ALL EPISODES

Almost my entire childhood, I was indoctrinated by school propaganda and child programming into thinking that to be valuable in society, you had to be a good leader. We were told that we were all leaders and that we needed to lead the people around us. We were pumped up with motivational stories and told how special we were, but if everyone is meant to grow up to be a leader. Then who's going to be left to follow?

Journaling is less so a process of writing and more so a very active way of thinking. At the end, you have a very coherent, thought out piece of writing that has just organized your thoughts internally as well. I don't know that we are really capable of thinking without bouncing our thoughts off of other people. Without other people to balance out our views, we can really spiral into crazy. But writing has the magical effect of allowing us to see our own thoughts as an out

Carl Jung once said, we are not what happens to  us. We are what we choose to become. I think people have a lot of voices in their head trying to tell them who they are. Some voices are louder than others, and for a lot of us, the voice that is the loudest is the one that tries to tell you that you can never be better than your worst moments. On the other hand, some of us like to succumb to the voice that says we are God's gift to humanity.  But I believe there is a voice

There are few easier ways to shoot yourself in the foot than to get hung up on what's fair. Bad people deserve bad things to happen to them, but the efforts we make to try to make them pay don't always serve us. Maybe someone wronged you, maybe they stole money from you and got away with it, but in our attempts to seek out justice, maybe we're just causing more harm to ourselves.

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't? I hope that as we consider that question, along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “We Are All Just a Little Delusional.” There have been a few times in my life where I found myself briefly thinking or believing something that upon further reflection was absolutely ridiculous

Sometimes the loudest person in the room is actually hiding in plain sight. I think everyone knows that person that walks in and kind of imposes their voice on the group. When you find yourself in a room with this person, you'll notice that pretty much all the talking being done is coming from that one person, and the conversation doesn't veer from where they want it to go.

I worry about having nice things sometimes. Not because I don't want them, but because I worry that I won't be able to stand living without them. Why is the pain of losing something so much greater and long lasting than the satisfaction we get from first acquiring a thing? The saddest thing about having nice things is that they become commonplace over time.

For some of us, it's hard to see our peers surpassing us in the world. We want to believe that none of our friends are superior to us in any way. So, we sometimes get into the bad habit of tearing down people that aspire for more than we do. For some reason, seeing our friends pass us up, threatens our egos.

To win at something is a concept that is really not that simple. In the context of a game or a battle, the idea is fairly clear. But in the grander scheme of things, winning a battle often doesn't win the war. And sometimes a battle won under the wrong circumstances, might even speed up the ultimate loss of a war.

Humanity is inherently gullible. We imagine ourselves to be these independently thinking entities when in reality we're so easily shaped by the people around us and by the people that know how gullible we actually are. Our pension for belief and what the people around us are saying makes sense. It keeps us safe.

You are not just you, but rather you are the culmination of hundreds of lives that came before you. Your past is more than just a short life that you've lived because of your past. It's also made up of all the pasts of the people that made you who you are, as well as all the past of the people that made them who they were.

Few things feel better than knowing you got a good deal on something.  It's evidence of your superior negotiating abilities, but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. What do we really get out of a bargain? I've lived in the world of business for years now, and I've tried to get good deals from vendors and many, many people

Pain isn't really our enemy. We think it is, but it's not. It's a process that too often we try to run away from when we should be embracing it. As humans, we know how to feel pain like no one else. Not only do we feel physical pain, but we're experts in carrying pain over from our experiences. Our intelligence relative to other species on earth is not just a blessing.

It is hard to know what to do when you're with someone going through a really  hard time, at least for me. Maybe they're crying. Other times they might be yelling, and on occasion they may be hysterical. What's sad is that I think there have been a lot of opportunities I missed to take some of that pain from someone else.

If you really want to love a thing, sometimes you need to learn to hate it.  First, real love is when you can still appreciate something even after the shine has worn off. Imagine you're dating in person. Generally, you wouldn't decide to marry them after a day or two of fun, not because that person is a bad fit, but because you have no clue who that person is yet you haven't seen any of their flaws. The reason we try to date for a while is because no one can legitimately

It seems like there's some amount of value we assign to having the quality of being ambitious, at least in the United States. People advertise that they are ambitious on resumes and profiles and public forums, so apparently being ambitious is a good thing, but why? People say they wanna be successful because they are ambitious, but what does that even mean?

I've hated people deeply. And if you're being honest, so have you, anyone who says they've never hated someone is lying to themselves, but is our nature truly so constraining that there's nothing for us to do about that? The more I think on my enemies, the harder it becomes to hate them, even if I still am at odds with them. I have found in my life that everyone I have ever spoken to thinks they're in the right. They'll gimme detailed arguments for why someone else was ter

I think the vast majority of humanity's pursuits boiled down to an effort to escape pain, but pain built civilization.  We learned to use fire to keep the pain of the cold at bay. We drive cars and use computers to speed everything up so we can avoid the pain of having to wait so long. If pain is such a bad thing, then why is it so often the catalyst for so many good things in my pursuit of understanding?

Once upon a time, I used to think that there was a way to make everyone like me, but that's not possible. I don't think even Mother Teresa was universally loved. No one is universally loved. Some people are able to manage being liked by a lot of people, but those people are also very frequently uninteresting.

Freedom seems like the ability for us to do whatever we want. But that's often the very thing that enslaves us at this moment. I kind of want to check my phone, but is that freedom or compulsion? What most of us like to call freedom is more of a curated form of voluntary enslavement. So, I noticed something a while back.