Before i begin, apparently we're under a
tornado warning
in this area, so if you see my home
get destroyed halfway through the video,
if you see, like, the roof
collapse on me, please don't take that
as a point
against the message of the video, like
the
gods have chosen to smite me halfway
through it for
saying what i'm saying. It's just weather.
If that happens, i'll finish the video
some other time and just edit it
together. So, if I were to start a new
religion
or, let's be honest, a cult, I
would have
one guiding principle i would ask
everyone to follow. First, I would
assume that things like
"be nice to each other" are things you've
pretty much already got down. So if
there is one
guiding principle that i don't feel like
is conveyed well enough
in modern society or that enough people
have absorbed,
it would be this: To have any chance in
life,
in any area of life, you have to make
yourself valuable to other people.
I know that can sound like a simplistic
bumper sticker slogan just like the rest
of the advice you get
from people like me, but allow me to
explain because I really think most
people
don't get this. I got an odd piece of
advice
years ago that I never forgot (I don't
remember who gave me the advice so i totally
forgot
the person but i did not forget the
advice)
which was if you've got a friend who's
depressed not -- 
clinically depressed but they're just
down, they're going through a rough patch,
they kind of
can't see the point of anything anymore -- 
if nothing else seems to work,
if you've tried cheering them
up or tried saying, "Hey, it could be worse!"
and all the stuff that we try that
rarely helps, try flipping it around
and going to them and asking THEM for a
favor.
Try asking them for help doing something.
You'll
be surprised how well this works or,
conversely, if you're the depressed one
try finding someone who needs help doing
anything -- help moving,
anything that they need assistance with -- 
and go do it. You'll be surprised at
how
well that works in terms of kind of
getting you out of your
funk out of your rut. This is because
you are programmed by biology
to want to feel needed, to want to feel
valuable. I don't feel like describing
this as a biological imperative is that
weird of a thing to say; 
humans dominate the globe because we are
better than other species at organizing. We
form societies and cities and countries
and nations millions strong.
When's the last time you've seen 5,000
wombats get together and and build
something? Probably never.
But humans are able to function large
groups because our brains are very good at
organizing ourselves into
groups to accomplish things together.
So it stands to reason if that was our
strength
then due to evolution the humans who
survived and passed on their genes were
the ones that were really good at
functioning in a tribe.
So if you have that impulse back then, 
to want to be helpful to the
tribe, to have an impulse to contribute,
then you passed on your genes. And if you
did not have that, then no one would have
sex with you. So as a result, today
you have biological buttons inside you
that need to be pushed and that button
is you need to feel like you are
contributing something.
The problem is in the modern world and
the system and the economy the way it's
set up now,
it's very easy to get into a situation
where either you're not contributing
anything substantial,
or at least you're it's not made
apparent to you how you're contributing.
For example, how many of you have a job
where you really
come home every day satisfied like, "I
have helped people" or "I have built
something" or you really
see the result of the work as opposed to
just
being eight or ten hours that
have been stolen from your life
just so you can pay rent, where you
have to begrudgingly clock in
so that you can do the things you really
want to do afterward. 
Likewise, you know the way we
socialize now, it's a lot of social
media it's a lot of more loose
connections versus the in-person
connections where you can constantly be
doing things, like
helping somebody move or helping nurse
them back to health when they get sick.
It becomes this less tangible thing
where you're not contributing as much to
their life because, after all,
if you're one of somebody's 900 friends
on instagram,
that's not the same level of connection.
And if you disappear,
you're one of 900 friends they wouldn't
necessarily
miss you so much. Speaking of
social media,
the way it functions is almost proof of
what i'm saying, because they've built in
all of this functionality like the "Likes"
and other point systems
to make you feel needed, to make you feel
important.
But i feel like to some degree that is
an artificial
feeling, I think to truly feel like
you're contributing, to truly feel like
you are valuable to other people,
the only way to do it is to actually
make yourself valuable to other people.
I would even say if you don't have that,
if you don't have that baseline of
confidence that you are
valuable and that you are contributing
something, that actually makes you
vulnerable to
a lot of sales pitches from either
advertisers
or even something like a cult
or a hate group, 
where they're going to try to play on
that thing that's missing in your life,
they're going to try to come to you and
say -- 
dishonestly -- hey come join us, you'll
be
a member of the team, you'll be a member
of the elite. Come believe this
conspiracy theory, you'll be
you know one of the few people that know
the truth. And the thing they're trying
to appeal to is the fact that this 
may be the only time in your life you
feel like you're doing anything special,
like you're really contributing to
anything.
