When doing the right thing is a waste of time

Empathy. That's good thing, right? That's something that we want to have. It's certainly something that we want our friends to have. So unless you're just bitter old ghoul who's possibly been hurt one too many times, when could having empathy possibly be bad? If you watched my Game Theory videos, like the one about my favorite scene from the Fallout TV show, or the one about why the Ghoul doesn't tell Lucy everything, it probably doesn't shock you to hear that my take on empathy might be little nuanced, little complicated, but today we're going to expand little bit beyond just caring about others. Has vulnerability has risk. Because feel like we've talked about that to death. What's little bit more interesting to me right now is that sometimes acting based on empathy can be dick move, like not only potentially harmful for you, but potentially harmful for the very people that you're supposedly experiencing empathy for. So let's start by talking about this scene. So this is Season 2, episode 2, The Golden Rule. I've talked about this lot because love to give Lucy shit for leaving the Ghoul behind and walking off with the Legion woman. And believe it or not, we're gonna stop before the red scorpion stings. think today we're going to talk about the conversation that happens before that. So Lucy has been exhausted with the Ghouls indifference, cold, uncaring attitude because she thinks the opposite is what's going to save the wasteland, and that it's her job to save the wasteland. So when they're walking and she hears somebody calling out for help, then boom! An opportunity for her to be what she was born to be the hero. So she stops and tells the Ghoul, hear something, think it's coming from inside. And the Ghoul says, empathy is like mud. You lose your boots in that stuff. He's the first person to say the word empathy, which think is interesting. It's like he already sees where this is going because he understands what it's like to be driven by empathy, and he knows where that road potentially leads. But Lucy just does not have it in her to listen to someone screaming for help and then just let them die. She's just not built that way. And arguably no one should have to be. But what the Ghoul says next is something that feel to my bones, he says. Folks been screaming for 200 fucking years. But then Lucy replies in way that also feel to my bones. I'm very confused, as she says, did it ever occur to you that if you helped them, they would stop? Did it ever occur to you that if you helped them that they would stop? my God, because it's kind of naive, but she kind of has point. At the same time, will come back to it. And then the Ghoul says, that thing that we've repeated so many times since. You want to know what was like before the war? was just like you. Stupid. Was he stupid? Is it wise to come to the conclusion that not helping is necessary? That people will continue to scream whether you help them or not? Lucy will hear none of this. She's going in. She's going to help the person screaming. And the Ghoul says it's waste of time. But she says doing the right thing is never waste of time. Doing the right thing is never waste of time. Well, actually, Lucy, today we're going to talk about when doing the right thing as waste of time, 100% omnidirectional empathy doesn't work. Not that it's in any way easy to determine. This is when it's okay to do the right thing, and this is when you got to do the wrong thing. Where you draw that line is totally up to you, but you got to draw it somewhere, not just to protect yourself from harm, but to protect other people from you sometimes. yes. The reality is, despite what Bethesda written quests might have you believe, if you choose the good guy Greg route 100% of the time without exceptions, without looking at the context, you'll end up hurting yourself hell of lot more. hell of lot more than you'll do anything helpful for anyone else. Even if you sincerely care about other people more than yourself, which would encourage you to examine. But that's another topic. Sometimes one of the most caring and empathetic things that you can do is mind your fucking business. Maybe in this information ecosystem, the world is in better place if every fucking pop star weighs in with their opinion on foreign policy. As society, we can't just throw everything at everything else. We need appropriate, compatible solutions for their appropriate, compatible problems. Does it really make sense to expect every individual, including yourself, to make the most educated, most selfless, most long term responsible choice in regards to every single potentially problematic situation that they find themselves having some sort of impact on. Not only is it impossible, but expecting that of yourself and of other people is wildly arrogant. Why would you be certain that your idea of what goodness is is an objective fact? It's actually egomaniacal, holding yourself to standard where you're expected to spread goodness and represent goodness everywhere that you go, suggests that the world would be better place if it orbited around your worldview. It's pretty much what every villain in Fallout does. Sometimes we walk away not because we're selfish, not because we don't care, but because it's not our place. Like Norm said in the vault 33 meeting, don't think it's our job to help these people. don't think it's our job to help these people. That scene and that whole conversation points to Vault Tech's tendency to have this arrogant assumption that they're doing human life correctly, and that everyone else would be better off if they did life the same way. In order for us to make choices, we have to have our own idea of what the good choice is and what the bad choices. Absolutely. We need that foundation, that moral ethical foundation. The question is, what right do we have to put that framework on anyone else? At what point are we doing the right thing because we believe it's right? Versus when are we assuming that whoever we're interacting with should have the same position that we do about what's right? So I'm going to deconstruct this into components. How is