In this podcast episode, John explains how a noble emotion like obligation has come to wreak so much havoc in our behavior. To understand this, he explores the evolution of human societies, the evolutionary context of obligation, and the role of authority.
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In this podcast episode, John explains how a noble emotion like obligation has come to wreak so much havoc in our behavior. To understand this, he explores the evolution of human societies, the evolutionary context of obligation, and the role of authority.
Topics include:
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome to the second or third recording of this week's podcast. I'm going to try to do one take here, because I recorded for an hour and a half yesterday and then lost the audio. I had the video of me talking into the microphone, but no sound. So for those of you in the audience who can't read lips, that probably would have been a minor inconvenience. I consider just not posting an episode this week, but I was like, come on man, sit down at the microphone, just talk for half an hour. It's better to do something than nothing, right? I don't really know what I'm going to talk about. I can briefly summarize what the what what yesterday's episode was, and that has to do with some of the cognitive reasons why we suffer from a lack of motivation, why ultimately we don't lack motivation for any of the things we want to do. And wanting to do something contains motivation to do it. What happens is that something gets suppressed. And so we go looking in the external for the thing that we're holding back.
Speaker 1 (00:01:00) - Basically, it's like looking downstream for all the water that the dam is holding back. The main emotional reasons, the emotions that we get resistant to and that keep us from enjoying our own motivation to do the things we want to do. Shame, fear of failure and shoulds or obligations. And I just taught this week in the Weight Loss Freedom Academy about how obligation is really a beautiful emotion, and it's the only emotion that would really cause you to sacrifice your survival for the survival of someone else. And it's that feelings of obligation are what caused us to sacrifice for the benefit of other people, because we feel that it's right or it's good. And evolutionarily, this made sense when for tens of thousands of years, our survival was dependent, well, maybe even hundreds of thousands if you think about pre-human species. Before anatomically modern sapiens. So 1 to 200,000 years ago and before we were social animals, we weren't lone wolves. We traveled in packs, basically. And that's because life was extremely hard and you needed people to have your back.
Speaker 1 (00:02:14) - Communities could survive things that individuals could not. So obligation really, in that sense, is where our hardwiring in our DNA prepares us to potentially do the unthinkable, to sacrifice our own life when every emotion is there to maintain survival and reproduction. But if they come into conflict, your brain will pick survival. And yet, when it comes to threats to the community as a whole, your brain will go, okay, we're going to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good. And yes, for this individual genetic line, that's the end of the road. But that's a small price to pay to keep the species going. So there are things in our DNA that are trying to keep our species alive, not just ourselves. So community is in your DNA. Individuality is in your DNA as well, because we are discrete, individual creatures. But community is definitely in your DNA. So this idea that we can't work in groups is patently ridiculous. The problem is that we evolved to work in groups no larger than, you know, a few hundred people max, generally speaking, groups of 30 to 120 people.
Speaker 1 (00:03:24) - That's where we thrive. That's where we function the best. And when you're in a survival situation and you're trying to survive with other people, the assistance of other people, equality is really important. You can't have one person taking while everyone else is giving, because that's fundamentally unbalanced, and it's going to be a threat to the the health of the group. So obligation, it's not just, hey, I will jump in front of a spear to protect somebody else on the on my tribe. It's I will give up some of the food that I brought back to the camp, even though I got the food, and I'm going to share it with someone else who didn't get the food, because tomorrow the shoe could be on the other foot. And this person plays a role in our community. Maybe they're not the main food acquirer. Maybe they're not the person out there who's actively bringing home game or bringing home berries and tubers, but maybe they have a different function in the group that's just as important in the long run.
Speaker 1 (00:04:16) - So obligation allows us to exchange value for value. So the question I'm answering here is how could something that's so incredibly motivating, one of the most motivating emotions, how can it actually hamper our motivation in our modern context? Well, it has to do with the changes in social complexity that have occurred since those old days when we were running around in bands or clans of 100, 100. And some people, as society grew more complex, as the world became more populated, as people were forced to, in some cases people were forced to live in greater population density, which still would be laughably not dense in today's standards. But at that time, when you're a hunter gatherer, you need quite a bit of space to feed your family, let alone your extended family and clan. It takes quite a large area. So as people started to put more pressure on the places where people wanted to be, where there was game and where there was water sources and potentially plants to eat, there's more and more pressure to protect your resources and potentially the people who you live with from attack or intrusion, because other people are operating for the sake of survival as well.
Speaker 1 (00:05:29) - They might. They're pressured. If you're pressured, they're pressured, right. And they're going to come and try to take your stuff. It's because they don't have a better option. So there's a rise in conflict. As conflict gets to be more common, people band together in larger and larger groups because bigger group, bigger army, the bigger forces you can hold off. So it started to make sense to make society a bit more complex. This is where we start to join clans and bands into tribes, larger units that are political units. However, in a tribe we often use the term you know, a tribe has a chief, but in the anthropological definition, tribes have chiefs, but those chiefs are equal to everybody else. They have a role, they have a job, but their job does not involve taking more from the community than anybody else. And it does not usually confer hereditary status, meaning the son of the chief doesn't become the next chief. The person who's most qualified to be the next chief becomes the next chief.
Speaker 1 (00:06:33) - And so it's merit based. It's largely egalitarian. And this was still a leadership role. It was respected. There was authority, but the key difference was that authority did not receive more resources than anybody else. As tribes grew and the social complexity grew, the need for a stronger, stronger. Leaders have to emerge because you're dealing with more complex situations you're dealing with. If you're getting five different tribe leaders to work together, you're dealing with the most powerful, resourceful people in their communities, and you have to somehow manage them. So the requirements of leadership rise. And where we move from tribe into chiefdom is where the center of power grows so strong that. It. Chooses to take more than other people because it can. And in some cases, you could argue that it needs to because it takes resources to run that sort of organization, something that big, which if we're talking about a chiefdom, we're talking about most likely thousands of people at minimum. And all this time obligation is spreading. The line of obligation grows at each time our society becomes more complex.
