How to Stop Wasting Time and Procrastinating Your Life Away — advice from Jordan Peterson
You can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness, and I think the best micro habits — this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes — I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself, goals that you actually value. And the future authoring program helps people do that and basically, it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis, I would say. And so, the questions are something like, ‘well, alright, you’re gonna have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so, what are the potential sources of motivation?’ Well, you could think about them in the Big Five manner: if you’re extroverted, you want friends; if you’re agreeable, you want an intimate relationship; if you’re disagreeable, you want to win competitions; if you’re open, you want to engage in creative activity; if you’re high in eroticism, you want security. Okay, so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on, that you could tailor to your own personality. But then, there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across.
And so we asked people about, well, if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years, if you were taking care of yourself properly, what would you want from your friendships, what would you want from your intimate relationship? How would you like to structure your family? What do you want for your career? How are you going to use your time outside of your job? And how are you gonna regulate your mental and physical health, and maybe also your drug and alcohol use? Because that’s a good place to auger down because alcoholism, for example, wipes out five to 10 percent of people so you want to keep that under control. And then, so maybe you develop a vision of what you would like your life to be and once the goal is established, and then you break down the goal into micro-processes that you could implement, the micro-processes become rewarding in proportion in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your incentive reward system.
We talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that’s the thing that keeps you moving forward. And the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal. Okay, well, what’s the implication of that? Better have a valued goal because otherwise, you can’t get any positive motivation working out. And so, the more valuable the goal in principle, the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge. And so, what that means is while you get up in the morning and you’re excited about the day, you’re ready to go. And so, as far as I can tell, what you do is you specify your long-term ideal, maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you’re terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that’s also useful. You specify your goal, you do that, in some sense as a unique individual, you want to specify goals that make you say “oh, if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts, it would clearly be worthwhile”, because the question always is, why do something? Because doing nothing is easy; you just sit there and you don’t do anything, that’s real easy. The question is, why would you ever do anything? And the answer to that has to be because you’ve determined by some means that it’s worthwhile. And then, the next question might be, well, where should you look for worthwhile things? And one would be, well, you could consult your own temperament. And the other would be, well, you kind of look at what it is that people accrue that’s valuable across the lifespan. So, you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence, and I already did that. You need a family, you need friends, like you don’t need to have all these things but you better have most of them; family, friends, career, educational goals, plans for time outside of work, attention to your mental and physical health, etc. That’s what life is about and if you don’t have any of those things, well, then all you’ve got left is misery and suffering, so that’s a bad deal for you.
But once you set up that that goal structure, and in many ways that’s what you should be doing at universities, that’s exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you’re trying to be and you aim at that, and then use everything you learned as a means of building that person that you want to be. And I really mean want to be, I don’t mean should be, even though those things are going to overlap. And it’s important to distinguish between those because that’s partly — and this is back down to the micro routine analysis — so as I say, well, you’re gonna try to make yourself more industrious. Okay, number one — specify your damn goals; because how are you gonna hit something if you don’t know what it is? That isn’t going to happen. And often, people won’t specify their goals too because they don’t like to specify conditions for failure. So, if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is real easy, because that’s just a matter of not doing as well, then you don’t know when you fail. And people might say, “well, I really don’t want to know when I fail because that’s painful, so I’ll keep myself blind about when I fail”. That’s fine except you’ll fail all the time then, you just won’t know it until you’ve failed so badly that you’re done. And that can easily happen by the time you’re 40. So, I would recommend that you don’t let that happen. So, that’s willful blindness; you could have known but you chose not to. Okay, so once you get your goal structure set up, you think ‘okay, if I could have this life, looks like that might be worth living, despite the fact that it’s going to be anxiety-provoking and threatening and there’s gonna be some suffering and loss involved in all of that’, obviously. The goal is to have a vision for your life, such that all things considered, that justifies your effort.
So, then what do you do? Well, then you turn down to the micro routines. It’s like, okay well, this is what I’m aiming for, how does that instantiate itself day to day, week to week, month to month? And that’s where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful; Google Calendar, it’s like make a damn schedule and stick to it. Okay, so what’s the rule with the schedule? It’s not a bloody prison. That’s the first thing that people do wrong. They say, “well, I don’t like to have to follow a schedule”. It’s like, “well, what kind of schedule are you setting up?” “Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this, and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do?” It’s wrong, set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want — that’s the trick. It’s like “okay, I’ve got tomorrow. If I was going to set it up so it was the best possible day I could have, practically speaking, what would it look like?” Well, then you schedule that. And obviously, there’s a bit of responsibility that’s going to go along with that because if you have any sense, one of the things that you’re going to insist upon is that, at the end of the day, you’re not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day because that’s a stupid day. If you have a bunch of those in a row, you just dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it. It’s like, sorry, that’s just not a good strategy. It’s a bad strategy.
So, maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it’s more than that, depending on how far behind you are. But even that, you can ask yourself, “okay well, I’ve got these responsibilities, I have to schedule the damn things in. What’s the right ratio of responsibility to reward?” And you can ask yourself that just like you’d negotiate with someone who is working for you. It’s like, okay, you got to work tomorrow. Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say “okay well, what are you gonna do for me that makes it likely that I’ll work for you?” Well, you could ask yourself that. Maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. I don’t know, whatever turns your crank, man, but you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself. Like you’re negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life. And that’s how you make the schedule, and then you look at the day and you think, “well, if I had that day, that’d be good”. Great. And you’re useless and horrible, so you’ll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero. And if you hit it even with 50% accuracy, another rule is, aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God’s sake. Because you’re gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward. And so, that’s one way that you can work on your conscientiousness.
Plan a life you’d like to have, and you do that partly by referring to social norms. That’s more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale. But the other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself as if you don’t really know who you are, because you know what you’re like; you won’t do what you’re told, you won’t do what you tell yourself to do, you must have noticed. It’s like you’re a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work for you. You don’t know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don’t do it anyway. So, you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but my point is that you have to understand that you’re not your own servant, so to speak, you’re someone that you have to negotiate with and you’re someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to. And that’s hard for people because they don’t like themselves very much. So, they’re always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating, and it’s like, god, it’s so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time. And you know what that’s like because you probably waste like six hours a day — and I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back, right?
Your time is probably worth 50 bucks an hour, something like that. I mean, you’re not getting paid that now but you’re young and so this is investment time and what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future. So, let’s say it’s 50 bucks an hour, which is perfectly reasonable. So, if you waste six hours a day and you are, then you’re wasting about $2,000 a week or about $100,000 a year. So, like go ahead but that’s what it’s costing you every hour, and you need to know what your damn time is worth. So, let’s say it’s not 50 bucks, it’s 30, whatever, maybe it’s a hundred, it’s somewhere in that range. One of the things you should be asking yourself is, when you spend an hour, was that well? What if I paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour? And if the answer is no, it’s like well maybe you should do something else with your time, and it depends on whether or not you think that your time is worthwhile. But the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn’t worthwhile, what happens is you don’t just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility list bliss, what you do is you suffer existentially.
Peter Pan
Peter Pan is this magical boy. ‘Pan’ is the god of everything, roughly speaking. And so, it’s not an accident that he has the name ‘Pan’. And he’s the boy that won’t grow up, and he’s magical. Well, that’s because children are magical. They can be anything. They’re nothing but potential. And Peter Pan doesn’t want to give that up. Why? Well, he’s got some adults around him but the main adult is Captain Hook. Well, who the hell wants to grow up to be Captain Hook? First of all, you’ve got a hook. Second, you’re a tyrant. And third, you’re chased by the dragon of chaos with the clock in its stomach; the crocodile, it’s already got a piece of you. Well, that’s what happens when you get older; time has already got a piece of you and eventually, it’s got a taste for you and eventually, it’s going to eat you. And so, Hook is so traumatized by that that he can’t help but be a tyrant. And then, Peter Pan looks at traumatized Hook and says, “well, no, I’m not sacrificing my childhood for that”. So, that’s fine except he ends up king of Lost Boys in Neverland. Well, Neverland doesn’t exist and who the hell wants to be king of the Lost Boys? And he also sacrifices the possibility that he’d have a real relationship with a woman because that’s Wendy. And she’s kind of conservative, middle-class London-dwelling girl. She wants to grow up and have kids and have a life. She accepts her mortality. She accepts her maturity.
