← Modern Wisdom
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- [00:01]
A
Why is self awareness a problem?
- [00:03]
B
Self awareness is a problem. Well, first of all, I think it's important to recognize that we often think about self awareness as a good thing. We generally think about it as a gradient. So we might refer to somebody as being more or less self aware than others, and more is typically assumed as better. When I'm referring to self awareness, I'm referring to just the fact that we are aware of a self at all. And so the mere fact that we have a certain form of consciousness that provides us that sense of self is a problem for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we've arrived with a sense of self awareness by a process of evolution that doesn't really care, obviously. Care I'm using loosely there because evolution doesn't care at all about anything besides, it's just continuation, propagation. But the experience of consciousness and self awareness from the first person perspective is not central to the reason for why self awareness and consciousness arrived in the form that humans experience it. And so we are often at odds with the fundamental nature of reality in existence by virtue of the self awareness, in my view at least. And the reason for that is as a self who is aware of that self, we attach to that self, we attach to the ideas of that self, we attach to people and things and our desire to make sense of our perception and understanding through all of the concepts that we form by nature of having that degree of awareness. And yet reality and existence is fickle, chaotic, uncertain. We're going to lose everybody and everything through time or distance, decay, age or illness or death. And so we find ourselves in this sort of cosmic ocean where the waves are crashing on our heads constantly. And yet we, we must continue because we are also a part of the same substrate that, that built us, that needs continuation. So it puts us in this very peculiar position where we can feel the intensity and pain and suffering that seems from a conscious individual entity terrible. And yet we, we, we just refuse to give up. We, we must endure. And so that's why it's problematic. But also, obviously, I see the other side of that coin. And the paradox of self awareness in my view is that self awareness, self consciousness, self apprehension is the most horrific, terrifying thing in the known universe. And yet it is the most beautiful thing in the known universe. Because as far as we're aware, it's the only thing that allows conceptual understanding of existence and reality. So we can form the very idea of beauty and wonder and meaning and purpose and hope. And it seems to me to be necessary that the first part the other half of that coin is in the equation for the second half to be possible.
- [03:28]
A
Yeah, you've got this line. Self awareness is a sort of poison that we each consume upon birth.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, I believe that's our birthright. Is the horrific qualities of self awareness a poison, but that we as almost magicians or alchemists can transmute into gold, into art and beauty and wonder and love and all that. And so it makes you want to, you love and hate it in the fullest possible form of those words at the same time, at least, obviously that's my perspective. I know maybe some people might see life in existence as purely positive and beautiful. Some might see it as purely negative and horrific and somewhere in between there's a spectrum. But in my view it's sort of, it has to be both at the same time. And that is the paradoxical nature of it.
- [04:23]
A
How much of that do you think is just us all coming up with some fancy philosophical explanation for our own idiosyncratic experience of the world? That you have a bit of a grasp of the awe and a bit of a grasp of the dread. And some people are almost all dread and some people are almost all awe. And each of them kind of create their own philosophical views of the world and the universe based around just. Well, this is my typical daily affect, this is my typical experience of things.
- [04:54]
B
I, I think that it's, it's definitely important to not universalize your own perspective, your own experiences and your own way of thinking. It's, it's easy to assume that the way you think, both in the most literal of sense and in the most abstract of sense, is the way most people do. And it's not the case. There's a huge spectrum and variety of, of modes of thought that people experience and operate through. And so people might be more visually inclined, people might be more linguistically inclined. People might be a more feeling orientation of the world. So just on that level alone there's a wide variety and spectrum of experience, of thought. And so we have to start there and recognizing that our own fundamental experience of the world and reality is not going to be universal in the way that we might project or assume.
- [05:48]
A
If consciousness is a mystery that can't understand itself, does that mean that the human condition is just fundamentally tragic?
- [05:58]
B
Well, that, that's, that's at the heart or a heart of the paradox. It's a multi hearted paradox, I would say. Okay, so it's, it is a, a part of the tragedy or it is partly a tragedy, perhaps is a better way of putting it in the sense that, yeah, I think that consciousness from the first person perspective, which is naturally the limit of consciousness. Right. You can't, as far as I could possibly conceive, there's no reality, world, being, entity phenomenon in which a consciousness could perceive itself in the world without its consciousness. And so it's a feedback loop in that sense. And so it'll get increasingly close to comprehending the nature of itself, but it'll never breach. It's sort of that Zeno's paradox of the arrow where it'll get increasingly close, but it's always infinitely far away. And that's sort of how I see consciousness attempting to comprehend itself. It's like, can you make sense of an inch with an inch, a minute with a minute? No, it's just the same thing trying to measure itself with itself. And so that is tragic in that sense, but also on the flip side of it, it's what fuels the unending inquiry about what it means to be a conscious entity and what it means to be, in our case, a human. And so that's the beauty, if you see it that way, because what else is there to do and make interesting about existence other than the exploration of the nature of existence? I mean, maybe some people would think that we'll just sort of sit around the surface and that's fun with margaritas and, you know, sit by the pool and all that. And I totally get that. But I think there is something very riveting. And the deepest experiences of wonder come from those explorations that are, from my view, an infinite landscape of possibilities, questions and answers that will never satisfy, will never fulfill, will never reach some sort of peak. That landscape is flat. But there's just so much territory to explore.
- [08:14]
A
Is there a way to become self aware without it becoming self destructive?
