Intimacy Crisis - with Kathryn Wilson (HLcFW2XYac8)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HLcFW2XYac8

identity, a oneness, if you will, right, within the world. Like that’s not the idea in Eastern Buddhism for sure, even though it seems to be in Western Buddhism. Well, and it’s just silly because if you don’t have a self, then who’s talking? And if you don’t have a self, then why do you care to convey ideas? Like if you had achieved that and if that was valuable, then you don’t need to share it. And so why would you be talking about it? Which means you haven’t achieved it, which means you don’t know what you’re talking about. And it’s a made up idea. Because you think, usually I think it’s fairly nihilistic, you think you’d be better if you didn’t exist. And I think you probably need a hug. You need somebody to love you. An intimate connection in the moment, yes, to put, to ground you back into the world with other people. Well said, I like that. Thank you. Yeah, that was a well reasoned, but also that definition of self, I think is super important because I don’t think people, that is the best definition of self I’ve ever heard or read, but by far, so it’s dead on. Wow. I hope I can reproduce the definition. At least you recorded it. That’s good. All right. And I am gonna talk about the intimacy crisis today with Catherine. And Catherine is a wonderful person that I met on the Bridges of Meaning Discord server. And she has a lot of relevant experience. And I will let Catherine introduce herself, take it away. As Mark said, I’m Catherine. Relevant experience. I’m a mom with three kids. My oldest is, how old is he? 16. My youngest is 12. I’ve been married for 17 years. I just finished, not hosting, organizing, planning the conference in Thunder Bay, which I thoroughly enjoyed and was far more wonderful than I’d even hoped it could be. So we just finished that conference. I’m a mod on the Bridges of Meaning server, which means I’m on there far too often. I’m also a psychotherapist. So I do therapy by day and by night, depending. And I have written a few articles for the symbolic world on usually fairy tales and the symbols within them. Yeah, I think that’s the relevant details. Yeah, I know the conference was wonderful. Obviously I went up there and it was great to meet everybody and lots of interesting things emerged as a result, a lot of unexpected things, and I hope we can do it again. Yeah, even Thunder Bay is not my very favorite place, but it’s a little cold up there, but it is pretty. It was very pretty. I could only see it on Sunday there, Sunday after the conference, but it was good. I got some good pictures. So yeah, I mean, one of the things that came up for me is, what is the utility of consciousness? Because to some extent, consciousness is the way people are using it. We don’t really have a definition in my mind. And of course, I do have my previous video on this that sort of goes over consciousness, unconscious and dead matter, and the differences between those three things just to start the conversation. But if consciousness isn’t about relationships, then, you know, I mean, it’s about other things too, for sure, but if it’s not wrapped up in relationships and the quality of those relationships, because that’s what intimacy is, you know, in my definition. And if you need more on that, I did on Andrew with the Bangs channel, and I’ll link it here. I did a talk with her on this too, right? So if consciousness is wrapped up in anything, it’s wrapped up in the quality of your relationships. And that to me is what the intimacy crisis is, where we don’t have quality relationships, right? Where we’re counting the number of friends on Facebook, and we’re not considering how many good friends we have, say in our neighborhood, right? Or throughout our lives from college, you know, wherever. No, I think that’s an excellent definition. And I think that all the experiential work and research has shown that that is absolutely true. Like if you see all the studies on, you know, orphans who aren’t held enough and what happens to them, and the tragic stories of young children who are locked in basements and come out 16 years later and what they’re like, and, you know, even to lesser degrees, all the work on attachment, and how the quality of those relationships and the quality of your intimacy, especially at a young age with an attachment figure, what does that do to your consciousness? What type of consciousness are you capable of maintaining and building? And it is obviously like super, super closely linked. So I think that is a very, very fair definition. Yeah, and it occurs to me that that’s kind of linked to, you know, John Brevicki talks about his four Ps of knowing, and of course, slightly different model, but it’s very linked for me to participation in the world, right? And so that’s where the intimacy comes from, roughly speaking, is how are you participating in the world? How are you able to participate in the world? And that modifies the thing that Jonathan Pigeot likes to talk about, which is attention. What things can you attend to? Like what’s within the sphere of your awareness even, right? To be able to be attended to. And if you, you know, if you weren’t brought up correctly, right, if you weren’t touched or you didn’t have that, that kind of connection, you know, when you’re growing up, then maybe you don’t see it anymore. And I think to some extent, you know, I could easily take this too far, but I think to some extent there’s autism is about that inability to connect, right? That loss of participatory skills in the world where you’re not able to get a quality connection with whatever it is. It could be other people, right? It’s almost always other people in the case of autism, but it’s also things like what, you know, the relationship with numbers, you might have a savant. It’s like, well, why is your relationship so high with numbers and so low with letters, for example, or reading, right? And it’s like, oh, that’s, you know, that’s an interesting thing. It’s one of the things that I like about John’s model when he talks about participatory knowing, even though I don’t think it’s type of knowing, I think it’s a good point, right? There’s a way in which we’re participating and I think, you know, we’re doing that sort of unconsciously, right? Back to my other video on consciousness. And that’s a more important way of dealing with the world. And, you know, I was just listening to John Vervecki’s Q&A on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server, because I missed the first 40 minutes or so, or maybe it wasn’t 40 minutes, first 25 minutes, something like that. And he mentioned religio, right? Which is his Latin word, reinventioing Latin again. Don’t bring back Latin, John, please, please stop. You know, but really that’s the connectedness, right? And I think that, yeah, there’s one thing about connectedness, but if you try to measure it, if you try to quantify it, right, then you’re gonna break it, right? Because it’s really about quality, which is more the vertical dimension that I think people are starting to talk about. So, yeah, and attachment theory is based on like attachment types, right? But really it should be more based on attachment quality and the qualities inherent in attachment. Well, it is, it’s probably bad language is probably what it is, because essentially, if you have a quality, a high quality attachment, you will have a healthy attachment. And then there’s three basic ways it can go wrong, which is where you have the other types. But it’s not because they’re particular kinds, it’s because you have low quality attachment. And sometimes you have low quality attachment with a caregiver who’s just inattentive and doesn’t care for you. Sometimes you have low quality attachment with an abusive caregiver. And so varieties of low quality create varieties of ways of seeing and ways of experiencing the world, which then relate to various patterns as you get older, obviously. So it is about quality of relationship, but there’s only one category where it’s actually a good quality relationship. And then the rest are more diagnostically, therapeutically kind of helpful categories, but are all low quality, essentially. I see, okay. Yeah, I’ve never gotten that out of attachment theory before. So that’s a good explanation, actually, that there’s only one good type. And the other three are just diagnostic tools or obvious brokenness around the quality itself. And then that leads me into this idea that one of the problems with, we’ll say modern relationships is in the therapeutic, because in the past, the role of therapist was taken on by your extended family members, as well as by your religious authorities, roughly speaking. And that’s gone. I think this is part of the recession of the church and this whole idea of the nuclear family. I mean, we’ve kind of, oddly with the nuclear family, nuked all the goodness, all the quality out of the family, right? Like, yeah, they were nuking the family all right with that system. So since I now know that you have a more biblical bent to your therapy there, what do you think about the idea that the religious sort of authorities used to take on that role that we would now put in psychology? Oh, I 100% agree. Like it used to be families, family structure, and then broader community and religious authority kind of helped set the frame and reinforce the frame for how that ought to go forward and the language you could use to help facilitate that. And of course, the language is sort of holds the ideas that are available. And so religious language sort of holds the available ideas for the community, which they can draw on in their conversations with each other. And they set a normative frame, which is one of the huge things we’ve lost right now is we don’t have a normative exemplars that we follow. We say, take anything, there’s no normative. In fact, maybe if you choose the normative, that’s bad. Whereas all throughout time, there’s always been a healthy normative standard that people could aspire towards and try to achieve throughout their life, which we don’t really do anymore. So, yeah, I certainly agree. I’m trying to remember when it was a quote. I can’t remember the exact quote, but essentially the idea is that the church is paying for the fact that there were a lot of issues that were being thrown at the church at the beginning of modernism that they decided to defend and they needed to be defended. Key issues, the historicity of Christ, the reliability of scripture. And so a lot of the energy of the church circled around defending these things, doing research, proving contextual criticism, a lot of that kind of work. But what fell by the wayside tended to be pastoral care. And so attention to the congregations got lost right at the same time as a lot of psychology was coming into the forefront. So now pastors are preaching more propositionally about the doctrines we need to defend and the faith we need to defend, which were issues at the time. But what got lost was a lot of the pastoral issues, which then therapists and psychologists kind of stepped in to start speaking to those issues. And then the authoritative weight of who not only can speak to those things, but holds the language, which we hold ideas and the substructure under the language of the worldview that holds those ideas started shifting into place. So I absolutely agree with your hypothesis. Oh, wow. I like that outline. That’s really, really useful actually. Well, I’m not a fan of the, we’ll say the modernism frame particularly. I mean, there’s definitely something to the idea of modernism, but I think of problem stone materialism, which leads to propositional and procedural, right? And that’s where they’re stuck. Okay. And I agree probably I’m using modernism more as like a historical time marker, especially in church history. It’s a phrase we tend to use where it’s like, oh, the modern age, the modern church, roughly denoting the last several hundred years. But I think you’re right that the underlying problem is not modernity, it’s the materialistic vision, which anchors modernity. Right, right. And then the other thing is, I like how you talk about this sort of normative framework by which to judge, which I think is important. And the problem nowadays is nobody wants to be judged about anything for any, right? They just, I have my lived experience, it’s my lived truth and all this sort of unhelpful from a pragmatist standpoint stuff, right? That’s great that you have that, but if I don’t have that, then we can’t agree on it. Like it’s just, it’s not possible. I can acquiesce to you, right? I can admit myself to you by saying, oh, okay, well you have that, right? But I can’t agree, right? I can only become, in essence, you’re a slave and maybe that’s okay, but maybe not, right? Especially absent other factors. Like it’s fine to submit if you have a framework to submit within, but if you’re just submitting to somebody else’s subjective experience, I’m not sure that’s gonna benefit either party in the long run. Well, and that’s always been the role of these broader social structures, right? Is you have a higher something to which everyone submits to. And then because there’s something higher that isn’t an actual human person, we can all submit to the higher thing and then we can call each other to equal submission to that thing. So when they step out of line, you can say, no, no, we’re under the constitution. And the constitution says, you don’t do that thing. Or if you’re at a church, you can say, no, no, we have our church order and you agreed to it and so did I, and that means that in the church order, you can’t do that thing and it’s my job to tell you to stop it. And so because it’s not an actual person, it actually is incredibly helpful because then it’s everyone submitting to a set of, or if you wanna say principles, it’s fairly propositional at that point. And then usually communities figure out how they’re gonna do that. But the fact