you're doing there is some that's in the back of your mind. Was it the Damon? Is that what the ancient Greeks or something used to talk about?
17:20 >> Yeah. The Yeah. Also in computer science like there's a concept of a demon which is a a program that's always running in the background. You can't see it. >> Okay. >> but yeah, it probably comes from the ancient Greek demon. but yeah, I what you know that you don't even know you know is far greater than what you know you know, right? You can't even articulate most of the things you know. There are feelings you have that have no words for them. There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself. You don't really you can't articulate the rules of grammar yet you exercise them effortlessly when you speak. So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge you can articulate and that you can communicate.
18:05 And so at some level you're always watching yourself. That's what your consciousness is, right? It's the thing that's watching everything including your mind, including your body. So if you want to have high self-esteem then earn your own selfrespect. >> I had this idea the internal golden rule. So the golden rule says treat others the way that you should be treated. You want to be treated. The internal golden rule says treat yourself like others should have treated you >> and it was a a repost to maybe people that didn't grow up with unconditional love. Yeah.
18:39 >> In that way. On the love thing, one of the interesting things about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved. So go back to when someone was in love with you or someone did love you and like really remember that feeling like really sit with it and try to recreate it within yourself. And then go to the feeling of you loving someone and when you were in love. And I'm not even talking about romantic love necessarily.
19:04 So be a little careful there. I'm talking more about like love for >> sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love >> right a sibling or a child or something like that or or a parent and think about when you felt love towards someone or something and now which is better and I would argue that the feeling of being in love is actually more exhilarating than the feeling of being loved being loved is a little clawing it's a little too sweet you kind of want to push the person away it's a little embarrassing and you know that if that person is too much into it that you feel constrained. On the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expansive. It's very open. It actually makes you a better version of yourself.
19:41 It makes you want to be a better person. And so, you can create love anytime you want. It's just that craving to receive it that's the problem. >> You mentioned anxiety before. imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is is one of yours. And anxiety is the emotion dour of the 21st century. And lots of driven people very anxious, very paranoid. That's what's caused them to be affected. They pay so much attention, detail oriented, not letting things go, staying up at night, thinking about it. That's the paranoia coming in.
20:10 >> What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it? >> So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when like if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once. So for example, you know, you you want to be liked but you want to do something selfish and you can't reconcile the two and so you're under stress. you want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? These aream you you don't want to go to work but you want to make money so you're under stress, right? So you have two conflicting desires and I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that oh I actually have two conflicting desires and either I need to resolve it. I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other or I will decide later. But at least just being aware of why you're stressed can help alleviate a lot of stress. And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why and you can't even identify the underlying problem. I think the reason for that is because you you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are and there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg and that's anxiety. But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things. And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why. Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see like when does that stress go away. If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. a lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly. Not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them. And so this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things, but you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself, >> to indulge them.
22:21 >> Well, if if if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality. you know, one one big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're gonna die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trit and I know the the we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions. We kind of give up on them when we're very very young. You know, a little child might ask the big questions like why are we here? What's the meaning of life?
22:52 What is this all about? You know, is there Santa Claus? Is there God? But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things or we've given up on them. But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero, what's there to stress about? >> Yeah. For better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness?
23:21 >> Enjoy it.