 If there's something holding you back, even if it's dear to you, you have to let it go. You seriously have to let it go. Because there isn't anything more important than progressing forward. And cheap sympathy, cheap empathy, cheap nostalgia, none of that is sufficient. None of that will work. Because the consequences of not putting things together immediately are dire, and there's no time to wait. God only knows what will happen to you if you put your house in order. Certainly things that you do not currently regard as possible will happen. And the more you put your house in order, the more things that you regard as impossible will happen. And it might be the case that if you put your house together sufficiently, things that were of miraculous impossibility would happen to you. Well, and there's no way of knowing until you try it. But there's no way of being sure that it's not the case, unless you do. And my experience has been that, I don't mean just personally, I mean that the world is a remarkable and mysterious place. And the relationship between the nature and structure of the world and your actions is indeterminate. They may be more tightly related than you think. The utility of rekindling the aims of your highest values when you come to the end of an epoch in your life, when you have to take stock again, right? You take stock of yourself. That's really what that phrase means to take stock is to take stock of yourself and to decide, OK, well, what should move forward in time with me and what should be let go as if it's dead wood? And the more dead wood that you let go of and burn off when you have the opportunity, the less it accretes around you. As you elevate your aim, you create a judge at the same time, right? Because the new ideal, which is an ideal you, even if it's just an ideal position that you might occupy, even if it's still conceptualized in that concrete way, that becomes a judge because it's above you, right? And then you're terrified of it maybe. That's why you might be afraid when you go start a new job, right? Because this thing is above you and you're terrified of it. And it judges you. And that's useful because the judge that you're creating by formulating the ideal tells you what's useless about yourself. And then you can dispense with it. And you want to keep doing that. And then every time you make a judge that's more elevated, then there's more useless you that has to be dispensed with. You don't have to pick an external ideal. You can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you. You can say, OK, well, if things could be set up for me the way I need them to be, and if I could be who I needed to be, what would that look like? And you can figure that out for yourself. And then instantly you have a judge. And I also think that's part of the reason people don't do it. Why don't people look up and move ahead? And the answer is, well, you start formulating an ideal. You formulate a judge. It's pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal. That's what happens to Cain versus Abel, for example. Then it's really easy to destroy the ideal instead of to try to pursue it because then you get rid of the judge. But it's way better lower the damn judge if it's too much. Like if your current ambition is crushing you, then maybe you're playing the tyrant to yourself and you should tap down your ambitions, not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination, but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp. You don't have to leap from 0.1 to 0.50 in one leap. You can do it incrementally. Where do I want to be more comfortable? Do I want to be more comfortable with that which I already know? And so that would be the circumscribed territory that you've already mastered. Or do I want to be comfortable with all those things I don't know? And then the right answer is that you should want to be comfortable with all those things that you don't know because there is a bloody lot of things that you don't know. And if you can be a sojourner among what you don't know, well, then you're so protected because, well, you're going to go lots of places where you don't know and you're going to be able to manage it. So you want to be that person that can act where they don't know. You see this with anti-social kids. It's a very tragic thing to see because if you're an anti-social child, by the time you're about four, you're very hostile and distrustful to people. And so you're like a growling puppy. And if you're a growling puppy, you tend not to get petted. You're more likely to get kicked. And if you're a growling puppy and you get kicked, then you have even more reason to growl. And that's sort of the story of anti-social kids. If they're not well-socialized by the time they're four and they're more on the aggressive side, then they alienate themselves from the community and all they get is rejection. Well, and then they look at the rejection and they think, well, hell with humanity, you know? And no wonder they think that. But the part of the catastrophe is, is that they get what they evoke. And I'm not saying it's their fault precisely, but it doesn't matter. That's still what happens. And so you might ask yourself, if you're not getting from people what you need, there is some possibility that you're not approaching, especially if this happens to you repeatedly across people. And this is a virtual certainty. If it happens to you repeatedly across people, especially if you have the same bad experience with people, it's not them, it's you. I would say three is the limit. If something happens to you once, you write it off. If it happens to you twice, it's like you open your eyes, but you write it off. But if it happens to you three times, it's probably you or it's the rest of the world. Better it's you, because you're not gonna change the rest of the world. And if you don't want it, you're not going to get it because you're scattered. But if you do want it and you make the proper sacrifices, then God only knows what might happen. And that's a, see, one of the things I really like about the existential philosophers is their emphasis on personal responsibility. Many of them had an emphasis on the role that people had in shaping their own destiny. For the existentialists, and I think this was a consequence of the religious substructure of philosophical thinking, it was self-evident that life was tragic and better. But, and then fair enough, but that isn't where it ended. The next issue was, well, there are better and worse ways of dealing with that and the better way of dealing with the fact that life is tragic and better is to pause it, the self you could be and live authentically in relationship to that. No one can take the adventure of life away from you. That's, they can't do it with good advice, for example. Because no one can demonstrate to you that if you straighten yourself out and aim at what you want and make the proper sacrifices that your life will turn out in the manner that you might want it to turn out. It isn't in anyone else's purview to make that judgment. The only person that can possibly figure that out is you. It's something that can't be stolen from you. I would say it's your destiny. It's a destiny that cannot be stolen from you and you can forego it. You can say, well, I'm not willing to put in the effort because what if I fail? Well, first of all, if you don't put in the effort, you will fail because life is hard and it takes everything out of you to do it properly. If the proper order of being is violated then that's something like the balance between chaos and order. Say, if the proper balance of being is violated then all hell will break loose. And one of the things I can tell you from reading a very comprehensive set of myths from around the world is that that's a conclusion that human beings have come to everywhere. Stay on the goddamn path and be careful because if you start to mess around and you deviate, especially if you know that you're deviating, things are not going to go well for you. And that idea is everywhere. And I think the idea is right because there aren't that many ways of doing things right and there's a lot of ways of doing things wrong. And if you do things wrong, the consequences of doing them wrong can be truly catastrophic. He said that a human being is not only responsible for everything they do but for everything that everyone else does. Now, you know, that's crazy. And he was an epileptic and a mystic and that's a crazy thing to say. But it's also, there's something about it that's true because if you were better, the people around you would be less worse than they are. And if you were good enough, you don't know how much better the people around you would be. The sexual thing here is something more like the absolute danger of immediate gratification, sexual included, outside the constraints of any civilized structure whatsoever. There's no excuse whatsoever for not getting at what it is that you should be doing. And I think there's something else that's going on here, especially in the New Testament stories, which is even maybe worse, which is it's absolutely reprehensible to justify your inaction with a catastrophe that extracts mercy from other people, right? There's a tricky, tricky game that's going, well, of course I can't do that. Look at the terrible thing that's just happened to me. It's like, okay, I understand. You're absolved of any necessity to move forward because of your current catastrophe. It's like, well, actually you're not and it's rather rude of you to use it as an excuse. And it's certainly counterproductive. Are you in a place that's so bad that you should leave? And if you are in a place that's so bad that you should leave, then the time to leave is now because there's no time to waste.