The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness - Robert Pantano

Robert Pantano is a writer, creator, and the founder of the Pursuit of Wonder YouTube channel. At what point does self-awareness become self-sabotage? The more you analyse yourself, the easier it is to get stuck overthinking. So how do you improve your life without ruining it? Expect to learn why self-awareness is a problem and the paradox of being too self-aware, if there is a way to be self-aware without becoming self-destructive, why aging is like a road trip, why regret is framed as a prison in which the prisoners are also the guards, if anxiety is just the natural consequence of seeing reality clearly, what makes life worth the trouble and much more… - Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom - 0:00 Why is Self-Awareness a Problem? 5:48 The Tragedy of Being Human 8:13 How to Stay Self-Aware Without Self-Destructing 13:41 Is Regret Just An Illusion? 20:57 Why You Should Never Waste Adversity 36:24 The Curse of Living Inside Your Mind 38:59 How to Reduce Choice Anxiety 46:03 Truth vs Security: What Are We Really Chasing? 48:29 How to Come to Terms With Your Anger 58:57 Is Desire a Hidden Trap? 01:03:17 Can You Trust Your Own Mind? 01:05:04 What Actually Makes Life Worth Living? 01:06:58 Does Self-Awareness Make Love More Fragile? 01:09:55 Where to Find Robert - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why is self-awareness a problem?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  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 and 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

• 1:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  And so we find ourselves in this sort of cosmic ocean where the waves are crashing on our heads constantly, and yet...

• 2:12Speaker 01

  We must continue because we are also a part of the same substrate 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

• 2:32Speaker 01

  terrible, and yet we just refuse to give up. 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.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got this line, "Self-awareness is a sort of poison that we each consume upon birth."

• 3:33Speaker 01

  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 into gold, into art and beauty and wonder and love and all that. And so it makes you wanna, you know, 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 and existence as purely positive and beautiful. Some might see it as purely negative and horrific and somewhere in between.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  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, this is my typical daily affect. This is my typical experience of things.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  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, 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, a wide variety and spectrum of experience of thought.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:48Chris Williamson?

  If consciousness is a mystery that can't understand itself, does that mean that the human condition is just fundamentally tragic?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Well, that, that's, that's at the heart or a heart of the paradox. It's a multi-hearted paradox, I would say.

• 6:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  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, I, 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, it'll get increasingly.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Close to comprehending the nature of itself, but it'll never breach. It's sort of that Xeno's paradox of the arrow where it'll get increasingly close, but it's always infinitely far away. And that's, 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, um, trying to, you know, 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?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  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, and, you know, sit by the pool and all that. And I, 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, uh, an infinite landscape of possibilities, questions and answers that, um, will never satisfy, will never fulfill, will never reach some sort of peak. That landscape is flat, um, but there's just, you know, so much territory to explore.

• 8:14Chris Williamson?

  Is there a way to become self-aware without it becoming self-destructive?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I, I think so. I think, 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, um, reflectiveness about that self-awareness where you can realize that, and then it might, there, there's a certain experience of.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Difficulties and confusions and sufferings that they are just, 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, 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

• 9:34Speaker 01

  is, is par for the course and par for the beauty of the course. And that I think is, is the ultimate goal to strive for when it comes to these sorts of topics and questions.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  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, 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, 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

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  success, even if you manage to achieve the success, because you were aware of all of the ways that you might have lied or, or, 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.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, first of all, I resonate with that reaction. And I think there's, there's validity in that reaction. And if you feel that way, um, 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, of being, of existence from a human perspective that, that dulls that, that dilutes that. But unfortunately, you don't really get to choose whether or not you are

• 11:42Speaker 01

  or are not thinking about those things, experiencing those thoughts and feelings. So you, 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, uh, you know, a certain proximity to those thoughts and concerns, um, that become very difficult to, to experience and manage. And it, it, it might make you, um, 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

• 12:27Speaker 01

  and you can't, you can't close it. You, you, 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, uh, is forward, not back. Because backwards, that, that, that end is closed. Um, in, in terms of the tunnel metaphor, you, you can't return to some form of yourself, some version of yourself that hasn't already, um, you know, wondered, questioned, pondered, or, or become concerned about those sorts of things. And so I, I see that it's, it's quintessential to, to not put those things aside if you're experiencing the sufferings and pains of almost self-alienation and self-confusion.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  You, you have to move forward and figure out how to. In some people's cases, it's maybe resolving them through practical and tactical methodology. And in other people's cases, it might be more of an 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.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  What about regret? I think one of the things that comes along as a side dish with quite a lot of

