Name: Simon here. I made my own channel. Here's the first video
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T22:21:32.000Z
Duration: 55 min 27 s
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Hi everyone. Welcome to the first episode for my new channel, Simon's Book Club.

Participle clauses

I'm putting the full episode here on Ichikimchi as an example of the videos I'll be creating over on my own channel, also named Simon's Book Club. Yes, I have finally made my own channel.

Future continuous

It's long overdue. I know. Every month I'll be picking a new book on the latest and the most interesting psychology and science of well-being, really digging into it, and then creating a podcast and video talking about what I've learned, how I've applied it to my life, and how I think it relates to the other books I've been reading. I'll also be hosting a monthly book club meetup, both online and in person. I'm going to tell you about it at the end of this monster of a video.

If you're still interested at the end of the video, then I'd love to see you and hear your thoughts on these books as well. So this month I'm talking about my experience with the book

Transcend, the new science of self-actualization, which is written by Scott Barry Coffin, who is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist. He's founder and director of the Center for the

Science of Human Potential and an honorary principal fellow at the University of Melbourne

Center for Well-Being Science. He's taught at Columbia University, Yale, NYU, University of

Pennsylvania, and he hosts a psychology podcast, which is the most popular psychology podcast on the planet. One that I'm now totally hooked on. Give it a listen. It's good stuff. In this episode,

I'll be discussing Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how our perception of reality is distorted and constrained by those needs. I'll be deep diving into the depths of my own narcissism.

That'll be a good one. Talking about self-compassion, the characteristics of self-actualization, PTSD, and post-traumatic growth, and how some romantic relationships fail, evolutionary game theory, some challenges with psychometric scales, giving love versus deficient love, the role of the nervous system in finding meaning and purpose, and finally, how I've incorporated this book into my next calling in life. It's not entirely navel-gazing and it's not entirely dry science either. I'm going to try to blend the personal and the impersonal here and I hope that it's something that you find interesting. Also, I dig humanistic psychology. I feel like psychology is often associated with helping people that are in some ways damaged and really zeroes in on that. Talking about mental health is more like talking about mental illness. But I think humanistic psychology wants to go beyond fixing what's broken, beyond just looking at you for your shortcomings and isms, and goes more into helping you grow into your fullest potential. There's more of a sense of optimism here and that resonates a lot more for me. I chose this book because even though self-help books are an 11 billion dollar industry just in the US alone and there are so many to choose from, this guy seems to be as credentialed as it comes. He's taught at universities that I really respect, some that I actually want to go to, and has conversations with other well-credentialed psychologists that I respect as well. So I think what he says holds weight and this book has a lot to offer. It's framed through Kaufman's fanboying-slash-scholarship of Abraham Maslow's work.

Maslow, who you might remember from learning about the hierarchy of needs, which looks like a pyramid with physiological needs at the bottom, including food and sleep and health. Safety needs are next, like shelter and money and a job. And then we have love and belonging needs, like friends and family.

And then self-esteem needs, like confidence and accomplishment. And then at the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, which is where creativity, morality, and psychological well-being come into fruition. The goal is always self-actualization, to live the fullest life you possibly can.

Though for many of us, self-actualization is out of reach and we're often stuck at the bottom half of the pyramid, in a kind of scarcity mindset, either with financial insecurity that dictates how we're spending our lives, anxious or avoidant attachment styles that jeopardize our connections, or with self-esteem issues that get in the way of living a fulfilling life. When our thoughts are dominated by our deficiencies, it's almost impossible to see the world and our lives for their potential. Interestingly enough, one of the first big wows that I got from this book is that Maslow never framed his hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, but a marketing company in the 60s reframed it as one, and that image has stuck with us ever since. And that does the list of needs a bit of a disservice, unfortunately, as it's not as helpful as it can be, nor is it true to Maslow's vision. And so Kaufman suggests that instead of using the image of a pyramid for summits, where we're climbing and ascending, where we can start thinking of ourselves as higher or better than others, let's think of these needs instead as making up the parts of a sailboat, which is meant for surfing, for experiencing the world. After our base is secure, the next three growth needs of exploration, love, and purpose make up the sail of the boat that we can open up. And then with all six, we can explore the world, we could be generous and loving, we could contribute to society, we could self-actualize, and then ultimately we can transcend the self. And that sounds like a nicer image to me, I think. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to one of the major needs, with the first three chapters being on the deficiency needs, where we tend to have the most suffering, and the next three being on the growth needs, and how they lead to better health and greater life satisfaction. Kaufman starts off each chapter with a story about how

Maslow came to think about the need, and then Kaufman describes the need with extensive research and resources. Each chapter is super dense, with many quotes from other psychologists in their publications, and the list of references at the back of the book is massive. If you're like me, and you like to check up on references as they're noted, this book is going to take a long time to read. I don't think this is a read once and done kind of book either. I think it's a great book to use as a reference manual, where if any of the topics discussed interest you, you can follow

Kaufman down the rabbit hole of his reference articles, books, and podcasts. For real, this is very thorough, and it's one of the reasons why I love it. It's not just a stream of thoughts and theories where I'm rushed along, and wowed by aphorisms and pretty writing, and where I hoped that I could follow the thesis. No, I like to double check the ideas as they come my way. Kaufman's writing is totally my jam. So let's start digging into the first half of the book, which goes into great detail to show where we are deficient in our needs, and how is that affecting our well-being.

