In the last few videos, I’ve been talking about this world of systems and institutions, and being industrialized and part of a system, a machine. And it can easily sound like it’s some kind of alien entity, and it’s really easy to look at it this way, but I don’t think it’s this way at […]

Industrialized humanity. It’s like a way of managing large numbers of people, organizing social systems. It’s not really about individual feelings and individual will and determination. It’s about managing herds of people, essentially. Now, it sounds so negative when I say it that way. But for many practical, everyday purposes, this is very useful. This

Last couple of videos, I talked about the idea of being taken care of, being in this whole network of institutions, in government, school, business, that kind of manage our lives. And contrasting this to the idea of being autonomous, where we control ourselves. And as much as it seems in most ways it’s very

In the last video, I talked about how we have this desire to break out of this whole system of being taken care of, and we’re always part of some bigger institution that’s taking care of us. And as much as this is absolutely efficient, safe, it’s really the best way to operate, compared to

So when we’re born, we’re taken care of, and we are raised by family, or maybe some other situation, somebody’s taking care of us. We go to school, we follow the rules of school, and get a job, and follow the rules of the job. We are taken care of by these organizations. Family, some

Work, efficiency, flow. This series is about how to actually get things done. You’ve already decided what you want to do, what you consider to be worth doing, but now how do you actually go through the steps to actually do it? And I’ve run into so many different roadblocks along the way, as I’m

Habits and discipline. This series is about those basic daily steps when we’re trying to live life in some new way, make changes, try to improve somehow, try to make our life more full of good things. A lot of it has to do with habits: establishing good habits, breaking bad habits and replacing them

Laziness and escapism. For me, these have been some of my biggest challenges that this whole self-development journey has been about. The whole idea of simply not wanting to deal with the difficult challenges facing us, and instead pass the time pleasantly through one of the great menu of distractions that we have available. And

Personal change and growth. This series is about the whole process of change. Once we start to make changes in life, start to try to make improvements, put ourselves on a new path, a new direction, it can be of course a very long and bumpy journey to actually get any results. For one thing,

Motivation, inspiration, and faith. These are these kind of feelings and states of mind that seem to be so central to trying to improve our lives. If we don’t feel any motivation, and we don’t have any trust in what’s going to happen, then it’s very difficult to actually do anything that builds towards the