Ever suffer from anxiety about success?

Here is the answer!

November 04, 2023

0:00 /

https://cdn.freedomainradio.com/FDRP/FDRP_RESPECT_YOUR_EMOTIONS_locals_question.mp3

This episode explores success anxiety, its impact on relationships, the pursuit of simplicity, and the caution it requires. It discusses personal success, intelligence breeding hostility, leftism's beliefs, and the need for vigilance.

2023, Stefan Molyneux
Www.freedomain.com

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Generated Shownotes

Chapters

0:00:00 Introduction and Question on Success Anxiety
0:01:35 Contradictions, Intelligence, and Parental Reactions
0:09:57 The Hypocrisy of Yelling and Complex Justifications
0:14:15 Success, Vanity, and Enemies in Personal and Political Circles
0:18:52 Success Creates Enemies in Leftist Ideology
0:21:51 Success Comes with Problems and Enemies
0:26:23 Success Brings Enemies and Dispersed Allies
0:28:22 Success Comes with Caution, Anxiety, and Vigilance

Long Summary

In this episode, I delve into the topic of success anxiety and its two main categories: personal and political. I explain how personal success anxiety can arise when one achieves more success than their parents, causing a sense of humiliation for them. I discuss the role of intelligence in this dynamic and how parents' reactions to their child's success can be influenced by their own vanity and ego. However, if a child's intelligence leads to them finding contradictions in their parents' beliefs or behaviors, it may cause hostility rather than pride.

Moving on, I discuss the pursuit of simplicity amidst complexity in various fields like science, philosophy, and morality. While we often teach young children about morality with absolute rules without exceptions, as adults, we complicate things by considering factors like childhood experiences and personal circumstances when questioned about our own morality. I highlight the contradiction in teaching simplicity while defending our hypocrisies using complexity, and how this contradiction should bother intelligent individuals. I draw parallels to great thinkers like Einstein and Newton who simplified complex concepts, and the value of keeping certain things simple.

Next, I explore the importance of empathy and intelligence in recognizing future implications and the dangers of sacrificing free speech for people we may dislike. I discuss how less intelligent individuals are unbothered by contradictions and tactical shifts as long as the pursuit of power remains the same. On a personal level, I reflect on my own experience with my mother's pride in my intelligence, and how it was celebrated when it served her vanity but created conflicting emotions when it revealed contradictions in her life.

Shifting gears, I discuss the challenges of success in relationships with parents. I share my experience reading philosophy, particularly the works of Jung, and a sentence that stood out to me about parents being ordinary incompetents and more than half children themselves. I also delve into the implications of success in a free market, creating win-win situations for customers, and the notion that success often creates enemies both in the competitive and personal spheres.

Moving on, I discuss the foundational beliefs of leftism, where losers in society often believe that winners have taken something from them, leading to the view that successful people are bad and should be attacked. I emphasize that moral progress creates enemies before it creates allies, and the need to build substantial social movement allies over time. I use my work on peaceful parenting and ethical teachings as an example and highlight the difficulties in distancing oneself from amoral or immoral people for moral improvement.

I reflect on the caution that comes with success throughout history, as those who have openly embraced success without any anxiety or caution often did not succeed due to being cut down by others. I explain that success is a double-edged sword, and even in times of significant free market influence, successful individuals were often seen as bad by society. I touch on the anger and resentment that can arise when one's success harms the interests of a concentrated group of people while benefiting a larger number of people.

Finally, I discuss the reasons why success can be anxiety-inducing and why it is not necessarily a psychological issue. I explain how success can harm concentrated groups of people who become resentful and attack the successful individuals, while the benefits are dispersed, leaving the beneficiaries with little incentive to defend and protect them. I emphasize that success brings caution, anxiety, and the need to be vigilant due to potential blowback. I conclude by acknowledging that sometimes, avoiding pursuing success and living a "basement dweller" life can be the most sensible option. I encourage listeners to respect their emotions and view them as self-friendly, and thank the audience for their questions and invite them to donate to support the show.

