#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns

Orlando Botton, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.
Where do bad inner voices come from? Well, the way I like to think about it is an inner voice is always an outer voice that got internalized. You know, we're very porous people.
The way in which we're spoken to becomes the way in which we speak to ourselves. I mean, if that sounds too weird, think of language, right? All of us arrive in the world not speaking any language, and by the age of three, four, five, six, seven, you know, we'll have learned a lot of words.
But the fascinating thing about human beings is we don't know we're learning. So we can be doing other stuff like, you know, doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen.
And we're becoming expert grammarians. Hundreds of words are entering our minds.
Complex grammatical constructions are entering our minds. Now, the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy holds true for emotional life as well.
So at the same time as we're learning a language of words and declensions, we're also learning a language of emotions. We're learning things like, what's a man like? What's a woman like? What happens if you give something to someone? What happens if you're vulnerable? What happens if you want to play? What happens if you say no? What happens if you say yes? All of these are the syntax.
They comprise the syntax of our emotional lives. And it's an invisible syntax, just as our grammatical syntax is invisible.
But it's there, and it will operate throughout our lives, and it will be immensely hard to change. I mean, you know what it's like if you grew up speaking English, and then you want to learn a foreign language.
If you suddenly want to learn Italian, well, good luck to you. You're going to be learning a long time.
It's not impossible. It can be done.
But I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves. They go to things like, you know, I want to change how I relate to people in relationships, say.
And I've read a book, and I've been to three therapy sessions, and I'm really annoyed. Nothing works.
You want to go, okay, imagine this was Italian. So you've looked at a book on Italian, you've taken three classes, and you don't speak fluent Italian, and you're complaining.
So we do need some modesty here, just in order to be properly ambitious. I mean, as you know, the root cause of early despair and early retirement from things is a false picture of what success demands in an area.
And I think in the area of emotional improvement or maturation, we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's going to have an ease which it won't have. It's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world that German, for instance, has a colorful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't.
You say, well, does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way that allows us to do self-investigation?

Yes.

I think philosophers watching this, philosophers of language may have arguments prone in it. It's a big thing.
But I definitely feel that the more words we have, the more we can attend to what we feel. And in some cases, the more we can feel.
You know, I remember learning the word anxiety when I was a teenager and thinking, wow, that's a really useful word. Probably nowadays people learn anxiety a lot earlier.
But in those days, it was a fascinating word to learn. And the more one's vocabulary stretches, the more you're able to put a flag in bits of your psyche that are perhaps painful.

And I think, if you think about why people go to psychotherapy or even frankly what motivates a lot

of friendship, it's somebody else helps to give you a vocabulary for bits of your mind and bits

of your experience that have not, till now, that have eluded definition. And that definition is

not merely a fancy thing, it's a life-saving thing because the more you can define, the easier life gets. Freud speculated that the origins of language lie in an ability to bear frustration so that if a child can think, you know, I'm currently frustrated, but, you know, mummy's coming back and the person's got those words, then that can help you to bear missing and also bear excitement or, you know, all sorts of things.
Things can become more bearable the more you can put them into language. And I think adults know this when we go about journaling, right? Why is it so helpful to journal? Because we know it is, all research shows that it is.
What is it about translating a feeling into a word for that feeling that's helpful? And I think it tames, it contains, and it narrows the spread of difficult emotions. It's very ephemeral, right? You've got these thoughts up here, moving around, floating about, and then they have to be concretized.
And it almost feels like it squeezes it through an aperture of some kind. You say, okay, this is what I meant by that.
It's not this notion. It's not this sort of ambient.
It's somebody shouted a noise in the next room. It's like, oh, no, it's here.
I can touch it. You can see it.
Yeah, that's right. And think of relationships, couples.
The more their vocabulary for what they're going through increases, the more they can say, i'm feeling this i'm feeling you know when you do that i feel this etc and the enemy you know the sort of normal word is people say communication but it's really language it's it's putting language to to feelings and so much goes wrong in life because we're unable to do it it starts with ourselves ourselves. We can't do it with ourselves.
Here's a useful phrase that psychotherapists use to word disassociation. It's a fascinating concept.
What would it mean to disassociate? And the way it's understood therapeutically is that you could feel an emotion. It's so difficult, tricky in some way, and you then stop feeling it.
You disassociate from the feeling that's in you. It's still in you, but you're no longer registering it.
Tricky, tricky. And the argument is always the more you can associate and the less you can disassociate, the better off you will be.
But look, there are many bits of life that are unbearable to us. Let's remember this.
There's a wonderful quote in Middlemarch, George Eliot, big fat 90th century novel, where she says, if we could properly register the full sounds of life, we would lose our minds from the full richness of existence. In other words, if you were sensitive to everything that's around you, you would sort of go mad.
And I think if we think about what madness is, what colloquially called madness, if you think

of people with severe mental illness, very often what has happened is that their ability

to sequence thoughts has gone.

Everything is coming at them and they can't grade thoughts.

They can't say, this thought must go away now.

So they'll go, I made a mistake 15 years ago.

And if you're balanced, you'll go, well, that was 15 years ago. And it's not a problem.
We don't have to have it pressing down. If your reason is buckling, often everything that is alarming comes at you at once, everything that is difficult at once.
And so, in a way, I'm sticking up for the ability sometimes to take distance from our feelings so you know i started off by going it's really important to to know what you're feeling but let's also remember at points the ability not to feel the full force of everything also belongs to health so it's it's double-edged sword there what's your advice for how people can heal a negative inner voice? We've got this odd artifact that we've carried with us, this inheritance of our life, but kind of almost some previous life of ours. Where should people begin if they want to have a more friendly inner voice? Such a good question.
I'd say you have to start by finding the inner voice because it doesn't

announce itself as an inner voice. So how are we going to, you know, we're not talking here about literally hearing voices.
Some people do, but we're not talking about that here. What we're talking about is a way of speaking to yourself or a way of conducting yourself in your own mind that owes more to something from outside and from inside and that is more negative, or you can put it this way, unfair to you and your chances, your hopes, etc.
So how do we detect this is even going on? Because I don't think it's necessarily obvious. Here I think that it's quite helpful to get people to do what are called sentence completion exercises where you start off with a stub sentence and then you have an ellipsis dot dot dot so men are women are life is i am i want if dot dot dot because dot dot dot and you say to people right here's a list these things without thinking too much right important important prompt, without thinking too much, just say the first thing comes into your head.
Men are, women are, life is, I am, etc. Or even beginnings of stories, story completion exercises.
When I meet someone that I... Just finish that sentence.
And what people will come out with is fascinating. They'll go, you know, men are cruel.
Wow, wow, wow, men are cruel. A person might even be surprised that they've said that.
And you say, okay, where's that come from? What led you to believe that? And often what you'll find is a story that owes more to something outside than something inside. Or when I meet someone, what will happen is, dot, dot, dot, they'll be very friendly to me, then they'll turn against me.
Wow, wow. Where did that come from? It's going to be a specific story in the past that is being carried forward.
Isn't it interesting that we're talking about maybe the thing people identify with most, you know, the texture of their own experience, the landscape of their inner mind. But you're then saying, well, this may not fully be self-generated.
This might be something which you've absorbed from the past, from society, from norms, from cultures, from the way that you've compensated for past traumas, et cetera, or just habits. But it brings up an interesting question, which is, okay, so who are you? Where are you in this? Are you that voice? In some ways you are, because you're inexorably linked to all of the experiences you've had.
But then we have this sort of transcendent us, which is better. It's the better us.
If only I could. It's the me without the compensation, the trauma, the et cetera.
Such a good question. Sometimes we have this idea of the real me that is separate from everybody else.
We are penetrated by society. Think of how we're speaking.
We're using words as we speak to one another. Every one of those words is both spoken by us and was made by other people long before we were even a rumor in anyone's mind.
We are penetrated by society. Every one of the words that I am using is the result of generations and generations of people who've used those words, refined their meaning, et cetera, and then given them to me.
So that's literally the language. We're permeated by social language.
Even our biology, as we know, our gut bacteria is both us and not us. The neat, Chris, Alain, we are these sort of entities where you can put a strict circle around.
Now, we're interpenetrated by society, biology, history, et cetera. So then the question comes, well, is there anything that's more me, less me? And I think here, absolutely, absolutely.
And I think that one of the journeys, you know, life's full of journeys. One of the journeys that I think we all are on is to start to separate out a little bit.

I can understand there's a lot in me that was just put there by society, by the context in which I was born.

Which of those bits do I want to keep or focus on?

