What if I told you every bad experience you’ve had is your fault.

If you’re like me, you probably got defensive when you read that and usually blame most things on circumstance instead of on your own free will.

That idea is one that Carl Jung struggled with throughout his life as a psychiatrist. He dealt with thousands of patients who were depressed, anxious, scared, and needed help.

Person after person, after talking to the same types of people for years, eventually he found a pattern in their attitude: They all tried to take the least amount of responsibility for their suffering and they thought of themselves as highly virtuous.

It was almost like they were stuck in a bubble where everything was everyone else’s fault and they were just a victim to an unlucky circumstance. They even blamed “God”, or being itself for purposely creating all this evil against them.

The problem with blaming the world for your problems is that it puts you in a position where you can’t do anything to improve your current state. If it’s your fault, at least it means you’re the problem and you can improve yourself to improve your life circumstance.

But if it’s the universe’s fault, well then guess what, you’re screwed. How are you, 1 person gonna change the fate of the universe? Impossible, and it’s one of the reasons why people get flooded with negative emotion, because the possibility of change becomes hopeless.

If you look at things from a biological perspective, what advantage does a lack of responsibility give humans? We’re hard wired to dislike change once we’ve figured out a way of doing things that works.

If using a spear to kill a fish works really well, then I’ll be less likely to try using a rock instead. That’s just the way we’ve evolved. It can be helpful in certain cases to be stuck on one way of doing things, but also unhelpful if the habit or belief doesn't make sense (like someone trying to convince you the flying spaghetti monster is real).

And that sense of avoiding change get’s worst as we age. Your brain loses it’s neuro-plasticity and can’t form new neural connections as easily. It’s why a bunch of old people hate the way we’re headed with computers and technology — because they are adapted to a different time and physically can’t understand current progress without extreme effort and openness.

Adopting the lack of responsibility mindset means not being open to change. Blaming everything else for your suffering means tricking your brain into thinking it’s right and not adapting your physical brain structure.

But with that mindset you’re stuck in the past and can’t accept the future. Everything changes while you stand still. It means you’re suffering to keep up while everyone’s having a good time, further making you feel like the universe is to blame.

Carl Jung understood this, and constructed a theory explaining the 3 parts of our psyche.

The Ego

Also know as the “gatekeeper”, this part of the psyche is made up of memories, thoughts, and emotions.

Thoughts + emotions + experience = complexes. Those complexes are like mental models we use to classify the information and stimulus we get on a daily basis.

There’s no way we could interpret everything we hear or read as truth - we’d be flooded with paradoxes. Instead, we use those complexes to decide whether we should take something at face value or not.

That bias gives us our individual identity. I wouldn’t be Luke without being sceptical and questioning things that don’t make sense to me. But that just comes from my experience of frequently finding flaws when I look deep enough. Other people have very different mental models based on their experience, each good and bad under different circumstances.

The individual Unconscious

This part of the psyche is just like the ego — it’s formed from a bunch of different complexes— but those complexes are forgotten and are hidden in the unconscious.

The more memories and emotions associated with a complex, the stronger it becomes. 

In Hitler’s case, his negative experiences and negative emotional responses associated with foreigners made him idealise the German race and want to eradicate any signs of impurity in others.

That subconscious complex had kept getting reinforced and validated by new experiences and emotions to the point where his ideology spiralled out of control.

It’s a good example of how dangerous complex validation can be — especially when that complex has already been established. If you already have a cognitive bias against something, it’s likely your bias will fit the thing you’re judging and will hence further validate your bias.

“If you’re looking for negativity, it’ll come to you. If you’re looking for positivity, it’ll come too”
-me

Sigmund Freud was a prominent figure in crafting Carl Jung’s philosophy. Jung worked under him for years until they diverged paths when he denounced some of Freud’s theories publicly.

Freud stressed a lot on the impact a child’s experience has on their adult life. His big thing was that all problems we deal with are a result of not being raised right as children and being exposed to childhood trauma.

Jung didn’t really think that was enough, and thought the present and the embodiment of the future into the current self + our deepest unconscious complexes had a much more to do with it.

It might be hard to think of the future embodying the present, but Jung believed that who we could be and who we strive to be directly transforms us into that person in the present — a much more optimistic view over Freud’s.

But that isn’t all they disagreed on.

The Collective Unconscious

Paradoxically, Jung also put a lot of stress on the past and it’s effect on our current complexes. But instead of our complexes being a product of our childhood traumas and experienced past, he believed some were ingrained into our DNA through evolution.

