Jordan Peterson: How To Deal With Depression (Transcript)

But, you know, I say, well, look, man, what if you had diabetes, you’re not going to take your insulin? It’s like, you got stressed, you blew out at your weakest point, that’s what happens when you get stressed.

If there’s something out there that might help you, it’s like, try it, for God’s sake, you’ll know in a month, and you’ll just stop if it doesn’t work. Now, having said that, you want to do a multidimensional analysis. It’s like, well, do you have any friends, do you have an intimate relationship, or are you pursuing one? Do you have a reasonable career? Are you as educated as you are intelligent? Do you have something useful to do with your time outside of work? Do you have a drug or alcohol problem? Are there other behavioral issues like sleep dysregulation and lack of eating that are contributing to the pathology? You want to differentiate all of that, and wherever you can make a behavioral intervention, so much the better.

But sometimes, too, you’re dealing with people whose lives are so wrecked that they don’t even know where to start. They’re different than the ones who have everything in order, say. And you say, well, try this, man, maybe you won’t cut your throat in the next month, because if you’re dead, it’s going to be hard to work with you. And so, medical interventions, anything, if you’re sick, you do what is necessary to get better, and you leave your pride behind, if you have to. And that says nothing about the utility of the behavioral interventions. You want to hit the problem with everything you have at your disposal. Antidepressants, especially for people whose lives are together and who are depressed, antidepressants can be absolutely miraculous.

So when you hear about the clinical evidence in their favor being iffy, and that’s partly because the diagnosis of depression isn’t very well formulated, it’s very different to have a terrible life than to be depressed. And antidepressants can only help you so much if you have a terrible life.

Moving Forward and Validating Your Map

You want to stay inside this little map, because it’s working. You want to get from point A to point B, and this is good. This indicates that you are moving forward, that’s the first thing it indicates. And the second thing it indicates, which is even more important, and you’ll never hear this from behavioral psychologists, is that your map is correct. So every time you move a little bit forward and something that you want happens, it says, oh, the game I’m playing is the right game. And so not only does the reward indicate progress, it indicates that the frame within which progress is being calculated is the right frame. And that’s good, because it’s the frame that makes things irrelevant. And you want them to stay irrelevant.

So if you don’t move forward and you start to question the frame, that’s way worse than merely not moving forward. You get a bad exam grade. What do you think? What the hell am I doing in university anyways? It’s like, probably that’s not the first place you should go with that piece of information. And you think, well, why? Why is that worse? Well, as far as I can tell, your map of you as a university student is a comprehensive representation. It tells you what you should do every day. It kind of tells you where you’re going in the future.

And if something emerges as an anomaly, you get a worse grade than you expected. And you blow that whole map, it’s like, okay, what have you been doing for the last four years? What kind of high school student were you? How clueless are you about how you’re arranging your future? What’s your identity going to be if you’re not going to be a student? Where are you going to end up in five years? So it’s like that little grade, that bad grade, it’s like a portal through which snakes can crawl. And that’s exactly how you respond to it, especially if you open the door too much. Well, maybe this means that I shouldn’t be in university. Well, one of the rules is don’t, you want to constrain the anomalous event to the minimal necessary domain. It’s really, really important.

Minimizing the Impact of Mistakes in Relationships

You want to do that when you’re arguing with your partner, which you’ll do all the time. We have an argument. Well, I should never have married you. It’s like, no, no, that’s not the first response. That’s a bad response. Or here’s a really good one. “You’ve always done that sort of thing. And you always will.” It’s like, oh, good, great. It’s like, the only answer to that is to hit someone. Because like, you’re done, right? You’re like that, you’ve always been like that, there isn’t a chance that you could be repaired and none of it is acceptable. It’s like, the person is going to fight with you right away. Because what else are they going to do?

So what you want to do is you want to minimize, it isn’t rationalization. You want to say, OK, this person did something that disrupted our joint map. OK, what’s the smallest possible thing they could do to put it back together? And you have to know. Well, we need to make a plan so you don’t do it again. Or we need to have a discussion so that you know that it wasn’t a good thing to do. But I’m not going to go after your whole character. I’m going to say, when I come home and you’re watching TV, just come to the door and say, hello. Not, “don’t you love me?” Or something like that.

It’s like, no, no, you just have to walk to the door and give me a hug or something. And then that’s good enough. And so then the other person might be able to tolerate that much corrective information, maybe, if you’re kind of nice about it. And you also understand that they’re probably going to have something equally horrible to say about you in the next 15 minutes. Because you’re going to do something stupid.

