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Episode 4: Beat the Genes
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just a recap a couple of you know we've done this our fourth show now the first the first couple of shows we talked about this concept of beating your jeans and then a little bit about self-esteem and then last week we talked about the high cost of high expectations and how to really taper our expectations to ensure that we can have the best shot of trying a goal and maybe maybe succeeding maybe not but kind of go in that direction this week I wanted to continue talking about this concept of beating your jeans now what's really the purpose of psychology yes well broadly speaking the study of psychology is the there are certain kinds of entities in the world that have brain so trees don't have brains and neither two concrete blocks but just about animals do and so what animals have to do is they have to behave they actually have to move and adjust their location in order to survive and reproduce and so a tree doesn't do that it just sits there and it does what it does but it's not moving around the so when you see movement actually some in some plants do some very very narrow stereotypic movements like you know flowers opening in the Sun and then closing at night so they do extremely simple movements that are dictated by a highly specific environmental into it but that's not the same thing as having a brain so a brain is a is a characteristic of animals and what those brains do is that they're computational mechanisms they're they're literally a device for figuring out where we ought to be and what we ought to be doing in order to increase our likelihood of survival and reproduction so the the way that those brains do that is what we call I mean that's what we call their psychology and so psychology has three basic components to it we're going to call those thought feeling and behavior so if you're thinking about a beaver building a dam I you you you wouldn't necessarily say that they think in the wit we think they don't have a self-reflective process the way that people do but they are computing they're actually running computations they have mechanisms inside their mind that enable them to make decisions they have certain feelings that are a result of environmental inputs so for example if they see a predator they feel fear when they when they see it free that is of the right circumference they feel motivated to go and start and start gnawing at the base so that they can they can knock it down and carry it back and add it to the pot to build their dam and so then they have love mechanisms inside of them for at last for mating not the deep complex romantic love of a human but they absolutely feel care bonded to a mate and then they feel very attached and loving and caring about their offspring and those offspring are about the most important thing in the world to them so this is this is thoughts ie computations feelings ie a a a valence reaction to the thinking so when they think that something appears to be a positive thing then they have a feeling that has them feel good and they motivate they're motivated to move towards it and so that's the third component that comes at the end of feeling is going to be behavior so you are designed by nature to figure things out have feelings about what it is that you figured out and then behave in ways that appear to be optimum based upon what your feelings are telling you and so that's when when you hear the phrase follow your feelings or follow your gut what that is is that's just humans reporting what humans really do which is to have their feelings guide their behavior and that's true throughout the animal kingdom so psychology is the study of these thought feeling and behavior processes across all species in other words psychology studies all brands and they're interested in all of them but most fundamentally of course were most interested people and people have their own particular psychology just as a beaver has its own and a giraffe and an aardvark and everything else has theirs interesting now now it seems as though some people are much better at following their feelings and others I mean I remember I I was taking a class in college and this was kind of right around the time I started really kind of immersing myself in in in kind of different nutrition ideas than the mainstream and I remember thinking to myself taking a multiple-choice test is I know what the actual right answer is but what does the teacher think the right answer is and and I would I would constantly get the wrong answers for these in my classmates would tell me just trust your gut trust your gut and I would to me it was like what are you talking about how I am trusting my gut but it ends up being wrong so right the thing is is that here's how this actually works I mean there's been a for thousands of years philosophers have talked as if thought and feeling are different things and so they'll say things like you know follow your heart rather than your head and so they actually are not sort of understanding what is going on there what's happening when you have a conflict between seemingly your heart in your head is you've got a conflict all of your feelings are actually generated from your head so the way the way that the psychology works is as follows you have sensory data that comes in from your five senses from your finger tips of your toes to everything on your skin to airwaves that you can hear things to smell and taste little tiny particles or chemicals can be floating around the air and you can smell them and then you can see things you have light bouncing off of objects in the world and then you can figure out