Modern Wisdom - #568 - Dean Rickles - How To Deal With The Shortness Of Life

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Dean Rickles is Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney and a Director of the Sydney Centre for Time. Life doesn't last that long. The ever present spectre of death looms large, even if you life to be 100. This can feel like a tragedy in many ways. What use are our efforts if they'll all be turned to dust eventually? A philosopher is needed here, to give us a fresh perspective. Expect to learn why keeping your options open is a path to an early grave, how you can remind yourself of the miracle that you're alive at all, the solution to living a listless, unintentional life, whether death is actually the only thing that gives life any meaning, the danger of being a sailor without a journey or a route and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount & free shipping on the best Ketone Drink at https://ketone-iq.com/ (use code MW10) Extra Stuff: Buy Life Is Short - https://amzn.to/3Hsk2PV  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dean Rickles. He's professor of history and philosophy of modern physics at the University of Sydney and a director of the Sydney Center for Time. Life doesn't last that long. The ever-present specter of death looms large, even if you live to be 100. This can feel like a tragedy in many ways. What use are our efforts if they'll all be turned to dust eventually. The philosopher's insight is needed here to give us a fresh perspective. Expect to learn why keeping your options open is a path to an early grave, how you can remind yourself of the miracle that you're alive at all, the solution to living a listless

unintentional life, whether death is actually the only thing that gives life any meaning, the danger of being a sailor without a journey or a route, and much more. I didn't plan it to be this way, but this feels like quite an appropriate episode, I think, to go into the Christmas period with. I do sometimes feel a bit melancholy when it's Christmas time. I think it's because I'm back home and I'm reminiscing about what's happened throughout the year and everything slows down a little bit. And I do think that considering the shortness of life and where it is that we're going with our days,

is probably a pretty nice reflection. And it is, despite the morbid sounding description, it is actually quite uplifting. So this will be the last episode I get to speak to you about before Christmas happens. There is no episode this Saturday. I figured that I would give everyone that ears arrest on Christmas Eve. But yeah, thank you very much. Merry Christmas to you and your family. Love you all. I can't wait to see what the New Year's got in store. Tons and

tons of exciting things. But for now, enjoy the food, enjoy the family, be present, remember that life is incredibly short, and that this could be one of the last Christmas's that you get to spend with even the annoying aunt who you can't bear to hear her burping her way through Christmas dinner, whatever it is, I really hope that you find time to reflect and enjoy it. So yeah, Merry Christmas everybody. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dean Rickles. Is it right to say that life is short in your estimation? It is, it is short. I think it is a little bit too short, even though it's necessary that it's finite. I don't think it needs to be quite this finite.

Although having said that, I mean, that's just my selfishness and my ego talking. What would you like for if you had the choice? 250? That would be pretty good. But then if it was 250, it would be sitting here saying, I don't know, 250. I wish it was 750, you know. But it seems to be the way that, I mean, I make this point in the book, the way the memory system and the human mind is put together

seems to be pretty much well made for about 100, maybe 120, something around that, years, because one of the examples I give is this classic example from the philosophy of memory, sort of back in the online period, whether with these debates between John Locke and Thomas Reed, parapherlocipus, and they were talking about what the nature of self

is and the continuation of the self. And there was a memory theory of the self, which is that we're just sort of this continuation of being able to remember who we were over our lifespan. And Thomas Reed pointed out, well, no, we can imagine situations where when you're sort of in your middle age, maybe 30 years old, it's easy to remember what you were doing when you were five maybe, or little easy. You can remember scrimping apples when he was a kid, is the example he gives. And then as he gets older, he's opposing it's an officer.

He can remember being, when he's retired, he can remember being an officer, but he can no longer remember scrimping apples. He's lost that bit. So there's sort of limits, finite limits that have been placed by biology on what we can fit coherently in a lifespan and what we can remember of ourselves to hold a self together. Yeah, because I mean the ship of Theesius as an example, right, that if you replace every board on this ship after a particular amount of time, is it still still the same ship? Now the difference is that the ship has no idea that it is a ship, or that it can remember each

of the floorboards being removed. I think it's every seven years, pretty much every cell in your body has been recycled so that there are no cells that would have been there seven years before. So you go, okay, well, if I am a ship of theses in that regard, what does it mean to say that me now

is the same as me seven years ago or 14 years ago or 21 years ago? What does that mean? Yeah, well, this was, I mean, this memory idea is supposed to take care of that problem. So an earlier theory would have been we're just what we're made of, right? You are what you're made of. Well,

the Schipathesis example you've just presented shows you, well no you can't be because it gets recycled all the time. So you're not what you can't be identified with what you're made of. So there must be something else and one of the things that you can say about the Schipathesis and humans is, well maybe there's at least some continuous thread through these changes. Like it doesn't make sense if you just change all of the bits of the ship of the thesis all at once, because that's just obviously a new ship. The whole point of that ship of the thesis example is you're doing it gradually, plant care at a time, so it's not sort of too significant a change.

So the memory problem with the memory ID was supposed to take care of that, but then it faces this other problem, which is that there are limits to memory in what you can hold. So it's probably not memory either that's playing this role, or it is, but then it sort of shortens necessarily shortens your life. And I make the point that there's a kind of interesting overlap here with old theories of Transmigration of the souls and the idea that we have an immortal soul that endures Through these various bodies. I mean it's hard to make make sense of that really because there's not going to be any record or remembrance of these passages just like there isn't within a life. So if we were immortal, if we had these extremely long life spans,

it would be just as if we were a bunch of separate people after a certain time. So it doesn't make any sense to say that we're immortal if we have something like the same memory system. And then if we change our memory systems in such a way that we can expand, then it's not clear that we're humans anymore and we're something else. And this is what many people want to do, right? With this transhumanist business,

they wanna get around what they consider to be these terrible limitations of being human like mortality and these memory problems and so on. It is interesting to think what is the single continuous thread and someone might say, well, it's my sense of eye, right? It's sort of consciousness or it's the self-referential element of me internally, my internal texture.

