Jordan Peterson: How To Deal With Depression | Powerful Motivational Speech

The question is how to differentiate the usefulness of behavioral/psychotherapeutic treatments for conditions such as

depression

versus medical treatments. Well, the first thing I would say is don't underestimate the usefulness of medical interventions. Depression is a feline catastrophe that leads to a very high suicide rate and it also levels people and it is very hard on their families and that and that and it is physiologically extraordinarily harmful and if you are in a depressed state and it is severe you can try an antidepressant that you will know in a month if it works if it works well maybe it will help you organize your life as we could say well maybe you are depressed because your life is not very well together it could be that sometimes people are depressed their life is just like that.

It's not okay because no one's life is okay, everyone's life is a tragedy, but sometimes people have their lives in order as much as anyone could expect. They have friends. They have an intimate relationship. They have a career that they like. You know that they are. they are skilled hardworking people who work hard at what they are doing and really play a minimal number of games with themselves and are terribly depressed, an antidepressant man that sometimes that will just fix it and so hooray as your biological entity if there is there's something out there that can help strengthen you so you can prevail great and you know the people you listen to that everyone takes antidepressants you know everyone takes them just like no one takes those damn things without serious consideration half the time I spend with my clients who Depressed is often the two-year attempt to get them to tentatively try an antidepressant because they are so guilty that they rely on an external crutch to order their lives that they can't even tolerate it, but you know, I say okay.

Look man, what if you had diabetes? You're not going to take your insulin. It's like you're stressed. You exploited yourself at your weakest point. That's what happens when you get stressed. If there's something out there that could help you, just give it a try, for God's sake. you'll know in a month and you just stop, that doesn't work now, having said you want to do a multidimensional analysis, it's like if you have any friends, you're in an intimate relationship or you're looking for one, right? You have a reasonable career. Are you as educated as you are intelligent?

Do you have something useful to do with your time outside of work Do you have a drug or alcohol problem Are there other behavioral problems such as sleep dysregulation and poor eating that are contributing to the pathology, do you want to differentiate all of that and wherever you can make a behavioral intervention, much better, but sometimes you're

deal

ing with people whose lives are so broken they don't even know where to start, they're different from everyone else. those who have everything in order say and you say well try this man maybe don't cut your throat in the next month because if you are dead it will be difficult to work with you and then medical interventions anything if you are sick you do what is necessary to get better and you leave your pride behind if you have to and that says nothing about the usefulness of behavioral interventions you want to attack the problem with everything you have at your disposal except some antidepressants especially for people whose lives are together and who are depressed, antidepressants They can be absolutely miraculous, so when you hear that the clinical evidence in their favor is dubious, and that's partly because the diagnosis of

depression

is not very well formulated, it's very different. having a terrible life than being depressed and antidepressants can only help you so much if you have a terrible life, so yeah, you want to stay within this little map because it's working, you want to get from point A to point eight, point B and this . is good, this indicates that you are moving forward, that is the first thing it indicates and the second thing it indicates, which is even more important and you will never hear this from behavioral psychologists, is that your map is correct, so every time you you move a little go ahead and something you want happens, it says "Oh, the game I'm playing is the right one," so the reward not only indicates progress, it indicates that the framework within which progress is calculated is the correct framework and that's good because it's the framework that makes things irrelevant and you want them to stay irrelevant so if you don't move forward and you start questioning the framework that's much worse than just not moving forward you get a bad exam what do you think What the hell am I doing?

Anyway, in college that's probably not the first place you should go with that information and you think well, why is it worse? As far as I can tell, your map of yourself as a college student is a complete representation, it tells you what you should be doing every day, it tells you where you're going in the future, and if something pops up as an anomaly you get a worse grade than you expected. and you ruin the whole map, okay, what have you been doing for the last four? years what kind of high school student were you how clueless are you about how you are organizing your future what will be your identity if you are not going to be a student where are you going to end up in five years is this is how that little grade, that bad grade is like a portal that snakes can crawl through and that's exactly how you respond, especially if you open the door too wide, maybe this means I shouldn't be in college, well, one of the rules.