- [08:23]
B
I think so. I think that it's a spectrum, it's a gradient of. You start from maybe a very, I don't want to say a low level of self awareness because that reduces it. It's not like that, but maybe reflectiveness about that self awareness where you can realize that and then it might. There's a certain experience of difficulties and confusions and sufferings, that they are just them, they exist for themselves. And you struggle to justify them, you struggle to deal with them. And I think if you continue on that path, you, you get to a point where you become more comfortable with the confusions and the uncertainties and you become, you don't be, you don't get better at justifying them. You don't get better at dealing with the problems of being a conscious entity in the world, but you get better at recognizing that the lack of answers, the lack of stability, the lack of rigidness is par for the course and par for the beauty of the course. And that I think is the ultimate goal to strive for when it comes to these sorts of topics and questions.
- [09:46]
A
I think a lot of people have this sense that the more that they learn about themselves, the more difficult life becomes. That there's a kind of enjoyment, freedom, there's a freedom in naivety would be a way to put it. And that. The less naivety that they have, the more challenging the world seems to be. There's complexity and responsibility and self doubt and self esteem issues come in and there's an awareness of what I could have done. Staying standards kind of begin to rise, but in kind of squirrely ways about virtue. If you've got a critical mind, you find an ever increasing number of ways to derogate success. Even if you manage to achieve the success because you were aware of all of the ways that you might have lied or cajoled or coerced or not been fully virtuous en route to achieving the thing, whereas previously you were just happy to have fucking done it. And then, yeah, this tighter and tighter spiral, this ever increasing resolution that you look at the world with, I think to a lot of people feels like a personal curse. I think it feels like an increase in self awareness just equates to an increase in suffering.
- [11:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, first of all I resonate with that reaction and I think there's validity in that reaction. And if you feel that way, that's justified. That makes sense to me. I feel that way often. I think most people feel that way when they start to, like you said, unravel the absurdity of a lot of what we are and what we're doing. And there is perhaps a better version of being, of existence from a human perspective that dulls that, that dilutes that. But unfortunately you don't really get to choose whether or not you are or are not thinking about those things, experiencing those thoughts and feelings. So you kind of, you know, you don't think, in my view, you don't think thoughts, thoughts, you know, arrive in your head after a sort of conveyor belt of experiences and neurology and all of that. And so you ultimately wind up with these questions and thoughts and concerns, these, you know, a certain proximity to those thoughts and concerns that become very difficult to experience and manage. And it might make you envious of the idea of not feeling that way and not experiencing that proximity. But unfortunately, once you start worrying about something or once you start thinking about something, that that can of worms is fully opened and you can't, you can't close it. You have to figure out how to, how to deal with it, how to move forward. And I find that the, the best way to deal with those sorts of cans of worms or those tunnels is, is forward, not back, because backwards, that, that, that end is closed. In terms of the tunnel metaphor, you can't return to some form of yourself, some version of yourself that hasn't already wondered, questioned, pondered, or become concerned about those sorts of things. And so I see that it's quintessential to not put those things aside. If you're experiencing the sufferings and pains of almost self alienation and self confusion, you have to move forward and figure out how to. In some, in some people's cases it's maybe resolving them through, through practical and tactical methodology. And in other, in other people's cases it might be more of a embracement of those feelings. And by embracing certain thoughts and certain experiences, if possible, I do find that you can reduce their gravity, their force on your head and neck.
- [13:41]
A
What about regret? I think one of the things that comes along as a side dish with quite a lot of, quite a lot of self awareness is people's increase in rumination, sort of whimsical, wistful, remembering regret. What have you learned about regret?
- [14:03]
B
Well, I think regret is very interesting because regret implies that you could have done differently, you could have done, you know, better than you had in a particular moment of your life. Which in my view, I get the, I get the impulse, I get the sentiment. But if you rewind the clock of reality a hundred percent of the time, you're arriving at that same moment as your same self with the same brain, the same physiology, the same information and the same external circumstances. There's no way you could have made any different of a decision. And so regret is sort of an understandable illusion of our consciousness where it makes us feel like there's a lot of possibilities and we can be deluded by our hindsight and our ability to reference back and forth between time. But there is no world in which you didn't make all the decisions you've made. Putting aside maybe sort of quantum multi world theories. But in this world, the world that we're talking about and in there is no version that you could have done anything differently. And that brings into sort of the concept of free Will, which personally I don't believe in the sense that we typically refer to it as. But yeah, if you consider free will as a part of the equation, and even if you don't, I see no world, I see no logic that makes sense of, of regret being. It's an understandable reaction, but not a, certainly not a rational reaction, which I know we oscillate between emotion, feeling and logic, but I just think that regret exists in an illusory realm of our perception.
- [15:52]
A
It's a weird one because I think the free will argument is one of. It's in an interesting category, something that might be literally true but figuratively useless, that it might actually be. We might be a deterministic set of dominoes all the way from the Big Bang until this conversation right here. But it's functionally pointless to believe that as far as I can see, you need to go so deep into non attachment to. I couldn't have done any differently, but you need to not overshoot into nihilism and fatalism. And it's just fucking. It's too hard. But if we stay, if we shelve the discussion around determinism and you say, okay, you, you get to go back, you didn't make a decision before you got to the point at which you made a decision, or you didn't do a thing, or you did do a thing after or before you wish that you and you want to do it differently. As far as I can see, sort of reading your perspective, regret is kind of like a refusal to accept the limits of foresight. Like you couldn't, you couldn't have chosen differently under the same conditions. And an acceptance of necessity kind of helps to dissolve regret.
