Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…For me to overcome it, I had to realize that I was taking something away from my future wife. Some people would be like, “Oh, well, once you get a girlfriend then you can stop.” And it’s just like, “No, because you never stopped the problem.” You don’t stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife. And I didn’t even know my current wife at that time. She was not in the picture. I’m not even sure if she was at Montana State University at that point. And so it’s just that’s… Once I made that realization, I think it went from my head to my heart, which they say is the greatest distance in the universe. I finally got it. And that’s really where things change. The ability to say like what’s going to help you change and all that, I don’t know if there’s… I don’t think there’s silver bullets, right? If someone could offer you a drug… I forget who says this phrase, but there’s this really interesting phrase that goes something like, he was a very depressed man and he was struggling with suicide and he writes about this in this memoir. And he goes to these doctors and the doctors effectively say, “Well, here’s antidepressants, it’s going to help you.” And he says that, “Well, the problem was is that scientists told me that I could just touch my brain and make myself happy, and that’s it. They could reach in, they could configure some stuff and I’ll be happy.” He’s like, “For me, it was a lot like going out into a field and being able to take a drug to see the rain. I could look out, see the rain, it would fall down, it’d be silvery, it’d be beautiful, but all the crop would still die because there’s not actually any rain. I had to discover how to be happy myself.” And so for me, it’s like the reason why I looked at porn is because I was unhappy. I was trying to find meaning. I was trying to find value in something, right? Something that was supposed to finally give me this ultimate satisfaction. And it just does not, no matter how hard, and no matter how much you think it will, there is no escapade, there is no pornography that will ever give you that satisfaction you’re looking for. That’s the reason why it’s addicting. And that’s my call to why you shouldn’t do it, but how to get out of it, I only got out of it by realizing. I think that’s really brilliantly described. You knew that this thing you’re doing is preventing you from finding your future wife and future wife could mean more even broadly, this path to a flourishing, to a beautiful life. I think there’s a lot of choices we make that are just preventing us from opening the door to whatever future. I think what’s really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you’ll be truly happy and you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths. And there’s a bunch of addictions, there’s a bunch of choices that prevent us from traveling down those paths. So just believe that you’re going to have an awesome life and remove from your life the things that are preventing you from walking down that path, which is essentially what you did. It’s a leap of faith that if you let go of porn, that a better life is waiting for you on the other end. Yeah. I definitely can’t say how long it will take, a better life. But for me, there’s no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps because I couldn’t value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was. I would have valued her through the index or the lens that I currently was looking through.…

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