Peter Pan has to content himself with Tinkerbell. She doesn’t even exist. She’s like the fairy of porn. She doesn’t exist. She’s the substitute for the real thing. And so, but the dichotomy that you’re talking about is very tricky because there’s a sacrificial element in maturation. You have to sacrifice the plural potentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame. And the question is, well, why would you do that? Well, one reason is, it happens to you whether you do it or not. You can either choose your damn limitation or you can let it take you unaware when you’re 30, or even worse when you’re 40. And then that is not a happy day. And I see people like this, and I think it’s more and more common in our culture because people can put off maturity without suffering an immediate penalty. But all that happens is the penalty accrues and then when it finally hits, it just wallops you. Because when you’re 25, you could be an idiot, it’s no problem. Even when you’re out in a job search, it’s like when you don’t have any experience and you’re kind of clueless, it’s yeah, yeah, you’re young, it’s no problem, that’s what young people are but they’re full of potential. Okay, well, now you’re the same person at 30. It’s like people aren’t so thrilled about you at that point. It’s like ‘what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years?’ “Well, I’m just as clueless as I was when I was 22”. Yeah, but you’re not 22. You’re an old infant, and that’s an ugly thing — an old infant.
So, part of the reason you choose your damn sacrifice because the sacrifice is inevitable but at least you get to choose it. And then there’s something that’s even more complex than that in some sense is that, the problem with being a child is that all you are is potential and it’s really low resolution; you could be anything but you’re not anything. So, then you go and you do adopt an apprenticeship, roughly speaking. And then, at least you become something and when you’re something, that makes the world open up to you again. Like if you’re a really good plumber, then you end up being far more than a plumber, you end up being a good employer. I’m not putting plumbers down, more power to plumbers — they’ve saved more lives than doctors; hygiene. So, if you’re a really good plumber, well then, you have some employees, you run a business, you train some other people, you enlarge their lives, you’re kind of a pillar of the community, you have your family. Once you pass through that narrow training period, which narrows you and constricts you and develops you at the same time, then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hand. And [Yun] talked about that. He thought that part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to rediscover the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing and so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time. Very, very smart. Well, he was very, very smart, so that’s a very wise thing to know.
So, yep, sacrifice. We’ll talk more about that too. You get to pick your damn sacrifice. That’s all. You don’t get to not make one. So, you’re sacrificial whether you want to be or not. That’s a good thing to know as well. So, even though it’s a rough thing to figure out but- other questions?
Q1: That thing you just said about noticing and more and more and people wait into their 20, what do you think about that? What do you think that comes to mind in terms of the culture we live in?
I think universities facilitate it. Because you can go to university to not be something, instead of going to university to be something. Its Pleasure Island, and the price you pay for it, especially in the U.S. is debt. And you’re enticed into it because the administrators can pick your pocket. So, they rob your future self while allowing you to pretend that you have an identity. Very nasty. And you can’t declare bankruptcy with your student loans in the U.S., it’s indentured servitude and it is precisely Pleasure Island, it’s exactly that. And so, tuition fees have shot way out of control. And part of the reason that universities don’t make more demands on their students and let them get away with all the things they let them get away with is because they’re basically, why the hell would you chase them out? They’re are a hundred thousand dollars or more, so they can do whatever they want as long as you get to sell them to the salt mines. And you know, it’s not the only reason because the other thing that’s happened is that the rate of technological transformation is so fast now and the rate of turnover of things is that it is genuinely harder for people who are say 18 to 20- when I was a kid, roughly speaking, the kind of rough patch for life is probably 14 to 17, something like that, now I think it’s 18 to 25, something like that. And I think the reason for that is that all the jobs that the bloody hippies complained about being doomed to in the 1960s have now disappeared. Their problem was, ‘oh my god, I’m going to go have to work for a corporation and get a salary for the rest of my life, and then I’ll just end up in it with a pension and that’ll be my whole life’. It’s like, well, it seems like a lot better deal than an endless round of part-time Starbucks jobs. So, some of it is that. There’s a space now in our culture that is lacking for people to make that transformation from adolescence into adulthood and so the cost of that is forestalled but it’s not a good thing.
Adam And Eve
So, in the Garden of Eden, there’s Adam and Eve, right? The primordial human beings and there’s a walled garden — that’s paradise. ‘Paradise’ means ‘walled garden’, and ‘Eden’ means ‘well-watered place’. And so, there’s this idea that the proper habitat of human beings is an amalgam of social structure and nature. And that’s exactly right because that’s what we live in. We never live in nature and we never live in society, we live in an amalgam of society and nature — that’s the human environment, so it’s a walled garden. All right, and so it’s a productive well-watered place, where we could thrive, it’s safe and it’s ruled over by a father figure in this particular story. And you could think about that as the spirit of civilization, that’s at least one way of considering it. So, well, there’s a snake in the garden and it’s there unbeknownst to God, roughly speaking. Although he knows everything, so I guess he probably knows about the snake too. And he tells Adam and Eve not to interact with it. Fine, and they do. And the snake wakes them up because when they interact with the snake, they’re given a fruit that opens their eyes and makes them aware that they’re naked and vulnerable, and then dooms them to work. Well, I’ll tell you the whole story much later in the course but I want to give you an overview of it now. But then there’s this really strange idea that developed over the course of the development of not only Christianity but Judaism and a number of other religions that fed into the mainstream of Christian ideas, including Zoroastrianism.
