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What To Do When The World Is Falling Apart

2025/5/6
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Dr. Alok Kanodja
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Dr. Alok Kanodja: 当前世界面临诸多挑战,例如俄乌冲突、经济下行和孤独感疫情等,让人感觉世界正在崩塌。然而,真正的挑战并非世界本身,而是我们难以在不确定性中前进。 首先,我们需要理解这种无力感并非懒惰,而是源于长期创伤的适应性反应。从911事件、次贷危机、学贷危机到新冠疫情,这些事件对千禧一代和Z世代造成了持续的创伤,导致我们适应性地选择行动迟缓,以节省能量应对不可控的局面。这种适应性反应在长期内会变得有害,形成行动迟缓。 其次,我们需要认识到,我们所处的社会已经从过去的“荣誉文化”转变为“受害者文化”。在“受害者文化”中,人们倾向于将问题归咎于外部因素,并依赖外部机构来解决问题,而不是承担个人责任。这种文化进一步加剧了我们的无力感和行动迟缓。 第三,科技成瘾加剧了我们的问题。我们每天花费大量时间在手机、社交媒体等科技产品上,这不仅浪费了我们本可以用来提升自我的时间,也扭曲了我们对成功的认知,让我们更加被动地应对生活。 那么,我们该如何应对呢?首先,不要试图寻找应对现状的完美方法,而是要避免那些错误的应对方式,例如过度沉迷于手机等。其次,要投资于自己,即使在经济困难时期也要关注身心健康,学习新技能,提升自我。最后,要学会在内心中寻找不变的事物,以获得内心的平静,从而更好地应对外部的挑战。这需要持续的练习,例如冥想,以找到内心的平静,从而提升应对困境的能力。 总而言之,世界虽然充满不确定性,但我们仍然可以通过积极主动地行动,投资于自我,并保持内心的平静来应对挑战,最终获得成功和幸福。

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This episode is brought to you by Disney's Lilo and Stitch, only in theaters this Memorial Day. A reimagining of Disney's animated classic, Lilo and Stitch is the wildly funny and touching story of a lonely Hawaiian girl, Lilo, and the fugitive alien, Stitch, who helps to mend her broken family. Lilo and Stitch crashes into theaters May 23rd. Rated PG. Get tickets now.

Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

So everything is falling apart right now. We've got prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The United States stock market is basically crashing as we speak. And on top of that, we have a loneliness epidemic, not only amongst young men, but against amongst young people as a whole. We have the lowest rates of birth in some countries that are probably going to herald economic ruin. And so everything seems to be falling apart.

And no one knows what to do about it. And today, we're going to try to fix that. Now, I know that sounds impossible, but I would love to share with you all a path of how to move forward when the world is falling apart.

Now, in order to do this, the first thing we have to do is understand why we are so crippled to move forward when there is uncertainty all around us. Right. So in medicine, and I'm a psychiatrist, by the way. Hello, my name is Dr. Alok Kanoja. One of the big things that we believe in medicine is that good diagnosis precedes good treatment. So if you want to fix a problem, we have to start by understanding what the problem really is.

And I don't know if this makes sense, but the world falling apart around us is not the problem, right? So the first thing we've got to understand is the problem is that you have difficulty moving forward and figuring out what to do when the world is falling apart. Now, this may sound kind of confusing, but I'd love to share with you all like something cool that I learned, which is that if you look at the Japanese kanji for crisis,

This is also the Chinese character for crisis. It's a combination of two characters, danger plus opportunity. And even though the stock market is falling apart, there are people like Warren Buffett who are sitting on $334 billion in cash. When there is uncertainty in the world, there are some people

people who are able to use that uncertainty to maximally improve their lives, whereas the vast majority of people get absolutely crippled when the world is falling apart. Right. These are the times, as my financial advisor told me before, these are the times that fortunes are made. It encouraged me to buy the dip.