How does low self-esteem get in the way of life satisfaction? How is fame seeking an unsatisfying way to escape loneliness? How does social isolation lead to a slew of health problems? Or, in other words, how have your deficiencies led to more deficiencies? Basically, the overwhelming feeling

I got from the first three chapters is how I'm f***ed, and how my being f***ed is leading to deeper levels of f***ery. The chapters aren't entirely doom and gloom, though, as they suggest a few strategies to healthfully integrate and how to satisfy our needs for safety, connection, and self-esteem. Which sounds great, but there's solutions to be worked on, which will take time.

And during that time, while the deficiencies persist, so too will the discomfort. To hell with that. I want to feel better now. Please and thank you. In that spirit, there's a very fundamental point of wisdom in this book that's helped me out a lot, and it's this.

Our deficiencies act as lenses through which we perceive the world. We don't see the world as it is. We don't see fundamental truth as it is. None of us have access to it. Instead, we see the world, our surroundings, and the people through the interface of satisfying our needs.

For our chronically and extremely hungry man, utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating. Anything else will be defined as unimportant. Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy may all be waved aside as fripperies that are useless since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone.

Now, I thought this was an absolutely brilliant insight, one that tied together a lot of my past experiences. Let me give some examples of this here. I remember reading the book Homo Sapiens a while ago and being surprised at for just how long the whole world was on the brink of starvation.

Put this quote by Maslow into context, and it makes sense how utopia was often described as a land of milk and honey, which to me doesn't sound like utopia at all. The land of milk and honey translates to me as a land of indigestion and rashes. No, thank you. Think to yourself what heaven looks like for you, and there's a good chance that you're describing a place that fulfills what you're wanting most, what you're perceiving as a lack in your life.

Or, let's think about purpose for a bit. It struck me the other day when I read that Elon Musk tweeted that his goal in space travel is to preserve the light of consciousness, which is something I find very important as well, but to others, some responded to him with, pay your taxes.

To Musk, where the insecurities of money aren't an issue that concern him personally, his great goal is to ensure that consciousness persists in the universe. For real, staying on earth isn't a long-term goal, as we have an appetite for destruction and the tools for it as well, and if we don't destroy ourselves, then give it enough time and the dangers of space will do the job for us. For others though, this idea isn't important, as their lens for life is heavily tinted by financial deprivation and inequality, and Musk's greater goals are waved aside not only as unimportant fripperies, but as distractions from what to them is more important. Another example, on a personal level, someone dear to me suffers from PTSD, and she's very often getting triggered and activated, and in a state of constantly feeling unsafe. I remember having a discussion with her about finding purpose in my life and how I want the work I do in the future to provide me with a sense of meaning, and she found that to be bullshit and idealistic. For her, setting up a safe space for herself and for others was her main concern. I even experienced it with my own family. I told them about my goals to live life where my actions are in accordance with my values, to read a lot about psychology, to create content that I think would help people suffer less and thrive more, and to foster a community where we can discuss these ideas openly, vulnerably, and with curiosity. My mom, who grew up very poor in Poland right after World War II, just wanted to know, yeah, but what are you going to do about money? No, I don't know yet, mom. I'm trying to figure it out. So the point being, I found this idea of deprivation salience changes the way we perceive what's important in life to be pretty accurate to my experiences of the world, and also with my own sense of discomfort. The more that I'm in a scarcity mindset, the more my perception of the world will change, and not in a good way. Is it possible for me to be aware of this, and then to drop the sense of urgency and need? I find meditation helpful in this regard. I try to cultivate the feeling of an absence of a sense of lack, to ask myself the question, what is here now when there's no problem to solve, and in a way, to come to my senses? And with that, personally, I found myself less identified with the narrative of deprivation, and I found it easier to be more present in the moment, but not all the time. It's so easy to slip back into deficiency mind. I think this idea of deprivation sensibilities is a useful way to understand how people project their insecurities as well, because I'm not the only one operating through this model. Others are too. Hell, probably you are as well. And it ties into last month's book club, where we discussed nonviolent communication. In people's judgments of the world, of you, and of others, a compassionate response would be to hear the needs behind their words, rather than to argue against their judgments, criticisms, condemnations, moralizing, and shoulds that they're couched in. Not only do unmet needs muddy the way we speak to others, these needs change the way we interact with the world as a whole. This isn't just my idea. Kaufman suggests as much when he says that deficiency needs, which Maslow referred to as D needs, are motivated by a lack of satisfaction, whether it's the lack of food, safety, affection, belonging, or self-esteem. The D realm of existence colors all of our perceptions and distorts reality, making demands on a person's whole being. Feed me, love me, respect me. The greater the deficiency of these needs, the more we distort reality to fit our expectations and treat others in accordance with their usefulness in helping us satisfy our most deficient needs.