Brief Summary

In this episode, we delve into success anxiety and its two main categories: personal and political. We discuss how personal success can humiliate parents and how intelligence can lead to hostility. We explore the pursuit of simplicity amidst complexity, the importance of empathy and intelligence, and the challenges of success in relationships. We also touch on the foundational beliefs of leftism and the caution that comes with success. We conclude by discussing the reasons behind success anxiety and the need for caution and vigilance.

Transcript

Introduction and Question on Success Anxiety

[0:00] Well, good morning, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
Sorry, I forgot to get to this question the other day. We got:

"Hey, Stef, would you elaborate more on success anxiety, please?
When I reach a new level of success, there's a brief high followed by a lot of anxiety.
Or occasionally, I will envision a new endeavor going perfectly, and when it doesn't, I berate myself for even trying, even if I was successful overall."

That's a great, great question.
And there's a lot of depth to this issue of success anxiety.
It's really, really fascinating. So to me, I say there's a lot of depth, I'm going to break it into two general categories and see if this makes any sense to you.
And by making any sense to you, I don't mean that will you understand it, I mean, I hope it makes sense.
I hope it makes sense as a whole. So here we go.
Now I have some experience in this, having gone from, again, sort of like welfare trash, heap to, you know, some decent success over the course of my life. This success anxiety is a big thing. So, there are two levels at which success anxiety kicks in. One is the personal and the other is the political, believe it or not. And we'll sort of do the personal, that's a little bit easier to understand. The political might take a little bit more, time. Now, the personal, of course, we don't need to spend a huge amount of time on. The, personal is well how do you feel doing better than those who raised you? How do.

[1:29] You feel doing better than those who raised you? It's really interesting.

Contradictions, Intelligence, and Parental Reactions

[1:35] Success does have something to do with raw intelligence and so if you do a lot better than those who raised you there are really two possibilities in this category of intelligence. There's really two possibilities. One is that those who raised you are not very smart and you are very smart. And that of course can happen. It's just a general scatter shot of genetics and so on. Or maybe you just really got into reading or something happened that gave you an organized worldview or whatever it was, right? But let's, just go with sort of the raw intelligence. It means that you're much more intelligent than your parents. Now, it's interesting because a lot of parents are really excited about their kid's success from an educational and income standpoint. In other words, if you're a kid and you become a doctor, lawyer, whatever, which your parents can brag about, a lot of times your parents will be quite excited and quite happy. But the reason why they're happy is it serves their vanity, it serves their ego.

[2:45] Like I raised a kid who became a doctor, therefore I am a good and or better type of person, right? That's the general equation, right?
So it serves vanity. So your parents often, not always of course, right, your parents will often want you to be successful, but they don't want you to be better than they are, right?

[3:08] So if you're successful, that's a big plus. If you're better than they are, then that does not serve their vanity, does not serve their ego, and they will often be hostile towards that.
So what I mean by this of course is that if your intelligence gives you high status to, your parents, they're happy, but if your intelligence creates humiliation for your parents, then they're angry.
And one of the marks of intelligence to me, deep intelligence, is having a problem with contradictions, right? You think of the people who figured out physics, sort of modern physics, they had a problem with contradictions. Why is it so complicated to figure out the motion of Mars? Something must be wrong with the model. It bothers them. It's like a splinter in the mind's eye was the name of an Alan Dean Foster novel that I read when I was a teenager about Star Wars. Like Han Solo at Star's End, Han Solo at Star's End. I always that he found a carbine rifle that had been.

[4:11] He said you could lay it up against a tree for 10 years and it would still be perfectly functional when you came back.
I always remembered that because that was about my brain during trauma.
Just things you remember. And the splinter in the mind's eye, things bother you, there's a contradiction, you feel uneasy, your brain is sort of working to resolve contradictions.
People who said, well, why do clouds float and anvils fall down?
And they won't accept hearsay, right? They want direct experience.
So everybody thinks that an orange and a bowling ball would fall at different heights and was, it Galileo went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa? I could be getting this totally wrong, but he dropped a bowling ball and an orange or something like that and they both fell at the same rate.
So or Einstein, why does the Ether calculations produce all of these complications?
It should be simpler, right?
This is the essence of genius is it's got to be simpler to be bothered by complication.
Love complication because it allows them to feel intelligent and baffle others.

