https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T3G7K3NRe0c
The best way to present yourself is to stand up, forthrightly, and to stretch out, you know, and to occupy some space. And to, to, to, you make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that because you open up the front of your body, right? But it’s a sign of confidence, and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. And that’s a good way to start regulating your mood. But not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up, because it’s so tightly associated, like posture reflection is associated with serotonin and emotional regulation, but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that manner, then other people are more likely to take you seriously. And that means they’ll start treating you as if you’re a number one lobster instead of a number ten lobster. And that’s another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt, right? And, and, and, and, and confront the world in a courageous manner. And that’s a really good way of also of, of figuring out how to establish yourself in multiple competence hierarchies, because one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage. And that’s kind of a universal strategy for success. And so that’s what the first chapter is about. So that’s quite fun. My graduate students, I told them these lobster stories. My graduate students, when we used to go out for breakfast, and they were a very competitive bunch, very fractious and witty, and they were always trying to get one over on each other, eh? And making some witty put down or something like that. And it got to the point in the restaurants where they put their claws in the air and clicked like this, when they, you know, got one over on one of their colleagues, which was very peculiar and strange and very funny as well. So that’s rule number one. Rule number two is treat yourself like you’re someone that you care about. And that’s a deeper chapter, I would say. Like chapter one is kind of comical, but it’s also got this serious scientific end, for example. And it’s practical, like most of the rules are. Chapter two is a bit of a meditation on why… See, I read this piece of work by Jung a long while back. And it was a meditation on the injunction to treat your neighbour as you would like to be treated. Something like that. And what Jung pointed out, which I really liked, was that that wasn’t an injunction to be nice to other people. It was an invitation to reciprocity. It was something like this. It’s like, you should figure out how you would like to be treated, like you were taking care of yourself, not how you would like people to respond to you. It’s more important than that. It’s like, imagine you had a child that you really cared for. And someone said, well, people will treat this child exactly like you want them to, but you have to figure out what that is. And so then you’d have to sit down for like a month and you’d think, okay, well, how do you want your child to be treated? You don’t want everyone just to be nice to him, you know. You want people to challenge him and you want people to discipline him and you want people to tell him when he’s wrong. It’s like, you don’t just want everyone to be nice. That’s pathetic. It’s pathetic. There’s no challenge in that. And so, well, you want to treat other people like you would like to be treated. Well, then you have to figure out how would you like to be treated? And while you’d like people to fawn all over you and just lay everything at your feet, it’s like, no, that’s not something you’d wish for for someone that you were taking care of. And then there’s an additional problem, which is it’s often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves. That happens extremely frequently. So one of the things I pointed out in Chapter 2 was that if you have a dog and you take him to a vet and the vet gives you the prescription medicine, you’ll go buy the medicine and you will give it to the dog and you will do it properly. But if you go yourself to a doctor and you get a prescription, there’s a 30% chance you won’t even pick up the medication. And if you do, there’s a 50% chance that you won’t administer it to yourself properly. And so I really thought about that when I first came across that statistic. It really was another one of those little facts. I thought, what the hell’s up with that? It’s like you’ll do it for your dog. So obviously you’ll do it for something you care about and you’re conscientious enough. So you’ll actually do it. So like, why wouldn’t you do it for you? Your dog likes you, you know, even your dog would rather that you did. But you don’t. And it’s actually one of the reasons that modern medicine doesn’t work nearly as well as it could, because people just don’t take their medication. And it’s not only because they don’t take care of themselves. There’s some skepticism about doctors, but you could be just as skeptical about the vet. So it’s a deep meditation, I would say. And it’s what I’ve done with these rules is they’re very simple rules and they’re kind of comical and tongue in cheek in some ways. But what I’ve tried to do is like pull them apart and show what’s underneath them and to go down as deep as I possibly can. And in rule two, it’s a bit of a meditation on why people don’t like themselves very much. And I think there’s two reasons really. And one is that we’re we’re fragile and damageable and imperfect in multiple dimensions all the time. And that often just gets worse. It gets lots of things get worse as you get old, for example. So it’s not necessarily that easy for a self-conscious being who’s extraordinarily aware of his or her own fragility. And but not just fragility, foolishness and errors. Like you know yourself better than anyone else knows you. And you know, you might have a certain amount of dislike for someone you know because of something they did. But you know everything you did. Jesus, that’s a drag, man. You know, you have to carry that along behind. It’s like really I did that, you know. And then so there’s that. It’s like you’re you’re weak and kind of useless and prone to temptation. And you know all those things, you know, that just shouldn’t be that way. And then you’re also capable of pretty vicious acts of malevolence. And so you also know that about yourself. And so it’s a real existential question for people. It’s like why the hell should you take care of something as sorry and wretched as you are? And that’s really what the chapter is about. It’s because the answer in the chapter is yeah, yeah, yeah. You know you’re first of all, yes, you’re pretty useless and terrible. But so is everyone else. And that’s actually an existential problem, right? And what I mean by that, it’s a problem that every human being has always had and always will. So it’s not just you. It’s a universal problem. And that there’s there’s an answer to that. And one of them is to what is to say love the sinner but hate the sin. It’s something like that is that despite the fact that you’re not all that you could be, the proper attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone that you genuinely cared for. And that it’s incumbent on you to act as if you genuinely care for yourself, just like you would act towards someone that you actually cared about some other person. And so it’s a reversal in some sense of the golden rule. Right. And and it’s a discussion of why that’s necessary. And also more than that, it’s a discussion of why why you have a moral obligation to do that. It’s not just that you should because it would be better for you. You actually have a moral obligation to do that, I think, because you make the world a much better place, a much worse place if you don’t take care of yourself. So you should bloody well take care of yourself, you know, because well, that’s what the chapter is about. It’s partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world. That’s the thing about being an individual. It’s the thing that Western civilization has always recognized that as an individual, you have a light that you have to bring into the world and that if you don’t bring it into the world, the world is a dimmer place. And that’s a bad thing because when the world is a dim place, it can get very, very, very dark. And so it’s necessary not just so that you feel better and not just so that you’re a number one lobster. None of those things. You need to take care of yourself because you’re in the best position to do that. And it’s necessary for you to take care of yourself, despite the fact that we’re mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable, not only capable of doing terrible things, but actually do them. Despite all that, you still have that responsibility. And so I wanted to hit the question as hard as I can to try to figure out why people are contemptuous of themselves.