Don't you want to restrict the failing event to the minimum necessary domain? It's actually very important, you want to do that when you argue with your partner, which you will do the entire time we have an argument. Well, me. I should never have married you it's like no, no, that's not the first answer, it's a bad answer or here's a really good one, you've always done that kind of thing and you always will, it's like, oh, okay, great, It's like the only response to that is to hit someone because like you did it right, you're like that, you've always liked that there's no chance you can be fixed and none of that is acceptable, it's like the person is going to fight with you, right? away because what else are they going to do, so what you want to do is minimize it, it's not rationalization, you mean, okay, this person did something that disrupted our joint map, okay, what's the smallest possible thing they could do to say it? get back together and you have to know well that we need to make a plan so you don't do it again or we need to have a discussion so you know it wasn't a good thing, but I'm not going to do it.

Go after your whole character, I'll tell you when I get home and you're watching TV, just come to the door and say hi, no you don't love me or something, it's like no, no, you just have to walk to the door and you give me a hug or something and then that's enough and then the other person could tolerate so much corrective information, maybe if you're nice about it and also understand that they probably will. I have something equally horrible to say about you in the next 15 minutes because you're going to do something stupid, so you don't want to, you don't want to open the door for every possible snake to come crawling in because that's one way. to depression and you actually see that what happens in depressed people is that every little event cascades through their entire value system and they end up saying "well, that's just another reason why I should jump off a bridge." and they really see it that way, it's really horrible because they don't have defenses it's like well, I didn't do very well in this course it's like I'm going to get a bad grade on the or on the exam I'm going to get a bad grade on the course that's going to ruin my ability to finish my degree I'm never going to enter the field of my choice it's just another indication that I'm useless and that life isn't worth bang I'm going to jump off a bridge and if you're really depressed It's like each one of those things hits you with the certainty of the truth, it's really not good and that's why you have to be careful, you have to be careful walking down that path, when you make a mistake you think it's okay, what is it? the narrowest framework of interpretation within which I can understand this that will require minimal behavior change to decrease the likelihood of it happening again is the mental hygiene background yes, we'll get to that, we'll get to that, that's the next question It's because they don't exist in isolation, and that's another thing that often happens when you hear behavioral accounts of cognitive processes that are generally just focused on as if it's something isolated, it doesn't exist, it's scalable, it's scalable in many ways, it's scalable. temporarily. because what you do now is associated with what you will do tomorrow and with what you will do next week and so on, so it has to be temporally scalable and it is also socially scalable, so it has an effect on you that has an effect in your family that has an effect on the community, etc., so you don't want to take it, it's very difficult to think about the effect of your action and all those levels of scale simultaneously, but you have mechanisms that allow you to do that. that and we'll see, I think the sense of let's assume you're not constantly lying to yourself so that your head isn't full of chaos and garbage and that you have reasonable relationships with people in the world, I think that's a leap.

Going forward, I think your sense of meaningful engagement with what you're doing is the psychophysiological marker that you're acting in a way that takes into account all simultaneously accumulated representations because you are, you are, you are like you. I'm trying to figure out where you are and you might think that means where I am in this room, but look, this room is not a simple thing, it's nested, it's a subset of the university, it's a subset of society, it's a subset of your life, the room is a complicated thing and you need to figure out where you need to be in the room and you can't do it for sure with perception because all you see is me and part of the wall, of course, you have this.

Kinda tight, this tight little portal, so you can't really rely on your perceptions to orient yourself, but you do orient yourself and I think what you do is your commitment. Does this seem meaningful, deep and engaging? Yes, then it is an indication. that is serving multiple masters simultaneously, then perhaps both socially and temporally, so I think the sense of meaning is actually an instinct that the people of the East in time and space is not a nominal empathy, it is the form more fundamental of perception and that is the only optimistic option. What I've ever been able to deduce from psychology is that that could actually be true, it could be that the sense of meaning is an orienting reflex and it would be wonderful if it were true because it would make it real, you know, and it's one of the, You know, one of the devastating elements of nihilism is kind of like, well, who the hell cares what you're doing?

What difference will it make in a million years? It's as if your sense of meaning is just an illusion. You are a limited creature in a limited place and nothing you do really matters. It's like it's a

powerful

argument, especially if you're an objective materialist and a reductionist. It's a deadly argument, but it seems wrong to me, actually wrong. because the meaning seems to me like it's a real phenomenon, it says that your proper position between chaos and order or something like that is very real, so we'll see, let's develop that argument because if it's real, you want to know that because it gives you something to lean on, you know, maybe it's as real as pain, but it's not pain, it's something positive and you need something positive that you can rely on, and psychoanalysts I think it's too airy.

