Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 110: Co-dependency, child attachment styles, advice on losing a child
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


today we've got a couple of questions that have to do with codependency child attachment styles and advice to parents on losing a child so we're just going to go straight from there and if we can get through all of them we're also going to hear we're going to get a question in about your opinion on excessive cell phone use and whether or not you think that's objective and then we're going to get to these all right so we're going to try to power through them and see see but but we'll see what happens all right so dear dr. Lao can you speak on codependency and narcissism many sources I've heard recommend that spouses that escape a narcissistic spouse need therapy and support on codependency the thinking is this tolerance and coping tendencies began in childhood trauma and ultimately need to heal if this is wrong thinking can you recommend some strategies for healing from an abusive marriage say books or any other information our friend Jack will appreciate this yeah it's all wrong that what everybody's thinking the there is no wound in childhood that's causing any of this here's what's happening that think instead of codependency which is a fancy word that I suppose means something just think agreeable okay so this makes it much simpler to talk straight and instead of narcissism we could just call it disagreeable so can dr. Lyle speak on agreeable and disagreeable and in narcissism we would call it very disagreeable so not let's know so the notion is is that if anybody escapes a very disagreeable spouse and they need therapy and support on their agree ability no they don't they don't need any such thing so this this agree ability did not begin in childhood as a result some wound or bending their psychology to deal with a pain in the neck parent or abusive parent or anything else under the Sun no this is true now how can I be so definitive easy monozygotic twin studies where the twins are raised apart so we know that there is neither are an imitation of personality characteristics from childhood to adulthood in other words you don't imitate anybody in your environment or adoptive children would correlate with their adoptive parents on personality dimensions which they do not they also don't they don't correlate negatively either so psychodynamic view would be if you had a very abusive parent then you might become very codependent in order to deal with that and then you might carry that on and then of course repeat this in future relationships because this was the sort of prototype of how it is that you learn about men or learn about women you know from watching your parents or interact with your parents now I'm making fun of this and I don't mean to if we were in the early 20th century or mid 20th century and we didn't know any better this would be a completely reasonable molding or melding between psychodynamic and learning theory and that that's some some middle ground between psychodynamic and learning theory is kind of the way most psychologists think these days they just sort of think in a fuzzy fuzzy headed fashion about the development of personality characteristics and in people's quote coping strategies or behavioral styles and relationships what they don't do is they don't see the effect of the genes and yet if we actually look the scientific evidence the effect of the genes are massive and they're sitting right in front of us we just have to know to where look at the evidence now so by stripping away this notion of codependency and narcissism we now strip it down to the fact that some poor sap who is a really sweet person let's let's call them for those of us that haven't heard my way of describing the group agreeable disagreeable dimension before I want you to think personality characteristics fall on Bell curves and I want you to think of dead center of the bell curve with on the left hand side of the bell curve think of disagreeable very disagreeable as you get out to the far in tail of it say the last five percent of it we could actually use a word called narcissism the as we go to the far for our other side of the curve we're going to call those sweet hearts sweet people very nice extremely nice and if you want to call it codependent I suppose you could the people that I've ever heard described themselves as codependent tend to me to not be could quote they're not that sweet they they are often manipulative have a secret little disagreeable streak in there where they're looking to look a do manipulate our opinions of them for their own interests so they don't people that tend to call themselves codependent are not now the but there's an awful lot of sweet people out there and those sweet people are the people that wind up in long-term relationships with disagreeable narcissists the now so what what happens here but what happens is is that when you get out of one of these things you are if you manage to which is like a miracle so some some bizarre set of events takes place and a person actually winds up out of one of these things if that's true then the then what will happen is is that they will be in a situation where they're they certainly don't want to walk back into something like this again and yet they have recognized that they are actually vulnerable and so God help them if they run into a psychologist because the psychologists going to start explaining to them about how their they've been childhood idli you know Haywired as a result of some assaults to their their psyche is when they were young or some such