https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EiM0p_9YoSM
So we’re back here trying to navigate some patterns and one of the things I’m going to try and talk about today is trade-offs. So I think we have a lot of confusion around trade-offs. We’re sort of in an environment where people are treating trade-offs as something that you don’t have to make or that are relatively easy to understand and deal with and that there is an acceptable level of trade-off that’s sort of easy for us to engage in and understand. And I think what I’d like to demonstrate is that we’re constantly making trade-offs. Trade-offs are super difficult to make and we’re not even aware of what trade-offs we’re making in the moment. We’re just going through life making these trade-offs and taking them very much for granted. When I say trade-offs, what am I talking about and how does this relate to navigation of the world? Well, I think I’ve talked about this before. You know, there’s a way in which you’re trying to do something. You have a goal in mind and maybe your goal is to get into some industry. And so an industry you might want to get into is the medical industry. Now there are a number of ways to get into the medical industry and they require different levels of trade-off. So if your goal in the medical industry is to get in there and help people, one way to do this is to become a doctor. Another way to be in the medical industry and help people is to become a nurse. There are different sets of trade-offs for that. Nurses work typically three 12-hour shifts. Interestingly, this is usually something that no other industry can do because there are labor laws and the nurses are exempted from them in many states. Just something interesting to know. Also doctors are. So if you become a doctor, you’re likely to have to go through a lot more school, right? Nurses don’t have to go through six or eight years of school to start working. Doctors do. And then they are basically servants when they first get in, right? They’re interned and the internships are brutal, absolutely brutal. They work lots of hours. And then they tend to be highly driven people, right? They’ve got to put in a lot more work than say a nurse. They also tend to make a lot of money and can potentially make a lot of money. But nurses do pretty well too in many states. You know, look, you can make well over six figures as a nurse in Massachusetts and California and places like that in the cities. Anyway, so they’re both helping people. Now you could also be a pharmacist, right? And there’s different set of trade-offs. Or you could work at a pharmacy. Still helping people. How many people are you directly helping them? Yeah, sure, absolutely. So there’s different trade-offs associated with each of these types of decisions. But what we don’t realize is that trade-offs of that level, how much school, how much money you’re willing to spend up front, how much time, energy and attention you’re willing to put into getting your career, whatever career that is, whether it’s helping people as a doctor, helping people as a nurse, helping people as a pharmacist or as a pharmacist’s assistant, right? And there’s tons of other jobs. There’s just an endless number of jobs in the medical field right now. You know, how much work you will input in, how much effort you want to put in, you know, is your motivation just to help people? There’s lots of ways to help people in and outside the medical industry. So that level of trade-off is, you know, combinatorially explosive. Pretty quick. There’s all sorts of ways to do that. But these trade-offs are everywhere because our time is limited. It turns out that when we were born, we were useless. Completely useless for the first few weeks of our life. And then we got slightly more useful. But we were submitted to our parents. We’re submitted to their abilities, their inability, right? Their knowledge, their experience, their lack of knowledge and their lack of experience, their understanding and their lack of understanding, their awareness and their lack of awareness. There’s all these things we were submitted to that we don’t, we’re not necessarily aware of. Like we’re not necessarily conscious, rational access to. And you know, that affects how we grew up. And it affects everybody, how they grew up. There’s not much choice about that. That happened to us. And that’s shaping some of our trade-offs, right? It’s shaping some of our personality. It’s shaping some of how we view the world, right? Which I would argue is not mere personality. And we had no choice about that. We were submitted to it. And so if we want to say challenge it, for example, you know, we can. But there’s a cost to that. You have to spend time, energy and attention to make a challenge to something you’ve already figured out or something you know or whatever. So there’s a way in which these things are super important. And we’re embroiled in all of these trade-offs. We’re submitted to all of these things that we don’t understand, like time. We really don’t understand time. It seems to move at different rates based on your age, for example. That’s kind of weird. We perceive it at different rates. There’s a way in which things have to happen at