The Dangers of Cascading Thoughts in Depression

So you don’t want to open the door so that every possible snake comes crawling through. Because that’s a pathway to depression. And you actually see that happening in depressed people, is that every small event produces a cascade through their entire value system. And they end up saying, well, that’s just another reason that I should jump off a bridge. And they really see it that way. It’s really awful. Because they’ve got no defenses.

It’s like, well, I didn’t do so well in this course. It’s like, I’m going to get a bad mark in the exam. I’m going to get a bad mark in the course. That’s going to screw up my ability to finish my degree. I’m never going to get into the field of my choice. It’s just another piece of indication that I’m useless and that life isn’t worthwhile. Bang, I’m going to jump off a bridge. And if you’re really depressed, it’s like each of those things hits you with the certainty of truth. It’s really not good.

And so you want to be careful. You want to be careful about walking down that pathway when you make a mistake. You think, OK, what’s the narrowest framework of interpretation within which I can understand this that will require minimal behavioral change to decrease the probability that it will happen again? It’s mental hygiene, fundamentally.

The Scalability of Frames

Yes? When you say that these frames are scalable, do you mean they’re multiple at the same time? We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. That is the next question. Because they don’t exist in isolation. So that’s another thing. Frequently, when you hear behavioral accounts of cognitive processes, they generally only focus on as if it’s an isolated thing. It’s not. It’s scalable. It’s scalable a bunch of ways. It’s scalable temporally, because what you do now is associated with what you’ll do tomorrow and not with what you’ll do next week and so forth. So it has to be scalable temporally. And it’s also scalable socially. So it has an effect on you. That has an effect on your family. That has an effect on the community and so forth.

And so you don’t want to take. It’s very difficult to think through the effect of your action on all those scaling levels simultaneously. But you have mechanisms that allow you to do that. See, I think that the sense of, let’s assume that you’re not lying to yourself constantly. So your head isn’t full of chaos and garbage. And you have reasonable relationships with people in the world. I think that, and this is leaping way ahead, I think that your sense of meaningful engagement with what you’re doing is the psychophysiological marker that you’re acting in a way that takes all of the stacked representations into account simultaneously.

Meaning as an Orienting Reflex

Because you’re trying to figure out where you are. And you might think, well, that means where I am in this room. But look, this room is not a simple thing. It’s nested. It’s a subset of the university. That’s a subset of society. It’s a subset of your life. The room is a complicated thing. And you need to figure out where you should be in the room. And you can’t do that surely with perception. Because all you see is me and some of the wall, right? You’ve got this little narrow portal.

And so you can’t really rely on your perceptions to orient you. But you do orient yourself. And I think what you do is, it’s engagement. It’s like, does this seem meaningful and deep and engaging? Yes. Then it’s an indication that it’s serving multiple masters simultaneously. So maybe both socially and also temporally. And so I think the sense of meaning is actually an instinct that orients people in time and space. It’s not an epiphenomena. It’s the most fundamental form of perception. And that’s the only optimistic thought that I’ve ever been able to derive from psychology. Is that that actually could be true. It could be that the sense of meaning is an orienting reflex.

And that would be wonderful if it was true. Because it would make it real. And one of the devastating elements of nihilism is something like, “well, who the hell cares what you’re doing? What difference is it going to make in a million years?” It’s like, your sense of meaning is just an illusion. You’re a limited creature in a limited place. And nothing you do really matters. It’s like, that’s a powerful argument, especially if you’re an objective materialist and a reductionist. It’s a killer argument. But it looks to me like it’s wrong. It’s actually wrong. Because meaning looks to me like it’s an actual phenomenon. It does say that you’re positioned properly between chaos and order, something like that. It’s real.

So well, so we’ll see. We’re going to develop that argument. Because if it’s real, you want to know that. Because it gives you something to stand on. Maybe it’s as real as pain. But it’s not pain. It’s something positive. And you need something positive that you can rely on.

The Limitations of Psychoanalysis

All right, so the psychoanalysts, I think, err too much on the side of the subject. They tend to think that too much of you is inside of you. And too little of you is outside of you. And part of the reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience. I love the psychoanalysts, man. They’re brilliant. They’re brilliant. They’re deep. They grapple with real problems, like with the problems. When people have real problems, and I mean profound problems, they’re really profound moral problems. They’re problems of good and evil, really. There are things going on in their family that are so terrible that, well, that they’re sometimes fatal. Lie upon lie upon lie upon lie for decades and decades and decades.

Awful. And that’s not exactly inside them. It’s out there in the world. And lots of the people that I see, very famous critic of psychology, I can’t remember his name, but I probably will, criticized the practice of psychology quite effectively, I believe in the early 60s. The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, S-Z-A-S-Z. It’s a classic. You should read it. If you’re interested in psychology, read it. It’s a classic. And he basically said, most people have problems in living. They don’t have psychological problems.