That point is so important, I'll read it again. The greater the deficiency in those needs, the more we distort reality. Once I started applying this to myself, and then finding ways to settle myself and relax, I found myself catching my anxious thoughts a lot more easily, and being able to feel more at ease with what's around me. Sure, it doesn't solve the deficiencies themselves immediately, but at least I don't have to be gripped by ruminating about their absence, which I think is a step in the right direction. I think now would be a good time to go over the self-esteem section of security, as it was one that I wrestled with the most, seeing how it focused so much on narcissism, which, well, is kind of complicated for me to talk about online, given my public history surrounding it. So let's talk about narcissism for a bit.

All right. Hello, everybody. My name is Simon, and I'm a narcissist.

Now, I could feel within me a deep discomfort with admitting that I'm a narcissist, because it's a term that's been popularized, and in turn, overused and misunderstood. And I worry about giving myself a one-way ticket to the shadow realm of the canceled, but I'm going to lean into that discomfort, and instead of arguing why I'm not a narcissist, I'll just embrace that it's a part of me. But a part of the discomfort comes with most people just knowing about grandiose narcissism, of an overestimation of the self, and a belief in one's superiority over others, which is something that, to my core, I just don't identify with. And reading Coffman's explanation of grandiose narcissism didn't raise any alarm bells for me at all.

There's another kind of narcissism called vulnerable narcissism, and oh boy, did that section get me in my feelings. So I'm going to get to talking about how Coffman describes it more in a bit, but first, there's a bit of confusion around the difference between self-esteem and narcissism. They're not the same. It's possible to like yourself and not be narcissistic.

Healthy self-esteem comes from two big factors, which is a sense of self-worth and mastery.

Narcissism, on the other hand, arises out of a sense of being superior to others.

As for why it's so easy to label someone with healthy self-esteem as a narcissist, let's go back to the deficiency lens I mentioned earlier. If you've got a low sense of self-worth yourself, then it would be easy for you to project that onto others and to misperceive their self-worth as being narcissistic. I'm sure that you've heard someone say, oh, he's so full of himself. She thinks she's better than everyone. And maybe you've even been one to say this yourself.

So before you're quick to label someone as a narcissist, I think it's worthwhile to see if you've got a healthy sense of self-esteem first. You could do this test online and calculate your score if you look up Rosenberg's self-esteem scale, or you could follow along here. Check all that apply. For self-worth, can you sincerely say, I like myself? I'm a worthwhile human being.

I am very comfortable with myself. I am secure in my sense of self-worth. I have enough respect for myself. When it comes to having a healthy sense of mastery, can you say, I'm highly effective at the things I do? I'm almost always able to accomplish what I try for. I perform very well at many things. I often fulfill my goals. I deal well with challenges in my life.

Now you could probably look at these sets of statements and still not be able to tell between healthy self-esteem and narcissism, as someone displaying grandiose narcissism can probably agree with many of those statements and still have high self-esteem of themselves. So let's start looking at some of the differentiating factors as well, all of which aren't something that you can use to diagnose another person in narcissism as the main crux of number two and number three come from early childhood development. Here's point number one. Those with a high self-esteem believe they are worthy and competent and strive for intimate, meaningful connections with others, but they don't necessarily view themselves as superior to others. Good point here. Narcissism comes out of a sense of relative measuring up. So let's stay away from comparisons. They're not good for anyone. Point number two, whereas self-esteem tends to be at its lowest in adolescence and slowly increases throughout life. Narcissism tends to peak in adolescence and gradually declines throughout the lifespan. So for number two, I think I'm doing all right. I'm getting older and with it, my sense of ego is diminishing and with it, my sense of narcissism too. I think

I'm able to do this as well as I've read a lot about Buddhism lately, and I feel pretty knowledgeable about it. And I've always been very smart at school and I've been able to be great at things

I set out to do. I think I'm pretty special in this respect. So maybe narcissism doesn't apply to me. Okay. With that in mind, let's look at point number three. Narcissism tends to develop in tandem with parental over-evaluation. Parents who raise children who exhibit high levels of narcissism tend to over-acclaim their child's knowledge, overestimate their child's IQ, over-praise their child's performance, and even tend to give their child a unique name to stand out from the crowd. So if you couldn't tell, my commentary for number two was a joke to set up number three. But joking aside, number three was where my alarm bells really started blaring while grandiose narcissism didn't really have that effect. I remember closing the book at that point and needing to go for a very long walk because almost all of number three applied to me.

My parents told me that I'm the greatest son in the world, that I'm the smartest, the handsomest, the best at everything I do. I was told that I was a genius. Yes, I know. I know. It was super unhealthy for me and I know that it has long-term effects on me. I'm kind of tempted to quote this be the verse here. They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They give you all the faults they had and give some extra just for you. Just for me. So I could see how the third point really planted the seeds for me blossoming into the narcissist that I became.

