2015 Maps of Meaning 04a: Narrative, Neuropsychology & Mythology II / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)

We're gonna go through quite a lot of material today, and a bit of it will be reviewed, but not very much. Okay, so we've started with these fundamental propositions here that you're viewing the world through a narrative framework. The narrative framework basically lays out the world for you as a place in which you can act, and the reason that you act is to make the state that you're in current, that the state that you're moving to next better than the state you're in now.

Now, part of the reason that I had you write about your past was because the early cognitive scientists sort of took it for granted that your model of where you are now wasn't actually a model. It was just reality because you look out in the world, and you can see the reality, and there you are. But that's not true. You're as constrained with regards to the information that you have at hand about the present just as much as you are about the future or the past. Then your conceptualization of the present is also a model, just like your conceptualization of the future.

The reason that's so important to know is that if, when you're moving from point A to point B, you make an error, the error could be that you've predicted the future or construed the future inaccurately. But it could also be that you've construed the present or the past inaccurately. What that means is that you didn't start from where you thought you were starting. You know, and that happens, for example, if you're moving forward and you discover that you have weaknesses of one form or another that you didn't know about when you made the original plan. What that means is that your current conception of yourself is sufficiently inaccurate so that you can't move from that conception to the future desired state without error.

The other reason I'm telling you that is because one of the things that also helps you understand is how broad the domain of potential error is when something you don't understand happens. Not only does it throw the future that you're conceptualizing into doubt; it also throws the conceptualization of you as a being in the present into doubt. It's not obvious at all when you do the initial search where in which of those domains you're going to find the error or where, and so it's a more complex problem than the cognitive scientists who are interested in the comparator models of cybernetic processing had ever conceptualized. They thought they kind of thought in behaviorist terms, which is while the world just presents itself to you as it is, so you're not going to be making any errors of fundamental perception. You just might be making errors of prediction, but that's far too optimistic.

Now, we also know that this fundamental narrative framework, which gives you a sense of the value of your current position and the destination, is because you're a moving creature. You're an active living creature that's interacting with the world and transforming it all the time. There are also constraints on which the narrative that you're going to conceptualize and act out can exist. The constraints are, well, they're Piagetian constraints in some sense. Whatever it is that you're doing has to support you while you're doing it. That's constraint number one, and that means that the path you take has to fulfill whatever constitutes the list of necessities that you can't move forward without.

Some of those we think of as basic needs; like you have to breathe, and you have to eat, and you have to have sufficient water, you have to have shelter, and all those things. The parameters within which those needs can be fulfilled are pretty broad, but you can't think of it necessarily as a simple problem or that there are simple solutions, but there are still obvious constraints. Not only do you have to fulfill all those fundamental obligations to yourself, but you have to do it in a manner that's relatively non-contradictory, so that while you're pursuing one, it doesn't decrease the chance that you're going to obtain another. You have to do it in a way that the way you do it now doesn't compromise you doing it next week or next month or next year. That's where the delay of gratification comes in. You also have to do it in a way that fulfills your basic needs in a non-contradictory manner over different spans of time and space while other people are doing the same thing.

So you see, that’s a very, very tight set of constraints. The idea that this narrative could be anything is wrong because it has to serve many masters simultaneously. I'm not saying there aren't multiple solutions to that just like there are multiple ways of playing or winning a game, but it's a constrained set of possibilities.

Now, the next proposition is that when you're moving from point A to point B, there are basically two or three classes of things that can happen. One is things that you don't want to have happen, and that, obviously, is symbolically represented by the little blue unhappy face. Then there are positive things that can happen, and the positive things are twofold in nature. They have two fundamental elements, and behaviorists never tell you this. So it's one of the fundamental flaws in behavioral theory: things that indicate that you're moving towards a desired goal are positive; that's classic sophisticated behavioral theory. Those are incentive rewards because an incentive reward indicates to you that a consumatory reward is forthcoming.

There are different neurobiological systems that underlie those two types of reward. Consumatory reward basically produces satisfaction, whereas incentive reward produces excitement, hope, and movement forward. It's actually the kind of reward that you like better, which is weird. You know, because you think that the most potent reward would be consumatory reward, but people will work harder for incentive reward than they will for consumatory reward. That's one of the things that makes people very peculiar creatures.

