The Cost of Conformity and the Dangers of Fitting into Society's Procrustean Bed

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Show Notes:

Introduction

• Greetings to listeners

• Quote from "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens

Discussion

• The concept of the "Procrustean bed" and its modern-day application

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb's stance on the Procrustean bed and why it can be dangerous

• The dangers of standardization in education

• The personal experience of the speaker with the educational system and Adderall

• The need for a more nuanced approach to thinking and decision-making

Transcript:

Hello, beautiful people! What a day to be alive. As Charles Dickens said in his novel "A Tale of Two Cities", "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." It's amazing how something written in 1859 is still applicable today. Although people, places, and costumes may change, humans remain more or less the same.

This brings me to what I want to talk about today. The term "Procrustean bed" comes from Greek mythology, where the bandit Procrustes would stretch or amputate his victims to fit them to his iron bed. In modern usage, the term refers to situations where people or events are manipulated or distorted to fit predetermined standards or categories.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist and scholar known for his work in the fields of probability theory, risk management, and philosophy. Taleb argues that the Procrustean bed is a dangerous way of thinking because it can lead to oversimplification, misinterpretation, and even harm. He advocates for a more nuanced and flexible approach to thinking and decision-making, where individuals are open to uncertainty and complexity and are willing to adapt to changing circumstances.

We can see this dangerous way of thinking most starkly in our education system, where we're moving even more rapidly towards standardization. If there's one thing I know about humanity, it's that no one human is the same. While the educational system worked great for me as an all A student, not everyone is like me. There are so many other people who the system leaves behind because they want to do things with their hands or learn more visually or in different ways.

The fact that we are basically putting everyone on a college track is ludicrous because not everyone should be going to college. College should be a deliberate decision based on how you want to leverage the rest of your life. Think of it this way: If you had to go to a bank and talk to a loan officer and an underwriter about your personal business, which is yourself, and you asked for $100,000 to go to college, you would have to pitch a business plan of why you should get the money. The fact that you can just take out a student loan just because you happen to be 18 is absurd.

I don't think it should be hard to get a student loan, but I think that the individual should think about it in terms of pitching a business plan because that's what they're doing; they're investing in themselves. When you invest $100,000 or however much you pay to go to college, you should have a pretty good idea of what you're leveraging for. And if you're not entirely sure yet, take a gap year or go to another country. I can't advocate that enough. Going to another country has the same effect as taking a psychedelic drug.

The experience shows you that everything you took for granted your whole life was just a construct. Other places have different norms, different cultures, different ways of living. Different ethics and different mental models.

Which is why I think it’s absolutely ludicrous that if a child, a child, cannot sit still for more than 15 - 20 minutes for a lesson, we diagnosed that child with ADD and medicate them to fit the procrustean construct that someone 200 years ago set up.

It's a child. Some will be hardwired to have more energy. They are intensely curious. They want to get up and play and get up and go, and we literally change the internal biochemistry of a child’s mind to suit the edifice that was created by a society.

Once again, I have no personal ax to grind. I have never been put on ADD medication. I can get into deep work and flow. I can work for long periods of time without needing to get up and go.But that being said, I have taken Adderall before.

In college, I would take five milligrams, which is half the recommended dosage for someone prescribed with ADD. Adderall is a combination of two amphetamine salts: dextroamphetamine saccharate, amphetamine aspartate, dextroamphetamine sulfate, and amphetamine sulfate.

These salts are slightly different forms of amphetamine, which is a central nervous system stimulant that affects the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Methamphetamine, on the other hand, is a more potent form of amphetamine. It is also a central nervous system stimulant that affects neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine. The molecular structure of methamphetamine is slightly different from amphetamine, with an extra methyl group attached to the amine nitrogen.

This difference gives methamphetamine a greater ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, making it more potent and more addictive than amphetamine. So I take 5 mg, which is half a pill. Half of the daily recommended dosage for a child. I would eat lunch first because it suppresses your appetite, that’s one of the side effects, then I would go to the library and over the course of about six hours, I crush four essays.

So that is a 22-year-old college student taking half of the recommended dosage and being able to operate on a heightened level for six hours. Essentially, I was doing what’s known as “batching,” which is working to get a lot of work done in one day so I could enjoy the remainder of my week working on creative projects and spending my time in other ways.

But I was taking half the recommended dosage prescribed daily to children one day a week, and these were my personal side effects: I was able to operate at a tremendously heightened level but also suffered from insomnia on those days I took the drug. It caused me to crave things like nicotine and to flood the brain with more dopamine when the drug was wearing off, and it caused me to want to smoke weed at night to take the edge off and help me go to sleep.

So I don’t know what high school was like for you, but I don’t necessarily think we want to be promoting that behavior more than we need to in our youth. If we are prescribing them this medication on a daily basis, I don’t think we want to incentivize them to start balancing their own internal biochemistry with cigarettes and weed.

