 Welcome to The Sam Vakni in Horror Show. There's one question that keeps you awake at night. One question that nearly drives you insane. One query. The answer to which you must have whatever the cost may be. Even if it takes watching one of my videos. So be it. You need the answer and you need the answer now. And the question is, is the SOB happy? Is the narcissist content, satisfied, gratified, happy-go-lucky? Or is he depressed, karmically? The karma got him. Is he sad? Is he downcast? Is he disabled by his own internal dynamics? Grief, narcissistic injuries and modification. So which is it? Happy or depressed? And I'll give you a typical Jewish answer. Both. You know, two Jews, three opinions. And so here we are. The narcissist is both happy and depressed at the very same moment. Simultaneously, concurrently. How is this possible, you ask? How can anyone be happy and depressed at the very same moment? Aren't these two mutually exclusive states of mind, moods? You're forgetting that the narcissist is God. He's all-powerful. Everything is within his remit and ambit. He can accomplish and do anything he wants. He can even decide to be happy and depressed at the same time. And no one can prevent him from accomplishing this counter-intuitive task. So, because narcissists can do anything, know everything, are perfect, they are the only subspecies of humans who have something which I call effective ambivalence. And if you're wondering what is effective ambivalence, you're not the only ones. Because hitherto, we knew of emotional ambivalence. Emotional ambivalence is when you hold simultaneously two conflicting emotions directed at the same person or situation or place. So, you hate your narcissist, but you also love him. Love-hate relationships with mommy, with daddy, with your narcissist. This is an example of emotional ambivalence. But what on earth is effective ambivalence? Don't bother to look online. Don't ask anyone. Because I've just come up with it. Effective ambivalence is when you simultaneously hold two moods, two effects. So, you're simultaneously happy and depressed, simultaneously you're up and down. Effective ambivalence is when you have two conditions of affect, conditions of mood, which subsist or coexist at the same time towards the same target. Now, this sounds an impossibility. But before Freud came with emotional ambivalence, people thought that emotional ambivalence was impossible. They said, how can you hate and love the same person at the same time? And now we know it's extremely common. I think effective, effective ambivalence might gain these status in due time. But let us go back to a favorite topic, the narcissist, or at least my favorite topic, the narcissist. First of all, let it be clear. Effective ambivalence is not typical only of narcissists. It's actually, I would say, typical of most personality disorders. For example, avoidant personality disorder, schizoate personality disorder. And of course, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionine, schizotypal, paranoid, they all have, they all display effective ambivalence. They all harbor, entertain, contain mutually exclusive, mutually contradictory moods at the very same time. In many personality disorders, we have approach avoidant behavior, approach avoidance behavior. These people with cluster B and other personality disorder approach you. And then when you respond favorably to the approach, they avoid you. And then they approach you again, approach avoidance. There are repetition compulsions. They keep repeating the same set of behaviors. The same speech acts. Never mind how counterproductive, self-defeating, or even self-destructive this pattern is. They keep repeating it. And this is what Freud called repetition compulsion. They have identity disturbance. They don't have a clear core of identity. They shift between identities and the shifts can be mind boggling. They shift between values. They shift between convictions and preferences. They shift between moods and effects. They shift between emotions and cognitions. And so they have something which we call alternating self-states. You're beginning to see that these people are highly unstable. Their internal landscape, internal environment is very, very disorganized and chaotic. And this internal chaos is fully reflected in their behaviors, in their conduct, in their choices, in their decisions, in their relationships. And it is this chaos that leads to affective ambivalence. To remind you, affective ambivalence is two concurrently experienced moods or effects which contradict each other. And are usually mutually exclusive, healthy, normal people experience one mood at a time. But what if you don't have an identity? What if you don't have a core? What if your identity is very disturbed? What if you're fractured and fragmented? What if you have self-states, several self-states, not only one? Well, each of these fragments and each of these self-states can have its own mood. And because they all coexist, you can have multiple moods simultaneously. Because there's no you, there's nobody there. Each fragment continues its own internal process. Each self-states awaits the moment to take over and manifest. And each one of them harbors specific effect, emotion, cognition, etc. Bromberg calls it narrative. Take, for example, the avoidant or the