Part of the reason for that is that the incentive reward system is part of the broader seeking system. Jacques Panksepp describes it, and so because the incentive reward system not only tells you that a reward, like an expected reward, might be forthcoming, it also tells you that an unexpected reward might be forthcoming. The reason that's so important is because you actually view the world that you don't understand partly through the lens of threat. If something that you don't understand happens, it might be dangerous. But also through the lens of possibility because if something you don't understand happens, that means there's an indeterminate probability of reward.

These things turn out to be extremely important. For example, if you're in a long-term sexual relationship with a person, the degree to which that relationship might be sexually pleasurable will decline. Part of the reason for that is that the novelty disappears because novelty enhances incentive reward. One of the things that you can do to maintain the romance in a relationship is to mix some novelty in however you might be able to do that, and that usually involves playing in one form or another and a certain amount of creativity.

So it's not a trivial issue; it's an important issue. So anyways, when you're moving forward and you encounter something that indicates that you're going to achieve your goal, the other thing that's happening at the same time is that the fact that that thing appears validates your entire perceptual scheme, right? So A, you're moving forward to the goal, but B, the whole plan that you're using to construe the world in order so that you can act, so that you can move towards the goal, is also sufficiently right. That's a big source of incentive reward—not only your conception of the present but the whole framework itself—your conception of the present, the future, and your choice about what behaviors to implement.

Okay, yep, oh no, definitely not. As you move towards the goal, things you don’t want and things you do want might be happening. If something you don’t want happens, then it depends on the relationship of the thing that didn’t happen to your whole goal hierarchy. The problem is, and that's where we're going to go next, is when the unexpected thing happens, unless it's very simple—which means that it can be modified here and now with very little disruption—then it has an incalculable effect on the integrity of the entire plan. That's why unexpected things, in particular, are a class in of their own.

Now, it's complicated because normally, when you're moving towards a goal, if any obstacle appears, it's unexpected. Obviously, because partly what you're trying to do when you lay out a good plan is to make sure that the pathway doesn't have any obstacles in it. You almost never encounter, just like you never encounter an incentive reward without also encountering a piece of evidence that your plan is good. You never encounter an obstacle without also encountering evidence that your plan is flawed. Then the question is, well, how flawed? And that's the big question.

That's why there's a third category of events that occur as you're laying your plans out in the world and implementing them. That category is things you didn't expect. So not merely obstacles, but they're things you didn't expect. So now that's what this diagram basically indicates. As you're moving from the unbearable present, it's unbearable because you want to make it better, which is also something to think about when you're considering why human beings are constantly dissatisfied. It's like, well, if you weren't vaguely dissatisfied with the present, you wouldn't be doing anything to try to change it into the future.

There's a certain amount of vague dissatisfaction that's actually a necessary motivator. Now, you know, you hope that there are times when you think things are good enough for right now so you can take a break from constantly walking uphill. But you can also see that if you were completely satisfied—we know this from animals like lions—you know, after a kill, all the lions just lay around until they've digested all the food. You know, and they're probably satisfied, but it isn't obviously the case that that's the best possible strategy.

So as you're moving from the unbearable present to the desired future, you can think that positive things happen, so those facilitate your movement forward. Negative things happen, and that interferes with your movement forward, or you can think differently, which is a slight reconceptualization. You can say that predicted things happen and that unpredicted things happen. So that's just a slightly different shift, right? Because when you talk about unexpected and expected, obviously, you're not referring to something that's only a manifestation in the actual world. It's also a relationship that you have with the thing in the world because expected means not only does it happen, but you knew it was going to happen, whereas unexpected means not only does it happen, but you didn't know. So there's a subjective element.

And then you could change that another way. I think the most accurate way to think about it is that it’s not expected and unexpected; it’s desired and undesired. The utility in making that transformation is that it brings motivation into the picture. You're never only expecting or not expecting; you’re wanting and not wanting.

Yeah, yes, sort of. If you lay out a good plan, you may say, well, here's 10 things that I don't want to have happen that are relatively high probability, and then you could build a little sub-plan around each of those that constitutes a micro-strategy within the plan. But the way to conceptualize that effectively is to think about this. You don't have a plan ever; you have a nested series of plans, and you're operating at one level of that nested series at a time.

