Domicide! Exploring Why People feel lonely (dFoX6eR1iYQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dFoX6eR1iYQ

All right, I guess we are live. Can’t prove it, but that’s sort of what my thingy says. What does your intuition tell you there, Manuel? Are we live or what? I don’t know. Yeah, we’re live. That’s what it says. There we go. We didn’t get an introduction thingy. It can prove that we’re live. No, I didn’t do an introduction thingy. Sometimes we just got to dive in and just explore why. Yeah, well, we got to explore why this domicile, why you feel alone. So, in a topic of much discussion lately, I think, on the corner, Domos House, the side is killed, the loss. I was thinking that we could go into different ways, because some people never really have a home. They just have a place where they stay. Some people have a home, they lose it. Then they get homesick. Ferdinand Clay had this pretty interesting piece about homesickness as an illness in the 1800s for the immigrants towards the Americas. That there was a significant number, one in six, I think he said, that actually would return to the Europe’s. So, yeah, there’s this thing where you’re bound to a place where you’re born, usually. It’s connected to a family that you’re born into. It’s connected to a culture that tells you who you are, who you could be, what is important, what is not important. It’s a sense of connectedness that the home gives you. I’ve got a bunch of frames that I want to walk through. So, if we look at the home as a place, the home is a place that you can invite people into, that you can return to when you’re in need of protection. It provides you contrast to other places. It’s a you, other aspect. It gives you that grounding. And that grounding gives you the ability to judge, because now you have a standard, which is where you live, where you grew up, where you’re situated at the moment, however you want to frame that. You can judge everything else. Right. And then you have your people. Your people, you’re bounded to them. You bound yourself to share interest, share experience, but also share reference. You engage with the people from the same place to somewhat the same world, the same signals. So, there’s a lot of things that you’re sharing with the people. Those people can start providing things to you. Right. So, they provide ways of constraining you when you fear of path. They give you a place to be of service. Right. You can find a way to be of value to others. Right. You get those things whether you think they’re providing them or not. There’s a bunch of signals that happen as a result of you being in the world and being in a world in a certain place. And that manifests irrespective. So, in a way, we always have a home because we’re always surrounded by the signals. So, what does it mean to not have a home, we’ll say spiritual or otherwise? And I think that’s more to the point. If you don’t feel connected to, embedded in, cared for by the things around you, whether you were moving or not, then you have a sense of domicile. And I think you can do that to yourself. It’s one of the few things that you actually have a great deal of control over. Right. Is that sense of home. And that sense of home is mediated by your ability to manifest meaning with the things around you and judge things. And that will happen as the result of you trying to do this thing that people often try to do, which is to try to become an individual. Like, you’re not an individual. You’ve never been an individual. You’re not going to be an individual. You were born into a world with a bunch of people upon which you rely to survive. That’s always happened. From your birth, if you put a baby out in the wilderness, it dies immediately. It doesn’t have to get eaten either. Like, babies can’t feed themselves. So, as is the way with most creatures when they’re born. And so, you are born deeply embedded in, connected to a part of some kind of an ecosystem. Right. And when you try to remove yourself from any ecosystem by trying to assert your individuality or whatever, you lose that. But you need that. It’s not optional. That’s what domicile is getting at. Is that the parts, you know, look, you don’t need everything that everybody tells you you need. Right. But you need certain things. When you remove the parts that are needed, whatever those parts happen to be, and they might be different for different people for all I know. Right. That’s your sense of domicile. That’s what slides you into nihilism. Because now you don’t have a historical grounding. You don’t have something in the moment that can, you know, that can hold you. And part of the reason this came up for me today, I went to my entrepreneur meetings on Wednesdays. You have entrepreneur meetings in Columbia, South Carolina. And it’s great. You know, a little entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs and people who are interested in entrepreneurship get together. And it’s mostly a tech thing, but not entirely. And almost nobody was there today. It’s, you know, getting close to the long weekend. Right. And to the couple, this couple walked in and they’ve been to every meeting, I think. And because when I walked in, everybody went, oh, look, we’ve doubled the size of the group, you know, even though there were like five or six people there. So they walked in and I said, uh-oh, you know, we had a nice quiet thing going on. And look at this. Right. And, you know, they laughed. Right. Everybody knew it was funny. I’ve known them for a few months now since I’ve been coming. Later on, we were talking about, well, you know, what, what, what, what is it that I’m doing, say, on Navigating Patterns on my YouTube channel? And I was talking about the meaning crisis. Can you give me a definition of the meaning crisis? I was like, yes, meaning is that you co-manifest with reality. Right. With the things around you, things outside you to create, to create more reality, basically. And the example I gave was, you know, around the intimacy crisis. Right. You lose intimacy because you’re trying to be too much of an individual. Right. And what happens is you remove yourself from the ability to create meaning and you fall into nihilism. And a lot of people do this. They fall into nihilism just because they’re rejecting all of the connections that people are trying to make with them in the world. And that’s, that’s the problem with individualism. It’s like, well, what, what makes you not a part of things? What part of you is unique to the things that you have to be a part of? Really, you have to be a part of the world around you. Right. You’re taking up space. You’re using up oxygen and water. You’re eating food. Like, where do those boundaries, and I talked about boundaries before, on a live stream. Right. Begin an ant. And, and that’s the, the problem is that people are trying to be apart from others, but you, you can’t, it’s not even healthy for you. Everybody will say, well, I’m an individual, but then they want to feel love. It’s like, well, guess what? That’s, there’s probably plenty of love to be felt if you weren’t trying to be an individual so hard. Right. And where are those lines? Where, where do those lines begin and end? Because the thing with, with intimacy, with, you know, re-enchanting, we’ll say intimacy is, you have to have a place to fit in, to belong, to be a part of. If you’re busy saying, I’m apart from everything else because I’m an individual, and therefore you’re destroying that. And, and the difference is, let’s suppose two people had, two new people had randomly walked in to the entrepreneur meeting. And I, and I, you know, made that, that remark. It wouldn’t have gone well. And it shouldn’t have, right? It’s an inappropriate remark, but because it’s people that I know, I understand their sense of humor. I know how they operate. Right. And they feel at home on Wednesday mornings going to the entrepreneur meeting because that’s one of the things that they do on a regular basis. And they do it with us. Like a meeting by definition isn’t an individual act. Right. It’s an act of, of engagement with others. It’s anti-individualistic in a very strong sense. And that’s part of the, the domicile problem. And I, I’m not sure I’m on board with, like, I understand the point of St. Chino and talking about the quest for a spiritual home and, and all that, this spiritual domicile idea. You know, you could argue home is where you hang your hat, right? But what’s your hat? Right. What, what is the thing causing the domicile? Right. I just want to go to the last one. Like the home binds you, right? But it provides you a way of having an identity. Right. Like who are you? Well, like you are what you’re bound to. And like your home is one of the, or is the primary thing that you are bound to. Right. Like this is, this is a way that it allows you to judge the world. Right. Like now it’s like, okay, now I know what is important because like they affect the things that I care about around me. Right. So if I don’t have a home, right. If I, if I just live in, in, in an apartment that’s pre furnished, like I just move around every half, half a year or whatever, like then I’m not bound to something. So like, I don’t, I don’t have to protect the city that I live in because I can just move to the other city. Like what, what’s the big deal? Right. So, so being in, in a place, right. Like setting roots allows you to say, well, this is no, because like this is an attack upon the things that I cherish or say, yes, this, this is allowing me to do more. Right. And it’s also providing an anchor. Right. It’s like, if, if you feel like you’re spinning off, right. Like you, you can reorient yourself in relation to your home, right. Like you can cut the bullshit out. Right. And you can focus on the things that are really important. Like, so there’s all of these affordances that, that, that come with having a home. Right. And then like, like Mark said, right, like in some sense, you necessarily have a home. Right. But how much value do you get out of it? Well, that’s dependent on how much you’re bound to it. Right. Like, do you have a family? Do you have responsibilities? Like have you have people depending on you? Do you have a property depending on you? Do you have a legacy depending on you? Right. And this also becomes a source of motivation. Right. Like it’s, it’s something that drives you out into the world to take action, right. Like to, to be the hero and to bring back the treasure from the dragon. Right. Well, well, and there’s other, there’s other aspects to that binding, right. What a binding does, it is allows you to say, make a comment that’s, you know, that’s a negative, it’s a purely negative comment, a purely negative comment. Right. But that comment, because of the context, that’s the binding, that’s the intimacy, is held in a way that makes it funny instead of making it insulting. Right. Because again, you know, your home is your standard. Right. It gives you the method to judge. That can be a bad thing for sure, but it can also, you know, be really important to know about, to have. And, and that’s the, that’s the problem. Is that when you try to be an individual by yourself on your own, and somebody comes along and says, you know what, you don’t have to plow that field. You can just wait and the food will, somebody else will plow the field and food will come to you. And therefore you don’t need to plow the field. It’s technically correct. That’s almost certainly true. But also it’s not useful because you’re separating yourself from the operations around you that, that in this case get you food. Right. And your contributions are not arbitrary. And, and, and when people tell you they are, they’re just changing the context on you. They’re not being truthful. And that’s the, and that’s the problem is that you need that to hold everything else you do. Otherwise you don’t know what sanity is. Yeah. So when, when we’re talking about domicile, I, I just made a quick list of four ways that you can lose your home. Right. So, well, first we start with the case that you don’t have a home really. Right. Like you’re just pursued always and you’re in this endless running away cycle. So that’s completely horrible. And we don’t wish that upon anybody. But yeah, the first one, and I think this one is happening the most is alienation. Um, just when, when there’s a lack of binding, uh, within the family, right. Everybody’s doing their, their personal, their individual activities. Um, you, you don’t, you don’t feel like you’re going along. Right. And the only interactions that you have are, are frustrations as opposed to things, things that are generative, that, that lift you up, that make you a better person. Right. Then slowly you just drift away. Right. Like you, you find other interests and you become an atom, right. You come atomized and you’re no longer part of everything else. Right. And then there’s seduction, right. The grass is always greener on the other side. So you might think, oh, look at that. Like I want to participate in that. And you get just dragged out of your home and then you end up at this other place. And then it’s not what you thought it would be. And then you also experienced domicile and then you can have resentment. Right. You can resent your parents or your family or even your nation for a lot of things. And then you can refuse to bind yourself to the thing that is willing to have you. Right. The home that’s willing to have you and you’re an active rebellion. Right. You’re living in a way where you’re facing away from the home. And even though it’s there for you, you’re unable to participate with it. Right. And that is a way. Yeah. You’re identifying against. Like you’re not saying like, I am the thing that has this other home. You’re saying, I am the thing that is not in this home. Those are very different things. Right. Are you running away or are you running towards? And most people are running away believing they’re running towards. Right. But when you inspect what are you running towards, there’s no answer there. And that’s the individualism. Right. That’s the danger because you’re removing yourself from the web that keeps you sane, that holds you together. That right. And I’m not saying in all cases you need to stay where you were born or anything crazy. Right. And I think that’s what the spiritual home gets at is that what is the web that you are embedded in that helps you to orient in the world, that helps you to stay sane, that helps you to know when it’s time to leave home and when it’s time to go back to home. Because sometimes you should never leave home. Sometimes you should leave home and come back. Like you need to. Like, and that’s different for everybody. It’s not a universal answer. People get very stuck on the web. Everybody needs to take a year off before college. No, some people don’t. That’s just not true. Right. And maybe most people should. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s not everyone. Right. And we’ve got to avoid that. And some people are fine on the road because they’re spiritually at home where they’re at. That’s home is where you hang your hat. Some people cannot do that. Cannot. Right. And it’s hard to know from the outside without really knowing the person, where that line is, but whether or not that person’s able. And like there’s things that work on different timescales. Right. So you might be hanging your hat somewhere. You’re like completely fine. But then after a year or maybe like five years, you end up figuring out, no, there’s something lacking. And I’ve grown into this person that I resent. Right. I resent what I’ve become as a consequence of me not participating in the world in a certain way. Because it’s really difficult to notice a lack of something. Right. Like how do you know that you’re not getting a thing that you’re not paying attention to? Well, yeah, that’s impossible. And then, yeah, like it slowly changes you. And so in some sense, right, like the home also needs to take care to interface with you on all these levels that you have needs. Right. Like there’s a responsibility, like that’s part of the binding that is supposed to, at least even if they can’t fulfill those needs, notice them so that you can get a way to fulfill them. Right. Well, and it is noticing, right, you can’t notice things without contrast. And the home that you’re in, whether it be spiritual or material, is important to that. What is it that you’re noticing? Right. Because if you’re not noticing the beauty of the caterpillar changing into the butterfly, or you’re not noticing how the flowers seem to bloom on their own, and sometimes at different times, even though there’s the same flower from the same plant, you’re missing a part of the world. Look, you say, look, we’re always missing parts of the world. Yeah, but you’re missing a part of the world. Parts of the world. Yeah, fair enough. But is that the part of the world you want to miss, or do you want to attend to the miracles around you? Do you want to attend to the things that give you an appreciation for being alive, being grounded? Right. You know, it’s very much going to bleed into what I believe. I believe that there’s going to be a live stream on Friday, although without my assistance, on gratitude. Right. What allows you to be grateful? Well, I would argue that’s your home. Your home allows you to be grateful for everything, basically. Because again, it provides that baseline of contrast for you. And it is the place where you hold things. Like, if you have attained something, like to have it have some sort of permanence, you need to give it a place. Right. And even if it’s a spiritual thing, right, like, oh, yeah, remember that. Holiday, right, like the remembering the holiday with the people that you went on holiday with is giving it a place. And if you don’t have those people to remember it with, like, what it means to you will change. Like, and the way that you value things and the way that life has meaning to you will literally change because it’s now going to be reduced to the individualistic aspect again. Right. And I’ve been noticing how attending to the same thing in community and being aware that you’re attending to the same thing is adding something to your experience or at least can add something to your experience. And so, yeah, like, you need to have that. You need to have people around you who are willing to do that with you and capable. Right. Because, like, it’s not easy. You can’t just, like, do a pickup group like in a computer game and go, oh, let’s all attend to the boss fight. Like, if you’ve ever seen a pickup group in a computer game do a boss fight together, like, everybody has their own idea of what needs to happen. Right. And sometimes, like, people are doing the complete opposite of each other even though they’re in the same arena. Right. Well, and that’s why games pretty quickly, all the multiplayer games, develop clans almost immediately. Right. They all start out with clans. Clans are too political, which fundamentally, yes, you’re inventing tribes. And so they’re fundamentally political or can be thought of in political frames. But also the game doesn’t work without. Then it’s like, oh, wait a minute. Politics is not optional? No, it’s not. Tribes are not optional. Right. Clans are not optional. You need them to coordinate so that you can do the boss fight correctly so that you get a sense outside of the boss fight for how what people are really good at, not what they say they’re good at, not what the stats might indicate they’re good at. Ah. Right. But what the quality of the person is. That’s what the clan gives you. It also gives you an in-game home. Oh, I am part of this clan. This tribe, this group, that is part of my home within this game. Yes, it is. You may have a house apart from that. Right. But your home is the clan. And the interesting thing about being in a group of people attending to the same thing is the independent navigation of the other sovereign persons. Right. And it’s like, oh, wait a minute. There’s me relating to this thing in a vacuum with nothing else around. Right. Individualistic sort of method. And then there’s other people also relating to the thing. To your point, the words in video games do. How do you relate to killing the boss? I relate to killing the boss this way because these are the skills that I’ve used to pass successfully. Or these are the ones that I want to try this time. Or there’s lots. It’s not one or two. Right. There’s lots of ways. Life works the same way. Right. Obviously. These are just little versions of life. They’re not bigger than. They’re smaller than. Right. And so seeing other people approach whatever it is, what they think of ghosts, how they approach funerals, what they do in their prayer and contemplation, how they meditate. All of these things are important to see, especially if you’re involved. That’s why I don’t particularly care for this bizarre and almost certainly contradictory concept of participant observer. No. Either you’re a participant or you’re an observer. Observer, you can’t participate and watch yourself and watch others. When you’re participating, you’re paying attention in a particular way that is antithetical to observation as we would think about it. So you have to kind of keep that in mind. There are trade-offs here. You can either participate or you can observe. You can’t really do both. And there’s value to both. But you have to know what that value is and where it isn’t, more importantly. That’s the Socrates. I know nothing to total misquote. It didn’t happen. It’s in the Apologia, by the way. No. The real thing was Socrates doubting the wisdom of the oracle and then realizing, oh, no, no, no. The difference between me and that other person is not the amount of knowledge we have, but the wisdom that I have to say I don’t know that. That’s what Socrates was discovering. That misquote aside, that’s a bunch of garbage. It’s totally inaccurate. And that’s the thing. You need to have that sense. Well, if you don’t have a sense of home, how are you going to have a sense of what you do and don’t know? Because again, your home is your standard. That’s why domicile is so important. We get kind of caught up with what’s going on in our heads. And then we build a perfect world in our heads. And that’s great. And you can do that. It’s really easy. But you’re in your imagination. And it’s when you carry things out of your imagination that things start to go horribly wrong, at least according to you. But also can manifest things far beyond what you can imagine at the same time. It’s a nice, interesting, paradoxical sort of sounding way of looking at the world. But also it works. Right. I want to go on the idea of computer games a little bit. Right? So the computer game, if it’s not too difficult, right? And this is important, right? Like the difficulty of the things that you do determines the way that you judge your participation in some sense, right? So if what you’re doing is really easy and you’re with a group of people, like it seems like what you’re doing is working. And on some level, it is working, right? Like you’re functionally capable of manifesting what you join together for, right? If you turn up the difficulty, like then you put strain on the system. You put strain on the relationship, right? You reduce the margin of error. Then are you still capable of doing the same things that you were doing in the easy version, right? Like is the connection that you thought you were having with these people really as strong, right? And I’m not pointing at the individualistic skill. I’m pointing at the capacity to cooperate, right? To be together. And that is the thing that is giving you home, right? And Mark was saying like, well, you can’t observe everything at once, right? You might say like the role of the leader is kind of to do that, right? Like because he needs to keep track of the union between the parts and then he needs to direct, right? And then the parts can look at everything as well if the strain isn’t high, but like when the taxation upon the individual elements increases, then at that point, you get into trouble, right? Now you need to put all your attention to your