MY MOTHER WANTED ME TO DIE!

MOTHER WANTED ME TO DIE call in

Speaker shares childhood experiences with their angry mother, discussing struggles with motivation and music production. Highlights importance of willpower, therapy for healing, while offering support and financial assistance to the other speaker.

Brief Summary
In this part, I open up about my childhood experiences with my mother's anger. I discuss my struggles with motivation, music production, and dependency on my mother. We talk about the importance of willpower, processing anger, and seeking therapy for healing and growth. I offer my support and financial assistance to the other speaker.

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Chapters
0:00:00 Anxiousness and Isolation
0:03:24 Moving and Homelessness
0:08:11 Empathy and Abandonment
0:13:06 Lonely and Isolated: Childhood's Dark Impact
0:16:39 Directionless and Unemployed: Seeking Guidance and Purpose
0:23:21 Immersed in Fantasy and Fiction
0:36:41 First Memory: Nightmare of Being Murdered by Mother
0:42:18 Mother's Angry Outburst: Room Destroyed, Verbal Abuse
0:47:23 The Inevitability of Torture and Inner Torture
0:57:14 Bullying Escalates, No Solution Found
1:08:53 Exploring Feelings towards Cousin's Abuse
1:20:18 The struggle with conflicting desires and actions
1:21:02 Failed Dreams of Music Production
1:26:05 Struggles with Moving Out and Toxic Mother
1:30:46 The Desire to Move Out and Get a Job
1:36:04 The Illusion of Being Productive
1:37:26 Excuses for not pursuing passion
1:41:36 Fear of inconvenience and facing the future
1:45:46 Shielded from necessity and struggle for masculinity
1:48:51 Estranged Relationship with Father
1:52:24 The Importance of Willpower and Discipline
1:55:26 Lack of Father Figure and Choices in Life
1:58:30 Lack of Anger and Its Role in Staying in an Abusive Environment
1:59:15 The Paradox of Mocking and Anger
2:02:53 The Babysitter Incident: Rage and Protection
2:06:37 The Desire for Justice and Revenge
2:09:38 Seeking Pleasure and Avoiding Conflict
2:10:02 Mother's Desire to Maintain Family Structure
2:13:31 Parents' Obligation to Tell the Truth and Maintain Positive Relationships
2:14:12 Emotional Manipulation by Father
2:17:30 Waiting for Apologies: The Roman Chariot
2:24:27 Money won't be a barrier to therapy

Long Summary
In this part of the conversation, I open up about my childhood experiences and the profound impact my mother's anger had on me. I share how her destructive behavior and constant verbal expressions of anger deeply traumatized me and affected my language abilities. Despite acknowledging that her actions were wrong, she never truly apologized for them. It is ironic that she expects cleanliness from others while having a relationship with a hoarder. It baffles me how she demanded more discipline from a child than she had over her own temper. I firmly believe in taking responsibility for our mistakes without necessarily offering apologies.

Moving on, I reflect on my current lack of motivation and ambition. I explain how I initially moved back in with my mother to save money, but instead ended up relying on her support. As the conversation progresses, I discuss my struggles in pursuing a career in music production and my hesitancy to commit to a full-time job. The host challenges me to take control of my own life and suggests considering moving out. I admit that I have been using music production as an excuse for not actively seeking employment, and express disappointment in my own lack of dedication. Deep down, I realize that change is necessary and it is vital that I take action. Moreover, I touch upon my thoughts regarding masculinity and how necessity often drives individuals to succeed.

Dwelling on the detrimental effects of being financially dependent on an abusive woman, I emphasize the importance of cultivating willpower and striving to make logical decisions rather than simply acting on emotions. I candidly share my own struggles with pornography consumption and a lack of discipline in my faith. Drawing a contrast, I discuss how I have chosen to pursue challenging conversations through podcasting rather than opting for easier alternatives. I stress the profound significance of willpower in shaping our actions and ultimately, our destiny. However, I cannot help but feel curious about why the other speaker is taking the path of self-disintegration and why there seems to be a lack of anger in their circumstances. I emphasize the importance of acknowledging and properly processing anger in order to grow and heal.

As the conversation deepens, I reflect on my own feelings of shame and guilt, and how they have influenced my behaviors. I delve into the concept of anger and its manifestation in both males and females. I express frustration in not fully understanding my mother's sympathies with certain ideologies and shed light on my relationship with my father. In conclusion, I strongly encourage the other speaker to consider therapy and offer my financial assistance if necessary. I firmly believe in the importance of having a support system and ensuring that money is not a barrier to obtaining help. I wholeheartedly express my willingness to support and assist the other speaker on their journey of healing and growth.

Tags
childhood experiences, mother's anger, struggles, motivation, music production, dependency, willpower, processing anger, therapy, healing, growth, support, financial assistance

Transcript
Anxiousness and Isolation

[0:00] Hello. Hello, hello. Hey, can you hear me? I can hear you just fine. How are you doing?
I'm fine. A little bit anxious. I've been facing a whole and yeah, I've been very nervous and excited.
Well that's a good place to be. That's a good place to be. That's where the progress is, I think, in life.
So all right Sid, do you want to read what you sent me? Do you want to just chat about it? What's your pleasure?
Yeah, I've been reconsidering what I am rethinking.
I believe I have a lot of problems, but I had to condense most of that down to two large issues I have in life, one of which is isolation, I suppose.
And I've been very isolated in my life, especially after dropping out of high school in 2017. And it's gotten really painful, and I've also been very much attached to reading fiction.
So it sort of started when I was 12 years old, and I'm 25 now.

[1:04] And only recently, it really has started to lose its charm and its grip and influence on me.
But very often, I would find myself awake at night and do nothing but read until I couldn't stay awake anymore.
More, and basically I'd be drowning myself in it, in fantasy and fiction, and I guess I wanted to postpone reality because it sort of always sort of ran faster than my heart could beat, I suppose.
And I tried detaching from this habit in the past, but doing that was always very painful, And I could never manage more than six months without.
And sometimes I'd be reading 14 hours a day for weeks, and I wasted many years on this.
And I believe this reading habit had a precursor which it metastasized from.
And I was also a very sleep-deprived child and teenager because I wanted to maximize the amount of time being in my fantasies.
And I would create worlds and characters in my head and let it all play out.
And oftentimes Sometimes it kind of was the only thing for me to look forward to.

[2:20] I had this space in my head that made everything soft.
An intentional wordplay, but- What do you mean, you had this space in your head that made everything soft? I'm not sure what that means.
Because my family life was kind of empty and agonizing, and I feel like by going back into my, by retreating into my fantasies, I could have this synthesis between communication communication and intimacy, which I never really had with my family.
I feel like I gave up on trying to reach my family members around the age of eight, and I realized that I couldn't really interact with them much without feeling agony and sadness.

[3:01] And I guess, you know, giving up on interacting with my family that early is kind of part of illogical sequence in which, I guess, after that I just gave up on myself.
And I suppose I silenced myself as well, so I feel like I forgot who I am over time.
Moving and Homelessness

[3:24] And with the silence came isolation, and I think this history of isolation really reared its ugly face when I turned 11, that's where...
Sorry, my family moved away to a different town when I turned 11 and I guess I'll call it the indifferent town because I told my mother shortly prior to us moving that I'll kill myself if we move away.
And so we did move away and we ended up in two different homeless shelters for about half a year.
Wait, what? You moved in, you ended up in homeless shelters.
How did that come about? I guess we sort of wanted to cheat the endless waiting queue of finding an apartment in a huge populated city.

[4:15] That's kind of a trick. Oh, so if you go to the homeless shelter, then you get under fast track for government housing. Is that right?
Exactly. Despite German laws being kind of differentiated and nuanced, you can do these. There's kind of these loopholes that you can play around with.
But yeah, my family moving did me such an incalculable amount of inner harm.
I remember sitting at the desk in a tiny room of that homeless shelter, and I counted five pills and various stuff that I supposedly needed every morning.
And one of those pills… pills? Yeah.
One of them was a quite high dose for my body weight of ADD medication, and I had to take this useless iron supplement due to anemia, and I needed B12, probably malnutrition because I didn't eat enough meat, and being B12 deficient isn't exactly easy nowadays because they stuff that in everything, and I needed a vitamin D supplement as well.
I don't remember the fifth one, but yeah, before taking these ADD drugs, my grades in school plummeted.

[5:29] I suppose it was a mystery to all the adults around me.
I guess that they didn't have the empathy and curiosity to ask what was destroying my cognition so much.
But yeah, I had to find new friends. I couldn't imagine a life without friends, not yet anyway.
And it was quite difficult under all of that medication.
It took me some time to find friends, like about one to two years.
But something fundamental happened to my friendships at that point, and the way I related to people would change permanently.

[6:08] My old friends from my hometown, they were very bright and kind of bubbly and optimistic and playful, creative.
You know, we were kids kind of like me back then.
But the world sort of turned bleak after we moved.
There was a lack of play, a lack of exploration, and a lack of adventure and friends that I eventually could make.
And my new friends were often rather recluse and shy, and their temperament was a bit subdued, and they seemed to be very in-drawn.
And I think I turned into someone who was very much similar to that, and it was kind of the opposite of the friendships I had before being abducted by my family.
And I remember that as I turned older, especially during puberty, I'd often think, that normal people were boring. And I was bullied a lot shortly after moving.

[7:07] Another thing I noticed is that after my family moved, I became incredibly tense physically, and I always felt very stressed.
And I had to go to this neurofeedback thing to relearn how to relax my body, with electrodes attached to my scalp and everything.
It wasn't really helpful, but yeah, I think ultimately my friendships started to grow another mutation, and I would notice very quickly that some of my friends were troubled, and especially now I feel that they were the neglected children like me, and my entire attention was tuned towards the problems of the people around me, and my friends in particular, I would always want to talk about their problems and lend an ear to them, and I would spend this massive amount of empathetic and cognitive resource to the point that it exhausted me.
Empathy and Abandonment

[8:11] I would often try raising my friend's motivation, you know, to find her dreams, her ambition.
I wanted to shake them awake, and I feel like I wanted to...
I was trying to get my old friends back and it's like my heart was left behind at my old hometown and it sounds weird.

[8:34] After I moved away, nothing really seemed more alive than something dying because I think I'm attracted to people who feel hopeless.
And you know, the sad thing is that whenever my friends started to spend time with other people, I'd become jealous.
And sad, because I had this feeling that something was wrong with me.
And without me, maybe they would have been better off. And sometimes I got paranoid, and what if they hate me?
And what if they talk about me behind my back? Do they even need me?
And is it okay if I disappear?
And I would withdraw, because I think I wanted them to come to me and somehow signal to me that I was appreciated or accepted, and maybe I even withdrew once they started to show signs of self-sufficiency, but I'm not too sure.

[9:39] After dropping out of high school, and everyone that was functional, I guess psychologically more independent. They fell away from my life and I only had two people remaining.
And everyone I knew at that point, either online or locally, they had this kind of hopelessness to them and a pessimism to some degree, either about their lives in general or about our relationships and their parents or orientation job and career.
And I was always so focused on trying to help my friends solve problems.
They treated us unsolvable, and over time I grew tired of everything.
So it started to feel like I was thinking for them instead of them thinking for themselves.
So I'm very alone now, and I was journaling the other day, and it came to me that.

[10:40] There may be some subconscious, some irrational logic in this because if I solve people's problems that I think are unsolvable, maybe I have a chance or a hope of solving my own issues as well.
But I feel like this all put me in a therapeutic role that is very inappropriate for a friendship because, especially for young people, because one party falls short of the standards I wanted, to convince them of, and the other party would be this lonely sage exposing their weakness just constantly.
And it reminds me of my earlier childhood, because I always felt small and insignificant, and I think maybe I unintentionally put these same feelings of smallness on others, because with my constant involvement in their inner lives.

[11:52] I might have been undermining their undermining their ability of them finding their anger and sadness naturally, so that they could break out after depression or their hopelessness.
And six years ago, I didn't really know that you couldn't help people who didn't want to be helped, and it hurt me so much to have so many people around me, or at least multiple people around me who felt so hopeless or who didn't have the ambition I wished everyone to have, or I tried maintaining within myself, which I failed at, honestly.
And I think my role of being this cool, wise guy came with some kind of inhumane standard of omnipotence, because as a child I had to be inhuman as well, because I had to be functional, with half of my functions cut off.
And it's not entirely clear to me what the exact origin...
Lonely and Isolated: Childhood's Dark Impact

[13:06] I was neglected and clearly malnourished.
I didn't sleep much. I wanted to spend more time with my brother and my family in general, but my father left me and.