Now, if that expected, if it's an expected undesirable thing, it usually affects a micro element of the plan, right? And so that you can change that and fix it without too much effort. If it's a macro element, you know, let's say, okay, you fail. Of course, that's one thing. Another thing is East European cybercriminals hijack your hard drive and encode it and they charge you $10,000 to decode it, and then you don't have enough money to go to university. It's like, okay, well, which of those events is more serious?

Well, obviously, failing the exam is not a positive event. It's a somewhat unexpected event, likely if you were doing the work, but it doesn't blow apart your entire plan. Whereas the theft of all your resources is a macro failure. Not only are you not getting from point A to point B, but the framework within which you're conceptualizing point A and B is wrong. But it might even be worse than that. It's a superordinate framework that blows apart ten or eleven different plans.

So it's that it's complicated because things are never only predicted and unpredicted; they're desired and undesired. And then they're desired and undesired to different degrees, and the degree depends on the place in the hierarchy where the unexpected thing is doing the disruption. But there's no way of getting towards that level of description without starting off as if you're only implementing one plan at a time.

So this is an oversimplification that's necessary before we develop a sophisticated idea of how it is that you're interacting with the world. Okay, so a desired outcome—that's an incentive reward. It makes you hopeful and positive and alert and energetic and willing to move forward. It's what you want; it's what you want—it's a dopaminergic reaction fundamentally.

Whereas if something that happens that you don't want—well, that's both threatening technically because it indicates that a punishment is likely, and you don't necessarily know the magnitude of the punishment. It's also punishing in and of itself, so those are all, that's obviously a category that you don't want to have happen. The other problem is it's not easy to bind it.

You know, so look at it this way: you have a relationship with someone, and it's kind of conflict-laden, you know, and you think each time you have a conflict, you think, should I be in this relationship? Well, that's a big problem because you actually don't know how much conflict should you have before you shouldn't be in a relationship. The answer to that is, well, you don't know. Now, there's actually some empirical work on the topic, so I can give you a provisional answer, which is quite interesting.

There was a research psychologist a while back who I thought did a brilliant study, and they had couples record positive events—just qualitatively, how many positive interactions did you have with your partner during the day versus how many negative interactions? Don't think they quantified the degree to which they were positive and negative; they're just going to assume that across multiple instances that would wash out.

What they found was quite cool. They found that if you had fewer than five positive interactions to every negative interaction, the relationship was going to collapse. So now you can start counting and see if that's appropriate to you. But the other thing they found, which I thought was really lovely, was that if you had more than eleven positive interactions to one negative interaction, the relationship was also doomed.

So you think—so you understand that, right? Yet everyone knows that because if someone's wandering around treating you like a god, regardless, the first thing you're going to do is be just contemptuous of them and then completely bored. You want the person to harass you a bit just so that you learn something—that's part of it. But so it's also evidence that there's actually someone there that you're interacting with. You know, because if someone just does everything you want all the time, well, I mean, that might sound like an ideal fantasy, but you know perfectly well that if that ever happened, that's just—you're just gonna get completely tired of that instantly. Plus, there's no life in the relationship, right? Which is a big issue.

So yes, right, right, right. Well, exactly. Well, the other thing too is you can be sure that in a relationship where there's no conflict, nothing is being decided. Because thought is conflict—even if you do it by yourself, you know? And so if there are two of you in a boat and you're trying to decide where you're going in the future, it's not self-evident. There has to be some—you have to have an opinion, and your partner has to have an opinion, and there's no reason at all to assume that those opinions are or will be or should be the same.

You know, you hope the relationship is solid enough so that it can withstand the tension of the conflict. One of the things you've said about marriage, which I thought was, because you can get a very nice job of trying to understand from a psychological perspective why in the world you should bother being married, which is really a very interesting question. You know, one of the things he said was that you don't need to tie two things together if they'll just stay together of their own accord.

The fact that marriage is a human universal, which it is, indicates that there is enough tension within intimate relationships, centrifugal tension, to blow them apart. Some of that's just because people are different and they clash, but it's also because as you go through life in a single boat, you encounter huge waves, and you know, you might get swamped. So it's a big problem. His point was that the marriage vow was necessary because if your response to potential conflict was, I can leave, you can't have the conflict. You can't have the conflict.

