(Auto-generated)Hey guys, welcome back.
We got another show for you today, episode 22 of the podcast.
No idea what I'm naming it yet, but anyways, let's jump right into it.
I'm WS Walker.
This is the laughing matters podcast and welcome to the thing.
I've so often heard people say that you shouldn't worry that much about
what other people think of you.
We've all gotten that piece of advice at some point.
I disagree to an extent.
There's a specific, there's an asterisk to mine.
Um, because part of what people think about you and often most of what
people think about you is not entirely accurate of who you are.
What I'm saying is that you should be worried about what people think of
you by way of your actions, especially those who have a good read on who you are.
Because those people, they are the product.
They're not, they're not just the byproduct of your decisions.
They are the makers of the product of your decisions.
I know that's confusing, but I'm saying that it's good to keep in mind that
wider viewpoint of your effects on the cacophony of the product.
On the cacophony of cause and effect as a whole, if nothing else, to give you
a more accurate barometer of where you're at in this life, and at the end of the
day, in those big impression moments, the way that we affect them the most
deeply is most often the one that lingers within them and shouts the
loudest within them when they think of you.
Remember how, and I'm certain that seconders will definitely remember this one.
Remember how I had you imagine time existing as a sculpture that's ever
being added to that runs from one cause and effect to another, building the
sculpture at a steady, unchanging rate with every detail and result of said
decision and everything that has already happened is there, and that's
already happened is there permanently.
Exactly as it happened.
You remember the sculpture, right?
But if not, now is an excellent time for your first read of the book.
I started chapter one, go to chapter 10.
If you already read the book and don't remember it, maybe it's time for
your first reread of the book.
And here's a secret.
Well, not a secret, I guess, because I've already told you guys this,
but it is a far bigger hit to your system during the second reading, because
you already have the full groundwork and understanding each of the pieces and
how they fit together and support the other pieces, and you get to see for
yourself in the second read through.
If each piece fits from a place of knowing about the whole thing, it's kind
of a staggering experience and one that I recommend to everybody, and I feel
more than confident that seconders would back me up on that.
Anyways, we talked about how we build a sculpture, right?
So the thought is that when you consider what is left behind when a person
dies, you know, the parts of the sculpture that they influenced, well,
I'd imagine those that spend their life sending out decisions and actions that
made somebody's day better or made somebody else more likely to be gracious
or kind or generous in their next interactions with people.
Those people move up through the sculpture, sending out parts of themselves.
They add complimentary colors and shaping to the sculpture.
And when they go, what's left behind of them, which is still every bit as
there and as real and tangible as when it was happening, mind you, but so
much of the best of them, they have left themselves behind in the people that
they interacted with and then the decisions that came forth from those
interactions, they hold partial ownerships of every person's decision
that they somehow affected with their own.
And then in every decision affected by said decision and every decision
affected by those decisions that resulted in a on it goes and multiplies
as it goes and the statue.
Well, it's so much better from that kind of person making their way through it.
They stretch out into the statue so that when their physical body is gone and
their consciousness is no longer available to the rest of the world by
conventional means, they are still living in those ownerships and the
decisions of those still building the sculpture.
What part of them stays behind lives on in the cacophony of cause and effect.
To quote Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton,
legacy, legacy.
What is a legacy?
It's planting seeds in a garden.
You never get to see, but who's to say we don't get to see that sculpture after we die.
I mean, once we're no longer tethered to the sculpture itself, that three
dimension with the sliver of the fourth dimension point that we just been
stuck in our whole lives, being able to step away from it, to take it all in.
I don't know about you guys, but I love seeing the sculpture.
I don't know about you guys, but I love stepping back after finishing
an art piece when it's done or being like halfway through it.
Admiring the beautiful strokes of the brush and cringing at the mistakes I made.
So to me, seeing how a lifetime of choices affected the timeline, see how I
progressed as a person and the decisions I made, you might see how that would appeal to me.
But I digress people that reach down with good intent, spreading themselves
and that good intention through the statue.
They raise the statue, they strengthen it.
They feed it.
They beautify it.
They make it better.
They make the statue better.
And then there's those that didn't, those that kept mostly to themselves,
that did primarily for self above all others, that
the people that made little to no spread out, they take all of their
achievements, prizes and meetings from their time here.
They take all these with them when they go.
I mean, they don't get to have them.
They aren't really left in us either.
They accumulate inward until suddenly there's no more inward and at which
they accomplished for themselves, just suddenly goes, they pulled in on themselves and are gone.
Their existences are there, but they don't have the power to do that.
They're little more than a texture line sculpted into the sculpture and their
influence on the decisions made after they pass from this world stops when their body stops.
And then, then there are those that stepped on next to get what they wanted.
Those that embrace the idea that they're going to be the next generation.
They wanted those that embrace the idea that they can get more for themselves by caring
less about how what they're doing is affecting others.
Well, they litter the sculpture with landmines and razor wire.
I mean, what do you want me to say?
They make it so much harder for everybody else.
Their interactions to this life crack and crumble the clay and blow whole chunks out
of the sculpture's body.
So yeah, yeah, it matters a bit what people think of you.