And you go, well, my, the texture of my mind is different now than it was two or three years ago, because I'm always learning and developing things. And if my memories are in this whatever sort of 50-year window, whereby by the time that you're 50 years hence from remembering something, especially as a young child, that you basically can't, you go, okay, so, as soon as you can no longer remember something,

does that mean that the person who did the thing is no longer related to you? Is that a different person somehow? And yeah, I can completely see this. So you mentioned there about the fact that this is a conversation and a topic that's been discussed for a good while. Seneca wrote on the shortness of life.

2000, over 2000 years ago now, what did he get right and what did he get wrong in your opinion? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the, obviously, it's a reference to Seneca, the title of the book. And part of the point of the book is precisely to reassess what Seneca did in that book on the Shorter's of Life, which is an absolutely amazing book. It's shorter than my book as well. What do you got? I think the best thing that I disagree with him a lot in this book as well. I think he gets a lot wrong, especially about the role of death and the role of the Shorter's of Life. So he's not so much concerned with sort of appreciating why it has to

be short. It doesn't really mention that. He's sort of agreed. He's more kind of telling people off and wasting it. So he's saying it's not that it's so it's short. It's that you're just not using it well enough. And if you used it well enough and wisely and prudently and almost like a kind of enough and wisely, and prudently, and almost like a kind of economic problem where you distribute the various bits of your life, then you'll find that it's not particularly short. So I disagree with him on that point that you also need life to be short in order for all of the various components that are within it to make sense and to build a good human life. But what he gets right most right, I think, is this business of the the provisionality of most people's lives. So he has some fantastic quotes about So, he has some fantastic quotes about how life is supposed to be a journey. And if you imagine somebody who sort of, you know, a sailor who went out in a ship and

was just sort of tossed around by the ocean and sort of then came back, although they endured and there was time-lapseing and these kinds of things, well, he didn't have a journey. Whereas, you know, some sailor who's going and exploring all of these new lands. Well, that's a journey, and that's what you want your life to be like. Right? It's not enough just to endure and just to exist. You need to be sort of choosing, and this is why I think the having death at the end of it is vital, because it forces you to have to make choices. If you didn't have that sort of boundary flashing before you, you wouldn't feel like you had to make choices you'd relax and you think, I can do that, you know, whenever. I've got plenty of time

for that. So it's in precisely that, it's precisely the limit of death that forces you to face the provisionality of life and not living provisionally. I'm thinking that you've got all of your options open and try and thinking it's good to keep all of your options open as if it's you know some sort of wise move like you know this old proverb don't put all your eggs in one basket and you don't just don't settle don't choose don't commit to, don't commit to anything, don't be anything basically as the ultimate outcome of this kind of approach. So one of my friends, Gwinderbogel, taught me about deferred happiness syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere

prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach revealing that the prelude you rush through was in fact the one to your death. Yeah, that's very delicate. That's almost identical to a quote I've got in my book where I was talking about how you're putting things off and you're saying like when I'm 60, I just get this done when I'm 50, then when I'm 60, then I can do all of those things and enjoy life. And yeah, I also mentioned some of Carl Jung's theories because he discusses very similar problems. He calls it the provisional life and the problem of the provisional life, but he also calls it the problem of the poor eternus, which is he associates this aspect of living

provisionally with a psychological complex, basically. And it's associated to narcissism in modern terminology. He tried to call it the, it was tried to call it, be called the back us concept initially. And it's the idea that you should live like, you should be unlimited, right? A proir, a turn us character thinks they shouldn't be limited by things like death, jobs, marriages, any kind of commitment at all because it pins them down and any limit is not a godlike kind of thing to have. So there want to be eternal children with no responsibility. And if you make a decision and if you act then you're going to be

held responsible for that action and you have to be responsible for the consequences and that's an adult thing. Not a childlike thing so they don't want that. And I mean it's amazing to see how many people are like this now. It is an absolute epidemic, this sort of provisionality and sort of enforced in the politics. Is that not a natural byproduct of the fact that there are so many options open to people? You can travel to more places, learn about more things, people don't even have a job for five years now,

whereas previously you'd have had a job for life, or perhaps you even had a job, you would have been some indigent laborer under the feudal lord of whatever country you were currently being occupied by. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It spreads to a bunch of phenomena, actually, where the meaning, what looks like a good thing, having loads

of options and loads of choice, is not necessarily a good thing. You can think of, even things like digital photography, seemed like a good thing, but it's absolutely taken the meaning and value out of the photograph, which used to be a nice thing. You'd take a lot of care in choosing them and then you put them in the album and you would actually look at the man again. Most people don't look at their photo-gash. You'd take a trillion photographs and they're gone. They disappear somewhere on your hard drive, never to be seen again. So it's sort of, you can say the same thing as well about the internet and the Google search, right? You've got all of that knowledge,

all of what looks like this huge possibilities and huge options for finding things out. And it's too much choice and it ruins the sort of meaning of maybe going into a library of getting a book and looking at it and it will have more significance when you find this fact. So it's sort of reducing the value of many things. Even though it allows you allows us to talk these technologies, allow us to talk and do things like this, and they can be very, very good and productive. I agree that having so many options is not necessarily a good thing, because it's then harder to choose. Well, this is Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice. He uses this great example

in his TED Talk from 10, maybe 15 years ago now. 50 years ago, you go into the jeans store to buy yourself some jeans and there's one pair of jeans in many waist sizes. What's your waist size? There's your jeans. You go in now and it's okay. Well, do you want skinny or straight? Do you want bootcarts? Do you want stretch? Do you want cropped? Do you want ripped? Do you want bleached? Do you want dark? Do you want bluepped, you want ripped, you want bleached, you want dark, you want blue, you want like weathered. And all of that choice from an economist's point of view would suggest that you can get closer to your optimal utility function. The thing that I want the most is available to me, therefore I can optimize.