thing and they're going to be just chasing their tail with a bunch of worthless conversation and confusion what is the issue the issue is is that they happen to fall on the right-hand side of the bell curve on the agreeable disagreeable dimension and so as a result of that let's suppose that right down the middle you would conceptually think of this as fifty-fifty like an average person would be a 50/50 trader but we know that this isn't true we know that the average human being is in fact more like a 55/45 trader in other words they tilt the scale 10% in their own interest so instead of 50% of the pie it feels better to them to get about 10% more than they would normally have coming to them so 55% feels fair to them so this you can you can easily there's a whole host of research on this you we could we could have a thousand citations it would point to this over and over again the but all you have to do is watch the NBA for about six minutes so just turn it on even if you've never seen the game before you're going to find every call somebody's going to be complaining and it's just not fair just it's just they're just so outraged at how the referee has just is abusing them now yeah it's going to turn out that all you have to do is just talk to sports fans about how their team is being treated and the sports fan will tell you that their team is just consistently mistreated by the referees and they're just so disgusted but they're not so disgusted that they're not willing to watch the game because after all it's only about 10% loaded against us and if we you know the heroes in in white or blue or green or whatever the color is of their their jerseys that the good guys you know can just overcome the the referee bias against them then you know and we win then that's grand but if we lose you know we probably lost because the referees stole the game from us this is how human beings think and so this is telling you that there's all kinds of data showing that people remember people that owe them money more than they remember who they owe money to just a little things like this we're now people in the listening audience saying oh that's not true me I can remember that time when I forgot all about that money well I'm sure that there there is truth to that we've got a few listeners out there the tail end of the bell curve that are that have really dysfunctional memory systems and they remember much better who they owe then who owes them but it's going to turn out to be the case that that is the unusual human nervous system that the typical human nervous system beautifully remembers who owes them better than who they owe now this is all to say that the human beings concept of what is dead-on fair is actually not dead-on fair it's 55/45 tilted their direction now this is so that so that they don't get out negotiated when it comes to conflicts of interest in the village so if you've got a little edge to you that you're snarling just a little bit then you're not going to get taken advantage of nearly as often it's a better evolutionary strategy than having a dead-on fair chip this is clearly the case because that that is what has evolved you know in human evolution evolution of personality now it's going to turn out that you can imagine that bell curve I don't know that anybody's have actually charted this out and it's sort of it's my concept that you could you could delineate along the disagreeable dimension the concept of what the deal needs to look like in order for it to feel fair to you so you can imagine that somebody else was a 60/40 trader so they are a little more disagreeable than average and therefore they need if it's sixty percent their way and forty percent for the other person then that feels 50/50 to them now I got friends like this that think that they are very fair and reasonable and the truth is is that I can sniff that they're 6040 traders there's a reason they're friends of mine and that's because they're very talented and they've got a lot of brains and they got a lot of give but it doesn't matter they're still I could smell 60/40 all over them and if they ever listen to this they know who they are and mate as metal wolf okay now the hell remain nameless now the thing is that you can imagine as we go down the bell curve as we continue to go to the left that there's going to be people that are going to be 80/20 traders not very many of them it's very dysfunctional to be an 80/20 trader because you are feeling irritated all the time everywhere you go it turns out that the people are just trying to screw you over with the twenty eighty deal because that when it's a 50/50 deal when it's an objectively 50/50 deal if you're an eighty 20 trader it seems outrageously loaded against you and so these people are chronically irritated angry you know a high percentage of the hours of their life just because they believe that they are being you know mistreated underappreciated underpaid etc etc now the this is as we head out that direction that's what a narcissist is and narcissus is some special dimension to be uncovered by psychology that can't be found in the factor analysis of the big five it's right there okay it's disagreeable now the on the other side of the equation we're going to have a twenty eighty trader who's just a sweetheart and it's going to turn out that it's not very common that fifty-fifty traders get hooked up with eighty twenty narcissist because if you're a fifty-fifty trader coming from the middle of the bell curve or so somewhere nearby there then the 8020 trader is going to be consistently irritating as hell and they're going to be constantly pushing you to accept a twenty eighty deal because