Though I still feel kind of resistance to the idea since I didn't view myself as superior to others. My sense of self-esteem really kind of sucked. I thought lowly of myself for a long time and had a very unhealthy sense of self-worth. If you would have asked me three years ago to answer the first five questions about self-esteem, I would have said fuck no to all of them.

So here's a good point to talk about vulnerable narcissism. The research on vulnerable narcissism suggests that high levels of uncertainty about one's worth as a human being often brings along with it hairpin triggers of shame and reactive hostility. Yep. I've definitely felt this all my life and I know that this has been very damaging to my relationships. Avoidance of situations that may activate such triggers. Check. As in most recently, I totally checked off the internet for a while. Stopped showing my face online and just showed fudgy. I lied to the new people I met about my YouTube past. I actually told people that my job was in travel and tourism. And once I did open up to people about my YouTube past, I asked them not to look up my videos. Next point.

Grandiose fantasies of receiving validation and respect from others.

Oh God, how I dreamed of and imagined that I'd be able to say something that would change the mind of those that now hate me. Even now. But I've learned to let that shit go.

Kinda. Kinda learned how to let that shit go. Next.

A constant need for validation and attention from others, including feeling entitled to the attention of others, and constant resentment for not being appreciated.

Check. Hell, is there anything stronger than a check? Super check. I made a whole career off of this. I remember at the tail end of the height of my YouTube career, I found the greatest rush, the greatest satisfaction in this, not in the shooting or the editing of the videos, not in the creative part, but right at that moment of publishing. When the comments would come flooding in. High praise from people who were waiting for the video to be released.

Notification squad. It was a drug. It was so addictive. I'm actually kind of torn about what to do with comments now in the future. I feel like leaving comments off of these videos for a while now, though it's not because I'm expecting overwhelming praise. I'm not that deluded.

I'm just not sure how I feel about reactive comments from people and if they're good for me to read or not. I think the longer that one takes in responding to someone, the healthier the response, whether it's online or offline, while the comment section of videos offers more speed and haste than opportunity for reflection. So the jury's still out on this one for me.

Next point, a hiding of one's felt needs and perceived weaknesses.

While I found this point understandable, I also found this one a bit debatable. Talking again about nonviolent communication, a central idea of that book was that we weren't taught how to express our needs to begin with. Many of us were taught to suppress our needs and feelings and not to burden or bother others with them. And so we're not really fluent in the language of expressing our needs and feelings, though we are very fluent in the language of judgments and thoughts and criticisms. In a way, I think a very big percentage of people will check this one off. And so I kind of find this point moot. You got something to say, buddy? Next point, an excessive need to help others in order to feel good about oneself. This one definitely made me question myself as I've adopted a caregiver role in my relationships very easily and eagerly. I don't know what qualifies as an excessive need to help, though. What's the line between pathological and healthy altruism?

I got to do some reading on this. I know this relates, but I haven't really been able to unpack this one yet. Next point, and distrust and cynicism about people's true intentions. I could definitely say this is something I felt before. And I remember feeling like most people were just trying to take advantage of me rather than trying to connect with me, which was such an unhealthy way to think.

I know. So yeah, I'm a recovering vulnerable narcissist. I know I've still got a lot of work to do. But even to this day, I could still see those reactions attempting to arise in me, though it's a lot easier for me to catch myself in these old patterns of thinking. And it's not realistic for me to think that I could cut out vulnerable narcissism from my personality altogether. Heinz Kolhut believed it was better to take a patient's existing narcissistic tendencies and channel them to humor, creativity, empathy, and wisdom than attempt to eliminate narcissism entirely from their personality structure. Can't be done. You got to live with it, embrace it. So this is a part of who I am. This is where practicing self-compassion has helped me out a lot. I got into the work of Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer. I practiced loving kindness meditations every day, and I took an eight-week class on mindful self-compassion as well. A big message for all three was the idea of shared humanity, which isn't just a Buddhist idea, but one that Kauffman echoes as well.

Since none of us is perfect, we tend to feel more comfortable with others who express our common humanity, including acknowledging human imperfections, rather than with those who always seem to have it all together. So yeah, I don't have it all together, clearly, as you could have seen through my last few videos, nor am I alone in my feelings of vulnerable narcissism. I think some of you listening might be able to relate to this as well, to some degree. Narcissism isn't a binary in which you meet enough of the criteria and then flip the switch into narcissism. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum, though I can definitely see how I felt at big time. Bigger than you. Oh, shit, there's my narcissism coming through. Okay, back to Kauffman.

This suggests that those who score high in vulnerable narcissism tend to avoid the very things that will give them the greatest happiness and growth in life.

