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Episode 250: Owing parents, Childs pleasure trap sabotages moms goals, Is mom disagreeable or am I too sensitive
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okay so here we go dear dr lyle how much do you owe your parents as they age my father's very disagreeable and i hate being around him he has embarrassed me many many times throughout my life and always depended on me for his social life he's cheated on my mother was divorced three times and is now alone in his eighties i'm sure he is lonely but as i said i don't like being around him i help him when he needs rides or other things and he wants a social life with me but i'm bitter towards him for a number of things i do feel guilty that i don't want to help him with his loneliness i read the book you suggested how i found freedom in an unfree world by howie brown but a dilemma i have is that as my father ages he will need me to care for him more and i would like to move out of state he does not have any savings to afford quality nursing home care so the question is do i need to take him with me because there would be no one else here to care for him uh a couple things nate that i just want to let you know you broke in and out on there when you're reading that so hopefully it's fine on our recording um i would say uh the the first part of the question uh asked uh how much do you owe your parents as they age and the answer is you don't owe them anything okay so the um anything that that you feel obligated to do uh it should should be coming from a place of uh gratitude for what it is that they did for you and uh some feeling that they have they have earned credits uh with you so that so that when now the shoe is on the other foot and in this particular case uh what's that excuse me oh my phone i didn't say anything okay all right the so the uh so the notion is now when the the shoe is on the other foot and there is um and and now they need help and they they actually have no resources to pay their way or compensate us then then they had better obviously be hoping that we have great affection for them now uh in many of our cases that the answer is i would say probably most cases that's true so most cases you know certainly a lot of people will some number of people have had really badly conflicted and and um you know nasty and maybe abusive processes between their them and their parents that's not the typical pattern uh but it certainly exists in the world and those are you know obviously unfortunate circumstances um and so if you have that situation uh then then obviously that this can be there could be some sort of conflicts running around somebody's head about how they feel about the person even in in uh even in abusive situations a lot of times uh a person who is even abused as a child can have a very conflicted uh situation with respect to an abusive parent just because it wasn't all abuse there sometimes that you know there's a very mixed bag of essentially costs and benefits that went along a long term process so the relationship is a complicated conflictual mess and that remains potentially in place when when the parent is aged and infirmed and has no resources and a child with obviously that has an adult child that has more resources now is looking at a situation and trying to decide you know what it is that they want to or feel like they should somehow give now this case doesn't sound like it was like that it was just unpleasant and nasty and and uh and conflicted behind a highly disagreeable man and so my very first pass is you don't owe him anything at all and i'm not sure why it is that you're giving him rides and doing this possibly out of feeling like the village may look at you and basically uh is is if has some sort of a recording process obviously in the minds of the village that would be watching you about how it is that you treat this aged parent who is now you know in these circumstances and has nobody else and so the uh so maybe that that is a motivation which is a completely legitimate motivation to protect your own uh protect your own standing in the village i.e the assessment that the village would have of you that can be visited with guilt in other words guilt can be essentially the internal audience is watching you and therefore it's uh it's got an opinion about this and therefore it's signaling uh it's signaling some degree of of disturbance and possible disgust if you don't hustle and and uh give up some of your time and energy and money or whatever resources that you have uh to this aging parent so that's what freud would call superego it's the same concept as an internal audience that is signaling to you that the cost that you may be imposed on you by the village uh if the village was to observe that you abandoned this person now and so that that we can't necessarily warm our way around that uh those are those are innate structures and we may not be able to essentially recalibrate the internal audience's view of the situation i don't know if we can or we can't um the i i'm just tough enough and nasty enough that i i i would not be intimidated uh by the uh by the village's view if i abandoned the parent that that was had been my relationship with the parent uh my attitude would be uh i'm enough of a free enterprise libertarian that that my attitude would be you know you had 80 years uh and there was an awful lot of days when the sun was shining when there was money for you to be made and that you could have saved it and you could have taken care of business and now you don't have anything and now you also don't have any friends and you don't really have any credit with me because of who it is that you are sorry i i'm living by the disagreeable distance rule and you're disagreeable and