Lindsey defining what's good? What's right. How is Lindsey defining what's bad, what's wrong. And then in order for me to define those had to define third thing community. And boy howdy, there's word that is losing its goddamn meaning. In internet discourse, community is used to describe two very different but very related things. One of them, group of people who do stuff together, interact with each other, the people that you people with. And then the other definition is people who have similar concerns, similar stake in the game. So like over here would be like local community and over here would be like the autistic community. Autistic people as group are affected by similar things. And so we need to band together sometimes to solve problems that impact other autistic people, whether we like it or not. The communities on this side don't like Party together. really wish that we did. In an ideal world, these two things would be same. We would live among and grow and learn and evolve along with people with similar worries, concerns affected by the same things. But it's important to note that when somebody says your community, our community, that is very contextual concept. It might not be referring to your neighborhood, your metric of marginalization, your race, your religion, etc. but it could relate to any of those things. It only specifically means people you share interests with that which is in their interests is also in your interests. What's good for you is good for them. So now that we've defined community, let's talk about good and bad, right or wrong. According to my definition, right and good means choosing what is, in the long term best interest of your community over short term personal gain and the wrong direction. Evil direction is choosing short term personal gain over what's in the long term best interest of your community. When we say good or bad, I'm not really talking about binary, even though there's two things like are you sure you're not talking about binary? It's more like polarity, more or less bad, and then more or less good. You know, like there's spectrum here. Killing someone and looting their body will get you short term personal gain. You don't get hurt. You get their stuff, you win. However, that person may have had family. That person may have had community of their own. lot of people could be really pissed off at you and yours for doing that. You could have made friends with that community. Now you've made bunch of enemies, so now you might have war between your community and theirs, because all you could think about was getting the loot off of one dead body. Very short sighted. Now, what you'll notice about this framework that's little bit different than how you might think of empathy. Is that the good guy choice and the bad guy choice both help you. There's no altruism here. There's no self-sacrifice here. You're looking out for you in both scenarios. The question is, do you include others or any other particular others as part of you, as part of your community? Doing good to them is doing good for you. Altruism is kind of shit deal, okay? Altruism is like the way that the Brotherhood of Steel conditioned Maximus to believe that the Brotherhood was more important than he was. It might seem noble at first to be like, well, there's this thing in this cause that care about more than myself that's bigger and more important than me. But once you've kind of actually, ironically step out of ego and you look at yourself as human being, just like all your other friends who are in this organization with you, who are also human beings, and you care about those human beings, and you want good things to happen to them, and you don't want them to be hurt. Well, you're also human being, and they care about you and they don't want you to be hurt. So why would you want to be in an organization that doesn't value your friends, that doesn't value and protect and care for human life, that lets good people suffer and die to protect future generations? Will those future generations are doing the same thing. So kind of like said in the last video, who gets to live? If you believe that your life has value, it behooves you to be loyal to community that agrees with you, that your life has value. And if you think that being loyal to that community is selfish because it's in your long term best interest to be helpful to that community and that you're better person. If you have lofty moral principles that might sometimes motivate you to choose someone outside of your community based on the amount of need or the amount of suffering to put some broader, wider, more objective moral principles higher than taking care of your people, your jurisdiction. There's reason lot of people are going to think you're an asshole for that social justice warrior. You don't see yourself as person in community, in game, in mess, full of bunch of other equals. You're positioning yourself above the world that you are very small piece of. You kind of see yourself as god because you're basically acting like your individual moral compass is above people. People form groups and you are not above that. You have to decide what people are, your people and what people aren't, what animals you're going to eat and what animals you're going to keep as pets. You're not an omniscient god. You don't have an endless supply of resources, and you're lot more clueless than you think you are about most things. Find the people who care about the same things that you care about or caring about their interests, cares about your interests. And for the love of God and all that is holy, define your God. hate this word. Boundaries, boundaries. Why do hate the word boundaries? Okay, let's just zoom through all the ways that our culture has totally fucked us when it comes to our understanding of boundaries. So whenever there's any kind of human suffering of any kind, there's an element of lack. There is an unmet need. Remember tension and release. Awareness of that lack is tension. Release from that tension is filling whatever that hole is. And sometimes whatever that hole is, is internal. It's something that we need to fill ourselves, and