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#1080 - Robert Pantano - The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness

Modern Wisdom

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  • Why Self Awareness Feels Like A Poison
    • Robert Pantano argues self-awareness is both the mind’s poison and its miracle because attachment meets a chaotic world that destroys everything we love.
    • The same consciousness that creates suffering also makes beauty, meaning, hope, and wonder conceptually possible. Transcript: Chris Williamson Why is self-awareness a problem? Robert Pantano Self-awareness is a problem. Well, first of all, I think it’s important to recognize that we often think about self-awareness as a good thing. We generally think about it as a gradient. So we might refer to somebody as being more or less self-aware than others and more is typically assumed as better. When I’m referring to self-awareness, I’m referring to just the fact that we are aware of a self at And so the mere fact that we have a certain form of consciousness that provides us that Sense of self is a problem for a number of reasons. Self-awareness by a process of evolution that doesn’t really care. Obviously, care I’m using loosely there because evolution doesn’t care at all about anything besides it’s just continuation propagation. But the experience of consciousness and self-awareness from the first person perspective is not central to the reason for why self-awareness and consciousness arrived in the form That humans experience it. And so we are often at odds with the fundamental nature of reality in existence by virtue of the self-awareness, in my view, at least. And the reason for that is as a self who is aware of that self, we attach to that self. We attach to the ideas of that self. We attach to people and things and our desire to make sense of our perception and understanding through all of the concepts that we form by nature of having that degree of awareness. And yet reality in existence is fickle, chaotic, uncertain. We’re going to lose everybody and everything through time or distance, decay, age, or illness, or death. And so we find ourselves in this sort of cosmic ocean where the waves are crashing on our heads constantly, and yet we must continue because we are also a part of the same substrate that Built us that needs continuation. So it puts us in this very peculiar position where we can feel the intensity and pain and suffering that seems from a conscious individual entity terrible. And yet we just refuse to give up. We must endure. And so that’s why it’s problematic. But also, obviously, I see the other side of that coin. And the paradox of self-awareness, in my view, is that self-awareness, self-consciousness, self-apprehension is the most horrific, terrifying thing in the known universe. And yet it is the most beautiful thing in the known universe, because as far as we’re aware, it’s the only thing that allows conceptual understanding of existence and reality. So we can form the very idea of beauty and wonder and meaning and purpose and hope. (Time 0:00:00)
  • Go Forward When Self Awareness Starts Hurting
    • Move forward, not backward, once self-analysis opens a can of worms because you cannot return to the version of yourself that never asked the question.
    • Robert Pantano says some people need practical tactics, while others reduce suffering by embracing confusion and uncertainty. Transcript: Chris Williamson There a way to become self-aware without it becoming self-destructive? Robert Pantano I think so. I think that it’s a spectrum. It’s a gradient of you start from maybe a very, I don’t want to say a low level of self-awareness because that reduces it. It’s not like that. Where you can realize that. And then it might, there’s a certain experience of difficulties and confusions and sufferings that they are just, they exist for themselves and you struggle to justify them. You struggle to deal with them. And I think if you continue on that path, you get to a point where you become more comfortable with the confusions and the uncertainties. And you don’t get better at justifying them. You don’t get better at dealing with the problems of being a conscious entity in the world, but you get better at recognizing that the lack of answers, the lack of stability, the lack Of rigidness is par for the course and par for the beauty of the course. And that, I think, is the ultimate goal to strive for when it comes to these sorts of topics and questions. Chris Williamson I think a lot of people have this sense that the more that they learn about themselves, the more difficult life becomes. That there’s a kind of enjoyment, freedom. There’s a freedom in naivety, would be a way to put it. And that the less naivety that they have, the more challenging the world seems to be. There’s complexity and responsibility and self-doubt and self-esteem issues come in. And there’s an awareness of what I could have done. Standards kind of begin to rise, but in kind of squirrely ways about virtue. If you’ve got a critical mind, you find an ever-increasing number of ways to derogate success, even if you manage to achieve the success, because you were aware of all of the ways that You might have lied or cajoled or coerced or not been fully virtuous en route to achieving the thing. Whereas previously, you were just happy to have fucking done it. And then, yeah, this tighter and tighter spiral, this ever increasing resolution that you look at the world with, I think to a lot of people feels like a personal curse. I think it feels like an increase in self-awareness just equates to an increase in suffering. Yeah. Robert Pantano I mean, first of all, I resonate with that reaction and I think there’s validity in that reaction. And if you feel that way, that’s justified, that makes sense to me. I feel that way often. I think most people feel that way when they start to, like you said, unravel the absurdity of a lot of what we are and what we’re doing. And there is perhaps a better version of being of existence from a human perspective that dulls that, that dilutes that. But unfortunately, you don’t really get to choose whether or not you are or are not thinking about those things, experiencing those thoughts and feelings. So you kind of, you know, you don’t think, in my view, you don’t think thoughts, thoughts, you know, arrive in your head after the sort of conveyor belt of experiences and neurology and All of that. And so you ultimately wind up with these questions and thoughts and concerns, these, you know, a certain proximity