I think this is a good segue into the next half of the book, which I found a lot more pleasure in reading. The first half of the book was a bit of a slog and really got me to do the work with constant gut punches along the way. Yeah, it was tough. The second half of the book, though, filled me with a sense of optimism and hope and felt like a reward for getting through the first half. So now that we've discussed a bit about the secure base of our sailboat, let's talk about how we can open our sails and start living a self-actualized and fulfilling life of exploration, love, and purpose. Also, it's not as if getting a secure base is going to be enough for us to feel self-actualized or our best selves. According to Maslow, even if all these basic needs are satisfied, we may still often, if not always, expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop unless the individual is doing what he individually is fitted for. A musician must make music. An artist must paint. A poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization. I'll admit I started to get a little doubtful at this section as it seemed that only creatives and artists qualify as people who are self-actualized and that would be rather unfair to the vast majority of the world. And let's be honest, there are a lot of artists out there whose lives we don't want to follow.

Are the Gucci gang self-actualized? Self-actualization is more than just sex, drugs, and rock and roll and to live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. So thankfully, that's not the recipe for self-actualization. Kaufman offers a list of the characteristics of self-actualization. So let's gather around now and read them together, shall we, and see how many of these we can say apply to ourselves.

Truth seeking. I am always trying to get at the real truth about people and nature.

Acceptance. I accept all of my quirks and desires without shame or apology.

Purpose. I feel a great responsibility and duty to accomplish a particular mission in life.

Authenticity. I can maintain my dignity and integrity even in environments and situations that are undignified. Continued freshness of appreciation. I can appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.

Peak experiences. I often have experiences in which I feel new horizons and possibilities opening up for myself and others. Humanitarianism. I have a genuine desire to help the human race. Good moral intuition. I can tell deep down right away when I've done something wrong. Creative spirit. I have a generally creative spirit that touches everything I do. Equanimity. I tend to take life's inevitable ups and downs with grace, acceptance, and equanimity. So now reading this list makes self-actualization seem more attainable to those who are not artistically inclined. Nor is self-actualization something that is idealistic and out of reach. As Kaufman has studied self-actualization rather extensively, he suggests that it's not rare, it's not associated with age, nor is it associated with race, ethnicity, or gender. Self-actualization is available to us all, in all walks of life.

And with the characteristics here, it seems that they're available with a change of perspective, a change in your lens through which you see the world. For example, a continued freshness of appreciation is a mindset we could all cultivate when we stop to smell the roses.

Self-actualization isn't just airy fairy idealism either. These are actually scientifically measured. So here, you could take the test yourself and see how close to self-actualization you are at selfactualizationtest.com. Answer the questions as you do in any personality test, and you could see a nice bar graph at the end. I had issues with some of the questions, however, and I think perhaps they need to be rewarded. I've always felt kind of iffy about these tests.

So for example, here are two truth-seeking questions. I often have a clear perception of reality, and I am always trying to get at the real truth of people in nature.

For the first question, I'm going to strongly disagree. But for the second, I'm going to strongly agree, even though they're similar. So I've recently become enamored with the work of Donald Hoffman and his idea that through evolutionary game theory, the probability that we see reality as it is, is zero. The beings that perceive fitness payoffs outperform those who perceive reality as it is. Fitness trumps truth. We weren't built to see the world as it is.

We're built to survive and procreate. And so our perceptions are a virtual reality headset whose interface is goal-oriented to satisfying our survival needs. So this ties in with what

Maslow and Kaufman were saying about how when we're in need, we distort reality to satisfy those needs. Think of it as one of those body scanners at the airport. When they take a picture of you, their interface isn't designed to show reality as it is, with the details of your shirt and your hair and your eye color and your respiratory rate or any of that. All the body scanning interface shows you is if you have metal on you and the outline of your genitals.

But on the other hand, I'm always trying to get at the real truth of people in nature. I'm aware of my effort to find the truth, to get closer to it, to calm my sense of need and to connect with my bodily senses as much as I can. Even though I know it won't get me to the truth itself,

I think it'll get me closer to it than when I'm in a deficiency mindset. So moving on, here's another problem I had. I don't know how to choose between agree and strongly agree.

So for me, I'd answer strongly agree to questions that I felt physiologically excited about. So let's look at these two questions as an example. A sunset looks just as beautiful every time I see one. So for me, I answer strongly agree to this one because I f***ing love sunsets.

I've always got my eye out for them. I don't know why I love them so much, but I always get lost staring into them and I take pictures of them even though I already have tons of pictures of sunsets and it's not even like I look at the pictures afterwards. And so in answering this question,

I remembered my time with sunsets and I felt the warm swirling in my chest and I got excited for the next sunset I'm going to see tonight. So yeah, I strongly agree. But look at this similar question on this test. I can appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy. However stale these experiences may have become to others. For that, I don't feel the same kind of swirly whirlies that I did with the sunset question, even though I think the question is a rephrasing of the same metric that Kauffman is trying to measure. And because I didn't feel the same, I didn't think that I felt as strongly.