that it’s an equal submission to the same set of rules is what makes it possible to play the game. Because if you can’t play by the same rules, you’re not playing a game. That way. Right. Right, and having that overarching frame, so Manuel and I talk a lot about containers. Right, you need that. You need that, that sort of container. And then the other thing that’s wrapped up in this normative and this judgment is there’s conflict with the judgment. Right, so maybe I have tendencies that aren’t good for me, right, and don’t work within a framework for a church or a government or it doesn’t even matter, right? Like anarchists have bad tendencies. They can’t live in a society with a government, definitionally. And so there’s conflict there. And I think part of the intimacy crisis is we’ve lost the ability not to resolve conflict because maybe there’s some conflict that can be resolved, but I think there’s a bunch of conflict that is never resolved and isn’t resolvable. Like I would call this, but we’re gonna use fancy, verveky words, we call this perennial problem, right? There’s just things like grief. Grief is a great example of a perennial problem. But I think conflict with the people around you is also a perennial problem. Maybe not all conflict, again, but a lot of it is. And so the ability to not resolve the conflict, because it’s not gonna go away, but to accept it, right? It’s to, you know, and acceptance is wrapped up in the submission. Like, well, I want something from Catherine, and so I’ll give something to her, right? But also when I get something from Catherine, she’s not gonna give it to me the way I want it exactly because A, she probably doesn’t know, and B, she probably does something that annoys me because I’m disagreeable. So absolutely everybody does lots of stuff that annoys me. So I’m kind of screwed. Like I’m just annoyed 24 seven I don’t have to deal with anyone or anything outside of me. I’m like, oh, I’m too disagreeable for this. Yeah, exactly, right? That’s why I meditated, you know, from a very young age because boy did I need it. So yeah, I mean, I think the idea of acceptance of conflict, right? Of this, you know, accepting the trade off you’re making. Like, well, I’m getting something that I can’t get any other way, or that I can only get efficiently some other way. Although I’d argue there’s tons of stuff you can’t get any other way other than using somebody else’s perspective, right? Or somebody else’s skills or something, whatever, right? And therefore I’m willing to accept whatever conflict we have, right? You know, it might be having to deal with somebody who knows psychology, like that’s very hard for me, like psychology, well, no. But, you know, maybe they put on an excellent conference. And so it’s okay that they’re perfectly happy with psychology and I’m not, right? Because you’ve got to accept these trade offs, you know? And, you know, to some extent too, right? Like, so we take John Brevicki’s model and we modify the heck out of it, right? It’s a totally different thing now. And we accept the conflict because John isn’t gonna move, right? And we’re not gonna move. The only person, you know, maybe as disagreeable as me is probably Emanuel, so at least that I’ve met so far in my life. So, you know, we’ve got, you know, immovable object meets unstoppable force, right? And we just have to accept that condition, like John and I had a wonderful time meeting each other at the conference and, you know, there was no friction whatsoever. So, yeah, we just avoid the things that we don’t need to have a fight about, right? Or an argument or disagreement about, right? Because there’s so many things you have in common. And when you focus on the things you have in common rather than the things that you’re conflicted about, it’s easier to accept the conflict. Yeah, if you can have things that you hold in common, especially goals, like if you have communal goals that you’re working towards together, that’s huge. But also if you have rhythms and systems for like appropriate conflict management, where hopefully you can resolve things before they escalate, you have individual habits, norms, practices that are inculturated into you from a young age so that you know not to do certain things or to do certain things, all of which has been rapidly shifting over the last 20 years. But every culture has norms for what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable. And so, yeah, one is if you can accept and have overarching goals that you share together. And the other one is if you have very strong boundaries in place. So within a society, you can either have people who are very strong and you decide to develop a society with very high character expectations on each person and high responsibility. And if the person fails in their character expectations that the society puts on them, then they are punished or excluded or whatever it might be. Or you do not expect high character from the individual and you give high power to the state and expect the state to regulate people. And those are kind of your options. Or you have nobody regulating anything and it’s like a free for all at every man for himself. I guess mostly people have tried to avoid that over the last thousand years or so, but it’s also an option. Yeah, right. Yeah, well, there’s always, I’m a big fan of threes here. So yeah, there’s always three things. There’s never just two. I’m not a dualist. It always worries me when people say, I’m not a dualist and they start using a binary. And I’m like, I don’t know if you’re not a dualist. I think you say you’re not a dualist, but you’re using two. Yeah, and I mean, I think that the bigger problem for me with the intimacy crisis is not only external. So like I talk a lot about three frames. I have a video on three frames. I’ll leave that here because we do, I think our videos, right, where it’s you with yourself, you with others, and you with nature, roughly speaking. And I mean, I can make an argument for a fourth frame, but yeah, I don’t need to. Hopefully all the people with fourth frame already got that. They don’t need any help. And it is that conflict within ourselves. So what I see is the flattening, right? So literally you’re taking out the vertical dimension. You’re taking out the quality dimension, everything that materialism does. Then I have a video on materialism, objectivism and individualism, because they seem to go together somehow. Not sure how, I don’t really care. Right, at a certain point, like you don’t need those details. You just need to know to avoid, avoid all three of those snakes or pits, wherever you wanna think about them. And then what’s happening is, because we don’t know how to accept conflict, right? How to manage conflict, how to find a way to accept conflict, how to resolve whatever conflicts are resolvable. Some are obviously resolvable. We want single identities. And that’s where the whole identity stuff comes from, is that, well, I can’t, I can’t be so, how did you identify yourself, right? So there’s two, well, three major buckets you put yourself in, right? But two interesting ones, right? Which is, you’re a mother. Oh, okay. And that, I believe you listed first. So that tells us a bunch of stuff about you, right? Like right off the bat, how are you thinking about yourself and your most important, your highest value, right? Well, there it is. Like the highest value that I have to myself for society that I’m gonna tell people about is raising kids. Fair enough. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. You know, and if you have a good, large enough container normative frame, that’s probably right. And if that’s not the right answer, then your frame is probably too small, I would say. Like there’s a nice heuristic. But then also there’s other things, right? And it’s like, well, okay, but I also do therapy and like there’s definitely a conflict of time, energy and attention, right? Give you a limited amount of time, energy, attention. And you know, maybe you’re putting it first towards your children. In fact, I’m sure you are. I’ve met your children, they’re awesome. So you’ve done an excellent job. I don’t know if your husband had anything to do with it, but maybe so he also did an excellent job to whatever extent he was involved. So you get into this, but there is a conflict there and it’s not resolvable. Like you have to help people you’ve agreed to help, right? And then there’s other identities that you have, right? Like what, probably a member of a church, I suspect, right? So you’re doing that. And then you’re a member of your family, right? You’re a good daughter and sister at the very least, right? And so there’s all these things competing for your time, energy and attention, which are my three favorite things to talk about here. And you have to juggle that, right? And so where’s the acceptance, the conflict? Well, that to me is intimacy. Like that’s why we all have multiple identities, whether we like it or not. Like we’re all the children of some parents, right? We’re all people with friends, right? We’re all wrapped up with people around us and things around us in various ways. Like I own a house, right? Some people have an apartment, right? They move a lot, right? But they’re all wrapped up in whatever systems they’re wrapped up in. And that causes conflict with all the other systems. They’re like, you need to have a job for most people to make some income. And if you don’t have a job to make some income, then there’s different requirements of you to continue to get those checks, right? There’s all sorts of ways in which there’s these conflicts. And then if you don’t have a job and you wanna have a job, but right now you’re being supported by some state system, well, there’s a conflict there because they’re not gonna like that very much, right? And so you have to transition and a transition that’s full of conflict. So I see this shrinking of identity down to resolve all of those conflicts because they think they’re resolvable. Like we live in this scientific world where there’s, oh, there’s no need for conflict. We can just figure out a solution because I went to school and every time there was a problem, they gave me a solution, right? Every single time. And so we get this warped view of the world due to this materialistic scientific sort of outlet. And now we’re going in like, oh, there’s gotta be a way where I can just resolve this conflict. And then we shrink our identities down. So again, that’s that flattening. And it’s not just like this has happened with institutions. I argue it’s happened with the church. I know Bishop Barron in the Four Horsemen of Meaning conversation with Peterson and Verbecky and Peugeot there. He talked about the flattening of the church and my eyes just lit up. I’m so happy. Yes, the other people are seeing this there. So yeah, I know there was a lot there, but I know you’re smart. You can digest it all and make it better. There was a lot there. Yeah, and I think that one of the things to, like if you’re going to not flatten things, it’s because you have to sacrifice things, right? If you’re not going to flatten it and say, oh, all of this can be resolved, we can fix it. The only way to do that is you have to prioritize and you have to sacrifice things that you value and probably parts of yourself, to be very Petersonian, to be able to make something good. You can not sacrifice things and you can ruin everything or you can sacrifice some things and make some things excellent. Those are kind of your options. But the other thing too is part of the, now I will say modern and not materialist because I mean modern. Part of the modern situation is that we are highly technical and that means that we have neutralized environmental factors to a great degree. So you can always work. It can always be light or dark when you choose. It’s always a temperate. For those of us who have the privilege of listening to this, you probably are in at least somewhat air conditioned homes or heated homes or whatever. And what that means is part of our deep patterning is no longer in rhythms with nature, which means that we also think of prioritization as a one-time thing. Am I going to be mostly a mother now or mostly a psychologist now? Well, that could feel like an eternal choice, but it’s not an eternal choice. My oldest son is 16. In six years, my children will all be gone and I will be in my early 40s. So I will have like half of my life to reprioritize and say, okay, well, what am I going to be spending most of my time and energy on now? Because if it’s still my children, they will feel smothered and they will not be very happy and I will no longer be a good mother. So I really need to shuffle. So I think that part of what has harmed us is this feeling of everything is always the same. And so the choice I make now, it’s this current choice and it just lasts forever combined with a really poor anthropology. Like one of the things that basically every ancient culture understood was that people came into the world and it was their job to be refined in some way. You had things about you that needed to get knocked off you and you had things about you that you needed to build and things that needed to grow. And it was the community’s job to help you do those things so that you could become a good member of society and that you could contribute to society and be somebody who is honorable. And we had these categories, you’re honorable or you’re dishonorable and you’re honorable if you go through that process well. And you are not an honorable person if you say, forget that system, I’m going to essentially pursue what’s good for me at the expense of society. And so we no longer have an anthropology that tells people that that is what you do as a human. Instead, we say whatever you came out as is the perfect form and society must adapt to your perfect form, which is very not in line with anyone who has any ounce of self-awareness. Yeah, I like that. I like how you reversed it. That was good, that was