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Episode 101: Neoteny, Why do women stay w men who don't love them, Asexuality
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good evening everybody it Nate gee along with dr. Doug Lyall here with the beat Eugene's podcast dr. Lyle how are you doing today good about yourself okay alright so we are going to we are going to talk today about Yanni why do women stick men who love them we are going to be talking about asexuality and if we can get to it we're going to be talking about genetics and time in the womb and how that can how if that will shape our personalities so let's let's just get started dr. Lyle you ready very good okay dear dr. Lyle can you please talk about what neoteny is how our neoteny and female attractiveness related why does this work why is this team so important human beings and if the big five and intelligence are so important to knowing who a person really is how does a person figure out what the other person is without them taking a big five test okay all right the first issue is about neoteny and what this is as far as humans are concerned is it's a it's the the observation that human beings look like they are juveniles in other words they have a characteristics that make them look young even as they're aging and there's several characteristics in biology where this is true where the nature of the shape of faces and primates and the size of the head relative to the body these are the fact that the body becomes hairless all these sorts of things and there's been quite a number of explanations over the years for for why different biologists have thought that this was true my favorite explanation is the notion that this is probably a characteristic that probably fairly recently in evolution maybe the last hundred thousand or so years that sexual selection by males looking to to mate with younger females has driven female characteristics to look youthful and so and even possibly even youthful like behaviors giggling higher voices all sorts of things that that could be related to youth cues the actually the expenditure of energy and excitement and emotional excitement etc so this would come about in a species with menopause where where women would be competing it would potentially be heading to a cliff where would they would no longer be able to keep mates around for resources etc if the mates were to figure out that they were no longer fertile and so if you could essentially Bluff the males into thinking they were still fertile it would be there would be essentially evolutionary pressure to evidence queues both physically and behaviorally that would suggest that you are still youthful so I forget who the chief author this was but I I believe I remember seeing this somewhere in Miller's writing somewhere made a great deal of sense to me and I can remember even even even quite frankly my mother at 84 years old most definitely evidences childlike girlish behavioural characteristics and that completely different than my father you know so my father never evidence such things my mother always has literally her whole life and that it it would look like this is probably it probably has its roots in sexual selection probably behind that competitive problem so the that is incidentally the the there's other times in in evolution that are that are important where we're creatures are being selected for youthful characteristics most particular in human domestication of animals so the domestication of animals people are picking up on juvenile like neoteny characteristics in in individuals individual arctic wolves and individual cats and so on and so forth and you're looking for the animals that look like they are juveniles because juvenile animals are friendlier and the in probably it's also true that human beings throughout the last hundred thousand years of increased trade have essentially selected each other in trade relations for neoteny characteristics in other words juvenile like characteristics even in males where they are less rugged less fierce therefore more cooperative and therefore most more useful as trade partners so it's it's hypothesized that human beings have effectively domesticated animals and the first animal that they probably domesticated was themselves through trade relations and and also even man-woman relationships are have probably had such a high level of cooperation in their activities have probably been selected for high degrees of cooperation which are also related then to not being quite so fierce and so quote adult so anyway I think that's where the oniony and humans ultimately comes from is it probably the biggest vector in this has been men selecting for females that are still evidencing youth cues so that's probably why we have those but in addition we have probably selected each other more broadly for these for some of these characteristics across the last hundred thousand years where trade looks to have become a much much bigger force in human evolution I say this because my understanding is is that the skulls of humans have become increasingly thin in the last hundred thousand years maybe even more so in the last 50 and that that is a not any characteristic is the thinner skulls alright now next question was about esteem okay so let me ask you about sound yummy good yeah go ahead sure so the what my thinking was was do when the women who are menopausal and they're seeking to bluff the male do they succeed honest or is this just something that got we did it that we got weeded out oh no I'm sure they did and do in other words the the this is not obviously this is biological bluffing the female listen to consciously attempting to do anything of the kind