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Episode 255: Perception meets reality, Sense of Awe
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dear doctors for the past 20 years i have been bewildered and somewhat disappointed in how my ex-husband and two adult sons have been difficult to get along with and very dismissive of me despite my huge efforts to forge a warm and close feeling among the four of us no matter how hard i try i keep getting rejection and sometimes even ridicule from these guys even though none of us live together anymore now finally i realized that the problem maybe isn't me i.e it's not that i'm not a good enough mother or good enough wife perhaps it's their personalities they would all score pretty high on the disagreeable bell curve while i am in the high 80s for agreeableness so now what is there a different strategy i should now take with these family members or should i just give up and head for the hills i'd appreciate any help i love these people but i just don't enjoy being with them anymore that is a fabulous question that is really covers a lot of grounds yeah that is that is fabulous that is uh that is you know front and center of one of life's great dilemmas and how it is that uh if we're trying to identify the right strategies to live your life in the best way this is a great question to highlight you know what's an ideal strategy so let's uh jen let's just have your take what are your first impressions of this well yeah this is it's getting to the heart of so many things that we talk about all the time um first and foremost the you know the tyranny of personality um so it sounds like a lot in in how she's asking this question she's come to the realization that she can't change these people um you're dealing with a lot of disagreeableness and as an agreeable person this is just conflict central for you uh it's really just there there are very few things that you can experience with these human beings that are going to be pleasurable it's it's especially now that you know you're divorced and you've got these kids who have half of their genes coming from their you their disagreeable dad sounds like um it's just you're going to find yourself running into conflicts of interest around activities and negotiations and conversations for for which that there would not be a conflict of interest with people who are less agree less disagreeable more more agreeable like yourself so it's just it's just shitty it's just shitty and it's hard and you're you've had enough experience with this now that your cost benefit analysis is starting to tell you it's not worth it they're the payoff that maybe we had some good times in the past they're you know you don't hate them um you have obviously a lot of shared interest and a lot of shared memories but uh again and again you've gotten the evidence your nervous system has integrated evidence that you know you go in and you wind up being taken advantage of you your good will gets chiseled they wind up making a big stink about something that you don't think is worth making us think about all the things that disagreeable people will do that are very high costs to agreeable people and uh it has just taken you a certain amount of time and a number of repeated interactions to finally get to the point where you're starting to accept that this is true and so that takes us into what we call the the disagreeable distance which is just that you make your peace with the fact that the you you can't change these people it has nothing to do with you it has nothing to do with what what a good wife or mother you are and this is the life long lesson that agreeable people have to continually learn until they get it is that yeah there's nothing that you can do to change their change their personality in any kind of permanent way and so this is them this is who they are and uh it's up to you to create this disagreeable distance and to create a life that you know sits parallel with them and has some amount of overlap uh to the degree that it makes sense and that you find it pleasant and beneficial to do so but not out of any misguided sense of obligation because you happen to share some genetic material with these kids and some sunk costs and good memories with the ex it's it's really about looking forward and saying okay well maybe we're gonna we're gonna hang out under these conditions these very specific conditions for these very specific moments of time for holidays or important key dates of the year whatever that that happens to look like but not more than that and and to not get into the agreeable particularly the agreeable conscientious trap uh which is that you you feel some sort of misguided obligation because you want to be good you want to take the high road and you're you're just cannibalizing your own life experience by doing that so it sounds like you're already already there this is the the wonderful old zen saying which is that you must not learn you know you do not need to learn to let anything go you just need to learn to recognize it is already gone um and these this relationship with all three of these people is already gone there's there's really nothing there that's particularly worth salvaging or salvageable even if you wanted to salvage it so it's it's about managing your experience going forward wow yeah doctor hawk beautiful super comprehensive the um yeah i want to uh i'll take this opportunity on this uh there's there's nothing more for me to say about uh the decision-making process and and the analysis of it the i would the the only thing that comes to mind for me is to uh back the camera up one notch and look at it even wider which is that people people's personalities don't change at all the only thing that changes in your life is your perception of the environment and so the uh the the environment that matters is going to be the only environment that makes any impact on you is going to be what we're going to call the perceived environment so if i suddenly convinced everybody