what those objects look like and what their characteristics are without having to go touch them feel them so you've got these five sensory channels that come into the system and then then the brain analyzes what this all means for you and so if you're in a swimming pool or you're in the ocean and you see a great white shark you're going to be terrified and you're going to be trying to get out of the water the whereas if you're a great way to sort yourself and you see a great white shark and if it said the opposite sex you're going to be attracted to it and want to move towards it so it all depends what you're seeing has feelings attached to it because the the mind is designed by nature to actually figure out not just what something is but what it means for you and so then you have feelings associated with that computation ie if I'm a great white shark and I'm a male great white shark and she's a female great white shark then I compute that is good for my survival reproduction and I feel attracted and I move towards her so my thought feeling in action are all integrated now God so where do we get to the great philosophers conundrum where you think one way and you feel another well the truth of the matter is is that you aren't thinking one when feeling another what you're having is you're having two opponent or contradictory computations so one set of computation says you know do what your mother-in-law says because it's going to be easier on everybody at Thanksgiving if you just go ahead and go along with her and you don't you know fighter on what what time dinner is going to be but another part of you says you know what I really want to watch the football game at that time and I'm like really irritated about this and this this bitch you know what I mean always has her way every Thanksgiving dinner and I'm sick of it and I want to put my foot down and I want to tell everybody that we're not going to do it that way this year and but I want to adjust it and so now we have two very contradictory outcomes that we are that we're dealing with so one of them is going to be we can envision a more peaceful situation but the only person that's real if that is me and and that I'm irritated about this and maybe I can take the game and work my way around this and the other part of me is now envisioning a completely different outcome where I get this thing straightened out once and for all and if there has to be some upsetedness and some feelings for so be it but I'm tired of it okay so we have two very things well now which is your heart and which is your head and the answer is is that you know we might be saying well your head is telling you to you know be smart do the right thing and be kind and be pleasant and your heart is telling you to tell her to go to hell okay the but the truth is is that that's not true what you actually have is two very different sets of thoughts that are trying to organize your behavior you have feelings about those thoughts in other words you have feelings that are related to what those outcomes will look like and how what the what the benefits and prices are going to be associated with them and you have two very different opponent actions so you cannot do both of them you're only going to have to do one and so you're going to well of course what happens to a lot of people is you split the difference you sit down at dinner and you seem like you're nice about it but then you get real nasty and irritated as you signal your irritation so a lot of times we'll see that behavior winds up splitting the difference okay you really can't get away with it this is so but this is uh this is the supposed you know contradiction between thought and feeling there is no contradiction between false bottom feeling what there is is there's contradictions between two different sets of thoughts about what what would be in your best interest to do and sometimes it's very difficult to resolve those and you will have a different sets of feelings associated with one set of thoughts a different set of feelings associated with another set of thoughts and believe me it is quite possible for you to have two very different sets of feelings going on inside the nervous system at the same time okay as a result of two different sets of analyses about the situation and this is actually I have to tell you what great acting is if you ever if you ever study acting and you you won't ever look at a you know real be moving acting just go look at some worthless film that nobody ever watched after they shot it and look the acting and most of the time the acting is very flat and wooden if you watch the people's faces in their eyes they're following a script it is you know very simplistic and you feel like as a reader you're not as a watcher you're not surprised by anything and they're their actions in the movements of their faces are very obvious and simple it's like they've only got like seven moves and you keep watching the same seven moves all through the movie whereas if you watch a great actor like a Robert De Niro or Jack Nicholson what you'll see in certain scenes when you watch their faces is you'll actually watch multiple emotions being expressed at the same time and so it's very possible for us to pick this up in the face there'll be one set of muscles we'll be firing that will be associated with anger and the other set of muscles will be firing associated with for example gloating okay and you can you could actually get them full in you know a spectacular actor and get it both going on at the same time and that complexity is fascinating for us to watch because it gives us attention but we're not sure what they're gonna do and they're not signalling it it's not obvious