schizoid narcissist. Or, actually, don't take them. But consider them. Consider the avoidant or the schizoid narcissist. They endure simultaneous dissonant, egocintonic happiness, gratification and satisfaction, and egodistonic depression and regret. Let's break this down, because these are very big $10 words. At the same time, they're happy. They're gratified. They're satisfied. And so they are egocintonic. They feel good. They feel comfortable. They want to go on in this state of mind. But at the same time, concurrently, they're depressed. And that is, of course, egodistonic. That's bad. It's a bad feeling. It's an uncomfortable feeling. Or they regret things. And that's also an uncomfortable feeling. So at the same time, they're happy, egocintonic, gratified, satisfied. And depressed, sad, down, angry, regretful. And this creates a dissonance. This creates a clash and inner conflict between the competing moods. And it's essentially a civil war between the self-states with the moods and effects as proxies. But why would someone who is happy, gratified, satisfied? Why would someone like that be depressed? What regrets would someone like that have? Why would you regret becoming happy or gratified or satisfied? Well, it's because the cost of becoming happy, the cost of attaining contentment, gratification and satisfaction, happiness, the cost that these people pay are very high. Healthy people, when they become happy, when they attain happiness and contentment, they pay a cost, of course. Everything has an opportunity cost. But these costs are minimal and they are well compensated for by the state of happiness. In other words, the price of happiness is worth the price, whatever it is, in healthy people, normal people. But with personality disorder people, the costs sometimes frequently actually far outweigh the price of happiness, gratification and satisfaction. Consider, for example, the schizoid narcissist. In order for him to be happy, he needs to cut off all human contact and all interactions with everyone around him, including his so-called intimate partner. He needs to isolate himself, to be totally, solipsistically, alone, a single atom in a totally empty universe. So he pays a horrendous cost because we are all social animals. Even schizoid narcissists, even schizoids, are essentially social, but they internalize their social impulses, their social urges, and they internalize them and they redirect them into fantasy. They have a fantasy social life, but that's a huge price to pay. To not talk to anyone, to not sleep with anyone, to not be intimate with anyone, to not be friends with anyone, to not trust and confide in anyone. This is a horrendous price. It's like solitary confinement. Ask any prisoner and they will tell you, they don't dread, they don't dread, dread weapons in prison. They don't dread anything. The thing they fear most is solitary confinement. And so the schizoid narcissist willingly, voluntarily submits himself to solitary confinement in order to satisfy his schizoid style or his schizoid personality disorder and be happy. The schizoid is happy only when he is alone, but in order to be alone and to be happy, he pays a horrendous, terrifying price in social isolation. So, simultaneously, he is happy that he is alone and he is unhappy that he has had to pay this price. He is depressed and he is depressed at how disabled he is, how abnormal he is, what he misses out in life. It depresses him, he is unhappy about this, but these are the costs of being alone and he can be happy only if he is alone. Consider, for example, the borderline. She is happy and unhappy at the same time. She is happy only when she is with an intimate partner. This intimate partner regulates many of her psychological functions, provides, caters to many of her needs. It's the same with the codependent, but the price the borderline pays is enormous. Self-annihilating, the price she pays is emotional dysregulation, which is the outcome of extreme radicalised, catastrophised abandonment and separation anxiety. So, it's an approach avoidance. She can be happy, the borderline can be happy only with an intimate partner, but the minute she is with an intimate partner, the costs of being happy are gigantic, mind-wracking, destructive. They lead her, these costs lead her to become a secondary psychopath and to engage in reckless self-endangering behaviours and worse. So, the schizoid pays the price of social isolation in order to be happy when he is alone. The borderline pays the price of emotional dysregulation just in order to be with a partner, because only when she is with an intimate partner, she is happy. You see, these people are forced to pay such a price for their happiness that it renders them unhappy. They are unhappy with who they are. They are unhappy with the price they have to pay, just in order to obtain and attain what other people, healthy people, take for granted. They pay a psychosexual price as well. People with personality disorders are typically immature psychosexually. They have relationship failures, very harrowing, very agonising failures which involve triangulation, cheating. They go through the most devastating consequences in their relationships because their psychosexuality is infantile. And yet, they need a relationship in order to be happy, except the schizoid. All the