And which of those bits do I want to keep or focus on and which of those bits do not fully represent my values, my considered choices, et cetera? And this is where life gets interesting because people start to say things like, well, where I come from, normal meant dot, dot, dot. But the more I think about it, the more I'm reflecting on who I really am, the more I want to ditch that and that and that.
It's just a form of editing process. Self-authorship.
Absolutely. And I think that the more mature someone is, I'll use that word because you've used others.
the more mature someone, the more what they do, what they think, the values they hold are more to their own work, their own sifting, their own editing than it does to the context that they were born into. I think, you know, it's interesting if you look at the arc of a life, right? a very small child is often remarkably authentic, which is why we adults in small doses at least have such great time with little ones because they come out with stuff and you think, oh my God, I can't believe they've just said that thing.
They've just said that granny's nose is too big or that this restaurant is boring or this very expensive thing is a load of rubbish, etc. they'll come out with stuff that is non-normative.
And that's very interesting because as an adult, you recognize your own spontaneity that's been lost normally. So it's kind of bittersweet.
You think, oh, you know. You don't want exactly the child's version of it because that would lead you into trouble.
But you want an adult version and it's very hard to get. And probably the high watermark of the opposite is when you're 14 and a half, and you're at school, and your most fervent wish is to be like everybody else.
You want your parents to be like everybody else. You want your name to be like everybody else.
You want your appearance, your haircut, etc. You cannot bear difference.
And then slowly, slowly, you individuate, And that's a very exciting journey. I don't think anyone individuates in all areas.
So I think the first choice is, what are the areas that matter a lot to you? I'm interested in individuation, but when it comes to clothes, you might have noticed,

it's a really interesting area, but I'm just leaving that one for another time. I'm just not engaging with that.
Similarly, food, fascinating area, very interesting. Not quite on my radar yet, but other areas, what I'm reading, very opinionated, very individual.
So I don't think all of us can do it in all areas, but we choose. And that's also part of what makes someone an individual.
I love the idea of children being unencumbered by sort of expectation in that way. And yeah, trying to find the balance between what would the mature childlike version of ourselves do or say in this moment, where we found ourselves too swayed by the opinions of others, by expectations, by societal norms, etc.
Do you remember that story of Picasso, who was going around an art school, little kids were doing art, and some kid was sort of scrawling, you know, mummy, whatever. And this kid was seven.
And Picasso said famously, when I was his age, I was painting like Raphael, you know, one of the great Renaissance artists. And it was sort of true.
I mean, young Picasso. And then he went, and it's taken me all my life to remember how to paint like this.
Now, he didn't, you know, an adult painting like a child is not a child painting like a child. It's something different, you know, which is why people go, oh, a child could have done that.
Well, when a child does it, it's one thing. And when an adult does it, it's another thing.
And I think it's quite different. And I think that's why, you know, when you look at Picasso, and there are lots of artists and lots of figures you could draw that analogy with.
But, you know, when you're looking at a painting that Picasso did when he was 90, you know, at the end of his life, and it's got elements of stuff that a child might do, but it's gone through. You know that this guy has been doing so much other stuff.
So he's got deeper reasons. Did you ever read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman? No.
Okay. Trilogy of children's books, ostensibly, I guess.
This was my favorite series when I was a kid. And in it, the protagonist, Lyra, finds this truth teller.
It's called an lithiometer. And for some reason, this particular device, it takes an entire lifetime of study to be able to read it and as a child she can do it immediately so it's this beautiful arc and it's the first time i ever thought about it and pullman takes you through unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and one of the final scenes of the entire book at the very very end uh she goes back to the uh nunnery where she was being raised five years ago before the story begins and uh she's lost the ability to read it she hits puberty and it's kind of this fall it talks about kind of the awareness that her and her partner now have and she says i can't read it anymore and the nun turns to her and she says uh my dear it's going to take you an entire lifetime but the depth of knowledge you have will be greater than it ever was before and it's that arc and conscious incompetence unconscious competence conscious incompetence conscious competence and that finishing side something that's been earned you found your way there through effort agency self-authorship is um yeah yeah it's it's it's special yeah and i think you know it's it's interesting isn't it when when people who've read a lot thought a lot etc come out with stuff and it sounds very very simple and i think our society gets a bit puzzled by that because the the sort of obvious respect goes to people that speak in a very dense way and you can't quite understand what they mean so you know philosophy discipline i started out in you know the heroes there are people like wittgenstein or um hegel kant etc very very hard not superbly accessible to make headway and then you know you turn to the East.
You look at Eastern philosophy. You look at the poetry of someone like Basho in Japan, medieval Japan.
It's so simple. It's, you know, it's four words on a piece of paper.
And very easy to go mumbo jumbo or child's play or whatever. And to be kind of mature enough to go, okay, I'm going to bear with the anxiety that this is very simple sounding, simple sounding.
In the East, the idea is that poetry, for example, can sound very, very simple. The point is that it's an interaction between the reader and the work.
So not everything is in the poem or the saying. You bring yourself to it.
And therefore, the ultimate impact of that work is a collaboration between you and the work. Fascinating.
So the Western view might be to go, there's not that much in there.

And it's the artist's fault.

It's your job.

Whereas in East, the view is, well, it's a collaboration.

So if you're not seeing anything, it's because you're not bringing enough of yourself.

So very interesting to, you know, lots of the arts.

And we think of that Enzo, you know, in, you know, just a circle. This is the whole of life, whole of life.
It's just, you know, you're just doing a circle with your, your brush and amazing, amazing. The, the courage to say, okay, we're going to go with this.
We're going to, you know, the whole of existence is this circle. And if you meditate profoundly enough on this, you will see the world, not just in a grain of sand, but in a circle, et cetera.
And we really meet a fault line here in the Western understanding of depth and profundity. This takes a bit of time for the Western mind to kind of get to grips with that.
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That's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Why do you think we struggle to connect with our emotions fully? Come on, let's be honest here with the audience.
We know what emotions are like. They're not just lovely, cuddly things.
They're absolutely terrifying a lot of the time. Think of what it takes.
Think about love, right? So people, we think that people spend their lives looking for love. And half true, that's a half truth, is spend a good deal of time running away from love as well in all sorts of forms.
We are as assiduous in our escape from love as we are in our pursuit, perhaps more so. Why? Because it's terrifying.
It's especially terrifying if you come from a childhood, a young world, where there was some kind of disruption in your attachments, in your experience of love. The next time you then meet love as an adult, half of you is just wanting to run away.
And I think people don't still not fully appreciate enough the strength with which we are going to resist love if our earliest experience of it was in any way, in any way difficult. And this explains a great deal of the misery of the world.
It's very interesting to think about how much we try and push away the thing that we're also wanting, like how we are complicit in creating the scenario that was so terrified of having happened. I've been thinking a lot about, um, second order emotions, third order emotions.
So, um, you have a thing that happens, you feel agitated and then you begin to tell yourself a story and you become stressed at your agitation and then you become resentful at your stress about your agitation and then you become anxious about. And that additional layering, this kernel that we began with, with regards to the emotion, sort of explodes out.
And before you know it, you're feeling an emotion that's not only the thing that started, but it's an entire universe away. And this is now the problem, not this.
Yeah, that's right. And I'm not sure if I understand you fully,

but is it really the case that you are not accepting the primary emotion? So let's say you go somewhere, it should be nice, you're disappointed. You can't be disappointed.
It's meant to be nice. You can't accept that disappointment.
And then you're angry with yourself for feeling disappointed. and then, you know,

whereas if one could just go,

okay, maybe it's all right to be disappointed i mean it's not it's not brilliant but but there it is or i'm feeling sad okay well that's not wouldn't be what i wanted but let me not be sad that i'm sad or angry that i'm sad well i think this is why we have certain signature emotions that feel like home base yeah there's ones that we're intimately familiar with and there's ones that scare us a lot more yeah and uh a unsatisfactory but familiar emotion is often more safe to us than a slightly novel more exotic but uh scarier one and and also, I think, happier one. I mean, you know, talking just a minute ago, people escaping love, people also escape happiness.
I mean, the way I think about it is that very often we're in a situation of, it's like being a prisoner. You've been kept in jail for a very long time.
Your diet's been restricted. It's not been much fun.
Then the gate opens and you're allowed to walk out. It should be a great day.
Fantastic. You're free.
Nah, you know, we know what happens. Let's say you've been on a calorie-restricted diet.
Suddenly someone says, you know, here's a buffet. You can eat anything you like.
You don't want to eat it. You can't.
You can't digest it. You can't process it.
It's too much. So, you know, something similar goes on in our attitudes to happiness often.
I mean, it's useful to say to yourself, ask yourself, in the circumstances in which I grew up, what did it mean to be happy? And for some of us, it meant upsetting a parent. It meant challenging the dominant mood in a household.
It meant taking away attention from somebody else. It meant danger.
And that's odd because we think, why would it be dangerous to be happy? Well, but there are all sorts of risks associated with it. And so in our deep minds, sometimes in adulthood, we simply cannot accept the circumstances of our lives and therefore go about spoiling them so that we put the more, you know, there's a wonderful paper called something like a criminal, a psychotherapy paper, criminal in search of an offence.
A sense that you've done something wrong, if you carry that from your past, and then you think, how am I going to get rid of that feeling? Oh, I know, I'll do something wrong. And then I won't feel that feeling anymore.
Sometimes, you know, it's a bit like that. It's like saying, I'm feeling happy, but I shouldn't be happy.
What should I do? Oh, yes, I'll make myself unhappy. Or, you know, I'm feeling love.
Someone's offering me love. That's not normal.
I don't recognize that feeling. Oh, what should I do? Oh, I'll drive them away.
I'll go and be rude to them or go and have an affair with somebody else or whatever it is something to spoil something that's nice so the impulse to spoil is really deep happiness and love are hard to bear i suppose if reality is not delivering our model of the world our expectation of the world our prediction of the world we have discordance between the two and there are two things that we can try and do we can try and bring our model of the world up to reality or we world, we have discordance between the two. And there are two things that we can try and do.
We can try and bring our model of the world up

to reality, or we can try and bring reality back down to our expectation.

Exactly. Beautifully put.

