so we use this term life syndrome to basically describe this group of people whose lives are so bad as they are trying to survive in life they run into mental health challenges they go somewhere they get diagnosed with a particular thing and they just rack up these diagnosis I remember seeing this mentioned in an HG video a while ago but I don't remember which one it was I'm sure it's not an empirical medical phenomenon or anything but whatever it resembles I'm curious about the outcomes of the people who suffer from it is there such thing in living in living in a situation that is systemically unhealthy to the point that there isn't any viable path to good mental health can people overcome shitlife syndrome some time ago I talked about this term [ __ ] life syndrome so when I was a seconde resident at the maybe intern at Massachusetts General Hospital I was working with a very very talented Nur nurse practitioner she would go see patients and then I would ask her you know what's what's the diagnosis of the patient and then sometimes she would say that this patient has [ __ ] life syndrome and so I was really intrigued by the term and I would ask her like what does that mean and she would basically say like okay so you have these people who come into the emergency room and if you look at what their diagnosis is they have like 15 they have ADHD PTSD Oppositional Defiant Disorder these were often times like children or adolescence major depressive disorder bipolar disorder and poly substance use so they have all of these different diagnosis and the thing about these diagnostic constructs is that the idea that that someone has six different independent brain pathologies or mental health pathologies that are all concurrent is exceedingly rare and so we use this term [ __ ] life syndrome to basically describe this group of people whose lives are so bad that as they are trying to survive in life they run into mental health challenges they go somewhere they get diagnosed with a particular thing and then just rack up these diagnoses so this is where the term [ __ ] life syndrome comes from so how did tell the difference between mental disorders and [ __ ] life syndrome I've been trying to answer this question for a while how do I know what's the cause and what's the effect when it comes to mental state am I depressed and suicidal because of how my life turned out or am I perceiving life to be more shitty than it is because of underlying mental disorders I've never been to a psychiatrist so I've never been diagnosed but I've been dealing with OCD since I was six I experience a lot of MDD anxiety social phobia and ADHD symptoms I've also been suicidal for more than 6 years the thing is most of those things appear so small when put next to seven figures in the bank account most of my issues would immediately disappear only then would I be able to do the things because I can not because I have to I experienced what I'd call a money induced paralysis it's very unlikely that I'll ever be financially independent and it's unlikely I'll ever find something interesting enough I deem worth pursuing for hours on end those realizations alone are enough to make me apathetic procrastinate on all matters and basically give up on life and wait for the right opportunity to kill myself I'd rather be dead than live a life I don't consider to be worth the effort I've been thinking about seeing a psychiatrist for the past few months but I have my doubts I procrastinate on making an appointment because it feels like my problems stem from money and it's not like they'll make me Rich over there that is enough justification for me not to go I also can't get myself to schedule other appointments blood tests physio dentist because in my if my life will remain the same despite improving in some areas then why bother I'll kill myself anyway without some magical Epiphany occurring in my mind I suspect there could be something wrong with my brain because plenty of other people have lives objectively worse than me yet they see survival as something of value and of itself that could be the result of them being ignorant me being ungrateful or my brain being disabled so some of us look at our lives and we say that things are objectively bad and we look at our lives and we think okay so like modifying my internal instrument is useless if my circumstances are bad right so we can say like okay I'm short I'm bald my chances of ending up with someone seem very very very very low so what's the point in trying like the my life is objectively bad and so then like the question is like okay is this mental illness like is this an appropriate adaptation to negative circumstances or is this a mental illness that is misinterpreting what my chances are how do I know which one it is the short answer is that it is a false dichotomy and that even if your circumstances are bad I believe that you can do drastic things to drastically improve your circumstances and if you're rebelling against that that is part of [ __ ] life syndrome which we'll kind of get to right so the first thing that I want you all to notice is that if I say that this is possible your mind will automatically have a reaction and so the problem with [ __ ] life syndrome is that you have objective problems and you have internal problems and the problem is that your object problems you may not be able to fix but even when you're subjectively hampering yourself it is very difficult to to