i'm not helping you're gonna have to find another way and so uh that you know i wouldn't necessarily say that in plain english to the person but i would say it with my behavior so um i would of course just out of sort of general compassion for any animal i would try to help them problem solve to some degree i wouldn't feel incumbent on me to actually solve the problem but i would certainly help assist them so if this guy is 80 years old and he's got social security and he's got 1350 a month and he's getting trapped uh by by financial considerations and he can't uh he's going to be in trouble well first of all if he has any resources at all he can live in a boarding care and he doesn't need to go anywhere he doesn't need a ride for anything uh you get public transportation so i would if this were my parent and i didn't like them and they were disagreeable difficult i would keep my distance and basically act as a social worker uh and i and and i would actually be pretty soon a social worker one step removed so that i'd actually have a real live social worker or somebody equivalent uh you know senior assistant people etc that he could call and i'd give him you know you have a list of phone numbers uh on speed dial on some phone in the house where he could hit those numbers and talk to mabel down there who's supposed to tell him you know when he's supposed to pick up his bus okay so i would not by any stretch of the imagination cramp my style about where it is that i was going to move to um you know you say you're moving out of state um i that that individual wouldn't particularly be welcome uh to follow me they would be welcome to it's a free country so if they're if they want to move and be within a few miles of me in the boarding care uh that's three miles away that's fine but don't count on me uh dropping anything to come over and help you in fact you can probably count on me stopping by and giving you i don't know a box of chocolates you know or something equivalent every couple weeks and chat chatting with you for 15 or 20 minutes that's probably about what i would do okay so i i'm just not going to let such an individual swallow very many of the hours of my life uh the fact that they have painted themselves into a a a personal and financial corner uh is you know that's okay that that was those were choices that they made and uh and these are the consequences that they face and these are not dire uh i look at at uh people's lives i i project their life against a backdrop of the nature of life as it has existed for human beings for a million years and an 80-something-year-old man who has medicare so therefore he's got uh he's got perfectly outstanding medical care relative to all of the medical care that ever took place in all of humanity for all time except that no whatever he gets at medicare right now is not the mayo clinic fair enough okay the medicare that he gets today is better than what the mayo clinic could have given him 40 years ago so that is going to have to do so he has outstanding medical care by any reasonable measure he has plenty of food because he's not going to starve there's no possible way to starve in this country unless you don't know where the food bank is or where the free food is so that is that is impossibility uh he does not have to be cold or hot okay he can be in a board and care room somewhere with you know with with horus and mabel down you know that run the thing and he can he can be in perfectly reasonable circumstances if he is so inherently disagreeable that he gets kicked out of horse and mabel's then he can go over to i don't know burton alice's okay they'll take them because they've got a vacancy so the point is is that they're extremely well protected better than any tp okay or any place in mesa verde uh any place you know in in egypt uh you know prior to 1900 in other words basically he can live in outstanding circumstances with probably cable television and probably can afford a cell phone and can have completely comfortable air conditioning and heating and has nice sheets of at least 400 thread count and has a tv to watch with all kinds of free stuff on it quite frankly i don't really care that he doesn't have any money he's got enough resources to survive and survive very very well relative to how human beings have survived throughout their natural history so um now uh what kind of help is it that is he gonna need oh now he's suddenly he's uh incapacitated and he he has to be you know in a home because he has to be hauled out of his bed in order to go to the bathroom oh well he's not going to live in my house for god's sakes he's going to wind up in a social security mediated nursing home fair enough okay so that's how that is that's that's what the society has for him this is not a tragedy okay uh i've worked in some of those places and they they they are you know from my standpoint as an able-bodied you know 40-year-old walking into those places uh the smell of them and the the you know the clinical attitude and the the kind of you know the kind of like not to hop to it on the staff part and and you've got these little old people lying up in bed and they're pretty feeble it's not an inspiring happy place but it is the life that that's the best we can do and uh you know 100 years from now the standard will be somewhat better than it is now uh but this is the standard that that exists now and so and that standard is not really physically uncomfortable because of the ecological circumstances uh what's physically uncomfortable is whatever infirmities the person has and the limitations that they have that that's really the problem and there's really nothing to be done about that problem so a quote better medical care isn't going to fix it you know a little old person that's in deep