Is there a danger of intellectualizing challenges of emotion for smart people,

people that like to read and consume YouTube channels like yours or podcasts like mine,

and like to investigate ourselves, we want to understand ourselves and the world around us and maybe we've even got the theory from evolutionary psychology that explains why this is adaptive and and ancestrally we are made up of blah blah blah how how much is that a prophylactic against us actually having to feel things? And how can we better break through this intellectualizing of emotions and rationalizing of them away? Let's start with compassion. We are the way we are for poignant reasons.
We didn't get to be that way. Think of the bookish child.
Think of the child who's reading a lot. Often it's because life around is quite difficult.
Now, it's great to read, it's good to read, etc. But if you spend all your time in books, that's often a sign things are challenging.
And so often people who excel at intellectual pursuits, etc., are in flight from an overwhelming situation, I'd wish them well. In time, the overwhelming situation could get a little less intense and they could get a little more of reality into their intellectual world.
I mean, I'm describing myself. Perhaps you want to try and see reality for what it is.
And if you're warding it off with intellectual structures, let's say thank you to those structures. I think it's really important.
Whenever you look at people doing stuff that seems a bit suboptimal or a bit strange, they're reading too much, they're jogging too much, they're trying to make too much money, whatever. They're feeling too much.
They're feeling too little. All of these departures from so-called health normality, et cetera, always ask yourself, why are they doing it? And it's normally a defense.
It is a defense against a situation that was very difficult at some point. They learned that defense.
And even though it would be optimal now to let go of that defensive structure, they're still clinging onto it because that's what feels safe. It feels safe to make jokes all the time.
It feels safe to be very serious all the time. It feels safe to be depressed.
It feels safe to give up. It feels safe to try and win at all costs, including your own health, etc.
All these are defensive structures that once kept us safe that I think in order to evolve, we almost want to say thank you. Thank you to your younger self for working this out, for finding a way of coping with reality.
But could we learn to cope in a slightly different way? So great. I'm interested just taking that one step further and the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally.
Uh, I think even I I've in my less equanimous moments, uh, when I do journaling, uh, I find myself writing more of an essay than a personal inquiry. And, uh, yeah, the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally, again, for the cerebrally minded praying at the altar of cognitive horsepower people.
It's a coping mechanism. It's a way to distance yourself from this.
Yes. And I think our minds, it is much easier to have the headline than the meat of the topic.

And very often we reach a sort of an uncomfortable state of half-knowing ourselves.

And we think, oh, I've covered it.

I know in my childhood there was this, and then there was this, then there was that. And you've got to go to the headline, tension with my dad, or tricky with my mom, whatever it is.
And we think, oh, I've got that. I've got that.
I know it now. Let's go back to the Eastern Enzo circle, right? And the East says, meditate for hours repeatedly on the thing that looks obvious, the thing that you know.
So they're saying the whole of life is that circle. So look at that circle and keep coming back to it.
And the more you look at it, the more you will see in it. Now, the Western approach is too impatient.
It'll say, all right, yeah, it was tense with my dad. I know that.
I'll go, hang on, hang on, hang on. That's an Enzo of its own.
It was tense with my dad. You could meditate around that for an hour a day or an hour a week or whatever it is.
You can keep coming back to that. It's never, there are so many things still to be discovered there.
It's not dead. And so I think I'd almost want to excite those who are listening to think, okay, I think I know something.
Do I really know it? Might I go back there? Our real experiences tend to be so much richer than our workaday sense of them. Think about a holiday, right? So have you ever been to Greece? Oh, yeah, I went to Greece.
All right, have you been to Santorini? Yeah, I've been to Santorini. Okay.
So we think we covered that one. The person's been to Santorini.
Hang on. First of all, our minds are amazing mechanisms of capture.
You know, we've got cameras around, sound equipment, etc. Nothing beats the human mind for capturing absolutely everything.
um often the time to explore this is is sort of twilight um your mind as you're going to sleep

waking up if you say to yourself yeah santorini what was that like what was it what was it really like and you realize oh my god i remember there was a tiled hallway that led to a blue door i actually remember there was a flower in a little vase and there was light coming in from i think it it must have been from the left. And actually, if I look to the right, there was a little window, et cetera.
And it's all there. It's all in your mind.
Just waiting to be asked, waiting. This is the famous, can I talk about Proust? Marcel Proust, great French novelist, early 20th century, et cetera, came up with this famous idea of the Proustian moment.
Some of you will know it, some of you won't. It's basically a moment when you take something sensory, like a sip of water or a smell.
Imagine the smell of concrete after rain or the smell of snow just after a snowfall, et cetera. And suddenly you get that sensory experience and a world opens up.

You think, oh my God, I'm five years old again and I've just gone outside of the garden,

of the yard where I grew up and there was a brick wall and there was that exact smell

and I'm there again.

And suddenly your world becomes so much richer.

And these are just little moments of expansion around a topic like after a snowfall or first air spring or Santorini or whatever it is. So in other words, many of the things that are in our minds in intellectually compressed forms can be expanded with the addition of, I mean, you know, the sort of fancy trendy modern word is meditation.
But, you know, some people don't get on with the word meditation. Let's just say by giving it some time, by allowing an experience to assume its proper shape.
And we do rush past our experiences. Things are very compressed.
And that's why at the end of an average day, my goodness, how much we've seen, how much we've felt, how many little things, cross-consciousness. If we were able to give some of that space, how much lighter we would start to feel.
But we live so much and we experience so little. We see so much and we notice so little.
What would you say to the obsessive person who wants to learn to let go a little more?

A lot of what I see in the circles that I move in is a need for control, a desire to limit down the potential paths that the future could go down to sort of constrain how unpredictable reality could be. and i think the optimization life hacking productivity world is very much a part of

this plus a denial of death if i can fit more life into less time, then maybe it's kind of like living longer. But yeah, that need to control, that obsessive sort of requirement to be able to wrangle reality as you wish.
Can people learn to take their hands off the wheel a little bit more easily? Well, I think the simple answer is that these people are running away from something which is painful and difficult, et cetera, and they're not allowing themselves to think about it. They're not even allowing it inside consciousness.
So think of mania. you know but when we say so-and-so is in a manic mood or so-and-so is doing something manically, what we really mean is that they're doing something in order not to do something else, normally not think about something or feel something.
And we all end up in certain points in manic states where we're scrubbing the kitchen just a little bit too assiduously, or we're jogging a bit too hard, or we're scrolling our phones a bit too much. And really, the question to ask ourselves at that time is a very simple one, which is, if you weren't able to do what you're doing now, what might you need to think about or to feel? And the answer's there waiting for you, if you can bear.
It could be a very, very awkward question to ask yourself. In other words, if you weren't able to clean the kitchen manically or go jogging, et cetera, but you just sit with something, what do you need to sit with? The old saying, don't just sit there, do something.
Don't just sit there and think, do something. Well, imagine, you know, don't just do something.
Sit there and think, reverse it. You reverse it.
And what is it that you need to think about? Yeah. Yeah.
The coping mechanisms that we have and the inventive ways that we come up with alchemizing and justifying. Well, a lot of the time people will say it's better to be addicted to the gym than be addicted to drugs i don't think that's a particularly controversial yeah if that's if that's the binary choice yes of course um but then i realized recently but maybe over the last year i spent a lot of time meditating toward the end of my 20s and i'm trying to turn myself out of the adult infant into maybe an adult adolescent.

And most people would look at meditation,

you know, sort of an emotion arises inside of you,

you notice it, you release and allow.

Like that's, you know, a common sort of tempo that you have.

Brilliant.

You know, you are no longer as at the mercy

of this particular emotion.

But it was only when I started doing therapy, as first ever suggested by Charlotte, one of your ex-staff from your school of life. It was only after doing quite a lot of that that I realized that even meditation or maybe breath work or going to the gym or whatever it might be, is still another way of not having to actually investigate where that emotion has come from yeah and meditation particularly or something more like breath work perhaps is a not nefarious but it's a very it's it's so close it's internal it feels sort of self-investigative uh it's mindful this is brilliant you go yeah but that is going to continue is going to continue to come up.
And you now have a coping strategy. It's not drugs.
It's not even as obvious as you running 50 miles a week. But there is another strategy which is not forcing you to turn the eye back down to where's this coming from and why does it keep on arising? And if you have this very good strategy to release these things as they move through you, that cycle will continue.
And I think that those emotions are worthy of investigation. So Chris, how do you define therapy or how do you define what therapy might bring you that's a bit different from meditation? I mean, I did twice a week psychotherapy for the last year or so um and it was i've said this before it i learned more about myself in a year of twice weekly psychotherapy than i did in 1500 sessions of meditation and if you could characterize what what was different but how therapy operates.
You have another party investigating your statements, the language that you use. I use the analogy that it felt like living in a house your entire life and then one day just inviting somebody else in.
Yeah. And they're walking around and they start pointing out doors in a house that you know intimately well, every inch.
And they start pointing out doors that you never even knew existed. And you go, what's that? And you go, oh.
And you open the door and you realize that the back of the kitchen actually leads into, I always wondered how those two things came together. And it's this sort of odd, it's very humbling.
I found it very humbling experience to see somebody else who knows me for a hundred hours point and say, what about that? But I think one has to be really, I mean, that's a beautiful way of putting it. One has to be totally relaxed about that and just say, in the same way that you can't see the back of your head.
It's just one of those things. It's not, you know, we can't see some very obvious things.
I mean, a therapist, a trained therapist can see within minutes things that have eluded someone for their whole life. Very humbling.
Very humbling. But someone can do it for the therapist as well.
Everybody is like this. That's how we're wired.
And the best thing to do is laugh. It's funny.
I mean, it's funny how inept we are. But as everybody's in on the joke, we can laugh together.
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To get all of this, that's drinklmnt.com slash modernwis modern wisdom you said uh talking about the emotion thing just from before and i think that this sort of comes into when you're regulating opening up with someone whether it be a therapist a friend a partner or whatever the sort of need for uh comfort and reassuring kindness look you can say these things yeah i'm not running away yeah i don't find you despicable. It's actually kind of interesting.
Maybe it's charming for you to do this. I mean, this is really very much at the core of what we could understand by the word love.
Think of it in childhood, a loving parent, right? The child, the young child gets an experience that who they really are is acceptable to someone else. So, you know, little child will go, I hate the teacher.
And the parent, you know, good parent is able to bear that, even though it's not perfect. The parent is able to go, oh, okay, well, wonder why, what's, you know, why, why they upset you? Sounds like they might have upset you.
Rather than someone who go, don't be so silly. The teacher's the teacher, and they work very hard to give you an education, so don't complain.
Wow. That's a tough comment.
Your emotion is not valid. Your emotion is not valid.
I mean, parents do their best, but goodness me, stuff happens in that crucible of childhood that is a bit suboptimal. But love, come back to love, what love is, is accepting.
I don't want to see granny. Okay, you don't want to see granny.
All right. Or I really love you.
Or I really hate my sibling. Or I really like the dog.
Or I want to live forever. All the stuff that little children come up with.
Or I'm terrified of daddy, actually. I don't like daddy.
Oh, okay. Well, let's think about that.
What does that mean? So being able to accept. And then in later life, again, having someone, it could be a therapist, it could be a friend, who is able to bear the really difficult bits of our psyches, which we all have.
I mean, we're all so much weirder than we're supposed to be, so much sadder, so much more worried, etc.