that's what feels fair to them and you're just kind of finally get sick of it and it's going to irritate you and you're going to have a bunch of arguments about what's fair and you're going to leave okay now now what's going to happen is if you ever see a narcissist a long-term relationship there's an exceedingly good chance that the person on the other side of this is a twenty eighty traitor an unbelievable sweetheart so right now my my lovely eighty five-year-old mother is sitting here listening to me commit her kitchen table and my my dad bless his heart ralph was quite described 'el now he was in eighty twenty he was about 65 35 and my mother is about a thirty seventy so as a result they rarely had conflicts because she would just give it would didn't seem unreasonable to her even though to my sister and I were looking at her like what's wrong with you and suddenly reasonable and you know the household ran just fine the only anger that ever came at the household was was Ralph but when it when that 6535 you got a little bit of pushback from somebody and then we would see the anger emerge so this is how it is that this works if you if it turns out that you quote get out of one of these relationships however is that you escape because you are the 2080 trader on the other side of a full-on narcissist then the truth of the matter is you don't need any help to heal anything just breathe the free air and try to learn about this dimension and let's you know don't make the same mistake twice for God's sakes the look for the clues the clues are a constant chronic repetitive irritability that's the tell-tale footprints in the snow that you can't miss people that are nice people aren't angry very often and so that this is this is going to show you this isn't that they can't get angry once in a while or irritated once in a while but if it's a chronic ongoing cyclical issue and god forbid they ever turn it on you when you're a sweetheart and and everybody in the world thinks you're more than fair then that's the problem you don't need any therapy you just need to find the right environment ie a decent person so you can imagine that a nice solid fifty five twenty five fifty five forty five trader won't have any problems with some twenty eighty sweetheart whereas the worse the mathematical conflict of interest it's just not going to be there the 55:25 is happy to take fifty five seems like everything's fair the the twenty eighty trader is getting forty five they're getting a forty five fifty five deal and they're like wow this is really nice person I really like this person good that's the therapy that you needed therapy you needed was an environmental change away from an ass and the a book that can help you with this is called how I found freedom and unfree world you don't need to heal from an abusive marriage you just need to not repeat it that's the the therapy is the good life that you have in front of you alright next go to the next one actually okay last one well I had a little follow-up question that that had to do with or disagreeable agreeable dimension and I was just thinking yes I was curious if if the the subjectivity of the agreeable disagreeable bell curve with respect to each person may explain why higher conscientious people who have the intelligence gravitate towards engineering and my thinking was because with the math you can show exact fairness and I wonder if that is really interesting thinking that's very interesting yeah that's it's quite possible that the objectivity of mathematics may be comforting to a to extremely conscientious individual fascinating good good thinking never quite thought of that before and we'll have to we'll have to kick that around good job okay all right all right well let's go into the next question Joe and next question has to do again with the difference between evolutionary psychology and the standard psychology thinking so dear dr. Lyle or children's attachment styles bogus in predicting their personalities also what's the earliest age that you can see a person's personality characteristics can you tell if a two-year-old is open to experience agreeable disagreeable etc I don't know the research on this topic however this is what I first of all the idea of attachment styles is what let's sort of transform and let's look through the telescope through the right you know when's the attachment theory goes way back to John Bowlby goes back to the 1930s etc and it has it has psychodynamics sorts of roots in it yet and it's it's it's actually incorrect fundamentally then the notion is is that early childhood attachment the quality of attachment the security attachment etc is impact in human personality development that is the underlying theory in in attachment theory and some of this was born out of the what he called the extreme deprivation z-- that we're seeing in in what he call it what do you call it when kids or orphanages so this is I suppose and I don't doubt that it's the case that if you take an infant and put it in a bed and never talk to it and touch it for a couple of years I think that you're it's very likely that there's some significant impact on that so we're not going to say that there's no process by which the an environmental set of inputs could not potentially influence personality if you if you put someone in an extraordinarily extreme situation that is inconsistent with the natural history of the organism and it survives then I'm not shocked that there may be fallout from that now I'm going to bet that that was oversold and I bet if we went back and look at that research today where the world's a little bit wealthier and there's just enough people