good. And I like how you brought in time because that’s one of the big missing factors is that, yeah, part of the flattening is, because science does this, the first thing you have to control for in a scientific experiment is time, right? Because what’s the definition of rust? Everything’s rusting all the time, technically. Technically everything’s subject to oxygen in our atmosphere and so everything, we’re rusting, all those things are rusting, right? It’s not something just for metal. Yeah, exactly, falling apart, right? So in order to define the word rust in some useful pragmatic fashion, you have to talk about timeframe first, right? And then people often say, well, what’s the rust? When does it rust? Like how long does it take to rust? You know, they’re constraining all these other variables to your point, it’s flattening. Science flattens everything else because it has to remove as many free variables as possible to have a clean experiment. Fair enough, but like also you’ve removed a bunch of important factors at the same time, right? There’s a trade-off you’re not paying attention to. And then, yeah, we very much have that sense. And then I think one of the side effects of that is that you get the Sam Harrises of the world who they seem like, they don’t say this explicitly, I totally get that, but if you listen to them carefully, they start the world at their own personal consciousness. Like I was conscious at a point and then therefore, right? And they throw out everything else. It’s like, you know, and Peterson, Peterson adds time back in, right? It’s one of the beauties of Jordan Peterson, he adds time back into the equation. Boom, he says you, you now, you tomorrow, right? You don’t have to be what you were, right? So you can break the chains of the past. Well, that’s a good to know, right? Wasn’t just born the way I was born. I can change after I was born, right? And then, or whatever point I made a decision to your point, like, oh, I made a decision to focus on my children when they were younger, but now that they’re older, I shouldn’t do that anyway. So now I can make a decision to put that attention somewhere else, because, you know, the reliance on staying the same is tempting, but also dangerous because the world is changing, whether you are or not. So you better get on that, you know? So yeah, that’s part of it. Not accounting for the time dimension is part of it, and also not accounting for the fact of change. Like, because you can make a case that, well, you know, the time changes, but actually the world doesn’t. It’s like, oh no, no, they’re both changing. And you’re changing and you can change, and that brings up all these conflicts with past me versus present me versus future me, right? And how are you resolving those conflicts? Well, look, Jordan Pugin has a writing program and that seems to work pretty well, right? It’s like, wow, that’s weird, right? Unless what you’re really doing is re-enchanting the world through story, because you’re telling a story about yourself. Yeah, yeah. The other thing which it does, and it is in line with your points on intimacy, is it deepens interpersonal intimacy, your own intimacy with yourself. And one of the things that is sort of hard is that to have better intimacy with yourself, you have to include other people, because part of what impedes your own intimacy with yourself is your own self-awareness. And often you can’t break through your own self-awareness. You need outside input to do that. But one of the hacks around actually doing that with a human is to do that with yourself through time through a journal. So, and even time, it can be a five second lapse, right? Like you can write, I’ve done this. You’re writing furiously upset about something. And then you look at what you wrote and already you’re arguing with that point, because there’s the other part of your consciousness congress that jumps in and says, well, that’s not really fair to that person, or all right, that’s awfully sounds arrogant of you. And then your brain, all the sides, they jump in and they start self-critiquing. And you actually are able to then engage in deeper self-awareness and self-reflection. But if you don’t force yourself into this somewhat sort of time-lapse state through writing, which forces you to slow down, not just all of your thoughts, but the thoughts you’ve chosen to condense and then write, you don’t end up with the same kind of processing power. You end up just with your brain scrambling and yelling at it, you know, until you decide, screw it, I’m gonna go watch Netflix or whatever. You just shut it down because it’s too much. But if you want to deepen that interpersonal intimacy, you have to include either someone else or yourself through time. Because this is the whole point about infancy development. The infant starts off believing that they are one with the mother. And that extends for an extremely long time. And it’s only through both the mother reflecting the child, so the child experiences their own emotions being reflected back at them, so they know what their emotion is. But then also the mother distancing from the child and not reflecting and correcting. That through those two inputs, the child is able to develop self-consciousness. So you have to have both reflection and non-reflection from the mother. And so, yeah, that is another element where I think Peterson helpfully includes time back because time goes backwards as well through there and then also to your forefathers and your ancestors and all the way back as far as he can trace it to the lobsters. He’s pulling time in both directions, which gives you, like you said, that deepened intimacy with the self and also humility because you realize how, well, humility but also agency, which is like the fun trick. That the more humility you have, the more agency you actually have. So I think that’s really important to understand. I mean, you need that deep, we call it historical grounding, right? You need to go all the way back to the lobsters to understand, you know, because that’s where the judgment is, right? And, you know, just from an evolutionary perspective, this is what blows my mind about all these people. There, I’m an evolution believer. It’s like, I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can do that. I think you can do that. I’m an evolution believer. It’s like, I don’t think you can evolution. Like just from that perspective, history is correct, right? And so like the things that survived are true. If that’s the framework you’re claiming to use, then, you know, you should do what your ancestors did. Like, cause it worked. That’s how you’re here, right? It’s just sort of self-evident almost and yet it’s not. And then there’s something about the container and maybe the only sufficient container to, for a human to exist in is a story, right? Is an actual story. And then I don’t wanna relate story and narrative in the way that we’ll say Jordan Peterson and John Verbecky and Jonathan Peugeot all got confused cause they kept swapping words literally in the conversation which really bothered me to no end. I was definitely yelling at the monitor at that point. I did not get a chance to talk to John and the Peugeot about this, but I do, of course, have a video on it. So yes, there’s a story at the bottom which is the instantiation and the implementation. Then there’s narrative in the middle which are the templates of stories, right? Story can have pieces of more, one or more narratives. Problem, how do you know the narrative? You need lots of stories, right? To see the commonalities of the stories that gives you the narratives, right? And then there’s the archetypal frame, right? Which is, I don’t wanna say too much about that cause A, I have a video on it, B, it’s not, like it’s not, in some sense it’s not important, right? What’s important is the narratives roll up to the archetypes. Like there’s archetypal patterns and there’s archetypal characters, right? And there’s archetypal frameworks, like all these things are, but they’re illuminated by the narratives. So the stories illuminate the narratives, the narratives illuminate the archetypes and that’s why the deep storytelling through the years, I mean, one of the things I really liked is, you broke down Rumpelstiltskin, which was great. It was a great article on symbolic world. And I really liked that because I hadn’t heard that particular perspective on that story. It’s been a long time since I engaged with that story and the Bluebeard story I didn’t even know. I was like, oh, okay, I didn’t know that story. Wow, how interesting, right? So, but you can see the way in which these patterns, sort of emerge and maybe the best container or the only container for a person to participate in, even with themselves, because it’s you plus yourself, right? You’re in a relationship with yourself. That’s the first part of the frames, the lowest frame requires a story that you can live in, right? And that story could be informed by narratives, or at least a narrative, but hopefully several narratives, right? So that you can rewrite the story, right? Reorient with respect to the narratives, right? And contain yourself within it. Is your container, like, what should I look out for? What should I ignore, right? When things are important, why are they important? When do they become less important, right? When does importance change? All of these things are in the fairy tales. It’d be interesting to try to break one of those down. I don’t know if I have it in me, but maybe I could break one down and start showing, you know, like, there’s this and this and this and this and this in just one story. And I know you, I like what you did. It was like, oh, there’s many more. I’m gonna give you three and there’s many more here and you can put them in the comments and I’ll see you later by, because I’m just gonna finish this article. I was like, yes, that’s a good approach. In fact, at one point, I know Don Depegeot was giving one of his talks there at the conference and he said, well, it’s hard to know, because I don’t know who’s seen the last two videos I did on left and right. And you never know, and quit me being a snarky 50% French Canadian guy, I said, it’s almost as if this symbolism opens up to an infinite potential. Of course, Mr. Peugeot was gracious enough to give me a snarky smile and say, yeah, pretty much, right? It was pretty funny, because he was like, I just didn’t know where to stop. It’s like, yeah, you don’t know where to stop because you can just keep going and you can just keep going. I don’t think it has an end, which is the beautiful part, because now we have a way to relate to the conflict. We have a way to relate, but there’s a conflict between left and right. It’s the one side or the other. It’s a lot of choice there, right? And maybe you can’t stand in the middle, right? Or maybe you should try to, right? There’s a lesson, right? So that’s part of the resolution of intimacy, is having enough options. It’s not just a binary system, right? Having enough options within the story to move around and participate, because participation is movement and movement is a type of participation. So you need a container big enough to do that, that can also help you to, if not resolve, but then I think mostly it’s not resolving, at least accept the conflict. No, well, I’ve traded this off for a good reason. Like there’s a good reason why I stop paying attention to my children so much, right? There’s a good reason why I didn’t write more than three archetypal patterns about these particular fairy tales, right? There’s a good reason for doing that, right? Brevity might be one of them, right? Or not losing your audience or not confusing kids. There’s lots of reasons for that. So yeah, I know there’s a lot there too, but what did you think of that? Well, I loved it. There was a lot there, which is great. So you have, one of the things that I think is super important, other than me not losing my voice. Yeah, don’t lose your voice. Take a drink. It’s one of those days, yeah. It is. One of the things that’s super important is that you have to have narrative. Like you said, you have to have narrative to have identity first of all. So to even know who you are, it is always foundational on narrative. And when people are trying to construct a narrative that is agreed upon by other people, it is also about identity because you have to have, you have to have a narrative that you don’t exist in by yourself for it to be considered real, for you to experience it as real. You can’t be the only one who exists within that narrative. And it can’t be a narrative where you are alone and there’s no one else because even other things would count as being aspects within the narrative. You have to have others to relate to. Otherwise you have no self. Like there is no emotion. There is no self. There is no experience. If you are all alone, there’s just nothing there. I might get some crap from some folks for that, but I don’t know how you could possibly argue anything else. So you have to have others in the frame, which means you have to have a narrative for an identity. So I love that you’re putting that at the forefront with the intimacy crisis and also consciousness because clearly you can’t even retain memories if you don’t have words. If you don’t have language, you don’t keep memories. It’s just a fact because you can’t retrieve the memories you make. You have to have words to retrieve the memories. So if you don’t have memories, how do you have consciousness? You don’t have an ongoing narrative. You could have like maybe total perfect consciousness in the moment, but you have no sense of self-consciousness because there’s nothing to reflect upon in the past. So you have to have the environment. And to have the environment, you have to have, again, items that you can name. You have to have the little low guy as Pujol likes to talk about. You have identities within things and you relate to all of those things. So first of all, you have to have it for