 President shine zoomers, it's Saturday morning now I want to talk about something in this video and that is if you're someone like me who has at least some degree of I Guess notoriety like minor fame or something like that you often get people who watch the stuff you put out and Have I guess? Advice questions they look to you for advice or something like that and so a lot of the questions that I get by email Or in live streams or whatever are general things like oh, how can I become more productive? How can I you know time management skills? What time management skills do you have and a bunch of questions that I think are frankly silly now? I don't manage time. I don't have a schedule. I don't have any of that kind of stuff But I and I don't believe in giving advice I maybe it'll become clear why I don't believe in that in this video But there is one sort of non-advice I can give you and that is you may have heard this term That's been circulating relatively recently called via negativa in the video title now This term of course it means the negative way it originally was sort of a theological term Understanding God by understanding what God isn't but more recently. It's a term that's been used by This guy you may have heard of Nassim Taleb He's a little hard to describe. He's sort of I guess he's like a professional nerd bullier and therefore I support him, but um so How he uses the term via negativa is not necessarily in this theological sense, but in I guess Oh, let's put it this way in modernity. We have this idea that let's say you're sick Let's say, you know, you're down under the weather or something or let's say you have high blood pressure Let's say you're a big fat boomer You have high blood pressure. Well the modern response to that is to do something like well I have high blood pressure So I'm gonna take some blood pressure medicine or something like that or oh, I can't sleep So I'm gonna take some sleeping medication or I can't wake up now So I'm gonna take some I can't wake up medicine or something like that and you keep adding stuff to your life And it becomes more complicated now via negativa turns that on its head and that is instead of adding medications in this example to your life If you feel sick or you have high blood pressure, the solution is not adding stuff to your life But taking things away. Maybe I'll stop consuming sugar or something like that That's usually the solution nowadays or stop consuming diet stuff. That's just as bad or You know a lot of times people will ask me when they're asking me about things like time management You know, they'll ask me like what software do you use to take? You know schedule all the things you do or something like that. How do I use any of that? I'm not gonna complicate my life with that kind of garbage instead I Implicitly abide by via negativa and that is if I want to get more things done I cut out the stuff that is in my way and Usually for people nowadays that means things like, you know, I watch no TV I'm sorry Netflix is TV. I know there are a bunch of millennials out there who say they don't watch TV And then they watch like eight hours and Netflix today. That's TV But I don't do that. I don't use social media. I don't you know, there's a bunch of stuff Or the killer nowadays for I'm sure a lot of my subscribers are these terrible things called video games Where you convince yourself that spending four to five to six to eight to twelve hours a day playing video games is somehow profitable to you and it might feel that way But um, you know, it's not an issue of I do think that it has a negative effect on you But more important than that. It's filling your life with stuff that isn't necessarily good So the via negative approach, I mean if you feel I mean people come to me with these very specific Psychological problems as if I'm gonna fix them for them or something like that But you know people say things like oh, I'm so depressed. I'm not motivated. What am I supposed to do? Well, usually you're in that kind of position because well if you play video games for 14 hours a day You you're you don't have the up the hormonal up and down of your daily day You don't really feel awake. You never really feel asleep You never really get anything done and the solution to most of these problems is not You know some extra Addendum to your life to complicate your life the solution to these kind of problems is just taking away the parts that You know cause them more or less and sometimes you don't even know what causes them mind you you might You know, I remember a couple years ago. This is like maybe I don't know nearly 10 years ago I was feeling really bad. You know like health wise, you know I didn't have that much energy or something like that and Eventually, I realized why after I happen so you know, there's like Arizona sweet tea things I used to drink like nearly a gallon of that a day I can't believe I used to do that but I didn't even think about it But when I stopped drinking that garbage I suddenly felt better, you know the kind of things So what I'm trying to get at is if you want to improve your life Don't do it by adding extra junk to it do it by taking things away Now there are things in your life that you know you know are bad watching pornography is not going to benefit you in any way Playing a bunch of video games, you know is not going to benefit you in a bunch of way I guess I have a gazillion hours on civilization on steam from years ago and not a single one of them benefited me All right, I mean past the age of 12. Okay, I learned the capital of Sweden from civilization too But you know past the point they'd mean nothing and you know they mean nothing So there are some things that you know are not beneficial and if you subtracted them from your life You would benefit quite a great deal in ways that you wouldn't even understand part of it is just you having Free time part of it is just you being able to have mental space to yourself But aside from that there are some things that you might not even know are bad that you do maybe some kind of food you eat Maybe some kind of habit and if you just try instead of adding things to your life If you try to cut things away from your life You will be greatly benefited and your life is only going to get simple simpler because of that so that's the extra benefit less things to worry about and Probably that's the thing that solves all of your problems. So anyway, so that's all I want to do This is why I don't really give advice, right? I don't give advice because I don't know what can improve your life But usually the advice you really need is just getting rid of bad stuff Usually stuff, you know sometimes stuff you don't know so that that's the extent of all I want to talk about in this video so I will see you zoomers next time and Yeah, I don't know cut something out of your life today And I'll see you next time