Divorce: Nihilism & Learning from Regret.

but when there wasn't anything to do i
just play video games and for whatever reason she just hated video games and i tried to explain to her i was like it's really cold outside i don't have any friends right now we don't have any money and this is free so this is what i'm going to be doing during school between the stress of trying to pass classes and her kind of adapting to living with me and her working and trying to figure out what it's like to live with someone that you've never really lived with more than like three weeks things started to get stressful and you start to realize that you didn't know the person um that you that you thought you did things started to kind of just go downhill i never claimed to be like a like a perfect husband or like that i didn't do anything wrong but i will say that like i was always supportive and i was always trying to you know be as logical as possible and i know everyone in the comments is like well there's your first problem right there josh you're talking you're telling me now right but i think i was a pretty decent husband but i think the stress on her end of maybe being the provider role was kind of too much and i think over time she kind of started to resent me for that because i would go to school full time and she would work and i would say things like hey look man it's just your turn right now you i know you got to work but when i when i graduate and i get this degree i can start making money and i can i can pamper you a little a little bit you know and i can i can do all the things that you want to do that you're having to put on hold because you have to deal with me um you aren't man enough um i remember one time she said to me like you're a sex addict and i was like we mumbo like once every other month what are you talking about um i would try to do things around the house i would try to like spend time with her but like things just aren't the same anymore um you know i try to cook food give her foot rub whatever i think it was a pretty decent husband in that regard but when there wasn't anything to do i would just play video games and for whatever reason she just hated video games and i tried to explain to her i was like it's really cold outside i don't have any friends right now we don't have any money and this is free so this is what i'm going to be doing in hindsight right i'd go back in time and slap myself and like learn code or something but at the time it seemed it seemed fine because there was a lot of stress you don't want to deal with it throughout the course of school i started to find these books with the finnish word divorce labeled on them wait what is this i didn't know quite enough finish to be able to decipher what it all said so i'd take pictures and send them to my finished friends that i had at school i just had like two and then one day i came home from school and i was at my computer doing some homework i think and she came and slapped a piece of paper down on the desk that said sign it i was like what is this she says you know what's going to happen anyway and i said what are you talking about she said this is a paper for [Music] divorce the topic for this video is not divorce and it's not video game edition and it's not the excuses that we make for auditions in life it's the way in which people will tend to construe a problem in terms of the solution they are most comfortable with that may be totally irrelevant to the problem itself so i used to be a scholar of buddhism for years and years and years and i talked to my fellow buddhists some of these people were buddhist monks some of these were white people with phds who were experts in buddhism different stuff some of them by the way some of them actually were like administrators and charities so people were involved with helping orphans and starving people like in the name of the religion buddhism and you'd say to them something like man you know i've got a i've got a real problem um i can't find a phd program to apply to and get into and they'd be like oh oh oh oh your problem is that you're selfish the problem is that you're thinking about your own ego and you're not cultivating selflessness enough and it's like um i'm i'm dealing with like a bureaucratic issue here like it's really like it's irrelevant to the problem it's irrelevant to the solution you are just preaching to me teaching me or focusing on the aspect of this problem that you're most comfortable with now this really could extend to absurd situations like um well my visa to live in cambodia was attached to my job and now that that's over with either i can get a new job or can apply for a new visa like as soon as you're dealing with problems there these are worldly problems and you could get these same kinds of uh totally totally otherworldly solutions when i talk to my father this this example may be easier for some of you in the audience to relate to talk to my father after 10 years of mutually invidious silence so we had not spoken for fully 10 years he was in denial about that for me it's the most amusing part of the story to to remember like i was talking to him and whenever i refer to the fact that like we hadn't spoken for 10 years i could tell he would come back at me like oh yeah well i guess it's been a few years but like in his mind it's like oh it's only been two years and six months like he's playing this game with himself like it hasn't really been 10 years and then i asked him this is quite as you can imagine this was quite close to the beginning of the conversation it's like well look can you hear me okay and he thought i was talking about like his computer set up you know microphone and i was like no no no no the last time i talked to you like you were scheduled to go to the hospital and have an operation because you were going deaf you know like and he got furious and he started shouting at me and he said like you're delusional that was 10 years ago [Music] he just he just stopped