those things. But then second of all, if you’re gonna move through time at all, you have to have good schemas. Now that’s the psychological term. I don’t know what you wanna call it, but that’s basically the pattern of how do things relate to each other, but you’ve gotta flip through them because as like a five minutes of your day progresses, unless you’re doing nothing at all, you will have multiple new stimuli come in front of you, even if it’s only internal, like even if like you’re just thinking about things, things will come at you and you will change who you are within the frame. And there will be different frames that you should adopt to be more helpful to you. So you need to have access to not just who am I in a narrative but who am I in various narratives as they confront me and I have the capacity to see the thread of self throughout the various identities that whip along. Because like you said, I have like 40 identities. In one moment, I’m a wife and then I’m a mother and then I’m a psychologist and then I have a neighbor and then I’m a hungry person and then I’m a person, you know, I flip between all of these things and I have to not only be able to prioritize which of those identities is most salient, but I also have to be able to orient in what way am I posturing myself between the items within my salience landscape as I flip between these items, which is super complex. And so it cannot be a conscious process. It has to be a deeply, deeply habituated process that is an unconscious process. And the more integrated an identity is between multiple aspects, the more smoothly you experience yourself going through those things. Otherwise it causes a lot of distress and anxiety because you’re like, oh no, I’m gonna get really stressed out because my neighbor wants this and my kids want this and what do I do? I can’t make both people happy and resolve the conflict because I don’t have a well-integrated idea of who I am within these frames and my posture within those frames. And I know we talked about this probably a year ago or more, but I think an essential element that we don’t talk about enough is you have the schema, you have what you’re related to within the map, but how are you postured within that? Because you can be in the same map with different postures. And so you have essentially four postures, I think. You have a posture of approach, you have a posture of retreat, you have a posture of being frozen and there was another one I’m not thinking of right now. But you have a few postural options. I actually think this is why icons, this is the function of icons, is they give you a frame, they give you a figure which you identify with, which has a nature. So it’s a super condensed image, right? So let’s say it’s, I don’t know, you have a saint and she is surrounded by birds and there’s a doorway and there’s a figure approaching, but she’s looking in a particular direction. That’s like the shorthand for all of these things, right? There’s an opening, there’s an opportunity, there’s a stranger, there’s ideas, there’s these heavenly messengers that can steal thoughts or bring you things like birds, right? Then you also have her. So what is she? She’s female, she’s a saint, she’s clothed or robed or whatever, all these things that tell you, okay, this is who she is and then where is she looking? Where is her attention? Is she looking at the stranger? Is she moving towards him? Is she looking to heaven? And that is the little snapshot that tells you the posture in the frame, in the context. And the more you have icons sort of deeply inhabiting, the more you can pop into that unconsciously and you will take on the posture because part of your brain will say, I yes, the opportunity with the stranger and the heavenly message, I should fill in the blank and you don’t even think I should, you just do it. Now I’m not somebody who uses icons, but I have spent time trying to figure out what the heck is the deal with icons. And so I think that that is on a functional psychological level, what they provide and the value of creating a relationship with such an image. And because I wanted to know if I was a crazy person, I threw it by Jonathan Peugeot and he agreed that it’s a really crazy, weird way to think about it and it’s very unnatural to somebody who’s from the tradition, but yes, technically that’s what it would do for you. Oh, okay, I’m gonna go backwards on this, because I wanna touch on one of the things you said early on last. So actually I’m gonna jump around. So I wanna say schemas is models in my world. So the models are the things that, right, and then you have multiple models and that gets back to these multiple identities, right, and you flip between them. So I like that, that’s great. When Manuel and I did our dive on icons, we came up with the conclusion that at least one of the functions of icons, you know, an icon is this, that’s not gonna happen. I’m not a propositional person, like propositions are great, I can wield them with great force and power, there’s no question, but this is not the way I think of the world at all. So it’s just something to be somebody I’m good at, despite not using it all the time in my thought. So the icon has different, for Vicky we call them affordances, right, and then so it meets people where they’re at to some extent, right, and then you go in and that allows you to move up and down and you can come out in a different place. So it enables you like a portal, literal sort of dimensional portal to teleport, roughly speaking, right, through your thought or through your relationships or through your participation. And then I liked your reframing because it immediately made me think of, well, one of the things that icons are doing, aside from allowing people different ways in and, you know, a space to go up and down, right, is also mimicking what’s there. And so that goes, for me, that goes back to the knowledge. So one of the cases I made, I can listen to the video from yesterday, is that, yeah, in fact, that’s your unconscious. Is the participatory knowledge is being imprinted unconsciously, that’s the mimicry circuit we know about that this is all standard basic cog sign, right, and standard basic psychology. It’s been in the research, that piece has been in the research since the 60s at least. I’ve read those papers from the 60s, so I know that it’s that far back and maybe they didn’t use the same language that we would use today, but those concepts are right there about mimicry and how that works and the difference between, you know, although this is now being challenged, but the difference between how young gorillas or apes mimic versus humans, right, and there’s some controversy around that now because maybe the early findings were incomplete or, you know, whatever, right, but there is a difference, right, there’s a marked difference. And I know Verveki’s talked about this before too, right, where they go through all the steps, even though the monkey won’t go through all the steps, just goes to the last step and gets the cookie, right, and why, right, and that sort of dovetails in with his rituals, right, but the icon, to your point, like there’s all this information that’s conveyed to us by looking at things or by watching things, roughly speaking, right, and we mimic those things and having icons around allows to mimic a bunch of different things. We’re not just move into and through, but also just mimicry, so that’s another level of affordance, I would call it, if I were oppressed, and I feel oppressed, all right, but the real, for me, the striking thing that you talked about was you gave what is probably an optimal definition of what self is, right, because you’re running between these identities, right, and there’s your conflict, right, there’s your intimacy, like you have multiple identities, you can’t get around that, you’re oppressed, and you’re from the world, right, you can throw out Rousseau, because he’s an idiot, and everything he says is just dumb, and if you start there, I assure you, your life will improve 10 times, at least, right, like society is a function of humans as groups, like it’s not, you can’t be separated from it, the whole idea that you can be separated from it is so inane, it’s hard to imagine anybody ever took anything he said seriously just because of that one thing, and look, like I said, throw it all out, you’re gonna lose 20% of the good stuff, you’ll be fine, trust me, you’ll be fine, because you don’t know which 20%, do you, you probably don’t, I have my guesses, but they’re not relevant, so that idea, the piece of you that is yourself, that is self, is that piece that’s navigating these identities, is like perfect, it’s probably also why, I know you kinda touched on this earlier, you’re talking about, yeah, the idea of no self is, well, it’s literally self-defeating, right, it’s not a useful, pragmatic way to think about anything, so let’s say I’m Harris, oh, I go to the place where there’s no self, like, this is Western Buddhism, and as near as I can tell, because I’ve talked to many people from the East about this, Western Buddhism has nothing to do with Buddhism, there’s some key things that are different, and they’re key, they’re at the base of all of this, right, and that’s one of them, there’s no, their idea of no self, that’s a bad translation, that that’s what it is, it’s not, they don’t think of the self the way we think of the self, and so no self doesn’t mean the same thing, right, and you could make an argument that, when they’re talking about no self in the Buddhist tradition or whatever, that what they’re really talking about is removing yourself from as many intimate connections as possible to gain a new perspective, oh, fair enough, fair enough, right, but it’s not no self, right, that’s removing self from your connectedness temporarily, right, to add contrast, contrast is how we see physically, and again, it’s also how we see everything, you have too much, you have too little, but you need some, you can’t have none, so it adds contrast, but it’s not the idea of not being a self, not having a coherent identity, a oneness, if you will, right, within the world, like that’s not the idea in Eastern Buddhism for sure, even though it seems to be in Western Buddhism. Well, and it’s just silly, because if you don’t have a self, then who’s talking, and if you don’t have a self, then why do you care to convey ideas? Like if you had achieved that, and if that was valuable, then you don’t need to share it, and so why would you be talking about it? Which means you haven’t achieved it, which means you don’t know what you’re talking about, and it’s a made up idea, because you think, usually I think it’s fairly nihilistic, you think you’d be better if you didn’t exist, and I think you probably need a hug, you need somebody to love you. An intimate connection in the moment, yes, to put, to ground you back into the world with other people. Well said, I like that. Thank you. Yeah, that was a well reasoned argument, but also that definition of self, I think is super important, because I don’t think people, that is the best definition of self I’ve ever heard or read, but by far, so it’s dead on. Wow. I hope I can reproduce the definition. At least you recorded it. That’s good. I do think though that what would be most helpful, so I completely agree with the vision that we need to increase the intimacy that people have with themselves, with others, with their environment, with, in my opinion, with God. More friends. More friends. So I agree that we need to increase intimacy. And I think that one thing that would help people a lot would be teaching them how they can navigate between those frames and that they can’t and that they should. I think what’s hard is that people aren’t even told, like, this is something you’re doing. These are the stories that are possible. These are really unhelpful frames that you’ve probably been given. Hey, why don’t you look at your childhood and look through this list? Maybe there’s a few here that you learned in your childhood that weren’t very good. And now you can’t stop using them, but when you notice you’re using them, then you can say, oh, maybe this isn’t helpful because of that thing. Is there a different frame I could be using? And you actually can navigate between those more skillfully. And you can move from the place where you just have a schema that’s exterior and aspirational, and you can actually fully integrate it so that you say, well, that is me. And then there isn’t that gap. And then the benefit is once that’s integrated, you no longer have to mentally and emotionally navigate any of the disturbance that’s caused by having a schema that isn’t something that you fully identify with. So for example, because I started with it, and it’s an easy frame for me, I’m just going to talk about motherhood. So you can say, OK, I have a child now, and now I’m a mother. And I have inherited several negative models from motherhood. I have my own mother, and she did some good things, but she did some bad things. And I have my grandmothers, and they did some good things and bad things. And maybe I had a friend who was a mother before me, and I saw what she did. So I have all these models. But then I’ve also read some books, and I’ve had some fictional characters that seemed like good mothers that I would like to be like. And I knew a woman, and I thought she was a great mother, and this is the way that she acted. And so I have these aspirational models, and then I have lived experience as a daughter of a mother and a grandmother. And so I have very deeply integrated but mixed models over here. And so every time I am aware of my own action as a mother, I am unconsciously assessing it compared to all of these schemas. And so getting to the point where you can say, OK, this is my aspirational schema. At this moment, these are the parts that I can achieve. These are the parts that I can’t. This is how I’m going to try to achieve those things. These are the reasons why it’s OK that I haven’t