Jordan Peterson: Men need an intimate relationship (probably?)

the route to optimal the route to two quality of life and productivity has been laid out by other people we kind of know what the parameters are you need to do something that other people find is useful and and and you have to regard it as useful as well or at least you have to be entertaining there has to be something about you a value to other people that you have to pursue with a fair bit of diligence so you have to play a productive social role probably need friends probably need an intimate relationship and if it could be medium to long term into an intimate relationship perhaps all the better that's what most societies hold up as ideal could assume well there's probably a reason for that I think one of the reasons is is that your life gets fragmented otherwise badly fragmented you know it's because every time you have a long term relationship and it and it fragments it's like your identity is blown into pieces you get fragmented across time it's it's not it's not good it breaks you into pieces and you don't necessarily recover that well it makes everything much more impermanent and unreliable all of those things so it introduces a tremendous amount of uncertainty into your life and it also means that you don't have anyone around that you can really trust and that's bad because if you have someone around you can really trust then you have two brains instead of one and like you probably need two brains to manage your way through life it's pretty complicated so you orient yourself towards some good the highest good that you can conceptualize and it has to be through a consultation with your ancestors because you need to do the things that people have always done and you need to do them properly and you need to assume that that's the way that you should live unless you have a very good reason to change it dramatically and maybe you do but you got to start with some axiomatic set of presuppositions because otherwise you have to invent everything on your own and you don't have enough time to do that so you have to use normative guidelines and if you don't then people won't know what to do with you that's another big problem if you live completely outside the norm I mean you know remarkable artists manage that to some degree but of course they pay for the privilege by being remarkable artists so if there's something truly remarkable about you perhaps you could justify deviating from the normative path but if there isn't first of all there's nothing remarkable enough about you to justify deviating in every way from the normative path no matter how remarkable you are so so that's part of the the rescuing of the father from the from the adepts is to to reunite yourself with the traditional structures of your community you can do that in a way that you feel suits your own needs best but I don't think you can not do it because it makes you weak and then you'll drown all right so let's say you have oriented yourself but not perfectly because you're full of mistakes and errors so then what do you do because you have to fix those errors but you still have to be oriented and this is why I started getting interest to get interested in the phenomena of meaning as a phenomenological experience to experience something as meaningful it's not exactly obvious what that means to experience something is meaningful I think that you can you can approach it obliquely you know like if I said watch yourself for two weeks and notice when you're doing something that you regard is meaningful I could say well here's some here's some markers you lose a sense of time you lose a sense of vulnerability you're deeply engaged in it it seems it seems worth the effort right you forget yourself while you're doing it maybe you forget your existential concerns while you're doing it you're not ruminating or obsessing about the meaning of your life I think there is an alternative I think it's associated with this idea so imagine imagine we have a we could have a conflict if we were in a relationship we could have a conflict that would blow the relationship apart all right so we don't want to have that conflict and then we could have no conflict whatsoever which means that you would never get to say what you wanted and I would never get to say what I wanted because we're either identical which is just not happening or we're going to have conflict because you're gonna want some things that I don't want and vice versa so if there's no conflict we are not in a relationship all right so zero conflict is the wrong amount and conflict that destroys the relationship is the wrong amount and then you might say well okay what's the optimal amount of conflict well so so so then we can think about how people respond emotionally so let's say if you go after the person that you're arguing with and you say you're a bad person and you really make that case you bloody well hammer at home you remember 50 things they've done that we're bad and you lay them out so like I'm gonna stomp you you're a bad person you really need to change okay well first of all you're gonna meet tremendous resistance and that's like you've got the hydrogen you bring in the hydrogen bomb to the war right and maybe unless you want to destroy everything maybe that's not the most logical solution but then by the same token everything's alright and we never have any conflict that's not helpful either and you're gonna get bored of that and you're not going to develop and so then the question is well maybe there's some happy medium here maybe you want to be repairing this structure you know the structure that goes from micro actions up to higher-order conceptualizations maybe you want to be updating that on a constant basis and you want to update it in a manner that doesn't drop you into chaos or place you in too much stasis and then that answer is well how then then the question is how is it that you can calibrate your approach to error so that you get the benefits of doing it without the disadvantage of collapsing into chaos and then the issue the answer to that is something like it's something like once you have decided to adopt responsibility for being and will say that what that means is that you have conceptualized a good that you're willing to devote yourself to and I think you you're perfectly welcome to do that on an individual basis

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 403,582

Keywords: Jordanpeterson, Jordan B Peterson, Essential Truth, advice for men, relationships, dating, bite-sized philosophy, Dose of Truth, men and women, PowerfulJRE, Ideacity, Transliminal, Philosophyinsights, Ramble, Intense 5

Id: wFOkMQFzD1g

Length: 6min 28sec (388 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018