[5:10] But genius is passionately devoted to consummating a relationship with simplicity. That is a simple fact, he said, obviously trying to, categorize himself.
If your intelligence leads you to become a doctor or a lawyer, your parents can brag about you.
But if your intelligence leads you to find contradictions in the positions of your parents, particularly if you do so in public, then they don't like your intelligence anymore.
So your success that serves vanity is happy for them.
It's not all parents, of course, right? And your success in reasoning that proves them to be contradictory or deficient, well.

[5:55] They don't like that, right?
Because a lack of intelligence is entirely unbothered by contradiction.
So I mean this is all the way back to the sort of theory of the elements that fire leaps up because it wants to join the fire element of the sky and so on, which is anthropomorphizing fire that it has a desire or a preference and that's obviously ridiculous. And so, I, mean, lava goes down the mountain. So, looking for simplicity and clarity. Obviously UPB is aiming for great simplicity when it comes to ethics. Ethics is way more complicated, and complication is a sign of failure. Complication is a sign of failure. In philosophy, in art, often complication is a sign of great success. A complicated, deep novel, Middlemarch or, Crime and Punishment or War and Peace, deep and complicated novels is a sign of success.

[6:53] But in science and in philosophy and particularly in morality, simplicity is the key. The fewest explanations, the most simple explanations is, and particularly with moral philosophy of course, because we instruct two-year-olds on moral philosophy, so it can't be super complicated.
It's so funny, right? When we instruct children, we pretend that morality is dead simple and two-year-olds can understand it.
When those two-year-olds grow up and question us about our morality, suddenly it's all kinds of complicated and there are all these factors and my childhood and balancing this and that and work and home, right?
We inflict morality as if it's simple.
Defend our hypocrisies as if morality is super complicated. This is one of the — and of course a —.

[7:39] Intelligent person would be bothered by that contradiction. Because your kids would say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. When I question your parenting, you say there's all complicated factors and problems and issues and balances and this and that and the other.
But when you told me to be moral when I was a little kid, it was just simple absolute rules with no exceptions and no understanding and no balancing this, that or the other or your childhood or my childhood or, right? Morality inflicted is simple. Morality defended is is suddenly woefully complex and an intelligent person would be bothered by that contradiction.
I mean, when people have pointed contradictions out in what I'm doing, it bothers me. It bothers me and I want to correct them. It really bothers me when there's contradictions and my fundamental, gut instinct, which doesn't mean I'm right of course, has always been, it's a lot simpler than you think it is. I remember when I was sitting down working at UPB, I was like, okay, what if it's so simple that you could teach it to a child? Because Lord knows we do and.

[8:37] Lord knows I intended to as a parent. What if, what if it's just so much simpler than we think it is? Which is again what Einstein did with the equals mc squared, what Newton did with the constant of gravity, what Copernicus and Tycho Brahe did with the sun-scented solar system. Like what if it's just simpler? What if you just move some assumptions and it's way simpler than you think and everything clicks into place and blah-di-blah-di-blah, right?
Complication, yeah. I mean if you're a coder you're going to end up, I remember Windows NT way back, or Windows 2000, 20 years ago, had 40 million lines of code. Okay, well that's kind of necessary, also because of backwards compatibility, which is a big problem for.

[9:16] The Windows system. You still have to be able to run DOS 1.0. So yeah, simple. You want some things to be simple.
So the clarity and simplicity that great intelligence brings to formally complex questions, or questions that are rendered in a complex manner in order to defend hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is when you yelled at me to not yell at kids. Well, it's complicated, I was stressed, there was a difficulty, you weren't listening, blah blah blah. And the response to that would be, well, mom, dad, that's not what you told me when I was a kid. You didn't say, well, if you're stressed you can yell, or, well, if the other person isn't listening you can yell. You just said don't yell. It was a simple, basic fact.