but the the males part of the male's job is to figure out whether the female is out of eggs and part of the females job is to Bluff the male into thinking that she's still got some and so it's notice for example it's no accident and it's a worldwide phenomenon that women are extremely disturbed about their aging cues so you know this is this is not something that happened with modern cosmetic surgery and oil of olay for God's sakes this has been going on forever the women know that they are under threat for having mates leave them for younger females and therefore there goes some of the the child-raising help and and protection provision so that that is an obvious thing I forget where else I was going with this the yo so the the females are not so they can do some conscious bluffing because it's such a major meditational issue they're actually thinking it through for God's sakes and it arrives in real live English or French or Spanish inside of people's heads like ooh I got to worry about my beauty and my looks and my youth and my gray hair and everything else under the Sun particularly my wrinkles the but unconsciously the biology both in terms of the brain and in terms of physical cues physical characteristics is looking to try to to try to bluff the male out of probably what is an important few years protection and provision and so this has been part of an evolutionary arms race between males detection abilities versus females bluffing abilities and the truth winds up somewhere in the middle so you you're going to find probably males are are going to find women still sexually attractive past their fertility and yet wouldn't at some point when they start to see that they're convinced that there is no fertility then the attraction is going to probably drop off quite a bit and quite precipitously but it's going to be across a time you know a time frame for each individual female in each individual male it is notable that males are are much more sensitive to aging kids than females are that that is that is no accident so males are or are more accurate at detecting ages of females and females are detecting ages of males or females I believe so male males are have razor sharp eyes looking for aging cues in a way that strangely enough females don't similarly and interestingly and I and I don't know why for sure but females sense of smell is much better than male sense of smell there could be many reasons for that but one of those reasons could be sniffing whether males have been hugging and having sex with other females whether they can pick up other scents that wouldn't surprise me a bit if that was a significant force I don't know that it is but it could be and it would be you know reasonable but that would be uh that that would be a characteristic females could evolve that that reminds me about a story that I will not share on air but but you've lived a much more interesting life in your few short years go ahead all right well it's good whatabout yeah go ahead no it's interesting that the counterpart for four males is that they're they're trying to bluff the female and casual mating strategy whereas the male trying to bluff the male in typical visioning and it just kept me yeah just to let you know on my end your audio is very choppy the yeah but I did I did get the gist of what you're saying in other words this is exactly how evolution really works males and females are sitting in an interesting problem that that exists throughout all kinds of relationships that humans have with each other and that is that they sit in it with a cooperative problem and they have a competitive problem and so they are sitting in a complex game of competition and cooperation and so in that game there's all kinds of deception as well as honest cooperation that's going on so sometimes you know the left hand has one game going in the right hand has another and that's just that's the name of the game across evolutionary time alright look at or less parts team yeah esteem is a issue why is it so important to humans actually it's really the most important thing that there is to humans so the let's let's look at why this is the the reason is is that if we break this down from the most fundamental level in biology the job of an organism is to reproduce its DNA which means it has two big problems that it's trying to solve one one one problem we're going to call it survival and the other problem we're going to call reproduction now both of those things are actually simply derivatives of the same problem which is that what we're going to call the problem of genes survival so the real purpose of the organism is for the genes that are within it to copy themselves and survive as copies into the next generation that that is the task of the organism the B so gene survival is the ultimate purpose of the organisms design and the in order to get done the organism needs to survive and reproduce so under those two big monster headings of survive and reproduce what the creature needs to do is it needs to solve what we're going to call sub problems so the sub problems of survival and reproduction if we look inside of them they all have to do with social relations issues now this is where the outstanding chemists in in the 20th century Abraham Maslow it really did not understand the architecture of human motivation he couldn't have and we couldn't have expected him to he was writing well well ahead of evolutionary theory the Maslow you know had this concept of a hierarchy of needs he's trying to figure out you know what the needs are of human beings and how they work and so on and so forth all all very good and appropriate for him to try to understand this and what he had in his list was he had things