They know that that it in some ways
makes you vulnerable. People can get into
bad relationships this way,
it can cause all sorts of problems. So my
guiding principle
is if you want to fix your life, if you
want to fix how you feel, if you want to
fix
you know your lack of motivation, it
starts by
instead of getting out of that kind of
myopic view of
thinking about what you're
missing and how you've been screwed over
by society or what you don't have.
Instead try to flip your point of view
around to realize,
"Oh, i'm surrounded by people who also
need things, i'm surrounded by people who
desperately
have needs that they need filled. What
can i do to become the type of person
who can
fill those needs?" Once you do that, i
believe
your own situation can fall into place.
Because the world, society, friends,
romantic partners, they tend to
treat you differently
if they perceive that you're the type of
person who is valuable and who can do
things.
Let me give you some specific examples.
Let's start just with your personal life. You know there's people out there who
don't have friends or they don't have
romantic partners, like you talk about
like "Incels", the guys who've become very
bitter and hateful because they can't
get a girlfriend.
They've got this whole world view of
how unfair it is that they've been
rejected based on these arbitrary rules
society has
about who's attractive or who people
want to be around. It's the same for
people who don't really have a friend
group, 
you can become very go to a very dark
place where it's like,
"Society has rejected me for no
reason, 
why can't people just accept me for me?"
What is difficult to do in that
situation
is to turn it around and say, okay, what
would i
bring to a friendship? What would i bring
to a relationship?
What is what's different about me? What's
 unique about me?
What talents do i have? What skills do i
have? Am i a good cook?
Am i a good storyteller? Do i have tons
of interesting stories and experiences i
can tell you? Am i
funny? Am i a well of useful
information? What can i do that makes me interesting,
that makes me stand out?
Now i realize there's very a very
cynical version of this out there
among like pickup artists that kind of
thing, where it's like, "All women
want
are guys that have a lot of money or
they have a nice car or
whatever because they're all they're all
gold diggers,
they're selfish." that's a very cynical
and unfair way to put it. The truth is
everyone has needs that they need
filled everyone and everyone treats
other people differently based on how
they can fill those needs.
There's a reason why you can have some
guy who makes a lot of money
who still doesn't have a
girlfriend or a boyfriend
and then this other guy who is actually
broke but he can play guitar
and is surrounded by friends and
girlfriends. Just being able to play
music
gives that person the status and the
feeling of, "This is somebody who can contribute
something," they have a talent
they're good at something. It can be
anything like that; 
if you wind up in a relationship of any
kind, a friendship
you've got a
girlfriend or a boyfriend, 
where you're not really contributing
anything. Most people,
automatically their mind goes to a case
where
the girlfriend has a job but
the boyfriend doesn't, they're just
staying home, or vice versa.
But it doesn't have to be just that, any
situation where they're not
contributing something -- 
emotionally, financially -- something
i feel like it is a matter of time until
that blows up.
Because even if the other person doesn't
mind, even if they're with you just
because they want someone to be around
or they felt sorry for you,
you will know you're not
contributing anything and it will come
through.
Because that's what i i'm trying to
convey here, is that it helps you in two
ways:
It's both in the way the world treats
you and also the way you think of
yourself.
People who are confident, people walk
around like they own the place, 
it's usually because they get that daily
feedback that, hey,
you're needed. Now, in terms of your
career, 
this one should be obvious. But i say
"should be obvious" when 
it wasn't to me for a long time. If you
went back to high school and asked me
 what's your dream job
i would have said my dream job is
where i go to work for some giant
company
and i don't actually have to do anything
but i
get a huge paycheck. Like i just get
paid to do nothing
and then i can just go pursue my hobbies
and have fun in my spare time. 
i now know that if you ever found
yourself in that situation -- and you
actually might where you're kind of
getting paid to do something that doesn't
really need to be done --
the time is ticking down until you lose
that job. Somebody in that
company is going to recognize
this person's not contributing anything,
that we're not actually getting anything
out of them.
So you're actually in a very
precarious position.
Your whole career works that way; if the
thing you're doing, if the task you're doing
is something that could either be done
by someone much less qualified
or could be done by a machine in a
couple of years, you're in trouble.
You've put yourself in a
position where in the company's eyes
you're not really contributing anything
that someone else couldn't.
Now, your rebuttal to that might be, "But
that's just a problem with capitalism.
Why
should a company only see me in terms of
what i can do for them what economic
value i can provide for them?
Why shouldn't they just say, as a
human being, you have a right to
a home and food and all that, so
we're going to give you a paycheck just
as a human being." 
But i would argue that even if you found
yourself in a society where
money didn't exist, even if you found
yourself in the Star Trek universe where
they're in a post-scarcity
society and everybody has everything
they need,
you're still going to be judged by what
you can contribute. If you go and live on
a commune where they don't believe in
physical possessions,
the person who has more knowledge about
building or farming or music or
entertainment or
whatever is still going to have a more
valued position
in the organization than someone who
can't do those things.
