HealthyGamerGG - Will I be Stuck at a Crappy Job Forever?

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Dr. K dives into crappy jobs. How expectations are influential, the assumption that work is necessary to survive, and black and white thinking. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So if you're 18 and you're concerned, if you're 21 or you're 25 and you're concerned that this is going to happen for the rest of your life, like honestly you've got no clue. Like I've got no clue. No one's, no one can see the future. Why is it normal and expected to waste most of your life away doing a crappy job? I'm 18 taking a gap here and we'll go to college in the fall and I've been working at a store for almost a year now. And every time I'm reminded I'll be doing this for the majority of the rest of my life. I break down and start crying. Is there any way around this eternal suffering at all besides being a neat and leaching off people for the rest of my life?

So this post is short. It's not a long and drawn out exploration of thoughts and feelings and whatever. What this post is about is like if you're 18 years old and you've got a crappy job, this sucks. That's the essence of it. right like somewhere along the way like this is what we started to expect from people is that you're 18 you're kind of bored you're taking a gap year because you need some money and this is what you have to look forward to right and then you're sort of like sitting at this this dead end job where due to like inflation and all kinds of other problems like it doesn't even make you

the money that you need to make but you sort of need to do it right like because the alternative is being a neat and leaching off of society. You want to contribute. You want to do a good job. But this is sort of what you have to look forward to. And we see this like all over the place, right? So this is a post that's in our subreddit, but there's, you know, for a little while before this whole, you know, anti-work mod fiasco and going on like Fox News and stuff. Like this sentiment is growing larger and larger and larger. And what we're noticing is that there's a growing sentiment of being young, feeling like you're in a dead end situation, potentially being in a dead end situation. And you've kind of got nowhere to go. And there's despair. And the thing is, this is not just

unique to one person. This is like everywhere you look, we're seeing stories like this, where young people are struggling to try to figure out, like, what's the point of this crap? And so this question, the question is actually like, why is it normal and expected to do that? So we're actually going to answer that in a minute. But I want to start with, like, what's so challenging about this situation is that, so there's this perception that young people are lazy. The thing is, I mean, maybe we're lazy, but I don't think we're any lazier than any person that's come before us. I think most of human laziness is like baked into the way that we work. The challenge right now is that most of the people I've met and most of the people that I worked with are actually like okay working hard.

They just want to work hard for something. That's what's missing. It's one thing to like want to work hard or not want to work hard. It's another thing to work hard for no reason or work hard for like way too small of a reason. reason. So it's one thing to like slave away for eight hours a day to support yourself and your family. It's another thing to slave away for eight hours a day and not even be able to support yourself or support family or even get a financially like a financial leg up. That's the crux of the problem. So it's it's not actually that people are lazy. I mean, they are, but not really. Honestly,

I don't, I don't believe that about people. I think what disincentivizes people from working is that what you put in and what you get out doesn't match. So this is tricky, right? So like you're faced with a situation. You're 18 years old. You're like trying to figure out, okay, like, what should I do with my life? Well, I got to get a job because I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be a leech. I'm willing to work. I'm willing to sacrifice. But then you find yourself in this situation where the sacrifice you make is not commensurate with what you get in return. And so this leads to despair. and it's happening like all throughout our society. So let's try to understand like if you're in this situation, first of all, what's going on,

how we got here, because I do think that's important to understand and what you can do about it. Because the key thing about this is that there are some things about this that are actually outside of your control, which it's really important to understand what those are because a lot of the frustration that we get at comes from railing against a system that does not give a crap. and that just it exhausts all of our energy, leads us to despair, and then like, you know, we run out of energy and then we can't even do the things that we can control, which is what's really important to understand is that there are some things you can do about this. The problem is that the more that we sort of focus on the system, there are maybe even some things you can do there. But like, we have to really be careful about how we devote our energy because what I've seen and what I'm actually pretty hopeful for is like, I've wrote a lot of people who are Dumers and stuff like that. But the good news is that a lot of them get their crap together. It's just no one sort of teaches us how.

Because the biggest thing that's changed is that the default plan like doesn't work anymore. Right? You can't just like people will say this is how you become happy and successful and whatever. And like that just doesn't work. And we're sort of seeing that here, which is working to save up money so that you can go to college. Like that used to work because the ratio of how much college costs, how much living in college costs to how much money you. you can actually make if you devote a year of your life to working. Like, that worked.