that oh i don't know some stock was going to go sky high because i got an inside tip that would influence your perceived your environment about what you think the best thing is to do with any money that you've got uh rattling around in an investment account or something like this so your it's your perceived environment is uh the real environment uh ultimately becomes the perceived environment when it hits you over the head but the the uh when when those features so you're you're just so sure it's going to be warm and sunny out there today because that's what the weather report said and so you actually plan your day tomorrow on your perception of what you think is going to happen and then it turns out oh no it's not going to be what's going to happen and then it turns out that you then change your behavior with response to that the so the changes in perception of the perceived environment is going to be what we call learning and you're actually learning every second in other words you're as you move your head around and as your ears do the work that they do and all your sensor organs do the work that they do what you have is a flow of new information that is constantly coming into your nervous system and it's updating your perception of the environment now you don't even notice this because the updates of the perception of the environment are minuscule but let's suppose you're you've got you're a new parent and so everything's quiet and you're sort of relaxing and your mind is drifting to different problems of life and then suddenly your newborn starts to scream okay so now you've got a perception of the environment that we've got to stress there and now that becomes super important to respond to that and figure out what we're going to do about it so you're you're constantly quote learning and what will happen at times is that um you'll you'll figure out that you sometimes your perceptions of the environment have been deeply flawed and this is what will happen at such times it may be that that you thought that you had a great deal more status with an individual and then a showdown takes place where they need to take sides on something and it turns out they're not with you after all that they're they're on somebody else's team and so that that quote is now you learn something your perception of the environment uh was different than the reality and you feel quote betrayed okay so all kinds of things can work this way so when you have a big misunderstanding uh in other words you have an illusion about what the facts are of reality and then a uh significant informational event comes to the fore and you you have a huge learning process that takes place this is going to be what we call a paradigm shift okay and it's not what it is is that it's a whole you know it's possible no matter how if this reaches pretty far that the paradigm shift literally can change every little tiny bit of information literally as you wiggle your toe and your sock and you feel something slightly sharp in there perhaps that is a new update of information that will slightly alter your behavior all the way to a paradigm shift when you find out that i don't know your best friend has been embezzling from your joint business account and you've got a hell of a lot less money than you thought you had and you're not sure what you're going to do about it and it's a crisis okay so the uh what is what's happening in moments of disillusionment is that the illusion has been stripped away by a new more accurate perception and what happens then is that this leads us to a better future so as jen was saying that zen it's so good that she studied all this stuff that i never did just hung out with some hippies yeah but that's a but that's a beautiful saying and something i hadn't heard that that yeah it's already been lost the all that you're losing now is the illusion and the uh and with the with the disillusionment uh often it can be a painful disillusionment as we go through the emotional reaction to this shift of loss as if we are as if the loss process is taking place during the moment of realization when actually it's been it's been a process that's much longer than that however um if uh we we get down to a beautiful pithy insight of john woodens which is that when you lose don't lose the lesson so in this case the the lesson is that that people's personalities don't change and this is something this is one of the grand illusions of human nature and as jen has pointed out it's it's an incentivized taught illusion and it is the it is the great illusion of uh social science and it's it's a huge corrupting concept in social science it leads to a tremendous amount of misunderstanding unbelievable misinvestment in time and energy trying to change your children and the things that they aren't and working on relationships uh uh that are that are doomed because of the emergent properties of the two individuals and who and what it is that they value and then finally in this sort of situation that uh you know working on your relationships with your with your adult children for god's sakes the um now we don't work at these things this is uh it would be a rare instance where we might be highly motivated to discover if we we we're having a misunderstanding about some signaling that goes on typically early in relationships okay so in the early months of relationship people can be leaping to conclusions and be very antsy and worried about what it is that they're seeing and really not understand exactly what the other person is up to and why and so that that can transpire three years in 20 years in forget it there's no there's no misunderstanding of what the hell is happening what's happening is the emergent properties of the nature of the individuals that are involved and so once we see one of the great insights is that oh no they do not change the personalities do not change the relationships fundamentally are just emergent properties and the relationships can shift around based on how much illusion there is in