The Hypocrisy of Yelling and Complex Justifications

[9:57] To me, don't yell while yelling at me continually. So that's bull, right? So when you said to me, don't yell, it was a simple rule and absolute, but when I point out the hypocrisy of you yelling at me not to yell, suddenly it's all kinds of complex and it didn't happen as often as I think, and, you had a bad childhood, and you had a job, and it was stressful, and so you have all these excuses.
You didn't give me any of these excuses when I was a kid, right? So this is just complications, immorality are invented in order to defend hypocrisy. And less intelligent people are unbothered by hypocrisy. And one of the reasons why you'd be bothered by hypocrisy is you can empathize with yourself in the future, which is a rather abstract thing to do and requires, I think, more intelligence, and of course being raised reasonably decently or gaining self-knowledge over the process. So you'd end up with the free speech question, right? Why do you not want, free speech to be restricted for people you dislike? Because then people you dislike will get a hold of that weapon and turn it against you. And you know, there's principles and then there's also practicality, but people who are less intelligent just aren't bothered by.

[11:10] Those contradictions, right? Like all the people on the left who were like pro-free speech and anti-war have now become anti-free speech and pro-war, and they're not bothered by that contradiction because the goal is the seeking of power and therefore change of tactics is irrelevant if the goal remains the same, which it generally seems to be. So at a personal level, if you do better than your parents, and I mean I have direct experience of this of course, right? My mother was proud of the company that I co-built and she was proud of my educational level and she was proud of what I was doing. I mean I remember when I was in.

[11:49] I don't know grade 8 or grade 9 I was taking an adult computer science course that taught me how to program blocks on a floppy disk and all that and she was, very proud of that she's very happy then she would tell people always he's taking adult computer science courses he's taking adult or grade 13 writing courses he's in grade 8 like so she was very very keen on my intelligence because I mean she comes from a family where intelligence was greatly worshipped and she was sort of proud and happy about all of that. I didn't like it because it felt a little bit like I was a performing monkey, but obviously I was a smart performing monkey and I guess I had to take that as a consolation. So she liked my intelligence when it served her vanity, but when my intelligence started no...
Contradictions about her entire life and approach and way of being and blah blah blah blah blah.

[12:33] Well suddenly my intelligence is not such a bonus. Oh no, he's actually smart and is noticing contradictions and now my intelligence would be a problem. So she was very happy that I was smart but then when I would point out even as a child her contradictions and, I would say well I thought and she would say don't think right. So think when it serves, my vanity, don't think when it harms my vanity. That's kind of common. So you're going to have that issue. If you have, I mean, I was thinking about this last night, just a phrase that had a very large impact on me when I was on vacation. I went on a two-week vacation on my own to the Dominican Republic, I think it was, and spent the time swimming, playing beach volleyball, snorkeling, and reading philosophy. Oh, fantastic. Just fantastic.
What a glorious couple of weeks. And that's when I was reading a lot of Jung. It wasn't, I guess psychology plus philosophy, I was reading a lot of Jung and I came across a sentence that burned itself into my brain.
And it was just a casual aside where he said, but of course most parents are merely ordinary incompetence more than half children themselves.
And that sort of, it's like, shouldn't that be a whole book, not just an aside, but you know, I guess he had his cautions, which I didn't, and maybe he was wiser that way, who knows, right?

[13:54] If you blow past your parents' intelligence or honesty or directness and your intelligence, is no longer beneficial to them, so there's a problem with that.
Your parents don't want you to succeed to the point where it harms their vanity.
They want you to succeed to the point where it serves their vanity, not harms their vanity.
All right, so that's number one.

Success, Vanity, and Enemies in Personal and Political Circles

[14:15] Number two, which is the political one, and it's not just your parents, right?
Could be siblings, could be friends, all that kind of stuff.
I happen to have come from a friend group which was divided into fairly significant successes and fairly significant failures.
There wasn't a lot of like, I don't know many people I grew up with who I was friends with, I think it's sort of my D&D group. Most of them. I can't remember.
Of the single one who ended up in the middle, right? There's the people who had significant failures and people who had significant successes, but there wasn't a lot in the middle.
So the second, of course, is political, which is what does it mean to be successful throughout most of human history? Well, remember, in most of human history, there's no free market.