sometimes it's external. It's something where we need help from other people. So if you have empathy and you see somebody else who is suffering and you see that they are lacking something, having boundaries is recognizing, is this something that you can help with or not? Is this lack that needs external support because you can provide external support, or is it something that requires internal support? Is it something that's going on in them that nobody on the outside of them could possibly solve it? Our culture makes it extremely unclear which is which, and that's more or less by design. The more that people feel like everything is theirs to carry, like if there's something that they can do, then there's something that they should do. Empathetic people end up weighing themselves down, becoming very over encumbered, holding all of these quests for other people, the bad guys of this world. The manipulators do not want you to know what problems aren't your problem. Ironically, the core reason we end up doing work for other people is this hyper individualist culture. We were expected to mind our own business and we want other people to mine their own business. We're overloaded with our own problems. We can't take anybody else's. But there's not whole lot of examination about what it is that we consider to be our own problems. Like we can't be bothered to worry about how much trash we're adding to landfills every year, because our boss is really writing us about nailing that deal with client. So we have taken in our boss's professional ambitions as part of ourselves, but not the health of the planet that we live on. Supposedly, companies used to give that feeling of community, right? If you did something good for the company, you were doing something good for you. But that's not true anymore. Companies will fire you as quickly as look at you. Companies are healthier when employees ask for less and less and less. So that's what we learn. We learn how to not be bother. We have to make money and be independent. We have to be hyper individualistic. That's the only way that we can get anything resembling community is to not need anything. And because we have worked so hard to be individuals who aren't drain on anybody else, and we've watched tribalism and groupthink, and we think we are so above that we've developed distaste for community. We think it makes people prejudice. Tribal, mindlessly following cultural doctrines without examining them. Our capacity to resist groupthink atrophies because we are doing it just as much as the people that were judging. The more socially isolated that you are in the modern world, the more dependent you are on corporations and Grubhub and Uber and the internet. Nobody is totally independent. Yes, if you're paying your own bills, you figured out how to not be financial burden on other people. Congratulations. But you're still Ripon and defending the interests of community. It's just one you don't know, one that does not care about you at all. And that's what should really send chill down your spine. If that system goes down, you're fucked. But if you go down, no one will notice. File this away. No amount of money will ever, ever make you feel as safe as being loved. Will. And if that doesn't make any sense to you, hope one day your loved. So we're hyper individuals were isolated. We're dependent on the system that doesn't give fuck about us and that's going to create diluted culpability. We're all teeny teeny tiny pieces of these systems that are doing lot of damage to everybody else. So yes, your actions, your participation do have negative impact, but my God, if you're this powerless, if you're this small and your percentage of the big picture is that teeny tiny, then how big karma hit could that possibly be? And in the modern world, with the internet, we are completely overwhelmed with all the information and data points about how fucking problematic every single one of us is. We are exposed to far more pain than any single one of us is equipped to deal with. I'm not the first YouTuber that you've heard talking about this. If we don't set some sort of rules about what parts of this need to take in and what parts of it can't possibly take, and if we don't do that, we're going to lose our minds. We're already collapsing from executive dysfunction, and have to be doomsayers about this. But there is serious, scary problem with people unable to make proactive decisions to have their own opinions. We can't decide, and we are outsourcing our prefrontal cortex to robot. And I'm not even just talking about AI. I'm talking about YouTube recommendation algorithms. Like, how often do you stop and decide what you're going to watch today, like really? Or do you just open the phone and let it send stuff to you that it knows you're going to find interesting? Every time you let computer tell you what to do, the part of your brain that could do that is getting weaker. recently went down rabbit hole with this idea of everyone on the internet is 12 and my god, it connected so much stuff for me. Stuff that's been bothering me for while about the immaturity on the internet. It's about reactivity being reactive as opposed to proactive. That is what the internet is training us to do, react to whatever stimulus is being thrown at us, and then celebrate that reactivity by calling it authenticity, transparency, honesty. But we're just getting our guitar strings plucked to reclaim our brains and make choices. We have to decide what we're going to care about and what we're not going to care about. We have to give ourselves permission to not care about everything. The reason I'm so frustrated with the concept of boundaries is because our nervous systems are constantly being invaded. The only version of it that people seem to understand is boundaries as defenses. The only way we know how to be ourselves is to block everybody out, because we can't decide who is worthy to come in and who isn't. Who is safe to come in, who are our people? But your boundaries are not just walls. They are supposed to be gates with doors. They're supposed to change as we grow and evolve, and as we allow people that we