They tend to think that a lot of you is inside you and very little of you is outside of you and part of the reason why I think is because of my clinical experience. I love the psychoanalyst, they are brilliant. They're brilliant, they're deep, they struggle with real problems, like problems when people have real problems, and I mean deep problems, they're really deep moral problems or problems of right and wrong, you really know that things are going on in their family. that they are so terrible that, well, sometimes there are fatal, you know, lie after lie upon lie upon lie for Cades and decades and decades it is horrible and that's not exactly inside them, it's out there in the world and many of the people I see are very famous. psychology critic I don't remember his name, but he probably criticized the practice of psychology quite effectively in the early 60s.

Thomas' The Myth of Mental Illness, says Szasz, is a classic, you should read it if you are interested in psychology . Read it like it was a classic and it basically said that most people have problems living, they don't have psychological problems, so despite my love for psychoanalysts, I have experienced it very often. What I do as a therapist is help people have a life that would work, you know it and you can parameterize it which is like what do you need? How about some friends that people like? How about an intimate relationship with someone you can trust that maybe has a future that would be good?

How about a career that puts you in a dominant Archy? somewhere, so at least you have some chance of increasing some chance of stabilizing yourself and our schedule into a routine because no one canliving without a routine, you simply forget that if you don't have a routine, I would recommend the one you have. one goes because you can't be mentally healthy without a routine, you need to choose a time to get up at whatever time you want, but choose one and stick to it because otherwise you deregulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood and you eat something for the morning.

I had many clients who had anxiety disorders. I had a client who was literally starving. A very intelligent girl. There are very few things she likes. She tried to survive on half a cup of rice a day. She came to see me and she told me. I have no energy, I come home, all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over again. What's that weird? And I thought, well, it depends on how hard you work. You know it's a little weird, but whatever it is, what you're seeing looks familiar. to console herself so I did an analysis of her diet it's like three quarters of a cup of rice it's like you're starving eat something you know you'll feel better so she modified her diet and you're all her anxiety disappeared and she had some energy , it's like, you have to eat, so a schedule, that's a good thing, man, your brain will thank you, it will stabilize your nervous system, it's a bit of a plan, that's a good thing, you need a career, you need something productive .

What to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol, especially alcohol, because even a lot of people do that, you need a family like the one you have with your parents and all that, it would be nice if everyone got along, they could work . That's a good thing to work on and then you know that you probably need children at some point, that's life, that's life and if you're lacking, you know that you may have a good reason not to operate in one of those dimensions. It's not required, but I can tell you that if you're not functioning reasonably well on four of them, I think I mentioned six, if you're not functioning reasonably well on at least three of them, there's no way you're going to thrive psychologically and that's more pragmatic. in a certain sense than the psychological.

Human beings have a nature, there are things that we need and if we have them well, that is good, and if we do not have them well, then we feel the lack, so behavioral psychologists focus much more on that. kind of thing that you know is practical is like creating a strategy making a career plan figuring out how to negotiate because that's very important figuring out how to say what you need figuring out how to tell the truth to people figuring out how to listen to your partner in particular because if you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they will return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years then maybe they are constantly giving themselves what you want well hooray that would be nice and then There are two in all circumstances and it is better to have two brains than one because people think differently due to their temperament mainly, so negotiation is where wisdom arises and is part of the transformation. the psychological transformation that accompanies an intimate relationship and one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship, so we are starting to be able to put the traits to nail the traits into their underlying biology with respect to neuroticism.

If you have a high level of neuroticism you are more sensitive to anxiety and that is regulated at least in part by the hippocampus and generated in part by the amygdala. There is another part of the brain called the periagua or gray aqueduct that seems to be associated with the experience of pain and pain is a fairly complex phenomenon depression is pain like grief is pain like social isolation is pain like disappointment is pain like there are anxiety components to that too, so neuroticism seems to be something of a threshold for the activation of these negative emotions. systems, so if you have a higher level of neuroticism, one unit of uncertainty could produce, say, three units of psychophysiological response, while if you have a lower level of neuroticism, one unit of uncertainty could produce one unit of response psychophysiological, it is difficult, obviously, that is a simplified solution. schematic but there is variability because if something unexpected or its threat happens to you, it is not obvious how upset you should get a response, which could ignore it, it is nothing, another response could be that it is a bloody catastrophe and often when it happens something uncertain or threatening.