task and you need to trust that the directions that you get from the leader are going to be sufficient for you to do what you need to do. That changes the relationship, right? This is why I think like a lot of things just can’t go on for a long time, right? Because they never get put under strain and they never prepare to be put on the strain. And they never create the connections that are necessary to engage with each other on the strain. So you might be in domicile while you think you have a home, right? You might have the sense that you have a home, but when it’s tested, it’s not really there. And so that’s maybe the last way that the home, you can experience domicile, that the house just disappears. It might be the disappearing of your house as a consequence of a disaster happening from external forces. Or it might be that the binding that was holding you together just wasn’t strong enough to keep you going. Like the environment changes and the way that people, the requirements upon people change. And then they can’t pull that weight in the same way as they did. And then you get into trouble. Yeah, and I think that it is that thing that we’re bound to. But if we reject the binding, and we can, right? We try to be an individual, we try to reject the binding or reject the attempt at binding, right? Deny the intimacy, deny that connection, or deny the quality of the connection that’s trying to be made. Then we remove ourselves from that. But now we don’t have that cushion, right? We can’t rely on that thing anymore. And if we idolize home, if we make it strictly a material thing, then we run into that problem. Oh, I have a home, it’s right over there. It’s whatever street number it is in whatever town you’re in. But then it gets back to home is where the heart is or whatever. Home is where you hang your hat. Or it’s not entirely material. But it matters. It matters what it is and how you make it. And you do, over time, hopefully make your own home. You’re supposed to leave your home and make a home for your family, basically. Whatever that looks like. In some sense, you can’t make a home by yourself. That doesn’t make any sense, right? The home is you embedded in whatever place with whatever other connections, right? And of whatever quality. And maybe part of that is you showing up for the meetings, right? Maybe part of that is you physically building a house, right? And then other people come to live in it, right? All of these things are important to engage with because that binding and where that happens is non-material fundamental. It’s a spiritual thing fundamentally. It’s not in the material realm. And we do have some control over that binding. And that’s usually where we get confused. We can leave home. Well, you can leave home and you can take off from your parents’ house. And the first time you run into some new condition, be confused by it, have all the other people know about it, right? You kind of hear these stories about people encountering things for the first time and not knowing how to deal with them, right? Everyone’s like, whoa, why don’t you know that? Right, well, I didn’t grow up that way. And that goes from outhouses all the way to ordering pizza, right? All the way to, you know, what do you do to buy a newspaper on the street? All right, most of you don’t know how to buy newspapers on the street because we haven’t had to in the US in quite some time. Or how do you relate to authority? Right, that’s a big one. Like that. Right. There’s a reverence that you need to show and that’s different in different countries and in Western countries, like authority has kind of evaporated, right? Like we don’t treat authority figures with due respect anymore. And then, yeah, like how do you relate to a person who still is in an authority position to you, right? While they don’t have the rituals around the authority anymore. And going from that to a more authoritarian society is difficult. But the other way around is also difficult as well because like now there’s no rules. Like how do you relate to a no-rule situation? That’s even harder. And I yesterday or the day before yesterday, we were talking on the discord a little bit about what do people do when they’re in domicile, right? Because now they’re looking for a home. And the problem, like if you had a home, right, like a good home and you are looking for a new home, that’s not too much of a problem because you kind of know what it’s like. You know what you’re looking for. But if you had a broken home and you’re looking for a home, that can be really problematic. Right? So part of home is being at peace, right? So in order to establish a safe space, like people resort to white knighting people. For people, right? So to white knight is to come in as the knight on the shining horse to protect whatever person is in need, right? And now you create this area around that person, right, where you allow that person to relate to you, to have a connection to you, right? And who’s the person that’s going to have a connection with you? It’s going to be the victim, right? So now you’re establishing two roles and they’re looking for intimacy, right? Because that’s the thing that we haven’t really talked about, right? Like the home is that which provides the means for an intimate connection, right? So they’re trying to establish an intimate connection through participating in roles. But the roles, they facilitate the idea of an intimate connection, right? Like so it kind of looks like the knight and the person saved are in this relationship that is really intimate. But if you never cultivated the skills of being in an intimate relationship, that’s role playing. And we’ve been talking a lot about people feeling that people are role playing, that they’re NPCs acting out a script, right? So that’s the situation where you get into that. Yeah, yeah. When you don’t have intimacy, that’s when things seem like K-Fabe or NPC or whatever, right? They’re just doing something. They don’t have any connection to what they’re doing. And so like, look, if you watch wrestling, I tweeted about this last week, if you watch wrestling and you think, well, they’re just, you know, this is K-Fabe, okay, no, it’s not. You’re wrong. So what’s going on, right? That means you didn’t go and experience wrestling, right? Because the people who go to wrestling, if you go up to them and you go, you know that’s fake, right? They think you’re crazy. The reason why they think you’re crazy is because your idea of fake is wrong, actually wrong. They know that it’s a story being played out on a stage. They’re well aware of this. Every person who goes to wrestling knows this. And the purpose of wrestling, WWE in particular, or whatever they’re calling it nowadays because they keep changing that corporate name, it’s a children’s play. It’s what it is. It’s a children’s moral play. Everybody that goes to wrestling knows this. And that’s not what adults can appreciate children’s stories. And maybe they should. Maybe they should do that more, in fact, right? And the fact that you, who is not involved, who is not a participant, think that it’s K-Fabe means you are broken. That’s a you problem. That’s you separating yourself from those people. You’re denying the intimacy. And look, if you try to force intimacy on the other side of the ledger, you white knight for someone and they don’t want that. They don’t want to be connected with you because you’re creepy or know you or whatever. Now you have two victims because you are saving somebody from something and then they’re rejecting it. Now they’re not even safe. And now they’re victimizing you. Ah, it’s a mess. And we sense that. But what we’re really sensing is the loss of intimacy. We just don’t characterize it that way because we have video games. So we’re going to use NPC or we have this K-Fabe term. So we’re going to use it. Just your lack of participation of intimate connection with something does not mean that it is fake. It means that you’re an idiot. That’s what it means. Because people aren’t participating with things and acting as if they’re real. And maybe if you act as if something’s real, it becomes somewhat real. And that would be a problem if a bunch of people were acting out something that say wasn’t long lasting and couldn’t continue on its own. So if, for example, you were one of these evolution believers, and look, I’m a big evolution believer. I think evolution is true. I think it’s a real process that actually works. But if you engage in the evolutionary process in a way that doesn’t allow for children to occur or the continuation, direct continuation of your line, it ain’t going to work. It’ll work for a while. You can participate. And you know what? You can have a generation participate in it. That generation dies out. And then another generation comes up, and they can try to participate in it. Right? Hopefully that number is low. You can do the experiment on the computer. I’ve actually done it more than once, by the way. But whatever. Dawkins did it too, to some extent, although he missed a few things. If that number is under 10%, the population will be fine with 10% of the population and rejection of its own ability to procreate. Population would be just fine. Population would be just fine. It’s normal and healthy to have under 10% rejecting. Once it gets over that number, however, then all kinds of strange things happen, population in terms of narrowing and all. Right? That’s because we co-manifest reality. Reality isn’t some fixed thing to which we’re conforming. And that’s what domicile helps us with. It’s like, oh, no, no, no. Here’s the standard that we use to create intimate, quality relationships with nature, with ourselves, with others. Right? Or maybe with the ineffable, however you conceive that. That standard, that historical grounding is important. We can change some of it to some extent. We can say, all right, I’m not going to be like my father. Or, all right, I’m not going to get divorced like my parents. Or, you know, all right, I’m not going to be constrained by this small town that’s got one coal mine and that’s the only business. Like, I’m not going to do that. Fine. Fair enough. You’re still using that old standard to create a new world. Right? To manifest a new form of reality for those people that you are placing in your new family. And how connected you stay to your other family, you know, your original family or however you want to conceive of it, is a different question. And none of this gets easier. Not trying to solve a problem. Just trying to point your attention at the right areas for trade-off judgment and discernment. Right? Yeah. So when we’re talking about reality, what is real, right? When these people are participating in the wrestling match, they are tuning in to an aspect that is real to them. Right? And maybe everything… I’m not making an exclusive claim, but maybe everything has an aspect of reality in it. Right? And it’s up to us to tune in to that part of what we’re participating in. And so if we point that idea at dormaside, right? Like, that would imply that we’re experiencing dormaside because we’re not connecting to the right things that are around us. Right? Like, and if we would be connecting in a different way, we would not be experiencing the dormaside. Right? So then the job would be to find the means of connecting to what is provided to you. Right? And in some sense, this has to be true because humans have lived like almost everywhere on the planet in whatever conditions there are there. And they have made homes. Right? Like, they have built families and started legacies in the strangest places. Right? In the strangest places that, like, I would die if you put me there right now. So it’s important to realize that. And it’s like, okay, well, what does that ask of us? Well, that means that we are going to have to find a way to become intimate with what is provided to us. Right? And what is the aspect that we need to get intimate with? Well, the thing that’s real. Right? We can go on about what’s real for a long time. But in some sense, what is real is what we are connected to. Right? Like, the intimacy of the connection is the thing that provides the reality to us. Right? And like, if we’re trying to be intimate with something we can’t be intimate with, then that’s not going to work. Right? So long term. Right. Long term. Time is always a factor. Anybody can be infatuated and be in love for three months. Anybody. Right. But that doesn’t mean that’s the right person for you for a year or three years or 10 years, the rest of your life. And that, like, one way to think about reality a little bit better is, what if everything is a garden? And gardens grow better when people attend to the garden properly. Not randomly. You can’t attend like I do. Yeah, like I did. We put in my plants and they all break off and I’m like, oh no. Right. Right. It has to be correct. It has to match what the plants need and how they grow. And there’s always this food production. While food production works better with humans. Like, food doesn’t produce itself efficiently without us. Efficiency comes from rationality. Rationality seems to come almost exclusively from persons. Or at least rationality at the scale that helps nature in a way that makes it, you know, let’s say several orders of magnitude more efficient. And like that, like having a farm is the creation of reality in many ways. And you can have a bad farm. You have a farm that can only run for a season because you deplete the soil. Or there’s lots of ways to do that, by the way. Like you don’t do proper rotation. You try to farm all your land all at once every season. Yeah, that’s not going to work. So being, you know, being in intimate connection with that, in that intimate quality relationship, that’s what tells you what lasts. And what if all of reality were a farm or a garden, right, that had to be cultivated? So if you cultivate the thorny trees, then they overgrow and, you know, you die of thorns. Because that can happen. Right. If you cultivate poison ivy, like you get infected with, right, if you don’t hold those weeds, before they can do damage, they will do damage. And that may be 10 years away. But that, you know, you can’t throw away, we’ll say, the knowledge of the elders, the historical grounding, it’s, well, traditionally we didn’t do this for a reason. It’s all, it’s arbitrary, right? You do the postmodern trick, then you’re going to run into problems. And maybe if you look around the world, you kind of see that play out in the additional chaos. Right. Because order is a function of rationality, or it was at least wrapped up in it. And so that matters. The domicide is the rejection of the existing order in some real sense. And look, some order is not going to last anyway. Fair enough. Some order needs to change or could be improved. That’s the cultivation. It’s hard work, right, but it shouldn’t be thrown out or immediately rejected or rebelled against for the sake of rebellion. Right. So you’re going to provide the answer before you remove the problem, because you’re going to have a bigger problem if there’s nothing in the place of the thing where something was. And I’ve experienced that in my real life. I remove problems without replacing them. And that ended up with me doing nothing and getting into depression. So I cannot advise you to do that. So to go back to my list of how do we create a home with people around us. So enchantment is a way to create harmony. When you enchant people, right, you give people something to relate to. You turn all the heads the same direction. And the person that is going along with that, I would qualify as a simp, right, like someone who’s trying to appease the other person, get along with, right. So now what do we have? Well, we have a sense of harmony, right, like, oh, like we’re moving in unison, right. Like, so there’s a sense of communion, right, like coming together. Like coming together under the same banner, right. But because it’s enchantment, right, like it’s not grounded in truth. It’s grounded in the drawing you along, like the siren call, like it’s drawing you out. It’s like as long as the music is playing, everything is all right. But then when the music stops, right, like you’re looking down and your feet are on the sticky dance floor and you still have to go home with your drunk ass, right, like that’s kind of what happens when enchantment goes away, right. And the problem with enchantment is like it gives us a nice feeling, but we can’t lift it, right. It doesn’t have lasting power unless it is integrated with something that has inherent lasting power, right. And so if you enchant your garden, but you’re actually doing the gardening or like putting the things in the right place with the sun and doing the watering and you dress it up nice, that’s proper enchantment, right, like that’s actually the creation of a home in some profound sense where you’re increasing the connection to the things that you’re already connected to. You’re creating a story around your participation and that is the thing that provides meaning, but that also provides a binding between people that maybe have a different relationship to the tree, right. But now if we give the tree a story that grandpa planted it, so now we can all have a relationship to the same history when we’re looking at the tree. So now that unites us in a profound sense. Yeah, and I think, look, you can enchant places, right, not just people, right. You can enchant a place to make it a home. Well, you know, I would argue that men build the house and women make it a home, right. They take the structure and enchant it such that people want to be there. They feel comfortable there and that’s kind of the purpose, right, because, you know, look, I still don’t have things on the walls of the living room because I’ve been here like six years. I just don’t care about stuff on the walls, right, but that, you know, that it’s not fully a home because it doesn’t have stuff, you know, up and permanent things sort of nailed to the wall that has a, you know, has a way of enchanting the place for others too, not just for me, but also for me. Like, it’s actually really important to have the things, you know, you get a new office, you put stuff on your desk, whether it’s pictures, I’ve got pictures, right, or it’s little toys. I’ve got tons of little toys on my desk, right, or whatever it is, right, the things that make your desk yours and not just, you know, another desk in a row of desks or in a cubicle or in an office like all the other offices, right, and that’s part of enchantment. And we’re enchanted by different things and how much it captures us is how much, how grounded we feel in the space, right, and maybe we should feel grounded. Like, at some point, that’s kind of important to address, like, what’s a proper level of enchantment? What happens when the enchantment turns all wrong? So one example is if you’re in a relationship, those first three months, right, three to six months before, whatever it is, when you, you know, you’ve got the oxytocin problem and, you know, you’re just into that other person and then maybe that wears off for them before it wears off for you and so you’re still enchanted with them and they’re no longer enchanted with you, right, oh, that’s an issue, or you, you know, you go to New York City and, you know, Ayn Rand is clearly enchanted with New York City, right, she wrote about the big buildings, right, and then suddenly, you know, you don’t realize the trap that you’re in because you’re trying to afford a place in New York City, you can’t make enough money because it’s almost impossible to make enough money to actually live in New York City, right, and so, you know, when, what, when’s it healthy, when’s it unhealthy? Because enchantment can be, can be a wonderful thing. You enchant your home, it feels more comfortable for you, or you chant your house, rather, right, it feels more comfortable, it becomes a home, right, it really helps with that sense of domicile. On the other hand, yeah, you can be trapped by the enchantment for far too long and then when’s the time to leave? Like, when, when, when is your home no longer serving you? You know, when, like, I left New England, why did I leave New England, like, six or seven years ago, because, yeah, that place was done, it wasn’t the same place, the, you know, and I saw that, you know, they’re trying to re-enchant New England with different things that, look, removing lanes on the major roads inside the city is a bad plan, just, I don’t know why I’d have to tell anybody that, but apparently in Massachusetts you have to tell everybody because they thought it was a great idea, and they put in bike lanes and now there are fewer bike riders on those roads than there ever were, true story. Right, so it had become a different place, right, the enchantment that kept me there was gone, I left, it’s that simple, right, I became enchanted with South Carolina instead mainly because of the heat. So, you know, the best way to fight enchantment is not to smash it, right, because, you know, that person needs something in that, from that enchantment, but it’s to offer a better enchanting alternative, right, then maybe you can smash their enchantment, and you see this, you know, when you’re, when you’re talking to people, a lot of people are enamored with, we’ll say, the solution of meditation, or the solution of learning about psychology, or the solution of understanding neuroscience for the first time, or whatever nonsense they think they’re up to, which they’re definitely not doing, by the way, right, and then you go, yeah, you don’t understand any of this, let me show you how much you don’t understand this, that can be very useful if you’ve given them a place to go, if you haven’t given them a place to go, you’re pulling a rug out from under them and they’re falling forever, right, and so you have to be careful, you know, when you try to break enchantment, or, you know, you can’t walk up to people and say, Sam Harris is evil, if they’re Sam Harris fans, you first have to give them a way to relate to Sam Harris, right, so that, so that everything he does isn’t like pure poison, and then you can show them the contrast, right, because you can’t, you can’t disenchant something without a relationship to something else, right, you can’t see through illusion, unless you have a foot in reality, so you have to provide the foot in reality first, right, and that way you don’t cause domicile, because otherwise you will cause domicile, because domicile is related to that enchantment. Yeah, when we’re looking at enchantment, right, like you could argue that enchantment is a type of intimacy, right, but it might be a type of intimacy to something that’s not real, right, but there’s an affordance there, right, like there’s a capacity that the other person has, and we can appeal to that capacity, right, like we can use that capacity, and we can point it at another aspect of life, and get fulfillment there, and like if that’s more real, right, like it’s gonna be more fulfilling, because it’s like, that’s just the way that it works, right, like there’s more actual intimacy to be had, and that will just be affirming of that connection. Yeah, there’s more affordance, maybe, more availability for affordance. This doesn’t have to be a person, like the thing, the reason why I’m here, so I’m near Columbia, South Carolina, I originally intended to be near Charlotte. Charlotte is in North Carolina, but it’s 10 miles over the border, so I was going to be in South Carolina, which is the thing to do, by the way, for tax purposes, is going to live in South Carolina, work in Charlotte, where all the banks are, you know, nice career, making huge amounts of money, at least for living down here, but I was enchanted by having a pond, and having 12 acres of land on this beautiful, you know, brick house, it met almost all my needs, like there was almost nothing in this house that wasn’t met by the existence of this house, and that’s the enchantment, the enchantment is, oh, you can have 12 acres of land, you can have a pond, a huge pond, you can go kayaking in any time you want, grab your kayak, throw it in the pond, no