and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat so that is a beautiful example when that's integrated well with a story and you understand the the actors Fox and thought processes and their valuations of what's happening and then you watch a conflict between two different alternative courses of action inside their mind and watch their face and facial expressions in moments of truth in the movie about which direction they're going to go you now you are watching the great philosophers conundrum which is you know gee my thoughts are thinking one thing my feelings are another no you're actually watching conflicting feelings play out for dominance because ultimately only one behavior can be done you're either going to you're either going to do door number a or door number B and so it can be quite a dogfight inside that nervous system as it it just sits computations as fast as it can to try to figure out which is the right decision and this is what stress is right that's beautiful Nate that's exactly what stress is so you're you are not sure what to do and your brain is working very hard and fast try to figure out quote the right decision so if you're a customer service Asian and you know you have some nutcase on the other end of the line like part of you wants to say hey you know what you're just way out of line like where do you get off thinking and we're gonna give that back to you you've had this thing for three months you had a 30-day guarantee that's it you're stuck okay don't bother me like part of you wants to just say one thing but the truth is is that it's not the appropriate or best thing or what you're taught to do so you're literally in a stressful situation where one set of neural circuits is telling you one thing and another set of neural circuits is telling you another and that battle when it gets close when when the values on both sides are very very close that creates what we call cognitive dissonance in other words you are you are not you're your thought feeling and behavior are not integrated and easily following down an obvious path as to what the best thing is to do the path gets muddy we're not sure whether to go to the left or the right and we are in a you know in a stressful process where we're trying to figure it out and we're having a lot of conflict in our feelings now so so this and and it seems to me that most people in daily life they're not just dealing with left or right or one you know one side two sides to go on it it seems like it yes it's more more things like I've got a PTA meeting and then I've got my customer and then I have my my mother-in-law is coming into town and then I've got my pastor at my church wanted me to do this we have this almost I think I've heard you called the fractured village where we now have multiple villages trying to trying to look out for for those but but the question I have with that though is is behavior on this type in this end is it learned yeah almost everything is encoded in the DNA so you learn you learn the little frosting so let me give you let me give you a an example so the all all around the world use language and that language around the world no matter what language you study they almost have the identical structure so the so the the way language is structured is clearly set by the genetic code and what you learn is you learn the tiny little nuances so you learn that a truck is this thing that we've made in the 20th century with you know four wheels and an engine or more or more wheels but that whole stuff okay and you know that you learn that that's different from what we call a car so those things that you learn but you don't you don't learn that there's a thing called objects okay and you don't learn that there's a thing called movement you you already know those things those things are innate to the system so you you happen to learn that a truck is something that you know they can move and the could halt stop so you could you can you learn that but most of everything in this life you're even though you think you're learning it or and you watch children that don't seem to know a lot of things and they learn as they go but what you're actually seeing is the emergence of the mind you're not seeing necessarily that it's learning so much is it's actually emerging this is just like a watermelon plant if you apply a watermelon plant when it's a tiny little sprout inch above the ground what's going to happen is as it grows and matures it's going to have a lot more structures than you see right now when it's a little tiny to sprout it'll develop bigger root structures it'll develop all kinds of other fancy gizmos that it goes about its business it'll have flowers it'll have you know they don't have a reproductive process that turn into new watermelons those watermelons will have seeds in other words there's a whole bunch of specialization that will take place as this thing emerges it doesn't learn to be a watermelon plant it emerges as a watermelon plant the same thing is true of a human so a human being for example you don't learn to be sexually attracted to the girls by having people tell you that you should be it spontaneously emerges in the system and and so this is just what happens and I can remember as you probably can in about the fourth or fifth grade I started noticing girls breath all right and so the girls had bigger breasts and other girls by the time they're about fifth grade or sixth grade and us boys were all very fascinating but we were extremely interested in this okay so this is not something my dad taught that said look those are girls breasts you know you should value these things so that they're like very important I couldn't have done that it didn't do it because he