Jealousy, Envy, Psychology, Fame: About Me, and About Veganism.

it's difficult in my generation for me
to talk to people about about my own psychology both the things that make me a little bit irregular a little bit different from other people the older generation you know my parents generation was really shaped by Sigmund Freud's philosophy I guess to a staggering extent basic basic basic assumptions like the idea that you can solve your problems by talking about them that you'll feel better about your problems by talking about them these are really kind of Freudian myths very very simple things like that and very simple ideas about the structure of the family the nature of religion those ideas of Freud have influenced people who've never read Freud people who can't spell Freud I don't know I guess my generation was coming up with a slightly different set of assumptions if you can for my channel for a while you may have heard me comment before that I do not feel jealousy I don't experience jealousy and it took me a long while to figure out that this is just a psychological irregularity of mine it's just one of the ways in which I'm different from you know the majority of other people and you know it makes it very hard for me in some circumstances to understand what motivates other people why it is they're doing what they're doing that sort of thing now if you tell people who are your close personal friends all right here somebody's been your girlfriend for a long time they may take that with seriousness they may understand that you're just trying to disclose something about yourself and the way you think the way you perceive the world but obviously um if you're talking to someone who doesn't know you that well they may think you're boasting they may think you're making a kind of claim to morality under a judeo-christian heading which I don't believe in you know and I mean I don't see my own lack of this feeling of this capacity to feel as an advantage in many situations it makes it more difficult for me to understand my fellow human beings around me is a lot of what they're doing is motivated by jealousy or envy and I'd say that you know what we call jealousy at bottom we can also describe as a strange form of sympathy right it's a way of understanding other people again to me it really is it really is alien I don't want get into any samples there was one example that'll that'll stay with me forever where I had a co-worker who hated me I didn't know why I couldn't guess why I just didn't know what her problem was with me and my very last day at work she screamed at me and what it was was that she imagined falsely that I was getting paid more than she was this was not true in fact but there were reasons why she thought that there were bits of information she had misinterpreted and also that she'd the way she what she did with that information and the way she bitterly viciously hated me she really felt jealousy in that sense and I you know I thought weren't her circumstance I would feel that way at all I remember there was once a lecture from a guy who was actually an ex Buddhist monk and since then I found him on the Internet he actually went back to being a Buddhist monk so at that time he was a layman but he was a former Buddhist monk future future Buddhist monk um but in what this guy gave a lecture at a Buddhist monastery and he was talking about you know jealousy and envy and everybody in the audience except for me was absolutely relating to and digging what he was saying he gave this um he gave this example of a woman it was a Chinese woman in the example obviously this is a very ethnically mixed crowd but a lot of Chinese people and some Sri Lankans some Buddhist from other parts of Asia and he was giving this example of a woman whose husband came home one day and said that they had to buy a more expensive dishwasher you know why because he found out that some friends of theirs I had a more expensive dishwasher than they had I'm sorry just Kramer actually it was the washing machine for clothes clothes washing machine sorry just distant memory now and the the you know the wife asked she went to the Buddhist monk for backup and asked why can't we just be happy for them and everyone in the crowd except me is completely digging this completely relating to this as like a major life experience when yeah yeah you know they absolutely know what the monk is talking about they understand this conflict between husband and wife and the fact that the wife would go to a Buddhist monk to try to deal with this as an ethical issue it's completely alien to me on the one hand if someone else is doing better than me I can just feel happy for them I can also just feel indifference I can also feel contempt for them you know but there's a whole not of human emotions there that I don't get that I don't relate to and where I really have to use my imagination not even I get to use logic to try to think the way other people think and this same guy in the same lecture this Buddhist monk or former Buddhist monk he was talking about walking down the street and feeling intense jealousy because other people better looking at you like in particular ways someone has nicer legs than you and like everyone in the audience a way above ninety percent they were absolutely on his wavelength and agreeing with him and you know vocalizing saying yeah you know the new one who's dying I was sitting there thinking what he was describing a normal daily occurrence when walking in the street never once in my life not as a child not as a teenager not as an adult and it's this is not about morality this isn't something I chose this isn't something I decided this isn't something i cultivated this is really just a difference between me and a lot of other human beings including people within my own family I just don't think it's a common trait and I don't know you know I've you know I assume it's part of my nature but who knows maybe it's a result of even maybe there's some some cause and effect to it I mean I've mentioned before you know I have a very unusual tendency to lucid dreaming basically all of my dreams are lucid because it's say that while I'm dreaming I'm aware that it's a dream that it's not the real world and I can therefore if I want to manipulate and control the false reality of my dreams that's rare but that's documented and studied there are people like that it's a psychological abnormality what I was thinking this evening when seeing a lot of behavior on the internet that I consider insane that from my perspective is insane but I had to reflect on maybe there's some connection between this lack of jealousy and me is lack of envy just as an impulse just as a faculty again it's not a moral issue for me maybe there's something connecting that so how I regard Fame and how how alien it seems to me the people who are really chasing Fame now here I've got to put in a caveat if you guys watch my youtube channel and you think of doing this to get famous I completely understand why you would think that about me I mean a lot of my videos are very boring lectures their morality lectures in a lot of ways what I'm doing in these videos is similar to what i would have been doing as a Buddhist monk if I had stayed on that career path I also could have been a great rabbi you know and in some ways maybe it's a motor stand-up comedy but you know if you stick around I think if you keep watching the videos I think you will come to understand but know this stuff is not motivated by a quest for fame and there's a sense in which I really don't even understand what other people are doing when they're motivated by you know when they're turned on by the possibility of Fame what it's a little bit of Fame or a lot of Fame I mean the fame thing apparently it seems like gambling you know a compulsive gambler can be turned on by can be excited by a little bit of money or a lot of money there's something about the chance itself there's something about the nature