[14:55] There's no private property, there's no objective courts. We're sort of returning to prehistory it away. But what did it mean to be successful? Well, to be successful meant to win in a win-lose situation. See, in the free market, to be successful is to create a win-win situation.
You're successful in a free market because you appeal to your customers better, you provide them better services or goods or efficiency or time savers or dopamine delivery, happiness or you do something. So the people who buy from you in a voluntary situation, that's a win-win situation and all is good, all is well, all is happy. Now, in a pre-free market, which again is most of human history, you win at the expense of others. It's win-lose.

[15:40] It's win-lose. Now, of course, in the free market, the only people who lose are your direct competitors and even they don't lose because they're stimulated to do better by you winning, right? It's well known that competition brings out the best. People who run, run faster when they have a fast runner competing with them. They just do, rather than even if you You tell them to run as fast as they can solo, they won't run as well as if they're running with someone in some sort of competition.
Just competition brings out the best in you, which is why it's always been fairly disappointing to me that it's tough to find someone to debate with who's really good.
So what does it mean prior to the free market to be successful?
It means that somebody else is losing, and the more successful you are, the more you, are harming somebody else's interest who probably has quite a bit of power, right?
So if you grab a bunch of land, really valuable land, you're harming the interests of the, people who owned that land, right?
Like if you're able to buy that land, let's say, or you're able to conquer that land.
So success creates enemies.
Now again, in the free market, success does create some kind of enemy, but mostly among the petty people, oh how dare he get that contract, my stuff is way much better.
Like a new restaurant opens up that's really good and all the bad restauranteurs get mad at it.

[17:08] Oh it's all just marketing, it's all just hype, it's like well no, maybe try it, but the smart restauranteurs will recognize that competition and welcome the opportunity to improve their food.

[17:17] Their decor or their service or something like that, right? So yeah, the immature people will get petty and angry, the mature people will generally work to improve and in a sense be thankful for your competition, right? As Immanuel Kant said about philosophies, the.

[17:34] Philosophies he disagreed with, it aroused me from my dogmatic slumber, it aroused me from my dogmatic slumber. And this was sort of the pursuit of the non-aggression principle to a universal standpoint, that was the same for me. Now, if you get more of the king's attention, let's say the king really likes you and takes you on as his trusted advisor, well that comes at the expense of other people who were the king's trusted advisors before and they're going to get mad at you and they're going to hate you and all of that, right?
And so they're going to work to plot your downfall. So your success creates enemies And because it's not a free market scenario, those enemies will work to take you down.
And of course, the same thing does happen at a personal level.
If you do a lot better than the people you grew up with or your family or whatever, they will often get mad at you and trash talk you and try and level up by bringing you down from a reputational standpoint or so.
He's too good for us. He thinks he's so great. He thinks he's so hot.
He just got lucky. I could have done it. He's so vain, right?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So losers imagine that winners took something from them. Right?
Definition of somebody who's a loser is a losers imagine that winners took something from them. Losers imagine that winners took something from them. It's sort of the relationship between legacy media and alternative media whatever.

Success Creates Enemies in Leftist Ideology

[18:52] Right. The losers imagine that the winners took something from them. That's foundational to leftism and so on. If someone has something he took it from you and he stole from you and therefore his success makes him bad and because he stole from you you can steal it back and aggress against him and harm him and attack him and undermine him and so on right. So success creates enemies success creates enemies. Now moral success in particular being a better person than your parents I mean sort of foundationally fundamentally particularly in the realm of child abuse, moral progress creates enemies long before it creates allies right.
About what I'm doing, I have to wait at least a generation for any allies. I mean, I'm not talking about you guys and all of that's great, but in terms of like substantial social movement allies, I have to wait at least a generation because by putting out peaceful parenting and how to teach.

[19:46] Ethics without hypocrisy and all of that, then there'll be a whole generation of kids who are raised who will look back and they say, gee, you know, we were raised really well, what happened?
Oh, this deaf guy or whatever, and then there'll be some allies, but it's not in the present.