And so I did spend what some of the money that I had on buying the dip. And then I texted him back the next day and said, these are the times that fortunes are also lost, bro. So in order to understand how to make something of it and how to move forward, we have to understand how we got here in the first place. And it starts with if you are someone who is between a millennial and Gen Alpha, you have basically been chronically traumatized for the majority of your life.

Now, I know that sounds kind of weird because when we normally think about trauma, we think about things like physical abuse or emotional abuse. That's not what I'm talking about. So we have to first understand is that any time we are faced with a trauma, we, our bodies, our brains will adapt. Right. So if I get cut on my arm, the body will form a scar tissue. This is a trauma that that results in a response. Right.

So we as millennials through Gen Alpha have been taught and have been forced to adapt to certain circumstances in ways that cripple us. So the problem with trauma is that after we adapt to it, over time it becomes maladaptive. So I'll give you all a simple example. Let's say I got, I mean, I did get bullied a lot in grade school, high school, middle school, all throughout the schools. I was bullied a lot. So

So one of the adaptations that I make when I get traumatized or when I get bullied is that I learn how to be invisible. Now, that worked really well for a while because I got bullied less in high school because I got really good at being invisible. But then college came around and I started crushing on a girl and I'd spent all of my experience points and leveling up character points in the invisibility skill instead of the talking to other human beings skill. And so then I found myself trying.

Thank you.

or click the link in the description below.

Hope to see you there. So the main adaptation that we have is something called the paralysis of initiation. You heard that right. Paralysis of initiation when you struggle to do anything, right? When you get up in the morning and you're like, I don't feel like doing anything today. And then it's really hard to get yourself to do the bare minimum. This is not because you are

lazy, this is because you have been possibly repeatedly traumatized by society and you have adapted into something called the paralysis of initiation. So I know this sounds crazy, but Dr. Judith Herman, who coined the term complex PTSD, basically sort of explained this concept and we'll explain it to you now. So complex PTSD was originally researched in

in POW survivors, so prisoners of war. And basically what happens when you were a prisoner of war is you are faced against unsolvable circumstances, right? You're surrounded by guards. You're stuck in this prisoner of war camp. You have no idea what's going to happen. You have no idea when it's going to happen. You can't, you don't know if you're going to be safe. You don't know if everything's going to fall apart, but these circumstances are bad.

And when you're a prisoner of war and people are, you know, taking things away from you and suppressing you and all this good stuff, sound familiar, by the way, the first thing that you feel is anger and you feel incredibly angry. But then if you express that anger towards guards, you get punished for it. So how does the brain survive when our drive to correct things gets punished? For example, in growing up around 2010 to 2015, and everyone says, go to college.

that will help you get a good job. So you sign up for college and you get hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and then you sort of finish college and the job market sucks and you have a bunch of debt and you have no idea what to do. What is the adaptation that you are going to learn? You are going to learn to do absolutely nothing. And this is exactly what happened in the prisoners of war. So what they learned

learn what the adaptation they form is when circumstances are uncertain and when I have no power in the world, the best thing to do is to conserve my energy and not try to initiate anything because if I try to initiate something, things aren't going to work out. So I want y'all to think about this, right? So if you've worked really hard and you have nothing to show for it, what is your brain going to learn from that? It's going to learn to do absolutely nothing. So what are the traumas that have created this paralysis of initiation?

So I am a millennial. First thing that happened to us was September 9-11. So this is where we sort of felt that we sort of learned as a society that even if you're like, you know, in New York City and you're a banker who's working in one of the Twin Towers, the world is not safe. So the world became unsafe in 2001. Next thing that happened is 2007 to 2008. We had a subprime mortgage crisis where a bunch of people went bankrupt and things like that. So like 2001, major trauma, 2007, 2008, major trauma.

Things got better for a couple of years. People were sort of coming out of it. But this is when the student loan problem started to really balloon in the United States, where if you look at the cost of tuition for universities, you know, it rose by like 400 percent or something, something insane. So we have 2001, we have 2007, 2008. We have a group of people who are graduating around 2015, 2016, 2017 with a lot of crippling debt. Everyone said become a programmer and then COVID hit.