It is just human nature that you're
going to treat someone differently based
on what they can provide, this is why
attractive people will always have an
advantage. It's unfair -- i didn't say
it was fair -- but because they're
providing
something that other people need, they're
going to get treated as such. You can
pretend
otherwise, but ultimately when you
examine how you behave and how you treat
other people, generally you're going to
find that you favor people who can do
things for you in return. I can
imagine people objecting to this, because
that makes it sound like it's this very
cold and cynical worldview, where all
relationships are purely transactional
and everybody just wants to know, "What do you have to bring to the
table?" 
but keep in mind some of these needs are
purely emotional. You know, your ability to read people,
your ability to counsel someone who's
going through crisis, your ability to to
talk to someone, to share your feelings,
to make them comfortable talking to you,
those are also skills.
They're things that have to be practiced
and learned and in fact the modern world
actually makes it harder to practice
people skills.
If you can do it, you'll be rare, because
the way we've set up society now, 
you can do so many things without ever
talking face-to-face with the person.
If you think about 30 years ago the
amount of face-to-face interaction it
used to take just to buy something
or to shop for things or to sell
something, or to do your job,
so much of that has been replaced with
things can be accomplished over email or
through just
a form on the computer or through a
kiosk. Those chances for everyday
interaction
where you have to talk to someone, maybe
you've got a complaint and you've got to
try to
convince them to help you, those
opportunities
don't come up nearly as often. But you
need practice so that's also a skill.
You would normally just think of it as being a good guy or a nice
person,
but being a nice person also takes
practice! It's a learned skill. 
And a lot of people these days don't
have it. Finally,
even if you want to ignore everything
about your career, everything, about your
personal growth
just think in terms of a purely
unselfish view
of your position in society. Like if
 your goal is
that you want to
be an activist, you want to achieve
social justice or fix the environment.
If you join
some movement like that, the exact same
rule is going to apply.
How effective you are at helping them
get the environment cleaned up or
whatever
is going to come down to what skills you
can bring to that organization.
Are you good at talking to people? Are
you good at organizing? Think of any group whether
it's a church
or a charity or a lobbyist group, they
need people who are good at computers,
who are
good salespeople, who are
good at working the phones,
networking -- all the stuff you think of as
crass
things that only stock brokers
and rich people care about like "working
a room" and getting to know who the
powerful people are,
you don't think that an
environmentalist group trying to lobby
washington for new regulations needs that?
You don't think they need people with
sales skills, people skills,
every kind of skill? You don't think a
protest group needs somebody that knows
how to fix a car,
or to program their computer? No matter
where you go,
even if it's the most pure, unselfish
organization where you're just
trying to make the world better,
it's going to be the same thing -- you're
better off if you wake up every day
saying, "Okay,
what does this group need, what are they
lacking?" And then thinking how can i become that
person, 
how can i learn the skill that they need?
Instead of thinking of it in terms of, "Here's a thing i can do because i need a
thing to do." Think outwardly, like how can i
make myself into the type of person they
need?
So now, if you say, okay, but what does
this look like day to day? What
specifically are you asking me
to do? I've decided i want to join your
cult, Jason, so what is it you're asking
of me?
The big thing is looking at how you're
spending your time --
all of your time including your time at
work -- and saying, "Is this
actually teaching me new things, new
skills, new experiences?
Is it making me a better person, making me
someone who's more valuable to other
people?"
Especially now in the
current situation,
the economy the way it is, we're so
heavily reliant on retail work or 
gig work, that sort of thing, and then
we're in a pandemic so 
you've got 30 million people out of work
in the united states.
It's very easy to find yourself on a
treadmill where you're forced to take a
job
purely to pay the rent this month.
But the key is that at some point you
have to say, I don't still want to be on this
treadmill 20 years from now, 
so whatever time you can find in your
spare time, whatever you could do on the
side,
learning something, whatever it is.
Learning another language,
or how to code or how to fix a car, 
looking at something you don't currently
know how to do but it seems like you
could do or maybe you would have an
aptitude for it, and
doing that in some of your spare time.
I'm not gonna play
the cranky boomer and say, "You
need to put down the video games and 
go learn latin, you need to turn off the
the Fortnite machine
young man and go learn math!"
I'm not saying that -- you're going to
have to have some things you do for fun
in your spare time -- I'm just saying that
you should have some time you're
devoting every week or every day
or whatever to learning something
that you have some aptitude
for, whether it's another language
or how to repair a car or how to fix
stuff around the house.
These days, with youtube, you can get a
tutorial on
anything. Learn to cook, be learning something
all the time. If you are laid off, use
that time! Get on youtube, look up how to do
something that doesn't require very
expensive materials.
