Hey, everybody, it's Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show. Welcome today. I wanna go and expand a little bit on the topic that I talked about in the last episode. The last episode was the short version, To The Point. Really tried to challenge myself to keep it short. I did an okay job. This one, I wanna expand a little bit more on the methodology around how I got to that topic, how I thought about it, why I mentioned certain things in that episode, why I skipped other things.

A lot of things that I would talk about here are kinda like about philosophy, about knowing versus not knowing, non-duality, all these kinds of like sort of esoteric, metaphysical considerations. And I think that that's really interesting. Those are the things that I really particularly like to talk about. So this is a little bit more an after-cuff episode. So if you just want practical advice, go back to the previous episode.

Short, it's focused on that. This is a little bit more of a philosophical rant, if you will. I'm going to start with a quote. Outrage culture is the weaponization of emotion, and the elevation of emotion above reason. It's the new normal where moral righteousness rises in proportion to your level of outrage. The more outraged one is, the more authentic one is perceived to be. And the more authentic one is, the greater one's moral standing.

Reason, rationale, and evidence be damned. By Dan Crenshaw, if I pronounce that right, from his book Fortitude, Resilience in an Age of Outrage. I know nothing about this author or this book. I just like this quote. That's why I cherry picked it. So this is not recommending this by any stretch. I literally know nothing about it. But the one thing that I wanted to pick out there is the weaponization of emotion.

And the more outraged and righteous you are, the more you get eyeballs, you are perceived to be authentic, and reason, rationale, and evidence go out the window. And I wanted to talk about that in context of really the same topic as the last shorter video on emotion regulation, where we focused on sort of the limitation of checking the facts. And I tried to bring in effectiveness, another DBT skill there to go a little bit like next level.

And I've gone through this. I mean, obviously, I do a lot of content on DBT, and I think that DBT is super helpful when you're in a situation that you're often emotionally dysregulated. So meaning that A, it's upsetting to you, and B, you're at risk of taking decisions that will harm you, right? So the examples that I've given in a previous episode as well, it's like if you get really angry and you're about to punch your boss, that has very clear external negative consequences, and you want to learn from that, right?

But it's not that emotions are bad. Emotions teach us or help us to do things in the moment. We have all these different brain structures in our head, and some of them are really fast, and they kind of like work in real time. You just have to figure it out. You have a couple of seconds or milliseconds or whatever to respond, and you just respond. And then there are the more like the planning cognitive capabilities, like the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus in a way as well, where you look at experiences in the past, you try to think about the future, and you try to change strategies to survive better, right?

But we're talking about this emotion regulation stuff. We're really talking about retraining our emotions in a way to respond better in the moment. So in a way, an aspect of doing this stuff well is reflection, but the outcome is being able to trust your own impulses in the moment. That's like, I think, where it ultimately would grow towards. And if I compare like sort of role models that I have in my life, you probably know people like that as well, that have the same emotions that we do, get upset, get all the things, but they seem to be in the right proportion for them, they can act on them, and things are just kind of good for them if they act on those impulses.

And that's really like, I think, the state that everyone wants to get in. And that's partially something that's trainable. So, I think that that is not the same as knowing you're right and that you have the facts on your side. And that's why when I was like designing this episode, or the previous episode, honestly, well, it's one and the same, I started having like sort of a problem with checking the facts.

And although I really like this skill, and I've got a lot of help in my life from this, there's also like sort of a metaphysical problem that I have with that, because I do buy into... One of the worldviews that I like to inhabit is the worldview, like sort of a non-dualist approach, where like the object-subject distinction kind of like collapses. Like we like to think of, I'm the thing over there, but out there, there's something objective happening, and I, as a subject, I can subjectively experience that, blah, blah, blah, but there's still something objective happening.

There's atoms moving from A to B, there's sound waves, like, and those things are not interrupted or entangled, really in a measurable way with me, the subject. So I can, as a scientist over here, put a ruler next to like sort of surface, and I can determine it's two meters, or something like that, right? But at the same time, when we get to more of these subjects that involve emotion regulation, we get like sort of, we change scenes into a realm where facts are not, well, I wouldn't say aren't as important, but at the same time, they're not.

So what do I mean by that? So actually, before I do that, let's go through these skills again, because what are we doing when we're checking the facts, we're supposed to look at what sort of like physically happened, take away our interpretations or thoughts and emotions. Right? So the example that I gave in the other episode is someone rolled their eyes at you. Right? There's interpretations that come with that.

