https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9Wlq2Q60RCg
Is there advice you can give now that we know the frame to give to me, Lex, about how to do this podcast better, how to think about this world, how to be a good engineer, how to be a good human being from what you know about me? Take your preoccupation with suffering seriously. It’s a serious business, right? And that’s part of that to circle back to the beginning, let’s say, that’s that willingness to gaze into the abyss, which is obviously what you were doing when you went to Ukraine. It’s like, it’s gazing into the abyss that makes you better. The thing is, and this is maybe where Nietzsche’s ideas not as differentiated as it became, sometimes your gaze can be forcefully directed towards the abyss, and then you’re traumatized. If it’s involuntary and accidental, it can kill you. The more it’s voluntary, the more transformative it is. And that’s part of that idea about facing death and hell. It’s like, can you tolerate death and hell? And the answer is, this terrible answer is yes, to the degree that you’re willing to do it, voluntarily. And then you might ask, well, why should I have to subject myself to death and hell? I’m innocent. And then the answer to that is, even the innocent must be voluntarily sacrificed to the highest good. That’s such an interesting distinction. Voluntary suffering. Voluntary, yeah. Yeah, well, that’s why the central Christian doctrine is pick up your cross and follow me. And I’m speaking not in religious terms saying that. I’m just speaking as a psychologist. It’s like one of the things we’ve learned in the last hundred years is voluntary exposure to that which freezes and terrifies you in measured proportions is curative. So a form of, at least in part, involuntary sufferings, depression. Do you have advice for people on how to find a way out? You’re a man who has suffered in this way, perhaps continued to suffer in this way. How do you find a way out? The first thing I do as a clinician, if someone comes to me and says they’re depressed is ask myself a question. Well, what does this person mean by that? So I have to find out like, because maybe they’re not depressed, maybe they’re hyper anxious or maybe they’re obsessional. Like there’s various forms of powerful negative emotion. So they need to be differentiated. But then the next question you have to ask is, well, are you depressed or do you have a terrible life? Or do you have a terrible life? Or is it some combination of the two? So if you’re depressed, as far as I can tell, you don’t have a terrible life. You have friends, you have family, you have an intimate relationship, you have a job or a career, you’re about as educated as you should be given your intelligence, use your time outside of work wisely. You’re not beholden to alcohol or other temptations. You’re engaged in the community in some fundamental sense and all that’s working. Now, if you have all that and you’re feeling really awful, you’re either ill or you’re depressed. And so then sometimes there’s a biochemical route to that treatment of that. My experience has been as a clinician is if you’re depressed, but you have a life and you take an antidepressant, it will probably help you a lot. Now, maybe you’re not depressed, exactly. You just have a terrible life. What does that look like? You have no relationship, your family’s a mess. You’ve got no friends, you’ve got no plan, you’ve got no job. You use your time outside of work not only badly, but destructively. You have a drug or alcohol habit or some other vice, pornography addiction. You are completely unengaged in the surrounding community. You have no scaffolding whatsoever to support you in your current mode of being or you move forward. And then as a therapist, well, you do two things. Well, if it’s depression per se, well, like I said, there’s sometimes a biochemical route, a nutritional route. There’s ways that can be addressed. It’s probably physiological if you’re, at least in part, if you’re depressed, but you have an okay life. Sometimes it’s conceptual. You can turn to dreams sometimes to help people because dreams contain the seeds of the potential future. And if your person is a real good dreamer and you can analyze dreams, that can be really helpful. But that seems to be only true for more creative people. And for the people who just have a terrible life, it’s like, okay, you have a terrible life. Well, let’s pick a front. How about you need a friend? Like one sort of friend. Do you know how to shake hands and introduce yourself? I’ll have the person show me. So let’s do it for a sec. So it’s like this, hi, I’m Jordan. And people don’t know how to do that. And then they can’t even get the ball rolling. For the listener, Jordan just gave me a firm handshake. Yeah, as opposed to a dead fish. And there’s these elementary social skills that hypothetically, if you were well cared for, you learned when you were like three. And sometimes people have, I had lots of clients to whom no one ever paid any attention. And they needed like 10,000 hours of attention. And some of that was just listening because they had 10,000 hours of conversations they never had with anyone. And they were all tangled up in their head. And they had to just, one client in particular, I worked with this person for 15 years. And what she wanted from me was for me just to shut the hell up. For 50 minutes was very hard for me. And to just tell me what had happened to her. And then what happened at the end of the conversation, then I could discuss a bit with her. And then as we progressed through the years, the amount of time that we spent in discussion increased in proportion in this sessions until by the time we stopped seeing each other when my clinical practice collapsed, we were talking about 80% of the time, but she literally, she had never been attended to properly, ever. And so she was an uncarved block in the Taoist sense, right? She hadn’t been subjected to those flaming swords that separated the wheat from the chaff. And so you can do that in therapy. If you’re listening and you’re depressed, I would say if you can’t find a therapist and that’s getting harder and harder to find a therapist, and that’s getting harder and harder because it’s actually become illegal to be a therapist now because you have to agree with your clients, which is a terrible thing to do with them. Just like it’s terrible, just arbitrarily oppose them. You could do the self-authoring program online because it helps you write an autobiography. And so if you have memories that are more than 18 months old that bother you when you think them up, part of you is locked inside that. An undeveloped part of you is still trapped in that. That’s a metaphorical way of thinking about it. That’s why it still has emotional significance. So you can write about your past experiences, but I would say wait for at least 18 months if something bad has happened to you because otherwise you just hurt yourself again by encountering it. You can bring yourself up to date with an autobiography. There’s an analysis of faults and virtues. That’s the present authoring. And then there’s a guided writing exercise that helps you make a future plan. That’s young men who do that could go to college, young men who do that, 90 minutes, just the future authoring, 90 minutes. They’re 50% less likely to drop out. That’s all it takes. So sometimes depression is this heavy cloud that makes it hard to even make a single step towards it. You said isolate, make a friend. Oh man, sometimes- The first step is extremely difficult. Oh my God, sometimes it’s way worse than that. Like I had clients who were so depressed, they literally couldn’t get out of bed. So what’s their first step? It’s like, can you sit up once today? No. Can you prop yourself up on your elbows once today? Like you just, you scale back the dragon till you find one that’s conquerable that moves you forward. There’s a rubric for life. Scale back the dragons till you find one conquerable and it’ll give you a little bit of gold. Commensurate with the struggle. But the plus side of that, cause that’s, you think that, God, that’s depressing. You mean I have to start by sitting up while you do if you can’t sit up. But the plus side of that is it’s the Pareto distribution issue is that aggregates exponentially increase. And failures do too by the way, but aggregates exponentially increase. So once you start the ball rolling, it can get zipping along pretty good. This person that I talked about was incapable of sitting with me in a cafe when we first met just talking, even though I was her therapist, but by the end she was doing standup comedy. So, you know, it took years, but still most people want to stand up comedy. That’s quite the bloody achievement. She would read her poetry on stage too. So for someone who was petrified into paralysis by social anxiety and who had to start very small, it was a hell of an accomplishment.