- [17:08]
B
I think that's very well put, I think, and to your point, you could even put aside the deterministic, the potential deterministic nature of reality. You're still limited by the same constraints in any given moment. It doesn't mean that maybe there's some sort of deterministic ultimate reality that was going to pan out the way it has and did, but it does mean that you are always limited in every moment by a set of constraints. Your physiology, the condition of your mind, your emotional state, the information you have, the, you know, the most recent influences you've experienced, all of that is going to cause you to make a decision. And whether it's built into the laws or the nature of the unfolding of reality is irrelevant at that point. It's just you are going to make the same decision over and over again to regret Having made that decision is to deny the very fact that you're always going to be limited by a set of constraints. And unless you intentionally decided to make the, the less viable decision, the worst decision in that moment, which I, I mean, I, obviously there are masochists and so forth, but for the most part, people are trying to make good decisions that make sense to them in any given moment. And so you're always trying your best given those constraints. And it's absurd to think that you could have done or would have done any better. And like, you put very well, it's, it's sort of this, this foresight, hindsight equilibrium that you just sort of stretch and contort to make the most sense for your current reality. And I also think, I think another important point of what regret tends to point to is, is a lack of embrace around the fact that there are no conditions of your life that are going to resolve the fundamental tensions that we often experience, which is, you know, we want a sense of certainty, a sense of happiness and ultimate resolve, a sense of having made all the right decisions, having done everything right, and all these pieces are in order. That's a sort of underlying desire that we all experience. Some, you know, maybe recognize that that's not going to be the case or not, but I think there's a proportional relation to how we willing you are to accept that you're never going to get out of the sort of hamster wheel of desire and suffering and boredom and anxiety and how much you might regret what you've done and how your life has gone.
- [19:45]
A
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- [21:04]
B
I do not know that line, but I love it. I love how that sounds.
- [21:07]
A
I fucking love that line. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
- [21:12]
B
That's beautiful. No, I love that.
- [21:14]
A
Well, you've got that story about the guy asking for directions, which is pretty similar.
- [21:18]
B
Yes. And so, yeah, I mean, I've written a story called the Nova Effect and I've also done a lot of similar explorations around the idea that, you know, we basically never know. This is sort of playing off a Kurt Vonnegut line. We never know the good luck from the bad luck until the story's over. And you know, for all of us, we don't. The story never ends until we're not even around. And so you never quite can discern what was good and what was bad for you or for a collective until it's reached its ultimation. And yeah, that goes for each of our individual lives where it's the same case. We feel in any given moment that some good fortune is going to lead ultimately to good fortune forever thereafter. But that's not how life works or reality works. It's a sort of spurring off of multiple lines. That one good thing, one advantage could lead you to a misfortune or a disadvantage and vice versa. And so there's, you know, you always want to feel good when good things happen, but there's. And you always, you don't always want to feel bad when bad things happen, but you do ultimately tend to feel bad when bad things happen. But there's, here's the dual sided coin of a different phenomenon where you know, if you know that when good things happen, it's still, there's still more, more game to play, more life to live. You're going to be willing to accept the potential for more trials and errors and all that which is not so great. But knowing that when bad things happen, that's not, it's not going to just Be misfortune forever thereafter as well, gives you some hope and gives you a sense of the possibility that things could be directly related to that, that ultimately save you in whatever sense save you might mean.
- [23:07]
A
Yeah, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. I wrote an essay today actually, and I want to read you this thing because I thought it was really interesting. All right. Adversity is a terrible thing to waste. Almost all of the biggest periods of growth in your life have germinated from your lowest points. Once shock, grief, sadness and fear subside, more energetic emotions arise. Pain, resentment, bitterness, anger and a chip on your shoulder. Change is hard and deeply fundamental. Change requires an insane amount of activation energy, far more than is available by just wanting it a lot. This is why people change so much. After losing a parent, enduring a betrayal, losing a job or going through a breakup. Not because the past version of their world has been stripped away alone, but because they finally have enough fuel to get their new life off the launchpad. In the mid-90s, there was a single mother living in a near poverty home in Edinburgh. When she left her first marriage, it wasn't a quiet parting. She's described the relationship as abusive. She fled to Portugal with her baby daughter and a suitcase that contained the early chapters of a book that she was working on. At one point, her ex husband hid the manuscript, trying to prevent her from leaving with it. She was clinically depressed and contemplating suicide. She couldn't afford to heat her flat properly, so she pushed a pram to cafes to write while her daughter slept. The manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers. That's 12 people telling her in different ways that it wasn't good enough. The rejection wasn't abstract, it was survival level. If the book failed, so did her last attempt at building a life. The humiliation of those refusals became momentum. J.K. rowling went on to sell 500 million copies in the Harry Potter series globally and became richer than the Queen. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Not all adversity becomes growth. Some people are crushed by it. Adversity is fuel, not destiny. The difference is what you do with the surplus emotion. If that energy isn't directed, it curdles into rumination. The same fuel that could power a transformation can just as easily power self destruction. There's also a time window because pain calcifies. The chip on your shoulder becomes your identity. The story of what happened becomes the story of who you are. Anger gets you moving, but it can't steer. It's rocket fuel, not guidance. Eventually the Chip on your shoulder has to become purpose. As a tldr. The worst thing that's happened to you might be the only thing powerful enough to change you. Pain is temporary and fuel is rare. So if you're going through a hard time, don't waste it. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
- [25:38]
B
Beautiful. I think that's beautiful. I'm curious to think about or to ask you about what you think allows someone to create that differentiation or to act on that differentiation between it becoming a collapsible effect and a fueling effect. What do you think it is that allows some people to utilize those adversities versus. Yeah, go ahead.
