Uncomfortable Truth About Life We Learn Too Late - Stop Feeling Empty & Find Purpose | Robert Greene

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   I see a lot of people out in the world who are struggling. They're struggling with their lifestyles. You know, they wanna make change. And I'm wondering, how do you think these laws of human nature can help people who are struggling with their lives?

2. RGRobert Greene0:22

   Well, um, it's a very good q- very good and important question. I mean, um, we all have to be very practical. We have to get by. We have to put food on the table. We, you know, we have to feed our children. We have to do certain basic things to survive. And so, um, but, but there's another side to that, and that is a sense of fulfillment in our lives. And a lot of people, particularly with the, uh, great... what they call the Great Resignation going on during the pandemic, are feeling that disconnect. They're working and they're getting money, but there's... they feel kind of empty and, and, and something isn't happening for them. And so the book is trying to tell you that we're social animals, that our survival, our happiness, our sense of fulfillment depends on our ability to get along with other people, okay? And in order to do that, you have to become aware. You are generally in a sleep... state of sleep. You are not really aware of who you are, of what makes you an individual, of what makes you tick, of where your thoughts come from, of where your emotions come from. And that lack of disconnect to something es- essential and vital about what makes you an individual, it has a very deleterious effect on all the things that you do in life. It also makes you a very poor observer of people and their nature. It also makes you a very poor observer of the few toxic people that you inevitably encounter in your life. People, you know, the great narcissist, the passive-aggressive, the people full of envy. And because you don't recognize them, because you're not paying attention to yourself and to them, you create all kinds of emotional turmoil in your life. And this could be as simple as you have a job and your, your boss is someone that you just can't deal with or get along with, or you have colleagues, and it drains you of so much energy, and it makes that work seem almost impossible. And so by flipping the switch, by learning about who you are, about the fact that you have a lot of these negative impulses that I talk about in the book, understanding yourself on a deeper level, allowing yourself now to judge people for what they are, not what you think they are, not projecting onto them, will make your life at work and everything so much easier. So, uh, it's not gonna necessarily make you a lot of money and help, you know, in the, in the most essential and immediate needs in life, but I think it will have a very, very important effect on your overall mental health.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:05

   You mentioned awareness there, and self-awareness, awareness of other people i- is something that I also find is missing a lot these days. Sometimes people will make changes when their motivation is high, and it will last a few weeks, maybe a few months, but often they'll revert back. And over the last few years, Robert, I've really been thinking it's not just information that my patients need, it's changing the way they think, changing the way they approach the world. Actually, at its core, it's about understanding themselves better, why they find certain things easy to do, why they fall back into certain patterns when life gets tough, which really speaks to a lot of the things I think that you write about.

4. RGRobert Greene3:58

   Very much so. Very much so. I mean, um, and it's not easy, you know, because, um, the way our brains are set up, with the way our physiology is, we don't really introspect a lot. It's not easy to look at yourself. We're easily distracted by appearances, by what's going on in the environment. And to actually take the time to be alone, because you can't introspect when you're in a crowd or when you're talking to people. You have to be alone. You have to spend quality time actually thinking about your desires, your needs, about some of the patterns of your behavior, and that is not often a pleasant process, quite frankly. And one thing that happened in writing The Laws of Human Nature, each chapter deals with a sort of a negative quality in our nature, more or less, you know, aggression, irrationality, grandiosity, envy, et ce- conformity, et cetera, et cetera. Coming to terms with the fact that you share these qualities is not pleasant. It's not easy. It's not fun, and I had to go through that in writing the book. I had to become aware of the fact that I, the writer of the book, am actually quite self-absorbed. I have narcissistic tendencies, right? But if you can't come to terms with the fact that you are by nature self-absorbed, how can you then begin to change it and become more empathetic and become more interested in other people? So I completely agree with what you're saying.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:29

   I mean, what you're talking about there to me is a radical honesty. It's a radical acceptance that, look, I may not wish to have these traits or these behaviors. I may judge other people for those behaviors. But actually, if I look in the mirror carefully and rationally, I may see some of those traits in myself. Do you get much pushback from people when they read these things initially and go, "Look, that's not me. I'm, I'm not self-obsessed"? Because you talk a lot about that at various parts of your writing, that actuallyYou know, many of us are a little bit self-obsessed, and actually we need to learn, as you say, to be more curious about other people than about ourselves, which I think is a really helpful thing, uh, to think about. But I don't know, what, what are your thoughts on that?