Speaker 1 (00:07:51) - Obviously, this would happen over many generations. It was it's a slow progression, and that's partially why we don't see what's happening. It's called creeping normalcy. Why you can't see changes every day as you look in the mirror, because the changes are so minute, day to day, you don't can't really notice them. However, if you hold up a picture of yourself from ten years ago, you might notice a huge difference. Same goes for looking at let's say we're talking about one people group. We're talking about the um, I'm just going to find a the battery people. I just found an object on my desk. So the battery people batteries weren't invented yet, so it must probably mean something else. Maybe that's their name for a bird or something. So the battery people, they start out basically, let's say there's 5000 of them and they live in the plains of what is now Ukraine. Well, 20,000 years ago they were working in clans, and those clans would meet up certain times of year.
Speaker 1 (00:08:43) - They'd party. They would exchange, potentially exchange marriages, exchange resources. We know that people were having these meetups. People were in some cases, travelers were crossing mountain ranges and traveling incredible distances, trading goods. People in the ancient world were a lot more mobile than people thought for a long time. That started to change at with social complexity, because there were more reasons to go to further flung places. When you live in a clan, there's not a big reason to go on a trip to see another clan that's maybe 100 miles away. Other than these usually annual meetup rendezvous to to trade and create social bonds and things like that. So you're not going to send a member of your clan out to just kind of wander the countryside because because the resources that run your life are food, water, shelter. You don't need trade goods. When you make everything that you use you, you make your tools out of stone and wood and bone and hide. You're completely self-sufficient as we move out of the Stone age and we move into the Bronze Age, all of a sudden, people need resources that that might not be where they are, right? You need copper and tin to make bronze.
Speaker 1 (00:09:56) - Not everybody has a copper source nearby. So trade starts to grow. Trade was happening potentially at every point in history, but we would see a major spike if we were looking at things on the whole and we're watching a graph of global trade, we would see this is the part where we would see a tiny little diversion from the baseline from zero. But in places where there's more population pressure, people have to organize differently and eventually we start forming tribes. Why would somebody form a tribe? Why would we join four clans together and have and choose one person to really run the show? Well, it has to do with pooling risk. The same reason that you pay money for insurance of various types is the same reason that somebody would want to be in a slightly larger group, because for a long time, yeah, about 120 people was pretty perfect because that allowed a lot of that's that's a fairly large community of people. That's many families. You're going to have people of varying ages when you have 120 different variables at work, a lot of bases are covered and they're going to be covered.
Speaker 1 (00:10:59) - Even if people get sick and die, if there's a hunting accident and, you know, a couple people get trampled, things can carry on. People can make it until the young ones are old enough to start contributing. But if population pressure increases and like I said, there's an incursion from the outside or you're just dealing with climate changes and all of a sudden resources are harder to come by, you might pool more of your risk, right? You might say, okay, listen, we're going to join forces with four other clans, and we're going to basically make a tribe of about 6 or 700 people, and we're going to strengthen this tribe identity, because if there's a famine or there's a volcanic explosion somewhere in the world, and the next couple winters are especially bad, in the summers are colder solar flares, volcanism, and just the normal changes that that the Earth goes through over time. You hit a rough patch and yeah, out of 100 clans you might see five out of 100 not show up the next spring.
Speaker 1 (00:12:01) - They're not at the rendezvous the next summer. Why? They starved to death. They got really weak, and then they got sick and boom, that was it. And that's a lot. 5% of the population is a lot, especially when you're struggling, when half of children don't make it to five years old. So you have to have if you want to replenish your tribe. Right. So if you have 120 people in a clan and let's say the the average lifespan was 35, which might be generous, then we're going to have turnover every 35 years. I'm not going to make it 30 years just to have a round number. So this makes sense. Let's say the average lifespan in your tribe, in your clan is 30 years. That means we're going to have a complete turnover every 30 years, which means 120 people are going to die every 30 years, which means per year four people are going to die. So you have to have eight babies every year just to keep the the clan healthy, to keep the numbers up.
Speaker 1 (00:12:57) - That means eight women have to successfully carry a pregnancy to term, which means more than eight women need to be pregnant. We only have 120 people, right? So how many women in the clan are of childbearing age? Let's say half the clan are women 60. So it's probably gonna look like a pyramid with at the very top. If we slice the pyramid sideways, laterally, going from the top down downward, where we're making like levels at the very top, at the tippy top, you'd have people who are over 40, so it wouldn't be very many people. And then as you went down in age, you'd see the numbers grow. So of the 60 women in the clan, easily, there could be 30 who are not old enough to have children yet, because the everything is so skewed as far as the age differential. So we have fewer than 30 women who are of age to carry a child, and not all of them are going to get pregnant every year. People struggle today to get pregnant, and we have doctors who specialize in helping people do that.
Speaker 1 (00:13:55) - People have always had reproductive issues. Some percentage of those 30 who were of age, there's probably going to be 3 or 4 who really struggle to get pregnant, so they're not going to get pregnant. This year. We're down to 26 people. We are we're living in hard times. We're doing labor all day, right? Everybody's working their asses off. We're burning a lot of calories, and sometimes things are things don't go so well. Some months we're not as fertile because sometimes we're not having our cycle. When stressors get too high, women do not get pregnant. Why? Because if things are that stressful, it's not a good time to bring a child into the situation. So yeah, if there's a lack of food or a lack of proper nutrition, if there's food but not the right kinds of food, we're not going to have babies. If people get sick, they're not going to have babies, right? So of of the 26 people who could potentially get pregnant, practically speaking, there's no way we're going to get 20 pregnancies.