others need to be in a relationship. The narcissist needs to be in a shared fantasy, for example. The borderline needs an external regulator of her emotions, which is her intimate partner. They need relationships, they are dependent of course. The avoidant even needs relationships. So, relationships are sine qua non, they are absolute necessity. But they enter the relationship fully anticipating loss and failure, because they know that they are not adults. They are not sufficiently mature to maintain the relationship and keep it going. And there's an impairment of reality testing, cognitive deficits and biases. So, in the thrust, in the drive towards happiness, they lose touch with reality. They engage in delusions, in fantasies, in grandiosity. It's bad to lose touch with reality. It's frightening, it's threatening, it's dangerous, and they know it. They take huge risks just to be happy. And so, they keep asking themselves, why was I dealt such a bad hand when I was born? Or, when I've had these kind of dysfunctional parents, dead mothers, why me? There is this nagging question, why me? It hurts. It's a problem. So, even the most egocintonic, overt, classic, self assured, self confident, etc., etc., grandiose narcissists. There's this nagging thing, like why me? Why do I have to pay this price? So, the narcissist lies to himself. He says, well, it's because I'm special. I'm unique. I'm super intelligent. People are stupid. People are envious. That's why I have to pay this price. The borderline says to himself, he was about to abandon me. He was about to reject me. He's an abuser. He's horrible. And so, that's why I have to pay this price. The invent narratives. That's why Bromberg insists the personality disorders are actually narratives. And so, they invent narratives, which in order to explicate, to somehow make sense of why they have to pay this tremendous cost. Why they have to give up such huge parts of themselves in just in order to be happy. And so, they're simultaneously happy and unhappy about it. And some of them, not always, and not about everything, but some of them regret. Some of them have regrets. Talk to any borderline. She will tell you. She has many regrets. paranoid personalities, avoidant, of course, have regrets. So, as you see, it's not limited to cluster B. A classic overt narcissist would deny that he regrets anything, that he has remorse of any kind, and so would a psychopath, someone with antisocial personality disorder. But it's not true. It's not true. When they are alone at night, looking in the mirror, they have regrets. They have regrets. They feel they've missed out on things. They feel life could have been different. They feel there's so much they have no access to. So much they hadn't benefited from. So much they have never enjoyed. Pleasures denied. Pleasure of, I don't know, intimacy, love, proper sex, adult, reciprocal. They are punished by their own disorder, and no one can ignore such a punishment, not for long anyhow. Narcissus is a very powerful defense and psychopaths even more. And so, in order to cope with these constant, all-consuming, all-pervasive losses, the strategy of these people, the strategy of these patients with personality disorders is to lose even more. So for example, the narcissist in order to cope with his failures and defeats and broken relationships and broken heart to cope with all this, he loses yet more. He loses access to his emotions. He denies his emotions. He does not emote. He feels nothing. He converts himself into an android robot just in order not to feel, because he feels threatened by emotions. He is afraid to become a borderline in effect. So, here you are, a narcissist. You've lost so much. You've lost loved ones. You've lost businesses. You've lost friends. You never had intimacy or love or proper sex or anything. Your whole life is one ginormous loss. And how do you react? You lose even more. You lose your emotions. Here's a psychopath in and out of jail or in and out of relationships or in and out of infatuations or in and out of business schemes which never work out, in and out of exploiting and abusing people and stealing from them and leveraging the vulnerabilities and weaknesses, in and out. And how does he cope with all this? He copes with all this by denying all his emotions, except anger and resentment and vindictiveness. So, the solutions render the dysfunction more egregious, more extreme. And so, finally, regret sets in. But of course, regret in the case of the narcissist, for example, in the case of people with personality disorders, regret is irrational. They should not actually regret anything. I'll try to explain why. It's not a value judgment. It's not a moral judgment. It's not that they have done nothing wrong. Most of what they have done is wrong. Most of what they have done is evil and wicked or hurtful and painful to others or self-interested or egotistical or whatever. So, there's a lot to regret, but they should not regret, because in their case it's irrational. And I'd like to try to explain why is it irrational? Why is it illogical? Why is it unreasonable for, for example, analysis to regret what he had done? Stay with me. It's a bit of a complex argument. Regret makes sense only if there is personal continuity, an immutable, unchangeable core identity. I repeat this. Regret, remorse, feeling