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Episode 68: Explaining enablers, dating with psychiatric disorders, and having grit
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all right good evening everyone Nate here along with dr. Doug Lyle with beat your genes podcast so dr. Lyles here with me every week to talk to you our audience about how to beat the genes and so for those of you who are just tuning in for the first time beat the genes is dr. Lyles concept where we we are trying to actually figure out what our genes are trying to get us to do and then compare that with what actually optimizes our life experience producing moods of happiness and we find that in certain circumstances especially in the modern world those two behavior trajectories can actually be at odds surprisingly so for example addictive drugs can actually cause intense pleasure but they do not optimize our life experience but since our genes are designed to seek pleasure it can actually be quite a battle to beat the genes and actually feel happy when the abusing drugs so if we take this concept and apply it to all kinds of life situations like love sex dating relationships friends family and even your job we can start to see that there are actually some ways to optimize our life experience that have rarely been explored anywhere else so we're actually live today dr. Lyle how you doing today good to be here excellent so we're live today so if any listeners feel like calling us and talking us to us today we're live on Wednesdays 8:30 p.m. Pacific the number today if you want to call in at six five seven three eight three zero seven five one you can call in just to listen to the show or just to see if you want to talk to us send us a question or something this show we're actually taking emails from you the listener some really thoughtful questions from everybody I just want to let you guys know I read every one of your emails I try to respond as much as I can I really appreciate everybody taking the time to send your questions to us and so today's show we're going to be talking about a few emails now the first one is about being an enabler and the next question the next email is going to be about the details of what cost-benefit analyses are and then we're going to shift over to some research from one of our listeners who found an article suggesting what talking about how dating looks like for people with psychiatric disorders and then we're going to go over another cycle students question about the lack of evolutionary psychology in their own curriculum and then we're going to wrap this up with a question that's dear to me it's also another listeners questions about being ambitious but also lazy so dr. Lyle are you ready I'm ready we'll see you how see how far we get all right sounds good but first I actually have a question for you and then question is how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb yeah this is the oldest the oldest one in the book yeah I think only one but the light bulb house want to change yeah at the answer you got it you got it okay very good I remembered that if you remember it first we first hear that in grad school by the way yeah I remember that's the first joke I ever told you about TrueNorth so ah there you go okay so here we go speaking of which you know changing here's our first question dear dr. Lyle I am a 33 year old female and about three months ago I ended a five-year relationship after one and a half years of becoming increasingly more unhappy and fighting more and communicating less he's 30 years old and has chronic depression since he was about 15 something that I found out only about six months before we split while he was in the middle of a long debilitating episode there were many times over the past 12 to 18 months that I recognized I wasn't happy and that my instinct was actually telling me to leave but instead of doing something about it I just went deeper into the relationship like moving together sharing finances and then financially supporting him making it even harder for me to leave we were happy together for about two and a half years we even got engaged and he didn't have any intense bouts of depression in that time but looking back the signs were always there and I was getting gauging in enabling behavior right from the beginning I changed a lot in my own life to make the relationship work and to try and help him become happier and to succeed in his own life resulting in a slow decline of my own happiness I'm a very happy and positive person by nature and I run a modestly successful small business have wonderful friends and family and have sound spiritual practice I'm excited about and engaged in life so I'm curious as to the function or the benefit of being an enabler from the perspective of evolutionary psychology what am I getting out of it why am i doing it and why do I feel so responsible for is happiness to the extent that it harms us both a wonderful question terrific and there's there's many different angles to look at this from and there there may be if all the truth may be in one analysis I might even miss something here this is this is really good stuff and this is let me let me begin with what I think the truth probably is or mostly is the human beings compete in villages for status so we're competing for what I call esteem or status and so one one people that have listened to us understand the big five in terms of personality so you've got openness to experience conscientiousness introversion extroversion agreeableness and emotional stability so we are advertising these characteristics along with our intelligence and our beauty and our athleticism we are advertising these things to the village in order to gain and maintain esteem which will give us negotiating power in trying