[13:22] There wasn't really anyone to speak to and to fall back on, and there was a lack of comfort.

[13:31] I had a very, quite a dark family life, dark as in lonely and isolated.

[13:41] And so I don't know what… When I look at my key memories, they're sort of applicable to most of the issues I have, and it all seems to be tightly intertwined.
And I guess that's typical, because otherwise these survival mechanisms would be too easy to unravel.
But yeah, But that's one of the big issues I wanted to speak with you about, because I don't think it's that healthy to be this lonely, and it really harmed me physically.
I feel like I lost a lot of vigor and vitality because of this, partly due to my previous inaction.
I guess that's kind of a feedback loop. But, yeah, I guess I'm asking you to help me in understanding these dynamics. MX.
Sorry, which dynamics in particular do you mean?
The way I would engage with other people, the relationships I would have to my friends, and the way I would withdraw after that, and how it all, I believe, came from my childhood.

[15:04] I mean.

[15:08] There's a reason for why all the people who I think sort of went on to live and to be probably to be, I don't know, they fell away from my life.
So there's a reason for why this happened, I suppose.
There is a reason to my, for my loneliness, as most of the, a lot of this isolation is kind of self-inflicted too, so.

[15:39] I'm never sure when you're finished your thought. I'm about to say something, and then you start again, so I don't want to interrupt.
Oh, I'm sorry. If you have more to say, I don't know when you've finished your thought. And that's just, you know, probably just not used to some of the back and forth, right?
I'm not used to this. So, you have a lot, obviously, you have a lot to say and your language skills are fantastic, of course.
I assume that's partly intelligence and partly just 40 hours a day of reading.
But yeah, I don't know when you're finished, your thoughts, which is, and again, I don't want to interrupt you, you have a lot to say, so.
Jens I'm finished. I think I'm finished with this one, I believe.
There's another problem I have, but I don't know if I want to, I talked so much that I don't really want to throw that. I think it's okay to separate that.
Maybe once we're done speaking about this one.
Well, it could be related. What's the other problem? The other problem is that I'm totally directionless.
Directionless and Unemployed: Seeking Guidance and Purpose

[16:39] I'm kind of letting things decay around me, and I'm unemployed.
Sorry, I mean, when you say things like, I'm kind of letting things decay around me.
That probably is a vivid experience for you, but I don't know what it means I don't know if that means you're letting black mold grow in your apartment I don't know if that means that you're not exercising I don't know if that means you're not maintaining relationships Like if you could just give me a little bit less language and a little bit more empiricism, That would be really helpful because your inner experience isn't working for you So if you communicate to me your inner experience, which isn't working for you, you're telling me what doesn't work.
But if you give me the facts, then I can look at things a bit more objectively, if that makes sense.

[17:26] All right, so I'm unemployed. I'm maintaining myself physically, and I'm trying to, and it's going really well. My diet is good.
I'm getting much stronger physically. I'm kind of recovering from my teenage years and childhood.
I don't have many friendships. I have one friend that I'm growing tired of locally, one local friend, and one from my old hometown that's been in my life for since I was three years old.

[17:56] But that's really all. I don't have any romantic, not many romantic experiences.
It's been seven years since I've been with, I guess it's my old high school.
The one from high school kind of collapsed immediately.
And I don't know, I don't know what you could say. But you say it kind of collapsed immediately. I don't know what that means.
I mean, that's your own internal experience, but I don't know what that means, because if you communicate your own internal experience rather than the facts, it becomes a monologue, if that makes sense.
Because I don't know what to add to that, I don't know how to evaluate that, because I don't know what actually happened.
Did it end because she moved away, did it end because one of you cheated, did it end because you got bored, did you have a big fight?
I don't know when you say like it just kind of collapsed immediately, I don't know what that means, because that's very much an internal analogy for an experience rather than the facts that would unite us in conversation.
Yes, yes. And none of this is a criticism, you understand, this is not a bad thing, I'm just pointing it out.
Yeah, it may be a bit of a, maybe a little bit unoptimal because I'm trying to have a conversation with you.

[19:12] So I... Well, no, no, to be fair, to be fair, and again, none of this is a criticism in any shape or form, but you're not trying to have a conversation with me as yet.
We'll get there, but as yet, you're not trying to have a conversation with me. Do you know why?

[19:29] Maybe it's a defense. It's a guess. No, no, no, no, no. I'm not asking you for the causality.
Do you know why as yet? And again, no criticism at all. Nothing negative.
I'm just pointing out the facts.
Do you know why you're not having a conversation with me as yet?
No, I don't. The reason is that you are giving me a bunch of really vivid internal experience and analysis and thoughts and judgments and possible connections and evaluations and so on, right?
But you haven't asked me if it makes any sense to me.

[20:05] Oh yeah. And you also haven't asked me what information I'm looking for.
Yes. And again, no criticism, again, because I know that you're probably quite prone to self-criticism, so I'm not, I have no problem with anything you're doing, no problem whatsoever, I think it's perfectly fine.
But you're dumping a huge amount of highly complex stuff, some of which is, I get the occasional scrap of fact, like you moved town, that you're on these five medications, but it's this stream of internal thoughts and judgments and experiences and flavors and so on.
And you haven't said, does this make it, are you following? Does this make sense?
What information would you like to have?
So normally when people, when I say to people, you know, do you want to read the email you sent me or do you want to tell me more about the issue?
Yes. I don't usually expect a sort of 25-minute, I won't say a ramble because it's not rambling like it's very important and I get all of that and I appreciate that But, you had a monologue without asking whether it made sense to me or whether it was information that was helpful to me in helping you solve your problem.
That's true. And it sort of burnt up in a way, you know, we usually have two hours, so you burnt up almost a quarter of that time without asking me if the information is helpful.

[21:32] Yes. And again, no problem, but so as yet, a conversation is when you're exchanging information, not having a monologue.

[21:47] Now, when I interrupted you a couple of times to say, what does this mean or what does that mean?
It didn't seem to say to you that there were parts of your monologue that I didn't understand and couldn't follow.
You just went back to the monologue, if that makes sense.

[22:03] Yes, that makes sense and I remember and I follow. Good.
Okay. So again, no problems, no issues. This is the stuff that we're trying to work on and I wanted to make sure.
I was just curious to see if at some point you'd say, is this helpful to you or does Does this make sense or are you following or what else do you need to know or but no just makes a lot of sense straight on right straight marching on with the syllables and of course you read books and what what are books books are a monologue of the author to you.
That's very true. You don't get to interrupt the author and say hey I'm sorry this this part doesn't make any sense like I'm reading Oliver Twist with my daughter and you know part of us you know we sort of make jokes about interrupting Charles Dickens to say dude look I get it I know you're paid by the word, but seriously, you don't need a paragraph that goes on for two pages, right?
So with authors, they're just having a monologue at you, you're on the receiving end.
And so you're not used to interrogatory or sort of a back and forth thing. So that's fine.
So I guess one of the questions I have, you said you wasted a lot of years reading.
I hate to even think that anyone imagines that they're wasting time reading. I get that you can.
So what kind of books were you reading as a whole?
Immersed in Fantasy and Fiction

[23:22] Like Christopher Paolini and Brenton Sanderson, John Gwynn, hero stories, fantasy, fiction, like Inheritance Cycle, if you've ever heard of this one.
And sometimes I'll just even go through and browse the internet sections for fine fiction and read all kinds of stuff.
Related, but because I was very focused on character, I wanted to...
It feels like I wanted to get closer to the characters.
I was very character-focused.

[24:01] See, I don't know what that means. I wanted to, I just wanted to feel, I feel like, I feel like I, I don't know how to say this, I was about to give you another internal experience thing.
Good, good, okay, good. Good catch. Good catch. Yes.
Okay. It's very difficult. So I asked you what type of books you read and you gave me a bunch of authors and then you vaguely mentioned that it's sort of fantasy and hero show.
So you wrote, is it sort of medieval fantasy stories that you're reading? Yes, yes.
And I mean, I assume there's somewhat of a limited number of books in that genre.
Is that all of what you've read or were there other types of stories that you read?

[24:58] Yeah, I've been reading a lot of fan fiction. So I remember I found this… Maybe you're familiar with these Japanese comics, these mangos.
I found one at the age of seven at a storefront, and I was kind of, I guess, enraptured by by this because it was totally new to me.
And it would stick to my…it would kind of follow me around in my memories for years until I had my first, I suppose, one of these iPhones with which you could connect to the internet.
And I would just download the app and browse for fan fiction related to this particular Japanese comic work.
And I would just read everything I could get my hands on, and I did this with various, sometimes anime-related works.

[26:10] I needed to feel things. I feel like it was the only way for me to experience emotion without hurting.
________________ Sorry, the only way to experience emotions without hurting?
I'm not sure what you mean. Hurting is an emotion. That's true.
I don't know how to explain this. I was um.

[26:48] I mean, maybe a different angle. I mean, I could...
No, listen, if you don't know how to explain it, that's fine. Yes.
I mean, it's funny, I don't know how to explain it, and then you start going on to try and explain it. And I'm like, we're probably not going to get any play useful, right?
I don't know which way we should go, but let's go this way.
It's like, no, no, just sit in not knowing, right? That's okay. That's fine.
Okay. All right. So, it's not like, and that's one of the reasons why I had some curiosity about the types of books that you read or the types of stuff that you read for me it's kind of hard to sit there and say well you know I've worked my way through the classics you know Dickens and Dostoevsky and like all of the Jane Austen and all of that sort of good meaty literature stuff it's hard for me to think that somebody's wasted time doing that but is it your experience that the books were escapism and avoidance and in a sense it sounds to me and I don't want to tell you your experience it sounds almost like they're empiric, like they're giving you something that's a substitute for life that displaces or replaces life?
BV Very much so, very much so. I think, yes.
No, sorry, go ahead, you were going to say?
So it started in childhood, so I think it was a replacement for what I needed as a child.

[28:15] Intimacy or... No, not a replacement.
It was a substitute or a drug in a sense, right? Oh yes. Yes, yes.
Okay. All right. Much so a drug. So I still don't know your family structure, right? You mentioned that your dad left you, which I thought was interesting.
He probably didn't leave you, but rather your mother.
And you mentioned a sibling, a younger brother, I think it was.
But I don't know. We've been talking for over half an hour and I don't know anything really other than a couple of hints about your actual circumstances.
How wealthy was your family?
How long were your parents together? What happened to their relationship?
You know, the empirical facts that we can share.
My parents were never together. And they also never married. I have an older brother.
He's my half-brother. He's nine years older than me. So he has a different father.
His father, half of my family is from Iran, the other half is from the northern area of the Caucasus.
They came to Germany.

[29:22] My brother was... Geography off, it's fine, but yeah, go ahead. Yes.
So I never really spent much time with my father.
My mother told me that And when she had me in the hospital, my father wasn't there.
And I had to be left in an incubator for three months because I was….

[29:53] I'm a premature child, so I was born at week 25, so I was very tiny, and my lungs were Remember.
Very good question. I asked my mother why that happened, but she didn't really give me much of a useful answer.
I mean, I had some issues with malnutrition, so maybe she was stressed, maybe my mother was stressed, or she didn't eat enough food, or she had to, support the family alone. It might have been stress-related.
And what was your mother's circumstance meeting these men, or what was her job?
It's all to me kind of vague, like how did she end up in this hospital, and where did she meet your dad, what happened to him? I'm not really, I don't really understand that.

[30:54] My mother met my father at some political meet-up, and that's all. She never really gave me too many details regarding the circumstances of the meeting. And do you know much about your mother's early life?
Oh yeah, it was horrible. Her early life, she was imprisoned.
I don't know when exactly, but it was during the Iranian revolution.
And prison back then, it was horrible. She saw people and friends die in front of her.

[31:41] And there was a lot of arguing between her mother and her father.
She told me that she would often...

[31:55] Try to manage. So her parents were arguing a lot, and sometimes it would get a bit violent, and she would often go to her siblings and try to hide them, try to tuck them away in the adjacent rooms just to protect them and keep them safe.
So, I guess she was sort of a mediator between her father and her mother to sort of manage the situation, and it has caused her a lot of stress.
And that's all I know about her early childhood. Her very early years sounded a bit better because she could sort of live out her childhood with her siblings.
But later it got worse and worse over time, and she had to work two jobs to support the family because my grandpa wasn't working, and I don't know much about my grandma.

