https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BIaxTFCbO38
Generally, what happens in a healthy society, as you’re pointing out, is that we have people around us to whom we can express our concerns, and then they react, and then you react to that. And that’s thought. And the fact that we would even ask people to do that alone is an indication, as you pointed out, of how isolated and lonesome people have become. You know, you said friends are people you can tell good things to and people you can tell bad things to. And you have friends because friends keep you sane. And this is one of the things I liked about your book, is this insistence that sanity, in some real sense, is distributed. It’s not something inside your head. It’s something that you find as a consequence of being nested in a sequence, in a hierarchical sequence of proper relationships. And so, if you could do it alone, man, you could do it in solitary confinement. And, you know, even antisocial criminals hate solitary confinement. We’re social beyond belief. It’s the way we punish prisoners, right? Is to put them in the hole. And we’ve just created a society where that’s where we choose to live. Yeah, and I love the idea of, I like to think of society, it’s evenly distributed. We carry each other’s burdens in different seasons. And that’s the way through. There’s just simply moments when my wife gets sick or my dad finds himself, my aging father’s passing away. That’s the old, you know, holding your arms up in the desert narrative, right? Like we need other people to help us navigate these. And how many, I won’t put my experiences into your marriage, but the number of times over the two decades I’ve been married that I’ve been hanging out with some friends that I trust, and I say, my wife said this and this, and my friends go, man, she’s right. You’re an idiot, right? And so I need that sort of iron sharpening iron, right? To help me reframe something that my body’s taken off on. Yeah, well, a good definition of sanity, in some real sense, and I don’t mean this in a trivial or a coy way, is that you’re saying if you can behave well enough, that other people can stand having you around so that they can provide you with corrective feedback. And if you’re sane enough so that other people can stand having you around, they’ll reward you when you deserve to be rewarded, and they’ll punish you when you deserve to be punished, and all you need to do is pay really careful attention to that feedback, and you’ll be sane and properly situated. Now, that can go wrong if the entire social community takes a pathological turn, and that makes things more complicated. And that does happen from time to time, but generally speaking, you have to be surrounded by people, and so we could walk through that. Very few people can function effectively without an intimate relationship. That’s because you don’t have anybody who’s monitoring you over the medium to long run if you don’t have an intimate relationship. And so how can you organize yourself intelligibly, insanely, without the medium to long-term orientation? You just can’t do it, and how can you tell if you’re being a civilized human being if you’re not bouncing your behavior off someone really close to you continually? You can’t. You need the intimate relationship. You need the family, parents and siblings, children, for the same reason, and you need friends. You talk a lot in your book about friends, and you have some good practical advice, I would say, and this would be something for us usefully to concentrate on, I would say, as you talk about how people can make friends because people really don’t know. And so maybe you could share some of that with people who are watching and listening. Yeah, I think there’s two tracks I wanna follow, and one we can circle back to. This conversation we’re having right now, evolutionarily, I think we’re running a fantastic experiment because for all of the history of mankind, nobody could sit in and listen to you and I dialoguing this way unless they were in physical proximity, which that physical proximity is a form of intimacy. We’re all in the same room sharing the same meal, sharing the same fire. And now we’ve created this bizarre intimacy where people can drive to work for two hours, and they can go on road trips, but they’re sitting by the fire with us, right? And so there’s this intellectual intimacy that’s happening, but I think our bodies are hollering at us. When it comes to making friends, I spent a seasoned man. I was two inches from my wife, and I was 2000 miles away from her. And I shared a bed with the woman that I loved, and I was profoundly lonely. And I always thought lonely was proximal, right? You have nobody around you. And so I think it’s proximal and it’s emotional. I’ve mastered the art of being alone. I’m an introvert by nature, just a nerd. I love to read my books. And so I’ve mastered the art of being alone in a crowded room. I can wave and smile and be completely on my own planet. And that has a physiological and a spiritual cost to it. And so what I had to stop doing was beating myself up for having a lack of character or I’m a failure. No, I needed to learn a new set of skills. And that skill set was making friends. When you’re a child, when you’re in middle school, when you’re in high school, when you’re in university, everything is geared towards community. You play games together, you don’t play games together. It’s all about doing things together. And then you cross that graduation stage or you get out of the army and the world looks at you and says, it’s now you versus everybody. And so I think we just have to say, hey, I don’t have the skill set. So what do I gotta do? I think we overthink it. I think hospitality, going first, asking people over to your house, to your events, to your thing, and just go first and get over yourself. Look at it as you just gotta quit smoking at some point. I just gotta make friends at some point. I’m gonna go first. People are gonna say no, they’re going to challenge you. You’re gonna find out that nobody wants to be around you. So you gotta go to the mirror and ask yourself, what is it about me that I’m projecting in the world that nobody wants to spend time with me? It really challenges, but man, just let’s stop over pathologizing. Let’s just go be weird. Go be weird and be hospitable. Go first, go first. Yeah, well, you said that you’re an introvert and the thing about introverts is they often have to learn consciously how to socialize. Because extroverts, well, they’re tilted so hard in that direction, it just comes naturally to them. We can walk through some of the initial stages in forming relationships in a very behavioral manner because people might find that useful. So Benjamin Franklin said that one of the things you could do when you first moved into a neighborhood was to ask one of your immediate neighbors for a very small favor. And the reason for that is because it gets the reciprocal trade moving in the proper direction. So people like to be of service to other people. And if you ask someone to do you a very small favor, then you put yourself in their debt and then you can also reciprocate. So you allow them to show themselves in their best light because you allow them to easily indicate that they’re positive and friendly and willing to do something for someone else. And they’re very happy about that if you get it right. And then you’re in their debt so you can offer to do them a favor. But we have to be very honest about how counter-cultural that is now. Because overnight, just with a snap of the finger, we don’t ask our neighbor for a cup of sugar anymore, man. We just get on Amazon Prime and it shows up at our house. Or we don’t ask a friend to drive us to the airport anymore. We just click a button on our cell phone and somebody comes and picks us up. And overnight, I think we have shifted this idea from, I’m gonna honor you and allow you to be of service to me, which is a gift. And I’m going to allow my needs to be heard out loud. I need some sugar, I need an egg, I need a ride. I need you to help me move, right? The worst call. We’ve suddenly become, we think we’re a burden. Dr. Peterson, we think we are a burden to our friends and neighbors. And burdensomeness, perceived burdensomeness, the idea that people are better off without me. That’s one of the pillars of suicidal ideation. And our entire civilization has run that way. We consider ourselves a burden. And so the very act of asking a neighbor to help with something is an act of defiance in our current era. Go for it, man. You wanna be crazy and you wanna be counter-cultural? Ask somebody to help you with something.