wouldn't have known what they were for because we're just we're just learning what they're for now okay here in the early 21st century so so this fascination with female breasts part of the male emerges as a neural circuit built by the genetic code becomes active in puberty behind the influence of androgens and now that new system comes online just as a watermelon plant has features that come online at certain parts in its development so human beings think and they feel and they behave according to beep values value assessments that are taking place in the mind because it's a human and it doesn't have to learn them so you do not have to learn to jump to the water and see a great white shark could say move that's a great white shark I should be sexually attracted to now you do not have to learn that you already know you need to be terrified of something very large and anything that has a piece like that that is not something that has to be learned little children are spontaneously terrified of the dark and if things call quote monsters from the time they're you know a couple years old and these are this is a natural mechanism and sensitivity to help our ancestors that our ancestors utilized a genetic defense system have little kids not be eaten by predators so most of what you think feel and behave about are are actually deep universal values part of human nature when people create something that was not part of our period of the genetic code forming not to be too esoteric there are very many candles that you can find out in the jungle or in the savanna I remember as a kid I saw the stove burning and and I said what is that my mom said don't touch it and I'm guess what I did is I went ahead and touched it right and and I learned the first word was hot you know and yes and so for me I'm kind of thinking and you know correct me if I'm wrong but but I had to learn that that was hot yeah for example a hot pot on the stove does not look hot to human and so you you that when you would have to learn but here's what you didn't have to learn you didn't have to learn that when you touched it you did not have to learn that oh that is hot and therefore that causes tissue damage now you better avoid it now you know instantaneously that that thing is causing tissue damage and you have a terribly negative reaction about it and so you didn't learn that it was hot you learned that it looked cold but it's hot and now I now learn to avoid it and carefully touch things that might be on a stove that looks like they may just have that done correct and the reason I bring this up is because this whole point of our discussion is about this concept of beating your genes I guess often times it seems as though our modern environment is our brains have not evolved fast enough for our modern environment in some ways mm-hmm absolutely there's a whole bunch of these things so for example here's a here's a pretty problematic and and costly instinct inside of women so let's suppose we've got a young gal that's twenty-two years old and she meets guy named Harvey and they go out and they seem to like each other and she's not so sure that she's out of them and he's pretty hot on her and so now they start sleeping together and the and they do so you know feeling she's feeling will call her Sara and she's feeling quite responsible about herself because she's using birth control and therefore she feels reasonably well-protected in this situation and everything seems like it's all going along quite reasonably so now four and a half months into this she's been sleeping with him for about three months and now she she's now displaying some rather irritating personality characteristics he's more selfish than she thought he was a lot nicer guy when they were dating earlier a few months ago but now he's a lot he's more short-tempered he's more irritable etc he might even be possessive or he might be blasé and not very giving etc so she's picking up a bunch of cues one way or the other we could paint that's a scenario in different ways but she's picking up cues either about who he is as a person or what his relationship is to her about how he values her she's picking up things that are unpleasant and she's getting signals to her computational systems but tell her that this is not such a good match but the problem is is that because she lives with a Stone Age and and that stone-age brain knows that she has been having repeated sex with him she slept with him maybe 10 times a month for three months so maybe they've had sex 30 or 40 times yeah if this is true then in the Stone Age it's very likely that she's now pregnant and so in fact the odds are quite good if she hasn't she if she hasn't been pregnant already there's a good chance that this month that she finally is and so as a result of this her her attachment mechanisms actually have her in a bind that she may be getting data that says that she should get away from this guy because she could do better and it's not that great a situation but her Stone Age brain is saying you know what you very likely are pregnant and therefore nobody will be as as invested in the offspring that you are carrying as this guy Harvey okay so you had better just stick with Harvey because you're now an invulnerable situation and you just better make the best of it now this this is you know when we talk about these two different sets of computations pushing against each other this isn't this happen occasionally happens all the time so your your mind is flooded with contradictory impulses and you just don't feel them very often because a lot of times they're not shoving that heart against each other is one of them is clearly the showing the best pathway but in this case if it's pretty