Try to learn how to do it and just put
yourself in a mindset where you're
always adding to the things you know how
to do.
In my experience, whether or not that
leads to another career down the line --
although it may very well, i'll get to
that in a moment -- i feel like a lot of
your anxiety, your depression
may -- MAY, this is not medical advice,
this is from personal experience -- you may
find it getting a lot better because
you're waking up every day
with a goal in mind and something to
look forward to. And
you're able to look at the progress
you've made and say, "Wow, the thing i'm making now,
the pottery i'm making now or
whatever, looks so much better than what
i was making six months ago."
That sense that you're always
improving, always getting better, always
getting smarter, always getting more
valuable
and having a skill that you can
show off to people like, "Hey did you
know i bake
my own bread? LOOK AT IT!" 
When you see how impressed people are by
that and how differently they treat you
when you've got like a talent or a skill
you can show off,
it can make all the difference in the
world. And especially when you look out
your window or you look on TV
and it seems like everything is slowly
falling apart and slowly getting worse,
to be constantly making yourself a
little bit better
can kind of counteract that feeling in
my experience.
My personal story, the reason i'm so hung
up on this, is that i
went to college for journalism, that was in the mid-90s
and since then i've had two different
careers completely fall apart on me.
But i'm doing okay because i now
write books for a living and i started
doing that in my spare time. There was a
point where i had a full-time job and
another part-time job and was writing
books
on the side, or rather, i was LEARING to
write books in the side. I had no
education on the subject,
i had no training. I was
teaching myself how to do it. I spent a
decade
writing for basically no pay just as a
hobby
but getting my thousands of hours of
practice in. So that
when everything else fall fell apart, i
was actually in a position where i could
go out and write books for a living.
A lot of people have their current jobs
-- and especially people who are happy in
their jobs -- because they did that. Lots of
people who have a job
in computers or whatever,
it's something they did as a hobby ,they
did the coding in their spare time
in many cases. So this could
be a parachute for you later on in life.
But even if not, i honestly feel like
just that process of really trying to
use your time that way, trying to always
get better at something or learn
something,
you will find that feeling like you've
become a more valuable person or a more
capable person
will push a button in your brain that
you didn't know was there.
It will fill a hole the maybe didn't
know was missing.
Because the culture as it set up now is
very good at just kind of keeping you
forever distracted and just scrolling on
your phone or playing games,
things that artificially make you feel
important or that give you feedback or
the illusion that you are
part of a group, but not really.
i feel like
you ultimately cannot fake this, you will
know when you've done something that
kind of makes you a more
valuable person ,a more valuable
contributor, something
that makes you more interesting to other
people.
And it's really hard to convince
yourself otherwise.
That's all, thank you for watching. The
tornado did not destroy my house.
Before you go, i have a new novel coming
out, here is an ad for it,
please watch the whole thing and then
order it. Thank you.
You know how sometimes you wake up naked
and hungover on a friend's trampoline
with only
fuzzy memories of how you got there? Well
imagine all of civilization did that at
once.
(VO)"...friday a local man equipped with an
implanted groin enhancement lit up the
dance floor but,
probably not how he intended..."
That's the future: the aftermath
of
bad decisions everyone regrets but would
definitely make again.
Now imagine it's the future and you're
me, living in a trailer with your cat and
your mom
bothering nobody. Then one day you find
out you've inherited
a billion dollars from a scumbag
biological father you barely knew.
The bad news is, you find out he made
that money by committing many
many crimes.
In fact, most of the things he did that
weren't crimes
were only legal because no one had
thought to make them crimes yet. Like selling black market technology
that supposedly gives people
superpowers.
 
So now you're in charge of
your father's inner circle,
a team of con artists who use creepy
psychological warfare tricks to secretly
run
everything behind the scenes. You now
have
no choice but to work with them, all of
you
trying to keep a horde of superhuman
morons from
tearing the city apart.
 
Now imagine that an author wrote all of
these events into an award-winning book
series. 
Only you don't have to imagine that part
because it actually happened.
The first book was called Futuristic
Violence and Fancy Suits.
It drew glowing praise from the new york
times and publishers weekly called it
"subtly brilliant", which is impressive for
a book that contained 36
instances of the word "butt."
Now imagine that for some reason no
one stopped David Wong from writing a
second book in the series called Zoey
Punches the Future in the Dick, which is
available for pre-order now
pretty much anywhere books are sold.
David Wong
aka Jason Pargin is also the author of
the best-selling John Dies at the End
series. That one got turned into a movie.
So ask your bookstore for Zoe Punches
the Future in the Dick by David Wong
or go to futuristicviolence.com.
you