- [26:07]
A
Great question. I'm always hesitant of giving some pithy philosophical answer to this stuff because I think so much of it is just practical. Spending less time on your own sounds so dumb. You go through a breakup, spend less time on your own, man. It's important for you to have your friends come round with tacos and ice cream and watch shit movies. That is an important part of the healing process. It's important for you to stay busy. It's important for you to reconnect with the hobbies that you had as a kid. Right? Start playing football again or pickleball or whatever it is that you like to do, martial arts or running, whatever, and to do it in a group. And that will carry a lot of the difference between somebody who that pain calcifies and it turns into stasis. Basically, what I'm pushing toward is a bias for action. But it's a bias for action when your capacity for action has been severely diminished so you can't act as easily. Your one rep max has been chopped down by 95% and you're really going to struggle to lift anything, even the smallest weight. So what do you do when you have a weight that you can't bear while you spread the load between other people? So I think relying on other people. But the broader lesson, not everybody has other people needs other people in this way.
- [27:20]
B
The.
- [27:20]
A
The broad lesson, I think is a bias for action. How can I just. What's that line? Antidote anxiety hates a moving target. That action is the antidote to anxiety. And it's so fucking true. And it sounds like maybe I'm running away from my problems, maybe I'm hiding them in the fog. And that's a lesson that for a lot of people, probably is accurate. They use busyness and chaos as a way to sort of force down whatever it is that they should be thinking about more Deeply. But I get the sense that if anybody's a fan of pursuit of wonder or modern wisdom, that they have the opposite fucking problem. Okay? They're like the David Goggins of rumination. They're the fucking Bonnie. They're the Bonnie Blue of rumination. They do not need. They do not need to be told to spend more time thinking. They need to be told to have a bias for action. So I think learning to trust yourself again is done through experimentation and evidence. Once you've got just a little bit of that moving, that tends to help. I certainly think not being afraid to use some of the more negative emotions, some of the stuff like bitterness and resentment and anger. This is one of the paradoxes or one of the disadvantages of self awareness that you don't like these sort of darker emotions. You think, I should transcend these. I should be sufficiently elevated that I'm not. I'm not tapping into this. This is a more base version of me. It's juvenile, it's petty. I, you know, this is a version of me that I don't like going. I get that. But what did you use to get yourself here? Because for the most part, you probably used that kind of fuel. And then, okay, it's pretty toxic. If I hold onto it for too long, I probably shouldn't still be thinking at 45 years old about what the kids said to me in school. Fine, but that also means that you don't have that fuel tank anymore. And this fuel isn't going to be there forever. It's not. The anger will subside, the resentment will wane, your bitterness will eventually dissolve. What are you going to be left with? You will have. The time will have passed anyway. And that's some pretty fucking potent fuel. So I'm saying just, you know, go in and maybe just fucking tap, tap, tap into the side of the fuel tank for a little bit. Yeah. And make use of it. And yeah, look, you're going to look back on this period and it can either be some, you know, kinetic spark at the beginning of growth. You can be your own primer switch for a hydrogen bomb, or you can self work your way through it. And I'm sure it'll be great. But I don't know, it was just an idea. And especially that J.K. rowling story. So fucking good. And after I read that Cormac McCarthy quote, which I've been wanting to write about for ages, I need to fucking put something together. It's not true for all people, in all situations, at all times, times But I do think it's pretty useful.
- [30:12]
B
Yeah, no, and I agree. I mean, I think that it's like you said, obviously not true for everybody all the time, but you don't know if it's true for you until you do everything in your power to attempt to make it so. And so you ultimately are up against zero possibility by not trying to take everything in your power to make adversity worth it for you and worth it for your circumstances and your goals. That's a zero percent chance if you don't try and then you have some percentage of chance of things working out for you and being, you know, able to transmute that adversity into, you know, the ultimate good fortune that you've, you know, the most you've ever seen in, in your life. And so I agree that approaching it from a fuel minded perspective is, is really the only viable way. And that's also that, you know, brings up questions about whether or not certain people can even recognize that and whether or not it's, it's going to be, you know, there are degrees of, you know, environmental factors that weigh down on people that make it very difficult to, even if they, you know, if you might recognize good luck versus bad luck is not always the end all be all. There is still, you know, there are still environmental and external factors that make it very challenging for somebody to, to actualize that potentiality in adversity and continual adversity. Is one of those things.
- [31:46]
A
Well, yeah, dude. I mean, it's, it's all well and good, me talking about the survivorship bias of J.K. rowling's 500 million books.
- [31:53]
B
Right.
- [31:54]
A
But there is a lot of people that have not just one kick in the nuts, but a series of them that are, you know, so frequent that their ability to even lift the lightest weight kind of gets degraded. But I mean, the alternative is, is to just keel over. And this is, you know, me saying it as a guy that's been kicked in the nuts a lot over the last couple of years. Like you literally do have only two choices and one of them is to give up and the other one is to do whatever the opposite of that is and fuck that, dude. Jesus Christ. Like absolutely fuck that. What's that? Rage. Rage against the dying of the light. Yep. You might as well, because you've literally got nothing else to do and the fucking time is going to pass in any case. Yeah. So you might as well send it.
- [32:36]
B
I agree 100%. I think it's important to recognize survivorship bias, but also to recognize as an individual that if you're still alive, you're a survivor in some sense, and as long as you're alive, there's hope.
- [32:49]
A
Well, let me give you this one. You know what? The fucking ultimate inversion of the survivorship biases. Every person that gave up, right? Every person that reaches survivorship bias is a mark on the wall for somebody that didn't give up.
- [33:04]
B
Absolutely.
- [33:06]
A
If you want to guarantee that you are not a part of the survivorship bias numbers, you can just give up, and that would be fine. And again, that creates a pressure. I understand that. That makes people go, ah, fuck, it's all on me. And that's not fair. And things are hard, and it's harder for her. Wasn't as hard for her as it is for me. And I've got this thing and get it, I get it. But I want to see you win, and I would rather see you win and be in discomfort than see you lose and fucking keel over.
