"IT'S TIME TO GROW UP! Stop Wasting Your Life Away" - Jordan Peterson Motivation

[Music] we have inundated especially young men yeah go seek freedom go do what you want how you want to do it when you want to do it which is fine there's nothing inherently wrong to that when you're young but if you really want meaning if you want satisfaction if you want direction it's the stuff that has consequence it's family work that's exactly right freedom is freedom we're not teaching young men no intentionally that's the other thing i wanted to get to but go ahead right i think it's intentional i i think it is too because it's part and parcel of the idea that the productive activity of young men and this also goes for the masculine symbolically masculine activity of young women by the way but the productive activity of young men is indistinguishable from the force that gives rise to the to the crushing tyranny of the patriarchy it's like well and that also gives young men a moral excuse not to engage in life it's like well you know productive activities i see it all the time i've been told i'm a horrible person my whole life what use is this to me i'm gonna go play video games in my basement yeah well it gives an excuse to the useless part of men that don't want to succeed because it's easy to sit around i mean it isn't because the long-term consequences of that are just absolutely devastating yes but see so when we have a discussion about freedom you know we might also say well the freedom is i think this is right it's it's freedom to pick your poison it's freedom to pick your responsibility that's cool you might say well there's there's a set of weights in front of you that you have to pick up in order to stand yourself because that's the other thing i think about human beings well you know we conscientiousness is a trait and it we don't have an animal model for conscientiousness in fact we don't understand conscientiousness at all from it from from a psychological or darwinian perspective well that's that's more complicated because um conscientious men tend to do better and so they're going to be more successful but but we don't have a model for what conscientiousness is but but conscientiousness is at least in part this the the necessity to carry a load for yourself and for other people or to suffer guilt and shame as a consequence and so that's that seems built in especially to conscientious people now conscientious people tend more tend to be more conservative because that's one of the predictors of conservatism but it could easily be that freedom is the freedom to choose your yoke let's say and you and then you choose the weight that you have to carry so that you can justify your miserable existence to yourself so that you can go to bed at the end of the night and you can think look i i did what i needed to do to set things right today and i don't have to carry the existential weight around of my failure and uselessness as a consequence the existential psychologists in the 1950s who emerged out of the chaos of world war ii were very much um very much concentrated on the idea of existential guilt you know that you owed you owed being a ransom for your existence and the way that you paid that ransom was to work for the betterment of being i mean it's a very ancient idea but of course but it is the one idea i think that gives people the self-respect not self-esteem the self-respect that's necessary to carry them through terrible times when i'm asked what what has jordan peterson done for your members people you know i say he has them to stop acting like peter pan so i think they can actually be a man and not a boy well the peter pan story is a really interesting one because peter pan pan means everything right technically that's what pan means and peter pan wants to be a child because a child can be anything it can be everything right so what you have in childhood is that a plethora of potential and the problem with growing up is that you have to sacrifice that that pan potential for a defined actuality right that's that's that's to grow up and become something instead of staying potentially anything now the problem with peter pan is that he looks into the world and and sees captain hook as his role model right and so that's his model for for adulthood and hook is terrified of death that's the crocodile that's chasing him with the clock in his stomach and the crocodile already has a piece of him it's got a taste of him and so hook is constantly chased by the dragon of chaos essentially that's already got a taste of him and because hook is terrified of his own mortality and terrified in general he's a tyrant and so pan looks at hook and says well if that's adulthood i'd rather stay king of the lost boys that's exactly right and so yeah and it's a very powerful story which is why people still tell it what's one piece of advice that you would have given your 16 year old self don't be so high and mighty that you don't take advantage of the humble opportunities that are granted to you when i look back i didn't like school at all you might say i hated it and i thought a lot about that you know because i thought well there were reasons you know i was a very fast reader i could get through the books that were given to us in english class generally in the first day and that wasn't really appreciated i would say but there were things and i was bored a lot as a teenager and and got into a reasonable amount of trouble not an unreasonable amount but but then you know there were sports teams and there were attempts to organize plays and there were things that i didn't do that i could have that would have made my life better but i was too cynical maybe to take full advantage of them and like i did work when i was a kid i worked in restaurants as a dishwasher short order cooked that sort of thing that was a really good decision i think my fondest memories in some ways of my adolescence are memories of working in the restaurant but don't like life is very difficult and and in order to thrive [Music] with this difficult life if an opportunity is presented to you be you shouldn't be so arrogant that you dismiss it [Music] and it's really