one can tell you otherwise, no one else is going to be there unless you invite them, right, and you go fishing, you’ve got this dam, like it’s crazy, right, I was enchanted by that, and I remain enchanted by my pond to some extent, right, and by the location, it’s a particularly good location, really near the highway, six miles from an IMAX movie theater, like there’s nothing I lack, even though I live in the woods, it’s really not living in the woods, to some extent, this civilization, we’ll say, is so close, it’s very enchanting. Yeah, and then this one goes out to Sally, it’s the verbal expressionism, and the verbal expressionism is effectively impressionism. Impressionism. Impressionism, oh, yeah, like the impressionist painter. Yes, but it’s presenting a shape to you, right, and then you can use that shape to project whatever’s in your head upon the shape, right, so in some sense, like you can have a ball, and it can be a sun, or it can be earth, or it can be a football, or it can be a head, right, but like, so when I present this to you, you can have whatever relationship you want with it, and if I just relate to the roundness of it, right, like I can say something about the head, about the sun, about the earth, at the same time, right, so there’s a way in which you can say non-meaningful things, right, but they can convey meaning to the other person, right, and what is the other person, like that’s, well, I identified it as a narcissist, right, so someone who wants to have the world in their image, right, and then someone is providing images for them to project upon, right, now you have a coming together as well, right, you create a intimacy, a place that seems hospitable, but again, right, like it’s not a real connection, right, because like the one person isn’t really providing something to the other, right, like they’re just providing a screen, and the other person is not seeing the other person, they’re just seeing themselves in what is being provided, so like that’s the opposite of an intimate connection, but it is something that can function, like yeah, it’s a projection, right, and it’s not a participation, so the real fight in the world is between projection and participation, can I participate in this, or is it just a projection, and who’s projecting what, because maybe I’m projecting, maybe the other person is projecting, but it doesn’t matter, and projection isn’t bad, right, because it’s not optional, like you’ve got to project a prediction of the future in order to manifest something in the future, that you have to believe you can touch a wall, or you can’t touch the wall, it’s technically true, right, you have to be able to do that, but at a certain point it needs to change into a level of participation, or it doesn’t work, and look, you can argue that, you know, look, I have all these ideas, and I try to manifest them, they don’t manifest, they’re, you know, they’re all bad projections, yeah, maybe, and maybe most of your projections will never manifest, never be, you know, be able to be participated with you or others, right, maybe, that’s possible, that doesn’t matter, what matters is whether or not you participate in it, this is where the pragmatism comes in really handy, it’s like, can I participate, and how, because maybe other people can participate, but not me, and I’m okay with that, like I don’t have to participate in everything, that’s, I don’t play every game, it’s not, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna be a basketball star, it’s not gonna happen, I’m not gonna be a baseball star, it’s not gonna happen, right, it’s okay, like I’m not bothered by it, I have other skills, right, so I’m good, I’m totally good, so yeah, I think, I think it’s important, like how these, you can see that these relationships, right, and I guess these poles, right, like these, these things that can commune in some sense, right, they can give the sense of a home, right, and they can function for extended periods of time, especially if you spend that time separated, right, if you spend a lot of time separated, then the actual friction never manifests, and like both parties will separate with a good feeling afterwards, because they both got what they needed from the interaction, right, and this is the sad part, right, like John Hufaki talks about his circling event, and how people get really emotional from the idea that like they’ve never had communion like that, like a level of intimacy like that with other people, and they literally thought that was impossible, right, so that was impossible, right, so now first of all, that’s probably also an enchantment, right, like there’s a level of enchantment there, because it’s a new experience, and you you just don’t have means to judge, but it’s also saying something, right, like there there is a lack, right, like there is a a capacity for intimacy that is at least invoked in that person, and they’re surely needing that, right, and the implication there is that we we don’t have these things in society, right, and like the Estuary Project is trying to provide means to provide that to people, but well, yeah, we’ve been talking about this a lot, like what is the thing that you want to provide, right, like because you want to provide a spiritual home, right, you want to create a spiritual family or a fellowship, right, a group of people that are pointing the same way, but in order to have that, right, like in order to have that body, there needs to be a binding, and yeah, there needs to be all these very requisites, and I have been going over that, or over, you know, trying to figure that stuff out. Yeah, well, and it’s hard too, because what those people are actually seeing, ultimately, is they’re just seeing that the level of distress or problems in their life is not unique to them, and in some cases the problems aren’t unique. When we look out in the world right now, a lot of what we’re seeing is wrapped up and caught up in this whole idea of what the ideal family looks like, what an ideal job looks like, right, and you know, from TV, from movies, from, you know, from whatever, basically. So we see that as a signal, and we go, aha, and then we think, well, how far off of that am I? But we’re not talking to each other and realizing, oh yeah, we all have terrible parents, they all screwed up, because parents do, because they’re people, it turns out they’re people, and people screw up. Like, if you want to have something in common with everyone else, screwing up. I’m done, you don’t need anything else, we all screw up all kinds of things all the time. Right, parents don’t know how to be parents, like, you’re not going to, you don’t reach some milestone, like, get a PhD in parenting, right? No, you- I got a PhD in screwing up, does that count? I have a major and a minor in screwing up. I screw up majorly and minorly all the time, so there, yeah, and that’s the problem, is that, you know, you get in these groups of people and you find out, oh, you know, your father was mean to you too, and your mother did that to you too, and your siblings, you know, fought with you too, and yeah, whatever it is, right, and oh, you know, my brother’s struggling with drug addiction, and you’re like, oh, you’re the only one in your family who’s not drug addicted. It’s like, wow, I don’t feel so bad anymore. That’s what they’re relating to, they’re relating to the greediness of reality, of life, and they’re going, wow, right, and this is part of that recession that we have, like, especially of, we’ll say, the church, right, like everyone’s withdrawing, we’ll say, you know, and Sally Jo calls this great testimony, they’re withdrawing their gritty sort of struggle, right, and replacing it with nothing but a positive idyllic symbol. This is based on B.F. Skinner’s work, he did more damage. B.F. Skinner did a lot of great work in psychology, and then he did this one terrible thing, which is this idea that positive only reinforcement is a thing that you can do and that is good, even though anybody that thinks about it for 10 seconds and understands even a little bit of tiny piece of evolutionary development would understand that, no, negative signals are far more important than positive ones, because negative things kill you. Positive things don’t necessarily make you live longer, but negative things make you live shorter, right, and so it’s obvious that positive reinforcement only ends in catastrophe. He did a couple of experiments, his son did an experiment, lots of people have tried to emulate this since, I think he started that in the 60s, interestingly enough, and it just doesn’t work, like it just doesn’t, we know why it doesn’t work too, which is just amusing to me, we know exactly why it doesn’t work, why it cannot work ever, but this idea of positive reinforcement and we’re not giving each other enough, no, no, things are bad out there and we all struggle. Yeah, I think that’s all related to validation, right, so like a lot of us are having a rough time and we want to be validated and the question is, well, what is the means by which we’re looking for validation, right, so Mark was talking about validation of experience, right, like oh yeah, you are going through something and I’m also going through something, and in some sense, right, like I think the right validation would be the validation of the struggle, right, like oh yeah, what you’re going through is rough, right, like that’s the way that I can validate it, but like am I going to validate the way that you’re describing your struggle, because like now we’re at a different level, right, like is the way that you’re engaging in your struggle valid, like I don’t know, like maybe, right, but that’s way harder, right, and a lot of people they come into the Discord and they’re looking for validation of their ideas, right, it’s like oh, I have this way of dealing with this and like you should like it too, right, that’s the kind of conversation that you end up having and then there’s also validation through identity, right, so I heard a lot of people like, oh, I got this diagnosis of what my problem was and now I feel a lot better, right, and it’s like well, yeah, you’ve just received intelligibility, right, you’ve received a way to, well, not really understand, but like, yeah, you can describe what’s going on, you have roots for what’s going on, but you could have made up a fantasy word and you could have gotten the same effect, right, but like just the fact that you have an external word for something doesn’t mean that you can resolve the problem, it doesn’t mean that you can grasp it better or whatever, right, so, but like there’s this tendency where we can say, well, I’m now going to assume this identity and when I have this identity, I’m supposed to be treated in a certain way, like there’s certain privileges connected to my identity and then if you affirm my identity, like I’m a screw up and you affirm that I’m a screw up, then you’re not going to judge me hard for being a screw up and then I can feel good about myself and like I don’t have to get frustrated, but at the same time, like you’re not going to provide the frustration that I need to grow to stop being a screw up, right, so there’s this tension, right, and so we should validate that it’s rough to be a screw up and that like that sucks to be like that and that there’s a struggle involved in there, but we should also pressure the people that are in the struggle to come out as shining diamonds on the other end, because like that’s the proper way to engage in a struggle, to take the fruits from your labor day. Yeah, exactly and I think that’s when people feel far apart or try to be, try to separate themselves from everything else and say, well, I’m an individual and I didn’t grow up like you grew up. It’s like, are you sure? Because, you know, and look, some people have wonderful parents and their fathers are not tyrannical and their mothers are not over over-loving or whatever, you know, there’s tons of archetypes there on both sides, right, some people have, you know, really, good childhoods, right, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have other struggles in common with most other people and that’s where we get confused. It’s like, the thing we have in common is struggle, it’s not necessarily a struggle and our a struggle we might have in common with several other people but not everyone, right, and that’s where we get confused, right, we don’t really understand the difference between the specific type of struggle or specific instance of struggle and the fact that everybody struggles as a generic sort of abstraction, like we all have our struggles, you know, I need to use the example but it’s a good one, there are people out there who’s, the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them was they stubbed their toe, I’m not exaggerating, she meant something like this, it’s just like, really, that’s the most traumatic thing that you can recall in your memory from your life and, you know, is it actually from their report it was, and like, fair enough, we all have a most traumatic thing but when you try to measure it against an objective material reality and say, well, something your toe is not the same as having a father beat you, it’s like, but it is their most traumatic thing, it’s still, like, it’s still the thing that created your trauma, so it’s like, this is why I don’t like the trauma thing, it’s like, everybody has trauma, what are you gonna do, like, okay, everybody has trauma and everyone’s trauma is different, oh boy, right, some people have the same sort of trauma and some people can use that same trauma solution, you know, to help others, so maybe, but you’re not, you know, at that point you’re really kind of watering down the usefulness of the frame and that’s part of the problem with things like domicile, you can water down the usefulness of domicile and I like, you know, when John Brevicki originally talked about it, he talked about in the case of right after Alexander conquers everything, people who didn’t move physically didn’t know where they lived anymore, why, because there was this mixing and there were these changes underneath the surface about how things worked, because the affordances around you were different, right, like, the way you store meat changes when you get spices from the Middle East, right, and they’re not necessarily grown in the Middle East, but that’s the trading route, but once you get access to that trading route, you know, all of Europe changes, like, there’s all these things that happen as the result of trade and connections that have nothing to do with you directly, but they affect you and it’s acknowledging that you’re embedded in this bigger system and in this culture and that your culture is impacted by other cultures, yup, that’s true too, because we all stuck on this big blue ball together, right, and whatever little clans, tribes, cultures, societies we form are still on the blue ball and that blue ball is one thing, right, at some abstraction level, right, so we’re all kind of, like, trying to work all that out all the time and it changes all the time, right, like, the EU didn’t used to exist and then it existed and now the way people do trade changed overnight pretty much, right, the way people do money, except in England, good for England, changes overnight as a result of the creation of this, you know, you can call that K-Fade if you want, but that just means you don’t live in Europe, it’s not part of your participation, participant reality, it was part of your participant reality, it’s not K-Fade because you’re doing it, it’s not, like, if you’re wrestling, you know, look, people get hurt in wrestling all the time, people get paralyzed, people die, is that, if you’re doing something and it’s a play and you die, is it less real or more real? I don’t, like, what’s your definition of reality? Is that not helpful, right, and I think that’s, you know, that was the thing that, you know, the John Stossel video has been going around, it’s how John Stossel got famous, right, the wrestlers smacked him, so you think this isn’t real? It’s because they smacked each other in wrestling, they hurt each other, they really strain each other, it’s not, you know, it’s not that they’re not actually doing what you see, but yeah, they’re not putting their all 100% into it because they kill each other. It’s good not to kill people, you think people would be happy about that instead of saying, it’s fake! It’s like, I don’t care if it’s fake, I’m happy people aren’t dying, can we focus on that instead? I don’t know. Well, that reminds me, I was, when I was, Joey, I was going to this play and at a certain point he asked someone from the audience to come on stage and participate in the play, so I came on stage, I had to run around the stage or whatever, and at a certain point, I think he was narrating and he said, and then he fell, and so I just threw up myself on the floor, right, and then he had to break character because he was worried that I was hurt, right, so it’s like, there’s this play and then there’s not the play and then there’s reality, right, like there’s the actuality of being hurt, interfacing in that, like, does it matter, right? Like, does that diminish the experience that he broke character or did, were you actually experiencing something generative when you were in the audience and did you actually have a moment of excitement that you could participate in and is that maybe more important, right, is that maybe more real, right, like this communal spirit that just gets arisen as a consequence of shared excitement, right? Like, there’s something extreme happening, right, like the extremeness, the norm, yeah, it’s out of contract, it’s breaking the frame, like literally with the guy, right, he’s like, oh, I’m doing this and now I can’t do it, doing the thing that I’m planning to do anymore. Right, well, and that’s the thing, it’s the participation that is the manifestation that we would refer to as reality, I do want to address this with Mills, very good stuff, guys, I think Critical Theory slash PM in general pulled the rug with no real alternatives, this makes people desperate for any home, even a bad or a fake one. Well, yeah, they’re telling you your home is K-Fame, they’re telling you your home is fake and that there’s a better home out there and look, James Lindsay does a really bang-up job, especially lately, of talking about this, their whole trick is saying, well, this is broken here and this is broken here and this is broken here, right, so they’re pointing out flaws in whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, whatever structure, institution, whatever they’re attacking at the moment and then they’re saying, we can build something that doesn’t have those problems and then you ask them, what is it and they go, well, watch, we’ll build it and then they start to build it and everything gets worse and you go, well, yeah, but everything’s getting worse, guys, and what about all this and you’re supposed to fix these problems and they go, no, we’re not done yet, we’re not done, like, give us a chance, in the meantime, they’re in control and they’re like, I don’t know, that’s their postmodern idea, is that everything is power and so when they’re in control, they equate control and power, that’s their whole goal, they don’t have a goal past being in charge, their whole goal, whatever they say their goal is, is garbage, explicitly, like, this is explicit in the text, if you actually pay attention to what Foucault and Derrida are saying, and yes, those two specifically, but also all the others, right, they’re saying the only thing that matters is power and it doesn’t matter how you obtain power, you can lie, cheat, and steal, it makes no difference whatsoever because they’re unprincipled, because there are no higher values or principles in postmodernism other than power, in fact, there is no anything else, everything else in postmodernism, whether they state that explicitly or not, is an actual real illusion to them, it’s an actual arbitrary frame, and so if all things are arbitrary, then it’s a fight to power, I absolutely agree, but all frames aren’t arbitrary, that’s where I disagree with their… And also back to the domo side, so what they’re saying is the home that you think is your home is not taking care of you is evil, and then they provide the alternative home, right, so, okay, you were part of this bad thing, now you have to get rid of your sins, right, like you have to renounce your old home, you have to renounce your whiteness, or whatever heritage that you have, right, you have to renounce your fossil fuel car and get an electric car, or whatever the initiation ritual is, and now you can enter this new family who truly cares for you, right, like that’s literally like Maoistic mind-washing techniques that they’re using, and that’s what they use to bind, right, like there’s a sacrifice that you need to make in order to participate in the promised people effectively, right, and then when you’re part of that, like you’ve left behind your old self and you’ve been born anew in this, well, kind of religion, right, like at least religious setting. It’s a religious pattern, right, and it is very, like, it’s very explicitly the trick. Lindsay talks about this, they keep telling you, no, no, wait, we’re not done, when their stuff doesn’t work, because you’ve been foolish enough to hand over the reins to them, and, you know, it’s very much a trick. The other appeal they make is, look, you’re going to be part of the global community now, or the global tribe. There’s no more tribalism, because there’s only going to be one tribe. It’s like, well, A, that doesn’t work because disagreeable people exist, just right off the bat, like boom, that theory’s done, it’s done, it’s over. One disagreeable person, theory over. I can be that one person if you like, or Manuel, or both of us maybe, doesn’t matter. That theory’s done, that’s wrong, cannot happen already, right, and so, unless you shoot us, which, you know, whatever, if that’s your bag. It happened in the past. And give it a shot, literally, because it’s going to take that, right, and so, at that point, it’s like, well, wait a minute, why is this attractive? Well, because you have more connections. It’s a quantity argument, right, but the question is, would you rather have a hundred Facebook friends, or five good friends in real life? Oh, because that’s what the communists, and the socialists, and the Maoists, and whatever other label you want to put on the Identify Against crowd are doing. They’re just telling you, you can have more friends, you can have a higher friend count on Facebook, in the virtual world. That’s all they’re offering. That’s literally the whole trick. They’re just offering you more. You’re like, oh, more, I like them. I look, I’m a glutton. I love more. You want some steak? Yes. And then, when I’m done eating my steak, where do I want more steak? Because it’s just how I’m wired. It’s like, I like steak, give me more. I like candy, give me more. That’s why I can’t have candy in the house, because I’ll eat all of it. I can’t dole myself out candy every day. It doesn’t work. I just want more, right, and it’s very attractive, right. It’s a very good enchantment, especially for materialists. Materialists have no other measure. They like more quantity, that’s it, right. But really, what you want are five good friends, five quality friends. That’s what you want. That’s what gives you that sense of home. And don’t forget, emergence is good, right. So even if you have a sense for quality, right, like if you just have more people, there’s more chance to emerge quality. Right. Yeah. The emergence is good. It sneaks in all over the place. Yeah. The materialism sneaks in all over the place. I heard, Peterson did a talk recently with somebody about AI. I haven’t heard the whole thing. At some point, it’s just silly. They just keep contradicting themselves and saying things and not realizing that they’re contradicting what they said earlier, right. And very materialistic. Very, then we’re going to do this, then we’re going to do that, we’re going to take this and compress it, and then we’re going to take this