DoctorOz: Jordan Peterson on How to Overcome Disappointment

The suffering is part of the part of you that's disappointing, disappointed, in some sense, dying. Let's talk about disappointment. It happens to all of us. It comes from unmet expectations. It's inevitable, but how do you modify your expectations or forego the selfishness that is disappointment at its very core? How does that happen? I mean, it is a lot of self-pity sometimes when you're disappointed. People around you probably don't feel the same pain you have, but it is a motivating force as well to be disappointed and feel pain from it. Yeah, it depends on the magnitude of the disappointment, you know, because different beliefs we have stabilize us at different levels of resolution in some sense. Some things are vitally important to us and stabilize our lives in vital ways, and some things are more trivial. And so if you're disappointed in something trivial, well, it's not as consequential, obviously, as when the bottom falls out of your life. How do you deal with it? Well, hopefully, what you do is you learn from it. You suffer first, I would say, and you have to assume that that's going to happen. And the suffering is part of the part of you that's disappointed. In some sense, dying, you know, you put a lot of effort into that thing that's now gone. And there's grieving that takes place, but there's also physiological transformation because that system is no longer functional. And that's a small death. You have to learn to accept those small deaths and hopefully the rebirths that follow as part of what moves you forward in life. And then I would say, you look to yourself first and you think carefully. Think through the causal pathways. What errors, what missteps did you make? What did you have mapped improperly that increased the probability that you were going to encounter that disappointment? You don't want to do that with too heavy a hand, right? You don't want to start by assuming that you're guilty of the most major of sins, you know? You start with the assumption of a relatively small error, but you have to investigate till you find out where you walked off the path. Because the purpose of memory, especially memory about disappointments, is to analyze your error so you don't repeat it in the future. And so that's how you deal with disappointment. You have a model that if we can go up, I want to show everybody. Sure. This is a model to help people understand the paths of coping with unmet expectations. And I'm just going to start again. You're lifting the burden of the planet above you, and that's your goal. And that's the unbearable present. Yes. Well, this is the map that we all inhabit, you know? Well, I call it the unbearable present, and the reason for that is that, well, you're trying to change the present because it's not good enough. So obviously, it's unbearable. It's part of what you're trying to transform. And you want to transform it into what you're aiming at, you know? And as you go along, you put into practice the sequence of behaviors that you think are appropriate. And then either what you want to have happen happens, predicted outcome, or what you didn't want to have happen happens. And if it's predicted, then what that means is that your map is correct, right? Because your answer was your strategy. And so that produces positive emotion. It's actually the genesis of positive emotion. Promise and hope. Yeah. But it's a really important thing to know, because one of the things that it implies is that unless you have a direction that's an important direction, you don't feel any positive emotion. So you need an aim. Now, the downside is if there's an unpredicted outcome, well, that's threatening and makes you anxious. And, you know, and if it's really a threatening outcome that indicates that your pathway to the ideal future, you're positive, is blocked completely. Well, then there's going to be a collapse into chaos. And that's the disappointment that we were talking about. Well, part of you dies. And yes, it's in flames. It burns away. Despair there. You know, that's the underworld. That's the mythological underworld. Hell is part of that. And the reason for that is that if you're disappointed enough, you can visit the worst suburb of the underworld. And that's where you get bitter and vicious and resentful and angry and, you know, willing to destroy. It's a very dangerous place to be. You need to know that you can go there. Well, the thing is, is you can learn from your immersion in chaos. If you run into a disappointment, if you hit an obstacle, what it means, an unpredicted outcome, what it means is that there's something wrong with your representation of the present, or there's something wrong with your representation of the future. You don't know what it is, right? Your map's wrong. It's either you didn't know where you were, or your destination was specified improperly, or something, you know, something about the journey. So the unpredicted outcome, the advantage to that, which is also why it's very useful to be attentive to your errors, is that if you are attentive to your errors, then you can update your representation of the present and your representation of the future, even though that might require a pathway through chaos. And then the next map you produce will be more accurate. So go to chaos. If you don't get stuck in the worst neighborhood, you reintegrate. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah, now maybe you're a new person. You say to people, you know, you've gone through this disappointment. Maybe it's the collapse of a love affair. And you say, geez, you know, that was really bitter and horrible, but I'm a new person. I'm actually better for it. I have a better understanding of myself. I have a better understanding of other people. I know more about what a real relationship would be like. And so you've put yourself back together, but that's only because you passed through fire, you know, and maybe you dispensed with some of the parts of you that weren't so necessary. So just so I'm clear, in life, you have the unbearable present. You're aiming high, big aspirations. You make it or you don't. You don't, you go to chaos, which is OK, because the point is to come back out of that, to reintegrate, to ascend, to repeat this process over and over and over again. Yes, and what you hope is that the map that you're producing after you pass through chaos is a much more accurate representation of the moral world, and the moral world being the world in which you act, so that you understand yourself better. You know where you're situated better, but your aim is also higher and truer. And hopefully, like, it's a process like this, as well as one that goes up and down. You know, you're searching for the optimal pathway forward, and there's going to be deviations during that search. And then you have to ask yourself, like, who are you? You know, first of all, you're your plan, and it gets blown into pieces, and then you're chaos, and then, you know, that's a catastrophe, and then you're your new plan. Well, you're not, because it's going to fall apart, too. Eventually. Yes. In some domain. So what you want to know is that you're the thing that does this movement, right? You're the thing that's constantly transforming its map of the world and moving forward. And that makes you also the thing that can transcend the whole process in some sense, because you