around milling around that we no longer could not in the first world have a deprivation situation that would be as rough as maybe some of those deprivation situations were now but bet this aside what we're going to do is we're going to assume that the people's attachment process that they're going through in almost all cases is is normal with respect to the species in other words they're growing up around people that give a damn about them most likely their parents it could be an adoptive parent who might wind up being quite ambivalent about what it is that they took on after the after all the poop and the squalling and all the problems but nevertheless the kid is getting normal interactions with members of its species and it's developing as it's going to develop now so the notion that the the the nature of that development is going to have a impact on adult personality turns out to be false what is going to be true is going to be the fact that the kid's personality is emerging even as a young person and you're going to be able to see it so this is the correlation coefficients that have been observed by attachment theorists that have reasonably insensibly got them very excited in the early days of this so of course you would be fascinated and hopeful and then create create a literature that would have people very much afraid of putting their children at risk for not being able to attach and not being able to love fully and not be able to commit to a marriage and not be able to be a good mom or good father not be able to really you know etc because if an attachment theorist would say wow the kids not a tax well this is like critical and unbelievably important and if it isn't done really well here in the first two or three years oh my god then you know this person it's like a battery that gets messed up when you're when you're recharging it like oh if you don't recharge it all the way you know when you do it the first time then you mess up the internal architecture of this thing and you can ever only charge halfway the rest of his life okay not true with the human personality at all so this is uh so this is but what they were observing was something real and that what they were observing was individual differences in personality emerging right before their eyes even early but nobody in the in the tank nobody anywhere in this theory was thinking that what they were observing was individual variations in genetics okay that is what they were observing and so the those things can can be shown I mean I've been around little kids that have grown up I could see it okay now I don't I don't know the literature on this subject but they are different and very often they are they are reliably different pretty early so it you know a two-year-old that is Pleasant happy-go-lucky and agreeable in place nice with you know might look quite a bit different I'll bet you if we took 50 of those and took 50 that we're biting and kicking and screaming and all that and I'll bet you that there's a pretty strong correlation coefficient 20 years later as to what those things look like so no shock that things are emerging intelligence is you know is becoming obvious very quickly early intelligence can be fairly reliably measured at six months old okay and quite reliably measured at three years old so this is no it would be no shock given the fact that that's true it would be a big surprise if it was not also true for personality I don't know that any developmental psychologist is looking at the assessment of the big five longitudinally you know starting with some kind of assessment of the big five early in the game at say two years old or earlier now if you you understand why nobody would be that interested in such research because all it's saying is hey it's in the genes anyway so therefore the whole process of panicking over the developmental process means we can just quit quit funding these grants because no longer do we give a damn because we know it's not making any difference so you can see that there's probably a considerable reticence in developmental psychological research to holding the light of the truth on this particular question if I am wrong I apologize but I I will bet that the zeitgeist of modern developmental psychology in this arena is not being dominated by behavior genetics so that is certainly I had a report from a student at UC Berkeley that was there in the last two years that told me no way is his behavior genetics front and center it's actually snarled at from the side and is is treated in a hostile fashion so I don't know that if Berkeley is typical but you know it should be a citadel of academic excellence in this arena and it is not so that's that's what I think is probably happy there but anyway the long short of the answer that question is that yeah you're watching personalities emerge it's probably can you tell the two-year-olds open to experience probably could if somebody would bother to develop and standardize device in order to test it I have no doubt that they could figure that out and it wouldn't take much till agreeable disagreeable and everything else but you know they will see the marshmallow experiment that was so famous done by Walter Mischel that for a while was thought to be a device to actually help people become conscientious and successful in the future turns out to be of course nothing other than an early demonstration of conscientiousness and intelligence so the energy event and enough of that question the answer is yes you can see those characteristics early and attachment Theory the general concept attachment Styles makes some sense only insofar as they correlate with the variables of