 Okay, May 40th here. So I've been listening to this New Zealand Healer Woman on YouTube, Kim Knight, and she talks a lot about difference between healing a person versus healing an illness or healing a person versus healing a symptom and I like it. I think it's it's really useful with mysterious debilitating things like chronic fatigue syndrome, which has held me over the past 35 years and the great news to report by taking these beef organ supplements, just like swallowing these capsules, my fatigue has just left me. I mean, I have not felt stronger and more vigorous and better able to sustain physical activity in 35-plus years. Like I'm biking 12 miles every other day doing about four sets of 20 push-ups doing some light weights and then take a day off and I feel great. It's like so exciting to experience this return to health and I can't tell you definitively what caused it, but it sure feels like this this beef organ supplement is the only variable which I'm aware that accounts for my renewed vitality over the past month. But of course not all my problems are gone. So I have an intermittent problem with insomnia. I have a symptom very much like my dad's in that we both tend to get very intellectually excited and then sometimes when the mind switches on we can't switch it off and so we struggle with insomnia and so I would prefer to go, oh, you know my problems insomnia, that's perhaps less challenging than looking at insomnia as just a symptom of a much deeper problem because if insomnia was simply my problem I'm smart enough to be able to follow good sleep hygiene and all the recommendations for insomnia and solvent but it's probably a symptom of some deeper underlying unhealthy and unnecessary level of anxiety that perhaps I'm carrying with me. So someone might have a problem with yeah, Luke get in the water bra, cold water swimming will destroy your insomnia. That's what my father said. My father swore by being by the beach whenever my father could get by the beach and swim in the water every day his insomnia would disappear. So definitely strong healing properties from swimming in cold water. I do benefit from a cold shower every day but yeah, getting out there into the ocean. I feel very at home in the ocean taking a good long swim in the ocean, I'm sure it's good for me. But let's say a person's got a symptom of say that they're looking at porn too much and they don't like it. Well, porn addiction is just a symptom of a deeper problem of disconnection. So rather than trying to heal the symptom or heal the illness we'd want to heal the person, right? So it would require a whole rejiggering of the of your neural pathways. That's one way to think about it. So taxicab drivers in London, they have to pass some very complicated tests and requires about two years of study and at the end of those two years of study, they can do electromagnetic imaging, radiographic imaging in the brain and they can see they can see certain neural pathways that have been strengthened that are bigger because those muscles have been exercised so much. The chat says, I have a fat problem. I have a blocker on my web devices. But your fat problem is not the problem. Your fat problem is a symptom of a much deeper personality that is disordered, right? What it fundamentally comes down to in my understanding is a lack of ordinary levels of human attachment, right? So when you bond with other people these these these manifestations of being ill at ease diminish. So how do I stop fapping? Well, recognize that it's a problem with human connections. So for example, if fapping is often used as a response to anxiety and so if you are avoiding anything in your life that you really should be doing every time you avoid something that you should be dealing with, you are increasing your anxiety because you're getting a dopamine reward from avoiding some painful challenge. Yes, I confess my sins and Mr. Ford gave me a wrench. So if there are people that you're avoiding, if there's computer software that you're avoiding, if there's work that you're avoiding, if there's exercise that you're avoiding, there are social situations that you're avoiding, there are relationships that you're avoiding, then you're going to build up all this anxiety from that avoidance of necessary interactions and when your anxiety reaches a certain level, you found this one easy trick for getting rid of your anxiety, you go fap and the deeper solution for healing the fapping problem is not to focus on the fapping, but to focus on the person. You the person need healing. You need an ordering. You need a rejiggering of the way you operate and the way you think to reduce your anxiety levels so you're not driven to reach out for that easy solution to your fapping, to your anxiety, which is fapping and every time you fap to relieve your anxiety you strengthen those neural pathways so that fapping becomes more and more appealing because you know that there's release from anxiety at the other end and and then you don't feel so dependent on other people because you've released your anxiety and now you can just be the selfish person that you really want to be. The solution is to come out of the cave, come out of hiding, come out of avoiding necessary human contact and attachment and reconnect with people by clearing up the mess that exists between you and others. Now, fapping may be a severe sin, but that's not going to help you overcome fapping. People don't stop committing sins like fapping just because they become convinced it's a sin. Trashing yourself, punishing yourself does not help you overcome any bad habit. Self-punishment, self-abnegation, self-hatred, self-dislike. That's not going to ever become any bad habit you've got. There's no religious solution for a behavioral problem. All