fix your situation hey all' if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health it combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today so what is the difference between a setback and a failure so in both cases the objective reality can be the same I tried something and I failed the difference between a setback and a failure is whether I decide to try again and if I try again and then I succeed then the failure becomes a setback and if I decide to stop at that point the failure becomes a failure it is very unlikely that I'll ever be financially independent and it's unlikely I'll ever find something interesting enough I deem worth pursuing those those realizations alone are enough to make me apathetic procrastinate on all matters and basically give up on life right so this is where we have to be very very very careful because now what we see is that there is a objective circumstance on the outside which results in a realization and then that realization creates apathy procrastination and people giving up and then what is responsible for you staying stuck it is actually a combination of all of these things it is a false dichot so let's talk a little bit about [ __ ] life syndrome so this is a psychodynamic article that someone kind of talks about [ __ ] life syndrome so uh this is like so so this is what's really interesting the [ __ ] life syndrome is something that clinicians came up with so let's read this case okay in the letter from the doctor we learned that she had experienced a number of problems since early childhood she had initially been raised in foster care bad thing number one abused by a neighbor bad thing number two left home at only 17 Bad Thing number three subsequently engaged in a series of emotionally and sex sexually abusive relationships with men bad thing number four this is [ __ ] life syndrome this person it appears does not have a chance bad thing after bad thing after bad thing and there is a lot of data that supports that this is what happens right so we have a lot of studies on something called adverse childhood experiences which is that if you have a bad upbringing what tends to happen is that this correlates with worse mental health outcomes worse life outcomes this is very common so I've since become very curious about this expression [ __ ] life syndrome not the least because of the implicit consensus by everyone in the meeting including myself as to what it meant everyone knows what it means even though it's never been defined the phrase seemed to denote a level of long-standing poverty family breakdown lack of stability unemployment and potential risk factors common to many of the predominantly young working class patients referred to the service for [ __ ] of course is something that we generally prefer not to think about something we continually re get rid of or hide at the same time it is something that we cannot completely repudiate it is part of us something we need something that is in in ineluctably ineluctably I don't even know what that means part of our status as human beings is subjects those suffering from [ __ ] life syndrome then would be would seem to be those individuals whose problems are deemed to be so terrible so untouchable that they quite literally cannot be thought about and cannot be handled by the service no amount of you coming to my office one hour a week for therapy is going to fix your history of abuse your problems with employment your foster care background your history of trauma the ADHD the OCD there's no amount of therapy that will fix this objectively bad thing and so we call this [ __ ] life syndrome right because it's like it's it's too much to handle the question is can we do something about it and my belief is yes so there is this this construct that we have discovered in mental health called deaths of Despair I think this was originally discovered actually in the UK so there were these old fishing villages that used to have very robust economies and then once like the fishing industry left the town became like a ghost town There's No economy people started drinking people started committing suicide and as we tunnel down into why are people commit killing themselves what we discovered is that there's a lot of systemic factors that are causing this what we find is everyone in this town is an alcoholic and is suicidal not everyone but the rates are way higher and then in this neighboring town where things are socioeconomically better like the climate is the same the water is the same but like the economic situation is different we see way less suicide and alcoholic liver disease among other things so systemic and problems have systemic Solutions I 100% believe this this is part of the reason we started healthy gamer in the first place so I I want yall to really think about this why did we start this because I saw a systemic problem I realized no amount of like talking to people in my office is going to fix what I saw in my office was an increasing number of people who did not know how to live life they didn't know how they work and since you don't know how you work you can't figure out how to live life so this is what I want youall to understand you are a living organism and the whole point of a living organism is that it interacts and is shaped by its environment we are in a home ostatic relationship with our environment we adapt to our environment we shape our environment so it goes both ways so if it's