love to have an impact on us. Because if we continue to see boundaries as brick walls, as just defenses, we will continue to feel lonely. Think of boundaries like borders on political map. You're on this side of the line. You're in Nevada. If you're on the other side of the line, you're in California. But the rules and the expectations are going to vary ever so slightly. So let's look at that, looking at human boundaries. And we'll go back to my favorite example that I've ever said on this channel. And that is Lucy's air versus Lucy's finger. Most of us would probably instinctively say that Lucy's finger is part of Lucy, and that the air is not part of Lucy. If that's the case, then how come if you cut off Lucy's finger, she lives? But if you cut off Lucy's air, she dies. The air is just as important to Lucy, if not more so than her finger. But hyper individualist culture, says her fingers. Her problem. The air isn't so. When was talking about community shared interest, Lucy, whether she acknowledges it or not, is in community with everyone who needs to breathe air. It is in the interest of every living being that breathes the air that the air stays breathable. This is how we need to start thinking about boundaries, not just as individuals, but as members of community. If you care about having clean air, clean water, human life, having intrinsic value, whatever things that if these values were prioritized, you getting your needs met would also be prioritized. Because these are your needs. Find other people who care about those same things and care about those people like they are an extension of you. Don't leave them on the ground with the red scorpion stings. Your community, your family is an extension of you. Caring for them is caring for you. And if you don't trust somebody to have that kind of impact on you, then that's your cue that they shouldn't be part of your community or your family. Okay, but let's not conflate empathy with compassion. So empathy is just the ability to understand or to feel somebody else's emotional state. So not only is there nothing wrong with having basic experience of empathy across all peoples and living things, mean, sure, the question here when we're talking about boundaries isn't turning off those feelings as much as being discerning about when we're going to act on those feelings, when it's our place to act on those feelings, which in lot of ways is harder to feel it, to care and to still walk away. This is what the Ghoul is talking about when he says you'll get your boots stuck in it. People have been screaming for 200 years. You can't stop every time someone needs help. Just because you recognize that job needs doing does not mean it's your job. Love is the only natural resource that the more you give, the more you have. However compassion, there's energy involved in that. There's resources. It is possible to totally recognize that that person needs and deserves help, and that you are not the guy who can provide it. Like Norm said, not our job to help these people. And because compassion takes resources, not just material, but metabolic. If you make all the world's suffering your problem, that means that other people's distress will become physiological workload. Take this very seriously, because when we human beings take on work that we cannot physically withstand, our fight or flight responses are going to kick in to protect us from that workload. That means you are going to protect yourself from other people's pain. If you haven't seen this pattern, my God, this is going to make so much asshole behavior make sense to you. Have you ever met somebody who is just constantly making victim out of themselves because they're such hero and they're an empath, and they care so much about other people, but they're fucking assholes. This is why they're not lying to you. mean, don't know the details of whatever person you're imagining, but if you are an empath and you don't have boundaries when another person is hurt, when another person is suffering, when another person is in distress, that hurts you, your body can't handle it, and then your body is responding to that like it's an attack, fight or flight responses will kick in and you will become an asshole who is mad at people for being hurt. How does that help suffering people? You are such hero because you feel so much for these people. How does it help them for you to be mad at them for being hurt? Because that's what happens if you don't have any boundaries. With all that empathy, look at how angry and snotty that Lucy can get if people just won't let her help them. Shame on you. That is awful. The question every empathize to ask themselves, are you really doing it for other people? Or are you doing it because of how those people are making you feel? If we allow ourselves to be this impacted by all the pain in the modern world that we're exposed to, we will feel like people are attacking us just by existing because they are existing in pain, and that pain makes us feel pain. We will start obligating them to accept our help. We will start to feel ownership. We will start to feel dominion over their pain. How dare they continue to be in pain when that pain is hurting us? but we're such heroes, right? It's not our job to help these people. It's not our job to help everyone. Yes, it's painful to watch people in pain when we feel like there's something that we could do to help, that there's something that we understand, that they don't understand, especially when we feel like we have the facts. We don't just have different opinion. We're seeing realities that they're not seeing, which makes us feel like our way of seeing things is so much more righteous. And while yes, there are facts and there are opinions, everyone has different opinion about what sources that they trust, and they're going to have different opinion of how credible they think you are. Even if you do have the correct answer, you don't get to decide how much somebody else values your input on any subject at all. This goes back to what was saying earlier about whenever there is suffering, there is lack. And sometimes that lack is something that has to be