This is exactly what I'm saying is that like that sacrifice, sacrificing your year, a year of your life at a dead end job doesn't actually make a significant impact in going to college, or at least not the way that it used to. Okay. So let's try to understand, like, so let's look at this question actually quite precisely first. And it's why is it normal and expected to, waste most of your life away doing a crappy job. So let's talk about that. So when my grandmother was born, so we're talking like she's like in her 90s now. So she was born around like 1930-ish or so.

And when she was born, the infant mortality rate in India was probably around 20%. So they had problems like drought, they had problems like, you know, medicine wasn't available. I still remember visiting my ancestral village in India before, in my lifetime, it did not have electricity or running water. Actually, I think they had running water. They didn't have electricity. I remember it was a huge deal when electricity came to the house, and there was one dude who got a television.

And what he would do every night is charge entry into his living room, for people to watch television. So he had this whole, like, thing going where it's like, you know, it's like one rupee to come in and watch the TV. And you can stay as long as you want to. And like in the evening, people would come in and like 30 people would be in his living room, like watching TV. Okay. So this is like, this is in my lifetime. Okay?

I'm a turn 40 this year. So this is like in my lifetime, in parts of the world, this is what life was like. So where does the expectation that you have to work and slave away stuff that you don't want to do come from? It comes from the fact that that's what was required to survive. So for the majority of human history, human beings had to work to survive. Right? So we had to like, originally we were like hunter-gatherers, right? So it's like, like, you know, animals, for example, like they have to, well, unless they're pets, but generally speaking, or like raised livestock or whatever.

but like if you're a wild animal, like, you got to work every day because if you don't work every day, you don't eat. And human beings were basically an extension of that, right? So if we've got like an early on village, so everyone in my ancestral village were farmers because that's just, that was the option. And you had to go to the fields every day because you had to like make, get food. You had to grow food. You had to sell some of that stuff so that you could pay for things like clothing. And so like they were like peanut farmers and stuff like that and they'd grow this crop and that crop and whatever. And they'd like sell it.

So like, where does the expectation that you don't get to have fun in life and you have to do crap that you don't want to do come from? It comes from the need to survival for survival. That's where it comes from. So where did we expect this? Because that's what society was like, like even within 100 years. Where everyone sort of had to do their part. Otherwise, like, society kind of doesn't work. And of course, there have always been people who are like not a productive member of society.

You've got homeless people. You've got alcoholics. You've got people who are physically ill, mentally, or whatever. and like we didn't have treatment for those kinds of people always. So there's always been unproductive members of society. But for the most part, where does the expectation that your enjoyment is not important come from? It comes from, honestly, the need for survival. And there's even some really interesting data that if you look at like what has impacted life expectancy of human beings the most in the last like 300 years, it's actually the availability of food.

So what is, you know, 500 years ago, I think the life expectancy. was maybe like in the 50s or something like that, maybe even lower. And so why are people living to like 60 and 70 routinely? It's because we have enough to eat. So society is changing a little bit. And what's happening, though, is that the expectations that we have are not mirroring the world that we live in today. So where does the expectation that your enjoyment is not actually like that important?

That expectation comes, in my opinion, from survival. because human beings had to do crap they didn't want to do. Like you had to wake up at 4 a.m. every day to go out to the fields to farm because if you didn't do that, like you didn't have food. So you had to do that. So I don't care about how you feel about it. It's like necessary for survival. So then what happened is for thousands of years, we had this like structure in human society,

which is that you have to do work to survive because life is about surviving. That was the primary goal. That was not guaranteed. That was not assured. that was not likely necessarily. And so where does the expectation comes from? It comes from that. Like, in a nutshell.

Right? Because you had to work to survive. So now what's happened is we don't really have to work to survive. Like so survival is like, not guaranteed. I mean, obviously death is guaranteed. But, you know, it's like a lot of our survival is sort of like secured. So generally speaking, you know, more people die of obesity than hunger. Right?

more people die of like heart disease and diabetes and things like that, then they die of hunger. I think, you know, I don't actually have statistics on that, but I'm pretty sure. So if you look at most of the burden of disease right now, so you look at things like cardiovascular disease, you look at things like colon cancer, you look at like these things like type 2 diabetes, obesity, at least in the U.S. like 30% of the U.S. is, I think, obese. And all the health effects from that, it's like we have diseases of plenty now, as opposed to before, when life expectancy was lowered by like malnourishment and stuff like that. In developing countries and things like that, the situation is reversed.

