#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns

27:51Happiness and love are hard to bear. I suppose if reality is not delivering our model of the world, our expectation of the world, our prediction of the world, we have discordance between the two. And there are two things that we can try and do. We can try and bring our model of the world up to reality or we can try and bring reality back down to our expectation. Exactly. Beautifully put. Is there a danger of intellectualizing challenges of emotion for smart people, people that like to read and consume YouTube channels like yours or podcasts like mine and like to investigate ourselves, we want to understand ourselves and world around us.

28:30And maybe we've even got the theory from evolutionary psychology that explains why this is adaptive and and and the way, and cessery, we are made up a blah blah blah.

28:41How how much is that a prophylactic against us actually having to feel things and how can we better break through this intellectualizing of emotions and rationalizing of them away? This thought was compassion. You know, we are the way we are, you know, for poignant reasons, not, you know, we didn't get to be that way. You know, think of the, think of the bookish child, you know, think of the child who's reading a lot. Often it's because life's life around is quite difficult. Now, it's great to read, good to read, etc. But if you spend all your time in books, that's often assigned things that things are challenging.

29:18And so often people who excel at at intellectual pursuits, etc. Are in flight from an overwhelming situation? I'd wish them well. That in time, the overwhelming situation could get a little less intense and they could get a little more of reality into the intellectual world. I mean, I'm describing myself, perhaps you, you know, you want to try and see reality for what it is. And if you're warding it off with intellectual structures, Let's say thank you to those structures. I think it's really important. Whenever you look at people doing stuff that seems a bit suboptimal or a bit strange, they're reading too much, they're jogging too much, they're trying to make too much money, whatever, they're feeling too much, they're feeling too little.

30:07All of these departures from so -called health normalities, etc. Always ask yourself why are they doing it? It's normally a defense. It is a defense against a situation that was very difficult at some point. they learnt that defence and even though it would be optimal now to let go of that defensive structure, they're still clinging onto it because that's what feels safe. It feels safe to make jokes all the time. It feels safe to be very serious all the time. It feels safe to be depressed. It feels safe to give up. It feels safe to try and win at all costs, including your own health, etc. All these are defensive structures that once kept us safe, that I think in order to evolve, we almost want to say thank you.

30:51Thank you to your younger self for working this out, for finding a way of coping with reality. But could we learn to cope in a slightly different way? So great. I'm interested just taking that one step further and the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally. I think even in my less equanimous moments, when I do journaling, I find myself writing more of an essay than a personal inquiry. And the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally, again, for the cerebral -y -minded praying at the altar of cognitive horsepower people.

31:34It's coping mechanism to a way to distance yourself from this. Yes, and I think our minds, it is much easier to have the headline than the meat of the topic. And very often, we reach a sort of an uncomfortable state of half -knowing ourselves. And we think, oh, I've covered it, right? I know. In my childhood, there was this. and then there was this, and then there was that. And you've got to go to the headline, tension with my dad, or tricky with my mom, whatever it is. And we think, oh, I've got that. I've got that. I know it now. Let's go back to the Eastern Enzo circle, right? And the East says meditate for hours repeatedly on the thing that looks obvious, the thing that you know.

32:26So they're saying, the whole of life is that circle. So look at that circle. and keep coming back to it and the more you look at it, the more you will see in it. Now the Western approach is too impatient. It'll say, all right, yeah, there was tense with my dad. I know that. I'm going to go, okay, hang on, hang on, hang on, that's an Enzo of its own. I was tense with my dad. You could meditate around that for an hour a day or an hour a week, or whatever it is. You can keep coming back to that. It's never, there are so many things still to be discovered there. It's not dead. And so I think I'd almost want to excite, you know, those who are listening to think, okay, I think I know something.

33:06Do I really know it? Might I go back there? Are real experiences tend to be so much richer than our work -a -day sense of them? Think about a holiday, right? So have you ever been to Greece? Oh, yeah, I went to Greece. All right, if you've been to Santorini, yeah, I've been to Santorini. So we think we covered that one minute. The person's beat to Santa Rini. Hang on. First of all, our minds are amazing mechanisms of capture. We've got cameras around, sound equipment, etc. Nothing beats the human mind for capturing absolutely everything. Often the time to explore this is sort of twilight of your mind.

33:47You're going to sleep or waking up. If you say to yourself, yeah, Santa Rini, what was that like? What was it? What was it really like? And you realise, oh my god, I remember there was a tiled hallway that led to a blue door. I actually remember there was a flower in a little vase and there was light coming in from, I think it must be from the left. And actually, if I looked to the right, there was a little window, etc. And it's all there. It's all in your mind. Just waiting to be asked, waiting. This is the famous, can I talk about Proust? Ah, well, Marcel Proust, great French novelist, early 20th century, etc.

34:22came up with this very idea of the prustian moment. Some of you know, it's basically a moment when you take something sensory like a sip of water or a smell, imagine the smell of concrete after rain or the smell of snow just after a snowfall, etc. And suddenly you get that sensory experience and a world opens up. You think, oh my god, I'm five years old again and I've just gone outside of the garden of the yard where I grew up and there was a brick wall and there was that exact smell and I'm there again and suddenly your world becomes so much richer. And these are just little moments of expansion around a topic like after a snowfall or first air spring or Santorini or whatever it is.

35:10So in other words, many of the things that are in our minds in intellectually compressed rest forms can be expanded with the addition of, I mean, you know, the sort of fancy trendy modern word is meditation, but, but you know, some people don't get on with the word meditation. Let's just say, by giving it some time, by allowing an experience to assume its proper shape, and we do rush past our experiences, things are very compressed. And that's why, at the end of an average day, my goodness, how much we've seen, how much we've felt, how cross -consciousness. If we were able to give some of that space, how much lighter we would start to feel, but we live so much and we experience so little, we see so much and we notice so little.

35:59What would you say to the obsessive person who wants to learn to let go a little more, a lot of what I see in the circles that I move in as a need for control, a desire to limit down the potential paths that the future could go down to sort of constrain how unpredictable reality could be. And I think the optimization, life hacking, productivity, world is very much a part of this plus a denial of death. If I can fit more life into less time, then maybe it's kind of like living longer. But yeah, that need to control that obsessive sort of requirement to be able to wrangle reality as you wish. People learn to take their hands off the wheel a little bit more easily.

36:47Well, I think, I mean, I think the simple answer is that these people are running away from something which is painful and difficult, etc. And they're not allowing themselves to think about it. They're not even allowing it inside consciousness. So think of the, think of mania. Yeah, you know, but when we say sonzo is in a manic mood or sonzo is doing something manically, what we really mean is that they're doing something in order not to do something else, normally not think about something or feel something. And we all end up in certain points in manic states where, you know, we're scrubbing the kitchen just a little bit too acidiously or we're jockeying a bit too hard or we're scrolling are phones a bit too much.

37:32And really the question to ask ourselves at that time is a very simple which is if you weren't able to do what you're doing now, what might you need to think about or to feel and the answer is there waiting for you if you can if you can bear as it could be a very, very awkward question to ask yourself. In other words, you know, if you weren't able to clean the kitchen manually or if you're joking, etc. But you just sit with something. What So what you need to sit with, you know, the old saying, yeah, don't just sit there, do something, don't just sit there and think, do something. Well, imagine, you know, don't just do something, sit there and think, reverse it, you reverse it.