trouble and is sick and has got some degenerate chronic degenerative disease you know we're not going to fix it with an esselstyn diet you know and some extra carrot sticks at this point that's never going to happen okay this person's in trouble and they are infirmed and we're not going to get some big improvement of the diet and even if we did it wouldn't make much difference at that point so yeah this is a long rant on this question but what i'm what i'm trying to explain uh to this person and try to uh to give them at least my frame from my my standpoint is a person that i believe is probably sitting right about in the middle of the bell curve for disagreeable um and that is um you know i would give them the time and attention that i feel like that they have earned and deserved and uh in the case of my mother my mother is a fabulous human being and my mother lives with me okay so that means when she calls out in the middle of the night for me i get up okay and that may be three times a night and that's been going on for a year and if it goes on another three years it goes on another three years because that little lovely incredible lady deserves it okay so the uh this individual if that individual had been my father no dice okay so you uh disagreeable distance goes all the way to the grave so we don't have to uh we don't have to abandon people and we don't have to get pissy with them we just set limits and boundaries that work for us but essentially the conflict isn't between you and your father it's between you and your internal audience it's really about you analyzing in your own mind what's fair and not being intimidated by what others might think of what is fair instead try to zero in with your own conscience about what you think is fair and from my standpoint from what i'm hearing about this what's fair is the closest you get is two three miles away and i'm going to drop by twice a month for 15 minutes and a box of chocolates that's fair okay and all the other financial issues and all the other wheel sharing that he needs and all the other stuff that's for somebody else to do not you all right wonderful dr lyle thank you very much all right what else we got our next question dear doctors i'm having environmental issues and i'm i'm really stuck as to what to do about it i have a 36 year old special needs daughter for the most part she eats what i put in front of her but adamantly says no to going full on plant-based she still wants occasional meat and also cookies with her coffee in the afternoon this is so embarrassing but every chance i get i sneak into her room and grab some cookies or candy or whatever else she has stashed in there away from mom it's really hindering my progress i almost think it's psychological on my part every time i go below 200 i sabotage myself and i'm just lingering between 198 and 202. i get so down on myself i know you shouldn't beat yourself up over a slip up but jeez this has been going on for so long [Laughter] [Music] okay all right well first of all it's not quote psychological okay so uh you have a a tremendous set of integrated circuitry that you're going to find in something as as simple as a honeybee okay that is going to guide you to the richest food in the environment so that is the the story of the pleasure trap is a story of a rejection of the notion that there are some some uh nefarious and uh opaque psychological reasons that cause us to quote self-sabotage and eat rich foods do you understand eating rich foods is not self-sabotage it's freaking survival okay your nervous system is designed by nature to run cost-benefit analysis on algorithms that were built for a stone age environment when you eat the cheetos you are doing the smartest thing that that brain can figure out what to do there is no better move in the house unless there's oreos and there's no better moves than that unless there's i don't know chocolate cheesecake then that's a better move so to think that this is self-sabotage is ludicrous or that it's quote psychological and it's ludicrous and that there's a barrier to you getting going under 200 because somehow you won't allow yourself to do this this is all completely and utter you know psychobabble fantasy has nothing to do with the truth the truth of the matter is that if you have rich food in the environment you're like a ferret okay and you're gonna find it that's that's what it is so now the question is what do we want to do about this and so we have a all kinds of range of alternatives so one thing we could sit in a yogi position and chant and then go on to some online you know hot shot that's going to tell us how to how to how to focus you know and and focus on your deep breathing so that then you know then you'll get rid of that those cravings okay that won't work [Laughter] okay so that's out okay so what are our alternatives well uh another alternative if we if we're talking to our good chef abby jay she'd probably say what's the crap doing in the house oh but my daughter's special needs and she really likes it so so what's she gonna do okay how is she gonna go down to the store and get her own coffee and donuts uh doesn't sound like that's probably able for her to happen so understand that you are in dictatorial control over what's in that house and you can monitor what's in there and whatever is so enticing to you you don't have to bring it in there and if we hear some squawking from the special needs child oh well so there's some squawking they'll only squawk so long and then they'll quit squawking okay that's because they're designed by nature to run a cost-benefit analysis on on how much time and energy to put into complaining and after they complain for long enough and they don't get any results then it quiets down okay that's how life works