Speaker 1 (00:14:56) - So let's say we do really well. And about half of the women are able to conceive. We're down to 13. Right. And so we need to get eight of those 13 pregnancies to term. And miscarriage was more common then than than it is now because the chances of injury, exposure, infection were just a lot more things that could take out a pregnancy. So of those 13, you're lucky to see eight come to term. Let's say we see ten, we get really lucky. We have ten. Well, when it comes time to give birth, there are complications to that as well. Those ten pregnant women, how many of the pregnancies deliver a living child? Okay, let's say it's ten. Say we perfect ten out of ten. How many of the women are still there? After those ten deliveries, the chances of death and childbirth were much higher than it is today. It wasn't an uncommon thing to encounter. Of the four people who died in your community every year. I have no data to back this up, but it wouldn't be uncommon for one of those to be a mother who had died in childbirth or due to complications to childbirth or pregnancy.
Speaker 1 (00:16:07) - So we got ten babies, but we only have nine mothers on the other side of things. So net gain, nine people in five years. That number is going to be 4.5. Let's say it's lucky and we're five because you can't have half of a baby. So you have five people. And and it was incredibly difficult to get five children born. And to five years old. That is pretty much what people are thinking about all the time. Is that how are we going to keep these kids healthy and alive long enough so that we can teach them skills and they can start to contribute and learn enough? Before we pass on that, they're going to have all the collective knowledge of our people and be able to pass it down. Our knowledge of plants, our knowledge of wildlife behavior. These people were they had massive logs of information. They were botanists, they were wildlife biologists. They they would study these things because that's literally all they did. Yeah. So when we talk about the hardscrabble conditions in which we evolved, we we have to point to the incredible human resiliency and the incredible intelligence that was required for those people.
Speaker 1 (00:17:20) - Even though they had very little, they were brilliant in their own way. And if they weren't, none of us would be here. Right? Your ancestors during these times, for dozens and dozens, possibly hundreds of generations, were the smartest people, the people who who were able to look at reality, assess it, take it in, accept it even when it's hard, and make the best decision possible. That's what you're hardwired to do. So we need to learn to trust ourselves. Because ultimately, if we're not going to trust ourselves, what we're saying is I don't trust the generations of unbroken success that created me. It's a little bit ridiculous if we were. Humans are complicated creatures. We're not always good. We don't always do good things. But the idea that we're fundamentally evil or destructive doesn't hold up. We put far more work into creating and preserving life than we do destroying it. And that's true even now, in days where, you know, there's such horrible things in the news, most of us, for all our flaws, are working very hard for our own benefit and the benefit of other people.
Speaker 1 (00:18:24) - And that's a lot of reason why we have our tics and hangups. Right? The reason you eat too much when you get home and you put the kids to bed is because you're incredibly stressed, right? And that's your way of dealing with the stress. And if we took somebody from 20,000 years ago and we transported them to today's situation, they'd probably do the exact same thing. Once they realize that there is an endless supply of food, they're going to go, this is pretty cool. I'm going to eat. You got to remember, prehistoric people were it's just. All of us. Take everyone you know, make them much fitter, a little bit dirtier, quite a bit hairier. But other than that, exactly who we are today. Same personalities, same levels of ability, intelligence, physical ability. Anyways, I'm rambling a bit. I'm tired. But that's the situation that the emotion of obligation evolved in. If you are working that hard to keep this unit of 120 people alive and functioning, it's like a factory where you're churning out people and if you fail, that's it, right? So it's life and death factory work, and you work so hard.
Speaker 1 (00:19:28) - Let's say you're a young male. You have one child and and you're strong and fit and you have leadership capability, and you might be the future leader of that tribe, of that clan. And you're 17 years old. You're an incredibly valuable asset to the clan. And yet when that animal starts stalking people at the edges of camp, you're going to grab your spear or your bow, and you're going to go try to take care of it. And even if you're alone and no one else is there, a hunting party is out. So a lot of the other people who are trained in physical combat trained hunters enough to actually have a stand, a chance against a large predator, maybe they're not there. And so you head out there with with just you and you're fighting a fucking tiger or a bear or a wolf or a bunch of wolves. Yeah. Man's best friend pretty recently for most of human, for most of our time, as anatomically modern sapiens dogs were not our friends. They were one of our worst enemies.
Speaker 1 (00:20:32) - So keep that in mind, people. Keep your dogs on leashes, okay? They've evolved for millions of years to be killing machines. And if you think that your little baby doesn't have the capacity to potentially harm someone else, you're joking. You're joking. This thing has a brain the size of a walnut, and it evolved to do one thing kill. And yeah, it likes you. It protects you, and it sees everyone else as a threat. So when your dog is running up to somebody and you yell, don't worry, he's friendly, it doesn't matter. Have some consideration for other people. Keep your dogs on a leash. I love dogs, everybody loves dogs. But I can't go for a walk without getting, you know, interfered with by a dog every other time. God forbid I try to go for a run. It's just wild. It's just wild. How many people around here let their dogs off leash? So, yeah, you go out there into a very bad situation.
Speaker 1 (00:21:22) - If you were on your own, you would escape. You'd climb a tree, you'd run away, you'd evade. You probably would do everything you could in your power not to have to go mano a mano with a large predator. But here you realize there's a bunch of tasty little babies in that camp, and you don't want the tiger to get them. So you're going to try to kill this thing, and you have to. And quite likely you're going to lose. And quite likely you know that as you're running out into the dark with a spear, ready to fight a £400 animal with razor sharp claws and teeth and little to no protection in the way of clothing or armor? None of that. That's obligation. That's what that emotion does. It causes us to lay down our lives for other people. And when that's the case, sharing some of your fish with other people is not such a crazy thing. Going hungry so that others can eat is not a crazy thing. Eating slightly rotten food so that the kids can have fresh food.
