Daily Motivations - WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE GIVING UP!

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Speaker: Jordan PetersonInstagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

If you're suffering, you are obligated in a sense to hold on to whatever rope someone throws you. Life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering. You can tyrannize yourself into doing things, but I wouldn't recommend it. What I would recommend it instead is that you ask yourself what you're willing to do. It's a really effective technique. It's like a meditative technique. That's when life is worthwhile. I don't know exactly what's going to help you, but don't arbitrarily throw out any possibilities

because you might not have that luxury. Antidepressants help a lot of people, and there are technical reasons why that's the case. If you're offered a gift by your society and it works, try it. I don't care what your presuppositions are. The time you see people who are suffering with depression, for example. There's a multitude of reasons, but I'll take one common reason. You can think about it as associated with the story of Peter Pan.

A Peter Pan is someone who won't grow up, right? Now, the problem with Peter Pan is he gets to be king, but it's king of Neverland. Neverland doesn't exist. So being king of nothing isn't that helpful. Well, one of the things that you often see with people who suffer from depression, and I'm not making a blanket statement about the cause of depression because there's lots of them, is that people who don't have enough order in their life tend to get overwhelmed.

So, for example, if someone comes into me to see me and they say they're depressed, I always ask them a very standard set of questions. Do you have a job? If you don't have a job, you're really in trouble in our job. society. First of all, your biological rhythms tend to go off the rails right away, because there's no reason to go to bed at any particular time, and there's no reason to get up. And for many people, if they don't get up at the same time, they fall up the functioning of their circadian rhythms, and that's enough to make them depressed right off the bat, especially if they start napping

during the afternoon. They also don't have a purpose. People aren't good without a purpose. And this isn't hypothesizing. We absolutely understand the circuitry that underlies positive emotion. When you're attending to something you're interested in and you're engaged it, that's when you're alive. That's when life is worthwhile. It's so worthwhile that in those moments you don't even ask the question about it. The question itself goes away because the meaning that you're united with is so powerful that it can push back the adversity that would otherwise characterize life. Nietzsche said the person who has a why can bear any how. We know how it works. Almost all the positive emotion that any of you are

likely to experience in your life will not be a consequence of attaining things. It will be a consequence of seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value. That's completely different. And you need to know this because people are often stunned, for example. They finish their PhD thesis and their presupposition is that they're going to be elated for a month. And often instead, they're actually depressed. And they think, hell, I've been working on this for seven years and I handed it in and what do I do now?

And that's what depresses them, right? It's the what do I do now? Well, they're fine if they enjoyed it pursuing the thing. As long as it was working out, they get a lot of enthusiasm and excitement out of that, because that's how our nervous systems work. Most of your positive emotion is goal pursuit emotion. If you take drugs like cocaine or amphetamine, the reason they're enjoyable is because they turn on the systems that help you pursue goals.

That's why people like them. So if you don't have a job, you've got no structure. That's not good. Plus, you tend not to have a point. So you're overwhelmed by chaotic lack of structure, and you don't have any positive emotion. Assuming you want to get better, there's usually something you can figure out that would constitute a step towards some sort of concrete goal. And my presumption, it's a behavioral presumption, fundamentally, is that small accruing gains that repeat are unbelievably powerful.

You can tyrannize yourself into doing things, but I wouldn't recommend it. What I would recommend it instead is that you ask yourself what you're willing to do. It's a really effective technique. It's like a meditative technique. So for example, you can get up in the morning and you can think, well, you know, I'd like to have a good day today. So I'd like to go to bed tonight without feeling guilty because I, you know, didn't do some things I said I was going to do. And I, you know, I'd like to have kind of an interesting day. So you've got to fulfill my responsibilities and I want to, you know, enjoy the day.

Then you can ask yourself, well, what would I have to do in order for that to happen that I would do? And the probability, if you practice this for three or four days, is your brain will just tell you. You'll say, well, you know, there's that piece of homework that you haven't done for like three weeks. You should knock that sucker off because it would only take you 10 minutes and you've been avoiding it and torturing yourself. to death for 72 hours straight and say well let's figure out what your aims are you got to have some aims whatever they are and they might say well I'm so depressed I don't have any aims and then I say well pick the least objectionable of the aims and act it out for a while and see what happens because sometimes your emotional your emotional systems are so followed up that you have to pretend you have to act the thing out before you can start to believe it life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering I thought

God, that's such a good idea. Because it's not optimistic exactly. You know, some people will tell you, well, you can be happy. It's like, those people are idiots. I'm telling you, they're idiots. There's going to be things that come along that flatten you so hard, you won't believe it. And you're not happy then. And so if life is to be happy, well, in those situations, what are you doing?

