Name: How To Deal With Feeling Aimless
Uploaded: 2023-08-31T13:00:33.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How To Deal With Feeling Aimless' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How To Deal With Feeling Aimless' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-31. Transcript available.

so many of us are aimless it's like we're and we're like why do I feel aimless
people ask me
that all the time like man I feel so aimless I don't know what to do well you
know okay so two
things happen when you're aimless okay so the first is you get anxious and the
reason you get
anxious is because anxiety computes aimlessness so if you're if you drop
someone in the middle of
the desert the reason they're anxious is because it's not because they don't
know which way to go
it's because there are way too many places to go right every direction and that's
aimlessness is
like every direction beckons that's way too complicated and your brain
literally signals
that with anxiety okay so that's so aimlessness and anxiety are the same thing
but it's worse
your brain is set up to produce positive emotion literally this is what the
positive motion system
does it computes decrease between you and a goal so if you have a goal and you
see that you've done
something that moves you towards it your brain produces a dopamine hit and that
makes you feel
good and it strengthens the neural circuits that moved you forward it does both
of those that's
reward and reinforcement and what that means is if you don't have a goal you
have no positive emotion
and when people say you know they're aimless they're they're partly telling you
that they're anxious but
they're also telling you that they have no positive emotion so then you say
well what short a goal
should you have because that's the next question right and the answer to that
is well ask yourself
and this future authoring program that i set up it helps you do that it's like
okay here's the deal
here's the deal maybe this isn't true but maybe it is you can have what you
want in five years
but there's two conditions you have to know what it is and you have to aim at
it okay okay so let's say
you're willing to play that game might be wrong because who knows you're going
to get run over by a bus
tomorrow but you know you're going to play the game okay now the next step is
all right
you probably want to have an intimate relationship now maybe not but probably
but assuming you do
imagine pretend like you're a kid you get to have an intimate relationship what
does it look like what
does it look like when your wife greets you when you come home from work what
does your sex life look
like right what do you do for entertainment how do you treat each other you
need a fantasy just like a
little kid playing house right figure out what you want write it down figure
out what you could do to
start moving towards that okay do that with your family relationships do that
with your friendships
do that with your career do that with your education think about your misuse of
alcohol and drugs and
other things that might drag you down if you want to drink it's like you want
to be a bumbling barney
gumbel idiot like you want to drink okay what do you mean by that exactly how
often how much is too
much how are you going to constrain that and why develop a vision and you have
to do that in dialogue
with yourself right it's like if i could have what i wanted what would satisfy
me and you might think
well i could never get that and i could say well maybe not but i'll tell you
one thing man
you can move towards it and i know that everyone who knows the underlying
neuroscience knows this
almost all the pleasure is in the moving toward so even you know you don't want
to set up a goal
that's so high that there's just no possibility that a schlub like you could
ever manage it but god only
knows what your upper limit is you know but but if you set up a goal that you
think is
you know just on the edge of conceivability then every time you move even a
tiny bit towards that
you're going to think good work man good work you get a little kick from that
you get a little stronger
from that and that works like a charm yeah yeah you bet you bet an end of aimlessness
the end of
aimlessness that's the desert in exodus hey when when the egyptians leave the
pharaoh they leave
tyranny right and everybody thinks oh my god we're out of tyranny now it's
freedom everything's great
that isn't what happens they go into the desert they're aimless they're slaves
they have no capacity for
self-governance they have no vision of their own they leave the tyranny and now
they're somewhere
worse they're out in the aimless desert and part of the reason people like tyranny
even their own is
because they don't want to be aimless in the desert it's why some people go
back to prison
absolutely absolutely it's why the after the soviet union collapsed it's why so
much of the population
was nostalgic for stalin you bet it's also why lots right there's a story of
lot's wife when sodom and
gamora destroyed she looks back god turns her into a pillar of salt right you
don't look back when you
escape somewhere terrible you don't look back and long to be there but it means
you have to develop
a new vision right if you don't develop a new vision then you can you part of
you will look back just
because you want to have some organization your brain wants to have
organization some direction right
that's right that's right you'll take here's another rule this is a terrifying
rule if you don't
provide yourself with direction you will take direction from a tyrant yeah
right right so and
you might say well why should i take responsibility you asked that you know
yeah i'm afraid of my own
goals because of the responsibility it's like well you're either going to be
responsible to yourself
or you're going to be responsible to a tyrant or you're going to be absolutely
lost that's your option
set yeah right that's it yeah bet that pick one tyranny slavery or something
approximating visionary
self-determination hope you enjoyed that video and you can watch another and
you can watch this one
you can watch this one different options different choices some guy just brings
you one option not this
guy two options watch one this one or this one