You don't have enough information at your disposal to make a full determination of the potential importance of this circumstance, especially if it is uncertain, so you have to guess how upset you should be and where you fall on the normal distribution. Regarding the trait of neuroticism, let's say that determines what the average of your guests will be, so you know the other one scrupulously, you say you could say well, how hard should you work well? That's a really tough question if you're going to die tomorrow and then. you probably shouldn't work very hard today at all, so one thing you could say is that the degree to which you should work hard depends on your assumptions about the stability of the future, we actually know this to be true because if you put people In wildly uncertain circumstances they discount the future, which is exactly the right thing to do.

It only makes sense to store goods for future consumption if the future is likely to be very similar to the past and present, you need a stable society for that and Conscientiousness only works in a stable society because otherwise the only thing you do if You are accumulating assets, which is what conscientious people do, is leave them there for criminals to take or wait for the next chaotic uprising to wipe out everything you have. I have stored it and therefore even conscientiousness is a kind of assumption. Working people say, "Well, you know, sacrificing the present for the future, that's great, as long as the future is there and you can predict it, but if it's not it's going to be there." and it's unpredictable, so the right answer is to take what you can take right now, well, getting it is good, you know, obviously, there are problems with that too.

I'm talking, you know, I'm offering rough rules of thumb, but I'm trying to give you some indication of how and why these differences in value structures exist because they're applicable in different environments, you know sometimes in a dangerous social environment it's not Obviously, being an extrovert is a good idea because extroverts stand out especially if they are extroverted and creative, because they are not only loud, dominant and assertive, but they are also colorful, flamboyant and provocative, which happens to people is that, as they move towards zero, positive feedback loops are set up so that they are more and more likely to reach zero, and as they move away from zero, positive feedback loops are set up so that it is more and more likely away from zero, so here's an example, let's say you're not doing too bad, so maybe you're in the middle of the normal distribution, then you lose your job, okay, so let's say you're a person conscientious and we can say, just for the sake of argument, that you lose your job due to mass layoffs in your company, so it has nothing to do with it.

With you it's fundamentally, basically it's like luck of the draw, but then what happens to you? Well, if you are conscientious, you will chase yourself pretty hard, especially if you are also high. In neuroticism you will be depressed about losing your job and maybe you are in a situation where for one reason or another you don't have many other opportunities now, maybe you should look for them, but maybe you are in a depressed situation. strata of the economy or you are geographically located somewhere that makes it difficult to move, etc., etc., you know, but you lose a job and then you start to get depressed about it, well, when you start to get depressed, you know.

It makes you less likely to look for work, but it can also start to stress out your family and it also starts to make you less likely to engage in positive social interaction, so now you're not just unemployed. and you are suffering from financial stress, but your marriage is starting to suffer and you are starting to isolate yourself from your friends and then, of course, as your marriage suffers and the stress increases, that will make you more depressed and that will keep you even further away from your friends and that will decrease the likelihood that you will have enough positive emotion and enthusiasm to look for another job and then you know that you might want to add a little bit of a drinking problem to that just for fun and You can see that you can create a spiral that takes you down and there are all kinds of things because a lot of times people conceptualize, let's say you know you're an unemployed guy and you go to therapy and you're diagnosed with depression and What happens with a depression diagnosis is like there's an assumption that something went wrong in your psychological makeup, it's like if you're unemployed and you're depressed, it's not at all obvious that the problem is in your head.

You know, you know what I mean, it's not even obvious that it's a psychological problem, it's just a problem and problems can take you out, so you know if you're unemployed and you're under financial stress and your marriage is starting to falter and you're isolating yourself from your friends and you are less likely to be motivated to look for a job. You think of it as a depressive spiral, but you can also think of it as a conspiracy. in a sense, external forces that are driving you into the ground and we don't tend to conceptualize psychological disorders that way, but we should because a lot of times when people are suffering from something that could be described in psychological terminology and depression is a illness very good example of that, it is not obvious that there is something wrong psychologically with them, often they are just in trouble and there is no category in psychological diagnosis for the client in serious problems, but my experience has been almost without exception that the people who come to see me come to see me because something went wrong in their life not because they have a psychological problem now you could say well there are psychological deficiencies that could be interfering with their ability to recover or maybe even served as precursors to you know, increases the likelihood of a catastrophe and therefore a well-functioning personality has all the microroutines in place, that's something you help people with if you're a behavioral therapist because one of the things you assume if you're a behavioral therapist The therapist is that sometimes the reason people don't do things is because they don't know how you know.

