You mentioned anxiety before. "Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time" is one of yours. And anxiety is the emotion du jour of the 21st century. And lots of driven people are very anxious, very paranoid. That's what's caused them to be effective. It pays so much attention, being detail-oriented, not letting things go, staying up at night thinking about it. That's the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it?
So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when—like if you look at an iron beam—when an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once.
So for example, you know, you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish and you can't reconcile the two and so you're under stress. You want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? These are examples. You don't want to go to work but you want to make money so you're under stress, right?
So you have two conflicting desires and I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that, "Oh, I have two conflicting desires," and either I need to resolve it—I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other—or I will decide later. But at least just being aware of why you're stressed can help alleviate a lot of stress.
And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why and you can't even identify the underlying problem. I think the reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are.
And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg and that's anxiety. But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things. And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like, okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why.
Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see like, when does that stress go away? If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety.
A lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them. So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about them or to indulge them.
Well, if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality. One big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trite.
And I know we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions. We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young. A little child might ask the big questions like, "Why are we here? What's the meaning of life? What is this all about? Is there Santa Claus? Is there God?" But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things or we've given up on them.
But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero—what's there to stress about?
Yeah. For better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness?
Enjoy it. Make the best of it. It's even briefer than that. Each moment just disappears. It's gone. There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly. So if you're not there for it—if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else—you missed it.
So any moment when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment. You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or living in some imagined reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality. So one of my recent realizations was: what is wasted time?
So I don't like to waste time, but what is wasted time? And everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment the thing matters. In each moment it's the only thing that matters. What's happening in front of you literally has all the meaning in the world. And so what matters is just being present for the thing.
So if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it, then it's not wasted time. If you don't want to do it and your mind is running away from it and you're reacting against it and you're wishing you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing or you're anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that's wasted time.
That's time that's being wasted when you're not present for the reality in front of you. So my definition of wasted time—yes, I do want some material things in life and there are things that have more value than others within this life—but this life is very short and bounded. So the true wasted time is a time that you're not present for when you are not there for it.
When you're not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you're immersed in it. If you're not immersed in this moment, then you're wasting your time.
People get worried about dying and no longer being here, but they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case.
That's right. And I think people crave being here for it. And when you're here for it, you're not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the thing, the moment, the task at hand. We don't want peace of mind. We want peace for our mind.
That's right. Yeah.
The mind is what can eat you alive if you let it. And there's more to you than the mind.
How so?
Well, I don't want to disassemble the body, so to speak, right? Because—
Please go on.
Yeah. At the end of the day, like everything arises within your consciousness, right? You've got nowhere else to experience it.
You've got nowhere else to experience it.
Nowhere else to experience it. And that consciousness is relatively static in the sense that it's been exactly the same from the moment you were born to the moment you die. And everything that you experience—from your body, from your mind, to the world, to everything—is within that consciousness.
And that thing—that base layer of being—this is what the Buddhists will tell you is the real thing. Everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body, is unreal. And trying to find stability in those transient things is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble.
Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you. And different people interpret them in different ways.
Yeah. The old line about two people walking down the street. They're having the exact same experience. One is happy, one is sad, right? It's a narrative in their heads. It's how they choose to interpret.
So I think when I said that, it was a long time ago. I was talking more about having positive interpretations and negative interpretations. But these days, I think it's better just not to have any interpretations and to just allow things to be. You're still going to have interpretations. You can't stop it, nor should you try. But even having an interpretation is just a thing you can leave alone.
Yeah. I really want to try and just dig in a little more to the best way to remind people that they should value their time. Just how brief it is, that the time that you spend ruminating, being distracted, fears of the past, regrets...
Well, I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life. I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life, the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and be a little—not necessarily critical—but be observant of yourself more objectively and then you'll kind of realize your own loops and patterns. It takes time. It's not overnight. It's not instantaneous.
So you mean letting go is not a one-time event.
Yeah. And letting go is not necessarily even the right answer. Like yes, if you're trying to be an enlightened being and you want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect and be a Buddha, sure you can let go. But I think in practice it's quite hard to do.
I think I would say that you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want rather than doing what other people expect you to do or society expects you to do or what you might just think should be done by default. I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms.
Be selfish. Holistic selfishness. We can clip that little selfish.
Yeah. Yeah. Keep running back. Bad guy. Great.
I had this insight or a question, I guess. How much do you think that we should trust the voice in our heads? Because half of wisdom suggests to rely on your sort of bottom-up intuition and then half of it has to be sort of top-down rational as possible. How do you navigate the tension between head and gut in this way?
I think the gut is what decides. The head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards. The gut is the ultimate decision maker. If it doesn't—and what is the gut? The gut is refined judgment. It's taste aggregated. Aggregated, and it could be aggregated through evolution and it's in your genes and your DNA, or it could be aggregated through your experiences and what you've thought through.
The mind is good at solving new problems and new problems in the external world that have defined edges, beginnings, and ends and objectives. What the mind is really bad at is making hard decisions. So when you have a hard decision to make, I find it's better to—yes, you ruminate on it. You think through all the pros and cons, but then you sleep on it.
You wait a couple of days. You wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right. And when you're younger, it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience. And when you're older it can happen much faster, which is why—
And you have less time to—
Yeah. And old people are just more set in their ways as a consequence, right? They know what they want. They know what they don't want.
So it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment. But once you've developed them, don't trust anything else because you can't go against your gut. It'll bite you in the end. Usually, in relationships that failed, you can look back and say, "Oh, I knew it was going to fail because of this reason, but I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way, right?"
"I wanted this person to be a different way than they are, or I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to, than I knew I was going to get, but I just wanted it." So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then trap you.
Yeah. Wishful thinking.
It traps you into a pathway that chews up time.