achieved them and that I feel confident I will be able to. And all of that is like, I mean, I just said it quickly, but that’s like months to years of work to actually do that. But then once you’ve done that and you’ve seen yourself at times act in the way that that mother acted or act in the way that that ideal acted, then you can integrate and say, sometimes I am that. I am that ideal. It’s not just an ideal I want to be. That’s who I am. I’m the good mother. I’m the good mother. And you know what? When I’m faced with a screaming child, I’m going to choose to be the good mother again. And I’m going to choose to be it again, and I’m going to choose to be it again, and I will continue to be the good mother. Because it’s not something exterior to me. It’s who I am. And I’ve embraced that. And it’s not just me randomly grabbing an identity out of a hat. It’s not me choosing to be the good lion tamer when there’s no lion around. And I’m just going to act out the identity of the lion tamer. I actually am a mother. And there’s a variety of forms of motherhood that I could live in. And I’ve chosen one, and I’m committing myself to that because I see it as valuable. And so I’m going to act it out even though my emotions don’t participate and aren’t very happy with it. And sometimes my brain is screaming. I mean, I will choose to act out this pattern because I know what the pattern is. I’ve seen the pattern. As you do that and as you integrate the fact that you aren’t the perfect representation of the good mother, you’re just the best version of it that you can be, once you integrate that, then you have less and less emotional distress when you see yourself not acting out of that pattern or into other patterns because you’ve created a very strong identity link with that choice. I am the good mother. And you need to have a frame that allows you to be the good mother, but imperfectly, but still be the good mother. Yeah, I like that. That brings up a bunch of stuff. I mean, one of the things it brings up for me is the postmodernism, the idea that there’s arbitrary interpretations of texts, of actions, of everything. They say texts. It’s not. It’s everything. Once that idea that you’re a good critiquer of things, that you can even do that. But the thing that I’ve been trying to explain to people is, I don’t know, the postmoderns are literally three years old. That’s what they are. Because any three-year-old knows this trick. Why? Why? Why? And if I ask you or anybody else why long enough, I will easily come up with something where you don’t have an answer. And then I can go, ha, gotcha. I’m smarter than you because I asked you a question you can’t answer. It’s like, what? It’s such a backwards way to think about the world. It’s hard to believe that anybody ever engaged with postmodernism at all. You didn’t see they’re just three-year-olds. They’re literally only three years old. That’s their whole trick. They’ve developed to three. And they’ve developed really good language skills for a three-year-old. But they’re still three. I don’t know. Just to me, it was always obvious. And I was always like, people listening to these muppets. They’re three years old. Come on. Move past this. But also, and the idea of not having an ideal. I mean, the thing that the fourth frame roughly is for is the container that holds the virtues and values that allows you to interface you with yourself, you with others, you with nature. You need something to contain all that. And you need something that allows you to instantiate virtues and values relative to those three other frames, roughly speaking. So this is that. Jonathan Pashow talked about this is the conference, the three versus the four. Well, four is the pillars, right? And then you invited four speakers somehow. I don’t know. Magic ensues, right? But then we also need to understand this. So part of this intimacy crisis is understanding this conflict between who we wanna be and who we end up being, how we act. I wanna be a great programmer. And then I go and I suck, right? It’s like, ugh, right? But if we don’t, if we can’t sit down and conflict with the fact that we’re not yet who we wanna be in time, bring the time component back in, we’ll never get there. We need that intimacy. We need that acceptance of, I’m gonna suck at this because how do you learn? You suck at things. That’s how you learn. Things you don’t learn by osmosis, mostly. Some people have natural talent, which is one of my bugaboos of John Breveke is, oh, you develop skills. Some people are skilled out of the box. Oh, sure, I’ve seen them. They’re amazing. How did you, you couldn’t have, where did this happen, right? There’s prodigies. They happen. They’re rare, granted. But one means your theory that these are learned is wrong. That’s how science actually works, by the way. In case you didn’t know that, a lot of people don’t know that, apparently, or at least they’re acting like they don’t know that. So yeah, I mean, a progeny says that, no, it’s not all, there’s something else going on. It’s not all learned. And what that means is that for most people, though, aren’t prodigies at something or anything, maybe, because maybe they’re not. Fair enough, most of us probably aren’t. You’ve gotta fail. And you have to come to terms with that repeated failure. And also, while you were going through your spiel, you mentioned emotions. It’s like, well, yeah, these emotions come up in you. You wanna respond right away, right? That moves me into Stoicism immediately, because I’m a Stoic, love Stoicism. If you’re feeling nihilistic, or you’re in trouble, or you think there’s intimate crisis problem, Stoicism’s a good stepping stone to everything else. It’s not a destination, right? And it doesn’t handle the whys of the world, but man, does it give you a power like nothing else. It is fantastic. And it’s a practice, so you’ve gotta, you know, because you’re not gonna be a perfect Stoic, just because I said Stoicism three times. It’s not Beetlejuice, right? It doesn’t work that way. So, you know, you need that way to understand. Your emotions need to be trained, just like the rest of you. And the way you train them is with these ideals that you’re acting out, that you’re making decisions about to your point. And I think that’s really powerful. Like, oh yeah, the emotions are popping up, and the way to train them, right, in Herviki’s Neoplatonism, there is, there’s the man, the lion and the monster, right? And so the man trains the lion, the lion keeps the monster in check. It’s like, oh yeah, well there’s that aspect of training right there. I’m a big fan of this Neoplatonism idea, but it’s all there, right? Like these concepts are there, where you’re trying to embody the ideal, right? The ideal’s in your head, it’s the man, roughly speaking, in that model, right? And then you’re using the power, the unbridled power, if you will, of the lion to tame the monster, because the monster’s constantly coming up, and it wants food, or it wants to fight back against the child that interrupted you, or whatever it is, right? There’s thousands of things, and that’s the other problem, is we wanna believe in our conscious rationality. Consciously rational 24-7, it’s like, nothing could be further from the observable truth in this whole universe, like, what are you, a lunatic? You can just see it in others, you can see it in yourself, it doesn’t take long, you could do, I like the trick you talked about, you write in the journal, and then read it right away, it doesn’t take any time to figure out, there’s something going on there that you’re not in full control of, or even in full awareness of, which is even worse, like, forget about control, you don’t even gotta awareness what’s going on in your head. One of the things that meditation is good for, or Vicky’s meditation in particular, I mean, you learn real quick, there’s stuff going on, and then you need an ideal to mimic icons or a good start, like, whatever, right, good stories are a good start, realizing those stories are not arbitrary, like, again, the evolutionary frame, they’ve survived through time, I know Nassim Taleb talks about this, go for books that are old, yes, all right, it’s important, they gotta be at least 200 years old, otherwise, it could be, I’m not saying don’t read new books, but read them for entertainment value, although Taleb’s books are gonna last at least 200 years, that guy’s brilliant. So yeah, you can use a little discretion, but generally speaking, right, the Western canon in particular, it’s not arbitrary interpretation, right, it’s not just this random, oh, you can just pick anything you want, like the postmoderns tell you, first of all, are you really smart enough to critique an author? I don’t know about that, I have a video on postmodernism, my critique of that, that’s part of it, right, but also what utility is there in constantly fighting and finding reasons to disagree, when instead you can take the attitude of let’s find our commonalities and then we’ll accept our disagreement, which I think is, man, that whole model right there is, if I explain a lot of the problems of the world, our inability to look for commonalities first, I know I’ve talked with Paul Van der Kley on his channel about this before, like this is the problem with the church, like they won’t all say, what do we agree on? And then, and then go, okay, well, we can accept these minor disagreements or we can’t accept these minor, they don’t do that, they start from the disagreements and then they try to find unity, it’s like, that’s never gonna work, guys, right? But we have that struggle to your point in our lives. And that’s where the concept of the self, right, to go loop it all the way back is really important, because that’s the happiness of the self or the frictionless of the self or the sacrifice of the self, right, in whatever partial form is the thing that gives us the coherence to allow us to live in a story, in a set of narratives. No, I agree. And what I’m gonna maybe add to what you’re saying about emotion. Yeah, stoicism is, it’s like a good raft to get on when you’re just getting swept down the river. But, so emotions are what you have to live with and what you love in a context, any environment. What you love is in that environment and the emotions is the self telling you what the relationship is between the things in your frame, all the environmental things and the thing that you value. And the thing you value could be a person, but it could also be your reputation, your money, your ego, your comfort, like whatever it is, it’s what you love. And we love all kinds of things, but your emotions are that thing in a context. And then that creates the emotion. Now, one of the levels of environment is your body. So your body could be screwing with your emotions because emotions are felt physically and then translated through the brain. So that can definitely screw with things. But just to acknowledge that that is part of the context that can be triggering emotions. But in general, where you wanna be landing is in a place where you have rightly ordered affections. Because if your loves are in the right order, then you don’t have to manage your emotions because your emotions will be the appropriate emotion. Right? I want to be, like every emotion is appropriate when it’s in the right place. There are times for every emotion. There’s not, it’s not that you should never feel shame. It’s not that you should never feel anger. There’s emotions that we don’t like having because they don’t feel good or there’s social consequences for them. But all of the emotions are good. The problem is that we have loves that are out of order. So then the emotion that comes from the wrongly ordered love will have negative consequences we don’t want to deal with. Right? So if I love my comfort more than I value something else in the environment and my comfort is being impinged upon, but I cannot change that, I will become upset and frustrated and annoyed. And so now I have the social consequence of my own annoyance, but because I value this other goal more than my comfort, I can’t actually act to get myself the comfort that I want, but I’m annoyed because this goal of maybe maintaining my job so that I get money is making me have to be uncomfortable. But the solution to that in the short run could be stoicism. But in the long run, you want to actually find a higher love that can submit all of those things so that you no longer have the annoyance because you are happy to submit your comfort to the higher goal. The goal of money making is apparently not quite enough when the discomfort becomes too high to be enough. But if you can have a higher goal of, in a true passion, not just like an intellectual, like, I should care about this, but a true love where you’re like, I am happy because I want to earn this money and I want to give that to this poor widow that I know personally, I have a connection with, and I know that this will serve her, and so I’m happy to work. Or I value the customer who’s right in front of me and I actually have a real connection with them and I value this and it’s my business, and so I care about the success of this. And so my comfort goes lower and I genuinely don’t have the same emotional response because I have differently ordered affections in the same environment. And so then you don’t have the emotions because the schema in that environment is actually different because the values are different. Right, right. Yeah, what I often tell people is, all jobs are useless. Like, all of them have zero value at the end of the day, right? But the thing that’s valuable is what that job enables you to do, right? And it might be that you have a job where you’re time flexible, working from home, so you value the ability to do your dishes and your laundry during the day, right? Or you value the not having to drive to work, right? And so the fact that you make $20,000ayearlessmightmeannothing.Because,well,firstofall,youcouldblow$20,000 on your commute pretty easily. That’s not