right, if you behave your way into a problem you can't pray your way out of that problem. I just get an Alexander technique massage when I get the esh to fap. Yeah, you don't need to wear a kipar if you're swimming. So then like the alcoholic, right? This is not someone whose life is all ordered without regard to the alcoholism. So the alcoholism, the excessive drinking is only a symptom of someone who is restless, irritable, discontented and who is avoiding a whole lot of ordinary human connection. So when we help a person to become at ease with themselves, like this could be meditation, this could be prayer, it could be going for a walk, it could be taking a swim in cold water, it could be cold showers, whatever you need to do that is healthy and come to ease with yourself and then come to ease with other people by dealing with anything that you've done to harm others and make amends with that. So clean up your side of the street, then clean up the wreckage of your past relationships so that you then feel more at ease with other people and start to take other people more into consideration, then you will feel less anxiety, less rage, less resentment, and then you'll have less need to drink to cure your anxiety. Or let's say a person's got a problem with deading, right? You could take away his credit card, right? That's the equivalent of putting a blocker on your phone or on your computer so that you don't visit porn websites. But that's only dealing with the symptom, right? Someone who's got a problem with deading is someone who's addicted to vagueness, someone who does not want to confront reality, someone who is avoiding reality, getting dopamine hits from avoiding reality. And then the more you avoid reality, the more anxious you grow. So the more you need whatever is your release from anxiety, whether it's porn or alcohol or excessive spending or acting out online. So what we need to do is reduce the level of anxiety so that we feel more at ease in the world. So for example, there's nothing in my life that I would be ashamed for you to know about. There's nothing that I surf to on the internet. There's nothing that I write on the internet. There's nothing that I do to earn a living. There's nothing that I do with my friends. There's nothing that I do in my spare time. There's nothing that I do in my religion. There's nothing that I do with my fellow Jews. There's nothing I do with my fellow non-Jews, with my fellow Americans, with my family. There's nothing in my life that I would be ashamed for you to know about. And therefore I sit and speak before you right now at ease in who I am. And because I feel increased ease with who I am, I have less anxiety and my life works better and there's more transparency. So increasingly my insides match my outsides. The different spheres of my life are not at war with each other. They either compliment each other or there's no inherent contradiction. Is it madaphnil and addiction? Not really. Some days I skip madaphnil. There's no dramatic ill effect. It has no street value. It has no addictive quality. Swimming in cold water activates your parasympathetic nervous system. This destroys all anxiety, says Elliot. Some solutions are simple and direct. That's just dealing with the symptom. You're not dealing at the disordered personality that is creating this excess anxiety that you're getting rid of through swimming in cold water. Let's say that you have a work situation that causes you tremendous anxiety. You can rid yourself of the symptoms of tremendous anxiety by swimming in cold water, but you still would remain a disordered individual because the stresses of ordinary life are building up, building up to an unhealthy level. So one has to reorder oneself to grow so that one is no longer triggered as much by frequent interactions and one is not avoiding reality. So yeah, you can find sleeping pills that will temporarily cure insomnia and you can go for a swim in cold water and get rid of anxiety. But this is just dealing with the symptom. So you can try to heal your whole person, get down to root causes, or you can just attack the symptoms. Your notions of personality disorders are downstream from chronic anxiety. What's causing the chronic anxiety? The chronic anxiety does not exist in and of itself. There are reasons why you're chronic anxiety and some of it may well be an evolutionary mismatch. That we probably evolved to be more alert than is necessary for us in living in safe, modern America. So our ancestors survived through evolutionary adaptation by being hyper alert and maybe that level of hyper alertness which served us 1,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago doesn't serve us as well today. Anxiety is a physical condition. It's not a moral disorder. I'm not talking morality here. Anxiety is a physical condition. It's also a spiritual condition. It's also a psychological condition. It's a symptom of a whole person. So we can focus on the symptoms. Ah, I'm deading. I'm pawning. I'm drinking. I'm under-earning. I'm engaged in a series of unfulfilling relationships. But that's just chasing symptoms. You want to get down to root causes. So I like this Kibneid approach of looking at healing the person, focusing on healing the person rather than healing the illness or healing the symptom. It's like you can embrace your diagnosis. Oh, I've got scoliosis. I've got fibromyalgia. I've got chronic fatigue. I've got chronic insomnia. I've got narcissistic personality disorder. All right. So I'm sure there are some benefits just focusing on the symptoms and on the diagnosis. But I think most of the time there's probably more benefit from focusing on the person and seeking to understand what's disordered in the person that is bringing about these unwanted symptoms. 