38:08And what is it that you need to think about? Yeah. Yeah. The coping mechanisms that we have and the inventive ways that we come up with, alchemizing and justifying, well, a lot of the time people will say, it better to be addicted to the gym than be addicted to drugs. I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement. If that's the binary choice, then of course. But then I realized recently, but maybe over the last year or so, I spent a lot of time meditating toward the end of my 20s and trying to turn myself out of the adult infant into maybe an adolescent. And most people would look at meditation, you know, sort of an emotional rises inside of you, you notice it, you release and allow.

38:55Like that's, you know, a common sort of tempo that you have. Brilliant. You know, you were no longer as at the mercy of this particular emotion. But it was only when I started doing therapy as first ever suggested by Charlotte, one of your ex -staff, school of life. It was only after doing quite a lot of that that I realized that even meditation or maybe breath work or going to the gym or whatever it might be is still another way of not having to actually investigate where that emotion has come from. And meditation particularly or something more like breath work perhaps is not nefarious, but it's a very, it's so close, it's internal, it feels sort of self -investigative, it's mindful, this is brilliant, you go, yeah, but that is going to continue to come up and you now have a coping strategy, it's not drugs, it's not even as obvious as you running 50 miles a week, but there is another strategy which is not forcing you to turn the eye back down to, where's this coming from?

39:59And why does it keep on arising? And if you have this very good strategy to release these things as they move through you, that cycle will continue. And I don't think, I think that those emotions are worth even investigation. So Chris, how do you define therapy? How do you define what therapy might bring you that's a bit different from meditation? I mean, I did twice a week psych therapy for the last year or so. And I've said this before, I learned more about myself in a year of twice weekly psychotherapy than I did in 1500 sessions of meditation. And if you could characterize what was different, but how therapy operates.

40:45You have another party investigating your statements, the language that you use. I use the analogy that it felt like living in a house your entire life, and then one day just inviting somebody else in, and they're walking around, and they start pointing out doors in a house that you know intimately well, every inch and they start pointing out doors that you never even knew existed. And you go, what's that over there? And you go and you open the door and you realize that the back of the kitchen actually leads into, I always wondered how those two things came together. And it's this sort of odd, it's very humbling.

41:19I found it very humbling experience to see somebody else who knows me for a hundred hours. Point and say, what about that? But I think one has to be really, I mean, that's a beautiful way of putting it. Why don't we totally relax about that and just say, in the same way that you can't see the back of your head, it's just one of those things. It's not, you know, we just, we can't see some very obvious things. I mean, a therapist, a trained therapist can see within minutes things that have eluded someone for their whole life. Very humbling. Very humbling. But, you know, someone can do it for the therapist as well.

41:55It's everybody is like this. we're just, that's how we're wired. And best thing to do is laugh is funny. I mean, it's funny how inept we are. But as everybody's in on the joke, we can laugh together. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Element contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other BS. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite and curbing cravings. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a beautiful sweet salty orangey nectar first thing.

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43:06You said talking about the emotion thing just from before and I think that this sort of comes into when you're regulating, opening up with someone whether it be a therapist, a friend, a partner, or whatever, the sort of need for comfort and reassuring kindness. Like, you can say these things. I'm not running away. I don't find you despicable. It's actually kind of interesting. Maybe it's charming for you to do this. I mean, this is so, you know, this is really very much at the core of what we could understand by the word love. You know, if a thing of it in childhood, a loving parent, right, the child, a young child, gets an experience that who they really are is acceptable to someone else.

43:49So, you know, child, little child will go, I hate the teacher. And the parent, you know, good parent is able to bear that. Even though it's not perfect, the parent is able to go, oh, okay, what, wonder, wonder why, what, what's, you know, why, why they upset you, might have upset you, rather than someone who go, don't be so silly, the teacher is the teacher.

44:13And That's, you know, that's a tough comment. Your emotion is not valid. Your emotion is not bad. I mean, you know, parents do their best, but goodness me, stuff happens in that crucible of childhood that is a bit suboptimal. But, you know, love, come back to love. What love is, is accepting. You know, I don't wanna see granny. Okay, you don't wanna see granny, all right? Or I really love you, or I really hate my sibling, or I really like the dog, or I wanna live forever. We know all the stuff that little children come up with, or I'm terrified of daddy actually. I don't like daddy. Okay, well, let's think about that.

44:45What does that mean? So being able to accept and then in later life, again, having someone, it could be a therapist, it could be a friend who was able to bear the really difficult bits of our psyches, which we all have. I mean, we're all so much weirder than we're supposed to be, so much sadder, so much more worried, etc. And to be able to have someone, you know, it might only be one person, or two, if we're really lucky, in three if we're, you know, God's gift, who can bear and who we've allowed into that sort of private sanctum. That was one of the realizations that Charlotte first taught me and then I learned through my therapy over the last year.

45:30One of the very unique parts of a therapeutic relationship is that you're allowed to be as small or boring or petty as you want and those are areas that were the friend or a partner. It's really difficult to do because you're managing optics in some way. I think it's my job to kind of entertain this person, even if they're there to sort of sit and listen with me. I can not that. Not the fact that the way that the lady in the canteen ladled my beans today seemed a little bit disparaging or you dismissive or something and like, oh my God, how shameful for me to think that that's something that should play on my mind.

46:05So small, you know, the story I tell the second, third, fourth order of emotions come in. And that is one of the very few, it's that and your mum are kind of... Not even your mum, because most, as you say, most relation, it was all relationships, you have to manage and you have to curtail the fear of being abandoned, if you are too honest. This again, the canteen lady and the beans again, this is the third time in two months. Think about how this plays out in couples, right? So people come together because they're fed up of being lonely, right? You know, you, you, it's lonely. So you try and find a special person and we, we dignified this concept by saying, I'm in a relationship, you know, I'm, I'm a special friend, I'm getting married, et cetera.

46:45We got these words. But really what this means is I'm no longer so alone in a terrifying world. So you have a special person. And in the early days of love, it's thrilling that you can say stuff that you wouldn't say to anyone else. And it's so delightful. You can say things like, you know, I still long for my teddy bear and they go, quite long for them too and then hug to the teddy bear. It's so amazing because you're the CEO and you're an important lawyer, doctor, banketer and actually you're clutching your teddy bear and it's amazing or you can go, I really wanna put mayonnaise on the pizza and that's great and then you push it further and then you go, I'm gonna go to a museum but I don't like any of the art or I don't like it either or I've never read that book but I always pretended I did and it's just thrilling and then sex gets invited is you go, I like this strange sounding thing and they go, I like it too, I like this other thing, etc.

47:34And you're building a wonderful universe, but this is the challenging thing about love, because let's imagine you're with this person and you share all this stuff, etc. And then you go to a cafe, say, and you say, wait as hot, and then you look at their face and they're like, look really quite hot, Brooke, that you've just commented on the visual appeal of waiting stuff. And they feel hurt and they feel jealous and they feel upset. And suddenly you think, oh my goodness, there's a choice here between kindness and honesty. And I think that's what we're circling around, which is, what moment does honesty run up against the limits of kindness or the requirements of kindness?

48:22And I think what you're saying about therapy is you don't have to be kind to the therapist because it's a 50 minute session, you're giving them money. And did people go, oh, it's a ball that you're giving them money? Well, Freud thought long and hard about this, about the role of money in therapy. And his view was, it's an agent of liberation. It's a good thing, he's a paper therapist. And that's where he wanted people to be cash and leave the cash on the table at the end of every session. Nowadays, you might put your card on, but the point is, it's a way of saying I can be fully myself because I've earned this person's attention.