to those thoughts and concerns that become very difficult to experience And manage. And it might make you envious of the idea of not feeling that way and not experiencing that proximity. But unfortunately, once you start worrying about something, or once you start thinking about something, that can of worms is fully opened and you can’t close it. You have to figure out how to deal with it, how to move forward. And I find that the best way to deal with those sorts of cans of worms or those tunnels is forward, not back, because backwards, that end is closed. In terms of the tunnel metaphor, you can’t return to some form of yourself, some version of yourself that hasn’t already, you know, wondered, questioned, pondered, or become concerned About those sorts of things. And so I see that it’s quintessential to not put those things aside. If you’re experiencing the sufferings and pains of almost self-alienation and self-confusion, you have to move forward and figure out how to, in some people’s cases, it’s maybe resolving Them through practical and tactical methodology. And in other people’s cases, it might be more of an embracement of those feelings. (Time 0:08:14)
  • Regret Denies The Limits You Actually Had
    • Robert Pantano frames regret as hindsight pretending you had more freedom than your actual constraints allowed in the moment.
    • With the same brain, information, physiology, and circumstances, he says you would make the same decision again every time. Transcript: Chris Williamson I think one of the things that comes along as a side dish with a lot of self-awareness is people’s increase in rumination, sort of whimsical, wistful, remembering regret. Robert Pantano What have you learned about regret? Well, I think regret is very interesting because regret implies that you could have done You could have done better than you had in a particular moment of your life, which in my view, I get the impulse, I get the sentiment. The clock of reality, 100% of the time you’re arriving at that same moment as your same self with the same brain, the same physiology, the same information, and the same external circumstances. There’s no way you could have made any different of a decision. And so regret is sort of an understandable illusion of our consciousness where it makes us feel like there’s a lot of possibilities and um we can be deluded by our hindsight and our ability To reference back and forth between time but there is there is no world in which you didn’t make all the decisions you’ve made putting aside maybe sort of quantum you know multi-world Theories but in this world the world that we’re talking about and in there’s no version that you could have done anything differently and that brings into sort of um you know the the concept Of free will which personally i i don’t believe in in the in the sense that we typically refer to it as um But yeah, if you consider free will as a part of the equation, and even if you don’t, I see no world, I see no logic that makes sense of regret being, it’s an understandable reaction, but certainly not a rational reaction, which I know we oscillate between emotion, feeling, And logic. But I just think that regret exists in an illusory realm of our perception. Chris Williamson It’s a weird one because I think the free will argument is in an interesting category, something that might be literally true but figuratively useless. We might be a deterministic set of dominoes all the way from the big bang until this conversation right here but it’s functionally pointless to believe that as far as i can see um you you Need to go so deep into non-attachment to i couldn’t have done any differently but you need to not overshoot into nihilism and fatalism and it’s just fucking it’s too hard. But if we stay, if we shelve the discussion around determinism and you say, okay, you get to go back. You didn’t make a decision before you got to the point at which you made a decision, or you didn’t do a thing, or you did do a thing after or before you wish that you had and you want to do it Differently. As far as I can see, sort of reading your perspective, regret is kind of like a refusal to accept the limits of foresight. Like you couldn’t, you couldn’t have chosen differently under the same conditions and an acceptance of necessity kind of helps to dissolve regret. I think that’s very well put. Robert Pantano I think, and to your point, you could even put aside the deterministic, the potential deterministic nature of reality. You’re still limited by the same constraints in any given moment. It doesn’t mean that maybe there’s some sort of deterministic ultimate reality that was going to pan out the way it has and did. But it does mean that you are always limited in every moment by a set of constraints. Your physiology, the condition of your mind, your emotional state, the information you have, the most recent influences you’ve experienced, all of that is going to cause you to make A decision. And whether it’s built into the laws or the nature of the unfolding of reality is irrelevant at that point. It’s just you are going to make the same decision over and over again. To regret having made that decision is to deny the very fact that you’re always going to be limited by a set of constraints. And unless you intentionally decided to make the less viable decision, the worst decision in that moment, which I mean, obviously there are masochists and so forth, but for the most Part, people are trying to make good decisions that make sense to them in any given moment. And so you’re always trying your best given those constraints. And it absurd to think that you could have done or would have done any better. And like you put very well, it’s sort of this foresight, hindsight equilibrium that you just sort of stretch and contort to make the most sense for your current reality. And I also think, I think another important point of what regret tends to point to is a lack of embrace around the fact that there are no conditions of your life that are going to resolve The fundamental tensions that we often experience, which is, you know, we want a sense of certainty, a sense of happiness and ultimate resolve, a sense of having made all the right decisions, Having done everything right, and all these pieces are in order. That’s a sort of underlying desire that we all experience. That that’s not going to be the case or not. (Time 0:13:42)
  • JK Rowling Turned Rejection Into Momentum
    • Chris Williamson uses J.K. Rowling’s poverty, depression, and 12 publisher rejections to show how adversity can become launch fuel.