hot outside I will start to sweat if it is cold outside that's called diaphoresis if it's cold outside I will have pyo erection which means I will have Goosebumps and my hair will stand on end my physical body adapts to the circumstances around me in order to try to succeed in this scenario so when we say that people with with [ __ ] life syndrome is this [ __ ] life syndrome is this mental illness the answer is both mental illness is often times the consequence or the adaptation to negative circumstances okay so I'll give you all simple example we consider PTSD a mental illness and why is it a mental illness because it does not allow human beings to live their life normally but what we also know about PTSD is that it is an adaptation is a mechanism of survival that the organism goes through so as a simple example of this if I've been traumatized in some way my body is on high alert my heart rate goes up my blood pressure goes up I start to think more catastrophically which is not a bug it's a feature it's an adaptation when the brain is faced with danger we need to focus on the worst case scenarios not the middle of the road scenario the problem is that these adaptations which allow us to survive prevent us from thriving because these two goals are fundamentally different so the problem in [ __ ] life syndrome is that the way that you wire is not to succeed it is to survive now I want yall to think about the implications of that really think about that for example like I'll give you all just a couple of examples so one thing that we develop is something like low self-esteem or we talk about this in the trauma guide one of the things that we see in [ __ ] life syndrome is the inability to consider the future so if we look at this post and you read it this person is not future oriented they are not planning for the future they are not doing steps 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 they are simply existing and responding to the environment they are apathetic they procrastinate and they're not like they're not exerting an influence to change their their situation now people can call this laziness but it's not laziness it's an adaptation so let's understand this I'll give you all just one example so when someone grows up in a deficient environment an environment that does not have stimulation what happens is our if we grow up in an environment where we are not allowed to plan for the future if we grow up in an environment where our circumstances control our future our brain loses sight of the ability to plan for the future okay so I'll give you all a simple example let's say I'm a kid and I want to have a birthday party because all my friends have a birthday party so I go to my mom and my dad and I say hey Mom and Dad can I have a birthday party this weekend with my friends and your mom and dad say sure then what happens is if you think about being a seven-year-old you can't plan your own birthday party you don't know how to order cake you don't know how to invite friends you don't know how to do any of that so it is your parents responsibility to do all of those things but if your parents if you have a single parent household and your parent is working three jobs if you have parents who struggle with substance use if you have parents who don't know how to operationalize their own problems because they have a history of trauma they don't know how to make your birthday party and so what happens is you have or in the worst case scenario your parents say yeah we can have a birthday party and then the day before the birthday party one of your parents is drunk and angry and they arbitrarily punish you for nothing that you did wrong and they say you don't get a birthday party because you're making too much noise you don't understand how to be respectful unrespectful kids disrespectful kids don't deserve birthday parties now when you grow up in an environment like this what is the cost of thinking about the future just pain you told all your friends hey I'm going to have a birthday party and what happens your birthday party gets canceled now you're ashamed now you feel disappointed now you feel like your expectations have been let down so what we see on Research from complex PTSD especially is that the capacity for your brain to think about the future requires that when you were a child and you think about the future that is rewarded but if thinking about the future leads to a punishment leads to expectations that get dashed lead to suffering then your brain is like this is a waste of time thinking about the future is only results in pain and nothing good ever comes of it so we're going to stop thinking about the future then the problem is that these adaptations cause future problems because you don't know how to craft a life that like is fulfilling right so this person may not even know like they say like pursuing a passion I don't know how to pursue a passion so the adaptations that we use to survive are the very things that prevent us from thriving now here's the really tricky thing is it turns out that these adaptations that you make will be deterministically bad for you in the future okay so remember that the organism is in homeostasis with the environment we're trying to survive so we're forming certain kinds of adaptations so if we look at some of these adaptations what we find is that these adaptations will become problematic in the future so what we know is that when people