49:01But they don't really love you, etc. And you go, maybe they don't really love you, but that's a liberation. Correct. Because there's no obligation. No obligation. Just lingering on that balance between transparency, emotional openness, and you said kindness, but I think that there's other reasons to edit too. Is there a place for editing yourself in a relationship? Should we not be open, honestly, communicating all the time? This is how I feel. You want to see the inner texture of my mind, don't you? I mean, you're putting a finger on a big paradox. I think the idea that you should be yourself in a relationship is one of the most disastrous ideas.

49:41Because the untrammeled self is a frightening specter. Best kept for you and your therapist, you're in the mirror. If you have to confront your partner with your stream of consciousness at all times, you can't do this. Parents don't do this with their children. Obviously, our partners are not children, but it's telling us something about love. In a loving relationship, at points, you edit yourself. It's 11 at night. I'm not going to bring that issue up. They're very tired. I'm not going to bring that up. I'm feeling stressed and raw. I'm not going to start a subject that I won't know how to handle, etc.

50:22Now, all of us fail at points, all of us fail in this area. But as I think as an ideal, it's a good ideal. I mean, I could stick up for a word which sounds very odd in the context of love, politeness. You know, it's a good idea to try and be polite. Oh my god, that's fake, that's fake. Well, it's also kind, you know, to edit yourself, to put a veneer of civilization on certain things. Yeah, why not? There's a very slippery slope with that, though. A lot of people, especially if they have started doing therapies and self -increase and emotional work, think, God, I should push the amount that I'm emotionally open.

51:03I should improve my transparency for so long. I'd played a role. I was terrified of making my needs known. My desire is putting myself first, realizing that I even have needs. I'm putting those out there. And now there's these odd bits of territory that I shouldn't stray into. What happens if I stray over there and the tendency for you to over -correct and go in the other direction? Neil Strauss says unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. And we have this balance between the two. Yeah, you're absolutely right. There is some people who need to work on being more transparent, more communicative, and others, you need to be less technical word, I think for it is reactive.

51:47They're not, you shouldn't come out with whatever it is that you're feeling at all times in its full force. It just depends. I mean, that classic, anxious, avoidant attachment pattern, we might say that on the whole, avoidant people need to work on their communication skills and they need to be more transparent and avoidant and anxious people, need on the whole to contain certain feelings. And it's just horses for courses on this one. What would be your advice to people in the classic anxious, avoidant relationship, the two polarities coming together? Understand, understand, understand where each one's coming from.

52:26I mean, why is someone an avoidant? They're not evil. They're not mean. They're not, you know, it can be pretty horrible to be on the receiving end of certain kinds of pattern of behaviour. But let's remember, why does this exist? Someone becomes avoidant when they've grown up in a calorie, emotional calorie control diet, environment where they have had to get used to very little. The way they survive is, mom's not so interested, dad's not interested, there's no caregiver around, a lot of disappointment, I'm just going to hunker down and get used to very little. Literally like an animal that gets used to a very thin diet.

53:01that is what has happened to an avoidant person. And then when they get to love and someone goes, I adore you, let's spend every evening together, let's, you know, you're more marvelous. They feel a bit often they don't even understand that they're feeling it totally engulfed. They feel overwhelmed. They feel their very identity is in threat of dissolution by something that's lovely, but it's too much too soon. And what they need is an experience of love titrated. They need the titration of love. But often they don't know how to ask for it. They don't even know. Often they might smile through it and go, I'm not really feeling this and then they can't bear it and they can't bear it and then they run away or just become weird.

53:42So explanation. Hello, I'm somebody who had to get used to a very calorie -controlled diet emotionally. I really feel warmly. This relationship matters a lot to me. But the kindest thing is not to be too kind to me in an overwhelming way. The most generous thing is not to be too abundant. Not because I don't want this, but because I grew up in a situation deprivation. So that's our avoidant friend. Anxious friend, similar kind of story of explanation. Why did people become so called anxious? Normally, because unlike the avoidant person, they have had an experience of love. So some ways the anxious person has had a better childhood, better journey through life.

54:24in a way. They have experienced love, but they've also experienced loss and a disruption of that attachment. So someone died, someone went away, someone had to go to the army, something happened to disrupt the bond. It was very intense, but it was disrupted. And that person needs to understand that they are, you know, there's a wonderful sentence from Donald Winnicott, great psychoanalyst, you said, the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened. And the key thing is it's been forgotten. You forgot the catastrophe and that's why you keep seeing it in the future where it actually belongs in the past.

55:00So what you need to do is understand this structure and we patriate the emotion and put it back where it belongs. And so the avoidant person at dinner, you know, on an early date needs to go, you know, I really want to believe in your love. But if you say you love me, I might not be able to believe it very easily. And what I will do is test it. And the person might go, Oh, test it, fine, fire away. And the anxious person should go, Yeah, this test can be quite unhealthy, quite horrible. You know, it's, it's going to mean that when you say, I love you, I'm going to start to act up because I want to see if it you really do.

55:41So I'm going to be really difficult around you because not because I don't want you, but because I want to test whether your affection is really real and the only way I know how to do that, because I'm carrying this stuff from childhood, is to act up, play up. And so when we're in a nice restaurant and you tell me that, you know, things great, I'm going to say, actually the food's not that nice and then, don't really like the clothes you're wearing, and I'm going to cause a drama. Why to test whether their love is real, very unfortunate. So the more the anxious friend can get on top of their anxiety, the more they can translate everything I've just said into something that sounds like it's been processed and can be understood by another person, then the better it can be.

56:21So

56:25anxious and avoidant people are walking wounded and they need to be able to explain the nature of their particular wound so that appropriate care can be set up. Awareness, awareness, which is why, you know, it's great for people to go to therapy. It's great for people to explore themselves. It's not merely fancy, it's not merely whatever. It's a serious indicator of an easier life with them. I mean, if you're with a partner who's able to go, okay, hang on a minute. I think I'm slipping down. I think I'm confusing you with my mother at the moment, or I think an anger that actually belongs to my father is weirdly in the room, because that's what happens when you start to explore your past, you see the intermingling of past and present all the time.

57:12And the more you're able to handle on that and warn your partner, the easier it is. I mean, we don't need people to be perfect, we need people to understand how they're imperfect and warn us of the coming imperfection, or retrospectively be apologised for it in relatively civilised terms. That's what we need. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I'm such a massive fan of momentas. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet. If you've been struggling with your sleep quality, their sleep packs are one of my favourite products, which I use every single night before I go to bed.

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58:19Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 20 % off everything sight -wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom, a checkout that's LIVEMOME and Tious .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. How malleable are our attachment styles? The foundations of them able to genuinely be moved, or is it a case that the best we can hope for is to just compensate for them in adult life? I'm hopeful here that we can definitely make progress from wherever we start, we can make progress, that a temperament where we're inclined to close ourselves off, because we constantly think that no one will be able to understand us.

59:07Once we start to think, okay, this is what I do. I feel very easily misunderstood and I go and essentially sulk. Once you notice that, that's a big step. You know, and we're so good at marking milestones. It's somebody's birthday. Let's throw a party. It's you know Somebody's just run a marathon. Let's give them a medal, etc We need different kinds of medals, you know the medal for the avoidant person who understood that they sulk rather than explain Don't let's put them on television. Let's give a game show in their honor These are major milestones. Let's give a party. Let's give a party to the person who's understood that that's going on to mark there's much more significant than their birthday, which might not be tracking anything significant.

59:47That's a significant milestone. So we should give more public within our circles, public recognition of moments of emotional maturation. And how much is that? I think that lots of people envy the other side. If only I could have a little bit of a little bit more of that anxiousness. If only I could actually lean in a little bit more, if I could feel a little bit more easily, if I could communicate, or, God, if I could just be a little bit more distant, if I didn't need the reassurance in this way, if I didn't have this requirement to feel safe in order to be able to feel comfortable, if I wasn't externalizing my own sense of self -worth onto somebody else quite in this sort of way.