[33:03] But it all sounded very, very stressful, kind of like a war of attrition.
CB. A war? Sorry, what was the word? Yeah, it sounded like a mental war or like a mental… No, no, but between….

[33:28] Just in general, the atmosphere was very hostile.

[33:36] I mean, that's kind of my interpretation, because she hasn't told me much.
Who were the participants in the mental war?
Grandma, grandpa, her father. Was it a mental war between them or a mental war between your mother and your grandparents? parents?
Between them, between my grandparents.
They were arguing a lot. And what does your mother do for money?
She works in a hospital right now.

[34:11] And did she have any medical training or knowledge or experience when she had you or was that prior to her gaining this knowledge or experience.
I'm sorry, she's not really medically trained, although she did work at a pharmacy for a while, but that was way after I was born. She didn't have much experience.
No, she didn't.

[34:41] What was your question again? Whether or not she was medically trained before I was born?
No, she wasn't. trained at all, then it doesn't, I mean, it's sort of a moot point, which is fine.
And do you know whether or not you had any sort of touch contact or anything like that in the incubator you were in for three months?
Yeah, that was a big one. That hurt a lot, knowing that. Not much, not much.
Because I think now the belief or knowledge is that if babies don't receive some touch, you know, it can give them some challenges.
Well, yeah, there is that. So you must have received some, right?
But I don't know how well understood all of that was back then.
I guess the hospital staff, yeah, true.
The hospital staff probably had to touch me occasionally out of necessity because I was intubated.
And I think my mother, she told me that she held me occasionally.
I don't know what that means, but I didn't ask her about how often or how long, and I also didn't ask her what she did during the time I was at the hospital.
I don't have much info on this one?
Right, okay, okay.

[36:09] And do you know what happened with regards to your mother after you were born?
I mean, three months seems like, again, I'm no doctor, but that seems like a crushing amount of time to be in the NIC.
Did she have postpartum depression? Was she around? Did she go back to work?
Do you have any idea what happened during the time that you were in this incubator?
No, no, I don't. I don't know what happened.
First Memory: Nightmare of Being Murdered by Mother

[36:41] My first memory, I can tell you what my first memory was if that should be relevant, right?
So the very first clear memory I had was, I think I must have been three years old, and I remember waking up feeling scared.
I So I woke up from a nightmare, and I still remember that nightmare very clearly.
And that dream, I was murdered by my mother.
So we were at the top of a staircase, and she was carrying me.
I was in the wheeled baby carriage.
I was inside one, and she was carrying it down the stairs.
And as we reached the basement, there was a skeleton in that dark corner staring at me, and it jumped me, and I feel like it felt like I was electrocuted.
And suddenly I saw my mother's face, and then she grabbed me, and that's where it stopped.

[37:47] And yeah, that's my first memory. I'm sorry about that.
And when you got out of the incubator, I guess you went home with your mother, but your father had almost nothing to do with you guys, is that right?
I saw him occasionally, I suppose once a year for… I think I saw him once when I was four years old, I remember he went outside with me to visit a couple of playgrounds around the city.
So I was always looking forward to visiting the local playgrounds with him and play with him.
And we played some soccer. So he was in the neighborhood, right?
He was close, he was close. We never knew where he went.
So my mother was very enraged, actually. that she was very, very, very terribly angry at him, because he was never around, or never as in, he wasn't really a father to me, and she was very… And were you the product of a one-night stand, or a short relationship, or…? Probably a very short relationship.
Right. And I assume, of course, that your mother has never taken responsibility for choosing the wrong guy to be the father of her children.

[39:12] Responsibility would mean, um, what would that mean?
Well, instead of getting mad at your dad, she would say, I'm so sorry that I chose the wrong guy to have children with. She never apologized?
No, but even taking responsibility.

[39:36] I really don't know what it means to take responsibility for such a mistake.
I know it's a horrible mistake, but I don't know what it would look like, restitution or remediation.
No, no, no, restitution is a long way. You can take responsibility for things without apologizing for them.
I mean, I take responsibility for everything I say in this call-in show.
That doesn't mean that I'm apologizing.
I'm just I I'm responsible for what I say, right? I'm responsible for what I do It means not blaming other people for what happens in your life when you become an adult I, Talked to her about the choice she made and She said that That it was a stupid choice and that she did a mistake, Okay, but if she did the mistake, and I'm trying to sort of square that with she's really angry at your dad.
She was very angry at him. I don't know what she's feeling now.
And how did you know she was very angry? What would she say or do?

[40:45] I asked her a couple years ago about this show, so she said to me that she was very angry, but I also experienced her as a very, very profoundly angry person when I was a child.
Okay, so this is where our conversation needs to get a little bit more efficient, So I asked for the empirical evidence, right?
So I said, and again, it's not a criticism, I'm just sort of pointing it out.
So I said, how did you know she was angry?
And then you say, well, I talked to her about it and I experienced her as a profoundly angry person. I'm like, okay, I get all of that.
But what did she do or say empirically outside of your head that gave you the experience or impression that she was very angry?

[41:27] Multiple things. And those are my key memories, by the way.
So, I remember my mother one day coming home from work and my room was kind of untidy. Actually, it was a mess.
Because I would be playing alone in my room and I'd be at peace.
All right, I am going to come right over there with a pair of pliers and I'm going to get this information out of you without time-wasting story time, all right, because now I've heard about it was your core experiences, it was a big history, how messy your room was. How does that answer my question?
She went crazy. Okay, so let's get to that. Okay, let's just go straight to the facts, right?
I don't need a prologue, right? So tell me about the things she did that gave you the thought that she was very angry.
Mother's Angry Outburst: Room Destroyed, Verbal Abuse

[42:18] She took my entire room apart, breaking everything while screaming profanities at me. Things like go die, eat shit, and disappear.
Oh my gosh, that's appalling. At the top of her lungs.
That's appalling. Like she was demonic. Yes. And how old was she?

[42:38] Five to six years old. Well, this of course if she's saying to you go die.
That's why you're having dreams of her murdering you, right?
Exactly. Yes. Yes makes sense. Yeah, but mother is not is not a great place to start, So, so all I could do was cry and my brother watched it happen and he didn't do anything and then walked out and Actually, I forgot how to speak my mother tongue, and all I can remember are fanaties.
That's all I can remember and freely recall.
So I guess it kind of traumatized me. Right.
And, of course, well, I shouldn't say of course, maybe she did.
Did she ever say, gosh, you know, that was really out of control, I'm so sorry? KK.

[43:27] She didn't apologize, but she did admit that it was not good behavior, or it was wrong of her, that she wronged me.
But I had to really, every time I talk to my mother about these things, I really have to pull that out of her nose.
She never really went up to me by herself, by her own choice, to apologize for these things.
And were you guys living in Europe at this point? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was born in Germany.
Okay, got it, got it, got it.
And did she date at all in Germany? No, no.
But she, well, that's a lie. She met someone.
When I was five, she met someone and she told me that she met someone at the bus station or in the bus, and they've been sort of together ever since, even today still, and their relationship is very…, It's not a good relationship.
The guy is a hoarder, he's kind of dysfunctional, he's… Wait, are you kidding me?
I'm not. I'm not. Do you know why this is kind of jaw-dropping?

[44:52] Uh, I don't know. Uh, well, it's kind of jaw-dropping because She screams at you to eat shit and die because your room is messy and then she ends up in a, multi-decade relationship with a hoarder, Yes, he's a hoarder and something kind of ironic in a way right because hoarders are just about the messiest people known to man Oh, I see that.
I see that now. Do you know what I mean? Like how dare you have a messy room?
I'm holding out for the hoarder Oh my god, I see that.
I never noticed that. That's mad.
Yeah, that's amazing.

[45:30] Thank you. Well, and of course, a woman or a man screaming at a kid about a messy room, it's like, you ought to have more discipline and keep your room clean.
It's like, well, shouldn't you have more discipline and not scream that you want your children to die?
That's very true. I mean, how can you expect a child to have more discipline over his environment than you have over your own temper?

[45:54] Yep, that's very true. Okay, so she's I mean with all sympathy to her childhood.
She's monstrous and horrible It shows in their relationship too because um, I can't really stand being well listen I I I assume that your mother's relationship with the hoarder is horrible I don't care I want to sort of focus back back on you good good yeah good understood I mean I assume she's she's paying all the price for being murderously abusive towards her children and honestly the amount of misery that she's going through is irrelevant to me and and you know it's if you if you scream at your children that you want them to die I don't care what happens to your heart and happiness afterwards. In fact, I kind of hope it's bad.
I have the same thoughts sometimes. Sometimes I have very bad, evil thoughts towards her.
Why would they be evil or bad?
Not evil, justified even. Oh yeah, no, my mother's in misery.
I mean she lives and she sleeps with a knife under her bed. She's paranoid and terrified of everything and it's like, yeah well, maybe don't abuse children and you'll end up with a happier life.
But if you abuse children, it's like why would I care about her happiness, right? She didn't care about mine.

[47:12] It's not like I don't inflict these things. I'm not going over there and pretending to be some shadowy figure who ghosts past her house in the middle of the night.
The Inevitability of Torture and Inner Torture

[47:23] I'm not going to torture her. But the fact that she is tortured, I mean, it's sort of pointless for me to have any opinion about it.
It is what it is. It's inevitable that it's going to happen.
People who torture children are themselves tortured as they age.
And me having an opinion about it, oh it's good, it's bad, it should happen, it should, it doesn't matter.
It's like me, like if someone's a chain smoker, my opinion about whether they should or shouldn't get lung cancer is completely irrelevant.
Because I, like I can't change my mother's torture, right? The only person who can change my mother being tortured is her.
Like she'd have to take ownership, make apologies, restitution, that would give her some ease, right? That would give her some comfort. I can't make her do that.
I can't relieve her inner torture because it's not under my control, it's not under my power, it doesn't come from me, and therefore I have no authority over it.
LBW I wanted to relieve the inner torture of my friends, I think.
I wanted…that's how I think…that's how the relationships sort of… PW No, no, no.
You didn't want to relieve the inner torture of your friends any more than you wanted your fiction books to give you courage.
You were doing these things to avoid your own inner torture and to pretend that you had a kind of authority because you felt helpless.

[48:47] Well, I think that's right.
I don't want to tell you your own life, but that to me would fit.
If it doesn't fit, obviously I will withdraw that, but it would seem to me that would be the case.
Because if you were very good at healing people's inner torment and torture, I mean, maybe you would have fixed your mom, or certainly you wouldn't be in your mid-twenties and be in the situation you're in, right?
LBW Yeah. Do you want to know about my brother?
I have a couple memories regarding my brother and other people who didn't treat me. I don't know if that's relevant, but they… PF.
Prior to receiving information, I have no idea whether I want to receive it or not, right? Would you like to learn about X?
I don't know. I couldn't possibly tell you, but if you want to tell me, I'm happy to hear." So I remember my cousin as a very terrible person to me.
He's two years, three years older than me.
And I think I met him when I was five, six years old.

[49:54] And sometimes, so my family would meet up with his family, and I would spend a lot of time in his room with him together.
And during nighttime, he would tell me scary stories, horror stories.
And the later it got, the more terrible it got because he would try to scare me and try to terrify me, and sometimes I would be sort of paralyzed in fear.
He would play, he had a cassette player, and sometimes he would play horror stories all the while, making weird noises and pretending to have a seizure, and sometimes he would do that.
Yeah. So it's this just to be, I mean, it's in this layer of hell, there's nothing but demons.
Yeah, sometimes he would do that like at 3am in the middle of the night, and it would get worse over time.
A year later, he started to just beat me up regularly.
He was very strong very early, and every time I would.

[51:01] Be at his place, he would just wrestle me, throw me around the apartment like a ragdoll.
And he would play music really loudly while just wrestling me, trying to, I guess, some– TB. Well, it's not really wrestling if you don't want to. It's just assault, isn't it?
CB. Yes. I was kind of lifeless by then. I didn't really see a point in defending myself.
I was very weak. And, um, sorry, you were very weak. How old? Yeah, I was very weak.