like the basic needs like food and shelter etc and safety and then up then up from there he had some other needs I forget what they were and then then in the middle somewhere he had like what he called the scheme needs for belongingness and then above that it was like love or something and then above that was what he called self-actualization where you know the person is sort of above all the fray of what normal humans are going for and they're sort of going for something deep and meaningful and completely independent of anything else other than their own you know actualizing their own potential all right all good interesting you know worthy effort for someone who's trying to figure out human motivation outside the context of human biology which is basically impossible so let's uh let's look at through the heart of where this is going to be a problem it we start right away with basic needs food and shelter and safety those things are not independent of social relationships in fact they are entirely dependent on social relationships human beings do not live as Hermits okay they don't they live in groups and those groups require cooperation a very intensive cooperation in the teeth of conflicts of interests ie I want to sleep with your girlfriend you want to sleep with my girlfriend and I want to eat your food and you want to eat my food okay so we've got nothing but conflicts of interest here and so human beings have to cooperate and they have to be be known to be essentially more benefit than they are cost in terms of the interaction with the other people and living side by side with them so people are running cost-benefit analysis on whether or not to have relationships with other people in the three chief domains that human beings trade their time and energy which are mating friendship and trade and so what esteem is is esteem as the process by which we as individuals judge other individuals and we judge them we rate them as to how valuable or how valuable we find them which is what esteem is and so the so to ask the question why is esteem so critical in human life the answer is it's critical for everything it is the is the most in the Stone Age it's the most important feature that will determine your ability to survive and it is the most important feature that will be determined your ability to reproduce so are there other features of your life that are important yes like yes like how cold is it you know for all hungry how much meat you have in your bones etc like there are other features of life that are important to human beings but the most central feature that determines your survival and reproductive success is the esteem that you hold and it's the esteem that other people have conferred upon you by virtue of your advertisement of the the benefits that you would bring to relationships so if you're beautiful you bring a lot of benefits and therefore you are esteemed more than someone who is less beautiful and you get those cues from other people and those cues are critical and in helping determine whether you are so you will survive or not the don't even think about asking the question who gets saved the less attractive person are the more attractive person you know if we got it like we got somebody in the boat and it's sinking and who are we going to grab all right this is not difficult the you know this gets this gets actually increasingly brutal when you realize for example the shopping cart studies that have shown that that unattractive children are not monitored nearly as closely as attractive children in a grocery store so the parents let them roam far and wide and they're much more likely to get lost in the grocery store or not know where their parents are because attractive parents are not doing that they're keeping very close track of those children the on esthetical on children or more valuable right growing up what's that I got lost a lot I lost my mom a lot of times my sisters oh yeah like my parents did lose sight of them very often know that you you were expendable all right so that is why esteem is so central to to human nature and human happiness and that's why essentially human happiness is largely but not completely dependent on the the nature of the flow of steam coming from outside people into your nervous system or what I call esteem signals all right now let's look at last question this person had was about was about the big five are so important in in romance for example how do you figure out who the other person is without them taking a test well you're actually designed by nature to figure this out the big five you know may have been consciously discovered in the last few decades but they have been understood forever and so you're designed by nature to be looking at these characteristics not only looking at them but also displaying them to best effect yourself you're you're simply built this way and so the you can't miss somebody's intelligence that's going to hit you over the head without too much interaction the but people the other big five characteristics openness to experience conscientiousness how agreeable they are how how outgoing they are how emotionally stable they are these things are actually that's called getting to know somebody and I would say that this is mostly to be played by feel with a couple exceptions and I think that there are there are two exceptions that are that are worth noting and underlining in your own mind particularly depend upon who you are and what your your motivations are in the middle Rena if you're a male who is pursuing either casual mating or pair-bond in any given time then you don't worry about it you're just you know you're just deciding whether or not you're physically attracted