unfolding over some intermediate level unpleasant but you've been sleeping with this guy for a little while you actually have circuits that are confused and there can be a lot of dissonance about whether you should dump this guy or not and then worse yet you know I'm saying you let's suppose you had a very strict moralistic Catholic upbringing and you weren't even supposed to be sleeping with somebody before you uh yeah it you were married and so now you've actually got some social pressure because your mother your grandmother suspects that you've been sleeping with this kid who knows I mean we could just pile on things onto the system but what were but what I'm really getting at is independent of all the social pressure which would of course be absurdly problematic and confusing if we just settle it down to just her stone age ancient circuits that are telling her wait a minute you're vulnerable you're likely to be pregnant you better stick with this guy because he's going to be the most invested father we're ever going to find in jr. that you're probably carrying okay that is a woman that may stick it out with this guy and and stick much longer in this relationship than she should she might even marry this guy and it's a mediocre situation for her but it's very likely she will stick in this relationship quite a bit longer than serves her happiness or her long-term best interests because of a Stone Age algorithm that is built in there to protect her against vulnerability during pregnancy so knowing that this is true I will tell my my women that I see in my practice I will tell them look if you are ambivalent about a relationship you know three four five months into a relationship it doesn't it's not feeling that good and he's kind of selfish he's he's not that attentive or he's possessive and difficult get out get out get out get out okay and yet they can feel the pull and the anxiety and the attachment as it is they're struggling with this and I tell them look that those are those are prescriptions that have been passed down by your genetic code to try to save you from single motherhood in a in an environment of scarcity don't believe them you're you're not a single mom you use birth control you're not in an environmental of scarcity the other signals are shouting very loud telling you that this is not the best deal that you can make for a mate get out if you're not happy get out that's what I tell people and yet we see very large percentages of lives not getting out behind things like this now I'm thinking though is a lot of this computation does it have to do with the if they'll say the woman's getting a little bit older and now she feels that this quote biological clock is ticking and if she gets out now all the time and energy says she's invested she's gonna have to invest all that time and energy to try and secure another mate who may not even want her because of all these other passes you know baggage or whatever they were called yeah well you just you just entered we just brought the learning mechanism right on top of the scenes are telling you to get the hell out okay it's not very happy and I would say that there's a really good rule in relationships that you can you can pretty well follow it and that is that when it's good you know it and when it's not good you also know it you you need to be paying attention when there's a bunch of dissonance it's very likely that what you have some of these these conflicting signals and you're probably not reading them from the form a completely modern appropriate perspective and your best move is almost certainly to get out relationships are enormous ly expensive in terms of time and energy and the payoffs have to be pretty good to be to be worth you know to be worth sticking out all the compromises and issues that are involved so that anyway yes the defy logic and clock ticking on the 36 and a half year old woman who is getting a lot of signals that this is actually not really mr. right but she's watching the clock and thinking that she really wants to have a baby all I can tell you is everybody's situation is different you know every situation is different and I can tell you what is probably not a good answer it is probably not a good answer to try to grit your teeth and force this relationship through get married get pregnant have children that way that that nice prescription for really mediocre existence better to take your chances I've had more than one of my clients not not by my encouragement but by their own by their own computation as they worked these problems through that went and got sperm donors and had children on them and their their lives were in this way much less complicated they didn't have a mate that they were there that they were lukewarm or negative about and they they wound up with you know children of their own that was 50% their genes and they were the entirely the mom and then it put them in a position of power with respect to romantic relationships for the rest of their lives so now they're 40 with two or three year old and that seems like a horrendous place to be negotiating from but the truth is is it's a much better mechanism to map out your happiness than to be in a situation where you are in a humdrum situation that you didn't really want to be in and now now you have a child that you have if you ever decide to leave you've got custody disputes over and all this sort of thing so yeah these are not life doesn't always give us easy choices but but sometimes it pays to try to figure out what your genes are up to so for the male listeners was an easy trap to fall into when you have to change out of human nature's has several Wiggles in it there's some some funny little funny little