easy to be arrogant as a teenager especially if you're smart because you think well i'm smarter than everybody else it's like actually no there's lots of people that are a lot smarter than you you just haven't met them yet and and you're not as smart as you think you are besides and other people aren't as dumb as you think they are either there's different kinds of smart there there certainly is yes and why is beats smart so i would say if you're 16 and your life isn't so happy it's like look around and see if there are opportunities that people are granting you even imperfect opportunities because they're going to be imperfect that you could exploit let's say in the proper way and and learn and grow i had this teacher ada paul she's dead now i really liked her in grade four she was an organist at the church and when i was 14 15 she offered to teach me how to play the organ i for a variety of reasons wasn't really that into the idea and so i kind of went and then a couple of times i skipped it and it just sort of fell apart you know and which is pretty rude of me obviously because she went out of her way to offer this and like that's a good example because like it wasn't cool to play the organ it wasn't cool to do any i don't know what it was like when you grew up when i grew up it wasn't cool to do anything she was a great teacher like i really like data paul she was and i be i betrayed her trust you know it's like that wasn't very bright i think we all have memories like that oh yeah yeah yeah yeah but i think i think that advice is good too even young adults even to adults really to pause and appreciate the opportunities and the the doors that are always open to them well here's the experiences that are always available here's an idea yeah so life is brutal and what you have to say against that is possibility and you might say well life is so brutal that you have to utilize all the possibility that comes your way you know so an opportunity manifests itself and you turn it down you ignore it you let drift away it's like that's one thing that you had against the horror of existence that you let go of you let go of ten of those things man [Music] you're on the street right and it's no fun there and it doesn't get better and so is a possibility that if you utilized all the possibility that was offered to you that your life would be straight and clean and engaging and acceptable and positive and that's worth finding out if that's the case because it might be true find out that edge that you can push yourself against it it's going to be different for different people but there's there's that's the call to adventure and heroism and you there are life and death situations everywhere around you if if you want to involve yourself in them now and it sometimes that might be like to put yourself together to the degree that you can say physically or spiritually or intellectually it could be an intellectual battle it could be a moral battle like the frontier is everywhere the frontier is just the edge between what you know and what you don't know you want to put yourself on that damn edge and then make yourself into something and and you can retreat into comfort in the modern world and i think that is a problem you know i mean i've noticed that um it's one of the pathologies of wealth i would say because one of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you're a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity and that's a big problem because they need necessity to call them into being and you know if you don't have a lot of material resources and your children ask you for something you can say no because no is the answer it's like no we can't do that but if you can say yes then it's really hard to say no because then you're just arbitrary well i don't know it's like kierkegaard said you know there will come a time when we have so much security and comfort that what we'll want more than anything else is deprivation and challenge and i think i think that's particularly what young men want you know we tend to think of meaning as something that people create as a secondary consequence through thinking or through philosophy or something like that and when we think that it's easy to criticize it it's easy to become cynical about it it's easy to lose faith in it but when you understand that it actually is a much deeper phenomenon than that and that the cognitive elements the philosophical elements are sort of like well they're like the fronds on the top of the pond on on a plant system that has unbelievably deep roots that go way down into the water it's much it's it's it's much there's something about that that's much firmer and more solid and and i i think that i think the evidence that meaning is an instinct a deep deep instinct is overwhelming i i don't think that popular knowledge has caught up with that i mean the research is it's not new but it's been done i would say in the main in the last 30 years or so and mostly by psychobiologists like people who are really on the hard science end of of psychology and and their work is difficult it's it's technically difficult it involves a lot of neurobiology neuroanatomy psychopharmacology it's hard work it's hard going but it's unbelievably useful do what is meaningful not what is expedient because meaning is an instinct the meaning is the instinct that guides you in life across the totality of life right what's expedient that's what you might want to do right now in an impulsive sense right because you're driven forward by oh anger or anxiety or frustration or disappointment or despair some sort of one-eyed motivational monster that's got you in its grip that really isn't considering everything at once right like considering your life tomorrow or your life next week or your family's life or or maybe your maybe even your well-being half an hour from now you know because you lash out in anger and it's you you can you know people do that it's understandable sometimes it's even necessary but it's not wise generally and the instinct for meaning seems to be a consequence of the integration of all of those underlying motivations and emotions with social being and then