to the person and whether the effort of trying to get to score is worth the trouble and you're testing the feedback etc etc you're not it's not essential that you like slice and dice and try to make sure that you are sort of hanging out with the person that's worthy of your character if you're a female however you're you're likely to be in different circumstances and that is that you are probably feeling the pinch of time and energy with respect to the problem of trying to find an outstanding mate and so if that is in fact your situation then you would like very much to be able to have as Jeffrey Miller would say to have their Big Five profile tattooed on their forehead so that would be a nice thing to have okay now so the things that are where people are going to likely they're going to try to hide their liabilities you cannot hide liabilities in your intelligence there's just nowhere to hide casual conversation starts dragging out out of people at a very rapid rate the fact that that's true can tell you that intelligence has reigned supreme as an absolutely critical variable in trying to assess mates if that were not true you wouldn't be so good at figuring it out so that's one thing these other characteristics are less important but they're also still very important and so I would say the two that I am that my eyes are most sharpened for our conscientiousness and agreeableness the in the longer term emotional stability is also going to become important so that may show itself over time and probably will and not too much time so conscientiousness and agreeableness though are are important to when you're trying to find partners who are actually really good long-term partners so we want people that we're looking for essentially stability and employment stability and relationships non complaining of previous relationships for example somebody that's complaining about a lot about previous relationships is pretty low conscientiousness in general okay or disagreeable or both the now and now that those aren't set in stone I'm just telling you that those are cues so conscience justice and also agreeableness just in casual conversation and also in the very slight possible disagreements that come up in early conversations disagreeable people have no problem contradicting you and so whenever I see that which I occasionally will it's a it's a glaring red flag more agreeable people have the discipline to when they disagree with you they don't show it okay and they're very careful to feather any disagreements in a in a web of this what I call the octopus strategy they will put ink all over the water and you can't tell quite what they think because they are they're not wanting to agree with you but they don't want to disagree with you now disagreeable people won't do that that doesn't make them bad people just be warned that they're disagreeable and the more they contradict other people and things and insist that everybody else is wrong about everything then and the more complaining that they do the more the more disagreeable they are so these are these are sort of the general guidelines look for contradictions look for disagreement in in anything with respect to where we going to meet when would you like to meet etc agreeable people particularly are going to bend over backwards to make sure that they are signalling that they're pleasant and agreeable to deal with okay that doesn't mean if anybody says no I can't meet then I could meet then no I'm not I don't you know I don't feel like no I don't want that no I really don't like Greek food okay quite frankly if someone said to me I really like steak and fish you know can we go there I'd be like sure okay now I'd be a little odd for somebody to put that out there so when I ask somebody what they like deed I usually offer about three different things and whatever they choose I'm agreeing to it the but the the willingness to display contrary opinion in contradiction and as well as lifetime evidence of instability and employment relationships school everything under the Sun these are not there's these are not hallmarks in any given case of lower conscientiousness for example but they start to tell a story the person's life as you gently listen to their stories and listen to their life story this should it should be relatively you should be able to understand it it should integrate into a picture that makes sense if it doesn't then somebody is hiding the time when they spent in county jail we're skipping now it's like a resume with a big thing missing the so when I'm speaking with people I just have them tell me a story and that's what I'll say I'll say hey we'll tell me a story how did you come to San Francisco what happened and I just want them to roll out and tell me the story of their life and then I will gently cross-examine and ask oh what did you do then and then what happened then and we want to hear a the openness of telling a story that makes sense so no we don't need a test we need a story and we can get that story if we're just patient Pleasant and we ask questions and we in for God's sake don't contradict them if you're a difficult human and you feel like contradicting just bite your lip you'll live all right well your blonde is something different all right sounds good I was going to ask you what can you infer about somebody who brings the DF 10 survey to the first date and insists that there's a flow to that before they start oh my god that's hilarious that that is a that is a hyper conscientious that's like an OCD kind of gather characteristic and highly entertaining all right all right next question dear dr. Lau this is about why do women stay with men that do not loved ah okay well let's let's start