BREAK THE BAD HABITS - Jordan Peterson's Inspiring Speech

and you know people are very very very very tough and it turns out that if you face things it turns out that if you face things that you can put up with a lot more than you think you can put up with and you can do it without becoming corrupted and she did recover quite quite fully and much as a consequence of her own Nationals because she figured out what was wrong with her and then took the necessary steps to fix it which is nothing short of a bloody miracle as far as I'm concerned and

anyway as part of the the cap myth is I actually start by talking about our dog who actually died about a year ago but he's still alive in the book I you know I let people know because dog lovers love dogs and if you love cats then they think you don't like dogs and they don't like you so I also point out at the beginning of the chapter that you know if you want to pet a dog on the street that's okay too so you don't have to get up in arms about it but but

the idea is that you know you have to be alert when you're suffering you have to be alert to the beauty in life the unexpected beauty in life and that's kind of what I was trying to get across with the idea of the cow there's this cat that lives across the street from us called ginger and Ginger's a Siamese cat and cats really aren't domesticated a technically speaking they're still wild animals but they kind of like people god only knows why but they do you know and so ginger will come wandering over and our dog

looks at her but they're friends and she rolls over on his back and Siegel used to you know nose or a bit and and then she'd kind of mosey over and let you pet her if she was feeling like it's out day and you know you have to look for those little bit of that little bit of sparkling crystal in the darkness when things are bad you have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there's still something that's sustaining and you know you narrow your timeframe and you'd be grateful for what

you have and that can get you through some very dark times and maybe even successfully if you're lucky but even if unsuccessfully then maybe it's only tragic and not absolute hell and you can do that you know in the worst situation you can make it only tragic and not held and there's a big gap between tragedy and hell you know there's nothing worse at a deathbed than to see the people there fighting the death is bad enough but you can take that as terrible as it is and make it into something that's absolutely unbearable and

maybe I think and this is sort of what I closed the book with is this idea is that if we didn't all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things that we have to put up with in order to exist and maybe we could make the world into a better place you know and it's what we should be doing and what we could be doing because we don't have anything better to do and that's what the book is about and that's the end of 12 rules

for life every time you learn something you learn because something you did didn't work and that exposes you to the part of the world that you don't understand every time you're exposed to part of the world that you don't understand you have the possibility of rebuilding the structures that you use to interpret the world that's often why it's more important to notice that you're wrong than it is to prove that you're right one of the things that you're supposed to learn in university is precisely that it might be useful to listen to people that annoy

you on the off chance that they know something that if they tell you you can use instead of dying talking to people who agree with what you say is like walking around in a desert you already know everything that they say the reason you're associating with them in that situation is so that they never say anything that challenges you because you're afraid that if you go outside of what you understand that you won't be able to tolerate the chaos but it isn't the case people have an unbelievable capacity to face and overcome things they don't

understand and not only that that's essentially what gives life its meaning the Buddhists say life is suffering and you think well if that's the case why bother with it and people do ask that question and they ask it in ways that result in their own destruction and worse in the destruction of others so for example people who become particularly cruel particularly in a genocidal manner are more than willing to dispense with as many human beings as that they can possibly train their sights on because they're so disgusted by the nature of human limitation that they'd

rather eradicate it and lots of people become suicidal because they can't bear the conditions of their own existence and suffering is real and it's inescapable so the question is what do you do about it people do get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be what wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be

good for you well why don't you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what I would like if I could have it and and I don't mean I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what I mean I mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay I'm caring for this person I would like things to go as well for them

as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case what people don't do that they don't sit down and think alright you know let's let's figure it out you've got a life it's hard obviously it's like three years from now you can have what you need you got to be careful about it you can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people as being

is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't necessarily tan idea about what would be good for you and then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria

for success and so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here in the proposition is if you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but

maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at sit on your bed one day and

ask yourself what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl it's not an accident that the axiomatic Western individual is someone who was unfairly nailed to a cross and tortured it's like yes right exactly so

what do you do about that well I thought about that for a long time too it's like well you don't get together in a damn mob because all that does is allow you to be as horrible as you could possibly imagine and suffer from none of the consequences that's a bad idea so how about we don't do that well there's a deep idea in the West too it's like pick up your damn suffering and bear it and try to be a good person so you don't make it worse well that's a truth you know I

