HealthyGamerGG - You Suck At Living Life

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

In today's episode, we address a fundamental yet often overlooked aspect of life: learning how to truly live. If you find yourself struggling daily, feeling as if life is a constant battle, it may indicate a gap in your understanding of how to navigate life's complexities. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And so the basic problem if you're suffering every day in life is that you haven't been taught how to live it. And you haven't asked the question, what is the source of my suffering? Why do people choose to live life when most of it is just suffering? I need this answer I need to know. Hello all. For the past two years, I've been struggling to answer this one question. Why do people choose to live despite it all? When I look at everyone's lives around me, I'm just so stunned.

For most people, life is nothing more than a cycle of working your ass. off all day so that you can make enough money to feed yourself so that you can wake up the next day to repeat the same thing, again and again and again until you die. And I have not been able to cope with this, not at all. This question struck me hard two years ago back when I was 16, the time during which I would start studying for college entrance exams. I studied all the time. I'm an Indian, so it's harder here. Eventually, I looked at my future and I was horrified. Nothing but working to live the next day, to then work for the next. And the worst part of all this is that I'm one of the few who have it good. I just can't imagine others. Poor countries where people have to work even harder or war-torn countries,

even the countries which I felt would have been my salvation. Like the United States seemed to be getting crushed under inflation. There's nowhere to run from my fate, no hope. In the past, it was even worse. Slavery was a thing. Slaves actually chose to live. Why? Why? Why did they choose to live?

Why do the Chinese who work the entire day choose to live? Somebody please tell me. Right now my life is a bit on ease, but I can't imagine how I will cope with the idea of being alive once I get a job. If I can get one, I'll probably kill myself. Ooh, that's scary. So please don't do that. And, you know, if y'all are having thoughts of suicidality,

please go see a licensed professional or call emergency services. But let's start with this basic premise, right? Like, why on earth should I live if life is suffering? Hey, y'all, I want to take a second to talk about HG coaching. And y'all may be wondering, oh my God, bra. Like, I don't want to talk about coaching. I just want to watch YouTube videos because there's a part of your brain that recognizes that you need to do better in life. But you don't actually want to invest the time and energy.

You just want to sit there and watch another YouTube video, which is exactly why I developed a coaching program. Because I realize the problem that we have today is not that we don't know what to do. It's that we don't really understand how we work and how to get our social. to actually do things. And the reason I developed a coaching program is so that 12 weeks from now, you can actually have made progress. We've shown that people improve in their sense of life purpose by about 58% and a 25% to 45% reduction in depression and anxiety. The reason we made a coaching program isn't because you can't DIY it. It's because if you want to have made significant progress three months from now, you're going to need help doing it. So if you're

interested, check out the link in the description below. And if you're still not ready yet, Totally fine. That's why we literally have 800 YouTube videos. Because for many people, it's about a slog. I wake up today. I work really hard. And I work really hard. And then I go to go home. I feed myself. And then I go to bed so that I can have more energy to work tomorrow. I'm in a highly competitive testing environment where everyone is cramming all the time. And what's the point? It sucks to cram. I don't want to learn this stuff. But I have to because my future depends on it. And this person even says, Some of us will try to cope with this reality of life is suffering, and I can't cope anymore. Well, yeah, coping ain't going to work. So if you all want to understand, how do you live life if it is fundamentally suffering? And why should we do this? The reason you should do it is because you can get better at it. And the reason that life is suffering is because you suck at living it.

I know that sounds kind of not compassionate, but that's how it is. Let me give you all a simple example. I can throw someone into a swimming pool and their experiences, I'm struggling to stay afloat. Oh my God, this is awful. I can barely breathe. I'm trying to cope with the fact that I don't know how to swim and I'm in a body of water. Why on earth should I stay in this body of water? This is awful.

Yes, you are correct. Being in a body of water sucks if you don't know how to swim. And coping is not the answer. The basic problem is that we are not taught how to swim in life. We are not taught how to live life. Because if all your life is subsisting today so that you can continue to subsist tomorrow, that ain't going to work. Now, sometimes, so let's start with a couple of basics. The first is that we all have a core need for survival and theoretically procreation.

So this is a basic human drive, where if you look at a bacteria, a bacteria is trying to live to procreate. So we have this core reason to stay alive. which is just because we're designed to, right? We prefer life over death as human beings, as all animals, as all living things. They don't even need to be animals. They strive to survive. So what's happened in the past, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 years is that the drive to survive is no longer sufficient to keep us in the game because life has started to suck so much. And this is where people will say, but Dr. Kay, what are you talking about? There's been so much advancement, and I agree, there's been a lot of advancement and a lot of good stuff that's happened.