hard, not in a year, right? So are you really making less money, right? Because people tend to look at totals, quantity, tyranny of quantity, right, over this quality. And they say, oh, well, you know, not only am I not spending that money, but I also have this time back, very valuable to me, right? Because it came in the ass, because now they call me 24-7, but maybe that’s worth it, right? It might probably wouldn’t be. But, yeah, when you’re not looking past the job and at the things that it enables you to do, and one of the things any job enables you to do is to enjoy vacation. Because if you don’t have a job, you’re on vacation all the time, and then people are like, oh, you want to go hiking? And I’m like, no, not really, because someone’s on vacation, I hike all the time. It just, right, everything loses its flavor, because there’s no, again, there’s no contrast. You don’t have this droning sort of nine to five or whatever, right, regular five day a week, whatever it is rotating, doesn’t matter. It’s very regular, then there’s no surprise events either, right, because if your life is always a surprise, there’s no other thing as surprise. It vanishes in context. And the other thing I wanted to touch on, just to tie it back to intimacy, is you talk about order, and I know earlier you talked about prioritization. Those are conflicts, and they’re unresolved conflicts. They’re accepted. So that’s what I’m talking about, like the idea of prioritization, you’re like, oh, no, I don’t have any conflicts, I have prioritization. It’s like, no, no, prioritization is a form of conflict acceptance. I accept that this thing is more important than this and that they conflict, which is why I’m doing this first and this second, right? And any kind of ordering is an acceptance of a conflict, not a resolution of a conflict, right? It’s an acceptance of a conflict, and that’s the skill, like, even the language is working against us there, and cultural cognitive grammar is one of my things, right? Something I took very seriously from John Brevegie, yeah, someone needs to work on this, so let’s do it, and navigating patterns. So, yeah, I think that’s important to realize, you’re always accepting conflicts, right, that you can’t resolve necessarily, and we’re just calling it something else, and we’re not really realizing the extent to which there’s an intimacy in that, because when you accept a little discomfort to say, do a customer service job, I’ve done customer service jobs, oh my, I don’t even like people, and I’m actually really good at customer service jobs, why? Because I’m like, okay, well, I don’t like talking on the phone, so back in the day, it was all on the phone, so I will learn the phone. This is gonna cause me much consternation, and I was the best customer service guy at the place I was at for a long, big place, too. There were like 300 customer service people, I smoked them all, thank you very much, right? But it took a while to get there, because I don’t like talking on the phone. I am not at all surprised that you’re excellent at customer service. Well, thank you. That you’re extremely good at customer service. Well, I’m disagreeable, so, but the trick is to submit yourself to what you’re doing, and to why you’re doing it, so. It was a great place to- Agreeable people aren’t very good at customer service. Really? No, they just talk to you. They just talk to you. Too much, and then they try to tell you, they lie to you because they want you to be happy, and then they have to come back, and they sneak off to the manager because they can’t handle it. No, disagreeable doesn’t make you bad at customer service. Ah, well, yeah, I’m disagreeable about all people, though, so I just, but I was very good. Once I got into the group, I was very good, but there were lots of advantages to that particular job, right? I paid pretty well for the time. I was getting experience in an industry that I couldn’t, you know, otherwise I’d need a degree, and hell if I’m going to college, so. I mean, I’ve been, I can point out a college, but it’s about as close as I get. I’ve been to parties on college campuses, but I’m not, I’ve audited classes at MIT and stuff, and Harvard for that matter, but yeah, generally, I steer clear of colleges and degrees and things like that, but getting on the ground floor of customer service is actually a great way to, or was a great way to break into what I was trying to do, and I think it still works. I think all these things that people done in the past actually quite still work if you just, you just don’t buy the lie of progress, which I also have a video on incidentally, right? And you sort of, you know, try it out, right? You can accept that temporary, you know, look, I mean, I started out as a software engineer, then I went into customer service, right? I had technical support technically, which is the lowest of the low in the industry at the time, but A, it paid well, and B, I was learning stuff I knew I needed to learn. So they go, I need to learn all this stuff. I need to be better on the phone. I need to be able to understand problems better and do problem solving and find out how good my problem solving is, and actually got quite good, thank you very much. So yeah, you know, but that took years of work, but I was not born with that skill, believe me. I was born with several skills that helped me get that skill, and I got it pretty quickly probably, but I wasn’t born with it, and the ability to solve problems, all of these things I had to submit my disagreeableness, my dislike and probably fear of talking on the phone, right? And the fact that, man, for that job, I had to drive like 45 minutes each way to get to that job. It was a haul, right? In a time where, you know, I should be able to get a job much closer, but I couldn’t. So yeah, I submit to all these things. I accept all that conflict because it’s all conflicting with my life. I had a computer lab at home to run and a 24 seven internet connection back before such a thing was possible or fashionable. And yet I had to be away from home for this job, and occasionally they’d be like, well, you can work overtime whenever you want. So occasionally when there was the opportunity to work overtime and I was feeling like, daddy needs a new computer, you know? I was like, all right, we’re gonna work some overtime here, right? Cause I can pay pretty well. So overtime was a big deal. And I was like, I think probably one of two people allowed to just do overtime without asking permission. And anytime you wanna work longer, buddy, you go right ahead. I was like, okay. So all of these conflicts are there, conflicts for my time, conflicts for, what time I’m getting out of work, how late it is, how dark it is. Cause you know, driving in the dark is no fun. Even when you’re young and can see, and now that I can’t see, it’s really no fun. So, you know, there’s all these conflicts there and doing things you don’t wanna do. Why, man, did I have a hell of a computer. I’ll tell you that much. I had all the toys in the world. It was fantastic. And it was worth it for that. Like all those conflicts were worth accepting. The job wasn’t gonna get any better. It’s customer service. Only get technical support, only get so good. And that’s when you get good at it. And then it doesn’t, like you change, not it. That job stays exactly the same. You know, and sure, some days you have a mix of really great people. In fact, I one day where I answered 128 calls in an eight hour shift. Oh, I smoked the record in the building. We had the hardest thing to support. And I beat everybody with easier stuff. And look, with sheer luck, like you have to get lucky. You can’t, cause people were just asking for specs on the device. So they didn’t have a problem to be solved. I’m like, really? You just wanna know how fast this thing spins? Or you just wanna know how many bits it transfers? No problem. I’ve got charts on my, I’m just looking at the charts. Like I got my, you know, everybody had charts pasted, right? I knew where everything was, but I was two weeks in actually. It was really, really odd, but I got lucky. And man, I hit it just right. Every customer I got, I was taking calls as quick as I could, right? Every customer I got pretty much just didn’t have a problem. They just wanted to know something. And I was like, okay, right? So that was a great day, right? But most days in customer support aren’t like that. There’s difficult people, they want a new unit. They want this. They gave you their RMA, why haven’t you sent it? And you know, they’re lying, right? It’s like, whatever, right? And so there’s all these, and there’s all this mix. It only gets so good, but you get better, right? And so that’s what changes is you change. The world’s not gonna change. Like the material world doesn’t actually change that much. I need to break it to people. And that’s what we have to accept. We have to accept that most of the change comes from within us. That’s what makes our lives better. We accept things, we make changes, we accept these conflicts, talking to people. Like if you wanna know what it’s like, have a contentious conversation. And I’m not around, just find Manuel. And I am sure that you will find something to disagree with him on pretty quickly. And you’ll find how difficult life can be just trying to talk to somebody about something. It’s not hard. Find a disagreeable person, they’ll show you the way. You’ll get frustrated really quickly. They might even try to scare you off the Discord server before they even know who you are. It’s a hypothetical, could happen, right? Could happen, somewhere. I completely agree that acceptance of these conflicts is key. I also think that phrases like ordering of loves, well, ordering of priorities is a systemization of that acceptance. Because you can’t make that choice, you can’t think through every day, what am I gonna prioritize? And sometimes there’s really big life choices that you make because of that prioritization. I was on a particular career path before I had children. And because I was gonna be a mom, I changed that because it was not going to work. And so sometimes you have to completely restructure things in a way where you close off doors completely. But sometimes it’s just the patterns. And so it’s a deep acceptance of the conflict because you have to pattern how you will resolve that conflict every day. Every day, one of the ways that I resolve the conflict of how do my children get enough time to be properly parented is, for example, you could sit down and eat dinner with them. That is one way that you could create a structure so that you always can resolve that conflict, at least to a minimal set. And then you can decide if you’re gonna expand that or not. But without creating patterned structures that you can rely on so you can offload your cognition, you become overwhelmed. And a lot of people do, and that’s why they come to therapy, they become overwhelmed trying to resolve that issue every day. What do I prioritize? I’m so stressed, I have all these problems. What do I do? I can’t make anybody happy. I’m not happy. Well, you have to come up with patterns for life that resolve that that you lean into even when emotionally you’re not sure. So yes, it is an acceptance of the conflict, but it’s also a patterning of how to resolve that in a day-to-day kind of way. And then the ordering of affections, that’s not the resolving of conflicts. And it’s not the acceptance of conflicts because it is… Okay, so the difference is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about ordering and structuring, it’s all this like, from my perspective, I build and organize. But love doesn’t work that way. So love has to be something that pulls you in, right? I love knitting and I don’t love computers. And there is something inherent in knitting and computers that orders it in my affections that way. And so there’s something about the ordering of loves, which is not mechanical. I can’t sit down and make a list of what I will love in what order. But what I can do is I can put my attention on the thing that I want to learn. And I can practice putting it in a place of honor and sacrificing to it. And as I actively put it in a higher position, eventually my emotions follow that action. So, but it’s not something that I can do with my prioritization, where I just make a list. I say, this is where I spend my time, this is where I’m gonna put my energy, and then I follow through. And everything else that doesn’t fit, I guess that’s what falls off the sides. You can’t order your affections that way. Right, right. Well, I like you said, offload cognition. And I think that’s like, this is really part of the key. Another brilliant, absolutely brilliant thing that John Vervecki talks about is distributed cognition. I know it isn’t his work, it’s Chalmers and somebody, I can’t remember the other guy’s name, I apologize. You can look up distributed cognition, you’ll find it pretty quick. Distributed cognition is also what I call outsourced cognition, like all of it. And then that’s offloading cognition. So what are we offloading our cognition to? We’re offloading our cognition, back to the evolutionary point, to patterns that worked in the past. And we don’t have to think about them because to your point, we can pattern them. And then problem solved. Now you don’t have to think, you don’t have to rationalize all this stuff. Like, why did I do that? What am I gonna do next? That’s exhausting, it’s not gonna work. If you don’t do that, it’s not gonna work. It’s definitely not going to happen. I don’t want to do that, that sounds like hell. Right, and why would you want, well, it’s probably a good proximal definition of hell, yes. Right, having to do that, yeah, it definitely sounds like a good proximal definition of hell. One of many maybe, but certainly one. And yeah, I mean, the ability to offload this or outsource it to the distributed cognition through time, the missing factor for John Vervecky and others, right? They don’t account for