Some of them, they make sense, as in if someone rolls their eyes at you, that is a social behavior that we've learned. It means something if you do that. Right? It has a significance in our society. Maybe if you do that in, I don't know, in the Amazon forest, that wouldn't really communicate. I don't know. I know some ways that humans express themselves, such as celebrating like this, that communicates the world over.

But this might be one of these subtle ones that is different from culture to culture. Right? It doesn't really matter. But when I'm going and checking the facts, what I'm supposed to check for is the fact that I'm angry, if that is justified by the fact that someone rolled their eyes at me. Right? And generally, you're angry because of a thing, because you feel like you're not being taken seriously.

And your point is you ought to be taken seriously. Right? If we then decide that this is the case, we can go and engage in problem solving. So we can interact with that person, and we can try to get our objectives met. Or we can engage in opposite action, which is seeing that our emotion actually probably is not justified. We are still experiencing it. But then DBT gives us a framework to really do the opposite of that emotion impulse.

Again, I have more elaborate episodes on that. So I'm really skimming on the surface here. But it gives you a framework that I can truly go fully opposite to that action. And over time, if I do that five, ten times, my emotions are going to change. That is the prediction. That is sort of the research that DBT is based on. So instead of challenging the thought and breaking down the thought and trying to change the thought directly, which you could see a little bit more of the CBT approach, where you're really trying to...

You have these lists of black and white thinking and all these different cognitive distortions. So you really try to see the cognitive distortions. In this way, it's sort of similar, but you're not trying to fuck with the emotion yet. I mean, this depends on practitioner to practitioner. Myself, people that I've worked with, will really like to underline, like, you don't want to change the emotion. Like, you want to change the emotion in a way because it's upsetting, but you also don't.

Like, this is also such an important part of DBT, where acceptance and change, like, they are these dialectical, dialectically opposed things that we both want, and they feel like they're opposed, but they're not. We actually have to and accept the fact that we're experiencing that emotion and still do work to change it, because if we estimate or we determine that the emotion is not appropriate to the situation, and this is often if you're dealing with, like, depression or anxiety or something like that, right?

But it's kind of a deep rabbit hole as well. So this is already where you want to get philosophical, because, I mean, partially it's hard to estimate whether or not we should feel anxious or should feel depressed or something like that, about that, because we just kind of do. But I do very much believe in whether or not we should do a thing, we can act in a direction, and we will feel different.

So what I mean by that, the classical example is, I just heard a talk or a podcast with Jordan Peterson, who said that as well, it's a very known fact. It's like, the worst thing you can do is get sad, that happens to everyone, and then go isolate. Those two things exacerbate each other. I know you get sad, that's fine. You seek connection. Because if you isolate, it's going to get worse.

So that's a good example of your emotion urge might be to isolate, depending on the sadness, depending on how you're trained, depending if you had caregivers that were reliable, etc. But that's really where you can get into a very depressed state. And if you don't do that, if you try to, like you connect with people actually, that's where you will start feeling different. And in a way, let's take these two different branches, right?

In the one branch you isolated, and another branch you started like talking to someone, and you're feeling in a different way. Which of the two is how you should feel? Let's say that you're sad about how you were treated by someone, or global warming, or this and that war, or the state of society, or that the Republicans are doing this, or the Democrats are doing that, or Antifa is doing, you know, the third thing, right?

You do these two different, there's two different branches, one of them where you feel like a lot worse. You're really, like, super sad, and maybe you have, like, suicidal thoughts, and it's terrible, and the world, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. The other one is you go, like, mingle with some people, talk to some people that you can trust, and you feel bad. Which of the two is, like, the right way to feel, right?

And then you have to bring, like, sort of an whole other layer of thinking to that, right? Because how can you say what is correct in a situation like that? Should we feel, in a certain way, like, sort of negativistic about the state of the world, of how things are? And this is another thing where effectiveness comes in, which again I've talked about, is effectiveness in this sense is, is acting in this way, following, like, these thoughts that I'm having, like, remember the meditation way they often talk about, like, helpful thoughts and unhelpful thoughts?

By keeping engaging with thoughts, have I determined with whether or not they're helpful or unhelpful? And if I've determined that they're unhelpful, why, why am I, why am I still engaging with, with, am I being effective? It should have never happened. That's terrible because we should have a different universe without like blah, blah, blah. One could argue for that, or argue for the moment that humanity stopped being hunter-gatherers, and they started agriculture, that's when everything went to shit, or whatever, right?