the manifestation of something like the proper pathway forward and so and you need that because you need to know how to move forward in life because you need to move forward in life you need to act in life and the other thing that's i suppose part and parcel of let's say 12 rules for life is the insistence upon action as of primary import we're not fundamentally creatures who passion passively perceive the objective world that's not the goal of our perceptual systems it's not the goal of our memory the reason that you have memories isn't to remember the past the reason you have memories is so that if something bad happened to you in the past you can figure out what it was that was bad and you can figure out why it happened and then you can not do it again in the future right it's very practical and it's the same on the positive end of the spectrum if good things happen to you in the past then conceivably duplicating whatever you did to get those good things to happen could have them happen again in the future so it's it's practical memory and it's it's oriented towards action and it's oriented towards like the quality of your life so you need that instinct for meaning too so and we should get this real straight why do you need it well you need it because life is really really difficult right i mean people have a rough time of it there's plenty of suffering in life and everyone is going to encounter it right there you don't you know you learn this as a clinical psychologist and you know this generally you know unless you're an extraordinarily fortunate person um you don't have to talk to someone for very long and and really talk to them and get beneath the surface until you find you know there's a tragedy or two or three or ten lurking not very far beneath the surface someone in the family is very ill there's a childhood history of extreme pathology alcoholism somewhere in the family maybe a touch of insanity someone has cancer you know someone some an older relative is dying there's financial trouble there's economic trouble there's marital trouble it's like life is trouble and now you know it that doesn't mean it's all trouble but man it's trouble and sometimes it's it's a lot of trouble and sometimes it's so much trouble that you can you can barely stand it and and you see that because people you know people get depressed and they commit suicide and the reason they do that is because they think not being is better than being and that's quite the decision you know so and and it's not that uncommon among people who are depressed and so it's it's it's a very it's a very important thing to consider and it and it isn't just a matter of depression and suicide that's bad enough but you know if you're unhappy because your suffering has pushed you past the point of your ability to cope then there's all sorts of other things that can happen to you that aren't directed towards you you can become cynical and you can become bitter and you can become cruel and you can become narcissistic and deceitful and arrogant and and it's like everything's for you and then you're out for revenge that's a nice one i don't know against who but maybe everyone maybe even including you because you're not happy about the role you've played in generating your own misery i mean there's a lot of darkness underneath the suffering and so and and that's that's an ever-present existential danger for human beings you know we're aware of the future we're aware of our fragility we're aware of our mortality it's something that makes us truly unique truly conscious in a way that no other creature is and capable of things that no other creature can do but also bearing an unbelievably heavy existential load we're the only creatures that have to always contend with the fact that we're finite and that everyone we know is in the same position that allied with the suffering and so that's there all the time and and you know even even in in the brightest moments in some sense you know in in in renaissance paintings in still lifes they used to put a momento memento mori often in the in the still life like a skull somewhere in the corner or sometimes sometimes in in a very strange perspective so that you could only see the skull if you were standing like right beside the painting instead of dead on but the idea was to always remember you know that everything that exists is tainted or touched with the with the with the with it with the taint of mortality and you know that's rough but there's some useful things in it it keeps you awake and it keeps you focused if you're careful but it also does indicate to you if you think about it the necessity of having a meaning in your life it's bad enough to have something bad happen to you and it's likely that that'll happen but it's even worse for you to do it to yourself and to know that you did it that's rough and it's also extraordinarily rough to be betrayed by someone else or you know tyrannized by your own culture and so and that's that's not just suffering that's like unnecessary and pointless suffering that's been directed at you by something that wants that to happen and so both of those are very very powerful let's say archetypal forces suffering and malevolence and we have to deal with them at every level of reality and you need something to you need something to push back against that it's not optional [Music] i've read the accounts and the actions of people who've taken a very vicious turn into the darkest parts of the underworld consequence of their resentment and their malevolence and then their desire to make everything in the world suffer for the outrage of its existence man i mean that's how we turn things into hell if you want to know why totalitarian states take the brutal twists they take and why people are motivated to do the absolutely terrible things that they do well that's why is that the suffering and the malevolence that's intrinsic to life overwhelms them and and they turn and they turn in a very bad direction and then they make everything that's already bad way worse and we're very very inventive at such things and so that's not good unless that's the path you want that's a bad idea you need