And to be able to have someone, you know, it might only be one person or two if we're really lucky and three if we're, you know, God's gift, who can bear and who we've allowed into that sort of private sanctum. That was one of the realizations that Charlotte first taught me.
And then I learned through my therapy over the last year, one of the very unique parts of a therapeutic relationship is that you're allowed to be as small or boring or petty as you want. And those are areas that with a friend or a partner, it's really difficult to do because you're managing optics in some way.
You're thinking, well, it's my job to kind of entertain this person, even if they're there to sort of sit and listen with me. Like, not that.
Not the fact that the way that the lady in the canteen ladled my beans today seemed a little bit disparaging or dismissive or something. And like, oh my God, how shameful for me to think that that's something that should play on my mind i'm so small i you know the story i tell the second third fourth order emotions come in and um that is one of the very few it's that and your mum a kind of not even your mum because most as you say most relations it was all relationships you have to manage and you have to curtail the fear of being abandoned you know if you if honest.
This again, the canteen lady and the beans again, this is the third time in two months. Think of how this plays out in couples, right? So people come together because they're fed up with being lonely, right? It's lonely.
So you try and find a special person and we dignify this concept by saying, I'm in a relationship, I'm a special friend, I'm getting married, et cetera. We've got these words.
But really what this means is, I'm no longer so alone in a terrifying world. So you have a special person.
And in the early days of love, it's thrilling that you can say stuff that you wouldn't say to anyone else. And it's so delightful.
You can say things like, I still long for my teddy bear. And they go, I long for them too.
And then, you know, you hug to the teddy bear. And it's so amazing because, you know, you're the CEO and, you know, you're an important lawyer, doctor, banker.
And actually you're clutching your teddy bear and it's amazing. Or you can go, I really want to put, you know, mayonnaise on the pizza.
And that's great. And then, you know, you push it further and then you go, I'm going to go to a museum, but I don't like any of the art.
I don't like it either. Or I've never read that book, but I always pretended I did.
And it's just thrilling. And then sex gets invited and you go, I like this strange sounding thing.
And they go, I like it too. I like this other thing, etc.
And you're building a wonderful universe. but um you know this is the the challenging thing about love because you know let's imagine you're

with this person and you shared all all this stuff, et cetera.

And then you go to a cafe, say, and you say, the waiter's hot.

And then you look at their face and they look really quite heartbroken that you've just commented on the visual appeal of the waiting staff.

And they feel hurt and they feel jealous and they feel upset.

And suddenly you think, oh, my goodness, there's a choice here between kindness and honesty. And I think that's what we're circling around, which is, can you be, at what moment does honesty run up against the limits of kindness or the requirements of kindness? I think what you're saying about therapy is you don't have to be kind to the therapist because it's a 50-minute session, you're giving them money.
And do you have people go, oh, it's a bore that you're giving the money. Well, you know, Freud thought long and hard about this, about the role of money in therapy.
And his view was it's an agent of liberation. It's a good thing if you can pay the therapist.
And that's why you want people to bring cash and leave the cash on the table at the end of every session. Nowadays, you might put your card on.
But the point is, it's a way of saying, I can be fully myself because I've earned this person's attention. Some people go, but they don't really love you, et cetera.
And you go, maybe they don't really love you, but that's a liberation. Correct.
There's no obligation. No obligation.
Just lingering on that balance between transparency, emotional openness, and you said kindness, but I think that there's other reasons to add it too. Is there a place for editing yourself in a relationship? Should we not be open, honestly communicating all the time? This is how I feel.
You want to see the inner texture of my mind, don't you? I mean, you're putting your finger on a big paradox. I think the idea that you should be yourself in a relationship is one of the most disastrous ideas because the untrammeled self is a frightening specter, best kept for you and your therapist, you and the mirror.
If you have to confront your partner with your stream of consciousness at all times, you can't do this. Parents don't do this with their children.
Obviously, our partners are not children, but it's telling us something about love. In a loving relationship, at points, you edit yourself.
You know, it's 11 at night. I'm not going to bring that issue up.
They're very tired. I'm not going to bring that up.
I'm feeling stressed and raw. I'm not going to start a subject that I won't know how to handle, et cetera.
Now, all of us fail at points. All of us fail in this area.
But I think as an ideal, it's a good ideal. I mean, I could stick up for a word which sounds very odd in the context of love, politeness.
You know, it's a good idea to try and be polite. I'm like, oh, that's fake, that's fake.
Well, it's also kind, you know, to edit yourself, to put a veneer of civilization on certain things. Yeah, why not? There's a very slippery slope with that, though.
A lot of people, especially if they have started doing therapies and self-inquiry, some emotional work, think, God, like, I should push the amount that I'm emotionally open. I should improve my transparency for so long.
I'd played a role. I was terrified of making my needs known, my desires, putting myself first, realizing that I even have needs and putting those out there.
And now there's these odd bits of territory that I shouldn't stray into. What happens if I stray over there and the tendency for you to overcorrect and go in the other direction, Neil Strauss says, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.
Right. And, you know, we have this balance between the two.
Yeah. You're absolutely right.
There are some people who need to work on being more transparent, more communicative, and others who need to be less

technical word, I think, for it is reactive. You know, they're not, you shouldn't come out with whatever it is that you're feeling at all times in its full force.
It just depends. I mean, you know, that classic anxious avoidant attachment pattern, we might say that on the whole, avoidant people need to work on their communication skills, you know, and they need to be more be more transparent, and anxious people need on the whole to contain certain feelings.
And it's just horses for courses on this one. What would be your advice to people in the classic anxious-avoidant relationship, the two polarities coming together? Understand, understand, understand where each one's coming for.
I mean, why is someone an avoidant? They're not evil. They're not mean.
They're not, you know, it can be pretty horrible to be on the receiving end of certain kinds of pattern of behavior. But let's remember, why does this exist? Someone becomes avoidant when they've grown up in a calorie, emotional calorie control diet environment where they have had to get used to very little the way they survive is mom's not so interested dad's not there's a no caregiver around um a lot of disappointment i'm just gonna hunker down and get used to very little literally like a like an animal that gets used to a very thin diet um that is what has happened to an avoidant person um and then when they get to love and someone goes, I adore you.
Let's spend every evening together. You're marvellous.
They feel, but often they don't even understand that they're feeling it, totally engulfed. They feel overwhelmed.
They feel their very identity is in threat of dissolution by something that's lovely, but it's too much too soon. And what they need is an experience of love titrated.
They need the titration of love. But often they don't know how to ask for it.
They don't even know. Often they might smile through it and go, I'm not really feeling this.
And then they can't bear it. They can't bear it.
And then they run away or just become weird or something. So explanation.
Hello, I'm somebody who had to get used to a very calorie-controlled diet emotionally. I really feel warmly this relationship matters a lot to me.
But the kindest thing is not to be too kind to me in an overwhelming way. The most generous thing is not to be too abundant.
Not because I don't want this, but because I grew up in a situation of deprivation. So that's our avoidant friend.
Anxious friend, similar kind of story of explanation. Why do people become so-called anxious? Normally, because unlike the avoidant person, they have had an experience of love.
So in some ways, the anxious person's had a better childhood, better journey through life, in a way. They have experienced love, but they've also experienced loss and the disruption of that attachment.
So someone died, someone went away, someone had to go to the army, something happened to disrupt the bond. It was very intense, but it was disrupted.
And that person needs to understand that they are... There's a wonderful sentence from Donald Winnicott, a great psychoanalyst who said, the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.
And the key thing is it's been forgotten. You forgot the catastrophe.
And that's why you keep seeing it in the future, whereas actually it belongs in the past. So what you need to do is understand this structure and repatriate the emotion and put it back where it belongs.
And so the avoidant person at dinner, you know, on an early date needs to go, you know, I really want to believe in your love. But if you say you love me, I might not be able to believe it very easily.
And what I will do is test it. And the person might go, oh, test, oh, fine, fire away.
And the anxious person should go, yeah, this test is going to be quite unhealthy, quite horrible. It's going to mean that when you say, I love you, I'm going to start to act up because I want to see if you really do.
So I'm going to be really difficult around you, not because I don't want you, but because I want to test whether your affection is really real. And the only way I know how to do that, because I'm carrying this stuff from childhood, is to act up, play up.
And so when we're in a nice restaurant and you tell me that, you know, things are great, I'm going to say, actually, the food's not that nice. And I don't really like the clothes you're wearing, and I'm going to cause a drama.

Why? To test whether the love is real. Very unfortunate.
So the more the anxious friend can get on top of their anxiety, the more they can translate everything I've just said into something that sounds like it's been processed and can be understood by another person, then the better it can be. So, you know, anxious and avoidant people are walking wounded,

and they need to be able to explain the nature of their particular wound so that appropriate care can be uh set up awareness awareness which is why you know it's great for people to go to therapy it's great for people to explore themselves um it's not merely fancy. It's not really whatever.
It's a serious indicator of an easier life with them. I mean, if you're with a partner who's able to go, okay, hang on a minute.
I think I'm confusing you with my mother at the moment. Or I think an anger that actually belongs to my father is weirdly in the room, because that's what happens when you start to explore your past.
You see the intermingling of past and present all the time. And the more you're able to get a handle on that and warn your partner, the easier it is.
I mean, we don't need people to be perfect. We need people to understand how they're imperfect and warn us of the coming imperfection or retrospectively apologize for it in relatively civilized terms.
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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. How malleable are our attachment styles? Are the foundations of them able to genuinely be moved or is it a case that the best we can hope for is to just compensate for them in adult life?

