Quoting Derren Brown on Tim Ferriss #776.

I used to watch a lot of Derren Brown’s shows growing up, back when I was more interested in magic, mentalism, and psychology. This was a very interesting and thought provoking interview with some important, contrary frames for the human experience.

Life is difficult:

life’s difficult. Life has this centripetal quality. It brings us to this difficult central point

at the heart of it, that life brings us to these difficult centers. When we’re there, it feels lonely. We feel like we failed, which is the big problem with the American optimistic goal setting model. That when things don’t go well, you’re supposed to, I guess you have to blame yourself because you didn’t set your goals well enough or believe in yourself well enough or whatever that strange Protestant work ethic apply to life tells us we should feel.

But the reality is, that lonely, difficult, central point is exactly the human experience. We are all brought to those points. It’s what we all share. The thing that makes us feel most isolated is the one thing that actually connects us the most. Interestingly, we have written this show and then lockdown happened and it just played out. The very thing that was physically isolating us, was the one thing we were all sharing.

That I think is eternally valuable to me. It’s the thing that — I know is also that the answer to finding dinner parties with high status people difficult, is that they’re the same. They’re probably hating as much of it as I am, that we’re all having these awkward experiences most of the time and you shouldn’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides because they’re very different things.

Resonance:

imagine you’ve two artists, and it’s an art competition, they’re told to go out and paint the best picture they can, and one of them goes home and does the best he can do and provides his picture. And the other one thinks, “Okay, all right, well, I want to do the best picture, so I better get a — well, first of all, I need a really good studio space.”

So he finds a great studio space, “And now I need the best possible easel and, okay, a proper good linen canvas.” And he sources that, and now he’s going to go get the best paints and the best brushes, the finest brushes, and so on and so on, and then time’s up.

And this is what we’re doing, generally, we’re treating the world as a resource. But what’s happened is that the resources that are a means to an end, right? So we’re trying to be richer and more attractive and more this and more that, those are only means to an end. They got a bit confused with the goals somewhere along the lines. And he’s suggesting a rather more — he talks about a tuning fork, like you put one tuning fork next to another one and the other one starts to vibrate, and it’s just a different relationship of resonance with the world, as opposed to treating it as a resource. And a number of other things that we do.

Natural unhappiness:

life is difficult, and you’ve got — here’s your X-axis and your Y-axis, and on the one axis you’ve got all the things you want to achieve, your aims and your plans, and then the other axis is stuff that life is throwing back at you, what they used to call fortune, and we don’t really talk about that anymore, which is a shame.

And we’re told, if you set your goals and believe in yourself correctly, that you can crank this line of life up, so it’s in line with this X-axis, in line with your goals and your aims. But the reality is we live an X equals Y diagonal, it’s sort of a meandering line and sometimes we’re on top, and sometimes we’re not. We’ll have a great day and then life will throw something horrible our way, and it’s that, so how do you make your peace with this?

And that image of that X equals Y line is something that resonates throughout history. Schopenhauer spoke about it. Freud, he wasn’t trying to make — that first talking therapy was never about making people happy. His goal was to — how did he put it? Restore a natural unhappiness. So your life is basically going to be unhappy a lot of the time, and you don’t want to be overly unhappy, but it’s just how you make your peace with the fact that life’s always going to be a bit dissatisfying. You’re always going to get caught between these poles.