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  quite a lot of self-awareness is people's increase in rumination,

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  sort of whimsical, wistful remembering regret. What have you learned about regret?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  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, 100% 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 a

• 14:43Speaker 01

  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, there is no world in which you didn't make all the decisions you've made, putting aside maybe sort of quantum, you know, multi-world theories. But in this world, the world that we're talking about in, there is no version that you could have done anything differently. And that brings into sort of, you know, the, the concept of free will, which personally I don't believe in, in the, in the sense that we typically refer to it as.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 15:51Chris Williamson?

  It's a weird one, because I think the free will argument is one of, it's in an interesting category, it's something that might be literally true, but figuratively useless, that it might actually be, we might be deterministic set of dominos 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

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  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 wished that you had, 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.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  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, your, 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, and whether it's, you know, built into

• 17:50Speaker 01

  the laws or the nature of the unfolding of reality is, is irrelevant at that point. It's just you are going to make the same decision, 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 mean, 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, and it's absurd to think that you could have

• 18:31Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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

• 19:13Speaker 01

  done everything right and, 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 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.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

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• 20:30Chris Williamson?

  Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap. Plus, you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com/modernd wisdom. That's join.whoop.com/modernd wisdom. You've got that, you know, that Cormac McCarthy line, "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

• 21:03Speaker 01

  I do not know that line, but I love it. I love how that sounds.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  I fucking love that line. "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

• 21:12Speaker 01

  That's beautiful. No, I love that.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've got that story about the guy asking for directions, which is pretty similar.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yes. And so, yeah, I mean, I've, I've written a story called "The Nova Effect."

• 21:24Speaker 01

  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, you know, ultimation. And, um, yeah, that goes for each of our individual lives where it's, it's the same case. It's, we, we-

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Feel in any given moment that good, 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, it's a, 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, of a different phenomenon where, you know, you, if you know that when good things happen, it's still, there's still more, more

• 22:38Speaker 01

  game to play, more life to live, you're, you're going to be willing to accept the potential for more trials and errors and all that, uh, 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, some hope, uh, and gives you a sense of, you know, the possibility that things could, could be directly related to that, that ultimately save you, i- in whatever sense save you might mean.

• 23:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you never know what worse luck, your bad luck has saved you from. I wrote, uh, I wrote an essay today, actually, and, uh, I want to read you this thing because I, 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.

• 23:49Chris Williamson?

  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 nineties, 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.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  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 or bad luck has saved you from.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  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?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Those adversities versus.

• 26:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, go ahead. 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.

• 26:14Chris Williamson?

  Spending less time on your own. Sounds so dumb. You go through a breakup. Spend less time on your own, man. Like, it's important for you to have your friends come around with tacos and ice cream and watch shit movies. Like, 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.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  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? Well, 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. The broad lesson, I think, is a bias for action. Like, how can I just? What's that line? Anxiety hates a moving target.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:29Chris Williamson?

  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, you know, maybe I'm hiding them in the fog. And that's a lesson that for a lot of people probably is accurate. They 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

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  to be told to have a bias for action. So I think learning to trust yourself again is done through experimentation and evidence. And once you've got just a little bit of that moving, that tends to help. I certainly think.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  Because for the most part, you probably used that kind of fuel and then, okay, it's pretty toxic. If I hold on to 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 is, it's not. The anger will subside. The resentment will wane. Your bitterness will eventually dissolve.

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  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, I'm saying, just, you know, go in and, and maybe just fucking tap, tap, tapping the side of the fuel tank for a little bit and, and make use of it. And yeah, look, you're, 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, um, 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

• 30:06Chris Williamson?

  all people in all situations, at all times. But I do think it's pretty fucking useful.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  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, and so you, you ultimately are up against

• 30:30Speaker 01

  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 0% 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

• 30:57Speaker 01

  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 are 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

• 31:43Speaker 01

  continual adversity is one of those things.

• 31:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, dude, I mean, it's all one and good me talking about the survivorship bias of J K Rowling's 500 million books.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:53Chris Williamson?

  But there is a lot of people that have not just one kick in the nuts, but a series of them that, 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?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:28Chris Williamson?