time. Well, if it goes way back in the past, how did people deal with the conflict with their children? It’s like, well, we have patterns for that, right? It’s all embedded and compressed down into this. And then how do we communicate that compressed pattern? Well, there’s your narrative, right? There’s your stories, right? That’s the stories that point to the narrative, the narratives of the compression, the templates, all of that distributed cognition through time. This is the stuff that has worked in the past. Is it 100% flawless? No, so what are you giving up? Well, when you’re not being scientific, you’re not being accurate and precise, okay? We don’t live in an accurate and precise world. It’s not a machine. You don’t hit B9, put in a quarter and get a Snickers bar, which is too bad because I like Snickers bars, but this is not the way the world works, unfortunately. And so you need that compression. You need to engage with these compressed narratives in the form of stories to give you those patterns so that you can rely on offloading that cognition to those patterns. And yeah, they’re not gonna be perfect, but if you’re going for 100%, I got news for you. Anything gonna happen, right? And if you can get 80%, you should be so thrilled that it shouldn’t matter that you screw up 20% of the time on anything. And there’s the Pareto distribution all over again, but I like that you brought that in, that offloading cognition. So I think that’s super important. I agree. And to your last point, nothing is ever 100%. You never hit the mark. You never, ever, ever, ever, ever get it right. And that’s not bad. That’s okay. That’s not a problem. You have to aim, because if you don’t aim, you don’t go anywhere. So you have to aim and you have to have an ideal and you have to have a goal, but you have to understand that you will never accomplish the goal. You will never, and even if you get close to it, it’s never perfect and it’s never 100%, ever, ever, ever. And that is okay. And that doesn’t mean that you screwed up. And I think a lot of people get really stuck in that trap of like, I’m trying to be X. And then you’re like, yeah, the goal is great, but this is why character and virtue matters so much, because 90% of the battle is how you pursue the goal. And often, if you can make the goal how you pursue the goal, it’s much better, but built into how you pursue the goal is the acceptance of failure in how you pursue the goal. So it’s like this, it cycles in on itself, but if you try to have either an ideal without the acceptance that you will never achieve the ideal, or you say, well, we’ll have no ideals at all, and we’ll just all happily live without any ideals. I’m like, both of those will ruin you mentally and emotionally, none of that works. And people get really stuck, especially people who either have parents who are like type A personalities or a much more rigid religious background that has told them that there is some perfection available if they could only achieve the perfection. Both of those things can create people who become extremely emotionally distressed when there is imperfection. And the answer is always to just deeply accept that you will never be perfect, it will never be perfect, and nobody expects it to be and nobody else is. And if you think they are, it’s because they’re putting up a front and they’re just hiding things, because nobody achieves it. And frankly, I probably wouldn’t even wanna be friends with somebody who achieved it. Like, what is that? It’s not human. It’s not human and it’s not expected. But that’s why character and virtue matter, because if you spend all your time being like, I’m gonna achieve the goal, whatever the goal is, right? If it’s like the good mother goal or the successful businessman goal or the player or whatever, you achieve that, what is that? It’s nothing. The goal is never the thing you’re trying to achieve. It’s always who you are in the process of achieving the thing. Because who you are in the process of achieving the thing is the greater thing that brings everything together. And we’ll make it far more likely for you to not only achieve that goal, but all the other subsequent goals that kind of ripple out from that bigger goal. But you don’t get, it’s kind of like you don’t get anything at the end of the rainbow if you don’t go through the process to get that by becoming the person who should achieve that. You don’t become in a perfect way. It’s always gonna be your version of whatever that is, which will be inherently flawed because you’re not a crazy ideal, you’re an actual human. And that’s a good thing. That’s not a bad thing. Like I’m a good mom. I am. But am I the perfect mom? No, I am not the perfect mom. And I’m not the good mom at all times. But I am a good mom. But I’m not, I’m not a robot. I’m not like some ideal stoic person who’s always emotion, and even if I was like always emotionally controlled, even that wouldn’t be ideal because then I’m not teaching my kids the other side of humanity and they don’t get to like grow through my own flaws. And like there is no, there has to be the personal instantiation of whatever that thing is. And that is the joy of life. Nobody wants to live with the platonic forms. Nobody wants to live in that world. Right. Right. No, I like that. Yeah, if you never lose your temper and apologize, your kids will never learn to apologize, right? It’s like, it should be obvious. It’s like, no, it’s not. And then I think a lot of this though, it comes from, comes from like we get, we go to school, we get answers to every, they put up fake questions and give you fake answers. And it might be real. It might be important questions. They might be important actual answers, right? But it’s fake because it doesn’t represent reality. And then, I like what you said about, you’re going after this goal, but really it’s character and virtues and the values, those sorts of things that you’re actually refining, but you’re not refining trying to get to the end because when you do that, and we’ll throw in another fancy verbatim word, you can exact out those skills. And then other goals. And then what occurs to me is, and this whole cycle, so we’ll assume to some extent that school has taken out of some of this ambiguity, right? And I’ll just quickly point to the fact that it’s not that they took religion out of schools. They took religion, music, art, and gym out of schools all at the same time. And I would argue all of these are around participatory and poetic information. See the model, see our model, not John’s. And that is contributing. Not saying it’s causal, don’t think it’s causal, but it’s contributing to this problem because now you don’t have that sense of the thing that everybody reproduces in, well, I gotta find this clip. I mean, it happens all the time. So you can just, if you pay really close attention, you’ll see it, but there’s a clip of Sam Harris basically reinventing original sin. And Brett Weinstein did it once. I was like, you’re just reinventing original sin, Brett, congratulations. Like, it’s so funny. But you need that. You need that concept, that concept’s really important. Everybody tries to get rid of it because all there’s guilt. It’s like, oh, but maybe you should feel guilty. Like maybe that’s a motivator for you. Like, you can treat it as a bad thing if you want, but this is the problem. You’re treating something like guilt as a bad thing instead of using it as a motivation and changing it into something that is positive, right? And then converting it into a positive. And to your point with the intimacy crisis, people now, and it’s easily argued that there are groups of people like this through time, but certainly in our culture now, people are not very resilient. Like their egos, their sense of self, their identity, it is not very resilient. So then as soon as they feel guilt, it’s shattering because it’s like, oh, I’m bad. And now all of a sudden you have this identity marker because you don’t have, as you said, multiple identities, multiple schemas, and you can flip between them and you see yourself through them. Now you just have a marker, which is like a black spot that you just carry throughout all of those, I’m bad because I feel guilt. And if I didn’t feel guilt, I wouldn’t feel bad. Therefore you made me feel bad and you’re the bad person who made me feel bad because it’s this squashed, flattened identity. And so you can’t handle guilt. Whereas in my worldview, which I just laid out ad nauseam, you will feel guilty because you are not perfect. And feeling guilty is not the end of the world. I can feel guilty, be like, oh, yeah, maybe I should say sorry to my son and then say sorry and then move on. And it doesn’t carry forward into everything. It just makes me think next time, oh, I should bite my tongue because last time I had a reamed out at him and I really shouldn’t have done that. So I’m gonna wait and listen longer this time. And that’s it, that’s the whole thing. But it was imperfect and I felt guilt, but because I can have a resilient sense of self that is not so brittle that I fracture at a negative emotion, it’s a positive thing. Guilt is a positive thing because it actually guides me. And it’s an informative emotion instead of a weight that, and not to say the reality is also people with brittle egos are extremely, it’s emotionally painful for them. And it is emotionally deeply distressing for them. But the solution is not to take away the distress. The solution is to make them more resilient. Yeah, you don’t resolve your problems. You grow bigger than they are, right? That outline. I like that, I never thought of it that way before about the guilt and having a too brittle, well, a story to live in, right? Where you’re not able to find any good and then you can’t integrate because there’s nothing to integrate with because you’re just a bad person. If you feel guilt, it’s like, oh, wow, that’s huge. That’s really significant, I like that. And I like what you just said, that it is the story. That’s how you broaden paths and you become more resilient is you have to have multiple stories and stories of depth. You need to have rich stories, even if you, again, they don’t have to be on a conscious level. They have to be deeply patterned stories. So it doesn’t have to be something where you’re like, oh, let me sit down and tell you my deep rich story. It doesn’t have to be like that. It just has to be something that you know on a very, very deep level to the point where you don’t have to say it because you know it on levels deeper than the cognitive. It’s embodied, right? It’s, yeah, it’s not propositional, right? But it is participatory, right? And poetic, and I think, yeah, I mean, this is what’s, for me, this is what’s tied up in the intimacy crisis is this inability to deal with the quality of the connections and know that you don’t have enough or you don’t have the right ones or they’re not strong enough to hold you, right? Because you’re not one thing. You’re not gonna squish yourself down to one thing. And look, there’s an interesting side effect. Like you squish things down to one identity like you and other people are people. I can squish them down to one identity. Now I know how to treat them automatically, right? It’s like, oh, that’s handy. So now there’s your offloading of cognition again, right? It’s like, it’s gonna happen. You can’t understand enough of the world, especially not in the moment, but even after the fact or before the fact to handle this stuff. So you’re constantly offloading or outsourcing your cognition. You have no choice. And you really gotta like, you know, humble yourself to that fact. And I think it does, it goes back to these discrete linear connections that we make and school tells us, right? The scientific worldview tells us, materialism tells us. And, you know, some people have asked me like, well, you know, Mark, you seem to have a command of all these facts and all this stuff. And yeah, probably I have a really good memory for some reason. Thank goodness for that. And yeah, I haven’t fallen into any of these traps. Well, not ever in my life, obviously. I solve my meaning crisis. They talk about that with Paul Vanhoef. That was quite a few months ago now. It was well over a year ago. But I think, you know, now that I think about it, and it’s hard for me to think about because it’s, I call it the before time. Before homeless and after homeless. The stuff before, I don’t remember a lot of. I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. And I used to. So it was definitely the homelessness that did it. There’s no question about that. I went to Boy Scouts. I didn’t stay there long. I was in Boy Scouts. I was in the 4-H club. Right, I was in a magnet school, right? So they did special things with art and stuff like that. Like I, right, I was in a private Catholic school for a while. And you know, they had a summer program, right? And then you do summer program. You’re not doing what we call learning today, right? It’s not education. We wouldn’t call it education. I’m gonna do a video on education versus training. What we’re doing kids now is training. We’re not educating kids at all. Well, all we’re doing is training. Like that’s almost 100%. And in college, you get a lot of training. You get some education still, but in below college, forget it. They’re just training kids. All they’re doing, right? It’s the standard, you’re graded, that’s it. You know, again, they took all this stuff out. And so we’ve lost the skills of participation. And there’s a paper, I’m gonna find it. One of the days I’m gonna find it. Actually, it’s not a paper, it’s an article. But I think it referenced a bunch of papers. A female psychologist, or psychiatrist, whatever, wrote this paper about learning and said, early learning is bad for children. Like it’s right there in the data, guys, go look. Right, like preschool is really bad. And it’s not just preschool, right? But it’s modern preschool and first grade and kindergarten where they’re training kids at