now now someone might say oh my god that would be terrible you know we can't do that we we uh this this person you know has is caught on the pleasure trap and they really want these foods and they've got it in their head and then they're gonna squawk and squawk and you know how terrible of us to to only let them eat the bounty of nature of all the possible natural foods and healthy foods that are in the environment and not let them eat the drug-like foods that are in the environment so that would be a just terrible abuse i could just hear it out of about a bunch of social workers now telling me you know and a bunch of uh what do you call it i could just see doug lyle getting cancelled as a psychologist for saying that it would be perfectly reasonable to do nothing other than bring whole natural foods in your house that is a totally reasonable solution to this problem [Laughter] now now well let's suppose that we think well that's a little too far for us we feel like you know these are these are treats in this individual doesn't have that much excitement in their life or some such thing and which is probably not the case but maybe it is or maybe that's your perception so maybe we're going to do this well then fine do it on a limited basis so bring home a sack of oreos you know every saturday and uh instead of set some down in front of your daughter and lay it a bunch of them around the house and you know you'll get your share and then that's it no more for the rest of the week you tell your daughter this is her sack of wario's for the week in fact maybe you keep it in your room and then go sneak in there when she's not looking and get your shares see if you can get a row okay but the truth is that's all you're gonna get this week all right so big deal this isn't gonna stop us mythically at 201 pounds one raw oreos is not going to keep you over 200 pounds so that's what i would tell you so the notion is you've got you've got all kinds of options uh the the yogi and the hypnotism isn't going to work the uh because you're you're fighting uh deep instinctual algorithms that are gonna get you into that room and slip past the the burglar alarm that your daughter has set and you will get your share okay that is going to happen so the question is what is your share what is maybe it's not that great maybe it's kind of whole natural oriented you know healthy or junky food that you don't really like that much good good so maybe that's what we bring in the house and it's and you're it's not that enticing uh but your daughter still gets to uh smack her lips over it she likes it pretty well and that's that or maybe what we do is we bring in the really good junky stuff but we only do it on a very limited basis and that's uh and then there is no food to be sneaking into her room to get so the only way reason we have a problem is we're bringing home truckloads of this stuff that's what's happening and if you're bringing home truckloads of that stuff and it's in it's in there all the time and you know it's in there then we can expect that your stone age brain will have mapped out the environment it knows where the bathroom is knows where the kitchen is it knows where the trash can is and believe me it knows where your daughter's room is and it knows where she's got the stuff it would be a moronic system that did not know okay so it knows it's never gonna not know it's never going to not be motivated and so therefore i would suggest that we acknowledge that openly and and straight up and we understand that the kind of solutions that i'm talking about are the only reasonable solutions we've got yeah wonderful dr lyle it's uh it's always a pleasure to hear you rant on the pleasure trap all right i recently had a patient we did we actually actually discussed shredding his credit card and putting all his money in the bank so that he couldn't access it so he couldn't get food you know the food that he wanted to get right we ended up brainstorming that maybe someday in the future you know the you'll be able to tie your whatever alexa or amazon account yeah it won't let you actually buy nothing but fruits and vegetables yeah yes and who knows we'll we'll give somebody good luck with that with that app yeah all right all right okay our next question dear doctors i'm a high 90th percentile in all the categories of personality i believe that my high conscientiousness often protects me from the negative aspects of being emotionally volatile as i have high standards of behavior for myself and others however even being reasonable intelligent caring etc i'm easily thrown off by simple things at work or in my personal life and i'm a crier as an example i share an office in the work from home world right now with my mom the office is connected to my house and yesterday she brought me candied ginger which i love i ate about a quarter of it and i didn't want to get caught in the pleasure trap with the rest so i put it in my compost bin well this morning she happened to go brush my cat and after she put the hair in the compost she saw the ginger and got upset that i threw away any of it after explaining to her that i really enjoyed it i just didn't want to keep the rest around the house she kept going on that yes she wanted me to be happy but she thought that i cared about not being wasteful for the record it cost five dollars i didn't get over it for over an hour and kept involuntarily crying because i was so upset that i disappointed her i understand this sort of thing is my esteem meter for people i love but i don't recalibrate quickly from negative feedback and i'd like to learn how to get better at it i'm 31 and overall successful in work and relationships but i'm too darn sensitive um interesting obviously this is one of these cases where we're trying to