A bit.
The way that you affect them and the decisions they made while under that effect.
The impression you leave on people.
I mean, the way that someone is shaped and affected by interacting with you.
I, we could go in circles on this, but you know, when there is something that since
we're talking about impressions here, I would, I would love to know this.
When was it that we decided to use impressionable as an insult?
I mean it, the word impressionable at its core breakdown.
Let's take it apart by route impression.
Right.
We know what impression is and able meaning you are capable of having
an impression made on you, AKA.
You are pliable, you are able to make an impression on people.
AKA you are pliable and remoldable to new information that you are open
minded and willing to observe something from someone else's point of view.
And make decisions from there.
And to clarify the someone else's point of view part isn't definition, but it's a
pretty common example of having an impression made right.
You're capable and likely to take in another's viewpoint and add to your
learning, AKA you are impressionable.
They can make an impression on you, but there's a little tag put on it to
insist that it's an insult and that that's that, that doesn't feel right.
Not inherently.
It shouldn't mean specifically this.
If anything, so the, sorry, but a bit of a point of contention, the Oxford
language gives us the definition easily influenced, right?
Because of a lack of critical ability.
Whoa.
Why?
Why does it have to have that second part?
A Macmillan dictionary gives us someone who is impressionable is easily impressed
and influenced by other people.
Okay.
That's I mean, okay.
Yes.
That's, that's actually pretty good, but it doesn't just have to be people.
It could be experiences.
It could be that to have an impression made on you, it doesn't have to be from
a person.
But right after someone who is impressionable is easily impressed and
influenced by other people, they put that tag in there usually because they are
young and lack experience in life because they lack experience.
Not because, you know, possibly as an alternate, they've gained enough
wisdom to understand keeping an open mind within themselves tends to lead to better
understandings of the truth.
Just saying.
But, you know, according to the dictionary, it's a lack experience as a
blanket statement, or of course are young and young.
I take no issue with them saying young.
That's fine.
Because for me, I'm not a young person.
I'm not a young person.
Fine, because from a biological point of view, we are the most fantastically
malleable and shapeable mentally and anatomically as will ever be when we are
young.
It's just that implication that keeps coming with it.
You know, nowadays people use it more to mean gullible, foolhardy, easy to be
tricked. And it comes with this aftertaste of this, this person's kind
of a little bit untrustworthy with their own lives and decisions.
You know, they're not good for themselves.
You know, I've been asked before why I tend to gravitate towards a younger
crowd when it comes to social hangouts.
And that's because they are still in that phase where they're impressionable
in the best sense of the word.
So from there, let's say you're not impressionable.
You know, if you aren't impressionable, I'm not going to go after you here.
But I do, I do want to ask you to take just a moment and ask yourself and
answer yourself honestly, because you know, you've had a hard day.
You deserve an honest answer.
Ask yourself why you're not impressionable.
I mean, go ahead.
Leaving this space open for you to do that. Okay.
And then I would point to one specific thing about our thinking influences.
And I want you to tell me if this lines up in your own life.
We talked about predictability.
And how we crave it, structure our lives with it, because we can't see
past our position in time, right?
Everything ahead of us is unknown.
Well, to get along in that predictable lifestyle requires building
systems for everything, because that's one of the glorious aspects of a system.
It brings order out of chaos.
The systems and the patterns they form are the core of predictability building.
I mean, you have to have it in loads in order to obtain predictability.
And why is predictability so important to so many of us?
Well, that's because the main component of all fear is the unknown.
We can't see ahead of our positions on the sculpture that is our timeline.
We are stuck in that ever progressing present and we can't know ahead of time
what may happen.
So we create systems to make it guessable.
It's not exactly like knowing, but it's enough to take that screaming,
shrieking fear down to a gravelly grumble.
So as you may have guessed, there is a
major pitfall to this behavior, but there's more than one, obviously.
But I want to make sure the point of finger right in that one's face.
System building has made us a bit emotionally lazy, I guess.
I'm not really sure if there's a good phrase for that, but we began
automating everything that we could.
Gaining efficiency and minimizing our efforts spent pacifying that ever
present threatening fear that could wake up any moment now.
And a really important one, perhaps the most important thing that we automate.
Was emotional responses.
And our decision making.
Now I feel as if I've talked plenty enough today about plenty enough that
you don't need me to explain why the automation and depersonalization of
your decision making when it deals with other people can be so important.
And depersonalization of your decision making when it deals with other people
can be a very, very bad thing.
So instead I'll defer you to an old adage.
I remember hearing once that people that push to better themselves,
they become one of two types.
The tiger or the dragon.
You can become the tiger.
The tiger is very powerful.
It's full of raw power and frosty and lightning slick quick movements,
as is the dragon.
But there's a very distinct difference and it isn't the tiger's inability
to shoot fire from its mouth.
Unless of course it's the one being ridden by a shirtless,
muscled Tony Danza across an neon 80s techno field as featured on the side
of my Aunt Nancy's deep purple Estra van.
Now the big difference between the tiger and the dragon is that the tiger
only reacts.
If the tiger is hungry, it hunts and it kills.