read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other you just cannot even imagine it it's so awful so you don't want to be someone like that no do you have a reason to be yes you have a lots of reasons to be god there's reasons to be resentful about your existence everyone you know is gonna die you know you too and there's gonna be a fair bit of pain along the way and lots of it's gonna be unfair it's like yeah no wonder you're resentful it's like act it out and

see what happens you make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse there's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that's because no matter how bad is some stupid son of a like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse so you think well what do you do about that well you accept it that's what life is like it's suffering that's what the religious people have always said life is suffering yes well who wants to admit that well just think about it well so what do you do in the face of

that suffering try to reduce it start with yourself what good are you get yourself together for Christ's sake so that when your father dies you're not whining away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral and you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you that's better don't be a damn victim of course you're a victim Jesus obviously put yourself together and then maybe if you put yourself together you know how to do that you know what's wrong with you if you'll admit it you know there's a few things you

could like polish up a little bit that you might even be able to manage in your insufficient present condition and so you might shine yourself up a little bit and then your eyes will be a little more open then you can shine yourself up a little bit more and then maybe you could bring your family together instead of having them either faithful spiteful neurotic infighting batch that you're doomed to spend Christmas with so then you fix yourself up a little bit kind of humbly because you know God you're a fixer-upper if there ever was one

and then you got to figure out well can you figure out how to make peace with your idiot brother and probably not because he's just as dumb as you so the how the hell are you gonna manage that and so then you've maybe you get somewhere that way and your family sort of functioning and you find out well that kind of relieved a little bit of suffering although it reduced the opportunities for spiteful revenge and that's kind of a pain in the neck and so then you get your family together a little bit and you're

a little clued in then at least a bit because you've done something difficult that's actually difficult you're the wiser and so then maybe you could put a tentative finger out beyond the family and try to change some little thing without wrecking it it's like our society is complex and we teach our students that they could just fix it it's like go fix a military helicopter see how far you get with that it's like you're going to get to do you're like a chimp with a wrench whack whoa look it's better it's like no it's not

better things are complicated and to fix things is really hard and you have to be like a golden tool to fix things and you're not so and that's the other message of the West it's like how do you overcome the suffering of the of life and I'm not saying it's only the message of the West how do you overcome the suffering of life is be a better person that's how you do it well that's hard it takes responsibility and I think you know if you said to someone you want to have a meaningful life everything

you do matters that's the definition of a meaningful life but everything you do matters it's gonna have to carry that with you or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and then you don't have any responsibility because who the hell cares and you can wander through life doing whatever you want gratifying impulsive desires for how well useful that's going to be and you're stuck in meaninglessness but you don't have any responsibilities which one do you want well ask yourself which one are you pursuing and you'll find very rapidly that it isn't

the majority of your soul that's pursuing the whole meaning thing because well look what you have to do to do that you have to take on the fact that life is suffering you have put yourself together in the face of that well that's hard Christ it's amazing people can even do it I'm stunned every day when I go outside and it isn't a riot with everything burning because really God you talk to people it's like I knew this guy he'd been in a motorcycle accident and it really ruined him and he was like a linesman

you know working on the power and he was working with someone who had Parkinson's disease and they had complementary inadequacies and so two of them could do the job of one person and so they're out there fixing power lines in the freezing cold despite the fact that one was three-quarters wrecked with a motorcycle accident the other one had Parkinson's it's like that's how our civilization works it's like there's all these ruined people out there they've got problems like you can't believe off they go to work and do things they don't even like and look the

lights are on my god it's unbelievable it's it's a miracle it's a miracle and we're so ungrateful college students the postmodern types they're so ungrateful you know they don't know that they're surrounded by it just a bloody miracle it's a miracle that all this stuff works but all you crazy chimpanzees that don't know each other can sit in the same room for two hours sweltering away without tearing each other apart because that's what chimps do so anyways so what happened while I made some videos and I got to the bottom of some things at least

as far as I can tell so I told you what the bottom is and then I got this idea about what you might do about it which isn't my idea it's like it's not my idea it's an old old old old idea it's far older than Christianity it's old it's the oldest story of mankind get yourself together transcend your suffering see if you can be some kind of hero make the suffering in the world less well that's the way forward as far as I can tell if there is any way forward final rule it's called