extrapolate from very little data so uh the person speaks in a lot of generalities they've given us uh one specific instance and uh that one specific instance is is it's a little muddy about how to score it you know as i'm trying to look down on this thing from a thousand foot view the uh the mother's response seems uh her response first of all seems uh very reasonable in other words yeah i threw it out but this is why etc okay so the mother's response is curiously argumentative okay which is sort of like yeah but i thought you i.e i thought you also did you didn't want to be wasteful okay as if this is some character trait that has been discussed and analyzed and and organized along a continuum of virtue and so the fact that the mother would bring it up um is indicative of quite a high degree of disagreeability so the the way that that uh that that thing essentially should go if the mother was a reasonable down the middle person it would be hey the reason i didn't do that is because this that or the other would be like okay i got it okay the uh i could see the mom saying something like well gee maybe next time maybe just next time maybe take half or a quarter okay something like that and then to be like yeah that's a good idea but to to essentially go after and criticize this individual um essentially criticize her conscientiousness as a characterological uh sort of attack that's kind of shitty quite frankly and so um so like i said i'm extrapolating here but that a flag goes up in my head uh that says disagreeable okay now that's important and let me tell you why because we're not going to change you we're not going to make you tougher we're not going to make you more resilient this is all fantasy for you know some other therapist now what we're going to do this is straight out of gen hawk's potted plant okay you got to think of yourself as a potted plant and the the control we have is where we place the potted plant it isn't changing the plant's characteristics so um so your we have to recognize that uh with your with your mother okay we just got a we just found a possible conflict of interest uh between you and your mother your mother's trying to do a nice thing and right away you know you're a little uncomfortable with it okay so we know this because we know that you're going to go to a fair amount of trouble to self-discipline yourself and try to get rid of this stuff on the sly it's like so you know at the moment that this is happening this is a conflict of interest and so what we do with these people like this is you know this is sort of an unfortunate little mess but what we can do with disagreeable people that we're close to is we have to essentially hammer out you know if we've got repetitive types of issues or repetitive specific issues we can try to hammer out agreements and see if they'll honor them okay if they won't honor them then we have to move back and we have to get less we have to essentially increase the distance so we're a potted plant so we can try to negotiate with the gardener and then if it turns out that the gardener we can't negotiate them with wealth no problem then we move a little further away you know we don't have to like go to the other side of the country but we have to do things like hey maybe we're not going to work in the same office or you know this is the there's some boundaries here don't bring me any food because i i've got my own designs on how i think about food and so you know what i know i i appreciate your your thought and i really do uh i do appreciate your caring and concern and wanting to to do nice things for me but you know what it's a problem so just don't okay so we set that boundary and then we should never have that problem again and so by the time we with somebody that may be a little disagreeable a little pushy by the time we set half a dozen boundaries if they're a super important person that's a big fixture in our life we'll see whether or not they can hold those boundaries now if they can't oops too bad then don't try to change them we just change the distance okay that's how we're going to fix it because they can't be fixed they can't be negotiated with now i have no idea uh what the what the gal's mother's like whether or not she actually could be pretty reasonable whether or not we can set a boundary with her and then she's going to respect it but the notion is that we're not going to change so we're going to have to reduce by structuring the social interactions between us and others we're going to have to reduce the likelihood of us getting pushed into those situations and that's all we can do okay so if you're a sensitive soul uh then we have to put you you know we got to maneuver you to pleasant enough situations that that you can function quite well and that's the best advice i've got wonderful all right all right how do you feel i think we got yeah we got room for one more all right let's do it yeah okay our our final question uh dear dr lyle you discussed on the podcast a situation where a person feels depressed because they feel they are not motivated to work diligently on their goals i have a similar but slightly different situation where i am very happy with my life i have a dream job good performance reviews good pay and and so i should be happy but i know that i'm not fully applying myself at work and that i'm cruising at about fifty percent effort as a result i feel constant guilt for slacking off at work and i yet i can't seem to force myself to work harder the boss is happy and unless there is an immediate and heavy deadline i really don't feel motivated this puzzles me because i really do love my job and i would even happily do this work for free by the way i worked for government agency and the work is quite analytical some would say it's adhd