Sometimes maybe the person is depressed but potentially high functioning. They have all the damn microroutines. They are well socialized. They are simply inactive. you have to wake them up again and implement them, but sometimes there is someone in your practice who says that they are just being neglected like you can't believe it, the parents never paid attention to them or maybe they just punished them every time they did something good, that's really fun. and then you know they didn't become friends and that's why they're really big and poorly articulated and then what you do is work on the foundation of the micro routines and have them practice building all these little attributes. that weren't developed and you know one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is now maybe you understand something about your own personality, you might say well, what could you do to improve your personality and the answer is develop? some of the microroutines on the other side of the personality distribution, so if you are very unpleasant maybe you could start learning how to do nice things for people and that really works, by the way, so if you take unpleasant people who They are depressed and you get them by doing good things for other people, their depression tends to go away, but in the same way, if you are okay with it, then you should practice doing some things for yourself and be tougher in your negotiations, so you can stand above the distribution of personality traits, you know you're extroverted, okay man, learn to spend some time with yourself, right, you have low openness, try reading a book that's outside of your, you know you're your sphere of interest from time to time.

If you're conscientious, you should probably learn to relax from time to time, etc., so you can. I think part of what you're doing is you're developing your personality, you're not moving much around the average where you know where you are. you're located but you're stretching the standard deviation so that you have a bigger bag of tricks than before and I think you can practice that consciously it's like you're hyper ordered so get yourself a dog, you know, they're dogs. Horrible messy thingsI know it's just what you need if you're very tidy because they're going to leave hair everywhere and force you to live with it, and that's okay, so and so, so you're right, this is your personality, it's this collection of connecting root subroutines that you've become a hierarchy and then there's something at the top and that's a big question like what the heck should be at the top of the hierarchy because that's the fundamental questionof the unit and then the doctors would say, well, it's the self-actualized person or it's the self or something like that, you know, that's the identification, that's the implicit and maybe explicit i

deal

that you're aiming for and you might say, well, is there such thing?

I would say, well, do you admire? people because that's your answer, right? Do you despise people? Well, you like some people and you don't like others. You respect some people. You don't respect others. Well, you're acting out the notion that there is at least an implicit ideal. The same thing when you go to the movies, you know who the hero is, you know who the bad guy is, you are acting out the proposition that there is some kind of hierarchy of values ​​and there is some kind of manifestation of it that is coherent over time, so You seem to believe that and you know that you are driven, at least to some extent, by your own internal ideals, so you tend to answer affirmatively to the question of whether it is real, and if you don't, there will be catastrophic consequences for Nietzsche and the existentialists. .

You're really good at detailing math like you let your hierarchy of values ​​disintegrate, so how much of this is nihilistic chaos? That's not so fun and then there's the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire for someone to come and tell you what. do the right thing, then what happens is that if you let this relapse you end up with a nihilistic existence, not with nihilistic chaos or the demand that the tyrant show up and that has happened to us many times and it doesn't seem to have happened. Well, okay, so what happens when you set these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis?

Well, that's how your emotions work in general terms, you know you're aiming for something and this is an oversimplification, so I want to show you this when I show you that I assume it's made of that right, it's just a schematic oversimplification because even If let's say I'm trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door, I mean that the action Walk towards the door is based on the existence of all the subroutines that allow me to propel my body through time and space and that required a lot of internal organization to get it right, now he's traumatized and that's why you can treat him like It's invisible, but it's implicit in any of these structures and you actually see this in therapy a lot.

Well, one of the things I've discovered over the last few years is that this is a good proposition, so you know, it's pretty self-sufficient. It is evident that life has its nest of miseries and that is for sure and perhaps you could even make a categorical statement that life is mainly a nest of miseries. You know you can make a pretty

powerful

argument for that, but then there's a counter question. which is good, what if you tried not to make it more miserable? That had to be true, so what would it be like? And my suspicions are that that misery law would suspect that most of that misery would go away because it's the unnecessary misery that really gets you down, you know, it's well, someone has cancer, it's like that sucks, but it's not like you can to say that if we had done this differently, then that wouldn't have happened, but when someone comes out like torturing. in a malicious way or maybe you are doing the same thing you can always ask yourself well really is this really necessary is this as a useless complement to the miseries of life that is what discourages people and that is why even in your own life if If you're not suffering from self-imposed misery and you're just suffering from misery that you can escape from, maybe you can handle that and you know that you could, you could survive, you could endure it and maybe even without becoming hopelessly corrupt, so the goal would be.