I'm hopeful here that we can definitely make progress.

From wherever we start, we can make progress.

That a temperament where we're inclined to close ourselves off because we constantly think that no one will be able to understand us.

Once we start to think, okay, this is what I do. I feel very easily misunderstood and I go and essentially sulk.
Once you notice that, that's a big step. And we're so good at marking milestones.
It's somebody's birthday. Let's throw a party.
Somebody's just run a marathon. Let's give them a medal, et cetera.
We need different kinds of medals. The medal for the avoidant person who understood that they sulk rather than explain, dong, let's put them on television.
Let's give a game show in their honor. These are major milestones.
Let's give a party. Let's give a party to the person who's understood that that's going on.
To mark, there's much more significant than you know i mean which might not be tracking anything significant that's a significant milestone so we we should you know give more public within our circles public recognition of moments of emotional maturation and how much is that you know i think lots of people uh envy the other side if only i could have a little bit of a little bit more of that anxiousness if only i could actually lean in a little bit more if i could feel a little bit more easily if i could communicate or god if i could just be a little bit more distant if i didn't need the reassurance in this way if i didn't have this requirement to feel safe in order to be able to feel comfortable i wasn't externalizing my own sense of self-worth onto somebody else quite in this sort of a way uh yeah i think it's a question you know attachment styles are kind of the hot new girl in school psychological emotional work at the moment it's very trendy um it's been around a while in a good way and it's based on very solid science you know it's we we we we we we we

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we psychological emotional work at the moment it's very trendy um it's been around a while it has in a good way and it's based on very solid science you know it's we've been going at this for 50 years i looked at some really interesting stuff recently that um attachment styles like everything psychologically genetically predisposed not necessarily predetermined but predisposed and given that you are raised in the environment which is probably the uh breeding ground for that very predisposition it gets reinforced yeah so not only have you got the raw materials to make this thing happen but unless your parents have somehow managed to sort of pivot in the opposite direction you then get this additional boost which is oh well the environment uh nature came along and nurture then enhanced it. Yeah, it's interesting.
It's going to be interesting, I think, over the next few years to see what sort of interventions we have to be able to help people to ameliorate. Yes, and I think, not to try and sound trendy, but I think AI is going to have a real impact on us in a sense that so often what happens is we lose sight in the moment of things we know but are no longer in our minds.
And so people will have, let's say, a couple will have a rather torrid time, difficult time, and then each one goes to therapy in the week. And then they all come back and they're starting to, you know, they're back on track.
They can see things more clearly again, or they've spent some time alone, they've journaled, etc. I can imagine a world where we allow technology to nudge us.
In the same way that, you know, we've learned that technology can nudge us awake, nudge us to sleep, nudge us to eat this, nudge us, you know. You know, imagine a little nudge for an avoidant, a little nudge for an anxious person, et cetera.
A little reminder, hang on, hang on, hang on. You're slipping, you're sliding.
And psychotherapists talk about the window of tolerance, where it's a window in which you're in charge emotionally, or you're kind of in control, and you slip out of the window of tolerance into something you know you lose command of yourself and and you can imagine a little ai helper just nudging you to stay within the window yeah your attachment strap has piped up and said notice you're a little bit stressed at the moment this might be because of yes x y and z yes and you know it sounds supernatural and strange and you know a lot of people will say things like, oh, it's not, you know, I don't want to give my data, blah, blah, blah. Okay.
I grant all of that. And, you know, it could be spooky, et cetera.
It's no different from, think of people who got there first with religions. Religions understood that if you want to keep people on track, you've got to get them repeating stuff.
It's not enough to tell someone something once. You need rituals, systems of memorializing the important things.
That's why, you know, if you're an Islam, if you're Muslim, you know, you'll be praying multiple times a day. You'll be saying the same words because those words have, as it were, been forgotten, not intellectually, but emotionally.
Their full resonance has been forgotten. In Judaism, you're reading the Torah every Saturday.
In synagogue, you're reading the Torah, and you just go back over it. You don't just read it once.
You keep reading. You keep going back to the same important text.
We're very bad at that in the modern world. We think, oh, well, I read this book on attachment.
It was quite interesting, and now that's it. I know it now.
No, you don't. You need to go back.
You need to read it all the time. That's why the idea of nudging is not as strange as it might sound.
Not as futuristic. It's a very old idea that you might give new life to.
One of the most shameful or humbling realizations of going down a personal development journey for a while is that the tool that you're looking for to the problem you're encountering now is not only something that you know. It's one of the first things that you ever discovered when you began this journey.
It's maybe something you wrote about. It's maybe something that you practiced for a very long time.
And I often get asked, I was doing these live events recently, and one of the most common questions is, what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago? The interesting thing about that question, I think, is that the answer that you give, what you would tell yourself 10 years ago, is almost always invariably the answer that you right now need to hear as well. Because the big problems remain the big problems because they're so fundamental to who you are.
If they weren't fundamental to who you are, they would probably not be the big problems. if you were able to detox that it's it's the ancillary stuff it's the extraneous outsides that you end up tinkering with but the core you know the the middle of the cake is this chocolate is it strawberry uh that's really where it is and um yes to think not only is this challenge that i'm encountering i i you know to uh break the fourth wall i've used a number of videos from the school of life over the last decade when i've encountered the same situations like i already i i've not only have i watched this there's been periods where i've learned entire passages from this there's a little mantra that i can reflect I go, I'm going back to the same, but you're right, this temptation novel, new.
There is a better answer. We're five years hence.
There must be something that's come out in the last however long. And I guess this is what art and heritage history does, that it helps to sort of strip that away.
What's stood the test of time? What's been sufficiently lindy that it's still with us now? Yeah. You know, T.S.
Eliot in the Four Quartets says, you know, we return to the place where we started. It's the idea of that's kind of part of every journey as you come back to the place where you started.
It's the entire story of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, right? Right. Exactly.
And so, I noticed also when you were speaking just now, you have a smile on your lips. And that's not coincidental.
I think the more one journeys through life, the more there's really only one major solution, which is a smile on one's lips at the sheer, let's put it bluntly, idiocy. Absurdity.
Absurdity of oneself. At the School of Life, we did a class on confidence, and we wrote a little book about confidence.
Great book. And, thank you, and I remember sitting with my co-author, a great friend of mine called John Armstrong, and I said to John, because we started the topic, she's like, okay, what makes us confident? you know and we'd read a a few books, each of us on like bestselling books.
And they were saying things like, repeat yourself, how great you are, repeat yourself, your potential, get in touch with, you know, what's great. And I said, I've read all these books and I'm starting to feel humiliated.
I feel a bit depressed. Like, I know that, I know that it's kind of wise, but I don't know.
And then I remember John saying to me, okay, what makes you feel confident? And I said, if somebody goes, it's okay, you can just be a total idiot. It's all right.
You're a bit of an idiot. And it's okay.
Not you're an idiot, but we're all idiots. That makes me feel I'm ready to play.
I'm ready to have fun. I'm ready to take risks.
Remove the seriousness. Well, remove the inhuman expectation of what a human life can be.
Pressure. And accept that we're all of us blockheads who can't really make very much progress.
And, you know, there's a wonderful painting which we put in the book by Bruegel. The ship at sea.
Yeah, well, the ship of fools. And anyway, forget this exact title, but it's showing people doing mad things, silly things.
One person's eating his foot, the other one's walked into a wall, the third one's jumping off a cliff. And it just shows human folly in all its exaggeration.
And you think, yeah, that's us. That's we humans.
And that opens up such an avenue of compassion. You just think, okay, compassion for yourself, compassion for the other.
We're all flailing about in the darkness. And if we can have a relaxed relationship to our foolishness and our blindness, that's a huge confidence booster.
Yeah, I want to try and linger on that as well. I think, again, the sorts of

people that listen to the show, the sorts of people that read your work, they'll probably

take life seriously. They think it's a thing that you're supposed to apply earnest pressure to,

perhaps, a kind of sort of dynamic persistence, but maybe more persistent than dynamic.

What's your advice for people to try and embrace some more playfulness when it comes to life serious, serious things. I want to be taken seriously.
I want to do things. I want to make an impact in the world.
I don't want to grip too tightly. I know that when I grip too tightly, it kind of ruins the entire point.
Well, I think the way is not to say, oh, what you need is a bit, you know, lighten up and tell a few jokes, because I think that's going to rile people up. I think the thing to do is to push some pessimism their way, because it's actually, if you think about what a joke is, a joke is always basically a bit of pessimism, wrapped up in, you know, artfully wrapped, but it's basically pessimism.
One of my favourite sayings by the Stoic philosopher Seneca,

he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears.

And everyone who hears that sort of gets a smile on their face. And you think, the guy wasn't

trying to tell a joke. He wasn't trying to make it funny.
He was just trying to be bleak and say

how it is. And then it makes a smile out of relief.
And the relief is,

phew, it's not just me. Arthur Schopenhauer, another great pessimistic German philosopher,

said, today it is bad, tomorrow it will be worse until the worst of all happens.