But what it doesn't account for is decision paralysis and regret. And the fact that if you're based with all of these different options, a lot of the time you walk out of the store with no genes, because if you're, you become culpable for the suboptimal decision, the more choices that you have, right? If you could have chosen otherwise, the fact that you didn't puts the impact of that potentially bad decision on your shoulders, whereas if you couldn't have chosen otherwise, like no one in an arranged marriage feels like they chose the wrong partner. They might not be happy with their partner, but they don't feel their own same

sense of sort of culpability and regret. Yeah, exactly. The more options, that's a very good point, actually. The more options there are, the more ways there are getting it wrong, basically. It's almost like an entropy kind of, kind of calculation. It's a very good point. So I feel like it's a particularly sort of brutal paradox that trying to keep your options open to live a life with optimal optionality can result in no life being lived at all, because you're just in this liminal space throughout it all. That's right.

That's right. And that's one of the main, again, one of the main points of the book is that I don't mention this as an example. I possibly would have done had I have thought of this. One of the reasons for provisionality. The reason I give for provisionality is a little bit. Just gives a definition of provisionality, just in case people haven't quite hammered that home.

Yeah, so provisionality is the idea that you're, as you said earlier, you're waiting for the thing to happen, the real thing to happen. So you're indecisive. There's never a decision made. So you might have aisive. There's never a decision made. So you, you know, you might, you know, have a girlfriend, for example, and you're not quite ready to tie them up because you think there might be something better, somebody will fit better or something like this. You don't quite want to buy any of these houses because you think you another one might come later. It's almost a kind of

fear of missing out on the better option. So you end up not doing anything at all and you've sort of got this unlived life where you're always waiting. It's always provisional. What you have now is never the thing. So it's always pointing elsewhere and you never settled like that and you're never real. It's almost like a virtual reality, right? Because you're never sort of settling into real life. So that's the idea now what were we talking about we were talking about why your example They didn't put in the book. Yeah, why people choose not choose why people seem to go down this provisional life is Precisely because and it that's supposed relates to your example when you make a choice and you do decide You there's a knowledge that you are for going these other options.

It's a sacrificial act choosing something, especially the more significant the act becomes the greater the sacrifice. So again, the girlfriend example, if you decide to commit to one person and you mean it, then you're sacrificing lots and lots and lots of different opportunities. If you sort of choose some particular job, I give the example of a musical instrument. I always wanted to learn both piano and violin, but you're never going to get really, really good if you're, you know, the more options you keep open, the less you're going to be at one particular thing.

So you have to make a choice and you're sacrificing something that you would love as well. So there's like real significance in making these choices, but this is where the meaning comes from as well, because sort of with a, there's sort of meaning in sacrifice, because it gives the thing that you choose more significance in that way. Right? If you're having to give something up to choose the thing that you eventually choose, then it's sort of imbuing this whole thing with meaning and it calves a meaningful life in this way. Because if life was unlimited, then you would never have to say no to anything. You would be able to learn the violin and then learn the piano and then learn the trombone and then learn the flute and the harmonica and so on and so forth. Exactly. Provisionality would then be a sort of the natural choice, basically.

You could live provisionally because you would not be able to sample all options in this possibility space that you have before you. You could just try anything. You could say, I'll do that once I've done this. I'll master this, then I can do that. I'll be, shall I marry to this person for a thousand years, and then we'll try that one. I will try the next one, yeah, exactly.

Okay, so I understand that somebody who is railing against the inbuilt shortness of life, or even just the fact that it has an end at all, like I think that seems pretty robust. Yes, it would be nice if we could do 250 and stick about for that long. But I do think unlimited life would end up a whole bunch of strange externalities.

Let's say that somebody's accepted that. How does this help them live a better life? They know that it's going to end. They've conceded the fact that they're not going to be immortal. What is the next step after they've accepted that, then what is it to live a meaningful life? Yeah, so then again, going back to this idea of choosing and making sure that the choices you make are the decisions you make are done

with intention. So the fact that you've got this death flashing away at you should be there to force you to avoid living provisionally, as we've just mentioned, but also choosing the particular options you choose with a bit more care and attention, because it clearly is extremely precious. And people usually start thinking about this at midlife. It's called a midlife crisis. And maybe, and I used to hate that word, midlife crisis, but if you think of crisis as, you know, from the Greek word, as I mentioned earlier, as decision and having to choose. Then it's actually not such a bad idea because once you get past that midlife, you're precisely aware that your possibility space is shrinking. So it's harder to live in this provisional options open way. You can see that you now have to start making decisions that are really going to matter

and the closer you get the more options are carved away. So you can either have the situation where you know the world or other people are carving away those options and choosing this little final bit of path. Are you can figure out which path you would like to choose in those final, especially in those final bits? So one of the other things I bring in, so I mean, it's hard to know what is the right decision, right? So one of the things I bring in on this point