the same time. Many businesses aren’t open 24-7. You can’t go to all of them all at once because you can’t be in multiple places at the same time. You also can’t be in the same place as somebody else at the same time. You know, you can’t be close. You can’t be in the exact same space. So you can’t see things the same way. So there are trade-offs to all of this. There are benefits to the things you do and corresponding costs and risks. And we’re constantly, somehow, unconsciously trading that off. We’re calculating these things. We’re looking at the known unknowns and thinking about the unknown unknowns and moving our time, energy, and attention from one place to another. So you can imagine if you have two children and one goes to the left of you and one goes to the right of you, the amount of attention you can pay gets split. And you probably have to go that kid, that kid, that kid, that kid, left, right, left, right. You know, you can’t pay equal attention to both of them all the time. It’s not possible. And you shouldn’t have to unless they’re exactly the same age. But even then, like kids are different, even when they’re twins. So you have to trade off. And, you know, do you stay at work or do you get off work early and go to the kids baseball game? Right? But, you know, even if you don’t have kids, like two of my friends have Thursday off and they can only see me on Thursday. But I can’t see both of them because I don’t like each other. There’s a trade-off there. Which one do you want to see? Which one do you want to see first and which one do you want to see the second? You know, and look, if you’re working and something happens in your family and you need to be there for a family member, you have to decide. Do I risk taking time off of work, which might cost me money, might cost me my job, who knows? Like these things happen. Has never happened to me, but they could happen. Or do I go see the family member? Right? I mean, do I stay at the job? Do I see the family? I don’t know. I don’t know. How you travel? You know, I often go from South Carolina up to New England and, you know, like I can take two days and do it in the car. Although I could theoretically do it one day. You know, but it’s a minimum of 16-hour drive or something. You know, or I can fly. And the flight, you know, total maybe three hours. Maybe three hours, right? So it’s not, that’s not bad, you know? So it sort of depends on what you want to do. So there’s trade-offs and flying costs more money. Driving’s not that far behind, by the way. If you go the wrong way, you can hit quite a few tolls and they add up quick. And you got to drive back. And gas is not cheap. So, you know, there’s not that much difference. On the other hand, if you drive, you can see beautiful things the whole way. So, you know, and if you stop in the middle, there’s a night stay at a hotel that you’re gonna pay for. So there’s all these trade-offs. You know, I went to stay at the airport. You get to pay for parking. There’s no winning. And there’s pluses and minuses to both. Sometimes I fly, sometimes I drive. All depends on what I, if I drive, I’ve got a car when I get there. If I fly, I’ve got to count on other people having the car that I can borrow for a while. So there’s all these trade-offs that we have to make when we travel, when we don’t travel. The very act of not traveling means, you know, we’re not gonna experience something new that day, right? You stay in your house all day and you’re probably not gonna experience anything super new. At least not outside in nature where maybe it counts more. So these trade-offs are everywhere. And a lot of times we’re trading off our preference for other people’s preferences. Where do you want to go to eat? Mexican. Oh, I don’t like Mexican. All right, well, you know, that’s where I wanted to go to eat. Mexican, you don’t like Mexican. So I’m gonna trade my preference for your preference or I’m gonna tyrannize you and make you go to Mexican. But there’s a trade-off, right? Because if you tyrannize somebody, they’re not gonna like it. You might pay for that later. So that’s a trade-off, right? And we do this all the time without thinking about it, without appreciating it, without really understanding and appreciating and being aware of what we’re doing. We’re constantly making trade-offs. And when we participate in the world, that requires conflict. And conflict in the trade-offs for participation. And there’s a way in which our participation, for example, we can try to make it pure or perfect. But at a certain point, you have to trade that off for a closure, right? A sense of getting something done. Do I want this to be perfect or do I want it to be good enough? There’s a trade-off there. I don’t know where that line is for you. I don’t even know where it is for me most days, you know? But it’s a trade-off. There’s a trade-off. And sometimes, look, I want it to be perfect. Sometimes I want it to be as close to perfect as I can manage. And I’ll take the time to make it perfect. And, you know, I spend time putting stuff on my board, right? Oops, my board’s over here. I spend time putting stuff on my board. And, you know, I’m trading off my time, energy, and attention to the board so that I can