repaired internally, and sometimes it's something that needs to be repaired externally. You can only help somebody else if the suffering is in that external category, like if somebody just doesn't have any money and you have lot of money, bam, you can help. But if we're talking about somebody beliefs, if we're talking about somebody values, if we're talking about their culture, even if seeing things your way would benefit them from your perspective, it is not your place to interfere with that immediately. Thinking of Nathan Vargas from Fallout three, people think I'm just crazy old man. Things will be different when the enclave gets here. This guy just believes in the enclave. He just listens to those radio broadcasts and thinks that those people are gonna make the Capital Wasteland better place. And it is obvious that this is commentary on propaganda. They're on the radio. They have been for years. President Eden talks about everything they're doing. They got flying robots all around watching everything so they know what to do when they finally swoop in and clean this place up, you'll see there's something very sad about the way that he just buys into the messaging that he's being sold. But if that guy has decided that these broadcasts hit his criteria for what he believes, that's something going on in him. You don't have to respect any conclusion that anybody's come to. By all means, we should all have our own values. What we think is functional, what we think is dysfunctional, what we think makes sense, what we think doesn't make sense. Respecting other people's choices isn't really about respecting the choices. It's about respecting other people being on their own journey. And maybe this is just phase that they have to go through in order to get to where they're going in life. But how they get there is their business. mean, this was supposed to be the idea of the Prime Directive and Star Trek. Really, you're better off staying focused on your own journey and your own awareness. And if you're constantly thinking about people who are operating at this smaller, more narrow consciousness perspective, then you don't grow. So not only are you putting yourself above other people, making other people's journey your business in way that is very arrogant, but you're also denying yourself your own journey. One of the most painful aspects of trauma healing is outgrowing everyone you've ever known. Because that lack that deficit, it's vacuum. It's black hole. Misery loves company, right? And because of the reasons talked about earlier, how our culture makes boundaries really confusing, there are lot of people that have these vacuums, these black holes inside of themselves that don't know that this is something they have to fill themselves. They don't know the difference between suffering that needs community and needs companionship, and what kind of suffering has to be adjusted internally before you even have the means to invite blessings from the shared reality construct. feel like the best example of this idea that can think of. There's like this old joke about guy who's like, adrift at sea. And he's like, don't need to be rescued. God will save me. Somebody comes by with boat and life raft and helicopter, and he just says no to all of these things. And then eventually he dies. He asks God, why didn't you save me? And God says, did with all of these things that you turned down, right? So the life raft in the helicopter, these are all examples of external help. But the mindset shift inside that made him open to those solutions was an inside job. So there's lot of people out there who insist that they need external help without realizing there's something inside that they have to deal with first, premise position of how they orient themselves in the world, some core beliefs that our interfering with what outside help they have access to. That's why you have so many people who are constantly disasters, who never grow up, who never seem to learn their lesson because they just get stuck in that state. They continue looking for that external help without repairing the internal damage, and they just suck people in. And every time somebody gets sucked in, it sort of puts cork in it so it doesn't heal. They basically just find parade of enablers and they think that's just how the life. So if you're very empathic and you encounter person like that, then you think you're helping by being that cork. this person just clearly needs help with this one thing. can be that. And then you get stuck inside other people's pain. And that's just an individual example. This is happening on communal level as well. Like there are certain communities that are just sort of nasty and shitty, and everybody in that community just enables each other. And if you stay in it, then you can't outgrow it. You can't move past it, you can't put it behind you. Because in order to have empathy for those people, you have to continue to care about things that might not actually matter to you anymore. talked about this little bit when Lucy was talking to the Legion. If you are surrounded by community or culture that doesn't have the same ideas as you about what's worth valuing the value of human life, then you can try to influence that culture, but you can't control it. And it's not up to you how much they respect you or are willing to take in whatever influence you might have. Having trajectory of what good person would do requires having sense of who your community is. And there is no community if there aren't people who care about the same things that you do. Having empathy and compassion and doing the right thing for people who are not invested in the same values that you are, is waste of time. think this is why the first thing that we see happen to that Legion woman is she got her throat slit, Lucy got on her high horse, and she betrayed the Ghoul and wasted her last stem pack to save the life of woman who willfully walked directly into the tent where she got her throat slit. Because she was representative of culture that does not have the same values that Lucy does, that golden rule doesn't make sense. It doesn't work if not everybody is on