Speaker 1 (00:22:19) - Not a crazy thing. Going without to make sure that the pregnant women have enough to eat. Not a crazy thing. This is what all of life is about. So sacrificing comfort, nutrition, shelter, clean water, physical health for other people is just the norm. Because if we didn't all do that, none of us would be here. There's no question of fairness, of equality. It's built into who we are at this phase of society. But as times grow difficult, we start to pool risk with bigger and bigger communities. There's more pressure from people trying to come in and take our hunting grounds. You know, a lot of people spend summers in a different place than where they spend their winters. They have a summer house in a winter house. And sometimes when you go back to your summer house, somebody, they're living in it. And that's going to be a problem. You have to work it out and learn to share the resources, or you're gonna have to duke it out. So if you have four neighboring clans and you decide to become one unit, obviously you're still going to keep your clan identity.
Speaker 1 (00:23:25) - But if anything goes down, if anybody messes with one clan, they mess with everybody. And that means that if you come back to your summer hunting grounds and somebody's there, you just whistle and call your buddies, and then all of a sudden, instead of five dudes showing up to fight, you have 30. And that's a huge force at this time. That's a problem. And you can fend off just about every single kind of attack you could imagine with a. Like that. Hey, somebody says there's a tiger over in the camp. Over in camp B, all of a sudden you have potentially 30 hunters, skilled killers who have the athletic ability of what we would think of as professional athletes today. You know, my money's on the humans at that point. If it's one on one, it's two on one, three on one. My money is on the tiger. You start putting 4 or 5 of these dudes together. It's bad news for just about any animal, even a terrifying predator.
Speaker 1 (00:24:19) - So social complexity makes sense. And as times get difficult, social complexity usually deepens, right? Because things get harder, we need to pool risk more. So every time a famine comes in, every time the population pressure increases, every time a bit of disease runs through the villages, people start coming together and bigger and bigger groups. And eventually we get a situation where there's a hereditary office held by usually a guy. Absolutely. Where situations where it was a woman. So now we're extending that sense of obligation beyond the tribe to other tribes, and we're going to give authority to a single person. We're going to we're now going to change our orientation completely from egalitarianism to where I'm going to take care of my people, and I'm going to sacrifice for them to now I owe obligation to this leader. And that leader is emblematic of the larger chiefdom. But now we don't have political organization outside of authority. We don't have political organization outside of the will and interest of a single human. That changes everything.
Speaker 1 (00:25:29) - It changes everything. I'm not going to go into every little detail of it. But when the people when power exists in an individual, it functions very differently than when power is vested in a community. All of a sudden resources start to flow through that leader, and that leader starts to exert influence on how the resources are distributed, and they start to see threats to their reign. So they want to make sure that things are distributed evenly enough that everybody eats. Because if people go hungry, they're going to get pissed off. But if they can funnel a little bit extra, just take a little off the top and shovel it over to the leader of tribe C, then tribe C is going to be a little more willing to share the resource they have cornered, and the political power that tribe leader has. So the flow of resources and their use in gaining and maintaining power is basically politics as we think of it today. And it is very old. It is very old. So yeah, for the last 10,000 years, that really ramped up at different points throughout history.
Speaker 1 (00:26:30) - And now as a chiefdom of a few thousand people, you can organize your resource gathering. You're hunting more efficiently, you're gathering resources more efficiently, you're putting even more pressure on the land, and people are eating better because of it. We're having better child rearing, right? We're getting six out of every ten babies to the age of five. And that starts to compound every year where everybody benefits. Everybody is eating more. All of a sudden, people are dying less, living a little longer, and the population grows in a pretty delicate ecosystem. This puts more pressure on the tribe itself to expand, to widen its resource base. And that's going to put it into conflict with other people, which is going to deepen the need for political organization. And this is why we're like, hey, I guess I got to pay taxes. I got to give all my stuff to the leader or a big portion of it so that they can run the show so that we can all be safe. And this just becomes the norm.
Speaker 1 (00:27:28) - For thousands and thousands of years, this has been the norm. And the most important thing is that authority figures use familial community type obligation to convince people to serve their needs. Sometimes those needs really do reflect their best judgment and the needs of the community. Sometimes it just reflects that person's desire to hang on to power at all costs. And as we know, that happens more often than we'd like. Basically, once authority gets involved, it's not a two way street, not the way that it is in a familial situation or, you know, a small band of people where other people survival really kind of does equal your survival. That's not the situation. As our social groups become more complex and larger. And that's not a value statement. It's just it's not good or bad. It just is. Right. It's just the way things are. So notice how businesses will use the language of family to why do they want to do that? Because they want you to think of working there as like you're working for the family.
Speaker 1 (00:28:30) - They want to manipulate your sense of obligation, true obligation, familial obligation for the benefit of the company. Right? So you'll work harder, be more dedicated, sacrifice more, and that eventually that leads to the success of the business. It's not a value statement. I'm not saying that it's, you know, right or wrong, it's. Just is. And when you notice that when you hear when you're working at Walmart and you hear them talk about family and you roll your eyes on the inside, it makes you a bit resentful. It's like, do you really think I'm that stupid? Right? And now all of a sudden, like, you want, you applied for this job, you got the job, you've been coming to work, you've learned how to do the job, and now you viscerally do not want to do the job. Why? Because someone's treating you like a fucking idiot. They're trying to manipulate you. And quite frankly, they can, because they have all the power. So you're mad, you're offended, and ultimately you're powerless.