It's every move, it's every decision is reactionary.
But the dragon acts.
It's not a slave to its environment.
The dragon always has a choice.
The tiger, none.
And I see so many people out there that have designed automatic decision
making for their lives, allowing these automations to take control
of their lives.
These decisions and outcomes aren't that person.
It's not them, not really.
It's a design that you made or very probably copied and one that gets rid
of true decision making in favor of creating a system that'll handle all
your reactions for you, AKA the tiger.
And my explanation to them is this.
If you're focused in, we already talked about what you leave behind and what
stays growing out in the statue, right?
It's being made after you pass.
These things that you're leaving with your reactionary, they continue
outward after you're gone.
When your decisions and your output is purely reactionary, you're
the one that's making the decisions.
It's not you.
I would barter that most of the most important decisions we make in this
life are emotionally based.
They have an emotional component to them.
They have a compassion component to them.
And every time you've chosen to be compassionate in this life, was it
something that was rational to you that you logic out that I should do this
as a result of this or this?
If it was, okay, awesome.
Some good got done, but it didn't leave you with the same feeling as when you
just did it because that part of you said, yeah, we should help that person.
And when you automate these systems, you're doing basically predictive
thinking, looking ahead and saying, okay, well, this has worked so far.
And you know, this is the pattern.
So let's assume this pattern's in play and let's go ahead and make this the
recommendation for the decision that we make in situations where this occurs.
We do that.
We take away that emotional component.
It's left to pure thought, which thought has its merits.
But in the face of when you feel, when it comes to helping someone or doing the
right thing by someone or just making somebody stay patterned, then do we do
it because it rationally makes sense?
Or do we do it because we feel that it would be better if we did?
And how crucial is that emotional component of who you are?
So if you don't, then you're not leaving you behind, not really.
You're leaving behind decisions made from a system.
Give this world you in its entirety, please.
And not the person shackled to the path of the events of what's convenient to
organize.
Give this world the decisions that you make while you build this sculpture.
Don't let your brain be trained in reactionary thinking.
Learn to act.
Don't be the result of the way you live.
Be the stimulus.
Lead or follow willingly and knowledgeably rather than being lent.
Let spark as inspiration to others and let them see what caring about how you
affect others looks like.
And if you lead, well then flare out throughout the statue.
Come flare with us, yeah?
We've got a statue to build.
Okay, so I'm going to end today's show here and I'll leave you with a personal note about
me.
I spent so much of my life having to learn how to be me.
And I know that everybody does, but for me, it took so much time because a lot of the
things that people kind of learn naturally, I had to make sense of them in order to learn
them.
And that includes a lot of facial expression.
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned on the show that I'm on the spectrum.
I'm considered very high functioning.
But it's one of those, for me, it's normalcy.
That's what I am.
You know, I can't see the world through somebody else's eyes.
I can learn from them, but I can't see it through their eyes.
So that's my base level.
And there was this period of time in my life where I had to objectively learn about and
then study my own usage of standard facial expressions.
And I got pretty good at them because I was objectively thinking about doing them, engaging
reactions objectively through my own study.
But the biggest one would have to be learning how to care about other people, you know,
the people that I didn't know and some that I did.
You have to understand when I say I had to learn these things, I had to understand them
first.
For them to get implemented into my life, it had to make sense.
That's not to say I didn't love people.
I just, I didn't understand it, which made it a point of contention.
Something that was constantly being analyzed anytime it came up.
I didn't understand it enough to put it on involuntary status.
It was always observed.
It was always critically thought after.
And I think this had a big hand to play in why I recognized all of these concepts when
I saw them.
I believe it was because I studied all of these emotions and all of these more ethereal
concepts such as the origin of emotions objectively.
I just didn't know how they all linked together and how much each part of it meant.
It's not totally surprising that I became much more generous and a kinder person as
a result of these understandings.
Once I understood all of the stuff that I've taught you about, it was easy because it made
sense to me.
So why do I bring that up?
Well, it's, I wanted to share it with you because looking back, I feel like I was Pinocchio
except I didn't realize I was the wooden boy.
I didn't understand real happiness.
I didn't understand how to care about people.
I cared about people and I loved them, but my love was very different than it is now.
But finally, yeah, now I'm a real boy.
And I'm aware of what it feels like to be a real boy and be able to understand why.
That is just fantastic.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, a good way to fake it until you make
it is to be good to them.
Be good for them.
You're going to be fantastic.
I'm WS Walker.
You're the fantastic you.
Be sweet.
Computer, lights out.
Okay.
Thank you.
I don't know if you guys have one of these.
I've got a Alexa that was given to me by my brother, which is such an amazing like just
he was like, I'm done with it.
But it has been such a nice addition anyways.
But I found that there is a couple of like little key phrases you can throw out, mostly
nerdy stuff like I don't know if we have any Star Trek fans, but computer.
T O gray hot.
Unable to comply.
There's our offline.
I love that.
Let's see what else we got.
Oh, there's a computer.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
Remember, the force will be with you always.
Very nice.
Oh, and computer.
I am your father.
No, that's not true.
That's impossible.
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