I think we're better off today than we used to be, but we are swimming in different waters. And survival used to be sufficient because in some ways, survival was easier. And I know it sounds kind of weird, but like if you look at hunter gatherers societies, how many hours a day do hunter gatherers work? They kind of work six, maybe eight hours a day. Their life is pretty chill. They don't have to worry about mortgages at the end of the month. They don't have to worry about, oh my God, if I get a B on this test, in my sixth month of university,

how will it affect my job prospects four years from now? So a couple of fundamental things have changed. Objectively, things in some ways are better. For example, people used to starve to death, and some very unlucky people still do. But generally speaking, obesity causes more death than starvation does, which is wild, right? Think about that for a second. We have essentially won the game of surviving life, and we have won the trophy of suffering as a result. Because survival used to be enough to drive us, used to be enough of a reason to do something.

Because if we didn't do it, we didn't eat and we didn't survive. And so now the game has changed. The main quest is different. And now the very things that we have been wired to do are the things that harm us. I love fatty, carbohydrate-dense food, as does every human being on the planet, because that helped us survive. Now that love kills you, literally. So that which we were wired to do no longer works because the world has changed. And the world has changed more rapidly over the last 30 or 40 years.

Because if we look at the rate of change in the world is increasing, how much technological advancement happened between the years, 400 and 30 CE and 600 CE. Not very much. What was the world like in 1850 compared to what it is now? Completely transformed. You could take a human being from the world in 1850 and drop him into today and they would be so confused. What is this guy doing? He is talking to an image of himself and there are these weird lights and he's like talking as if he's interacting with people, but there's no one in the room. So the world has fundamentally changed and we have not been taught how to live in it. And you can't cope with this. You just have to learn how to live. And so then the question becomes, how do you learn how to live? Because they don't teach us that, right? So this is a core problem. In the past, our education was based on external things because that's what we needed to survive. This is how you farm. This is how you do mathematics.

This is how you read. But now we have tools that do all that stuff. We have this thing called a calculator. We have programs that will do your taxes for you. We have audiobooks and we can look up anything at the drop of a hat, right? We can search anything on Wikipedia and have all the information at our fingertips. So our educational system has not kept up because now what we need more than ever is to understand how to live, not be successful, how to live. And so this is where spirituality comes in. Because I think the most successful study on how to live is what I would call spirituality. So if you describe different branches of knowledge, so what is like mathematics? What is psychology, right? So mathematics is the study of math, or not study. It's, it's mathematics. I guess

math would be the study of math. And in psychology, this is where we get another thing that's kind of tripped up. So psychology is not about understanding yourself. It is about understanding the external behavior of humans. How do human beings in general function, right? It's kind of like economics. It's not like there's a big difference between personal finance and economics. Economics is, money on a big scale. Personal finance is personal. It's money on a small scale. And we even call the field, I work in finance. That doesn't mean you do personal finance. That means you work in like banking, right? So we add the word personal. So personal psychology is spirituality. Because if you go to get a degree in psychology, they're not going to teach you how to wake up in the morning.

They're not going to teach you how to find motivation in your own life. They literally will not teach you that. They will teach you core psychological principles like Pavlovian responses. This is what we understand about human behavior. This is what we understand about sadness. Not your sadness, but people's sadness. So spirituality is the discipline of understanding yourself. It has nothing to do with God. So even if you're an atheist, this is why you should engage in spirituality. If you're religious or an atheist, both people should engage in spirituality. Because spirituality is the study of the self. That's how I'm defining it. Now, a lot of people may say, but hold on a second, like, isn't psychology and biology and whatever sufficient? I don't think so. Because learning about

how human beings develop cravings and learning about the science of digestion doesn't necessarily allow you to choose a salad instead of like a fried whatever the fuck. And so the basic problem if you're suffering every day in life is that you haven't been taught how to live it. And you haven't asked the question, what is the source of my suffering? And people will say, okay, I have to work every day. And studying for this test is the source of my suffering. That's not the source of your suffering. Your suffering comes from your reaction to those circumstances. Does everyone who studies every day suffer? The answer is no. In fact, some people love it and don't you wish you were like them? I study more on a daily basis today than I did at any point in my life prior to like the last two

years. So this is an example of something that I went through over the course of a month. All right? This is a gigantic pile of paper. So studying isn't what causes suffering. It is your reaction to studying. And the number one reason that people suffer is because they do things that they should. Because your whole life, you've been taught that you should do this and you should do this and you should do this and you don't want to. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax.

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you bury this. You bury a part of yourself. You stop paying attention. You numb out. And what you are literally doing is burying a part of you that strives for something. And then we're confused why we suffer. The reason you suffer is because you're not living your life. You are living a life that is prescribed by other people. No wonder you suffer. Because you're not living the life that you want. You're literally living someone else's ideal idea of a life. And it's not even one person, right? It's some fucking Frankensteinian amalgamation of what we should do. Because then you get into this educational system where the goal isn't even learning anymore.