He called them archetypes, fundamental ideas that are found across all societies.

According to him, there were many archetypes that are uni-present across all human beings because they universally apply to everyone’s life. Here are the 4 major ones:

• Persona → what your projected image on society is (ex: CEO, bar tender, housewife, etc.). He called it the “conformity archetype” because they are vast generalisations that give us a means of conforming to societal expectations.
• Anima/animus → mirror image of our biological sex (unconscious masculine in women and unconscious feminine in men). He believed that because we’ve worked so tightly in communities, we’ve mixed the two together, where now men are much more feminine and women are much more masculine.
• Shadow → our primitive animal personality seen as the evil side that only acts selfishly. It is the source of both creative and destructive energies.
• Self → unity of the individual across their complexes, both unconscious and conscious. He thought that the problems of modern life come from “man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation”, the disunity of the self often caused by mixing anima/animus too much (women being too manly and men being too feminine).

Freud thought this was mumbo jumbo, and stuck to his theory on childhood trauma.

But I think that was Freud’s biggest mistake — he was too stuck up on his ideas and didn’t question them enough. He would come up with a hypothesis and be convinced it had to be the truth vs Jung who was constantly questioning his ideas.

After looking deeper into his hypothesis on the collective unconscious and into ancient and recent societies across the world, Jung realised all of them shared these same archetypes. It’s how he validated his hypothesis, will hard historical evidence.

Stories are a way of reinforcing certain actions by showing hypothetical positive or negative outcomes.

In Cinderella, Cinderella finds true love and happiness because of her good character whereas the evil step sister get their eyes picked out by crows (sorry, didn’t wanna draw this one).

These stories are a way of showing people the right way of conducting yourself in the world and the benefits you’ll get from acting in that way.

Jung looked into ancient myths, old stories across societies all over the world that would have never had contact with each other, and he found similar archetypes among all of them. Other than the 4 I mentioned earlier, here are some others:

• Mother
• Earth
• Birth
• Rebirth
• Child
• Death
• Power
• The hero

These would take a while to unpack, but out of all of them The Hero myth seems super interesting to me. No matter where you go, there’s always stories of a hero who concurs evil, and creates order out of chaos (known out of the unknown).

Jung used that textual evidence to validated his hypothesis on fundamental complexes we all have ingrained deep into our DNA.

Overcoming the Shadow

In a previous article, I talked about “Why you should stop expecting things”, basically explaining how expectation leads to betrayal and negative emotion that’s meant to force us to change our habits.

What do I mean by that? For ex: getting cheated on by your best friend makes you terribly sad and forces you to re-evaluate your trust in people and adjust it to fit that negative experience.

Jung believed that when it came to high neuroticism and overcoming negative emotion, a big piece came from a lack of responsibility and courage to face your mistakes.

We know that deep pain comes from betrayal, so Jung argues that taking responsibility for that betrayal and realising you could equally do the same is the cure for negative emotion.

It’s the acceptance of the shadow, understanding that you could do terrible evil, that gives you humility and makes you less prone to betrayal and more aware of your true motives.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
- Jung

That comes with understanding that under the right circumstances, you could’ve even been a Nazi concentration camp guard — and enjoyed it.

It’s the hard path to happiness

Basically admitting you could’ve been Hitler is completely against your human nature.

But being good only comes with the potential of evil. You can only be moral if you could do unmoral things. Being scarred of punching someone vs deciding not to punch someone are 2 completely different things. Same outcome, but completely different motives.

Everything is relative, and there wouldn’t be good without evil.

Until you take responsibility and understand you could do horrible things, you can’t be a fundamentally good person.

“The reason modern people can’t see God is that they won’t look low enough”
- Jung

That’s his most important message. Take responsibility. Understand how flawed and evil you could be, and you’ll be aware of when you’re doing evil and find it much easier to stop. The alternative is hiding that part of you and not realizing till it’s too late.

A couple of months ago, I thought it would be fun to set a challenge for myself: write a page a day on something, literally anything.

It ended up giving me some forced reflection time where I could materialise my thoughts down on paper. After a couple days, I started thinking about emotion and how it drives people to do strange things.

From there, I went down a rabbit hole of questioning why we have emotion in the first place, and how we could  control our emotions without external factors.

Envy

Envy is the state of toxic desire. Desire can be broken down as the absence of fulfilment in a goal, and the state of craving that results.

When you envy a state of being, your brain is trying to telling you that the goal is achievable, but that you’re not fulfilling it.