pedak out when you encounter one on the street and it's it's a very it's the most personal chapter in the book it's a lot about my daughter and my daughter was very ill when she was well when she was a kid but particularly when she was a teenager she had a very terrible time of it she had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and when she was between the ages of 14 and 16 at first destroyed her hip which had to be replaced and then it destroyed the ankle on her other leg which had to be replaced and

she walked around for two years on broken legs and she was taking massive doses of opiates and could hardly stay awake and like and she had this advanced autoimmune disease which produced all sorts of other symptoms that were just as bad as the joint degeneration but which are harder to describe and so it's just bloody brutal you know and as a test of your faith there's almost nothing that's more direct than a serious illness inflicted upon an innocent child right and so the chapter is a meditation on that and also on but what to do

in a situation like that because everyone is going to have a situation like that in some sense you know because you'll be faced with illness and the people that you love and in crisis and so it's a just it's a practical guide to coping with those sorts of things like and one of the things you do when you're overwhelmed by crisis is you shorten your time frame you know it's like you can't think about next month maybe you can't even bloody well think about next week or maybe not even tomorrow you know because now is

just so overwhelming that that's all there is it's like and that's what you do you cut your timeframe back until you can cope with it and if it's not the next week that you see how to get through then it's the next day and if it's not the next day then it's the next hour and if it's not the next hour then it's the next minute the internal problem is how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence and you can say well I'm not prepared it's like yeah fair enough unsurprising especially if you were over

protected as a child it's not a good idea to over protect your kids because the snakes are going to come into the garden no matter what you do and so then you instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away what you do is you arm your child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them so that the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and malevolence is strength not protection it's a completely different idea we also know this clinically we know for example that

if you treat people with exposure therapy for Agoura phobia which is roughly speaking the fear of chaos I would say the fear of everything you don't make them less afraid you make them braver it's not the same thing because with an agoraphobic see what happens to them is the fall they never conceptualize death and suffering they're naive right it never enters their theater of their imaginations because they're protected from it but then something happens this this often happens to women in their 40s because they're the people most likely to develop Agra phobia something happens there

they've been protected from chaos by Authority their entire life so maybe they had an overprotective father and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend and then they went to an overprotective husband and maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the project protection right so so that's the bargain they stay weak and dependent and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyper protective but the price they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent and then something happens in their

life often in their 40s they develop heart palpitations maybe as a consequence of menopause their heart starts to beat erratically and they think oh no death it's like well who are you going to talk to about that right there's no protection from Authority for that or maybe their friend gets divorced or maybe their sister dies or something like that it brings up the specter of mortality and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality and it brings it up in a way that Authority recourse to Authority cannot solve and so then they have panic attacks what

happens they go out they get afraid they feel their heart beating then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think oh no I'm going to die and they think oh no I'm going to die and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention so the two big fears come up mortality and social judgement and then they have a panic attack it's like fighter flights going out of control very very unpleasant then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack then they

end up not being able to go anywhere so then tiya matt has come back write a huge monster a little victim and so what do you do with them well there's no saying no there's no time app that's done right there naivety is over they've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment they've met the terrible mother and they met the terrible father and there's no going back there's no saying oh the world is safe it's not safe not at all it's not safe the fact that you think it's safe means

that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture it's a gift and now that's been shattered and so now what do you do well the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go you're the ultimate frozen rabbit right and your life is hell because you can't function the alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of let's expose you to them you know carefully and programmatically and then you'll learn that you can you're actually tougher than you think you

never knew that and maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because you know people play a role in their own demise so to speak when you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid you chose to withdraw because you were afraid so it's not only that you were over protected often it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were over protected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity you know so maybe you're a kid in the playground right and you're having some

trouble with other kids and you know in the back of your mind I should deal this with deal with this myself but you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene and you know that that's not right you know that you're breaking the social contract but it's easier and so that's what you do you run off to an authority figure and hide behind the Great Father right roughly speaking well the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself so then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40 so

then you take people out you say well what are you afraid of rank it from 1 to 10 so 10 is make a list of 10 things you're afraid of the least the thing you're least afraid of will call number 10 so we'll start with that okay well I'm afraid of elevators ok well let's let's look at a picture of an elevator let's have you imagine being in an elevator let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're responding to it symbolically right and you're

gonna do that at it at the the closest proximity you can manage you find out you go do that it works you're nervous as hell especially and from an anticipatory perspective shaking you go out you stop you watch it happen and you actually calm down you do that 10 times it no longer bothers you well what you've learned that you didn't die but more importantly than that you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death that's what you've learned and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and then