Speaker 1 (00:29:26) - I can't think of a better recipe for getting somebody to not want to do something. Take anything anybody likes doing and take their take their agency away. Take their ability to execute their best interests, insult them and watch their desire to do that thing. Fade away. If you like going to the gym and somebody says you have to go to the gym, it's the law. All of a sudden that clothes this thing that you liked in obligation in and ultimately unfairness. Right? Because when we get obligations from authorities, those obligations often don't reflect our best interests. And we know it. We're just not allowed to express it or we feel like even knowing that isn't helpful. So let's just repress that knowledge. But I'm telling you that it is helpful because a big part of the reason you're not going to the gym, it has to do with your relationship to authority and the incredible breadth in which authority has spread throughout our our lives and our psychological schema. The way we think about the world, the way we assume things have to be.
Speaker 1 (00:30:26) - Whereas we evolved in a context where there was no authority, there is teamwork and community, and that required balance and that required sharing and that required sacrifice. And it wasn't right or wrong, it's just what was required. And that's the context that our brains developed in. And so we struggle. For the last few thousand years, we've been increasingly living in a world characterized by authority and organized via authority. And we struggle with it. We struggle hard with it. We see authority figures using this incredible power, this imbalance for nefarious deeds. We see people under the thumb of authority, struggling really hard to try to get things. To be fair, having to, you know, often fight and die because things are so unfair. It's unjust, and they're trying to get authority to treat them in a modicum, a tiny little sliver of the way that they're expected to, to treat the authority. And this extends way beyond, you know, how humans organize themselves politically, territorially, it's never been more prevalent, right? The role of authority is is on the rise.
Speaker 1 (00:31:34) - Institutions are crumbling. Our faith in institutions is crumbling, which puts even more emphasis on authority. People are hungrier than ever to find a person that they can trust to guide them. Why? Because we don't trust the school system anymore. We don't trust the university system. We don't trust doctors. We don't trust. I mean, we just don't trust a lot of things. And ultimately, part of my message is that you. I mean, you deserve trustworthy friends and authority figures who can teach you, but you also deserve to trust yourself. And when you have that, you will have something far more valuable than an authority figure. You will have autonomy. And when you have autonomy, you always have motivation to do the things you want to do. It hasn't been complicated by the social complexity and, you know, illegitimate authority. Right? And for you, illegitimate authority might be some influencer that you follow who is telling you, hey, you want to learn how to bake a cake? And you're like, yeah, tell me how to bake a cake.
Speaker 1 (00:32:34) - And they're like, okay, so you pour the batter in the pan and you put the pan in the oven and you take it out after ten minutes and you're like, okay, okay. And so you make a batter to the best of your ability. I'm not even sure what a batter is, but I do it and it doesn't work. I get burned, it tastes like garbage and it's my fault. I screwed up because they told me what to do. I just have to do it. What we're so often seeing with this type of self-help, which is the vast majority of self-help, it's a lot of what happens in our mental health services. It's a lot of what happens in the school system, right? Just giving kids expectations without giving them the tools or the understanding to meet those expectations. This is why a lot of kids hate school. Even though every kid is obsessed with learning every single one, they just might not want to learn about the things that you want them to learn about that day.
Speaker 1 (00:33:26) - So yeah, we're not talking about, you know, the local authorities or the president or the prime minister mostly where this is going to come up in, in your motivation is the way that you feel obligated to do things because of your beliefs about yourself, the nature of the world and the nature of other people, who has the power to judge you and shame you, and who gets to decide whether you're a success or a failure? If any of those things exist outside of you, you're in a rough situation, you're going to suffer. And so what we have to do, the whole point of my coaching is not to help people lose weight. It's not even to help people get motivated or stop emotionally eating. I mean, it is, but it's not right. Those are the how we get to the destination. Most people come to me in. The destination is weight loss. But you know, about a third of people will mention I don't trust myself. And whether we realize it or not, our fundamental reason for doing all the stuff we do or don't do that would make our lives so much better if we did it or didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (00:34:30) - It starts with a lack of self-trust, and from there it's a lack of self-love. And then it just things start to unravel even more from there. So the capper on coaching is helping people see the truth and embrace their autonomy. Autonomy doesn't mean that you exist. You're a hermit alone in the woods. Autonomy actually allows you to move in groups of other people with self-assurance because you know what boundaries are. What is a boundary? A boundary is I'm only going to agree to an obligation. I'm only going to say yes to doing things for you. If this is fair, if anytime you have a boundary issue, it's because somebody is obligating you to do things that they wouldn't do for you. That's it. The reason you're doing Kathy's work for her, you know, at at work, and you're mad about it because Kathy wouldn't do that for you. Oh, it's because I'm so busy. No, it's because you're just going to take advantage of whatever you can take advantage of. If you thought that Kathy could or would put down what she's doing to come bail your ass out when things get hard, you wouldn't resent her and it wouldn't be a boundary issue.
Speaker 1 (00:35:40) - So you got to realize that the resentment of your boundaries is a massively demotivating force for every boundary that you're crossing, for every time where you are doing something that doesn't benefit you, you are not doing something that would benefit you, right? This is where motivation and emotional eating, letting go of compulsion and regaining urinate. Motivation. There are different sides of the same coin. It's ultimately about balance. It's ultimately about autonomy. When you regain, when you unleash your inner motivation, you stop looking for it in the exterior and you take off what's choking it off. In the interior, you will find yourself less needy of other people of their support and encouragement. Why? Because you'll have access to motivation. Motivation is like a shadow to all your desires. If you want something, you have motivation to do it or get it. If you want to avoid something, you have motivation to avoid it. The problem is that we get convinced to do things that are against our best interests. The problem is not that the way is dark and and unlit, because you can see the next step.