the individuals so you can feel like okay well that was a mess but now we sort of kissed and made up and things are good again sure they are yeah they're good again until the next disillusionment incident uh that where once again we remap what it is that our worst fear was and it turns out that the guy or the girl is is just as messed up the way we we feared before in the last crisis so you know i don't know maybe you maybe you don't have a second crisis but maybe you do and then you become quote disillusioned and upon that you improve your perception of the reality of the environment and with that you're the keys to your better future and uh so everything that jen said about this situation you know applies to all relationships of all people uh it's all about recognizing the personalities are intractable the only thing that changes is our perception of the environment and with that you know those are the keys to your better future that if you've if you've had a long-term mediocre relationship you know think hard about whether or not you know what kind of investment and what kind of time and energy you want to put into it my answer is you know move a healthy chunk in the direction of less overlap in the venn diagram between your life and your adult life i.e the disagreeable distance try that as a nice experiment and see if your life improves that's that's how we make uh the the big decisions about changes in relationships we make them in increments and then we follow the evidence uh by monitoring uh essentially what life feels like so i think that's uh i hope that's good enough yeah i think they're just uh ad add in a little more explicitly than the you and you touched on this but just to make it more clear for people because it's important particularly for for the agreeables um yeah the agreeables with the sucker triad especially so that you can get conscientiousness you get the co-dependence basically is what a typical kind of pop psychologist would call this but you you have watched their relate their their personality change so there's there's some confusion because they are more disagreeable than they used to be you do you probably do remember when days were better um and uh and and that may not have just been at the beginning it may have definitely been at the beginning when people always are overselling their agreeableness and their in their conscientiousness um but if you're dealing with real disagreeables um it probably also got better when they needed something from you you know when they when when they were acting in an opportunistic way in a manipulative way so this is where all the kind of conventional pop psychology discussion of narcissism comes in which is really just a synonym for disagreeable so you know if an if a narcissistic personality i.e a really disagreeable person is viewing the world as yeah unfair cutting them a raw deal and they deserve better which is essentially how they're going through life most of the time they they can improve really deliberately improve your cost benefit on the relationship in a way that you subjectively as the agreeable feel is oh well things are better now right so things we're getting along we're not fighting as much he's not he's not saying shitty things to me anymore he's not making fun of me um you know it's it's things things are better and so your little the inferential processes in your noggin are trying to figure out what did i do to make that different you know what how did i maybe now i'm being a good wife and a good mother to to cause the relationship to go in this different direction not realizing that you're really just sort of a pawn in this larger game of chess that this this person is playing to get what they want which is based on this very unequal perception of what what fair is so you know to the degree that you fit into that scheme moment by moment whatever it happens to be in an expeditious way then it can be all hearts and flowers and unicorn farts and cupcakes for you and it might look really nice and feel really good and it's going to contribute to really good memories and feeling like well we we did you know we've had good times sometimes it's bad but then it's good again so that's not the personality changing that's the that's the environmental context and the opportunity structure of that that opportunistic person behaving in a deliberate way to get what they want beautiful absolutely great jen thank you that's uh that's important yeah when uh what we if we look closely what we see is that there's a there's a there's a regression line in other words there's a statistical description of this relationship and any given week or day is bouncing around that particular line and and it can there can be some variance but the truth is is if we uh when i when i say that uh relationships are merchant properties and the people don't change that the emotional character of that relationship uh over time it's triangulating quote on the truth uh and it's it's always bending that direction uh it's can you know an outlier either to to the good or to the ill is it pretty soon the next set of experiences will regress back towards that mean and what we need to do is back up and look at the history of something and when when uh i don't you know just me i don't have a lot of uh of of uh willingness to put up with too much uh unless i see that the overall cb is very good uh that's you know that's that's the the idea is that you you know an awful lot uh and certainly you know a lot in a few months but you know a hell of a lot in a year kind of what what is the mean payoff emotionally in this relationship you can estimate that very well and this lady undoubtedly and people that are in relationships that are highly conflicted because of difficult personalities you can you can give a very good estimation uh by the end of the year of what the next 20 are going to feel like yeah they're it's not likely to be a phenomenal surprise and so particularly if you're 10 or 20 years in if you're 20 years in you know