you move a little closer and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective it's a tomb right it's it's it's a place of enclosure and isolation and you learn hmm turns out I can withstand that and then you're met much more together much more confident and that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that I've seen this multiple times is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and and toughen them up they'll often start standing up to people around them in a

way they never did before because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before because they weren't willing to undermine the protection see if you're protecting me I can't bother you because I can't afford to forsake your protection so if I'm gonna play that game I'm gonna be high hide behind you then I can't challenge you so that's no good because that's sometimes why people you see this with guys very frequently they're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s it's like well why not because they still want to believe that

there's someone out there that knows and so they're willing to accept the subjugation because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge right because he knows well what if he doesn't what if no one knows any better than you well that's a rough thing you don't until you realize that you're not an adult right that's really technically the point of realization of adulthood is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do I mean

it's a horrible realization because what the hell do you know it's a terrible realization and people will often pick slavery permanent slavery to the spirit of the great father let's say over that realization and it's completely understandable but the problem with it is is that there's more to you than you think and so if you continue to hide behind that figure then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think far more to you than you think maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat

of mortality without collapsing maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing who knows it's certainly possible and it's not an abstract question it's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process it's it's always the question that you address and the answer is often in the affirmative because people can get unbelievably tough and you know that because people work in emergency wards and hospitals right or they work in in palliative care Awards or they work as mortuary assistants I mean these people have bloody rough jobs you know or they're on the

front line of police investigation into you know highness child abuse crimes and so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis and you know those are very stressful jobs but people do them and and some people do them without even being damaged by them although that's a harder thing because you can see horrible things you know things you'll never forget the problem is it's true you're oppressed you're oppressed you're oppressed you're oppressed god only knows why maybe you're too short or you're not as beautiful as you could be or you know your parent your grandparent was

a serf likely because almost everybody's grand great-grandparent was it's like you know and you're not as smart as you could be and you have a sick relative and you have your own physical problems and it's like frankly you're a mess and you're oppressed in every possible way including your ancestry and your biology and the entire sum of human history has conspired to produce victimized you with all your individual pathological problems it's like yes true ok but the problem is is that it is true and so if you take the oppressed you have to fractionate them

and fraction ate them it's like you're a woman yeah ok well I'm a black woman well I'm a black woman who has two children well I'm a black woman who has two children and one of them isn't very healthy and then well I'm uh I'm a Hispanic woman and I have a genius son who doesn't have any money so that he can't go to university and you know I had a hell of a time getting across the border it was really hard on me to get my citizenship my husband is an alcoholic brute it's like

well yeah that sucks too and so well so let's let's let's fix all your oppressive oppression and we'll take every single thing into account then we'll fix yours too we'll take every single thing into account it's like no you won't because you can't you can't it is technically impossible first of all you can't even list all the ways that you're oppressed second how are you gonna weight them third who's gonna decide and that's the bloody thing who's gonna decide that's the thing well what's the answer in the West it's like in free markets oh yeah

Christ will never be able to solve this problem no one can solve it what are we gonna do about that we're gonna outsource it to the marketplace you're gonna take your sorry pathetic being and you're gonna try to offer me something that maybe I want and I'm gonna take my sorry pathetic being I'm gonna say well all things considered as well as I can understand them maybe I could give you this much money which is actually a promise for that thing and you've packed all of your damn oppression into the price and I've packed all

my oppression into the willingness to pay it and that solution sucks it's a bad solution but compared to every other solution man it's why 10% of us have freedom and so there's a tremendous iya logic at the bottom of this it's like you have to fractionate feel pressed all the way down to the level of the individual well that's what the West figured out you know there's a couple of figures who at the mythological roots of our culture and you know people get upset with me because I bring in religious themes but I understand some

things about mythology religion it's not an accident that the axiomatic Western individual is someone who is unfairly nailed to a cross and tortured it's like yes right exactly so what do you do about that well I thought about that for a long time too it's like well you don't get together in a damn mob because all that does is allow you to be as horrible as you could possibly imagine and suffer from none of the consequences that's a bad idea so how about we don't do that well there's a deep idea in the West -