If, on the other hand, you're with someone and you think, there's no bloody way I can get rid of you no matter what I do short of murder; I'm stuck with you for the next 30 years. Then we better work this out. And so that makes the—he thought of that as a container within which a transformation could take place. It was a chemical motif, and that without that pressure, people weren't going to be sufficiently motivated to really hash out problems.

You know, you can think of that in whatever way you want, but I thought it was an absolutely brilliant observation. Well, the problem is it doesn't solve a problem. It doesn't solve any problems usually. For a variety of reasons, one is it's probably you and not your partner, anyways, or at least there's a 50/50 chance. And if it's you, you're just gonna bring your stupidity to the next relationship and torture someone else to death. You know, so that's a big problem.

The next problem is, is that if you can't work out the bugs in this relationship, why do you think you're going to be able to do it in the next relationship, especially now that you're older and more set in your ways? The third is, well, you know, what about the kids? The fourth is, I don't know if you've ever seen people in a protracted custody battle, but if you want to ruin your life, that's a really good way of doing it because that'll take you out for about 15 years, and it'll cost you pretty much all your money. It'll destroy your closest relationships and it'll also make it four, actually impossible for you to be happy with the next person that you're with because they're gonna be, you know, burdened by this absolute catastrophe that's surrounding you with regards to how you organize your intimate relationships with the people that you love.

So generally speaking, I don't think that it usually solves the problem. Now, sometimes it does, but my sense is it probably introduces more problems than it solves. You know, so I mean one of the things you might note, for example, is that the only people who now get married are people who are relatively wealthy. You know, the fact that we've disrupted the structure of marriage as an institution since about 1965, say, what that's meant is that its benefits are now only available to people who were privileged.

You can look up the stats yourself, but if you're middle class and above, the divorce rates haven't moved much since the early 70s. If you're working class and below, it's a complete catastrophe, and what that's meant is that many children who are in rougher socio-economic straights are being raised by a single person who is absolutely and 100% overwhelmed by their multiple commitments, right? Full-time responsibility for children and generally in employment in an extraordinarily dismal, low-paying, unstable, and exploitative job. So to me, if you're like you guys are, you're all gonna be middle class or above in all likelihood, it's like it's fine for you; it's not gonna make a bloody bit of difference all things considered. But for people who are poor, it's just been a catastrophe.

So, okay, so yes, oh wow, there's all sorts of reasons. I mean, first of all, it's become socially acceptable, right? Divorce wasn't socially acceptable, and you can say, well that's, that was pretty hard on people who wanted to get divorced. It's like, yeah, obviously any rule is hard on people that break it, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be rules; you know. Now what rules there should be, that's a whole different issue. Out of wedlock childbirth has become a norm; it was absolutely rare in the 1960s—vanishingly rare—and that’s become acceptable even though all the evidence suggests, like if you actually look at the evidence, it's absolutely clear that kids who have two parents do better than kids who have one.

Now, you know, people when you tell people that, they'll tell you an anecdote about someone they knew, maybe their own parent, who did a wonderful job of raising them as a single person. It's like the anecdotes are irrelevant. What’s relevant is the bulk of the evidence. Of course there are situations where people are better apart than together, and of course there are situations where one person can do a better job than two people who are at each other's throats. But it's aggregate; it's aggregating examples that you use when you're doing a scientific survey, and the results of those surveys are crystal clear.

You know, the other thing that's going to happen, it's going to happen very soon, is that there is going to be a very, very, very, very large number of elderly people who are alone. And being elderly and alone, like no family, that is not something you want to look forward to, especially when you start thinking that you're gonna be elderly for like 40 years. So, you know, because say it starts around 65; I don't know how long you guys are gonna live, but it's probably 95 is not an unreasonable estimate, and it might be longer than that.

So, because, you know, we're adding about three months to the total lifespan every year, right? That's the rate of technological improvement in relationship to overall mortality. You know, and the degree to which we're adding that extra lifespan is increasing each year. You know, and it may hit, get to the point where we're increasing lifespan a year every year. Now, I doubt it because it'll probably eat; it'll probably be in a city a sim tote, but it has been increasing for a very long period of time.