You don't envy things that our out of your reach. No one envies superman, because we realise it's impossible to shoot lasers our of your eyes. We (especially children) admire his courage and honesty, values that we can practice too.

People talk about envy as “poison” because it stays with you until you either

1. Achieve that goal
2. Move onto a different goal

You become stuck with this toxic feeling of dread and jealousy until you achieve your goal. Once that goal is achieved, your mind restructures itself to desire something that is even harder to achieve, always pushing your to your limits. Elon Musk went from 

The other option is to change your goals. But goals are mostly subconscious and can't be changed on command. Once you do change them, you're still stuck in a state of envy. 

The solution lies in expectation.

Expectation vs reality

Humans need goals to function. Without direction, we wouldn't have incentive to move or to perform any basic function. 

These goals are deeply ingrained in our brains, and are often understood after we act. We can figure out why we're doing things on a surface level, but if I keep asking you why? why? why? it'll reach a point where you no longer understand why you exist.

Expectation — what you think will happen.

Reality — what actually happens.

Every second, we’re making millions, if not billions of assumptions (actually, I'm not sure you could put a count on the number of assumptions you make. Space is theoretically infinite, and assumptions rely on spaciality, so it could be infinite. But how can a confined brain make an infinite amount of assumptions?). For example, when I’m writing this article, I need to assume that my heart will keep pumping 24/7, that my eyes will blink, that my head won’t explode, and that some guy won’t break into my house and tackle me.

Assumption leads to the expectation of some outcome, where as reality might not actually align with that expectation. Since assumption relies on experience, when assumptions are wrong, it's because we don't have enough experience to make a proper assumption.

It doesn't help that humans don't think statistically. When thinking about dying next year for ex, we either think that we're going to die, that we're not going to die, or we're unsure. We don't think in probabilities, only in binary.

As a result, we're often wrong and suffer the emotional consequence. 

Betrayal — the worst of all pains — comes when that expectation is broken. The pain and sadness you feel is your body telling you “that false reality you’ve been living in, yeah not the best idea to keep living like that”, so you adjust your view of the world to fit whatever data point you’ve just learnt.

It makes sense that we often feel sad and betrayed. We subconsciously rely on what we know, and that’s not much considering how vast human knowledge is.

Why lying is bad

Why do we feel guilty about lying?

Because just like expectation, you’re fabricating a false environment around you — and there’s nothing life hates more than false realities.

When I say I did my homework when I really didn’t, I’m actually creating a false expectation of reality in my teacher’s mind that I’m a good student, when really I’m not.

Knowing the absolute truth lets us make better decisions. Not knowing the truth skews our decision making and can actually make us less likely to survive in the long run.

Ex: I'm a homo sapien living in the year 50 000 BC. If I tried to gain admiration and credibility by telling my tribe that there was this place I found that had a bunch of good food, people would respect and follow me. But once they get all the way out and realise there isn’t actually any food, we end up wasting a bunch of time and resources and now we might all die because of it.

That uncomfortable gut feeling you feel when you lie is probably something we developed to stop us from skewing reality and risk harming the entire community.

Validation

Validation is truth without facts. You feel like your belief is right because other people say so, but that doesn’t hold up to objective reality.

You’ve only lived 0.0001% of all human experience. If someone else validates your beliefs, that still only 0.0002% of all experience.

Validation gives us way more confidence because it was an extremely useful in hunter-gatherer tribes. Validation is synonymous with cooperation, which would have lead to growth and perpetuation of the species.

But, validation puts you in the same spot as the liar. You’ve created a false reality around yourself that’s fundamentally rooted in experience, not fact. So again, we become prone to betrayal and suffering.

Humility and Entitlement

Humility — low expectation.

Entitlement — high expectation.

Since we’re goal oriented, it’s hard to feel humble, because it implies a satisfaction with the current state and a low expectation for future states.

We’re wired to self improve and propagate the human species. But not only that, we’re wired to increase human potential.

Tons of sex is only valuable if humans know how to collaborate. Polygamy is only valuable if humans can still learn and self improve — which is hard when you have one parent. We need to act in a way that guarantees survival and propagation in the present, but also maximises our potential for the future.

It could be that our brain doesn’t let us feel humble and devoid of all expectation. But by reducing that expectation, you can reduce suffering.

Buddhism

Buddha believed that there were 3 universal truths:

1. The Nature of suffering

Suffering is universal and dissatisfaction is the default human state.