And so I’ve experienced, despite my love for the psychoanalysts, very frequently what I’m doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work. And you can parameterize that. It’s like, what do you need? How about some friends? That, people kind of like that. How about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust, that maybe has a future? That’d be good. How about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere, so at least you’ve got some possibility of rising, some possibility of stabilizing yourself, and a schedule and a routine, because no one can live without a routine.

You just forget that. If you guys don’t have a routine, I would recommend you get one going, because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine. You need to pick a time to get up. Whatever time you want, but pick one and stick to it, because otherwise you dysregulate your circadian rhythms, and they regulate your mood. And eat something in the morning.

I’ve had lots of clients who’ve had anxiety disorders. I had one client who was literally starving. Very smart girl. There was very little that she liked. She kind of tried to subsist on half a cup of rice a day. She came to me and said, “I have no energy. I come home, all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over. Is that weird?” And I thought, well, it depends on how hard you work. It’s a little weird, but whatever. It’s familiar, you’re looking for comfort.

So I did an analysis of her diet. It’s like three quarters of a cup of rice. It’s like, you’re starving. Eat something. You know, you’ll feel better. So she modified her diet, and all her anxiety went away, and she had some energy. It’s like, yeah, you gotta eat.

The Importance of Routine and Life Structure

So a schedule, that’s a good thing, man. Your brain will thank you for it. It will stabilize your nervous system. With a bit of a plan, that’s a good thing. You need a career. You need something productive to do with your time. You need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol, most particularly alcohol, because that does it in a lot of people.

You need a family, like the family you have, your parents and all that. It’d be nice if you all got along. You could work on that. That’s a good thing to work on. Then, you know, you probably need children at some point, and that’s life. That’s what life is.

And if you’re missing, you know, you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions. It’s not mandatory, but I can tell you that if you’re not operating reasonably well on four, I think I mentioned six, if you’re not operating reasonably well on at least three of them, there’s no way you’re going to be psychologically thriving. And that’s more pragmatic, in some sense, than psychological, right? Human beings have a nature. There’s things we need. And if we have them, well, that’s good. And if we don’t have them, well, then we feel the lack.

And so behaviorists, behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing. You know, it’s practical. It’s like strategizing. Make a career plan. Figure out how to negotiate, because that’s bloody important. Figure out how to say what you need. Figure out how to tell the truth to people. Figure out how to listen to your partner, in particular, because if you listen to them, they will actually tell you what they want. And sometimes you can give it to them, and maybe they’ll return the favor. And if you practice that for like 15 years, well, then maybe you’re constantly giving each other what you want. Well, hooray, that would be good.

And then there’s two of you, under most circumstances. And it’s better to have two brains than one, because people think differently, because of their temperament, mostly. And so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises. And it’s part of the transformation, the psychological transformation, that’s attendant on an intimate relationship, and one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship.

Neuroticism and Sensitivity to Negative Emotions

So we’re starting to be able to put the traits, to sort of nail the traits down to their underlying biology. With regards to neuroticism, well, if you’re high in neuroticism, you’re sensitive to anxiety, and that’s regulated, at least in part, by the hippocampus, and generated, in part, by the amygdala. There’s another part of the brain called the periaqueductal gray that seems to be associated with the experience of pain. And pain is quite a complex phenomenon. Depression is pain-like. Grief is pain-like. Social isolation is pain-like. Disappointment is pain-like.

There’s anxiety components to that, too. And so neuroticism seems to be something like threshold for activation in those negative emotion systems. So if you’re higher in neuroticism, one unit of uncertainty might produce, let’s say, three units of psychophysiological response, whereas if you’re lower in neuroticism, one unit of uncertainty might produce one unit of psychophysiological response.

Obviously, that’s a simplified schemata, but there’s variability, because if something unexpected or threatening happens to you, it isn’t obvious how upset you should get. One answer might be, brush it off. It’s nothing. Another answer might be, it’s a bloody catastrophe. And often, when something uncertain or threatening occurs, you don’t have enough information at your disposal to make a full determination of the potential import of the circumstance, especially if it’s uncertain. And so then you have to guess at how upset you should be and where you are on the normal distribution with regards to trait neuroticism, say. That sort of determines what your guess on average is going to be.

Conscientiousness and Future Orientation

So with conscientiousness, say, you might say, well, how hard should you work? Well, that’s a really difficult question. If you’re going to die tomorrow, then you probably shouldn’t work very hard today at all. So one thing you might say is that the degree to which you should work hard is dependent on your assumptions about the stability of the future. We actually know this to be true because if you put people in wildly uncertain circumstances, they discount the future, which is exactly what you should do.