Right. So COVID was the next thing that sort of taught us that we could not plan for the future. It's about surviving today.

And then once COVID hit, a lot of other cracks in society started to show. We discovered that we were in a mental health crisis. We have an addictive technology crisis. We have a loneliness epidemic. So we're starting to see all kinds of problems in dating and mating. No one knows how to survive. No one knows how to succeed. No one knows how to do anything. When faced with these repeated problems, we end up

just being paralyzed. We don't know how to move forward in the face of chaos. But that's not the whole of the situation. There is another macroscopic force that I've sort of noticed, which is that we've also adopted a culture of victimhood. So in the past, like back in the wild, wild west, we used to have something called a culture of honor, which means that, you know, like...

If I am like a cowboy and someone wrongs me in some way, I have to correct that wrong. If I don't stand up to people who take advantage of me, then I will be taken advantage of. There is no larger institution in the wild, wild west. There's no really law or order that is pervasive that I can go to. There's like a very rudimentary court system. Maybe there's a sheriff out there. But generally speaking, if someone wronged me, I had to do something about it in order to fix things.

So over the last 20 years, our culture has shifted into something called a culture of victimhood. Now, what does that mean? That means that if I want to advance...

my goals in life, one of the most powerful things that I can do is play the victim. So for example, when I was growing up and I got bullied, no one told me to go tell the teacher. The teacher didn't do anything about it. If I got bullied every day, like that was something I had to deal with. But as we grew up and we realized bullying is bad, we started telling our children to tell the teacher. The teacher will protect you. Our institutions will protect you.

Right. So as you have problems, what used to happen is people used to fix their own problems and not rely on institutions or higher authorities to fix things for us. But now what we've started to do is if something is wrong in my life, the way to fix it is to appeal to someone else and say, hey, I am a victim. This is unfair. I want you to fix it for me. So you may have sort of noticed that in your friend circle, in your family, in your workplace,

one of the quickest ways that someone would overcome you is to play the victim. So we have bridezillas now, we have Karens all over the place. And what is like the MO, the modus operandi of a Karen? The MO of a Karen is to say, I have been victimized. This person is victimizing me by, I don't know, ordering soy milk instead of whole milk or organic milk or whatever, right? So people are playing the victim in order to advance their interests.

Now, the culture of victimhood only works...

If there are large institutions that are sort of invested in fairness and are hoping to kind of like make everything even for everybody. But the problem is that we sort of learned, okay, so now if I'm like unhappy with my job, the right thing is for someone else to fix it, right? There's a power imbalance here, and I'm not saying there isn't a power imbalance, but the question is what is the method we use to fix that power imbalance? We appeal to other people.

So what this has sort of created is a society of people, a generation of people who sort of relies on other institutions instead of taking responsibility themselves. Now, you may ask, how did we get to the culture of victimhood? And this is where I think we get to think about the generation that came before us.

So the generation that came before us basically had a lot of luck. We had an unprecedented level of economic growth between like the 50s and basically 2000, 2005, 2004. So you had a generation of people who basically rode a wave of economic prosperity and sort of –

thought they were working really hard, but weren't actually working really hard. So they believed that working really hard was sufficient, but our society has changed. So now we're in a situation where basically we've been told, hey, if you work really hard, things will work out. And at the same time, we've sort of adopted this idea that if something is wrong in the world,

It is someone else's responsibility to fix it. So I've seen a bunch of like posts recently from people who are millennials to Gen Alpha who are kind of like saying, is this what life is? Am I supposed to grind for 40 hours a week, commute for two hours a week? And like, this is not what life is supposed to be. Where is fulfillment? Where is my joy? Where like, why? Like, is this what life is supposed to be? And this is where I got to say, like, honestly, no.

Where did you get the idea that life was supposed to be more than that? Right. So if we sort of look at like life, right.