So is this just an agree or a strongly agree? I think the questions could be reworded a bit. And the five point scale, I think is an issue as I kind of have difficulty with adding quantities to qualities on a personal relational level, but that's a different story altogether. But these are just my own little quibbles here because on a scientific level, Kauffman scale does offer some really good correlations worth noting. Self-actualization scores were associated with multiple indicators of wellbeing, including greater life satisfaction, curiosity, self-acceptance, positive relationships, environmental mastery, personal growth, autonomy, and purpose in life. So when all is said and done, the more self-actualized we are, the measurably better our lives can be. And while self-actualization is tied into our perceptions of the world, it might not be as easy as just telling ourselves to think differently.

There are some actions, habits, and orientations that we're going to need in order to cultivate that kind of mindset. And with that, let's look at exploration, love, and purpose.

The first aspect of exploration falls into the realm of adventure seeking and growth.

We have a need to explore, to go out into the unfamiliar, to experience novelty, to be challenged, to go to the boundaries of our windows of tolerance, to ardently seek out our potential and to be changed by it all. Think of this terms of a securely attached child who knows that they can return to their caretakers and go out and experience and play, as opposed to anxiously attached children who are too afraid and constantly need to be comforted and regulated.

For those that are somewhat into neuroscience and neurochemistry, or have heard about it at least, the exploration drive is fueled by dopamine, which has been popularized and as a result, a bit misunderstood, as all things popularized usually are. It isn't just a chemical that makes you feel nice. Dopamine is the drug of wanting, not of getting. And it feels good to want something, kind of like when the new iPhone is announced and then we get excited for it, but once we get it, the good feeling fades soon after. Think about how excited you are for an upcoming trip, and then once the trip is over, that feeling is gone. How often does your second day on vacation feel not as exciting as the first? So the value of exploration and self-actualization isn't about just getting the next iPhone every year. For exploration's role in self-actualization, the value of dopamine is in the acquisition of information. It's cognitive exploration, as Kaufman describes it, from which we extract information that helps us find meaning and grow.

We feel more self-actualized when we can extrapolate meaning from our new experiences and then incorporate that new information into our being. It's that opposite feeling of being stuck.

A big part of this growth drive is social exploration as well. We don't just want to learn from others, but we want to learn about others. We're interested in their experiences, in their perspectives, in their stories. I don't know about you, but I enjoy my conversations with others the less I speak about myself and the more I hear about them. I already know my story, but thank you very much. I've been telling it to myself my whole life. Let me hear your story instead. So this sense of adventure seeking is somewhat tied into post-traumatic growth, which might sound insensitive at first, as trauma isn't adventurous or thrilling in a typical sense.

What both share, though, is strategies for coping with stressors and growing from them. While adventure seekers voluntarily seek their challenges, trauma survivors don't seek their trauma. So I'm not sure if you share the same experience as well, but I've only heard about post-traumatic stress disorder for most of my life, or PTSD, and it's only within the last year and a half that I heard about post-traumatic growth. And for a while after hearing about post-traumatic growth, I thought that it was kind of a rare case for growth and that mentioning growth out of trauma was insensitive to those who are suffering from PTSD. But according to Kauffman, studies show that the majority of trauma survivors do not develop PTSD, and a large number even report growth from their experience. So I've heard Paul Bloom take up issue with the idea of post-traumatic growth in a discussion with Kauffman on the Psychology Podcast, but

I wasn't convinced by his arguments. I'm more aligned with the idea that majority of the time, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And a Buddhist saying I heard is not to let any good suffering go to waste. So after facing adversities, we experience a kind of positive disintegration in which our old notions of ourself and our lives are kind of taken apart, and then we could reform our image of ourselves and our ideas about our lives. So I think it's useful here to look at the umbrella concept of trauma. According to Richard Tedeschi, who's a retired professor from

UNC, he's been studying trauma for decades. He suggests that trauma is in the eye of the beholder.

Trauma isn't defined by certain kinds of events. Trauma is a disruption of the core belief system.

So in my case, I had a core belief that I was going to be married for the rest of my life. It was a very big part of my identity, both personally and even professionally, as I made a few videos about it in the past. And the adversity of going through a divorce is really traumatic, as most people who have gone through divorces will tell you. It ain't a walk in the park, and mine unfortunately resulted in a dragging through the mud. Take a look at my last three YouTube videos, in which I definitely had a disintegration of my old self, and it really kind of freaked out a lot of people. I don't think my disintegration of my old self was as positive as I'd have liked, as it was more a matter of me avoiding many parts of myself and feeling deep shame.

Yeah, it wasn't pretty. I'm kind of embarrassed by it.

So let's bring this back to the book. According to Kaufman, there are seven areas of growth that spring from adversity, all of which I could say I now relate to.

Number one, greater appreciation of life. I could say this is something I feel, even though I'm not sure how to quantify appreciation and measure it as higher or lower. Do I appreciate more things than before? I don't know. I haven't been keeping count.

And this is where Paul Bloom's argument against post-traumatic growth comes in, because he suggests that humans are good storytellers, and maybe we're lying to ourselves when we say that we grow from our trauma. I just, I don't like that idea though.