a desk in propositions, roughly speaking, right? Very detrimental. Those kids have terrible outcomes, terrible. Compared to kids who weren’t put in preschool, kids who were held back, kids who went to kindergarten later for whatever reason, right? Because it’s usually the age cutoffs and they do funny things with the numbers. That’s quantity, right? So those kids who go later actually do better because they have more time to participate in the world in a pre-formed fashion. They’re learning something, right? I don’t know what that is, right? I would say they’re informing the world through participation in poetics, right? By actually interacting with objects and other people and nature and themselves, right? They just have better outcomes and they learn better propositionally too, by the way, which is weird, but you know, it just points to Piaget and embodied knowledge and all the stuff Peterson talks about, right? It’s all right there in the data if you care to actually look at it and maybe not read their conclusions when they were looking for something else or unaware of that frame, right? So yeah, all of this stuff kind of comes together. And yeah, we need to be aware first that we’re unconsciously mimicking things, right? That happened or that we saw or that we were exposed to without realizing it so that we can engage with them in a more intelligent fashion and sort of change up the script and introduce that space. Like, so this is my life to tell people, just introduce this space, right? The whole practice is just adding a space between feeling and action, right? Or feeling and reaction, however you wanna frame it. But when you add that space, then you can put things in that space, like rationality. Like, hold on, is there a better way to deal with this? Right? That’s what the Stoicism is a nice first step for because once you create that space between your feeling and your action, your emotion and your action, now all of a sudden the world opens up because you can change yourself. You don’t need the view from above or the view from nowhere or the selfless whatever meditation. Like, that’s all built into Stoicism to some extent. You don’t need any of it, roughly speaking. And I did get the Stoicism first and the meditation second, but I never went after the floaty weird meditation. So I think that’s important because when you have that space, now you can live with a different story. Swap out that story again, right? Manage, navigate that identity, right? Whatever, navigate out of one pattern and into another just to tie in the channel name, because why not? Prove to everybody exactly why it was an excellent choice for a channel name. It was, I wish I came up with it, but Manuel came up with it. And then- A good friend. He’s excellent. He is a good friend and a good person, for sure. Well, what do you think would help with the intimacy crisis? That’s a good question. Yeah, I’ve sort of bandied this about. I’ve got some notes, not a lot, not a lot of notes, because a lot of the intimacy stuff I have to intuit my way through, which sounds right to me. I think the main problem that we have is this lack of participation. So, and you pointed to it beautifully earlier, right? We live in these houses, we have climate control, we’re not in touch with nature anymore, right? And that’s a big problem because we’re not participating with the extremes, right? And we know we need it because we like to camp, right? Like people, or hike, or whatever it is that people do, like people do all kinds of weird things. I’m like, why are you doing that? You get this nice warm house, like, why do you wanna leave? Right? But you do. And then that’s very mysterious and people don’t realize how mysterious that is. It’s not just shaking things up, it’s also interfacing with reality better. Because when you’re in your house, and I’m in my house, I like my house, you’re not interfacing with reality. I have to go outside to interface with reality, now I’m in the middle of the woods, thankfully, on purpose. So I’ve got 12 acres of reality to deal with than cutting down branches and removing weeds and I haven’t done enough of, right? And I have a garden that I didn’t plant, so I’m very grateful, right? There’s hummingbirds, they come by my window. There’s all this encounter that I have with nature deliberately, because I know I need that, right? And introverts typically do too, they typically get refreshed. Peterson talks about this, they get refreshed by going outside. I think a lot of it is just integrating with the outdoors, with nature, with the things, participating with things that are not within our control and don’t respond to our influence, right? Right, like, yeah, just talking to a female will do that to you, you know, they’re not within your influence at all, they’re crazy. So yeah, just talking with people in general, right? Because you have limited influence over other people and those interactions are very valuable and if you can keep your emotions under control when you do it, that helps you to re-enchant the skill of intimacy, which is roughly speaking, the participation. And then in our model, it’s participation through the navigation, the navigational tools, poetics, right? Which is also what ties narrative together, right? When narrative is in our model, right? It’s right there, it’s at the core, because we think it’s super important. We don’t just give it lip service, we say, no, no, no, it’s part of the model. So, doing participation badly over and over again as a way of learning, submitting to the fact that you’re gonna do it poorly and you’re gonna screw it up and you’re gonna piss people off and piss yourself off and they’re gonna piss you off and et cetera, that’s part of the acceptance of learning how to poetically navigate other people, nature and yourself, right? So, meditation’s one way, because you discover a bunch of stuff about yourself. Meditation in a group is better, right? Then you’re talking with other people, right? Getting outside, getting in touch with nature, all these things I think help that crisis. So, yeah, I mean, that’s just some of the stuff I’ve been thinking about and working on there. I’m super happy that you’re highlighting this. I think it’s really, really important. I think, I know I have a really bad habit of like you say things I agree with and I’m like, yeah, that’s really good and then let me add something to it. I should have spent more time highlighting the things that you said, but I thought, I think the way you frame it is really, really good and I breeze past it because I’m like, yep, agreed and I’m moving past, but I don’t want to not communicate the fact that I think the topic is super important. Your framing is right on. I think the way that you see it is accurate. I like the way you frame it. Obviously, we use some different words and we come at it in slightly different angles, which I think is helpful and we come to very similar places and maybe it’s helpful for people listening to know, we’ve kind of talked about things, but we haven’t really hashed it out like this before with just the two of us and so I’m very happy to hear how similarly we land on many things because I see that as just a clear correlation that this is a problem and that the things that we see contributing to it and the way that it’s flushing itself out is, well, it’s two points that at least between two of us are saying, yep, we’re seeing the same thing. We’re seeing it caused by the same thing and my hope is that you’ll have more of these conversations and that the more conversation means more people listening and more attention and the more attention it gets, the more likely it can be that it can be resolved because this is even the thing, one of the things I do at first when anybody has a problem that I want them to work on, I just get them to spend two weeks noticing it. You just notice it before you try to do anything about it. It’s like bring around a little cue card with you and if you wanna change the fact that you’re anxious or angry or whatever, all you do is every time you feel that feeling, you pull out your cue card and you put a little hashtag on it, just a little tick and you just notice every time you feel it and the more you notice it, all of a sudden, your attention is there and now that your attention is there, your brain starts working on it and as soon as your brain starts working on it, now you just have so much more content you can talk about because now it’s cataloging all the occurrences and you’re gonna naturally start seeing patterns in it and blah, blah, blah, but it’s the same with this. I’m like, yes, we need to put attention on this problem because the more we can pay attention to it and the more people will be paying attention to it, now we’ll start tracking it and patterns and we’ll be able to get a complexity that we need to find an actual answer. Unfortunately, I think the answer is fairly straightforward which is that we actually have to reengage with ourselves, with the people around us, with the world around us and doing that, it’s usually uncomfortable, painful and requires some level of self-sacrifice. What I think people haven’t been told is that if they do that, the benefit is enormous and the sacrifice is significant. The time is significant because usually the sacrifice is our own fantasies. You have to sacrifice the fantasy of who you are, some fantasies that you might be able to achieve certain things, that the narratives you tell yourself, like, oh, these bad things happen because of those bad people, instead of maybe those bad things happen because you made bad choices or you need to develop your character in certain ways. But often we avoid intimacy because of fear, either of rejection from others and social situations or fear of who we actually are. So either it’s fear or usually it’s ignorance. You don’t know what you could get if you were to pursue intimacy. And the answer is it is so meaningful and valuable and beautiful when you have those intimate connections with yourself, with the world, with other people. And it is far outweighs the threat of having to face the dangerous things that can lurk within the intimacy. And I know a lot of people have been burned by intimacy. They don’t wanna be intimate because people have burned them. And it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of monsters out there. There’s a lot of monsters in yourself. There’s a lot of opportunities to get burned. But that just means you’ve got to figure out how to face those dragons. Yeah. Right. Everything off the poster on your wall. But yeah, I applaud you for highlighting it and bringing people to pay attention to it. Well, thank you. Yeah, I like that idea of having a scorecard and checking it off. Yeah, just to sort of close it out. I mean, I think the intimacy crisis precedes the meaning crisis. I told that to Andrea, right? And one of the reasons why is because meaning is all about religio, making those connections, and it’s the quality of the connections. That’s what I’m talking about. And the ability to make them to begin with. Like if you’re an individual, you’re not making connections by definition. That’s why I tell people you’re not an individual. You’re a person. And a person is this complex thing. An individual is this simple single identity item, an object in the world, right? It’s a material object in the world. You’re not an individual. I’m not an individual. That’s not a good way to think about it. And I think part of the problem is we tend to take these problems and say, oh, that’s a problem of politics. And therefore the government should fix it this way. And like, I can take every intimacy problem, put it in that frame for sure. Easy peasy or economic. Oh yeah, well, it’s really just to get enough money. You just buy these things and that would, it’s like, no, that’s not correct. So to your point, yeah, it’s important to shine a light on this. And I’m very pleased to hear that you’re on the same page. And we haven’t had any conversation. I haven’t been talking a lot about this with anybody, but with Andrew with the bangs, we did, but haven’t had any deep conversations with you about this. But it’s good to know that there’s a convergence there. I know John Bravicki talks about convergence, so does Jordan Peterson, right? So yeah, the convergence is important because yeah, we’re seeing something. And then, you know, Jonathan Pichot, the world’s attention. Well, I think if we pay attention to the right thing, not the politics, not the economics, not the religion, right, necessarily, right? But the intimacy crisis, the problem that we’re having with intimacy that everyone’s having, then I think we have some chance of solving, right? And to your point, because now that we can pay attention to it, our brains work on it automatically. We don’t have to do that work to some extent, right? That’s the unconscious cognition that just happens. I wish we’d talked more about that at the conference for sure, right? I know, I know. But that’s okay. We’re gonna do another one, I hope. And then at the next one, we can force people into that frame and see how they like it, see what they come up with. Because there’s some great minds there with some wonderful thoughts. But yeah, thank you for joining me and thank you for agreeing with me because that’s always nice and adding so much perspective and flavor. Yeah, I mean, there’s some stuff in this talk that I’m gonna have to go over again and integrate now because I’ve got new tools, upgrades. Woo-hoo, very happy. Thank you, Mark. I enjoyed this very much. All right. And then I will continue talking about the intimacy crisis because that’s what I do. And we’ll see if you wanna join me again. Maybe we have some more thoughts and ideas after this comes out or if I’m gonna go and find other people. I’ve been nagging people all over the place to try and get these talks done so that I can work it through. So, but you did and I really appreciate your time and we’ll see what the future brings. Sounds good.