Outside of human beings, what we find is that every day is a struggle for survival, right? So animals get like eaten by other animals. There are droughts and there are floods and there are all kinds of problems where the struggle for survival is the point of life. This broader idea of fulfillment is something that was somewhere along the way. We got it in our heads where life is supposed to be like winnable. Whatever.

Whereas when I really look at it, life is not really like winnable in its default state. Life is a struggle in its default state. And that's what I think we're experiencing. Now, this may seem really tone deaf to you, right? So you may say, but like, Dr. K, that's not fair because there are so many other people for whom life is easy and we should distribute the wealth and things should be easier for me.

So this is where I say, okay, so let's like think about this for a second, okay? I don't disagree with you, but what are you going to do about it, right? When we say life should be a certain way, whose responsibility is it to make it the way it should be? If you are unwilling to act,

In order to turn the world into what it should be, I don't know what to tell you. So I agree with you that life should be fairer. I agree with you that people should be nicer. I agree with you that there should be more economic opportunity that is spread more evenly between things. I agree with you that in a perfect world, you know, like some people should, everyone should work roughly the same and everyone should have some degree of ability to like go on vacation and have a good time. I agree with you. But

But who's going to create that world? Are you going to sit there and bitch about it on social media and like expect things to change? I'm not trying to be cruel, but I'm like honestly asking y'all, how do you think the world becomes what it should be? Who is responsible for that? The people in power. They should be doing it. The president, the prime minister.

The dictator, they should be doing it. Okay, well, they should be doing it. Are they doing it? And what are you going to do if they don't do what they're supposed to do? The whole problem that we have is that we have surrendered control over our lives to the people in power and look at what they have done. That doesn't work. So now the question becomes, what do we actually do about it?

So this is where I think there's a lot that can be done. So I know it sounds insane, but just hear me out, okay? The first thing to understand is that we don't control the circumstances, right? We don't control whether Russia and war are at Ukraine, unless you're like, you know, a head of state who's watching this video. But generally speaking, we do not control the circumstances of our lives. We don't control the economy. We don't control who's at war. We don't control whether there's inflation or not, right? So we're sort of like...

Sitting there, like I spawn into the earth and then there's like all these like RNG really bad events that are completely out of our control.

And yet 75% of people get crippled by this and 25% of people thrive. So the first thing is you don't control your circumstances. So what do you control? You control how you respond to your circumstances. You control what you do in the face of adversity. And this is where it's really hard to think about this because you think that

That there is nothing that you can do. You think that, oh my God, these circumstances are too big for me to deal with. It is impossible to do something about them.

And I sort of agree with you, but it is sort of like a non-helpful way of thinking. So if your mind tells you there's nothing I can do about inflation, you are correct. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing you can do in life, okay? So how do we figure out what we should do if we can't control our circumstances? So you can't control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. And then we get to the third thing that is absolutely messing up our lives, which is this bad boy, technology.

So in the backdrop of these macroeconomic forces, we also have all of these highly addictive technological devices that are shaping our brain, shaping our motivation, shaping the way that we perceive the world and what success really looks like, what success we're capable of. So I'll give you all a couple of simple examples, okay?

So a lot of people will say, there's nothing I can do to improve my situation. The first question that I ask patients who come into my office or clients when they do this, I ask them, this isn't the first thing because it's an asshole thing and they'll never come back. But later on, I'll sort of ask them, hey, pull out your phone. Look at how many hours a day you spend on average on your phone. So four hours and 37 minutes, the last time I looked at the statistics, is the average number of hours that we spend on our technological device.

And then people will say, but yeah, I do that because I have to do it for work. BS. We both know it's BS. Look at how many hours you spend on TikTok. Look at how many hours you spend on YouTube. Look at how many hours you waste, right? So it's not everyone's like, oh, am I supposed to work 40 hours a week and then that's it? That's all how I spend my days. No, you've got like 40 hours a week, maybe four hours a day, seven days a week. So people will say, am I just supposed to work 40 hours a week and never accomplish anything?