I think there are definitely parts of the world where poverty and a lack of nourishment is a primary factor in terms of life expectancy. But for the developed world, that's not really the case. The problem is that the systems that we have have not really kept up with that. So there's this assumption that working for the purpose of survival sort of means that, like, don't get to complain. Like, you just have to be a productive member of society. The thing is, that's just not true anymore, right? So if we look at, like, what's happened, economies of scale, things like technological advancements, things like hydroponic farming and, like, you know,

agriculture has changed drastically. You used to have a bunch of people in order to, like, create a bunch of food. Now you just need, like, one person, or even, like, drones or machines can automate it. You've got a hydroponic bay. I remember reading a couple years ago, there was this place in Japan that grew a bunch of lettuce per like square foot. And so they've got, you know, they're using the vertical dimension to farm. So it's not just like growing lettuce in the ground. It's like we've got one layer of lettuce here. We've got one layer of lettuce here. We've got one layer. We've got like eight layers of lettuce that go 12 feet up in the air. So you're basically like using your exponentially increasing the amount of food you can grow. And so what's a consequence

of this? We also see this like in the entertainment industry. So why is the, entertainment industry growing so rapidly? Like, why are, like, think about the number of video games that are around today. Think about the number of TV shows that are around today. And, like, how many TV shows were being made every year, 40 years ago? It's probably, like, one to 10% of what we're seeing now. And why is that? It's because we don't need humans to do the work anymore.

Right? So, like, as human beings, like, don't need to do the work, like, they want more entertainment. because a lot of stuff is automated now, right? If we have, like, self-driving cars, we've got, like, alarm clocks. We've got all kinds of, like, different devices. We have dishwashers. We have laundry machines. These are the things that human beings had to do before.

And now it's like we don't got, we have running water. We have electricity. We can stay up all night. Like, we no longer need to, like, chop down firewood for light and heat. Right? The power comes right to my house. Like, that's pretty cool. So the labor requirements of human beings have decreased.

And what we've essentially done is moved upward in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And now we're at the part where, like, you know, for most of us, thankfully, survival is like not that big of a deal. Most of us aren't going hungry, thankfully. And so as we do this, like, but the systems that are designed are not designed for happiness. They're designed under the assumption that you have to do crappy work in order to like make society function. But we don't need to do crappy work. I mean, some of us do, I suppose. But, you know.

And it's really interesting because this is something that's like, we're sort of seeing this trend. So I was looking at, I just want to show you all something real quick. So Deloitte did a survey on Gen Z and Millennials. And what we sort of found, there are a couple of really interesting findings from this survey. Like, I want you to look at this. So nearly two in five, 37% of Gen Zers and 36% of millennials say they rejected it. a job and or assignment based on their personal ethics. Oh, I guess you guys can't, hold on, so you all can see that.

This over here. Nearly half of Gen Zian millennials in senior positions have rejected a job or assignment based on their personal ethics. So what I hear in this post is that this is a dead end job. I don't enjoy it and my suffering is eternal. And it turns out that this is not just this person. This is a generational impact that we see. And like, this is crazy.

Like, the idea of rejecting a job based on personal ethics in my grandmother's day was absurd. You can't stop being a farmer based on personal ethics because your family needs the food. And so as we moved upward towards Maslow's hierarchy of needs, suddenly, like, personal fulfillment becomes more important to us as a whole generation. Because the truth is that, you know, we don't need to work as much as we used to as human beings. the human race does not need to work as much as it used to. Now, if we did work, I think that's generally speaking good, so we can, like, advance the human race better, the more of us that kind of put in the time. But we don't necessarily have to do it in a dead end job. And I think this is something that's really unfortunate, but it's true that society has not,

the institutions and structures of society have not actually kept up with the evolving needs of society. We're seeing hopefully change in that now. But the end of the day, like, what does this have to do with you? Right? So if you're faced in this situation and you're listening to this, I'm imagining your response as, well, that sucks. So what do I do about it? G.G.