is Jung's notion of individuation. And the idea of individuation is basically to try and make it so that the actions you're carrying out are truly actions that match. I don't know how to put this yaw kind of true self, your true authentic self. it looks like you're making decisions. It can be a whole bunch of external things, such as traumas, or from influences from outside, from sort of media. You know, a lot of young people seem to be,

because they're so heavily buried in social media. They think that they're choosing things and being very unique in how they're carving themselves. And they think that it's them that are carving themselves. It's quite clearly coming from a bunch of external influences that are molding them from outside. So if you don't want to be, I mean, the analogy young gives is sort of being

bobbed around like a cork in an ocean. It's just being pushed around by everything else rather than making its own way in that ocean. So individuation is the idea of figuring out what those complexes are that might be affecting you and influencing your decisions. What projections you might be putting out there onto the world so that you're not seeing it right because it's being colored by all of these projections and things that have been put into you so that any decisive action is truly your decisive

action, an authentic action. So this is quite a modern, this is a common thing now in a lot of literature. It's presented in different ways, but this is sort of Jung's great invention, this idea of individuation and making everything unconscious as close to consciousness as possible. So there's nothing, you know, and then you don't get caught. You don't sort of find yourself wondering why you did a particular thing. I spent 20 years climbing up a ladder to find out that it was against the wrong wall. For example, yeah, basically that kind of thing. Why did I get drunk again? Why did I do this again? Why, you know, why did I just spend this many hours doing something I really didn't

want to do? Because you know that there is something inside you that rebelled. Whenever you do something stupid, or you spend too long doing something, you know you know you shouldn't do. There's a thing that knows you shouldn't do it. So it's trying to make all of the unconscious drivers transparent, basically, so you can deal with them. It seems to me I've been using the term consciously designed life or intentional living and both of those seem to make a nice amount of sense here. Like the number one lesson that I've taken away from 600 episodes on this podcast is that you do not to live need to live your life by default.

You can live it by design and you get to inject yourself in ahead of the way that your past traumas and social norms and societal expectations and what your family wants you to do and the path's at least resistance and the fact that the couch is comfortable on a Thursday night, all of those things, every single one of those, there are predispositions that may push you toward one particular path or another,

but it is within your power to be able to redirect that. It is within your power to be able to choose how you respond, even if it's just internally, in a situation where you completely restricted, right? This was the man's search for meaning. This was Victor Frankles, like, made you insight from that as well. So given the fact that we're both staying here, intentional life design, individuation, don't just be a cork bobbing around in the middle of the ocean. That means that you need to take time and care and attention when it comes to making your decisions. But there's also this other price that you need to pay if you take too much time and care of your decisions

because you end up in the liminal space purgatory again and now you're dead and you haven't started living your life. Is this the fundamental tension between the two? That's absolutely it. So it's sort of explicitly referred to it as a bouncing act. It's a bouncing act between these two styles of living. So there's the poor eternal switch I mentioned, which is this unlimited style, which, you know, it's not all bad, that this unlimited style, it's sometimes good, it can push you into doing things you wouldn't, you know, otherwise do. It's a bit more sort of risk-taking, which can sometimes be good, means you don't stagnate. On the other side, there's the overanalytical senics, so Jung calls it the senics, which you know relates to senica. It's like the old

men kind of archetype. And it can become a psychological complex as well. So either sunlight, if taken too far, can lead to problems. So the Senex problem is, okay, you are pushed into inaction, exactly as you say, because you're analyzing everything. You wanna make sure you make exactly the right decision. You don't screw anything up. You're focused on too much on the future, on making it right, maybe too much on the past and thinking about what happened in the past.

So you're not living in that way either. But you're not living if you're overly poor focused either because you're not genuinely making decisions and forging a path, you're just doing everything, you're just trying everything out with no intention. So it's this really, and it is a very difficult thing to do and you'll probably end up swinging one way at some stages in your life and then swinging the other way. And part of the problem is, part of the problem of forming a life is to have all the various swinging one way at some stages in your life and then swinging the other way. And part of the problem is, part of the problem of forming a life is to have all the various bits arranged at the right times.

So there's a time for this poor energy, which kind of energizes the life. There's a time for being senics. And sometimes you might require a little bit of the poor energy later in life, right? You might get revived in some way by a little bit of that. And not as I say, stagnate towards the end of your life. So it is exactly this, um, there's difficult balancing. Yeah. There's an article that I must reference on a monthly basis. What do you want to want by Kyle Eschenroder?

It came out in 2017 and wow, would you look at that? His website, it would seem, has been taken over by a Canadian pharmacy which is trying to sell erectile dysfunction medication. So I must message him and get him to sort that out. Anyway, in it, he's got two quotes, both of which make me think about this. One, I think it's an Aristotle quote, if a man knows not where he sales, no wind is favorable. And another one, which may also be Aristotle, it might have been someone else from the the stoicism era, talks about this sort of listless man who steps out of his doorway

on a morning, and if you to ask him, where is he going? What are you doing with your day? And he'll say, I'm not really too sure, I'll go, maybe I'll see some friends, maybe I'll talk a little, maybe I'll see if something comes up. And it seems that there is an immediate comfort in this because your regret minimization in the moment is maximized, right? By making no decision, there can be no regret immediately. You feel no felt sense, there's no choice, cost needed at all, right? You pay no, no cost at all for doing this.

However, the longer that you do that for, the more you're going to look back on your life and realize that you just treadmilled your way through everything at the mercy of the winds of culture and trauma and norms and parents. Yeah, I mean, it's exactly at the mercy. Oh, I mean, so the way it's quite existentialists all of this and the way Sartre puts it is that you can either behave as a subject, as an active subject or you can behave as an object.