an alternative and that's meaning how much trouble would you want there not to be it's a weird question right because you want to have something to contend with you want to have something that that forces from you the best that you have and so you have to have real problems something like that would you dispense with all your real you could just lay down on a bed have pablum infused into your mouth you know if all your problems were solved and so maybe you want difficult problems that you can solve something like that because there's some i don't know what it is about it there's there's the overcoming and the growth that comes along with that there's something about the nobility of the enterprise you certainly see that when you go about having children for example which is you know the psychological literature is quite clear if you do moment-to-moment comparisons of people who have kids and people who don't have kids the people who don't have kids are happier and so psychologists who tend to get things wrong even when they make intelligent discoveries like that one immediately some of them jump to the conclusion that because happiness is the goal that well there's something about children that you know make you unhappy and that's not good it's like well wait a second and maybe that's the wrong metric it's like of course you're less happy once you have children because you have to worry about them you know my neighbor down the street who's very smart woman said to me once you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child and which i thought was really good you know that's really smart but then it isn't well if having children doesn't make you happy the answer isn't don't have children it's like don't be so stupid about being happy that's the answer it's because there's a nobility in the pursuit right and of course now you're responsible you know you have a new baby you think especially if you're a new parent you think what the hell is this and what am i going to do with it you know it's like and and then you're you're done for the rest of your life you never sleep properly again because you're going to be worried about this creature that you have to take care of but like what the hell good are you if you're not doing that or something else equally difficult because you just you just haven't been called out yet unless you take on a responsibility like that the idea that life is you know that happiness is the purpose of life it's like great for happiness man if it comes along you should be thrilled that it's visiting you but the notion that that's that that's what you should pursue that's that's the weakest possible notion first of all as soon as something terrible happens to you you're done it's like life is to be happy it's like well now you have cancer so how's that how's the happiness thing working out for you now or maybe it's not you you know maybe it's your father that has alzheimer's disease or some damn thing and you know it's like it's a rare person that doesn't have some catastrophe one one person away from them it's like life is to be happy it's that's not right and and we can at least derive that from these stories that isn't what they say at all god's perfectly happy in the stories to grant the people with whom he forms a covenant happiness and prosperity but there's never a word that that's the purpose the rule is aim high and get your bloody act together that's the rule and establish this contractual covenant with the ultimate ideal and that will see you through the catastrophes and that's a much more mature way of looking at life as far as i'm concerned because all you have to do is have your eyes half open and you see that the fundamental reality of life is tragedy and suffering there's that's inescapable the quest that doesn't mean that it it makes life unbearable or that it makes being something that shouldn't have existed right that isn't what it means but it means that you have to contend with it and you have to get ready and the willingness to adopt responsibility for yourself and for others is is the precondition for that and and then maybe if you do that properly then now and then you get some happiness you know you can sit at the end of a day and you have half an hour where your conscience is clear and there's nothing that you need to be doing and you can relax and think you know that's all right things are okay and thank god for that and that's that's maybe where you get your happiness so it's it's sort of predicated on the idea that life is for happiness and i don't think that's right and i don't think that's how people experience life and i might be wrong but it seems to me that people experience life as something like a series of crucial ethical decisions it's something like that i mean when i i just can't imagine maybe i'm being naive about this but i can't imagine that i can't imagine another being that's like me in in most senses that isn't constantly wrestling in some sense with what the next proper thing to do is it's not like it's obvious it's not bloody obvious and it doesn't mean you'll do the right thing because you don't law lots of times and you know that by your own judgment right because you're making mistakes all the time sometimes you don't know what you're doing and maybe it's a mistake and maybe it isn't and who's to say that isn't what i'm talking about i'm talking about when you know that what you're doing is wrong and you go ahead and do it anyways people do that all the time and that's also extremely peculiar you bloody well think that if you knew it was wrong and you told yourself that it was wrong that that would be sufficient so that you just wouldn't do it but that isn't what you're like at all you know and you can tell yourself something is wrong 50 times and you'll do it the 51st time and then you'll feel you know like like you deserve to feel probably and but it doesn't stop you and so so then i think the other problem with the the viewpoint the idea that the suffering of life eradicates its utility is that it's predicated on the idea that happiness or lack of suffering even is is the right criteria by which to judge life and i don't think that's