he was like oh i guess it really has been teddy you know yeah it's been 10 years we didn't talk for 10 years you know he hadn't talked for 10 years and again right at the start of this conversation my first time talking to my father in 10 years he starts laying in on me for why he thinks a particular job i had didn't work out i think at that time i don't think it was the most recent job i had for whatever reason he starts laying into why this job didn't work out for me and now part of my response this is so wait you know we haven't spoken 10 years you you never talked to me about this you've never read anything about this you didn't talk to my employer like where is this even coming where did you get this this theory but like his theory was that my problem was a lack of commitment that like i had this really great job working in the publishing industry but somehow i just wasn't committed enough to it now this really is his religion this really is what he's into in the same sense that those buddhist pilgrims are into preaching selflessness like you may not realize but like my father's problem in his life has been lack of commitment he at one point he had three different women pregnant at the same time he's leaving one woman for another he's leaving one you know he's had commitment issues in his life what i mean maybe one of the problems he's been talking to his own therapist about during those 10 years where he didn't talk you know was uh was commitment but like he's coming at me like as if my problem in life and my problem with this particular job was lack a minute he knows nothing about it and i try to get through to him by using some like real specific examples that challenge what whatever he imagines about this job i said to him you know i was the only employee who spoke english on that job do you do you realize that it's like of course he had no idea he like imagines this is some office tower full of people with suits and ties speaking english in thailand right this is not the case at all i was i was literally the only person who spoke english as their first language in whole company i said you know um i was the only able-bodied person in the whole company every other employee was physically disabled and pretty seriously physically which is an interesting thing the boston company decided he knew this um kind of special home for helping to train uh disabled people to have a better life it wasn't it wasn't an orphanage but it was this kind of special live-in uh training program kind of thing and uh you know he worked with them to hire all of the staff myself being an extraordinary exception and i said you know that company all the initiative all the new ideas uh just all the commercial impetus all the successes and all the failures of that company came from one man and that man was going deaf and maybe you can relate to that barry i i'd say maybe you can relate to that dad i never called him dad i didn't mean he was barry lord i was i called him by his name i was like you know i think you know what it's like to be the director of a small company who's going deaf and where everyone relies on you and your decisions and you're actually getting frustrated having difficulty communicating with people and they're having difficulty communicating that's prob that exact scenario you've had years of dealing with because my father was going down for you could say he did go down and he was such an [ __ ] that nobody noticed you know like really he was such a he was such an [ __ ] he'd be in situations where people were speaking french and he was dead and he was just like replying in french to people and like i i spoke enough french that i could recognize this and it was happening he would give replies that were completely irrelevant to what had been said in french i think he wasn't aware of it like when he was speaking english like he was maybe reading lips and things he was taking he was picking up on cues more so it seemed like he could hear what you're saying but then when he switches into french it was like whoa like the topic of the conversation there's absolutely no no relationship but yeah i mean before he went deaf he already was just such a self-centered [ __ ] that like you know you know he was just you know he was on his own track whatever he wanted the conversation to be and disregarded the people around him so a lot of people a lot of people didn't notice a problem hey maybe it was a credit to me or that i should i think i had the closest relationship with him of anyone i don't think any of his other sons knew him the way i did that uh yeah i can say that i can say that about you dad i noticed when you went to hell i noticed the difference um and it's this kid i've i don't know old he is you know he runs through a bunch of different reasons for his divorce or contributing causes for why that that marriage uh didn't work out he went up from 180 pounds to 240 pounds some people would tell this story with that being the main focus with that being the part of the problem and the part of the solution that they're comfortable talking about there are youtube channels that is totally you know devoted i can imagine right now a different youtuber breaking down this whole timeline completely focused around weight gain and exercise and diet and like and really you know and she lost interest in me and you know and it is it's part of his story but it's it's demoted and it's it's not you know he just mentions it that he gained weight and then at the end he started to lose weight because he knew he was going to be single again could be you know for that particular could be the reason he mentions the extent to which he was playing video games and i think we all know i mean some of you you've never heard of this youtuber before if you know anything about this guy um he is massively massively downplaying underrating the significance of playing video games and in that one moment where he mentions that his girlfriend for some reason uh hated video games