board, if these people aren't on board, if they aren't operating on values that are comparable to yours, then any attempts that you make to help them is going to drag you down more than it's going to lift them up. The time that we spend trying to force someone else to evolve is time that we are wasting. When we could have been evolving ourselves. Funky death Clara minding you to like and subscribe, like and subscribe. realize that lot of people out there are going to think it is egocentric to reserve your compassion for just your community. However, think you're going to find in practice it is far more egocentric to assume that your values are relevant beyond the bounds of your community. Absolutely. In certain metrics, in certain areas, we should think globally when it comes to destroying the Earth, climate change, pollution, Earth stuff. Yes, but you'll notice my definition of community doesn't change if the outcome affects us all. We are all in community. All life forms on earth are invested in the health of the earth. But if we're talking about any group of people, anything that is not invested in the outcome of something, they must be released from our concern. If you want your friend to stop dating assholes, but they don't seem that invested in learning how to quit dating assholes, release them. In another video, said that love isn't something that's earned. It's something that you opt into. Learn to recognize when people opt out for these people, your boundaries are defenses, and people who hold lotteries at an have opted out. And you know who else has opted out. Boxcars. would have given you medics, dude, but you had to be dick. And if you've spent any time in the personal development internet, you've probably heard about crab mentality. personally prefer to call it agent smithing because I'm always down for matrix reference. The idea is, you know, crabs in bucket. If crab is trying to crawl out, then the other crabs will, in an attempt to climb over, the crabs will end up just pulling the other crabs back down and nobody can escape the bucket. And in the matrix, Agent Smith, he was program. He was an agent of the matrix. But what was so interesting about him as villain is that he hated The matrix just as much as neo did. So you would think remember as kid watching this being like, why aren't they in cahoots? Why don't they fight the machines together? Because neo and people like him see The Matrix as something that is possible to escape. And Agent Smith and agents in general don't see it that way. They see it as an inevitability that we're all kind of stuck there. We have to deal with the machines and people like neo, people who fight the system are just making things more difficult for no reason. And it is definitely theme in The Matrix that if you are plugged in, even though that system is feeding off of you, it's the only reality that you know and you will fight to protect and defend that system even though it's harming you. So you could be surrounded by people who are in all sorts of ways, being harmed by our hyper individualist culture, etc., etc. but they don't see these things as changeable. They don't see these things as healing. They don't see that there's whole inside of them that they could tend to themselves. They think it's things that has to be externally solved. They need other people. They need willing victims to fill that black hole, that vacuum. They don't know that they have other options, and you can't make them trust you to show them another way. And so you have to leave these people. You have to leave them screaming and walk away even though you feel for them. But it's not your job to help these people. For those of you who didn't already know this, it probably won't shock you to find out that came into making Fallout content from making personal development content. Screw saving the world. just want to play video games. But this video is definitely touching on why made that call. like to tell people that left personal development to develop personally because there is toxicity. Putting yourself in position to give advice to people in dragging people along for journey, because you think that journey is what's best for them. So make so many jokes about talking down from my dinosaur. was very much Lucy and the sin of people like me, and Lucy is taking it as given that everyone should want what we want for them. sincerely wanted to help people. can't say that for everyone in personal development, promise, but my desire to help people and my desire to work hard and take hits in order to do that was 100% sincere. But that's why the point of this video is even well intentioned. Empathy can still be bad, can still be not helpful. Because even if you want good things for people, what you actually want is your definition of what good things are. And if you start defining your own value based on the hard knocks you're willing to take in order to help people, then your life just going to be full of lot of hard knocks because people have been screaming for 200 years. There will always be people screaming, always be people that need help. And if you can help people on your way throughout your journey, then by God, that's exactly what you should do. But the key component there is on your way. Don't get your boots stuck in the mud. It was becoming really clear to me that if pursued coaching, it would be kind of like being kindergarten teacher in the sense that every year you get older but the kids stay the same age. It's kindergarten every year, and the whole reason was interested in lot of these subjects was because of interest in my own healing. wanted to grow up. left personal development to develop personally, and trying to make myself stay available to people who were struggling with things that felt like figured out long time ago, felt pretty stuck in mud. And wanted to talk about this now because I'm finding myself having lot of similar feelings. Talking about the trolls, you know, that personal development itch in me is like obsessed with analyzing all of these struggling people. All these people in pain. Why? They're in pain. I'm like Lucy hearing screaming, and have to