Q&A: Techniques for dealing with lack of motivation, malaise, depression

[@user-tt4dy1ti5v]

00:03 Did you experience imposter syndrome early in your career? 00:30 How to regularly practice these techniques? 01:15 Do you use language to describe these sensations? 02:15 Is there more to consider regarding thoughts & intelligence? 04:42 If I'm not my thoughts, what am I then? 04:53 "... look at the room ... have a relaxed attention ... don't think anything ... and do that for as long as possible ... and if you fail ... try again ..." 06:10 "... If I am my thoughts, then where did the thought about the box come from?" 06:42 "So obviously, there's a big part of me that is prior to thought." 06:50 "And if you have difficulty stopping your thought or not thinking something, you can try stopping a sentence in the middle." 07:38 "If you're your thoughts, then how are you seeing your thoughts?" 08:33 Has finding artistic success brought you any peace? 10:52 Have you ever been to meditation retreats? 10:56 Should one address the cause of physical discomfort or ignore it? 13:03 How to thrive in a world with so much dire news and geopolitical conflict? 17:20 (off-topic question) 17:34 How to go back from a neutral state to an emotional state? 18:00 What kinds of retreats were you at, and how did they influence your thinking? 19:03 (Interesting that you did not mention meditation in your talk.) 19:42 Are games as a medium better able to explore this interior/exterior relationship...? 20:06 (Thank you - I've been in a funk recently and this definitely helps.) 20:43 What are your experiences with Zen and mindfulness meditation generally? 22:35 Which of the 3 negative sources do you think is most prominent when working on a long project? 23:56 When did you start using these techniques, and quickly did they affect your work and motivation? 25:16 Can gaming be a form of meditation? 26:10 (I feel like I've neutralized my emotions and sensations a bit too much in my life - I've been described as "cold"...) 26:25 "... feel the (negative) feelings ..." 28:55 Would you call the observation of thoughts and perception of feelings meditation? 29:35 How have these techniques affected your relationship with positive experience and emotions? 31:15 Do you agree that mind-altering substances can put you in a mindset to the one achieved using these techniques? 32:55 What makes you unhappy the most, and how do you fight it? 33:55 "Being self-aware of what is going on with you is tremendously useful." 35:20 Is this approach about making negative interpretations of reality neutral? 35:28 Have you ever tried to consciously make positive events happen to mitigate the negative and add positivity? 37:25 How do you judge if you're actually tired or avoiding the task at hand? 38:07 "... If I feel this mildly depressive kind of tiredness ... a nap helps." 38:32 Do you get lonely since you don't work in your company's office most of the time? 39:00 Have you ever studied any of the pragmatic esoteric occult teachings? 39:40 Are you familiar with stoicism at all? 39:45 Do you think there is value in viewing all things as neutral, even the positive? 40:20 Have you experienced being chronically mentally tired? 41:05 Are these techniques enough to get motivated? 42:35 Have you every tried applying these techniques directly competitive gaming? 43:20 Do you believe in God? 44:40 What do you do if you feel like you're wasting your potential and fearing your whole life will pass without producing something of value? 46:38 (I think there's a difference between tiredness with a spinning brain which is depression and tiredness with a cloudy brain which is exhaustion.) 47:05 How much does the success of your games lets you feel content? 47:20 How do you observe non-verbal thoughts? Is awareness of your body a thought? 49:05 "Awareness of my body, I'm not categorizing that as a thought." 49:40 (off topic question about standing vs. sitting desks) 49:50 Is it a big problem that people don't see things as they are, but see things _about_ the things? 50:35 What's to stop you from using a kind of mindfulness inappropriately in situations where immediate actions are required? 51:28 "Proper use of mindfulness techniques are about knowing the truth. They're not about feeling good." 52:15 [Jon adjusts blurry webcam] 53:13 Do you trust in anti-depressant drugs? 53:30 Do you tailor your present actions based on how you might feel in the future? 53:55 "If we want to live pragmatically in the real world, consideration of the future is one of the things that we do." 55:10 Have you ever gotten so detached that getting back to "normal" is jarring? 56:10 Can you circle back to the first question about imposter syndrome? 58:48 How does one handle accusations of pretentiousness?

[@vama89]

"serenity of actively performing something good right now in this second...whether other people acknowledge how good it is or not" 10:25 Those words hit home. Wise thoughts. Thanks.