have a history of trauma and when they suffer from depression which by the way can be an appropriate U like almost like an adaptation or maladaptation from your circumstances so here's the chain of reasoning okay adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of depression so if you've had a [ __ ] life you are more likely to have depression once you add depression into the mix that creates perspective problems so there are multiple the I behind this but they're basically all agree that there's some kind of bias in our mind so we have memory biases this is wild so what we know is that there are memory biases in depression so a memory bias for negative material found that individuals diagnosed with depression recalled more generic or overgeneral memories that than did their non-depressed counterparts okay so this is kind of weird but what this means is that people with depression do not remember like positive details importantly the tendency to elaborate negative emotional information memory bias for this information and recall of overgeneral memories maybe associated with other cognitive aspects of depression so these are the three biases is this mental illness or is this [ __ ] life syndrome illness is a consequence of two things a genetic predisposition plus an environmental exposure so there is something that is part of you plus some environmental shaping results in something called a mental illness and this is really consistent with our studies of things like depression and adverse childhood experiences so if I have a crappy life my mind starts to get depressed the depression is a consequence of my past but it very actively and negatively shapes my future so we know that once you have some negative view of yourself it changes the way you perceive the world you pay attention to more negative stimuli so if we look at this p uh paper what we basically find is that if you're looking at a neutral face you will pick up negativity even within neutrality so what we know about cognitive bias and depression is let's say that I have multiple interactions throughout the day 25% of my interactions are positive 25% of my interactions are negative and 50% of my interactions are neutral once I have a cognitive bias from depression what this means is that I tend to overgeneralize the positive parts of my memory so the positive parts of my memory become vague and fuzzy the negative parts of my memory are negative and then the neutral Parts become negative so now in a life that is 25% good 25% bad and 50% in the middle my brain interprets that this is 75% bad and 25% neutral and this is where I know it sounds crazy but like the reason that I think [ __ ] life syndrome can get better is because there are three steps to this there is circumstances which are outside of control create an adaptation this adaptation creates your destiny now this you can't control but this you can fix and when you fix this this changes so that's what we're going to talk about today so now the question is how so I'm going to give you all just a couple of really simple examples of how you can change your thinking and what I see in people who have [ __ ] life syndrome and people who don't so first is when people don't grow up with adverse childhood experiences or in high socioeconomic status the first thing that's different is that people in [ __ ] life syndrome do not think that they can shape their future if I have [ __ ] life syndrome I grow up in an environment where my intentions do not shape my circumstances I'm so neglected in my household that my desires become worthless they have no bearing on the environment so once our brain realizes that our desire has no differential impact on the environment it decides let's forget about desire compare that to what we see in the worst cases as entitlement people who have high socioeconomic status where the world says hey you don't get to jump to the front of the line and their cognitive bias is so robust that they say everyone else needs to move out of the way they believe that they are allowed to shape the environment right so this is a huge difference and it leads to a huge difference in outcomes what shitlife syndrome teaches you is that what you do does not matter this is the lesson that you learn and once you learn this lesson then your future is determined the beautiful thing is that you can unlearn this lesson and when you unlearn this lesson and you discover that you can shape your circumstances then a lot of things will go well so I want you all to just think about two people when faced with some set of challenges one person believes that if I'm challenged there's nothing I can do about it and the other person believes there is something I can do about it I don't have to take it laying down what impact do you think those two attitudes will have on these people's lives so that's the first adaptation is simply believing that you can affect your your life or you can't can I shape my circumstances or can I not shape my circumstances and I'm not saying that people are are stupid for believing they can't shape their circumstances remember that if they believe this they believe this for a good reason it is because they haven't shaped their circumstances so this is the other thing about the human organism the human organism learns from the past and it carries that forward into the future now the problem is that sometimes the learning that we do is maladaptive so I'll give you all