  You might as well because you because you've literally got nothing else to do and the fucking time is going to pass in any case.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  So you might as well send it.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, give me, let me give you this one. Do you know what the fucking ultimate inversion of the survivorship bias is? Every person that gave up.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  Every person that reaches survivorship bias is a mark on the wall for somebody that didn't give up.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  And absolutely.

• 33:05Chris Williamson?

  If you want, 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. Um, 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, 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, so.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I, 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 gonna face continual adversity and it's not gonna, it's not gonna 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 Rollings 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

• 34:13Speaker 01

  out of the chaos of your life more viable, more possible. And to do that, in my view, and this is, I, I recognize there, 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, a preference, a, a priority, a sense of meaning, an orientation toward meaning, whatever.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  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 is worthwhile. And there's no 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, a beautiful relationship, a, a beautiful family. It could be a simple, quiet life, whatever it is for you, to, to continue onward towards achieving that, maximizing that, working towards the

• 35:16Speaker 01

  maintenance of that, whatever you're up against, uh, you have your time and, and you ought to use it wisely to, to. Manifest that.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

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• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  right to your door. Right now, you can get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernd wisdom. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernd wisdom. Given the fact that we can never step outside of our own minds, how should that change the way that we treat our beliefs?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I think that, and I've 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 tunnel vision of your mind, your specific mind. And then your own mind is sort of been molded and

• 37:14Speaker 01

  mapped according to a particular condition of geography, of culture, of history.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  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 must recognize that as individuals and as a collective, at any given time and any given space, we're up against this contorted, chiseled-out view of reality that's a pinhole size. And to have rigid beliefs, have a sense of certainty,

• 38:02Speaker 01

  I think is 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 a sort of essence of confidence and conviction that can carry through across a spectrum of ideas and beliefs. And the importance is not the individual belief, but the continuation of, you know,

• 38:47Speaker 01

  exploration and curiosity and openness and humility. I feel personally that that's a sort of essential, fundamental quality, for lack of better words, a sort of wisdom.

• 39:00Chris Williamson?

  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'd you come to think about netting down choice anxiety as a deeply self-aware person?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  You're sort of referring to the paradox of choice, if you will, right?

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  See, I don't know if I have a good answer to that because

• 39:37Speaker 01

  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

• 40:20Speaker 01

  a certain limit to which your, your, you know, minimum quality of experience is achieved in life,

• 40:29Speaker 01

  you can start to redirect your decision making towards a smaller number of options for different reasons than just like, you know, if you go to a grocery store, you could, there's so obviously an infinite number, not nearly, I mean, there's a, not literally, but nearly an infinite number of choices of 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.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  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

• 42:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  And I think, yeah, that's like the curse of the over optimizer. Somebody who, just for everything and every opportunity. I have a friend who is huge into credit card points. You go on 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 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 just decided that there was an area I had to consciously be de-optimized in and that was just one of the ones. I can't, I can't pick it for everything all of the time.

• 43:52Chris Williamson?

  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, um, it's a funny, 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?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  I would even go so far to say that you don't have to add that, that last part about being a deep thinker. I would think anxiety is a sort of fundamental consequence of being aware 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, of consciousness and self-awareness from a human perspective.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  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, of chaos and uncertainty that a singular framework of perspective is trying to control and make sense of. And what's, what could be more anxiety inducing than that? Trying to filter a ocean of possibility into a tiny, you know, pinhole of desire and preference and hope and idealization. So I would think that if you're, if you're that pinhole, there's a lot to be worried about.

• 46:03Chris Williamson?

  Is? 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.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  I absolutely agree. Yeah, I think that personally, I think that everything that humans do and humanity has done is is never in 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.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  And so the pursuit of truth is is an attempt to bring down the heavens and make it make sense right now so that we can feel comfortable as as conscious beings. And so, yeah, no, truth is not, in my view, a desire in and of itself. It's a it's a sort of proxy byproduct of the desire to produce uncertainty and unknowability.

• 47:26Chris Williamson?

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• 48:09Chris Williamson?

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• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm thinking about that anxiety, and I guess anger as well, which is kind of a little bit like anxiety at motion. Anxiety is anger at rest, in a way, and anger is anxiety in motion. It seems like anxiety arises because of foresight without control. And then anger is desire for control that gets denied. And I'm wondering what you've come to learn about how to sort of dissolve or reduce the anger and the anxiety in that way?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  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

• 49:47Speaker 01

  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 necessarily take it there for the same point to be cogent.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  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. You're right, you're right to say that it's closer to regret. It's like, I should have done differently. Well,

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  You didn't, 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 I'm 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 life, rest of time.