what number 21 is going to be so that's uh so all we have to do is is you know what it's going to be you know the you certainly know the best case scenario but it could get worse you know like yeah if anything you're you're overestimating because you know if that if that disagreeable person you know gets a bad health diagnosis or gets you know hit by a taxicab or you know loses their job or um any number of things that befall people that they're very likely to not deal with that very well relative to how an agreeable person would and their cost just went up to you in terms of the relationship so kind of the slings and arrows of life if anything the inferences that you're making early in a relationship of what it's going to be like that's kind of like the best that it's going to be um without controlling for the fact that [ __ ] happens [ __ ] almost certainly happens over the long haul so you have to you have to have some room for that you know what there's just no human on earth could possibly be that smart conceptually this must have come from experience no that is ingenious and i i sit back in awe at the conceptual accuracy of that because i think that's exactly how it is it's beautiful jen yeah definitely experience the school of hard knocks as they say oh my all right nathan let's see what else we got well yeah i've got so um if we can talk a little bit more about this question so her her final question was should i give up and head for the hills and i know that that you guys have talked before on different shows that um there are some obstacles that are sometimes standing in people's way uh in case in her case she's already divorced but if she was married then that would be an obstacle to do all the legal proceedings and all the stuff required to essentially break free um what sorts of things would you like you know what would that look like for her to head for the hills essentially if she has determined that that's the right move um it's basically looking at the uh if you think of your life and your your time and energy in a venn diagram the old venn diagrams that you learn intersection you know in in fourth grade and so and then you look at other people's lives as another another circle in the venn diagram and so for her for example she's got some amount of intersection with her two difficult sons and her ex and pretending that somehow this is a you know this is a confederation of a of a of a existing but you know altered family and the truth is is that that's how she's been looking at it and that's really she's looking at it through a fading delusion and so what we need to do is if she's been overlapping her her her sort of time and energy about the the relationships and the investments that she's making in certain relationships and it turns out that of her pie of relationships you know fourteen percent goes to son number one fifteen percent goes to some number two four percent goes to the x and so between them i don't know what it is at 33 percent of her energy or something like that it's too much so what we're going to do is we're going to go from 33 down to about 17 which means that oh are we going to get together twice a year now this next year it's going to be once okay and uh and instead of you know talking on the phone once a week it's gonna we're gonna fade it down to skipping every other week for a while and what we're gonna do is we're going to get used to those new uh equilibria and we're going to see what it feels like and if it turns out that if it feels good then the phone calls are going to go from every other week to once a month okay and so this is we're going to keep fading until we find a level that feels you know not only better but it feels very acceptable and where we actually feel motivated like okay that was a good thing to do so people know my great friend alan goldhammer i was actually wondering if we could get through a whole like a big question about disagreeable people but like when's the how we got how long 27 minutes before we mentioned either allen or larry so i'm impressed so alan uh once stunned me and i probably told this story on him before the um but he stunned me that uh i don't know what we were doing we were i don't know playing stratego with our amped up rules because you know that was that's always an interesting thing to do that this piece can move in this way now but the rules say it can't but now we decided it can you know just modify you know it's like wild cards and poker and make it all more exciting nerd alert [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] had to be said talk nerdy to us talk nerdy too that's why i got a harem here in my house for crying out loud but you see this so um so anyway and he goes he looks up at the clock it says oh hold on a second and he calls up you know i don't know how old we were we were probably 40. and he calls up his uh his parents and he and he talks to him for 10 minutes and then okay okay i got you all right well good talking boom hangs up and i said what what was that he goes oh yeah he goes yeah i have to talk i have to call him 10 minutes before their favorite show so [Laughter] so that's what he did every week there they had a favorite show that they watched on whatever night it was and he called him up 10 minutes before talk to him and then they'd say hey our show's up and that's it that's what he did unbelievable they didn't catch on to this it seems like they'd put their own regression line together at some point no i i'm sure if they did it you know whatever i don't think they did and he's crafty enough you know he'd mix it up he'd go 20 minutes one time that's true he's pretty crafty oh he's very crappy yeah so uh so anyway that's the disagreeable distance right there that's a great good example alan and the favorite show that's how we do it i think that we often miss with that you know it's it's difficult for people i mean it's really it's it's disagreeable distances always kind of come naturally to me which is i think unusual as a high agreeable