It only makes sense to store up goods for future consumption if the future is likely to be very similar to the past and the present. You need a stable society for that. And conscientiousness only works in a stable society because all you do otherwise, if you’re piling up goods, which is kind of what conscientious people do, is leaving them there for the criminals to take or waiting for the next chaotic upheaval to wipe out everything that you’ve stored. And so even conscientiousness is a kind of guess.

Hardworking people say, well, sacrifice the present for the future. That’s great, as long as the future is going to be there and you can predict it. But if it’s not going to be there and it’s unpredictable, then the right response is take what you can take right now while the getting’s good. Now, obviously, there are troubles with that, too. But I’m speaking, I’m offering rough rules of thumb. But I’m trying to provide you with some indication of how and why these difference in value structures exist because they’re applicable in different environments.

Sometimes in a dangerous social environment, it’s not obvious that being an extroverted person is a good idea because extroverted people, they stand out, especially if they’re extroverted and creative. Because not only are they noisy and dominant and assertive, they’re also colorful and flamboyant and provocative.

Positive Feedback Loops and Downward Spirals

What happens to people is that as they move towards zero, positive feedback loops get set up so they’re more likely to hit zero. And as they move away from zero, positive feedback loops get set up so that they’re increasingly more likely to move away from zero. So here’s an example. Let’s say you’re not doing too bad, so maybe you’re in the middle of the normal distribution. Then you lose your job. OK, and so let’s say you’re a conscientious person. And we can say just for the sake of argument that you lose your job because of mass layoffs in your company. So it has nothing to do with you. It’s fundamentally, it’s just like luck of the draw, basically.

But then what happens to you? Well, if you’re conscientious, you’re going to go after yourself pretty hard. So you’re going to, and especially if you’re also high in neuroticism, it’s going to depress you to lose your job. And maybe you’re in a situation where you just, for one reason or another, you don’t have that many other opportunities. Now, maybe you should look for them, but maybe you’re in a depressed strata of the economy where you’re geographically located somewhere that makes moving difficult, or so on and so forth, you know?

So but you lose your job, and then you start to get depressed because of that. Well, then as you start to get depressed, it decreases the probability that you’re going to look for a job. But it also maybe starts to put stress on your family, and it also starts to decrease the probability that you’re going to engage in positive social interaction. So now not only are you unemployed and suffering from economic stress, but your marriage is starting to suffer, and you’re starting to isolate yourself from your friends.

And then, of course, as your marriage suffers and the stress builds up, then that’s going to make you more depressed, and that’s going to keep you even farther away from your friends, and that’s going to decrease the likelihood that you’re going to have enough positive emotion and enthusiasm to look for another job. And then maybe you want to add a bit of a drinking problem to that just for fun, and you can see that you can get a spiral going that’s just taking you down, right?

And it’s all sorts of things, because lots of times people conceptualize, let’s say, you’re an unemployed guy, and you go to counseling, and you get a diagnosis of depression. And the thing about a diagnosis of depression, it’s sort of like the assumption is there’s something gone wrong with your psychological structure. It’s like if you’re unemployed and you’re depressed, it isn’t obvious at all that the problem is in your head. You know what I mean? It isn’t even obvious that it’s a psychological problem. It’s just a problem, and problems can take you out.

And so if you’re unemployed and you’re under economic stress, and your marriage is starting to shake, and you’re isolating yourself from your friends, and you’re less likely to be motivated to go look for a job, you can sort of think about that as a depressive spiral. But you can also think of it as a conspiracy, in some sense, of external forces that are auguring you into the ground. And we don’t tend to conceptualize psychological disorders that way, but we should, because lots of times when people are suffering from something that you could describe in psychological terminology, and depression is a very good example of that, it isn’t obvious that there’s something wrong with them psychologically. Often, they just are in trouble. And there isn’t a category in psychological diagnosis for client in serious trouble.

But my experience has been, almost without exception, that the people that come to see me, come to see me because something’s gone wrong with their life, not because they have a psychological problem. Now you could say, well, their psychological inadequacies, such as they might be, are interfering with their ability to recover, or maybe even served as precursors to increase the probability of the catastrophe. And so a well-functioning personality has all the micro-routines in place.

That’s actually something that you help people with if you’re a behavioral therapist, because one of the things you assume if you’re a behavioral therapist is that sometimes the reason people aren’t doing things is because they don’t know how. Sometimes, maybe the person’s depressed, but potentially high-functioning. They got all the damn micro-routines. They’re well-socialized. They’re just dormant. You’ve got to get them awake again and implementing them.

But sometimes you get someone in your practice, say, who’s just being neglected like you cannot believe. The parents never paid any attention to them, or maybe just punished them every time they did something good. That’s really fun. And then they didn’t make friends, and so they’re really, really vague and poorly articulated. And so then what you do is you work at the bottom of the micro-routines and get them to practice building up all these little attributes that they didn’t build up.