[51:35] Uh, eight, I would be five, six years old, seven, or he was, he was eight.
He was eight, eight years old, nine years old. And I'm like, I'm two years, three years younger.
So I might've been off. I might've been off.
I'm sorry. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you were weak.
I don't quite follow that.
I was physically very weak. No, I understand what you mean, I just don't understand how you would define yourself as a couple of years younger than a psychotic bully.
I don't know what that would mean to say weak.
Oh, that's true.
I mean, did you think if you'd worked out you'd have been fine?
I mean, what are you talking about? You're five years old. I don't understand.
Isn't it like calling yourself, well, I was really short because the guy who's a couple of years older was taller than me.
And it's like, what the hell does that mean? What do you mean Short.
Shorter, yeah, but that's because of the age. Weaker, yeah, because of the age, not weak.

[52:34] Again, unless I'm missing something. I just couldn't do anything.
Well, of course you couldn't do anything, you're five! Yeah, no, I was totally defenseless.
And he would stop once I- No, but I don't know how you translate that in your head to weak.
I don't know either. Okay, well, tell me this. What would it have meant to be strong in this evaluation, right?
So you evaluate yourself as weak at the age of five for being tossed around by a kid a couple of years older, who's a total psycho, by the way.
Compare to weak, compare to what? What would strong have meant?
What would that have looked like where you'd say, I was strong?

[53:13] Being able to defend myself. Okay, oh my god, these abstractions are driving me crazy!
Sorry. What would it mean? What would it look like? I don't know what being able to defend myself looks like.
What physical actions would you have taken that would have given you the inner experience of being strong?
I wanted to stop him from beating me up.
Again that's an abstraction. I don't know what that means. Practical terms.
Physical, empirical, practical terms. What would it have meant to be strong?
What would you have done?

[53:53] Fight back? That's all very abstract. What does that mean? Does that mean you would punch him?
Oh. Oh. I guess so, yes. Yes, sometimes I wanted to punch him.
Okay, so let's play that out, right?
Because if you're going to condemn yourself as weak, we need to figure out whether you're right or not, or whether you're insulting yourself, whether you're slandering yourself, right? Yes.
Okay, so you got an eight-year-old kid, you're five, he's a total psycho, and he's very violent, And he's doing so under the full protection of the family, right?

[54:28] My mother wasn't there, my uncle was in the next room, either, or they were both in a different room, adjacent room, or they were out, so we were alone.
Actually, most of the time we were just all alone in the apartment.
No, sorry, sorry, doesn't matter.
Under the protection of the family. Under the protection because they are putting you in the same room and having you sleep over in the same room with a total psycho.
Yes. Right? So under the protection means your uncle and your mother, They're all pushing you into interacting with the psycho which means they either don't know that he's a psycho which means they're psychos Or they don't care that he's a psycho in which case he's under their protection.
So he's under their protection no matter what Whether they're in the room or not It's true.
And you knew that which is why you didn't go to them and say hey psycho kid here is Terrifying me and beating me up and throwing me across the room, right?
So you knew that he was under their protection Okay, so let's play it out.
He comes to be aggressive towards you He comes to assault you and he's three years older than you and you punch him. Is that that what you've thought of right?
No, I I Just tried to hide so you know, no, we're talking about fighting back, right?
Okay. Oh, you would punch him if you were gonna fight back, right?
Yes, okay. So so then what happens, right?

[55:51] I assume get taller than you and bigger than you and all of that, right?
Oh, yes Okay, and he had no sense of empathy or self-restraint and he was a violent kid So so you you punch him right with your little five-year-old fists, right?
Which which means you barely heard him at all, right and what happens then?

[56:12] It would get worse, so he would... Yeah, he would escalate, right?
Yes, yes. No, but then what you would do is you'd try and poke him in the eye, or you'd bite down hard on him and you'd cause him some real pain, or you'd kick him in the balls or something like that, right?
Again, in the fantasy of fighting back, right?
That happened once. Okay, and how did it go?
He cried. I guess I hit him somewhere where it kind of hurt.
I'm not sure what exactly happened, but he just stopped and started crying, and then he hugged me, and then he told me that I did a good job.
And how old were you at this point?
I'm not sure. Seven. Okay, so what are we talking about seven?
We're talking about five, right?
Yeah, I'm really…it's kind of a blur. I don't know.
It happened. What happened? You know, what happens if you punch a psycho when he's way stronger than you?
Bullying Escalates, No Solution Found

[57:14] It escalates. It always escalates. I guess except when you were seven, right?
Now after you were seven and you hit him and he cried and said you did a good job, did he continue to bully you after that?
Yes. Okay, so it didn't solve the problem, right?
Yeah, it also got worse. It got worse, okay. So, so, so, so he eventually he just, it just faded away.
He stopped beating me up regularly, but it would get sexual.
Uh, what now? He, he.

[57:47] I'm guessing he just abused me sexually, like at God of War.
You're guessing? What do you mean, you're guessing? He did. I'm not guessing. Okay, so what did he do?

[57:59] Hold on to his pants and, you know, show me…I had to, like eventually I had to pleasure him orally.
Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. This is just, I mean, again, in this layer of hell, there's nothing but demons.
There are no good people in this entire universe, there are no good people.

[58:27] And how old were you when this oral rape occurred or started to occur?
DT8 8 years old or 9 years old and it didn't happen too often, like 3 times, but I didn't really show much resistance.
It wasn't even weird to me at that point.
DF1 Again, you're focusing on your failures as you perceive them rather than his evil and all of the adults around you, their evil.
He told me that it was just something that it's okay to do.
Well I assume the guy who beat you up for years didn't have a huge amount of moral credibility with you.
No, no he didn't. Right so I'm trying to sort of figure out like you're focusing on your weaknesses rather than the evils you were subjected to.
In other words, you're self-critical rather than angry at vicious abusers.
That's very true. I don't feel much anger.
I don't feel much anger. Well, that's because you turned it on yourself, right?
Yes. This is why I sort of paused on you. I was weak, right?

[59:48] Yeah. I mean, usually... Kind of like I'm hostile.
Well, no, you're judging yourself negatively in order to avoid judging abusers negatively.
Yes. In other words, it's, you know, the classic victim-blaming thing, right? I was weak and that's why it happened. Nope.
That's not why it happened. It happened because they're sick.
It happened because your mother and your uncle and all of the adults all allowed it to happen and made it happen and colluded to have it occur. Yes.
Because you didn't, there was no point going to your uncle, there was no point going to your mother. I mean, why would you go to protection from someone who's already wished you dead?

[1:00:45] It's true. I was, I remember being very, very angry when I was 18, but I didn't know who to direct my anger to.
I was just very angry.
And, but, um, so you're not responsible for who she lets ejaculate into her, but you're responsible for being brutalized, terrorized, and orally raped or forced into oral rape as a child, as a five-year-old or a seven-year-old or an eight-year-old. Yes.

[1:01:21] And I didn't really have anyone to fall back to.
I tried to spend time with my half-brother, who's much older than me, nine years older than me, but I could never spend much time with him. He didn't want to spend time with me.
I remember he would play, he would spend time in front of the computer a lot and I would go into his room.
I remember him dragging me out of his room because he didn't want me to watch him play.
I would have wounds on my back a couple days later because he dragged me out of... Dave Oh, like bruises on your back, you mean?
Peter Again, what did you say?
Dave Did you mean, you said wounds, do you mean bruises or cuts or what?
Bruises from the carpet.

[1:02:17] And I also remember I was watching TV once, I believe I was four years old.
And I was watching a show that I think it caught my attention because there was a character, I believe it was a bird or an eagle, and I sort of fell in love with that character.
And my brother shut off the TV, and he said I wasn't allowed to watch because my mother said so.
And I just went to my room and just burying, I'm sorry.

[1:02:58] I went to my own room and I closed the door and I just went to bed and...

[1:03:10] And I just told to myself that I wish the bird to come to my life so I could be his friend, because I felt so lonely.

[1:03:26] It hurt so much. Right, yeah, you're not even allowed an innocent little pleasure like enjoying a show with a bird you like, right?

[1:03:37] Everything has to be taken away, everything has to be crushed, everything has to be rejected, all bonds have to be broken, and you must forever be isolated, right? So you could be exploited.
RM. Yes. And I also remember, I think it was my seventh or sixth birthday, and my brother called me to his room, and he told me to close my eyes and extend my hand towards him, and he just spat on my hand.
And I didn't feel much at that time, but I mean, it's just something that stuck to me. It just hurts.
And he was also making fun of me a lot, like making, mean remarks about my interests and I think when I was in third grade he tried to show me algebra and I didn't really understand that and he told me I'm stupid and he made fun of me not being able to solve, understand anything and as I entered school he told me school is horrible instead of being supportive and...
Well, you, I get it, you were the designated punching bag for everybody's fucked up neurosis, right? Yes.

[1:04:56] So I don't want to speak to your experience because I don't want to tell you your experiences.
My experience when I was bullied by older kids and it didn't happen more than I don't know half a handful of times but when I was bullied by older kids I realized that the only way to solve this because they said, you know, if you ever go to the police, you know, we'll just kill you or we'll put you in the hospital or something like that, right?
And so I remember thinking sort of very clearly that the only way that I was going to stop these bullies would be to either put them in the hospital or put them in the morgue.

[1:05:41] Okay. And I didn't want to do that. Because they weren't worth that in my life.
Because, and again, I'm not saying that you at five, this happened to me when I was, I don't know, 11 or 12, right? But you can find ways to do these things.
I don't recommend it. In fact, it's, you know, wrong, because after the fact, it's not self-defense, it's utterly immoral.
But I just remember looking at these kids saying, okay, well, I either put them in the hospital for a long time or I put them in the morgue because they've already told me that if I go to the police then they're gonna put me in the hospital or put me in the ground.
And I, you know, I was like no that's, I don't want to do that, I don't want that on my mind, I don't want that on my reputation, I don't want that on my history.
Because I knew for sure, of course, no matter that I had received death threats as a kid or severe injury threats, it wouldn't matter, right?
I would still be considered the bad kid, right?
Yeah, it's true. So, I didn't do that.

[1:06:47] I didn't do that. And I'm glad I didn't. To me, that was wise and strong.
To refrain from being drawn into a brutal circle of injury and violence, and possibly death, it seems to me kind of wise.
And yet you call yourself weak.

[1:07:13] Yes, that's true. I mean, let's put it this way.
Let me ask you this question, right? So, your cousin who was beating you up and who was raping you or forcing you to perform, oral sex and so on, if he had gotten hit by a car and killed, how would you have felt?

[1:07:39] My first thought was that I'd feel sad.
Oh, that's interesting. My second, yes, and the thought that followed was I wouldn't feel anything.
But I'm guessing the first thought is kind of the intuition that's kind of, I guess that's, I mean, that's true, right?
I'd probably be sad. I'm sorry, so this guy who beat you up, who harmed you, who terrified you at night and caused you to lose sleep and have nightmares and to brutalize you physically and then molested you and so on.
If this guy was wiped out in a car crash, you wouldn't feel any relief that the torment and torture was over?
I don't think so. I mean, I wanted to spend time with him because I just wanted to spend time with him. I just wanted to spend time with someone.
I could I could play with her. Oh, so so even though there was a torment of the molestation psychological physical brutality He was at least someone you could play with from time to time, right?
Exploring Feelings towards Cousin's Abuse

[1:08:53] Yes, I mean, I had friends at school too, and... Wait, so help me understand, so I'm going back to the cousin thing here, right?
And listen, I'm not saying what you should or shouldn't feel, I just generally want to sort of understand it.
So, if an accident occurred that had nothing to do with you, that took this brutalizer and molester out of your life, you would feel sad because you wouldn't be able to play with him.
I mean, you did have other kids you could play with, right?
Yes, yes, through school, class. But yeah, I think I would feel sad.
I mean, once I turned like 12, 13 years old, I actually started to resent him for what he did to me.
And now I'm hoping that I'll never get to see him again.
But I actually saw him six months ago, just randomly in the street, and I shook his hand and we hugged.

[1:10:05] And afterwards, I was like, shouldn't I be angry at him? But I'm not.
Or I am now, but six months ago when I saw him on the street, I wasn't.
Steven Right, okay. I obviously accept the way that you feel.
I'm obviously not going to tell you what you should or shouldn't feel, because this is a genuine experience, that you have some affection for him and some positive experiences of your childhood with him and you don't feel particularly angry at him, is that right?
Not anymore, no, no. And I didn't really, yeah. But you went through, I think you said you felt some resentment at the age of 12 or 13.
Yes. But it's kind of come and gone, is that right? Yes, exactly.
And what do you do for a living at the moment?
I'm unemployed. I'm sorry, I thought you were unemployed. And when was the last time you had a job?