the big five oh hold on I'm just swallowing all the mush marshmallows I couldn't handle I had to haha they're just too tasty all right there oh okay yeah I always wondered if you know we've talked about why evolutionary psychology isn't as accepted isn't isn't accepted at all and many of these things and I wonder if it's the maybe conscientiousness of the academics where they're essentially overestimating the worst case scenario where now if we start believing that you know people are the way they are shocker that bad people can do things that are bad with that information I actually don't think so first of all let's let's I want to clarify something the evolutionary psychology is a different branch of investigation than behavior genetics they sound similar but they're actually not the same thing behavior genetics is what it is that we talk about when it comes to personality and the it influences that give rise to individual differences and of course my way of thinking and the evidence indicates that genes overwhelmingly dominate the show other people would say the evidence is muddier than that but they it turns out that there's there's ways that you can look at that evidence through a really skewed prism and you can look at in a way and believe that the environment has got you know a significant influence but in the to just sidetrack us for a second let me explain there you can pinpoint a huge proportion of the variants and people's personalities to genetics the rest of it that you cannot pin down anything to in principle you could say oh well that's environment but when you say environment you it might be reasonable say well what in the environment do you think is having any influence on for example a child being more conscientious or a child being more intelligent or a child being more outgoing or a child being more disagreeable like what II what experiences or role models or any process from the environment do you believe is having an impact on that to what what X can you put in an equation that will predict the Y that you're observing and they cannot find anything so it means that you can say well genetics does not perfectly predict everything because to monozygotic twins raised hard to raise together are very similar but they are not exactly the same individual and they only they only correlate 0.62 across the personality dimension so what happens to the rest of the variance that is not being explained out of that 0.62 the answer is can can be looked at for many different dimensions but the dimension and I will argue that there's error variance in the in the in the tools that we use I will also argue that the person's understanding of their environment that they're in is actually a informational input that's acting on effectively a fixed mechanism of personality and the two different people have slightly different understandings about the environments that they find themselves in were the environments they find themselves in are slightly different and so as a result their decisions and tendencies are somewhat different because they are dealing with slightly different information even that they've got the same circuits okay so it's like what happens to do two different McDonald's on a given month you know shelling shamrock shakes well one of them is slightly you know in a different place there's more there's more people that are I don't know there's more Irish Catholics that are interested in in st. Patrick's Day and so they wind up going there and they sell twenty percent more than the other one slightly different environment even though both those McDonald's have pretty much the same sales on everything else throughout the year so slightly different environmental circumstances can lead to slightly different differences in behavior even though the underlying architectural structure of motivation can be identical okay and that's actually not a concept that's thought through very carefully in modern personality theory now there's uh there's other issues which is that even though the genetics are identical it turns out that in development and embryos even slight differences in the location the uterus etc just the fact they're different organisms not exactly the same organism having exactly the same experience leads to variation and this is seen in breeding fruit flies in a bottle that you can have 10,000 of em in there that are genetically identical but there's quite a bit of variation as they grow so but the question is is that the environments are effectively have all kinds of random action that's taking place it's not systematic when people talk about environmental impact on personality they are not talking about random unpredictable environmental processes that cannot possibly pin down anything no they're talking about moms this way and therefore you're that way dad was this way therefore you're this way this trauma happened to your 7 therefore that caused you to be this type of a person that's what people are talking about when they talk about environmental influence on personality development and there's not a shred of evidence that there's anything significant in that in that pot of explanations at all bay now so the God knows I forget what your question was it's totally lost I was CEO who tried I was trying a following which her second I think I forgot it to actually yet forget it lost a lot to our wool white alright let's move on haha my mom's cracking up she's used to this alright what else we got alright dear dr. Lyle what advice would you give to a parent who's lost a child who say 18 years old under tragic circumstances such as suicide are there any useful techniques or ways of thinking