Well, yes, life is a nest of miseries and may not have a final meaning. We might say that for feeling particularly pessimistic, but it still leaves an open question: If you didn't do everything you could to make it worse, how? Well, could you do it like this? and the least answer is well, it could be a tragedy, but maybe not hell and I think that's true, I really think that's the most pessimistic and appropriate statement, the worst outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your Life could be tragic but not hell and that's blood better than hell right, it is and you think I could give you an example of the difference you're on your mother's deathbed well that's tragedy here's another scenario you're out from your mother's deathbed and all of you, you and all your idiot brothers are arguing well, that's the difference between tragedy and hell and you might be able to tolerate the first circumstance and maybe it would even bring you closer to the members of his family, the second, no one can bear that. you come out of a situation like that fed up with yourself and fed up with everything else, and you know it's often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the Dragons because the stress is high and all those things that people haven't dealt with , They do not do it.

I don't have the energy to suppress it and all the bitterness comes out, it's like I'm serious man, so it's actually a good lesson, but it's a good trait to determine if you've adjusted properly or not. Your relationship with your siblings is as if you were all gathered around the bed of someone close to you who is dying. Could you handle it if there isn't? It's like we get our life together because it's going to happen and you should be the person who is there and can do it. do it and do it correctly and then maybe you'll find that it's not the kind of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself and I've seen, I've seen both situations, you know, ugly, ugly, ugly situations.

I know horribly ugly situations and then the opposite, where people have had terrible things happen to them as a family and you know they come together and rebuild their damn ship and walk away, so it seems a lot better to me. You know when the flood comes, well, then the same thing arises, the question arises, well, who are you? Well you could say you are this plan, that's what people usually identify, maybe they don't have any plan at all and are just in chaos. true, that is like being in the belly of the beast, they are nihilistic and chaotic, they have no plan, they are simply chaos itself and that is a very terrible situation for people or maybe they conjure a plan, that is their identity, It's kind of fragile and they hold on to that with everything they have, it's their little wooden stick that they're floating in the ocean, holding on to, you know, and so they're identifying very strongly with that plan, that's what What happens when you are an ideologue is that you are identifying very strongly with that plan.

The problem is if something arises to deal with it well, how do you act well? you can't let go of a plan because you drown and then you hold on to it rigidly that's not good because then you can't learn anything, so if that's you, you're a totalitarian, you're not going to learn anything and you'll end up with something that's close enough. from hell so that you don't know the difference and you could drag everyone with you that has happened many times true it is the entire history of the 20th century it happened over and over again and it happens in people's states it happens in their business organizations that happens in their cities that happens in their provinces, happens in their states and happens in their psyches, all at the same time.

You can't blame the manifestation of that kind of thing on any of those levels. It happens when a society falls like that, it falls everywhere. At the same time, it is not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people who strive to be at the bottom, it is not that at all, it is totalitarianism at all levels of the hierarchy, including psychological, so you do not want be what you want. I don't want to be in the chaos, that's for sure, but you don't want to be that thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you.

Don't you want to be that? So you think well exactly what are you? you know what the chaos is you know what the plan is maybe you are the one facing the obstacle and I would say that is the categorical lesson of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal transformation, that is what I always teach to people in psychotherapy I don't care what kind of psychotherapists they are, you are always teaching them the same thing, you are what you can't, you are not the plan, you are what can face the obstacle. to the plant and then when you know even more that the obstacle is not just an obstacle but an opportunity itself, then your whole worldview can change because you can think well, I have this plan, something came up to object to it, it's like it's possible that what you're objecting to has something to teach you that will get you to the place where you'll grow an even better plant, which is a good framework to use, it's like you're so sure this is a problem is that the only way you can see it or it is an opportunity.