Speaker 1 (00:36:48) - You can. We can all do it. We can all see the next step. And it's neon pink. And everything I'm doing in coaching is helping people see, okay, here's the next step. And and have them, you know, walk themselves to it. And it has to be. Their realization and their experience. It's not just me. Like shaking my finger at them, saying, step on the pink thing. No, it's. But we're going to see the next step that would take you directly toward the life you want to live. And then we go, okay, but what's the step you're actually going to take? Okay. What's the difference between those two things in that space, in the space between where you're going to go and where you want to go is a bunch of bullshit. There's a bunch of lies, delusions, and everything is based in some kind of false logic or untruth lie or a misperception. A lot of it's just misperception. And a lot of that gets instilled in childhood, and a lot of our conditioning is simply superfluous.
Speaker 1 (00:37:46) - It's there's more rules in our head than we need. So what ends up happening is that we, uh, we feel confused because we have more than one motivation. We feel confused not because we don't have instructions on how to bake the cake, but we have 16 different sets of instructions. So we're paralyzed with indecision. Because if I have 16 maps, I don't have a map, right? If there's if I have two different maps of the same place and they're telling me different things, I have nothing. I have less than nothing. It would be better to have no maps at all, because I'm going to be absolutely paralyzed. I'm going to be unable to make decisions, and it's going to be very hard to figure out which map is reflective of reality. So a lot of times you're not going to the gym, not because you lack motivation, but because your motivations are multiple and they're contradictory. A lot of your motivations are based in things that you feel resentful about. You feel resentful at people who yell at you and tell you you have to go to the gym.
Speaker 1 (00:38:42) - You feel resentful of the doctor who judges you for your weight and says, like, I don't know what to tell you. There's no medicine that can help you more than exercise. You just got to do it. And that and it pisses you off and you don't know why and you feel self-destructive. Part of the reason we end up turning our anger and frustration onto ourselves is we don't allow ourselves to take the next step, which would allow us to move assertively in a way that would resolve the emotion that we're feeling. By resolve, I don't mean fix. I mean basically help it complete. It's it's route. And one of the places where the normal travel of our emotions gets massively gummed up is it runs into obligation, a sense that some authority has told me how the cake needs to be baked, and yet there isn't clear instruction. So I don't want to go to the gym because I don't want to be seen. I don't want to go to the gym because I'm probably going to fail, and that's going to make me feel even more shame.
Speaker 1 (00:39:38) - And I probably don't want to go to the gym because someone's trying to force me to, and it makes me feel like they think I'm stupid, and it makes me feel like maybe I am stupid. Why do I have to be screamed at and told to do something that I like and that I want to do? Why am I deliberately stomping my foot on the brake when I try to do this? I must hate myself, right? You almost convince yourself that that you hate yourself. It. We start coming up with explanations for why we're not doing the thing we want to do, and none of it is good for us. None of it helps us in any way. It really just makes everything way worse. So if you're not doing something regularly, not doing a thing that you want to be doing, then realize that the motivation is inside you. It's just being blocked off. There's something that's blocking it. We don't need more people to help push the car. We need to remove the log out of the roadway, and then the car can move on its own.
Speaker 1 (00:40:27) - And we run into obligation a lot because we're voracious searchers and consumers of rules. We just want to know the rules. What's the cake recipe? Tell me the steps. I want seven steps, right? If you want to go viral in your content, give it. Give people an odd number of steps. They love it. Three steps, five steps, seven steps. Like people just absolutely gobble that up. Why odd numbers? Not exactly sure. And so many people in the self-help space are selling a delusional recipe. Here's the steps. This. Do this, do this. Meanwhile, what they're actually selling you is step 15, 16, and 17. Here's how in seven steps you're going to get out of debt. Right. And they read you the cake recipe. Except that they read you seven steps. But it's the last seven steps. And there's 14 steps in the recipe. Okay, great. I'm going to get out of debt. I'm going to pay off my high interest loans first I'm going to do this.
Speaker 1 (00:41:24) - Great. But how do I like make money to pay anything off to begin with? But what's how do I do? Step one through seven you gave me eight, eight through 14. That's great, but I'm not at number eight yet. I'm at one and I don't know what to do in my first step. So when we rely on authority, we end up getting incomplete packets of information, incomplete packets of instruction, blind to the fact that this is happening. It's happening right in front of your face, where you're gobbling up information on social media from people who are telling you the last three, five, seven, eight, ten steps of the thing and not telling you what the next step is. And the reason you're gobbling that up is because you want the outcome. So people you're going to listen to people who speak to the outcome that you want. This is why I have to talk about weight loss, because if I talked about, hey, here's the secrets of the universe, I'm going to I'm going to solve every problem in your life.
Speaker 1 (00:42:19) - If you listen to this TikTok, people are going to listen to that because it's like, I want to lose weight. Now, a lot of people don't realize that, listen, you're not going to lose weight and then have everything you want. You need to get your life right and then the weight will lose itself. But I can't tell people that because they will not listen to me. They will swipe. Why we are obsessed with just give me the recipe. And by being so obsessed with the recipe, we just keep cataloging recipes that don't work. So we got to go get another recipe. Well, now I've got contradictory recipes and and I think that's the issue. So which one's right? Which authority is right. And we spend all our time, you know, arguing about which authority's right, which one's wrong, what should I which recipe do you think I should follow? And no matter what you do, you still are going to have no fucking clue how to live your life. Why? Because the step you need is the next step and no one can tell you what that is.