a great example of this so I don't know if yall played Dark Souls 1 but in Dark Souls 1 there's this like cheat kind of thing that you can do there's this dragon and you can shoot the dragon in the tail and if you shoot it enough times the tail falls off and you get this thing called The Dragon Tail sword now the dragon tail sword is op you can one-hot a lot of enemies so when I first played Dark Souls 1 I got the dragon tail sword cuz someone told me about it and I was one-shotting all the enemies and then I gave up on the game because it became too hard cuz at some point the dragon tail sword stops scaling and you can't One-Shot anything so later a friend I was talking to a friend of mine and he said you know what the dragon tail sword is the biggest scam in the game it is the biggest Noob trap in the game no wonder you gave up and I said what do you mean and he said if you get the dragon tail sword you never learn how to play the game you don't need to roll you don't need to Parry you don't need to like Zone people out you don't need to pay attention it is such a crutch so the way that I learned to play the game based on my circumstances set me up for a failure in the future now if I ask you okay so if I play with the Dragon taale Sword does this mean that I can't beat Dark Souls of course not but it requires you to adapt your general approach to the game and this is exactly what [ __ ] life syndrome is like it's very unlikely that I'll ever be Financial independent and it's unlikely I'll ever find something interesting interesting enough I deem worthy worth pursuing these real realizations make me jump to a conclusion so the way that I would like you know I've had patients like this before and there there are things that you can do to change this right so what I'd say is oh that's so interesting so unlikely Oliver find something interesting enough I deem worth pursuing so then I would talk to this person this like What I've Done Right is I'd ask him what is the nature of Interest what determines how interested you are is there anything that you can do to change your level of interest in something realizations are alone alone or enough to make me apathetic okay so let's talk about being apathetic if you are apathetic does that mean that you cannot act what is the relationship between feeling like acting and being able to act so as you start to dig into a lot of these nuances you start to see a lot of positive change because it's this stuff that is truly deterministic but my point is that the adaptations to survive will often times keep you from thriving and so you need to unlearn those adaptations and one of the most most important things that I want y'all to pay attention to is how quickly your mind jumps to a conclusion I can bet y'all money because I've seen this before anytime I talk about super challenging things what inevitably happens is someone will respond Dr K was saying this and they will jump to some kind of conclusion are they saying I'm screwed so think about even how you were receiving what I'm saying are you looking at it critically or is some part of your mind jumping up and saying this is wrong there are a thousand different things that mind will jump to so quickly and look at where all of those thoughts go all of th those thoughts result in inaction that's the problem look at where your mind goes this is a paper that shows that when you have a low perceived control when you don't believe you are in control of your of your life that creates stressful situations so our perception and results indicated that dependent interpersonal stress mediated the relationship between low perceived control and higher levels of social anxiety in in girls conversely boys who exhibited low perceived control experienced a greater occurrence of dependent interpersonal stressors so this is really important to understand when you believe you are out of control this creates stressors what this paper really shows us is that it is the perception of low perceived control that creates problems in your life and I'll give give you all an example if you're skeptical of that so let's say that I have a family emergency and I have a big pdue in one week and I need to email my professor to let them know there's a voice in my head that says hey let your professor know that you have a family emergency but then what happens is I procrastinate or I think maybe I can get the paper done or maybe I think I don't want I don't I don't feel good it makes me feel ashamed to ask for an extension there is a right action to take in this situation but you procrastinate in doing the right action and then what happens is a week goes by you haven't worked on the paper now it's the night before the paper is due and now you begin to question yourself because you're like now if I ask like if I tell them oh there was a family emergency a week ago but now I'm asking for an extension on the paper the professor isn't going to believe me they're going to think I'm making it up I really should have done it a week ago this anxiety creates a negative situation if you had not been anxious in the first place you would have sent the email you'd have said hey I have a family emergency I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be able to get to the paper just wanted to let you know we all know that is the right answer and if you look at your life you're [ __ ] procrastinating you know what the right answer is the problem is you