but i know evolutionary psychology doesn't recognize adhd can you talk about this phenomenon please um yeah that's a that's actually a a very interesting problematic situation and um the the solution is actually to run experiments uh so that we can the person can educate their own nervous system about the value of earning self-esteem so the self-esteem mechanism is raising one eyebrow in disgust at this individual and that's why they're feeling guilty okay they're also the internal audience is is observing uh the mediocrity of effort and it is aware actually of the following the uh because he knows he or she knows that a mediocre effort is being made then they also know that they could be found out so okay just because you're fooling the village as far as you can tell you are not fooling everybody and even if you think you're fooling everybody you are aware that because you are in fact flaking out uh that someone could ultimately find this out now the uh that isn't any big tragedy i mean i i worked in the prison system and i saw unbelievably lazy people i saw staggering waste of government money um we we had one guy one guy uh by the name of john and please no john's need to be uh offended by this because a lot of people in the world her name is john but john was an old social worker he was probably in his 60s and um and i i hope some people out there uh that know me and it might be connected with me know who this guy is because he deserves to be called out this guy was the laziest most worthless human being i've ever met in my life um i you know i i met serial killers that i had more respect for than this guy this guy did got more pay for less effort uh than anybody and i found out later that uh he he would never be let go because it turned out he was an interior snitch so he actually uh would go up and talk to the brass about anything anybody else was doing apparently a very self-righteous dude and anyway so this guy one day we had we knew that we had these big inspectors coming from sacramento uh there was a there was some there was there's a long story there was a little crisis and the the office the inspector general was gonna come uh to my prison and they were gonna sweep through there and we all knew that this was happening so all of us you know made extra sure that we were we're gonna be looking like we were working so this guy john turns out he's a big road ton guy and uh he would kick back in his chair at his desk and he would just throw his head back and sleep i think this is routinely this was a daily event that would go on for hours and he would like snore all right i know this is hard to believe but it's true so anyway you know i i wasn't anywhere near them so i didn't have to see this happen very often but everyone now and then i would walk over to where he worked and there he'd be it was head back snoring uh anyway so here's the office of the inspector general who's actually coming to to do some report on oh i don't know oh it's actually a report on the fact that a lot of people were clocking in late and so therefore they they thought that we weren't working that hard so of course everybody was going to hustle around make sure that they look like they're working and what do we find john when the inspector general came in was in his chair with his head back sleeping [Laughter] you gotta love that man good night oh no not even gonna put it together for the inspector general so anyway uh what was i gonna say so this guy had no internal audience that could care because he had a big narcissistic streak so he figured he was doing us a big favor just by being there apparently the um now this individual here our person who wrote actually has a little guilt chip in their head and there they understand that no there's no in in a government agency with everything swimming along just fine everybody's working half time obviously the money's better than they deserve relative to a private enterprise job and everything's jake and he actually likes kind of some of the work that he or she does whatever it is the uh so in some ways it looks like a dream job but actually of course it's not and the reason it's not is because it's ripe for essentially termites constantly gnawing away at your self-esteem so you you feel like someone who is uh you know got a little counterfeit machine uh that you're actually cheating and getting away with it and it's a it's a little bit giddy uh to cheat uh but at the same time it is it it feels morally incomplete so they're not completely way over the line here they're not actually counterfeiting money but they're doing something pretty close they're basically basically stealing taxpayer money uh they're getting paid this individual's getting paid twice as much as they deserve because they're not they're not they're only working at halftime so what do i think about this well um you know it it really isn't for me to have any input into the to into how to analyze this thing from any sort of moral objective at all the real issue is is the moods of happiness inside of that nervous system and we're seeing a conflict in other words part of it giddy part of it perfectly pleased with the bit of work that they are doing part of it feeling the footsteps of the village discovery and that the game will be up and that they'll all have to quit being naughty naughty mice or naughty school kids with the teacher gone and effectively buckle down okay the um what i would say is i would say that i would run an experiment and i would say okay you know what for yeah let's start with three days let's see if you can discipline yourself for three days to get there on time work effectively don't stay out for a long lunch and work the way to the end bell and actually do your very best and i would be doing that for just one