the the question far more broadly and that is why does anybody do anything and the reason why anybody does anything is that they're running cost-benefit analysis and so why a woman stays with a man why she leaves a man you know etc why she's been with a man as opposed to with a woman like this is nothing other than cost-benefit analysis and so the situation here that's probably being asked is why would why would a woman stay with someone stay probably meaning long-term years so we're talking about with a man that doesn't love them obviously we're not talking about staying with a guy for a few weeks or a few months or even a year probably we're probably talking about the consternation that someone has as they observe themselves staying in a very long-term relationship and spending a great amount of their lives with someone who quote doesn't love them now this is this is because the reason they would do that is because there's going to be forces on both sides of the equation whenever you're trying to understand behavior you have to understand that this is the behavior is nothing really other than vector analysis it's just about different forces pushing each other in opponent directions and the behavior that you observe is essentially some kind of fancy summation process but that goes on so let's look at why women stay with men they stay with men because they've got kids with them and they worry about the status for the kids have coming from a broken home or having to say that their parents are divorced or could reduce their kids potential mating cachet in their particular village if their parents were divorced or they're worried about that if they if they stay together then then essentially the the main finances as well as all protection and provision efforts from the male are going to be directed at her children as opposed to if they break up and they officially break up and get through that process that man may shack up with somebody new that either has kids of her own or that he may create new children at which point resources are going to be directed away from our woman's children to potential other children so that's a problem the also just time effort and energy for a given standard of living just straight money so the modern world has the disadvantage has the great advantage of wealth where get to enjoy houses that were built a hundred years ago or 20 years ago etc so the standard of living of a modern human in a modern westernized society is phenomenal compared to where things were 100 years ago much less a hundred thousand years ago and so with money on the scene or resources or wealth on the scene you can better believe that this is going to make a big impact on people's decision making you know which would you rather do stay in a relationship where the guy's not very into you and he's into other people and you're just having to deal with this this knowledge or you know where you could leave and then go work on the factory floor somewhere or you can stay and not have to work on the factory floor you can work in a nice gift shop for 15 hours a week and have a nice little Pleasant time talking about I don't know little tchotchkes that people buy okay so this is this is the decision that could be very important to to any woman or anybody else that that is involved in a situation that where money is a factor now status in in the broader community is also another resource and we talked about how human beings esteem in their village is really front and center when it comes to their happiness and their survival reproductive success and so that echoing through the ages is still a concern that that is true and so to be somebody's wife who is successful stable whatever it is looks fine looks like everything's fine looks like it looks like I'm fine because I'm in a relationship looks like I'm fine because I'm married looks like I'm fine because I'm in a nice house looks everything looks fine okay now one thing isn't fine which is the woman's not getting romantic esteem cues from her mate and so that that is a that's an open sore and a and an open essentially a circuit that is not being anywhere near satisfied and if she really is into the guy really likes the guy she's being rejected that's even harder the so this is but the giving up status by openly admitting that one is not actually the apple of ones mates I that is that's not an easy that's a potentially significant sacrifice depending upon who that individual is in her circumstances finally those males and females that man and that woman may have a very genuine friendship and so there could be a really a lot of value in the relationship even as a friendship but it's uh but somewhat heartbreaking that that relationship is not a romantic relationship and both parties may be hesitant to break that relationship up just because there is so much friendship goodwill in human beings mates are not just mates they are mates they are friends and they are also very often trading partners and so it is it is the most complex set of relationships that you'll find in the animal kingdom so it is it is no surprise that at one point in time a person could qualify to be a mate but at a later time they no longer qualify to be a mate but they do qualify to be a friend and so that that often happens in these situations so to give away potentially a very good friend and some sort of publicly humiliating acrimonious situation and start fighting with your best friend over the stored wealth this is a problem and sometimes people aren't willing to do it so there are a complex array of issues that can be visiting any specific and woman's head when it comes to why she should or shouldn't go and in every situation is different and