Marcel FernandesCEO and Founder at Cel Education

#depression #anxiety

19 May 2025 · 2 min

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1:32

A 43-year-old living in his parents' basement is trapped in what one speaker calls learned helplessness, a Pavlovian cycle of repeated failure that convinces him he can't change. The other argues that feeling stuck is a lie, and that people can break free from their circumstances.

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I see some guy who's 43 years old, lives in his parents' basement, he fucking hates the world. I'm like, that was a baby, man. This is a baby that somebody just gave shitty nutrients to, whether it's nutrients in the forms of food or in the form of thoughts and ideas and examples. And this kid developed these horrible self-defeating patterns of behavior that have led them to this point where there's this middle-aged person with no future and no idea of how to get out of this rut and probably never will escape it and might just wind up sucking on a gun. You know, I mean, this is, this is the world that we live in today.
That's 100% true, man. That's 100% true. That's something called learned helplessness, something that the psychologist Pavlov discovered when he experimented with dogs. He figured out that you can condition the dog's brain to learn that they can't get out of the bad situation that they're in. And that is the exact same things that we can do with human beings. It's called learned helplessness, and you are conditioned so much throughout your entire life, and then it comes a point where the most terrible thing happens— you stop trying. But I just want to shoot this video to give you a message, a positive message, that that's a lie. You can change your life. It's not true that you can't change your life, that you're stuck in your situation, whatever situation you're in. It's not true. That's called conditioning. You have been conditioned to think that you can't change your life, but that's a lie. You can.