No, if you look at it, if you spend an average of four hours a day on your phone, seven days a week, right? And that doesn't include computer. It doesn't include Netflix. It doesn't include watching White Lotus, which is a great show, by the way, highly recommend it. Love it, right? So what we're actually doing is we're spending about 30 hours per week, like we're wasting 30 hours a week. And those 30 hours are the hours in which you will fix your life. But that's not how we experience it.

Our experience of living in the world today, as I wake up today, I feel unmotivated. I don't feel like doing anything. My mind tells me it's a waste of time to try to apply for a job or get promoted. All of this investment into the future is not worth it because the world is uncertain and there's that paralysis of initiation kind of setting in, right? So we're starting to live our lives incredibly reactively. We're trying to survive the times instead of build in the times because...

There's no point building a sandcastle on the beach when the tide is coming in and wiping it all away. This is what we think. So this is where there is a huge problem with our thinking. So I do a lot of addiction psychiatry, and a lot of this thinking is not what you think it is. So if you wake up in the morning and you feel I'm unmotivated, there's no point to anything, you make comparisons.

to other people and you look at how someone else is doing well and you think to yourself, oh my God, things are so unfair. I know this is going to sound kind of weird, but what is that? What are those thoughts? We just assume that those thoughts are correct, right? But that's not what they are at all. These are actually what craving for dopamine looks like. So let's understand this, okay? So when I'm an alcoholic, right?

What does a craving for alcohol feel like? Sometimes it feels like thirst. Sometimes it feels like anxiety. Sometimes it feels like a longing for relief. Sometimes it feels like anger towards the world. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing I can do. So I want you all to understand this is really important. So craving for dopamine happens, let's say, in our nucleus accumbens. So our brain wants dopamine. What is the subjective feeling...

Of craving for dopamine. What does it feel like to crave dopamine? Do you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh my God, I can't wait for like, I need to inject that dopamine in my veins. Oh my God, I need that dopamine. I need that dopamine. Come on, give me that dopamine. That's not what it feels like. What it feels like, so this is crazy, is a motivation. If you wake up in the morning and you do not feel like doing anything, that is a craving for dopamine. It feels like boredom. So I want you all to think about this for a second. What is boredom?

Boredom is a state of mind that is uncomfortable in our body and our mind that causes us to seek certain things. So when I'm hungry, I seek something. When I'm thirsty, I seek something. What does boredom do?

cause me to seek. It causes me to seek a device. It causes me to seek pornography. It causes me to pull out our phone. So boredom and amotivation are actually cravings for dopamine. And we spend our days searching for dopamine and finding dopamine instead of actually improving our lives. So a lot of people ask, okay, so what should I do? There is a lot of uncertainty in the world.

But I can't fix my circumstances. Fair enough. But there's still a huge problem, which is what do I do? Right. So even if I can't fix my circumstances, what is the right way to respond to my circumstances?

That is the wrong question. We already said there's no way to predict the future. We can't we don't know what's going to happen. So instead, the first thing that I would encourage you all to do is don't try to find the right way to respond to your circumstances. Think about what is the wrong way to respond to your circumstances and don't do that.

The number one thing that I've seen, whether I'm working with CEOs who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars or degenerate gamers who are living at home, is that they need to stop making mistakes before they figure out what the right thing is. The right thing to do is to not wake up first thing in the morning and spend two hours on your cell phone. The right thing to do is to not do the wrong thing. And even if you don't know what the right thing is, you know...

what the wrong thing is. You know that when you wake up in the morning, you shouldn't spend an hour on your cell phone. You know that if you're spending your weekends like vegging out because you don't feel like doing anything, that is not improving your situation in some way. So I would start super concretely by thinking about what are the wrong things to do. And this is where the biggest advice that I would give you is move in the direction of preparing yourself.