You can argue for that, and that can be a worldview, but guess what? You're not gonna be very happy, right? And you can have a different worldview, where you focus on different aspects, you get your meaning from different places, and then suddenly, you are happy. And that's kind of like ultimately what we're shooting for. So if we're really honest about these things, it's like, from an absolute perspective, we don't know, and it doesn't matter.

And we can never really know how things should be. Should be, like from like, you know, God's eye. Like how does God think that this world should be trash on the street? What does God think? Right, right. Like, you can't know. I mean, and you could argue there should be, because there is, and God is what is. But anyways, now we go down a different rabbit hole, and what is God, and etc, etc, etc.

So let's not right now. So we can't really, truly, truly know, and it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter perspective. That's more like, gosh, that more has to do with sort of absolute knowledge. I don't know how applicable it is. It doesn't matter in the sense of like, whatever happens is fine. Like the world doesn't care. Like if I estimate that something is terrible, I can't know that it's terrible.

Let's say that I say it's terrible, and then I attach a consequence to it. Like I destroy it, or I destroy myself or something like that. Like the grand scheme of things is it doesn't matter. Even like if it's atrocious, and you wouldn't know if that was the right thing. It doesn't matter. That's like sort of like the absolute perspective, whatever happens happens, and that's fine. But that's backed right now, right?

Like that's because that seems like something to me that a lot of people don't really think through, but it's really obvious to me. Like I think about these things a lot. So then you're always in the situations when you're acting on emotions, which, by the way, we're doing like 95% of the time is like sort of, that's the model that I use. You're not always as aware of it, but even the super rational people and logical people, that's your dogma that you're going for.

But it doesn't mean still you're acting on emotion and emotion that whatever you believe in, what logic is, is that it is important, and you don't know that. You don't know if your skepticism is the way to live. You know that you use your skepticism to pick apart the Christian worldview, and you're just like, oh, they're wrong there, there, there, there, there, and then you pick apart the Jewish perspective, and you're like, oh, they're down, you know, this is wrong with that.

And you do that with all the worldviews. But your skepticism isn't turning in towards itself. Like, why is a skeptic perspective, why is that the right world view? Why, if I become like a full blown skeptic and I question everything, except skepticism itself, why does it, why would that bring me something better? Why would breaking everything down be a better world view than Christianity? And then what you discover is like, skepticism is great as long as you also turn it in to itself.

It's just seeing like, okay, let's be skeptical about my skepticism. What is that doing to me or for me, right? What kind of power is that giving to me? So this is all to say to like really get back to the original point here is that when we're looking at our emotion regulation, I was saying that no matter what our world view is, we're mainly driven by emotions anyway.

We have a ton of biases that are made up of the things that we know, that we've learned, how we grow up, society we live in, etc. And if we're very honest about that, that means all of these things really are our preferences. They're not absolutely true. So we're just really operating, really I feel the most essential thing, what is going on here is we're really operating from our perspective all the time.

And our perspective is something that we can influence as well by our behavior. That's what I was referring to with that branch of like, hey, I feel sad. Branch A, I go talk to someone about it. Branch B is I go isolate. And we both know how these things turn out. So it's all about our perspective. And ultimately, it is about happiness. And maybe happiness is not the best way of saying that.

Meaning, fulfillment, right? And then I really love Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. He spent time in a concentration camp being like, I mean, a prisoner there, but also a doctor. So he would take care of like other prisoners that would fall ill. And he noticed that there were two types of inmates, or however you want to call them. The ones that would come in there and they would just reminisce about the past or just think about the future, and just either be in the past or go towards the future, and the future being like whenever they get out, they would wither and die.

And the other type was they will be able to find some kind of sense of meaning in the struggle that they were going through like right there in the concentration camp. And these were the ones that would not fall sick, right? So I find that a very, it's of course like a story, a parable as it were. But I find that a really powerful message, right? If that was true for someone who was working in a concentration camp under abysmal circumstances, most of us know how terrible it was to be in a situation like that.

But if we can still find a sense of meaning in there, then, I mean, so much of us are in situations that are so much better. And as long as we make sure that we are not becoming a victim, and in a way, we are always sort of a victim, but more get into that ownership mentality. Because that's the moment that you're a victim, you just reason about the world doing things to you, things are being done to you, and you're not really getting anything out of it.