other thing and compress it. And we put these two compressed things together, it’s going to form something bigger. Well, bigger than the compressions, but not bigger than the original things you compressed. I don’t, I feel like, what are you doing? I don’t understand what you’re doing at that point. You’re reducing the affordances and then saying, if we take two reduced affordances, we’ll have more affordances than either of the single affordances. Thanks, math genius. I knew that. I know if you add a thing to a thing, you have more thing. I totally get that. But also, you started by reducing. So that might be a little bit more significant, right. But the materialists get caught up in this quantity trap. And they’re not paying attention to quality, they’re not paying attention to intimacy. Because the intimacy is the quality of your relationships. And that’s what prevents domicile. And I think it’s also, right, like you’re in the tunnel, right. So you can’t look at the tunnel where you’re tunneling your perspective in. And then it’s like, oh yeah, like, first the tunnel was so big, but it’s both a tunnel, right. So you can’t distinguish between the sizes of the tunnel that you’re in. Exactly. Exactly. Do you want to open the floor for people to participate? I maybe even share a story about domicile. Yeah, if they’ve got domicile stories or whatever, I kind of shared mine moving out of New England. And people have asked me, like, you know, why did you leave New England? And my answer is inevitably, New England left me. And some people have a, that gives them pause, especially if they’re in New England. And I’m like, well, it’s changed and you didn’t notice, but I did. And I got out when I noticed, I got out late, actually, I should have left about 10 years earlier than I did. But whatever, a year earlier than I did would have been nice. But I got out when I could. So fair enough, I trapped it on five year lawsuit. I would have left five years earlier, probably, maybe not five, maybe four years earlier. But yeah, like to go back to the intimacy frame, right, that’s a mistake that a lot of people, I don’t know a lot of people that people make is when you leave home, right, because you’re becoming an adult, right, like you have certain intimate connections, when you’re at home, right, if you try to reestablish those same connections, when you’re not at home, that’s inappropriate, right, like you need to develop new capacities, new means to have intimacy, partially because like, you’re not in the same relationship, right, but also, like, they’re different persons, like, like a different person needs a different connectivity. And when you don’t get that adjustment, right, like, oh, how do I attune to this new person, then we start with the projection, right, like now we’re going to treat the person as if they’re going to respond in a behavior pattern that they’re not in. And then when we start applying behavior patterns responses to others, now we’re forcing situations, right, like now, like if you treat me when I show you an alternative as if I’m trying to change your mind, instead of trying to get you to engage with the potentiality of the world, which is not the same as trying to change your mind, then now you perceive me as an antagonist, and more so, I’m going to perceive that you perceive me as an antagonist, and I’m going to feel insulted, right, and now it’s the burden upon me to be bigger than that, or to be able to resolve your problem, and like, I don’t have the tools, like, my mind, develop the tools if I know you for a long time, but not if I don’t know you, like, I can’t help you, I can’t. Yeah, there’s a limit to what you can do, and so, yeah, David, I mean, look, we were probably deliberately to some extent, and not deliberately to another extent, addressing the loneliness when we’re talking about the intimacy and the domicile, right, when you, like, loneliness is very largely a function of you, right, the thing that makes you lonely is not other people, it’s you, you make yourself lonely, not entirely, but mostly, right, and look, some people, like me, have absolutely no problem living alone by themselves without other people, doesn’t bother them one little bit, they have no desperation, no need to, you know, to be around other people whatsoever, you know, in real life, 24-7, right, whatever, and maybe that’s because they grew up that way, or maybe that’s just how they’re wired, or it doesn’t really matter, right, but most people, they are desperate for that connection, and so, like, you see a lot of people get bad relationship after bad relationship after bad relationship because they can’t be alone, they literally can’t be alone, they can’t stand not living with other people, and that leads them astray, like, sometimes it means that they are convinced that they’re attracted to the same sex just because it’s easier for men sometimes to live with other men, especially if they’re of skills with women because maybe they have an absentee mother, or maybe they get smothered by their mother, you know, there’s all kinds of ways that this manifests, right, and then they can confuse those two things pretty easily because it’s not, some people think everyone’s rational, we’re not rational creatures, like, just on average we’re almost never rational, so it’s easy to get disconnected from the world, but that disconnection is a function of you. When you don’t realize that your attempt to be an individual is the thing that’s causing your loneliness, you get trapped in this loneliness, you get stuck with depression, you get forced into a situation where the only thing that’s actually holding you back is your ability to submit to the fact that other people exist and that their ideas are going to conflict with yours, and that that’s going to thwart some of your plans, but again what often happens is what manifests in place is far bigger and better and greater than anything you could imagine. Right, yeah, the ability to imagine what you’re not participating in, and like, even your ability to imagine the thing that you had five years ago, especially if you changed as a person, like, right, no, like it’s just not an option, like, you just have to experience it in order to know what it’s like, and then even that’s not enough, right, and so the first thing that comes to mind when you ask me why are people lonely is they have expectations, right, so what are they expecting, like, is their expectation realistic, like, are they looking for things that they can have or are they looking for things that are just complete fantasies, right, so we went into these crazy relationships, right, like, okay, so if someone is pushing your buttons, right, in the right way, then you can feel like you have something, and then if it’s gone, you’re going to be upset that you don’t have it and you’re going to look for it after, right, while you didn’t have the thing, like, you were just living in a fantasy thinking that you had the thing, and then also, like, why do you feel lonely, well, like, what is it that you’re valuing, right, like, we were talking about validation a while back, like, where do you get your validation, I always talk about three frames, right, like, one of, a lot of people get validation from themselves, right, like, they can just walk up the stairs and then they can feel good about themselves, right, so that’s, like, the narcissistic perspective or the solipsistic perspective, right, then there’s a bunch of people that have social validation, right, like, so they can’t be their own judge, like, they need an external standard in order to feel certain about certain things, right, and when your environment isn’t providing these things that, like, you can’t self-generate, well, yeah, no shit, you feel lonely, right, like, that’d be horrible, right, like, oh, like, my sense of self is dependent upon other people and they’re not validating me, and this is where this identity craziness is coming from, right, like, you say, identity-crazy people are, like, okay, I’m not getting the validation, so now I’m going to make explicit to you the way I want to be validated, and if you’re not validating me in the way that I want to be validated, you’re hurting me. That’s an assault upon my personality, right, my personhood, which is completely ludicrous, and then you have the people who get validation in the transcend, right, like, so for very good talks about the things that have value in and of themselves, right, which would be virtuous, right, so I feel validated if I do a virtuous action. That’s not because I am this amazing person that is doing the virtuous action, no, that is because I’m participating in what I see as good, and the fact that I participate in what I see as good is validated, right, which can be misconstrued as narcissism, right, because it’s a fine boundary between those two. Well, then you get caught up, all you can do is what you can do. No, you can do more than you can do. The self-referencing thing is, it’s a red flag, oh, it’s a self-reference, it’s bad, it’s wrong, it’s not complete, right, it’s not encompassing. You can do more than you know, and you can do more with others. The question is, what do you have to sacrifice now to work with others, because you always have to sacrifice something, right, like, you know, I don’t necessarily want to be doing a live stream at this particular time of day, but if I want to do a live stream with Manuel, this is the time he had available, and it was a discussion already, and they’d be like, no, I don’t want to, this is not my ideal time to live stream for lots of reasons, and most of them are petty, fair enough, right, but also, yeah, there’s a negotiation there, I had to sacrifice my comfort and my timeline, you know, because it’s Europe, and Europe doesn’t seem to be changing her time zones appropriately, in my opinion, but what am I going to do, right? Darkness has descended upon Europe. Darkness has descended, right, it’s perfectly sunny here outside, and that’s part of the problem, is that we don’t realize what we can do when we’re with others, but it’s way more than we can do when we’re not with others. We just have to make a sacrifice to kind of get there, and the loneliness is really just a function of the rejection of the relationship it takes to be better than we are by ourselves, because that’s what it is. We have to give up something, we have to give up our time, energy, and attention in some way, right, that’s significant and important, and that’s what we don’t want to do, like, you know, if you’re going to be married to somebody, maybe you can’t play video games for your whole life, maybe you can’t live in your mother’s basement, maybe you can’t just on a whim eat what you want to eat when you want to eat, like, it all seems perfectly okay, right, and you know, some people need that validation above all other types of validation, and there’s lots of different self-validations. One way people validate themselves without needing, you know, the validation externally is they troll, right, they troll people, and they go, ah, see, I’m smarter than them, and therefore their validation is not important. Of course, they got validation, they got the validation that they’re smarter than the other person, and so they’re fooling themselves into thinking they’re an individual who’s smart and doesn’t need other people, but without the other people being dumber than you, you wouldn’t feel validated, and you trick yourself into this. Yeah, I want to go into this idea, right, so validation in good work, depending on your description of what good work is, but like, if you’re finding validation in like the material result of your work, right, like there’s a good chance that you’re in a materialist framing, right, because now you’re kind of looking for proof, right, you’re looking for the material manifestation that can effectively talk back to you and see, right, job well done, right, and so there’s also a way that you can do good work, right, like you can just have a day of work and you participated correctly with people and you were integrated, right, and that would be like the spiritual version of doing good work, right, and then, right, like people should validate that, right, like if that actually was good work, like people should validate that, but you also shouldn’t need the validation of the other people to feel good about it, so yeah, like getting this validation question right for yourself is tricky, right, because if you’re if you’re self-validating on the wrong standard, you’re effectively a narcissist, right, like you’re gonna be in a corrupted relationship because you’re judging work. And narcissism is gonna lead you down the path of individualism and separation, all right, and then loneliness, ultimately, it’s ironic, I can self-validate, I never need to feel alone, it’s like no, when you self-validate, you’re going to only be, you’re only ever gonna be alone, and I did want to address this from Mills, bootstrapping looks impossible because we don’t want to face what we have to do. Yeah, look, when we see bootstrapping, you know, we really don’t want to face it, and it is that validation. What standard are you validating? You’re like, you’re upset that you’re not Elon Musk because Elon Musk got, you know, is really smart and that’s how he succeeded. Elon Musk spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and lost all of it before he succeeded, guys. If you’re not starting from hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe you’re not gonna be as successful as Elon Musk, like maybe if you don’t have that money to lose in the first place or your father doesn’t give it to you or whatever, you know, or maybe, you know, maybe you’re Richard Branson, maybe if you’re not willing to, we’ll say, skirt the law by using row boats in the middle of the night to shepherd records across certain waterways, maybe you won’t be successful, right? Like maybe if you’re not willing to take a chance, for example, and risk whatever, whether it’s, you know, whatever it is, it could be your time, it could be your life, it could be limbs, it could be your family, right? Then maybe you can’t be successful, I don’t know. Hey, Yana, it’s good to see Yana in the comment, even though she should be asleep because… It’s always good to be feel validated, even if you talk about the necessity of validating other people just before that. Right, right. Well, and it is that it is those modes of validation, like, because we see the world a certain way, and then we think that we can embody that or participate in that, and maybe you can, but maybe you can’t. And maybe that’s why you’re not succeeding, it has nothing to do with, with, you know, a lot of stuff in life is chance, and a lot of stuff is what you were born into. And yeah, if you’re born into money, you can start 10 businesses and fail at 10 businesses and learn business well enough that when you start your 11th business, it’s a huge success. Yeah, maybe, or maybe if you just start enough businesses, however much money that costs, you can eventually hit on a successful business. Yeah, maybe. Nassim Taleb talks a lot about this in his book, read all his books, they’re wonderful. Or you can find the person that can actually assist you properly, right? Or the people, right. A good business, yeah, is all about business partnerships, and finding the right group of people, not the right skills, because the right skills will not get you there. You have to have people that care about the project, and you have to have people that care about you. Otherwise, what will happen is they’ll use their skills and they’ll screw you. You know, people, you hear these stories all the time, oh, my accountant stole all my money. Yeah, of course he did. Because you hired on skill, and you didn’t hire on passion and connection, right? Oh, the CEO, you know, took all the money and flew to the Bahamas, and yeah. You didn’t create a home for them. Right. You didn’t create a proper home. And what do you want in a leader? You want a leader that’s going to create and manage and maintain a home for whatever project you’re working on with that leader. And we don’t have just one home. We have one home that’s like uniquely ours, right, that we have historical grounding in. And again, maybe we can change that or modify that a little bit, but maybe not too much. Maybe there are limits on that. Maybe there are limits on everything. Who knows, right? But we also have these other homes, because we feel home at work. I mean, there was a movement a while back, you know, my work wife and my work husband, and it’s like, what? It’s crazy talk, right? But I understand where it comes from. It’s not terrible framing. It’s just wrong. It’s not wrong in any significant way. And maybe it’s unhealthy, but, you know, there’s a truth in there somewhere. Yeah. I forgot to mention one thing. Like, home is the place where you find rest, right? So when we have a relationship, right, that is based upon a persona, right? Like, I’m holding up this version of myself in order to relate to you, then we cannot find rest in that relationship, and it’s going to destroy us. And so it’s really important to realize that, right? Like, you need to be able to take off the makeup when you get home, because if you can’t take off the makeup, then where are you going to rest? Like, where are you going to find peace? Like, you’re going to be a chaste gazelle everywhere. You’re going to be full of adrenaline your whole life, because, well, you’ve got this sort of damocles of one mistake hanging over your hat, right? And we can talk about all these stories about people trying to have multiple homes and stuff like that, right? I don’t even want to know what it’s like to live like that, or if you’re going undercover, right? Like, now you’re going to be part of a home, right? Like, usually a well bound home, else you don’t have to go undercover. And it’s going to be in tension with who you are in real life, right? Like, that can break people really, really easily. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s good. Again, and the rest is related to the contrast, right? Like, you don’t dress up at home, right? You don’t need to. It’s the place you don’t need to do that, everybody except you sort of, or who you are. When you’re out in public, you actually should dress up, right? You should, you know, for whatever, you don’t have to dress up the same way every time, right? You have to dress for the event, though. And the place you do that is your home. And then the place you undo that is also your home, right? And so that’s your, the base that you use, again, to measure and judge. And yeah, you’re right, resting is really important. I kind of miss that. So yeah, yeah, it’s good, good catch. Because rest is key to home. That’s for sure. Yeah. And that all these people, right, like home is, is in your heart or whatever, right? Can you really rest when you’re wherever, right? Like, there’s, when I was on my trip to India, I was in India, and I was always when I was in India, I felt like I was cheating. Like, I felt like I wasn’t really doing the thing, because I could go back, and I had a place to return to. So whatever I was, that was somewhat fake. Like, I was like, like, if there weren’t any planes, right? Like, if I’d had to take a ship for a couple months to go to India, or whatever, that would have been completely different. Yeah. But the fact that I can just, like, do emergency button and have an escape made it fake. And it changed the way that I participated in it. Like, I actually had nights where I agonized about this, right? Like, it’s really hard to find your motivation, right? Like, is what I’m doing true? Like, am I doing this authentically? Or am I just like, well, like doing the cave, doing the lark, like, oh, look at me. I’m in this other country having this relationship with people that I’ll never see again. Well, that’s the Peterson, you know, some games, you have to be all in, right? Like, if you’re going to build a home with somebody, or say, have a relationship with somebody, right, long term, you need to be all in. And this goes back to the whole, like, e-girls, OnlyFans, right? These are affectations. And they’re negative affectations. They’re fake relationships. They can’t manifest over time anything other than, you know, entertainment or pleasure in the moment. That’s it. Those are the only two options. And you should have things like that, like wrestling, which is not cave faking. Because it is entertainment explicitly. It is the purpose of it is educational entertainment is what I would call it. Right. And that’s really important. I did also want to address this. Mills leadership is home building sounds like really good framing. Thank you. I like it too. A lot of times implementation lands flat. People don’t believe it. And it just feels patronizing the culture goes beige. It’s not that they don’t believe it. They don’t understand these concepts. I mean, to some extent, you have to have a lot of grace with people. Like, we have a lost as a culture, as societies, as Western societies, a lot of core axiomatic assumptions that we need to survive. We’ve lost to them. We’ve lost what leadership proper leadership is. Leadership is not typically in one person. Some people make good leaders and some people make better leaders than others. But leadership is a function of the whole group. And different people. Right. And we’ve lost that concept. We’ve over reduced it to leader. And then a leader is an object in the world. And then you can pass that leader thing on to other people because this person can be CEO and then he’s the leader. I got news for you. I’ve worked in Fortune 500 companies. The CEO is not the leader of the company in most companies. He may be leading certain things. He’s not the leader. Doesn’t determine all things. A lot of CEOs come into companies a lot. You can just read. If you read business, you’ll see this all over. They come in with a new vision, a new idea, and they try to lead the ship and it fits. That’s the common thing that happens. That’s the most common thing that happens. The only companies that that tends not to happen in our companies that don’t change the leadership at all. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. And sometimes it’s disaster to Iran because you get disruptive strategies. Studying business is fascinating because it leads to all this. And then Mills, again, I do think it’s good framing to be clear. I guess this is where T-Los shows through in the implementation. The key to pragmatism is to look at the implementation and worry more about the implementation and what that tells you about the T-Los than listening to people talk about their T-Los. If they say they’re after something and they’re not manifesting it, I don’t care if they’re after it. It doesn’t matter to me. Well, if you’re creating the work as a home and you don’t have a good conception of home, or you’re in this modern culture and you want to have the catchiness, so what is the place? What do you do at home? Are you relaxed? So we’re going to build a yoga studio, we’re going to build a tennis table, and we’re going to do a meditation cell. That’s the way that we make it homely. And we’re going to put in 15 plans because now we’re in the jungle. What really makes it though? Because a lot of people will, and this is a big scandal about 10 years ago, it may still be going on, but the whole unlimited vacation scandal with the startups. So what’s happening is people in their 40s and 50s are starting companies. And to get the young talent, which can suck a lot of work out of young people because they have a lot more energy, to get the young talent, they would promise them unlimited vacation. And then of course, they strike to in these studies to find out, well, if you have unlimited vacation, you take more vacation or less. And it turns out almost nobody ever takes any vacation in these companies. Why? Because they’re highly competitive and nobody has a standard by which to judge. So they’ve sold the workers on more quantity of vacation. All the vacation you can imagine. Oh great, my imagination is pretty big. I can imagine a lot of vacation. But the reality, the implementation, and a lot of these people knew full well, because the psychology has actually been well known since the 50s on this work, you give them too much choice, they have choice paralysis effectively. They don’t take vacation because they’re scared. They don’t know what, should I take four weeks or five? Can I take a whole month off? Is that okay? Because in most companies, man, in the Fortune 500s, when I was working in the Fortune 500s, you can take three weeks off. Maybe you could get two weeks in a row. Me. But usually they deny it. They’d say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, spread this out. And then some people like me would get smart and they’d say, all right, I’m going to take every Friday in the summer off or every Monday or every Monday and Friday, then just spread their vacation out to lengthen their summer, their summer interaction to England. That’s where you want, well, that in the fall, fall in England is gorgeous. And that’s where you want your time. You don’t necessarily want a month off. I’m not saying sabbaticals aren’t good. I think sabbaticals are wonderful. But there’s ways around these things. But it’s interesting that if you give somebody unlimited vacation, they basically don’t take it. That’s not 100%. But boy, the numbers are in on that. It’s very sneaky. They offer you this quantity. And it’s very attractive because in your imagination it’s great. But your participation in all of that is not great. And so what was their intent? Was their intent really to be better to you, to your employee by offering you all this stuff, by making sure, look, you don’t have to leave the office for lunch. We have snacks and food and we bring lunch into the office. Isn’t that wonderful? We’re bringing this quantity to you so that you don’t have to leave the office. Do you think maybe that results in people spending more time in the office working? Because it does. Do you think they didn’t know that? Any idiot can figure that out, honestly. I hate to say it, guys, but if you thought about it for 10 seconds, you’d realize, well, I don’t have to go anywhere. I’m just going to stay indoors and eat at my desk or eat and talk work because I’m still at work. I haven’t changed my location. The container’s the same. Yeah, and I think it’s really important what you’re talking about. So there’s different activities. I suck at this. Don’t shit where you eat effectively. But you have to pick things and put them in a specific place. You need to invoke a different spirit. You need to have a different mindset. A home is also a place for transformation. So you go to bed, which is a completely different experience than cooking and eating or relaxing in front of the TV. All of these things. The most important one is putting on your face going outside. There’s a state of becoming, you become mentally or spiritually ready to engage in the thing that you need to engage in. Yes, you can make work like that. You should separate the eating of food from the workspace. You should have people change. You should have people go outside to get some air when they’re relaxing or something. All of these things are really important. I think if you facilitate people, and I think this is where being a good leader or making a good home is you enable people to have participation. What is a home? Well, that’s the place that you participate. If you’re not participating in the place that you’re supposed to participate in, is it a home? If you have a $400 an hour cooking food for you, is that home or is that going out for dinner at work? If you want to make it homey, then you have to bind people. You have to participate. Yeah. That requires distraction from work, first of all, but secondly, it requires you to have affordances that people can get into. I was thinking about church today. What is it? In some sense, you’re trying to manifest ideal participation towards one thing as a group. You’re in some sense creating the perfect home. And then it’s like, okay, we have the perfect home. Now we can go back into the world and create mirror images of the perfect home. And then we screw up because we’re all screw ups. At the end of the week, we go back again and then we see what we’re doing wrong so that we can go out and repeat. I think that’s kind of like the pattern that church is supposed to manifest. Well, yeah. And I would say that goes back to the topic of Chino, which is a spiritual home. It’s like, oh, why do you need that? Because that’s the model, the ideal model for your non-spiritual home. That’s the ideal. Things in the spirit realm or in the Platonic realm of forms are the ideals. So you need that ideal. You need a sense for that ideal, even if you’re not living there or not able to live there now or something. You still need that to aim at, to calibrate what your non-spiritual home should do, should look like, should be, how you should interact with it. All of that is super important. Mills, I’ve worked in places where you could not leave on lunch. They coordinated with a Chinese restaurant to bring in overpriced food. A little different. Yeah, well, it’s the same sort of ethos though, right? Where they don’t want you to leave. And look, when I was younger, especially, I loved eating at my desk because I was super productive. Look, I’d put in eight hours and take offs. So I ate at my desk. Man, I’m getting home an hour earlier because I didn’t take an hour for lunch in my mind. I ate at my desk. I’m still typing. No, nobody cared. Nobody actually cared. So it was cool. But I’m okay with all that. Now, should I have been? Maybe not. There was a time I worked at Boston. I worked for the Small Boston Development House. Brand new thing before doing. It was cool. They had a refrigerator. They had a little kitchen. They had the whole thing. But we used to go for lunch. We’d leave and we’d stand in line. And downtown Boston is just a terror. These lunch places, they’re open three to four hours a day. That’s it. Five days a week. That’s it. And they make enormous amounts of money. And the way they make enormous amounts of money is they serve very good, fresh food, very fast. They just zip through these lines. The lines are long. And you’re standing in line and you’re moving. You’re standing in line and moving. So I’d stand in line and I’d get this wonderful salad every day. It was a wonderful salad with the spinach leaves and the alfalfa. And you couldn’t do it yourself. They had to do it for you. But they’d ask you, what do you want? This? You want that? And you bang. And you’d be in and out of there in no time. Really, it made you stand in line. It probably took you three to five minutes to get out of line. But they’d go through 20 people. In the line, they were just super efficient. And it was better for me to get up and leave and go outside and experience the weather in Boston. When it’s lovely, it’s lovely. But even when it’s raining, it’s better than being indoors all the time. It’s like that. That’s actually important, that change from the home of work to being outside for lunch and thinking about different things. And that’s always really good. Use the Pomodoro technique. If you don’t know what it is, look it up. It’s always good to get out of the thing you’re thinking of for a bit. Lunch allows you to do that. Then you’re more productive at work, as it turns out. Most people, some people aren’t. I’m not always. But I do Pomodoro now. So yeah, those interactions are important. And that contrast is important. Because again, this down the slide is all about contrast. And your spiritual home is the thing you’re contrasting your material home with. That’s the contrast. And then the material home is the thing you’re contrasting things that aren’t material home with. That’s more contrast. You need all of that. It’s really kind of not optional. And I would argue you can’t make a home, a proper home, ever without a proper spiritual home. Because you don’t have an ideal to aim at. That would be how I would slice that up. And I didn’t go to Cheen House. I don’t know what they talked about yet. I know the talks are coming out. I haven’t listened to any of them. Super busy. I got to get ready for a trip tomorrow up to New England. So it’s crazy. But I’ll get all caught up on my drive, I’m sure. Yeah. About the domicile and the replacement, right? I was commenting on the livestream yesterday, I think, that they were having. And it’s like, the binding is important. Right? People, and this was Chris’ point, people coming together is important. It’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient. Coming together doesn’t bind. Right? Like, having a profound experience doesn’t transform. Right? Like, you need to institute institutions in order, and you have to have people commit and submit to them. Right? Because that’s also what a home is. You’re submitted to it. In some sense, it’s more important than you. You’re going to give your life to funding. Right. Well, and maybe there’s an interesting frame here, Manuel, I didn’t think of until you brought it up. And integration is something that you do to take something from the outside into you. And institution is the opposite. It’s you embedding yourself in something. But it’s a form of integration. You’re integrating yourself into something bigger than you. Right? Which is important. Like, you can’t just take in everything from the outside and integrate it into you. You have to integrate yourself into things outside of you. And that’s what institutions do. That’s what structures do. That’s what the purpose of an institution is, is to give you a way to relate to something bigger than you in a way that is analogous to integration, but just really in the opposite direction. That’s the right way to think about it. I’m always suspicious about thinking about things in terms of direction, but maybe this is a use case. Like your institution is a form of external integration so that you’re submitting yourself to something so that you can get more out of it than you could otherwise by yourself. In some sense, it’s instituting offices, right? And offices are relationships to each other. Right. And then if you’re aware of the office structure, you can participate in an intimacy that is not cultivated. Right? Like it’s inherited from the roles and interacting. Right? But that requires submission. And that requires that people are filling these offices and they’re fulfilling their roles within these offices. And that’s hard, right? Especially if we’re doing it on a volunteer basis. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but a lot of work needs to happen and well, we’ve mentioned telos, right? The telos of people coming together to a conference is different than the telos of people working together in an institution. It’s completely different. Right? Right. And when you’re coming together, you’re, everybody has their personal motivation and they’re doing that on an individualistic basis. But if you’re working in an institution, you can no longer rely on this individualistic basis for action. Because now, like there’s going to be frustration, right? Like there’s going to be an imposition upon the way that you think things should work in order for the corporation to manifest. Right. Right. Well, then that’s where the loneliness comes in. Right? The loneliness is your rejection of institution. It’s your rejection of these quality connections. Right? It’s your faking out or trying to fake out these communities by saying, well, I’m in an online community. Well, look, there’s online communities and there’s online communities. And I’m kind of an expert in this. I know the difference. There’s a big difference. Like some people just get together around a topic and they don’t care about the other people. Some people don’t care about the topic and they’ll typically just troll everybody. And there’s very little you can do to prevent this. And there’s also a difference between, say, the people who organize the conference and the people who attend the conference. And the question is, are you going to a conference or an event or are you going to a community or are you going to a job with an expectation that you try to determine on your own and predict on your own? Are you going with the spirit of exploration where you’re like, well, I don’t know what can manifest here. Let me see. Like how good can this get? How much better than my imagination could this get? Because that opens up a bunch of ways, affordances for you and ways for you to interact that aren’t available if you think that jobs are just for money. If it’s just for enemy, maybe your job’s just for money. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. But if your job’s just for money, the odds that you’ll be able to manifest anything greater are very small. But if your job is not just for money, that’s different. That’s why people talk about, oh, there’s a minimum wage jobs and people can’t afford to live on that. Of course they can because they do. So it’s kind of a dumb thing to say when it’s obviously observably false. Maybe you can’t live in a single bedroom apartment in New York City on minimum wage. No kidding. But if you’re living with a family and you don’t have to pay the mortgage, a minimum wage job is probably going to cut it for you. That’s what I did. That’s why I get very upset with people who want to come out of school and become a teacher and be able to afford. It’s like, no, I didn’t do that. I had to live with a bunch of dirty smelly hippies for a while before I could afford my house. But then I could afford my house. That’s how I did it. It’s not magic. It just takes a while, four or five years. Four years of living dirty hippies, roughly speaking. But then I could buy my house. It’s not magic. You can’t just graduate college and buy a house. It’s not how it’s supposed to work. It probably never worked that way for anybody unless they had the money up front. Everybody else had to work. That’s how it happens. And it takes time. And just like that, the reason why you feel lonely is because you have these high expectations about how the world is going to treat you. And when the world doesn’t treat you that way, you don’t feel connected. Instead of having this attitude of, what are the connections that are available in the world that I am willing to sacrifice to have? And what are you willing to sacrifice? And that’s tied up in Peterson’s offering programs, the past, present, and future offering programs. They’re very much, if you could have whatever you wanted, what would that look like? And then you can start to get the framework for how would you get it. And I think part of the problem of, say, talking about some of these more difficult meaning crisis issues is, first we have to define domicile in home. I think we have to before we can get anywhere near the meaning crisis. And that’s part of what navigating patterns is about, what this livestream is about, is setting some of these basic explorations into these concepts so that you have the concepts to build on to get out of whatever part of the meaning crisis you’re in at the moment, maybe. Or at least understand how to help other people who are stuck in a meaning crisis, because that’s more our alley than, we’ll say, directly helping people on a video because it’s a little bit harder. But giving people tools that they can help others, well, that’s easier to do in this format, for sure. Right. And Faveke talks about this, right? The first thing you need to do is have a correct problem formulation, right? So the thing that we’ve been focusing on the last three years is, okay, what is actually the thing that is beneath all the symptoms that is causing people to go one way or the other way, right? So for example, when people get in these toxic relationships, right, like these relationships that are based upon masks, basically, right, like what are they looking for? Well, they’re looking for intimacy, right? And then they’re misapplying the way that they can get intimacy. So how do you reach these people? Well, you have to reach them with a means to get the intimacy that they’re looking for. Right. But you can’t just give it to them, right? Because now then you end up feeding them and then they’ll suck you dry. Right? So there’s this dance that you need to go into, right, where you’re changing the way that they’re attending to the world and that you’re giving them eyes to see. Like we’re having a conference at the church and we’re praying for having eyes and ears to see the message that that’s because if you don’t, right, and if you don’t pay attention to that, that is important when you go to a place in order to be transformed, right? Like if you don’t pay attention that you need to pay attention in a certain way, then you’re not going to receive the transformation. Like you’re just blocked off from even having it. And even if you’re aware of that struggle, right, like that difficulty that you need to listen in a certain way, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get it. Like that doesn’t mean that you’ll receive this transformation. So this transformation, this is a whole way of having attention that you need to cultivate. Like it’s a skill. Well, and that’s if you don’t know about attention and you don’t know the power of attention, then you’re not even there, right? You’re not even able to, not to say it can’t happen by accident or whatever, because it does, but you know it’s easier for people who are trying to be rational, especially if they’re trying to be individuals, because you have to, if you’re an individual, you have to rely on rationality even though you don’t live in a rational world. It must be very hard on people who are trying to do that, right? Then all of a sudden, right, they don’t have the concept of attention. They don’t realize their attention’s being moved, because you can’t be an individual in some sense. Your attention is going to get moved. And then all of a sudden you’re trying to play a political game and it’s not political. Like it’s, you know, or all of a sudden you think it’s kayfabe when it was never kayfabe. That never happened. It’s not, it’s only kayfabe people who didn’t participate. And like everything’s like that. So yeah, it’s NPCs everywhere. Now what? Now you’re screwed, because now you live in a world where everything’s NPCs. You’re back in the postmodern trap of where everything’s equal, because it’s all fake. But that’s not true. Some things are going to work out in the long term and some things aren’t, right? The gender binary, as it’s called, is probably going to work out in the long term if you think that way. If you think there’s such a thing as gender non-binary, it only isn’t going to work out in the long term. And evolutionary theories yet would say it can’t. It’s mathematically impossible. So, you know, those two games are not equivalent, right? They can both be looked at as NPC or kayfabe or whatever, but they’re not the same. And so one of them is more real than the other, at least over time. And can you play the other? Yeah, absolutely. You can play any game you want. You can play walk across the highway blindfolded, if you want. But you can probably only play it once. And look, if that’s what you want to do is play the one game once, then there you go. But if you want to keep playing the game, the game of games, as Peterson calls it, right? The game that keeps you playing other games on and on and on, that’s different. That’s fundamentally different from the arbitrary postmodern framing of every game is the same and it’s all just whatever people are doing. It’s really not. There’s still an underlying intelligibility there somewhere. And that underlying intelligibility is, to some extent, what we need to seek out. And it’s not arbitrary, even though we can sort of bend things for a while, and maybe for way longer than we understand, but eventually it snaps back and reality sort of reasserts itself. One of the definitions I like of reality is, reality is that which objects to your subjective experience. That’s certainly one aspect of reality. Yeah, and when we’re talking about attention and being aware of the fact that you’re attending to things, if you’re not aware of your attention, what is the means that you’re going to judge what you’re attending to? Well, whether you’re being frustrated or not by the way that your attention is changed. Effectively, that’s what a child does. It’s like, oh, I like the stimulus. Oh, I get all excited. And then, oh, I don’t like the stimulus. And then you get upset and you start crying. So this attention thing can be a thing that pulls you or that you use to pull you forward. Right. And just having that concept really helps people once they understand, oh no, you have attention, you own your attention. And Peterson does this with clean your room. He says, no, no, no, there’s a part of the things around you that you have a great deal of control over. Maybe not total control, but maybe total control, right, which is your room. And then he reinstantiates your agency by drawing your attention to this. And then he shows you how attention works. Right. He goes through in Maps of Meaning, he goes through Pinocchio and the Lion King. And he shows you, oh, there’s a way to attend to these things where you’re getting signals out that were probably, you were probably getting unconsciously, by the way, that now you understand that there’s a depth to them that you weren’t appreciating before. And they become more significant because you become more connected to them. Right. Because there’s more intimacy there. Right. The quality of the relationship to the movie changes as a result of him pointing your attention at these other factors and what they may mean and how they’re embedded. And a lot of the meaning crisis is just losing that framing and no longer understanding that Jiminy Cricket is down south, the way some people refer to Jesus Christ. It’s a very subtle thing. It’s actually something I knew and have kind of forgotten until I heard, you know, like, oh yeah, I knew that. Like, well, I have totally forgotten. Right. And I didn’t, I didn’t live down south for most of my life. I lived up north. So it’s not, you know, it’s not like I was embedded in it. But it’s there. It’s definitely there. These little signals that we don’t, you know, they sneak in and are unconscious. We don’t even, we’re not even aware of them in some sense. Yeah. And Peugeot talks about this as well. Right. And the question is whether we should be or shouldn’t be. Right. We should be aware on some level, right? Because we should have an intentional relationship to these patterns because else we’re not engaging with them. But like you said, making them explicit is wrong on some level. Right. Because if you have to make these things explicit, now you’re, you’re stepping out of them. Right. Right. Right. Right. You’re not embedded in them and participating in the right way anymore. Yeah. Well, and like I had this discussion with this philosopher today. I said, well, I have thought through all of these ideas myself. And then she said, well, I have just read all the books and I have these ideas of all these other people. And I said, well, then I’m going to win because like I own my ideas. Like you can’t do anything against because like I got an integration and I got a connection to the truth that like you cannot have if you don’t own the ideas. Right. Right. She’s got a Frankenstein monster and you have an intimate connection with it, with the creation of a philosophical idea that is born from your own thought. And that’s the question. Like, like what do we want? Right. Like do we, do we want to have a Pokemon card collection of all the, all the patterns or all the symbols or do we want to live in a world that we can see the symbols in the world and participate with them? Right. Right. Well, Taleb talks about this. He quotes this on Twitter every once in a while or some of the accounts that talk about his work. Right. I want to live comfortably in a world I do not understand. Yes. That’s exactly what you want. You don’t need to understand the world. Like you don’t need to understand why gardening works to garden the way they’ve been gardening for thousands of years. You just, it’s not required. You just need to, you just need to embody it and notice it and participate with it in that way. And yeah, it’s not a procedure necessarily. Right. Because it’s not, we always plant it this time or you know, some of the procedures may sort of be there, but they’re tied to nature. Like it’s the first rain after the fifth moon and you know, there’s weird stuff out there. After the first frost. Right. Right. Well, that was one of the things in New England that took me off that, you know, New England was going downhill was when I grew up and I’m very much into meteorology. And these talk about the leaves because the leaves turn in New England’s absolutely gorgeous. One of the most beautiful places on earth for leaves and turning, you know, bright reds and yellows and just beautiful colors and it’s great. Right. They started saying, oh, the leaves always turn in the second week of October. And I was like, no, when I grew up, it was pretty clear. And in some cases it was the same people, actually the same people, just one year, everybody started saying, no, no, they turn at this time. It’s like, no, no, leaves on trees turn after the first frost at whatever elevation they’re at. There’s a frost after that frost. They start turning colors. That’s how it works, guys. Anybody tells you different is lying. We actually know this experimentally and they stopped saying that they started saying something else completely different. And I was like, what happened? These people a year ago had the right answer and now they have the wrong answer. And they’re all science embedded and you know, whatever. And I was like, oh, this is, this is a bad sign. Like why would this, why would all of a sudden people think that it was tied to a clock? I don’t know if you know this. Well, I don’t know if you know this, Manuel, maybe some of our audiences realize this, but trees don’t have clocks and wristwatches. I’m just, they can’t, oh, look, it’s October 12th. It’s time to change. But my clock is made from a tree. Well, there you go. So they must have a sense of time the way we do. The whole thing’s absurd. And that actually happened. I actually watched it. I experienced it. I was just like, what the hell is going on with the world? Why, why are we so ungrounded from nature and the natural cycle of freezing and thawing and things like that, that we’ve come up with this new bizarre, obviously observably incorrect method of figuring out when the leads are going to change, when everybody up here knows. We all knew, we all, we had experienced it. We didn’t need anybody to, you know, to tell us, right? It was only for the new people who just came to New England for whatever reason. Yeah. On the other hand, like, why is it important? It sounds like the thing that you say at the cocktail party to sound smart. Exactly. Which is why you feel lonely, because you’re trying to sound smart instead of trying to find something in common with somebody. Right. Because like, just imagine, right? Like, how do I relate to you telling me that this is the time when? Like, okay. And behind the sun, there’s a vacuum point that has the number 57835 associated with it. It’s your turn. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and you’re trying to control things. And yeah, you’re trying to establish yourself in an adversarial relationship rather than a cooperative relationship. And yeah, maybe that’s something we can talk about next time is the difference between those two things. We’re very much an adversarial, you know, I’ve got the goods on you because I’m smarter instead of how can we cooperate? What can I sacrifice to get, you know, to get cooperation with you? Yeah. And to give an insight on that, like, I had this conversation with my dad. At a certain point, he started defending communism because I apparently understood it wrong. And I’m like, why do you care? Right? Like, why is there a battle that you’re engaging in? You’re not a communist. Like, what’s going on? It’s this pattern. Like, people are like, well, I have this truth because like, I once saw it in a book somewhere or I saw it on TV. And now you disagree with it. And now we’re going to have to have this battle to the death because like, my conception of the thing that you’re talking about is different. And I was like, what makes you the author that you can just like quote some random thing that you don’t even know where you read it? Like, you don’t even know where you got the information from. You’re going to shove that in my face saying that I’m wrong? Like, holy cow. Well, that’s the worship of epistemology of knowledge over everything else. Knowledge is the highest value. I have a video on that, a navigating pattern. Yeah, that’s the highest value problem. And if knowledge is your highest value and that’s the thing that you think is the most valuable, then you need to have the most knowledge. I like what Mills says here. People posted about the toilet paper shirt before it ever happened. Yeah, well, and look, it happened in different places at different times. It certainly took a long time to get to where I was at. And the joke down here was that a lot of people down south don’t live in cities because the cities are about two hours drive apart, roughly speaking. To get to it, the nearest city I can get to is an hour and 30 minutes. It’s Charlotte. If I want to get to Charleston, it’s a little over two hours. It’s right about two hours. And that’s because I’m northeast Columbia, roughly speaking, so I’m a little bit closer to Charlotte than I am to Charleston. But cities are two hours apart. That means most people shop for the month because they got to drive an hour, right? Because most people live roughly an hour to an hour and a half away from the city. So if they need to get supplies, their nearest thing is quite a ways away. Everyone’s a prepper here. Everyone. Except the people who live in the cities. They’re all preppers. So a toilet paper shortage doesn’t affect them because they’ve already got a month or two’s worth of toilet paper. It didn’t affect me the same way because yeah, I’ve got a shed. Guess what I buy in bulk? Paper towels, toilet paper, things like that. Yeah, they’re all sitting in the shed. I don’t want to shop for that every week or every couple of weeks or every month. So I don’t. I’ve got like a year’s supply because it’s cheap and easy. All right. I have the storage for it. So how you experience these things is also vastly different city to country. And when we think everything’s a city, we try to relate to everything as a city. And then we feel alone because everything’s not a city. And we’re like, why don’t you agree with me about guns? Why don’t you agree with me about political parties? Why don’t you agree with me here and there? And it’s like, well, maybe because I don’t live where you live. Maybe because you’re not willing to sacrifice your view of the world to realize there’s more view of the world. What is this comment? Nathaniel. A lot of this sounds like apophatic philosophy. No, I hate philosophy. Is there more than breaking down what doesn’t work? No, don’t break down what doesn’t work. That’s a ridiculous thing. Or is your goal more like pointing people towards figuring it out on their own? No, you can’t figure things out on your own. Why do you think it’s hard enough to do that? You can’t. Just stop trying to figure out things on your own. You’re too stupid. You’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. You can’t figure it out. You don’t need to though either. Put a lot of effort into figuring something out and find out you don’t need to. I should watch some of your early content maybe. Yes, navigating patterns. Watch all the navigating patterns. You’ll understand things a lot better, that’s for sure. We’re not postmoderns tearing things down. We’re saying no, institutions are important. You need to engage with them even when they’re broken. A good person engaging with a bad institution still makes the institution better. It’s not that hard. And they also provide the contrast to other people to see, oh, that good man got hurt by that institution. Is the good man going to get hurt by the institution? Probably. If he doesn’t, it’s worse though. That’s something worth considering. There’s a sacrifice worth having. Look, I’m involved in a lawsuit right now. I was involved in one earlier too, about six, seven years ago. And yeah, almost broke me. This one might break me. Possible, right? But if you don’t see people being broken by the justice system, you don’t think you have a broken justice system. This is a sacrifice that I might be making. Oh yeah, it’s real possible at this point. Lawsuits are expensive. I don’t have that much money, so it’s not looking good. But it’s necessary. It’s absolutely necessary. It’s not necessary for me. It’s necessary for everybody. Right? And is the system broken? Yeah. How do you exemplify that? Not by, oh, you mean the system’s broken because I did the trigonometric calculation and found out that the ancient Greeks had… No. No. You see it broken. You participate in it and it doesn’t work. That’s how you know things are broken. You know how you don’t know things are broken? Because someone told you. Maybe they’re lying. Do you ever think about that? A lot of people just lie. Somebody the other day actually said, and this is fantastic, right? They said, oh, my mother told me that when she was young, women weren’t allowed to have bank accounts. Let me explain to you when in history that ever happened. Never. Never a time in history. I’m not saying there was never a time in place where a particular bank wouldn’t give accounts to women. That certainly happened. There’s never been a culture that didn’t allow women to do banking. That just never happened. Certainly never happened in the US at all ever. It just never happened. Right? And so people lie and they make up outrageous lies. Like just ridiculous. Some people think there was chattel slavery occurred on the Mayflower. That didn’t happen. Nothing like that happened. Indentured servitude, while you can argue is certainly a form of slavery, it is nothing like the slavery of the South that the barbaric Barbadens did in the southern US where I now live. Very different types of slavery if you want to classify them as slavery. And maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I don’t really care. I’m not pointing at a broken thing. I’m saying this is how it is. And that’s the problem. Well, I like this comment, Madan. That’s very true. I was raised Seventh-day Adventist. And know that living in fear of a bad institution isn’t the answer. Right. But institutions are all bad in some aspect. And pointing that out isn’t necessarily helpful to anybody. So I want to go back to this apathetic philosophy thing. Right? The thing that we’ve identified is that people are kind of stuck in a materialistic frame. Right? And so the materialistic frame is constraining the capacity to observe certain things in the world. Right? And when you don’t have the proper discernment, you cannot justify certain actions. Right? They just end up being arbitrary. So what the project is that we’re involved in is giving people a way to provide contrast. Okay. Like, oh, you’re in this relationship. Right? You’re exhibiting this pattern. Right. And because you’re in this pattern, you’re negatively affected in this way. And that gives a justification to start participating positively. Now, we have done three quarters of a year on Clubhouse, where we explored what does a person need to do, right? Like, what it like, I guess, is the idea of an ecology of practices, right? Like, so what are the practices a person needs to participate in, in order to be a healthy, well-rounded person. Right. And then we leveled that up and to say, okay, well, that’s not going to work. Like, Peugeot said, right, you go to church in order to commune with people you don’t like and do things you don’t like. Right. So you need to be frustrated and you need to participate in the frustration and you need to resolve that frustration in an ideal setting in order to gain the skill of resolving conflict. Or accept it. Yeah. Not all conflict can be resolved. Some of it has to just be dealt with and accepted. Yeah. And then, right, like, when we’re at that point, okay, now we kind of know what needs to happen. Well, we kind of started doing the live streams and we’re like, oh, guys, cooperate with us. And what happens, nobody wants to cooperate. Like, we’re in the Discord server every day and we want to make practices, we want to start up communities on the ground, like all of that stuff. But nobody wants to work with us. Which is fine. But that means that, and this is why I’m skeptical about the things that happen in Chino, right? Like, people are just not ready to do certain things. Like, they only want to do the things that they want to do. And they don’t want to make the sacrifice that is needed to get the thing that they say that they want. Right? Because everybody says that they want the thing. And then we say, well, in order to have the thing, this needs to happen. And they’re like, no, no, no, that’s oppressive. Like, that’s dictatorial. That’s hiring. Like, that’s the thing that happens. So we need to figure out, like, okay, like, why would a person do that? Like, why would a person say that they want to do a thing and then when they get offered to do the thing, they don’t want to participate? Because then there’s something really wrong. And this is, I don’t think it’s a problem of this little corner. I think that’s the problem of society. And it has to do with the domo side. And it has to do with the lack of intimacy, that capacity for intimacy. Right? And then when you don’t have a developed way to be intimate with people, well, what’s the way that you’re going to resolve that problem? You’re going to be suspicious. Right? You’re going to treat people with the hermeneutics of suspicion. You’re going to get the information that they’re saying. Right? It’s like, well, yeah, if there’s a hierarchy, I can be negatively affected by it. And it can hurt me. Yeah, damn right, it can. You’re going to be a skeptical cynic. Right? Like Socrates. I have a video on that. Right? Skeptical cynicism of Socrates. I wanted to address this too. Alex says, it’s possible some tiny subcultures don’t allow things, of course. Right? And people project onto the entire world because it’s their entire world. Yeah. And you know what else happens? A lot of times people don’t see what’s going on in their subculture. And so they only see certain things. And they’re like, well, my mother doesn’t have a bank account. And therefore banks don’t allow it and nothing to do with the bank. It was her father or her husband or whatever. Right? And sometimes that’s the right freaking answer. I mean, I’ve met people who shouldn’t have bank accounts. I’ve met people who shouldn’t have licenses to drive. This is not an easy thing. I’m not saying like, oh, there’s a system and it’s perfect. No. I’m saying there are reasons for things. And just because you don’t understand those reasons doesn’t mean they’re not valid. And so the number of people I’ve met who said, oh, I can’t become a software engineer because I need a degree. And I’m like, do you understand who you’re talking to? I don’t have a degree in anything. I mean, I’ve been to a college to attend parties. That’s about it, kids. I worked pretty heavily in the software industry telling developers that their code sucks and showing them how to fix it. So do you need a degree to work in the software industry? No, you don’t. I know that because I’m doing it. What sacrifices I have to make? Well, there’s a lot of sacrifices there for sure. One decision was go to college and get into debt or buy a house. Well, I chose to buy the house. Same amount of time, by the way, about four years. So whatever, where do you want to spend your money? That’s a real interaction in the real world by a real person. And so when people say that, I always get upset because I’m kind of like, I am literally the reputation of your ridiculous worldview. People get these weird worldviews all the time because the amount of world you’re exposed to is always small. And it should be because you’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. We have very, very strict limitations of what we can understand. When we look at, you know, the Eric Weinsteins of the world and the John Verveckis of the world and the Petersons of the world, look at all the things they can understand. Maybe you can’t, maybe most people can’t. Otherwise, IQ doesn’t work, by the way. You get to look at the IQ numbers and realize in percentiles, what the hell is going on? Are you really in the top 10% of smart people? I don’t think so. I’m sorry, but the odds that you are in that top 10%, we know what they are. It’s defined already by the percentile. You’re just probably not that smart. And the fact that you have, look, I know people who have 100 IQ who are experts in fields that I can’t even touch their expertise at. Because IQ doesn’t really map the way you think it does. Now, there are imbeciles in other areas. There’s the famous story about Einstein not being able to find his way home. That’s real, by the way. That was definitely, there’s documented evidence that, you know, there’s a bunch of stuff. I know people like that. I know lots of people from MIT that are like that. Like, my God, the things that they can’t manage, bank accounts. You can do particle physics and you can’t manage a checkbook? That happens though, because we don’t realize our attention is really limited, even if we can know the things. Because I do this all the time. I mentioned it earlier, like, oh, I knew Jiminy Cricket was southern slang for Jesus Christ. I had totally forgotten. Why? Because on an interface, I wasn’t living in the south until very recently, right? Relatively speaking. So it just didn’t come up. So the fact that you have the knowledge isn’t even helpful. Because if your attention isn’t pointed at the knowledge that you have, it doesn’t exist. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, that sucks. Have you ever forgotten a word and you try it like five minutes to remember the mix? Because I have. It happens all the time to everybody and nobody realizes what a whopping piece of information this is. That means you’re not rational. The amount of knowledge you have doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. It doesn’t solve these problems. And there’s something going on that you’re not paying attention to. What if somebody else is paying attention to that? What if somebody knows how to drag your attention away from you and put it towards a thing that you don’t even want to be involved in, like video games or porn or protesting or need I go on? Have you seen that in the world anywhere recently? Hijacking your attention? Okay, you can blame the phone. My phone, first of all, notifications are off. They’ve been off all day because I’ve been in meetings. And then I did this. So phone notifications are off all day on this stupid phone. It’s very easy to control, but we don’t want to control it. Why? Right? And then to Manuel’s earlier point, most people want you to do their project their way. You know what they don’t want to do? They don’t want to do the work. They want you to do their work their way. I’m happy to do my work my way, and I’m happy to cooperate with you and do some of your work and help you, but I’m not going to do your work your way. And that’s a sacrifice, right? It’s a problem. And Nathaniel here, this is right on. After my own domicile, I’m very suspicious. Well, you should be. Appreciate what you guys are doing. Well, I’m glad to hear that. It’s always good to get good feedback. Somebody knows what we’re saying and finds it helpful. We’re always like, are we making any sense? Because a lot of people, you know, and I would argue, well, we make a lot more sense to the people who don’t quite understand what we’re saying in some cases. We hope that that’s true anyway. Yeah, it’s important to realize that that’s part of what creates the domicile too is you go out into the world and you find out your little bubble of a world doesn’t really represent something significant or something that you thought was important or whatever. Imagine all the people whose hopes and dreams are dashed by the fact that it wasn’t just Elon Musk and his brains, but actually there was this Emerald Mine that wasn’t really a mine, but whatever that his father funded his failures on. And it was actually his repeated early failures that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that contributed to his success. And now they’re like, oh, I can’t just be Elon Musk because I can’t start with however many hundreds of thousands of dollars and fail a bunch of times in order to learn the lessons that, oh, you didn’t have, right. Think of all the dreams I just crushed. I mean, some people knew that story already, I guess. But I, and then you get skeptical and cynical, like, oh, everybody told me Elon Musk was just smart and he slept under his desk. And that’s the secret to being the world’s richest man. And it’s like, well, obviously not lots of people do that and they never succeed. So yeah. I want to highlight something about the subcultures, right? So first of all, right, like a subculture has the capacity to go to great heights, but that also has the capacity to go to great delusion. So, but it’s always separate from the culture. That’s why it’s a subculture, right? And so when you’re in a bubble, don’t try to apply the rules from within the bubble outside of the bubble. That’s the one because it’s inappropriate. Like, like there’s different rules outside. That’s why they’re different places. The container matters. Yeah. And then it’s like, okay, like I live in some sort of a bubble with Mark, right? Like this is one of the means that we’re trying to get out of the bubble, right? Like we’re trying to interact and relate and see how people relate to what we’re having. But it’s like, okay, we have all of this stuff in our bubble. Now what? Right? Like you still have to export it outside of the bubble in a way that people can make use of it, right? And that’s why this apathetic philosophy question is kind of important, right? It’s like, yes, right? Like if we come off like we’re saying, we’re doomsaying, it’s like, well, no, because like there’s an answer, right? Like there’s a way in which you can turn, right? And like we’re highlighting intimacy, right? And developing the capacity to be intimate, right? Either with objects or with people, right? But it’s the quality of the connection that you need to cultivate. And this is where the ecology of the practices comes in, right? But also, yeah, just like be among people, like, and cooperate, right? And then, yeah, like, what are the spaces where that is facilitated for you, right? Like, are you engaging in spaces where you can do that? Because like, I get the sense that university is supposed to be that place, right? Like, that’s the purpose. But it’s not like that’s not what university is doing anymore. The people, like, in some sense, that is the story that people live in, right? Like, that’s what they think they’ve done. Like, oh, I have a degree from university, so now I can rationally think, and like, I have an authority to speak from. And then, what effectively happened is you got like indoctrinated in some sort of postmodern propaganda, and you just, they’re pawned. It’s sad. Well, you’re told you can be an individual, and you can understand enough of the world to rationalize your way through it. And that’s not true. There’s no way that’s Bob, no one’s doing that. You may think people did or not doing that. And that’s part of the argument, we’ll say, of the more religious side of this little corner versus the more scientific side, which is you think you’re doing these things, but actually, you’re relying on an awful lot of Christian framing, a la Tom Holland, or you’re relying on a lot of non-scientific language, or you’re relying on a lot of standards that are set religiously that science is embedded in. And that’s part of the problem. And look, it must be tough if you think you have