So what I can say is that I'm really enjoying my life now, and I can remember more moments of fulfillment and excitement than I was when I was at the start of the divorce process, which is why I'm kind of inching towards thinking that I have a greater appreciation of life. I could definitely say that I appreciate different things in life now, and I feel excited for my potential to grow. Number two, greater appreciation and strengthening of close relationships. So this is easily verifiable for me as it was one of the first things I tried to do, not only reconnect with family and friends, but to get closer with them, to spend more time together, to be kinder to them and to be more attentive. So a hundred percent yes. Increased compassion and altruism, again, another a hundred percent yes, easily so, as some might remember in one of my first podcasts that I didn't really even understand what compassion was, while compassion is now something that I practice every single day. Nor did I really consider myself altruistic or even charitable before, while now I've become really interested in effective altruism and I kind of preach it to my friends. And it's a cause that I've talked about here a few times as well. Number three, the identification of new possibilities or a purpose in life. I think this might sound cheesy to those who haven't been part of the discord, but this work here kind of feels like my new purpose, one that I feel excited about. By the end of my YouTube career, I kind of lost sight of what I was doing all these videos for. While now I think that through starting this book club and through sharing my experiences with these books, I think I could do something more meaningful in my life and perhaps meaningful in the lives of others. What point am I at? I kind of lost track. All right, number four, greater awareness and utilization of personal strengths. Interestingly enough, one of the first books that I read at the start of my divorce was Martin Seligman's Flourish, where a key aspect of the book is to find out what your signature strengths are and then to do activities that utilize those strengths. While my major signature strengths are curiosity, love of learning, and appreciation of beauty, I think you could see how this book club satisfied those first two. My appreciation of beauty hasn't stopped much. I've still been taking lots of photos and videos, even though I haven't been sharing them. Okay, so for those of you watching the

YouTube video here, here are a few. Okay, that's enough. Enough. I actually found this exercise very useful to me and very fulfilling, so I suggest maybe you try it as well. Go to viacharacter.org and then you could find out what your strengths are and then try to do activities that live up to those strengths. Number one, two, three, four, five. Number six, enhanced spiritual development. From my what happened assignment video, where I put on my namaste voice and talked a bunch about mindfulness and meditation, it's clear now that Buddhism is a big part of my life and meditation is a substantial part of my day as well. I listen to talks about the science of consciousness, mindfulness, compassion, and meditation every day. So yeah, spirituality is a big part of my life now. And point number seven, creative growth. Here's where I'm going to say that I'm failing a bit, as I'm not nearly as creatively productive as I once was, but I'm trying out a new format here, so I'll say it's kind of creative growth, but it's not to the same degree that I feel comfortable in identifying with the other factors. It took me a lot of flailing around and making of thunderous mistakes to get here, especially in the early stages of my denying and rejecting my former self. It was super alienating and sometimes even mean to the people that were watching, and I am sorry for that. I wish I would have read this book sooner, especially the point that instead of trying everything we can to inhibit or self-regulate those emotions, experiential avoidance, avoiding feared thoughts, feelings, and sensations paradoxically makes things worse, reinforcing our belief that the world is not safe and making it more difficult to pursue valued long-term goals. Yeah, yeah, I definitely can relate to that. So that's all I'm going to say about post-traumatic growth and this section of exploration, which has a lot more to offer, so now let's move on to the next section of love. So let's start off this section by outright giving up on love. The word, that is. It's such a messy word, isn't it? It's so emotionally charged, and if someone says, I love you, it's pretty much a substitute for, I feel nice feelings towards you, but even then it's not true in all cases. Everyone has their own meaning of it, even if they haven't thought deeply about the meaning. We haven't converged on a single understanding of it, the way we understand what it means to run, or to cook, or to dance, or to pay taxes. Ideas about the right way to love and be loved cause so much confusion and pain. We all want it, but like ice cream, we all want a different flavor of it. Poets and writers and singers have talked about it forever, in better words than I can offer here, and with all of their wisdom and insights that we've been bombarded with, we still kind of suck at it. Or at least, I kind of suck at it, as, well, many of you might be aware.

I'm definitely not a reliable source of information on love here, so all I could do is offer quotes and questions, so let's look at the science of it instead. For this book's meaning of love, in this chapter in particular, I think it's important to look at love through the lens of growth rather than through the lens of security. We're not talking about a lack of love, the deficiency of love, or de-love as Maslow puts it. We're talking about the ways to be loving, or be-love. This isn't about what it's like to get love, which is often the substitute for satisfying our needs for safety, security, and esteem. But once those needs are met, let's talk about what it's like to give love.