1:00:35Yeah, I think it's a question. Attachment styles are kind of the hot new girl in school, psychological, emotional work at the moment, very trendy. It's been around a while. And it's based on very solid science. We've been going for 50 years. I looked at some really interesting stuff recently that attachment styles, like everything psychologically, genetically predisposed, not necessarily predetermined, but predisposed, and given that you are raised in the environment, which is probably the breeding ground for that very predisposition, and get reinforced. So not only have you got the raw materials to make this thing happen, but unless your parents have somehow managed to sort of pivot in the opposite direction, you then get this additional boost, which is, well, the environment, nature came along and nurture, then enhanced it.

1:01:26Yeah, it's interesting. It's gonna be interesting, I think, over the next few years to see what sort of interventions we have to be able to help people to ameliorate. Yes, and I think not trying to sound trendy and think, but I think AI is going to have a real impact on us in a sense that so often what happens is we lose sight in the moment of things we know, but are no longer in our minds. And so people will have, let's say a couple have a rather sort of a torrid time, difficult time, and then each one goes to therapy in the week. And then they all come back and they're starting to back on track.

1:02:06They can see things more clearly again, or they spent some time alone, they're journaled, etc. I can imagine a world where we allow technology to nudge us. In the same way that we've learned that technology can nudge us awake, nudge us asleep, nudge us to eat this, nudge us, you know. Imagine a little nudge for an avoidant, a little nudge for an anxious person, etc. A little reminder, hang on, hang on, hang on. You're slipping, you're sliding. And, you know, psychologists talk about the window of tolerance, where it's a window in which you're in charge emotionally or you're kind of in control and you slip out of the window of tolerance into something, you know, you lose command of yourself.

1:02:47And you can imagine a little AI helper just nudging you to stay within the window. Yeah, your attachment strap has piped up and said, notice you're a little bit stressed at the moment. This might be because of X, Y and Z. Yes, and you know, it sounds supernatural and strange and you know, a lot of people would say things like, oh, it's not, you know, I don't want to get my data blah, okay. I grant all of that and you know, it could be spooky, etc. It's no different from, you know, think of, people who got their first word religions. Religions understood that if you want to keep people on track, you've got to get them repeating stuff.

1:03:19It's not enough to tell someone something once you need rituals, systems of memorializing the important things. That's why, you know, if you're in Islam, if you're Muslim, you know, you'll be praying a num - multiple times a day. You'll be saying the same words because those words have a - as it were been forgotten, not intellectually but emotionally. The full resonance has been forgotten. In Judaism, you're reading the Torah every Saturday in synagogue. You're reading the Torah and you just go back over it. You don't just read it once, you keep reading, you keep going back to the same important text.

1:03:57We're very bad at that in the modern world. We think, oh, well, I read this book on attachment. It was quite interesting. And now that's it. I know it now. No, no, no, no, you don't. You need to go back. You need to read it all the time. That's why, you know, the idea of nudging is not as strange as it might sound. Not as futuristic. It's a very old idea that you You might give one of the most shameful or humbling realizations of going down a personal development journey for a while is that the tool that you're looking for to the problem you're encountering now is not only something that you know.

1:04:31It's one of the first things that you ever discovered when you began this journey. It's maybe something you wrote about. It's maybe something that you practice for a very long time. And I often get asked at, I was doing these live events recently in one of the most common questions is, what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago? The interesting thing about that question, I think, is that the answer that you give, what you would tell yourself 10 years ago is almost always invariably the answer that you right now need to hear as well, because the big problems remain the big problems because they're so fundamental to who you are.

1:05:01If they weren't fundamental to who you are, they would probably not be the big problems. If you're able to detox it, it's the ancillary stuff. It's the extraneous outside that you end up tinkering with, but the core, you know, the middle of the cake is this chocolate is its robbery That's really where it is and Yes to think Not only is this challenge that I'm encountering I you know to break the fourth wall I've used a number of videos from the School of Life Over the last decade when I've encountered the same situations like I already I I've not only if I watch this, there's been periods where I've learned in typacidius from this as a little mantra that I can reflect on.

1:05:44I go, I'm going back to the same, but that you read this temptation novel, new, there is a there is a better answer, five years hence. There must be something that's come out in the last however long. And I guess this is what art and heritage history does, that it helps to sort of stripped out of the way. What's stood the test of time? What's been sufficiently Lindy that it's still with us now? Yeah. You know, it's T .S .L. is in the four quartets is, you know, we return to the place where we started. It's the idea of that that's kind of part of every journey. You come back to the place where you start.

1:06:18That entire story of the alchemist by Paolo Quaylor, right? Right. Exactly. And so, I noticed also when you were speaking just now, you're smiling your lips and that's not coincidental. I think the more, you know, one journey's through life, The more there's really only one major solution, which is a smile and one's lips at the share. That's what it bluntly. Idiocy. Absurdity. Absurdity of oneself at the School of Life. We did a class on confidence and we wrote a little book about confidence. Great book. And thank you. And I remember sitting with my co -author, great friend of mine called John Armstrong.

1:06:58And I said to John, Because we started the topic, she was like, okay, what makes us confident? And we'd read a few books, each of us, I'm like best selling books. And they're saying things like repeat yourself, how great you are, repeat yourself your potential, get in touch with, what's the problem? And I said, I read all these books, and I'm starting to feel humiliated. I feel like I'm stressed. I know that it's kind of wise, but I don't know. And then I remember John's saying to me, okay, what makes you for confident? and I said, if somebody goes, it's okay, you can just be a total idiot. It's all right, you're a bit of an idiot.

1:07:33And it's okay, not you're an idiot, but we're all idiots. That makes me feel I'm ready to play. I'm ready to have fun. I'm ready to take risks. Remove the seriousness. Remove, well, remove the un -inhuman expectation of what a human life can be. Pressure. And accept that we're all of us blockheads who can't really make very much progress. And, you know, there's a wonderful painting, which we put in the book by Broiko. This is the ship at sea. Yeah, well, the ship of fools. And, and, anyway, forget this exact title. But it's showing people doing mad things, silly things. One person's eating is for the other one's walked into a wall, the third one's jumping off a cliff.

1:08:16And it just shows human folly in all its exaggeration. And you think, yeah, that's us, that's we humans. And that opens up such an avenue of compassion. You just think, okay, compassion for yourself, compassion for the other, we're all flailing back in the darkness and if we can have a relaxed relationship to our foolishness and our blindness, that's a huge confidence booster. Yeah, I want to try and linger on that as well. I think, again, the sort of people that listen to this show, the sort of people that read your work, they'll probably take life seriously. They think it's a thing that you're supposed to apply earnest pressure to, perhaps a kind of dynamic persistence, but maybe more persistent than dynamic.

1:09:02And what's your advice for people to try and embrace some more playfulness when it comes to life serious, serious things? I want to be taken seriously. I want to do things. I want to make an impact in the world. I don't want to the way is not to not to say, oh, what you need is bit, you know, lighten up and tell a few jokes because I think that's not going to that's going to rile people up. I think the thing to do is to push some pessimism their way because it's actually, if you think about what a joke is, a joke is always basically a bit of pessimism wrapped up in, you know, artfully wrapped, but it's basically pessimism.