bad about what you've done makes sense only if you have personal continuity. You're one and the same person all the time. Only if you have unchangeable, immutable core identity. But people with personality disorders don't have this. They are discontinuous. They are not continuous. They're not the same person from one year to another, from one week to another. In some cases, like the borderline, from one hour to another, they're not the same person. These are separate self-states. They share memories, these self-states. They have a common repository of memories. So there is continuity in the biographical sense, as when it comes to personal history, but there's no emotional, not even cognitive continuity. It's like these people are populated, inhabited by a multitude. These are all cases of effectively multiple personality disorder with permeable dissociation, with no dissociation in many cases. And so consider, for example, the narcissist. One day on Wednesday, he's person A. On first day, he's person B. Person A did something wrong. Should person B feel bad about it? Why? Person B is not person A. Why should person B feel bad about something person A had done the day before? Indeed, when you talk to narcissists, they will tell you, I didn't do anything wrong. I shouldn't be punished. It's unjust. It's unfair. Why are you punishing me? I was a different person. Nazi war criminals often use this argument. I was a different person then, they say. I'm all entirely changed now. I'm reformed. Alcoholics who went through AA used the same argument. Prisoners who had found Jesus or Islam in prison give you the same argument. I was a different person. I should go and parole. I should be paroled, because now I'm not the same person who had committed the crime. So regret makes sense only if there is personal continuity. Person A can regret having acted in a certain way or having chosen inaction over action. But person A can regret or have remorse only if he has remained largely person A. It would make no sense for person B to regret anything person A had done, even if both inhabit the same body. Indeed, dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, and recently narcissistic personality disorder, the case of Brian Blackwell, are beginning to be considered and taken as insanity defenses. In identity disturbance, which is very common in many personality disorders and in many other mental illnesses, not personality disorders. So in identity disturbance, we have self-states. Each self-state is distinct. One self-state is very empathic, warm, loving, emotional. Another self-state in the same person, in the same person, in the same body. The other self-state is a secondary psychopath, defined, consummations impulsive, aggressive, and reckless, callous, novelty-seeking, and risk-taking. Nothing to do with the first person. And yet they both inhabit the same body. We have this erroneous notion that we should judge people as the same just because they share a body. A body can be inhabited by many people. Possession, demon possession, was founded on this realization and observation that different entities can inhabit a single shrine, a single temple, the shrine of the body. And so identity disturbance means that you have self-states. And self-states are far apart. The transformations over time, the transitions switching between self-states, they are startling. Anyone who had witnessed a rejected, humiliated, abandoned borderline becoming a secondary psychopath, switching to a secondary psychopath would understand what I'm saying, would immediately understand what I mean. It's not the same person, end of story. Person A effectively becomes an almost unrelated person B. The transition is seamless and instantaneous, flick of the thumb or a switch or something. There is no constancy of traits, behaviors, values, effect, cognitions, emotions, any parameter of identity. And there is no constancy of these parameters because there's no core identity, there's no negotiator, there's no coordinator, there's no stable kind of weight which holds everything, there's no glue. And it makes no sense for person B to regret the behaviors or the choices or the decisions of person A. Although, of course, person B can disagree with person A. Person B can criticize person A. Person B can even be angry at person A if he has to suffer the consequences of person A's actions. But they're not the same, they're two self-states. You can say, I regret that person A had chosen to not have sex for 15 years. I regret that. It was a very bad decision, deprivation, depriving me of pleasure, of intimacy, of love. I regret that person A is like that. I criticize him, I think he's an idiot. I would never do what person A had done. Had I been in control of the body instead of person A, I would have never reached this decision. I would have never implemented this choice. I'm angry at person A because person A denied himself love and sex and intimacy and now I'm person B and unto all. So I'm angry at person A. He had put me, person B, in this situation. I have to suffer the consequences of the price for person A's inanity, idiocy, stupidity, insanity. Yes, there could be a civil war between person A and person B, but there could be no regret and no remorse. Person B is not responsible, doesn't feel responsible for person