    • He ties it to the line, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. Transcript: Chris Williamson You’ve got that, you know that Cormac McCarthy line, you never know what worst luck your bad luck has saved you from. I do not know that line, but I love it. I love how that sounds. Fucking love that line. You never know what worst luck your bad luck has saved you from. That’s beautiful. Robert Pantano No, I love that. Chris Williamson Well, you’ve got that story about the guy asking for directions, which is pretty similar. Yes. Robert Pantano And so, yeah, I mean, I’ve written a story called The Nova Effect. And I’ve also done a lot of similar explorations around the idea that you know we basically never know this is sort of playing off a Kurt Vonnegut line we never know the good luck from the Bad luck until the story’s over and and for you know for all of us we don’t the story never ends until we’re not even around and so you never quite can discern what was good and what was bad For you or for a collective until it’s reached its you know ultimation and um yeah that goes for each of our individual lives where it’s it’s the same case it’s we we feel in any given moment That good some good fortune is going to lead ultimately to good fortune forever thereafter but that’s not how life works or reality works. It’s a sort of spurring off of multiple lines that one good thing, one advantage could lead you to a misfortune or a disadvantage and vice versa. And so there’s, you know, you always want to feel good when good things happen, but there’s, and you always, you don’t always want to feel bad when bad things happen, but you do ultimately Tend to feel bad when bad things happen. There’s, here’s the dual sided coin of a, of a different phenomenon where, you know, you, if you know that when good things happen, it’s still, there’s still more, more game to play, More life to live. You’re going to be willing to accept the potential for more trials and errors and all that, which is not so great. But knowing that when bad things happen, it’s not going to just be misfortune forever thereafter as well, gives you some hope and gives you a sense of the possibility that things could Be directly related to that, that ultimately save you, in whatever sense save you might mean. Chris Williamson Yeah, you never know what worse or bad luck has saved you from. I wrote an essay today, actually, and I want to read you this thing because I thought it was really interesting. All right. Adversity is a terrible thing to waste. Almost all of the biggest periods of growth in your life have germinated from your lowest points. Once shock, grief, sadness, and fear subside, more energetic emotions arise. Pain, resentment, bitterness, anger, and a chip on your shoulder. Change is hard, and deeply fundamental change requires an insane amount of activation energy, far more than is available by just wanting it a lot. This is why people change so much after losing a parent, enduring a betrayal, losing a job, or going through a breakup. Not because the past version of their world has been stripped away alone, but because they finally have enough fuel to get their new life off the launch pad. In the mid-90s, there was a single mother living in a near-poverty home in Edinburgh. When she left her first marriage, it wasn’t a quiet parting. She’s described the relationship as abusive. She fled to Portugal with her baby daughter and a suitcase that contained the early chapters of a book that she was working on. At one point, her ex-husband hid the manuscript, trying to prevent her from leaving with it. She was clinically depressed and contemplating suicide. She couldn’t afford to heat her flat properly, so she pushed a pram to cafes to write while her daughter slept. The manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers. That’s 12 people telling her in different ways that it wasn’t good enough. The rejection wasn’t abstract, it was survival level. If the book failed, so did her last attempt at building a life. The humiliation of those refusals became momentum. J.K. Rowling went on to sell 500 million copies in the Harry Potter series globally and became richer than the Queen. But here’s the uncomfortable truth. Not all adversity becomes growth. Some people are crushed by it. Adversity is fuel, not destiny. The difference is what you do with the surplus emotion. If that energy isn’t directed, it curdles into rumination. The same fuel that could power a transformation can just as easily power self-destruction. There’s also a time window because pain calcifies. The chip on your shoulder becomes your identity. The story of what happened becomes the story of who you are. Anger gets you moving, but it can’t steer. It’s rocket fuel, not guidance. Eventually, the chip on your shoulder has to become purpose. As a TLDR, the worst thing that’s happened to you might be the only thing powerful enough to change you. Pain is temporary and fuel is rare. So if you’re going through a hard time, don’t waste it. You never know what worst luck your bad luck has saved you from. (Time 0:20:57)
  • Use Action Before Pain Hardens Into Identity
    • Bias toward action when pain shrinks your capacity because movement, people, and structure stop suffering from hardening into rumination.