make a video with stuff on the board, right? And that’s for you, by the way. That’s something I’m doing for my audience, not just for myself. There’s a way in which it helps me, too, right? I’m not benefiting from it, obviously. But it’s primarily for my audience. It’s not primarily for me. I could just hang something up over there. I have something else up over there if I wanted to. But I choose to use the board. And that’s deliberate. So you can see these. You get a sense of these trade-offs. You know, we may have lives of 70 years, 80 years, whatever the average lifespan is. Various men and women vary a little bit. But a lot of that, we weren’t full agents in the world. And we trade off our agency. First, we start out with very little agency. Then it sort of grows, right? As we grow up, we can walk. We crawl. We walk. Then we can speak. And we can start to manipulate the world by ourselves. And then we can understand the world better, right? All this happens as part of our physical and mental development from childhood. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on. So a lot of the time we’ve spent developing gets traded off from learning mode to doing mode, right? And explanation mode, explaining the world, and less exploring. When you’re a child, you have all the time in the world to explore. You start going to school, you’ve got a lot less time to explore because you’re in school. And they’re just explaining things to you. And then that’s so that you can explain things later to yourself and to others, right? So there’s a trade-off in going to school. I would argue I learned better at home than I ever did at school, although that’s not entirely true. My English teacher in junior high in particular was quite good and maybe a much better writer than I would have been otherwise, for sure. But by and large, school was for me a waste of time. So I did my own education. I didn’t pay attention to this stuff in high school. I floated through it, didn’t do any of my homework, and managed to pass most of my courses, although never the language courses. Failed French and Latin. So maybe I should have failed Greek too. That would have been better to take, perhaps. So there’s a way in which there’s trade-offs there. So I traded off my learning at home for my learning in school and my good grades because they could have been a lot better. Not in science. They could have been a lot better and not in history. They couldn’t have been too much better in history. But they could have been a lot better in math and a few of the other things. I didn’t do all that well in geometry. I did better in geometry than I did in algebra. That’s for sure. All of these trade-offs are the result of the conflicts in the world that are apart from us. Time conflicts with our existence. Entropy exists. It conflicts with our existence. Eventually it wins, by the way. Just a surprise ending. Didn’t mean to give it away, but we all die. Apparently. I mean, I’m not sure. I haven’t done it myself, so I don’t want to speak too authoritatively. But the indications are that we all die. And that’s no fun. At least not while it’s happening. Maybe on the other side it’s fun. I don’t know. When you die, do you go to Disney World? I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter. There’s a trade-off there, though. I mean, that’s why people talk about bucket lists. Like, oh, I’m going to take some of my money and go see this and go see that and do this and do that. I’ve gotten to see a few things that I wanted to see. Coral Castle down in Florida. Roslyn Chapel. Got to see that. Beautiful place. Really, really interesting stuff. But there’s conflicts there. To go down to Florida, we had to go to Florida, which was a long way. We had to take a plane and rent a car. We took a plane down to Orlando at the time. We rented a car, went down to Naples, stayed at my girlfriend’s house at the time or her mother’s house. Then we had to drive across Florida because we were in Naples and Coral Castle is on the other side. We stayed there for a few hours and then we went to the Keys. All that takes time, right? It cost a lot of money to rent cars and stuff like that. It costs money and gas. Car rental is not cheap. I was away for Christmas that year and New Year’s, which is kind of a big deal to me. So I spent it with her family and not mine. It was not worth it. But that’s okay. I did get to see Coral Castle. It was a dream I had for a long time. I went to Roslyn Chapel. I had to fly across the ocean and go to Scotland. Edinburgh is beautiful, but I didn’t do a lot of the things one would do in Scotland, which is visit all the castles. They were closed. It was going during COVID. So there are these trade-offs. I don’t like to travel. That’s not particularly fun for me. There’s a lot of time wasted on planes and in airports and you can’t really do stuff while you’re waiting in line to get on the plane and trying to get off the planes. A pain. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but there are trade-offs there. It’s easy when we make what we think of as a good trade or trade-off in our head to think it didn’t exist. There was no conflict, but there was. It’s just it was maybe easier for us to resolve or maybe we resolved that it was very difficult and then we’re traumatized and we’re never doing it again. Things have not just time limits, but priority. Sometimes the priority will switch. You can’t say, oh, my child is my number one priority. I’ll always be my number one priority. Yet sometimes work is more important. In fact, if you cater to your child and you make them the number one priority all the time, they won’t have a good sense of priorities. They won’t have a good sense of how to resolve conflict. When do I prefer work over other things? Because if you just privilege a child all the time, it’s going to get spoiled and that’s not good. That ruins people. It ruins adults too, not just children. There’s a way in which we conflict with the time that we use and how we use it. Look, you can waste the best years of your life partying and being an alcoholic or doing party drugs or whatever. That’s easy. It’s easy to do. It’s easy to justify. While we’re doing that, we’re not building long-term, long-lasting relationships with people who are going to be there for us when we’re old and feeble, for example, or when we need somebody, we need somebody to help move. The number of people I know who take drugs and then they ask their druggy friends to help them move and their druggy friends don’t help them, that happens quite a bit. There’s another scenario where they, oh yeah, I’ll help you move, man. How many drugs you got? Then everybody does drugs and the moving doesn’t happen. I’ve seen that a lot too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I know it’s anecdotal, but I talk to people and my anecdotes and their anecdotes seem to match. It’s getting kind of overwhelming evidence there, which does not say it doesn’t happen, but good friendships are hard to cultivate and they involve a lot of conflict. That’s a trade-off. You trade off the quality of the friendship for fighting and and not necessarily resolving the issues because I don’t think conflicts can be resolved, but certainly the trade-off is in accepting the conflict itself, accepting that trade-off in the conflict. I’m going to have a conflict with somebody, you know, so as an example, I have a lot of dialogo sessions with Manuel. Manuel and I have been talking quite a bit, nearly every day, for close to two years now and we conflict quite a bit, quite a bit sometimes. We’re on the same page about a lot of things. We have a similar framework, obviously, right? It’s how we’re able to talk so much about deep issues very quickly. We’re very quickly able to get to the bottom of things. We have a lot in common in terms of disagreeableness, but he’s disagreeable. And boy, is there a conflict with disagreeable people. That’s what they’re all about. I’m disagreeable, he’s disagreeable, maybe somebody will fight to use more disagreeable, probably will at some point, just because if that’s something we can be disagreeable about, we’ll get there. We disagree about lots of things, but we have to accept that. Like sometimes we just get exhausted to each other, right? Like I can’t make any progress explaining my position to him and maybe that means I’m wrong because that happens a lot and he can’t make any progress explaining his position to me. You know, maybe he’s wrong. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand what he’s saying. You know what it could be. That happens. So there’s conflict there, but we accept it. We accept the trade-off. Oh, well, look, sometimes I’m not going to be able to convince people of things that I think are true. And sometimes I’m going to be wrong when I say things because I say a lot of things. The more things you say, the more likely you are to be wrong about some of them. The more of those things you’ll be wrong about too. Just math at that point. That’s okay. I’m okay to have conflict with people for the most part and only certain types of conflict, right? I really don’t want to get in fistfights with people. It’s not my thing. First of all, I know martial arts, not advised because I probably won’t punch you. But if I hit you, I don’t know, man. They just gave me a bunch of really nasty things to do to people that weren’t really conducive to a disablement, we’ll say, more conducive to hospitalization and possible worse side effects like comas. But not a lot of stuff to disarm people. More the disablement permanent side. But that’s one form of conflict. Just again, I don’t prefer that form. The conflict’s always there and we have to accept it. We have to accept that there’s maybe there’s a better and worse conflict in the same situation. Absolutely. Almost certainly. Not in all cases, but in most cases, sure. But there’s a trade off in that conflict. What are you trading off? I don’t know. Do you? That’s something we need to pay attention to. What are our trade offs? When are we making these trade offs? Are these trade offs worth it? Is this really important to us? Is it important to win a fight? Is it important to get in the last word? Is it important to let somebody else get in the last word? Even when they’re wrong, even when they’re mean, sometimes people are just mean, and you’ve got to accept it. That person is just mean. And I’m not going to make them nice. And anything I say is