1:09:42One of my favorite sayings by the Stoic philosopher, Sennaka, he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life. He says the whole of it calls for tears. And everyone who's a his that sort of gets a smile on their face. And you think the guy wasn't trying to tell a joke. He wasn't trying to make it funny. He was just trying to be bleak and or to say how it is. And then it makes a smile out of relief. And the relief is few. It's not just me. Arthur Schopenhauer, another great pessimistic German philosopher, said today it is bad tomorrow it will be worse until the worst of all happens. Yes.

1:10:21You know, totally bleak. And you read that and you think, I feel a bit better about today already. I'm starting to cheer up. I think we really get it wrong, but we think we think the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them someone cheer something cheerful. I think the the brits have understood this, you know, right? We, you know, great. This country's got lots of problems, but one thing it understands is melancholy and the relief available in dark humor and you know bless our American friends but they don't get it. If you pitch up in LA and someone goes how are you and you go you know it's bad today to more of me worse to the worst of all happens.

1:11:01I don't know if you're sectioned. It's not you're not your life in Los Angeles is not going to take off. I've heard you refer to melancholy as tragedy well handled. Absolutely. I adore that. I think it's so great. Sam Harris says something very similar. You have to smile at the absurdity of life. These situations, just as things were smooth, something comes along and completely sideswipes what you had planned. And an interesting insight, I suppose, that the volume that you complain is probably proportional to the amount that you aren't, you're unable to see life for what it is, which is not at your whim.

1:11:49Life is going to have problems thrown at you. Yeah, but Chris, let's not do down complaining. I mean, it's one of the great pleasures. It's one of the great past times. Well, you know, it's one of everybody, you know, and, you know, being able to complain to a loved one and you'll have to listen to their complaints too. But to complain without expectation of a solution, I mean the big complaint that every mortal, you know, directs to the sky, ultimately is why do I have to die? And you know, and then you work your way down from that to why do I have to go to work, why do I, you know, all these things.

1:12:19But yes, life would be a poor thing if we weren't allowed to spend a good deal part of it complaining. I've heard you say that adult relationships are a litmus test of our emotional development. that there are a moment where your past catches up with your present. How so? What is that the case? So the way we love as adults always bears the imprint of the way which we were loved and we loved as children. And that hugely restricts how we're able to behave and explains the very peculiar, often nonsensical, often counterproductive ways in which we love. We're not free to love just anyone. And this, you know, I'm sure you all have had this in your life, met people, etc.

1:13:05Who will say things like, seem to have ended up with quite a difficult person for me. You know, they're really, they're quite challenging for me. Why can't I go in love with somebody else? Why am I so in love with this person who's quite challenging? And often it's because what's challenging sits on the very area that was challenging in your past. And that's what makes them attractive. Now before we want to jump off a cliff at the pessimism involved Let's be a little optimistic here in a good relationship We are drawn towards people who yes carry some of the puzzle some of the knots some of the challenges of a parental figure or figure of a caregiver But they hold out the promise of a different ending So, whereas in the relationship with parent or caregiver, it ended up with shouting and you stormed out of the house and you're no longer in touch with them.

1:13:59Imagine the joy, imagine the sense of triumph over adversity and human noncommunication if you are together as a couple able to move towards understanding and mutual growth. I think that explains why people hang in there with people who you might think, you know, take, you know, from that, attachment theory. An anxious person who teams up with an avoidant one, you might wanna go, why? Why are you with this avoidant person? Look at this other, I'm gonna present you with a perfectly securely attached person. You go, they're a bit boring. Don't really want them. You say, why? What's going on is this pure perversion.

1:14:39Let's be generous towards that impulse, that trying to find a different ending to probably a very painful early situation. And to be able to do that, to be able to grow together is, literally I think one of the most exciting and lovely things, it's rare, which is why successful love is rare. But to grow together away from your early attachment wounds powers a lot of the ambition of love. We'll get back to talking to a lion in one minute, but first I need to tell you about function. Stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body be staying on top of your health requires more than just an annual physical, which is why I partnered with function.

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1:15:50Right now, you can discover where your health stands by going to the link in the description below, are heading to functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. Seems like deciding whether to stay in or leave a relationship can sometimes be a protracted decision, which might be surprising given that we have the short time on earth and we don't want to waste it. I think a lot of people have problems breaking up with someone even though they might not make them particularly very happy. Why do people get stuck in unhappy relationships in that way? Hmm. Um, there are, you know, I think the mood of the modern world, the mood of modern Instagram I've observed is all about, well ditch them, chuck them, run away.

1:16:37It's a pure pathology. You are, you are sticking around someone's suboptimal for purely pathological reasons. That's got to be true in some cases. It is definitely true in some cases. But because it's so well known nowadays that that's true, let's stick up for the other side. Sometimes we stick around very challenging situations because we want to try and grow together, we want to try and make progress. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. It's a balance. I don't want to advocate an endlessly unfulfilling relationship. But good relationships will be marked by heavy dose of what's that, so that's what's called rupture and repair, a break and a repair.

1:17:30And the ability to, you know, the thing crashes at night, but the next morning it's fixed. You know, our friends in the East, you know, the Japanese tradition of Kinsuki fixing that, that bowl with golden lacquer, fixing the break. It's a very, very important and satisfying trying part of all relationships. Yeah. Yeah. What about the people who are in a relationship but don't have the courage to leave? They probably have this stuff. They feel stuck. Sort of stuck in this unsatisfactory, not abusive, not terrible, but just they have that fear, pulling the pen, making a move. You talked about primary, secondary emotions.

1:18:15Let's not shame these people. Right, let's not add to their woes that they are deficient and ill in some way. They're finding something very hard and that's okay. Let's bear with how difficult it is. You know, again, I'm frustrated by the modern tempo, which is like, get out, shoot the awful person, you know, and join the liberated uplands. Maybe, maybe, and maybe that is what they're going to do. But, you know, let's be very thoughtful about why they've ended up there. Let's not, you know, this might just be... They might find 100 things in life quite easy. This is what they're finding difficult.

1:18:56And let's acknowledge that. Let's be very kind to that. And let's hold their hands through it. You know, why? What's difficult for them? Is it that they think that they'll be judged by other people? right? What's the fear? What's the fear? I'll be judged by the way. Okay, how does that fear stack up is? What might really happen? Or I'll never meet anyone new? Okay, let's think about that. Let's not immediately say, oh, you will. Maybe they won't, you know, take it calmly, etc. I just, I'm really resistant to some of this narrative, which is, you know, get out, get rid of all four underperforming people and get into that golden relationship.

1:19:36There's been promised you in heaven. It's not, you just acknowledge the bumps. Yeah, I think it's unrealistic. There's a lot of people who just don't want to make a fuss that this sort of fear, this question, is it fair to want what I want? You mentioned before, how do people that from the outside go, why? Why? Her with him. I him with her. Why would that union happen? And we don't get to choose what we love in many ways. You know, absolutely not. We are, you know, we think we've done away with the arranged marriage. No, we haven't. It's just become an emotionally arranged marriage internally arranged rather than arranged by our parents.

1:20:21Yeah, I think again, for the cerebral pre -disposed, you kind of rail against that. Why can't I? If only I could, can you not get in line with you? Please, all of the things they're there in front of me. They have the... And we get literally irritated and just to be able to understand, it's like saying, you know, why can't Mount Everest be smaller? Why can't there's Sky, B less blue? We're trying to change the constituent element of reality. And I think we need to have as much respect for the inner architecture as we do for the outer architecture. You wouldn't look at a building and go, I just want to get rid of that wing immediately.