    • Chris Williamson recommends friends, group hobbies, and using anger or resentment briefly as rocket fuel before it becomes identity. Transcript: Robert Pantano I’m curious to think about or to ask you about what you think allows someone to create that differentiation or to act on that differentiation between it becoming a collapsible effect And a fueling effect. What do you think it is that allows some people to utilize those adversities versus? Yeah, go ahead. Chris Williamson Great question. I’m hesitant of giving some pithy philosophical answer to this stuff because I think so much of it is just practical. Spending less time on your own. It sounds so dumb. You go through a breakup, spend less time on your own, man. It’s important for you to have your friends come around with tacos and ice cream and watch shit movies. That is an important part of the healing process. It’s important for you to stay busy. It’s important for you to reconnect with the hobbies that you had as a kid, right? Start playing football again, or pickleball or whatever it is that you like to do martial arts or running, whatever, and to do it in a group. And that will carry a lot of the difference between somebody who that pain calcifies and it turns into stasis. Basically, what I’m pushing toward is a bias for action, but it’s a bias for action when your capacity for action has been severely diminished. So you can’t act as easily. Your one rep max has been chopped down by 95% and you’re really going to struggle to lift anything, even the smallest weight. So what do you do when you have a weight that you can’t bear while you spread the load between other people? So, um, I think relying on other people, but the broader lesson, not everybody has other people needs other people in this way. The broad lesson I think is a bias for action. Like how can I just, what’s that line? Anxiety hates a moving target. Action is the antidote to anxiety. And it’s so fucking true. And it sounds like maybe I’m running away from my problems, maybe I’m hiding them in the fog. And that’s a lesson that for a lot of people probably is accurate. They use busyness and chaos as a way to sort of force down whatever it is that they should be thinking about more deeply. But I get the sense that if anybody’s a fan of pursuit of wonder or modern wisdom, that they have the opposite fucking problem. Okay. They’re like the David Goggins of rumination. They’re the fucking Bonnie. They’re the Bonnie blue of rumination. They do not need, they do not need to be told to spend more time thinking they need to be told to have a bias for action so i think um learning to trust yourself again is done through uh experimentation And and evidence um once you’ve got just a little bit of that moving um that that tends to help uh i certainly think not being afraid to use some of the more negative emotions, some of the Stuff like bitterness and resentment and anger, this is one of the paradoxes or one of the disadvantages of self-awareness that you don’t like these sort of darker emotions. You think, I should transcend these. I should be sufficiently elevated that I’m not tapping into this. This is a more base version of me. It’s juvenile. It’s petty. This is a version of me that I don’t like. I get that, but what did you use to get yourself here? Because for the most part, you probably used that kind of fuel and then, okay, it’s pretty toxic. If I hold onto it for too long, I probably shouldn’t still be thinking at 45 years old about what the kid said to me in school. Fine. But that also means that you don’t have that fuel tank anymore. And this fuel isn’t going to be there forever. It’s not. The anger will subside. The resentment will wane. Your bitterness will eventually dissolve. What are you going to be left with? The time will have passed anyway. And that’s some pretty fucking potent fuel. So I I’m saying just, you know, go in and, and maybe just fucking tap, tap, tap inside the fuel tank for a little bit and make use of it. And yeah, look, you’re going to look back on this period and it can either be some, you know, kinetic spark at the beginning of growth. You can be your own primer switch for a hydrogen bomb, or you can self-work your way through it. And I’m sure it’ll be great. But I don’t know. It was just an idea. And especially that JK Rowling story, so fucking good. And after I read that Cormac McCarthy quote, which I’ve been wanting to write about for ages, I need to fucking put something together. It’s not true for all people in all situations at all times, but I do think it’s pretty fucking useful. (Time 0:25:39)
  • Why Uncertainty Should Produce Humility
    • Because no one can step outside their own mind, Robert Pantano says certainty is the wrong response and humility is the wiser one.