Death. You know, totally bleak.
And you read that and you think,

I feel a bit better about today already. I'm starting to cheer up.
I think we really get

Thank you. you know, totally bleak.
And you read that and you think, I feel a bit better about today already. I'm starting to cheer up.
I think we really get it wrong, but we think the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. I think the Brits have understood this, you know, right? This country's got lots of problems, but one thing it understands is melancholy and the the relief in dark humor.
And bless our American friends, but they don't get it as much. If you pitch up in LA and someone goes, how are you? And you go, it's bad today, tomorrow it will be worse.
The worst of all happens. I don't have you sectioned.
Your life in Los Angeles is not going to take off you know what I mean yeah I've heard you refer to melancholy as tragedy well handled absolutely tragedy well handled I I adore that I think it's so great you know Sam Harris has something he says something very similar you know you have to smile at the absurdity of life these situations just, just as things were smooth, something comes along and completely sideswipes what you had planned. Yeah.
And an interesting insight, I suppose, that the volume that you complain is probably proportional to the amount that you're enabled to see life for what it is, which is not at your whim. Life is going to have problems thrown at you.
Yeah, but Chris, let's not do down complaining. I mean, it's one of the great pleasures.
It's one of Britain's great pastimes. Well, you know, it's one of everybody, you know, and being able to complain to a loved one, and you'll have to listen to their complaints too, but to complain without expectation of a solution.
I mean, the big complaint that every mortal directs to the sky ultimately is, why do I have to die? And then you work your way down from that to, why do I have to go to work? All these things. But yes, life would be a poor thing if we weren't allowed to spend a good deal part of it complaining.
I've heard you say that adult relationships are a litmus test of our emotional development, that they're a moment where your past catches up with your present. How so? Why is that the case? So the way we love as adults always bears the imprint of the way which we were loved and we loved as children.
And that hugely restricts how we're able to behave and explains the very peculiar, often nonsensical, often counterproductive ways in which we love. We're not free to love just anyone.
And this, you know, I'm sure you'll have had this in your life, met people, et cetera, who will say things like, seem to have ended up with quite a difficult person for me. You know, they're quite challenging for me.
Why can't I go and love somebody else? Why am I so in love with this person who's quite challenging? And often it's because what's challenging sits on the very area that was challenging in your past. And that's what makes them attractive.
Now, before we want to jump off a cliff at the pessimism involved, let's be a little optimistic here. In a good relationship, we are drawn towards people who, yes, carry some of the puzzles, some of the knots, some of the challenges of a parental figure or figure of a caregiver.
But they hold out the promise of a different ending. So whereas in the relationship with parent or caregiver, it ended up with shouting and you stormed out of the house and you're no longer in touch with them.
Imagine the joy, imagine the sense of triumph over adversity and human non-communication if you are together as a couple able to move towards understanding and mutual growth. I think that explains why people hang in there with people who you might think, you know, from attachment theory, an anxious person who teams up with an avoidant one.
You might want to go, why? Why are you with this avoidant person? Look at this other, I'm going to present you with a perfectly securely attached person. And you go, oh, they're a bit boring.
Don't really want them. You think, why? What's going on? It's just pure perversion.
Let's be generous towards that impulse. They're trying to find a different ending to probably a very painful early situation.
And to be able to do that, to be able to grow together, is literally, I think, one of the most exciting and lovely things. It's rare, which is why successful love is rare.
But to grow together away from your early attachment wounds powers a lot of the ambition of love. We'll get back to talking to Alain in one minute, but first I need to tell you about function.
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Seems like deciding whether to stay in or leave a relationship can sometimes be a protracted decision uh which might be surprising given that we have the short time on earth and and we don't want to waste it i think a lot of people have problems breaking up with someone even though they they might not make them particularly very happy yeah why do people get stuck in unhappy relationships in that way? Hmm.

There are… not make them particularly very happy. Why do people get stuck in unhappy relationships in that way? I think the mood of the modern world, the mood of modern Instagram, I've observed, is all about ditch them, chuck them, run away.
It's pure pathology. You are sticking around someone suboptimal for purely pathological reasons.
That's got to be true in some cases. It is definitely true in some cases.
But because it's so well known nowadays that that's true, let's stick up for the other side. Sometimes we stick around very challenging situations because we want to try and grow together.
We want to try and

make progress. And sometimes we can, sometimes we can't.
So, you know, it's a balance. I don't

want to advocate an endlessly unfulfilling relationship, but good relationships will be

marked by a heavy dose of what psychotherapists call rupture and repair, a break and a repair. And the ability to, you know, the thing crashes at night, but the next morning it's fixed.
You know, our friends in the East, you know, the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi fixing that bowl with golden lacquer, fixing the break. It's a very, very important and satisfying part of all relationships.
Yeah. Yeah.
What about the people who are in a relationship but don't have the courage to leave? They probably have this – they feel stuck, sort of stuck in this unsatisfactory, not abusive, not terrible, but just they have that fear, pulling the pen, making that move. You talked about primary, secondary emotions.
Let's not shame these people. Let's not add to their woes that they are deficient and ill in some way.
They're finding something very hard, and that's okay. Let's bear with how difficult it is.
You know, again, I'm frustrated by the modern temper, which is like, get out, shoot the awful person, you know, and join the liberated uplands. Maybe, maybe, and maybe that is what they're going to do.
But, you know, let's be very thoughtful about why they've ended up there. Let's not, you know, this might just be, they might find a hundred things in life quite easy.
This is what they're finding difficult. And let's acknowledge that.
Let's be very kind to that. And let's hold their hands through it.
You know, why? What's difficult for them? Is it that they think that they'll be judged by other people? What's the fear? What's the fear? I'll be judged by the people. Okay, how does that fear stack up with what might really happen? Or I'll never meet anyone new.
Okay, let's think about that. Let's not immediately say, oh, you will.
Maybe they won't. know let's take it calmly etc i just i'm really resistant to some of this narrative which is you know get out get rid of the awful underperforming people and get into that golden relationship that's been promised to you in heaven it's not you know that may be the direction of travel but let's just acknowledge the bumps yeah i think it's unrealistic you know there's a lot of people who just don't want to make a fuss that there's this sort of fear this question is it fair to want what i want you mentioned before how do people that from the outside you go why why her with him why him with her why why would that union happen and um we don't get to choose what we love in many ways.
Absolutely not. We think we've done away with the arranged marriage.
No, we haven't. It's just become an emotionally arranged marriage, internally arranged rather than arranged by our parents.
Yeah, I think, again, for the cerebrally predisposed, you kind of rail against that.

Why can't I?

If only I could, can you not get in line with you?

Please, all of the things, they're there in front of me.

They have the, and we get literally irritated.

And just to be able to understand, it's like saying, you know, why can't Mount Everest be smaller?

Why can't the sky be less blue? Whatever. We're trying to change a constituent element of reality.
And I think we need to have as much respect for the inner architecture as we do for the outer architecture. You wouldn't look at a building and go, I just want to get rid of that wing immediately.
You'd understand that it was incredibly difficult. It's the same thing.
Just because it's intangible doesn't mean it's not incredibly stubborn and it's hard to change. Do we need to build or create the capacity to give up on people in that way? Does that help? Yes, I think some of us do.
Again, life's all about finding what's the lesson that you need to hear. So there are some people, not everyone, but some people really need to hear a little lesson about how sometimes they should give up on people, that sometimes making excuses for people or trying to understand where people are coming from, et cetera, it can go too far, that those very nice traits can go too far, and that the next best thing that you need to do is to be able to say goodbye without too much regret.
That might be the lesson that you need to do. And let's remember, the people who, on the whole, find it very hard to give up on people are people who couldn't give up, as children can't, on parents who are very unsatisfactory.
You can't expect a five-year-old child to give up on a parent. So a parent can be beating the child every night

and the child will think,

oh, maybe it's my fault

because the child cannot bear

to give up on the parent

and do the thing that would be natural to do,

which is to say,

I'm in the hands of an abusive parent.

You can't do that when you're five.

You've got no access to lawyers.

You've got no money.

You can't go anywhere.

You are trapped.

And therefore you become a world expert

in not giving up on people. But some of what adulthood requires is precisely the opposite, sometimes.
Getting perilously close to people-pleasing here, and that sort of tendency to put other people's emotions ahead of our own, make their emotional state our responsibility. If you're not okay okay i'm not okay how how can we better alchemize that and understand that that tendency i mean look let's remember so the psychology of the so-called people pleasing person is someone who no one tried to please for themselves right in other words they were in an asymmetrical with a caregiver or parent, who didn't care about their feelings, didn't prioritize their needs, etc.
And they had to adjust to them. So if you've got a parent with a volcanic temper, where anything might set them off, well, what you say or think is going to disappear completely, because all you're going to be doing as a child is managing the mood of a parent.

They will be an infant, essentially, and you will have to be in the parenting role and you'll have to put aside your needs.

And children are great geniuses at reading the room and doing what needs to be done to survive.

It's a survival strategy.

I will become a people pleaser, not in order to annoy people in later life, but in order to survive, in order to get to the next stage of existence, in order to reach adolescence, let's face it.

Thank you. strategy.
I will become a people pleaser, not in order to annoy people in later life, but in order to survive, in order to get to the next stage of existence, in order to reach adolescence, let's face it. And the problem in this, as in so many other neurotic structures, is a very good idea outlives its use.
And so it's still operating in circumstances where it's no longer needed. So what we need to tell, what the people pleaser needs to tell themselves is, it was amazing at the age of five, I cleverly worked out that I needed to people please in order to cope with my

intemperate father. But that situation is now gone.
And if I keep doing this with my partner,

with my colleagues, etc, it's going to annoy everybody and it's going to create serious

problems. So what needs to be done is that person shouldn't feel shamed.
They should be made to feel proud. There should be a little ceremony where they're able to say to their five-year-old self, thank you.
Thank you, little whatever it is. Thank you for carrying me to a later stage and working out something so clever.
And this applies for all defensive neurotic structures. I mean, let's imagine somebody who can't feel very much, who's invulnerable, doesn't open themselves up to other people.
And in relationships, that person may be shamed. Oh, so-and-so, they're afraid of intimacy.
You want to go, okay, shaming this person's not going to help. You have to ask another question, which is, in what circumstances did their current behavior make sense? First question.
And it always will make sense. You go back in time and you say, right, in those circumstances, of course it may.
Your father was dying. Your mother was absent.
Of course it made sense not to feel anything. You would have been destroyed by your feelings.
Therefore, very clever, five-year, six-year-old, you to work out that it's best not to feel. Problem is you're now 35 or 45, and there's lots of reason to feel because there's someone loving nearby or you've got children or whatever.
And therefore, we need

to say thank you to the younger self, and then we can move on. But shame is not going to do it.

