 G'day mate, 40 here. So I've spent way too much of my life hoping to be rescued, right? Like, God's coming. Rescue's coming. Salvation's descending from above. If I just convert to this new religion, if I just, you know, take this new supplement, if I just, you know, understand this new idea, if I just read one more book, if I just watch one more video, if I just listen to a new podcast, rescue is coming. But nobody's coming, right? I have to do the work. So I'm a religious man. I do believe in God. I believe in a higher power. And so I do believe, say, with 12 step recovery, that it's not just a matter of, you know, I do the work and then I get a commensurate reward. It's like, I do the work and then I get a reward, you know, above and beyond my own efforts. But recovery is something that happens to me but not without me, to quote her okay. So I think for certain passive personalities or disordered personalities, there's a great temptation in hoping and believing that, you know, rescue will come from above. But God will come and rescue me. That someone will come along and rescue me. And as I heard in 12 step, nobody's coming. All right? It's up to me. Now, saying it's up to me doesn't mean that no other people will play an instrumental role in my recovery or in my life. So if it's up to me, that means I need to find better ways of connecting with other people, reaching out to other people and developing new relationships with other people. And as far as God, I can believe in God. But if I'm eating too much or dating too much or looking at pornography, then I need a whole new relationship with God. But God's not going to just come along and rescue me in my understanding. So I know in 12 step and in religion, a lot of people hope that God will come along and drive the car. And I much prefer the metaphor of God is like GPS. All right? You put in with your new cars where you want to go and then the GPS will give you a suggested route and you don't have to follow that route. So sometimes you may actually know better than the GPS. Sometimes you think you know better, but you're wrong. But then the GPS corrects and say, OK, now take the next ride. So to me, God is like GPS. So God's not going to drive your car. GPS is not driving your car. You have a choice to follow the GPS or not. You have to turn on the GPS. You have to put in a destination. Unless you actively engage with the GPS and follow the GPS, the GPS is not going to do you any good. So God's not going to drive your car. I encounter a lot of people in 12 step who think that God's going to come along and run their life. God's not going to run your life. God's not coming in that sense. You can tune into a higher power, however you want to understand that, and use that connection with a higher power as a GPS guide for your life. But higher power, in my understanding, is not going to come along and rescue you. Nobody's coming. God's not coming. No one's coming to rescue you. You have to take action. Go to a new 12 step meeting. You might need a new therapist. You might need a new synagogue. You might need a new church. You might need a new rabbi. You might need a new accountability partner. You might need to read that new book. You might need to add a new practice, such as swimming in cold water to wake yourself up. But nobody's coming to rescue us, guys. If it is to be, it is up to me. God's not coming. Salvation's not descending from above. It's up to us to tune in to a higher power and then follow the GPS directions. Follow the guidance. But God's not going to drive the car. God is not going to run our lives. God's not going to just take over and make our decisions. God's not going to speak for us. God's not going to take the actions that we need to take at work. So to me, God is a GPS. God will suggest what direction you take, and you can ignore that direction and then come back to it later. You can learn from your experience. But there is guidance. Or if you don't want to use God talk, I mean, there's guidance from people who are wiser, finer, kinder, more successful than us. And we can learn to tune in to guidance. So I'm someone who lacks a lot of common sense. So here I am in Ullawalla, thinking of moving to Australia. But it's very important to me knowing that I often lack common sense, that I'm talking over this potential move with a lot of people so that I'm just not acting out on my own. So I know a lot of people who have more common sense than I do in many different areas of life. And so I'm just spilling out what I'm thinking. So I just went for a walk on my first morning in Kudji. I went for a walk along the Kudji beach. Then emotionally something shifted in me to I want to live here. I want to move here. Then after that I started coming out with all rational reasons for why I wanted to move here. So I want to spend more time with family. I want to spend more time with my friends. I want to spend more time here at the beach. There's so much social cohesion here. There's low crime. There's very little social dysfunction. There's a nice Jewish community here. I'm in a bit of a rut. I need to challenge myself, get out of my routines, get