Successful
The Road to Happiness | Jordan Peterson
It's time for today's Lucky Land horoscope with Victoria Cash. Life's gotten mundane, so shake up the daily routine and be adventurous with a trip to Lucky Land. You know what they say. Your chance to win starts with a spin. So go to luckylandslots.com to play over 100 social casino style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Get lucky today at luckylandslots.com. No purchase necessary. Your culture is a set of value laden presuppositions that you orient yourself in the world that match the set of value laden presuppositions that everyone in your culture has and acts out. And so what that means is that when you believe something and you're among your own people, you believe something. Implicitly, it's the way you look at the world, it's the way you act things out. You act about. Everyone expects you to act about. They're happy about it, in fact. So there's a match between what you're doing, what you see and what you're doing and what other people expect. And it's that match that regulates your emotions. It's not the belief system. It's the match. And so part of the reason that people are so tied to their cultural identity is because their cultural identity regulates their emotions and in a profound way, this is no joke. One of the things that stabilizes human nervous systems is imagine that you have a domain of competence. There's many domains of competence and, of course, in some of those domains you're completely incompetent. But they may not matter because you don't go into that domain. So you have some area of specialization which you might think of as your sub-tribe, your university students. And so some of you are lower status by the rules of the university game and some of you are higher status by the rules of the university game, by the tribe, so the higher status people tend to be the ones who fit into the academic environment and find it conducive to their mode of being and who also do well. And their serotonin levels rise, and the neurochemicals that moderate mood, particularly, are serotonergic. It's serotonin. It's lots of other things. It's an oversimplification. But that'll do for now. As you become dominant in a hierarchy, your serotonin levels rise. And what that means is that happy things make you happier and sad things make you less sad. It tunes your nervous system. So if you're down at the bottom of the hierarchy and you're failing, it's like, hey, hardly anything makes you happy, and everything makes you nervous. And it's no wonder because it's not very good down there. So the societal structure, which is an elaborated dominance hierarchy, regulates your emotions because of the match between your expectations and the behaviors of the people within that structure. And then your position within the hierarchy regulates the ratio, let's say, and the intensity between positive and negative emotion. So you mess with people's status at your peril, and you disrupt their culture. They don't like that. And no wonder, because when it's disrupted, they fall into chaos, and chaos isn't just anxiety. I mean, anxiety is bad enough, but it's not just anxiety because when you fall into chaos, when things fall apart for you, of course you're uncertain and anxious because you don't know what the hell is going on, and you don't know where you are, and you don't know what to do. That's anxiety provoking. And maybe you can't even understand your past properly anymore, that, as I said, that happens when people get betrayed. And so you fall into this state where nothing is certain, the way you construe the world isn't certain, and even the way the world is is no longer certain because you don't know how to act, or your actions aren't working. And so the world is presenting itself as something that's chaotic. It's not just psychological. The chaos is a weird intermingling of the chaotic world and the chaotic self. I mean, that's what happens when you get unemployed. It's like, it's devastating, right? It's devastating to people. And you can say, well, that's psychological. It's like, well, yeah, but they're unemployed. It makes the world far more incomprehensible and uncertain. It's not just psychological. It's psychological, and that's bad, but it's also real, and that's even worse. And then those two things can spiral, which they often do because, you know, if you don't set your expectations properly for a job search and assume that you're going to get 49 rejections for every interview, which you really need to know because if you get 49 rejections, it's not because you're useless. It's because the baseline for rejection is 98%. And that's OK because the base rate for rejection for everything is 98%. No matter what you do, but you need to know that so that you don't feel that it's like something wrong with you. And of course, you only have to get it right once that then you have a job that's a lottery, but you have to set yourself up. You have to think, OK, well, I'm going to look for a job. I need to-- how many resumes can I tolerate sending out a day? You know, it has to be enough so you don't feel like a useless moron, and it can't be so many that you're overwhelmed by the burden, so-- and I help people do this sort of thing all the time, so maybe you decide, well, you're going to send out 10 a day and you're going to work two hours on it, and it's going to take six months. And then, you know, you've got your parameters set properly and you would know what to expect in the world and your emotions are regulated, and so-- but the state of being unemployed doesn't just produce psychological consequences. So the distinction between the psyche and the world in some sense is quite arbitrary, and the psychoanalysts, I think, air too much on the side of the subject. They tend to think that too much of you is inside of you, and too little of you is outside of you. Part of the reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience. I love the psychoanalysts, man. They're brilliant. They're brilliant. They're deep. They grapple with real problems, like with the problems-- when people have real problems and I mean profound problems, they're really profound moral problems, they're problems of good and evil, really, you know, there are things going on in their family that are so terrible that-- well, that they're sometimes fatal, you know, lie upon lie upon lie upon lie for decades and decades and decades, it's awful. And that's not exactly inside them. It's out there in the world, and lots of the people that I see, very famous critic of psychology-- and I can't remember his name, but I probably will-- criticize the practice of psychology quite effectively in the-- I believe in the early '60s, The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Saz, S-Z-A-S-Z, it's a classic. You should read it. If you're interested in psychology, read it, like it's a classic. And he basically said, most people have problems in living. They don't have psychological problems. And so I've experienced, despite my love for the psychoanalysts, very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work, you know, and you can parameterize that. It's like, what do you need? How about some friends that can go kind of like that? How about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future? That'd be good. How about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere? So at least you've got some possibility of rising, some possibility of stabilizing yourself, and a schedule and a routine, because no one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend, like, you get one going, because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine. You need to pick a time to get up, whatever time you want, but pick one, and stick to it, because otherwise you disregulate your circadian rhythms, and they regulate your mood, and eat something in the morning. I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders. I had one client who was literally starving, very smart girl. There's very little that she liked. She kind of tried to subsist on, like, half a cup of rice a day. She came to me and said, "I have no energy. I come home. All I want to do is watch the same movie over and over. Like, is that weird?" I thought, "Well, it depends on how hard you work." You know, it's a little weird, but whatever. It's familiar. You're looking for comfort. So I did an analysis of her diet. It's like three quarters of a cup of rice. It's like, "You're starving. Eat something." You know, you'll feel better. So she modified her diet, and her all her anxiety went away, and she had some energy. It's like, "Yeah, you got to eat." It's time for today's Luckyland Horoscope with Victoria Cash. Life's gotten mundane, so shake up the daily routine and be adventurous, with a trip to Luckyland. You know what they say. Your chance to win starts with a spin, so go to luckylandslots.com to play over a hundred social casino style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Get lucky today at luckylandslots.com. No purchase necessary. AGW group void were prohibited by law 18 plus terms of condition supply.