[@LeEnnyFace]

replayed that bit many times.

[@roberthickman4092]

can you do another talk on things related to this?

[@plightn]

I like the point of clearing your mind for a few seconds, you don't stop existing. A dissonance from 'I think therefore I am.' Because if you stop thinking even for a moment you're still there, still yourself, which proves that you are not your thoughts. Which in return gives distance from your thoughts. I like the video game question someone asked, because we have all played third person games like GTA, if you can imagine yourself outside your body and a chat bubble above your head with your thoughts as text it can help one see that those thoughts are just the inner monologue, only a part of your world.

[@eduantech]

"If I'm not my thoughts, what am I then?" You are you. An awareness of awareness unit. Simple as. Others call that a spiritual being.

[@Soda_Le_Moon]

You speak in a very lucid way. Your point of views about this material would be incredible important and useful for people that look answers in the meditation field. Mine approach is very similar to yours after 4 years of trying different stuff, but I'm stunned by your clear articulation. It's not easy translate in words. The eastern traditions have a terrible vocabulary for our western mind. Thanks a lot.

[@trungkiennguyen7655]

More than verbal articulation, he provided us with a mental model, a tool, that helps us remember and facilitates guiding ourselves on how to do this practice. Very incredible speech.

[@Optimus6128]

Great videos. I am currently trying to tackle this eternal problem, of wanting to motivate myself working on hobby programming projects, yet always procrastinating. It's when you decide to sit down and start working but you feel just like you don't want to. I use to call this feeling, the dreads. And if you observe it, it does manifest to some bodily feelings too. It's those feelings, that habituality make you more eager to try to avoid themselves, thus clicking somewhere to something on the internet, some youtube, a fast game of something, etc, away from the real work. So, the severity of the work you want to do, the feeling/fear of self fulfilling prophecy of procrastinating once again, makes the attempt to work feeling dreadful, as much as to avoid work itself, then feeling bad while you are doing everything else rather than work. So, the idea of observing what you feel as to normalise it, is very relevant to that psychological block, I might have actually managed sometimes to do that but didn't thought how helpful it is as to make it a habit. The dreadful feeling might even evaporate after a while and then creative flow might come, which I also observe can be lost again if you get distracted by something else, then feeling again dreadful at a second attempt, so I have these short burst of motivation between pausing clicking on things, but I think I can get better, especially these videos gave me more insight.

[@michaelemouse1]

So, to summarize, a lot of what holds us back and makes our experience worse is our brain taking negative sensations/emotions/cognitions and amplifying them beyond reason in a self-reinforcing loop? By observing dispassionately, we disrupt that self-reinforcing loop and see that most of the time, the fire we feel is just a spark we fanned into a storm? The closer we look at the raw material that starts out the loop, the less real it feels which undermines it? Am I getting it about right? I liked this talk. It fits in well with what scientists have been discovering these last few years. Psychiatrists Judson Brewer and Roland Griffith have gotten interesting results using fMRI and EEG to study the meditating brain. What neurologists call the "default mode network" in our brain has a lot of overlap with what Buddhists call the monkey mind.

[@mfalk6263]

I think part of his point is that sensations (at least physical ones) are not inherently positive or negative. "They are just there". Which is something you realise when you start focusing deeply on them. If you apply this same kind of focus to your emotions or your emotional reactions to things you will notice that these emotions just dissapear. So instead of getting hung up on an emotion or getting trapped by an interpretation construct that comes along with a certain sensation, you can snap out of it by taking a moment and apply serious focus on the emotion/sensation. That is how I understand him at least.

[@halflucan]

Been on a Sam Harris binge recently and this was pretty good timing. I remember the talk where you mentioned motivation and depression and im glad you focused a big chunk of time explaining it (it sounds like you also cover his argument about the absence free will also)

[@CaptainWumbo]

I believe "You are not your internal monologue" might be easier to understand for people than "you are not your thoughts." Thought is a little harder to define rigidly.

[@jblow888]

But I don't feel that western people have a big problem confusing themselves with their internal monologues. That seems a little too specific to me.

[@CaptainWumbo]

Jonathan Blow I thought so too after I wrote that. It seems like you're getting at a collection of processes of which internal monologue is just one. That was apparent when you said something can be bothering you even if you're not thinking words about it. You're getting at a category of experience there isn't an easy word for. Sensations vs interpretations of sensations, facts of life vs response to facts of life. It's hard to pin down where that line is drawn. I can't pretend to know precisely where you intuit it to be, but I have a general feeling what you're talking about, so maybe "thoughts" is as accurate as it needs to be.