[20:02] Right? As a whole, as a sort of general social thing. And we can see this playing out, or has, played out for the last couple of years, or actually played out immediately over the de-platforming thing. So if you have moral improvements, you know, the Prophet is loved everywhere but in his own country. And by everywhere, usually that means the future, right? Usually that means the future. So moral improvements will benefit you and your wife and your children but will create a lot of enemies. And the other thing too is that, with moral improvements you don't really want to spend time with amoral or immoral people particularly if you're a father any more than you know the old do-si-do that happens when you want to go over to a big family's house you have to ask the kids sick right because usually there's one kid who's got something and it's a real pain in the neck, sometimes literally a sore throat and I really can't do a week or two of a cold and a sore throat. My voice is kind of what I do. Like Pavarotti, like he wouldn't shake hands with anyone. He'd asked everyone to keep at least six feet away because he couldn't get a cold, right? Because he would be paid half a million dollars to sing and he couldn't like had a contract and he couldn't afford to get a cold, you know? I mean maybe it would be slightly better for my daughter's immune system but I really.

[21:20] Can't afford to not have voice for a week or two and sore throats can get pretty bad with me so I try to avoid that kind of stuff as a whole. So you don't want your kids to be around amoral, immoral people and so, you know, if you have a family and you're morally improving, you may not want to spend as much time or any time with, you know, corrupt relatives and so on, which again makes them angry, they'll trash talk you, it's, you know, it's a difficult thing to go through, I understand and I really, really sympathize, but that's sort of a reality.

Success Comes with Problems and Enemies

[21:51] So and of course in the political realm, if you succeed, well, you have a lot of problems, right? You have a lot of problems. And we've seen this repeatedly over the course of history, it's kind of playing out in the present in some ways. So yeah, so what does success mean?
Success means being targeted, right? So success anxiety, you know, there's a very interesting, survival strategy. You could call it any number of names, early mammal, basement dweller and and so on. Let's just say, basement dweller. So a basement dweller lives small, doesn't, raise his head over the parapet, doesn't confront, doesn't draw much attention to himself, and.

[22:33] Survives a time of significant change because he's unremarkable. The T-Rex, in a sense, does not go hunting for the field mouse. The T-Rex is looking for bigger prey. So more success makes you bigger prey, and we have some significant caution regarding success.
Or to put it another way, those who openly embraced success and didn't feel any anxiety about it or any caution about their success often didn't make it, right?

[22:57] Because they would become too successful and then be cut down by the king or some witch doctor or whoever it was that, who their interests were harming, they would sort of blow back and attack and all this kind of stuff.
So yeah, it is, success is a double-edged sword, right? And has been throughout almost all of human history.
There was sort of a brief, even think of in a time where there was significantly more free market, right, where you sort of look at the 19th century and the people who were, very successful, you know, the Rockefellers and so on, the people who were very successful and were actually beneficial to the customers who lowered the price of various goods that they were involved in creating and selling. If you look at the 19th century, when there was more free market and it was very beneficial to the customers, then what are they called?
They're called robber barons, right, they're just the age of predation and they were considered to be really bad.
And it didn't matter how much benefit they provided to the consumer, it didn't matter how much money they gave to charity or how many libraries they found, it didn't matter, right?
Because what happens is when you harm people's interests and benefit, like you harm a concentrated, number of people and you help a very dispersed number of people.
So if you're really good at, I don't know, importing oil and you can sell it for half the price of your competitors, then there's probably like 50 or 100 people who are really really angry at you because you're taking.