how we actually experience life i think what we do instead is put ourselves through a series of excruciating moral choices you know and one of the things that that's really significant about the biblical stories and i think about the the entire implicit philosophy you know that's embedded in the stories is that that's how life is presented in in the stories is all of these individuals first they're individuals they're not groups and second they're agonizing over their moral choices all the time all the time and they have a relationship with god and but it's not a it's not a directive relationship exactly even the people to whom god speaks directly which i suspect is not something you'd exactly want to have happen is it it's there's still even the fact that they have a direct relationship with god doesn't stop them from being tormented continually by their moral choices and so the world is presented as a a moral landscape not as a not as a place that justifies itself by happiness it's presented as a moral landscape and people are presented as creatures who traverse through the moral landscape making ethical decisions that determine the course of the world and that seems to me to be right and that's not that's not the same as happiness by any stretch of the imagination it's a whole different category of being and you know and then i thought that through a lot and i think well we do make choices and what we do is contend with the future you know and that the future seems to appear to us as a realm of possibility that's a more accurate way of thinking about it than that the future presents itself to it to us as a realm of determined things it's it's presents itself as a realm of possibility and there's good choices in that realm and there's poor choices or even evil choices in that realm and we're negotiating continually deciding which of those choices we're going to bring into being that seems to me to be phenomenologically indisputable and we certainly treat each other as if that's what we're doing because we hold each other responsible for our actions you know with some exceptions and that we're deciding each moment whether to make things better or worse [Music] there's a profound anti-human ethos i think that pervades our culture you know that considers human beings cancers on the planet something like that you know and that there should be less of us it's the same spirit that motivated the guy who wrote the book about it better to have never been it's like i don't see it that way you know i mean i think people do pretty well for you know for having their leg caught in a bear trap and their head caught in a vice they're actually doing pretty well because life is really hard and the fact that we're not absolutely brutal and murderous all the time is really something remarkable given what we actually have to contend with that we can go out of our way to be honest and generous and altruistic and to care for each other under unbelievably dire circumstances and to act nobly sometimes under the most trying conditions you know when solzhenitsyn school like archipelago he tells story after story of people who acted abysmally but also people who under the worst threats imaginable never sacrificed their character you know and reading about that is really [Music] well it really makes you wonder that's that's what it does perception is very very tightly related to action to movement forward and to emotion and those things are very important to know they're very they're very tightly associated so for example you live in a in a map let's say or a story and the story is um wherever i am isn't as good as it could be and so i'm going to go somewhere that's somewhat better and you know that can be of different time frames maybe you've got a plan for the next minute you know you're hungry and so you want to go somewhere to eat or maybe it could be for the next hour or the next week or the next day or the next year or whatever but basically what you're trying to do is take where you are point a and make it better point b and so you're always somewhere that isn't quite as good as it should be and you're always going somewhere that's somewhat better at least that's the hope unless things have gone wrong you know when you feel god it's nothing but downhill from here on in and that's not good you don't want that that's a that's a pathological condition so and it's kind of unfortunate in some sense because it means you can't be satisfied with what you've got but how the hell can you be satisfied with what you've got because you've got problems coming your way you know i mean even if everything's okay right now which it probably isn't but even if it was that doesn't mean everything's going to be okay tomorrow or next week or next year or five years from now right you've got the future to take care of and your future self and you've got your family to take care of and maybe you've got your community to take care of so you've got some problems and so the way things are isn't good enough and so you're going to fix them a bit and so then you fix them across different levels of resolution and you do this you know if you do this technically in this manner so you identify where you are one one thing you might think about is if you're mixed up one of the problems you might have is that you don't know where you are lots of times people have to go to therapy or or talk for a long time to someone to find out where they are because your experience might have scattered you everywhere and you just and you feel that things have that you've come apart at the seams right the things have fallen apart around you that you're in chaos you don't know where you are and and so then you're in trouble because how the hell are you going to plot a course forward into the future if you don't know where you are and so maybe you have to bring yourself up to date i have an exercise online by the way at a place called self-authoring which is called the past authoring exercise fittingly enough and what it asks you to do is to write an autobiography it's a guided autobiography and it can kind of bring you up to date and you can know if you need to be brought up to date