- [33:32]
B
So 100%. I mean, I think there's. You. You can carry both those thoughts in the same head at the same time. You can recognize that there is a survivorship bias. A lot of people who try fully to the maximum ability are going to face continual adversity, and it's not going to. It's not going to pan out. And you can also recognize that as an individual person, it's better to not weigh that case heavily. It's better to weigh the cases of the J.K. rowlings more heavily in the pursuit of the counterbalance of that dynamic, to inspire you to try everything you can and to continue forward towards what makes, you know, meaning out of the chaos of your life, more viable, more possible. And to do that, in my view, and this is. I recognize there's, you know, maybe a tone here, but to do that until the bitter end, you know, you. You, if you want to do anything and you have a preference, a priority, a sense of meaning, an orientation toward meaning, whatever you. Like you said, you have your time, and until the clock goes to zero, until the lights turn out, there's still like, just. Just keep going for whatever it is that you care about and whatever it is that makes sense to you and it's worthwhile and there' prescription to what that might be, what that source of meaning and worthwhileness need not be, some sort of, you know, ungodly achievement from a societal level. It could be a beautiful relationship, a beautiful family. It could be a simple, quiet life, whatever it is, for you to continue onward towards achieving that maximizing. That, working towards the maintenance of that. Whatever you're up against, you have your time and you ought to use it wisely to manifest that.
- [35:26]
A
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- [36:32]
B
I think that, and I obviously agree with the fact that, you know, there's not only can we not obviously step out of our own minds, but there is a huge implication to that we will never obtain objective truth, in my view, as a consequence of that fact. And so I believe that humility and almost a love of uncertainty is the only appropriate response to the fact that there's just no way that you can get out of the tunneled vision of your mind, your specific mind, and then your own mind has sort of been molded and mapped according to a particular condition of geography, of culture, of history. And there's been no moment as far as, you know, if we sort of rewind the clock. Every stage of history has presented a similar ensemble of ignorance, of futility, of wrongness, all that. And so you, you must recognize that as individuals and as a collective, at any given time, in any given space, we're up against this contorted, chiseled out view of, of reality that's a pinhole size. And, and to have rigid beliefs have a sense of certainty, I think is a, a less than ideal response to that condition. And this isn't to say that someone ought to be totally nebulous about everything they think and feel and believe. You can be convictive and confident in life, while also not ever being dead set and final about a belief or set of beliefs. And so there's, there's a sort of essence of confidence and conviction that can carry through across a spectrum of ideas and beliefs. And the importance is, is not the individual belief, but the continuation of, you know, exploration and curiosity and openness and humility. I feel, I feel personally that that's a sort of essential, fundamental quality, for lack of better words, this sort of wisdom.
- [39:00]
A
What about choice anxiety? Because I get the sense that people who have a lot of self awareness, again, we've sort of touched on, I know how much better I could have been. I know all of the different optionality that lays out in front of me. How do you come to think about netting down choice anxiety as a deeply self aware person?
- [39:27]
B
You're sort of referring to the paradox of choice, if you will. Right?
- [39:31]
A
Yeah.
- [39:33]
B
See, I don't know if I have a good answer to that because first of all, I struggle with it. I think the best way to deal with choice anxiety is to recognize the degree of your, you know, at what point are your desires no longer serving you? And if once you recognize that ceiling, the amount of choices that you need to consider can reduce. So if I think that, you know, I'm on an infinite conveyor belt of desires and satisfaction, desire satisfaction over and over and over, then there is an infinite number of choices that can satisfy or can play into that conveyor belt phenomenon. But if you recognize that there is a certain limit to which your minimum quality of experience is achieved in life, you can start to redirect your decision making towards a smaller number of options for different reasons than just like if you go to a grocery store, there's obviously an infinite number. I mean, there's not literally, but nearly an infinite number of choices of cereal, cereal and everything else. And if you regard cereal as a, as a reasonable proxy of your quality of life, you might stand in that aisle forever. But if you recognize that cereal is not going to serve you, it's not going to serve your quality of life, then you pick one and move on. And then you recognize that there is still a difficulty around decision making in other areas of your life that you're going to ruminate on and struggle with. But you can reduce the amount of decisions that are relevant to you by recognizing this sort of ceiling around how much your decisions are going to change the quality of your experience. And I'm somebody who believes that it's much more like I want to make decisions that Allow me to keep going. And I mean that in both the most basic literal sense and then sort of a more abstract sense, which is, you know, I want to decouple my awareness from my desire when I'm making decisions about what's going to allow me to get up in the morning and still care and then also what's going to allow me to experience some continual fuel, as you put it in your essay. And so there's no clean way of totally absolving yourself from the paradox of choice and the anxiety around decision making unless you sort of, you can kind of oscillate back and forth between the foresight of or the anxiety around decision making in the hindsight of regret. You can refer to your regrets to remember the absurdity of your anxiety right now. But I understand there's maybe a degree of impracticality there. But I do think that just recognizing that there is like every option in life for everything from cars to cereal to clothes to relationship partners to friends to careers, you can start to chisel those down by recognizing that so much of that is not what you care about. And you know, you decide what you care about or you end up caring about what you care about. But then you chisel those things out and you're still left with a huge chunk of decision making possibilities, but it's maybe a little bit more manageable.