can't do it and it is not that your life is randomly out of control it's because you [ __ ] neglect it you procrastinate that creates your situations we see this so much in our life I'm not saying bad things don't happen to us absolutely there's bad RNG and now we get to really the Crocs of [ __ ] life syndrome which is that in this life there are things that are outside of your control and things that are inside of your control and the beautiful thing about the homeostatic nature of life this isn't just humans this like even amoeba when amoeba detect the wrong chemical gradient they will move in the opposite direction they are responding to life and the problem that we have in [ __ ] life syndrome is that we cannot respond appropriately to life I need to send my professor an email asking for an extension that is what the situation demands there is a answer here what is it that gets in the way of me engaging the right answer this is what gets in the way interpretation bias attentional bias oh my God my professor will think I'm pathetic oh my God he'll dislike me oh my God this hasn't worked in the past I've asked for help in the past and it hasn't worked there is a memory bias there but it doesn't mean that it's all false so another big thing that people with [ __ ] life syndrome learn and think about how devastating this is to learn asking for help doesn't help two kinds of people in life those who ask for help and those who don't and why does someone stop asking for help because they learn it's useless all of the thoughts and beliefs that you have in your mind if you have [ __ ] life syndrome are warranted they are Justified that does not make them right this is a very important Nuance to understand you can have a lot of logic for believing what you believe but that does it the construct that you have in your brain does not dictate what happens in the future so the first is even the belie belief of self-determination the second is jumping to conclusions the third is not asking for help and the fourth thing that we also talked about is the loss of future orientation this one is very hard so if you look at some people like you look at some of these people and they're like living a life and part of living their life is like a dimension of future this is so simple that it's like I don't even know if this makes sense you look at some people and they're doing [ __ ] in order you guys know what I mean they're like today I'm going to I'm training for a marathon in August of 2025 and I look at these people I'm like what the [ __ ] man I'm trying to get through the week and they're like yeah I have a bucket list I'm like bro I'm trying to survive the day I'm just waiting for the next DOTA patch to drop how do you have a bucket like I don't have a bucket list someone recently asked me and they were like what have you done on your bucket list and I'm like I don't have a bucket list and then I was like kind of like is this because I'm yogic detached from my life and I'm like content with my life or is it because like when I was a [ __ ] degenerate gamer and I was just like [ __ ] waking up every day and playing video games for 20 hours a day I stopped thinking about the future I think it's a little bit of both the concept that I can accomplish goals in my life is foreign to me this idea and think about the hubris of having a bucket list this idea that if you set these random ass goals that are so far away that you will one day achieve even a portion of them like what the [ __ ] do you all get how that's a their brain is is working differently it is thinking about the future Dimension as something that can be realized and literally half of the people that I work with and I mean half okay I think this a pretty good estimate because I work with losers and I work with winners and the winners I work with have all these goals and the losers that I work with don't have any and it's like their mind operates in a different way this too relates to trauma so we know that once again surviving in a prisoner of war camp thinking about the future is a waste of time so our brain on learns thinking about the future so when we have [ __ ] life syndrome is it bad absolutely is the deck stacked against you absolutely but there is hope because what is really holding you back is not the circumstances that is what has held you back that I completely agree and this is a Nuance that's important but what holds you back what's held you back for the last 5 years is different from what will hold you back from the next 5 years and even remember there's no future orientation so even the capacity to realize that is impaired that the future will be different from the past when all you are trying to do is survive every day is the same and we see this so much it's so sad in our community I'm proud of this in a weird way because this is a place where I want youall to come and feel this it's okay to feel this we don't want to we don't want you to feel ashamed of feeling this way but people come here and they're like I'm existing I'm not living so that's what we want to help you with and the really sad thing about this is not fair forget about Fair we can get caught up in Fair as much as you want to I don't know about Fair it makes me sad I don't think life is fair right I can't I haven't seen that I mean I decided on this my first rotation as a third-year medical student I was one week in the third year and I decided fairness is [ __ ] all