stop. Maybe if somebody listened to them, maybe they would stop. But that's trap because these people aren't going to trust me. The void, the vacuum, the lack is inside, not outside. And since there will always be somebody screaming, if don't want my life to continually orbit around human misery, there has to be point where look at human misery and go, that sucks. I'm walking the other direction. And had sort of revelation on stream not that long ago when confronted that the reason let miserable people hold me back, the reason I'm constantly trying to untangle what these people need is really loneliness. I'm afraid that if don't stay miserable with the miserable, that will be alone, because my perception of the human race is that it's miserable and I'm already lonely enough as it is. So my instinct is to preach from the top of my dinosaur to drag people on journeys that they don't want to go on. Because if could just teach people to see the things that see, then we'd all be happier and none of us would be alone. And I'm confronting that. While that may be empathic because I'm feeling everybody's pain all the time, that doesn't make it good. It's inherently selfish and entitled and controlling, and it seems to me the most honorable way to live life is to see yourself as small piece of something so much bigger than yourself. And that means mind your impact, mind your behavior, be caring and kind and compassionate as much as you can, but mind your business. So what is your business then? I'm not going to sit here and say, not my circus, not my monkeys. If it really is my fucking circus and they are my fucking monkeys. My sanctuary hills is in tip top shape. Okay? It was my neighborhood before the war. walked Preston and his buddies up there. I'm taking responsibility for it. You got your water, you got your defenses. But am avoiding talking to Preston. Any more than that. Because don't need to hear about every single goddamn settlement that needs my help. People who have those black holes inside of them. It's really easy for them to trick you that any pain they experience is your fault, because they put you in role that you were never supposed to fill. Why are you calling me general? So if someone starts treating you like you betrayed them by making choice for yourself, it is wise to learn to examine. Did you betray role that you volunteered for, that you chose with agency and autonomy? Or did you betray role that was forced upon you or handed to you under duress by entities that are more powerful than you? Because you'd probably be surprised how often it's that secondary case where we are taught to feel guilty for not measuring up to something that we never had it in us to measure up to. Like people who threaten self-harm if you break up with them, or parents who call you bad kid if you aren't there for them at their beck and call in adulthood. Which, by the way, being someone's kid is not job. Being someone's parent is job. One chooses to be parent. One does not choose to be someone's kid. All this goes back to the question at the beginning what is yours to carry? Is it your circus? Is it your monkeys or not? If you walk away from somebody, are you separate entity? Moving on. Are you taking something from them? Because if they're acting like you, walking away is taking something that they are entitled to from them, that means that they believe that you belong to them. Do you? Maybe walking away from somebody will hurt them, will cause them pain, and that sucks. But maybe that pain that they feel after you leave is theirs to carry, theirs to heal, not yours. And what perfect segue to the end of the Lindsey versus the Fallout fans that she doesn't get along with story arc. This is like the grand finale, but swear to God, I'm going to practice what preach here and then never talk about this shit again. have learned my lesson. Not that long ago, released video. What are we going to do about Fallout trolls? Basically talking about lot of the negativity and nastiness that you see from certain Fallout fans. Specifically, lot of repetitive sentiments about the superiority of the old Fallout games and how Bethesda and newer fans are ruining the franchise, etc., etc. and talk about the Fallout TV show lot, which is huge target of disdain from this particular group. And so comments with these sentiments are pretty relentless. So in the trolls video, played around with the idea of just responding to their comments with nonsense, because ignoring them isn't making them go away, and thought if made it fun for myself then it would feel less vexing. But I'm already over it because this is crab mentality thinking this is me letting these people drag me down in way still, because these people's issue is internal, there is nothing that could possibly say that could help them get out of it. They trust the path that they're on more than they trust me. And when was talking about these people in the Begin Again video, the exact words that used to describe the Fallout fans that have an issue with are the fans that are obsessed with their attachment to the past iterations. When I'm talking about people who are obsessed with their attachment to the older games, I'm talking about people who are actively, aggressively fighting the franchise changing, the fandom, changing. If you like the older games more than the newer games, that is not the same thing. Lots of people prefer the older games, and yet got comments from people saying that they took issue with what said about people who prefer the design choices of Fallout one and two prefer the design choices, y'all. The conceptual gap between obsessed with their attachment to and prefer the design choices of is. So why'd you could drive tank through it? It's like if said brutally murdered and you heard bitch slapped. The point here is it doesn't matter what words use. If you're dealing with somebody who has opted out, somebody who is not in your community, it does not matter. They are going to hear whatever it is they need to believe. They heard you say. And sentiment that saw in the comments under the real that posted with my dead Money Begin Again montage really captures the issue