Transcript
0:00 What is the meaning of life? >> if I gave you an answer, if I said the meaning of life is to please God, well, which God? Okay, Judeo-Christian God. Well, okay, why that one? Why this thing? The problem is it's a why question. You can keep asking why forever. And you end up in a place called Agria's trailemma. And Agria's tile says that any questioning like this why will always end in one of three places. Okay? First is infinite regress. Right? Why? Because of this, why that? But it'll just keep going forever.
0:31 >> The second is circular reasoning. Well, A, why A? Because of B? Well, why B? Because of A, right? You get trapped in that. >> Or the third is an axiom. And the most popular axiom is God. But it could be anything because of math, because of science, because of the big bang, because of simulation, right? These are all axioms. These are all just stopping points. So you end up in one of these three dead ends essentially, right? So there is no answer. the real answer is because if there was a single answer, we would not be free. We would be trapped because then we would all have to live to that answer. Then we'd be borg like robots. Each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the others. Back to signaling like I'm better at it than you are. But luckily there is no answer. So you just do whatever you want.
1:18 The currency of life, right? People think it's money and yes, money is important and it does let you trade certain things for time, but it doesn't really buy you time. Ask Warren Buffett how much time money can buy you or Michael Bloomberg. So, you can't trade money for time. Money is not the real currency of life and time itself doesn't even mean that much because as we talked about before, a lot of time can be wasted because you're not really present for it. You're not paying attention. So, the real currency of life is attention. It's what you choose to pay attention to and and and what you do about it. You can put your attention on the news, but that's how you're spending the real currency of life. So, just be aware of that. If you want to, that's fine. There's no there's no right or wrong here.
2:03 maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news, learn about that problem, adopt that problem, and solve it. But just be careful because your attention is the only thing that you have. >> And that can also be captured by your own past. 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.
2:40 >> The meaning of life. It's funny that that what that's the basis of all existential angst that you don't >> you don't know why you're here >> and you have this feeling that it could be meaningless. You start going like Jesus Christ what am I just a little piece of this thing. It's like >> well the answers to all the great questions are paradoxes. >> Yeah. >> So for example you're asking like do I matter? That's like really the question you asked right? Well how do I matter in this infinite universe? Well >> you know on the one hand you're separate. No two points are the same. Every point is every two points are infinitely different. You're completely separated. No one will have your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your experience. So your life is a single player game. You're trapped inside your head and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on and that's it. On the other hand, I cannot say the words Joe Rogan without invoking the entire universe. Joe Rogan alien comes along says what's that Joe Rogan? What's Joe Rogan? It's a human. What's a human?
3:36 Bipedal ape? What's an ape on the earth? What's the earth planet? What's a planet? solar system, where was the carbon made inside stars, right? It's like I have to create the entire universe to just say the words Joe Rogan. So, in that sense, you're connected to everything. It's inseparable. So, the answer to that question of do I matter is I am nothing and I am everything. And you'll find this with all the great questions. The answers are all paradoxes, which is why at some level it's sort of pointless to pursue them, to find a tright answer like I'm giving. But the act of pursuing them is actually really useful because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace.
4:16 there's an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming a suffering addict. Sort of using suffering as the proxy for progress as opposed to the outcome of the suffering. Right? It's like I was in pain not eating the marshmallow. I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain, not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it. If you define pain as physical pain, then it's a real thing. It happens and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain and it just means you don't want to do the task at hand. if you were fine doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering. And then the question is, what's more effective? to suffer along the way or just to interpret it in a way that it's not suffering. You hear from a lot of successful people, they look back and they say, "Oh, the journey was the fun part, right? That was actually the entertaining part and I should have enjoyed it more." You can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position you were in 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and you try to remember, okay, who was I with, what was I doing, what was I feeling, and see if there's any advice you'd give yourself, anything you'd do differently. just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age related experience, how would you have done things differently? And I think it's a worthwhile exercise to do. So don't let me rob you of the conclusion. But I'll tell you for me I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering because that was optional. It wasn't necessary. M >> and I would argue that someone who can do the job at least peacefully but maybe happily is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil >> right the outcome may have been the same but the entire experience of getting there >> and and the journey is not only the reward the journey is the only thing there is so whether you're happy or unhappy at the end it tends not to last now I don't want to be glib and say that oh there's no point in making money or being successful there there absolutely is money solves all your money problems problems. So it is good to have money. Money can buy you happiness if you earned it because then along the way you have both pride and confidence in yourself and you have a sense of accomplishment and you you know set out to do something and you were right. So I I'll bet that lingers and then as I said money solves your money problem. But I would say in general this this loop that we run through of desire, dopamine, fulfillment, unfulfillment like you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is right? 99% of your time is spent on the journey. So what kind of a journey is it if you're not going to enjoy it?