It's just happening to you, where the owner always looks at like, how is this working for me? And that can get so extreme to people being in a concentration camp. And deriving some kind of meaning out of that, because they can help people. They can ease their suffering. So I think those are very powerful lenses to look at, to really sort of drill down as what we're here trying to do, right?

Like if we're just cut out all the bullshit, it means that checking the fact that skill doesn't really do that much for us. I have another tangent on that. Like this episode is one long tangent, so deal with it. And that is Hume's law. So Hume's law is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred based on purely descriptive factual statements. An alternative definition of Hume's law is that if P implies Q and Q is moral, then P is moral.

So with a little bit more text, what he talks about, you might know this as the is-ought problem as well. That's how they refer to it as well. So basically where it comes down to is, I'll just keep reading here. You cannot, according to Hume, derive an ought from an is, at least without a supporting ought premise. Like this is important. You cannot derive an ought from an is, at least without a supporting ought premise.

Anyways, in other words, if you have a supporting ought premise, then you can derive an ought from an is. Right? But otherwise, describing something does not tell you what to do with it. And the example that I've heard before is you can describe all properties of the moon, how big it is, what the mass is, what the elements are that are present, you know, gold and metals and whatever, and, you know, what speed the moon has and the distance and all these things.

But that tells you zero about what you should do. Should you mind the moon? Should you live on the moon? Should you destroy the moon? Should you pray to the moon? Should you, like, it doesn't apply, right? It doesn't apply. So what you ought to do depends on your premise. Like if I'm a deeply curious person, I would maybe want to go to the moon. And if I'm a businessman and I want to make a lot of money, I might want to build like a mining installation on the moon, right?

But just describing the supposed facts doesn't really get us anywhere, which is interesting if we look at checking the facts, right? So, going on. Deciding that you ought to not punch someone because it would harm him presupposes that causing harm is bad or immoral. This presupposition is good enough for most people. The blunder, according to Hume, is one of logic. Factual statements are logically different from moral statements, so no factual statements can by themselves entail what people morally ought to do.

So, Hume would most likely agree that punching someone in the face is wrong, but he'd say an argument against it is unnecessary even mistaken. People feel the wrongness. They feel that one ought not punch another in the face, just like a punched person feels pain. So, when we're checking the facts, everything that we come up with in a way doesn't matter, because if I describe all these things that this person did to me, that doesn't tell me in the least what I do next.

The only thing that checking the facts does for me is it strips more and more of my interpretations away. So, it forces me to be more... feel less right about myself in a way. So, it questions myself. I'm checking the facts. I'm going like, okay, well, I feel X. Well, is that justified? That's really what I'm doing when I'm doing the checking the facts skill. I'm doubting if my emotion is correct.

And that would probably be the better name for a skill, but I'm not going to say that I know better in this context. But it's not really about the facts. It's really about, given what happened, what do I think my emotions should be? What kind of emotions do I want? And not even which emotions do I want? What action urges do I want? So in a way, if you look again at the is-ought problem, it's really about, what do you call it again?

That supporting ought premises, and that's your moral framework. So really what we're continuously doing is we're dragging with us in life or a web of beliefs how we think the world works and how we should act. Sometimes these things are really explicit and we know, because they're like our political views. And when we start talking about them and we say like, Trump this and Biden this and like whatever, those kind of things, those are really conceptual.

And some of the things are more baked in, as in if I would go out on the street and someone just like sucker punches me, I'm going to react how I'm going to react without thinking about it. Like they're just like sort of kind of baked in. And there's a billion gray areas in between that, right? So, gosh, lost my train of thought there. So, yeah, I was talking about our Web of Beliefs.

So really, what my takeaway is after looking at this skill from multiple different angles is, yes, it is still important to sort of look at the facts, look at what happened and try to not say something like, they insulted me, but to more say like, oh, well, they said X, Y, and Z, and the tone of their voice was, seemed to me this, this, and this, right?

Because then you're just, the facts that you're stating are your opinions, in a way, right? Because I'm not necessarily saying, they were aggressive, because they seemed aggressive to me, right? It's more an interpretation that I have. And I think the fact, whether or not they were aggressive, what their intention was, in a way, that doesn't even really apply. And in a way, it does, in a way, it doesn't.