And objects are things that generally don't have, as Aristotle mentioned, purpose, they're not purposeive systems, they're not tele-logical, they're not, they're not aiming anywhere. They're just being pushed around by natural laws and whatever forces desire to take them, the same as this listless man, right? He's not acting as a purpose, purpose, purpose of system, which presumably is what it's, what being human is all about is that we're purpose of systems, what's supposed to have aims, so he's behaving as an object, and we all do it, we all go through

these little phases where we're not quite aware, and then every now and again we'll pop back into ourselves and think, think wow I wasn't kind of there for a bit. You do it naturally when you're driving. I mean it's amazing how automatic we can be and just be pushed around by the circumstances and it's a really hard thing. I mean we do it in meditation obviously the whole point of meditation is to try and be aware constantly. The trick is to try and just bring that into everyday life always so that you're always meditating in the sense of always being aware of what is trying to push you, what is trying to move you and making

sure that it's you that are making the decisions. And usually that requires having a name, right? It's hard to make a decision if you don't have some intention and aim beyond it that it's taking you towards. I had a conversation with Ryan Holiday about his new book Discipline is Destiny and I came to the opinion that without any goals there can be no discipline because when you talk about discipline, it is in service of a thing, right? To the person for whom their goal is to be in the top 0.001% of people that watch hours of TikTok per week. Them sitting on the couch and watching tons of TikTok is in service. That is their discipline. It's in service of their goals. For the David Goggins of the world who wants to run 20 miles a day, getting up at five in the morning and shouting,

expletives in the mirror, that is also part of his discipline. Yeah. So he has to be in service of a goal. Yeah, you've just reminded me of a, yeah, another point I was intending to make earlier, which is sort of this vivid, it's sort of important to have this vivid image, this vivid picture of the future that you want. And I mean, so I mentioned in the books some experiments that have been done,

where those that can form a very vivid picture of a future self, a future version of them, generally do better overall. So it's the vervidity of that future aim this sort of goal, the person you want to be in the future that drives it as well. And if you don't have, and the less vivid it is, the less you're going to be driven by it. What was some of the sort of things that people were thinking about, was it the life they had, was it the type of person they are, was it their friends?

The type of person they wanted to be. So if you want to get really fit and you want to improve your body, it helps enormously to have the most vivid version of that future image that you can possibly have. And there were experiments done where people would be shown, because often what happens is you end up thinking, most people end up thinking of their future versions. And we even call them future selves as if there are different entity. And I actually mentioned that I think this is a mistake in the book. It's just you in the future. It's not a future self as if it's a stranger. It's you in the future. And it's still going

to be you present over there. So I'm sort of very against this idea of thinking of future selves. And the effort, there was a bunch of FMI studies done, which showed that some people think of their future self, so use the term for now. In exactly the same way as they think of strangers. So the same bits of the brain are lighting up when they're thinking of that thing over there in the future as when they think of a complete stranger.

And that's a problem. And the more you can make it so that that thing in the future is associated with how you think of yourself, and not a stranger, the better you're gonna be at driving some disciplined sort of schedule to take you somewhere. So it's not only sort of, you know, plausible, there's kind of good experimental results that have been done to back this up, that this sort of image and this future goal, this aim, this tele-logical target is really crucial. What was the danger of bulletproofing yourself?

Bulletproofing. Bulletproofing is, I should just say, there's a whole range, you probably know, maybe you know them, you're wearing a fitness top. There's a whole range of bulletproofing, bulletproof sort of fitness products, keto and these kind of things. It was developed by this guy Dave Asprey who noticed that people were, people in Tibet are somewhere were sort of had really good energy and their bodies were sort of very good. From drinking this ghee coffee, mixed with facts and stuff like that. So he was one of the first people who realized that,

you know, this sort of fact, having lots of facts was a very good thing and he developed this stuff called bulletproof coffee where you mix it with ghee and whatnot. And that's fine, I actually quite like these kind of things, but he started saying things in his books like you should sort of remove everything that makes you weaker and old as one of the quotes he gave. And this, I mean,

that's kind of on the way to narcissism is the point of this. It's like very poor, eternus archetypal comment to make, right? Don't be old. Don't be weak. You've got, you know, just eradicate all of that. And the end point of that is sort of this thing that the psychoanalyst Jean Arndell calls the fortress of I. Well, what ends up happening is that what you're presenting to the world is just this sort of shiny beast that's there to prevent any kind of harm or risk or damage. But it's not real, right? Nothing's like that. Nobody's really, really like that. You can make yourself fit and it's good, obviously. I sort of do this. You can sort of try and be healthy and these kind of things. But the limiting case that he's

trying to push towards sounds like absolute narcissism. So there's a whole chapter on what happens when you push this desire to be utterly unlimited and invulnerable to the limit. And I think you end up with this strange projected creature that is not really human in any way. And some people like that again. Some people are just obsessed with this idea

of getting beyond human, but I don't think we're very good humans yet. Anyway, we haven't tried being properly human yet and probably consciously creating our circumstances. What was that quote that you had about how people use social media? Was it something like people would rather appear happy than be happy, something like that? Yeah, I mean, what they're doing is, I mean, they're presenting and it's the image again.