6. RGRobert Greene6:20

   Well, I think people who read, for instance, the chapter on narcissism and self-absorption, they understand what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that everyone out there is a narcissist on the level of, let's say, a Donald Trump or some of the great narcissists that we know in our, in, in news or in our lives, et cetera. I'm saying that it's a scale, right? There are what I call deep narcissists who their level of self-absorption never allows them to get out of it. I ex- I, I, I say that our self-esteem is kind of like an internal thermostat, and that at a certain point when it gets really low and we become so wrapped up in ourselves, we can't rise above a certain level to pay attention to other people. We're just so absorbed in our, in our own problems, our own needs, and we use people to get what we want, right? Now, we... There are people who are very low on that thermostat, and there are all of us who are kind of hovering and depending on circumstances which make us more depressed, in which we become more self-absorbed, we kind of fluctuate, but we are all on that scale, right?

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:31

   Yeah.

8. RGRobert Greene7:31

   So some people who push back are the ones who see like podcasts and videos where I say this and they go, "Well, that's not true. I know a lot of people in my life who are incredibly narcissistic and I'm not like them," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if you actually take the time to read the chapter, I recognize that it's a scale and there are people who fall much more deeply into it. You're probably not on that scale, but look in the mirror and recognize human nature by the way our brains are constructed, by the way we are, we are self-absorbed. You cannot get out of that fix-

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:05

   Yeah

10. RGRobert Greene8:06

    ... right? And, um, you have to understand the fact that you have these, these tendencies before you can begin to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to a conversation, I'm sitting in a bar or a restaurant with someone that I've met recently, I'm not really listening to them. You're kind of half listening to them. You're absorbed in your own thoughts, your own ideas, your own concerns, your own anxieties. You're half listening to them, and you're projecting onto them your own desires, your own needs, and your own wants, right?

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:39

    Yeah.

12. RGRobert Greene8:39

    If you can't recognize that, if you don't have that degree of self-awareness, I could write 8,000 pages, it won't make any difference. But you have to at least have that moment, that come to Muhammad moment where you see that, yes, you, when you are in a conversation, you are not really paying a deep attention-

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:58

    Yeah

14. RGRobert Greene8:58

    ... to people because you're not as interested in them as you are in your own thoughts and concerns, and you need to flip that around.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:07

    Yeah. It, it's so, so important that, that unless we can truly be transparent and honest with where we are at now and those tendencies that we have, we're, we're never gonna be able to make meaningful change, which is why we, in my view, stay locked in all kinds of negative cycles because we're pushing back and... You know, I once spoke, Robert, to Matthew McConaughey on this podcast a couple of years ago when his autobiography was out, and he said something to me that I've always thought about since that conversation. I was talking to him about what process he goes through when he's gonna play a different role. You know, how does he get into character? And he said something to the effect of this. "It's not about really getting into character. It's about finding that character inside of me. It's finding where does that live inside of me, then, then sort of really tapping into that." And that really surprised me and shocked me at the time 'cause I thought, I, I, I, I just assumed actors are trying to pretend to be someone else and, you know, how would they dress, how would they act, what are their mannerisms? But when he said, "No, I need to find that part inside of me," I found that pretty profound actually.

16. RGRobert Greene10:25

    Well, that has great application to daily life. Um, I can't remember, um, who I said it. I think it's either William James, the great psychologist, or somebody like that. But that if you wanna understand another person, you have to almost mimic them. You almost have to put yourself in not only mo- mentally, but even physically, and kind of put yourself in their shoes and see the element in them that is also in you. And one of the things that I try and say, to me it seems so logical and rational, is that we all descended from the same source. Although in this world we seem so divided and everyone, ethnicity, class, et cetera, the actual truth is our brains are essentially wired in the same way. We have descended from the same creature. If you pull back and look at it from the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, those differences that seem so sharp right now actually kind of vanish, right? And so if we all have the same kind of brains and we all s- come from the same evolutionary source, we are all going to have the same traits. And I'll give you one example. It's a very important part of the laws of human nature, but that I discuss in many of my books, which is the trait of envy.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:45

    Mm-hmm.