1:21:00You'd understand that it was incredibly difficult. It's the same thing. just because it's intangible doesn't mean it's not incredibly stubborn and hard to change. Do we need to build to create the capacity to give up on people? And that way does that help? Yes, I think some of us do. Again, it's, life's all about finding what's the thing that what's the lesson that you need to hear? So there are some people, not everyone, But some people really need to hear a little lesson about how sometimes they should give up on people. But sometimes making excuses for people or trying to understand where people are coming from, etc.

1:21:39It can go too far. That those very nice traits can go too far. And that the next best thing that you need to do is to be able to say goodbye without too much regret. That might be the lesson that you need to do. And let's remember, the people who, on the whole, find it very hard to give up on people, are people who couldn't give up as children can't on parents who were very unsatisfactory. You can't expect a five -year -old child to give up on a parent. So a parent can be beating the child every night and the child will think, oh, maybe it's my fault, because the child cannot bear to give up on the parent and do the thing that would be natural to do, just to say, I'm in the hands of an abusive parent.

1:22:18You can't do that when you're five. You've got no access to lawyers, you've got no money, you can't go anywhere, you are trapped and therefore you become a world expert in not giving up on people. But some of our adulthood requires is precisely the opposite. Sometimes. Getting perilously close to people pleasing here and that sort of tendency to put other people's emotions ahead of our own make their emotional state our responsibility. If you're not okay, I'm not okay. How can we better alchemize that and understand that that tendency? I mean, look, let's remember, so the psychology of the so -called people pleasing person is someone who no one tried to please for themselves.

1:23:01In other words, they were in asymmetrical relationship, probably with a caregiver or a parent, who didn't care about their feelings, they didn't prioritize their men needs, etc. And they had to adjust to them. So, you know, if you've got a parent with a volcanic temper, where anything might set them off, well, what you say or think is going to disappear completely, because all you're going to be doing as a child is managing the mood of a parent. They will be at infant, essentially, and you will have to be in the parenting role, and you'll have to put aside your needs. And children are great geniuses at reading the room and doing what needs to be done to survive.

1:23:39It's a survival strategy. I will become a people pleaser, not in order to annoy people in later life, but in order to survive, not to get to the next stage of existence, in order to reach adolescence, it's facing. And the problem with in this, as in so many other neurotic structures, is a very good idea outlives its use. And so it's still operating in circumstances where it's no longer needed. So what we need to tell, what the people needs and needs to tell themselves is it was amazing at the age of five. I cleverly worked out that I needed to people please in order to cope with my intemperate father.

1:24:12But that situation is now gone. And if I keep doing this with my partner, with my colleagues, etc. It's going to annoy everybody and it's going to create serious problems. So what needs to be done is that person shouldn't feel shamed. They should be made to feel proud. There should be a little ceremony where they're able to say to their five year old self, thank you. Thank you, little whatever it is. Thank you for carrying me to a later stage and working out something so clever. And this applies for all defensive neurotic structures. I mean, let's imagine somebody who can't feel very much, who's invulnerable, doesn't open themselves up to other people.

1:24:47And in relationships, that person may be shamed. Oh, so and so all that, they're afraid of intimacy. You want to go, okay, shaming this person's not going to help. You have to ask a dozen other questions, which is In what circumstances did their current behavior make sense? First question. And it always will make sense. You go back in time and you say, right, in those circumstances, of course it may, your father was dying, your mother was absent. Of course it made sense not to feel anything. You would have been destroyed by your feelings. Therefore, very clever, five or six year old you, to work out that it's best not to feel.

1:25:21Problem is, you have now 35 or 45, and there's lots of reason to feel because there's someone loving nearby or you've got children or whatever. And therefore we need to say thank you to the younger self and then we can move on, but shame is not going to do it. To wag a finger and go, oh, another one who's afraid of intimacy there. No one ever changed like that. Yeah, the realization that doing that internally, being a tyrant to yourself also isn't necessarily the best way to encourage you into behavior change, whipping yourself into submission. Yeah. But it's missing the logic of why you're doing what you're doing.

1:26:00As I say, so much of what we do as adults makes no sense even to us. Why am I worried every morning? Again, ask yourself the question. It's a key question for your viewers. Listeners, when did the current behavior, which now doesn't seem to make sense, when did it once make sense? In what circumstances did this pattern develop, this pattern that is now in verticals mad or destructive or boring or counterproductive. When did it make sense? And if you can start to see a logic and there always will be one, I would suggest, almost always will be one. There will be a moment when to feel anxious every morning was bound up with your safety and your survival to the next stage of life.

1:26:41So if you can recover contact with what that stage was, you will then be in a position to honour the defensive strategy but also say goodbye to it. What are some of the best and worst ways to tell somebody that it's over in a relationship?

1:26:59One of the worst ways is not to explain at all why some things come to feel necessary. In other words, just running away and leaving someone no sense because that then leaves the person to imagine everything. And most of our imaginations of dark places in this regard. In other words, we think that someone hates us boundlessly or is trying to humiliate us or deliberately wanted to be cruel to us, etc. And in many, many cases, I venture to say most cases when someone leaves someone, it isn't those things. The truth is better than we think. It's still tough, you know, it's very, very tough. You know, those attachment ruptures in everyone's life, If some of them is painful things we will ever have to go through to build a life with someone and then see that life disappear.

1:27:50I mean, we need space to mourn in Judaism when someone dies, you know, to lose a spouse. You're allowed a year of mourning. You're allowed, you're black and you're allowed a year of mourning. We're not too much as expected of you both professionally and personally. You can go bit mad and that's all right. Everyone looks after you. They know you're in mourning. We kind of need that when we're heartbroken, because we're dealing with something that is from an emotional point of view, as serious, this is as serious. As a lot, I mean, this literally is a lot. Someone has died. And so we need that space.

1:28:29So come back to your question, how to break up, to be able to explain diplomatically, kindly, generously, some of the real reasons why. And as the person who's leaving not to feel that those reasons, not to be ashamed of those reasons, you know, people feel Relationships don't have to go on forever. Sometimes relationships have a cell by date. They are there They were formed for a particular purpose unconscious to carry us to a next stage And maybe that stage has come to an end for someone and we can explain that we can try and You know verbalize that But also clarity and sometimes people try to be kind in ways that end up being very, very cruel.

1:29:17I want to leave you, but let's go and holiday together. Can you start a wise thing? Or I want to leave you, but let's be in touch every day. I'll just still call you what I used to call you when we were very intimate. That's tough. That's tough. So we may, couples may out of kindness and a mutual respect go, there's still a lot of loves a lot of affection, but probably shouldn't be in touch that much for a little while. You think it's a bad idea for X's to try and be friends? Look, it depends, but I think, I think, you know, there needs to be healing, doesn't there, there needs to be a break that's marked and honored so that two people can recover.

1:29:58How do you come to think about the balance between fixing our patterns, investigating them and dwelling on them. It seems like a lot of criticism is thrown at sort of reflecting on our past as akin to indulging in it in a way, not allowing us to move forward. This is a common debate that I'm seeing online at the moment. Yeah, some people I think are very afraid about responsibility here, aren't they? They're very afraid that someone will go, oh, sorry, I did that thing, but the thing is much i -altered and that's why it, you know, and the people will evade basic responsibility. So I think one can take full responsibility, full ownership, while still explaining it.

1:30:38People are also very worried about blaming parents often. That's another one that comes up a lot. People will go, if I start to investigate patterns, etc. The only solution is then to get angry with my parents. Well, again, there's a real, you know, people are lied, was like anger, blame, etc. You can say this happened because of child dynamics. No one really wanted it, no one's evil, but it definitely happened. And we can't evade that. Is the result anger or fury? It doesn't have to be. Sometimes it could be. Look, so many of these lessons, it's horses for courses. We need to... Rod strokes are very difficult with stuff like this.