To wag a finger and go, oh, another one who's afraid of intimacy. No one ever changed like that.

Yeah, the realization that doing that internally, being a tyrant to yourself also isn't necessarily the best way to encourage you into behavior change, whipping yourself into submission.

Yeah.

It's missing the logic of why you're doing what you're doing.

As I say, so much of what we do as adults makes no sense even to us.

Why am I worried every morning? Again, ask yourself the question. It's a key question for your viewers, listeners.
When did the current behavior, which now doesn't seem to make sense, when did it once make sense? In what circumstances did this pattern develop, this pattern that is now, inverted commas, mad or destructive or boring or counterproductive, When did it make sense? And if you can start to see a logic, and there always will be one, I would suggest, almost always will be one. There will be a moment when to feel anxious every morning was bound up with your safety and your survival to the next stage of life.
So if you can recover contact with what that stage was, you will then be in a position to honor the defensive strategy, but also say goodbye to it.

What are some of the best and worst ways to tell somebody that it's over in a relationship? one of the worst ways is not to explain at all why something has come to feel necessary in other

words just running away and leaving someone no sense, because that then leaves the person to imagine everything. And most of our imaginations are dark places in this regard.
In other words, we think that someone hates us boundlessly or is trying to humiliate us or deliberately wants to be cruel to us, etc. And in many, many cases, I venture to say most cases, when someone leaves someone, it isn't those things.
The truth is better than we think. It's still tough.
It's very, very tough. Those attachment ruptures in everyone's life, they're some of the most painful things we will ever have to go through to build a life with someone and then see that life disappear.
I mean, we need space to mourn. You know, in Judaism, when someone dies, you lose a spouse, you're allowed a year of mourning.
You wear black and you're allowed a year of mourning where not too much is expected of you both professionally and personally you can go a bit mad and that's all right everyone looks after you they know you're in mourning we kind of need that when we're heartbroken when we're serious because we're dealing with something that is from an emotional point of view as serious this is as serious um as as i mean this literally is a lot someone has died you know has died. And so we need that space.
So to come back to your question, how to break up, to be able to explain diplomatically, kindly, generously, some of the real reasons why. And as the person who's leaving, not to feel that those reasons, not to be ashamed of

those reasons. You know, people feel relationships don't have to go on forever.
Sometimes relationships have a sell-by date. They are there.
They were formed for a particular purpose, unconscious, to carry us to a next stage. And maybe that stage has come to an end for someone.
And we can explain that. We can try and verbalize that.
But also clarity. And sometimes people try to be kind in ways that end up being very, very cruel.
I want to leave you, but let's go on holiday together. Is that a wise thing? Or I want to leave you, but let's be in touch every day'll just still call you what i used to call you you know when we were very intimate that's tough that's tough so we we may you know couples may out of kindness out of mutual respect go you know there's still a lot of love a lot of affection but probably we shouldn't be in touch that much for a little while you think it's a bad idea for exes to try and be friends um look it depends but i think i think you know there needs to be healing doesn't there needs to be um a break that's marked and honored so that two people can um recover how do you come to think about the balance between fixing our patterns investigating them and and dwelling on.
It seems like a lot of criticism is thrown at sort of reflecting on our past as akin to indulging in it in a way, not allowing us to move forward. This is a common debate that I'm seeing online at the moment.
Yes, and people I think are very afraid about responsibility here, aren't they? They're very afraid that someone will go, sorry i did that thing but the thing is it's my childhood and that's why you know and the people will evade um basic responsibility so i think one can take full responsibility full ownership while still explaining it people also very worried about blaming parents often that's another one that comes up a lot you know people will go start to investigate patterns, et cetera, the only solution is then to get angry with my parents. Well, again, there's a real, people are lied.
It was like anger, blame, et cetera. You can say this happened because of childhood dynamics.
No one really wanted it. Maybe no one's evil, but it definitely happened.
And we can't evade that. Isade that.
You know, is the result anger or fury? It doesn't have to be. Sometimes it could be.
Yeah. So, look, so many of these lessons, it's horses for courses.
Broad strokes are very difficult with stuff like this. I understand that.
But yeah, I think dealing with an unhappy childhood, retrospectively not resenting things that happened to us then, and we're now at the mercy of wanting to be able to investigate why we are the way we are whilst not allowing that to define us. I don't know, there's an interesting movement at the moment, almost towards denial.
The horseshoe was horseshoed back around it. It's been rotated a couple of times.
And I wonder whether this is just a requisite pushback to some of the over pathologization of normal human emotions, the use of therapy language online, that somebody hasn't been mean to me that caused me trauma that that person isn't selfish they're a narcissist exactly and um yeah i i'm starting to see now a little bit more of a lean away from reflecting on why you are the way you are uh and again it's very much this is just one cohort of people saying that cohort of people over there their strategy doesn't work for me and vice versa yeah um look i mean we're a car that needs different gears you know sometimes we need to go forward sometimes you go backwards we need to turn right we turn left we we need full maneuverability right and i think when people discover an exciting idea the great tendency is to go well this toolkit will explain absolutely, and this will be the only thing I need. And this is why we need the whole history of ideas.
This is why Well-Stocked Mind has got in it some books on the Stoics, as it were, some ideas from the Stoics, some ideas about resilience and about shutting down emotion and about turning towards pain and all that. We need that.
Sometimes we need an aristocratic side. We might have read Nietzsche and his aristocratic sense of, you know, needing to overcome and, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, et cetera.
Sometimes we need Nietzsche. But if you're only dieting on Nietzsche, you may also need, you know, John Bowlby and attachment theory.
But if you're only snacking on John Bowlby, it was it. So we need a well-stocked mind.
And I think that, as I say, I appreciate that people fall so in love with certain ideas that they think that's all they're going to need. It's monotheism, only one God.
And the great thing about paganism, you know, ancient Roman or Greek religion, but, you know, it's finally in India too, and other parts of the world. There were many gods.
There was the god of the river, but there was also the god of the sky. And there was the god of the cloud.
And there was the god of rain. And there was the god of sunshine.
Many, many gods. And we need many gods.
And just as in our social lives, let's remember, you know, total monotheism doesn't, you know, it's like, I need one lover and they will answer all my needs. Ah, that's quite tough on the lover.
You may also need a friend who's brilliant at that thing, and there's a friend who's also good at this. So we need a paganism of ideas.
Yeah. My friend Gwinda has this idea called the golden hammer.
When someone, usually an intellectual who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept becomes so drunk with power, he thinks he can apply that concept to everything. Exactly.
Exactly. We think it's the hammer that… The one size fits all.
Yeah, and this is everything looks like a nail that slots into your very specific, very fancy, gilded piece of work. Yeah.
Look, but, you know, we can forgive it's it's very exciting when you come across an idea

that you think it's and does explain a lot of the world i mean this is what happens when people discover marxism they go my goodness this model explains everything and then no it's really good to explain certain things and then they discover freudianism it explains everything no you know go study we need multiple tools i wonder whether this helps to constrain some of the complexity of the world as well. But if I have one book, if it's meditations or if it's some ancient Chinese text, if we're looking at some Lao Tzu or something, and you think, well, that one thing answers everything.
I don't need to look elsewhere. And the problem is that we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity.
So the battlefield is stacked somewhat. The deck is offset against our favor.
And if we can constrain down the complexity that we're fighting with, we say, well, we've got this one person and he's got all of the answers. One guy all of the answers why i don't necessarily and you know we see it in religion we see it in politics one person has got every you know it's got everything and and it can't be true but you're right i mean we're drowning in inputs and that leads us to a certain kind of um yeah remorseless quest for the one input.
And I remember, I remember there was a book, there's a line saying something like, all of us are going to die with a book half read on our bedside. It might not literally be true, but there's capturing something important there, that our exploration will be unfinished.
It's quite daunting. It's a very sad thought.

You know, that we won't...

And of course,

the book that we really won't have finished reading

is the book of ourselves.

We won't have understood

more than a share of ourselves.

That's very frightening.

We'll have, you know,

on an average gravestone,

it should say, you know,

here lies...

You know, who half understood who they were.