40, you must simply discard that black t-shirt. It's old-style ring neck and does you no favors. Yeah, people want me to apply makeup to my neck to get rid of the wrinkles in my neck. Well, guess what? There's no makeup that gets rid of wrinkles. So I think that's a misconception among men that you can just like apply makeup and get rid of wrinkles. Well, there's no makeup that gets rid of wrinkles. Are there any sleeping pills to permanently cure my anxiety? Well, you can keep whacking away at the symptoms. Does it not make more sense to treat the person rather than treat the honest, to treat the whole person rather than just focus on the symptoms? So I know for me when I confronted my sex and love addiction in a 12-step program focusing on sex addiction that then my addictive tendencies manifested themselves in lots of other ways. So I substituted violent documentaries instead of looking at porn at night because the violent plane crash documentaries gave me the adrenaline rush and the excitement that I was seeking from porn. It was like a much healthier substitute for porn, but maybe I needed to go deeper. So we can simply chase symptoms or we can do the deeper inner work of healing the person, helping a person to feel at ease with himself and with others. So I just love the insight that the more we avoid something, the more anxious we feel. I found that helpful. And so there may be a symptom of like, say spending too much time watching sports. Well, that's because you've got a need for intensity and excitement that is not being met by your daily life. And so that indicates a lack of meaningful relationships in your life. So you're trying to substitute for that lack of ordinary human connection in your life by chasing artificial excitement on TV. So I was just reading this book on wasps by Anglos Axon Protestants. And it was amazing how much neurasthenia they were dealing with. Like the book was all about these wasps who are just constantly tired. It's called wasps. The splendors and miseries of an American aristocracy. And so have you heard the term neurasthenia? So it was a very popular term in the 19th century. It was first used in 1829 for mechanical weakness of the nose. It became a major diagnosis in North America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So it denoted a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, and depression. And so in this excellent book that I just started, that I just read last week, it seemed like most of the wasps in this book suffered from neurasthenia. So it mentions that white Anglosaxon Protestants don't tend to commit a lot of murder. But at least from the families focused on in this book, there's a lot of suicide and self-harm. And so he talks about the uncertainty of these young wasps in the late 19th, early 20th century. The splendor of whose poses is diminished by a certain vacuousness in their expression and emptiness in their eyes, some committed suicide, others were sent to lunatic asylums or languished in self-doubt and nervous stability, an affliction they knew as neurasthenia, for which reading Dante was the only cure. So a major reason why we feel weak fatigued, anxious, and depressed is we lack satisfied, exciting, exhilarating, meaningful interactions with other people. Like we were evolutionarily adapted to be in a tribe of about 150 people max. And so that's why we have so much nervousness about public speaking, because our current situation is an evolutionary mismatch from the past. Because in the past, when in our evolutionary adaptation days, thousand, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 years ago, public speaking was very dangerous before all the members of your group, because you could say something wrong that would damage your standing in the tribe. Now today, we tend not to be as limited to just 100 people in our life. We have a much wider range of people with whom we can form attachments. And so we no longer rashly need this great fear of public speaking. But what we needed then and what we need now is consistent, positive interactions with other people. Like I am talking to you, and I'm getting a little energy bump because we're on the same page. Like we're communicating, you're chatting, I'm responding to your chats. And it's like, pop, pop, pop, pop. This should be energizing. And think about how much better this would be in real life. If we are walking down the street and you made a point and I listened to it and I responded on the ball to what you said and then someone else responded. And so we're all on the same page and we're all interacting and we're all in synchrony with each other. And we will develop out of that a bond and out of all bonds develop an ethic, an attachment and a morality and a worldview. And it will be energizing. It's usually far more pleasant and far more energizing to walk a mile with somebody else than to just walk a mile on your own. So I think we're evolutionarily adapted to be going through our day interacting with other people and getting energy. And so if you're neurosthenic or fatigued, I think some of the time, some of the problem is a lack of these meaningful positive interactions with others. And so why do we lack positive interactions with others? Because we're unwilling to get on the same page with others. So if you're in synagogue and everyone's delving, but you're reading a book, you're not going to be on the same page with everyone else. And so you're going to reduce their enjoyment of the situation. You're going to reduce the energy that they get. And your energy is going to be reduced because you're not on the same page with other people. So getting on the same page with other people, it requires a little bit of thinking of yourself less and thinking about other people more. It requires some