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 51:37Chris Williamson?

  And they really have a great, like fucking consecutive lineage of often being similar sorts of things. And I, 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, that's great. It's just, it's such a fucking all encompassing emotion, anger. So trying to think rationally when you're in it is not easy.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  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?

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  I guess it depends. A lot of people. Convert anger into other emotions. Right. 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, I, I think it's really important for people to understand if, if there's something bubbling inside of you. The, the world is basically split into two kinds of people. There's people who get mad and people that get sad,

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  but both of them are generated from the same place. Like 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 going to 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 going to show you how far you crossed over the line. And it's not going to happen again. That's, that, that's the, the job of anger. So for the, when it's sad, not mad,

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  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 lot, 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, uh, depression, anxiety, like frustrations at, at, at themselves and at other people and at, and at the world or politics or, you know, 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

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  because it's so, it's, it's the fucking raw, uncut version of the fuel. And if you can have it just bubble down a little bit, I think you can make better decisions. Making decisions, I mean, Is there any emotion that's worse to use to make this? Maybe being horny. Maybe being horny is the only worst emotion to utilize when trying to orient yourself than anger is.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  I can't think of many more.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, nothing come to mind for me either. I think those are probably the two at the top of the list.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  The two horsemen of the apocalypse.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, but I think that's super well put. I think that there's absolutely a 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 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

• 55:39Speaker 01

  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

• 56:07Speaker 01

  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 than 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

• 56:29Speaker 01

  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 is there's a difficulty in recognizing those different kinds of angers, maybe to an extent?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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,

• 57:38Speaker 01

  everything's fine as is because you haven't expressed otherwise. So you just, you just sort of propagate, you continue the problem by being passive in those sorts of situations. And so there, like I said, I mean, there's, there's different ways of considering anger and different kinds of anger, but it's important to, to try to, you know, delineate those two.

• 57:59Chris Williamson?

  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,

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  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/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNDWISDOM at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNDWISDOM at checkout. What's the desire trap?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  In terms of, what are you referring to?

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  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, and, 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, 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.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Because you're never gonna eliminate desire. And you're never gonna 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, you're gonna 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, you're kind of destined to never feel an ultimate satisfaction.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  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 it's it's both ways. It's you're you're stuck in an infinite, you know, 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, uh, an unending hallway of doors. So it's it's not, it doesn't have to be purely tragic.

• 1:01:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So does that mean that happier people are simply less aware? Or are they, are they better at metabolizing awareness?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a very good way of framing that question.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  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 I'm not saying you're presenting it as a binary option, but I 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, um, 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, um, that everything you do is ultimately absurd and futile.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  So I see no reason why both kinds of people or all kinds of people couldn't find maybe not happiness, but a a justification, a a wonder, um, a reason to to keep moving.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  I guess, I guess if everything is uncertain and constructed, why trust any of our conclusions?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I wouldn't.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose.

• 1:03:49Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:04:02Chris Williamson?

  How are we not just permanently sort of wallowing in our own uncertainty?

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think I have a way out of that to some extent. It 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

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  of it, but it does provide a barometer, a compass that we can can reference and derive what we're really after from.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you think makes life worth the trouble?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  And it's by a very slim margin, I must say, but the experience of wonder, the experience of a self-produced meaning. And you can experience wonder from, 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 that sort of sludge and you can make it into something beautiful and worthwhile.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  And 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 the underdogs up against our lives and existence. But we put up a hell of a fight and that's, that makes it worth it.

• 1:06:58Chris Williamson?

  Do you think self-awareness makes love deeper or more fragile?

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Probably more fragile, if I had to pick.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  The reason I would say that is because

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  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 preferences and desires. However, on the flip side of that,

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  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

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  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 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 an impossible goal. And so that also can make you, you know, maybe over, overzealous, over.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Angered by, by the lack of success in certain areas like that.

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. 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?

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Appreciate it, Chris. Yeah. So I have a new book, Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness. That's coming out, um, March 10th. So depending on when you're watching this, it's available for preorder 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 of times a month over there. And then, uh, Pursuit of Wonder everywhere else on all socials and pursuitofwonder.com.

• 1:10:23Chris Williamson?

  Fuck yeah. Dude, I appreciate you, man. Congratulations.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate you.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

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• 1:10:57Speaker 03

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