There’s an idea that that emerged across a very long period of time that the snake in the garden was the same as Satan, the source of all evil. And I’ve been trying to figure out for the longest period of time, why in the world the manifestation of what’s essentially a representation of a predator — so, that’s the snake — and you know, the snake is associated with trees, well yes, the reason for that in all likelihood is that we dwelt in trees and snakes like trees and they’re around trees and they can climb trees and the snake was a typical predator on our ancient relatives. And so, that’s fine so you can see that that representation makes perfect sense. There’s predators that lurk in the garden. Yes, obviously. If you interact with them, they wake you up. Well, they better wake you up because if they don’t wake you up when you interact with them, then you get eaten. So, it’s probably just as well to wake up, even though there’s painful consequences associated with becoming conscious and that manifests itself immediately in the story of Adam and Eve. But then there’s this weird association, it’s very undeveloped in the biblical stories that are part and parcel of this line of thinking. It was more like a consequence of a cloud of mythological stories that surrounded it but the reason for that, I think, is this; imagine that what human beings were trying to puzzle out was the nature of the predator.
Okay, so on one level of analysis, the predator is the thing that slinks along the ground and that threatens you. And also, it’s the thing that’s your mortal enemy and that wakes you up. But then that’s one conceptualization of predator and fair enough, you can identify it and you can take precautionary measures. But a better conceptualization of predator might be, where does it come from? Let’s say it’s a snake. Well, there’s a lair of snake somewhere and so if we want to get rid of the snake, we shouldn’t be conceptualizing it as a snake, we should be conceptualizing it as one manifestation of a lair of snakes. And what we should do is go down, follow the damn snake wherever it goes and find its lair and wipe out all of the snakes. And that’s a more abstract representation, right, it’s not predator anymore, it’s the source of predation. And so, if you want to solve the predator problem permanently, you don’t kill the snake, you get rid of all the snakes. Okay, so fine and people are pretty damn good at that. And that’s why you have stories of people like Saint Patrick who chased all the snakes out of Ireland and all sorts of saints were snake eradication Saints. And well, there’s a variety of reasons for that.
But then you might think, okay, well, the worst predator is the lair of snakes but then you might think, well, wait a minute, the worst predator isn’t the lair of snakes, maybe the worst predator is the enemies that come to attack us and those are human enemies. And so, what we do is we defend ourselves against the human enemies. We put walls around our cities. We fortify our land and we defend ourselves against the evil that’s lurking in other people’s hearts. And so, that’s like a higher-order snake. And then we build these walls around us and what’s inside gets larger and larger and larger. And then, what happens is the snakes start popping up inside the cities because we’ve protected ourselves from all the evil that lurks outside but we’ve now created a space where that evil can manifest itself inside. So, there are criminals inside the city and there are people who want to bring you down and there’s malevolence within the city, not only outside. So, then there’s the problem of the snake that’s closer to you.
And then there’s the ultimate problem which is the snake that lives in your heart. And that’s each individual’s capacity for evil. And then that was conceptualized as a transcendent spirit, so that’s the spirit of Satan who’s the adversary of the hero. And that’s why there’s an association between the snake in the garden and this great series of mythologies about the existence of evil itself. It’s a consequence of our continued capacity to abstract. We started using the predator detection system to detect snakes and maybe no predatory cats and maybe birds of prey and all that, but that didn’t solve the bloody problem. Because just because you hid from the predatory bird today didn’t mean the bloody thing wasn’t gonna be back tomorrow. And tomorrow starts to matter as you get smarter. And then, once you’re on that path, when you’re starting to think abstractly about the predator, the nature of what constitutes the predator starts to become — because you’re trying to solve it across all situations simultaneously — it starts to become very much more abstracted. It ends up being something like a personality, like an eternal personality. And an eternal personality that has its effect on everyone all the time. And it’s so interesting to see those ideas because they basically evolved. People did not understand those ideas as they produced them. It was all put forward in a massive mythological context and in a rich storied context, and the stories were as conscious as the information got. It was never articulated past the level of story. So, remarkable.