I guess society has to change. And yeah, it does have to change. The truth of the matter is that there's a lot you can do about it. And we're going to start by actually taking a closer look at the post. So I want to zero in on this. Is there any way around this eternal suffering at all besides being a neat and leaching off people, off people the rest of my life. So what do you all notice about this statement? What do you think is going on in this person's head? Someone saying, take two jobs. So this is

interesting. Before we go further, I want to show you all something. So this is some stuff about the Great Resignation. Yeah, perhaps as a way to alleviate financial currents, many are taking on side jobs. Forty-three percent of Gen Ziers have taken on either a part-time or full-time paying job in addition to their primary job. That is shocking. That's what this says down here. Right? So this is already happening.

I think that this actually, Gen Zers are, I don't know exactly what the statistics are for like boomers and stuff like that. But I'm pretty sure that like close to 50% of people did not have side jobs. Right? This is a huge systemic problem. I don't think you can blame this on the millennial. But what I want to focus on here for a second is, what do you all notice about this statement? Yeah, here's a link.

Posting it now. Oh, I can't post. It's Deloitte's 2022 Gen Z millennial survey. So let's focus on what we're going to do about it. So what do you all notice about this? Dualism. Perfect. So this statement is black and white thinking.

Okay. So the truth of the matter is that the world is not black and white. The truth of the matter is you don't have a choice between eternal suffering and being a need. The truth of the matter is there's a lot of stuff in between there. So as we look at this problem, there is an external component and an internal component. The external component we've already touched on, right? The truth of the matter is that society has changed. Gen Z ears are getting crushed.

Right? So that may sound pretty bad. We can't really fix that. We can try to fix it. maybe there are people who are fixing it, like whatever. But at the end of the day, there are things that you can do. So the first thing that you've got to be careful of is your information diet. So this is where when something is happening to me and I turn to the Internet and I see that it's happening to everyone else,

I conclude that there's just despair, right? Because I have a cognitive impression. I'm feeling a particular way. I go to the Internet and what does the Internet do? The internet amplifies feelings and what it amplifies the most are negative feelings. So let me just like, we know this, right? So there have been studies starting with Facebook, looking at social media, and you yourself think about this.

So think about if you spend 10 hours a day browsing the internet, what does that do to the quality of your life? Do you feel invigorated, passionate, excited, hopeful about life? Of course not. So let's think about why this is. So if I make a post on the internet about. hey, I'm so grateful. I have an awesome job. I love it so much. What do you think happens to that post? Some people upvote it. Some people like it. And some people dislike it. The more time you spend on the

internet, the more likely you are to downvote that kind of post because you're resentful. Right. So what happens is we're like creating this echo chamber. And if I make a post that people can empathize with, if I say, I'm getting crushed at work, I'm going to get way more upvotes than downvote. I'm going to get way more likes than dislikes. That's actually what's going to happen. Because the truth of the matter is the people who are more happy in their jobs probably spend less time on the internet. And the reason they do that is because they're like more busy with their job.

Does that make sense? As Toys R Us kid says, misery loves company, absolutely. And that's what the internet has become. So I'm not saying that the internet is bad. I'm saying you should be aware of what impact the internet. has on your mind. Because when you sort of look at this, the natural, like what floats to the top in terms of the internet, it's stories of doom and despair for the most part. So I'm not saying that you should stay completely off of the internet. I just want y'all to pay attention to how much time you

read stories of doom and despair. And what does that do for you? I'm not saying that you shouldn't be aware. I'm not saying you should cut it out entirely. I do think that there's a lot to be gained from sort of like understanding how other people are struggling and things like that. But I think that watching that stuff time and time and time again is just going to reinforce perceptions. And there's a bias on the internet towards negativity. And the more that you open up yourself to that bias, the more stressed out you're going to feel. And then what we see is that stress is going to lead to black and white thinking.

We sort of see this, right? Because the truth of the matter is like, I don't know if it's common sense, but there's a lot, there are way more options than this. Is there any way around this eternal suffering at all besides being a neat and leaching off people? 100%. There are a thousand different options. But if you spend time on the internet, it's not your fault. It's not like this person is stupid.

