I'm Dr Orion terban and this is psycha Better Living Through psychology and the topic of today's short talk is the price of living your own life so living your own life is something that is actually very difficult to do this is because doing so functionally requires that you resist the pressure to conform to your culture's expectations of what your life is supposed to look like in my culture this looks something like well first you graduate high school and then you go to college and once you finish college you try to land a good job and
if you work really hard at that job you will climb the ladder and make a good salary and this will allow you to buy a car and a nice house and a vacation in Hawaii of course while you're advancing your career you should also be looking for that special someone after you date for a while you should become exclusively monogamous after a year of this you should move in together and after a year of this you should get married and after a year of this you should have kids you'll go to church on Sundays and
spend every other Thanksgiving at your in-laws and encourage your kids to graduate high school so they can go to college they can get a good job Etc you understand what I'm saying this there is a very clear Runway that your culture maintains with respect to how your relationships are supposed to proceed with respect to how your career is supposed to progress and with respect to how your family is supposed to behave and let me tell you those runways don't work for a lot of people I mean just look at marriage everyone knows that it fails
more often than it succeeds and yet people continue to get married not only that but if you tell people that you not interested in getting married they'll look at you like you have two heads even if their own marriages are broken and unhappy by the same token most jobs are neither necessary nor interesting nor rewarding they will also never make you rich true Financial Freedom will never come from a job every day millions of people work jobs that they literally hate so that they can continue to earn enough to afford to live in a city
to work a job that they literally hate and this is common knowledge and yet people continue to get jobs not only that but if you tell people that you're interested in working for yourself or becoming an entrepreneur they'll look at you like you have a screw loose even if they are counting the days to their own retirements the fact the matter is that these structures are not going to work for a lot of people if you actually want a life that fits you that fits your preferences and your interests and your personality and your temperament
you're going to have to build it yourself because the only life that could possibly fit you that well is going to be custom tailored for you just like you can't expect clothes to really fit you if you just buy them off the rack you can't expect your life to really work for you if you just follow your cultures recommendations that's the mental equivalent of shopping at Walmart it will work to a point some of the time now before I go any further if you're liking what you're hearing please consider sending this episode to someone who
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Stellar g.com I wrote all the content myself it's the same strategies that got me my perfect score I think you'll find it very excellent so let's get back to it so why don't more people live their own lives well there is a cost associated with living your own life the cost is simple but it's hard for a lot of people to pay here it is the cost of living your own life is the approval of others that's it if you want to live your own life you have to give up any claim to social approval
even though these cultures fail people every single day people are very emotionally attached to them they've largely dictated how their friends have lived their lives they've largely dictated how their relatives have lived their lives and they've largely dictated how their neighbors and colleagues and fellow congregants live their lives as well these people might not be able to approve of your choices because chances are they won't be able to understand them and how can someone possibly approve of something that he doesn't understand but that's the reality the more your life deviates from these cultural expectations the
less your life becomes comprehensible to others and and this can be a very lonely situation what's more as soon as you start to say hey you know what that doesn't really work for me and you start to take a different path you run the risk of inciting the Envy of others because your courage will reflect their own cowardice it will reflect the extent to which they have given up on their own lives and this generally does not make people feel very good couple the incomprehensibility of your life with the vague negative feeling they tend to
experience in your presence and you have an easy recipe for hostility aggression and ostracization which is why people who choose their own paths in life are subject to experiencing far more persecution and Injustice than those who conform even if their choices aren't harming anyone so it's important to understand that the approval of others isn't just like this warm fuzzy emotional validation it's a kind of social safety net upon which those who do not conform cannot rely many people incorrectly believe that it would be easy for them to forgo the approval of others mostly because others
is still in this case an abstract entity it isn't anyone in particular it's harder when it's your dad or your wife or your children I don't care how cold and hard you think you are I guarantee there are some people in your life that you would definitely prefer for them to support you however the fact of the matter is that your friends might not be able to do that your siblings might not be able to do that your parents might not be able to do that when you start to live your own life you're going
to not be able to count on the support and understanding of those around you and it's potentially going to feel very lonely loneliness is a very difficult emotion for many people to tolerate and it's loneliness that often drives Those Who start to live their own own lives back into those conventional structures they may not work but at least there are other people there I might be miserable but at least I'll have company and we can all kind of be miserable together and that's actually what a lot of the world is a community of shared suffering
it's not the only way to live but it's how a lot of people live fortunately though and let's end this on a high note this doesn't have to last the issue is that your family and your friends are large l ly in your life by accident like you did not ask to be born into your family it was not your choice to be born to those parents at that time in that place by the same token most of your friends are accidental friends you all happen to be born in the same general geographical region at
around the same time and you struck up a relationship because you both happen to be I don't know assigned to the same home room question how many of your friends would you be friends with if you you met them today if you've actually allowed yourself to grow and change over the past 10 or 20 years probably not many of them you both will have taken Divergent paths in life and your values now might be very different now I'm not saying to break up with your old friends but to understand that there are some things that
old friends can give you and there are some things that old friends can't give you and if you start to live your own life these friends might not be able to give you support and approval they might be able to but they might not be able to and that's to be expected now the good news is that once you start to live your own life and you forgo the approval of others and your life actually begins to manifest you will attract other people into your life who resonate with that Vision other people for whom your
life is intelligible and comprehensible and then you definitely won't be lonely in fact this might be the only way to to ensure that you are seen and understood by those around you you just can't have it both ways if you want to be approved by the masses then you have to be understandable to the masses which means that you cannot deviate from a conventional life on the other hand if you want your own life if you want your own chance at happiness and wealth and freedom then you have to be incomprehensible to the masses because
if they still understand you you probably haven't deviated enough to make a difference what do you think does this fit with your own experience let me know in the comments below and if you've gotten this far you might as well like this episode And subscribe to this channel you may also consider becoming a channel member with perks like the priority review of comments or booking a paid consultation as always thank you for listening