Developing Micro-Routines to Improve Personality

And one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is, so now maybe you understand something about your own personality. You might say, well, what could you do to improve your personality? And the answer is develop some of the micro-routines on the other side of the personality distribution.

So if you’re disagreeable as hell, maybe you could start learning how to do nice things for people. And that actually works, by the way. So if you take disagreeable people who are depressed, and you get them doing nice things for other people, their depression tends to lift. But then by the same token, if you’re agreeable, then you should practice doing some things for yourself and being more tough-minded in your negotiations.

And so you can sort of place yourself on the personality trait distribution. You’re extroverted. It’s like, OK, man, learn to spend some time with yourself. You’re low in openness.

Well, try reading a book that’s outside of your sphere of interest now and then. If you’re conscientious, well, you should probably learn how to relax occasionally, and so forth. So I think partly what you’re doing as you’re developing your personality is not moving the mean much, the average, where you’re located. But you’re extending the standard deviation so that you’re a bigger bag of tricks than you were before. And I think you can practice that consciously.

It’s like, you’re hyper-orderly. It’s, well, get a dog. Dogs are messy, horrible things. It’s just what you need if you’re hyper-orderly, because they’re going to leave hair everywhere and force you to live with it. And so this is sort of you, right? This is your personality. It’s this collection of subroutines that you’ve turned into a hierarchy, and then there’s something at the top of it. And that’s a big question, like, what the hell should be at the top of the hierarchy? Because that’s the ultimate question of unity.

And the clinicians would say, well, it’s the self-actualized person, or it’s the self, or something like that. That’s the implicit and perhaps explicit ideal that you’re aiming for. And you might say, well, does such a thing exist? And I would say, well, do you admire people? Because that’s your answer, right? Do you despise people? Well, you like some people, and you don’t like others. You respect some people. You don’t respect others. Well, you’re acting out the notion that there’s at least an implicit ideal.

You do the same thing when you go to movies. You know who the hero is. You know who the bad guy is. You’re acting out the proposition that there’s some sort of value hierarchy, and there’s some sort of manifestation of it that’s coherent across time. So you appear to believe that. And you are driven, at least to some degree, by your own inner ideals. And so you tend to answer the question, is that real with an affirmative? And if you don’t, there’s catastrophic consequences.

The Consequences of Losing Your Value Hierarchy

Nietzsche and the existentialists were very good at detailing that. It’s like, you let your value hierarchy disintegrate? Well, then what? Well, part of it is nihilistic chaos. That’s not so much fun. And then there’s the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire that someone will come along and tell you what to do. So what happens is, if you let this devolve, you end up with nihilistic chaos, or the demand for the tyrant to come forward. And we’ve had that happen lots of times, and it doesn’t seem to have gone that well.

All right. Well, so what happens when you lay out these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis? Well, this is how your emotions function, broadly speaking. You’re aiming at something. And this is an oversimplification, which is why I want to show you this. When I show you this, assume that it’s made out of that. It’s just a schematic oversimplification. Because even if, let’s say, that I’m trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door, I mean, the action of walking towards the door is predicated on the existence of all the subroutines that enable me to propel my body across time and space. And that took a lot of internal organization to get that right. It’s automatized now, and so you can treat it like it’s invisible. But implicit in any one of these structures is this entire structure. And you actually see this in therapy very frequently, too.

Minimizing Unnecessary Misery

One of the things that I’ve figured out over the last years is, this is a good proposition. So it’s pretty self-evident that life has got its rat’s nest of miseries, and that’s for sure. Maybe you could even make a categorical statement that life is mostly a rat’s nest of misery. And you could make a pretty powerful argument for that.

But then there’s a counter-question, which is, well, what if you tried not to make it any more miserable than it had to be? Then what would it be like? And my suspicions are that a lot of that misery, I would suspect that most of that misery would go away. Because it’s the unnecessary misery that really brings you down.

It’s like, well, if someone has cancer, it’s like, that sucks. But it’s not like you can say, if only we had done this differently, then that wouldn’t have happened. But when someone’s out torturing you in a malevolent way, or maybe you’re doing the same, you can always ask yourself, well, is it really? Is this really necessary? Is this just like a useless add-on to the miseries of life? That’s what disheartens people. And so even in your own life, if you aren’t suffering from self-imposed misery, and you’re only suffering from inescapable misery, maybe you could handle that. And you could survive. You could bear it. And even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt.