I find that really hard to put into words. In like sort of practical life, it does make a difference if someone was aggressive and then denies it. That's different from a situation where someone actually wasn't aggressive, but I interpreted this so. Like in a way, in like a karmic way, these situations are different. But I'm also like in this bind that I can never determine which of the two situations it actually, actually 100 percent, I can never really, really know it.

I can hardly even know it for myself. And I was right there in my own head, right? But in a situation with someone else, it gets incredibly complicated, right? Because they might be lying about what their intention were. They might actually also not been aware what their intention was, and they might have multiple intentions. They might have a smaller self and a higher self, you know. So it explodes in complexity pretty quickly, which is why I'm just not really that fan of checking the facts, unless there are very, very large consequences, and you have a history of emotion dysregulation, which of course is where this skill is for.

So I get it. I get it. I'm not saying that this is a bad skill. I'm just like trying to see if we like whittle it down, where do we end up with? So it's a great way to start. And I think the next stage, and that's why I talked about that in the shorter version of this, is the effectiveness, where we instead of focus on exactly what happened and what are my feelings about that, or my feelings correct, to more let that sort of shit go, and more go towards how do I want to react and be in general in life.

Because I can never really truly know the facts, and the facts, like I try to explain, like these, where do we thinking that, where do we think, I can't really actually, really, really prove it ultimately when you get down to it. So I might as well act the way that I want to act to people. And that probably means assuming the best in the situation. I mean, there are some things that you can really place like sort of in the fact bucket, as in whether or not someone was talking aggressively, that's, you can debate on that.

But then there are some things that actually, actually happened, like if someone pushed you, for example, right? That that's something your interpretation is clear in a situation like that. And for all intents and purposes, you're sure about that. Like if that would come in front of a court of law, like you could put your hand on the Bible and swear that that's what happened. Although, of course, you can never actually really 100% know that that's true.

And maybe you really thought that they pushed you, but like something else happened. Maybe it was someone else or something like that. We all know, like sort of the movies we watch where we think it's one thing, and then ultimately it's another. But so I think that the effectiveness skill here really focuses on outcome. And that takes away partially some of the egoic knee jerk reaction, egoic objectives.

So you're trying to more focus on the higher perspective of, sure, there might, something might have happened where I was insulted, right? Or someone wasn't taking me seriously. But let's put that in the back burner. We do want to reflect on that. We do want to think about that. But for the time being, we just want to act on our default web of beliefs, and we want to keep working on that web of beliefs, right?

So we then think about that is-ought statement again. Then the presupposing ought, so that's just really our world view, our web of beliefs, our moral standard becomes much more important. And then the tiny is and ought that follows from that is, like, it's, they become relatively thin. So instead of having to do, like, all this work on determining exactly what the is is, and then, you know, filtering through that, what I now ought to do based on, like, you could sort of like cut out that crap and just focus on what do I in general want to do as a human in life?

How do I generally want to approach situations with people that I want to have relationships with? So to skew away, general principle being to skew away from egoic objectives, because a lot of these objectives that get raised, they're not that important. They're not that interesting. The relationships with the people that you have are probably a lot more important. And acting in accordance with self-respect, which is really, I see the self-respect part as the presupposing ought.

Like, if I have my morals and ethics, and that is of course something that I have to, like you can do that unconscious and you can do that conscious, but that is one of the most essential, the essential things to focus on and make sure that that is trustworthy, because I think that there are lots of situations where that is not trustworthy. So what you will see with something like this is that it's very personal, because a different person might be much more skewed to a different side of effectiveness, right?

Like there's objectives effectiveness, relationship effectiveness, and self-respect effectiveness in this skill. So there might be people that habitually destroy their self-respect by just wanting to preserve the relationship, although the relationship is not to be preserved, or to just go for objectives. Or maybe you skew more in a direction that you never go for the objective. You never know what your mind pops into your head, your intention there.

You're just really complacent. You're kind of like a doormat. So in a way, we all have sort of different vulnerabilities there. But how it seems to me is that anyone can, if anyone with any of these like pre-existing vulnerabilities, at least that's I think how DBT calls them, the principle I think is still the same. Because if acting in that way, like not chasing after your objectives, if you've really observed that and analyzed that and reflected on that, and you're okay with that, then that's fine.

Then me over here could say, well, no, you are a doormat, or you should be a doormat, but it doesn't apply. If this is how you feel very comfortable in life, and the relationships that I would call toxic are important to you, like I can't really, but that's fine, right? And it's tricky. It's tricky because some situations, someone can be in an actual toxic or abusive relationship and still not get out of that because of all kinds of different factors there, right?