    • Every worldview is pinhole-sized, shaped by geography, culture, and history, so conviction should stay open to revision. Transcript: Chris Williamson Given the fact that we can never step outside of our own minds, how should that change the way that we treat our beliefs? Robert Pantano I think that, and I’ve obviously agree with the fact that, you know, there’s not only can we not obviously step out of our own minds, but there’s a huge implication to that. We will never obtain objective truth, in my view, as a consequence of that fact. And so I believe that humility and almost a love of uncertainty is the only appropriate response to the fact that there’s just no way that you can get out of the tunneled vision of your Mind, your specific mind. And then your own mind is sort of been molded and mapped according to a particular condition of geography of culture of history. Um, and there’s been no moment as far as, you know, if we sort of rewind the clock, every stage of history has presented a similar ensemble of ignorance, of futility, of wrongness, all That. At any given time in any given space, we’re up against this contorted, chiseled out view of, of reality that’s a pinhole size. And, and to have rigid beliefs, have a sense of certainty, I think is a, a less than ideal response to that condition. And this isn’t to say that someone ought to be totally nebulous about everything they think and feel and believe. You can be convictive and confident in life while also not ever being dead set and final about a belief or set of beliefs. And so there’s a sort of essence of confidence and conviction that can carry through across a spectrum of ideas and beliefs. And the importance is not the individual belief, but the continuation of exploration and curiosity and openness and humility. (Time 0:36:23)
  • Reduce Choice Anxiety By Caring Less On Purpose
    • Cut choice anxiety by deciding what actually matters and consciously de-optimizing everything else that barely changes your quality of life.
    • Robert Pantano uses cereal aisles as the example, while Chris Williamson praises dropping entire categories like credit card point maximization. Transcript: Chris Williamson About choice anxiety? Because I get the sense that people who have a lot of self-awareness, again, we’ve sort of touched on, I know how much better I could have been. I know all of the different optionality that lays out in front of me. How do you come to think about netting down choice anxiety as a deeply self-aware person? You’re sort of referring to the paradox of choice, if you will, right? Robert Pantano Yeah. See, I don’t know if I have a good answer to that because, first of all, I struggle with it. I think the best way to deal with choice anxiety is to recognize the degree of your, you know, at what point are your desires no longer serving you? And if once you recognize that ceiling, the amount of choices that you need to consider can reduce. So if I think that, you know, I’m on an infinite conveyor belt of desires and satisfaction, desire satisfaction over and over and over, there is an infinite number of choices that can Satisfy or can play into that conveyor belt phenomenon. But if you recognize that there is a certain limit to which your, your, you know, minimum quality of experience is achieved in life, you can start to redirect your decision-making towards A smaller number of options for different reasons than just like, you know, if you go to a grocery store, you could, there’s so obviously an infinite number, not nearly, I mean, there’s A, not literally, but nearly an infinite number of choices of cereal and everything else. And if you regard cereal as a reasonable proxy of your quality of life, you might stand in that aisle forever. But if you recognize that cereal is not going to serve you, it’s not going to serve your quality of life, then you pick one and move on. And then you recognize that there is still a difficulty around decision making in other areas of your life that you’re going to ruminate on and struggle with. But you can reduce the amount of decisions that are relevant to you by recognizing the sort of ceiling around how much your decisions are going to change the quality of your experience. And I’m somebody who believes that it’s much more like I want to make decisions that allow me to keep going. And I mean that in both the most basic literal sense and then sort of a more abstract sense, which is, you know, I want to decouple my awareness from my desire when I’m making decisions About what’s going to allow me to get up in the morning and still care. And then also what’s going to allow me to experience some continual fuel, as you put it in your essay. And so there’s no clean way of totally absolving yourself from the paradox of choice and the anxiety around decision-making unless you can kind of oscillate back and forth between The foresight of or the anxiety around decision-making and the hindsight of regret. You can refer to your regrets to remember the absurdity of your anxiety right now. But I understand there’s maybe a degree of impracticality there. But I do think that just recognizing that there is like every option in life for everything from cars to cereal to clothes to relationship partners to friends to careers. You can start to chisel those down by recognizing that so much of that is not what you care about. And, you know, you decide what you care about or you end up caring about what you care about, but then you chisel those things out and you’re still left with a huge chunk of decision-making Possibilities, but it’s maybe a little bit more manageable. Oliver Berkman had this question, how much should you care about things? Chris Williamson Answer, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s not as much as possible about everything all of the time. (Time 0:39:00)
  • Anxiety Comes With Consciousness Itself
    • Robert Pantano says anxiety is not a glitch in deep thinkers but a basic consequence of being conscious in a chaotic, uncertain world.