So the goal would be, well, yeah, life is a rat’s nest of miseries. And maybe it has no ultimate meaning. We could say that if we’re feeling particularly pessimistic. But it still leaves one question open, which is, if you didn’t do everything you could to make it worse, how good could you make it be? And the least answer is, well, it could be tragedy, but maybe not hell. And I think that’s right. I really believe that. That’s the most pessimistic proper statement. The worst case outcome, in the worst of all possible worlds, is that your life could be tragic, but not hell. And that’s a lot better than hell, right?

And you think, I could give you an example of the difference. You’re at your mother’s deathbed. Well, that’s tragedy. Here’s another scenario. You’re at your mother’s deathbed, and you and all your idiot siblings are arguing. Well, that’s the difference between tragedy and hell. And you might be able to tolerate the first circumstance, and maybe it would even bring you closer together with your family members. The second one, no one can bear that.

You walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of everything else, too. And it’s often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the dragons, because the stress is high, and all those things that people haven’t dealt with, they don’t have the energy to repress. And all the bitterness comes pouring forward. It’s like, seriously, man.

So that’s actually a good, it’s a rough lesson, but it’s a good hallmark for figuring out whether or not you’ve got yourself adjusted properly. And in relationship to your siblings, it’s like, if you all gathered around the bed of someone close who was dying, could you manage it? And if the answer is no, it’s like, well, put your life together, because it’s going to happen. And you should be the person who’s there that can do it, and do it properly. And then maybe you’d find that it isn’t the sort of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself.

And I’ve seen both of those situations, ugly, ugly, ugly situations, murderously ugly situations. And then they’re opposite, where people have had terrible things happen to them as a family. They pull together, and they rebuild their damn ship, and they sail away. So that seems to me to be a lot better. That makes you Noah when the flood comes, right?

Confronting Obstacles and Chaos

Well, OK, so the same thing, the question emerges. Well, who are you? Well, you could say, you’re this plan. That’s what people usually, that’s how people usually identify. Maybe they have no plan at all, and they’re just in chaos, right? That’s like being in the belly of the beast. They’re nihilistic and chaos. They have no plan. They’re just chaos itself. And that’s a very dreadful situation for people to be in.

Or maybe they conjure together a plan. That’s their identity. It’s kind of fragile, and they’re holding onto that with everything they’ve got. It’s their little stick of wood that they’re floating in the ocean, clinging to. And so they’re identifying really hard with that plan. That’s what happens when you’re an ideologue, is that you’re identifying really hard with that plan. The problem is, something comes up to confront it. Well, how do you act?

Well, you can’t let go of the plan, because you drown. And then you cling to it rigidly. Well, that’s no good, because then you can’t learn anything. And then if that’s you, you’re a totalitarian. You’re not going to learn anything. You’re going to end up in something that’s close enough to hell so that you won’t know the difference, and you might drag everyone along with you. And that’s happened plenty of times, right? It’s the whole story of the 20th century. It happened over and over and over.

And it happens in people’s states. It happens in their business organizations. It happens in their cities. It happens in their provinces. It happens in their states. And it happens in their psyches, all at the same time. You can’t blame the manifestation of that sort of thing on any of those one levels. It happens when a society goes down that way. It goes down everywhere at the same time. It’s not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people striving to be free at the bottom. It’s not that at all. It’s totalitarianism at every single level of the hierarchy, including the psychological.

And so you don’t want to be the thing. You don’t want to be in chaos, that’s for sure. But you don’t want to be the thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can’t let go when someone comes to rescue you, right? You don’t want to be that.

So then you think, well, exactly what are you? You’re not the chaos. You’re not the plan. Maybe you’re the thing that confronts the obstacle. And I would say that’s the categorical lesson of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal transformation. That’s what you always teach people in psychotherapy. I don’t care what sort of psychotherapist you are. You’re always teaching them the same thing. You’re the thing that can, you’re not the plan. You’re the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan.

And then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself, well, then your whole view of the world can change because you might think, well, I’ve got this plan. Something came up to object to it. It’s like, it’s possible that the thing that’s objecting has something to teach you that will take you to the place where you develop an even better plan. That’s a nice framework to use.

It’s like, are you so sure that this is a problem? Is that the only way that you can look at it? Or is it an opportunity? I mean, I’m not trying to be, you know, naively optimistic. There are some things that’s pretty hard to extract gold from some dragons. And maybe the death of a family member is a good example of that. But even in a situation like that, I can tell you that it’s an opportunity for, it’s an opportunity for maturation, that’s for sure.

And the thing is, you might say, well, it’s pretty miserable to be digging for gold when someone’s falling into the grave. Well, if they really love you, first of all, that’s what they’ll want you to do. And second, you’re gonna make their death a lot more palatable experience for them if you’re someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of be, you know, quivering in the corner and feeling that the entire world is collapsing in on you.