only going to make more meanness out of them because they’re not maybe they’re not capable. Maybe they don’t even see how mean they are. That happens in a lot of cases. So there are all these trade offs that we don’t realize we’re making. We just don’t know that we’re making them. You know, maybe we’re trading drinking too much for writing a great American novel that came up today in our Clubhouse chat. So maybe that’s not a bad thing. Like maybe you need to drink somewhat to be honest enough with yourself to be a good writer. I don’t know. I’m probably not that good a writer. I’ve never explored that in either case. So I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe you’d just be a better writer if you never drank. Maybe Hemingway would have written twice as many books or Vonnegut. I don’t know. I have no idea. But it’s possible that they made the wrong trade off in the drinking. It’s possible that they didn’t make the wrong trade off in the drinking, but they drank too much, which is a different style of the same trade off. Maybe they could have drank half as much and gotten more done and still gotten all good stuff done or all the best work. Or maybe their best work would have been better. I have no idea. These are the sorts of trade offs that they made that we can’t know about. And so hopefully this gives you a sense for trade offs and the trade offs we’re making with our time, energy and attention. The trade offs we’re making in deciding to sacrifice ourselves or sacrifice something in the moment for something later. A lot of people do this with money. You save up your money. You’re sacrificing your instant gratification for getting something in the future maybe that’s harder to buy or of greater value. There’s trade offs we make for our friends, for our family. Oh, we never mentioned this in front of my family. We do these things almost unconsciously all the time. I just want to draw attention to it. And also, yeah, you do this and other people are doing it too. And sometimes it’s unconscious on their part. Sometimes it’s conscious on their part. And sometimes people aren’t making trade offs. I would classify this as a denial of intimacy. And if you want to know more about intimacy, you can see my video with Andrea with the banks. I’ll link it here. And you have to watch out for those people. If they’re not willing to make trade offs for you to be with you, maybe they’re a narcissist. Maybe you shouldn’t have them in your life. Maybe they’re controlling and manipulating you in ways that they shouldn’t be, whether they’re a narcissist or not. Maybe they’re incapable of giving you the intimate connection that you seek. So maybe your love is blinding you and you think you’re more connected to them and they’re more connected to you than is actually true. So watching what trade offs other people are making is important. And being mindful of your own trade offs is important. Because in the goal really of this channel is to try to help people to understand what’s going on in here with you, what’s going on because similar things, not the same things, but similar things are going on with other people and how to use that to navigate the patterns in the world, whether they be personal relationships, whether it be intimacy as such, which I would argue is the quality of relationships, whether it be your own decisions and choices, whether it be the way in which you choose to interact with the world, because you make trade offs when you play video games instead of reading a book. You make trade offs when you listen to heavy metal music, which I prefer to do rather than classical. You make trade offs when you choose to interact with certain people. You make trade offs, maybe the most important thing is getting together with the family. You make trade offs to get together with the annoying family that you have because everybody’s got an annoying aspect to their family. You make trade offs with yourself for your future self. So be aware of that. Watch what other people are trading off for. You can learn a lot about their virtues and values. You can learn a lot about your own virtues and values, not the ones you state to yourself, but the ones you were actually willing to participate for. These trade offs are important to help us to see what other people are doing in the world and to call attention to it with them and say, oh, you’re not willing to trade off your comfort at your house to come visit me, or you’re not willing to trade off your time to get on a Zoom call, or you’re not willing to trade off every Saturday to come to the book club, or you’re not willing to trade off every morning at 9.30 a.m. on the Wicked Flaming Crisis Discord server to meditate with us and communicate with us as a group. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s good to be aware. If we’re aware of ourselves and we’re better aware of how others are behaving in the world, we can make ourselves better. We can help those other people get better. And the way we make the world a better place is that we get better together. And on that note, I’d like to thank you for being together here with me, giving me the most valuable thing that I have or that you have to give me, which is your time and attention.