[1:11:09] July this year. Okay. And what do you do for work?
I think it was just a temporary contract, I never really helped, I never really managed to hold down a job for more than a year.
I did a lot of delivery jobs and just unskilled labor.
And I was part of an apprenticeship program for three months, but they didn't really.

[1:11:35] Well, we had to cancel the contract, I suppose. They were not, they told me that I wasn't the right guy for them, or...
Okay, so, sorry, so since you're mid-twenties, right?
So since late teens to now, how often or what percentage of time have you had a job?
Let me think.
Like 35, 40 percent. Wow. And what do you live on when you're not working?
On my savings. Well how are you able to have menial jobs and not work 60 percent of the time?
So my mother did save up some money. My mother did save up some money for me in case I ever wanted to maybe do a driver's license or I ended up spending all of that, which was...
How much was that?
6,000 euros. Okay, so your mother gave you 6,000 euros she'd saved up and you used that rather than have a job, right?

[1:12:54] Yes. Okay, I'm not judging, I just want to make sure I understand, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm living at my mother's, I still live with my mother and my older half-brother. Wait, what?
Yeah, I still live with him. You still live with your mother?
I tried to, yes, I did try to move out.
What do you mean, try to? I don't understand what this is try to.

[1:13:23] So, when my uncle died in a motorcycle crash, we had a photo album of my uncle's childhood back in their home country, and various couple photo albums, a lot of photo albums.
And my cousin wanted to take a look at them, so we took these photo albums to his place, and my mother was very angry at that. She was terribly, terribly angry because we didn't tell her about this.
And she was angry, she locked the door of my room.

[1:14:00] Because we didn't tell her about this and because she didn't trust my cousin.
About me and my half-brother giving my cousin these photo albums without her consent.
Okay. Just wasn't sure. Okay. Always assume I don't know what you're talking about.
Yes. Yeah. So she was very angry.
I came back home, I got back home and my door to my room was locked.
And I really didn't like that and that sort of...
I called my friend and asked him if I could move in with him.
And so, I did for a couple months, and I found a job almost immediately, even though it was some unskilled labor job.
Then I got the next best job, which was a delivery job, and eventually, I moved back in to where my mother lives because… Wait, sorry, why did you move back in?

[1:15:10] I guess.
I just felt, I'm not too sure. I was getting very depressed.
I was losing my ambition and my motivation.
Wait, you were losing your ambition and motivation paying your own bills, so you thought the solution would be to move in and have your mother pay your bills?
SIMON I didn't pay my own bills because I was living well I did pay I did contribute to some degree I did pay some some rent to my friend's mother the mother wasn't okay so and like let's not I don't want to waste our time splitting atoms here okay okay like I wasn't paying all of my own bills I was paying some I don't care like this these details are irrelevant okay all right this is just stalling right so you moved out or your mother kicked you out, you were living with your friend and his mother, you had your own job, you were paying some of your own bills, and then you thought that you would increase your motivation by moving back in with your mother and not paying any bills at all?
Like that's not even a good cover story, and you know, we're both intelligent men.
The idea that you would try and sell that as a cover story, it's kind of an insult to us both if you don't mind me saying so.
You don't increase your ambition by moving back in with mom and letting her pay your bills, right?

[1:16:39] I'm guessing, yeah, well. Okay, so let's put that one aside and so why did you move back in with mom? Does she live with the hoarder or no?
No, she doesn't. Okay. She keeps tight boundaries between them.
Okay, so why did you move back? And sorry, how old were you at this point?
20, 21. So you were 21 and how long were you living in this other place?
Five months. Five months. Okay, so you're starting a life, it's not a particularly great life because instead of living on your own or with roommates, you're living at your friend's mom's place, right?
But it's something, it's more independence than you would have with your mom, right? So you're getting your life going, right?
You got a job, you're paying some bills, you know, 21 years old, that's not outlandish, right?
I mean, we used to go hunting at the age of 12, right? And so, you know, nine years later, you're paying a couple of your own bills and not living with mommy.
And so why would you, why would you, I mean, wouldn't the next step be to get your own place or some place with roommates and without a mom around?
So what, what got you back into your mom's place?
I'm not exactly sure. I think I was having doubts. I was being doubtful about my ability to really….

[1:18:05] I really didn't know where to go from that point onwards. What do you mean you were somewhere? What do you mean you don't… I don't understand. You were somewhere.
You were staying at your friend's mom's place and paying some of your own bills and you had a job, so you're getting your life going.
So what do you mean you didn't know where to go? you already were somewhere.

[1:18:26] I don't know. I think, I mean, I did it out of comfort.
I don't know what that means. What are the thoughts behind that?
I'm not sure what that means.
So I moved back in with my mother and I managed to save more money.
So I didn't have to pay any bills, so I could just save more money.
For what? What were you saving the money for? It's four years later, and you're still at home. What were you saving the money for?
And... I don't know. Oh, come on, man!
Don't go rubber bones on me now, right? You had some thought.
I've got to get back home and live with my abuser, who said she wants me to die and hates me, but I'm gonna save some money. Okay, I can understand that. For what?
I always wanted to have my own place, house, my own apartment. That's nonsense.
Come on man, you're 25 years old. If you'd wanted to have your own place, what would have happened by now?

[1:19:38] Well, maybe I would have finished my apprenticeship. Well, I don't know what would have happened, but you'd have your own place, right?
Yes. You'd have done just whatever it took to get your own place.
Maybe that means you've got to work two jobs. Maybe that means you've got to work a job and go to school. Maybe you've got to stay in the apprenticeship program.
But if you wanted your own place, you'd have your own place.
Like if I'm sitting by the pool and I'm saying, my God, it's incredibly hot, I'm desperate for a swim, and I don't get in the water, what's weird about that?
The struggle with conflicting desires and actions

[1:20:18] I mean, I gave up. I gave up then. What's weird about it is empirically I say I want to get in the water, but I'm not getting in the water, which means I don't really want to get in the water, or I want to not get in the water more than I get in the water, right?
And you are an intelligent, young, capable man. You can have and hold a job, and you can pay your bills.
And you've chosen not to do that, so you're sitting at home having your bills paid for by the woman who said She wanted you dead when you were a kid.
Exactly. Why?
Failed Dreams of Music Production

[1:21:02] Why? Have you saved the money? Have you saved up money?
I didn't save, no, I ended up spending it all. I didn't save any money. You spent it on?
I bought, um, so. I started to produce music at the age of 18, so I bought a bunch of software, which ended up being quite expensive, and I bought a new computer, and I bought video editing software, and because I wanted to… How does the video editing software… First of all, there's freeware for all that stuff except the computer.
Okay. So you spend a couple of grand, maybe a couple of thousand euros on software and hardware.
What's the video stuff for?
Again. What's the video editing for?

[1:21:56] Well, I used to record video game footage and synchronize it to music, and add effects to that to make it look cool, I suppose.
And did you monetize that? No, I never monetized anything.
I never monetized anything because I wasn't happy with the results.
I thought I needed to get better because I was comparing myself to the works of others.
But I prematurely stopped that and I've never kept up with it since.
And my mother showed me she was friends with someone who created his own startup company.

[1:22:50] So they were producers, so they were making music for, I guess, short And for movies, they were making music for short movie projects and advertisements.
And they gave me a job, and that was back at my friend's place when I lived with him.
They gave me a job for music production on one of their short trailers, and I did a submission.
But so I submitted my music to them and they said it was beautiful, but it's not the right … it wasn't what they were looking for because it was too calm and too …, Okay, so you sent some music in and they didn't like it, so you just did it again, right?
You tried it a different way or did listen to their feedback and do something?
Why not? Did they not want to do it?

[1:23:53] I mean, they were telling me... The odds that the first time you do something in a new field, the odds that it's good or right or perfect is zero.
That's true. So you got paid to do music. They said this is not the right kind.
So of course, you go back and do it again, right?
I didn't. Well, why not? Did they not accept that? They said, no, we're going to go with someone else.
Uh, they did it. They ended up doing it themselves because they were on a tight, um, they were, were on a schedule. Did you say to them, I'll do it again?
No. Why not?

[1:24:37] I wanted to quit. Why did you want to quit?
Because the first time you did something in a new field, it wasn't perfect?
Yes, exactly. What are you talking about? I was disappointed in myself.
I wanted a perfect result. I wanted them to give me good feedback.
I wanted to just succeed on the project and to contribute and help.
Oh, you wanted to be lazy, like you wanted to get a great output without actually doing a lot of work.
I guess that's true, yes. Right, I mean, the odds that, you know, that's like me playing golf and well, I didn't get a hole in one, so I'm quitting.
Yes, that's true. That's it. Okay, so you got your dream job, and you quit.
Yes. Yes. Yes. And then what did you say? Well, I could be doing music, but instead I'm going to move furniture or whatever you were doing that was manual.
I could deliver packages or something like that, right? Yes. Okay.
So, why that was for a couple of years ago, right? So why...
So, you said, well, I'm going to move back home to save money.
You didn't save your money anyway, right? Yep.
So why are you still home? Or, why are you still in your abuser's house?
Struggles with Moving Out and Toxic Mother

[1:26:05] I mean, I've been asking myself that question, whether or not I even want to move out.
Sometimes I want to move out, and sometimes I want to break out.
Okay, let's go with this scenario, right? So let's say tomorrow you're at the park, you meet some really great girl, right?
And whatever, you fall into conversation or she chats with you.
And you're 25 years old, you say you eat well, you're exercising, so you're attractive and all that.
And then she dates you a couple of times and then she says, oh, I'd really like to see where you live.
And you say, well, I live with my mother and she says, oh, okay, 25, maybe that's whatever. her, but let me come over and at least I get to meet your mom, right?
No, I don't want her to meet my mother. No, then you bring her over, oh, you would say, I don't want you to meet my mother?
Well, I would, no, yeah. That's where she's gonna, that'll probably raise suspicions.
Well you'll say, I don't want you to meet your mother, and you'll say, she'll say, okay, let's do this, right?
So I'll be the girl, right? And you say, I don't want you to meet my mother, and you'd say, well, why not? And what would you say?

[1:27:22] She hasn't been good to me and you shouldn't be, maybe you shouldn't be around her.
Wait, so she's really toxic to be around, is that what you're saying?

[1:27:38] Yes, and I guess I'm also, I also want to say that she's not a good influence on the people I love.
Sorry, sorry, I don't understand this. You say your mother is toxic to be around, but you're still around her.
Yeah, well, yes, that's true. I don't really interact.
I don't really want to interact with her much yet I still don't know if you don't want to interact with her. You wouldn't live with her. That's easy, right?
Okay, so she's toxic to be around and you don't want to interact with her, but you take her money.

[1:28:14] Well, yes, that's true, what do you think the quality woman is gonna do at that point, Leave? Nothing? Yeah, thanks, buttman, sorry.
Like, I can't unravel this whatever eatable shit's going on here, it's too deep for my head, right?
Yeah. Okay, so this, what's this costing you, right?
It's true. And you're choosing that? I am.
I am. So what do you want me to do? Like, what advice do you want from me?
I don't understand. I mean, if you're sorrowful about your childhood, for which I have bottomless sympathy, I mean your childhood was appalling and awful and terrible, and a massive sympathy for that, right? I have absolutely massive sympathy for that.
But if you're still living with your abuser, when you could move out anytime, I'm not sure So what advice I can give you?

[1:29:19] Whenever I think of breaking out I feel kind of scared. I feel very hesitant.
Do I even want to take a full-time job? It feels like I don't.
Okay. I don't even know what kind of... I don't think it could include the human race, kid! Yeah. Who wants to take a full-time job in their 20s?
Nobody! I don't understand! Well, I guess I'm expecting myself to be very ambitious and to have... Sorry, to be very what? Dreaming... Ambitious.
You're expecting yourself to be very ambitious, but I don't know... What does that mean?
I'm not trying to be, like... I'm not playing dumb here, I genuinely don't know what that sentence means.