So you don't know what circumstances will arise. You don't know what's going to happen with the economy. Fair enough. For whatever happens, for whatever the world becomes tomorrow, how prepared are you to face it? And you will say, not so prepared. So that's what you should fix. Are you physically healthy? Are you mentally healthy? Are you learning things on a daily basis? What should I learn? That's the wrong way of thinking. Learn something. I don't care what it is.

Start to progress yourself in a forward direction. While the rest of the world can fall apart around you, we are not going to give in to dejection and paralysis of initiation. Here's the crazy thing. If you waste today, tomorrow rolls around and you wasted today, you didn't get anything for it. But if you spend time learning something, I don't care whether it's baking bread. I don't care whether it's like plantings, a garden, like I don't care what it is.

When tomorrow rolls around, could it be useful? Could it not be useful? We don't know, but at least we're being productive and we're moving forward in some way. So figure out what the wrong things are and don't do them. And you can replace them with whatever feels right in the moment, because this is going to be an

evolution over time where you will connect with what feels right over time. Second thing that we're going to do that a lot of people don't do in economies like this is invest in yourself. So when we don't know whether we should invest in a tech degree, we don't know whether we should invest in the stock market. The one thing that we can always invest in is ourselves.

So oftentimes what I tend to see is that when economic times get hard, the biggest mistake that people make is they stop investing in themselves. So they think, okay, I don't have enough money, so I'm going to stop. I can't afford a gym membership. I can't afford to eat healthy. I can't afford therapy. I can't afford things like coaching. So they stop investing in the one thing that is reliable, which is themselves. Right?

So I would strongly, strongly encourage you that even if you're in a period of economic hardship, you spend your resources not on microtransactions, not on Netflix subscriptions, not on Uber Eats or fast food or things like that. You invest money in yourself. If you have a psychiatric diagnosis or you're concerned with a psychiatric diagnosis, you should see a mental health professional because if the world is falling apart,

The last thing that you need is to be depressed when it is falling apart. Does that kind of make sense? Like it's kind of like a no brainer. And this is also why we built a coaching program, because I realized that I know this is going to sound insane. Watching this video on YouTube,

ain't going to fix everything. At the end of the day, human improvement requires understanding who you are, what your challenges are, what your psychological problems are, what your cognitive biases are, what your emotional state is. Processing all of that crap

And then you set a goal that is appropriate and achievable. And you move towards that goal in a system of accountability. This is why we built a coaching program. Is it right for you or not? You have to try it out in order to see. But the one thing, I don't care even if you do ours or someone else's or whatever, just figure out what is the right way to invest in yourself. The third thing that we're going to leave you with, because I'm

I'm a meditator, spent seven years studying in Himalayas to become a monk and then became a psychiatrist. Oh my God. The third thing is that we are going to teach you how to

how to get rid of all of the crap that is swirling around you. There's inflation, there's stock market, there's war. And here we are as a human being, boom, stock market, boom, inflation, boom, loneliness epidemic. All of these things outside are assaulting you. They destroy your motivation. They give you crippling depression. You don't know what to do. All of it is kind of like

outside of you okay it's i don't know it sounds kind of bizarre but like at the end of the day when you take a sip of water when you wake up first thing in the morning and the world is falling apart you still have to do what you need to do right you still need to shower every day you need to clean up your kitchen you need to maybe apply for a job like i don't care you need to exercise

Your life doesn't necessarily change drastically even if the world is falling apart. And the way that you respond to your circumstances, even if your life does change drastically, you still need to respond to those drastic changes in a healthy way. So how can you find...

Some eye of the storm, some degree of peace so that all of these negative emotions and concerns and worries don't overwhelm you. I'm going to teach you all a meditation practice that is really, really, really hard and really, really, really awesome. And that meditation practice is to abide in that which is unchanging. Okay, now what the hell does that mean and how do you do it?