So, you know, it's one thing to think about the maximization of day-to-day freedom when you're between, say, 15 and 40, 45. After that, that's a whole different story, and modern people never think about the last half of their life. You know, so why? I don't know, but maybe they're afraid to or something.

But, okay, so here—there's lots of ways of conceptualizing what you encounter when you move into the world. So we said, well, you know, there's positive things you encounter, negative things, there's expected things and unexpected things, there's desired things and undesired things. Another way of thinking about it, which is more in some sense more empirical, is that you encounter tools and obstacles, right? Tools move you forward and tools are a funny thing because they're sort of half objective and half subjective, right? They're a thing, but the thing is defined by their use.

But weirdly enough, we tend to define things by use, you know? And I mentioned this before, so most people when they're thinking about language think that you use words to label things. But it seems much more likely that we use categories as tools to act in the world. We don't see things; we see the use of things or the fact that they get in our way. You're trying to set up the world so that what surrounds you are entities that you can use to get what you desire and to eliminate obstacles. In fact, that's what you generally do if you're a good manager, right? A big part of being a good manager is first of all lay out a plan for people that's hierarchy and where the hierarchical levels don't conflict.

The second thing is you get rid of obstacles for them so that they could come to you and say, well, I can't do this because this is in the way. Your job is to get it out of the way so that they can move forward. So it's a very good way of conceptualizing yourself as a manager. So now there are obstacles that you understand and those would correspond to the micro levels of the hierarchy, right? And then there's obstacles that you don't understand, and when they come up, they just blow apart your whole plan.

So now, associated with that expected, unexpected, desired, undesired, tool, obstacle is a corollary, which is all the things that you're not conceptualizing as tools or obstacles. Or as things you don't know, they're irrelevant, and that's a really useful thing to know because it means that whenever you're looking at the world, it's like the world is a sea of snakes and you're only concentrating on one snake at a time. But then if you make a mistake dealing with that single snake, what happens is you're neck deep in snakes because all the things—the thing is when you make a mistake—and this is a critical issue—when you make a mistake and you blow the framework within which you're construing the world, the framework that narrows it for you, what happens is that all the things that you've been ignoring become potentially relevant. And that's overwhelming, and that's partly why your body reacts as if it's under tremendous stress.

So for example, you know how these things work, and again, I think betrayal is the best example. If you have a partner and they betray you, then all the things that you thought were true about the mark and all those things you ignored as irrelevant turned out not to be irrelevant at all. So you know, maybe the person told you on a twice-weekly basis that they were too busy studying to spend any time with you, and you know, you just put that down into the irrelevant zone after some coming to terms with it. And then you find out, well that is what they were doing during that time. And then the next question is, well what else did they tell you that wasn't the way it was? The answer to that is, could it be anything?

It means every single thing about your relationship, past, present, and future has now been cast into the realm of potential relevance, and almost all the relevance is negative, and that's the descent into chaos. So that's the best way to conceptualize chaos, because what happens is that your plan is what's narrows the world for you and constrains it, makes most of it irrelevant—the parts that aren't relevant, positive—and the negative elements relatively rare. That's what the intact hierarchical plan does. If you blow the hierarchical plan, then all your nice little subdivisions are now irrelevant, and every little monster comes up to face you, and that's the descent into the underworld, right?

And people do not like that, and no wonder. The reason they don't like that is because it places them in a situation that's so complex that it could easily exceed their resources. You know, and so for example, one of the things that happens to elderly people sometimes—this isn't precisely a betrayal—is you know, they've been with someone for 40 years, and the person dies. Well, the probability that the partner will die in the following year is much elevated compared to their normal mortality.

Part of that is they just—it's not that they're grieving exactly, although they are. What's happened is that one of the fundamental axioms of the structures that they use to encapsulate the world has been blown out, and everything comes crashing down. Sometimes people just don't have the resources to make it through that; they're just done, you know? They don't know how to pick up the pieces and start again. You know, and at some point, maybe—God only knows—at some point maybe that's not what you do. I don't know what you do after you're married 75 years and your partner dies. I mean, maybe you have a party if it's been an absolutely dreadful marriage.