    • He also argues humans seek truth less for truth itself than for the comfort and certainty they hope it delivers. Transcript: Chris Williamson I think you mentioned anxiety there. Do you think anxiety is just the natural consequence of seeing reality clearly and being a deep thinker then? Robert Pantano I would even go so far to say that you don’t have to add that last part about being a deep thinker. I would think anxiety is a sort of fundamental consequence of being aware of reality on any level. And it only goes up from there. I know that people have worse cases and experiences of anxiety. But the idea that somebody could live and not, and this is me projecting my, you know, own experience, universalizing it and assuming everybody’s the same. And I recognize that. But I do find it very hard to imagine that anxiety is not a sort of building block of consciousness and self-awareness from a human perspective. Because everything, I mean, when we’re talking about decision-making, we’re talking about regrets, we’re talking about adversity, all these things. Everything is this hodgepodge of chaos and uncertainty that a singular framework of perspective is trying to control and make sense of. Filter an ocean of possibility into a tiny, you know, pinhole of desire and preference and hope and idealization. So I would think that if you’re that pinhole, there’s a lot to be worried about. Chris Williamson Is the pursuit of truth really about truth or more about sort of a psychological security then? It feels to me like our desire for truth is a fear response to the uncertainty of the future. I absolutely agree. Robert Pantano Personally, I think that everything that humans do and humanity has done is never in and of itself. It’s never for itself. It’s based on some preference. And so the desire for truth is not because we care so much about truth. In my view, it’s because we care so much about what truth will provide us. And that is a quelling of the uncertainty and the unknowability of existence and our relationship with it. We want to know that everything is going to be okay, both now and forever thereafter. That’s why heaven exists. That’s why religions exist. That’s why philosophies exist. (Time 0:44:26)
  • The Difference Between Useful And Useless Anger
    • Chris Williamson and Robert Pantano distinguish useful anger that defends boundaries from diffuse anger at existence that only corrodes you.
    • Chris links anger to boundary violation, while Robert says unowned resentment leaves others assuming everything is fine. Transcript: Chris Williamson I’m thinking about that anxiety, and I guess anger as well, which is kind of a little bit like anxiety at motion. Anxiety is anger at rest in a way, and anger is anxiety in motion. It seems like anxiety arises because of foresight without control. And then anger is desire for control that gets denied. And I’m wondering what you’ve come to learn about how to sort of dissolve or reduce the anger and the anxiety in that way. Yeah. Robert Pantano So, I mean, they’re pretty tightly intertwined where if you start to recognize, maybe I would intertwine anger more closely with something like regret, because if you start to recognize The absurdity of regret and your ability to control the way things have gone with a greater distance in time, there are many cases of anger in which it might be in real time that you’re Experiencing an event, but it was an event that you couldn’t have controlled. And so in the same way, it’s a much more difficult thing to quell in the moment, but you can sort of start to shave off the edges of anger, I find, by recognizing your lack of control over Everything else besides yourself and perhaps even yourself. And that takes it to a different degree and we don’t need to necessarily take it there for the same point to be cogent. Chris Williamson I think the lack of control over yourself is the regret point from earlier on, even the one that’s been lobotomized from the fucking deterministic perspective of the universe, that I’m angry at me, I should have done differently. You’re right. You’re right to say that it’s closer to regret. It’s like, I should have done differently. Well, you didn’t. You’re trying to motivate yourself to do it more in future. I understand. And if your brain ramps up the pain of the lesson from the last mistake that you made, you will make sure that you don’t make that mistake again. It’s basically an existential psychological equivalent of I put my hand on that stove. Close to this. I got bit by a dog when I was five. The lesson is don’t go near dogs for the rest of time. That is what our brain is trying to teach us. And the sort of amplitude, the fucking volume of the lesson is proportional to how important we think it was and how much pain we were in at the time. And if you’re in a lot of pain and then you realize that you are making the pain worse by trying to sort of whip yourself into submission so that you will be reminded you’ve kind of nine tails Your way through this thing. Well, in some ways you can kind of love that part of you. That is a good thing. That’s a really fucking cool thing to love thank you so much for trying to keep me safe i understand that i’m fallible and fucked up and i consistently make apparently the same mistakes Over and over again and they really have a great like fucking consecutive lineage of often being similar sorts of things and i i get it you’re trying to keep me safe thank you Thank you For trying to keep me safe. Thank you for trying to make me learn a lesson that my actions insist on not fucking detecting and not updating themselves from. That’s great. It’s such a fucking all-encompassing emotion, anger. So trying to think rationally when you’re in it is not easy. It’s definitely not. Robert Pantano Do you think that anger is necessary for what you just described? Chris Williamson Or do you think you can have that response without necessarily anger, the anger tank, so to speak, filling all the way up? I guess it depends. A lot of people convert anger into other emotions. And a lot of the time, these are people for whom anger wasn’t allowed as a kid. It wasn’t allowed in the household. There wasn’t a safe place to express anger. Maybe there was a fragile parent or an overly disciplinarian parent or a parent who had anger problems of their own or an absent parent who couldn’t really hold that for them. And you need, I think it’s really important for people to understand if there’s something burbling