Can you all believe that? And this person was from India. So I'll tell you all just random tangent. So I was looking at some statistics, the most successful companies in the world. And I was really surprised because if you kind of look at like developed nations, right, the U.S. and parts of Europe like Germany, like China, they have these like awesome, gigantic conglomerate. that are doing like very revolutionary and ground-breaking work. And India's falling behind.

Same amount of people as China, roughly. But Indian companies don't do as well on the global stage, right? And maybe that's incorrect. I'm not trying to dis India. But then I started to wonder why. I was like, wait a second. Like, we're just as smart. We're just as capable.

We have just as many people. We've got awesome colleges and institutions. Why is there a per capita disproportion in like the number of leading Indian companies? And it's because of the way that we foster creativity. or don't foster creativity, right? Learning is all about cramming, cramming, cramming, cramming, instead of actually learning. It's about rote memorization. And what we're also starting to see is like these very, are not starting, these have been there forever, very hierarchical power structures. And as we as human beings, start living in situations where, you know, I'm involved in a company

and there are people older than me who report to me. This is something that is very common in the United States, much rarer in India. So the reason that we suffer is because we're trying to exist in a world that demands other things of us. And we quiet down our internal thoughts and we ignore them. And then once you disconnect from yourself, of course life is going to be suffering. Because when life is good is when you're connected with yourself, when you get to feel and be and do something. Right. I was talking to a patient of mine who is perpetually high on marijuana, perpetually.

Constant use of edibles. and on top of that smokes throughout the day. And I was talking to them about, why do you do this? And they kind of told me that the more I talk to them, and the more I realize that they feel connected to themselves when they're high. They can taste food better. They can hear music better.

Their social anxieties start to disappear. They stop worrying about the outside world. And think about that for a second. This person's source of happiness, contentment, is about disconnecting from the outside world and reconnecting to yourself. This is the essence of spirituality. So some people will use drugs to do it.

You don't need to. It can be taught. And so if you're suffering in life because you're unhappy with your situation, do something else. And this is where you will say, I can't. Why not? Because. Because what? Because people will be upset.

How will I be able to pay my rent? How will I be able to do this? How will I be able to do this? That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. So if you don't know how to do something, are you going to try? and figure it out, or if you can't see the road from A to Z, are you never going to take the first step? And this is what happens. We are a society that is becoming increasingly risk-averse,

and we're told, follow this path, follow this path, Arbeta, follow this path, and you'll be happy, you'll be happy, you'll be happy, you'll be happy. And then you ask the question, when, the answer's always the same, later, when will we be happy, when the exams are over, I'm still not happy yet, when you're done with school, when you get a good job, you get a good job. Now I just grind at work every day when you're the boss. Even when you're the boss, you're so stressed out all the time. Later, later, later, later, later. So spirituality is the practice of living today. Not about the future, not about the past, living today. These are the core central tenets of spirituality. Number one, that happiness comes from within. People may think it comes from without, but this is the wild thing.

You may say, no, but my happiness comes from the enjoyment of external things. Okay, so y'all got to understand this, that is wrong. You will say, no, but I like apples. Okay, let me ask you a question. Where does the experience of liking apples happen? Likeing apples happen. Where do you like apples? I like it in here. Do you all get that? No material object carries pleasure. Pleasure comes from your reaction to an object. This fundamental thing we do not understand. Oh, I love playing this video game. It's so much fun. And on hour six, I don't know why the fuck I play this video game. It's not even fun. The game is the same. Game hasn't changed. You had smurfs on your team in game one. You had smurfs on the enemy team in games two, three, four, five, and six.

Crazy thing, there was never a smurf. You just thought there was, right? Because surely, when you're getting dumpstered, it's because there's an enemy smurf. Do you all see that? So this is the key thing to understand. All enjoyment comes from within. Literally, you cannot enjoy something outside of yourself. It's impossible, physically, existentially. You cannot enjoy something outside of yourself. Well, no, that's wrong. My brother or sister got married recently and I'm happy for them. Where do you experience the happiness? It's in here. First tenet of spirituality. Joy and happiness and suffering all come from in here. Once you discover that, a lot of things start to change. So now what you can do is there are external events, right, studying for a test,

which then get translated into your internal being. There is a system of translation. And then you can modify that sum, right? So now this is where things get really interesting because how much can you modify an external event to create a differential response within you? So let's start with 50-50, but honestly, the answer is close to 99 or even 100%. You can absolutely do that. And people may be confused about that, but we actually know this clinically. So when we have someone who is depressed and suicidal, we know that there are different kinds of coping mechanisms. So the most basic kind of coping mechanism, which is not very healthy in the long run, is emotion-focused coping. And what that means is when I feel something bad in here,

I'm going to do something to numb these emotions and make the badness go away. It doesn't help. The most successful kind of coping mechanism, and by successful, what I mean, is leads to good outcomes for people, like objectively and subjectively. So they feel better and they do better. Top of the list is something called cognitive reframing. And as therapists, as psychiatrists, we will literally go into our office for seven hours a day and teach people how to do this. What does cognitive reframing mean?