They're presenting a projection. They're more concerned about how they appear than how they are, basically. And this is, you know, it goes back to the options that you mentioned earlier. Right, they go around, there's like a trillion pairs of genes that can try and they're sort of carving through appearance, thinking that that's going to define who they are. And there's not really a lot going on underneath that. We used to teach people to work on this inner aspect of themselves. We don't seem to do that anymore. It seems to be very external because what's getting presented the only thing you can really present on Social media is an external snapshot. So you need to make that external snapshot as good and bright and as sort of impressive as

Compossibly be and that's the focus. That seems to be the focus of things. I mean, imagine what Senna could think of these things. He would just can't imagine. He saw Facebook and social media. Well, I don't have social media. I can't bear it. Well, I think it makes a lot of sense. I have a bunch of friends who also can't use it, but for better or worse, it's here. And we are defined by our opinions and appearances now. And the thing is that we've now, in the modern world, been able to detach opinion from grounding in something to back that opinion up greater than has ever been. So for instance, I can proselytize online about how altruistic or great my relationship with my

mother is, right? Meanwhile, going home and then treating her like an absolute piece of shit. I can do that. And the gap between what you can present online and the reality of what's occurring has never been so wide. Yeah, exactly. It's the author, again, it goes to the the individualization and the authenticity thing again. I mean, what you really want and what's going to make you feel the best and most in control

is if how you are presenting yourself to the world is how you actually feel, because then there's no line, nobody's lying about anything then, but it's a kind of deception, right? And the only person you're really deceiving is obviously yourself, because then you constantly feel like shit, because you realize you're constantly acting, right? Everything's, everything's just put this big performance and then you go back and you know, you're somebody completely different. So there's nothing wrong with choosing a, you know, this particular, um, these particular clothes and there's nothing wrong with covering yourselves with tattoos.

If that's what matches, but it never matches. It's generally something because they feel shit. So they do these things rather than just becoming who they are. There's an interesting situation occurring online that relates with this in the content creation world. Are you familiar with audience capture? Do you know what that is? No, I'm not aware of this. So, audience capture occurs when a particular content creator online finds content that resonates

with their audience and then begins to further define what they make by what they think the audience will want. So they start to throw more and more red meat toward their audience and ends up becoming basically a caricature of what their audience thinks they are. And there's this example that my friend Gwinda the guy who I gave you that quote about earlier on. Does this amazing article on Substack that you'd love called on the perils of audience capture? There's this guy called Nicocardo Avocado

who used to be a vegan violin playing YouTuber. And he was like this sort of thin, kind of like nerdy, sort of dainty guy. And then he started doing eating compilations on YouTube where he would eat food, like huge amounts of food, and he was getting a lot of attention for doing this. And the plays were going up and people were giving him what he wanted, which was public focus. And it has got to the stage now where he is gone from being this thin spindly violin

playing vegan to this sort of awful fat, slavvently screaming guy with a CPAC mask on £350, permanently in and out of the doctor, because he has been, he says, the person was subsumed by the persona. That's how he describes it. Yeah, that's absolutely tragic and it's kind of our fault, really, as a society to be incentivizing incentivizing that kind of thing. And again, it's the social media, obviously, that also incentivizes this kind of thing by getting the hit. But it's an old phenomenon, of course. I mean, you can think of somebody like Marilyn Monroe who had this persona. She was apparently completely different. She was quite well read and quite erudite off screen, but she had to constantly be this

other person for her audience, right? The bubbly blonde books, you know, but some kind of lady. And it inevitably leads to suicide. Like, I would worry about this guy who's doing this. If it's so heavily divergent from what he clearly is from his initial point of origin, he's in trouble and is probably going to be needing some actual psychological help. Every time that he disappears from the internet for a little while, which he does for periods, sometimes he's in hospitals, sometimes he's just doing other things or whatever. There is a non-minor contingent of people that send out an alarm call saying, we need to check, we need to make sure that he hasn't decided to top himself

because he's, I know, it's millions of people. I don't know how many subscribers it's lots and lots and lots of people who have been observing the slow motion self-imulation of this guy on the internet. And I do understand what you mean. You know, we shouldn't be supporting this behavior by watching it, but it's the same compelling reason that people, Rubeneck, as they go past a car crash, right? Like it's so limbically inbuilt in us.

And he has reverse engineered a type of content, which taps into something and then has leaned into it more. So the dynamic goes both ways. Everybody talks about the echo chambers that you get into online and these algorithms are so manipulative because they are able to find the exact thing that you want to watch and they can deliver it to you. No one ever talks about what happens reverse to the creator. The creator gets shaped by the algorithm and the audience in the same way that the audience gets shaped by the algorithm and the creator. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's also interesting from the point of view of sort of highlighting in a really

stark version what we all do a little bit of. Like we all present a version that we would like to be, right? We might like, you know, when you're young, you're really concerned about your appearance, we all were, I was. When you're an academic, for example, just starting, you wanna present yourself as this kind of very, I don't know, over the top intellectual,

you might even arrange, like when I was younger, there's a confession, And I would have somebody in my office, I would arrange books of a particular kind, really impressive books, sort of on my office shelves as if I've been reading them. So look like, wow, that guy's reading these quantum field theory books, that's amazing. How pathetic is that? But it's a similar kind of thing. It's exactly the same kind of thing. I'm presenting something for other people. This is not for me. It's not doing anything for me.

It's not who I am, but I want them to appreciate me. But they're not appreciating me. They're appreciating that thing there. That's exactly what I was listening. Percent, I did a TEDx talk a couple of years ago, and this was a big chunk of what I spoke about, where I said that if you are not careful, any praise that you receive won't ever existentially feel like it connects with you, because if

you're only playing a role, people aren't applauding you, they're applauding the persona that you are. And this is why I think you get some deaths in the acting world because the Robin Williams of the world or the Heath Ledgers, you know, when someone applaud the performance, they're not, we're not in love with Russell Crowe, we're in love with Gladiator, we're not in love with Chris Hemsworth, we're in love with Thor, right?

