The Think Free Rebellion
The Think Free Rebellion is a personal choice. It is the choice to make yourself the authority and author of your life.
Transcript
Today is going to be a little bit different because it's not going to be so much of a discussion as I want to share some ideas with you, and it's about changing the nature of the group and the base of the group. And then so I'm going to run through some ideas. If you have any questions about anything as I'm going along, just interrupt me. I'm going to run through this and then we'll see. You can see whether you agree or disagree.
OK, so. The idea so the basic idea is. That if we have a group that's formed around relationships. And people talk about sharing different perspectives. There's always a basis for conflict. And so whenever you're dealing with conflict, you have to look at where's the point of agreement? And so I've been giving it a lot of thought to thinking of. What's really behind, like, personally, most my philosophical view and where this conflict come in in terms of it.
So I want to start with a personal basis and as to how why, I think thinking free is the key to everything. And then we're working back. OK, so. When we talk about relationships. Or anything, we're talking about different things because we got different experiences and different perspectives, and so oftentimes that means there's a clash when people think they're talking about the same things. But actually they're coming from a completely different angle. You know, the thing about if six blind people come and see an elephant, they all have a different experience and they call each other lawyers because they don't understand from that frame of reference.
So, OK, so. The question of what's between you and your perfect life or your perfect relationship, now I want to share my my model of what about that? What causes us to what's between us and them perfect basis and explain, OK, hear me and explain why from my perspective. So. What are we looking at here is. I think. That based on my life, I spent four or five years studying happiness. Before relationships and really what meant what happiness, what makes someone happy is basically we have a blueprint, we have a blueprint that we can't change.
It's genetically what we believe to be. And so becoming happy is a is a journey of growth, is a journey of growth into becoming more of who we are and expressing that potential that we have. So this is kind of representing that journey. Now, what happens for a lot of people, for most people probably is somewhere they get swayed off course and so in terms of relationship can become stale or they can become bored, they can become bitter or even things go really wrong.
And they end up with an in somewhere that is quite toxic. So. What is so I'm looking at what why do people get swayed off? And the airline industry, they have a one in 60 rule. So basically, a flight path is similar to this that an airplane will set off and it's aiming for wherever it's going to land. But all the time it's getting buffeted by wind, by turbulence, by all these factors which take it, of course.
So in the airline industry, the one in 60 rule is that for every 60 miles an aeroplane travels, every one degree off is going to be one mile off. So, James, earlier in atomic talks about if if an aeroplane sets off from Los Angeles, it's four and a half degrees of. By the time it would have reached New York, it's instead in Washington, D.C.. And so I think that's an analogy for what happens in our life and in our relationships, is that that's what we're meant to be.
And then we get swayed off so we don't actually become the. So why do we get swayed? And that's really three things. There's. Ignorance. So in the example of the planes, planes have crashed when you act, when there was a miscommunication between them and the air traffic control so that they thought they were in a different place. And so obviously, they're like crashing into a mountain when they weren't expecting anything to be there. So what happens to us individually is we're born helpless, we born not knowing anything.
And. So we have to learn the ways of the world because we can't become. When we operate in the world. Like from day one. So we grow up helpless and we grow up and our parent or caregiver is looking after us, but they're also telling us all the traditions or all the rules and all the customs of our society. And that's the way that we pass on information generation to generation, and a lot of that is useful because otherwise we'd start from day one.
We have fire, we have technology, we have everything that we have because we don't have to start from the beginning again. And so then we've institutionalized these ways of passing on values and beliefs and expectations, and this comes from the wider culture, from so that we get to school, we've got the media, which is giving us certain ideas and values, religion and all of these kind of things. So they're basically giving us the map. But the map that they're giving us isn't necessarily Ahmet.
So we talked about the fairy tale framework, it is one of the biggest things that sways people off in terms of relationships. And. This is a mistake and this is something that we're told and we set up with expectations and beliefs and assumptions that aren't actually true. And so there's a lot of things and even without meaning to like when you're five years old and the teachers tell you, shut up, no one wants to hear from you when they say, like when you're made to feel stupid, all of these things become lessons to us.
All of these things become fears that we don't stand out. We don't say what we really mean. And so all of this. Sways us off our individual unique path. So this free, otherwise, what is free, why so why is ignorance, and it may be that we don't know what we're doing. We don't know, like we haven't got an accurate map. Or it may be that the assumption or the expectation or belief wasn't true, then the other two are fair.
And a lot of the times the fear comes from the idea of public speaking is is the biggest fear because. Of we are afraid of what other people tell us, because we've we've been told certain things and we've learnt certain things along in our childhood, so that makes it frightening to stand out. It makes it frightening to stand up for what you believe as opposed to what you're told. What everyone else thinks is true and said in the other way is.
That there's all these shiny objects, so. Like the get rich quick schemes, the idea, the hacks and the shortcuts and all these kind of things which are tell us that we need to. Do certain things, say a certain thing, so in terms of relationships. Like what stops us fear? So, for example, if you're dating is the fear of standing out is the fear of rejection. If you're in a relationship and is the fear of being honest, the fear of being vulnerable.
So what's the shiny object? So it may be that someone so attractive. That your state, of course, because they're not the perfect person, but they're so hot, or it may be that you desperately want it to work with a certain person who is an. The person who is going to be right for the. OK. All right, so we're looking. So where was I? So in terms of being swayed off by other people's like by by media references and things, I just want to use one example is does everyone needs to be Dimond's?
The rest of the base diamonds, so basically it's the story of why in 1930, 10 percent of engagement engagement rings with diamond rings. Now, something like 75, 75 to 80 percent. And so basically, that was a concerted, concerted advertising campaign for a generation of women, so Dimond's didn't have a lot of use and the birth had funded this big expedition to find precious resources. And they found these mines of diamonds and they had this glut of diamonds that there was no market for.