it's fairly straightforward if you're obsessed by memories of the past more than 18 months old and most of those are negative so anxiety provoking most often then there's a lot of you that's stuck in the past and what that means is you didn't map the territory well enough and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems anxiety systems are saying no no there's holes in the way you're looking at the world there's holes in the way that you're looking in the world and you fell in them once and you don't know where they are and you don't know how to fill them and you don't know how to walk around them and so you can't forget them you can't forget them you can't forget them you can't forget them if you have recurring nightmares for example are a good example of that sort of thing happening but in in any case if you have memories like that you remember them they make you feel anxious and negative you're stuck back there your body is still reacting as if there's an emergency that could happen again that you haven't fixed it doesn't matter if it was your fault that's irrelevant because the alarm system doesn't care like when your smoke detector goes off it isn't relevant whether it was your fault the smoke detector just says house is on fire and that's a bad thing and your anxiety systems are like that if if they're tagging old memories with anxiety then you have to do something about it or you will be tortured by those memories forever because that's how the alarm system works and so maybe you need to go back there and clean things up you got to figure out okay well how did this happen what sort of role did i play even if it's a minor role that doesn't matter because the point is is that you don't want to be put in the same vulnerable position again so anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good you know and often if it's a really old memory like maybe you were a child it's you're not a child now so you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with a situation like that if it came up now and so you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you're for you need to know where you are so let's say where you are is well you're on this stage and you're on this side of the stage and you decide that you're going to go over to that side of the stage just to show that you can um and you're making the decision the same decision that you know the famous chicken who is going to cross the road why does the chicken cross the road well if it's a sensible chicken it's because it assumes that there's something better on the other side of the road it's like or maybe it's random curiosity but then it just gets picked off by a dingo or a coyote so that's not so good the other side of the road is better so away the chicken goes so that's what you're doing you're going somewhere slightly better and so that's good technically it's good because the way that your positive emotion systems work they run on a neural chemical called dopamine which by the way is the neurochemical system that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine and alcohol for some people and opiates affect dramatically and make people feel far better than they should which is part of their danger it's a very fundamental system the dopamine system kicks in with a kick of positive emotion if you're going somewhere that's worth going and so that's worth knowing it's really worth knowing it's like okay you want a little bit of positivity in your life well how do you get it well you've got to get the system it's almost the like it's the left hemisphere system for for most people not that that's particularly relevant but it's a it it is a standalone neurochemical system it's rooted very very deeply in the brain's exploratory circuitry so very ancient ancient system and it's happy when you have somewhere to go that's the first thing and then it's also happy when you're going there and so if i'm on this side of the stage and i want to go over to that side of the stage and i see that there's a nice clear pathway i could just go straight down this line then i look at that and i'm actually a little happy i'm i'm not i'm not ecstatic i mean who the hell cares if i get to the other side of the stage right i mean it's it's a small piece of my life but it's not nothing it's something okay and so i look at the pathway and i think that's a good pathway and i feel a little positive and then if i move here and then i see that little table right in the way between me and the other side of the stage then i'm i feel a little negative because i don't want an obstacle in my pathway and so that's really how you're looking at the world by the way you don't see objects it's not the right way to think about it we don't see objects and then think about them and then evaluate them and then decide how to act on them or if we do we do it rarely and slowly and with a lot of thought what we see instead are pathways with tools that will move us forward or obstacles right and there's no obstacles here and there's a nice flat road and so great positive emotion well there this is a task i can undertake the sailing is clear it's a good day and then i'm here and it's like yeah well that's a little annoying i get a little pang of disappointment let's say anxiety can i make it around that obstacle i'm fairly confident i've done this sort of thing before so i can take the rough route and i can you know walk forward like this and then i can do this great trick which is just this and then you know i've circumvented the obstacle now if i didn't know how to do the little bit of circumvention then that would be a real problem right because i couldn't get from point a to b and that would screw up my plan but i do have that particular skill set so it's a minor disruption to the perceptual set that i'm using to organize the world it's a minor bit of chaos because that's what happens when your perceptual set the structure that you're using to organize the world the plan through which you're viewing the complexity of the world reveals an inadequacy then that destabilizes your emotions so that's another thing to know one thing you need to know is you need to be going