I mean, I'm not trying to be naively optimistic. There are some things that are quite difficult to extract gold from some dragons and perhaps the death of a family member is a good example of that. but even in a situation like that I can tell you that it's an opportunity because it's an opportunity to grow up, that's for sure and the thing is you could say, well, it's pretty miserable to go digging for gold when someone falls into the grave. . if they really loved you, first of all, that's what they'll want you to do, and second, you'll make their death a much more pleasant experience for them if you're someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of being You know, shaking in a corner and feeling like the whole world is collapsing on you.

I mean, that's another one. You want to be the helpful person at the funeral. How's that for a goal? That's a good goal. in a situation like that, because you're going to be with them and maybe you want to be the person on whose shoulder people cry, that would be a good goal, you know, I don't like to be evilly optimistic, so when I tell you to fix your life I'm not going to say roses and sunshine it's like that's that's pablum for fools but it's really something to be the reliable person after the funeral there's this idea in union psychology called circumambulation and you I just had this idea that I had a potential future self that he would potentially be everything he could be and that manifests moment by moment in his present life by making him interested in things and the things that interest him are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximum development now.

It sounds like a metaphysical idea or even a mystical idea, but it's not, it's not a really deeply biological idea, the idea is kind of like well, you. You are wired to automatically become interested in those things that fully expand you as a well-adjusted creature. Well, there's nothing radical about that idea. What else could be the case unless there is something fundamentally flawed about you? What the situation would be, it's interesting to think about how that would manifest moment by moment, but the idea is something like, well, your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of development, well, it better be that way. , OK? that's fine and then there's some usefulness and pursuing those things that interest you that's the call to adventure let's say it and the call to adventure takes you to all kinds of places now the problem with the call to adventure is what the hell do you do? you know you might be interested in things that are a little warped and bent and it often happens that when new parts of people come out and catch your interest, they say they do it very poorly and of poor quality, so you flounder like a fool when he tries to do something new, that's where the fool is the precursor to the savior from the symbolic perspective because you have to be a fool before you can be a master and if you're not willing to be a fool then you can't. be a teacher, so it's going to be a process riddled with errors and that's also set out in the Old Testament stories, but the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God throws them out of their father's house when they're like 84 is They get into all kinds of trouble and some of it social and some of it natural and some of it is a consequence of their own moral insufficiency, so they are stupid and but what's so interesting is that despite the fact that They're stupid they're still stupid They're supposed to go on the adventure and they're supposed to be able to learn enough as a consequence of going on the adventure to be able to right themselves through time and it's something like this, this circumambulation that Young talked about was this continuum will return. a This is a continuous circle in some sense about who you could be.

You might notice, for example, that there are themes in your life that you know. When you review your experiences, you see that you have your typical experience that repeats itself and there may be a variation like a musical theme, but it is as if you are going around in circles and getting closer to yourself as you move through time, That's the ring road. Now remember that for a second because we'll come back to that, okay, so imagine that. shines before you is an interest that is emerging and you decide well first of all you are paralyzed do you think well how do I know if I should move forward?

It's probably a stupid idea and the appropriate response to that is that you're right. It's probably a stupid idea because almost all ideas are stupid and therefore the probability that as you progress in your adventureget it right the first time is zero, it just won't happen, so you might think maybe I'll just wait until I get the right idea and what people do it right, so they're like 40 and thirteen year olds, which is not a good idea, so they wait until they are waiting for Godot until they finally got it right, but The problem is that you are too stupid to know when you got it right, so waiting won't help because even if the perfect opportunity were to manifest in your incompletely, the probability that you will recognize it as the perfect opportunity. the chance is zero, you might even think it's the worst possible idea you've ever heard of.

If you know that you have to fundamentally take it into account and work with it, then you can take these tentative steps on your way to the destination and you can assume that you're going to do it wrong and that's really helpful because you don't have to beat yourself up, it's pretty easy to do. wrong, but the thing is that it is much better to do it wrong than not to do it at all and that is a continuous message that resonates through these historical stories in Genesis, it is as if these were imperfect people they should have left their house much sooner and they go out and stumble into tyranny and hunger and self-betrayal and violence and but it's so much better than just rotting at home and that's great so that's good and why it's fine then you start your path and you think you're heading towards your star and then you go in that direction and then, because you are here, the world looks a particular way, but when you move here the world looks different and you are different as a consequence of having made that trip and what that means is that now that thing that shines in front of you will have changed location because you weren't very good at specifying it to begin with and now that you are a little sharper and more focused than you were, it will reveal itself to you with more precision and then you should know that it is almost like Inversion 180 degrees, but it's not because you know you've done it.