A's actions or inaction. It's like there is an external locus of control. Person B was controlled by person A while person A was in control. Like choosing a wrong leader, a wrong president, a wrong prime minister. As long as he is the president or prime minister, you are your hostage. Voted out of office, you're beginning to pay the price and you're angry, but you're not the president. You couldn't have done anything. Person B could not have done anything. Person B can regret not having coalesced, not having emerged earlier than he did. So person B can say, why did I wait for so long? Why didn't I just fight it out with person A, duel at noon, let the best one win? Why didn't I have it out with person A? Why didn't I take over this body? Why did I allow person A to control all the resources, hitherto? And it's akin. Person B's reaction, I should have fought person A off. I should have taken the body earlier. I should have controlled the situation and allocate the resources to myself. I, person B, should have been in charge, not person A, and I should have never allowed him to be in charge. This is like resenting our mortality. Because our mortality limits the number of possible experiences that we could ever have. And we are angry at this. We resent this. We deny our mortality. We ignore it. We live every day as though there's no tomorrow. We live every day as though we're going to live forever. And we behave this way because we can't accept that the set of all possible experiences is limited by our longevity. It's the same with person B. Person B is angry at person A because person A had absconded with, stolen from him, many years of his life. In this sense, person A is person's B mortality because person A had stolen time from person B. There is a problem of time I've dealt with it in a previous video. Kernberg had written about it. I had written about it years before Kernberg. There is a problem of the perception of time, the allocation of time, because there are so many self-states. There is a problem to manage time, to manage time constructively, productively, self-efficaciously, but also to experience time. The self-states share memories, but they can't share time. So many of them have a very distorted perception of time. When does it start? When does it end? Where does it lead? They don't have these concepts. They are time discontinuous. It's kind of malignant mindfulness. They're constantly in a prison. And so, the only regret person B can have is that he hadn't dumped person A, disposed of him, and seated him much earlier. But what person B should understand is that person B could not have emerged, could not have exited earlier, could not have taken over the body earlier. Because if he could have, he would have. The fact that person B took so long to emerge, the fact that person B emerged only under given circumstances, proves that it could not have emerged earlier or under different circumstances. The thing is, if you can, you do in psychology. If a process can manifest, it does. If something can happen, it does. If an emotion has to erupt, it erupts. If anything can happen, it does. And if things don't happen, they die. They're discarded. It's called the economy of the psyche or the psychological economy. So, person B didn't come forth, didn't manifest, didn't express itself earlier because he could not have. He could not have had, if he were able to, he would have. Pseudo-entities are suboptimal, but they are egocintonic narrative strategies. And they are asymptotic to the optimum. They are therefore mutually exclusive. Wow, that was a mouthful. Let me explain this. Pseudo-entities, self-states, they are not optimum. They don't give you the best possible result as a narcissist or as a psychopath or as a borderline. Just look at where these people end, how they end their lives. You know, discarded, broken, damaged goods. Personality disorders is not a good recipe for running your life. It's bad management strategy. So, pseudo-entities, pseudo-identities, these are very bad, very wrong, very inefficient methods of allocating resources. They are not optimal, they are suboptimal. But they're egocintonic. The person feels good with the solution chosen, with the self-state which had exited or emerged. So the person, the narcissist, for example, would be happy with person A. The borderline would be happy with the secondary psychopath, as long as they are in control, as long as they are the ones who are manifest and expressed. The narrative strategy is egocintonic. The narrative strategy of these various competing self-states, each of these self-states makes the personality disorder person happy. Happy. It's important to understand. The function of these self-states is egocintony. Egocintony is to keep the personality-disordered patient happy, content, gratified, satisfied, and therefore functional. Could it have been done differently? Of course. These are bad strategies, inefficient, not self-ifications. But they are the only ones the patient has. So they are some optimal. You could come up with better solutions, strategies, ideas, maneuvers, but that's it. That's what you have. Take it or leave it. And these strategies, these narratives are asymptotic to the optimum. In other words, they try to obtain a state of optimum. They try to do their best. They try to secure the best