Quite the opposite. I think this person is asking an insightful question and trying to understand themselves. But the truth of the matter is there's a ton of stuff that you can do. But all of the nuance is not represented on the internet. That's the big problem. Is if I go to Twitter, all I'm going to see is like black and white thinking. Twitter is a platform that restricts, by virtue of its nature, restricts nuanced thinking. Right?

There's a character limit. You can just go one way or the other way. And what's going to happen is like, as you go one way, it's going to be a visceral response. People will emotionally connect to. They'll share the tweet, they'll like the tweet, whatever gets floated to the top. So this is why if you look at like Twitter, it's so polarized. There's no discussion. you can't have a discussion.

It's just people yelling at each other and no one's paying attention. The more you participate than that, the more that your mind is going to see this, and the more that your mind is going to come to this conclusion. And furthermore, the more that you read this stuff is you get emotionally activated as your amygdala gets hyperactive, right, when you read this stuff because you're getting emotionally engaged. As your stress level rises, as you're like, oh, my God, the world is ending. What am I going to do? Your cortisol level increases.

as your cortisol level increases day after day after day after day. And remember that cortisol was not designed to be chronically elevated. Cortisol was designed in our by evolution, designed, evolved. The purpose of cortisol is to keep us alive for the 24 hours after a period of danger. And then the cortisol level is supposed to go down and we're supposed to be fine. So like the way that the cortisol system developed was sort of like to account for, long-term post-acute danger. Now what happens is paying rent at the end of the month is a constant danger.

So your cortisol level is elevated for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 100 days. And what does cortisol do to your brain? Does all kinds of crap like interferes with your sleep and things like that, lowers your mood, increases inflammation, but also encourages black and white thinking. Literally. stress hormones encourage black and white thinking. So as you consume a particular diet of information, your cortisol level is going to go up. As your cortisol level is going to go up, you're going to start thinking in black and white.

So what can you do about this? Three things. First of all, be critical of the information that you consume and be critical of how much you consume it and when you consume it and how you consume it. second thing is figure out whether you are operating in a cognitive bias. Now, that in and of itself is tricky. How do you figure out if you're operating in a cognitive bias? It's really simple. There's one tip.

Is your thinking black and white? If you're thinking is black and white, chances are your brain is not behaving in a completely, like, calm, objective way. Black and white is the consequence of subjectiveness. Right? You can sort of see that. You can see the stress in any kind of political discussion. It's black and white.

There's the good guys and the bad guys. And I'm part of the good guys down with the bad guys. I got to fight for this. It's like so much energy, so much emotion. It's a fight for survival. And then things become black and white. Because that's the way that our brain evolved. You know, if I'm like out fishing on my boat and a crocodile takes a bite out of the boat,

my mind needs to react quickly in a black and white manner. It's an issue of life and death. and that's what we see in all these political discussions. Everything seems like the world is ending and there's despair, right? That's what we see here. I'll be doing this for the majority of the rest of my life. I break down and start crying. How do you know that you're going to be doing this for the majority of the rest of your life?

Where do you get that idea? Can this person see the future? Can you see the future? Can I see the future? We have no idea. Did people 20 years ago, could they have predicted? Because I think smartphones are less than 20 years old. Right?

But like this kind of, like we don't realize this because all we see is the here and now. And when we suffer, time starts to dilate. So when you're like nauseous, like if you get food poisoning, like time is going to dilate, you're going to be like, oh my God, this is awful. It's going to last forever. And then what happens is this person, it's not just like time dilation because of suffering. There's other stuff too because they hear this story from people who are 30. They hear this story from people who are 40.

They hear this story from people who are 25 because of the internet. So what can you do about it? The first thing is like control your information diet. Second thing is recognize if you have black and white thinking. And if you do, just recognize that the conclusions that your mind are coming to are just like objectively false. And the third thing that you can do is play chess, like figuratively in your life. life. So this is the other thing that you all got to understand. So I'm not great at chess. I'm actually quite bad. I barely know how to play. But when you look at a chessboard at the very

beginning, because at the age of 18, you're just starting life. And your goal is to take the king. It's an impossible task. How on earth are you going to win this chess game? You can move a pawn, you can move a single pawn up one square or two squares. How much closer does that get you to winning the game? It gets you just as close to winning the game as it does to losing the game. Right? So when we're 18 and we have this deterministic view of the future, like the right thing to do is to start to play chess. And that's sort of like what I did. Some people will sort of ask, how did I go from, you know, a 2.5 GPA to training at Harvard Medical School and being faculty there? Like one step at a time. It took me years. It took me about seven years to start to put

my life together. And then after that, it took me like eight years to, not eight, four more years to actually land at Harvard. So, like, I finished undergrad. That took me five years. I took some additional classes to try to boost my GPA. I applied to medical school three times, started medical school at Tufts. Right. So each of those is like one step up.