self-abnegation, some self-sacrifice, but the enormous rewards from getting on the same page with other people come in that sense of energy and that sense of purpose and that sense of bonding and that sense of attachment. It just never ceases to throw me how much energy I get from say going to a writer's party or a writer's gathering or hanging out with another writer or going to synagogue and seeing my friends and having intense discussions, tremendous sense of energy. Sports are so boring to watch, I don't get it. Well, the more you love in life, the better. So I enjoy some sports. So I don't watch 20 hours of sports a week. I may watch four hours of sports a week. And for me, it's just a fun hobby. I mean, you're hearing William Price say he hates people who watch sports. Why would you hate people who watch sports? Yeah, some sports have a good flow and few commercials. Otherwise, cherry on top if your team or player is killing it. Yeah, or you can just watch sports with the sound off and you can be listening to a podcast or a lecture. And then if there's something happens in the game, you can pause it usually. I mean, I watch everything on YouTube TV and so I just pause it or replay it and I listen to the important bits with the sound off. But otherwise, I may be listening to a course from the teaching company. Giant Zoom chat with entire chat when? Yes. How can I add to others? What value can I add? Or how can I simply get on the same page with other people? So so many crippled souls in this book wasp the splendors and miseries of an American aristocracy. So I talked about the children of these wasp aristocrats, blame their weakness, their fatigues, their failures, the scruples that prevented them from succeeding in the war on neurasthenia. They believed it was a medical condition. And neurasthenia is the result of not being on the same page with others, not being connected and not having these positive interactions that give you meaning and purpose and bonding and energy. So in his 1881 book, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences, the wasphysician Dr. George Miller Beard described neurasthenia as a disease caused by lack of nerve force, producing insomnia, bad dreams, mental irritability, nervous dyspepsia, fear of society, fear of responsibility, lack of decision in trifling matters, profound exhaustion and excessive yawning. So I remember there was a couple of years a couple of years where every time I'd walk down the street I would like jump because I felt like I was seeing all these car accidents that were about to occur. Like I was that jittery and nervous and I guess anxious. And so I thought people were always about to collide and these accidents never happened. But when I got into my Alexander Technique teacher training every day, going to the Academy training in the Alexander Technique within three months these symptoms had diminished. And pretty much everyone in my life found me a lot easier to deal with once I started studying the Alexander Technique. I no longer was exhausting as nervous, as irritable as unnecessarily provocative. So neurasthenia is a state of mind of being ill at ease with yourself and with other people. Right, it's a soul sickness. It's a black bile according to the Greeks. And what probably distinguished the wasp neurasthenics was their consciousness of unused powers in the soul that they sought to discharge in civic and creative activity. So they wrote a tremendous amount and they went into public service. So you see it most clearly in Henry Adams. He adopted the pose of a neurasthenic weakling oppressed by his puritanical New England heritage. And he felt like he was just looking on in life rather than living it. He felt like he was doomed to fail in an America that had little use for the wasp theories of virtues. But the pose was ironic. I mean, the man who wrote The Education of Henry Adams, it's not in any ordinary sense of failure. But it gave Adams an explanation, a story, for why the best and brightest of his generation fell into neurotic despair. So what it comes down to is an unwillingness to accept reality and unwillingness to live life on life's terms. So it's great to have a relationship with God. I think many people need to begin with, say, a positive relationship with reality. So people like Henry Adams blame their fatigue and nervousness as just the natural response of their exceptionally gifted natures to an environment unsympathetic to their gifts. So this is refusing to accept reality, refusing to accept other people as they are. It's a response that says, my problems exist outside of me. And I see this response among many people on the distant right, that, oh, our society is so perverse. Our society is so corrupt that there's no natural place for my gifted nature to express itself. And so I'm being impressed by having to work for Walmart. Right? The marketplace is so vulgar. The jobs that are available to me just don't do justice to the whole of my human nature. And I'm living in hell because America in the 21st century, this is what Curtis Yavin talks about, that America in the 21st century is like the Soviet Union. It's like Hungary in the 1950s. It's like Eastern Europe in the 1960s. This is among the most bizarre points that Curtis Yavin makes in his recent discussion with Tucker Carlson. I think if you think we're oppressed in America today, anything akin to what life was like in the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe, I mean, you're just completely delusional, completely out of touch with reality. But that dramatic story, it gives you an explanation for why you're failing in life. Hey, it's not your fault. It's this oppressive, selfish, maladjusted society. That way you don't have to consider, hey, maybe I am maladjusted. Bye-bye.