possible outcomes in a given environment or under given circumstances. But they never make it. They never make it. And so these self-states are mutually exclusive. They are mutually exclusive because in one of them is in control. When one of them manifests, when one of them is expressed, when one of them is in charge, when one of them is observable, you know, is externalized. The person, the patient is egosyntonic, is happy, gratified, satisfied. Why would the patient want to transition to another state? Only when circumstances, environmental circumstances change in the human environment or the natural environment, only when certain internal processes go awry, only then there is ego-dystony and the person switches to another personhood state. And in that new state, the patient is again happy and sees no need to change. So this is the inner landscape of people with personality disorders. Now, about yesterday's video, I had to do with boredom, I bored you to death and reduced you to nothingness, which gave me enormous egosyntony. Some of you asked me, what about psychopaths? The literature says that psychopaths have a low threshold, low tolerance of boredom. So boredom is not good because easily I said the boredom is good. I said boredom is good for you. So you see, boredom is not good because for example psychopaths, they have a low tolerance of boredom. Well, that's precisely it. It's not the boredom that's the problem. It's the low tolerance of the boredom. When you don't tolerate boredom, you act out, you self-defeat, you self-destruct, you fake, you lie to yourself, you delude yourself in fantasies. You have a multitude of dysfunctional solution to not tolerating boredom. Let me put it this way. The less you tolerate boredom, the more psychopathic you are. Reverse this sentence. The more you tolerate boredom, the healthier you are. Tolerating boredom is healthy and a person who seeks boredom, aspires to boredom, is the healthiest of all. And a person who cannot stand boredom, a person who disintegrates, acts out impulsively, crazily, aggressively, because he cannot stand one minute of boredom. That's a good description of a psychopath. Let me reiterate very briefly the message of yesterday's video without the nothingness part, without the philosophy, just the psychology. Here the two, the literature says that boredom is a condition where there's insufficient stimulation and I beg to differ. I think boredom is a reaction to over-stimulation. The more stimuli, the more signals, the more symbols, the more information, the more data you're exposed to, the more likely you are to be bored. Let me give the example of an action thriller. You watch one action thriller, you're excited, you're thrilled, you're interested, and then you watch 20 action thrillers and you're bored, too much, not too little. Over-stimulation, hyper-stimulation, direct exposure to life without filtering, without firewalling, without categorical arrangement and classification, direct exposure to the tsunami wave of information and data that life throws at you. This leads to boredom. It leads to boredom through a process called desensitization. Desensitization means you need higher and higher level, higher and higher excitatory levels, higher and higher, more and more stimuli. You need more and more to maintain the same level of interest and thrill and excitement. So this is desensitization. At some point, you know, it's too much. You shut off and this shutting off is boredom. But boredom is a strong indicator that you interact, connection, direct contact, direct interaction with life itself, with reality itself, with the universe as it is. That's healthy. Boredom is the meaning of an authentic life because authenticity means to be in direct contact with reality and the world, not fake, not to falsify, not to put makeup, not to paint over, not to impose a veneer, not to pretend, but to bravely face reality, confront the world. This is healthy. Boredom, which is the result of such an interaction, is therefore healthy and imbues everything with meaning. It leads to an authentic life. So boredom leads to self-awareness. Try to remember when you're bored, you're aware of everything that's happening to you. You're aware of every tick and blip in your body. You're aware of your environment acutely. You're like, oh, you can't breathe. You can't breathe because you're inundated. You're flooded with life itself, with information. This is the most extreme form of self-awareness. So boredom is not worthlessness. And boredom is definitely not depression because depression pushes you to inaction. Depression forces you to not act, not act. When you're depressed, you don't want to talk to anyone. You don't want to do anything. You just want to sleep all day. You want to avoid life. Depression is about withdrawal, about avoidance, about inaction. Boredom pushes you to act. Isn't it so? When you're bored, don't you look for something to do? Don't you look for some entertainment? Boredom is a motivator. It's an engine. It's exact opposite. If I were asked, what's the opposite of depression? Boredom, that's the opposite of depression. One is demotivator. One is motivator. And the problem of Western civilization is that it is intolerant to boredom exactly like psychopaths. Western civilization is psychopathic because it has a very low