but you know i i have no problem really if if i'm really getting chiseled death in a disagreeable relationship i i have no problem fading to black and ghosting that person as you've seen me do yeah so um but i think it does not come naturally to most agreeables and particularly for this questioner who um you know we're assuming you're middle-aged and you know have adult kids like depending on the on the circumstances of your social life beyond your family it's gonna be even harder because you're sort of uh as as you disconnect from them if they're providing the bulk of your social connection and and your meaning in your life and and just sort of you know you've kind of built your whole life and identity around this family it's going to be a different question what it means to run for the hills for somebody who has a really strong friend network and work connections and everything else than for somebody who doesn't and i talk to a lot of people who don't um just don't have a lot of life outside of these kind of mediocre relationships with their ex or their adult kids or whatever it is so that's something just to keep in mind that if you're if you're feeling it's particularly difficult to disconnect you you might need to just crowd it out with other activities and other relationships and that can help um manage that whole problem you'll you'll feel like you're losing less than you really are if that's the situation that you're in yeah i mean this is uh this is a problem of this is the equivalent of a misinvestment and so we've misinvested and probably in this case she's got these two adult sons they're very disagreeable outside lingering out there waving in the future are grandchildren those are the only possible grandchildren that she would ever have uh she doesn't have a nice sweet daughter that she's well connected with that that therefore she has the ins inside track on grandmotherhood um no not if these guys get married or have have kids with somebody and have kids with partners it's the maternal grandmother that has the inside track on everything and so the uh so as a result that's that's kind of in trouble as a concept and also i wouldn't be waiting around too long because a lot of times those things don't work out anything like the way we would hope for uh not the way that we we learned in the 1950s that they were going to work out this isn't walton's mountain anymore and so uh as a result that's probably and the idea that these kids lingering waving out there in the future is your own future your own possible disability uh possible bizarre and un anticipated financial constraints on your existence in your old age so essentially your children are insurance policies and they're already signaling that they're not interested and that they are exceedingly difficult to deal with and and so as a result they're bad insurance policies so the the disillusionment uh of what takes place when we look with clear eyes at what it is that we're really looking at is really the realization of a misinvestment it's uh it's like oh well you work for pg e and then enron bankrupted that that retirement fund and now you're you know 52 years old and you don't have a retirement it's like okay all right that that is a shock and it's horrendous and it's uh you know an unearned disaster but what do we do now answer we get smart we we and we invest in sound processes from here that's what we do we don't chase you know some legal process and hope to win in some fiasco where enron is bankrupt pg e is bankrupt and everybody's bankrupt and we're hoping for something it's like no that's uh that's not a good strategy the good strategy is to start investing in soundly in your future which means new people new relationships your your own abilities etc and you know if finances have nothing to do with any of this which let's hope they don't uh the issue is if it's purely emotional and those of connection your job is to go to the trouble to go uh find and forge relationships with people that really like you and and wow what are what a rich thing in your life to have 10 years ago i don't believe i knew nathan and i think uh five years ago i did not know jen uh those two people are now uh important people now quite frankly jen's a lot more important than nathan but you know everybody can see that but the point is point of all this is that wow like my my life is richer and more secure there's like more more uh more uh spokes you know to my to my little table that that you know there's there's more feet on the table there's more stability to it i've got more sources of support and two more people that i enjoy in this existence that i didn't even know were here 10 years ago that's an investment okay and with that investment do i feel more secure yeah all i have to do is start thinking god what do i think about anything i'm kind of insecure about my opinion i better call jen and find out what i think the uh or call jen and talk about libertarian political economies oh yeah it's good too i get all upset then it's time to parameterize that's it but uh now this is this is what we do and this is how we make our life better uh by in investing in people where we can tell that the the payoff is good and now that's what we want to do and that's what she needs to do and that's heading for the hills you don't need to uh she's she's saying do i just walk off and leave these relationships no we we fade them down and we we find out you know how loud that music should be and it's going to be a lot quieter than it is that's how we do it yeah implied in head for the hills there's there's the last ditch strategy of the agreeable which is to you know well if they see me threatening to leave then they'll get straight they'll be nice you know they'll things will go back to you know they'll suddenly value me um and that sounds pretty unlikely in this case so there's not a lot to be gained with you know making a big noise about leaving and i've had it with this and this is unfair and i don't i can't stand being treated