- [42:56]
A
Oliver Berkman had this question, how much should you care about things? Answer, I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not as much as possible about everything all of the time. Yeah, I love it. And I think, yeah, that's like the curse of the over optimizer. Somebody who just for everything at every opportunity. I have a friend who is huge into credit card points. You got every different airline and he knows to use this card for this flight. And then if he goes to this supermarket he can get an additional 3% and then he gets to fly for his whole family for free and all of this stuff. One of his best friends is the most simple person. Oh, you must have a complex system. Just like, just like a mutual friend. He's like, no, I, I, I just decided that there was an area I had to consciously be de optimized in. And, and that was just one of the ones I can't, I can't pick it for everything all of the time. And the advantage of that is when you make the big decision around, I'm not going to bother about this at all. All of the sub decisions fall away. If you can sort of relinquish it. And there is a. There is a power in sort of letting go. It's the same sensation anybody's had if they've left a bad relationship that they go that, that thing and all of the decisions and all of the rumination around it wasn't serving me. And by letting go of it, I feel liberated. Isn't that great? So, yeah, it's a funny blend for that. I think you mentioned anxiety there. Do you think anxiety is just the natural consequence of seeing reality clearly and being a deep thinker then?
- [44:37]
B
I would even go so far to say that you don't have to add that last part about being a deep thinker. I would think anxiety is a sort of fundamental consequence of being aware of, of reality on any level. And it only goes up from there. I know that people have worse cases and experiences of anxiety, but the idea that somebody could live and not. And this is me projecting my, you know, own experience, universalizing it and assuming everybody's the same. And I recognize that. But I do find it very hard to imagine that anxiety is not a, a sort of building block of consciousness and self awareness from a human perspective. Because everything, I mean, when we're talking about decision making, we're talking about regrets, we're talking about adversity, all these things, everything is this hodgepodge of chaos and uncertainty that a singular framework of perspective is trying to control and make sense of. And what could be more anxiety inducing than that, trying to filter ocean of possibility into a tiny pinhole of desire and preference and hope and idealization. So I would think that if you're that pinhole, there's a lot to be worried about.
- [46:05]
A
Is the pursuit of truth really about truth or more about sort of a psychological security then? It feels to me like our desire for truth is a fear response to the uncertainty of the future.
- [46:18]
B
I absolutely agree. Yeah, I think that. Personally, I think that everything that humans do and humanity has done is never in and of itself. It's never for itself. It's based on some preference. And so the desire for truth is not because we care so much about truth in my view, it's because we care so much about what truth will provide us. And that is a quelling of the uncertainty and the unknowability of existence and our relationship with it. We want to know that everything is going to be okay, both now and forever thereafter. That's why heaven exists, that's why religions exist, that's why philosophies exist. And so the pursuit of truth is an attempt to bring down the heavens and make it make sense right now so that we can feel comfortable as conscious beings. And so, yeah, no, truth is not, in my view, a desire in and of itself. It's a sort of proxy byproduct of the desire to produce uncertainty and unknowability.
- [47:26]
A
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- [49:06]
B
Yeah, so, I mean, they're pretty tightly intertwined where, if you start to recognize. Maybe I would intertwine anger more closely with something like regret. Because if you start to recognize the absurdity of regret and your ability to control the way things have gone with a greater distance in time. There are many cases of anger in which it might be in real time that you're experiencing an event, but it was an event that you couldn't have controlled. And so in the same way, it's a much more difficult thing to quell in the moment. But you can sort of start to shave off the edges of anger, I find, by recognizing your lack of control over everything else besides yourself and perhaps even yourself. And that takes it to a different degree. And we don't need to, you know, necessarily take it there for the same point to be cogent.
- [49:59]
A
No, I think the lack of control over yourself is the regret point from earlier on. Even the one that's been lobotomized from the fucking deterministic perspective of the universe. That I'm angry at me, I should have done differently is. You're right. You're right to say that it's closer to regret. It's like I should have done differently. Well, but you didn't. And you're trying to motivate yourself to do it more in future. I understand. And if your brain ramps up the pain of the lesson from the last mistake that you made, you will make sure that you don't make that mistake again. It's basically a existential psychological equivalent of I put my hand on that stove or close to this, I got bit by a dog when I was five. The lesson is don't go near dogs for the rest of time. That is what our brain is trying to teach us. And the sort of amplitude the fucking volume of the lesson is proportional to how important we think it was and how much pain we were in at the time. And if you're in a lot of pain and then you realize that you are making the pain worse by trying to sort of whip yourself into submission so that you will be reminded you've cat of nine tails your way through this thing, you think, well, in some ways you can kind of love that part of you. That is a good thing. That's a really fucking cool thing to love. Thank you so much for trying to keep me safe. I understand that I'm fallible and fucked up and I consistently make apparently the same mistakes over and over again. And they really have a great like fucking consecutive lineage of often being similar sorts of things. And I get it. You're trying to keep me safe. Thank you. Thank you for trying to keep me safe. Thank you for trying to make me learn a lesson that my actions insist on not fucking detecting and not updating themselves from. That's great. It's such a fucking all encompassing emotion, anger. So trying to think rationally when you're in it is not easy.
- [52:09]
B
It's definitely not. Do you think that anger is necessary for what you just described, or do you think you can have that response without necessarily anger, the anger Tank, so to speak, filling all the way up.
