Joe Rogan - Jordan Peterson on Sorting Your Life

Some happy little place where someone's feeding you peeled grapes. That isn't what it is. It's more like victory on the honorable battlefield or something like that. Yeah, the perception that people have of ultimate success and ultimate happiness is it seems motivated by what they don't have rather than an understanding of what success and happiness really is. Their idea is that one day I'm going to go and I'm going to be in my golden years and I'm just going to be able to sit around and do nothing and tell everybody to fuck off. You won't be happy at all. Yeah, I talked to one of the people that I was working with who had a vision for retirement. I said, what's your vision for retirement? Well, I see myself in a beach, some tropical country, drinking margaritas and I thought, first, that's not a plan. That's a travel poster. It's like, okay, let's walk through this. All right. So you go down to this tropical country and you go sit on the beach and you have a margarita. It's like, okay, well, how many margaritas? Like 10? Okay. So you're going to do that. We're going to do that for six months. You'll be dead. Yeah. Well, you'll be this like pathetic sunburned, like fat. Yeah. Unhappy. Hungover. Serotic. Yeah. Yeah. It's like that's your vision. So how long can you have a margarita on a beach? Like maybe you can do that once every six months for like 10 minutes, something like that. It's not a vision. It's true. But when you are working and slaving away, you think about that beach with your feet up and the waiter comes over. Would you like another margarita, Mr. Peterson? Yeah. Yes, I would. Absolutely. They're like, all right, baby. Right. Exactly. But it's like this 16 year old fantasy of paradise. It's like, well, and it just doesn't work out. So, yeah. And the thing that sustains people through life really is the lifting of a worthwhile burden. It's something like that. And it's partly because we're social animals, right? It's like we're evolved to be useful to the people around us because they're much more likely to let us live if we're like that. And it's been very fun talking to, especially talking to young men about this. It's like, well, and that's the other thing too, is I think the world is full of darkness, let's say. And we could say each of us have a little bit of light. And if we release that light, if we let it shine properly, Christ, it's too cliched to go on with in some sense. But the world is a lesser place if you do not reveal from within yourself what you have to reveal. And the fact that the world is a lesser place actually turns out not to be trivial. Like if you aren't everything you could be, more people will die. More people will suffer. More evil will be unconstrained. More tyranny will reign. More chaos will remain chaotic and dangerous. All of that. Do you mean this in the sense of like the old proverb of the wings of a butterfly fluttering become a hurricane? It's something similar to that, but it can even be more local. It's like your family is more messed up than it could be if you were less messed up than you are. Right. So if you just got your act together, like 10% more, your family would be 1% better. Right. It's like, well, do it. And that would ripple off into the people that they interact with. Yes. And it ripples fast. Yes. That's the other thing that's so cool is that like people think, well, there's seven billion of us and each of us is just this separate dust moat like floating in the cosmos. And what the hell difference does it make what you do anyways? It's like that is not how we're connected. It's like you're the center of a network and you know, well, you know way more people than this. But let's say typically, you know, you're going to know a thousand people in your life well enough to have an impact on them. Okay. And each of those thousand people is going to know a thousand people. So you're one step from a million and two steps from a billion. And we are networked technically that that's how human interactions work. And so when you do something that you shouldn't do, it's worse than you think. And when you do something that you should do, it's better than you think. And so you think, well, this is why I've been telling people, we'll clean up your room. It's like, well, your room is actually networked too. It's not that easy to clean up your room, to set it. So you want your room to be set up so that when you walk in there, it tells you to be better than you generally are. It's organized. It's got direction. Everything's in its place. You try to do that in a chaotic household. You know, I've watched people do this because I had students do these sorts of things as assignments. I'd say, look, pick a small moral goal, clean up your room and just write down what happens as a consequence. So maybe these are students in a chaotic household. The whole place is a bloody mess. No one's taking any responsibility for anything. And so they decide they're going to start to clean up their room. And then the people in the household notice, well, the first thing they do is get pissed off. It's like, who do you think you are? Like you think you're better than us? Like, why do you think this is worthwhile? Who made, who died and made you God? All of that. So just by trying to organize this little part of their life, they immediately run into the people whose actions they're casting in a dim light by trying to improve themselves to some degree, they might have to have like a thorough war in their household to be allowed to do something as simple as keep the room orderly. They find out very rapidly that A, that's way more difficult than it sounds and B, that the consequences of it are far more far reaching than people think. So that's quite fun. You know, because maybe part of it is, is that like everything around you is full of potential. Everything. Maybe more potential than you could ever possibly utilize. And so maybe all you have is this little rat hole of a room in some rundown place in the world. It's like, fix it up. There's more there than you think. See what happens if you fix it up, and you'll fix yourself up simultaneously, because you have to get disciplined in order to fix up the room. Then you have a fixed up room and you'll be a more fixed up person. It's like, you think that nothing will happen as a consequence of that. It's like all hell will break loose as a consequence of that. It's really worth trying. It is worth trying. And it's a concept that seems alien to people. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Well, people don't take what they have right in front of them seriously enough. It's like the wasting time thing. They don't do the arithmetic. You know, and they also don't understand. They devalue what they have right in front of them. Like another, another client I worked with was having a hard time putting his kid to bed at night. And so we did the arithmetic. It's like, well, I'm fighting with my kid for 45 minutes a night trying to get him to go to bed. Okay, so let's analyze that. All right. So what does that mean? Well, it means that both of you end the day upset. That's not so good. Because why would you want that? It means that you're spending 45 minutes fighting when you could spend 20 minutes doing something positive, like reading to him, say, means that you don't get to spend that time with your wife. So she's not very happy with you. Plus, you're annoyed because you don't see her. Plus, you blame it on the kid because he's the proximal cause. It's like, that's pretty damn ugly. And then, and then let's do the arithmetic. It's like seven days a week, 45 minutes a day. Let's call that five hours, 20 hours a week, 240 hours in a year, six, you're spending a month and a half of work weeks fighting with your four year old son. Think you're going to like him? You don't like anyone you spend a month and a half a year fighting with. It's a bad idea. Fix it. It's important. Get him to bed, make it peaceful. You do it like these things that repeat every single day. That's a motif in this book too. Your life isn't, Marguerite is on a beach in, in Jamaica. That happens now and then. Those are exceptions. Your life is how your wife greets you at the door when you come home every day. Because that's like 10 minutes a day. Your life is how you treat each other over the breakfast table. Because that's an hour and a half or an hour every single day. You get those mundane things right, those things you do every day. You concentrate on them and you make them pristine. It's like you got 80% of your life put together. These little things that are right in front of us, they're not little. That's the first thing. They are not little and they're hard to set right. And if you set them right, it has a rippling effect and, and fast too. Way faster than people think.