But in all likelihood, you know, it's like a stroke that leaves you with only half your body; it's not clear that you can recover from it. So that's a good question, but I would say what it's—I don't think it's exactly from the breaking of the framework. I think what happens is that the framework breaks, and then the person is cast into such a state of physiological shock that the shock actually starts to destroy them. So like if I stress you enough for a reasonable length of time, you're gonna blow out at your weakest point, and that's a nice way to think about the genetics of pathology, of psychopathology. It's like everybody has a weak point, you know?

Some of you will have a threshold for that weakness that's lower than others, but generally, if I push hard enough on you, something's going to happen. You're going to get hypoglycemic, and then you're gonna eat too much, and then you're gonna become obese. Or you're gonna turn to alcohol because it's a really useful anti-anxiety agent for you. Or you know, you're gonna develop some kind of other stress-related illness, maybe diabetes, or you know, you're gonna develop an anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder. Or maybe, if you have a family history towards psychosis, you're going to develop delusions and paranoia.

It depends on fundamentally on exactly where you're most flawed in your psycho-physiological makeup. I don't think you can necessarily predict how that's going to happen, although you can sometimes if somebody has a loaded family history. Even with illnesses like schizophrenia, the standard models are always stress diathesis; there's a pre-existent vulnerability which will not necessarily manifest itself unless the person is put under pressure. You know, and it's interesting to think—we tend to think about stress in some sense as a psychological phenomenon, but it's not really a psychological phenomenon often, even though it is related to the way in which you construe the world—the complexity of the world is what stresses people. That hasn't psychological because the world is complex.

The psychological element is, well, are your tools generally adequate to deal with that complexity? Some of that has to do with subjective factors, you know? Some of it has to do with familial and social factors.

Okay, so I've construed normally as normal or revolutionary, and using Thomas Kuhn's terms, and a normal bit of anomaly is one that you can deal with without blowing the framework within which you're working. And so I hope everyone understands this—I know I've gone over it a couple of times, but it's a very critical issue. Does it make sense that the normally is normal if it only disrupts subsidiary elements of the plan? Is everyone clear about what that means? Yes.

There's a spectrum because there's a hierarchy, and we'll look at the hierarchy again, but the idea is that the stress—the stress of the anomaly is proportionate to its position in the hierarchy of plans. The most stressful anomaly blows out your top-level plan. That's a near-death experience. It means everything that you hold—that would be what would happen if the economy collapsed and your family was killed in a car accident, and your partner left you on the same day. It would be something like that. It's like the bottom drops out of absolutely everything, you know? And that does happen to people now and then, and we know what happens to people in situations like that depending on their level of resiliency because that is another issue.

But one of the most common precipitants of severe depression is unemployment. You know, and you might say, well is that psychological? It's like, no, I would say not really. There's a psychological element in that you might not be as well prepared for a bout of unemployment as you could conceivably be. But if I have someone in my— as a client who's depressed and unemployed, what I try to do is treat the unemployment, not the depression because what the hell are they gonna do? You know, how can you not be depressed when you're looking at a narrowing—a world of narrowing opportunities, followed by losing your house and ending up on the street? It's like that's not exactly a psychological problem.

Yeah, well, I mean one of the things is it's like being able to move on your feet. So let's say, well, let's say you want to have it. The first question is can you have a meaningful life, right? Because we're going to start from the proposition that unvarnished life is very dismal and dreadful, right? So if you're not prepared for it, we'll just grind you up, and that will be very painful.

Okay, so we're gonna use that as a baseline. The baseline isn't that you're gonna be secure and happy; the baseline is there isn't much of you. You're very fragile, and things will grind you into nothing. That's a Buddhist stance, right? Because the Buddhists say the first dictum of Buddhism is life is suffering. The first dictum isn't that life is happy, so the Buddhists basically say chaos is the normative condition.

Okay, so fine. So you—how do you do that? How do you deal with that? It's not how you fight against it or defend against it. I don't think those are appropriate conceptualizations. It's not positive illusions; it's not defense mechanisms; it's none of that, although you may also use that. What it is is do you have an intimate relationship that works? Do you have a family that's networked well together and strong? Do you have some sort of interesting occupation that regularizes your schedule, gives you something productive to do on a long-term basis, is stable and productive, right? Do you have something that you find engaging to do, or maybe more than one thing outside of work, right?