or hated him playing video games that she's at home with him the situation was that she was paying the bills because he was a full-time university student but she comes home and he's sitting on the couch playing video games for hours and hours and no offense but in this guy's case he's admitted to some extent he was addicted to world of warcraft and so on he's putting in all these hours playing video games and what are you not doing when you're playing games you're not building that relationship right the marriage is not becoming whatever it could have become and of course it's possible they're they're missing about he mentions real briefly in there they only had sex about once every two months don't you think that i mean there's a chicken and ag issue here you know there's a cause-and-effect question but don't you think that alone could explain why the marriage didn't work out or why you why you got divorced but that's not his approach at all his explanation his assessment his analysis of the problem and how he presents the solution totally has to do with earning money because that's what he's comfortable addressing so this is a funny kind of bias and i think people will be more aware of it if we had like one catchphrase for it negotiators the way you know people have all these catchphrases for logical fallacies oh that's a begging of the question fallacy that's an appeal to nature fallacy i don't think we have a catchphrase for that tendency we do have this saying in english uh a man who's carrying a hammer tends to see every problem as a nail but that's not quite what's going on here right he's aware of and he's even mentioning these other factors but his assessment his analysis what he has to say about the problem it's totally distorted by um the solution that he's comfortable talking about the solution that in a real sense he believes in so i mean coming back to the buddhists mentioned at the start of this i think those people really believed that if i could be more selfless i would get into a phd program like it's completely ridiculous it's like oh no this isn't the problem to do with paper i think those people really believed like oh like if you could just meditate and focus on selflessness and set aside the belief in the soul like this whole thing with getting a stamp in your passport and a paperwork for a visa that just wouldn't matter to you i mean you could be in prison you can be real selfless in prison because you overstayed your work visa you didn't care about these legal runs uh-huh yeah but i mean i think i think there's an aspect of belief there and that other hypothetical youtube channel i'm talking about like if there were a youtuber who told the same story of the marriage breaking up the divorce entirely in terms of weight gain and weight loss i think that would be someone who really believed in that that there would be people out there who believed that their marriage fell apart because they got fat and they could have saved it if only the lost way and where their message to you in the audience is hey if you're more self-disciplined if you care about your health you care about your appearance you know then you can get this with you and when i call myself a nihilist it's not just because i'm opposed to circumcision or celebrating christmas i am opposed to those things but you know living with nihilism it also means you kind of challenge and reject your beliefs in this more subtle invisible and petty way we're saying well i don't believe in one thing or another like there's certainly a level when i'm looking at this guy's uh divorce in which i look at it with a complete open mind i don't know i don't know why his marriage shouldn't work out i don't know if the fact that they had sex less often than once a month they were like 21 years old or something by the way so not people in their 60s i don't know if that was crucially important to her or crucially important to him i don't know if he's lying to himself but i don't know like i'm even though it's impossible for me to imagine i'm willing to believe there are people who could have a totally happy marriage only having sex once a month i have a vivid imagination but not that vivid what can i tell you but sure you know maybe that maybe that exists maybe that's out there you know um i'm willing to listen to all these things with a kind of radically open mind with no prefabricated conclusions that i'm trying to force the facts to fit into and then i examine my own life that way also right i think that's a really difficult discipline espec especially when you're young and hot-blooded and when you fear the sense of uh self-doubt that's involved that sort of emotion to have the self-doubt to look back on your own marriage or your own divorce or let's say your own experience university for this guy they all overlapped he was in university and maybe his greatest mistake really was playing video games during those few crucial years when all those things overlap when he had the opportunity to become a citizen of finland when he was supposed to be learning the finnish language in his spare time when he was a full-time university student and he was married to this woman who within those same few years lost patience with him got disgusted with seeing him and sitting there on the couch playing video games gaining 50 pounds all these things came together um it's not hard to see why it didn't last but the decision we get to make now is what do we regret right like people think of regret as if it's dead weight and it's not regret is something useful regret is something powerful regret is something dynamic he can look back on his life and i think really take on a positive new direction that could include quitting video games through regret and i think each of us in this way as life goes on we have new things to learn by re-examining the past unencumbered by the beliefs unencumbered by the assumptions the hopes and expectations that were with us when we lived through it the first time