- [52:25]
A
I guess it depends. A lot of people convert anger into other emotions. And a lot of the time these are people who. For whom anger wasn't allowed as a kid. It wasn't allowed in the household. There wasn't a safe place to express anger. Maybe there was a fragile parent or an overly disciplinarian parent, or a parent who had anger problems of their own, or an absent parent who couldn't really hold that for them. And you need. I think it's really important for people to understand if there's something burbling inside of you. The world is basically split into two kinds of people. There's people who get mad and people that get sad, but both of them are generated from the same place. The anger gets turned outward or the anger gets turned inward and the anger that gets turned inward. That's not the job of anger. The job of anger evolutionarily is you crossed a boundary and there's no police force around. So I'm gonna behave in a way that shows you that you can't do it again and shows anybody else who's watching that they can't fuck with me in the same way that you did. Because we don't have laws to enforce this. So my emotional response to you is gonna show you how far you crossed over the line and it's not going to happen again. That's the job of anger. So when it's sad, not mad, it's usually because you were disincentivized in a. I mean, everybody's disincentivized from being angry, right? Like, it's a very antisocial behavior. It's a very antisocial thing. Sadness is pro social. People come and give you a hug. Anger is antisocial. It makes people run away. But there should be a container for that. And if you don't learn it, there's a very long winded way of saying lots of people are angry but don't feel anger. And they turn it into other things. They turn it into bitterness, agitation, resentment, depression, anxiety, frustrations at themselves and at other people and the world or politics or whatever. So I don't think that you need anger. I would actually go as far as to say that maybe anger is a bit more warping because it's so. It's the fucking raw, uncut version of the fuel. And if you can have it just burble down a little bit, I think you can make better decisions. Because making decisions, I mean, is there any emotion that's worse to use to make decisions. Maybe being horny. Maybe being horny is the only worse emotion to utilize when trying to orient yourself than anger is. I can't think of many more.
- [54:58]
B
Yeah, nothing come to mind for me either. I think those are probably the two
- [55:01]
A
at the top, the two horsemen of the apocalypse. No, but I think.
- [55:05]
B
I think that's super well put. I think that there's absolutely practical application for anger. And to just assume that you should never be angry is you're cursing yourself for a life of being taken advantage of and never signaling to yourself and others when things are wrong and when things have been crossed in terms of your boundaries and lines. There is a separate category of anger I might. I personally would categorize. You know, there's. There's the anger towards people and things that are. That can be corrected, and then there's anger towards existence or things that can't. You know, components of life that things have gone wrong in your life that nobody intended towards you. Nobody did that to you. No, no conscious being or group was like, I want this to happen to you. And so there's no person or group to be angry at. There's just the nature of misfortune, at least insofar as you've experienced up until this point in your life. And so that sort of blanketed anger has a much different ramification. Then if somebody does something to me directly or a group does something to a group that I associate with that is tangibly negative, that is reasonably, you know, a line is reasonably drawn between that act and we can agree on that as people, then then that anger is productive. But anger of just sort of the humming and vibration in the back of your skull and neck and spine, I mean, that's. That's an anger that I think is totally unproductive. So there's a difficulty in recognizing those different kinds of angers, maybe to an extent. But you definitely don't want to be so willing to be angry that you find yourself angry about things that are totally useful to be angry about and so passive that you neglect the expression and actually recognizing an anger you feel and experience about things that warrant a frustration that if you express it, people will understand, people will change. And by not expressing your frustration and anger towards people or phenomena that can comprehend a reasonable, you know, back and forth between you and them, you're actually doing you and them a disservice because they don't have the information to maintain a useful, healthy relationship. And so they're just going to assume everything is kosher, everything's fine as is because you haven't expressed otherwise. So you just sort of propagate, you continue the problem by being passive in those sorts of situations. And so like I said, I mean there's different ways of considering anger and different kinds of anger, but it's important to try to delineate those two.
- [57:59]
A
In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years. Now it's designed by Dr. Mike Isretel and comes with over 45 pre made training programs, 250 technique videos takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step by step plan for every workout. It guides you on the exact sets, reps and weight to use. Most importantly, how to perfect your form. So every rep is optimized for maximum gains. It adjusts your weights each week based on your progress and there's a 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy it, train with it for 29 days and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com ModernWisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com ModernWiry and ModernWisdom at checkout. What's the desire trap
- [59:02]
B
in terms of what are you referring to?
- [59:04]
A
Well, think about your relationship with desire and what you've learned about it. Is it a trap? Because it seems like desire fuels suffering in many ways and even the desire to escape desire is a desire as well. And then evolution sort of hardwired dissatisfaction into us and we sort of may, we may secretly prefer striving over satisfaction in many ways. So how the fuck do we survive this?
- [59:32]
B
Well, we survive this because that fuels survival in my view. It's inescapable. I mean, I know that there are people that, you know, maybe sit on mountainsides and, you know, do nothing all day long and they're able to live an ascetic life and totally quell all desire. But for the vast majority of people, especially those who might be watching or listening to this, that that's not gonna probably happen and it probably shouldn't. It doesn't. You don't have to force some sort of romanticism around ascetic life. And so what you're left with is kind of comes back to what we were talking about a moment ago when it comes to understanding the, the constraints around your decision making and what matters to you. Because you're never going to eliminate desire and you're never going to eliminate the continual pain or dissatisfaction that comes from the very substrate that desire functions on. Because desire is, is, is not something that you, you get, you achieve, and then you're done. That, obviously that's not how that works. It's the same with hunger. It's the same with every, every breath is a desire for another breath. And that doesn't mean you're done. You're going to have to find the next breath, the next meal, the next everything. And so you don't escape that trap. That trap is paradoxical in the same sense as many of the other things we've discussed where it's, it's unfortunate because it makes you. You're kind of destined to never feel an ultimate satisfaction, but by virtue of that, you end up pursuing a ton of things, people, goals, achievements, preferences, art that you wouldn't otherwise ever care about if you were done after your first moment of achievement. And so the trap is also the open door. I mean, it's both ways. You're stuck in an infinite hallway of open doors, but in each door you can decide what you care about and what meaning you might derive from what's inside that room. And then you get bored, unfortunately, and then you move on to the next room. But there seems to be, if you keep moving, an unending hallway of doors. So it doesn't have to be purely tragic.
- [61:45]
A
Okay, so does that mean that happier people are simply less aware? Or are they, are they better at metabolizing awareness?