2. Desire is the cause of suffering

Our pain is caused by our goal oriented nature, and constant striving to fulfil our desires.

3. Suffering can be limited by minimising desire

Removing yourself from desire will limit your negative emotional response from not fulfilling those desires.

The three universal truths can be summed up as:

"Things don’t happen to you, they just are."

Most of his philosophy ties into what I said before about expectation and reality. When we willingly put ourselves in a state of desire, we rely on expectation an hence feel dissatisfaction.

The fulfilling of that desire is the expected outcome. When we don’t achieve it, we become sad — a sign that we aren’t well conditioned to reality, and that our expectations based off previous experiences were actually wrong.

It comes down to understanding your goals and the expectations you’re tying to them. Embrace humility and lower expectation.

TL;DR

1. Genetics is your vessel. Environment is your fuel.
2. Transparency and honesty comes with having less. Poor embrace change — Rich don’t.
3. Community matters more than social or material hierarchy.
4. Be likeable > being exceptional. Likeability comes from being respected for your grit, honesty, vulnerability, humility.
5. Internal mindset dictates your happiness — not external factors. Climbing a hierarchy is an external factor that won’t guarantee your happiness.

Genetics is your vessel. Environment is your fuel.

You are born a soup of DNA. That DNA dictates how competent you are at certain things.

Einstein learned math like any other kid, but other than dedication and extreme curiosity, what made him exceptional was the structure of his brain. He had a less voluminous but denser brain.

Your social and physical environment builds your decision making circuits. You learn what works and what doesn’t based on the outcome of action. You’re not born knowing fire will burn you, it takes time for you to learn.

Your environment It also shapes your morality and sense of justice. Negative and positive experiences show you what works and what doesn’t. Over time, you build a sense guilt when you hurt people, because it hurts your chances of having positive future interactions with them.

From that morality, you develop a will to do some things, and avoid others. I probably won’t want to push my grandma over, but I do want to work hard to make my own company so that I can impact people positively… All from the interactions and positive feedback loops I’ve had with my environment.

If there aren’t negative repercussions for harmful actions, which happens a lot more often in poorer countries where there is less authority and emphasis on reciprocity, then my goals and sense of justice could become corrupt.

I’d be motivated by my self interest, and wouldn’t consider the interest of others or the potential from future relationships. This works fine in the short term, but in the long run I screw myself over and loose communal trust.

When you look at the most successful people, most of them come from rich countries like North America and Europe. It’s not only that they have access to housing + food and must prioritise their ambition to feel fulfilled, but they’ve often been taught the value of reciprocity and social validation for doing good.

Transparency comes with having less.

In Riverton city where ~3000 Jamaicans live, you’d often receive blunt criticism that came off as inconsiderate. Questions like “why are you fat?” or “why is your face bumpy (acne)?” and “your nose is really big” seem disrespectful to us, but to them that blunt curiosity is typical.

It ties back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

For the people of Riverton, the most basic needs like security and shelter haven’t been met, so they don’t value needs like “achieving one’s full potential” and “self esteem” as much.

If we look at life like a role playing game, you could say that every one is trying to optimise their decisions through gaining knowledge on objective realities. To climb Maslow's pyramid, we need to understand our environment and how to manipulate it to acquire resources. We crowd source our experiences and knowledge to mutually improve our state of being. If no one told the truth, we would draw inaccurate conclusions that would harm us when we try and apply them. Ex: a tribe member who cracks walnuts with stones tells the rest that the best way to crack a walnut is by slamming it against your head. The story only goes down hill from there.

 In poorer countries closer to the bottom of the pyramid, honesty is valued because it gives you more knowledge on reality, in other words a better chance of understanding the world and getting yourself out of poverty.

But, since we Canadians already have our basic needs met and have lots of freedom and flexibility, we would rather avoid the truth because it makes us vulnerable to reality, and could give us a higher chance of failure.

Ex: an accountant works for a big bank. But secretly, he hates his job and would rather take up a career in music. Because an accountant’s job is more secure, he'll lie and tell himself + his friends that he doesn’t mind his job when really it’s eating him up inside.

The same goes for research, medicine, or any other stem field. Long term or capital intensive projects without any positive results can ruin the reputation of the researchers and executives who approved the project, so often times results are inflated.

If instead he was born in a very poor country and had to find a job or die on the streets, he would probably be taking on a job he doesn't like, but would be transparent about his financial situation with his social circle, because they could help out.