As Kaufman puts it, instead of needing, be-love is admiring, and instead of striving for satiation, be-love usually grows rather than disappears. So let's take a bit of a detour. I'd like to focus on this idea of love disappearing, which seems to be a feature of de-love instead, and wondering what deficiencies can lead to love disappearing. I'm going to skip to the appendix of the book here for some insight. Going back to the idea of our perception of reality being an interface through which we can obtain resources, it's not as if we have a goal to obtain a resource, and then we focus the entirety of our being in obtaining that resource. Like, oh, I need a job, so I'm just going to focus on that non-stop. We get distracted along the way, and faff about doing other things instead of what we tell ourselves is our most important goal. As Kaufman puts it, humans have multiple, often conflicting goals, some of which are conscious, many of which are not. So while we may need to get a job for financial security, we may also feel the need to hang out with our friends for connection, or play Call of Duty online for self-esteem issues. It sometimes feels good to talk about other people's mothers online. Not that I do it. I don't play Call of Duty. As we have many things we want to do and are pulled in many different directions, we can feel very conflicted in many situations. As Kaufman puts it, if sometimes it feels as though there are multiple personalities within you that are constantly warring with one another, well, that's because there are multiple personalities within you that are constantly warring with one another. Each of us contains a bundle of dispositions, emotional tendencies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and motives that are often contradictory and incompatible. So let's keep that in mind and bring this back to love, and consider our different needs in a romantic relationship to be its own bundle of dispositions.

The typical romantic relationship can be thought of as blending some combination of attachment, caregiving, lust, and romantic passion. While these elements are often deeply intertwined in a romantic relationship, each element has, quite literally, a mind of its own. Each is a hallmark of a specific system that evolved to facilitate a specific problem associated with survival and reproduction. Each of the elements of romantic love, attachment, caregiving, lust, and romantic passion works with the others in differing degrees of intensity to produce the myriad ways people express romantic love around the world. Nevertheless, a failure to integrate these various systems in a healthy way in a relationship and within ourselves can create enormous confusion and frustration. To me, this was very illuminating. I've read a bunch about how we have different personalities within us, within the framework of internal family systems therapy, and also the wild realm of split-brain experiments, but I didn't think of viewing the elements within a romantic relationship as being different personalities as well, all of which are vying for attention and employing different strategies to get their needs met.

While we have these four needs in a relationship, it's easy to see how when our partner falters in one of these aspects, we can get into a mindset of the relationship not satisfying us wholly, even if it satisfies our other needs. Once we start looking at our partner for what they lack, resentment and discontent can kick in, and we slide into the realm of D-love, rather than seeing what we admire about our partner by keeping the continued freshness of appreciation we have for sunsets and staying within the realm of B-love. To quote Kaufman,

Due to the narratives and unrealistic expectations our society holds about romantic love, we often enter relationships with ideas that are destined to lead to disappointment and resentment.

Many of us believe there is one right person out there for us, and we expect that partner to be our everything. We expect them to satiate our insatiable sex drive, satisfy our need for belonging, and quell our deepest existential feelings of despair. The book doesn't offer a way to have a relationship that keeps all four elements satisfied, and I don't have any insights either. Sorry. What's offered though is the suggestion that this is perhaps the wrong question, and we need a reframing of the problem. As the urge to have all of these needs met is a path that's going to lead to doom. What's needed is to change your mind about your relationship and to see it in a different way. Instead of blaming your partner for not fulfilling all of your needs, blame yourself for your piss poor attitude. Or as Kaufman puts it,

Love is not a specific encounter, but an attitude. A problem of not being loved is more often than not a problem of not loving. Still, I could see some people getting stuck with this statement. More often than not is an idea worth unpacking. If being loved is more often than not a problem of not loving, then in what cases is not being loved a problem of something else? So I think this confusion with love falls under tethering being loved and loving just to intimate relationships. It's not an encounter with someone, but an attitude, a disposition. If not being loved is a problem of not loving, it's like saying not being run is a problem of not running, or not being fed is a problem of not feeding. The onus is upon us to be loving, to give it out, to do it, rather than to seek it. Love is something we actually do rather than something we passively receive. In Belle Hooks's All About Love, she mentions how often we talk about falling in love as it's something that comes over us, something that happens to us. But instead of falling in love, how about standing in love, walking in love?

The beauty of viewing love as an attitude or an orientation toward others is that you don't need to wait until you have quote unquote positivity resonance with another person before acting lovingly toward them. This is why I find it necessary to distinguish be love from the need for connection. As a person matures and the needs of others become just as important as the needs of oneself, a person gradually transforms the idea of love from being loved into loving from a state of dependency in which one is rewarded by being loved to a loving orientation in which one is capable of loving the world at large.

Now this to me sounds like a much better way to love, doesn't it? And if you're not convinced yet, listen to all the benefits it confers.

Be loving people are high in universal concern, commitment to equal opportunity, justice and protection for all people, universal tolerance, acceptance and understanding of those who are different from oneself, and promoting harmony and peace among diverse groups, trustworthiness and dependability for close loved ones, and benevolence and caring toward close friends and family. The greatest character strengths of be loving people are kindness, love, zest for life, gratitude, perspective, forgiveness, social intelligence, appreciation, teamwork, hope, fairness, curiosity, judgment, humility, love of learning, humor, and spirituality. Be loving people also score high on some agency related traits such as grit, industriousness, productiveness, organization, and responsibility.