6:56 >> You got happy before the money >> mostly. Yeah. >> How did you get happy before the money? >> I started getting older. You know, I just realized like life is short. I'm going to die. >> that's again trit, right? >> In many ways. Yeah. Well, Confucious had a great saying that you know, every man has two lives and the second starts when he realizes he has just one. >> Wow. >> And I read that and it was one of those bookdropping lines. You know, it's like mic drop. Confucious had a lot of mic drops. Confucious was a bad He was. That's a crazy one.
7:26 >> That was a great one. or another one is next time you get sick, you know, cuz everybody gets sick every now and then. It's like a happy person wants 10,000 things. A sick person just wants one thing, >> right? So it's your it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness. Have desires. Your biological creature stands up and says, "I can do something. I I move. I resist. I live." But just be very careful of your desires. This is the oldest most trit wisdom. Desire is suffering. That's what it means, right?
7:57 Every desire you have is an access where you will suffer. So just don't focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you'll get it. But everything else, you got to let go. >> How do you shortcut that desire contract? >> You could focus. You could decide that I don't want most things. I I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments and everything. so I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus.
8:36 >> You can't be great at everything. >> You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time. At the end of the day, I I do think even despite what I said earlier, life is really a single player game. It's all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think you believe will very much shape your reality. Both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just everyday experience of reality. If you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone, you're like, "I don't like that person cuz their skin color. I don't like that. Oh, she's she's not attractive. That guy's fat. This person's a loser. Oh, who put this in my way?" you know, the more you judge, the more you're going to separate yourself and you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself. I'm better than that.
9:16 But then you're going to feel lonely and then you're just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. >> Reality is neutral. >> Reality has no judgments to a tree. There's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. Right? You're born. You have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds and then you die. >> Yeah. >> And how you choose to interpret that is up to you. You do have that choice. So this is what I meant that happiness is a choice. If you believe it's a choice, then you can start working on it. And I can't tell you how to find it because it's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself. But you have to believe it's possible. And it is absolutely possible. Is fame a worthwhile goal?
9:58 >> it gets you invited to better parties, >> gets you into better restaurants. fame. So fa fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you but you don't know them. And it does get you put on a pedestal. it can get you what you want at a at a distance. So, I wouldn't say it's worthless. Obviously, people want it for a reason. it's high status, so it attracts the opposite sex. especially for men, it attracts women. that said, it is high cost. It means you have no privacy. you do have weirdos and lunatics. you do get hit up a lot for weird things. and you're on a stage, so you're forced to perform, so you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense. But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it means that it would be disingenuous to say, "Oh, no. I'm famous, but you don't want to be famous."
10:49 >> that said, I think fame, like anything else, is best produced as a or pursued as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous for being famous, these are sort of traps. >> Fame for fame's sake. >> Yeah, exactly. So, it's better that it's earned fame. So, Generally, the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people. The higher level you're operating at, the more people you're taking care of, the more you sort of earn respect and fame. And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If if if fame is empty, if you're famous just cuz your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places, then that's a hollow fame.
11:31 And I think deep down you will know that and so it'll be fragile and you'll always be afraid of losing it and then you'll be forced to perform. Mhm. >> So the kind of fame that pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want. But the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful, why dodge that? You know, when I was growing up, there was this statement. I think it was Pascal. He said, you know, all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone.
11:55 And it's a disease. It's actually the road to misery. And now that I'm older, I realize like you actually want to again rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle into your mind. I'd 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. 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 cuz it's being bent in two different directions at the same time.
12:27 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. And 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 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.
13:44 It's like 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. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about indulge them. >> 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. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.