can function in the underworld. You can. Well, yeah, you need to know that's a place that people go, and that you can function there. There are things to learn there. It's part of life. It's scary. It's the unknown, but you can still go and come out. And it's also the case that it doesn't hurt at all, and this is with regards to developing resilience, is that while you're moving from point A to point B, you might be looking for unpredicted outcomes, you know, because it's kind of, that's curiosity. It's like, well, is there something here I didn't expect? You can spend a fair bit of time in voluntary exploration of what you don't know. And that actually really works, because it means that you'll be able to make smaller self-improvements often without that catastrophe of disappointment. And so you want to have a plan, but you want to kind of hold it in your hands loosely, and you think, well, I've got a plan, but, you know, what do I know? I don't really know where I am, and I don't really know where I'm going, but I need a plan because I've got to move forward. But as I move forward, I'm going to keep an eye out for what I don't know. I'm going to keep an eye on what other people might tell me that might disturb me even, but that I don't know. And that does build resilience, you know. That's the acceptance of voluntary challenge, and that strengthens you, and it allows you to make incremental improvements to your map so that, you know, the chaos journey is, you know, not quite as deep and maybe not as catastrophic. That's part of the adventure of life you've been speaking of. The maps of meaning takes us through adventures, and you wouldn't voluntarily normally want to go to chaos and the unknown, but without going there, you're not truly living the adventures of life. But you can see, too, that people have this immense proclivity to do this. I mean, think of all the crazy experiments that teenagers in particular do with themselves. You know, they're putting themselves at risk all the time, and people go to horror movies, and they put themselves in extreme situations, and that's partly because they are testing, and they're pushing, and they're trying to learn. So if this is your path to finding meaning in life, how do you live the virtuous life? How do you define what's a vice and what's a virtue if relativism seems to become a dominant way that we judge those today? Well, I think you do that in discussion with yourself and in discussion with others. You know, I mean, for weirdly enough, you know, I've asked my psychology class this many years in a row, I said, do you have a little voice in your head or a feeling that tells you when you're going to, that you're likely to do something wrong? You're about to do something wrong, and you shouldn't. That'd be one part of the voice, or that you have done something wrong. Everybody puts up their hand, like the faculty of consciences. Not everybody says it's a voice. Sometimes it's a feeling. It doesn't matter. People have this faculty that was identified thousands of years ago that orients you in some sense morally. Well, you could start to have a dialogue with that, with your conscience. It's like, well, this feels wrong to me. Okay, it feels wrong to me. But why exactly? Is it wrong? Is the feeling that it's wrong, wrong? It's like, if it is wrong, what does it imply? If it is wrong, well, what would right be? Well, if it's wrong, does it mean I shouldn't do it? If it's right, what sort of risk do I have to take? That's a dialogue. In the movie Pinocchio, Pinocchio is trying to not be a wooden-headed boy anymore, right? A marionette who's being played by the strings that he doesn't understand. And he has a conscience. And his conscience isn't that bright. It's a cricket that was like a tramp, you know? And so the two of them have to adventure. And as they adventure and communicate, each of them gets wiser. Until at the end, they're wise enough so that Pinocchio becomes an actual autonomous being. Well, that's part of the process of learning to distinguish vice from virtue. It's like, you have a conscience. Have a dialogue with it. It's not omniscient. It needs to mature like you do. It can be rough on you. It can be like a harsh Freudian superego that's too punitive, for example. Or maybe it lets you off the hook too often. It needs to mature as well. But it's a separate part of you. It's like, you could think about it as the demand of society within. If you were thinking about it biologically. Because people want you to act a certain way. And you're like, you are prone to be socialized, right? Otherwise, well, you're a criminal and you're outside of society entirely. You have to have guilt and you have to have shame and self-disgust and all those things. That's all part of conscience. And you need to integrate that in and live in accordance with it and develop it. So the Stoic movement now that has become so popular seems to be about allowing all this chaos to happen around you. The ascent and descent. Missing the targets. Disappointment. Without much of a response. Healthy. Problematic. Really beneficial. Your thoughts as a psychologist. Well, there's something to be said for endurance. You know, I mean, it's better to face a challenge voluntarily. That's a primary psychological truth. It's better not to let a challenge faced that you failed at stop you. Especially if it's crucial to your plan, right? Because, well, otherwise then you won't be able to manifest the plan. Maybe you could change the plan. That might be an okay way around it if it's not a rationalization. Let's say that you're pursuing a career that requires you to speak publicly. And you get up and you speak publicly and it doesn't go very well. Like it's 30th percentile talk or something. It's like now you're terrified. You were to begin with. It's like, well, I'm so afraid. I can't do this again. It's like, no, that's no good. It's like next time it's 35th percentile, right? Prepare a little bit more. You take some courses. You get the obstacle out of your way. And you build that part of your character that enables you to manifest that part of you that's going to let that dream manifest itself. Otherwise you don't develop. And so that's, there's a stoic element to that. It's like don't, what is it? It's a Western. Get back on the damn horse. You know, if you want to ride the horse somewhere. You get back on when you're thrown off. Because otherwise you lose faith in yourself, right? The horse loses faith in you. That's not a good thing. It doesn't want to listen to you anymore. But you lose faith in yourself too. And so you face the challenges. You assess your failures. You develop your skills. You confront the obstacles that are in your way forthrightly. And you progress. That's the hope. That's your best hope. It might not happen, right? I mean, I'm not a Pollyanna optimist. People are hurt often in life arbitrarily. Their dreams are destroyed by things that have nothing to do with them. They develop an illness. They're involved in a fatal accident. We can be taken out. You know, we're not omniscient. But your best pathway forward is that. The voluntary confrontation with those things that you don't understand. That potential that surrounds you. While you're trying to continually rebuild and improve the moral representation of the world. The map of the world that you carry with you. Dr. Jordan Peterson, God bless you. Very nice talking to you today.