Did a dual degree program there to try to increase my competitiveness. Matched at Mass General Hospital and McLean Hospital for psychiatry training. That's, it's a Harvard Medical School residency. and then four years after that, I was faculty at Harvard Medical School. And that was, I was 36. Technically, I was on the faculty at 32, because even as a clinical fellow, your faculty, but I was learning there, right? And like my journey started at the age of 21.

It took me 15 years. So there's no sense of time and duration. And each one is like one step forward. It's like playing a game of chess. You're behind a little bit. We're going to take one step forward. you're going to be behind a little bit, we're going to take one step forward. You're behind a little bit.

We're going to take one step forward. And as you move your pieces, you don't know what the plan is going to be. It's not linear. Life is not like that. You can just make the best move at every step of the way. And as you make the best move, as you develop your pieces, as you get different kinds of experience under your belt, you will reach a place where this future that you're predicting is just not the case anymore. and you're going to spend less time on the internet because you have a life that's worth living. It's hard.

To being 18 years old, taking a gap year and, like, trying to make some money before you go to college is like, it's mind-numbingly difficult. You get so little reward for the effort that you put in. And at the same time, like, just because you don't see the reward then does not mean that you're not accruing something. That certain amount of money will give you a certain amount of freedom. Right. It will position you a little bit better in terms of college and stuff like that. You'll have a year of work experience under your belt. Your ability to tolerate bad situations is also going to be better. Like, there's all kinds of stuff that you're gaining that you don't even see yet.

And case and point is like all of the struggles that I had never dawned on me when I was like 19 years old and playing video games until 4 in the morning. And like, so I could pass out so I didn't have to think about how I was screwing up my life. it never crossed my mind that suffering in this way and struggling in this way would allow me to help people in the future 15 years later, 16, 17 years later. Like you just can't, you have no idea what life has in store. Everyone thought they knew what was going on and then COVID hit. Everyone thought they knew what was going on when Bitcoin soared, right? Let's buy Luna.

Let's buy this coin. Let's buy Doge coin, Shiga coin, this coin. Cable coin, Terra coin. Everyone was confident. And here comes the next thing, NFTs. Didn't you know that the video game industry understands that NFTs are the next big thing? That's what gamers want. So we're going to buy this ape yacht club stuff and this is how I'm going to make my money.

Like everyone knows the future, right? Blockchain is what's next. Web 3.0. It's a video game that you can make money playing. That's what people want. everyone's so sure just like you are if you're 18 and you're sure that doom and gloom is ahead of you like everyone in the world is so sure so what can you do like take a step back cut back on like what you consume off of the internet recognize what helps you and what doesn't

look at yourself when you when you spend time on the internet how does it make you feel does it actually equip you to do better does it improve your mood because that's sort of like what we think, right? We think if we're like, okay, if I watch enough YouTube videos, I'll like, I'll figure this out. And I'm not saying that they don't help. There's even preliminary data from our internal community that we're now applying to the ethics board to do a study on about watching our content appears to improve. We're not really sure about this. So this is like we haven't done a study yet. We've just noticed some initial thing. It appears to improve some symptoms that some negative symptoms of mood and anxiety by 11 to 20%.

interesting, right? So people learn stuff on the internet for sure. So that's, it's not even studied data. It's like an initial signal that now we have to like, in a non-biased way, examine and see if that effect is real or not. We don't even know if it's real. But it's interesting. Can watching YouTube actually improve like symptoms of depression by 20%? That's the study that we're applying for now. So be careful about what you consume, recognize your black and white thinking. And then like ultimately, just to make one move at a time, right? So if you need to work for one year, it's not going to last forever. You don't need to be in that job for the next 50 years. Even this person said, I'm taking a gap year. This is time limited.