And the detachment from the two, for a big time, I was this well-known club promoter and did all of this stuff and it was fantastic and people knew my name, but it didn't fulfill me in the same way as doing the podcasters. And I think that that's because despite the fact that I adored the work and loved the lifestyle and thought I was super proud of what I'd achieved, but in a crowd of a thousand people, I was still able to feel a little bit alone because I had to put on a front. and because I was putting on a front and

Performing in a way any time that somebody came over and gave me a compliment It it didn't really land because I was like oh Club promoter Chris just received a compliment how fantastic for him Yeah, yeah exactly. I mean that's probably one good way of gauging How authentic you are is how well you can take a compliment from somebody, whether you can just go, okay, yeah, good. Like, thanks. Because it's, it goes either of what, you know, it can go a number of ways. I do feel like shit because it's not really complimenting you, as you say, it's complimenting

this character that you've built. This is what I meant by the shiny beast of eye, by the way, earlier. It's the character that you've built, this invulnerable character that's being applauded and these kind of things. So, it can go that way. Or you can be, again, like the cork in the ocean, pushed around by it. And it's exactly this sort of being built up. If you get a compliment, you start to thrive on seeking those compliments. That's exactly what happened to this guy who started eating. There was some sort of attention and compliment and you realized you could get

it this way and you want more and you get pushed by it. So again, it's sort of this being an object or being an agent, an actor, somebody who's creating the script, as you go, if you're getting pushed around like this, you are not in control. If you get a criticism and you've got, oh my god, and you're down for ages, you're not in control. You're being absolutely moved around like a cork in the notion. Other people's heads are a wretched place for yourself worth to live. There was a quote that I found last week from Stephen Pressfield in Turning Pro. The amateur is a narcissist, he views the world hierarchically, he continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rise and desperately

anxious if his stars should fall. The amateur sees himself as a hero, not only of his own movie, but of the movies of others. He insists in his mind if nowhere else that others share this view. That's very, very good. I like that a lot. And yeah, I have something a little bit similar where the narcissist and the poor think they sort of have this idea that they're constantly being judged right they're the source of other people's movies and I mentioned they feel like they're being sort of you know people are following them around like a big marching

band always watching their every move waiting for these these things to happen but like again I had some of these these kind of issues myself like some of this book was self therapy, was sort of recognizing a bunch of these slightly narcissistic issues that I had, especially this sort of comparing with others. I would always have to try and better everybody, like be the best, do the hardest thing, like with piano I would learn the hardest pieces with like my physics stuff, it would have to be the very hardest areas of physics that I did, otherwise it wasn't good enough. And it's the bullet proofing thing. It's the absolute best at everything.

And it would sort of, and it's exhausting because obviously you can't do everything. You can't be good at everything, but I would try to be good at everything. So this was a sort of a way of trying to eradicate all of these issues that I was finding in myself, yeah, to not be exhausted all the time and not have this deceit constantly going on. What are the difficult things that you have learned to use to remind yourself of the stuff that we've gone through here? Because you know, it's philosophically very compelling, sounds great, and you need to remember the shortness of life, I need to think about my decisions beforehand but not for so long that I die before I make them, and I need to, all of this wrapped together is great, but when it comes to applying this, what, is there something that you rely on a mantra or an insight that reminds

you of the shortness of life and reminds you of the importance of decisions and reminds you that you need to be in control of your destiny? I don't know. I think the main thing I do has to do with, I don't know, in terms of work, I'm always trying to only be doing the thing that I would do if I wasn't getting paid for it. If I was left just to be able to choose whatever I was doing at any moment, I want to be doing that now and that's kind of what I am doing.

Any particular day, I'm generally doing what I would be doing if I weren't being paid for it. That's a really tricky, I mean, you have to engineer it. It took a long time to get to this stage. And it was by using things like this vividness of the future that you want, right? This sort of picturing, almost like a movie, the future that you want. And then it's essentially a series of steps like there is

Even though it differs that the kind of steps that you would need to do differs from your starting point obviously Some people are poor some people don't quite have the sort of natural Skills in whatever in music or whatever it is that they want to do so they're gonna It's gonna take longer or shorter Some things might not really be possible. So they're going to have to make compromises and change that future. But I generally always have a positive future image in mind, and then it makes all of the awfulness

that you have to go for. OK, because it is awful. Engineering a good life is absolutely brutal and painful. right? You have to look at how many podcasts you're doing a week, you're sort of reading a bunch of stuff, but it doesn't feel awful because you've got this sort of aim at you want to find things out, right? You want to find truths. So my ultimate aim is a similar thing, I suppose, right? I want to know the truth of this world. And why we're here, the mysteries of this world, of people, whether this, uh, more to it going on. And that sort of pulls me through all of the arduous work and learning of new things that, that, that I do.

As soon as you posit an ideal, you begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And inherent in that is disappointment when you fall short. So how do you deal with the inbuilt fear of failure? Well, you're always going to fail. I mean, it's always going to be an ideal image. It's never supposed to, I mean, look, it's never going to be a, it's probably never going to be realized and you probably never don't want that ideal to be realized because then you're sort of, you've sort of lost a component of meaning that was leading you towards it, right? It's the path towards that image that's sort of providing the meaning, the decisions and the things you have to do to get there. If you make it there, well you probably didn't have a high enough

goal in the first place or then you need to set a more impressive goal. How do you avoid it? I don't think you ever... In that situation, how do you avoid yourself being permanently dissatisfied, though? If you're always setting the goal one step further than you can run to, does that not permanently leave you in this sort of sense of inferiority? I don't know, it's certainly a problem because you're always striving. You're certainly always going to be striving, but I don't have to. Me, that's part of being alive. Is this striving to a goal? I mean, maybe that's the time, you know, if you've achieved your absolute ultimate goal that you've been striving towards for your life, then I would suppose I die pretty happily.