these are all nuanced decisions and so therefore you know I'm never surprised when women stay in situations where from my personal perspective for my personal psychology I look at it and say I wouldn't stay but I'm not a email and I'm not in her circumstances and so therefore you know I'm in no position to judge whether my assessment of what the best decision is is in fact the best decision the there's another there's another factor and that is that women are often motivated to leave more motivated to leave when they believe they've got substantial market value and so there's a there's a knocking at the door as as she comes as she arrives up towards but before menopause where it's like if you're going to leave you better do it you better do it now and a lot of times if the relationship if she does not leave in the relationship survives past that point a lot of times there's a sense of what the hell you know what's the point now and the that that is a that is another factor that often that often seems to transpire that if we if we arrive at 50 or 55 it's like what what are we thinking now and and so you will see a lot of people stay at that point even if it turns out that the most optimal solution that they can arrive at is to to some degree live separate lives under one roof so that is a long convoluted answer to a specific question that actually has more general principles involved and those general principles that we can revisit again and again in the analysis of any human dilemma which is that human beings are running complex cost-benefit analyses and there are usually multiple factors involved that are highly individual to that you know to that specific person in situation and so but but the a lot of times the values are not you can name the same ten values but everybody's vector force on each of those values is a little bit different and so that's why that's why some people will stay and some people will leave fascinating mmm that's just fascinating all right well one last question okay that's a two-part question like they're not completely related but we're going to give it a shot anyway so you're dr. Lyle I noticed that most of the content of the podcast is about mating strategies I identify as asexual a sexual is defined as a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction to anyone at all and may even be repulsed by sex I find all the content about the mating strategies both interesting but also somewhat unrelatable I'm interested to hear your thoughts on asexuality and if it turns out it is something biological that people cannot change about themselves one of the ways what other ways can you fire up moods of happiness circuits as they are missing out on a very significant mating moods of happiness circuits second question should people get okay yeah I guess we can go to the first one first yeah let's go to the first one the let's see where this takes us the the first thing that I would say about asexuality is that I would look at this as nothing other than then on a bell curve so we're going to see in the middle of the bell curve we're going to see people the the thoth the typical and we would have two separate bell curves that would overlap but they would be somewhat shifted with the male brain having more sexual thoughts and more steam behind it than the female brain on average so think of two bell curves a female bell curve is the first one and then we shift to the right and the male occurr male bell curve is shifted so they're a twin pair of bell curves overlapping where the males the the mean of the male bell curve is shifted to the right of the female mean and the x axis is we go from very low sexual impulses to very high sexual impulses on the right side of the x axis so the what this is is that there's individual variation here as you would expect all over biology with respect to all characteristics so of course there's going to be some people more females than males probably considerably more females than males we'll have very few sexual impulses that's just how it works and there's nothing wrong with it it's just a biological variant in the same way that there will be people who are unbelievably hyper sexual and they too you know god bless them I'm sure they've got a diagnosis in the DSM okay but the truth of the matter is this is just them this is their psychology and that's how they're built and there's there's nothing wrong with it quote in quotes it is just who it is that they are so there's nothing wrong with an asexual person or a hyper sexual person they are these are just genetic variations the we we tend to look somewhere in the middle of the bell curve and see that it you know people are seemingly quote normal but the degree of variance in normal people is pretty extreme on this dimension the you you see actually quite significant differences in males and females on this dimension so in in some book back there is probably the evolution of desire by bus or might have been a later work where it's been well documented that that females this will dis will startle many people that are listening but it won't start leather a whole bunch of other people that are listening if you were to draw a bell curve of the female sexual thoughts during a month of a fertile female you will find that for the first third of the month when they are not fertile the typical human female has almost no sexual thoughts going through her head you will then see a dramatic rise as soon as the as soon as she has released an egg and you'll see that it will actually peak at the moment where she is most fertile it will then start to decline in a bell-shaped fashion and then by the time we by the time the egg is no longer fertile the female is once