[@dantess2693]

This reminds me of Eckhart Tolle's teachings (if you haven't read The Power of Now go grab a copy), but the internal monologue is called "the ego" that accumulates and builds negative baggage over the years.

[@someguy6075]

Another possible perspective that might help people understand is multi-agent theory. This ties back to Jonathan's discussion of thoughts arising spontaneously. Whatever subconscious mechanism generated a thought before it entered conscious awareness, it is internal and therefore a part of you. But it may be a small part among many, and it does not define you. It is hard to define _you_, in a Western sense, but a closer approximation might be how these inputs to consciousness get processed, synthesized, or promoted in the conscious mind.

[@poika22]

Glad to hear those thoughts on "impostor syndrome". I've always been offput by the term. Comes off as yet another way people in the modern West are told not to work on their themselves. If you're bad at something, that's "just the way you are". It's not a skill you lack, it's "a personality quirk". You don't have much to learn in your field, you're just "suffering from impostor syndrome". And that's ok because you're perfect the way you are!

[@darko_ef]

A few days ago I was just thinking about similar topic to what you were somewhat touching here. I figured how I would get a thought, and it would be a fully formed thought with it's meaning and it would take me only half a second to understand it. But then I spend next 10 seconds converting it to sentence (repeating it verbally in my mind). So I tried stooping myself from converting the thoughts into sentences and it feels like I can think way faster without needlessly repeating myself. But it get's tiring very fast. I'ts interesting to think about how much our thinking is affected by our language. It's almost like in that movie Arrival, if we had drastically different language structure our thinking might be completely different. Anyway, very interesting video. Would love to see more stuff like this from you!

[@Soda_Le_Moon]

It would be amazing another discussion about this topic.

[@arpanagarwal2524]

Vipassana is quite like this, especially Shinzen Young's version of it where all subjective experience is broken down into: Feel(emotional type body), Image(mental), Talk(mental).

[@TennessseTimmy]

Nice, I love thinking and observing things about the conscious and subconscious mind

[@nephew_tom]

I consider this talk is simply excellent. Jon dissects very well the parts and steps that can be followed. Just like a good engineering teacher. I would like to add a personal anecdote I had regarding thoughts. I am from Spain and like a lot a band named Chambao. There is a song in one of their albums that is called "Ulere". Some years ago, I remember I listened to it many times, probably driving. But didn't pay much attention to its lyrics. Don't know exactly when, I realized of its meaning. And I felt incredible to realize it. The song at the end says these lines in Spanish: Estoy agradecida de conocer la magia que tiene el saber saber que no solo soy la que piensa elijo ser la que observa a la que piensa That could be translated to something like: I am grateful to know The magic that is to know To know that I am not only the one that thinks I choose to be the one that observes to the one that thinks (Note: I translated two Spanish verbs, "conocer & saber" to just one in English, "to know") Chambao has another song that is called: "Camino interior". That could be translated to something like "Inner path". The lyrics are also very enlighten referring to our own pernicious thoughts. Just my 2 cents. PS: If anyone is interested in the songs. They can be found here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/baSokoKGr5t5rrM kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGKli6uffayGnsk

[@nosferadu]

8:00 so would you say you're like a Witness to your thoughts? ^^

[@Zsy6]

Thank you for your earnest and thoughtful presentation. I wish I had come across it sooner!

[@jamesevans2507]

03:09 you mean not everyone is like that? I learned something about myself today.

[@thunderpeel2001]

There's nothing wrong with using language to describe what you feel. It's calling "noting" and is a very powerful form of meditation. The main thing is to not make stories from the sensations.

[@navirobayo]

So cool. Very interesting person you are. Thanks.

[@MenkoDany]

Sugar (amplified by fiber-less processed sugary stuff) slows down thinking, I believe this applies to all mammals

[@daniellobo6079]

Thank you for the very interesting video. There's an interview of you by Brian Moriarty (watch?v=tRHnHlV96Jg) in which you mention that you don't have a "visual" imagination, and were at first surprised that people can usually picture things in their minds. I remembered that interview when you closed your eyes and talked about feeling the contact of your body with things around you, like the chair you are sitting in, checking if the feeling is concrete or somewhat abstract. I thought it difficult to separate the feeling from reality when I had my hand touching my desk (i.e. I didn't feel it like a particularly abstract thing) and I wonder if that is simply from lack of practice or if it also comes more easily to you because of your different way of imagining things. Same for the "illusion-breaking" you experience when you open your eyes after that. Do you have any thoughts about this? Naturally you and I are different, but clearly these methods work for you, so I am curious if you know more about the effect of your imagination on self-awareness.