If you’re born into a family with less, you’ll be more inclined to be honest and transparent with other people about your needs and your desires, because you don’t have much to lose.

Poor embrace change — Rich don’t.

When you're needs are met, there isn't a pressure to adapt.

The largest and oldest companies in the world (TD bank, BIBC, Ford, etc.) avoid innovation because it increases the changes of failure. They have been successful for such a long time that any new executive with succumb to the pressure of maintaining that success vs trying to increase it.

People who lack resources embrace change because it increase potential for success, whereas people who have abundant resources don’t like change because they enter unfamiliar territory that increases their potential for failure.

For context, If you where living off 1$ a day, it would be easier to convince you to take up something else that could potentially make you more money. But if you’re already set on a 100K salary, it’s much harder.

Community matters more than social or material hierarchy

At the root of decision is emotion, an internal compass that helps interpret external stimulus form the 5 senses.

Emotion is essential for 3 reasons:

→ Logical Shortcuts

If I get punched in the face, it’s probably smarter for me to react with an instant negative emotion than to reason out in my head the implications of why that’s a bad thing. Emotion let’s us skip a lot of the decision making and saves us plenty of brain power.

→ Perception adjustment

The universe can be split up into 2: the objective reality and the subjective reality. We see the universe through a filter of senses, so we have to make a ton of assumptions. I have to assume that no one’s going run me over when I cross the street, that my house will still be there when I come home, that I won't be struck by lightning. When something disrupts our assumptions, we react negatively. It's your emotions attempting to change way you’ve been perceiving the universe.

→ Primal motivation

Sex doesn’t make sense. Emotions give us the incentive to do it, but fundamentally reproducing isn't a rational act. So far as we know, there isn't one purpose that explains why we should reproduce. If we where purely rational beings, it’s not impossible to think that we wouldn’t be motivated by sex, love, friendship, etc. Emotion makes us to want things that benefit our species over the individual.

Emotion is in charge of whether you enjoy or don’t enjoy being. In North America, it’s easy to tie positive emotion to expensive and high quality material, but most of our desires come from mimetic theory.

If that Gucci belt was selling for 30$ and it wasn’t perceived as a luxury item, you probably wouldn't buy it.

Value is subjective, but we act as though the price we see is the objective value we gain. Most of the time it’s not, and when you entangle your reward systems around hierarchies of value (consumerism), it becomes very difficult to feel satisfied.

What makes you happy? In Jamaica, some of the happiest and welcoming people where those in Riveton city. 

For 3 reasons:

1. They had a tightly knit community and could count on each other. Millions of years ago, those same communities lead us to survive longer, so it’s still ingrained in our DNA to value community and get positive emotional response from it.
2. They didn’t have many material possessions, and prided themselves on their personality and values over their things.
3. They had big goals and ambitions. Everyone I talked to said they wanted to make it big. They where always on the grind and consistently put in work.

It’s not that having lots wont make you happy. It’s that endlessly chasing the top of material hierarchy while sacrificing close relationships wont.

Be likeable > being exceptional.

We’re deeply driven by emotion. It doesn’t matter if you’ve built a space ship and flown to mars, if you’re a selfish and unlikable person, people wont want to be around you and you'll feel miserable.

This hit me when I was talking to our bus driver.

He drove us around Jamaica during our trip, and was always positive and funny. Turns out though, he only makes about 6K CAD a year, and got a brain tumour a couple months ago (Jamaica doesn't have free healthcare).

Because we had built a strong relationship with him over the trip, and genuinely liked him as a person, we gave him enough money to pay off half of his cancer treatment bills. He wasn’t necessarily an exceptional person (except for being an amazing driver), but because we liked his personality and his values so much, we felt like he was a part of us and that it was the right thing to do.

At the end of the day, it’s the respect you get for your grit, honesty, vulnerability, and humility (to name a few) that makes people want to help you. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It matters you you are.

Internal mindset dictates your happiness — not external factors.

External factors are a great way of tangibly measuring progress. Being able to bench 100lbs when I could only do 70lbs the month before let’s me track how close I am to being on track to success. But the physical world isn’t everything.

I like to think of ambition as 2 things:

1. External Ambition → driven by external progress
2. Internal Ambition → driven by internal progress.

Your external ambition is a good way of tangibly proving you're making progress, but it’s the internal satisfaction and feeling of fulfilment you get from internal ambition that gives you the most happiness.

Mind > Matter.

It takes external actions to progress internally, but the key is not prioritising external hierarchy (social status, material value, etc.) over internal improvement.