[1:30:10] I don't know.
I think I've just been waiting for a spark to ignite within me and kind of spurn, just kind of, I don't know, I guess I'm just waiting and wasting time.
Because in reality, I didn't really want to move.
But I did some... Why don't you, why don't you want to move out?
The Desire to Move Out and Get a Job

[1:30:46] I don't know. Yes, you do.
Does your mother want you to move out? Yes, she does. And how long has she wanted you to move out for?

[1:31:09] Five years, four, three years, three years I think. And what does she, how often does she bring this up that you should move out?

[1:31:20] What she brings up particularly often, multiple times a week is that I should get a job.
I should do something, do something.
Are you doing something? Are you producing music? How's your music going?
How are you feeling? And is what you're doing mostly reading fan fiction and anime?
Well, no. Well, I did stop recently, like a week ago. I stopped completely.
I've been reading… You said you were getting diminishing returns, right? Like it wasn't as exciting to you anymore? Yeah, it started to lose its charm.
It's starting to feel very disgusting, actually. I'm starting to hate it.
And what do you hate about it?
The fact that I'm 25 now and I'm still doing this.
It feels kind of like I'm still living my childhood. But the truth is, I really do want to keep producing music, and I want to get better at this.
How many hours a week do you spend producing music, given that you're unemployed?

[1:32:44] It fluctuates, and I would take long breaks of multiple months, but sometimes I would do nothing else but write melodies.
I do write, I think I did in the past six years, I wrote about probably a couple thousand melodies, most of which are about 30 seconds or to one minute long.
And what is the purpose of these melodies? I never knew, I only had, I would feel anxious and restless whenever I stopped doing it.
No, no, I don't mean what's the purpose of you emotionally, I mean what's the purpose of these in the world?
So you've got thousands of 30 second to one minute melodies sitting on your hard drive, what's the value of that to the world?
I'm a writer because I've written a couple of thousand sentence fragments that are sitting on my hard drive.

[1:33:53] I'm not too sure. I think I just want to make things that are beautiful.
And maybe I want approval. Okay, so you make things that are beautiful.
I want to make things that are beautiful.
So why would you not put them out into the world so other people can appreciate the beauty? Okay, so you have put them out. Okay, and how's that been going?
So the piano melodies aren't as well received.
People barely pay attention to this. But I do have some ambient works.
I'm guessing you're familiar with the genre of ambient? I think so, yeah.
So I did receive incredible feedback for this, and there are a couple people – there's one Russian or two Russian guys who have listened to my… one of them had 1,400 individual plays within like a year, or half a year.
And do you get paid for these plays?
No. And how long have you been composing music for?

[1:35:02] Probably in total, 500 hours. No, no, since what age?
SIMON Okay, so in seven years, you've done 500 hours?
SIMON Actually, that's wrong.
Probably more like 2,000 hours, 1,500 hours.
I'm not too sure. I don't really... 200 hours a year?

[1:35:41] I would be spending most of my time just reading. So that's five work weeks a year.
40 hours, right? 200. That's five. Every year, you do five weeks full-time of music.
The Illusion of Being Productive

[1:36:04] Yeah.
I could be very, yeah, I didn't do as much as I should have.
Well, I don't know about this or that or the other, but this is not much, right? It's not much.
So it's barely a hobby.
But what it is, it's a pretend.
I pretend I'm doing something. It's an excuse. Well, you see the reason I can't get a full-time job is I'm working on my music, The reason I can't I have to buy a computer so I could work on my music Yeah, and I started drawing as well, but I've never really, So you you don't want to just look at the stark reality of your life So you create this hand puppet called music that makes you feel like you're doing something, That's true right, but it's not a real thing because if If you've been working at it for seven years and never made a penny and you work it at five weeks a, Year when you're 60% unemployed It's not a real thing.
It's just well, it's an excuse. You can say to your mom.
Hey, I'm not doing nothing I'm working on my music and You can say to yourself.
Well, I'm not doing nothing. I'm working on my music.
Excuses for not pursuing passion

[1:37:26] Yeah, right, it's a it's a pretend and it doesn't it doesn't really feel like it's my passion I remember it's not your passion it's your excuse yes and you know and then you finally got a chance to do it and you just didn't right because it wasn't the right the first thing wasn't right and of course look you don't have any entrepreneurs I guess you You have that one guy your mom knows who's got a startup, but of course you don't just hand over a finished product in an artistic endeavor, right?
So if somebody says, I need music for a movie, they needed music for some sort of visual thing, right?
So then you say, okay, you do a very rough draft, which takes you an hour or two, and then you send it over to them, right?
And you say, is this in the area that you're looking for?
And they say, no, no, this is too languid, this is too slow or whatever, right? And then you send over another draft right saying okay.
I did send a little right. I did send I did submit two drafts and Yeah, but they told me that it's too quiet and too too too slow to to um Not dynamic enough right okay, so did they say that on the first draft?
The second one because the first draft some what did they say on the first draft?

[1:38:45] Needs more work, spend more time on it, and let's see where it goes.
David So, when I was in theater school, I wrote a puppet play.
It was an adaptation of a Greek myth to these giant life-size puppets that were really kind of cool and wild.
The guy didn't like the first draft, so I just went back and scrapped it and started again, and he didn't like the second draft, so I went back and scrapped it inside it again, and eventually he got a draft that he liked.
I mean, I'm a pretty good writer, I was obviously quite inexperienced back then, but you just keep doing it until you find a way to get it right.
Or at least satisfy the person, right? This is not how I treated my music, especially the melody making.
It's not how I treated it at all. I just scrapped project after project, which is probably why I have so many... Sorry, what do you mean you scrapped?
I'm not sure what we're talking about. The movie that you were making the music for, what do you mean you scrapped project after project? What's that to do with?

[1:39:52] Well, everything I... I treat everything in the same manner.
I don't really spend time on it. I just end it prematurely. I just...
Yeah, because it's the pretense of getting something done and an excuse.
I'm working on my music, right? It's an excuse for your mother, it's an excuse for yourself, and so on, right? Mhm, yeah. All right.
So- I think it is. There's some- Sorry, go ahead.
With the music, it's a bit of a particular thing, because I remember playing, I did, my mother forced me to play instruments as a kid, and I never really wanted to practice.
But I remember when I was four or five years old, I was at my mother's friend's house, and they had a piano I remember playing. And the father of her friend told me I was playing very beautifully.
But the thing is, I don't know if it's a lie when I'm saying that I'm a musical person because I always have these melodies in my head, and I don't know how to express that otherwise.

[1:41:13] Yeah, I don't know what to say about that, other than if you want to mature, you have to get paid, right?
I mean, you have to get paid, right? Is that true? Yeah, you have to find a way to get paid.
Okay, yeah. I mean, otherwise it's a hobby, and there's nothing wrong with hobbies.
Nothing wrong with hobbies, right?
Fear of inconvenience and facing the future

[1:41:36] But you have to find a way to get paid, right? Yeah.
I suppose I don't really want to face any inconvenience.
I don't want to do it. I don't want to have a full-time job. Compared to what?
The inconvenience of being lonely, single forever, stuck in mom's house like an old plant that's unwatered?
Rotting away at a corner, nothing in your life, no future? What do you mean, inconvenient?
Isn't your life kind of inconvenient at the moment in terms of having a future? That's very true.
What do you mean inconvenient? I don't understand. Is it inconvenient to have a job? Yes. Yes it is.
And compared to what? Okay, where's your life in 10 years, if nothing changes?
Death. What do you mean?

[1:42:35] Just, I really don't know. Just darkness. Maybe I would be still living in this apartment.
Well, but you'd have another couple of thousand melodies on your hard drive, right?
That's no way. Do you have a girlfriend?
Oh no, I never had one. Well, I had one after high school or during… I dropped out of high school.
So where's your compassion for your future self?
If your future self, let's say 10 years from now, your future self can send a message.
Nothing changes, you're still in the apartment, you're still working part-time, you had another couple of songs or whatever, right? So, if that's the case, what does your 35-year-old self want to say to your 25-year-old self if nothing changes? What does he want you to do?
Anik. Okay, and then what?
Choose a job that doesn't seem like a dead-end job. Anything that'll take me, or anyone.
I mean, I guess this would be the next step for me, I'm guessing, just to find something that I don't even know what to do, really.

[1:44:01] What does it matter what your feelings are about what you want to do?
I'm a little confused about that. I think I think this is probably the legacy of growing up without a dad that you think your feelings are supposed to pull you through life, Well, I'll wait you said I wait for that spark I wait but that's a that's a woman's approach to life that your feelings It's just supposed to pull you through life like some water skier What do men do we do what we have to do, That's women can do what they feel like doing I'm not talking all women right but women can do what they feel like doing because Men are doing what they have to do, I mean, let me ask you this, is discipline more associated with men or women?
Men. Right. And it's nothing wrong with men, nothing wrong with women, it's just the way things generally have shaken out, right?

[1:45:00] So you're waiting for you to want to do something, which as a man, I don't understand. I didn't want to work three jobs in high school.
I didn't want to work during my university years.
I don't want to do taxes. I don't want to edit shows. I don't...
Like, there's tons of stuff I don't want to do.
That's a negative feedback loop for me on my end, because the more I wait, the less feeling I have as I'm waiting for my feelings to arise.
Well, yeah, all you're doing is growing a pudgy muscle called inertia.
Yes. So, you think that you have to want to do something, in order to get something done.

[1:45:43] Yeah.
Shielded from necessity and struggle for masculinity

[1:45:46] And that's because your mother has shielded you from necessity.
Now being shielded from necessity is often more of a feminine trait.
Yeah. So your mother has shielded you from necessity and therefore she shielded you from masculinity, and I don't… I'm no doctor, obviously, I have no idea, but I'm pretty positive in my heart without having any certainty in the science, that necessity gives you testosterone.

[1:46:18] And if you live in this kind of eunuch life of being paid for by a woman who abused you, if you're taking mommy's money, is it not kind of hard to grow into adult masculinity? That's very true.
Yes, it is hard, or kind of impossible. Well, and again, with all sympathy, genuine sympathy for your childhood, you're not a kid, you're like seven years past childhood, and you're giving yourself the permission and the preciousness, right? It's the entitlement.
Well, I shouldn't do things I don't want to do.
I shouldn't have to do things I don't want to do, right?
I shouldn't have to rewrite the music.
I shouldn't have to take a job I'm not passionate about.
I shouldn't have to really work to market my music, right?
I shouldn't have to do things I don't want I do.

[1:47:22] Isn't that the general, are we down at the heart of where the issues are?

[1:47:32] I mean, that's how I...
It seems like it, it really does. All right.
And even in regards to the time you're wasting on anime and fan fiction and it's garbage, right? For the most part, I mean, it's garbage.
I don't care what people read, but it's garbage relative to you having no life.
Because instead of reading, I don't know, about computer programming, or about business, or about marketing, or taking courses online, or something that would give you some kind of skill set so you wouldn't have to be a human forklift for money, it's a giant waste of time relative to developing some skills, right? Yes.
So even that, you didn't say, man, I got to put this stuff away because it's bad for me. Now you're like, why did you stop? Well, I felt disgusted by it.
Again, letting your feelings rather than your willpower determine your future.
But feelings are about the past, they're not about the future.
Willpower is about the future, feelings are about the past.
And so you can't have a future if you're basing your worldview on satisfying your feelings.
Estranged Relationship with Father

[1:48:51] It's true. Where's your dad now? Do you have any contact with him at all?
I did speak to him. The last time I saw him was at age 5, well, not the last time, but there was a huge gap basically.
Age 5 till age, I think I was, 22. I saw him in 2018. So the answer is no, you don't really have any contact with your dad if it's been 5 years. No, not at all.
No contact with your dad. Okay, do you have any other masculine influences in your life that you consider positive?

[1:49:33] No. And what are your views on religion?
I do pray the rosary, I pray the rosary, or I try to.
I don't think it's much of a surprise at that point, but I had massive issues with pornography consumption as well, and I would relapse and then I'd feel ashamed and just go back to my old habits and then stop praying the rosary, of course. Okay, so you're a Christian, right?
Yes. Okay, so does God say, do what you feel like?

[1:50:15] No. What does God say about willpower, discipline, effort, and success?
I'm not sure. I'm not exactly too familiar with the Christian religion, to be honest. Okay, but you're a Christian, so does God say, do what you feel like and you don't need any discipline? He does not.
No, he doesn't. He says that the road to virtue is high, hard, thorny, difficult and painful.