tolerance of boredom and anything that is reminiscent of boredom, like death. And Western civilization developed four strategies, four coping strategies, four defenses, four ameliorating defenses, boredom reducing, boredom erasing defenses and strategies. Number one, the unconscious. If you're flooded with information, if you're inundated, if you get in touch with reality without a skin, without a firework, without any filter, it's bad for you. So there's the unconscious. Pretend that everything you see, everything you hear, everything you're learning, everything does not exist. Push it down, suppress it. That's the unconscious, isn't it? Studies have revealed that 95% of all the information provided by life and the world is relegated to the unconscious immediately without any processing. Number two, fantasy, including religion, love, the nation state, your favorite football club, you name it. Fantasy is an escape route away from boredom. Western civilization cannot tolerate boredom. Number three, mastery. Master the world, control the world, act upon the world and in the world. This way you will not be bored. And number four, entertainment, diversion, distraction. Keep busy, keep busy, keep busy, busyness is the recipe to avoid boredom. Because boredom is so threatening, it's like dying, dying a little. And we don't want to admit death. We don't want to accept death. We don't want to acknowledge that we're going to die. We're never going to die. This is a narcissistic, psychopathic civilization. If you want one surefire sign of a narcissistic, a psychopathic narcissist, it's the way he relates to boredom and to action and the way he implements these four defenses, including foremost fantasy and entertainment or distraction. And we confuse these dysfunctional defenses with meaning. These defenses make life meaningful. You know, you act, so you create meaning. Your action is the meaning. But you see, these defenses are counterproductive, self-defeating and dysfunctional because the more you deploy them, the more you use these defenses, the more bored you become. These defenses actually generate boredom. Why they generate boredom? Because they force you to be exposed to even more information. If you entertain yourself by watching movies and reading books, you're exposed to much more information than had you not done this. If you engage in fantasy, the information is internalized, but it's still a vast amount of information. So these defenses push you to be exposed actually to more information, irrelevant information, true, addictive information, true, but still information. So these defenses actually generate boredom and they do not generate meaning. They do not generate meaning because meaning is an external thing. And if you rely on other people for meaning, you have to ask yourself, where did they get their sense of meaning? They are telling me that what I'm doing is meaningful, but how do they know? How do they know what's meaningful? Ah, someone told them. And who told that person who told them? And there's no end to this. Where did meaning begin? So the defenses of Western culture and civilization against boredom, they are not meaningful. They are not meaningful because they are derivative, imitative, dependent on other people. And other people can never be a source of meaning, ever. Because if you rely on other people for meaning, you're equal to them as a source of meaning. Why would you rely on them? And the second question is, where did they get their allegedly privileged knowledge? How do they know what's meaningful? Meaning can never come from other people. It can come from the outside, but never from other people. And Western civilization's solution to boredom is critically dependent on other people. Even fantasy incorporates other people in it. Of course, civilization, culture, these are pro-social experiments, pro-social models of organization. So, if so fact or by definition, they will include other people. When these defenses fail, we are again bored. When they succeed, when they work well, we are bored. When they fail, we are bored. These defenses have nothing to do with boredom. They are nothing defenses. They are wrong. They are dysfunctional. To the maximum, they don't generate meaning, and they don't alleviate boredom. And boredom is where you want to be, because boredom is a healthy state. Because boredom generates action. Boredom even generates fantasy, if that's your thing. If you're an author of fiction or whatever. Boredom drives you, drives you to action, drives you to a rich inner life. Brings enlightenment, especially if you don't try to fight it. If you leave it untouched, inert, if you let it do its thing, if you don't get scared, if you don't panic, if you don't try to fill the gap in the void. We are so terrified of empty things, emptiness, gaps, voids, we pathologize them. And so we should seek boredom. We should aspire to it. As a crucial step to enlightenment. And those of you who want to watch yesterday's video, it has a lot more in terms of philosophy. Okay, I regret to inform you that I'm happy. I'm depressed that I have to inform you that I regret to inform you that I'm happy. And I'm depressed and happy at the same time. And I regret that I'm bored with my depression and happiness. And so I regret that I, what the hell am I talking about? Bye-bye.