[@jblow888]

You say "separate the feeling from reality", which may be part of the problem. The feeling is reality. You're not trying to separate anything from anything else. You want to just put your attention on what you are really feeling, rather than the interpretation of reality that your mind is giving you. I would guess that you may be thinking about what you are feeling, and comparing that to some idea of what you 'should' be feeling, rather than just feeling the thing without interpretation. Thinking a lot about what how to do the exercise is a way of dodging the exercise. It's actually very simple. I don't think this has anything to do with the way my imagination behaves; these techniques work well for people with very visual imaginations too.

[@daniellobo6079]

I see, I was misinterpreting you a bit there! Thank you for replying. I'm still curious of what other people like you imagine differently and how it could affect this, though. Maybe we'll never know if there's a significant difference. :)

[@javidzcool]

What he is saying is basically the viewpoint of non-duality, which I also follow as well. Non-duality is not a religion but a way of seeing things, a realization that there is no "me" and "other" but that everything is an expression of infinite consciousness. You can read more about this, and I highly recommend starting with Gangaji's "The Diamond in your Pocket", which is basically non-duality for beginners, and then moving on to the more heavy hitting Rupert Spira's "The Transparency of Things" and his 2 volume Presence series of books.

[@Hir0-Protagonist]

O.

[@Hir0-Protagonist]

Oo.

[@DB-pt6zj]

What if you do have control over your conscious mind, but your awareness of the control is just on a delay? Such that you actively DO CHOOSE to think the thing, but the "awareness" part of your "choice mechanism" is just delayed? To take it back to games - there is some finite amount of time, however short, that a CPU takes to actually process a calculation and push it through the various memory locations and gates, until it outputs it to some output device. If we only ever see the output on the output device, we certainly wouldn't make the argument that the CPU didn't do the calculation. I like to think of the inputs to that CPU are analogies to our sense, the CPU is our "consciousness" that we DO have control of, and the outputs are an analogy to our experience of our consciousness. We display our consciousness through awareness of it. Perhaps it is the CPU with inputs pointed towards its outputs. The delay in that input/output loop is what we confuse as the concept of "where did our thoughts come from?" We only ever experience the world through our inputs (senses), so there naturally has to be some delay.

[@astewartau]

Jonathan, when you spoke about imposter syndrome, I think you missed one of the main ideas about it in that it generally affects successful people. For example - a student who receives awards or scholarships based on a very high academic record. They are possibly highly meticulous and spend large amount of time perfecting their work, but delude themselves by thinking they are 'covering up' their incompetence through their meticulousness, and are afraid of being 'found out as an imposter'. Of course, in actual fact they are highly competent.

[@jblow888]

Most of the people on the internet who say they have "imposter syndrome" are not at the top of their field / class / situation, they are regular people in the middle doing whatever they randomly end up doing. Of course they feel like they aren't good at what they do, because most people aren't good at what they do most of the time, especially if they haven't been doing it for very long.

[@astewartau]

Thanks for clarifying - that makes sense. I enjoy your talks!

[@digitalspecter]

Yeah, I don't feel so much that I'm not doing good job or wonder why I'm failing. I'm usually succeeding at what I do and getting praise but inside I feel like I'm just lucky and solve things by accident etc. and I fear that one day the luck will run out and people will realize I've been "faking" it... well the luck hasn't run out in 25 years I've been a programmer but that feeling still remains. I think that this is due to some kind of disconnect inside me.. I'm quite creative but that creativeness doesn't happen on a conscious level.. the ideas and solutions just rise from somewhere and I can't control that really. Like Jon said, I don't manufacture my thoughts they just appear. Therefore it feels like I am not in control and I'm just lucky that I happen to have the "right thoughts" and therefore cannot accept praise for them or take credit myself.

[@PieceOfDuke]

The methods you provide here are the basis of Vipassana, actually. Vipassana is a systematic approach to practicing these in a very intensive way.