[1:50:41] Yes. And that Satan will offer you the hard road or the easy road?
The easy road, of course. Right. And have you been taking the easy road?
I've been taking the easy road. And where does the easy road lead?
Hell, death. Well it leads to nowhere and nothing. Self erasure.
Yeah, it leads to nowhere and nothing, right? Because Satan will offer you relief in the moment, hey, you don't have to deal with the anxiety of trying to do a third draft of the music.
You don't have to deal with the anxiety of going out to get a job.
You can just sit there and diddle with music and watch porn and read anime and everything's great, right?
And that's how you lose your soul, right? You kind of lose your, I'm not saying you have, but that's the process by which, right?
Yeah, self-erasure, that's very true. Well, yeah, it's a kind of self-erasure.
A man is determined by what he wills.

[1:51:34] I wanted a worldwide conversation on philosophy, right? So what did I have to do?
I had to will it into existence. There was no demand for it.
Nobody would have been invested in this, right?
I mean, I've been to entrepreneurs, oh sorry, I've been to investors to get money for businesses And if I went and said, yeah, there's this new weird thing called podcasting, it's super expensive, nobody knows about it.
I'm going to use it to provoke the most difficult and unpleasant and censorious conversations the world has ever seen.
And I'm going to tell people all the things that are going to make their life incredibly difficult. What would an investor say to me?

[1:52:13] You've got to be kidding me. That's insane. So just will it into existence.
The Importance of Willpower and Discipline

[1:52:24] Now, if I was a hedonist, if I wanted to do not what was right, but what was pleasurable, I would not have been cancelled, I would not have been attacked, I wouldn't have had various mainstream media publications coming after me, guns blazing, right?
If I had said, like, you're talking to me, why? Because I did what was hard.
I did what was right and true, rather than what was easy and comfortable.
Right. But how do I... I'm sorry?
I mean, I'm attacking my own... So I'm guessing with my choices I'm attacking or destroying my own willpower then.
I mean, attacking and destroying is a very active verb for not doing much of anything. Yeah. Now.

[1:53:13] The question is, and look, please understand, I'm not saying me good, you lazy at all.
I'm not saying that at all. I had necessity, but you didn't.
So I'm not comparing us or trying to make you feel less or anything like that.
LM But that's what I was thinking of myself.
LL Yeah, I don't want you to experience that. Yeah, I don't I don't want to experience that.
The real question is the real question is Why are you taking the easy road?
Why are you taking the soft road of self-disintegration? Why I really want to know I really want to know right right, I Really do want to know because I could never answer that question.
Oh, yeah. No, I can tell you that I mean you won't like it Of course, of course if it was an easy answer, right?
And that's what I was sort of listening for at the beginning of this when you were giving me your a 25 minute monologue on your feelings about your life as a whole, I was like, okay, what's the level of insight here, right?
And you're a smart guy and you have lots of insight, so I'm not sort of criticizing anything to do with that.
It seems like I have insight, but I don't have insight on the essential core issues then.
The ones that I would probably acquire through will or virtue. Richard.
So then the question is, what is willpower and discipline?

[1:54:29] I mean you can't just make it up, you can't just write. What is willpower and discipline?
I've heard someone say that willpower is doing or discipline is doing what you hate as if it were something you love doing.
That's kind of psycho in my view. You can't do something you hate as if you love it.
I mean can you imagine the ugliest woman in the world trying to have sex with the ugliest woman in the world as if she's the most beautiful woman in the world, that's kind of psycho.
Right? So I'm guessing there's some alignment here.
There has to be some alignment for between what you do and what you feel and what you think your passions are and what you think your talents are.
That's all alignment and passions. That's all feeling shit.
Okay. Yep. That's waiting for the alignment of the planets to release me from my torpitude. It's like, no, no, that's nothing to do with that.
Nothing to do with that.
CB. Okay.
Lack of Father Figure and Choices in Life

[1:55:26] So it's not like I forgot who I am, I just didn't have a father figure.
I'm sorry, what's that to do with? Because I was saying twice, once in the beginning and once later on, that I forgot who I am, but maybe the more precise way of expressing that would be, well, I just didn't grow up with a father figure, and I didn't… No, no, don't give me dominoes, brother.
I am the way I am because of things beyond my control. No.
There's lots of people who grew up without a father figure who are very successful.
That's very true. I mean, Elon Musk had a terrible father.

[1:56:09] So why did I end up making these choices? I don't know. Why am I taking the easy road?
Okay, good. So, because we went through a whole bunch of fog there, but you weren't asking me, are you asking me for the answer?

[1:56:25] I mean, I can't really imagine finding it out myself.
I mean, is it okay if you just give me the answer? Yeah, fine with me.
I'll tell about myself. So, one of the main reasons I started this philosophy show is I was really angry about the prevalence of lies and child abuse, and is angry about it.

[1:56:55] And a lot of discipline has to do with anger.
You're not angry with yourself. You might self-attack or whatever, like, I'm such a bad blah blah blah, but that's not, right?
You're not angry at yourself, your circumstances, your childhood.
That's why I was asking you the question about the cousin who brutalized you and molested you and forced you to perform oral sex on him and you're like, well I'd be sad if he got hurt and died.
Oh yeah. Holy shit.
It seems like I lost my anger because I did move on. No, no, no. Stop theorizing. Please, God, man. Stop theorizing. Your theories are terrible in this area.
You have to resist this. Be open, be curious, okay? Because you're going to look for theoretical answers.
If you were angry at your mother for brutalizing you, your mother hit you I assume?
She slapped me a couple times. Okay, but she was terrifying and she chose a bad father and she raged at your father, right?
In front of you She trashed your room. She wished she called you shit and wished you would die, right?
Mm-hmm, right Now if you were angry at her, how would your life change?

[1:58:16] I would probably want to get out as quickly as possible.
So what's keeping you in your mother's house, in your abuser's house, taking your abuser's money, is a lack of anger. Yeah.
Lack of Anger and Its Role in Staying in an Abusive Environment

[1:58:30] I did tell my friends, um, I did give a couple, a couple, a handful of my friends the same advice.
Are you going to give me Wanderer stuff excuses here, rather than process your anger? Okay.
Were you ever allowed to get angry as a child? No. Of course not.
No. And the reason that people try to detach you from your anger is so they can continue to exploit you.
Exactly. And your mother feels superior to you, although she broke you of your anger, she broke you of your will when you were younger, and now she says, well, I can't believe you don't have will and strength and discipline.
The Paradox of Mocking and Anger

[1:59:15] I mean, that's like me breaking someone's arms and then mocking them for not being able to catch a ball.
MV What does a healthy scenario look like? Because usually it doesn't really take anger for a child to do this. PW What the fuck are you doing, man?
Why are you jumping into solutions and scenarios?
I'm trying to give you the biggest answer about your life. Ah yes, but what does it look like if it's different?
All abstract, all intellectual, all nonsense.
You're trying to jump away from what's going on inside you, which again I sympathize with and I understand.
What do you feel when I say that a lack of healthy anger is in my amateur outside view the root of your paralysis.
Sadness. Feel when I say that. Sadness and maybe a little bit of frustration. Okay tell me more.
Well, the first thing I felt was sadness because it's very… I don't want to live like this.
I guess… Just feel sad.
I didn't want things to be like this.
All right.

[2:00:44] I just feel ashamed to have survived this all just to end up like this.
It feels like I'm doing the same things others did to me.
Okay, that's another analytical intellectual judgment, what do you feel?
Let me ask you this, let me ask you this, let me ask you this.
You're at the park, you're just walking past the park and you see a woman shaking her five-year-old saying you're a piece of shit, I wish you were dead.
What do you feel? I'd be horribly, horribly angry. Okay, there we go!
Would you feel sad and melancholy and self-pitying and... much later? What would you feel?
I'd be horribly angry for probably at least a couple hours and then I would feel sad for the child. Okay.
So why is it appropriate to feel anger at the child of a stranger you see being abused in the way that you were, but not angry about being abused your son?

[2:02:10] I don't really understand the question. Why does it feel appropriate for a child to... You would be angry if you saw a stranger being abused, a child you didn't even know.
You would feel, I assume, rage at seeing a child being shaken and told she's a piece of shit and should die.
At five, you would feel very angry at that, probably rage, right?
I would, a lot of rage, a lot of anger. So why is it the case for a stranger you would feel that, but not for your own experiences as a child?
Oh. Why is a child, a stranger's child, so much more worthy of righteous anger than you are?
The Babysitter Incident: Rage and Protection

[2:02:53] Let me try it again. You get older, you have a daughter.
Your daughter is five. You get a babysitter because you want to go out with your wife. Right?
And the babysitter... You come home and the babysitter is shaking your little five-year-old, saying that she's a piece of shit and she wants her dead.
Oh, man. I don't know what I would do. Would you feel some rage?
Yes, yes, very much so. Would you want to separate your child from her abusive babysitter?
Immediately. Would you pull the babysitter off your child?
Yes. So why are you living at home?
Why are you not pulling the abuser who told you you were a piece of shit and she wished you were dead and has never apologized for it or made amends or restitution and continues to insult you?
Why are you not pulling yourself off this abuser in the way that you would pull the abuser off your child if it happened to your child?
I don't know. Yes, you do know!
Why is everyone so much more worthy of protection but you?
I don't know.

[2:04:15] What would have happened, this is why I was asking about your cousin when you were five, what would have happened if you had stood up and fought back as a child surrounded by these violent psychos.
The abuse would get worse. You would risk what? What would you risk by fighting death? Yeah, you would risk being killed.
Yeah. Right. So what is anger for you? What does anger equate to?
I mean in this case life, right? No. Anger equates to death.
Because getting angry as a kid meant what? You'd be killed.
Or you'd fear that, right? So what is anger? Anger is death.
The only way to survive is to NEVER get angry.
Anger is death.
Anger is suicide in a way.

[2:05:20] But everyone else was angry? Of course, of course.
And every family structure full of violent psychos needs to create a victim.
Needs to create a victim. And you were that victim. You were the youngest, right?
Yeah. Yeah, so you're the victim. You're the one who's never allowed to get angry so that other people can vent their rage on you.
You can be their poison container. You're the You're the person who is chosen, groomed, promoted, and forced into the role of victim so that everyone else can shit on you.
Yep. And if you're a kid, and listen, every family that's really violent and dysfunctional has that person, every family, every single, mine did, yours, every, you've heard this a million times on the show, everyone, and it's usually those people who are calling in because they survive, because it's far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, it's far better to suffer evil than to do evil.
So it's the identified victims, in psychology they call them the identified patients, oh this person's the problem in the family, when in fact they're usually the least problematic in the family, they're just promoted as the problem person by everyone else who wants to abuse them.
The Desire for Justice and Revenge

[2:06:37] I tell you man, let me ask you this, let's Let's say that somebody violently abused, terrified, mentally and physically tortured and then molested your daughter and then that person died in a car crash, what would you feel?
You'd be like, good! I hope it hurt! I hope it fucking hurts!
I hope they lingered on the hellscape of infinite pain for days if not weeks.
Right? But it happened to you and you're like, well I'd feel sad if the person who abused me died or got hurt.
Something in me changed seven days ago, or when I contacted you, I started getting thoughts such as, I hope my mother dies or my brother dies.
Right, now obviously, listen, I mean, just to be clear, like having the anger, having the rage, never means you act on it, right? You're aware of that, right? Of course not. You don't act on it, right?
But you need to know what it is. Because the purpose of the anger is to get you away from the dysfunction.
If you act on it or are aggressive or abusive or violent towards people, it wraps you into the dysfunction.

[2:07:49] Why am I losing my anger so easily? I mean, I was programmed that way.
No, no, no. Don't go rubber bones and play dumb with me. I just told you.
What did I just say? You were forced to.
Your anger was stolen from you, and you were threatened with death for being angry so that you could continue to be the place where everyone could vent their own rage on.

[2:08:14] Yes. All right?