quirks to to people how they work it in particularly in the romance arena it's pretty complicated men have two basic mating strategies that they play which has got what we call true love strategy and the other strategy is going to be what we call casual mating strategy and what these two strategies do is the females are typically designed and I'm not going to say there's 100 percent of the time but typically they're designed to actually be playing true love strategy so females are wanting to be very selective about the amendment they mate with and they would just soon have this guy be heavily invested in them and their offspring etc that's a true love strategy or what we call in biology a parabolic strategy the males are interested in two different strategies they're interested in the bond strategy but they're also they're only interested in a pair of line strategy when they feel like they're getting a really good genetic kill when they when they feel like the woman is at least as fancy as they are or probably fancier and now the man is willing to pair bond with a screaming deal whereas it's not a screaming deal the man may be attracted but he's actually thinking what we're going to call casual mating strategy which is that he's willing to mate with her certainly but he is not going to stick around he's going to invest the minimum of resources now this is these are on a continuum all the way from a one-night stand where the guy couldn't care less about a male and getting out of Dodge as fast as possible all the way to the other side of the continuum where it's all the way true love and he's best at reverent and it would get his life for the woman so these are this is the the range of alternatives men have a we believe a self deceptive mechanism inside their head at the beginning of the pursuit of relationships of females that they find attractive where they will feel and think that they are playing a pair of line strategy when sometimes they are not ok so they are very attracted and they essentially see the woman has a better human being than she really is and this appears to be a distortion that is built into the heads of males it makes them feel very willing to give her signals that she is fantastic and wonderful and that he feels totally invested etcetera etcetera so essentially what gets unlocked is a bunch of male bullshit and he has no idea that it's bullshit consciously and so he's fault he's essentially falling all over himself signaling that he is all in now the this can this can get unaware males some really dicey situation baby I want to take you to prom so this is a this is fine if you happen to be a disagreeable male with a considerable battle armor on you who isn't really going to have a lot of conscience about walking away from this females you know four weeks from now after you nailed or a few times so when suddenly it turns out that you weren't so in love after all so that that's all just fine it's fair but the truth is is that half of the men in the world are pretty darn sensitive in terms of their own conscience and their own agreeableness and so how well I'm just saying Oh jokey we're just gonna draw Beltre and fifty percent of us are actually really decent people what's what's it and we like long walks on the beach and by the way our online dating profile is on right so what we're going to see is that the man has inside of his head the propensity to fool himself elevate the females wonderful internal characteristics to go with her sexual charms and spill all over her the the notion that he's crazy about her and all the wonderful things he sees about her that he is in within this forever as far as he can tell because after all he's known her you know three weeks now and he feels like he's known her forever and and so the woman that will likes him loves those signals and buys it now we need wind-up we may be walking towards a very problematic situation a couple months from now where suddenly he's really not that into her he he now is but now his conscience may have him in a bit of a bind and of course she's at to him because she's now potentially genetically invested and now we have a situation where he could be getting his own conscience could nail him to the wall I saw this happened many times when I was in school I mean crowds with schools where people are getting older and get serious about relationships and and futures and marriages and children and I saw this happen a number of times where just interrupt I'm so so it's getting serious is basically code for let's transition strategy to true love strategy or pair-bonding Stern quote getting serious believe it or not is about babies I mean it's about it's about willingness to to feel like we're making huge long-term commitments that's why it's serious I'm sure there are there's a lot of guys out there who'd be willing to have babies you know in the Stone Age sense with with girls but they just don't want to invest in them no of course but that's sort of casual mating strategy or get the but see in the modern world because of the financial considerations and advantages for children to have a lot of finances behind them you know we have now these structures marriage and and divorce and law about finances and child support we have these extraordinary legal structures that have profound implications in relationships and I mean they are they are distortions and rough fact similes of moral processes that were at work in the Stone Age but they can be much more rigid and much more expensive than anything like this was in the Stone Age and so as a result I mean getting serious is pretty serious now you're you're going to quote get married you have a kid and you're instead of instead of throwing genetic