Speaker 1 (00:43:10) - Only you can see what that is. A big part of what makes my coaching different is that's the main focus, teaching people to get into their own lives, to see things for what they are, accept them, and and realize how powerful they are when they accept everything, even the stuff that feels uncomfortable or sucky. It's like, I'm not preferring this. I'm just accepting that it's here whether I want it to be or not. And that actually puts me in a position of power, because now I can move in alignment with reality in ways that benefit me, that align with my self-interest. Somebody's finally working for me. So I'm not against authority per se, but we're so used to to taking advice from authorities that don't give us the full recipe, because they can't. A lot of times they don't try to either, because it's much easier to just give you the last seven steps of the recipe and get you to pay for that. Like, let's say that's the workout plan that you buy from somebody, and then they don't give you the first seven steps.
Speaker 1 (00:44:02) - They don't explain to you how to actually access that state where you could make use of what they sold you. And so when you don't do it or you fail, it's your fault. Right. And there's a giant scam within the fitness industry that does this. They sell you stuff that they know you're not going to be able to use effectively. Because when it fails, you will blame yourself and the world will blame you. In any other industry, if the product failed 99% of the time, the government would swoop in and shut it down. People would be like, stop buying whatever this thing is. Can you imagine if one out of every 1000 cars just pulled itself into a ditch, that they would shut down the factories? And people's lives depend on this just as much as they they rely on safe vehicles. So it's a crime that people can just get out there, spew a bunch of unhelpful bullshit, charge for it, and not give a crap when it doesn't work. So yes, people are responsible for taking the steps, but, but, but the problem is, they want you to think that you're going to consume that from the outside.
Speaker 1 (00:45:07) - Why? Because if you if you find it on the inside, you're not going to pay for it anymore, right? And that's my ideal outcome. The only reason I can do this work and be in this industry, or even adjacent to the industry, is because I know I'm trying to stop the industry. I want the fitness industry go away, at least in its current form. I want because the fitness industry has a vested interest in overcomplicating things so they can sell you solutions, convincing you that you need things that you don't need so they can sell you shit that you don't need. Selling you broken stuff because it's easy to make and you'll just blame yourself when it breaks. It's not good. And this doesn't change the fact that, yeah, people are responsible when they buy these things. They are responsible for being the person who puts them into place. But what we need as people, as a society, is somebody to explain to us, okay, here's how you do the first seven steps.
Speaker 1 (00:45:56) - And really what we need is here's. Let's fix your brain so that the first seven steps are obvious to you. And that's really what we're trying to do all of a sudden, any workout plan, any diet pretty much works. Once you see the first seven steps. The first seven steps are the hardest things to teach people because you can't give them a list. It's not. It's different in everybody's life. What the next step is. Any list is going to be wrong. For people to access the first seven steps, they have to learn how to think. They have to learn how to unleash their mind to do what it does, what it's been doing for 200,000 years, just in anatomically modern sapiens. You're smart. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear that. You're dumb. You're not dumb. Do you know how brilliant people had to be to exist as hunter gatherers? They had to be there. They were botanists, they were naturalists. They were woodworkers. They were construction workers.
Speaker 1 (00:46:53) - They were engineers. They were architects. Yeah, maybe they were architecting wigwams, but not skyscrapers. But they had to do everything themselves. So this required, like I have today, in this day and age, I have the luxury of not needing to know what a fucking carburetor is. I can just go to the guy and be like, fix my shit and he'll be like, okay, just give me some money. I'm like, cool. And then I go do something very specific and people give me money for that and the world goes around. Back in those days, people had to be generalists. They couldn't be specialists because there was just no, no place for that. And I'm sure there was specialization back then because humans are going to be humans. Somebody in the clan is going to be better at woodworking than someone else. So, you know, maybe there's small forms of specialization, but still that person who is specializing in the group, they know more about the natural world than most scientists that you could run into now.
Speaker 1 (00:47:46) - And it's simply through observation. They don't have technology, they don't have microscopes, they don't have a way of understanding how everything works, but they know what works and what doesn't. And that's a huge treasure trove of information. That's the brain that you need to get the seven steps right, the seven steps you don't see in the recipe, a brain that can look around and know, okay, I don't need to know why it works. I just know that when I go to the gym, it feels good. There's nothing. They're overcomplicating that there's no one there with their thumb pressing you, no one pushing you or insulting you into doing it. There's no voice in your head insulting you, pushing you to do it, robbing you of your own agency and stealing away, you know, making you trade your dignity for doing the things that you want to do. And you put people in that situation. They're going to not want to do the thing anymore. And here's the thing. You aren't just the byproduct of brilliant people.
Speaker 1 (00:48:42) - You're the byproduct of the most brilliant in every generation, because the ones that weren't as smart, they died. And it wasn't because they were dumb. It was because that was a really difficult world. You just had to ace test after test, and you could never fail. Because if you fail, you're done and your genetics don't get passed on. So it might be hard to get your head around this, but you are the result. You are the sum of an unbroken chain of brilliance, success, victory, being able to do things that you want to do and to to avoid things that you don't want. Being able to outrun, things that are trying to kill you. Being able to find the things you need. Being able to craft the things that you can't find, and the skills to have meaningful, helpful relationships with other people that are fulfilling that. That trade value for value, that that helps us carry our burdens and shoulder them equally. We are hardwired for this. So you're not stupid and you're not lazy and you're not a loser.
Speaker 1 (00:49:45) - You are. You are. Success boiled down, shaken together and running over. And when you see the truth of this, you're not going to have a hard time loving yourself, and you're not going to have a hard time accepting yourself, and you're not going to have a hard time trusting. You're not going to have a hard time hearing that voice saying, hey, the instructions say, to get to Seattle, we got to go west. But if we go do West and that's it, that's all we do. We're going to run up a mountain and we're going to die. So like at some point we're going to need to deviate from this heading. And just with our eyes on the ground, find the path of least resistance through the mountains. And when we do that, we don't die. We don't kill ourselves trying to get to where we need to go. We take the path of least resistance. And sure, it's a hike, but we do hikes for fun. So you can't tell me that that it's really all that miserable.