14:24 Success comes from dissatisfaction. Is success worth it then? >> So, very complicated topic, but I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and fineries and he says, "How many things there are in this world that I do not want." And that's a form of freedom. So not wanting something is as good as having it. In the old story with Alexander Dionius, right? Alexander goes out and conquers the world and he meets Dionius who's living in a barrel and Dionius says, "Get out of the way. You're blocking my son." And Alexander says, "Oh, how I wish I, you know, could be like Dionius in the next life." And Dionius says, "That's the difference. I don't wish that I could." Sorry, Dioynes. Dioynes. Dioynes says, "I I I don't wish to be Alexander." So two paths to happiness. And one path is success. you get what you want. You satisfy your material needs or like Dioynes, you just don't want in the first place. And I'm not sure which one is more valid.
15:21 and it also depends what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it? >> does being happy make you less successful? That is a conventional wisdom and that may even be the practical earned experience of your reality. You find that when you're happy, you don't want anything, so you don't get up and do anything. On the other hand, you know, you still got to do something. You're an animal. You're here. You're here to survive. You're here to replicate. You're driven. You're motivated. You're going to do something.
15:48 You're not just going to sit there all day. Unlikely. Some people do. Maybe it's in their nature, but I think most people still want to act. Is that a realization you think you could have gotten to had you have not had some success in the first place? At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success first. I was not going to go be an aesthetic and sit there and renounce everything. That just seems too unrealistic and too painful. in the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince. And then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die.
16:21 And then he goes into the woods looking for something more. The reason to win the game is to be free of it. So you you play the games, you win the games, and then you get hopefully you get bored of the games. You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over. Although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels and are relatively open-ended. >> and then you become free of the game in a sense that you're no longer trying to win it. You know you can win it. and either you move to a different game or you play the game for the sheer joy of it.
16:51 What is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay with where you are >> not wanting not wanting things to be different than the way they are. Not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment. I think most people if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time not for a brief moment because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness. >> But if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time they were probably doing some variation of nothing.
17:26 That's interesting because in the chase is this sort of lack, this contingency. That's right. But then you get bored. If you just sit around all the time, you get bored. So you want adventure, you want surprise. Like there's a funny thought experiment of the bliss machine, right? Which is suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put electrode in. And they did this with monkeys. and I can put a wire in there and I can stimulate just the right part of your brain and I can put you in bliss and you'll just be in bliss. Would you would you want that?
17:55 So, most people will say, "Well, I don't want that. I want meaning. I don't want just bliss. I want meaning." And you're like, "Okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there and I'll give you meaning. How about that?" And if you kind of run this thought experiment long enough, I think most people realize actually what I want is I want surprise. I want and I want the world to surprise me and I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable but somewhat not and you kind of end up back where you started you know in every moment in everything that happens you can look on the bright side of something right and so I used to do that forcibly and then I trained it until it became second nature so for example like a friend of mine wife's was over and she when we were dating and she took all these photos she took like hundreds of photos and then she sends them all to us and my immediate reaction was like why are you dumping hundreds hundreds of photos on my phone. I don't need hundreds of photos. That's judgment.
18:44 That's my immediate reaction. And then I could say, actually, how nice of her. She sent me hundreds of photos. I can pick the one that I like. Right? There are two ways of seeing almost everything. There are few things that are like high suffering. So, you can't do that. Other than just saying, well, this is a teacher, right? But I slowly worked through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive in it. Now, it's second nature to me. I also realized that like what you want is you want to clear minds. You want to let go of thoughts.
19:10 Happy thoughts disappear out of head automatically. Very easy to let go of them. Negative thoughts linger. So if you interpret the ne the positive and everything very quickly, you let it go, right? You let it go much faster. get simple hacks get more sunlight, right? Learn to smile more, learn to hug more. These things actually release serotonin in reverse. They aren't just outward signals of being happy. They're actually feedback loops to being happy. spend more time in nature. You know, these are obvious. Watch your mind.
19:38 Watch your mind all day long. Watch what it does, not judge it, not try to control it, but you can meditate 24/7. Meditation is not a sit down, close your eyes activity. Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and say, "Why am I having that thought? Does that serve me anymore? Is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old?" What is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay with where you are.