- [61:54]
B
Oh, that's a very good way of framing that question. I, I reluctant to answer that with conviction because I, I just don't know if I know enough happy people to, to say one way or the other. I think that it could go, it could be both. I don't, I don't know if it's binary. I'm not saying you're presenting it as a binary option, but I think that you can be happy by being maybe less reflective and less aware about absurdity and futility and all that and the sort of associated, you know, suffering with desire. You could be happy that way, and you could be. Happy is maybe not the best word, but you could be a kind of happy by also knowing that everything you do is ultimately absurd and futile. But, but you're, you're still experiencing moments that are enthralling and interesting and you're experiencing moments of love and wonder and those don't, you know, the awareness of the futility of those things for me doesn't negate them. So I see no reason why both kinds of people or all kinds of people couldn't find maybe not happiness, but a justification, a wonder, a reason to keep moving.
- [63:18]
A
I guess. If everything is uncertain and constructed, why trust any of our conclusions?
- [63:25]
B
Oh, I wouldn't. You're saying why trust any conclusion? I definitely would not trust any conclusion, at least in the absolute sense. When you say trust, do you mean believing wholly in its sort of finality?
- [63:46]
A
Yeah, I suppose. How can we trust any of our insights like our own conclusions? Everything's uncertain, everything's constructed, our consciousness is filtering what we see in the world. There's no such thing as real truth. How are we not just permanently sort of wallowing in our own uncertainty?
- [64:07]
B
Yeah. So I think I have a way out of that to some extent is everything isn't uncertain because what you're experiencing now is completely real and certain. And so you have that basis always that tether to experience and selfhood and existence that, you know, maybe can't be extrapolated out onto some sort of metaphysics and you know, insight about some grander picture. But you can know that you're certainly feeling what you're feeling and experiencing right now. And you can navigate a life and existence based on those feelings to the best of your ability. And that doesn't provide certainty and I think the way that we often like to think of it, but it does provide a barometer, a compass that we can, can reference and derive what we're really after from.
- [65:04]
A
What do you think makes life worth the trouble?
- [65:10]
B
I would, I would certainly so. Pursuit of Wonder is the name of, of my YouTube channel. The reason why I'm bringing that up is because pursuit of happiness is the common phrasing. And I believe that there's, you know, that's the wrong way of approaching the justification around pursuits and life in general. And so I think what makes life worth the trouble is, and it's by a very slim margin, I must say, but the experience of wondering, the experience of a self produced meaning. And you can experience wonder through art, through relationships, through friendships, through aesthetic experiences, just walk through nature. And if you have enough of those moments, and enough is relative, but if you have enough of those moments, you can draw, you can take the ingredients of the trouble of existence, you can take the graphite of, of that sort of sludge and you can make it into something beautiful and worthwhile. And it's, it's, like I said, it's by a certain margin for everybody how much that actually feels like you made it worthwhile in terms of all the trouble. But I think that's, you're kind of in a boxing match that you're destined to lose, but you're still putting up a hell of a good fight. And there's, you know, there's so much spirit in that. There's, you know, everybody loves an underdog story and I believe each of us are, are the underdogs up against our lives in existence. But we, we put up a hell of a fight and that's, that makes it worth it.
- [66:59]
A
Do you think self awareness makes love deeper or more fragile?
- [67:08]
B
Probably more fragile. If I had to pick the reason, I would say that is because. It makes you maybe more self conscious. And obviously self conscious and self awareness are almost synonyms, but self conscious in the more typical sense of the word where you're worried about how you're coming off and how you're integrating with somebody else's preference preferences and desires. However, on the flip side of that, to be more self aware is to recognize, and this is one thing that I think is useful in all areas of life is to recognize, you know, how annoying you can be and how neurotic you can be. And so when you recognize a more granular sense of your neuroses or your annoyances or your, all the sorts of things that make you on a day to day basis from inside your skull, a little bit challenging to deal with. To be more aware of those qualities makes you more understanding of another person's difficulties with dealing with those qualities. And if you're not aware of those qualities, then you might never understand why is this person reacting to me in such a way? Why are they feeling this sort of way in relation to my behavior? You know, that you have a certain outward behavior, but without recognizing the proper, you know, picture, the full picture of those qualities and how they become manifest and why they are the way they are, it can be challenging to empathize with somebody who is trying to be as close to you as possible. And they obviously you are as close to you as possible, humanly possible. And if they're trying to get anywhere near that without recognizing those qualities, you do tend to lack the empathy for their perspective and experience. So I think ultimately this may be more of a benefit, but it can be also very challenging because you want to, you always want. I mean, when you're you're, you're always seeking ideal circumstances, at least for me. And so when you're aware of all those negative qualities, I'm always seeking to integrate them fully and properly into myself and in a way that makes sense for other people that I'm close with. And that's a impossible goal. And so that also can make you, you know, maybe over overzealous, over angered by, by the lack of success in certain areas like that.
- [69:55]
A
Yeah. Robert Pantano, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you rule. I love your YouTube channel. The book's fantastic. Why should people go to check out everything you do?
- [70:02]
B
Appreciate it, Chris. Yeah. So I have a new book, Terrible Paradox of Self Awareness, that's coming out March 10th. So depending on when you're watching this, it's available for pre order now. After March 10th, it's obviously available for regular order. And then YouTube channel is Pursuit of Wonder. Try to come out with videos a couple times a month over there and then Pursuit of Wonder everywhere else on all socials in Pursuit of wonder dot com.
- [70:24]
A
Fuck yeah, dude. I appreciate you, man. Congratulations.
- [70:26]
B
Thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate you.
- [70:31]
A
If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading list, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction and real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.