And are you compromising your mental and physical health by doing any things that are particularly stupid? And you know, one of those I would like—that's probably alcoholism. So if there's one thing you really want to avoid that screws up your life, it's drinking too much. It is unbelievably dangerous.

So, the first thing we might say is, well, let's optimize those. Well, the more you optimize those, the more the more pillars there are in your plan, and they're only somewhat correlated. So maybe you can lose one, or maybe you can even lose two. It's going to knock you down, but it's not going to sink you. You know, and then you might also want to have variants on those plans to some degree.

So like one of the things I mentioned earlier is that it's always nice to have an alternative to your current job at hand because it stops you from being vulnerable. It also stops you from being a slave or a victim, or maybe even stops you from being a tyrant because you've got some choice. So you diversify your hierarchy of plans essentially, just like you do. You can think about it as stock market investing in some sense; it's a very analogous idea. You don't put all your eggs in the same basket; you diversify across multiple portfolios. So if one sector gets knocked out, hopefully it doesn't knock you completely out of the game.

And that's partly what guides you through in the future authoring program too because it asks you to consider what I think are the main six dimensions of your life. So one of the things I do when a client comes is I just do a rough walkthrough of those dimensions. It's like, does anybody care if you're alive or dead? You know, so do you have any friends? Do you have anybody that loves you? Do you have an intimate relationship? However things going with your family? Do you have a job? Are you as educated as you are intelligent? Do you have any room for advancement in the future? Do you do anything interesting outside of your job?

If the answer to all those is no, it's like you're not depressed, my friend. You just are screwed really. It's like if someone— like someone comes to me and they're 40 and that's the issue, especially if they're also drinking, it's like Humpty Dumpty has hit the floor, and no one is going to put the pieces together. Because it's just—it's too much. It's too much people, you know what I mean? It takes a whole lifetime to put those things together. That's not a site that might have started as a psychological problem, but by the time it's fully manifest in your 40, that's not a psychological problem. It's just a complete catastrophe.

Well, I think sometimes antidepressants help, and the reason they help is because they actually buffer the stress response. So, you know, you're being ground down by the world because essentially what you are is you're—not even in the dominance hierarchy; you're solo in the dominance hierarchy. You're not even in it, right? You're an outcast fundamentally.

So maybe buffering the stress response will help the person just not die from that, and then you start with one thing. You know, it's like you lay out the potential areas for approval, improvement on the table, and you say, well, can we think of some small steps that you might take in one or more of those domains to start putting something solid underneath your feet? But what happens, I think, is that as you lose those pillars, the way that problems manifest themselves in your life becomes networked.

So you might make progress here, but some other catastrophe that's looming over here is going to knock you down, you know? So yeah, no, it means that you're better protected against being dreadfully miserable and swamped than you would otherwise be. So I would say you have to do those things before you can even address the issue of being happy, right? Because if you don't have—if you haven't established yourself in one or one or two of those domains—say there's some obvious things that you could do to decrease the degree to which your life is negative that you haven't yet done, so I would say you shouldn't even get to the existential problem before you've solved the practical problems.

And you may find that if you solve the practical problems, the existential problems would become bearable. Now, not necessarily, you know, because I might say, well there's another class of people, and I would say this is one of the pathologies of being creative. So if you're a high open person and you have all those things, that's not going to be enough. You're going to have to pick another domain where you're working on something that's positive and somewhat revolutionary because like the creative impulse is—for someone who's open, we know it's a fundamental personality dimension.

I've watched, I have clients who are very high in openness and others who aren't. If the ones who are high in openness aren't doing something creative, then they're like dead sticks. They can't live properly. So, you know, that—and I think those are the people, for example, who benefit particularly from depths of psychological approaches, especially Jungian approaches. I think that all of us clients were high in openness because I've watched my clients. I'll try Jungian ideas out on them, and if they're high in openness, they work like a charm; it just fits right in with their psyche. But if they're conservative people, fundamentally conservative people, low in openness and high in conscientiousness, it just doesn't click because the Jungian approach is aesthetic and creative, and lots of people aren't either of those things.