20:04 >> Not wanting >> Not wanting things to be different than the way they are. not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment. If you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively, then you can start being a little more choosy, a little more critical and you can realize that there are no problems in the real world other than maybe things that inflict pain on your body. Everything else has to become a problem in your mind first. You have to view it and interpret it and create a narrative that it is a problem before it becomes a problem. And then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent on reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying are problems. And you don't need all those problems. Do you really need that many problems in your life? Again, I would say try to focus on just one overarching problem and then go solve that problem. If you define pain as physical pain, then it's a real thing. It happens and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain. And it just means you don't want to do the task at hand. if you were fine doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering.
21:09 And then the question is what's more effective to suffer along the way or just to interpret it in a way that it's not suffering? You hear from a lot of successful people, they look back and they say, "Oh, the journey was the fun part, right? That was actually the entertaining part and I should have enjoyed it more." It's a common regret. But just be careful because your attention is the only thing that you have. 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. 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?
21:46 >> Yeah. For better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness? >> Enjoy it. There's a little thought exercise I like to do, which is you can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position you were in 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and you try to remember, okay, who was I with, what was I doing, what was I feeling, what were my emotions, what were my objectives, and really, really try to transport yourself back and see if there's any advice you'd give yourself, anything you do differently. Now, you don't have new information. Don't pretend you could have gone back and, you know, bought a stock or bought bought Bitcoin or whatever, but just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age related experience, how would you have done things differently? And I think it's a worthwhile exercise to do. So don't let me rob you of the conclusion, but I'll tell you for me I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering because that was optional. It wasn't necessary. M >> and I would argue that someone who can do the job at least peacefully but maybe happily is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil. And and the journey is not only the reward. The journey is the only thing there is. You know even success it's human nature to bank it very very quickly. Right?
23:10 Because the normal loop that we run through is you sit around, you're bored, then you want something. Then when you want something you decide you're not going to be happy until you get that thing. Then you start your bout of suffering or anticipation while you strive to get that thing. If you get that thing, then you get used to it and then you get bored again. Then a few months later you want something else. And if you don't get it, then you're unhappy for a bit and then you get over it and then you want something else.
23:35 Right? That's the normal cycle. So whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last. Now I don't want to be glib and say that oh there's no point in making money or being successful. There there absolutely is. Money solves all your money problems. So it is good to have money. that said there are those those stories that shows that people who break their back and people who win the lottery are back to their baseline happiness 2 years later.
24:00 >> Y >> again I don't know if that's entirely true. I think money can buy you happiness if you earned it because then along the way you have both pride and confidence in yourself and you have a sense of accomplishment and you you know set out to do something and you were right. >> How do you shortcut that desire? contract. >> You could focus, you could decide that I don't want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments on everything. so I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus.
24:42 >> You can't be great at everything. >> You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time. Don't do something you don't want to do. Why Why are you wasting your time? There's so little time on this earth. Life goes fast. What is it? 4,000 weeks. That's your lifespan. and and yes, we hear that, but we don't remember it. But I guess I'm keenly aware of how little time I have. So, I'm just not going to waste it. Don't fritter away your life on randomly scheduled things and things that aren't important don't matter and events and weddings and, you know, tedious dinners with tedious people that you don't want to go to. To the extent you can bring freedom into your life, optimize for that, you'll actually be more productive. You won't just be happier, more free, you will be more productive because then you can focus on what is in front of you, whatever the biggest problem of that day. When I wake up in the morning, the first 4 hours are when I have the most energy and that's when I want to solve all the hard problems. And the next four hours are when I kind of want to, you know, do some more outdoorsy activities or I want to work out or maybe I can, you know, have some meetings, but I'll try to do those last second based on whatever the day's priorities demand. The last four hours I kind of want to wind down. I want to hang out with the kids and I want to play games or read a book or something like that.
25:53 >> So having that flexibility and freedom is really important. So you can just put whatever is most needed into the slot at that moment. I reject this frame that efficiency and productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together. >> How so? >> The happier you are, the more you can sustain doing something, the more likely you're going to do something that will in turn make you even happier and you'll continue to do it and you'll outwork everybody else. The more free you are, the better you can allocate your time and the less you're caught up in a web of obligations and commitments and the more you can focus on the task at hand.
26:27 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. 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.
27:04 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. The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem. Why? Yeah, that's a tough one. well, I 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. 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 to some extent.
28:05 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?
28:37 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.
29:04 >> And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast. 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. >> 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 cuz 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. And 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 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.
31:01 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.