A short spoken excerpt from Eric Weinstein offering advice about struggling: he urges individuals to "struggle mightily" and take responsibility for self-improvement while also giving themselves compassion when things fail. He critiques social-media culture and contemporary economic/institutional pressures that produce cruelty and widespread dishonesty, and emphasizes that neither society nor the individual is solely to blame for personal failures.
Chapters
I struggle with social media and I struggle with just how much pain people are in. And if there's one message I would like to push out there, you're responsible. Everybody, all of us, myself included, with struggling. Struggle, struggle mightily, because it's nobody else's job to do your struggle for you. Now, with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure out how to better yourself and where you failed, where you've let down your family, your friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break if it's not working out. I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success. There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another. And I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous. I'm about to go do a show with Sam Harris. People are going to listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage. It's completely crazy. I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value, and that's why I'm doing this podcast. Just give yourself a break. You owe us your struggle. You don't owe your family or your co workers or your lovers or your family members success as long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel. Everybody is lying at the moment. Nobody's really a truth teller. Try to keep your humanity about you. Try to recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be and you're struggling and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, which you could do, it's not necessarily all your fault. We are in a global situation. I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful. Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes. Nobody's getting all tens. So I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough either. People want to hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable. You have to struggle. You have to try. Or they want to say you're 100% responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense.