So desperate times call from desperate measures. We ain't going to do any mindfulness crap. We're not going to do any deep breathing. We're going to do the most powerful meditation technique on the planet, which is to abide in that which is unchanging. So what I want y'all to do is close your eyes.

and look within yourself. And what you will see is all kinds of crap. Don't worry about engaging with the crap. If you're worried about something, don't try to defend, don't try to rationalize it, don't try to protect against it, don't even try to solve the problem. Whatever negativity is within you is within you. Fine, whatever. That's not the point. Now what I want you to notice...

is what changes within you and what doesn't change within you. And you will say the negativity never changes within me. That's not true. A quantity of negativity and the quality of negativity changes actually rapidly throughout the day. That's the whole problem, right? There's not one problem. There's a thousand problems and they change constantly. So discard that. A feeling of hunger comes and goes. Discard that. An itch comes and goes. Discard that. And sit with, abide in, try to sit inside.

whatever within you is completely unchanging. So this is going to be hard, right? So I would recommend that y'all practice this for five to 20 minutes for 30 days in a row, okay? 30 days in a row to even get the hang of it. The more powerful the meditation technique, the harder it is to teach. The more potent the meditation technique, the harder it is to learn. So you have to get the knack of it.

right? And getting the knack of it involves practice. So abide in that which is unchanging. So look within yourself. We're not going to give you what the answer is. Y'all can post what your experiences are in the comments or whatever you want to do is fine. Spend some time looking for what within you never changes and something cool will happen. Once you discover that within you that never changes,

First of all, it's a pretty peaceful place. Once you start living in that place, you will find that the anxieties of the world, which are really tricky because anxiety paralyzes you to act.

And then the problem is if I'm paralyzed to deal with my anxiety, my anxiety becomes a reality. That which I fear becomes destiny if I am paralyzed and I avoid it in the first place. Oh my God, I have to clean my room. I have to clean my room. If I don't clean my room, it doesn't clean itself. It only gets worse. So how do we flip this on its head? We abide in that which is unchanging. And once you find that port in a storm, you will discover...

that your ability to respond to circumstances improves drastically. Even if things are bad or things are fearful, you will be able to respond to it. So do this practice. So I know the world is falling apart. Ain't your fault, but you're the person who has to deal with it.

right? Forget about fairness. Forget about comparisons. Those are not useful. Waking up every day and looking at the messy room that you have and thinking about other people who have housekeepers and maids doesn't improve your situation at all. Comparison is a circle jerk of the ego. It doesn't actually help you. So think about what does help you. Number one, don't do, if you don't know what the right thing is,

Don't do the wrong thing. You know what the wrong thing is. Focus on not doing that, right? So focus on moving away from crappiness, number one. And if you keep doing that, you will be amazed at how much progress you can make. Number two, invest in yourself. I don't care whether it's cooking a healthy meal, making rice and beans, learning how to bake bread.

Going to the gym, seeing a therapist, working with a coach, and our coaching program is designed to help people understand what their internal blocks are, set appropriate goals, and achieve those outcomes. That's what we built. And we built this knowing that these kinds of problems would arise. I saw this five years ago, and I was like, we're going to need individual help for individual circumstances. We're going to need a system to adapt to.

to whatever the fuck is going on because standard answers and advice are not going to work anymore. It needs to be individualized. Last thing is abide in that which is unchanging, which is the hardest thing to do, but is also the most potent. Good luck. Let us know what your problems are and we will do our best. So I am going to answer the call of the circumstances. So if y'all tell us what the problems are that you are facing, we will do our level best

Everything is falling apart. Y'all are struggling. We got your back. So you tell us what the problems are. I will read papers like this and like this, right? We'll do scientific literature. We'll talk to y'all. We'll figure out how best to help you. But the minimum that you need to do

to let us help you is to tell us what is wrong in your life. What are the problems that you are facing? Because even though the world is falling apart, there's a lot of good left in the world. I actually think most of the world is actually pretty good. And if we band together and help each other out, we can actually ride this out and maybe even succeed and be happy and be peaceful. Like, I don't know, but it's not going to work unless y'all tell us what you need.

Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.