a spiritual home, say, in the church, maybe the Seventh-day Adventists or whatever, and then you find out there’s other ways, there’s other spiritual ways to interact, and you’re like, oh, and look, a lot of people, maybe that way is better for them, because it’s smaller and easier for them to deal with as an ideal to interact on earth. And maybe that’s okay that they’re interacting in their small way that they’re interacting in and not trying to do more than they can, because that’s exactly what I’m pointing at. This is where people get caught up. They try to do things they cannot do, and then they screw over everybody else. And it’s not good. And we’ve been given this sense of that. And I want to have some of these comments. Alex, I think it makes perfect sense. Well, that’s good. I like that. William Brand, domicile is the best new dragon in decades. Look, I loved domicile when Breveke brought that up. I thought it was a really important way to think about the world. And yeah, and then that does bring into this other factor. When you’re a materialist, you kind of set the world. This is why children are a problem. To your comment here, William, if we age, we change. Entropy is real, yes. Modernity makes us change more than the ancient seasonal cycle. It doesn’t make us. I think modernity is a bad frame. My video on navigating patterns of modernity. What it does do is it affords us the ability to make changes faster than the cyclical patterns. And maybe we just shouldn’t. Maybe we should just tell our phone to go to hell every Sunday, lock it in a box. There are people that do that. The Jews are especially famous for, we’re going to be Amish for the day or for the weekend or whatever it is. Like, okay, that makes sense. Actually, it’s kind of not a bad way to go because you eye contrast. But the fact that we don’t all have the same home is really important. And it’s significant that we understand what home is, that historical grounding, that contrast, that way, that place to stand to build from. And well, I like it. Well, hold on. I want to go on this modernity change thing. So, if we change modernity to modern times, in modern times, we accentuate this progression. Like, oh, we grow up. But first of all, in the ancient times, people matured as well. And they became old. And so there was a progression as well from the individual’s perspective. So they did have that. The only distinction is that we somehow have introduced this myth that emergence is good. Like, when we’re going to this change, we need to invite the change for the sake of change, because there’s this eschatological aspect to this change that’s inherently good. And that’s the problem. Going through change is not inherently good, because change doesn’t have a direction. And the goodness is the direction. So the goodness is judging whether the change is good. Like, the change has to conform to the goodness. It’s not defining goodness. And if you don’t have a good, like if you don’t have a way to articulate or relate to the good, then the change seems like it’s directional. It seems like it’s pointing towards a thing that is good. But that’s a misinterpretation. And that’s a flattening of the world, that materialism is the cause. Right. Right. Well, and I’m trying to use recent times rather than modernity. So I’m failing at it all the time. But yeah, it’s hard because it’s a really… But also you don’t want to remove people’s agency by telling them something like modernity is causing something. Modernity is not an agent in the world. It can’t cause anything. And no matter how you define modernity, it doesn’t matter. Right. The thing that causes things is agents. And the only agents are people, or maybe if you’re religious, God is an agent. That’s where the agency comes from. And the fact that other agents aren’t following your agency doesn’t really mean anything. That happens kind of all the time. So Nathaniel, pluralism is a mind F, to be honest, after that experience of false certainty. Well, look, I mean, you can hold on to false certainty and make it work. Like I said, a lot of people just need small worlds to live in. It’s not bad. William Branch, I went through all my parents’ moves. I survived college. I survived entering the work world with three different jobs in three different states by the time I was 30. Wow, that’s amazing. And look, you can do that with a spiritual home. Right. And maybe your spiritual home isn’t as big as it could be, or doesn’t include all the things that maybe it should or you want or whatever. These things are arbitrary standards. Like you can always say like, well, you know, the Amish have a very limited world and therefore, yeah, but they make better stuff than they need. Also, there are advantages to this specialization and not involving the world. I like that William agrees with modernity makes more bad choices available. Yes, more choices in general because of the emergence is good, as Manuel pointed out so excellently there. And yeah, William, I didn’t have a proper home until I left my parents’ home, found steady work, got married and seriously entered church. Yeah, well, look, where’s your anchoring? Right. Where’s your ideal coming from to build home, not just house, because house is the building, right? And you can change houses and to have a stable home. And that’s where the domicile becomes an issue. When you’re a materialist, you moved house and now you don’t have a home. It’s like, well, that’s not really true. Especially if you have something spiritual and ideal that you’re still living within. Right. If you’re still embedded in that ideal, that higher ideal, then the fact that you’re not physically in the same location, the material changes don’t matter quite so much. That would be my argument. We kind of went over what allows that in the start of the live stream. So yeah, it is important to settle somewhere and to build upon something. And then that building and the integration that you’re having is that which binds you. And then the rules of the game change. And at a certain point, you were talking about transformation and not being able to relate to experience, right? Like the way that you’re experiencing the world is not comparable to how you were relating to the world when you started off. Right. And this is why you can’t give, you can’t convince people of this or whatever. Right. Because like they don’t have access to the experience. They don’t have access to the imagination. So like you have to make people realize that the way that they look at the world now is temporary. And they have a great deal of agency about how they perceive the world. And when you take responsibility over that agency, right, within the proper framework, obviously, you can start living a completely different life. Like your experience is not the same as it was. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like, so Willingham says, having a child is a great add on. Yeah, it is. I don’t have a castle that needs a male heir that will maintain the dynasty. Well, you do. You just don’t have a material castle. But getting through this process of young adulthood has always been hard, even if the son is only one to provide it material. Yeah. Well, you know, that’s the thing. Like we all struggle with the change. And when we’re not recognizing that the world has changed, like without change, the world doesn’t. There isn’t a concept of world because you have no contrast. You can’t see. Right. So time is really important. A lot of people collapse time. And what happens when you collapse time? Well, why can’t children consent? If time doesn’t exist, they’re not going through it. And therefore, right, like these things are related rather directly. Or if I choose my identity, why can’t I choose my identity in the consent? And like, what are you complaining about? Just choose your consenting identity. I can choose to identify as a child. Like, yeah, right. And then it gets into a whole mess because you’ve destroyed the structure that was holding, you know, that was holding reality together effectively. And you’ve reduced time to zero and not accounted for it. And, you know, this is it’s weird that all these people tell me they’ve read Plato, The Republic. And then it deals with this explicitly. It’s in book two. Like, what are you talking about? The problem of forbidden knowledge is right there. The problem of time is right there. The problem of change is like, well, yeah, you can do a lot of things if you assume everyone’s a rational adult. All the people on the planet are not rational adults. No. First of all, when you get older, you get senile a lot of people, right? And second of all, children, right? And the amount of rationality, as we pointed out in the moment, changes because our memories are faulty. Like, our memories are faulty. Like, this doesn’t solve anything. It’s just not true enough to be helpful to building anything in the world. And that’s it, William. When I was 18, I had no clue about adulthood. Yeah, me either. Oh boy, did I make some mistakes. It was confusing and scary and I was shy. Yeah. Millennials just think they are the first to go through this. Yeah, well, that’s true. To a large extent, a lot of the problem is people don’t see other people having the problems that they have. And that’s a big problem. But like, most people have the same problems that you have or have had them. And we don’t talk about it. That’s the recession of the body of the church, right? The people in the church. They’re not talking about the struggle. This is Sally Jo’s great testimony. No one’s talking about the struggle they’re going through as part of whatever experience they’re in, whether that’s a church experience or it’s an experience with their job or growing up or whatever it is. That’s why I get frustrated when I hear, we have to live in her because we can’t afford to buy a house straight out of college. I know of zero people who had ever did that. Ever. Ever. Zero. Actually none. I’m sure there are one or two. I just never met them, right? Like, there are wealthy people who don’t have to do that. The wealthy people are by definition the 1%. I don’t know any 1%. So yeah, I want to go into this a little bit. Hi, Bumblebee. Good to see you. I don’t want to skip over his comment. He said hi. I’m going to skip over it, but that’s fine. He doesn’t need emotional support. Validation, Manuel. Validation. Well, yeah, but like, what do we mean by emotional support, right? Like, first of all, do our parents have their emotions in order, right? Like, are you sure you want emotional support from your parents? Like, there’s a good chance that’s maybe actually not what you want. And then it’s like, sometimes, like, you’re just a rebel or whatever, right? Like, you’re just, you’re unreachable, right? Like, I was unreachable during a lot of my early years. Now, I’m going to try and be fair to myself and say, well, that was just because there weren’t the right people to reach me. But on the other hand, right, like, like, I was still rebelling. Well, where would you have gotten that, right? Maybe it didn’t come from your parents, right? Maybe it had to come from a larger community that you didn’t have, right? Or whatever. Maybe a church community. Yeah, yeah. You need an authority, right? And while like you have to accept the authority, right? And then the authority has to be competent because else they’re going to blow up in your face, right? They’re going to betray your confidence because you’ve got all this suspicion against the world, right? Like, you have to remember that we’re really suspicious, right? So, so when, and this is this is one of my problems with Christianity, right? Like, like, they, they can’t argue their point. Like, they can’t argue for shit. Like, I know that I’m a tough cookie to argue with. But like, you, if you can’t argue your position, like, why are you convincing? Like, for real, like, even if you’re right, like, like, and that’s kind of like, like, you, you, you, what was it? Yeah, in the church, the guy said, the pastor said, you can only guide people about things you have experienced. Like, like, you don’t have the experience, you don’t have the authority. Right. Well, then I think, I think Mills brings up a good point, right? My grandfather would say, quote, it’s not the first time it’s happened, it’s just the first time it’s happened to you, end quote. We don’t hear that enough, right? And what’s causing some of this stuff is this idea of the nuclear family. The nuclear family is one step removed from actual individualism. It’s like, look, you’ve got a family and the family consists of a mother, a father, and, you know, 1.5 kids, whatever, whatever. It was absurd from the beginning. You’re kind of like, ha, ha, ha, right? It was absurd. And it’s like, well, if that’s what you have to rely on, then the odds that the two people that you’re with as a child are going to be able to provide you with all the things you need are actually zero, by the way, just to let you know. And so you’re going to grow up angry if that’s the way, if that’s the play people are acting out, if that’s the way people are trying to interact with the world, as though you don’t need to be embedded in a community, in a village, you know, if you don’t need to have these other identities, maybe a spiritual identity, right, to give yourself a spiritual home, maybe an identity in the community, maybe an identity as the child of somebody, because a lot of people reject that, right? You know, that’s really important. And, yeah, you know, you can get shielded too. Like, your parents can make big mistakes in shielding you from errors. And William points this out. Going out in the real world, didn’t have all these electronics and making mistakes and going on regardless taught me. Yeah, I bet it did. And that’s the problem is that sometimes that’s how you have to learn because you’re resistant to learning any other way. And some of that’s on you. And William, I would have loved to have had more advice and affirmation from my parents, right? Well, but as a reader, I have many heroes. Yeah. Well, and people get very attached to that. And then they don’t want to give up on their Socrates or their Plato. They feel an allegiance to these dead people. That’s necromancy, in case you were curious. And for very, very talks about this, right? Like it’s really, really dangerous if you try and educate yourself, right? If you’re, if you don’t have a tradition in which you get educated, because like you’re, you’re basically a puppet of fate at that point, right? Because like, how are you selecting the things that you’re reading, right? And how are you understanding that your understanding of your reading is correct? Like there’s no standard to apply to what you’re doing, right? And then we go back to this emergence is a good idea, right? It’s like, well, the only way that that would be justified is that like, if you just get more things that it would automatically work. And it’s like, well, yeah, reality is a correcting factor, right? And like, yes, if you’re going out and you’re making mistakes, right? Like you learn about reality. And if that’s the way that you check, like you put a check upon your ideas, that’s great, because now you’re grounded in your participation. But if you are like going to college and you’re skipping class and you’re watching YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia pages, right? Then you don’t have that. And then at the point that you’re going to fall on your ass because reality hits back, right? You’re going to fall hard. Or if you go to college and they don’t challenge you, right? So I like this, William, I assume the extended family of my grandparents, my parents were only children just as my wife and I were, was more life educational. Well, and then he says, you know, Molly Coddling is such a funny word. Yeah, I love the word Molly Coddling, even though it’s a little hard to say. This is the problem of affluence. What’s affluence? Look in the older stories, you’re going to find all these stories about these people who grew up. The story of the Buddha is a great one, right? It’s right there, grew up protected, right? And then enters the real world, right? Whatever mechanism, there’s the mystical aspect of that story that Westpers like to ignore. It’s highly mystical. Like there’s angels, basically, what we would call the West angels actually interfere to get around the king’s wishes, right? That’s what happens in the Buddha story. I know nobody talks about it, but it’s right there, guys, like really, right? And so it’s in all these stories, by the way. But there’s always this story, and you see this in all kinds of stories, where there’s an upper class person, and they are coddled, they are kept away from the consequences of their actions. What is affluence, my friend? What is affluence? Affluence is more people have more availability to keep themselves and their children away from nature, away from the direct reality consequences of their actions. That’s what affluence is definitionally, I would argue. And because of that, we’re taking advantage of that affordance that isn’t available in, quote, modernity or recent times, as I like to call it, right? And that’s causing a problem. And that even though that pattern’s there, that story’s everywhere, we don’t engage with the old Buddhist because they’re fake, we don’t relate to them. But actually, the problem is affluence, and if you take it too seriously, causes all these issues. You can argue about Elon Musk and his family paying for him to fail, but man, that’s way better than them not doing that, right? Like not giving him the opportunity to fail, actually making him succeed in spite of himself. He wouldn’t have learned any lessons. Yeah, I think it’s also really important to realize that affluence is not only a separation from nature, but it’s also creating a livable fantasy, right? Like I’ve been listening to this derivatives trading, which is like 300 times the size of the global economy, right? So we’re treating in fictional money, right? Something that’s 300 times what we produce, and that’s okay. No, that’s just a fantasy, right? And the only reason that that is possible is because everybody has too much stuff, and they don’t care. That’s the only reason why that’s okay. There’s a lot of people getting rich from that, right? There’s creation, fictional creation of wealth by magic, and because it’s too far away from people to even keep track of it or get upset. Even if you know about it, what are you going to do about it? You don’t have any agency on that level. Yeah, Nassim Taleb talks about that. He doesn’t like complex derivatives because he can’t understand them and doesn’t believe they’re real or reasonable. He’s correct about that. William, it would be very difficult to bring back an extended family of 100 years ago. No, it wouldn’t. Look at the Amish. If we have children, we must find a new way. No, there’s lots of people already doing this. I think that’s funny that you say that. It’s a city problem, dude. Go to the Midwest. I only see local living congregations as a substitute. You don’t need a substitute. You don’t have to play the game. You can actually play that 100 year old game. No one’s going to stop you, I promise. There are options, but you don’t have to take those options. Bubbleviz, Buddha, the Mali-Cottled Prince. Yes, indeed. That is the story of the Buddha. Read it carefully. You’ll see it right there. You’ll see the mysticism, too. Mills, I really had a poetic metaphor about pond ripples converging. Yes. The next day, I tossed two rucks in the pond and they did not converge at all. I laughed about it. Reality checks are good medicine. Yes, they are. They are. William Branch, we stayed active in church for our daughter’s sake and I have to hope it did all that could be done. Well, it certainly offered the affordance. I mean, look, we’ve talked about this before, the difference, or at least I have, right? The difference between the crisis of faith and the meaning crisis. They’re different things. In one case, you had something and you lost it, or you had an affordance for it and you lost it. In the other case, that affordance was never available to you. The meaning crisis, people never understood these core concepts. That’s a pretty big difference. Even if a quote doesn’t work, right? It did something and that something may work. It may work later. Right. And that’s like, God doesn’t work the way that you want him to, right? Sometimes he’s like a fuzz. I called him and did he listen? No, he never listens to me. Just saying. I had it all mapped out for him and he didn’t do any of it. But like what Mark was saying about the faith crisis and the meaning crisis is also true for domicile, right? So there’s types of provision that a home can give, right? Like there’s fatherhood, there’s motherhood, right? Like one of those can be corrupted or missing. Both of them can be corrupted or missing. You can have never had a home, right? And then like you have attachment problems, right? Like you have this whole theory about attachment styles, right? Like these attachment styles are highly likely related to your relationship to your parents, right? Like, oh, when you’re crying, is your parent reacting to them or do you need to cry harder each time in order to draw their attention? Because like if you need to cry harder, that is a rule about the world that you’re like integrating at like a really, really early level and that has certain implications about, okay, you’re going to insist to get that attention because if you insist, you’re going to get the attention. So now you’re going to be really obnoxious when you’re relating to people, right? Like you’re just going to double down on being the center of attention and like stuff like that, right? Like it’s just like, because like what is that? That’s you recreating your home, right? You’re recreating the environment that you had at home at this new place and now these new people are not your parents, right? So now you’re going to create new dynamics. You’re going to create interpersonal dynamics which are corrupted, right? Because like that’s not how you should be acting. And yeah, like that’s kind of what the domicile is because now you can’t generate the intimacy, right? Because you have this relationship. Right, right. Well, and I want to point this out. William says, once King becomes an adult, it is only him, her and the Holy Spirit. Well, they have an affordance for that. It’s meaning crisis versus crisis of faith. We can only make an appropriate adult child support, right? Well, and that’s where where affluent parents can fail to fence up. No, look, you can deny your affluence. You can move to a smaller house for the sake of your kids. You can move out to the country. You think there are, I’ve seen people do it. I know people that do this, right? They live in the city. They have a kid and they move the hell out of the city and they raise the kid in the middle of nowhere on purpose and they give up their high salary and all the affluence for the sake of their child. I’ve seen people do that. The Menendez brothers being the most tragic example. Well, William, look, there’s a thing called the billionaire boys club. I don’t know if it’s a movie or a mini series or whatever. It’s fascinating though. Same thing, right? Where these affluent kids were just living in a fantasy world and it’s a problem, right? And they were unconstrained and they were able to generate this fantasy and rip a bunch of people off and murder ensued because money was the only value. Wasn’t just the highest value. It was the exclusive value. Life wasn’t worth anything. You see that with Sam Harris and my highest value on navigating patterns. Check out that video. These things happen and they’re super dangerous. William says, I was very fortunate to have a stable home environment growing up. Well, maybe a stable spiritual home is more important. We tried as much as we could to do the same for my daughter. Well, that’s lovely. It’s weird, right? There’s that weird sort of discussion in this little corner about the sons of missionaries, sons and daughters of missionaries and how the children missionaries interact