[2:08:22] Right. So you didn't lose it. You know, if I get my arm bitten off by a shark, I don't come back and say, damn, I misplaced my arm somewhere.
What the hell happened to my arm? Let me go back in. I must have left it somewhere out there.
No, I ripped it off. Sorry, go ahead. Sorry for interrupting you.
The anger has to go somewhere. So, okay, that's another… I'm theorizing again.
Yeah, please don't try and explain things, you need to feel things. It's true.
I did just feel some anger, sadness, but also frustration, anger.
Yeah, so, sadness and self-pity is often how females experience anger, right or wrong, right?
Okay.
And I mostly feel the masculine anger is fight or flight.
Now you can't fight, there's no point fighting, right? So what's left?
Seeking Pleasure and Avoiding Conflict

[2:09:38] Please and appease.
I'm sorry, what was that? If there's no fight and flight response, there's maybe… No, no, no, that's not what I said. Anger is fight or flight, there's no fight, there's no point to fighting, so what's left?
Oh yeah, escaping. Yeah.
Mother's Desire to Maintain Family Structure

[2:10:02] You're staying with your mother, so you don't have to deal with your anger.
That makes sense.
And your mother doesn't want you to deal with your anger because she wants to continue to do whatever the hell she's doing.
Yeah, she wants to keep me in the family structure. She wants to keep you in, she doesn't want you talking about the abuse, she wants to keep you in the family structure.
Maybe she's lonely, maybe she wants you around, maybe she wants to feel superior to you, quote, failing in life, whatever, right? I don't care, it doesn't matter.
I mean, she is a feminist. Oh, she's a feminist? Oh yeah. She has a statue of Lenin in her room.
Oh, she's a communist? Oh yeah. My father is also. I'm sure Germany is very happy to import this. Oh yeah.
Very much so. Especially East Germany. Right.

[2:10:59] Right. Yeah, so she's a devotee of a murderous regime.
I did call her out on that, and she got angry.
So why are you calling her out on it?
Because it disgusted me. I asked her why she didn't have a statue of Lenin in her room, and it disgusted me.
I don't understand how she can have sympathy with death. You don't understand how your mother could have sympathy with evil ideas?
Come on, man. What are you talking about? I mean, it makes sense considering what she did to me. It makes sense.
I just don't know how that originated, but how would I be able to know?
She will never tell me. She will never be honest about it. Oh yeah, those facts don't exist.
They functionally don't exist, because you'll never get the truth.
Yeah. You'll never get the truth.
Never. It's like it'd be like asking my mom, me asking my mom, hey what happened to you in the war? I'll never know.
I'll never be able to trust anything she says because it's all self-serving.

[2:12:11] But the thing is, she doesn't owe me the truth either. Or does she?
Freddie Sayers She doesn't owe you the truth? You don't think parents owe honesty to their children?
Freddie Sayers I mean, strangers don't owe you food, but when you're a kid, your parents owe you food.
Jens Yes. I mean, I'm an adult now.
Well, hang on, if your mother doesn't owe you the truth, then why does she owe you rent money? Because she's paying for your rent, right?

[2:12:54] Yeah, well, she doesn't. She doesn't owe me rent money. No, but you're taking it.
Yeah, I'm taking it. Yeah, because if your mother wasn't your mother, she'd be charging you rent, right?
True. So you're saying, I have a special relationship with my mother where she totally owes me thousands and thousands of euros, and she gave me 6,000 euros, but she doesn't owe me the truth!
No, that's just a way, because if your mother owes you the truth and then she lies to you, then you would get angry, right?
So this is just a... well, you're taking your mother's obligation away so you don't get angry when she fails to fulfill her obligations.
Parents' Obligation to Tell the Truth and Maintain Positive Relationships

[2:13:31] Of course she owes you the truth. Parents owe their children the truth, of course, right?
People who claim to love you, people who claim to care about you, people who claim to have a relationship with you owe you the truth, of course.
You can't love someone and then continually lie to them, that's destructive.
You can't claim to have a positive relationship with someone and then delude them about reality, that's cratering their truth-processing brain parts, right?
So, of course she owes you the truth. You just want to take away that obligation from her so that you don't have to be angry when she doesn't fulfill it.
Emotional Manipulation by Father

[2:14:12] You know what I just remembered?

[2:14:16] I mean, it's another memory. I don't know.
I'm guessing we've been spending a lot of time speaking, but I remember my father visiting me when I was five or six years old, and I told him, please don't leave.
I want you to stay. He started to cry.
And as soon as he started to cry, I told him, okay, leave. You can leave.
And then he stopped crying immediately, and I didn't want him to cry.
So your father also has a defense called emotional manipulation, feels, female, blah, blah, blah, right?
Yes, but it feels like I was taking away his... I was excusing...
Yeah, that's true, but it feels like there was some sort of transfer of emotion.
It feels like I took away his responsibility as a father by just telling him.
No, he just played you. That's all he did was play you.

[2:15:18] He left you in the tender care and mercies of one of the worst verbal abusers I've ever heard of, and I've been doing this for a long time.
Your mother is one of the worst verbal abusers.
Well, of course, communism is verbal abuse so we wouldn't be too shocked at that, as is a lot of feminism, right?
So yeah, your mother's one of the worst verbal abusers and rather than take responsibility and keep you safe, your dad played you by pretending to cry.

[2:15:48] Okay He didn't want to stand up for you And so he just Pretended to cry so that you wouldn't make him fight his the mother of his child for custody or whatever it was, right?
He didn't never like her because she was scary and he was scared of her and she's verbally abusive and dangerous So he didn't want to fight her.
So when you asked him to basically protect you as a child Okay, fine don't okay, I'm fine, I was cowardly, obviously, and really sad and tragic.
Yeah, I never really felt angry at him either. Right, because you couldn't. Yeah.
You weren't allowed, because you're the identified victim in the family.
You're the person who has to take everybody else's shit and never fight back.
And that's why when he said you were weak, I'm like, oh my god, man.

[2:16:48] That's like calling Oliver Twist agoraphobic because he won't leave Fagin's house when he's locked in.
He's just got this weird fear of the outside, man, he's just, I guess he's just agoraphobic. He's locked in, there are bars on the window.
I guess people unjustly imprisoned just don't like getting vitamin D.
They seem to avoid sunlight it's weird don't they know, that's blaming the victim right, Right. So yeah, you were horribly mistreated. It wasn't your fault, and the people who did it are evil. And I live with them.
Waiting for Apologies: The Roman Chariot

[2:17:30] Well, you're not allowed to get angry, so you can't have any boundaries.
And there could, of course, be a part of you that's waiting for an apology, that's hanging around waiting for things to get better, waiting for things to turn around, because it's easier.

[2:17:46] Accepting that, I mean listen man, certainly by the time you've hit a quarter century, anyone who's not apologized will never apologize.
And listen man, I'm 57 years old, and in the first quarter century, how many of the people who never apologized to me for what happened as a child, how many of those people have ever apologized?
And there were dozens and dozens and dozens of them who either abused me or knew about it and did nothing.
How many of those people, and I've been public with it, they can't claim to not know if they want to know, right?
I've been very public about it and I was a top intellectual in the world for quite a number of years so it's not like they would never have heard or couldn't have known or anything like that.
So of the dozens and dozens, probably between 50 and 100 people over the course of my childhood it, knew about the abuse, or were directly abusing me, how many of those people have ever apologized in the 40 years since?

[2:18:51] Forty years. Well, I guess zero then. Zero. No one apologizes.
Forty years, well then zero, like that's causal.
But yeah, it's been forty years since I was seventeen, right?
Yeah. And it's in fact forty-two years, because I kicked my mom out when I was fifteen, right?
So it's been forty-two years, and who has ever apologized?

[2:19:19] No one. So you're waiting, I call it waiting for a Roman chariot, like you're standing around in Rome and you're waiting for a Roman chariot.
I'm not going to take a bus, I'm not going to take an Uber, I'm waiting for a Roman chariot.
Is the authentic Roman chariot ever coming in 21st century Rome?

[2:19:46] No. No? No. waiting for apologies from abusers and enablers is waiting for the Roman chariot.
I'm not walking, are you kidding me? A chariot is way cooler!
I'm not taking a bus or a train or a plane, I'm waiting for this cool chariot. Never coming.
And if somebody points out to you that it's never coming and you're like, no that's not true, it'll come, then you just... your goal is not to get anywhere but to wait.
The Roman chariot is just an excuse. you.

[2:20:21] They'll never admit they were wrong. They'll never apologize.
They'll never make restitution.
They'll never take responsibility. Ever, ever, ever.
It won't happen. It's a roman chariot. It's a square circle.
It's the sun and the moon switching places. It's a werewolf.
It's nothing. It's a fantasy.
It's magic. It ain't real. People don't regrow a conscience after they've abused children or watched it or enabled it or ignored it.
People don't regrow a conscience any more than a man regrows a limb he's lost.
I'm just waiting for that arm to grow back. Nope.
You're around people who will never apologize, will We'll never take responsibility, we'll never take ownership, we'll never make restitution, we'll never be kind, we'll never have a conscience.
It's far too late.
And it probably was too late before you were even born.

[2:21:27] And maybe you were born premature because you wanted to get out of that womb as quickly as humanly possible. I had that thought as well.
Maybe I knew I had to. Of course, that's nonsense medically, but it's interesting psychologically, right? Yeah.
I remember my mother told me I was trying to rip off these disintubating cables, the life support.
So maybe that's time to do it again.
Because it's a life support, right? Your mother is like, this is the incubator, right? You're back at the incubator, right? You're on life support, but you're isolated.
Your mother's paying your rent, your bills, and you're alone, right?
Time to rip off the feeding tubes, right?

[2:22:14] Can you get to talk therapy? Is there anyone you could talk to or would you look into that? Do you have any money?
Do you need money? If I can pay for a couple of sessions, I'm happy to help out.
Just don't spend it on computers and bullshit, but can you get to a talk therapist?
Can you get to someone who can help you with this stuff?

[2:22:34] Or would you be willing to do that or look into it? like you would be willing to help, that's incredible.
But I mean, if I were to look diligently, I would most likely find something.
I don't know where to find something. Because my suggestion would be to get an older male therapist.
I'm not sure, you know, that old line from Fight Club with a generation of men raised by a woman, I'm not sure another woman is the solution to our challenges.
I do not want a woman as a therapist. Yeah, don't get a woke guy in my humble opinion. I've got a whole thing on, I think it's podcast 1929, How to Find a Great Therapist.
So listen, look into therapy. If you need money, just contact me.
I'll find a way to get it to you to pay for some therapy.
But that would be my suggestion about the next thing to do.
Because I think get in touch with your anger under the, if that's the right thing, right? I don't know. It's just my obviously amateur guess.
But I would say that there's a talk therapy thing.
If you just yank off the feeding tubes without a substitute or without a support system, I think that could be tough and could lead to a sort of fallback or a relapse.
So in my opinion, I wouldn't, you know, I can't tell you what to do obviously, but if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't just yank out of the place, I would, you know, get into a really good talk therapy situation first.

[2:23:53] Sounds good. Yes. All right. All right. Will you keep me posted about how it's going?
Uh email via email then or yes in place you emailed call them at freedom.com is fine, Um, yeah, sure i'm thinking maybe What's the interval here so so i'll let you know If you can't afford a therapist or you can't get any state subsidies or anything like that if you need Money for therapy then just shoot me an email and we'll sort it out, I just, you're going to get therapy, if you want to get therapy, money won't be a barrier.
Money won't be a barrier to therapy

[2:24:27] Like I'll at least help you get you started on that and then once you get started, hopefully you can, you know, get a job and go from there.
But I'll certainly, I'll, what do they call it, I'll be the priming fluid, right? I'll get you started and I'm sure you can take it from there.
But yeah, don't think of money as a barrier to therapy, just, and you've got time, right? Because you're not working.
So that would be my strong suggestion and I'll do what I can to make that happen.
But it has to be up to you to find the therapist and set it up.
But if you can't afford it, then just let me know.

[2:24:55] I will let you know. But I'm also thinking that I could use that as motivation to just get a job.
However you want to play it is fine with me. But I just I don't want finances to be a barrier to you getting happy. So if it is... It's very kind. All right.
It's very kind of you. Thank you so much. I appreciate the call.
I really do. And I wish you the very best. And you can have a great life.
I'm really glad that we talked.
And the future could be wholly different from the past. and it sounds like you've got some enthusiasm for getting on that journey, and I massively applaud you for that.
And I also applaud you for making it through, like, really an unbelievably terrible childhood.
I mean, the fact that you are where you are and not, I don't know, in prison or, you know, something like that, is a testament to your strength and will and goodness, and I think you should take great pride in that.
Thank you so much. All right, brother, take care and let me know how I can help.
Okay, okay, I will. I will. Thanks. All right. Bye. Goodbye.