I mean, that’s another, you wanna be the useful person at the funeral. How’s that for a goal? That’s a good goal, man. You know that you’ve got yourself together in a situation like that. If you’re gonna be at them, and maybe you wanna be the person on whose shoulder people cry, that’d be a good goal. That’s kind of, you know, I don’t like being naively optimistic. So when I tell you to get your life together, I’m not gonna say roses and sunshine. It’s like, that’s pablum for fools. But it really is something to be the reliable person at a funeral.

The Idea of the Circumambulation

There’s this idea in Jungian psychology called the circumambulation. And Jungian had this idea that you had a potential future self, which would be in potential everything that you could be, and that it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things.

The Call to Adventure and the Path of Development

And the things that you’re interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development. Now, it sounds like a metaphysical idea or a mystical idea even, but it’s not, it’s not. It’s a really profoundly biological idea. The idea is something like, well, you’re set up so that you’re automatically interested in those things that would fully expand you as a well-adapted creature. Well, like, there’s nothing radical about that idea. How else, what else could possibly be the case unless there’s something fundamentally flawed about you? That is what the situation would be.

It’s kind of interesting to think about how that would be manifest moment to moment, but the idea is something like, well, your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of development. Well, that better be the case. Okay, so that’s fine. And so there’s some utility in pursuing those things that you’re interested in. That’s the call to adventure, let’s say.

So, and the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places. Now, the problem with the call to adventure is like, what the hell do you know? You might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent. And often it’s the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves and grip their interests, say, they do it very badly and shoddily. And so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new. That’s why the fool is the precursor to the savior from the symbolic perspectives because you have to be a fool before you can be a master. And if you’re not willing to be a fool, then you can’t be a master. So you’re going to, it’s an error, error-ridden process.

And that’s also laid out in the Old Testament stories because the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks them out of their father’s house when they’re like 84 is that they run into all sorts of trouble. And some of it’s social and some of it’s natural and some of it’s a consequence of their own moral inadequacy. So they’re fools, but the thing that’s so interesting is that despite the fact that they’re fools, they’re still supposed to go on the adventure and that they’re capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward on the adventure so that they straighten themselves out across time.

And so it’s something like this. This circumambulation that Jung talked about was this continual, we’ll return to this, this continual circling in some sense of who you could be. You might notice, for example, that there are themes in your life. You know, when you go back across your experiences, you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself. And there might be variation on it like a musical theme, but it’s like you’re circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time. That’s the circumambulation. Now, you remember that for a sec because we’ll go back to it.

The Process of Pursuing an Interest

Okay, so imagine that something glimmers before you. It’s an interest that’s dawning. And you decide, well, first of all, you’re paralyzed. You think, well, how do I know if I should pursue that? It’s probably a stupid idea. And the proper response to that is you’re right, it probably is a stupid idea because almost all ideas are stupid.

And so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you’re going to get it right the first time is zero. It’s just not going to happen. And so then you might think, well, maybe I’ll just wait around until I get the right idea, which people do, right? So they’re like 40-year-old, 13-year-olds, which is not a good idea.

So they wait around until it’s waiting for Godot, until they finally got it right. But the problem is you’re too stupid to know when you’ve got it right. So waiting around isn’t going to help because even if the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form, the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero. You might even think it’s the worst possible idea that you’ve ever heard of anywhere.

Highly likely, highly likely. So Nietzsche called that a will to stupidity, which I really liked. So because he thought of stupidity as being it, you have to take it into account fundamentally and work with it. And so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny, and you can assume that you’re going to do it badly. And that’s really useful because you don’t have to beat yourself up. It’s pretty easy to do it badly. But the thing is, it’s way better to do it badly than not to do it at all. And that’s the continual message that echoes through these historical stories in Genesis.

It’s like, these are flawed people. They should have got the hell out of their house way before they did. And they go out and they stumble around in tyranny and famine and self-betrayal and violence. But it’s a hell of a lot better than just rotting away at home. And that’s great. So that’s good.

And so why is that? Well, okay, so you start your path and you think that you’re heading towards your star. And so you go in that direction. Then, because you’re here, the world looks a particular way. But then when you move here, the world looks different and you’re different as a consequence of having made that voyage. And so what that means is that now that thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted its location because you weren’t very good at specifying it to begin with and now that you’re a little sharper and more focused than you were, it’s going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you.

And so then you have to take a, it’s almost like 180 degree reversal. But it isn’t because you’ve, I mean, you’ve gone this far and that’s a long ways to get that far. But that’s a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting. And so it doesn’t matter that you overshoot. You’re going to learn what you shouldn’t keep doing continually, because as you overshoot, even if you don’t learn what you should have done, you’re going to continually learn what you shouldn’t keep doing. And if you learn enough about what you shouldn’t keep doing, then that’s tantamount at some point to learning at the same time what you should be doing. So it’s okay.