somewhere and there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good the other thing to know is that if that plan is untenable or becomes destabilized then what happens is you become flooded with negative emotion frustration disappointment anger primarily anxiety but all of those things sort of intermingled anger maybe because you have to fight your way through the obstacle frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan disappointment because you put a bunch of work into the damn plan and it didn't work out anxiety because now there's too many choices in front of you and so people don't like to have their plans disrupted they don't like to have their plans disrupted and the reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the [Music] world it's easy to become bitter about life and to become angry because of course life is difficult and it's full of disappointments and people are also subject to betrayal on the part of themselves and on the part of people that hypothetically care for them and so it's easy to get bitter and to be resentful and resentment is a very useful emotion even though i think it's one of the most damaging emotions if it's not dealt with properly so if you're resentful basically means only one of two things it either means you should grow up and quit whining and get on with your life or it means that you're being subject to tyrannical forces of one form or another maybe emanating from you maybe a consequence of the natural environment maybe a consequence of society you're being subject to tyrannical forces and you're not uh putting your own best interests forward like in that broader sense that i described and i don't mean your selfish narrow interests that only serve the purposes of instantaneous gratification i mean your own best interests in terms of developing your character over the span of your life if you're resentful it either means that you're immature and that you should grow the hell up and so you need to figure out how much of your resentment is is is that and and maybe light with the desire to find other things or people to blame but the other possible option is that you have something to say or do right because you're in a situation where you're violating your own internal ethical standards and you're being required pressured let's say to say things you don't believe or to do things that you believe to be wrong and you need to determine you need to start to strategize and plan how you can rectify that so that you can say what you mean like if you're negotiating with a marital partner for example and there are issues in your marriage that aren't making you happy well the first thing is you have to take note of that right to see that you're actually unhappy the second is that you have to be willing to engage in a certain amount of conflict because in order to sort out what's disturbing you you're going to have to lay your concerns out on the table and say well look this is bothering me you don't have to say well i'm right and you're wrong and you have to fix this you have to say well i've noticed that this pattern of interaction or lack of interaction say in our relationship is making me resentful and angry and the danger of that of course is you're going to take it out on yourself and your partner the danger is passion passive aggressiveness you know you're not going to respond to your partner positively when they do something good if you're resentful about them and you're not going to respond to yourself properly so you have to lay it out on the table but sort of in a spirit of ignorant humility it's like look i'm frustrated i'm feeling this way about our relationship here's what i think might be going wrong maybe on my part and maybe on your part and here's what i envision as a possible solution that's also really necessary if you're going to say what you have to say which is to manifest yourself properly in the world is you can't just complain about what's wrong you have to think well what would my minimal preconditions for satisfaction be you have to offer that to the person that you're negotiating with and so then you learn to abide by the truth to the degree that you can do that and no one does it perfectly you know but it it's very useful because you're not storing up a whole sequence of memories about how you were unfairly treated and abused and betrayed instead you're trying to stay on top of it and to note your unhappiness and dissatisfaction when it manifests itself and to accept that that's the case and then to analyze that to see if it's your problem like i said with regards to maturity or if it indicates that there's an injustice in the manner in which you and the world are interacting and then to work to set that right even in small ways and so it's it's a matter of character logical development and that makes you that makes you stronger over time in the future authoring program we built this section where you have to outline your most dismal future right what your future would be like if you let all your bad habits and character logical weaknesses have the upper hand and the reason we did this is because you can't be uh you can't straighten yourself out merely as a consequence of hope let's say you lay out a vision for the future and you think about what your life would be what you'd like your life to be like and then that makes you hopeful and it motivates you because it gives you something worthwhile and higher order to work for right and that's useful that's positive emotion working for you because positive emotion is experienced in relationship to goals but it's not not as useful as also being chased by something you're terrified by and if you have a good sense of how you'd fall apart if you stayed weak and just exactly what kind of hell that would be then when you determined to do something like to tell the truth and to say what you think and to not do things that you hate then you're going to be pulled along by the purpose that your vision has provided for you but also pushed along by your desire to avoid the worst forms of hell that you've already outlined for yourself personally and that can also help you be brave enough to stand