inside of you, the world is basically split into two kinds of people. There’s people who get mad and people that get sad, but both of them are generated from the same place. Like the anger gets turned outward or the anger gets turned inward. And the anger that gets turned inward, that’s not the job of anger. The job of anger evolutionarily is you crossed a boundary and there’s no police force around. So I’m going to behave in a way that shows you that you can’t do it again and shows anybody else who’s watching that they can’t fuck with me in the same way that you did because we don’t have Laws to enforce this so my emotional response to you is going to show you how far you crossed over the line and it’s not going to happen again that’s that that’s the the job of anger so for The when it’s sad not mad it’s usually because you were disincentivized in a i mean everybody’s disincentivized from being angry right? Like it’s a very antisocial behavior. It’s a very antisocial thing. Sadness is prosocial. People come and give you a hug. Anger is antisocial. It makes people run away, but there should be a container for that. And if you don’t learn it, there’s a very long winded way of saying lots of people are angry but don’t feel anger and they turn it into other things they turn it into bitterness agitation Resentment uh depression anxiety um like frustrations at themselves and at other people and and at the world or politics or you know whatever um so i don’t think that you need anger i Would actually go as far as to say that maybe anger is a bit more warping because it’s the fucking raw uncut version of the fuel. And if you can have it just bubble down a little bit, I think you can make better decisions. Is there any emotion that’s worse to use to make this? Maybe being horny. Maybe being horny is the only worse emotion to utilize when trying to orient yourself than anger is. I can’t think of many more. Yeah, nothing come to mind for me either. Robert Pantano I think those are probably the two at the top of the list. The two horsemen of the apocalypse. Yeah. No, but I think that’s super well put. I think that there’s absolutely a practical application for anger and to just assume that you should never be angry is you’re cursing yourself for a life of being taken advantage of And never signaling to yourself and others when things are wrong and when things have been crossed in terms of your boundaries and lines. There is a separate category of anger. (Time 0:48:29)
  • Desire Is The Trap That Also Opens Life
    • Desire is an inescapable trap that also keeps life moving because satisfaction never lasts and every fulfilled want creates another.
    • Robert Pantano compares it to hunger and breathing, then says the hallway of open doors still lets you choose meaningful rooms. Transcript: Chris Williamson What’s the desire trap? Robert Pantano In terms of what are you referring to? Chris Williamson Well, think about your relationship with desire and what you’ve learned about it. Is it a trap? Because it seems like desire fuels suffering in many ways. And even the desire to escape desire is a desire as well. And then evolution sort of hardwired dissatisfaction into us. And we may secretly prefer striving over satisfaction in many ways. So how the fuck do we survive this? Robert Pantano Well, we survive this because that fuels survival, in my view. It’s inescapable. I mean, I know that there are people that maybe sit on mountainsides and do nothing all day long, and they’re able to live an ascetic life and totally quell all desires. Ways. But for the vast majority of people, especially those who might be watching or listening to this, that’s not going to probably happen. And it probably shouldn’t. You don’t have to force some sort of romanticism around ascetic life. And so what you’re left with kind of comes back to what we were talking about a moment ago when it comes to understanding the constraints around your decision-making and what matters To you. Because you’re never going to eliminate desire and you’re never going to eliminate the continual pain or dissatisfaction that comes from the very substrate that desire functions On. Because desire is not something that you get, you achieve, and then you’re done. Obviously, that’s not how that works. It’s the same with hunger. It’s the same with every breath is a desire for another breath. And that doesn’t mean you’re done. You’re going to have to find the next breath, the next meal, the next everything. And so you don’t escape that trap. That trap is paradoxical in the same sense as many of the other things we’ve discussed where it’s unfortunate because you’re kind of destined to never feel an ultimate satisfaction. Pursuing a ton of things, people, goals, achievements, preferences, art that you wouldn’t otherwise ever care about if you were done after your first moment of achievement. And so the trap is also the open door. I mean, it’s both ways. You’re stuck in an infinite hallway of open doors, but in each door, you can decide what you care about and what meaning you might derive from what’s inside that room. And then you get bored, unfortunately, and then you move on to the next room. But there seems to be, if you keep moving, an unending hallway of doors. So it’s not, it doesn’t have to be purely tragic. Okay. So does that mean that happier people are simply less aware or are they better at metabolizing awareness? Oh, that’s a very good way of framing that question. I’m reluctant to answer that with conviction because I just don’t know if I know enough happy people to say one way or the other. I think that it could be both. I don’t know if it’s binary. I’m not saying you’re presenting it as a binary option, but I think that you can be happy by being maybe less reflective and less aware about absurdity and futility and all that and the Sort of associated, you know, suffering with desire, you could be happy that way. And you could be happy is maybe not the best word, but you could be a kind of happy by also knowing that everything you do is ultimately absurd and futile. But you’re still experiencing moments that are enthralling and interesting, and you’re experiencing moments of love and wonder. And the awareness of the futility of those things, for me, doesn’t negate them. (Time 0:58:58)
  • Wonder Makes Life Barely But Meaningfully Worth It
    • Robert Pantano says we should distrust final conclusions yet trust immediate experience as the only certain tether we actually have.