that I'm talking about here. Somebody said something like, here it is, your thing is ours now, so just let it go. Your thing is ours now, so just let it go. Basically, to this person, old Fallout belonged to them. It was their thing. stole their property from them. I'm this conqueror or this colonizer that invaded their territory. And now, because stole it. It belongs to me. And now I'm telling them to let go of the thing that was there that took from them. That is how they see this. Y'all. Fallout never belonged to them, nor does it belong to me. Fallout is separate thing that is doing what it's doing. The creators of Fallout never intended to give you that initial attachment. They gave you form of entertainment that you could consume and then move on from. Fallout isn't mine now. It's thing that's separate from me. And if it becomes something that's not interesting to me anymore, will like something else. Y'all. used to be really obsessed with Star Wars, and then saw The Last Jedi and was over it. But never got mad at Star Wars or new Star Wars fans. just moved on to other things. These people feel like something that never belonged to them was taken from them, contextualizing Fallout in maladaptive way that it was never intended for. So if the creators of Fallout gave these people game and then they changed the game, did they betray these fans? The pain that these people are feeling, is it really Fallouts burden to carry? Is it my burden to carry? Is it really the responsibility of Bethesda, of modern Fallout fans, to regulate the emotions of people who mistakenly believed that they had ownership over video game franchise that they never actually had? Or is it these people's responsibility to take more ownership of their level of attachment to fucking video game franchise? Not ours to carry? Not our circus, not our monkeys? The future of Fallout. The future in general does not belong to any of us. There's not single thing in the natural world that isn't in the process of becoming something else. Allow change because it's going to happen whether you allow it or not. But just by talking about them, just by analyzing these things, just by pointing out the deficit and by making that trolls video, I'm doing exactly what have to stop doing. I'm doing personal development instead of developing. Personally, I'm letting the crabs pull me back into the bucket. It is not my place to dictate what these people should do and what these people should care about. And there is empathy involved. think these people are in pain, and wish that they would choose less painful path. And because their pain hurts me, I'm mad at them. And that's not happy way for me to live. can complain about them being stuck on those games, but why am stuck on them? It sucks that some people can't move on, but can. So will just let them scream because don't think it's my job to help these people. Believe it or not, sometimes walking away isn't about thinking that you're more important. It's about thinking you're less important. Maybe you aren't the main character. Maybe you're not the hero. Maybe you're just guy. Maybe you're not going to be treated like the hero. Maybe you're going to end up like profligate on cross. And maybe if you don't give yourself permission to walk away from lot of those people screaming in the wasteland, then you're holding yourself back from the people you really can help and who can really help you, the people with whom you will create new future, new way of living. And once you make that, once that thing exists, maybe people like that poor woman won't end up having to settle for living with people like the Legion. Because something better, something stronger, something more rewarding exists. But it won't ever exist. If you stay in the crab bucket, another settlement will always need your help. Don't talk to Preston. And while my whole deal about how I'm defining community and boundaries works for me, at the end of the day, the important thing is that you decide what you care about and what you don't and why. Don't let algorithms and shit make these decisions for you. Don't let groupthink make these decisions for you, because lot of that stuff is based on that. Internet's full of 12 year olds thinking reactive and not lot of examination, and we need people thinking about this. There's lot of cultural restructuring going on right now. We're going to have to build new rules, new ways of thinking, and we need to make sure that that stays proactive and not reactive, because if it's reactive, then we are being steered by forces more powerful than us. We are the monkeys and it's their circus. Let's not be circus monkeys unless it is our circus and it's the greatest showman. If it is our circus, then we have to take responsibility for our circus. Going little off the rails. think that pretty much does it for the video, though think got my point across. How'd do? Awesome. Empathy is beautiful. It is beautiful to feel for and understand what other people are going through. But make sure you are calibrating that nervous system that you are tuning your radio to the pain that you can do something about, and give yourself permission to tune away from that which is not yours to carry. It's not selfish, it's responsible, and you will do more good for the world, promise. Community section for the feral cools. All right. Sort of lost the plot little bit at the end, but I'm trying. So streaming again. Saturday, May 30th. will be there. Let's talk about this episode and hopefully I'll feel little bit better than did last week. still, feel like I'm not taking the world's best care of myself right now. feel like I'm kind of going through like little bit of slump. Like even while recording this video, was like, do need to write again? Like write full script? feel like I'm losing my vocabulary. feel like I'm not the wordsmith that that try to be. And maybe I'm like, out of practice writing things. I'm starting to do that thing that my brain does where I'm like, the thing and the thing and the stuff. Let me know how did. We'll see how the editing process goes. Anyway, will see you at the stream. And yeah, guess that's it. Stay cool.