They only half understood. That's very weird.
You're on your deathbed, and you don't really know who you have been. Was it Goethe on his deathbed pronounced, nobody really knows me.
I don't really know anybody else. Nobody knows anyone, really.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that kind of despair. Surrounded by by friends and family what a way to cut and call see you later on yeah speaking on that do you think it's inevitable for deep thinkers to be more lonely is the the deep or sensitive thinker kind of fated to have a bit of distance you know it's a ticklish topic isn't it because to say um you know i'm not doing so well in life i'm a bit isolated from things because i'm so marvelous you know you could go come on you know um however let's face it um you know look it's like imagine imagine you had a very sophisticated diet and you walk through you you know, we're in London now, you walk through every street of London.
There would be fewer restaurants and eating places and supermarkets that you could go into to get the food that you need because your dietary needs will be quite complicated. There's a version of this around sociability.
If you only need to talk about certain things, if you are, I don't know, let's imagine you're Brian Cox. I don't know Brian Cox personally.
And you really just really love interplanetary phenomena. You're not going to meet that many people who will really be able to meet you on those topics.
I mean, or even be that interested. They might go, oh, Brian, I loved your show.
Enough with the black holes, mate. Enough with the black holes.
And so he might find himself a little bit lonely. I mean, who knows about his life? I'm sure he's, you know.
He used to be a rock star. You know that? Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool.
Or imagine if you are, I don't know, imagine if you were Freud. And Freud was, you know, he had some collaborators, but he also fell out with a lot of them and didn't get on with lots of people.
So one might argue that complexity of mind militates against easily finding… Fewer people like you. I would say that's fair enough yeah that's fair enough yeah i we mentioned we sort of touched on it earlier on i think it's maybe worth just revisiting a little bit trying to the deeper thinker the more serious person the earnest person how can they find more fun inject a little bit less of that uh loneliness in they're in an area where maybe people don't resonate quite so much they don't have quite so so many of the conversations that they can answer a slightly different question i'm just because look i think it's really important to think that the deep thinker, the earnest person, etc., I don't want to suggest that there are these people called geniuses wandering around the world, and they're so different from everybody else.
I love this quote from Emerson where he says, In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. So key.
In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. I think what he was saying there was, geniuses don't have thoughts that are categorically different from the ones everybody has.
What's different is they hold onto them. They look at them.
They feel them. You could say in the minds of artists lie feelings that lie our own neglected feelings.
In other words, artists, geniuses, et cetera, they're just paying more attention to the stuff that's in everybody's mind. It's not that their stuff in their mind is completely, radically different, which is why often when you hear a great song or a great piece of poetry or whatever, or read a great book, sometimes you think, I kind of knew that that was already in me, that I'm merely being put back in touch with something that's in me already.
Because what the so-called clever person has done is just pay more attention. So let's not deify these people.
And let's also open up, quickest way to become a genius, pay more attention to your own neglected thoughts. I'm interested, you know, having followed your work for a very, very long time, and it's been one of the most reliably influential things, I think, on my intellectual journey.
So I want to thank you for parasocially guiding me through an awful lot of situations. I'd like to say that I remind myself of your work when things are good, but it does tend to be the sort of thing that I go to when I need a little bit more guidance.
But I'm interested in what drives you, the sort of primary motivating forces that are behind your studies and sort of thinking over the years. So it's brutally and horribly simple just to help me get through the day.
It is extremely personal and motivated entirely by a desire for self-help, if it helps anybody else. I mean, people sometimes say things like, gosh, you must have studied a lot um how did you know that about me i'm like frankly i have no clue it's just i was just doing my stuff and it's beautiful and lovely that it should echo in somebody else but that's not how i started it started always with me um and you know i became a writer i wrote my first book when I was 22 and it was not, you know, it became a writer.
I wrote my first book when I was 22. And it was not, you know, it grew out of writing a diary.
It grew out of trying to solve my own confusions. It was a way of trying to stay afloat emotionally, psychically.
and it had nothing to do with a career in that sense. Later on became some of the accoutrements of a career.

But as I say, it began and it still is to do with a career in that sense. Later on became some of the accoutrements of a career.
But as I say, it began, and it still is to this day, an emotional necessity, I would say. It's a way of coping.
I'm an intellectual, not a sort of fancy, fancy thing, but I'm an intellectual in the sense that I intellectualize pain. If something horrible happens, my immediate impulse is not to jog or drink or do all sorts of things people do, but it's to try and think about, well, what is this thing? What lesson is there here? And that lesson is being fished out for me.
If it helps anyone else, fantastic. But I do it anyway.
that's how i operate i've found an odd resonance with what i've done with the show as well um you know in many ways there is a a temptation to do what may be popular or trendy or accumulate the most exposure or status or make you look good and that that's always there. And neither of us are immune to those incentives.
But I think one of the reasons that I resonated with your work and hopefully some microcosm of people resonate with mine is research very much is me-search in this situation and the fact you're right how could you have seen the human experience has been really sort of shown to me that it's like you've turned the mirror around on myself like that's it's almost like you're speaking to me it's well because there's broad buckets of people that sort of fall into similar kind of cohorts and it would appear that perhaps me and you are in a non-too-dissimilar cohort. And this, I think, is a reason for confidence in our own work and in listening to our instincts rather than trying to work out what the market, the audience, the reader wants.
Just saying, okay, well, what would be useful to me right now? What would have been useful to me previously? Especially given the fact that the thing you need to hear right now is probably the thing that you would tell yourself 10 years ago. So it's still, it's the same lessons over and over.
It's looking at that circle. And I think it is the best justification for selfishly following your instincts when it comes to an intellectual investigation of yourself, of the world around you.
Because if you think a thing, if you feel a thing, if you're challenged with a particular issue, it's probably reliable that some non-insignificant majority, perhaps, of other people are feeling the same. How fucking narcissistic do you need to be to think that you're the only one? Me.
Because that's too mean. That's too mean because we don't think of it nastily.
We think of it shamefully. We think, I've been singled out for a particularly painful- Correct.
Personal curse. Yeah.
We don't think I'm so great and I'm alone. We think, oh God, I've God, I've been cursed.
I'm broken. I'm uniquely broken.
And you're absolutely right. It's so important to bear that in mind.
By the time you're feeling it, other people will be feeling it too. And it's so hard to hold on to that thought because we, well, frankly, because we see no visible evidence of it.
We don't see people talking about it in our vicinity, in the hundred people we know and move around. No one's talking about it openly.
They're feeling it, but they don't talk about it. And so we have to hold our nerve.
And there's a lesson here about capitalism here and business, which is fascinating. I mean, it's not naturally the area I fall into more.
You've talked a lot about this, but so many great businesses start precisely like this, that somebody thinks there's this thing I really want and need or that thrills me. And it sounds quite weird to everybody else.
And the person just sticks with it and just has a hunch about it. Just as many, many business failures are all about someone going, someone doing something.
And then if you, if you say to them, do you want this? Would you buy this thing? And then they go, actually, no, I wouldn't. You know, so why are you making it for somebody else? If, if it's got no resonance with you, you know, careful, careful.
You know, the biggest business disasters are people making stuff that they haven't asked themselves. Would I really want yes the word uh grift is thrown around on the internet a lot and i always i've asked people to define it you know this person is grifting or shilling for a particular product or company or ideology whatever it might be and um i ask the best definition i've ever heard one that i actually accept i don't like the word because I think it gets pattern matched incorrectly almost all the time.
But the best definition is somebody promoting something that they themselves would not use or believe. I think, ah, that's good.
And there's an intellectual version of that. When someone reads a book, et cetera, and they've lost touch and they're spouting Kant or Hegel or Vickensign or whatever it it may be, and it's not fitting them, and therefore there's something wrong.

But I think many hours ago now we began in this place,

which is how difficult it is to hone that authentic muscle

where you feel something, you hold on to it, you think,

no one else is talking about it, but let me stay with that

because I think it's a thing for me.

So it may be a thing for somebody else, even though no one's mentioning it.

I'm sorry. feel something, you hold onto it, you think, no one else is talking about it, but let me stay with that because I think it's a thing for me.
So it may be a thing for somebody else, even though no one's mentioning it. It takes a lot of courage.
How much better have you become at understanding yourself over the years? How much have you been able to nudge those fundamental physics of your system? I've made some progress. Yeah, definitely made some progress.
And I'd say that I understand myself more than I've been able to change myself. And one could go, oh, so nothing's really changed.
Well, understanding is a thing as well. That is its own legitimate thing.
Do I always make wise choices now? No, but I do understand things better. Yes.
I think I'm also better at understanding my unconscious. And by that I mean it's also what people call their gut instinct.

I do think that there are things we know without fully knowing why we know them or how we know them.

And to allow a little bit more for that slightly mysterious form of knowing.

We're talking about sentence completion exercises where you're completing sentences, you're letting something bubble up

from your unconscious.

I try and do that more and more.

But I ask myself simple questions like,

what am I really feeling here?

Don't overthink this.

What's really going on?

You've met this person.

What do you really feel around them?

Just say it.

Say it to yourself.

What do you feel?

And then holding on to that, that something quite important has gone on there, that your answer captures something that a more thought-laden answer might not. And trusting that a bit more in love, in work, in friendship, in areas of daily life.
I would say that one of the biggest contributions at least that i've seen from your work for me personally is that stark assessment of the human condition uh a very sanguine uh some would say british slightly self-deprecating, honest admission of how flawed, how insane, how irrational, how silly, shameful we can be a lot of the time. And yourself, Oliver Berkman, if you're familiar with Oliver as well.
Again, you know, sort really embracing that british melancholic sort of

tragedy well handled type thing yeah uh you know i this has been a very long time coming i've wanted you on the podcast since before i began it uh i went back and looked at my first ever set of notes that i had that has your name in i'm sure there's stuff that's a little bit earlier than that and that was 2017 so it's late to the party perhaps in the broad scheme of, but very early to the party in my intellectual trajectory. And making people feel less alone in the challenges that they face, the day-to-day machinations, this personal curse that, huh, I didn't know anybody else felt like that.
At least I'm not, at least it's not just me. At least I've not had this thing sort of thrown down on me from above.
And yeah, I definitely, when I find myself embracing that with the show, with the content that I create, with the thoughts that I have, with the way that I try to direct things, with the way that I try to push people forward, especially at my age, I'm 36. And this is, there's a number of different directions that I can kind of go down.
And the one that's pulling me the most at the moment is a much more stark assessment of the silliness and irrationality and shamefulness of the human condition. And I just wanted to say thank you very much for helping to be a role model for me to be able be able to do that more thank you so much chris lovely words so generous thank you where should people go if they want to keep up to date with more of the stuff that you're doing um so uh school of life organization that i started um if you if you follow our stuff every every day i'm writing stuff for the for, for our app, etc.
So there's content

coming out all the time. And we've got a lot of books.
I've written 15 books under my own name.

I've written about 70 books under the School of Life, together with my colleague, John.

So we've got a lot of stuff out there. Yeah.

I appreciate you so much. Thank you, mate.

Thank you. Thank you, Chris.