out of my familiar structures, do something new. I need a new challenge. I then rationalize all these reasons for why I wanted to move to Kudji. And I can, if you're talking to me in a conversation, I can list off half a dozen reasons. So when I'm talking to rabbis here in Sydney about my plans to move here, I can articulate rational reasons for why I want to move here. But what happened is something shifted inside of me. So I don't think we generally speaking make decisions based on evidence. Now, some people do. So for example, with the vaccine, I think it is normal natural human nature to want to not take foreign substance into our bodies to not get an injection, to not get the jab. I understand that natural human reaction. But then people face incentives such as they lose their job if they don't get the vaccine, or they would fall out of step with their social group, or possibly they review the evidence and they see, okay, I instinctively don't want to take the vaccine, but I'm looking at the evidence and the evidence seems to be that the vaccine on balance is a good thing. So evidence can affect people. But I don't think generally speaking, we make our decisions based on evidence. I think we get a gut feeling what we want to do. And then we come up with reasons for why what we want to do is the right thing. So I remember in something like April or May of 1984, I was just about to graduate from high school and I suddenly got the desire, hey, I want to go back to Australia and live with my brother for a year. So I got that feeling. And then I came up with justifications for it. And so I got a feeling a couple of weeks ago, hey, I want to go back to Australia and see my brother and sister. And then I got back here and I got the feeling, oh, I want to stay here. And so I can come up with all sorts of intellectual reasons to justify my feelings. So some people grew up in Orthodox Judaism, and then they just get the feeling that they want to drop it. And they can then come up with all sorts of, you know, evidentiary and rational reasons for why they want to drop out of Orthodox Judaism. It's, hey, they say it doesn't stand up to modern scholarship. It is debunked by say modern biblical scholarship or Darwinian evolution, or you can come up with all sorts of reasons for why you want to drop out of Orthodox Judaism. But I think for most people it's just a gut decision. So for some people they might grow up secular and then want to shift towards Orthodox Judaism, and they can articulate all sorts of rational reasons for why they want to do it. But something I think internally happens to us that we don't fully understand. So what's that saying? There are two reasons why we do something. There's the stated reason and the real reason. So I think our minds are good at rationalizing. It's one of the most frequent things that my parents said to me growing up, like, don't, you're such a rationalizer. Don't rationalize. Because I would excuse my bad behavior, my lack of responsibility, that I didn't get the chores done, that I didn't do what I said I'd do, that I'd behave badly. And I would always come up with rational reasons for my mistakes. So I was often told by my parents, you need to take responsibility. Because taking responsibility didn't come nationally to me. I always had rational reasons and excuses for why I shouldn't take responsibility for my bad behavior. And so it got to a point that my father would just shake his head and he said, you'll only learn through pain. You will only learn through pain. And he was right. And I think for a lot of us we only learn through pain. Some people are wise that they see mistakes that people make or they see a big ditch and they drive around the ditch. But many of us have to go into that ditch multiple times and then realize, hey, God's not going to come and rescue me. Nobody's coming. Nobody's going to rescue me. Salvation is not descending from above. I'm going to have to work out my hand salvation with fear and trembling. I'm going to have to make some concrete steps to move my life in a new direction. And often that means recognizing what you can learn from the people around you and recognizing where they are right and where you are doing things wrong and adopting more effective ways of living. Because all around us usually there are people who excel us in many different areas. And so we can learn from this person about how to do business and we can learn from this person about how to stay in a relationship and we can learn from this person about how to raise kids and we can learn from this person about how to invest and we can learn about interpersonal skills from this person and we can learn about mechanical skills from a different person. And we can learn about the right type of car that we need to drive from someone different. But we have to recognize that the way we're doing things is not adequate but nobody's coming to rescue us but we're getting to have to take steps to to change our lives and not just be passive it's like oh God's gonna come along and God's gonna drive the car. Now God's the GPS is up to us to follow the GPS or not follow the GPS.