to really help ease the pain of such a profound biological loss a great question fabulous and hard question I would I'm not sure but I would say the first thing that we do is we we we need to do a thorough assessment about what what our what our strategy was with the management of you know our influence that we had on that life and we have to think through obviously and remin eight and even get get feedback from wise other people about this process to make sure that there's nothing for us that we need to learn and the mind is going to let me let me explain in principle but what the mind is up to as a person grieves and then may regress and then go through repetitive cycles of grieving and may have a very hard time letting go of this the reason why the mind needs to go over and over again losses of great magnitudes is because the mind was designed by nature to run cost-benefit analysis on the utilization of its resources in order to optimize survival and reproductive success that's the job of the mind that is in fact its motivational architecture so as a result it has to has algorithms to make decisions about the utilization of its energy and so if you lose something as important as child if you're if you're I don't know if you're a mom a puppy you're not going to worry about it too much because you have a litter of five or six of these things every year but if you're a human you're going to worry about it a lot because you don't have very many of them and every one of them is a jewel and so as a result if you lose one you're you're designed by nature to spend think about how much investment you have in a child it is a phenomenal percentage of your life's energy and so if one dies or under some tragedy car accident illness suicide whatever it is you are built to do a post-mortem analysis to the enth degree to try to figure out were there any clues did I miss something you know did I handle it right what what can I learn the reason is is that your mind is going to grind and grind and grind and grind on that problem until it becomes convinced that there's nothing else for it to learn okay that that's how it's going to be designed and so so now that's why it's useful to have why is other people that can step through the process with you and check your logic and give you feedback on that everything that you did was incredibly reasonable or maybe it wasn't okay maybe we have to look at where there was a little window where we did where there was some clue or some some procedure that we didn't do right we had seen that kid was drinking and seen that he was driving and he'd actually drive drunk three times and we were embarrassed about and we talked to him about it but we didn't take away the car okay and that was a mistake and you know etc so in other words we sometimes we have to look we have to look at this thing and be honest and unmerciful in that analysis so that we make sure that our brain starts to figure out that we have nothing left to learn now that doesn't mean it's not it's going to shut off that analysis because it may always feel like there's something left to learn because there was so much lost that it's still worth some time to circle back around there and check one more time okay now what can we do about this if a person particularly what can be unfortunate if you have a person that's very high conscientious system therefore you know would be a ruminator anyway so person that would spend an awful lot of energy grinding on the worst case scenario then a worst case scenario happens and now that that sort of fuse or cycle is lit pretty easily and it can be hard for them to put a distance behind loss now one of the things that that that was suggested by a clinician I respect is that you can possibly have decision rules for when you are going to spend that time so you may be able to essentially coax your mind into saying you know what it's Saturday morning you know I mean Saturday morning is when I'm going to think about this and I'm going to think about it from I'm going to take a walk and I'm going to think about this between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. after breakfast and then I'm not going to think about it again until next Saturday that sort of thing and in other words the the the ritualization of focus of attention that may convince the mind to say I don't have to keep thinking about it right now because I will be circling back to this and making this the focus of my attention later and I've got it on a schedule okay so that that may be a useful technique to try to ease the pain of a profound loss Wow thank you help alright well we've got we've got time for a couple of questions that I did not have on the show press the show description and just to let our listeners know I read every single one of the questions that we are a little bit of backlogged so just keep saying the questions I love your questions this question is about a few maybe 100 episodes ago the episode of the future yeah oh dear dr. Lisle how would you describe excessive cell phone usage in your episode about the future dr. Lisle you said overuse of our cell phone is not an addiction I was surprised I realized people use their cell phones for different reasons checking news feeds or checking social media but either way I feel like conversations are interrupted when people pause mid-sentence to check their phones what impact will these constant distractions have on us long term do you think it's harmful that we can't stay focused for a sustained period of time okay let's look at this now the couple of things first of all I that there's the slightest bit of evidence that can be shown that there's been any