Like they can be applying the effectiveness skill and checking the fact skill very well by themselves within their little echo chamber. Because that's just sort of the context that they grew up with, or got accustomed to. Oftentimes, if you're checking the facts or looking at your effectiveness, if a party that is in a way abusing you is doing something very heinous, you would hear from these people is that they discredit it.

It's like, yeah, well, he hit me, but of course, I provoked him. Like I shouldn't have done that, you know? And that reasoning is, like from an external perspective, you can say is harmful. And this is where these things get so complicated, because as long as you're good with it, you're good with the situation, you're like more or less happy, and you're truly happy, like then there's no problem.

But in all these abusive situations, I would say is that there's of course not the actual happiness underneath, right? There's actually like probably deep unhappiness, but like a fear around certain things. But if a person in that situation would really spend significant time reflecting on that, and journaling on that, and meditating on that, I think that that would of course change over time. So, I don't know, this is a, it's a long story that comes down to the same thing I've talked about in the shorter version of this.

It's, I think that the most important thing, if it comes to emotion regulation, ultimately is training your emotional system so that it's reliable. So, and that, there's two components to that. Well, yeah, there's two components to that. There is being sort of honest as you're interpreting a situation, because checking the facts is partially to take away your dishonesty, right? To, this is where the quote in the beginning comes into play.

Like, you can, if you do checking the facts in properly, you can use it to become even more right than you originally were, right? You can say, oh, yeah, well, they rolled their eyes at me, or they did this movement with their arm or something like that. Therefore, I am right. And now that I know that I'm right, I'm even more righteous. And, you know, that that can can really exacerbate the problem quite a bit.

And the other aspect of this is just to be really, really clear of how you want to be in general in in in life, what your morals, what your values and what your beliefs are. And that requires a lot of introspection, and it requires taking, like, sort of breaks from everyday, everyday life to reflect. So I guess after this whole long winded philosophical detour, and there's actually even like more to to go into, which I will probably do at one point in the future.

But, yeah, these skills are very important, as long as you're in situations where there's an external thing that's happening that's really bad, as you're getting in trouble, right? You're getting, you're getting hurt. And the moment that it gets like more gray and more gray, and you're more in a situation that's kind of like stable and kind of okay, they kind of like lose their power, because there's not that much definition anymore.

Like it's not as stark what the differences are, and therefore it's harder to act, to problem-solve or to do opposite action, because, you know, the outcomes or the behavior that you can do is all like relatively closer together. And it becomes more important to decide whether or not your emotion is justified or not, because if you have this strong external reason that if you act on the emotion, something's going to go horribly wrong, okay?

But if, no matter if you act on the emotion or act opposite to the emotion, things will be fine regardless, gets a little bit more tricky, because it becomes just personal preference. Which outcome do I like better? And that goes all into, I guess, the effectiveness. Last thing that I will say about that is that I feel like what I really like about effectiveness as well, is that you can really relate it to your life purpose or your values, because you can always try to move closer to where you want to go.

Like let's say that. You would normally, a personal example is, I can easily, like my attention can be snatched away by something that gets me like a discount or a new credit card with like reward points or something like that. That can suddenly become an objective, right? And that can, you know, in a way like hurt a relationship as in I'm not interacting with people because I'm in some research tunnel doing stuff.

And then afterwards, if I come out of that research tunnel, I'm like kind of annoyed with myself because I know that I've like been wasting, wasting my time because it doesn't matter. Like getting the highest cash back is not one of my life purpose values. It's not that I'm going to have on my tombstone. This guy really knew how to squeeze out every, you know, it doesn't matter.

It's stupid. So the effectiveness can be really helpful to keep aligning you time after time after time to like sort of the highest thing that you would want to do. So then your objective does become the objective effectiveness becomes important, but it becomes almost like sort of synonym with your self-respect in a way, because your objectives are to handle in relation to your self-respect, and your self-respect is all about improving yourself.

And relationships play a part in that as well. Anyways, I know this was a different episode from what I usually do. I actually lose lots of time or invest lots of time preparing, and this is more like the Kerouacian stream of consciousness kind of things that I honestly really enjoy doing. So, yeah, I hope some of you do as well. Let me know if this sparks any other thoughts, and I'd be happy to hear about that.

And for now, thanks very much to making it to the end of the episode. It's been Vincent for The Meaningful Shit Show, and I will see you next time.