1:31:21I understand that. But yeah, I think dealing with an unhappy childhood, retrospectively not resenting things that happened to us then and were now at the mercy of wanting to be able to investigate why we are the way we are whilst not allowing that to define us. I don't know, there's an interesting movement at the moment, almost towards denial, you know, the horseshoe was horseshoeed back around it. It's been rotated a couple of times. And I wonder whether this is just a requisite pushback to some of the over pathologization of normal human emotions. You know, the use of therapy language online that somebody hasn't been mean to me that caused me trauma, that that person isn't selfish, they're anastasis.

1:32:11And yeah, I'm starting to see now a little bit more of a lean away from reflecting on why you are the way you are. And again, it's very much, this is just one cohort of people saying that cohort of people over there, their strategy doesn't work for me and the vice versa. Look, I mean, we're a car that needs different gears. You know, some of these are going forward, some of these are going backwards, we need to turn right, we need to turn left, we need full maneuverability, right? And I think when people discover an exciting idea, the great tendency is to go, well, this toolkit will explain absolutely every correct and this will be the only thing I need.

1:32:47And you know, this is why we need the whole history of ideas. This is why Wellstocked Mind has got in it, you know, some books on the Stoics. As it were, some ideas from the Stoics. Some ideas about resilience and about shutting down emotion and about turning towards pain and all that. We need that. Sometimes we need an aristocratic side. We might have read Nietzsche and his aristocratic sense of, you know, you need to overcome. And you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, etc. Sometimes we need Nietzsche. But if you only die at thing on nature, you may also need, you know, John Bolby in attachment theory, but if you're only snacking on Bobby, so we need a well -stocked mind.

1:33:24And I think that, as I say, I appreciate that people fall so in love with certain ideas that they think that's all they're going to need. It's rather, you know, it's monotheism. You know, only one got. And, you know, the great thing about paganism, you know, ancient Roman or Greek religion, but you know, he's finally in India too and other parts of the world. There were many gods. There was the god of the ripper, but there was also the god of the sky. There was the god of the cloud and there was the god of rain and there was the god of sunshine. There's got many, many gods and we need many gods.

1:33:57And just as in our social lives, let's remember, total monotheism doesn't, you know, it's like, I need one lover and they will answer all my needs. Ah, that's quite tough on the lover. You may also need a friend who's brilliant at that thing and his friend who's also good at this. So we need a paganism of ideas. My friend, Gwinda has this idea called the golden hammer. When someone, usually an intellectual who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept, becomes so drunk with power, he thinks he can apply that concept to everything. Exactly. Exactly. We think it's the hammer that the one size fits all.

1:34:33And this is everything looks like a nail that slots into your very specific, very fancy gilded piece of work. Look, we can forgive it. It's very exciting when you come across an idea that you think and does explain a lot of the world. And these wands, when people discover Marxism, they go, my goodness, this model explains everything. And then, no, it's really good, it's been certain things. And then they discover Freud, Freudianism, it explains everything. No, go steady. We need multiple tools. I wonder whether this helps to constrain some of the complexity of the world as well. Well, if I have one book, if it's meditations or if it's…

1:35:17If it's some ancient Chinese text, if we're looking at some Laosu or something, you think, well, that one thing answers everything, I don't need to look elsewhere. Yes, and the problem is that we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity So the the battlefield is stacked somewhat the deck is is offset against our favor And if we can constrain down the complexity that we're fighting with we said what we've got this one person and he's got all of the unspoken guy has all of the answers Why I don't know You know you've seen in religion we see it in politics one person has got you know it's got everything and and it can't be true but you're right.

1:35:55I mean, we're drowning in inputs and that leads us to a certain kind of, yeah, remorseless quest for the one input. And I remember there was a, there was a, there's a line saying something like, all of us are going to die with a book half -read on our bedside. It might not literally be true, but there's capturing something important there that our exploration will be unfinished. It's quite daunting. It's very sad, very sad thought. You know, that we won't, and of course, the book that we really won't finish reading is the book of ourselves. We won't have understood more than a share of ourselves.

1:36:37That's very frightening. We all have, you know, on an average gravestone, it should say, you know, here lies, you know, who half understood who they were. They only are understood. That's very weird. You're on your deathbed and you don't really know who you have been. Was it Gerta on his deathbed pronounced? Nobody really knows me. I don't really know anybody else. Nobody knows anyone really. So that kind of despair surrounded by friends and family. What a way to cut and call. So you let it run. Yeah, he said. Speaking on that, do you think it's inevitable for deep thinkers to be more lonely? Is the deep or sensitive thinker kind of fated to have a bit of distance?

1:37:23It's a ticklish topic, isn't it? Because to say, you know, I'm not doing so well in life. I'm a bit isolated from things because I'm so marvellous. You know, you could go, come on. Yeah. You know, however, let's face it. Look, it's like, imagine you had a very sophisticated diet and you walk through, you know, we're in London now, you walk through every street of London. There would be fewer restaurants and eating places and supermarkets that you could go into to get the food that you need because your dietary needs will be quite complicated. There's a version of this around social ability. If you only need to talk about certain things, you know, if you are, I didn't, let's imagine your Brian Cox, we do, I didn't know Brian Cox personally.

1:38:11And you really just really love interplanetary phenomena. You're not going to meet that many people who will really be able to meet you on those topics. I mean, or even be that interested. I might go to a Brian, I love to show, but you know, enough of the black holes. You know, and so he might find himself a little bit lonely. I mean, who knows about his life? I'm sure he's, you know, but used to be a rock star. You know that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or imagine if you are, I don't know, imagine if you were Freud. And Freud was, you know, he had some collaborators, but he also fell out with a lot of them and didn't get on with, you know, lots of people.

1:38:50So, So one might argue that complexity of mind militates against easily finding some people like you. I would say that's fair enough.

1:39:09We mentioned we sort of touched on it earlier and I think it's maybe worth just revisiting a little bit trying to the deeper thinker, the more serious person, the earnest person, how can they find more fun, inject a little bit less of that loneliness in that they're in an area where maybe people don't resonate quite so much. They don't have quite so many of the conversations that they need. Can I ask a slightly different question? I'm just because, look, are these really important to think that the deep thinker, the earnest person, etc. I don't want to suggest that there are these people called geniuses wandering around the world, and they've got, they're so different from everybody else.

1:39:55I love this quote from Emerson, where he says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. So key. In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. I think what he was saying there was geniuses don't have thoughts of categorically different from the ones everybody has. What's different is they hold on to them. They look at them. They feel them. You could say in the minds of artists, life feelings that you know lie our own neglected feelings. In other words, artist geniuses etc. They just pay more attention to the stuff that's in everybody's mind. It's not that their stuff in their mind is completely radically different, which is why often when you hear a great song or a great, um, piece of poetry or whatever, or read a great book, sometimes you think, I kind of knew that.

1:40:44That was already in me, that I'm merely being put back in touch with something that's in me already, because what the so -called clever person has done is just pay it more attention. So let's not dayify these people and let's also open up, you know, quickest way to become a genius, pay more attention to your own neglected thoughts.

1:41:05I'm interested, you know, having followed your work for a very, very long time. And it's been one of the most reliably influential things, I think, on my intellectual journey. So I want to thank you for parasocially guiding me through an awful lot of situations. I'd like to say that I remind myself of your work when things are good, but it does tend to be the sort of thing that I go to when I need a little bit more guidance. But I'm interested in what drives you the sort of primary motivating forces that are behind your studies and sort of thinking over the years. So it's brutally and horribly simple just to help me get through the day.