to secure mates friends and trading partners in the future for either ourselves or our children by the way so there there's a lot to it so we're altom utley scheming unconsciously and consciously for for esteem so some people that are emotionally stable and and highly conscientious and quite agreeable so they have plenty of natural oxytocin will fire off when they see other people suffering these people can can actually get get caught in a game that I'm going to call the spectacular altruist and so spectacular altruism is my term for a big time themed treasure hunting it goes on by being magnificent by being a magnificent human that that that demonstrates think about what you are attempting to demonstrate here what you're attempting to demonstrate is that that you are of unbelievably high benefit and unbelievably low cost and so if you have a partner of some kind in business and romance friendship etc and you do something spectacularly altruistic then and the world gets wind of it and learns about this then you are displaying some superbly valuable characteristics and therefore this is an expensive ad as what it is that I'm telling you this this is kind of like when it was kind of like when I do something nice like and act like oh I didn't even realize that you wanted me to do that yeah it's it's got all these aspects to it that that and this this goes back to this goes all the way to a madea javis hobby and handicap the notion that that it is it is spectacular advertisement to to do things that are extremely costly and self sacrificial so Zahabi discovered this underlying principle and and with essentially understanding that this is what we were seeing with peacock feathers and things of that nature that you're seeing very very costly traits and costly traits are are a stable mechanism to display genetic superiority so someone who has a mediocre relationship with someone who definitely that they care about in this case that they had a good friendship with and a romance with for a while but then it turns out that the person has has essentially a lack of emotional stability ie in this case we're going to call it depression so the person is experiencing some failure feedback in life and they're not managing it very well and they're essentially just displaying some limitations of their belt their ability to to deal with the challenges that they have so we're going to call that a depressive episode some psychiatrists would say that they've got a you know chemical imbalance in their brain but I wouldn't I would say that they're experiencing failure feedback and that they are you know sort of they're temporarily checkmated by the challenges and they're not doing well and so our gal here is made of stronger stuff and she recognizes that that this is not somebody that she can look up to and admire and so the the romance is bleeding out of this thing as far as she's concerned however she she is publicly in a long-term serious relationship with this guy and therefore she doesn't want to display she's probably extremely high conscientiousness so she is probably not wanting to display to the world a disagreeable less conscientious move which is to just cut and run just say you know what see you later all goodbye and good luck down the road that was a failed romance oh well we all have to move on that's not what she's doing instead what we see is a spectacularly altruistic process where she holds his hand does everything she can sticks by him etc etc and we go down that route for a while so I would say my first take on this is that that's what's taking place now there are other motivations as well but I think our are probably not as as prominent but they could be in there and one of them is going to be what I call the dirty dossier and that is if you've been in a romantic relationship with somebody they've got a dossier on you know how you squeal during orgasm like Mordor get out of it or what's inside your head like so they know more about you yeah just kidding okay so the point is is that they in principle have a lot of dirt on you that nobody else in the world has and then if you you know Nate if this is the first time you consider this we better have a sock okay so anyway the point is that it's quite possible that are that are that are highly conscientious individual here has a little bit of a dirty dossier but that is exposed and as a result she might be willing to overkill the spectacular altruistic display here and just basically cover herself shower him with niceness as she's quietly very gently and altruistically saying goodbye to the point where he's he's very unlikely to feel abandoned angry and then justified it spilling her dirty dossier so that could be a motivation another motivation can be what I call and I've called before what I call the last man on earth syndrome so the last man on earth syndrome is a is a female vulnerability that if you've had sex with a guy sometime in the last two three months there's a good chance you're pregnant and you're Stone Age brain is registering that possibility and if you are in fact pregnant then that individual is your best chance for getting resources to to aid and abet you while you go through pregnancy and the raising of a young child so this is why I discourage women from being quote sexually liberated as men are and and pursuing casual mating because the truth is is that very often what's going to happen is that they should be pretty darn careful in guarding their sexuality even though they can guard it from venereal disease and pregnancy very effectively today but they cannot guard it from their own evolutionary psychology which will lead them into into a psychological potential trap of varying depths where they feel like you know what I I kind of have to stick with this guy and I'm not really sure why and I will feel anxious if we break up and so this could have been a potentially modest factor with respect to this might have been a large factor probably was a modest factor from the way this young lady writes I believe that probably the prominent factor in this is the spectacular altruist and that that I think is story with possibly additional ingredients of the ones I'm talking to and maybe something I'm missing but I think that's probably it okay fantastic all right on to our next question dr. Lyle you talked often about the cost-benefit analysis of human behavior is this some sort of defined algorithm are there factors and coefficients and weighting factors and what are they and do these factors and coefficients change over time and under different conditions oh I got somebody really smart okay ha finally good yeah no yes justice benefit analysis that I'm talking about the you can see the cost benefit analysis formally written and mathematically in Hamilton's rule so the Hamilton's rule is the is the mathematical formulation of the theory of evolution is what it is so Hamilton's rule tells you what essentially what mathematical process had to have been taking place in nature for you to see what we're going to call an adaptation so even though Hamilton's rule wasn't written to talk to talk about all adaptations I believe you know we may have some theoretician evolutionary third edition listening to me he he or she may say oh wait wait that's a little bit wrong we've got some got some little quirk in here and you're misreading this but I don't know if I am miss reading at all let me explain how it is that we look at evolution in general and then we can walk our way back to what I'm describing mathematically here the evolution is fair fairly simple conceptually and that is that there is three principles that we have to understand those are selection inheritance and variation so animals have variation in their in their their their bodies and minds their phenotypes what they are and what they can do and that variation parse part of that variation is as a result of inheritance part of it is not as a result of inheritance if you have a if you have a badger bite off your ear then you're a one-eared human as opposed to a to a human so the and that that wasn't inherited so but at least part of the variation that you're going to see in animals has to do with genetics now that's or inheritance that's all we have to know is that part of its inherited and then it's going to turn out that certain of those variations certain of the types are more effective at survival reproduction than other ones so that is selection so if they are being selected they are being partly selected because of inherited characteristics inherited variance or differences and so that is what that's how evolution works so the the question then in evolution is what what sorts of things can can evolve can anything evolve and the answer is no actually it has to go through a cost-benefit analysis relative to alternative types so you have so now what we're going to look at that nature is essentially running constantly running experiments on variants of different types inherited variants of different types and it's going to turn out that the ones that have that have subtle changes because of genetic mutations causing some random changes that are taking place once in a while one of those random changes will cause a protein change will cause a little difference in a structure of the body or mind that will result in either slightly different physical form or slightly different mental operation and behavior and that will be an advantage it will have actually a what we're going to call a selective advantage so it's cost benefit its cost benefit that essentially is the backdrop game of what is taking place in evolution and so evolution itself is a process of which changes are beneficial relative to their costs okay and so when I talk about the cost benefit that's taking place inside the human mind what the the mind itself is simply the place where behavior is being generated and behavior itself is nothing other than a whole set of other of other things that are just like variations in the body so variations in behavior or also they are also variant in other words some people talk louder than other people then it some of that is inherited so some of that the loudness that people talk is because of their inherited characteristic some of the people are talking louder because they're hard-of-hearing because they went to rock concerts you know I'm saying so they can't hear themselves talk and so that is not inherited the and then there's going to be a selection so the people that talk a little too loud wind up getting by predators people who talk a little too soft don't get enough mates because they're not making enough fancy noise so as a result natural selection is going to be working on this problem and if there's going to be a cost-benefit analysis on behavior just as there is a cost-benefit analysis on physical form okay so when I talk about so now we see that the mind the propensity of the individual differences in both between species and within species these are genetic variants that are causing differences in behavior and so now the question is what how does the behavior itself work and the way the behavior works is that the the animal has usually will it will have alternative things that it could do so it could go it could wiggle to the laughter it could wiggle to the right and the question is which should it do and what it's going to do is it's going to take data in from its environment and it's going to try to figure out should I wiggle to the laughter wiggle to the right and ultimately what it's going to be running is it's going to be running a cost-benefit analysis and the the question of how it runs that cost-benefit analysis you know is is essentially for all intents and purposes infinitely complex so this is why you have the neural circuits the way they are this is the way it's done is it's done through the the jettison of neurotransmitters jumping from nerve cell to nerve cell these computations are are sort of extraordinary and how does that they were engineered what the brain is is it's an analog computer it's the it's the equivalent of in your car apparently there's a is the wheel spins in your front wheel it's generating electric current that gets plotted against an analog scale that tells you how fast the car is moving it's not actually running a calculation it's a trick that essentially is an analog to a calculation this is uh this is exactly what mines are mines aren't literally mathematical computers running correlation coefficients on outcomes and then storing them or anything else that's not what's happening what the mind is is the bag of tricks it's it's in a big mind like a human mind is filled with tens of thousands of tricks and the whole point of these tricks is just like the are just like the speedometer mechanism they are mechanisms which beautifully organize diverse sources of sensory input and memory systems and they triangulate running a cost-benefit analysis ultimately on gin survival and so they're all running the same currency it's in other words they're all running translating these impulses into gin survival and so yeah you couldn't possibly model this thing globally mathematically it's vastly too complex this thing took three and a half billion years to design and the the pathways of how it works are essentially we are millennia away from being able to have a really detailed map of it however we don't need a detailed map of it - we don't need to understand this thing at the level that you understand your TV set we need to understand how to change the channel okay so fortunately there's a great deal of good in understanding in principle that what the human mind is doing is it's running a cost-benefit analysis and sometimes we can identify the broad strokes or the major variables that are associated with that cost-benefit analysis and we can test those by by experimental manipulation and we can we can see that in fact when we change that input we actually got significant changes in behavior so we can we can see that the cost-benefit analysis is being run specifically all the details and the interactions of all the variables that are being considered we will never be able to map that so what you're saying is if we understand the general concept the little details are going to flow in as science gets more and more advanced yes so you're basically you're sort of when it comes to psychology right now you're kind of at the level of the organ and you're heading down to the level of the cell okay you are not yet at the level of the cell looking inside the cell and try to understand what the heck is going on with the mitochondria we're not we're not nearly that detailed yet but we are finally with evolutionary psychology we now actually understand and the general systems of what's taking place and we understand their general dynamics and understanding and we can see problems associated when there are there are adaptive challenges in those systems so we know so I mean incredibly if you if you were to if you were to ask Robert Sternberg it was one of the most famous psychologists of his generation in 1985 he was a big was the mid 80s think I may have the date right or may not but he was a he was at a symposium major I think was the Nebraska symposium on motivation like this major conference and he said you know we really don't understand why people love their children didn't he didn't have a theory had no he was admitting openly that he did not get it didn't didn't really make sense to him that's because he is not an evolutionary psychologist and these concepts were were not anywhere near his awareness so you had like the best minds in trying to think about motivation in 1985 had no clue that that evolutionary processes were the result were at the root of all human motivation okay so she I am so queer coming I don't know why my parents love me either so anyway the point is is that just getting down along this ratio we're now at the level of understanding these systems you know sort of at the level of a biology seeing that okay there's an immune system and there's a cardiovascular system and and and there's a musculoskeletal system and so and there's a nervous system so we now we're now seeing the contours of human mind it's major mid additional systems and how they work and it's so that's where we are but the the very fine detail that this questioner was was looking for is is not anywhere in the offing anytime soon okay fantastic well thank you for that answer regarding our gay people you said who if they talk too loud then they get taken up by predators and then other people who talk loud enough and therefore don't get enough mates I just have to say yeah thank God the podcast you know all right Larsson alright so our next questions from a medical student from Brazil who's interested in psychiatry psychology human behavior as well as the genetics behind it so her question is the question is dear dr. Lau clinicians have known since forever that there is probably high heritability in psychiatric disorders science is looking at some of genes of interest that appear to be high risk for psychiatric illness and that some disorders do share genes like ADHD autism spectrum disorder schizophrenia and bipolar disorder it's also known that many disorders have a very similar prevalence worldwide and strong familiar clustering so I recently read an article about patterns of non-random mating within and across 11 major psychiatric disorders this article basically points out that people with a given disorder have a very higher chance of mating with someone with that particular disorder than other people - as well as a higher chance of mating with someone with any other disorder rather than mating with healthy people although each disorder has its own preferences so for comparison purposes they looked for the same effect in non psychiatric illnesses such as Crohn's diabetes one-and two-and rheumatoid arthritis and we found that the same effect is not there so there's my question for dr. Lisle yeah what I think is happening are people with mental illness for some reason biased to choosing mates with mental illness if so why or are people with mental illness being negatively selected that is they're being left alone by the healthy people so they have no choice but to mate with one another okay I find an interesting article find it which also that yeah that's Jones that's correct yeah and go ahead what else we have also an interesting finding from the article which has to do with mating preferences between and women ADHD men will mate in order of preference with ADHD and then autism spectrum disorder women but ADHD women will mate preferentially with ADHD men as well but autistic men on the other hand are on the bottom of the preference what do you think right well we're seeing in both cases autism is on the bottom of the preference because autism is is a more severe psychiatric disorder than ADHD I got help some of my best friends are HD okay so the but I don't have a single friend that that is autism spectrum so the so this is this is simply a matter of of gene compromise and severity so there's nothing fancy happening here at all and and these are ADHD is a moderately problematic issue with respect to mating I mean it's it's significant but it's not it's not gigantic whereas autism spectrum is pretty profound and and so we would expect that autism spectrum people would in general have a very severely compromised mating poker hand and so that's all you're saying so that that's what I heard from this who is that the ADHD people select ADHD first autism second and and that the autism people in general are are pretty are pretty profoundly compromised in this game which makes makes a lot of sense and that isn't going to be true if you're a if you're a light as burgers you know what I mean then you're not going to be you're going to be moderately hit by this but as you start going into more more serious autism these people are going to be very severely penalized in this game obviously ADHD people can have can be charming have tremendous emotional reactivity in essence very normal bet quirky whereas your autistic you're not you're not remotely normal and the normal kinds of emotional expressiveness and reaction loops that would take place normally in human behavior are going to be missing or they're going to be badly compromised so yeah no nothing fancy there and no they are not somehow seeking each other out like heat-seeking missiles this is much more like that if you are the if you're the ugliest kid at the dance and in junior high school and everybody else is has walked over and asked a girl to dance and there's one girl left we don't have to ask what that girl looks like okay if there's 50 girls and 49 boys have asked 49 other girls to dance and there's one guy left and one girl left we know what those kids look like okay and so that's that's what's taking place there and that nothing mysterious in this at all did you happen to be at my junior high school dance by the way I don't know how you do that there's only 37 kids by the way thanks for thanks for yeah that out yeah all right what else right okay our next next question is from a longtime listener and I have to say he does say that our podcast is his favorite one to listen to so here you go all right there we go a rather odd up get his question answered yeah all right good for him latter II will get you everywhere got it okay so this is this is a third year accredited psychology degree in Australia so he's almost at the end and the question is why is there a complete absence of evolutionary psychology in the curriculum here there's evolution discussed in biological physiology but that is obviously not the same thing there must be a greater chance to learn evolutionary psychology in America or am I missing something by the way this student is from Australia there's no electives for here for evolutionary psychology or even a few weeks dedicated to the field but plenty of courses that give you little to no real life practical knowledge that this podcast imparts dr. Lisle would put most of my lecturers bar one or two to shame I suppose they can only work with the content they are given but but he this person's even referenced this podcast a couple of times in his coursework and forced it into assignments but the question is why isn't this making it in there many reasons so if you if you want actually the most definitive reasoning which I'm sure he doesn't at this point but if you're young young person and you continue to if you go on and it sounds against degree in psychology if he goes on in psychology and makes it a career and he wants to know what he's up against then the book that you need to read is called the blank slate the modern denial of human nature by Steven Pinker and this is a masterpiece this is one of the half-dozen you know great books that's ever been written and Pinker Pinker exhaustively answers this question and he essentially shows that there are there are many there are multiple motivations for this and none of them admirable so the you will not find it in the United States you will find rare little enclaves where evolutionary psychology is being discussed and researched maybe not as rare as it was 20 years ago but plenty rare and so if you go to a typical major university and you're looking for a class in evolutionary psychology it's not going to be there and the professors if you talk to them about it evolutionary psychology they're going to be generally dismissive and and irritated and they don't know very much about it but they know just enough to give a few party lines about why it is that they think it's limited or it's on its way out or etc etc okay so anyway the Steven Pinker great Harvard professor literally decided he would take a few years of his life out to explain to us why the academic world is is shutting its eyes and barring its head in the sand and worse trying to kick up manure and throw it in the face of evolutionary theory there are quite a few quite a few reasons for it a lot of it has to do with with there political considerations that are disturbing for people out of evolutionary psychology there are certainly sociological considerations that are disturbing there there Jeffrey Miller has gone as far to say is that you know it is evolutionary psychology amoral okay in other words it's going against so many things that everybody is trying to argue that we should we should have certain positions on things that there was actually a Pinker kicker discussed this thank god I'm nowhere near academia because had I known about this at the time I it would have raised my blood pressure for a month there was some conference held I think sometime in the 1990s and some major conference in psychology and all you know a bunch of bigwigs there and a big bunch of money spent of taxpayer dollars making sure everybody got funded and got there and at the end of it this was a leave associated with the American Psychological Association if I'm not mistaken and if I am mistaken and somebody finds out corrects me that I stand corrected but I believe that this is all APA sanctioned top level etc and they came out with a series of declarations about what it is isn't is not scientifically acceptable to believe and it was incredible I I wish I had it under my hands right now but it was things like it is scientifically unacceptable to have a finding that shows that men and women you know have a different score it is scientifically unacceptable that different races would have different score is scientifically unacceptable to find this or to find that it's like really well scientifically unacceptable okay the and so this is the this is the the the problem that psychology and the social sciences face that was not faced in the hard sciences well it was based in in other sciences in different ages so Galileo you know was tortured Darwin was was considered by many to be the Antichrist and so other scientists have certainly faced their their their crises of a paradigm shift in people's thinking but psychology is is you know now late to the game as far as this goes and this is psychologies great paradigm shift and it is also struggling people within the field are struggling to to actually wrap their head around issues that are very very disturbing to them about the truths that are in psychology this is very much like the problems that you know that very bright and open-minded and intelligent theologians would have faced in 1859 with the Origin of Species and so the and continued to face those that continue to question and try to learn and try to keep an open mind and and learn more and more about the world it continues to challenge them and challenge their faith you know there's a lot of dissonance that gets kicked up there well the in the political spectrum and in human rights and so on and so forth these people believe they know what is the right way for human beings to think about things rather than actually maintain a scientific objectivity and so this is this is the largest reason why you are not going to see evolutionary psychology which should at this point easily overwhelmingly dominate the field and that the other perspectives in psychology should be being quickly relegated to the ash heap of history and leave them there where they are discussed in interesting context as to why it is that they wandered off course and didn't understand and didn't didn't get the the penny did not fall for them for these theories and the so but that is not where we are and for all I know we may be mired in pretty much the same mess that we are now 30 years from now if I'm still alive I'll probably still be seeing it which is incidentally precisely why I did not spend my life in academia I recognized immediately that that the to be in cosmides in bus crowd was going to be fighting a huge armada of contrary thinking in the field and I did not want to be had my career crushed under that Armada and be frustrated my whole life so I bailed out and B was a clinician and had been able to use the thinking of these extraordinary people and visionaries and build brick by brick a system of helping people that is just far superior to anything that I learned in school so there we go Wow very interesting all right all right our final quite older on yes okay yeah I got a final question dear dr. Lisle I've been recommending this podcast to my friends and co-workers at least those that don't immediately leave the room the moment I start droning on again about my strategies and Johnny's village of steam dynamics that said I was wondering if you'd like to tackle my current big problem in bikes okay I'm intelligent and I have a lot of intellectual and life ambitions but I'm also somewhat lazy and not particularly gritty I'm pretty low on conscientiousness and high in neuroticism so great I have a history that goes back to childhood a starting big and ambitious life projects and then abandoning them the instant things get a bit tough