differently in the world because a lot of them move a lot and how they’re able to be well-rounded anyway. And uh-oh, Williams, yes, the original sin argument. Look at that. Life is broken, but we must never give up. Yeah, well, materialism isn’t perfect and we must have that higher spiritual home to model our material home on. Otherwise, domicide will ensue. Oh, and Mills says, very substantial discussion as always. Well, that’s lovely for you to say. That’s true for everyone. You’re most welcome. I’m very happy to hear that feedback. That makes me happy. Somebody understands something that we’re saying and finds it useful. It’s good to know. Yeah. What do you think, Manuel? I’m pretty beat. It’s been three hours and nobody wants to help. Yeah. Late over there. You got to get to bed soon. Yes, I do need to get to bed soon. So, I had some other archetypes of corrupt homes, right? So, you have the mama bear, right? So, you have the overprotective mom or like the mom that goes out on the tax, right? Like there’s all these ways in which there’s these corrupt inheritors and like, yeah, we could go over that, but it’s less important to go through the specifics and more important to realize that that is a factor, right? Like there’s an expression of your parent and that can cause you to feel domiciled, right? While reality isn’t really true. I did get kind of touched by this story from Chino where this guy was sitting in his tent feeling lonely, right? While there was people outside having fun at the campfire, right? And I was like, yeah, like that’s really problematic. If you get to a place where like what you need is there and you can’t get access to it, like that’s real rough. Yeah. But that’s you too, right? This we talked about earlier. Yeah. The thing that causes loneliness is you. The cause of loneliness isn’t modernity or money or the callousness of others. It’s really just you. Well, yeah. Are we going to do this? Yeah. Nathaniel, any thoughts on Kierkegaard? Many thoughts. They’re very easy and oversimplified. However, I think they’re totally justified and people give him way too much credit. When John and Chris released these videos recently, I kept thinking about your soothsayer stuff. True irony, true, right? Christianity, attachment problems with the church, et cetera. Look, Kierkegaard is very easy. Like these people and they’re like complicated philosophers. These guys are easy. They’re all projecting their personal problems onto the world and trying to solve them there instead of just participating in a way that they can solve their personal problems and not bother the rest of us with it. Kierkegaard is a prime example of this. Here’s Kierkegaard, the whole thing. Kierkegaard is Luther for the Lutheran church. That’s it. This is the whole thing. It’s just that pattern of Lutheranism, of Protestantism re-manifesting within the solution, right? Because that solution wasn’t a solution. Splitting off from the Catholic church was the wrong answer. Hint. Right? And therefore, once you splinter, the splintering keeps going. I don’t think that’s debatable. Protestantism keeps splintering, right? The churches keep destroying themselves over time and therefore they don’t have the lasting power of Catholics or the Orthodox, either of which I’m totally fine with, by the way, because they have lasting power. And I’m kind of big on actual evolution where lasting power is an indicator of good things. It’s not goodness, but it’s an indicator of good things. Pre-requisites. It’s maybe a prerequisite. Yeah, maybe even a prerequisite. But it’s at least an indicator of good things and things that don’t have that quality is an indicator of not good things. And Protestantism can’t have that quality by definition because it’s an identification against. That’s Kierkegaard. Don’t listen to him. He ain’t got nothing to say. And whatever he has to say is not going to last because it didn’t last. And he was railing against something that also didn’t last. Like for me, I engage differently with questions like that, right? So Kierkegaard, like why engage with Kierkegaard? Like for real, like you have all the things in the world that you can engage with. Like why pick Kierkegaard? And I’m going to tell you, you’re not going to give me a satisfying answer to that question, but let’s say you do, then, okay, you get out of Kierkegaard what you get out of it. Like my opinion isn’t going to matter for that aspect, right? I’m just going to say that probably whatever you want to get, like there’s better means to get it. So like screw Kierkegaard. Yeah. Well, look, there’s a lot of things. It’s so funny because I’m not used to these questions. People are like, where did you get your basis for the things you’re talking about? And then I have to think about it because it’s kind of like, why would I even discuss that? Why are you discussing? I don’t need validation, right? And then I was like, oh, I know where I got that from, right? I mean, it takes years in some cases. A lot of these questions are three, three and a half years old for me now, at least in this little corner, older in some cases. And like, I just don’t discuss the fact that, yeah, a lot of the stuff I learned I learned from watching classic Star Trek and engaging in these certain things. And, you know, my uncle gave me advice on this or, you know, my other uncle pointed this out to me or I had this experience in 4-H club or Boy Scouts, right? I didn’t even think of it. It didn’t even occur to me. Oh yeah, I went to 4-H club. I did Boy Scouts for a year, right? I didn’t even think of it, right? Because it’s just part of who I am. So I know I’m going to have a deep, Manuel, it’s a deep discussion about what I learned in 4-H. What? This is what philosophers do. Like, it’s wonderful. If that’s what you want to do for a game, go play that game. But really, you don’t need any of this stuff. And I said this on The Meaning Code. I got a couple of talks, a few talks with Karen Wong. And she, you know, I was talking about this once. I said, look, you can read philosophy or you can just learn everything that Plato and Socrates learned by living. Honestly, you don’t need to read any of it. You can just do that and it’ll work. And, you know, this is why I haven’t read those things on purpose. And now that I’m reading The Republic, it’s just making me angry. Because I’m like, you people who claimed to read The Republic, you kind of skipped over some stuff. Like, really, the most important bits. You kind of skipped over it on me. And now you’re making these ridiculous claims. And there’s not supported by the book, guys. If you read the book, you read it wrong. I’m sorry. I have to say that. Because I can point now to the pages in the book that you skipped over that were really important. Like, really, this is why I don’t like to engage in this stuff. Because it’s just like, you guys are making this really complicated. You can, honest to God, just live your life and be good. You don’t need this other stuff. I’m not saying don’t read it. Don’t whatever. Right? I’m not saying that. I’m saying that when you put too much emphasis on it, you’re not living. And you can learn all the same stuff without reading a word and just living. The smartest people I know aren’t readers. They’re workers. They work in the fields, usually. They have long days working. And the people I enjoy talking to the most do both. They’re well-read and they work. And they have long drives or they work on a farm or on a ranch. And they’re well-read. Those are the people I enjoy talking to most. Why? It’s easier for me to talk to them in some extent. We can talk about all kinds of wacky things and get into all this stuff. But the people that do things in the real world, they’re way smarter philosophically than anybody who’s ever written anything. And also, right, like, Jürgen Gott was depressed explicitly. So why are you engaging with the mind of a depressed person? Why do you want to have that in your head? Right. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Well, and look, William, is the republic subversive? Not really. It’s explicitly silly and absurd to highlight the fact that these lovely questions that you would like to have answers to, these problems aren’t problems. They’re patterns in the world that you have to accept and deal with. That’s really, you know, I haven’t finished the book, but like, that’s the whole book. It’s just, look, even if you had the ideal conditions under your own rationality, under your own rational agreement that we can all agree on, it wouldn’t work. That’s the theme of the republic. The theme of the republic is there is no political system that’s perfect. There is no government that’s perfect. There is no mode of interaction with others that gives you perfect justice. That’s the theme of the book. That’s the reason. That’s the tell-all of the entire manuscript. And again, I’m not done with it, but I’m fairly sure I know how it ends. So, you know, I’m feeling pretty good about this prediction. And maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. We’ll find out. We’ll find out. I don’t think truth is simple because truth requires discernment. Well, I think, well, no, I think truth is simple, but it’s wrong. What you care about is what is true. And true is an action. Truth is an object. Objects decay because entropy, and therefore what you need to pay attention to is the true. And being true is work. It’s effort. It’s struggle. And that’s a subtle difference, but it’s significant. It may seem subtle, but it’s really significant. Or a different way to say that. Even if there’s truth, which is static, you’re not static. So you’re always going to be in a dance. So you’re always going to be in a dance. So you’re always in a dance. So it’s no use to conceive of it that way. Exactly. Yeah, that’s well said. I want to deal with two things. Well, first, let’s do William. One of the first critical view is the question if you are dealing with a real problem. Yes. Verbecky characterizes this thing as perennial problems. And then what he describes are not problems because they don’t have solutions. Like grief does not have a solution. If it doesn’t have a solution, it’s not a problem. It’s a pattern. It’s a perennial pattern, and it repeats. For sure, there are perennial patterns that repeat. Most of us are going to hit, most of the most of us are going to hit grief. There’s no solution to grief. You don’t solve it. It’s not a problem. That would be my argument. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like we live in a very scientific world, and science deals with problems and solutions. I get it. But the world we live in is not mere problems and solutions. That’s too narrow, too small, too contained. Nathaniel. It’s similar to listening to sad and angry music. Right. 90% of everything popular. True. Thinking that it’s relatable and cathartic, but it’s just selling more of the same. Look, yeah. And here’s the problem. You can go too far the other way. We kind of talked about this earlier with Sally Jo’s great testimony and stuff. You can’t never talk about things that are sad and angry. Because sometimes we get sad, and sometimes we get angry. And it’s good to know that you’re not the only person that ever got sad about the same thing or angry about the same thing. It gives you that sense of home. Right. Oh, we’re all, everybody in my community is angry about electricity because I’m Amish. Fair enough. That’s good to know. Right. It gives you that sense of home. Right. Everybody’s angry in my community about the weather because I’m Dutch. There you go. There you go. Right. Or everyone’s angry in my community about taking religion, teaching of religion out of schools. Fair enough. That’s a good thing to have a community around and about. But if that’s your primary exposure, you’re over identifying with the negative. Right. If you’re reading Kierkegaard, I would argue you’re over identifying with depression and negativity. And you don’t need to do that. There’s a better way to engage, to realize, oh, Kierkegaard was depressed and negative and skeptical of his church, which was skeptical of the church back when there was really only two in the Western world, or one might argue one. Fair enough. Okay. But is that how you, do you want to be skeptical and cynical for your whole life, so you have getting patterns for more? Yeah. And it’s like, well, so you listen to the music, right? You have the feeling and then you take the lesson of the feeling, right? Like the feelings are there for a purpose. They’re not there to be felt. Like this wishy washy, new age bullshit of feeling your feelings. Like, no, like the feelings are there because there’s something beyond them. Right. And if you don’t engage with the beyond, like if you need the music to engage with the beyond, that’s fine, right? Also, you need to get out of that pattern, but maybe not right now, right? But like, ideally, you need to get out of that pattern. And Nathaniel, maybe he would have made a good Catholic. No, he would have made a good Luther, because he was a good Luther, right? The problem is all the problems in Catholicism are still there when you’re not in Catholicism. And just Luther didn’t understand that because he was an idiot. Like a lot of people like, well, this guy’s really smart because he did this. It’s like, was that really smart? Are you sure? Because it seems stupid. Like at some point, are you sure you just didn’t do something rebellious? And people are going, he’s really smart, they were rebel too. It’s like, maybe he wasn’t really smart. Maybe he was an idiot. Right. And I’d make that argument for all philosophers past Aristotle, actually. A lot of them seem like idiots to me, because they made really basic mistakes. Just very basic, basic, like that axiomatic assumption, like Emmanuel Kant, four axiomatic assumptions are just obviously incorrect. And when you proceed from there, you’re going to get bad answers. And of course you get. And I think, right, like we were talking about the affluence thing. Okay. I think Jürgen Gart was really affluent. Because he was affluent, he never made leaps in his life. Right. So then he had to make the leap of faith. And then it was a really big deal because he never did it. Right. And he couldn’t do it. While if that’s a natural thing, right, like if you’re just participating in that pattern as part of life, that leap is like a step. Like it’s like every other step you take. Well, and Thoreau did the same thing, right? You read Thoreau’s Walden, which I did when I was a kid. And you’re like, oh, wow, this is really deep. And he spent time in the woods and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reason why he was able to write about the woods is because he was wealthy. And look, I’ve been to his cabin. I lived in New England. I lived in Massachusetts. We went to Walden Pond all the time, literally, in a summer camp. We went to Walden Pond like every day. And there was a video out there of me taking a rock and putting it on the rock pile where his little cabin was. The fact of the matter is he went home every night for dinner. It was a two mile walk or something to the Thoreau farm, which is right next to Walden Pond. Right. And it is a big farm, too. It’s still there. Like it’s huge. And so his affluence was contrasted with him spending time in the woods without his affluence. And then he was able to, in that high contrast environment, write really deep and meaningful things. I love Thoreau, but I’m not throwing shade on Thoreau at all. I love the guy. But it’s that contrast from the affluence that allowed him to exemplify being alone in nature. But you can’t do it without the affluence. So being like, ew, affluence is bad. You should live like Thoreau. He lived in affluence. You have to to appreciate nature to some extent. Otherwise, nature is just every day. Every day, I’ve got more nature. You need that contrast. You just can’t be all-con. You don’t want to wallow in your emotions. You don’t want to live in your emotions, to Manuel’s earlier point. You don’t want to get stuck there. And that’s what romanticism derives. And it’s almost like a monastic impulse to extreme experience. It’s kind of like all these extreme sports now. It’s like, yeah, you’re going to do this really extreme thing to have done it. And then you’re special. It’s like a perverted type of sainthood. Are you going to be worshipped because you walked across the Alps or whatever? Is that the thing that you want to be known for? I get it. I get the high that’s in there. I had this conversation earlier today where a friend’s son went running and he got this high, partially from the girls, but I think also partially from doing something successful. I was like, that high is fine, but you shouldn’t do it for the high. The high is a second order of fact. And maybe we should talk about that in the going streets. Yeah, at some point. William Bray. Spontaneous emotional acting out is toddler. Yes. When you look around the world right now, you’re going to see a lot of this. And one of our arguments is that people are not maturing emotionally and mentally. They’re not maturing because they’ve been mollycoddled to death or into toddlerhood. And they’re really just four or three years old or something. William, you grow into maturity. You can’t just choose to suddenly be mature. Exactly. In the same way, you can’t choose to transform. You can’t say, oh, I’m going to transcend and transform and never transform. You can’t choose those things. They happen to you. Nathaniel Kickergard also used many pen names back to your naming point. Why would you use a pen name? Because you don’t want to participate in a way that you’re going to have consequences. And this goes back to NASA and televised an excellent book called Skin in the Game. You don’t want your skin in the game. Well, you’re not participating if you don’t have skin in the game. And if you’re not participating, you’re not. You don’t have the John Breveghi’s participatory knowledge, even though I disagree with that framing. And those are there. They are. It’s useful. Like you don’t have the type of knowledge because you didn’t take the risk. This is the second order effects. This is derivatives problem. It’s the same problem, complex derivatives. There’s no skin in the game. You’re not, if things fail, you’re not directly impacted in that way. And that’s the problem. And domicide is all about not being, not being in the game, not participating. Right? Why do you feel lonely? Because you’re not participating with the campfire. Maybe you don’t have the skills to participate with the campfire. Okay. And maybe that’s your parents fault. Also okay. But it doesn’t matter where it came from because the solution is the same. Whether your parents caused it or your drug use caused it or your trauma caused it. The way out is the same. Like people get really caught up and you have to find the root cause. Maybe, maybe you don’t need to know the root cause. Maybe you can solve it irrespective of how it was caused. The root sandstone. Oh, well, and that’s, and that’s the people get really caught up in understanding things instead of just fixing the damn thing and moving on with your life. Your car breaks down. Like I had it, no word of a lie. I had a car. It was a 1976 Plymouth Velare. Love that car. It’s a great car. It was all dented. It was black. Had a Mopar 318. The Mopar 318 is one of the best motors ever made. I don’t know if anybody tells you that they’re wrong. The 318 was awesome. A lot of power. That car would actually just, every once in a while, stop working. Now, I know what you’re saying, car guys. It’s the electrical system marked. There’s a ballast. Yeah, I know all about ballast resistance. No, it would actually stop working for reasons that I could never understand. I’ve asked literally hundreds of mechanics about. I’m not joking because I was really curious. Could never find out the answer. I would add oil to the car and it would start working again. And it wasn’t the carburation problem. I had that problem. I knew how to adjust the carburetor, by the way. That wasn’t it. There was an air fuel mixture problem. And of course, this car, by the time I got it, was ancient. It was ancient. Shouldn’t have been on the road. Honestly, shouldn’t have been on the road. The car had so many problems. But I loved it. It was fantastic. I used to smoke Mustangs all the time in that thing. And then we’d get all pissed off for a new Mustang. You’re done. See ya. Great 318s. Wonderful motors. Not the supercharged Mustangs, obviously, but the stock ones all day long. Never figured out why adding oil to the engine worked. And the car would just stop. And it was not the ballast resistor. It was not. Because I had a meter I could measure. It wasn’t the ballast resistor problem. Wasn’t a grounding problem. Really was the oil. Don’t know why. Don’t know how. Never figured it out. Wasn’t important. I had a solution. I didn’t need to figure it out. Wasn’t necessary. There’s lots of things like that. I’ve had many computers just blow up. It was like, I don’t know why that happened. Oh well. Move on. Get a new computer. Life’s too short to figure out why everything happened. And things often, well, I would argue, nothing has a single cause anyway. So what are you really figuring out? Are you just figuring out one of the four causes? And does that make you happy? In the meantime, you could be fixing the problem, though, and moving on with your life. Instead of worrying about why it happened. Worrying about the understanding or lack of understanding of why the thing happened. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, just move on. Just fix it and go. Really. Right. Or you ask an expert. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, William, materialists blame Big Bang. There you go. Yeah, you need, that’s all they have. Okay, let’s call it a night. Go to bed, Manuel. You’re up too late anyway. Exactly. But it was lovely, everybody. Stop yelling at me. No, I won’t. I’m your friend. I have to yell at you. Give you a good friend. I was already going to bed, but now I’m not going anymore. Oh yeah, you’re going to be disagreeable. Where’s this domo side? You can disagree yourself right into illness if you’d like. Is that the bottle of whiskey bottle I need to look? Identify against me because I’m yelling. That’s a good idea. Exactly. That’ll work well for your life. Is that five-year-old behavior? You’ve been upgraded. Yes, you’re a whole five-year-old. Congratulations. You’re making wonderful progress there. Look, everybody. Thanks. This is a lot of fun. It sounds like some people got something out of it, which is always just wonderful and lovely to hear. I really appreciate the engagement. We’re going to try to do more of these. It’s been hard. Things have been crazy for both of us. Yeah, we’re going to try to do more of these if you like them. Certainly like, subscribe to Navigating Patterns, look at some of my other videos, go on Agopic Orientation on Manuel’s channel, look at some of his stuff. It’s great. He’s got a great interview with VanderKlay and his interview with Father Eric’s really good too. Those are really important interviews, I think. Yeah, like, comment, subscribe. Tell us what you want to see more of, what you want to see less of. We’ll do our best to accommodate. Can’t promise, but we’ll do our best. I want to share the book club on Plato. Oh, yeah. Yeah, our Texas wisdom community folks. Join that. We’re going through the Republic and I’m going to miss it. Oh, I missed last week. I might miss this week. We’ll see. We’ll see where I land when I get up north. But yeah, join us. Join us on the Republic. It’s been a long journey. I won’t miss this week actually. But yeah, like, we’re doing a book club so I think there’s a Discord link in the subscription as well. So you can even join us. It’s every Saturday at 9 a.m. Eastern. Yeah, I think it’s 10. Or is it 9 Central, 10 Eastern? Something like that. I forget now. Crazy American times. Crazy American times. It’s either 9 or 10 depending upon what time zone you’re in. Yeah, thanks guys. It’s been lovely as always. Really appreciate the engagement. And we’ll talk again soon. See you.