spaghetti at the wall which was happening in the Stone Age now it's you know a typical individual in the United States will only have a couple of children in their lifetime and so who you have those children with enormous financial impact on your entire existence and and on your mating trajectory so a young man who has a couple of kids with somebody by the time he's 26 and then decides that that relationship this is so great after all the average guy does not have tremendous amount of resources to walk away from that situation and then pursue his heart unfettered for the rest of his life that's not going to happen at least a $60,000 a year a guy with a pretty good job at a pretty good education and he's ponying up you know I'm not saying it's legitimate I'm not legitimate it's perfectly legitimate but if he's if he is now going to have a considerable amount of his of his available resources being directed to those children for the next 15 or 20 years that is going to have profound implications on his on his mating options so these are these are very serious processes that are going on and and they're even more so today than ever one so if you want to have a lot of kids you got to be really rich yeah well I mean you will john paul Getty who was easily I believe well might have been him in Rockefeller but this matter one of the two or three richest men in the world in the early 20th century Getty had a Getty had a saying it is rather brutal and of course not true but has a ring of truth in it and he says any man who has not been divorced has not been successful in business yeah that that is saying that ie a lot of people are stuck in relationships behind financial considerations and that is certainly true so this is this may be a trap that this is bad attitude that you circum to preempt right it's useful for men to know that that their they have a falling in love try inside their head and and particularly the nice guys had better be aware that they've got a falling in love trap inside of their head and and they had better learn to grit their teeth and chew through the rope you know three three or four months in they're not into it either well this is a little different version of the same thing that we were talking about earlier these are actually very important issues with respect to beating your jinns the you know that that guy's genes may be actually telling him you know the if he's a very nice guy be a nice guy be empathic to her she's feeling very attached to him because she might be pregnant and yet there could be clear evidence that somebody does not qualify in this relationship and yet the relationship survives and then on you know I'm going to now criticize my fellow psychologist of course not all of them are guilty only 98% of them are more guilty psychologists have this notion that the survival of relationships is a positive thing this is absolutely insane the survival of marriages or romantic relationships is not a positive thing the and it simply should be an emergent property of two individuals best interests that they shouldn't have to endure they love the situation they like it and of course everybody with what the brain knows that if you have a bad game in the middle of an excellent season you don't like throw you know put your starting quarterback on the bench and fire the coach okay so nobody has to say and remind us that when you have some rough times that you have to have a little maturity and look at the relationship in context and so everybody of course knows that that is true however that is all you know that's sort of that's actually rather obvious but people use that fact as an enormous moral lever to send they tell people you should endure indefinitely you should be you know don't don't don't throw out her those few little good times you had we'll just remember and it's like that's ridiculous if people if there's one thing people should be doing today is it is honoring the feelings that they are having looking inside thinking about and feeling and actually falling those feelings as signals this this concept was starting to emerge in the nineteen sixties and seventies a notion of the human potential movement of what Nathaniel Branden would ultimately call honoring the self and paying attention and taken our feelings seriously those those feelings are often under a lot of pressure an assault from social institutions and expectations and no good comes of it how do we measure this it seems like this is way more complicated than the average person can advise on in a normal friend conversation yeah yeah normal friends are over their head and the psychologists are over their head because they don't they don't know what you can do is you can go to my website esteem dynamics org and listen to the little things that I talk about I have a little such a little five-minute discussions and one of them is for example like will love grow okay ie I'm in this relationship and it's kind of half dead below the waist I'm not that into it or he's not that into it and yet you know we're friends and we'll love grow no it will not grow it absolutely will not grow the this and and anybody's grandmother that's telling you that it will and it's the right thing to do it's wrong and if you had a child together and married three years ago and you are you are not happy and you're not attractive your partner and it's been that way for quite a long while no love will not grow it is oh the best year ever going to wind up with here is a friendly roommate that you've got a that you've got a support system an economic support system for but that's not the same thing and so you're leaving a great deal of human happiness potential on the table and to have that happen behind