[24:21] Their fortune, their the work of decades, their company, their status, their prestige, their sense of self, their sense of competence, like they're just really really mad at you and there's 50 or 100 of them and they have got a lot of money and resources and political contacts and connections and you're really getting them mad. Now maybe you're benefiting 10 million consumers but they don't see it directly and you're not benefiting to the point where they're going to expend a lot of resources defending you, right? I mean concentrated costs, dispersed benefits is a great alchemy for creating very motivated enemies and almost no allies, right?
It's just the way of things. It's sort of like, you know, if someone can convince the government to impose a tax that benefits them a million dollars, but it only costs each taxpayer 50 cents, then they have up to a million dollars worth of incentive and you, have 50 cents or less worth of incentive to oppose it. So it's, you know, this is going it's going to go through. It's the same thing when you succeed, you harm concentrated, people who are probably going to resent and attack you and you benefit very dispersed people who have very little incentive to defend and protect you, right? So it leaves yourself exposed to the inevitable arrows and hostilities and slanders and attacks and you understand all of this sort of stuff, right? So it's not just some weird psychological phenomenon like, I just don't want to do well, right? I mean, of course, we want to do well. We're.

[25:50] Animals. We're programmed to succeed. But evolutionarily speaking, we need the backing of the tribe in order to succeed, and improvements harm existing vanities and resource acquisition and power structures and so on. And so we are very cautious about success. Success is a flinch situation, right? I succeeded. Oh, no. Let's be cautious. Let's see whether Let's get the lay of the land. Has my success created any enemies that I need to get a hold of?

Success Brings Enemies and Dispersed Allies

[26:23] That I need to really keep an eye on. Will I survive my success? Success creates enemies and the enemies are concentrated. Those who are helping are dispersed and you're often alone in the battlefield. So it's not a big psychological problem, really. I wouldn't put it that way. Oh man, I'm just not comfortable with success. I guess I'm insecure. No, no, no. Being a basement dweller and not pursuing success was really great. I mean, if there's some revolution coming, the people who fight that revolution usually don't make it or do very well and the people who just stay in the basement and don't raise their heads or their voices, they tend to survive and those genes get passed along. So yeah, don't look in the mirror and see somebody, oh I'm just scared of success, I guess I'm concerned, I'm worried, I'm neurotic, I'm insecure. It's like, I guess you could say maybe, but that's not the first place that I would look. The first place that I would look when I have a certain feeling, first place I look is, okay, what's rational about this feeling? Don't necessarily say what's irrational.
Who wouldn't want success? Well, lots of people wouldn't want success.

[27:25] Lots of people wouldn't want success. For a lot of people, success has led directly to their demise.
So, I mean, we can think of countless figures throughout human history who were very successful and died for their troubles, right? Or were killed for their troubles.
So don't assume that it's some big psychological issue, but rather look at your feelings as a a whole and say, okay, rather than me slandering my feelings and saying, well, that's just insecurity, that's just, I can't handle success, I guess I've got a psychological problem, blah-de-blah-de-blah, rather than any of that stuff. That may be the case, but the first, place to start is, okay, what's rational about this? What's rational about this? You say, okay, so has success ever bought anyone any problems? Has success ever engendered any blowback throughout all the course of human history. You can't just look at the present because we've evolved under the pressures of history and violence, really, right?

Success Comes with Caution, Anxiety, and Vigilance

[28:22] Successful, well, were you ever harmed for it? Of course, it's pretty much the norm.
So of course success is going to bring caution and anxiety because it's putting yourself, in the crosshairs and you need to be alert and you need to be aware, right? If you get the management position of the Southwest sales team, well, I can guarantee you there were, ten plus other people who are highly ambitious, skilled and possibly malevolent who really, wanted that job and are mad at you for getting it, and will work to undermine and harm you, which is why success comes with anxiety, it's why success comes with concern, let's say, or success comes with vigilance.
It's not good sometimes to succeed. Not good to succeed.
The blowback can be pretty intense. So I get where you're coming from, I understand where you're coming from, and the life of, the basement dweller can sometimes be the most sensible thing you can do, and recognize that it's not irrational to have some success anxiety. It is in fact entirely rational, and you wouldn't want to slander your emotions by automatically categorizing them as neurotic or irrational or something like that. So just as a general premise, start with, yeah, well, this makes sense. It makes sense until I can prove that it doesn't. Emotions make sense until you can prove that they don't. And that's being self-friendly, and that really is being, self-respectful some. I hope that helps. Freedomain.com/donate. If you would like to help out, the show, freedomain.com slash donate. Love you guys. Thanks for the great questions.
Bye.

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