18. RGRobert Greene11:45

    And I say that envy is a quality that we all have. It's deeply embedded in human nature, but it's one thing that we never, ever admit to ourselves. You might admit, "Yeah, I can be self-absorbed. Yes, I can have a dark side. Yes, I can be irrational sometimes," et cetera. But you will very ever rarely admit that you feel envy towards another person, that you want what they have and that that causes you to behave a certain way.Right? And so it's a deep secret, and envy is something that's incredibly prevalent on social media. Social media is a tool for actually accelerating all of our envying tendencies. Well, if you look at the literature and you go back to hunter-gatherer societies which survived up until the 19th and even into the 20th century, envy plays a deep, deep role in their cultures. All of their- a lot of their rituals, like about giving gifts, is about making sure that nobody looks more important or more favored than another person because they know envy can be deadly and murderous when you're, it's only 40 of you living in a group, right?

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:53

    Mm-hmm.

20. RGRobert Greene12:54

    And they've shown, studies have shown that even primates like chimpanzees feel envy. This is deeply rooted in our nature, so stop trying to have this idea that, "Oh, I'm different. I'm different from other people. I'm better than they are. I don't have these negative qualities. I'm somehow superior." I tell people, "The person who tells you that I'm not a narcissist, I'm different, is actually revealing how deep their narcissism is because they're trying to show how different they are from other people."

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:25

    Yeah. You said envy is a quality. That was interesting for me. It's a quality. Uh, it served a role back then. You, you beautifully described why that was the case. I'd never really heard envy described like that before. I think envy, very few of us would call it a quality. A- a- and as you say, I think one of the reasons we don't admit it is because we feel people will look down on us. It's something that we don't want to have, even if we do have it.

22. RGRobert Greene13:56

    Right.

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:56

    So, I mean... And, and you, you br- you bring up social media and the online world, I guess, in general, but particularly social media. What do you think that has done to our human nature? Human nature being these core kind of principles that we all have. Now, from my understanding of your work, you know, we may all express, you know, different personality traits. We may have different characteristics. But at our core, we've got these laws, a- as you call them. Those, those laws exist in all of us. What do you think social media has done to them? And are any of the laws, I guess, more necessary now in the era of social media than perhaps they might have been 20, 30 years ago?

24. RGRobert Greene14:47

    Um, well, yes. I like to look at it in a slightly more macro way. So I say that human-- think of human nature, I say in the introduction to the book, that it's like a pawn that is moving us around. Our nature, we're not aware of it, and it's moving us on a chessboard and making us behave in ways that we're not even aware of. And this goes back hundreds of thousands of years, right? And so it's like this power that envelops the world and is actually influencing all of our decisions. Now, what I mean by that, to, to specify a little differently, is when you looked at the beginnings of the internet, going back to the early 2000s or in the late '90s, and I remember it very well. It w- it ha- well, there was a tremendous sense of freedom and liberation. We're gonna be able to communicate with people. We can connect to them on a higher level. We can sa- we can cut out the middleman. We can cut out mainstream media. How exciting. What-- It's like the Wild, Wild West. And then what happens is slowly, slowly, slowly, drip by drip by drip, human nature starts intervening and perverting that tool for liberation and freedom and turning it into this zone where it's about getting people to buy things and manipulating our emotions and making us hate each other and making us envy, you know, what other people have, et cetera, et cetera. This happens so many times and, and people have written about it. The invention of the telephone, which began as this kind of thing for business and just communicating, stuff like that, became this major source of gossip, et cetera. Things are created that have this kind of potential to be something fantastic, but our nature intervenes and now we see, like, the internet is like this zone where criminals can get, can, can, can thrive, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's, it happens again and again throughout the course of our history. And so I'm not saying that social media is inherently bad. I'm saying that our nature tends to pervert it that way, and if we could become aware and see that, we could perhaps change it. And you asked me, are there particular laws that are more and more relevant to, to what's going on. I will point out two of them. One is envy, which I already mentioned. So when you're on Instagram, and believe me, I'm as guilty as anyone. I use Instagram every day. I love it. But when you're sitting there day in and day out and you're looking at the amazing holidays that your friends are taking in Bali and how they're dating the most handsome, most beautiful woman on the planet and how they just are in this incredible car... People aren't taking pictures of themselves looking fat and waking up in the morning. They're all looking trim and beautiful and buffed out. They're all on these amazing vacations. They're not taking pictures of themselves in their kind of, you know, crappy, dingy apartments, et cetera. But it's making you think, like, "Well, I'm missing something. There's something I want out there that I don't have." And this is having incredible social impact on us. People far smarter than I are writing about the effects on envy on politics, on voting in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure it's happening all over the world. The other chapter that I talk about is the chapter on the shadow, which was deeply influenced by the great psychologist Carl Jung, who very eloquently talks about the shadow, and I'm trying to say that we have a dark side, and it's a dark side that we all have. You listening out there, you do have a shadow. You have a dark side, and it communicates itself outwardly in ways you're not even aware of.Well, social media and the internet became, become this great playground for venting all of your dark emotions and never having to pay a consequence. I'm talking about trollish behavior, where you can be as mean and nasty and say all the worst things to people, and nobody ever gets to know that you've done it, who you are, et cetera. It becomes like this area where you can vent. That shadow, it becomes a shadow land, in other words, right?