I mean, you've come this far and it's a long way to go to get this far, but that's a lot further than you would be if you stayed where you were waiting. It doesn't matter that you continually overdo it because as you overdo it, even if you don't learn what you should have done, you will continually learn what you shouldn't keep doing and if you learn enough about what you shouldn't. keep it up, then that equates to at some point learning at the same time what you should be doing, so okay, so now it's like that.

The good thing about this, I think, is that as you progress, the degree of overshoot starts to decrease properly and that you should know that there is nothing hypothetical about that, as you learn a new skill, like even playing it, playing a song in the piano, for example, you overdo it like crazy, to begin with, he's making all kinds of mistakes and then the mistakes disappear. There is an excellent TED talk. I think it was that this guy installed a very advanced computer recording system in his house and recorded every utterance his little boy made while he was learning to talk and then put together the boy's attempts to say certain phonemes and put them on the list and You can hear the child wandering madly at first and then after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions just focusing on the exact phoneme, so you know, you may not know it, but when children babble because they start babbling when they are very young .

They babble all human phonemes, including all kinds of phonemes that adults can't say, and then they die in their language, so after they learn to say English, there are all kinds of phonemes that they can no longer hear or pronounce, but to begin with , it's all there. which is actually quite interesting, but you see that as you learn a particular language, you focus on the correct way to pronounce it and your mistakes are minimized and every time you learn something, that's how it is and it's also very useful to know because means It's okay to wander around stupidly before setting your destination.

Now you see that was echoed in Exodus, because what happens is that the Egyptians or the Hebrews escaped from a tyranny, which is kind of what you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant axioms and stubborn it's like away from that tyranny it's great I freed myself from that well then how well do you think well now I'm on my way no it's no, you're not now you're in the desert where it wanders stupidly, you know, and worships the wrong things until finally you you organize yourself morally again and head in the right direction, so that's also worth knowing because you think well.

I got rid of a lot of things, excess luggage that I didn't need. my life and now everything is fine it's like no, it's not like you've gotten rid of a whole set of scaffolding that kept you in place even though they were pathological and now you have nothing and nothing actually turns out to be better than something pathological but You, are still stuck with the problem of nothingness and that is exactly why Exodus is structured the way it is, it is to escape eternity. Hooray, we are no longer slaves! Yeah, well, now you're a nihilist and you're lost. not necessarily an improvement, but it is, but it's the pre, let's see, it's also useful to know because you can also fool yourself into the idea that you imagine you're trying to become enlightened, which might mean turning on all those parts of you. that could be activated you think well, that's just a linear uphill path you know it's just from one success to another it's not like that, it's like here you are and you're not doing so bad and the first step is a complete and bloody catastrophe, It's worse and then maybe you can pull yourself together and you get to a new level and then that falls apart and shakes and hits, it's worse again and then part of the reason people don't become enlightened is because it's interrupted by deserts. intermittent, essentially through intermittent deserts. catastrophes and if you don't know it well, then you're basically screwed because you keep going with your forward movement and you collapse and you're like well, that didn't work.

I broke down, it's like no, that's par for the course, it's not an indication that you failed, it's just an indication that it's very difficult and when you learn something you also unlearn something and what you unlearned is probably useful and unlearning it in It's actually painful, you know, let's say if you have to get out of a bad relationship, it's like no. every no none really there is no relationship that is one hundred percent bad and then when you get out of it, maybe you are in better shape, but you are still alone and disoriented, you don't know what your past was and you don't know what your present is and you don't know what your future is, that's not why people are with the devil they know instead of you know, looking for the devil they don't know, so anyway the fact that you're full of flaws doesn't mean that you have to stop and thank God for that, that's a really helpful thing and just because you're full of failures doesn't mean you can't learn, so you can pause it for a while. ideal and you will be wrong about it, but it doesn't matter because what you are right about is in proposing the ideal moving towards it if the real ideal is not conceptualized perfectly well first surprise surprise because, what are you going to do? do it is perfect so it doesn't matter that it's imperfect imperfect it just matters that you do it and you keep going so as far as I'm concerned it's really positive news because you can really do it well you can do it. wrong anyone can do that so that's useful okay if you were an efficient person you would have just done that but you're not but who cares you know you still end up in the same place and maybe the trip Even more interesting, who knows, probably, you will be interested.