looks like pick up your damned suffering and bear it and try to be a good person so you don't make it worse well that's a truth you know I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other you just cannot even imagine it so awful so you don't want to be someone like that no do you have a reason to be yes you have a lots of reasons to be god there's reasons to be resentful about your exist everyone you know is gonna die you know you - there's gonna be

a fair bit of pain along the way and lots of it's gonna be unfair it's like yeah no wonder you're resentful it's like act it out and see what happens you make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse there's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that's because no matter how bad is some stupid son of a like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse so you think well what do you do about that well you accept it that's what life is like it's suffering that's what the religious people

have always said life is suffering only do you have to move from point A to B in life but point a is often a very difficult place to be because we're fragile and bounded and mortal and limited and because we know that and so one of the implications of that as many great religious traditions are at pains to illustrate or demonstrate or proclaim is that life is essentially suffering and I believe that to be a fundamental truth but but perhaps not the most fundamental truth because I think the most fundamental truth is that despite the

fact that life is suffering people can transcend that and partly the way they transcend that is by pursuing things of value and so that if there is no value proposition at hand then you have no meaning to justify the difficult conditions of your life and that's brutally difficult for people no Nietzsche said he who has a why can bear anyhow and you see and I've certainly seen this as a clinical practitioner that people who have no purpose in their life are embittered by the difficulties of their life and they become first bitter and then resentful

and then revengeful and then cruel and there's plenty of places to go past cruel that's just where you start if you're really on a downhill so when you fix yourself up a little bit kind of humbly because you know God you're a fixer-upper if there ever was one and then you got to figure out well but can you figure out how to make peace with your idiot brother and probably not because he's just as dumb as you so how the hell are you gonna manage that and so then you maybe you get somewhere that way

and your family sort of functioning and you find out well that kind of relieved a little bit of suffering although it reduced the opportunities for spiteful revenge and that's kind of a pain in the neck and so then you get your family together a little bit and you're a little clued in then at least a bit because you've done something difficult that's actually difficult you're a wiser and so then maybe you could put a tentative figure I'd beyond the family and try to change some little thing without wrecking it it's like our society is complex

and we teach our students that they could just fix it it's like go fix a military helicopter and see how far you get with that it's like you're going to get a do you're like a chimp with a wrench whack whoa look it's better it's like no it's not better things are complicated and to fix things is really hard and you have to be like a golden tool to fix things and you're not so and that's the other message of the West it's like how do you overcome the suffering of the rule of life I'm

not saying it's only the message of the West how do you overcome the suffering of life is be a better person that's how you do it well that's hard it takes responsibility and I think you know if you said to someone you want to have a meaningful life everything you do matters that's the definition of a meaningful life but everything you do matters it's gonna have to carry that with you or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and then you don't have any responsibility because who the hell cares and you

can wander through life doing whatever you want gratifying impulsive desires for how well useful that's going to be and you're stuck in meaninglessness but you don't have any responsibilities which one do you want well ask yourself which one are you pursuing and you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul that's suing the whole meaning thing because well look what you have to do to do that you have to take on the fact that life is suffering you have put yourself together in the face of that well that's hard Christ it's amazing

people can even do it I'm stunned every day when I go outside and it isn't a riot with everything burning because really God you talk to people it's like I knew this guy he'd been in a motorcycle accident and it really ruined him and he was like a linesman you know working on the power and he was working with someone who had Parkinson's disease and they had complementary inadequacies and so two of them could do the job of one person and so they're out there fixing power lines in the freezing cold despite the fact that

one was 3/4 wrecked with the motorcycle accident the other one had Parkinson's it's like that's how our civilization works it's like there's all these ruined people out there they've got problems like you can't believe off they go to work and do things they don't even like and look the lights are on my god it's unbelievable it's it's a miracle it's a miracle and we're so ungrateful college students the postmodern types they're so ungrateful you know they don't know that they're surrounded by it just a bloody miracle it's a miracle that all this stuff works but

all you crazy chimpanzees that don't know each other can sit in this same room for two hours sweltering away without tearing each other apart because that's what chimps do so anyways so what happened well I made some videos and I got to the bottom of some things at least as far as I can tell so I told you what the bottom is and then I got this idea about what you might do about it which isn't my idea it's like it's not my idea it's an old old old old idea it's far older than Christianity

it's old it's the oldest story of mankind get yourself together transcend your suffering see if you can be some kind of hero make the suffering in the world less well that's the way forward as far as I can tell if there is any way forward you