1:41:47It is extremely personal and motivated entirely by a desire for self -help. If it helps anybody else, I mean, people sometimes say things like, gosh, you must have studied a lot. How did you know that about me? And I'm like, frankly, I'm no clear. I was just doing my stuff. And it's beautiful and lovely that it should echo in somebody else. But that's not how I started. It started always with me. And, you know, I became a writer. I wrote my first book in I was 22, and it was not, you know, it was a, it grew out of writing a diary. It grew out of trying to solve my own confusions. It was a way of trying to stay afloat, emotionally, psychically.

1:42:40And it had nothing to do with a career in that sense. Later on, it became something accoutrements of a career. But as I say, it began and it still is to this day an emotional necessity, I would say. It's a way of coping. I am an intellectual, not a sort of fancy, fancy thing, but I'm an attention in the sense that I intellectualize pain. If something horrible happens, my immediate impulse, not to jog or drink or do all sorts of things people do, but it's to try and think about, What is this thing? What can we... What lesson is there here? And that lesson is being fished out for me, if it helps anyone else, fantastic.

1:43:23But I do it anyway. That's how I'll bring. I've found an odd resonance with what I've done with the show as well. In many ways, there is a temptation to do what may be popular or trendy or accumulate the most exposure or status, I'll make you look good. And that's always that. And neither of us are immune to those incentives. But I think one of the reasons that I resonated with your work and hopefully some microcosm of people resonate with mine is it very research, very much is me such in this situation and the fact you're right, how could you have seen? The human experience has been really sort of shown to me that it's like you've turned the mirror around to myself.

1:44:16It's almost like you're speaking to me. It's well because there's broad buckets of people that sort of fall into similar kind of cohorts and it would appear that perhaps me and you are in a non -too -dissimilar cohort. And this, I think, is a reason for confidence in our own work and in listening to our instincts. rather than trying to work out what the market, the audience, the reader wants. Just saying, okay, well, what would be useful to me right now? What would have been useful to me previously, especially given the fact that the thing you need to hear right now is probably the thing that you would tell yourself 10 years ago.

1:44:53So it's still the same lessons over and over. It's what, looking at that circle. Okay. And I think it is the best justification for selfishly following your instincts when it comes to an intellectual investigation of yourself, of the world around you. Because if you think a thing, if you feel a thing, if you're challenged with a particular issue, it's probably reliable that some non -insignificant, absolutely, majority, perhaps, of other people feeling the same. How fucking narcissistic do you need to be to think with the only one? Me. Me. This is a... Because that's to me. That's to me because we don't think of it.

1:45:36Narsely. We think of it. Chainfully, we think I've been singled out for a particularly personal curse. Yeah. We don't think I'm so great and I'm alone. No, no, no. No, no, no. We think, oh God, I've been cursed. I've broken. Yeah. I'm uniquely broken. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. It's so important to bear that in mind by the time you're feeling it. other people we're feeling it to. And it's so hard to hold onto that thought because we, well frankly, because we see no visible evidence of it, we don't see people talking about it in our vicinity, in the hundred people we know and move around.

1:46:05No one's talking about it openly. They're feeling it up, but they don't talk about it. And so we have to hold on nerve. And there's a lesson here about capitalism here and business, which is fascinating. I mean, it's not naturally air -fall into more, You talk a lot about this, but so many great businesses start precisely like this, that somebody thinks there's this thing I really want and need or that thrills me, and it sounds quite weird to everybody else, and the person just sticks with it and just has a hunch about it. Just as many, many business failures are all about someone doing something, and then if you say to them, do you want this?

1:46:49Would you buy this thing? And then they go, actually, no, I wouldn't, you know, so why are you making it for somebody else? If it's not no resonance with you, you know, careful. Yeah. The, you know, the biggest business disasters are people making stuff that they haven't asked themselves, would I really want this? Yes. The word, a grift is thrown around on the internet a lot. And I've asked people to define it, you know, this person is grifting a shilling for a particular product or company or ideology, whatever it might be. And I ask the best definition I've ever heard, one that I actually accept.

1:47:23I don't like the word because I think it gets patterned much incorrectly almost all the time. But the best definition is somebody promoting something that they themselves would not use or believe. I think, and that's good. And there's an intellectual version of that, when someone reads a book, et cetera. And they've lost touch and they're spouting can't or haggle or a thick inside or whatever it may be or attachment it and it's not fitting them and therefore there's something you know wrong. But I think many hours ago now we began in this place which is how difficult it is to hone that authentic muscle where you feel something you hold on to it you think no one else is talking about it but let me let me stay with that because I think it's a thing for me so it may be a thing for somebody else, even though no one's mentioning it, there's a lot of courage.

1:48:11How much better would you become at understanding yourself over the years? How much have you been able to nudge those fundamental physics of your system? I've made some progress. Yeah, definitely made some progress. And I'd say that I understand myself more than I've been able to change myself. And once you go, oh, so nothing's really changed. Well, understanding is a thing as well. That is its own legitimate thing. Do I always to make wise choices now, I always know, but I do understand things better. Yes, I think I've also better understanding my unconscious. And by that, I mean, it's also what people call their gut instinct.

1:48:48I do think that there are things we know without fully knowing why we know them or how we know them and to allow a little bit more for that, it's slightly mysterious form of knowing. We're talking about sentence completion exercises is where you're confusing sentences, letting something bubble up from your unconscious. I try and do that more and more. By all the way to my simple questions, like, what am I really feeling here? Don't overthink this. What's really going on? You've met this person, what do you really feel around them? Just say it, say it to yourself. What do you feel? And then holding onto that, that something quite important's gone on there, that your answer captures something that a more thought -laden answer might not.

1:49:35And trusting that a bit more. In love, in work, in friendship, in areas of daily life. I would say that one of the biggest contributions, at least that I've seen from your work, for me personally, is that stark assessment of the human condition. A very sanguine, someone say British, slightly self -deprecating, honest admission of how flawed, how insane, how irrational, how silly, shameful, we can be a lot of the time. And yourself, Oliver Birkman, if you're familiar with Oliver as well, again, and sort of really embracing that British melancholic sort of tragedy well handled type thing. You know, this has been a very long time coming.

1:50:29I've wanted you on the podcast since before I began it. I went back and looked at my first ever set of notes that I had as your name in. I'm sure this stuff that's a little bit earlier than that. And that was 2017. So it's late to the party, perhaps in the broad scheme of things, but very early to the party in my intellectual trajectory. and making people feel less alone in the challenges that they face. The day -to -day machinations, this personal curse, that, huh, I didn't know anybody else felt like that. At least I'm not, at least it's not just me. At least I've not had this thing sort of thrown down on me from above.

1:51:08And yeah, I definitely, when I find myself embracing that with the show, with the content that I create with the thoughts that I have, with the way that I trying to direct things with the way that I try to push people forward, especially at my age, I'm 36 and this is, there's a number of different directions that I can kind of go down. And the one that's pulling me the most at the moment is a much more stark assessment of the silliness and irrationality and shamefulness of the human condition. And it's what I'd So thank you very much for helping to be a role model for me to be able to do that more.

1:51:46Thank you so much, Chris. Lovely words. So generous. Thank you. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with more of the stuff that you're doing? So, School of Life, the organization that I started, if you follow our stuff every day, I'm writing stuff for our website, for our app, etc. So, this content coming out all the time. And we've got a lot of books. under the School of Life, together with my colleague John. So we've got a lot of stuff out there. I appreciate you so much. Thank you, mate. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.