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:56

    Mm-hmm.

26. RGRobert Greene18:56

    And so you can present yourself as a social justice warrior. "I'm on the cause of justice and rightness." And at the same time, you're canceling people, you're making their lives miserable because you, it makes you feel like you're okay and justified. But it's actually a zone where you can play out and vent all of those dark impulses that in normal society are greatly discouraged. So the final thing I'll say is we are this incredibly sophisticated, technological, amazing animals. Look what we've created. But the internet and technology is actually in some ways making us revert and bringing out some of these most primitive qualities-

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee19:37

    Mm-hmm

28. RGRobert Greene19:37

    ... in human nature.

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee19:38

    Yeah. It, it's, it's really fascinating, Robert. Um, over the past years, I've met a lot of people face to face who I first came across on social media, and I'll be honest, some people I didn't particularly warm to on social media, when I met them in real life at a conference or an event, I thought, "Oh, wow, you're, you're completely different. Like, I really like you." You know, we, we get on, we're engaging, and we're having a great conversation. And I, I've, you know, I've written about this myself as well, and I, I've thought long and hard about this. And, you know, you mention narcissism and how we've all got narcissistic traits w- within us if we're honest enough to look at ourselves. When it comes to social media, do you feel that in many ways the narcissism that lives within all of us tends to get magnified? Because that's the nature of the medium. The medium wants you to share what you've done, what you're good at. You, you have this sort of perfectionist presentation. You know, it is about this, "Look at me, this is what I've done." I mean, being aware of this is great, but isn't it the nature of the medium? Is there anything, number one, we can do about that? And then I guess the follow-up to that, Robert, there's a- another big theme in your work that I love is this idea about non-verbal communication. In fact, you say there's a second language that we're all speaking, and it ain't with words, and I, I found that really, really powerful. And of course, on social media, the whole non-verbal communication piece is gone. So how do you think all those things play together?

30. RGRobert Greene21:27

    It's not that, um, the internet or social media inherently does that. So we could see a potential here, for instance, where... And I, and I had this sensation early on, as I said, in that first kind of frontier days of social media, where, wow, I have access to the in- to the lives, to the desires, to the wants of all these people around the world, right? People are writing me now that, you know, I, after my books, et cetera, from Japan, from Brazil, et cetera, and they're ex- they're opening themselves up and they're venting, and I can like, I can empathize more deeply now. I can understand people on a higher level. It's not inherently bad, social media. It, it could be an incredible tool for exercising your empathy because it c- actually can connect people, right? But the way it's designed now, it's designed now to manipulate emotions, right? As opposed to actually stepping back. It, so manipulating emotions makes you self-absorbed. When what you see is always geared towards making you angry or outraged, it's all about you, you, you, you, you. It makes you funnel deeper and deeper into yourself. I notice on this, um, site, I don't know if it exists in the UK, called Nextdoor, where it's telling, it's all about your own neighborhood and what's going on. And I get these emails. Every single goddamn email is about a crime, a burglary, somebody being assaulted, et cetera. And I'm going, "But that's not my neighborhood. I never see anything like that." They choose those particular posts algorithmically to get you angry and upset and worried. You're gonna click on it. It's clickbait. It's designed to manipulate your emotions. And when you get emotionally roiled, you're not thinking about other people. You're not thinking about your own neighborhood and what's going on.

Episode duration: 1:29:04