up in a situation that we would require conflict because if you have something to say and you have something to negotiate about with someone then there's going to be a certain amount of conflictual dialogue that accompanies that right it to to lay out a set of problems and to describe the fact forthrightly that those problems characterize a relationship and then to seek for solutions is quite stressful in the short term and it's really easy to avoid and so people avoid it all the time and then they store up grievances across the span of their relationships and eventually the grievances mount to the point where they return in monstrous form and just eat everything up that's where you get divorces or that's where you explode at your boss and end up fired or that's where you you know you develop high blood pressure over 15 years because you can't stand all the accumulated monsters in your closet and you drink yourself into oblivion because he can't stand your life that's all you know very counterproductive but it's easy to avoid that necessary conflict on a moment-to-moment basis because it's very stressful to speak forthrightly about genuine conflicts especially when you're dealing with important parts of your life but otherwise you don't straighten them out and then you have to carry all that forward so you need to be terrified of the consequences of not speaking your peace and that can counterbalance the terror of actually trying to have a conversation so well you know and you also have to look with regards to the shadow ideas like you have to get in touch with the depths of your anger you know lots of people are resentful about all sorts of things they're resentful about oh women and they're resentful about men and they're resentful about the patriarchy and they're resentful about the left wing and they're resentful about the right wing and they're resentful about politicians and they're resentful about the like the cataclysmic force of nature and its ability to make people sick and and suffer and they're resentful about their own inadequacies and about their bad parenting and god like the list is just bloody endless and that can make you very very angry and that's part of that resentment and cynical and bitter and dark and full of fantasies about destruction and the desire to bring things down and the wish that everyone else suffered and the desire to shake your fist at god and all of that's really dark you know jung said well the shadow the human shadow extends all the way down to hell and he really meant that you know because all the terrible things that people are motivated to do are associated with that shadow domain and like none of you or any none of you are saints in any likelihood you have a terrible capacity for destructiveness and when you start to consult your resentment and to see how angry you are it can terrify you to see the depths of that anger sometimes that will manifest itself in very destructive fantasies you know which you might not want to become conscious of because they're so brutal let's say and so aggressive that you can't even believe that you generate them the nice person that's you it's like so it's quite frightening to open the door and see all that and that also associates you with the entire dark shadow of mankind right the satanic element of the human character and but it opens the door to understanding as well to understanding how people can do terrible things because you could see yourself as one of the people who could do terrible things that's really useful you know because then you well then maybe you start to be motivated to be the sort of person who wouldn't do terrible things [Music] it also is some in perverse sense it's also a discovery of your own strength though because you know if you have that desire for aggression that desire for destruction and that that that ability to fantasize in that aggressive manner it also means that you can incorporate some of that into your speech and into your actions so that you're a lot more immovable right and and a lot more of a force to contend with it can give you some respect for yourself when you realize that you're a force of destruction as well as creation and then you're also more likely to treat yourself with a bit more intelligent caution you know to know that your that part of you is a ticking bomb in some sense that can go off and so you you you tread a bit more lightly around yourself and and maybe you encourage people to tread a bit more lightly around you as well which isn't such a bad thing and all the people that i really admire that i know have a clearly dangerous side and you don't want to get you don't want to have that activated any more than necessary but it's also what makes them respectable and strong especially if they have that under control so oh that's a bit of a dialogue about shadow integration it's a very challenging undertaking you know to pull in that dark side of your character and and that would be all the things that you've repressed or failed to develop as a consequence of trying to be a harmless and well let's say a harmless and harmless citizen who looks virtuous on the surface that's the union persona and you need that because everybody needs a mask that they wear in public like a suit you know so that we can tolerate seeing each other on the street we don't have to look right into our depths every time we interact we need that persona but that has to be transcendent and the way to transcend that is to integrate the darker parts of the [Music] character [Music] [Music] you

Channel: SUCCESS CHASERS

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Keywords: success chasers, jordan peterson success chasers, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson motivational video, success chasers jordan peterson, jordan peterson life advice, jordan peterson 2021, improve yourself in 2021, how to improve yourself, how to reinvent yourself, motivation for 2021, create your dream life in 2021, IT'S TIME TO GROW UP! Stop Wasting Your Life Away, jordan peterson young men, it's time to grow up

Id: PsPF2gaOKhc

Length: 50min 59sec (3059 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021