purpose and that purpose is to observe whether or not you notice the internal audience change its feedback to you i think even one day you might see a change after three days that's not a very complicated experiment it's a 24-hour experiment uh that those 24 hours might be an interesting revelation as to how your own mechanics work of course the energy conservation system is delighted to try to game a system animal life is all about every possible shortcut that we can figure out that's why you have eyes okay eyes are a shortcut so you don't have to wander all over the landscape blind to try to find the materials you need to survive or to find a mate or to follow the sound or the smell of them no you can see them okay your entire sensory system is all about energy conservation so is your memory system it's about energy conservation uh everything about you is built around the principle of energy conservation and so it's no surprise that if you have a job that is rigged out of the free enterprise system without any competitive pressure that the government has carved out a bunch of money uh outside of outside of uh the real cost benefit analytics that that sit inside and drive the market that that people sit inside government positions that are overpaid and underworked and are basically scamming okay now that happens in private enterprise as well i'm not it's not like that's all clean and dandy but it's particularly rampant in government uh that's because there's no competitive pressures uh in free enterprise you have a company and you have a hierarchical structure and people are have expected numbers uh that every person in middle management understands that they are they are being judged on what their team below them accomplishes and so therefore and they're being compared to similar people and uh in the organization etc so or over time what is reasonable to be accomplished etc and this is all being organized under the heading of profit motive and it's being analyzed by stockholders or or the ownership etc so there's competitive pressures uh that sit inside a normally functioning competitive enterprise that will make this type of thing impossible the uh like i said it's not it isn't that it is impossible because there's all kinds of quirky distortions and systems all over the place but the distortions are rampant in government because the competition has been removed and this is why you know tony soprano you know this was all about getting the contract for the waste management in new jersey like that's what it's all about okay it's uh the mobs like listen we want a government contract of course we do we want we want twice as much money as we need to do the job and so um so that just is what it is and so this individual is is not in any unique circumstances they're in particularly good circumstances because they happen to like the the bit of work that they do do uh and they're being actually well paid most government jobs aren't super well paid they're just pretty well paid the uh but they're they seem very happy about it which means that they are aware that they would not be getting more money under private enterprise or they wouldn't be singing their praises about the pay okay so the uh so what we're hearing is a very cushy set of circumstances very unusual and what we're seeing is the termites gnawing away at the person's life experience behind the self-esteem mechanism so i would say why not run an experiment for three days do an outstanding job not just a decent job do a really good job like just just you know put on your best you know tie or or clothes and go in there and uh get serious and do a really good job and just see what it feels like okay and what i can tell you is that's what work can feel like so in some other universe somewhere that if you have skills that translate into the private marketplace somewhere there is a position that feels like that okay and then you can decide you can run a a better cost benefit analysis on how to spend your life as to whether or not we want to spend it you know in any different ways we can do a better job at our government job we can go ahead and continue to essentially cut corners and and let the energy conservation system run rampant and just you know cruise around and deal with a little bit of low-grade guilt that's that's not a terrible outcome uh we also may find that the feeling of actually doing it as well as we can figure out how to do it and to do it really well throughout the entire day we're like huh that's interesting and you may not be able to force yourself to do that in a government position because a lot of that a process is taking place as a result of the external structure of the profit motive and competition which sounds unpleasant but quite frankly it is in fact the state of nature and so that's why animals in a zoo are not as happy as their wild animal counterparts now they live longer which is why government workers live a lot longer than i'm just kidding no the uh the truth of the matter is is that uh uh they obviously animals in a zoo live a lot longer animals in captivity because they're not being eaten by predators and they don't have you know accidents and getting bit and get infected or whatever else that is under the under the sun but but they aren't as happy and and so consider just how happy you are and experiment with a different way of doing things and then you know look look around this problem obviously you would never leave a cushy situation unless you have awfully good reason to leave it but you know there there may be there may be a time when uh when you decide that you know it's a little too flat and uh maybe maybe you want to change something up in a way that will uh enhance your life you
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