Learning to Enjoy Being Alone is a Superpower | Joe Rogan and Naval Ravikant

Meditation, yeah. Yes, I mean, that's huge. It works. It's been a lifesaver for me. Oh, I do it. And I do it whenever I get like spare time. I was at the doctor's office this morning and I knew it was going to be 20 minutes. So I just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes and I meditated. You know, when I was growing up, there was this statement, I think it was Pascal. He said, you know, all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone. And it's very true. I always needed to be stimulated. And when the iPhone came along, boredom was dead. I would never be bored again. I, you know, if I'm standing in line, I'm on my iPhone and I thought it was great. And when I was a kid, I used to try and overclock my brain and be like, how many thoughts can I think at once? The answer is only one, but I would try to like think multiple thoughts at once. And I was proud of that. I was proud that my brain was always running. This engine was always moving and it's a disease. It's actually the road to misery. And now that I'm older, I realize like you actually want to again, rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle into your mind. Now I look forward to solitary confinement. You leave me alone for a day. It'll be like the happiest day I've had in a while. And that is a superpower that I think everybody can attain. The superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's critical and I, and I do think that this, these times where you just think about things, just be alone and think about things are so rare these days. And I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe. Yeah. It's, it's funny when I first started meditating, it was really hard, right? Cause everybody, I think a lot of people who listen to this broadcast, they've heard of meditation that has a good rep. So everybody tries it. They struggle, they kind of give it up. It's one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does. Right. It's like not eating sugar, right? Everyone talks about how, yeah, I don't eat sugar, but like, yeah, then the dessert tray rolls around and everyone's going for the cookies. Right. So it's become one of those things. And in fact, it's now even become a signaling thing where it's like, oh, how much did you meditate? I meditated this much. Or, you know, there are people now wearing headbands saying with tweetbirds, a chirp, and then when they're in deep meditation, I don't know how they make it work, but they'll be like, I got a lot of chirps today. How many chirps did you get? Oh my God. Oh, your meditation technique is wrong. Mine is right. But really all it is, is the art of doing nothing. Okay. And it's important because I think when we, when we grow up, right, it's all the stuff happening to you in your life and some of it you're processing, some of it you're absorbing, and some of it you should probably think a little bit more about and work through, but you don't, you don't have time. So it gets buried in you. And it's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues. And it's like your email inbox. It's just piling up email after email after email. That's not answered going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And then when you sit down to meditate, those emails start coming back at you. Hey, what about this issue? What about that issue? Have you solved this? Did you think about that? You have regrets there. You have issues there. And that gets scary. People don't want to do that. It's like, it's not working. I can't clear my mind. I better get up and not do this. But really what's happening is it's, it's self therapy. It's just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you're listening to yourself and you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one, you work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero. And there comes a day when you sit down, you realize the only things you're thinking about are things that happened yesterday because you've processed everything else, not necessarily even resolved it, but at least listen to yourself. And that's when meditation starts. And I think it's a, it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience. And that's when you arrive upon the art of doing nothing. Well, I think it's even a problem that most people are getting their meditation from an app. I will not use an app. It's sneaky. I mean, Sam Harris is a very good meditation app. I should say that, but you should be able to just do it. And many people can't, it is literally the art of doing nothing. All you need to do for meditation is just sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens happens. If you think you think, if you don't think, you don't think, don't put it effort into it, don't put effort against it. All you need. Do you concentrate on your breath or do you have a specific technique? Nothing. No, you just sit. You just sit. I think about my breath. That's all I do. I just try to only concentrate on breathing. I used to do that, but at some level, all the concentration, every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing, which is just witnessing. And concentration is a technique to still your mind enough that you can then drop the object of concentration. So you could also just try going straight to the end game. The problem with what I'm talking about, which is not focusing on your breath, is you will have to listen to your mind for a long time. It's not going to work unless you do at least an hour a day and preferably at least 60 days before you've kind of worked through a lot of issues. So it'll be hell for a while, but when you come out the other side, it's great. You get rid of the chatter. Or when the chatter comes, it's in the background. It's dimmer. It's smaller. You've heard it before. You see the patterns. It's more recent. It's something you need to resolve anyway, and you will get moments of actual silence. What is your, what's your ultimate state when you meditate? Like, is there a state where you've achieved rarely if ever, where you just, you're in bliss or you're in harmony or you're in enlightenment? Like what? It's kind of indescribable because when you're really meditating, you're not there. When there's no thoughts, there's no experience or there's nothing. There's just nothing. So it's, it's hard to describe, but I would say that it's like a, you can definitely, every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation. And I've definitely hit some of those states. You've hit some transcendent psychedelic states where you're hallucinating the whole deal. I've had trippy visuals. I've had the kind of the lights and colors. I've had the so-called downloads. I've had the realizations. I've had the bliss. I've had the light. I've had the colors, but not every time. No, it's rarely. And in fact, I would say that that's a, that's also like an experience that you can start craving, which will then actually take you out of meditation. Um, where you really, and I'm not enlightened or anything close to it. So not even the ballpark, but my own experience, and this is this personal experience is the place where I end up the most that is really the one that I, I want to be at is peace. It's just peace. Peace. Happy.