But until then, it's the striving that's the interesting thing and meeting the obstacles. You had this guy, you had Ryan Holiday, he's the guy that did that obstacle book, right? Obstacles the way. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly, that's kind of very similar. He's chosen a different form of limitation. I was focusing on death, but it sort of applies to limitations and obstacles in general. I mean, we feel good when we're battling. And in fact, I give an example at the end

of the book. There's a biologist, John Calhoun, who did these experiments on utopias, John Calhoun who did these experiments on utopias, biological experiments using mice. And he tried to raise a set of mice in utopian conditions where every need was catered for. There was no obstacle. There were no problems. They had all their food and everything. And they didn't flare so well as the mice that had lots of obstacles and were having to fight for their food and battle for it and had scarcity now and again.

And it seems that the utopia and some of them died, some of the mice actually died because everything was given. So it seems like this idea of having utopian conditions and not having any obstacles or constraints or limits just leads to absolutely dystopian nightmare of a life where you can't stand it, you can't live in there, even mice can't handle it. Was it Marcus Aralius who said, the whole universe has changed in life itself

is but what we deem it, I think it was. And it's that life itself is but what we deem it, bit that seems interesting to me, because the story around the challenges that you face and the difficulties and the setbacks and so on and so forth is for the most part your experience of it. Like that's not for me to say that if you're to snap a leg and you just tell yourself that oh,

this is fun I get to experience what having a snapped leg is like that it's gonna be that much better. But certainly with all of the myriad of just daily issues, the sitting in traffic, the extra time with the kids in the car on the way to school, it's like, is this making me late for work or is it extending the time that I get with my children? Like, you know, the story that you tell yourself and you're reframing of it, it is for the most part what's going on. It very heavily colors almost entirely your experience and especially given the fact that in retrospect you're not really going

to remember the thing that happened but you remember your experience which was coloured by your interpretation. Yeah, I mean that's the like the classic, um, stoic mindset right. You can you can choose how any particular event is all internal. Like, your entire world is internal, basically. So you can choose how you're going to deal with it. If you get, you can choose to be offended. You can choose if you're stuck in traffic, whether to be pissed off by it or think, this is an opportunity for me to think about that problem I wanted to think about. I broke my ankle recently and I was,

because it kind of took me off my, I was like, very speedily doing things and I was not really thinking. So I could have been pissed off by breaking my ankle, but I thought it was, you know, an opportunity to slow down deal with a whole bunch of other things that I had to deal with. So there's, you can, I mean, I'm sure there are really bad things where you, it's very hard to have this kind of stoical approach if you've got some really awful kind of injury. But with most ordinary day to day inconveniences, they don't really need to be inconveniences, but it's obviously hard to do. It's part of the discipline again, part of the habit. You need to get into a habit. I think I do know how the traffic habit, I must say, I develop this because I'm always stuck in traffic these days. So you, you can have a

gone mad or you can use it. It's interesting to think about playing around with the idea of the end justifying the things that you went through, which means that you're miserable on route to it. And then if you've posited as sufficiently high goal, then sometimes you're never going to achieve it. This is why I think it's so important in advance to make sure that the things that you're doing are enjoyable in the moment, right? Like if you're doing something

which each individual iteration of, it's fine, like it'll be great when I have a big studio that I can enjoy going into work, and I never have to answer an email again, and I've got a big team and all of this stuff. That'll be great. But the path on route to doing that, each one of these podcasts that I do is also enjoyable. Like this is, I'm not paying some unbelievably huge price and even when there is discomfort, sitting down and reading a book that's hard or whatever, trying to learn something in a really condensed period of time or doing

a podcast when I'm under slat because I've just flown back from New York or whatever, trying to learn something in a really condensed period of time or doing a podcast when I'm under slept because I've just flown back from New York or whatever, right? Even that is like, well, all right, it's challenging, but it's challenging towards something which I genuinely care about and it's challenging in an enjoyable way. So yeah, there are people that are in positions that are so limited that they can't just pick

and choose their entire life like that. Like I understand that. But I feel like there are far more degrees of freedom that people can have in order to be able to do that. And there's this quote from an episode I did with Peterson two years ago now, and it was so good. I think it relates to the other side of this equation, which is the over-optionality optimization. Contemplate the price you pay for in action. You're already in a little hell, you know perfectly well, it's going to get worse. The thing about in action is that you're blind to it. Do not make the assumption that in action has no price. That's a very nice quote. Another quote I like, which I give, I think I give it,

yeah, I give it in the book, which was by Terence McKenna. Terence McKenna had taken lots of mushrooms apparently, and it was a mushroom that said it to him, and he said, look, you need to have a plan, because if you don't have a plan, you'll be part of somebody else's plan, which is, again, it's sort of this same idea, it's either you are going to move yourself or you're going to be moved by somebody else or the world. I mean, what do you want? Which one do you want to be?

You don't prioritize your life somebody else well. That's the fundamental realization. Yeah, yeah. And again, you can do this in many ways. It doesn't have to be huge, massive, ridiculous, you know, world-changing goals all the time. It can be many things, but it just has to be you that's choosing them. It's absolutely crucial. Dean Rickles, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the book and your work, if you've got a website, you don't have social media. Where else can people find you? Do you exist online? You're a digital ghost. I'm a digital ghost, I think. I have a university web page. I think somebody did a Wikipedia page, but there's lots of books on Amazon as well with information there.

All right, I should maybe. Yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. See you. you