you have to do is spend one week in the Pediatric ICU and you'll realize fairness is a waste of I don't even know how this works there's a six-year-old kid with glioblastoma multi fori actually not a six-year-old patient with Gast multiform me was a couple years later that happens closer between 25 and 45 years old with a kid it was like a blood cancer leukemia or something right you look at this and you're like how there's no fairness here this is dumb right and I'm thinking about this patient with gastor well they just do great dude had kids was happily married and it's like boom one day you got a terminal cancer you've got three months to live like that's how gastor gasta multiform he hits you it's a rapidly Progressive very debilitating doesn't happen when you're old happens when you're young when you're in the prime of your life there's no fairness here but there doesn't need to be fairness that's the crazy thing right there is what you can control and when you're looking for the world to fix your problems like I just have lost faith in the world like I hate to say it and now this is where you all have to be careful right because your negative bias if you're depressed will be Dr K has lost faith in the world which means I should give up no I'm saying the exact opposite I've lost faith in the world but I've not lost faith in you there's a huge difference I don't count on the World to fix anything that's why I'm here because I saw a generation of people whose lives were getting screwed and I was like I I don't know if anyone's going to fix that in fact I went to people so many smart people so many compassionate people so many dedicated people who are doing nothing about technology addiction who doing nothing to address Rising suicide rates Rising unemployment rates in young men who are doing nothing to address toxicity towards women online stalking and dickpics I have no faith in the world but I have faith in you because this is all we can control so if you see some problem in the world there's once again two options right either I can't do something about this or I can try that's it those are your two options and that's why I think [ __ ] life syndrome can get better because I have worked with people to address these cognitive biases and we have moved from there is nothing I can do about this to I can try and the really sad thing is that even when circumstances improve it doesn't always lead to better outcomes so if you look at women who are abused in the household they're more likely to be abused in romantic relationships I think something like one in Six Women will be sexually or raped actually so even sexual assault could be higher intimate partner violence 30.7% of women with ADHD are likely to have intimate partner violence this is a staggering number and if you look at this like this is bad and the problem why does this happen why is it that if you were abused once you are likely to be abused again is it because the world is rigged against you no this is the really crazy thing it is because of the way that you engage in relationships see when you have a high self-esteem and someone mistreats you you leave the relationship but but when you are dependent when your goal is survival not thriving then you are willing to tolerate abuse it's a completely different way of looking at the world what's the goal and in [ __ ] life syndrome the goal is survival not thriving that creates all kinds of problems it keeps our life in this weird limbo zone of not actually ending right like we're struggling along we're kind of chugging along but we're never getting anywhere we're not quitting the race because once again I had a brilliant Pati who who taught me this who tried to commit suicide seven times and I was like do I need to be worried about you and he's like no I was like help me understand brilliant guy and he said well the seventh time I realized that like some part of me does not want to die I've been trying to kill myself and something within me is fighting for life so I'm going to stop fighting that thing and that's all it took for him no more suicidality right so there's something within you even if you feel like everything is like lost and whatever there is something within you that strives we look at this post and here I am [ __ ] bashing this person right I'm saying oh look at this cognitive bias but I want youall to point out pay attention to something this person posted this person is trying to change this person is saying my my life is unsolvable nothing's ever going to end up anywhere and they're not taking it laying down this is a huge prognostic sign in the right direction this is a win the post may be full of negativity but the fact that there is a post is a win and this is our bias right so now what I want youall to do is if you're listening to this if you've been listening to this did you consider consider that and if the answer is no why not this is bias so [ __ ] life syndrome is not deterministic I do not believe that is the deck stacked against you absolutely can we count on the World to fix things I don't know big question mark the world isn't all bad by the way it's a lot of good in the world right but what I have faith in is y'all I have faith that if you understand the way that you function if you understand what your biases are if you understand the way that you view the world determine some of the way that the world is then you can change your life can change [Music]