again in the last third of her cycle she is now not having any sexual thoughts that is typical now I I have met two for no useful outcome of my own I have met females for whom that is not true so I have met females who have a lot of sexual thoughts all the time and they don't even you know they either do or don't notice that they are more sexually inclined you know when they are fertile but base or hot all the time and that's just how they're built I have met other females who literally just don't ever have a sexual thought on their head never occurs to them and they may go months before they have a sexual thought in their head so this is this is an extraordinary variation that is much much wider than you will see in males so males as you can expect most males are having sexual thoughts it is nothing like the the tameness that you'll typically see in an average female so I don't see anything wrong with a sexuality at all not even the slightest I see it as a normal biological variation I see it more commonly in females than males probably by several factors wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor of five or ten or fifteen to one the now what do we do about what this means about life and happiness etc nothing the I am a person who does not like noisy party parties drinking and but it's a forget it never going to drag me there okay so I don't have the capacity to enjoy that scene it's not in me I am no way am i extroverted enough to handle and be comfortable in that setting so am i missing out on life no I'm not is that that type of stimulation is not able to activate moods of happiness inside my head the fact that it activates moods have happiness inside of other people's heads is interesting and it's somewhat entertaining but it is not relevant okay and so the what really talking about here is the concept of identity and that is that you each person has their own unique psychological identity and that identity is a is a set of characteristics that although it overlaps with other people in many areas is in fact as a total configuration it's unique and so your identity is important for you to understand and a map it as well as you can because you're trying to figure out what kinds of circumstances caused the mids of happiness to be activated inside my nervous system it really isn't important what what causes other people to have moods of happiness I couldn't care less okay so you know some guy likes to mate with his dog I couldn't care less not interesting to me believe it or not I had a criminal case where that was happening the so the but the point is is that you know somebody tells me I don't know I don't know Alan was all excited about chamoy is you know he said oh oh they're the greatest thing they're better than any desert you just got a way to eat a chamoy oh well I I probably didn't even do I've eaten one shaniyah dutifully in my entire life all right that's the lasting way I'm going to eat the my identity is different than my good friend Alan gold hammers fair enough all right so the so if you are asexual that means your identity is is different in that area than a lot of other people we don't care what we care about is that your time and energy then be directed towards the things that do activate your moods of happiness and those could be you know they're likely to be as varied as the human landscape so our job in this life is to figure out really and it's a very interesting question and it's one that to me is so obvious and yet when I've sometimes explain this to people sometimes older people sometimes a 68 year old lady sitting in my office with I open that never considered that this is one of the most important questions in life which is what makes me happy what do I like to do where how what do I like to eat where do I find excitement what's enjoyable to me okay and people will say we'll wait you know isn't it you shouldn't be serving others doesn't that sound selfish and - my answer is of course it's selfish which is exactly what it should be one of the most important things that you can attempt to discover in this life is what am I like what do I like you know what sorts of things cause me to be happy and and that can change you can change and grow and something that you were excited about before becomes boring that that can happen and then we move on as your identity is shifted and you now have new things that need to be encountered and experienced in order to activate them is happiness I look at this life as a complex video game where our job is to score happiness points and those points doesn't mean this is cheesy or or tacky in any way a lot of those points have to do with figuring out how can I essentially get the most esteem by doing a really good job for the village and so that that is one of the ways that we get points but it's not the only way we get points we also get points from I don't know I like to watch LeBron James play basketball that's a way that I get points if somebody says oh but I could have been feeding the poor in my town instead of watching LeBron man fair enough you know my conscience looks at me and the work that I do and the things that I do to help other people and I feel square with my own conscience and my own identity because I'm not Mother Teresa and my my system says no I've done a good job there now it's time for me to sit back and watch somebody else do something well so this is this is what we do and we don't worry about the fact that we're different than other people we we embrace it and our job is to not care about that aspect but rather to try to figure out how I unique and what can I do with my time and energy that brings me joy
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