Jordan Peterson - Why it's so Hard to Sit Down and Study/Work

Your attention, for example, is mediated by unconscious forces -- and you know that, you know that perfectly well. And this is another Freudian observation. You know, if you're sitting down to study for example, your conscious intent is to study.

But you know perfectly well that all sorts of distraction fantasies are going to enter the theatre of your imagination Non-stop, and annoyingly, and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except, maybe, wait it out You know, so you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away. You'll think about I don't know Maybe you want to watch Jane the Virgin on Netflix or something like that, or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich Or you should get the dust bunnies out from underneath the bed Or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette or maybe it's time for a cup of coffee Or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't Very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by and so they pop up and try to take Control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop, maybe you think well this is a stupid course Anyways, why do I have to read this damn paper, and what am I doing in university and what's the point of life? It's like you can really well You can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think well what is it in you that's trying to avoid because After all you took the damn course, and you told yourself to sit down.

Why don't you listen? Well because you're you're a mess that's basically why you haven't got control over yourself at all And no more than I have control over this laptop Okay, so there's the memory function of the unconscious And there's the dissolutive function that's an interesting one the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now Automatized and dissociated elements of the personality, which may lead a parasitic existence. That's an interesting one I would relate that more to procedural memory You know so what you've done is practice certain habits Whatever they might be let's call them bad habits, and you like those things to get under control But you can't so maybe when you're speaking for example You use 'like' and 'you know' and you say 'um' a lot and you practice that so you're really good at it And you'd like to stop, but you don't get to because you've built that little machine right into your being right?

It's neurologically wired and it's not under conscious control and anything you practice Becomes that; it becomes part of you, and that's another element of the unconscious; a different part, and then there's a creative part Which is that. . .

Well? You know you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something or maybe you want to Produce a piece of art, or a piece of music, or maybe you're just laying in bed dreaming And you have all these weird ideas and especially in dreams. It's like.

. . what?

Where do those things come from and even more strange One of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly weird is that you're an observer in the dream It's like a dream is something that happens to you. Well, you're dreaming it, theoretically, so how is it that you can be an observer? It's almost like you're watching a video game or a movie But you're producing it, at least in principle, although the psychoanalysts would say "Well, no, not exactly.

Your ego Isn't producing it; your unconscious is producing it. It's a different thing. " It's a different thing and, of course, Jung would say well It's deeper than that; the collective unconscious might be producing it It's in some sense It isn't you exactly Or it isn't the you that you think of when you think of you?

and that's the ego from the Freudian perspective - the you that you identify with - that's the ego and outside of that is the unconscious, the id That's more the place of impulses, and you could think about those as the biological Subsystems that can derail your thinking, right, and that govern things like hunger and sex and aggression and your basic Instincts is another way of putting it And it's a reasonable way of thinking about it because these are subsystems that you share with With animals, you share them certainly with mammals, you share most of them with reptiles, you share a lot of them with amphibians, and even going all the way down to crustaceans, there's commonality, for example, in the dominance hierarchy circuits And so these are very very old things and the idea that you're in control of them is Well, you're not exactly in control of them, and I would say the less integrated you are The less you're in control of them, and the more they're in control of you, and that can get really out of hand you know you Can be like with people who have obsessive compulsive disorder for example?