[@SaintPepsiSanCoca]

Are you drinking apple cider vinegar

[@fernandapanda]

and what about anxiety? when you feel you want to do a lot of things but suddenly you want to do everything at the same time and in the end you are just paralyzed

[@QW3RTYUU]

I think you pretty much answered it yourself there. If you end up doing everything at once, and you know by experience that it is not useful or does not help you attain your goal of doing a lot of things...

[@viledeg2569]

From my experience anxiety does manifest into body feeling and then these feelings are getting you more and more stressed out. I feel it almost every 10 minutes even now while writing this. Anxious brain is just working super fast but all that work is useless or even destructive. Observing your feeling helps to at least slow down a bit and to dampen that cycle of stress self-amplification

[@dmitrykolesnikovich]

Could you please make some short talk on what sport do you do and what are mistakes one should avoid on this way. (i'm from russia, sorry for accent)

[@PieceOfDuke]

Very interested in what you have to say about meditation.

[@JP-gs3jw]

Your "You're not your thoughts" technique really reminds me of 1984's doublethink lol. It's quite interesting. George Orwell, I fell, states that your technique not only applies to this depression or emotional area, but also to marketing, propaganda and politics. So yeah, I find that quite interesting. We can apply your technique to many other fields.

[@hasen_judi]

Completely offtopic but interesting take at 43:50 I basically feel the same way.

[@c0xb0x]

I wonder if that Canadian psychology .. something that someone asked about off-topically at was Jordan Peterson at 56:00. He talks about the dangers of nihilism and the search for meaning and so on mentioned at 1:00:00.

[@arcarajoportorta]

I'd say it was. I think Jon likes Sam Harris, don't know if it's because of Harris' meditation stuff or the other stuff (or both), and maybe the person who asked the question thought that anyone familiar with Harris' work has probably heard of JP (I'd make the same assumption)

[@pitpank]

Well actually I came to know Jordan B Peterson through Jonathan himself, when he shared one of his videos on Twitter back in February (an interview with composer Samuel Andreyev), and I've been a fan of JBP since then. Jonathan follows him on Twitter, so it's likely he's familiar with him to some degree.

[@raymeester7883]

You also have to look at Dr. Norman Diodge. He wrote a lot about observing sensations and thoughts as well.

[@ar_xiv]

if somebody was about to ask about jordan peterson I swear to god

[@hayabusa1x]

Very helpful.

[@numgun]

If you think what Jonathan is saying is hard to parse, try this instead: kzbin.info/www/bejne/i3bUno1oepaibJY If you like that, then continue with this: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hWXXhomnqM-EaKs

[@alexanderpritchard7868]

How is this related?

[@numgun]

The understanding yourself part, along with all the three things in the title. It takes a bit getting into to see the connection, but trust me its worth it.

[@WikiPeoples]

m8 im 2 minutes into your first link and the guitar is already out... it seems like a cult

[@zgmg9263]

Yay, Jonathan Blow!

[@eraspja]

Have you taken Care of the Box on the counter by now?😋

[@sudd3660]

you only lack motivation when you do not have anything important to do, 95% of any hjobby or job is at best nonsense but most often destructive and harmful. do not get motivated to do those.

[@annikamaier2581]

The cute plant quickly wink because citizenship preauricularly remove in a faint fair head. rightful, overrated development

[@error17_]

I think a lot of what you have found to believe, which is seeking reality and truth (and perhaps humanity), is also inline with Orthodox Christianity. I said this because you believe in some kind of creator, but you also had the biased and false view of "Christianity". Hope that helps

[@alexanderpritchard7868]

Okay, but doesn't that apply to basically every religion? This is a fine example of "projecting" instead of "helping".

[@jblow888]

I was raised Christian (first Catholic, then various flavors of protestant) so I know what it is like as commonly practiced in the USA. I also have done a fair bit of reading of the Christian scholars of the past such as Aquinas, Cusa, Origen, and Pseudo D. So I am not speaking from ignorance here. You on the other hand are maybe presuming too much.

[@error17_]

Thats good to hear. Sorry about the presumption. Any flavour is a schism, hence why I recommended Orthodox

[@jblow888]

I didn't even mention Christianity specifically. I mentioned Abrahamic religion which is a much wider umbrella in the first place.

[@LKRaider]

In my experience, religions do propose to explore a truth, where this truth is defined as the teachings of a tradition, leaving little room to exploration.