this way anymore um because you're not gonna move the needle that much on how they're behaving so that can be a useful strategy if if if someone is acting in a way that is um they're in a distorted information environment they don't realize that they could lose you over it and and we they have moved to a disagreeable equilibrium based on their position of power that you could light a little fire under and shift it back toward your direction but i don't think that's what you're seeing here so i think you're holding on to this hope that if you make that noise that they're going to get whipped into shape and that's that's very unlikely to happen so yeah yeah what you're talking about too with building the social um foundation and replacing the insurance policy harkens back to what we were talking about a couple of weeks ago which is um that you also don't you don't want to be you basically just you can't bring those expectations of of any insurance policy in your life in this moment for 20 years down the road for anybody whether it's a spouse or your adult kids or the new best friend that you meet at your pottery class nobody is a guarantee that they're going to be there and that that insurance policy is going to be paying off in the way that you want it to and expect it to uh as you're investing in it today all you can do is act in your best interest today in in a way that optimizes your happiness and your life experience not not with the sort of like well i'm doing this now even though you know it's not necessarily what i want to be doing and it's kind of mediocre but i really am going to need friends when i'm old and lonely because that's putting a burden on those relationships whether you're related to them or not that is unfair and unrealistic sounds like a signing a one-way contract and the other person didn't know they signed right yeah i think people well that's that's what a lot of these adult children insurance policies are too yeah so yeah and that's why there's a lot there can be resentment there and there can be um you know really kind of confused parents who don't understand why you know why this isn't paying off in the way that they expected it to wonderful well dr hawk dr lyle you want to take one quick question about landscapes and then yeah and wrap it up and why not okay all right dear doctors you've talked about how people enjoy landscapes that indicate that safety food and water needs will be met but why do people feel a sense of wonder and awe at the night sky a new board's hand or something like the grand canyon are these feelings related to religious experiences are there personality traits that would be more likely in people who have frequent experiences of awe and wonder well i know what my guess is jen uh i'll hold i'll let you tackle this one i this is i think there are there are personality differences among among people who have more frequent experiences of awe and wonder i.e they're more open to experience they're they're you know whack jobs like myself so they they have a larger we've called it a mystic chip it's just high openness that is something that makes you uh more inclined to feel this way about things that you interact with in the natural world but there there are good reasons for good good adaptive reasons for these things too which i've heard doug speak very eloquently about so you should you should take off on that yeah well i mean the first thing that comes to mind is that it's been sexually selected and so i think that that i think uh it's likely that religiosity has been sexually selected spiritualness has been sexually selected uh what we mean by that is that if you have those feelings and then you express them as this went down in the stone age in the last couple of million years that that it that that is sexier it it makes you more interesting and so i i think that um yeah one of the one of the most astounding insights that i ever read in evolutionary psychology was in the mating mind of which there was many astounding insights in the emitting mind but the most uh the high concept in the mating mind that that just knocked me off my chair in in you know just sheer admiration of jeffrey miller was the notion that feelings have been sexually selected but literally how you feel is a display process in order to be sexually attractive and it's i mean that that is such a and keep in mind you're talking to a trained cognitive behavioral therapist who who learned at the at the feet of the gods of cbt that you know what you feel is based on what you think and you know what you think there's these automatic thoughts and god knows where they come from that's the black box they can't get into but obviously your feelings are derivative of what you think we can see that there's a logical relationship that would make complete sense so then you start thinking okay well if i'm feeling spiritual it's clearly because i'm thinking about the possibility of spiritually connected you know energy moral processes in the universe okay where the hell would that come from okay well that's the black box that that jeffrey miller looks inside and says well the whole kit and caboodle is sexually selected and so that the uh that that would make perfect sense all that it would take would be to have a little bit of that feeling and the expression of that feeling a little bit somewhere in a campfire you know 787 000 years ago uh when the the dawn of language when there's only like 400 words but it's enough and somebody ex has a feeling of awe looking at the stars expresses it and then somebody else says wow that's pretty cool that's an interesting and nice feeling that you have think about how obvious this is about how women might look at a guy who treats his pet really nicely like his dog okay and think about what that is it's like wow i really find the fact that that guy is having those feelings is highly appealing okay and so then we start realizing okay the truth is is that feelings are absolutely critically uh important displays and that's