Why even live? But life isn't to be happy. If you're happy, you're bloody fortunate, and you should enjoy it. You should, because it's the grace of God, so to speak. People know when they're doing something meaningful. they can tell. So why the hell don't they do meaningful things all the time? It seems obvious. You could do it. I mean, it's hard. You know, because other people want you to do other things. And it's a struggle, but everything's a struggle. Oh, I get it. I see why. It took me about 10 years to figure this out. People have a choice. Choice number one. Nothing you do means anything. Well, that's kind of a drag, right? It's meaninglessness of life and all that, existential angst. You know, that's kind of a pain. But the upside of nothing that you do be mean. Is it. meaningful is you don't have to do anything you've got no responsibility now you have to suffer because things are meaningless but that's a small place to pay the alternative the

alternative is everything you do matters really if you make a mistake it's a real mistake if you betray someone you tilt the world a little more sharply towards evil rather than good it matters what you do well if you buy that then you can have a meaningful life but there's no mucking around it means responsibility It means that the decisions you make are important. It means that when you do something wrong, it's wrong. Well, do you want that? You know, if you take people, then you expose them voluntarily

to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of, that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals, their self-defined goals. If you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of, they get stronger. And you don't know what the upper limits to that are, because you might ask yourself, like, If for 10 years, if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do, what would you be like?

Well, you know, there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time, and there are people who do find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were. If they spoke their being forward. And they get stronger and stronger and stronger. And we don't know the limits to that. We do not know the limits to that. Probably running at about 51% of our capacity. Something you mean you can think about this yourself.

I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste. And the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day. You know, inefficient studying, watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch, that you don't even care about, that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done, that's probably four hours right there. You know, you think, well, that's 20, 25 hours a week. It's 100 hours a month. That's two and a half full work weeks.

It's half a year of work weeks per year. And so if your life isn't everything it could be, you could ask yourself, well, what would happen if you just stop wasting the opportunities that are in front of you? You'd be, who knows how much more efficient, 10 times more efficient, 20 times more efficient. That's the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient, efficient people get. It's completely off the charts. It's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path. Now when you say, well, nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer.

Yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility. So that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation. Say, well, I can't help being nihilistic. All my belief systems have collapsed. It's like, yeah, maybe. Maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out. And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering. but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you.

If you live a pathological life, you pathologize your society. And if enough people do that, then it's hell. Really, really. You're asked to outline the place you'd like to end up, which is your desired future, and also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart, is so that your anxiety chases you and your approach systems pull you forward. You're maximally motivated dead. And it's important because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue, right?

And that's very common. And so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward, but it makes you weak because you're afraid. You want to get your fear behind you, pushing you. And so what you want to be is more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them. Putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much better much easier on you, psychophysiologically because you don't produce you don't go into the generalized stress response to the same degree and you're activating your exploratory and seeking systems which are dopaminergically mediated and that

involve positive emotion so if you can face something voluntarily rather than having it chase you it's way better for you psychophysiologically so that's partly why well it's worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair instead of waiting for it to come and eat you so and especially when you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair, you might find it when it's a baby instead of a full-fledged bloody monster that is definitely going to take you down. Don't avoid small problems that you know are there. Face them because they'll grow into big problems all by themselves. And you can think about, imagine the tax department sends you a notification. You owe them like $300. Well, it's, you know, that's annoying. Maybe you don't even want to open the letter. Or maybe if you do, you just put it on the shelf. But that damn thing.