Does it mean fixing your problems? No. It means changing the way that you think about them. It's not changing anything on the external. It is changing on the internal. That process traditionally is what we call spirituality. So you can modify whatever comes in. And this is where I will leave you with the most basic tool.

of spirituality. The only thing that you need, which will get you all the way from zero to a thousand, which is look within yourself, all you need. Everything else is a permutation or combination or fancy way of looking within yourself. So if you are unhappy about studying, what is it about this that causes suffering within you? And what you'll discover usually is that what causes suffering in you is the attachments to the thing. The meaning that your mind literally extracts from a benign thing. This is just a test. I'm literally studying mathematics. That's all I'm doing. 2 plus 2 is 4. That's it. But our mind attaches all this crap to it. Oh my God, if I get it wrong, then I won't get a good job. If I don't get a good job, then I won't get a good marriage. If I

don't get a good marriage, then I won't be happy in life. And so what happens is 2 plus 2 equals 4 suddenly becomes your mind attaches meaning to it that you are fucked if you get this question wrong. But that's literally incorrect. Like literally, that is not correct. It is all of the rest, it's a hypothetical. It's not literal. Do you all get that? We attach all of these things. We construct these things in our mind. And that's the root of our suffering. How do we deconstruct? Pay attention to your reactions. Because those are the building blocks, your reactions to things. What does this mean to me? And as you look within yourself, what you're going to be doing is the very opposite of where we started. Someone else is telling me I should do this, but I don't want to do this.

So I'm going to suppress this and I'm going to lean into what everybody else wants. That is the very opposite of looking within yourself. In fact, it is shutting down your ability to see within yourself. And this is the source of suffering. Now, this has nothing to do with God. This is what spirituality is. Simply the study of the self. Now, people may wonder, but then how the hell did this get correlated with religion and stuff in the first place?

For two reasons. So the reason spirituality got correlated with religion is because when people did this, they discovered something like God. So as people started doing these meditative practices and looking within themselves, they started activating parts of their brain in unusual ways. So chances are what happened is they started inducing high CO2 states within the brain. Normally what happens when you have a high CO2 state is you die. But if you train yourself by like being in the Himalayas for 15 years and slowly reducing your respiratory rate until you can tolerate through sort of managing that lactic acidosis through metabolic means, there's a whole physiology behind it, which your body can ramp up. So it is no longer lethal. You start to create malfunctions in the brain that are not harmful.

And when you say malfunctions in the brain, what do you mean? What I mean is visual and auditory hallucinations. Psychedelic experiences. But since these are not induced by artificial drugs and you're trained in the ability to use your mind, your mind is a very sharpened weapon that can cut through anything. You are able to handle that spiritual experience. And you see some kind of connection to some greater being. And so the original practitioners of spirituality became the source of religion. They were enlightened in some way.

They had some kinds of spiritual experiences. The second thing that happened is that as people made discoveries, they started passing. these down. And that became codified into a religion. And Buddhism, I think, is the best example of this, where Buddha explicitly did not start out to start a religion. You could make the same argument for someone like Jesus, right? I'm not an expert in Christian theology or history, for that matter. And so when these people, this is the second thing that happens, when people started to discover the source of happiness and lose, like, conquer suffering, basically, other human beings were like, holy shit, what did you figure out, teach me how to do that because you seem happy all the time and you don't even

have as much money as I do. This person is different. And so then they gravitate to that person. And then this person teaches them. And this becomes codified into a set of practices that we then call religion. And then if you look at what goes wrong in religion, basic problem in religion is that you've got someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about. And then other people are like, teach me, bro, or teach me, girl. And you're like, all right. And then you teach it to them. And then the original person dies, the problem is that unless there is a enlightened person in the next generation, someone starts living by a script. Instead of actually understanding, they start parroting answers. And so there's a decay in knowledge and understanding, which is how religions go off

track, right? You can make an argument that a lot of religious people nowadays don't even understand the essence of the religion that they're practicing. It's turned into something else. Because without the spirituality, religion becomes a husk of codes of conduct without understanding. And then we get these really wild like contradictions based on the roots of the religion. When someone is like, yeah, we're about peace, but I'm a kill you. Or we're about compassion. But fuck you. Because these people don't have the spirituality.

And so I don't think people sometimes get upset about religion and stuff. I don't think religion is bad or good, just like anything else in this world. Science isn't bad or good. It's how we use it. I think the biggest problem with religion is that we've lost a lot of spirituality there. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we're fit for your ambitions, whatever shape they may take. Whether you're planning for today or tomorrow, we've got the flexibility and know-how to help you reach your goals.

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