change in the ability of human beings to focus their attention so the in fact I would bet it all that there's no such evidence now the thing is is that that doesn't mean that people aren't more quick to shift the focus of attention to something that's more interesting but that's a whole different story than saying that they're losing the ability to focus their attention the I I don't notice people are watching a big football game that means something to them that they're that they're unable to focus their attention on the football game I don't notice some guy out with a hot girl that's across from that he's trying to get laid he's having any problem you know not looking at his cell phone so the what you're seeing here is that all behavior is being driven by cost-benefit and so what we're finding is the cell phone is a vector for information to come in from all different sources that is interesting and it can be competing very favorably with whatever it is it's that you've got in front of you so when I'm at the car wash believe me I don't want to sit and talk to it to the guy next to me about what's on the TV is Oprah's up there and she's saying something and it's like I couldn't care less so as a result I'm going to be looking at my cell phone and seeing what interesting things are going on in the world so this is this isn't going to be this is no problem at all the the what would I say about anything else about this I'm actually it's actually curious to me that we haven't had any major rise in auto accidents I'm astounded that this is true given that the cell phones are around and texting and all that sort of thing it shows you that that it as enticing as this is and as it is to break the law what gets your cell phone etc it's actually people's survival capabilities are remarkably good and they're able to actually do an incredibly good job it's shifting their attention on a moment's notice it's incredible actually the so I actually don't think that this is a problem I think that that what what do I think about it I actually think that the just like just like with a lot of media there's things come with as a two-edged sword so I can remember as in my youth the I can remember that the television was seen as the big evil and that the television was this sort of addictive like thing and kids watched six or eight hours a day or some such thing and how terrible this is the now is it terrible no it's not terrible but it is a supernormal stimuli that can bias human action away from things that that might be more authentic with Stone Age programming inside the machine so in other words better to go out and kick the football and watch somebody else kick the football better to go dance than to watch other people dance however it is also the case that there was there's never been anything like television for educating humans about all kinds of things and there's probably never been and there isn't really any other source of entertainment that has been so vast and so extraordinarily valuable to human beings as television so is there is there an underlying cost to this potentially in individual cases and even even on a widespread basis to some to varying degrees course there that's true but a world without it ridiculous and the same thing can be said now all we're seeing is that the cell phone is a little miniature television it's more than that it's actually interactive it enables human beings to reach out across vast distances and to access all kinds of people doing all kinds of interesting things and to be consumers of that of that information processing and so that do I think it's problem no it is if somebody runs into me and wrecks my back or kills me because they you know they didn't use good judgment but that you know that's why it's my job to drive a big car and try to stay off the roads as much as I can the I don't I don't see that this is a harmful I think that just like anything else certain of these things can can get a person out of balance and I think probably it's not the cellphone per se that I think is probably able to drag life out of balance it's the notion of pseudo esteem and the asou dose steam processes of social media that are probably probably the most costly quietly costly thing that is taking place in the modern generation with with modern communication devices that that people are they are addicted to the process of trying to get pseudo esteem rather than earning a steam in the right way from the people that matter and it isn't a disaster for their lives it just it's it's junk food okay you can live on junk food and junk foods exciting but it's not as healthy as really healthy food and the same thing is true with the pseudo esteem processes of the modern social media environment the we can understand it we can see it in some ways it can be extremely valuable because certain ideas can spread like wildfire in a way that they never could before through micro networks used to be that you had to have a television show to be heard by a large number of people and now you don't and so now you can be anybody with a good idea you can you can have an audience and develop a wider microphone so it is a but probably to me what I see is I see a remarkable amount of time and attention and hustle and direction of energies and hurt feelings around pseudo esteem processes and that this is the inevitable byproduct of this and it's going to be with us it's going to be with us forever beating the jeans is about not letting your life leak its energy into a pseudo steam process and remain focused on earning a steam in the right way from the people that matter
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist