How To Cope With The Shortness Of Life - Dean Rickles

Dean Rickles 0:00 Life is supposed to be a journey. And if you imagine a sailor who went out in a ship and was just tossed around by the ocean and then came back, although they endured and there was time lapsing, well, he didn't have a journey. Whereas a sailor who's going and exploring all of these new lands, well, that's a journey and that's what you want your life to be like. It's not enough just to endure and just to exist. You need to be choosing.

Chris Williamson 0:24 Is it right to say that life is short, in your estimation?

Dean Rickles 0:28 It is short. I think it is a little bit too (laughs) short. Even- even though it's necessary that it's finite. I don't think it needs to be quite this finite. Although having said that, I mean, I- that's just my selfishness and my ego talking. I would like more-

Chris Williamson 0:41 What would you optimize for if you had the choice? 250?

Dean Rickles 0:45 That would be- that would be pretty good, but then if it was 250, we'd be sitting here saying, "I don't know."

Chris Williamson 0:49 "I wish it was 750," you know, yeah.

Dean Rickles 0:51 "If it's 50, pretty sure..." (laughs) But, um, but it seems to be... Like, the way the... I- I mean, I make this point in the book. The way the- the memory system and the human mind is put together seems to be pretty much well-made for about 100, maybe 120, something around that, years, because... Um, one of the examples I give is, uh, this classic example from the philosophy of memory, sort of back in the Enlightenment period, were there were these debates between John Locke and, uh, Thomas Reid, a pair of philosophers, and they were talking about, um, what the nature of self is and the continuation of the self. And there was a- a memory theor- a memory theory of the self, which is that we're just sort of this continuation of being able to remember who we were over our lifespan. And Thomas Reid pointed out, well, no, there's a... We can imagine situations where when you're sort of in your mi- middle age, maybe 30 years old, it's easy to remember what you were doing when you were five, maybe, or a little easier. You can remember scrumping apples when he was a kid is the example he gives. And then as he gets older, this, um, he's supposing it's an officer, he can remember being, um... When he's retired, he can remember being an officer, but he can no longer remember scrumping apples. He's lost that bit. So there's- there's sort of limits, finite limits that have been placed by biology on what we can fit coherently in a lifespan and what we can remember about ourself to hold our self together.

Chris Williamson 2:27 Yeah, because, I mean, the Ship of Theseus is an example, right, that if you replace every board on this ship after a particular amount of time, is it the still- still the same ship? Now, the difference is that the ship has no idea that it is a ship or that it can remember each of the floorboards being removed. I think it's every seven years, pretty much every cell in your body has been recycled so that there are no cells that would have been there seven years before.

Dean Rickles 2:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:54 So you go, okay, well, if I am a Ship of Theseus in that regard, what does it mean to say that me now is the same as me seven years ago or 14 years ago or 21 years ago?

Dean Rickles 3:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 3:07 What does that mean?

Dean Rickles 3:08 Well... Yeah, well this was... I mean, this memory idea is supposed to take care of that problem, so what... So an- an earlier theory would have been we're just what we're made of, right? You are what you're made of. Well, the Ship of Theseus example you've just presented shows you, well, no, you can't be, because it gets recycled all the time. So you're not what... You can't be identified with what you're made of, so there must be something else. And one of the things that you can say about the Ship of Theseus and humans is, well, maybe there's at least some continuous thread through these changes. Like, it doesn't make sense if you just change all of the bits of the Ship of Theseus all at once, 'cause that's just obviously a new ship. The whole point of that Ship of Theseus example is you're- you're doing it gradually, plank at a time, so it's not sort of too significant a change. Um, so the memory problem was... The memory idea was supposed to take care of that, but then it faces this- this other problem, which is that there are limits to memory and what you can hold, so it's probably not memory either that's- that's playing this role. Or- or it is, but the, you know, but then it sort of shortens, necessarily shortens your life. And I make the point that there's, um, there's a kind of interesting overlap here with old theories of transmigration of the souls and the idea that we have an, uh, an immortal soul that endures through these various bodies. I mean, it's hard to make- make sense of that, really, because there's not gonna be any record or remembrance of these passages, just like there isn't within a life. So if we were immortal, if we had these extremely long lifespans, it would be just as if we were a bunch of separate people after a certain time. So it doesn't make any sense to say that we're immortal if we have something like the same memory system. And then if we change our memory systems in such a way that we can expand, then it's not clear that we're humans anymore and we're something else, and of course, this is what many people want to do, right, with this transhumanist business. They wanna, you know, get around what they consider to be these terrible limitations of being human, like mortality and these memory problems and so

Dean Rickles 5:20 on.

Chris Williamson 5:20 It is interesting to think what is the single continuous thread, and someone might say, "Well, it's- it's- it's my sense of I," right? It's sort of consciousness or it's the-

Dean Rickles 5:31 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:31 ... self-referential element of me internally, my internal texture. And you go, well, my in- the- the texture of my mind is different now than it was two or three years ago because I'm always learning and developing things, and if my memories are in this whatever sort of 50-year window, whereby the time that you're 50 years hence from remembering something, especially as a young child, that you basically can't, you go, okay, so as soon as you can no longer remember something, does that mean that the person who did the thing is no longer related to you?

Dean Rickles 6:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:04 Is that a different person somehow?And I, yeah, I mean, I, I can, I can completely see this. So you mentioned there about the fact that this is a, a conversation and a topic that's been discussed for a, a good while. Seneca wrote On the Shortness of Life-

Dean Rickles 6:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:19 ... 2,000 years ago, over 2,000 years ago now.

Dean Rickles 6:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:22 What did he get right and what did he get wrong, in your opinion?

Dean Rickles 6:26 Yeah, well, I mean, one of the... Obviously, it's a reference to Seneca, the, the title of the book, and part of the point of the book is precisely to reassess what Seneca did in that book On the Shortness of Life, which is an absolutely amazing book. It's shorter than my book as well. What he got, I think, the best thing that he... I disagree with him a lot in the, in this book as well. I think he gets a lot wrong, especially about the, the role of death and the role of the shortness of life. So, he's not so much concerned with sort of appreciating why it has to be short. He doesn't really mention that. He sort of agreed. He's more kind of, um, telling people off for wasting it. So, he's saying it's not that it's so it's short, it's that you're just not using it well enough, and if you used it well enough and wisely and prudently and almost like a, a kind of, um, economic problem where you distribute the various bits of your life, then you'll find that it's not particularly, um, particularly short. So, I, so I, I disagree with him on, on that point that you, you kind of need a sh- you also need life to be short in order for all of the various components that, that are within it to make sense and to build a sort of a, a good human life. But what he gets right, most right, I think, is this business of, um, the, the provisionality of most people's lives. So, he has some fantastic quotes about how life is supposed to be a, a journey, and if you imagine somebody who sort of, you know, a sailor who went out in a ship and was just sort of tossed around by the ocean and sort of then came back, although they endured and there was time lapsing and these kinds of things, well, he didn't have a journey. Whereas, you know, some sailor who's going and exploring all of these new lands, well, that's a journey and that's what you want your life to be like, right? It's not enough just to endure and just to exist. You need to be sort of choosing, and this is why I think the having death at the end of it is vital because it forces you to have to make choices. If you didn't have that sort of boundary flashing before you, you wouldn't feel like you had to make choices. You'd relax and you'd think, "I can do that, you know, whenever. I've got plenty of time for that." So it's in, in precisely that bus- it's precisely the limit of death that forces you to face the provisionality of life and not living provisionally and thinking that you've got all of your options open and try- and thinking it's good to keep all of your options open as if it's, you know, some sort of wise move like, you know, this old proverb, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Mm-hmm. And you don't, just don't settle, don't choose, don't commit to anything, don't be anything basically is the, is the ultimate, um, uh, you know, outcome of this kind of approach.

Chris Williamson 9:27 So, one of my friends, Gwindogobgol, taught me about deferred happiness syndrome, the common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death.

Dean Rickles 9:46 Yeah, that's very Seneca. That's, um-

Chris Williamson 9:49 (laughs)

Dean Rickles 9:49 It's almost identical to a quote I've got in my book where he's talking about how you're putting things off and you're saying, "Look, when I'm 60, I'll just get this done when I'm 50, then when I'm 60, then I can do all of those things and enjoy life." And, um, yeah, I, I also mention, um, some of, um, Carl Jung's theories because he discusses very similar, um, problems. He calls it the provisional life and the problem of the provisional life, but he also calls it the problem of the puer aeternus, which is he associates this aspect of living provisionally with a psychological complex basically, and it's associated to narcissism in, in modern terminology. Um, he tried to call it the, it was tried to call, be called the Bacchus concept initially, and it's the idea that you should live like you should be unlimited, right? A puer aeternus character thinks they shouldn't be limited by things like death, jobs, marriages, any kind of commitment at all because it pins them down and any limit is not a godlike kind of thing to have. So they want to be eternal children with no responsibility, and if you make a decision and if you act, then you're going to be held responsible for that action and you have to be responsible for the consequences and that's an adult thing, not a childlike thing, so they don't want that. And I mean, it's amazing to see how many people are like this now. It is an absolute epidemic, the, this sort of provisionality and sort of enforced in the politics and...

Chris Williamson 11:29 Is, is that not a natural byproduct of the fact that there are so many options open to people? You can travel to more places, learn about more things. People don't even have a job for five years now, whereas previously you would've had a job for life or perhaps you wouldn't have even had a job. You would've been some indigent laborer under the-

Dean Rickles 11:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:47 ...the feudal lord of whatever country you were currently being occupied by.

Dean Rickles 11:51 Yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely right. It spread, it spreads to a, like a bunch of, um, phenomena actually, where the meaning, the, what looks like a good thing, having loads of options and loads of choice is not necessarily a good thing. So I, you can think of, you know, even things like digital-... photography seemed like a good thing, but it's absolutely sort of taken the meaning and value out of the photograph, which used to be a nice thing. You'd take a lot of care in choosing them and then you'd put them in the album, and you would actually look at them now and again. Most people don't look at their photographs. You'd take a trillion photographs, and they're gone, they disappeared somewhere on your hard drive never to be seen, seen again. So it's, uh, sort of, uh, you can say the same thing as well about the, um, the in- the internet and the Google search, right? You've got all of that knowledge, all of what looks like this huge possibilities and huge options for finding things out, and it's, it's too much choice and it ruins the sort of meaning of maybe going into a library or getting a book and looking at it, and it will have more significance when you find this fact. So it's sort of reducing the value of many things, even though it allows, you know, us to talk... these technologies allow us to talk and do things like this, and they can be very, very good and, and, um, productive. I agree that having so many options is not necessarily a good thing, because it's then harder to choose in particular.

Chris Williamson 13:13 Well, this is Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice, right? He uses this great example in his TED Talk from 10, 12, maybe even 15 years ago now. Um, (clears throat) 50 years ago, you go into the jeans store to buy yourself some jeans, and there's one pair of jeans in many waist sizes.

Dean Rickles 13:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 13:30 What's your waist size? There's your jeans. You go in now-

Dean Rickles 13:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:33 ... and it's, "Okay, well, do you want skinny or straight? Do you want boot cut? Do you want stretch? Do you want cropped? Do you want ripped? Do you want bleached? Do you want dark?"

Dean Rickles 13:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:39 "Do you want blue? Do you want, like, weathered?" And all of that choice, from a, uh, an economist's point of view, would suggest that you can get closer to your optimal utility function.

Dean Rickles 13:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:52 The thing that I want the most is available to me, therefore I can optimize.

Dean Rickles 13:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 13:56 But what it doesn't account for is decision paralysis and regret.

Dean Rickles 14:02 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:02 And the fact that (laughs) if you're faced with all of these different options, a lot of the time, you walk out of the store with no jeans, because-

Dean Rickles 14:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:08 ... if you're... You become culpable for the suboptimal decision the more choices that you have, right?

Dean Rickles 14:17 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:17 If you could have chosen otherwise, the fact that you didn't puts the impact of that potentially bad decision on your shoulders. Whereas if you couldn't have chosen otherwise-

Dean Rickles 14:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:27 Like, no one in an arranged marriage feels like they chose the wrong partner.

Dean Rickles 14:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:32 They might not be happy with their partner-

Dean Rickles 14:34 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:34 ... but they, they don't-

Dean Rickles 14:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:34 ... feel their own same sense of sort of culpability and regret.

Dean Rickles 14:39 Yeah, exactly. The more options... That's a very good point, actually. The more options there are, the more ways there are of getting, getting it wrong, basically. It's almost like an entropy kind of thing, (laughs) kind of calculation. It's a very good point.

Chris Williamson 14:52 So, I feel like it's a particularly sort of brutal paradox that trying to keep your options open to live a life with optimal optionality can result in no life being lived at all-

Dean Rickles 15:03 Yes.

Chris Williamson 15:03 ... because you're just in this liminal space throughout it all.

Dean Rickles 15:07 That's right. That's right. I mean, and th- and that's kind of one of the main, again, one of the main points of the book is that... I mean, I don't mention this as an example. I possibly would have done had I, uh, thought of this, one of the reasons for provisionality. The re- the reason I give for provisionality is a little bit, um...

Chris Williamson 15:23 Just give us a definition of provisionality, just in case people haven't quite hammered that home.

Dean Rickles 15:27 Yeah, so provisionality is the idea that you're sort of, as you said, uh, um, earlier, you're waiting for the thing to happen, the real thing to happen. So you're indecisive, there's never a decision made. So you, you know, you might, you know, have a, a girlfriend, for example, and you're, you're not quite ready to tie the knot because you think there might be something better, somebody who will fit better or something like this. You don't quite want to buy any of these houses 'cause you think you'll... another one might come later. It's almost a kind of fear of missing out on the better option, um, so you end up not doing anything at all, and you've sort of got this unlived life where you're always waiting, it's always provisional. What you have now is never the thing, so it's always pointing elsewhere. And you're never settled like that, and you're never real. It's almost like a virtual reality, right? 'Cause you're never sort of settling into real life. Um, so that's the idea. Now, what were we talking about? We were talking about why I think people-

Chris Williamson 16:22 Your example that you didn't put in the book.

Dean Rickles 16:24 ... yeah, why people choose, not choose, why people seem to go down this provisional life, is precisely because, and it, uh, I suppose relates to your example, when you make a choice and you do decide, you, there's a knowledge that you are foregoing these other options, right? It's a sacrificial act. Choosing something, especially the more significant the act becomes, the greater the sacrifice. So again, sort of the girlfriend example, if you decide to commit to one person and you mean it, then you're sacrificing lots and lots and lots of different opportunities, if you sort of choose some particular job. I give the example of a musical instrument, like I always wanted to learn both piano and violin, but you're never gonna get really, really good if you, if you're... You know, the more options you keep open, the less you, the less good you're gonna be at one particular thing. So you have to make a choice, and you're sacrificing something that you would love as well. So there's, like, real significance in making these choices, but this is wh- where the meaning comes from as well, 'cause sort of with a... there's sort of meaning in sacrifice 'cause it gives the thing that you choose more significance in that way, right? If you're having to give something up to choose the thing that you eventually choose, then it's sort of imbuing this whole thing with meaning and ag- and it carves a meaningful life in this way.

Chris Williamson 17:44 Because if life was unlimited, then you would never have to say no to anything. You would be able to learn the violin and then learn the piano and then learn the trombone and then learn the flute and the harmonica and so on and so forth.

Dean Rickles 17:58 Exactly, right. Um, provisionality would then be a, a sort of the, the natural choice, basically. You could live provisionally because you would all be able to sample all, um, options in this possibility space that you have before you. You could just try anything. You can say, "I'll do that once I've done this. I'll master this, then I can do that."... I'll be sort of married to this person for a thousand years, (laughs) and then we'll try a different one after that.

Chris Williamson 18:23 And then we'll try the next one, yeah, exactly.

Dean Rickles 18:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:24 Okay.

Chris Williamson 18:25 So, I understand that, um... somebody who is railing against the in-built shortness of life, or e- e- even just the fact that it has an end at all, like, I think that seems pretty robust. Yes, it would be nice if we could do 250 and, and, and stick about for that long, um, but I do think unlimited life would end up a whole bunch of strange externalities. Let's say that somebody's accepted that. How does this help them live a better life? They know that it's going to end. They've conceded the fact that they're not going to be immortal. What is the ne- what- what's the next step? After they've accepted that, then what is it-

Dean Rickles 19:09 Yep.

Chris Williamson 19:09 ... to live a, a meaningful life?

Dean Rickles 19:11 Well, yeah, so then, so it's again going back to this idea of, um, choosing and making sure that the choices you make are, um, the decisions you make are done with intention, right? So this, the fact that you've got this death, um, flashing away at you should be there to force you to, um, avoid living provisionally, as we've just mentioned, but also choosing the particular options you choose with a bit more care and attention. Because it clearly is extremely precious, and people usually start thinking about this at midlife. It's called a midlife crisis, and maybe... And I used to hate that word midlife crisis, but if you think of crisis as, you know, from the Greek word, as I mentioned earlier, as decision and having to choose, then it's actually not such a bad idea. Because once you get past that midlife, you're precisely aware that your possibility space is shrinking, so you, it's harder to live in this provisional options open way. You can see that you now have to start making decisions that are really gonna matter, and the closer you get, the more options are, are carved away. So you can either have this situation where, you know, the world or other people are carving away those options and choosing this little final bit of path, or you can figure out which, um, paths you would like to choose in those final, especially in those final, um, bits. So one of the other things I bring in, so... I mean, it's hard to know what is the right decision, right? Um, so one of the things I bring in on this point is Jung's notion of individuation. And the idea of individuation is basically to try and make it so that the d- the actions you're carrying out are truly actions that match, um... I don't know how, how to put this, your kind of true self, your true authentic self. 'Cause otherwise, although it, it looks like you're making decisions, it can be a whole bunch of external things, such as traumas or from, influences from outside, from sort of media. You know, a lot of young people seem to be, because they're so heavily buried in social media, they think that they're choosing things and being very unique in how they're carving themselves, and they think that it's them that are, you know, carving themselves. It's quite clearly coming from a bunch of external influences that are molding them from outside. So if you don't want to be... I mean, the a- analogy Jung gives is sort of being bobbed around like a cork in an ocean, right? It's just being pushed around by everything else rather than making its own way in that ocean. So individuation is the idea of figuring out what those complexes are that might be affecting you and influencing your decisions, what projections you might be putting out there onto the world so that you're not seeing it right, because it's being colored by all of these projections and things that are being put into you, so that any decisive action is, is s- truly your decisive action, an au- an authentic action. So this is quite a, a modern, this is a common thing now in a lot of literature. It's presented in different ways, but this is sort of Jung's great invention, this idea of individuation and making everything unconscious as close to consciousness as possible. So there's nothing, you know, and then you don't get caught. You don't sort of find yourself wondering why you did a particular thing, right? Why did that-

Chris Williamson 22:45 I spent 20 years climbing up a ladder to find out that it was against the wrong wall.

Dean Rickles 22:50 For example, yeah. Basically that kind of thing. Why did I get drunk again? Why did I do this again? Why, you know, why did I just spend this many hours doing something I really didn't want to do? Because you know that there is something inside you that rebels. Whenever you do something stupid or you spend too long doing something you know, you know you shouldn't do, there's a thing that knows you shouldn't do it. So it's trying to make the, all of the unconscious drivers, um, transparent basically, so you can deal with them.

Chris Williamson 23:18 It seems to me, I've been using the term, uh, consciously designed life or intentional living, and both of those seem to make a, a nice amount of sense here.

Dean Rickles 23:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:28 Like the number one lesson that I've taken away from 600 episodes on this podcast is that you do not to live, need to live your life by default. You can live it by design.

Dean Rickles 23:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 23:39 And you get to inject yourself in ahead of the way that your past traumas and social norms and societal expectations and what your family wants you to do and the paths of least resistance and the fact that the couch is comfortable on a Thursday night, all of those things-

Dean Rickles 23:53 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 23:53 ... every single one of those, there are predispositions that may push you toward one particular path or another. But it is within your power to be able to redirect that. It is within-

Dean Rickles 24:03 Yep.

Chris Williamson 24:03 ... your power to be able to choose how you respond, even if it's just internally in a situation where you're completely restricted, right?

Dean Rickles 24:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 24:10 This was the, Man's Search For Meaning, this was Viktor Frankl's like major-

Dean Rickles 24:14 Yeah. Of course.

Chris Williamson 24:14 ... insight from that as well. So,

Chris Williamson 24:17 given the fact that we're both saying here intentional life design, individuation, don't just be a cork bobbing, bobbing around in the middle of the ocean...... that means that you need to take c- time and care and attention when it comes to making your decisions. But there's also this other price that you need to pay if you take too much time and care over your decisions, because you end up in-

Dean Rickles 24:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 24:40 ... the liminal space purgatory again. And now you're dead and you haven't started living your life.

Dean Rickles 24:45 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 24:45 Is this the fundamental tension between the two?

Dean Rickles 24:48 That's absolutely it. So it's, um ... I sort of explicitly refer to it as a balancing act. It's a balancing act between these two styles of living. So there's the puer aeternus, which I mentioned, which is this unlimited style, which, you know, it's not all bad, th- this unlimited style. It's sometimes good. It can push you into doing things you wouldn't, you know, otherwise do. It's a bit more sort of risk-taking, which can sometimes be good. It means you don't stagnate. On the other side, there's the over-analytical senex. So, um, Jung calls it the senex, which, you know, relates to Seneca. It's like the old man kind of archetype. And, and it can become, um, a, a psychological complex as well. So either side, if taken too far, can lead to problems. So the senex problem is, okay, you're, you are pushed into inaction, exactly as you say, because you're analyzing everything. You want to make sure you make exactly the right decision, you don't screw anything up. Um, you're focused on, too much on the future on making it right. Maybe too much on the past and thinking about what happened in the past, r- so you're not living in that way either. But you're not living if you're overly power-focused either, because you're not genuinely making decisions and forging a path, you're just doing everything, you're just trying everything out with no intention. So it's this really ... And it is a very difficult thing, uh, thing to do, and you'll probably end up swinging one way at some stages in your life and then swinging the other way. And part of the problem is, part of the problem with forming a life is to have all the various bits arranged at the right times. So there's a time for this puer energy, which kind of energizes a life. There's a time for being senex. And sometimes you might require a little bit of the puer energy later in life, right? You might get revived in some way by a little bit of that, and not, as I say, stagnate towards the end of your life. So exact- it, it is exactly this, um, this difficult balancing, yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:50 There's a, an article that I must reference on a monthly basis, What Do You Want to Want by Kyle Eschenroeder, and came out in 2017. Uh, and wow, would you look at that? His, uh, website, it would seem, has been taken over by a Canadian pharmacy, which is trying to sell-

Dean Rickles 27:08 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 27:08 ... erectile dysfunction medication, so I must message him and get him to sort that out. Anyway, in it, he's got two quotes, both of which, uh, make me think about this. One, I think it's an Aristotle quote, um, "If a man knows not where he sails, no wind is favorable." And another one, which may also be Aristotle or it might have been someone else from the, the Stoicism era, talks about this sort of listless man who steps out of his doorway on a morning, and if you're to ask him, "Where is he going? What are you doing with your day?" And he'll say, "I'm not really too sure. I'll go, maybe I'll see some friends, maybe I'll talk a little, maybe I'll see if something comes up."

Dean Rickles 27:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:46 And he ... It, it seems that there is a- an immediate comfort in this, because your regret minimization in the moment is maximized, right?

Dean Rickles 27:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 27:59 By making no decision, there can be no regret immediately. You feel no felt sense, there's no, um, uh, choice cost needed at all, right? You pay no cho- no cost at all for doing this. However, the longer that you do that for, the more you're going to look back on your life and realize that you just treadmilled your way through everything.

Dean Rickles 28:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:20 At the mercy of the winds of culture and trauma and norms and parents.

Dean Rickles 28:24 Yeah, I mean, it's exactly at the mercy. Uh, I mean, so the way ... It's quite existentialist, all of this. And the way Sartre puts it is that you can either behave as a, as a subject, as an active subject, or you can behave as an object. And objects are things that generally don't have, as Aristotle mentioned, um, purpose. They're not purposive systems. They're not teleological. They're not, they're not aiming anywhere, they're just being pushed around by natural laws and whatever forces, um, desire to take them. The same as this listless man, right? He's not acting as a purposes- pur- purposive system, which presumably is what it's ... what being human is all about, is that we're purposive systems, we're supposed to have, um, aims. So he's behaving as an object, and we all do it, we all go through these little phases where we're not quite aware, and then every now and again, we'll pop back into ourselves and think, "Oh, wow, I wasn't kind of there for a bit." You do it naturally when you're driving. I mean, it's amazing how automatic we can be and just be pushed around by the circumstances, and it's a really hard thing. I mean, we do it in meditation. Obviously, the whole point of meditation is to try and be aware constantly. I mean, the trick is to try and just bring that into everyday life always so that you're always meditating, in the sense of always being aware of what is trying to push you, what is trying to move you, and making sure that it's you, uh, that are making the decisions. And usually that requires having an aim, right? It's hard to make a decision if you don't have some intention and aim beyond it that it's taking you towards.

Chris Williamson 30:03 I had a conversation with Ryan Holiday about his new book, Discipline is Destiny, and I came to the opinion that without any goals, there can be no discipline. Because when you talk about discipline, it is in service of a thing, right?

Dean Rickles 30:19 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:19 To the person for whom their goal is to be in the top 0.0001% of people that watch hours of TikTok per week...... them sitting on the couch and watching tons of TikTok is in service, that is their discipline, it's in service of their goals.

Dean Rickles 30:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:35 For the David Goggins of the world who wants to run 20 miles a day, getting up at 5:00 in the morning and shouting expletives in the mirror, that is also part of his discipline.

Dean Rickles 30:44 Yeah. So ...

Chris Williamson 30:45 It has to be in service of a goal.

Dean Rickles 30:47 Um, yeah, yeah, you've just reminded me of a, yeah, another point I was intending to make earlier which is, um, sort of this vivid, it's i- important to have this vivid, um, image, this vivid picture of the future that you want, and that, um, I mean, so I mentioned in the book some experiments that have been done, um, where those that can form a very vivid picture of a future self, right, a future version of them, um, have, generally do, do better overall. So it's the vividity of that future, um, aim, this sort of goal, the person you want to be in the future that drives it as well. And if you don't ha- and the less vivid it is, the less you're gonna be driven by it. So I think it's like-

Chris Williamson 31:32 What were some of the sort of, um, things that people were thinking about? Was it the life they had? Was it the type of person they are? Was it their friends?

Dean Rickles 31:39 The type, the type of person they wanted to be. So if you, so, you know, if you wanna get sort of really fit and you want, um, to improve your body, it's, it helps enormously to have the most vivid version of that future image that you can possibly have, and there were sort of experiments done where people would be shown... 'Cause often what happens is you end up thinking, most people end up thinking of their future versions and we even call them future selves, as if they're a different entity, and I, I actually mention that I think this is a mistake in the book. It's just you in the future. It's not a future self as if it's a stranger. It's you in the future and it's still gonna be you present over there. So I'm, I'm sort of very against this idea of fi- of thinking of future selves and the effo- there were a bunch of fMRI studies done which showed that some people think of their future selves, I'll use the term for now, um, in exactly the same way as they think of s- strangers. So the same bits of the brain are lighting up when they're thinking of that thing over there in the future as when they think of a complete stranger, and that's a problem, and the more you can make it so that that thing in the future is associated with how you think of yourself and not a stranger, the better you're gonna be at driving some disciplined sort of, um, schedule to take you somewhere. So it's not only sort of, you know, um, um, plausible, there's kind of good experimental results that have been done to, to back this up that this, this sort of image and this, this future goal, this aim, this teleological, uh, target is really crucial

Dean Rickles 33:20 for-

Chris Williamson 33:20 What, what was the danger-

Dean Rickles 33:22 ... for success.

Chris Williamson 33:22 ... of bulletproofing yourself?

Dean Rickles 33:26 Bulletproofing. Um, bulletproofing is, it's sort of, I mean, I should just say, so this, there's a whole range, you probably know, that maybe you know them, you're wearing a fitness top. There's a whole range of, um, bulletproofing, bulletproof sort of fitness products, keto and these kind of things, um, it was developed by this guy Dave Asprey who noticed that people were, people in Tibet or somewhere were, sort of had really good energy and their bodies were sort of very good from drinking this ghee coffee, like mixed with fats and stuff like that. So he was one of the first people who realized that, you know, this sort of fa- having lots of fats was a very good thing and he developed this stuff called bulletproof coffee where you mix it with ghee and whatnot. And, well, that's, that's fine, I actually quite like these kind of things, but he started saying things in his books like, "You should sort of remove everything that makes you weak and old" is one of the quotes he gave, and this, I mean, that's kind of, um, on the way to narcissism is the point of this. It's like very power internus archetypal comment to make, right? Don't be old, don't be weak. You've got, you know, just g- eradicate all of that. And the end point of that is, um, sort of this thing that the psychoanalyst, uh, Jean Arundel calls the fortress of I, where what, what ends up happening is that what you're presenting to the world is just this sort of shiny beast that's there to prevent any kind of harm or risk or damage, but it's not real, right? Nothing's like that. Nobody's really, really like that. You can make yourself fit and it's good obviously. I sort of do this. You can sort of try and be healthy and these kind of things, but the limiting case that he's trying to push towards sounds like absolute narcissism. So there's a whole chapter on what happens when you push this desire to be utterly unlimited and un- invulnerable to the limit and I think you end up with this strange, um, projected, um, creature that is not really human in any way. And some people like that, again. Some people are just obsessed with this idea of getting beyond human, but I don't think we're very good humans yet anyway. We haven't tried being properly human yet and probably con- you know, as you say, consciously creating our circumstances.

Chris Williamson 35:49 What was that quote that you had about, um, about how people use social media? Was it something like, people would rather appear happy than be happy? Something like that?

Dean Rickles 36:01 Yeah, I mean, what they're doing is, I mean, they're presenting an, it's the image again. They're presenting a projection. They're, they're more concerned about how they appear than how they are basically. And this is, you know, it goes back to the, the options that you mentioned earlier, right? They go around, there's like a trillion pairs of jeans that they can try and they're sort of carving through appearance thinking that that's going to define who they are, and there's not really a lot going on sort of underneath that. We used to teach people to work on-... you know, sort of this inner aspect of themselves. We don't seem to do that anymore. It seems to be very external because what's getting presented, the only thing you can really present on social media is an external snapshot. So, you need to make that external snapshot as good and bright and as sort of impressive as can possibly be, and that's the focus. That seems to be the focus of things. I mean, imagine what Seneca would think of these things. Uh, he would ... I just can't, can't imagine. If he saw Facebook and social media.

Chris Williamson 37:00 Well-

Dean Rickles 37:01 I don't have social media. I can't, I can't bear it.

Chris Williamson 37:03 Well, I think it, it, it makes a lot of sense. I have a bunch of friends who also can't use it, but for better or worse, it's here.

Dean Rickles 37:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:10 And we are defined by our, by our opinions and appearances now. And the thing is that we've now, in the modern world, been able to detach opinion from grounding in something to back that opinion up greater than has ever been. So, for instance, I can proselytize online about how altruistic or great my relationship with my mother is, right? Meanwhile, going home and then treating her like an absolute piece of shit.

Dean Rickles 37:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:39 I can do that.

Dean Rickles 37:40 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:40 And the gap between what you can present online and the reality of what's occurring has never been so wide.

Dean Rickles 37:47 Yeah. Exactly. It's the authen- again, it goes to the, um, the individuation and the authenticity thing again. I mean, what you really want, and what's gonna make you feel the best and most in control, is if how you are presenting yourself to the world is how you actually feel, 'cause then there's no lie. Nobody's lying about anything then. But it's a kind of deception, right? And the only person you're really deceiving is obviously yourself, because then you constantly feel like shit, 'cause you realize you're constantly acting, right? Everything's, everything's this pu- this big performance, and then you go back and you've, you know, you're somebody completely different. So, there's nothing wrong with choosing a, you know, this particular, um, these particular clothes, and there's nothing wrong with covering yourselves with tattoos if that's what matches. But it never matches. It's generally something because they feel shit, so they do these things rather than just becoming, you know, becoming who they are.

Chris Williamson 38:43 There's an interesting situation occurring online that relates with this in the, uh, content creation world. Are you familiar with audience capture? Do you know what that is?

Dean Rickles 38:53 No, I'm not aware of this.

Chris Williamson 38:55 Okay. So, um, audience capture occurs when a particular content creator online finds content that resonates with their audience and then begins to further define what they make by what they think the audience will want.

Dean Rickles 39:09 Ah.

Chris Williamson 39:09 So, they start to throw more and more red meat toward their audience-

Dean Rickles 39:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:13 ... and ends up becoming basically a caricature of what their audience thinks they are.

Dean Rickles 39:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:18 And there's this example that my f- friend, Gwynnder, the guy who I gave you that quote about earlier on, does this amazing article on Substack-

Dean Rickles 39:24 Yup.

Chris Williamson 39:24 ... that you'd love called On The Perils of Audience Capture. There's this guy called Nikocado Avocado, who used to be a vegan, violin playing YouTuber, and he was like this sort of thin, um, kind of like nerdy, sort of dainty guy. And then he started doing eating compilations on YouTube, where he would eat food, like huge amounts of food, and he was getting a lot of attention for doing this, and, and the plays were going up and, and people were giving him what he wanted, which was public, uh, focus. And it has got to the stage now where he has gone from being this thin, spindly, violin playing vegan to this sort of awful, fat, slovenly, screaming guy with a CPAP mask on, 350 pounds, permanently in and out of the doctor because he has been s- h- he says, uh, "The person was subsumed by the persona." That's how he describes it.

Dean Rickles 40:20 Yeah, that's absolutely, um, it's tragic and it's kind of our fault really as (laughs) a, as a society to be incentivizing, incentivizing that kind of thing. And again, it's the social media obviously that also incentivizes this kind of thing by getting the hits. But it's an old, um, phenomenon, of course. I mean, you can think of somebody like Marilyn Monroe, who had this persona. She was apparently completely different. She was quite well-read and quite erudite off-screen, but she had to constantly be this other person for her audience, right? The bubbly, blonde, bux- you know, buxom kind of lady. And it inevitably leads to suicide. Like, I would worry about this guy who's doing this. If it's so heavily divergent from what he clearly is from his initial point of origin, he's in trouble and he's probably gonna be needing some actual psychological help.

Chris Williamson 41:14 Every time that he disappears from the internet for a little while, which he does for periods. Sometimes he's in hospital, sometimes he's just doing other things or whatever. There is a, uh, non-minor contingent of people that send out an alarm call saying, "We need to check. We need to make sure that he hasn't decided to top himself." Because he's (clears throat) a no, it's millions of people. I don't know how many subscribers. It's lots and lots and lots of people who have been observing the slow motion self-immolation of this guy o- on the internet. And I do understand what you mean, you know, we shouldn't be supporting this behavior by watching it, but it's the same compelling reason that people rubberneck as they go past a car crash, right? Like, it's, it's so limbically in-built in us.

Dean Rickles 41:56 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:56 And he has reverse engineered a type of content which taps into something and then has leaned into it more. So, the dynamic goes both ways. Everybody talks about the echo chambers that you get into online and these algorithms are so manipulative because they are able to find the exact thing that you want to watch and they can deliver it to you. No one ever talks about what happens reverse to the creator. The creator gets shaped by the algorithm and the audience in the same way that the audience gets shaped by the algorithm and the creator.

Dean Rickles 42:24 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's also interesting from the point of view of sort of highlighting in a really stark version what we all do a little bit of. Like, we all present a, a version that we would like to be, right? We might like...... you know, when you're young, you're really concerned about your appearance. We all were, I was. Um, when you're an academic, for example, just starting, you want to present yourself as this kind of very, I don't know, over-the-top intellectual. You might even arrange... Like, when I was younger, this, this is a confession, um, and I was, um, I would have somebody in my office, I would arrange books of a particular kind, really impressive books, sort of, on my office shelves as if I'd been reading them, to look like, "Wow, that guy's reading these quantum field theory books. That's amazing." Like, how pathetic is that? But it's a similar kind of thing. It's, uh, exactly the same kind of thing. I'm presenting something for other people. This is not for me, it's not doing anything for me, it's not who I am, but I want them to appreciate me. But they're not appreciating me, they're appreciating that thing there. That's exactly what's missing.

Chris Williamson 43:32 One, 100%. I did, uh, a TEDx Talk a couple of years ago and this was a big chunk of what I spoke about, where I said that, um, if you are not careful, any praise that you receive won't ever existentially feel like it connects with you.

Dean Rickles 43:48 That's true.

Chris Williamson 43:48 Because if you're only playing a role, people aren't applauding you, they're applauding the persona that you are.

Dean Rickles 43:53 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:53 And this is why I think you get, um, some deaths in the acting world, because the Robin Williams of the world-

Dean Rickles 44:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:02 ... or the Heath Ledgers, you know, when someone applauds their performance, they're not... We- we're not in love with Russell Crowe, we're in love with Gladiator. We're not l- in love with Chris Hemsworth, we're in love with Thor, right?

Dean Rickles 44:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:13 And the, the detachment from the two... Uh, for a big time, I was, uh, this well-known club promoter and did all of this stuff and it was fantastic and people knew my name, but it didn't fulfill me in the same way as doing the podcast does.

Dean Rickles 44:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:26 And I think that that's bec-... Despite the fact that I adored the work and loved the lifestyle and thought I was super proud of what I'd achieved, but in a crowd of a thousand people, I was still able to feel a little bit alone, because I had to put on a front.

Dean Rickles 44:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:40 And because I was putting on a front and performing in a way, any time that somebody came over and gave me a compliment, it, it didn't really land, 'cause I was like, "Oh, c- you, uh, club promoter Chris just received a compliment, how fantastic for him."

Dean Rickles 44:55 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's probably one good way of gauging, um, how authentic you are, is how well you can take a compliment from somebody. Whether you can just go, "Okay, yeah, good. Like, thanks" (laughs) . 'Cause it's li-... It goes either one, uh... You know, it can go a number of ways. Either you feel like shit because it's not really complimenting you, as you say, it's complimenting this character that you've built. This is what I meant by the shiny beast of I, by the way, earlier. It, it's the, the character that you've built, this invulnerable character that's being, you know, applauded and these kind of things. So, um, so it can go that way or you can be, again, like the cork in the ocean, um, pushed around by it, and it's exactly this sort of being sort of built up. If you get a compliment, you sort of start to thrive on seeking those compliments. And that's prob-... And that's exactly what happened to this guy who started eating, right? There was sort of, some sort of attention and compliment, and he realized he could get it this way, and he want more and it... you get pushed by it. So, yo-... Again, it's sort of this, um, being an object or being, uh, an agent, an actor, somebody who's creating the script as you go. If you're getting pushed around like this, you are not in control. If you d-... If you get a criticism and you go, "Oh, my God," and you're down for ages, you're not in control. You're being absolutely moved around like a cork in the ocean.

Chris Williamson 46:18 Other people's heads are a wretched place for your self-worth to live. There was a quote that I found last week from Steven Pressfield in Turning Pro, "The amateur is a narcissist. He views the world hierarchically. He continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rise and desperately anxious if his star should fall."

Dean Rickles 46:38 Well, that's a-

Chris Williamson 46:38 "The amateur sees himself as the hero not only of his own movie, but of the movies of others. He insists, in his mind if nowhere else, that others share this view."

Dean Rickles 46:50 That's very, very good. I like that a lot. And, yeah, I have something a little bit similar where the, the narcissist and the poor think... They sort of have this idea that they're constantly being judged, right? They're the, they're the source of other people's movies. And I mentioned they feel like they're being sort of... You know, people are following them round like a big marching band, always watching their every move, waiting for these, for these things to happen. But, uh, like, again, I had some of these, these kind of, um, issues myself. Like, some of this book was s-... self-therapy, or sort of recognizing a bunch of these slightly narcissistic issues that I had, especially this sort of comparing with others. Like, I would always have to try and better everybody, like, be the best, do the hardest thing. Like, with piano, I would learn the hardest pieces, with, like, my physics stuff, it would have to be the very hardest areas of physics that I did, otherwise it wasn't good enough, and it's... The bulletproofing thing, be the absolute best at everything. And if... And it would sort of... I- and it's exhausting, because obviously you can't do everything. You can't be good at everything, but I would try to be good at everything. So this was a sort of... A way of trying to eradicate all of these, these issues that I was finding in myself to... Yeah, to not be exhausted all the time and not have this deceit constantly going on. It's a difficult thing.

Chris Williamson 48:11 What are the

Chris Williamson 48:12 tools that you have learned to use to remind yourself of the stuff that we've gone through here? Because, you know, i- i- it's, uh, philosophically very compelling, sounds great, I need to remember the shortness of life, I need to think about my decisions beforehand but not for so long that I die before I make them, and I need to... All, all, all of this wrapped together is great, but when it comes to applying this, what... Uh, uh, is there, is there something that you rely on, a mantra or, or, or an insight that reminds you of the shortness of life and reminds you of the importance of decisions and reminds you that you need to be in control of your own destiny?

Dean Rickles 48:49 I don't know. I think, look, the, the main thing, the main thing I do has to do with, um... I don't know. In terms of work, I'm always trying to only be doing the thing that I would do if I wasn't getting paid for it. If I was left just to be able to choose whatever I was doing at any moment, I want to be doing that now, and that's kind of what I, I am doing. Like, uh, any particular day, I'm generally doing what I would be doing if I weren't being paid for it. That's a really trick... I mean, you have to engineer it. Uh, like, it took a long time to get to this stage, and it, and it was by using things like this vividness of the future that you want, right? This sort of picturing, almost like a movie, the, the future that you want. And then, it's essentially a series of steps. Like, there is... (laughs) Even though it differs, the, the kind of steps that you would need to do differs from your starting point, obviously. Some people are poor. Some people don't quite have the, uh, sort of natural, um, skills in whatever, in music or whatever it is-

Chris Williamson 49:55 Yeah.

Dean Rickles 49:55 ... that they want to do. So then kind of it's gonna take longer or shorter. Some things might not really be possible, so they're gonna have to make compromises and change that future. But I generally always have a positive future image in mind, and then it makes all of the awfulness that you have to go through okay. 'Cause it, 'cause it is awful. Uh, engineering a good life is absolutely brutal and, and painful, right? You have to... Look at how many podcasts you're doing a week, I... You're, you're sort of reading a bunch of stuff. But it doesn't feel awful, because you've got this sort of aim at you wanna l- find things out, right? You wanna find truths. So my ultimate aim is, uh, a similar thing, I suppose, right? I wanna know the truth of this world, and why we're here, the mysteries of this world, of people, whether there's, um, more to it going on. And that sort of pulls me through all of the arduous work and learning of new things that, that, that I do.

Chris Williamson 50:51 As soon as you posit an ideal, you begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And inherent in that is disappointment when you fall short. So how do you deal with the in-built, um, fear of failure?

Dean Rickles 51:05 Um, well you're, uh, you're always gonna fail. I mean, it's always gonna be an ideal image. It's never, uh, supposed to... I mean, look, it's never gonna be a... um, it's probably never gonna be realized, and you probably never don't want that ideal to be realized, because then you're sort of, you've sort of lost a, a component of meaning that was leading you towards it, right? It's the path towards that image that's sort of providing the meaning, the decisions and the things you have to do to get there. If you make it there, well, you probably didn't have a high enough, um, goal in the first place. Or then you need to set a more impressive goal. So I, I-

Chris Williamson 51:40 How, how do you avoid-

Dean Rickles 51:40 ... don't think you ever-

Chris Williamson 51:42 In, in that situation, how do you avoid yourself being permanently dissatisfied, though? If you're always setting the goal one step further than you can run to, does that not permanently l- leave you in this sort of sense of inferiority?

Dean Rickles 51:56 Inferiority, I don't... Hmm. Uh... I don't know. It's certainly a problem, 'cause you're, 'cause you're always s- striving. You're certainly always gonna be striving. But I don't know. To me, that's part of being alive, is just striving to a goal. You sh- I mean, maybe that's the time... You know, if you've, if you've achieved your absolute ultimate goal that you've been striving towards for your life, then you can, I would suppose, die kind of pretty, pretty happily. But until then, right, it's the striving that's the, that's the interesting thing, and meeting the obstacles. You had this guy, you had Ryan Holiday, he's the guy that did that obstacle book, right?

Chris Williamson 52:35 Obstacles Away, yeah.

Dean Rickles 52:35 Is that the guy?

Chris Williamson 52:36 Yeah.

Dean Rickles 52:36 Yeah, that's, that's exact- that's f- kind of very similar. He's chosen a different form of limitation. I ch- I was focusing on death, but it sort of applies to limitations and obstacles in general. I mean, we feel good when we're battling things. And in fact, I give a, an example at the end of the book. Um, there's a biologist, John Calhoun, who tri- who did these experiments on utopias. Um, biological experiments using mice. And he tried to raise a set of mice in utopian conditions where every need was catered for. There was no obstacle. There were no problems, they had all their food and everything. And they didn't s- th- they didn't fare so well as the mice that had lots of obstacles and were having to fight for their food and battle for it, and had scarcity now and again. And it seems that the utopia... And some of them died. Some of the mice actually died, because e- everything was, was given. So it, it seems like this idea of having utopian con- conditions and not having any obstacles or constraints or limits just leads to a absolutely dystopian (laughs) kind of nightmare of a life where you can't stand it, you can't live in there. Even mice can't handle it.

Chris Williamson 53:48 Was it Marcus Aurelius who said, "The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what we deem it"? I think it was. And it's that "life itself is but what we deem it" bit that seems interesting to me, because the story around the challenges that you face and the difficulties and the setbacks and so on and so forth is, for the most part, your experience of it. Like, that's not for me to say that if you were to snap a leg and you just tell yourself that, "Oh, this is fun, I get to experience what having a snapped leg is like," that it's gonna be that much better.

Dean Rickles 54:17 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:17 But certainly with all of the myriad of just daily issues, the sitting in traffic, the extra time with the kids in the car on the way to school, it's like, "Is this, is this making me late for work, or is it extending the time that I get with my children?" Like-

Dean Rickles 54:32 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:33 ... you know, the story that you tell yourself and your reframing of it i- is, for the most part, what's going on. It, it very heavily colors almost entirely your experience. And especially given the fact that, in retrospect, you're not really going to remember the thing that happened, but you'll, uh, remember your experience which was colored by your interpretation.

Dean Rickles 54:51 Yeah, I mean that's the, like, the classic, um, stoic mindset, right? You can, you can choose how any particular event ... It's all internal. Like, your entire world is internal, basically, so you can choose how you're going to deal with it. If you get f- ... You can choose to be offended, you can choose, if you're stuck in traffic, whether to be pissed off by it or think, "This is an opportunity for me to think about that problem I wanted to think about." Like, I broke my ankle recently and I was c- ... 'Cause it, it kind of took me off my ... I was, like, very speedily doing things and I was not really thinking, so I could have been pissed off by breaking my ankle, but I thought it was, you know, an opportunity to slow down and deal with a whole bunch of other things that I had to deal with. So there's a ... You can ... I mean, I'm sure there are really bad things where you ... it's very hard to have this kind of stoical approach, if you've got some, you know, really awful kind of injury. But, um, with most ordinary day-to-day inconveniences, they don't really need to be inconveniences. But it's obviously hard to do and it's disci-... It's part of the discipline again. It's part of the habit. You need to get into a habit. I think I do h- ... I do now have the traffic habit, I must say. I developed this 'cause I, I'm always stuck in traffic these days. So you, you could either go mad or you can use it.

Chris Williamson 56:07 It's interesting to think about, um, uh, playing around with the idea of the end justifying the things that you went through, which means that you're miserable en route to it, and then if you've posited a sufficiently high goal, then sometimes you're never going to achieve it. Um, this is why I think it's so important in advance to make sure that the things that you're doing are enjoyable in the moment, right?

Dean Rickles 56:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 56:28 Like, if you're doing something which each individual iteration of is fine ... Like, it'll be great when I have a big studio that I can enjoy going into work and I never have to answer an email again and I've got a big team, and all of this stuff. That'll be great. But the path en route to doing that, each one of these podcasts that I do, is also enjoyable. Like, this is ... I'm not paying some unbelievably huge price. And even when there is discomfort, sitting down and reading a book that's, that's hard, uh, or, or w- whatever, trying to learn something in a really condensed period of time, or doing a podcast when I'm underslept because I've just flown back from New York or whatever, right? Even that is like, well ... All right, it's, it's challenging, but it's challenging towards something which I genuinely care about, and it's challenging in an enjoyable way. So yeah, there are people that are in positions that are s- so limited that they can't just pick and choose their entire life like that. Like, I, I understand that. But I feel like there are, uh, far more degrees of freedom that people can have in order to be able to do that. And there's this quote from, uh, an episode I did with Peterson two years ago now, and, uh, it was (laughs) so good. I think it relates to the other side of this equation, which is the, um, (smacks lips) uh, over-optionality optimization.

Dean Rickles 57:39 Mm.

Chris Williamson 57:40 "Contemplate the price you pay for inaction. You're already in a little hell. You know perfectly well it's going to get worse. The thing about inaction is that you're blind to it. Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price."

Dean Rickles 57:54 Mm. That's a very nice quote. Uh, another quote I like which I give qu- ... I think I give it ... Yeah, I give it in the book, which was by Terence McKenna. Uh, Terence McKenna had taken lots of mushrooms apparently, and it was a mushroom that said it to him, and he said, "Look, you need to, you need to have a plan, 'cause if you don't have a plan you'll be part of somebody else's plan." Which is, again, it's sort of this, this same idea. You're ... It's either you are gonna move yourself or you're gonna be moved by somebody else or the world. I mean, what do you want? (laughs) Which one do you want it to be?

Chris Williamson 58:26 If you don't prioritize your life, somebody else will.

Dean Rickles 58:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:29 That's the fundamental realization.

Dean Rickles 58:31 Yeah, yeah. And, uh, again, you can do this in m- in many ways. It doesn't have to be huge, massive, ridiculous, you know, world-changing goals all the time. It can be many things. But it just has to be you that's choosing them. It's absolutely crucial.

Chris Williamson 58:45 Dean

Chris Williamson 58:46 Rickles, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out the book and your work, uh, have you got a website? You don't have social media. Where else ... Where can people-

Dean Rickles 58:53 No.

Chris Williamson 58:53 ... find you? Do you exist online? Are you a digital ghost?

Dean Rickles 58:56 I'm a digital ghost, I think. I have a university web page. I think somebody did a Wikipedia page. But there's, like, lots of books on Amazon, um, as well, with information there.

Chris Williamson 59:05 All right, Dean.

Dean Rickles 59:06 I should maybe ... Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:07 All right, appreciate you.

Dean Rickles 59:08 All right.

Chris Williamson 59:08 Thank you, mate.

Dean Rickles 59:09 (laughs) See you.

Chris Williamson 59:10 What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.