doesn't just sit there like a piece of paper on the shelf, right? You ignore that for five or six years. It's going to become attached to all sorts of horrible things. And if you ignore it long enough, you get the idea. It's going to turn into something that is completely unlike the little piece of paper that it's written on. And many, many problems in life are like that. You'll see that they'll pop their ugly little head up and you know, and you might want to turn away, might not want to think about it, which is the easiest way of turn it. turning away, right? You just don't attend to it. You know, if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years,

if you were taking care of yourself properly, you know, what would you want from your friendships, what would you want from your intimate relationship, how would you like to structure your family, what do you want for your career, well, how are you going to use your time outside of your job, and how are you going to regulate your mental and physical health, and maybe also your drug and alcohol use, because that's a good place to auger down, you know, because alcoholism, for example, wipes out, you know, fight, to 10% of people. So you want to keep that under control. And then so maybe you develop a vision of what you would like your life to be. And that associates the, so the goal, once the goal is established,

and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement, the micro processes become rewarding in relation to their causal association with the goal. And that tangles in your incentive reward system. And that's the thing that keeps you moving forward. forward. And the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal. Okay, well, what's the implication of that? Better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out. And so the more valuable the goal, in principle, the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge. And so what that means is, well, you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day,

you're ready to go. And so as far as I can tell, what you do is you specify your long-term ideal. Maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding, because that's also useful. You specify your goal. You do that in some sense as a unique individual. You want to specify goals that make you say, oh, if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts, it would clearly be worthwhile. Because the question always is why do something? Because doing nothing is easy. You just sit there and you don't do anything.

That's real easy. The question is, why would you ever do anything? And the answer to that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile. Number one, specify your damn goals, because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is? That isn't going to happen. And often people won't specify their goals too

because they don't like to specify conditions for failure. So if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well, then you don't know when you fail. And people might say, well, I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful. So I'll keep myself blind about when I fail. That's fine, except you'll fail all the time then. You just won't know it until you failed so badly that you're done. Okay, so once you get your goal structure set up, you think, okay, if I could have this life,

looks like that might be worth living, despite the fact that it's going to be, you know, anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to be some science. suffering and loss involved and all of that, obviously. The goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered, that justifies your effort. Okay, so then what do you do? Well, then you turn down to the micro routine. It's like, okay, well, this is what I'm aiming for. How does that instantiate itself day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month?

And that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful. Google calendar. It's like, make a damn schedule and stick to it. So what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison. That's the first thing that people do wrong. They say, well, I don't like to follow a schedule. It's like, well, what kind of schedule are you setting up?

Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this. You know, and then I just go play video games, because who wants to do all these things that I have to do? It's like, wrong. Set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want. What's the right ratio of responsibility to reward? And you can ask yourself that, just like you'd negotiate, with someone who is working for you. It's like, okay, you got to work tomorrow. Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow. And you might say, okay, well, what are you going to do

for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you? Well, you could ask yourself that, you know. So maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. I don't know, whatever turns your crank, man, but, you know, you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself. Like you're negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life. And that's how you make the schedule. It's like, and then you look at the day and you think, well, if I had that day, that'd be good.

Great. You know, and you're useless and horrible, so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy, but that beats the hell out of zero, right? And if you hit it even with 50% accuracy, another rule is, well, aim for 51% the next week, or 50.5% for God's sake, or because you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward. And so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness. It's a plan a life you'd like to have.

The other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are. Because you know what you're like. You won't do what you're told. You won't do what you tell yourself to do. You must have noticed that. It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss. And both of those work, you know, for you.

You don't know what you want to do And then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyways You should fire yourself and find someone else to be But but you know My point is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak You're someone that you have to negotiate with And that's and you're someone that you want to Present the opportunity of having a good life to

And that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much So you know they're always like cracking the whip And then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating And it's like, God, so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time. And you know what that's like, because you probably waste like six hours a day. And I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back, right? Your time's probably worth $50 an hour, something like that. I mean, you're not getting paid that now, but you're young.

And so this is investment time. And what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future. So let's say it's $50 an hour, which is perfectly reasonable. So if you waste six hours a day and you are, then you're wasting about $2. $2,000 a week or about $100,000 a year. So like, go ahead, but that's what it's costing you every hour. And you need to know what your damn time is worth. So let's say it's not 50 bucks. It's 30. Whatever. Maybe it's 100. It's somewhere in that range. One of the things you should be asking yourself is when you spend an hour was that, well, what have I paid someone 50 bucks to have had that

hour? And if the answer is no, it's like, well, maybe you should do something else with your time. And it depends on whether or not you think that your time's worthwhile. But the first of funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn't worthwhile, what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibilityless bliss. What you do is you suffer existentially. And so that seems like a stupid solution. Imagine someone that you treat well, that you love, then try to treat yourself that way. You've got to detach from yourself a bit. You've got to think, okay, well, I'm a person among other people, and I deserve at least as much respect as a person among other people and I should be trying to help myself across time.

