Why Life Feels So Pointless (and what to do) - Angelo Somers - #1008

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
All right, before we get started, I am going on tour. My live show, Self Discovery, that's sold out in the UK, it's sold out in Australia, is coming to you. If you're in New York, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Salt Lake City or Denver, you can get your tickets right now at chriswilliamson.live. Toronto's sold out, LA's sold out, Vancouver's sold out and Nashville, all sold out already. This is the final time I'll ever do this show. It's an hour and a half long. It's a solo show with me on stage. There's a Q&A at the end. Zach Talander's warming up with music for me. It's gonna be awesome. Come out and see it. Tickets are limited, chriswilliamson.live.
What does trying for 20 mean to you?

**Angelo Somers** (0:38)
As with most things, people tend to do it as a positive and a negative side. I'm sure you're aware of that. The idea is just that, you know, when everybody else is trying for 10, you're gonna be the guy that tries for 20 And so the positive side of that is you can end up getting a lot done. You can end up building a podcast with a billion plays. But the negative side of it is you're constantly anchoring your actions and your behaviors to what you see other people around you doing. So in some sense, it kind of reduces your freedom, but can increase your actual output, or at least like what you're managing to achieve. So it's kind of like this comparative competitive sort of testosterone maxing thing where you're just like, whatever the other guy does, I'm gonna do more.
I think it was in the Hormozi episode or something when it came to meditation, it was something like, however much everyone else is meditating for inner peace, I'm gonna meditate more. And it's like, if you're a hammer, everything is a nail. And so if that's the type of guy you are, you're probably gonna achieve a lot of cool stuff. But yeah, you might not be the happiest while you're doing it, but you never know, maybe you will be as well.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
Because the position is always lack. It's always, you always feel behind the eight ball and you're trying to catch up. Not only do you need to be better than everybody else, but you have set your sights so much higher than them, double, that you're always going to be setting a, chasing an unrealistic opportunity.

**Angelo Somers** (2:05)
100%. And also you're living in a reactive state, right? Like you're, you're not actually affirming something. It's like an internally generated idea of what you should be doing with your time. You're just reacting to the environment, oftentimes out of like a sense of lack or fear. I mean, we have these like adaptive personalities that we create where we'll like something bad will happen. And then, I don't know, maybe like you're kind of outcast in school. That was my example. And then you kind of create this adaptation, which is like, okay, to avoid that sort of pain, you're going to do everything you can to not be in that position again, which often means just doing better than the next guy. But the problem, you can end up just getting really good at shit you don't actually care about or making a lot of progress along a dimension that you wouldn't have otherwise.

**Chris Williamson** (2:52)
What like, give me an example.

**Angelo Somers** (2:58)
Well, I was just in LA and I feel like this is a hub of that. There's a lot of people sort of playing the status game. It seems to be like the center of the status game in many ways. Oftentimes, it's to overcome a sense of lack.
Nietzsche always spoke about creating your own values. There's kind of a lot of debate over the extent to which you're actually capable of doing that. People like Peterson are kind of saying like, you can't do it. Young says you can't do it. But I think it's because there's, it's not because we're actually confused about what we mean when we say values or like the capacity or where they come from. It's because we're generally quite confused about this term, you, like I, like what actually is that? What's the scope of it? And it can kind of expand or contract depending on the context at play. So if you consider you to be like the body that is Chris Williamson, like that body will actually be creating its own values, even if they're mimicking other stuff in other people's bodies, like mirror neurons are still in your head, right? So you're kind of, if that's who you are, then you are creating your own values. But the conscious personality, the conscious identity, Chris, doesn't have any top-down control over the body. If you did, I could say, just pause your heartbeat and you'd be able to pause it. But you can't because nature is quite smart and it realizes that certain things just shouldn't be within the jurisdiction of the conscious personality.