You all see that? Like, but that's not how the mind thinks. So taking a gap year, we'll go to college in the fall. I'll be doing this for the majority of rest of my life. Those two statements don't add up, even internally. But the whole point is that once our mind starts thinking in this way, once our cortisol level starts to rise, we start thinking in black and white, we don't even realize this is only a one-year gig. By definition, it's a one-year gig. There's just this presumption that after I get out of college

is all I'm going to be able to do, then why are you going to college in the first place? If this is the job that you're stuck in for the rest of your life, there's no point in college. The whole point of going to college is that it's one step forward. It's one chess piece. You're mobilizing your rook.

You're mobilizing your night. And if you mobilize those, hopefully it'll give you bigger and better opportunities. And that's what I do see. I mean, I see that as we're kind of seeing in the, in the, you know, the Deloitte survey, right? So, it's a privately conducted survey. So take that for what it's worth. It's not peer-reviewed published research.

What we see is that people are actually turning down jobs that are not aligned with what their mission and what they want to accomplish in life. Which is also kind of interesting because that also sort of implies. And we'll see, if you go through the survey, there's other interesting stuff about how many people are quitting and how many people are moving, that there are. are more mission-driven jobs out there because I think employers are starting to realize, and not just employers, but like people are starting to realize that people want to do something that matters. We're not content to be peons anymore. And so I know it feels very despairing to be in the situation where you're like 18 and you're thinking like, oh my God, this is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. The rest of your life is a really long time. Okay,

like I want you all to just think about how long a life is. So I'm going to reference my grandmother one more time. So she grew up in a village. without electricity without running water. Like airplanes were not invent or maybe they were invented. She had certainly never seen one. Like airplanes were not a thing. Like for the generations prior to her. So she, the outside world was like, I remember talking to her about this one day.

The outside world was theoretical. There was not a place outside of her village. Like people had not left her village. Sometimes you'd go to the village and X over to get married. So there was like some kind of like genetic distribution. You kind of like move within a 50 mile radius, 100 kilometers or something like that to like find like people to get married to. But like the idea of another country was like a story. It was a myth.

No one she had ever met had ever been to another country. And for the first 30 years of her life. Actually probably less than that. But so when she was going by the time she was 18, she had never met a single person who had been to a different country. This is how long her life is. Now there are airplanes. We're sending people into space. There's the internet.

She knows how to use an iPad. Right? Like just think about a lack of electricity to where we are now. That is what encompasses a life. And that's like the scope of change. antibiotic therapy was not commonplace. Like surgery was, I mean, there was surgery, but there was just all kinds of stuff. The idea of a ventilator or a transplant, like, can you just think about this?

She's still alive today. And when she was like in the 1930s, the idea, or maybe actually transplants did exist then. I'm not actually sure. But the idea of like, yeah, we're going to take an organ out of a dead person or we're going to stick it in you and you're going to live for 30 more years. like that's one lifetime. And so the concept of attorney, the thing is the rate of change is increasing. The rate of change is increasing astronomically. So whatever prediction, so if you were lived 500 years ago, you did a far better job of predicting what your life would look like than you can do today.

We have no clue what the world is going to be like in 20 years, in 30 years, in 40 years. Who knows if we develop quantum computing, like what is that going to, what is that going to, what is that going to do? No one has any idea. Are we going to colonize a different planet? Like, no one has any clue. Astroborn is talking about 3D printing. So this is the thing. So right now, so there were like retail stores, right? And retail stores still exist, but like, so does online shopping. And boy, did that put a dent in retail. The concept that you don't have to leave your house to get things, food, like ladders. Like, I could order a ladder and someone will bring. to get to my house. And the concept of shopping could be extinct. If 3D printing really catches on in economies of scale like happen, I don't need to order anything off of Amazon anymore. I'm just going to make it.

If I need a screw or if I need a replacement of whatever, I'm just going to make it. I already know people who don't buy miniatures. Like when I was growing up, people would buy miniatures. I just 3D print them. I'll make whatever I want to. So if you're 18 and you're concerned, if you're 21 or you're 25 and you're concerned, and you're concerned. that this is going to happen for the rest of your life,

like, honestly, you've got no clue. Like, I've got no clue. No one's, no one can see the future. So take whatever steps that you can.