social convention and pressure is tragedy and it's one thing that these are the sorts of things that we're trying to avoid in this life to not be trapped by circumstances and by by inaccurate thinking about what's actually in your best interests for your optimum well-being let's say you have a kid and you're married and you realize that maybe you know you're not in love with the person I've always heard that it's it's better for the kid to be raised in a two-parent home versus a non two-parent home it's nonsense it's not true the the studies that have looked at this have have been very and the studies that have come up with that kind of evidence supporting that notion have been very poorly done and have been very poor science it turns out that children are best off under circumstances where there is not conflict where they're observing it constantly between the parents so there is nothing at all admirable about two people who are unhappy being in a situation raising a couple of kids that's not the kids best interest now sometimes very highly conscientious people will just essentially have a dead below the waist friendship that they are basically a team of raising these little genetic stars that they're raising and they themselves are very unhappy about being there because they are they're not able to pursue their own happiness romantically but they feel like they got to be in it for the kids and they could be very fine parents and the kids up a nice benign situation however the the truth of the matter is is that those children and those parents everybody would have been fine if they were apart so the parents what is painful for kids to watch although not damaging but what's painful for kids to watch is to watch acrimony between two parents so if there's an acrimonious relationship between two parents that is definitely harder on kids the two parents who are split up and that there is minimal acrimony between them because there's not very much interaction okay so that that research has been done robert emery at the university of virginia has been at the forefront of this kind of research hit him and him and many other people so no it is not in the kids best interest the kids do not need to a two-parent household and at all this is simply a this is simply a fallacy of twentieth-century psychology and it ought to be buried so how do you propose we bury it yeah well i don't know i think it be buried by by the future a great deal of just incidentally is simply simply wrapped around the fear of the economic hardships that are associated with single parenthood and those economic hardships are are anxiety provoking for people and they can be quite intimidated and those are those are real problems and in the future of humanity as we become increasingly wealthy which we often come increasingly wealthy at the rate of about 3% a year so now in future of humanity twenty thirty years from now these considerations will be much less than they are now today they are much less than they were thirty years ago and thirty years ago they were much less than they were six years ago if you were to propose bold single motherhood in 1955 everybody would have said you're out of your mind you better be an heiress okay the because human beings were struggling for just very basic things like you know clean place to to live and a safe place to live and enough food on the table this was they sure as heck weren't going out to restaurants in nineteen fifty five so this the very basic economic issues were very important then they became less important by 1985 and so you had much more latitude in people seeking divorces and breakups when when it was being called for by their own hearts desires and and now in 2015 it's even more and this is decried as a breakdown of society but it's not a breakdown of society it is in fact a reassertion of human ability and freedom to pursue their own romantic interest rather than to be stuck well and that trend is only continue indefinitely that's all it's in what you were saying earlier is that a lot of the considerations if say a guy has a kid and they decide to leave that situation there it can be very expensive for for that situation to take place yes and that's going to that's going to be true for a while and it's going to be true for a lot of people for a while so there's going to be that's why the situation's about romance ours are actually extra important to understand the traps that sit inside of our nervous systems to understand that that young women and women will have what I call the last man on earth syndrome which is that you've slept with them for a little while and your nervous system feels like this is the last man on earth even though we're getting some signals that he's not ideal and in fact we're not that happy we stick with him anyway ok that's a trap the the the good guy trap is I fell all over myself and told you all these great things six weeks ago and but now I'm seeing a lot of things that I wasn't seeing before and I'm not so wild about this ok but now I pushed you into the last man on earth trap and now we are now bound together in a mess and that that it's useful to know that those traps set inside of human nature because right now still and for the foreseeable future most people will have profound economic consequences towards breaking those situations up when children or even when children are not involved ok and as a result human happiness can be compromised indefinitely or for decades or many years behind some of these very interesting Stone Age algorithms that reside in humans so it's useful to know that they're there so that we can work our way around them and beat the jeans
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