    • Life becomes worth the trouble through wonder, art, love, friendship, and self-made meaning, even if only by a slim margin. Transcript: Chris Williamson I guess if everything is uncertain and constructed, why trust any of our conclusions? Oh, I wouldn’t. You’re saying why trust any conclusion? Robert Pantano I definitely would not trust any conclusion, at least in the absolute sense. When you say trust, do you mean believing wholly in its sort of finality? Chris Williamson Yeah, I suppose. How can we trust any of our insights? Like our own conclusions, everything’s uncertain, everything’s constructed, our consciousness is filtering what we see in the world. There’s no such thing as real truth. How are we not just permanently sort of wallowing in our own uncertainty? Yeah. Robert Pantano So I think I have a way out of that to some extent is everything isn’t uncertain because what you’re experiencing now is completely real and certain. And so you have that basis always, that tether to experience and selfhood and existence that, you know, maybe can’t be extrapolated out onto some sort of metaphysics and, you know, Insight about some grander picture. But you can know that you’re certainly feeling what you’re feeling and experiencing right now, and you can navigate a life and existence based on those feelings to the best of your ability. And that doesn’t provide certainty. And I think the way that we often like to think of it, but it does provide a barometer, a compass that we can, can reference and derive what we’re really after from. Chris Williamson What do you think makes life worth the trouble? Robert Pantano I would certainly, so Pursuit of Wonder is the name of my YouTube channel. The reason why I’m bringing that up is because Pursuit of Happiness is the common phrasing. And I believe that there’s, you know, that’s the wrong way of approaching the justification around pursuits and life in general. And so I think what makes life worth the trouble is, and it’s by a very slim margin, I must say, but the experience of wonder, the experience of a self-produced meaning. And you can experience wonder through art, relationships through friendships through um and you know aesthetic experiences just walk through nature and if you have enough of those Moments and enough is relative but if you have enough of those moments you can draw you can take the ingredients of the trouble of existence. You can take the graphite of that sort of sludge and you can make it into something beautiful and worthwhile. And it’s like I said, it’s by a certain margin for everybody, how much that actually feels like you made it worthwhile in terms of all the trouble. But I think that’s, you’re kind of in a boxing match that you’re destined to lose, but you’re still putting up a hell of a good fight. And there’s, you know, there’s so much spirit in that. There’s, you know, everybody loves an underdog story. (Time 1:03:17)
  • Self Awareness Makes Love Fragile But More Empathic
    • Self-awareness can make love more fragile because you become more self-conscious about how you land with another person.
    • But it also improves empathy by showing you your own neuroses, making a partner’s reactions easier to understand. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you think, uh, self awareness makes love deeper or more fragile? Probably more fragile, if I had to pick. Robert Pantano The reason I would say that is because It makes you maybe more self-conscious. Obviously, self-conscious and self-awareness are almost synonyms, but self-conscious in the more typical sense of the word, where you’re worried about how you’re coming off and How you’re integrating with somebody else’s preferences and desires. However, on the flip side of that, to be more self-aware is to recognize, and this is one thing that I think is useful in all areas of life, is to recognize how annoying you can be and how Neurotic you can be. And so when you recognize a more granular sense of your neuroses or your annoyances or your all the sorts of things that make you on a day-to basis from inside your skull a little bit challenging To deal with. To be more aware of those qualities makes you more understanding of another person’s difficulties with dealing with those qualities. And if you’re not aware of those qualities, then you might never understand why is this person reacting to me in such a way? Why are they feeling this sort of way in relation to my behavior? You know that you have a certain outward behavior, but without recognizing the proper picture, the full picture of those qualities and how they become manifest and why they are the Way they are, it can be challenging to empathize with somebody who is trying to be as close to you as possible. And they, obviously, you are as close to you as possible, humanly possible. And if they’re trying to get anywhere near that, without recognizing those qualities, you do tend to lack the empathy for their perspective and experience. So I think ultimately, this may be more of a benefit, but it can be also very challenging, because you want to, you always want, I mean, when you’re, you’re always seeking ideal circumstances, At least for me. And so when you’re aware of all those negative qualities, I’m always seeking to integrate them fully and properly, um, into myself and in a way that makes sense for other people that I’m close with. (Time 1:06:56)