Speaker 1 (00:50:33) - And this is how the journey to the destination gets to be what we want, right? Because if I want to go to Seattle, I want the path to Seattle. And when I realized that there is no path, there's only me and the decisions I make. I realize I want me, I'm dependent on me. So I'm going to take care of me. I'm going to go to sleep instead of staying up way too late watching bad reality TV. Jon, that's not a specific example from my life or anything. Once you see the truth, that you are the way, you will love yourself and you will trust yourself. And when you trust yourself, you will see the next step and you will take it. And you will keep doing that over and over again. And if somebody swoops in and says, hey, you should go eat, eat a bunch of bullshit and hurt yourself, you'll be like, no thanks. Hey, you should stay home from the gym. Yeah. You're tired.
Speaker 1 (00:51:22) - You're going to feel terrible. They're they're going to judge you. They're fat. People aren't allowed in the gym. You'll just be like, shut up. That's not true. Because I can see the truth. I can see the truth. That's my gym. I paid to go there. I get to go there. It's that simple. People can think whatever they want. And honestly, probably the most critical person in that gym is me. So we're going I'm just going to keep taking the next step and everything that pops up that tries to get me to to not walk straight at the stuff that I want, which is all we have to do. Just notice when stuff pops up and says, hey, you need to jump off the trail. You need to lay down and die. You need to hit yourself repeatedly in the face with this stick and just seeing it for what it is and ultimately seeing that, oh, this is not only is this something that's bad for me, it's not for me, but it was at one point.
Speaker 1 (00:52:09) - This is not some evil thing inside of me trying to hurt me. It's a younger version of me, a snapshot of how they learn to react to moments of hopelessness and powerlessness. And this was the best they could do. So I love this. I love the person who made this. And so then in that sense, you actively, truly love even the things that are trying to kill you. When you do that, you will become a more powerful being than you think you can. And I'm not talking about more powerful than your negative beliefs or your limiting beliefs. I'm talking about more powerful than your brain can even conceive of. Because right now, the outline of you that your brain draws is incredibly restricted. And when you start taking the next step, you are free. You can go anywhere, do anything. And what are you going to do? What your heart wants? What does your heart want? It wants to seek out good and share it with the people you love. So when you run up against obligation and you notice, okay, this is the part I can get my shoes on, I can block off some time in my schedule to go to the gym.
Speaker 1 (00:53:14) - Where it really shuts down is when it's time to go get in the car. Something in me just goes, oh, right. So that's where you stop. You're at the side of the road and this thing is telling you, don't go to Seattle. We don't want that. And so you stop and you look at it and you go, hey, what's up? Why are you saying this? And pretty soon, if you ask enough questions, you're like, oh, yeah, I see who you are. I see what you're trying to do. I'm not mad about it, I love it, I love that that you were trying to help. I love that this was the best you could do because we did survive. We're still here and, you know. But here's the situation. It's not like the old days. We're totally in control now. We're not powerless. We're powerful. Check this out. Watch. And then you keep walking. And eventually this thing that's trying to get you to stop, it just gets quiet.
Speaker 1 (00:54:02) - Because ultimately, all our survival mechanisms are trying to keep us safe. And once we feel safe inside of ourselves, once we have autonomy, there's no reason for these things to be running around, creating havoc in our inner world and our outer world. This is healing. This is how we get better. This is how we life becomes more sane. So I've got a coaching call I got to do in a few minutes. So I need to round this off, but realize that so much of what is malfunctioning with our brains is because of the difference between the social setting and the survival needs of the situation that we evolved in, that our brains are made for, and that they still every day get up and operate. In that context, our brains did not evolve in a time of Tick Tock and DoorDash. We're not ready for it. We never will be. The only way we're going to get through it is together. And and if you think about it, your brain sees other people as extensions of yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:55:02) - It sees other people as necessary to your survival. Some people do this in ways that hurts other people, and they're called narcissists and sociopaths. Some people do this in ways that hurts themselves, where they give and give and don't ever take or don't ask for anything in return. And they just they give away all their power, and they never get to see what they can express by doing the things they want to do. And both things are equally sad. So when you see that you don't want to do something that you want to do, notice there's shame, there's a fear failure, or there's a false sense of obligation pushing you and creating resistance because you don't need to be pushed to do the things you want to do. And if you're being pushed, you actually want that to stop. So that's what you're trying to avoid the indignity, the being forced. That's what you're rebelling against. You're not rebelling against doing good things for yourself. You're rebelling against an imposition of false authority. That's what all rebellion is.
Speaker 1 (00:55:54) - So if you benefited from this, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a review. You five stars. Kind words. Share it with a friend. Share it on your social media. Whatever you got to do, I don't know. Just get creative. Join us in the Facebook group. I'm going to be putting a lot more effort into that space for all the reasons that we're talking about. You know, the group stuff is really important, I realize, and there's a lot of possibilities for the group that I don't think we fully explored, and I want to see it reach its potential. So join Lose Weight with John. There's a link in the show notes. Join me on Substack. You can join my newsletter over there. It's basically takes my newsletters and puts them into like a blog so you can read, you know, older stuff, have access to it. It's not just stuck in your email somewhere. And if you think that your next step is working with me personally in one of my coaching programs, then shoot me an email and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 1 (00:56:41) - And if it is the right next step for you, then we'll do that. And if there's something else that's the right next step for you, you'll know that. And then you can move in whatever way is going to best serve you, because that's ultimately the goal here. So email me. My email is in the show notes as well. Just subject line coaching inquiry and just let me know that you're interested and I'll ask you some questions. All right. That's all for now. Talk to you soon.