So, enough with the critiques of society. Here is the guidance for this week.

Own your own time. Most people sell their time for money. Just make sure you are getting the best value proposition for your time and you are optimizing for what you want to accomplish in life.

We created money, corporations, and society to make our lives better, but it seems like many of us get lost along the way, and end up choosing things and lives that aren’t in our best interests.

So, enough with the critiques of society. Here is the guidance for this week.

Own your own time. Most people sell their time for money. Just make sure you are getting the best value proposition for your time and you are optimizing for what you want to accomplish in life.

We created money, corporations, and society to make our lives better, but it seems like many of us get lost along the way and end up choosing things and lives that aren’t in our best interests.

For example, I was in the steam room in my gym not too long ago, and there was a guy just chatting with us, and he was just a really cool guy. Nothing but love for the guy and just really funny off-the-cuff, really just confident, comfortable with who he was, which is why I was all confused because he was talking about how much he hated his job, which was accounting, and he was talking about how much he hated hanging out with his girlfriend’s friends. He said the worst is hanging out with their boyfriends because they’re always just like tools, friends again just guys, like he’s a funny guy and seemed cool and smart.

And yet he kept on like “like yeah, my girlfriend was gone for like 14 days, and that was so quiet, was so great, and she comes back. She starts bitching,” and he’s like “oh, I don’t even understand those couples that have to like eat with each other like every night, like we rarely eat together.” So it seems two of the main pillars of this man’s life, he is unhappy with. On the surface, society would tell him he has everything. A good, secure, well-paying, respectable job, and a lovely girlfriend.

But I think you have to get to a point where you would not look at your own life and be like, things need to change. I can’t continue to try to fit my life onto the bed of Procrustes.

Maybe that’s something that’s always just come easier to me. Just the feeling that staying somewhere where I didn’t belong was more painful than the pain of growth.

Maybe that’s just the muscle that I developed because I did something kind of crazy like move across the country without really knowing anyone, so I just got comfortable with uncertainty and became comfortable being in that state of limbo, but we really need to be rethinking how we’re spending our lives.

So many people say, “when I retire, I’m going to travel. Or when I make a million dollars, I’m going to rent a motorcycle and drive across the Great Wall of China.” Rolf Potts points out in his book “Vagabonding” that you could have a job scrubbing toilets and still save up enough money to do that within a year.

You’ll never hear me say, don’t optimize for the future. I think compounding interests is one of the strongest forces in our universe, next to gravity. I have investments I’m not going to touch for 30 years. But at the same time, don’t sell your time and soul for a promise of a future that may never come.

As far as we know, we only get one life, and at the very least, we only get one shot in this particular experience that we are now currently living. I want you to go ahead and read the tail end by Tim Urban. It’s a blog, and it’ll take five minutes because much of it is a fun graph, and it basically shows you what your mortality is.

It shows you in rows of little dots how many days, on average, you have left to live.

How many presidential elections you’ll probably see these are how many Super Bowls will probably see.

"How many presidential elections will you probably see? How many Super Bowls you will probably see. And it's not that many. So what you really have to ask yourself is, do you want to stay in a job that you hate? Do you want to stay in a relationship when it seems that you don't really enjoy spending time with them?

Do you want to do things or talk about things you don't want to do or talk about things you don't want to talk about? Take control of your own time. Time is a nonrenewable resource. Money is a renewable resource. And discipline = freedom.

Like Yuval Noah Harari said, we created money, we created society, we created corporations. These things should work for us. We shouldn't be casualties of society. We shouldn't be amputating parts of ourselves in order to fit onto the procrustean beds others have fashioned for us.

Especially when we know that our society is broken. The veil has lifted. It's all out in the open. Forget the Pentagon Papers. It's really just to the point where it's so glaring that we can't ignore it anymore. There are banks failing left and right because of poor fiscal policies, incompetent risk management, and lackluster regulation. Political leaders are actively involved in blatant grift or corruption.

The media is not reporting things as they actually happened. In fact, that's a generous way to put it. There are blatant propaganda machines on both sides of the political aisle. We have a published list of some of the most influential and most important people in business, entertainment, and politics going to an island that was a known pedophile ring. It's time to refashion our society in a way that suits us.

Now, I'm not advocating for radical change. I don't think we need to change our whole political system or get rid of capitalism or live in tents or pray to an extra-curvy piece of driftwood.

But we need to bring a semblance of integrity back to this society. And we need to stop trying to fit into a system that is becoming broken beyond repair. We're not trying to make America Great Again. We're trying to make it better than it's ever been. Let go of the past. Focus on the future. And let's build a society that allows us all to tap into what we do best so each of us can reap the rewards.

Light and love, my friends. Go in peace to love and serve.

Outro Song: The Incredible True Story: Logic

Outro Vocal: Alan Watts, What Do You Desire?