which I doubt you'll find too surprising given what I just mentioned about my personality my prime is that while I have a currently a good job quote quote unquote good pay good security generous vacation time I also find it kind of boring and I find myself constantly yearning to do something more interesting challenging and socially impactful I would quit and go pursue something cool while living off my savings which is what they're there for after all except I have a nagging fear that doing so would become yet another failed life project except this time it'll end with having turned down a good job for unemployment I'm in my late 30s and unmarried so a big career change is certainly possible but becomes more difficult less purposeful with each passing year been contemplating a bunch of different career options none of which ultimately ever seemed to feel right and so I find myself stuck in a somewhat frustrating loop that never really goes anywhere you love to hear some advice grounded in evolutionary psychology on how I should be thinking about going about how to tackle this yes what a great story this is a so let's just talk about about a few things and see what we can learn from from the general principles here and then we'll try to try to swirl into the middle of this individuals issues the but first we we understand that feelings are signals and so the there are multiple feelings that this person is feeling we're currently that are disturbing one of them is boring is boredom and another one is a sense of of opportunity lost and so those are those two signals are telling the individual that that that the self is calibrated person is capable of doing more spectacular things for the village than the end and then the individual is doing so just to to to back up for a second your your mind is can be usefully compartmentalized into three basic functions the first function is is what we're going to call the the self another system is going to be what we're going to call the esteem meter and the third system is going to be what we're going to call the internal audience and there's going to be three primary targets for trying to earn a steam and those are going to be mates friends and trading partners and families a little bit off to the side because the these three primary avenues of earning esteem are all subject that they you must earn the esteem in order to secure the partnerships and the partnerships are the mechanisms by which you actually survive and reproduce so you are designed with a with caliber apparatus which reside in what we're going to call the self and the self is going to estimate what it is that it thinks you can do in terms of securing different partners for the so in principle you'd want the most exciting fascinating maid in the world the best possible friends and the best possible job the most lucrative and most valued job in the world so these are these are in theory the the highest possible sides of the situation and what this individual does is they look at themselves and they look at the feedback that they've gotten from other people and they look at people like them and they look at people a little better than them and they look a little people worse than them and they see what those people's outcomes are and they therefore calibrate where to spend their time and energy and and so obviously if you're the most athletic kid by far in your high school you are thinking about professional athletics it would be absurd for you not to if you are the least athletic kid in your high school you are undoubtedly not thinking about professional athletics but if you're the smartest chess player in your high school you're thinking about something else so in other words the self is a set of comparison estimates that actually set goals for people so our person here I have a self that recognizes that he's bright it also recognizes that he it does not generally put his shoulder to the wheel very hard he's got some he's got some flakiness in there that's not too bad not bad enough to to make him stop from from achieving with his high intelligence a quite decent situation in terms of economically however the self also recognizes that he has not worked that hard and therefore he's seeing that there are people probably equal or lesser abilities to him who have who have achieved more spectacularly than he has and therefore he's feeling some longing for that which he may well have achieved and what that might have gained him in terms of the trade situations the the now the boring is is a signal that tells you that you're not learning very much and it's a very valuable signal either in a relationship or in in any in a set of activities that you're doing you could be sitting in front of the TV and staring at it and realize you know what you're bored and these are these are feelings that are basically designed to tell you that with with X amount of effort it is very likely that we can put put ourselves into circumstances where we can use our time and energy more wisely in order to gain advantages in survival and reproductive competition okay so that's why we are bored at something is because it's feeling like time is a-wasting and a competitor very very similar to you with similar attributes is on the other side of the of the mountain over there on the next in the next River Valley and that individual is now is not bored because they are engaged in something where they are learning and growing and becoming more competitive and that individual even though that you're they are your genetic equal they are going to be your actualized superior and they will get the girl that you wanted to get but you didn't accomplish enough so the warning device of boredom is to tell you get off your ass and find says find something more interesting because you are you are not making the most of the time and energy that you know in your life so that that goes on you know in a 3 minute interval and it goes on with a 30-year interval the in other words if you're if you're spending a lot of time bored that's a signaling device to tell you that you are the essentially you are not you we are not kicking out much excitement because there's not a lot of gains possible given our circumstances now the boredom by the way is probably the greatest punishment that takes place in prison because there's just very not much to do and there's not very much that's very interesting and there's not very much that seems worth learning or doing and so if these are long years that these guys slog through it isn't particularly physically painful or or that uncomfortable physically it is it is a boredom that is so so crushing now what would I tell this person so I would tell them probably so obviously the mind is running a cost-benefit analysis and part of what has happened is in the past he's put out some bursts of energy under excitement that he thought that he was going to make some survival reproductive gains behind those adventures and it turned out that he didn't win so things did not did not pay off well so as a result he's his self is now questioning his own judgment that the self is basically saying you your judgment isn't good enough for us to gamble very much okay so even though he still has some of the you still his self is also still saying you know what you got a lot of intellectual chops there and if you ever really applied yourself you could probably compete it at this level here that you're not at and if you did you would feel a lot better about yourself you have more trading power and be an exciting journey okay but he's also saying yeah but but I'm not so sure that I can count on that that seems pretty risky given the fact that that I'm over six the last six times I put out that kind of energy so what we want to do instead is we want to respect the fact that the system is not trusting its own judgment in terms of its learned that its judgment about its competitive advantages and it's it's likely talent acquisition and execution is not really that great and so therefore it may overestimate itself so we need to be careful fine so we need to be careful so what we want to do is we want to simply still be adventurous and still take a run at things that look interesting but we're going to run those experiments safely and we're going to run them short-term and we're going to see we're going to be looking on knocking on some doors that see whether or not they work in other words instead of investing ten thousand dollars in a project invest a thousand and let's see whether or not it engages our interest in whether or not it feel like it's paying off okay so this goes down to a general decision-making strategy in any changes that that I would talk about which is they'd never make a big decision when a small decision will do so recognize that that this individual has been very comfortable circumstances lives in the Western world protected by a by a democracy and in a national defense and in a social welfare system and their bright young and healthy and capable and intelligent and well fed and and well paid and as a result they're not that uncomfortable okay and as a result of this the the lack of discomfort is actually causing them to cruise at you know sixty percent of their abilities which is fine nothing wrong with this but guess what when we do this the nervous system will literally give it back to you it'll basically say well you're putting out about sixty percent we're going to make you about sixty percent as happy as you could be and that's what we're going to do okay and it's like well geez thought out works like yeah that's actually exactly how it works and so this individual would find if they were willing to jump in not not irresponsibly but jump in with their energy they would find that within days their self-esteem would rise now it's not low now person is not disgusted with themselves but the point is they would find their self-esteem rise because that esteem mechanism is dynamic and so they would start to feel better about themselves they would be you know they would feel the excitement of getting up early and staying up late and having having some goal that fires their excitement is they can sense that it comes closer that they are moving closer to actual izing their potential so that's what that's what I would recommend that this person do make make a list of a few places to go with your time and energy and just start going there and find out what happens and if it turns out it doesn't pay off no problem we go to the next one and run a series of investigative experiments about what types of intellectual and physical investments will pay off in terms of increased self-esteem and a feeling of any kind of useful achievement and and success advantages and if it doesn't move on to the next one that's part of the game and we you don't have to play it but if you don't play it then we just get to sit here and we get to live it a6 instead of instead of you're going to average six for the next forty years instead of averaging eight and that's that's what we're here to do is to to essentially beat the genes that right now are saying you know what I don't really have to do it and the answer is you do not you do not have to do it and you're you are not being forced by hunger poverty and dire competitive constraints into giving your very best because because you're pretty fancy and so you you can do mediocre and be okay but you can't do mediocre for you and actually be be very happy that's not that's not in the cards of how the nervous system is constructed
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