Instead of being self-contemptuous and self-destructive, I need to take care of myself as if I'm potentially valuable and to lay out my life that way. And so that's what that chapter is about. And it's hard for people, you know, they don't take care of themselves as well as they should. And I don't mean, you know, take care of yourself. I mean, that isn't what I mean. It's like, it's not a moralistic attack. It's like it's an encouragement to give yourself a bit of the benefit of the doubt. Take care of your room. Take care of your things.

Like have some respect for yourself. It's like you are, there is a lot of potential within you. And there's many things that you can do. And you're necessary more than you think to the unfolding of things. Like if you make a bunch of bad decisions, things get worse, not just for you. Like, things get worse. And so it matters what you do.

And so part of what you do is you want to treat yourself as if what you do matters. And so you want to have some respect for yourself. Young people like to think about ways to change the world, right? And that's actually a positive part of their development. It's a stage that the developmental psychologist, Sean Piaget, called the messianic stage, and he associated that with late adolescence. While young people want to change the world,

The problem is that that's been harnessed into attempts to change other people. But that isn't what you should do. If you want to change the world, you should change yourself. In the sense that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, when he analyzed the Soviet Union, he said, don't be thinking that the line that divides good from evil runs down a political spectrum or countries or something like that. It runs right down the middle of your soul.

And if you want to sort out the world, then what you do is you sort yourself out. It's a serious business. They say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city. Because you're complicated, and there are horrible monsters inside of you that need to be tamed and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you can be a powerful and useful person. And instead of rushing out there to change the world, by changing other bad people that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly.

And if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old, approximately, and when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an emotional reaction, that means you haven't fully articulated the memory. You haven't analyzed it causally. You haven't freed yourself from its grasp, and you're carrying it like a weight. And your brain responds to that,

like the more weight you're carrying like that, more baggage, let's say, the more of the stress hormone cortisol, your brain produces and cortisol makes you old. Divide your life up into six epochs and then divide each of those, that might be say, oh, birth to kindergarten and then maybe elementary school and then maybe junior high school, however you want to do it, and then to write about the emotionally significant events in each of those epochs and then to describe their effects on you and then to analyze how you did in those situations, what you might have done differently, what you might have do differently in the future,

to straighten out your past. If you're thinking about your past, what it means is you haven't analyzed the causal shapes, because you might say, well, why do you remember your past? Well, you might say, well, it's in order to have an objective, you know, record of the past. It's like it has nothing to do with that. There's only one reason you remember the past. And that's to be prepared for the future.

That's why you remember the past. And so what you're supposed to do is take the past and extract out from it, wisdom. And wisdom is the ability to avoid stumbling blindly into ditches. Here's a time in my past, I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch and terrible things happen to me. You need to take that apart. You need to figure out how was it that events conspired

with your participation voluntarily or involuntarily so that that terrible consequence emerged? You need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation. And as soon as you do that, your brain will leave it alone. You won't obsess you about it anymore because the anxiety-producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where there are obstacles in your environment. Don't go there, there's fire. Maybe you could master the fire, right? Then you're a wielder of fire, you're not just a victim. And lots of

situations are dangerous or not dangerous depending on your level of mastering, right? Life is like that. And so a negative emotion that's associated with a memory is something that's crying out for mastery. And writing can really help with that. You're reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically. Imagine emotion. Memories can be stored at different levels of your brain, from sort of primordial reptilian image-laden areas that are very emotional, up to finely articulated plans for your future life.

Well, you want to take everything that, negative and emotional and transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future. And that frees you of your past. You shouldn't be thinking about your past. I mean, maybe if you're 80 and you're going over a well-spent life, that's a whole different thing. But if you're 30, 35 or 20 and most of the time you're thinking about your past, it's like your soul is trapped back there. You need to free it through investigation.

And the metaphysical language is appropriate because that is in a sense, what you're doing you're trapped in the past it's like you got to break free of that so you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future