why you know uh the i was always embarrassed the way allen would treat waste waitresses you know and uh and it's because whoa your disagreeability is leaking out all over the place dude making you look bad making me look bad and it was always uncomfortable uh in those circumstances and so you know alan makes a lot of us uncomfortable makes jennifer his wife uncomfortable a lot of times because he's you know he's not meaning to be uh difficult he's just feeling annoyed and irritated and he's you're chiseling three minutes of his life because you're moving a little slow and you know he's he's you know he doesn't snarl loudly but he lets you know he's not happy and so when we start realizing oh wow of course this is true that the the nature and content of a per another person's emotional life is of prime importance uh not obviously not only i mean in all human relationships and friendship in trade uh and and absolutely in romance so when we start looking at any interesting feeling uh we are you know some curious interesting feeling it's like why would that feeling exist you know there's two reasons to there's only two paths to to derive why that feeling exists one of them is survival what possible good would awe have looking at the grand canyon or the stars in the sky when it comes to survival i see no benefit whatsoever for those feelings okay if if that were true my cat would have those feelings and you we'd see cats looking up at awe at the moon or whatever they don't you don't know you're not watching that cat 24 7. rich inner life well jen my cats look at me with those feelings baby the uh but no i think that we can clearly see if it's not for survival which it's not where the elephants would be having those feelings no it must be for reproduction yeah and it's not that it's staring at the sky having the feeling that is selected i mean that's sort of selected on the way to what is really selected which is talking about it right like when when when was the last time ladies you went on a date with a guy who talked about his trip to the grand canyon and how humbled in the face of the forces of nature he was like he's got to tell you the story the whole point is to having the experience is to tell you the story so he can he can look really deep and really profound and really connected to something bigger than you know he's there's something different about him he's special he's he's he's people still love you tomorrow yeah oh yeah for sure because he's never met anybody like you before in all of his travels when he's he's been so awed by the forces of the universe so it's really like yes we we do feel this feeling and and that that just that is sort of the byproduct of what's really being selected which is narrating the feeling and and eliciting this feeling of connection particularly from a male to a female like do you feel that too well we have a special there's something special here that we have that nobody else has because i am basically born out of zeus's forehead so here i am you better mate with me while you have a chance boy does this ever explain my failures in this arena [Laughter] [Laughter] yeah these things don't happen in a vacuum i mean it's it's nobody is having these sort of profound experiences without at least imagining narrating it to somebody else so yeah you can you can come back and say oh well i had this really profound experience under the night sky and and uh the you know i felt like i was sucked up into the vortex of the milky way and i was at one with the universe and i wasn't even on mushrooms like cool but you you and i didn't i never wanted to tell anyone about it i just wrote about it in my journal and so it wasn't a display it wasn't a virtue signal it was just my own my own feeling my own experience but you were still you were you were displaying it to your internal audience you were rehearsing it um and so this this is what miller tells us in this amazing book which really we i it's it's one of my favorite evolutionary psychology books of all time and it's really lyrically beautifully written of course which he acknowledges is your meta display it works very softly it works oh totally it worked it totally worked yeah um so it's it's a great resource and and yeah these are these are not just sexually selected processes but they're mostly runaway sexually selected processes very attractive big difference between the guy sitting around the campfire who has the sense of awe and can tell you about it and and make you feel more connected to him um than the guy who's like dinner got went eat not not oh i prayed for the the the spirit of the elk to give itself over to us so we could all share in this bounty together and and you know that we may feast as as soul mates yeah there you go beautiful well doctor yeah i think oh yeah go ahead go ahead nathan no now we're done this is like the after play now or what do you call that jen what do you call it at the end aftercare oh my god oh my god [Laughter] why the new podcast is called a hawk block this is hawk blocked i'm doing the little thing with my arms it's no shut it down we haven't heard the toxic masculinity alarm in a long time doctor laughs that's true yeah that's true that's well i've i've just been beaten down by the patriarchy it's it's my false consciousness that has taken over the situation like not even alert to violations anymore all good good all right nathan well dr lyle dr hawk thank you so much uh really really love it so um we will look forward to talking to you both in a couple of weeks and uh in the meantime you know maybe maybe a visit to the grand canyon or a look at the stars is an order yeah i i hear you we'll work on that we'll get some photos for you for your dating site there you go with your look of eyes yeah that's what we need that's what's needed that's that's good thinking how can we convert this to a display always that's always a question good yeah yeah all right that's great talking to you both you
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