So it’s like this. As you progress, the degree of overshooting starts to decline, right? And that we know that there’s nothing hypothetical about that. As you learn a new skill, like even to play a song on the piano, for example, you overshoot madly, you’re making all sorts of mistakes to begin with, and then the mistakes, they disappear.

There’s a great head talk, I think it was, about this guy set up a really advanced computational recording system in his home and recorded every single utterance his young child made while learning to speak. And then he put together the child’s attempts to say certain phonemes, and put them in a list, and you can hear the child deviating madly to begin with, and then after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions, just zeroing right in on the exact phoneme.

So you might not know this, but when kids babble, because they start babbling when they’re quite young, they babble every human phoneme, including all sorts of phonemes that adults can’t say, and then they die into their language so that after they learn, say, English, then there’s all sorts of phonemes they can no longer hear or pronounce, but to begin with, it’s all there, which is really quite interesting. But so as they learn a particular language, they zero in on the proper way to pronounce that, and their errors minimize. And every time you learn something, that’s really useful to know, too, because it means that it’s okay to wander around stupidly before you fix your destination.

The Story of Exodus and Personal Transformation

Now, you see that echoed in Exodus, right? Because what happens is that the Egyptians, or the Hebrews, escape a tyranny, which is kind of whatever you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant and stubborn axioms. It’s like, away from that tyranny. It’s like, great, I freed myself from that. Well, then what? Well, you think, well, now I’m on the way. It’s no, you’re not. Now you’re in the desert where you wander around stupidly and worship the wrong things until you finally organize yourself morally again and head in the proper direction.

So that’s worth knowing, too, because you think, well, I got rid of a lot of things, baggage, excess baggage that I didn’t need in my life, and now everything’s okay. It’s like, no, it’s not. You’ve got rid of a whole set of scaffolds that were keeping you in place, even though they were pathological, and now you have nothing, and nothing actually turns out to be better than something pathological, but you’re still stuck with the problem of nothing, and that’s, well, that’s exactly why Exodus is structured the way that it is. It’s that you escape from a tyranny. It’s, hooray, we’re no longer slaves.

Yeah, well, now you’re nihilistic and lost. It’s not necessarily an improvement, but it is the, see, it’s also useful to know that because you can also be deluded into the idea that imagine that you’re trying to become enlightened, which might mean to turn all those parts of you on that could be turned on.

You think, well, that’s just a linear pathway uphill. You know, it’s just from one success to another. It’s, no, it’s not. It’s like here you are, and you’re not doing too badly, and the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe. It’s worse, and then maybe you can pull yourself together, and you hit a new plateau, and then that crumbles and shakes, and bang, it’s worse again, because part of the reason that people don’t become enlightened is because it’s punctuated by intermittent deserts, essentially, by intermittent catastrophes, and if you don’t know that, well, then you’re basically screwed because you go ahead on your movement forward, and you collapse, and you think, well, that didn’t work.

I collapsed. It’s like, no, that’s par for the course. It’s not indication that you failed. It’s just indication that it’s really hard, and that when you learn something, you also unlearn something, and the thing you unlearned is probably useful, and unlearning it actually is painful.

You know, let’s say if you have to get out of a bad relationship. It’s like not every, not any, there isn’t any relationship that’s 100% bad, and so when you jump out of it, well, maybe you’re in better shape, but you’re still lonesome and disoriented, and you don’t know what your past was, and you don’t know what your present is, and you don’t know what your future is. That’s not, that’s why people stay with the devil they know instead of, you know, looking for the devil they don’t know.

And so, so anyways, the fact that you’re full of faults doesn’t mean you have to stop, and thank God for that. That’s a really useful thing, and the fact that you’re full of faults doesn’t mean that you can’t learn, and so you can posit an ideal, and you’re going to be wrong about it, but it doesn’t matter, because what you’re right about is positing the ideal, moving towards it.

If the actual ideal isn’t conceptualized perfectly, well, first, surprise, surprise, because like, what are you going to do that’s perfect? So it doesn’t matter that it’s imperfect. It just matters that you do it, and that you move forward, so that’s really, that’s really positive news as far as I’m concerned, because you can actually do that, right? You can do it badly. Anyone can do that, so that’s useful.

Okay, so like if you were an efficient person, you would have just done that, but you’re not, but who cares? You know, you still end up in the same place, and maybe the trip is even more interesting. Who knows? Probably too interesting. So, I hope you learned something. I hope you learned something. I hope you learned something.

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