So there was another question, yes. Yeah, but they fight, especially if you're orderly, you know, because conscientiousness is partly orderliness and partly openness. Hitler was like that; he was extremely orderly and extremely high in openness. One of the ways he solved that problems, which was quite interesting, is that whenever there were art exhibit submissions in Nazi Germany, there were two types: there was the approved Nazi art, which was very structured and conventional and, you know, bordered on the propagandistic, and there was forbidden art which was really chaotic and often it was the expressionist stuff, for example, which is really emotionally expressive but chaotic.

Hitler would have both exhibitions going on at the same time, and one of them would be forbidden and the other would be approved, you know? So, but the problem with orderliness is that you want everything to be in its category. No wonder we've described why that is, but if you're open, you're always thinking, well, maybe there's a better way of putting those things in a category, and that's a tough. So orderly, open people are always at odds with themselves, you know?

So, yeah, yeah. Well, people like that are often extremely successful, right? Right. And it looks like industriousness is the part of conscientiousness that predicts long-term life success, and orderliness is the part that predicts conservative political attitudes. But low openness is also associated with conservative political attitudes, so okay.

So, okay, so the descent into the underworld—that is basically what occurs. It can occur at any level of your plan, right? From the macro levels to the micro levels, and what happens is that it's a descent into chaos if the unexpected thing is big enough to invalidate the framework that you're using to deal with the world at that moment. Got it? And the degree to which you feel negative emotion is proportionate to the importance of that plan to the organization of your perception and action.

So you could think about it as—you could think about what you bring to bear on the world. It's almost like you can think about it as how Google Maps manages it. You know how you can take Google Maps, and obviously, it's a cybernetic intelligence, right? The whole GPS search process. Because you say I’m here and I'm going there, and then it maps a route out for you. If you go off route, it goes through a little period of chaos, and then it finds another route. So it's really an intelligent system, but you notice that Google Maps is scalable.

So you can look at—probably if you’re going from here to Mississauga using a map of Canada is the wrong map, right? You want to scale the thing down until you hit the level of resolution that best represents the situation so that you can move to where you want to go. You can scale up and down in it, and so finding out that the entire country has been destroyed by nuclear bombs is going to be a much bigger catastrophe in relationship to your plan than finding out that there's a few obstacles in the street on your way to Mississauga that haven't been marked on the map.

Anyway, so you're going to be much more upset when the entire superordinate—the low-resolution plans are disrupted than when the high-resolution plans are disrupted. And that's partly how your mind—part of the problem we're trying to solve here is how upset should you be when something you don't want happens? The answer to that is that's virtually impossible to compute, but then the problem is you have to compute it; because if you don’t, you'll burn yourself out with stress and worry; and that's not psychological; that'll just kill you because it's actually a physiologically damaging process.

So you have to constrain it, and so here are some of the ways that you constrain it. One, you're born with a baseline level of neuroticism. So, if you're higher in neuroticism, you're going to think that smaller things are more catastrophic than someone who's lower in neuroticism. You might say, well, who's right? The answer is it depends completely on the situation, and it’s random. It's fundamentally random, and that's why there's a normal distribution on average. We would say the typical person is matched to the typical environment, but sometimes terrified people are going to be right, and sometimes the people that you can't bother no matter what you do are going to be right.

Okay, so that's one; it’s a crapshoot. The second is where are you in the dominance hierarchy? Because one of the things your brain is trying to understand is how should you regard yourself as an active and competent organism when you're facing problems that you can't compute? The answer to that is we're not going to solve that. We're going to distribute the problem into the social network, and we're going to let everyone else solve it. So if you rise up in the dominance hierarchy, your brain reacts as if the dominance hierarchy structure, which is composed of many, many brains, has run its computations and decided that you're pretty damn competent.

The way your brain responds to that is it cranks up your serotonin production and decreases your neuroticism, and it's a perfectly reasonable computation. Because if everybody says you're competent, you're competent enough so that you're going to get more rewarded for your competence than other people are, and that's going to make you more secure in your job. That's going to make you more herbal and in demand among other people, and that's going to give you access to resources you wouldn't otherwise have.

So—and then there's a correlated element to that, which is sort of your level of self-esteem, although that's very much associated with neuroticism. People with high self-esteem generally have low levels of negative emotion; it's not clear that those are separable phenomena.

Alright, what time is it? 2:45. Alright, well, let's stop for 10 minutes. Okay? And we'll—yeah, let's stop for 10 minutes.