And so there wasn't really any value. And so they tasked advertising agencies for about 30 years to try and work out different approaches to find the market. And essentially what they did. Was like the winning campaign was they targeted a whole generation of women from about 15 to 20. So this was in the nineteen thirties. So all the women who were of, like, thinking about being proposed to them and basically told them a dime and lost forever, if your boyfriend proposes to you and he doesn't use a diamond ring, he doesn't mean it forever.
He doesn't really care. And so what happened was this there's this pressure on the girls that if they had an engagement ring wasn't diamond, it was a sense of you've accepted an engagement ring from a boy that doesn't care about you. And so they then put pressure on two boys and say, well, I want a diamond ring and. Then they came out with all these campaigns, like, if your boyfriend doesn't like what what's a lifetime of happiness worth, isn't it worth a couple of months of your life?
A couple of months of wages. And so basically in the generation. The diamond ring became. Like standard. For no other reason than the fact that the birds needed needed the marketplace to sell their diamonds. And so when we look at the messages that we get from the media. And when you look at magazines, when you look at TV, all of them are exist. Their business model is to exist in order to sell advertising. And so when you're looking at social media, it's basically the same thing that as it said, like if you if you aren't paying for something, you are the product.
And so when we look at. So when we look at the way that like and I'm not here with the conspiracy theory, I'm not bashing. Economics or money, but what we have to look at the motivation of. Advertising and media is basically to sell stuff. And so how so when we look at. Where does that lead to, like a commercial marketplace leads to? Being creating, I want to use the food industry as an example, so the food industry, like if you if you have a raw potato, is not really worth very much.
If you make it into chips, is worth a lot more. And if you make it into crisps, is worth a lot more. But what you've really done is you've taken a basic food and you've made it less nutritious. So. So the food industry works by pandering to our taste buds, as in sugar fat. So. And so, like we now, decades later, have an obesity crisis. Because they're creating the food that's going to that's going to compel us, make us crave and make us buy their products.
And so it becomes a rush to who can have the most sugar, who can have the most. So. In this way, so that it becomes a bit different and we have those suits. And so that's really what happened over 30, 40 years in the food industry, and so why we now have an obesity crisis. Now, when you look at. In terms of information and social media. Or social media is. Their business model is to sell our attention.
And the way that they get our attention is by. You know, things that things like Areva polarize us and outrageous, and so there's this culture of outrage and it's like people talking about in social dilemmas and other places that basically what you see in your news feed. Is individual to what you believe. Because so, for example, if you want to advertise on Facebook, you're not allowed to say anything that might target someone or might make someone feel uncomfortable.
Because if it if it's challenging, it makes someone feel uncomfortable, they're not going to spend as long on Facebook. So Facebook blocks those those ads out. And so basically. What we all get in our face. All the people that we agree with, the groups and the pages and things that we already agree, so we're not.
And what that leads us to is groupthink, which is basically where people who believe the same thing. Make poor decisions because they don't have the diversity of opinion. So. OK, so so basically. What I'm saying is. The world out there is kind of pushing us. To fit into it is is easy to sell us stuff, whether it's products with Armani or whether it's an ideology. And when you look like so you can see this play out in the recent Trump.
And to a lesser extent in Brexit, in terms of. We don't. Actually get to see the facts, we get to see the conspiracy theories, we get to see the dramatics and the polarized sides, and so it pushes people apart and it stops open and honest. Debate. OK, so so that's where we get swayed off by ignorance or by assumptions or beliefs or expectations that aren't actually true, and then we get swayed off by fear because our narrative makes us afraid, to be honest.
Makes us feel unworthy, makes us feel we're missing out or and so that's how we stray, we stray in terms of when something is easy. So so that's really the three ways that we get straight, that we stray off our path. So does that make sense so far? Could you repeat what the freeways are, please? Yeah, so it's ignorance, which which is like not having an accurate path or being so out of fear and desire.
OK, so the next be able to talk about is the difference between when we navigate that path. The way that we get swayed off in terms of fear and desire and often also ignorance is by emotions. Now. I'm like sometimes like when I describe things is very logical, sometimes it can seem cold. And. So I want to talk about why that is. Is that. There is when we say, for example, when we're talking about a relationship, when we're in a relationship, we're in it for the emotion and the benefit of being in the relationship is the emotional side the way that we can judge.
The quality of a relationship. Is by the emotions. When we feel good, we're on a path. When we feel bad, it's because we're off our path. So the why and that and. Why don't we evaluate the relationships is all emotional. However, the problem is that people. Use emotion to navigate. So when you're making a decision so like if, for example, if you had a GPS that worked on navigation, it said, OK, we're going to go down this road because because this is really pretty.
Right. I really like this route. We're going to take this route. You'd end up in a different place. And so when we navigate our emotion, when we navigate our relationship or even the life. Based on emotion. We take the wrong path because the role of navigation is is mediating what we want with where we are. And if we disregard the reality of where we are and like the map of the land. Then we just go where we want to go, and that's where we get switched off.
So logic is the bridge between what you want and where you want to go, so logic is a terrible reason to be in a relationship is a terrible reason to judge. Where people overthink is when where they try to judge their relationship through logic. So the emotion is for how the relationship's going. You judge based on emotion, why you want to be in a relationship is for the emotional feeling. But when you make emotional like so like when people really, really attach someone and they say the same people who are in abusive relationships, the guy that I love him and, you know, I, I, I can't leave, so.
And that's all because we were attached to certain outcome, because we were afraid of something...