of gambling that you know maybe the scale doesn't matter so much whether it's five dollars or fifty lawyers or five hundred dollars that captivates them I think for a lot of these people it doesn't matter if they're only famous to 200 people that completely captivates them perhaps as much as 2,000 or two million will never know a lot of these people are never going to get up to those those larger numbers again I mean there must be what is jealousy jealousy has to start from a certain kind of sympathy it has to start from understanding the position that I'm in and the position that you're in and the difference between them and some kind of that I am a connection between them and then obviously there's a desire to either destroy the other person or elevate yourself i guess i guess the root of it is that one person feels diminished by the other person's success or greatness or attractiveness any positive quality in the other person as the sense of a loss of one's own identity in recognizing the other person's identity and let's say i don't have that at all I can't even once remember in childhood I can never remember feeling bad because someone else was more handsome than me I can never remember feeling bad because someone else was smarter than me I can never remember feeling bad not even once not even as a small child feeling bad because someone else was better than i was at sports never and i think obviously that must be a very natural human impulse I mean it must be something that these people to try to be smarter and more beautiful and better at sports I mean it must if you scale it up to the millions of people for our site as a whole I presumably it has for many positive effects on people's people's lives you know um so I guess also maybe even the name itself like words like jealousy and envy maybe those are bad categories to use because they lead us to focus entirely on the negative aspect of the of the pattern of behavior of this way of seeing the world whatever it is unnamed and you know to me kind of unknowable you know just to give one example I think there are a lot of people who will never get it and it's fine i'm not complaining but they'll never understand that for me subjectively when I disagreed with unnatural vegan about castration of dogs that really was about castration of dogs that really was about domestication animals for me you know there were a bunch of other issues bundled up in that including even my history with Buddhism a bunch of other between her and myself there were a bunch of other issues that could ended up being part of the controversy but for me it really was about those issues first and foremost the domestication of animals castration of dogs killing cows to feed beef to our cats etc that set of issues that really was what I cared about that really it was what I wanted to speak on and for me it was not in any way motivated by Fame or by you know wanting to denigrate her but I completely understand that for the vast majority of people seeing this they'll they'll never be able to see it the way I see it and I guess that's just okay I continue to make comments you know defending a natural vegan because even though I'm a critic of her work in some respects of course I appreciate it in others which you've heard me say on this channel both are completely sincere I wrote a comic here I'm going to read out this is a comment on YouTube but it was a comment made to someone who is to be blunt to complete idiot and in his replies you made it clear they had no interest in such thing but anyway just a couple days going november eighth I wrote this comment which I'll now just read so this is a comment defending unnatural vegan against someone who had just been you know insulting her frankly offering a criticism or that I think has no validity I am I quote you seem to be unaware that unnatural vegan and I are at opposite extremes of the vegan spectrum sort decoration so he was also talking about me and unnatural rina vegan as if were members of the same team as if we're on the same side so I opened by saying you seem to unaware were actually at opposite extremes in some ways I disagree with her and believe me on a ballast yell I've had some very strongly worded disagreements of their but I think you start on a false footing by claiming that she's quote-unquote not vegan she's a real vegan but she's a vegan you happen to disagree with is she an idiot well on some topics that I care about she has definitely being idiotic plenty of people adore her but I think they just have different interests for myself saying that she and I both feel overly confident in our opinions isn't actually a valid criticism you really need to take the next step to show that we're confident about things we ought not to be confident about do you know more than me about cambodia about First Nations I doubt it do you know more about a net sorry do you know more than unnatural vegan about splenda or about pesticides I doubt it different people are confident about different things saying that you feel intimidated by that is just an extremely weak line for you to take although you seem to mistake that weakness for strength so I'm saying to him that he mistakes his own weakness for strength so um I don't know it's probably not worth my explaining how it is this comment relates to what I've just been reflecting on any great length but um to me I do see people attacking other youtubers with a sense of who do you think you are don't you know who I think I am and a sense of jealousy I think it is jealousy that someone else displays confidence this and including a natural beacon ear of attacking her for being overly confident and the other hand to use the same example with a natural vegan I think many people are drawn to her and become her fans precisely because she shows a certain kind of self-effacing lack of confidence she often has kind of bumbling informal videos i watch one recently where she was talking about which shampoo she uses it's an absolutely no interest to me sorry I'm not not criticizing I'm not saying it's wrong or bad but I said a lot of people enjoyed seeing her in this kind of bumbling self-effacing a very humble way talking about shampoo but to me it's boring stuff um but I think I mean it's some kind of insecurity that again I don't have I don't relate to that people look at a natural vegan and think she's smug that she's too confident that she acts like an expert and a lot of these things again I happen to disagree with her passionately about some topics I really care about but I think in some cases I don't know she did a lot of research on splenda on artificial sweeteners I think she's entitled to speak with real confidence on that given that she did the research even if she's wrong or even if you happen to disagree with her you know I don't react to it in that way at all I think she did a lot research on some pesticides she made some videos talking with pesticides and use of genetically modified crops why wouldn't she speak with this kind of confidence on that you know um and yeah on the other hand I see that I see people wanting to lash out at figures they feel are too confident etc etc and I guess on the other hand the lashing out itself is just justified by the same I think ultimately jealous impulse on the one hand to to try to abase others then and at the same time to exalt yourself in the pursuit of this micro Fame you know so I'm in the middle of all that and people today just now again people accused me of being jealous of Charles a vegan cheetah and there are both shallow and profound ways in which they will never understand how unimaginable that is to me it's not just the case that I do not wish i had Charles's life I can't imagine being a person who wish they had trials of life it's not just that I don't envy him on a really deep level I can't even really understand what and being him would be like because I honestly think I've never envied anyone and I don't know may just be a disability